A Little Death (2 page)

PART ONE
83 Thurloe Street, SW July 1955

It was my birthday last week. Lovely flowers from Master Edmund, beautiful. He always remembers, but Miss Georgina doesn’t pay attention to those sorts of things and I don’t expect it. Anyway, birthdays aren’t important when you get to my age. But this afternoon when I was having my rest, I heard her go thump-thump on the floor with the broom for me to go up there. I told her, ‘Don’t you go summoning me up here again in a hurry, my knees are poorly.’

She said, ‘Sit down, Greymalkin.’ That’s what she calls me at present, though I don’t know what it means. Six months ago she was calling me Brunhilde, and before that it was something else just as daft. But I don’t take any notice, it’s just her games. I took Master Edmund’s chair next to hers in the window where she sits all day and looks out. Then she says, ‘Really, Ada, you make such a
fuss
about everything. I’m not asking you to charge into the valley of death with the six hundred. I only asked you to come up because I’ve got a present for you,’ and she wallops down a box of chocolates on my worst knee. The doctor says I’m diabetic now, so I can’t have chocolates and sweets, and she’d know that if she ever bothered to think, which she doesn’t. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Very nice, I don’t think,’ but I kept mum, so of course she said, ‘Well, don’t I deserve a thank you?’

‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Georgina, I’m sure.’ That’s typical, making me look ungrateful like that.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these blasted chocolates. They had to go straight into the back of the cupboard, so I wouldn’t be wanting to eat them, and then of course I had to go and drop a tin of peas on my foot doing that, so now that’s something else that hurts along with the knee. I’ll have a sit-down and look out into the yard. It used to be a nice view from my little kitchen when Master Edmund got me the tubs of flowers, but they didn’t thrive; there’s not enough light for them down here.

Master Edmund calls us his two guardsmen. Me and Miss Georgina, he means. One guards the front and the other the back. Although what there is to guard in this basement I don’t know.

Miss Georgina never goes outside any more. She stopped getting the people coming up to her a long time ago, so it isn’t that. I think she’s lost interest in what goes on, apart from the papers. As long she can have a read and do her crossword, that’s all she cares about, really. This wasn’t the house where it happened, of course, nothing like it, but we moved up here straight after, while it was all still in the papers, and we did get the odd one or two sniffing around. Not reporters, just normal people. I caught a couple of them on the front porch once. Two women. I’d come out the basement door and I looked up and there they were. Broad daylight and one of them was peering through the letterbox. The other one’s stood behind her, going, ‘Can you see anything, then?’ But that was nothing to what went before. Miss Georgina used to get people shouting at her, nasty letters, all kinds of things. It was always women who did it; you don’t get men doing that sort of thing, do you?

It’s all forgotten now, of course, but there was a terrible to-do about it at the time. It’s not surprising—Mr. James was rich, he knew a lot of important people: politicians, in the world of business, that sort of people. A
cause celebre
, that’s what you’d call it. And Miss Georgina was so lovely, they couldn’t take enough pictures. I thought at the time, it’s a good job they never found out what happened to Miss Georgina’s brother Freddie, how he died, or goodness knows what sort of wicked things they’d have made up. Because there were plenty who thought she’d got away with murder as it was, without dragging all that into it as well. I thought there might be some trouble with the neighbours when we moved here afterwards, but they’re all nice people, and Master Edmund is so well liked they have plenty of friends. If Miss Georgina wants to see people, Master Edmund only has to telephone and they all come to play bridge. I think Miss Georgina gets just as much of a kick from hearing Master Edmund talking on that telephone as she does from the company: ‘Doo telephone,’ she says. ‘Dooo telephone, Edmund’, and then she always has to have the door open so she can hear him out in the hall. But it does make me laugh; to see him touch that telephone, you’d think it was going to explode at any moment. He picks it up and says, ‘Are you there?’—it sounds as if he’s shouting into the mouth of a cave. Sometimes, if she’s talking to him and she thinks he’s not listening, she puts on a voice and says, ‘Are you there?’

Miss Louisa comes here every week to see them. She’s Lady Kellway, really, by her marriage to Lord Kellway that’s dead. Master Edmund’s very fond of her—his face lights up like Christmas whenever she comes. Miss Georgina doesn’t like it, but Miss Louisa’s been a good friend to her and she knows it, though
she’d never admit it. Miss Louisa’s daughter, Miss Caroline, or Mrs. Cornford I should say, she comes to visit too, sometimes. He’s Cornford’s pickles. They repeat on me, but of course I wouldn’t ever say that to Miss Caroline. But somebody must eat them, because he’s got money coming in hand over fist.

We were here all during the war, right on this spot. I said to Miss Georgina, ‘Why don’t you go as a paying guest?’ because there was plenty in the country taking them at the time. Well, she wouldn’t hear of it. I told her, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be here to keep it nice for when you come back,’ but would she listen? Not on your nelly. Not that I was surprised, mind you. I might as well be a lump of coal for all the notice she takes of me. ‘I’ll sleep in my own bed and if Hitler wants to bomb me, that’s his look out.’ That’s what she said. Of course, where Miss Georgina goes, Master Edmund goes, so there was me, sat down here all alone, under the stairs, night after night, worried sick. One night there was a huge bang right on top of us and all the plaster coming down, and I thought that’s done it, I only hope Master Edmund’s got his teeth in. I wouldn’t like him to be found without his teeth in… and then I heard this thin little voice: ‘Ada, Ada, where are you?’ And I looked up and there they were, covered in dust and plaster, and looking like ghosts, Master Edmund in his pyjamas and tin hat, blood all over one arm, and her in a satin nightgown and his old tweed coat with a shawl wrapped round. What a pair they looked! But Master Edmund is a card, he made me laugh, even then. I’d done some washing, and of course the rack had come down with the bang and it was all over the floor. Master Edmund looked down and said, ‘Has the clotheshorse bolted?’

It turned out the damage wasn’t too much, it was the
house behind us that got the worst of it, and all we had was windows gone and a bit of mess, so it was fixed up soon enough. Master Edmund and Miss Georgina’d been told over and over to sleep downstairs—and that time the ARP man sat Miss Georgina down and said, ‘You’ll be stopping downstairs from now on, won’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. But I knew she wouldn’t and sure enough, the next night: back upstairs.

I’ve known Miss Georgina from when she was a little girl. Me? Well, I wasn’t a little girl, exactly, because I was thirteen when I went into service with the family. I missed my mother so much, when I first came away from home, I used to start crying if I even thought of her. But I soon grew out of it. Miss Georgina, she lost her mother when she was ever so young. I was there when it happened. I never even knew she was ill. We were all in the same house, but it was like another world, the way they lived, and nobody talked about those sorts of things, certainly not to their servants.

The day she died, it was perishing. November. I was out there at six in the morning, scrubbing down the front steps. I’ll bet they can’t get anyone to do that now. But it had to be done every morning and I was the one to do it, because I was the under-housemaid and that was that. In those days, you couldn’t go to your trade union and say, ‘I won’t do this and such at six in the morning,’ because there wasn’t nothing like that. I’m sure that’s how I got my trouble with my knees. I’ve had a habit, over the years, same as my mother, of saying, ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ if something hurts. When I was a girl I said to my mother, ‘Why do you say that?’ and she said, ‘Because it makes me feel better.’ And I don’t know why, but it does.

After the steps, I’d got my fires to do. That was what I hated most, the fires. Kneeling in front of those grates full of cold ash, I always felt like I was the only one in the world who wasn’t tucked up in a warm bed. I couldn’t even stop to enjoy the fire once I had it lit, because there were five others to do before I could even think about breakfast. I was halfway through when the housekeeper came and told me I had to take a can of hot water upstairs for the mistress. I went for the water and I never thought anything about it until I got to the landing outside Mrs. Lomax’s room. I thought her own maid would come out and take it from me, but she never did, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. The can was heavy and I wanted to put it down before I spilled the lot. I knocked, ‘Ma’am? Ma’am? I’ve come with the water,’ but no one answered, so I thought: Oh, she can’t be in there. I gave the door a push, ever such a little one, and it came open.

Mrs. Lomax was in there lying in the bed, with her hair all spread out on the pillow. She’d got her eyes closed and her face—I tell you what it reminded me of: once me and my brother Charlie stopped to watch the watermen drag up a corpse out of the river. They said it had been a week floating in the water and it was grey-white like a fish, with the mouth gone blue. And when I looked again, I thought, she’s dead… I didn’t know what to do. I put my can by the fire and ran for it. I was so confused I went down the wrong stairs, the proper ones, and I almost crashed into the housekeeper and the doctor coming up. I thought, now I’m for it, but the doctor said, ‘Wait!’ He wanted things bringing, water and linen, so I was up and down with that. I never went in the room, I put the things down at the door and knocked, and he came out and took them. Then he said to me, ‘Fetch the bath.’ I thought, what does he want
with the bath? But I went and got it. I knocked a lump of paint off the doorway getting it and I was worried in case someone noticed, but there was no one to see and anyway they were all too het up about Mrs. Lomax to bother with that. I asked one of the others afterwards and she said there was a baby, though I don’t know how she knew. When I heard that, I got it into my head that the doctor put the baby into the bath. I don’t know why I thought that, but I used to dream about it, the dead baby lying in the tin bath, that someone gave it to me and I had to keep it in my room, and I didn’t want it.

I don’t know why I was so upset over it. After all, I’d seen a baby dead before, several times. My mother used to have a baby every year or so. She’d tell us children, ‘You go and see your Auntie Vida, and when you come back, there’ll be a little baby brother for you, or a sister.’ The babies usually died after a few days, but there was a lovely one, a boy, that lived for longer—about a month, I think. Every morning I’d ask my mother, ‘Can we keep this one?’ and she’d say, ‘No, Ada, not this time.’ I could never understand how she could be so cruel. Because for a long time I thought my mother was the one deciding if they could live or die and I wanted to ask her why she couldn’t let this one stay alive, but I thought if I did that she might change her mind about
me
and then I’d have to go too!

Miss Georgina can’t have been more than six or seven when her mother died and Master Edmund two years older. They were lovely children, beautiful. Took after their mother: black hair, big dark eyes that glowed out of their faces, skin like cream. To see them together, it was like a mirror with a boy on one side and a girl on the other. Poor Master Alfred, that they called Freddie, he was the youngest and the odd one out. Didn’t look
like he belonged in the family at all, with his hair like carrots. But he was a dear little thing, ever so bright. I remember seeing him at Dennys—that was the Lomaxes’ country house—picking up handfuls of grass for the horses, even when they were standing in a field full of the stuff, and he was far too small to reach them even though he stood on tiptoe with his little hand stretched out, and of course the horse gave one sneeze and it all blew away.