All I Want Is You (4 page)

‘Oh, look.’ She turned to me, her eyes shining. ‘She’s so beautiful.’

‘Who?’

‘Her. It
must
be her. Lady Beatrice. Lord Charlwood’s widow.’

I hurried over to the window too, and saw that the chauffeur had opened the door to let Her Ladyship out. Lady Beatrice was dressed in mourning, of course, but her coat was shorter than we were used to, and her lips were painted red, and for some reason my heart began to beat a little faster, especially when she stood and gazed up at the Hall with a knowing little smile.

That night Her Ladyship’s maid – Margaret – dined with us in the servants’ hall and told us that Lady Beatrice got all her gowns from Paris. Margaret was a cut above all of us as a lady’s maid. She had a small white scar on her left cheekbone, and I wondered how
she had got it. She had, of course, her own bedroom adjacent to Her Ladyship’s suite, and after supper in the servants’ hall she retired, as was to be expected, to the housekeeper’s sitting room with the other upper servants to take tea and join in their superior talk.

On the day of the funeral, Lord Charlwood’s hearse was drawn by six black horses with black plumes fastened to their harness while six mutes, clad all in black with their faces veiled, accompanied the cortege on foot. ‘Fair give me the creeps, those mutes do,’ Nell muttered at my side.

Then we walked, all of the servants, to the church for the solemn service. Hundreds of mourners lined the route, and inside the church we saw the little heir in the front row, looking pale and afraid.

Lady Beatrice, Lord Edwin and his mother left a few days after the funeral but more visitors came daily – lawyers from London, Cook told us. Cook was less discreet than Mrs Burdett, and she told us also that what with the war and declining rents, certain ‘economies’ – she pronounced the word with doom-laden weight – were having to be made.

But my friend Nell was starry-eyed. Recently the Duke – though he still kept his elderly valet, Mr Harris – had hired a new young manservant, Eddie, to help him get around now his mobility was so poor. And Nell told me that on her afternoons off she’d started walking out with this Eddie, who also drove the Duke’s motorcar. Because he was good-looking and had a mouth as smart as Robert’s, Eddie was what was known as a catch.

A few weeks later in our dormitory, as we lay in our narrow little iron beds next to each other, Nell reached out to touch my shoulder and whispered, ‘I’ve done it, Sophie. With Eddie.’

‘Done what?’ I was exhausted; I’d had to wash all the copper pots twice that night with a mixture of flour, salt and vinegar, because Cook had said they weren’t clean enough.

‘Gone all the way.
You
know.’

I was wide awake suddenly. My pulse had stopped, then started again jerkily. ‘Nell…’

‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say. But it was wonderful, Sophie. I thought it might hurt a little, but it didn’t really.’ She was silent a moment. ‘When he kissed me – when he felt me, down there, and was so gentle with me – it was wonderful. I love him, so much.’

Again I felt a tremor run through me. ‘Nell. Aren’t you scared?’

‘About having a baby? No, he told me I was all right, so long as we choose the right time of the month. Anyway, my Eddie says he’ll marry me, Sophie!’

I said nothing else, but I thought of my mother, and how the man I’d called my father had left her. I thought that anyone who gave themselves as lightly as Nell had done was a fool, though I didn’t have to worry about men anyway, because no one was interested in me.

With Nell in love, I was lonelier than ever. I still wrote to Mr Maldon, even though he’d told me he wouldn’t be writing to me any longer. I’d already told him about the funeral, and how poor Lord Edwin was so very young.
Mrs Burdett was extremely angry
, I wrote
to him on a lighter note,
because she caught Robert the footman showing Betsey how to do the foxtrot in the dining hall the other day…

Then I put my pen down. I wanted to write,
I wish I could tell you how much your kindness meant to me, on the day my mother died. I wish we could meet again.
But I didn’t. I finished my letter, and then it was time for me to do the washing-up in the scullery.

I looked at my hands and suddenly realised they were as red and work-worn as my poor mother’s had been.

In September that year there was a big house party for Lord Edwin’s tenth birthday. The Duke, confined to his bath chair by now, made an effort at jollity, but the Duchess was as poisonous as ever to the young heir. When he arrived with his mother, and the footmen were all lined up in full livery outside the main doors, Robert heard her greeting him with, ‘Dear little Lord Edwin! You’ve not grown any taller, but goodness, how stout you are – what do they feed you on?’

Quite a few children had been invited to the house party – to keep the young heir entertained, the Duke and Duchess explained graciously – and on the morning of his birthday the Duchess personally insisted the children all go out riding in the grounds. Most of them, the girls as well as the boys, were already confident on horseback, but Lord Edwin was terrified of horses. Billy, one of the grooms, told us about it afterwards.

‘Her Grace the Duchess came along and insisted we put him up on the most evil-tempered cob in the stables. By gosh, when his little lordship was thrown in the first five minutes and started crying for his nurse, I’ll swear the old witch smirked.’

That was what they called the Duchess,
the old witch
,
though never in the butler’s or the housekeeper’s hearing.

At the birthday tea, we maids and some of the footmen served sandwiches and jellies in the downstairs parlour, then afterwards Robert organised games for the children, like blind-man’s-buff and pinning the tail on the donkey. Lord Edwin was poor at
everything
, and the Duchess’s cats, which were all over the place, made him sneeze
.
Some of the bigger boys got bored with the donkey game and wanted to play at killing the Hun instead, so Mr Peters announced they could go outside, and they charged about the lawns with their arms outspread pretending to be British airmen, while the girls gathered in a huddle to talk about their frocks and their ponies.

Lord Edwin was left sitting by himself. I felt sorry for him.

After a while the adult guests went out into the garden also for their afternoon tea, and I, together with the other maids and footmen, waited on them. The men who’d gathered around the Duke talked solemnly at first, not only about the war, but about a strike throughout the country by the miners and railwaymen. But they stopped their conversation and turned to stare when a blue two-seater motorcar came steadily up the drive and crunched to a stop on the freshly raked gravel – Lady Beatrice, Lord Charlwood’s widow, had arrived once more from London.

And my heart skipped a beat.

She fascinated me, with her short dark hair and her daring clothes. Last time we’d seen her she’d been in
black for her husband’s funeral, but now she was wearing a cream hat and a lovely swirling silk coat in shades of blue and gold. The servants all gossiped about her during supper and Betsey the kitchen maid reckoned Lady Beatrice must find it stiflingly dull here in the country after London.

‘Perhaps Her Ladyship feels closer to her dead husband here,’ said Mrs Burdett. ‘And that’s enough disrespectful talk about your betters, Betsey, my girl.’

Poor Lord Edwin, he was sick the day after his birthday tea. Robert muttered that the Duchess had probably poisoned him, but Cook pointed out that was unlikely, since the man who would be next in line if the young heir to the dukedom died was, she said, an even worse prospect than Lord Edwin.

‘Why?’ asked Nell.

‘He’s a distant cousin, and a bad lot, you mark my words,’ Cook said darkly. ‘They say he’s got business interests in America.’ In Cook’s eyes this clearly amounted to a criminal offence.

‘He must be well-born, though,’ put in Betsey.

Cook shrugged. ‘I’ve heard his father was an English lord. But this lord brought shame on his family by marrying a common Frenchwoman, and then the two of them got divorced in France – a fine old set-up.’ Cook had a particular aversion to the French, ever since the Duchess had started ordering her to put some more of the newly fashionable French dishes in her daily menus. So that was the distant cousin dealt with, and duly condemned.

Anyway, the ailing Lord Edwin had to be driven off
home with his ever-anxious mother, but the other guests stayed on enjoying themselves, and during the beautiful summer days that followed I watched for Lady Beatrice. She played tennis on the lawns, wearing a long white skirt and lace-trimmed white blouse, or drove her friends out into the country lanes in her gleaming blue motorcar. And I didn’t think she looked like a grieving widow at all.

I watched her whenever I could, because I thought she was beautiful.

In November that year the war ended at last, and there was a thanksgiving service at the village church, which all the staff were given permission to attend. I’d heard from Mrs Baxter that Will was safe, though not home yet; but I was so sad for all the men who never would return home, and I was sad too because I was beginning to realise that I would probably never see my Mr Maldon again.

I tried each night once the lamps were out to remember his face and his voice, but my memories of him were fading. And what if I did some day meet him? What could I expect of him? Nothing, except the chance to thank him for the kindness he’d shown my poor mother and me in Oxford that day, and to thank him for securing me this job at the Hall, for he’d been right; I was safe here, even if I was lonely. And I did feel that Mrs Burdett, as he’d said, watched out for me.

I was sixteen the following spring. By then Robert had fixed up a crystal set in the servants’ hall, and he would
fiddle around with it each night until, after a lot of noisy hissing, he would get some modern music. Mrs Burdett was disapproving at first; she still loved to listen to her Caruso records, but one evening a tune on Robert’s crystal set caught her fancy – ‘Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody’
–
and she went quite pink with pleasure when Robert caught her by the hand and did a few smart steps with her.

‘Come on, Mrs B,’ he coaxed. ‘You love it, really. And you dance like one of the chorus girls at The Gaiety.’

I loved the music, and I listened to Robert with almost painful concentration. ‘What’s The Gaiety?’ I asked him afterwards.

He winked at me. ‘It’s a theatre, little Sophie. A fancy theatre in London, where they put on shows with girls who dance and sing, and rich folks pay a fortune to see them.’

I searched for the name in the advertisement pages of the London newspapers, which were cleared away from His Grace’s library each night, and true enough it was there. ‘The Gaiety, London,’I whispered to myself.

And that was the day I started to dream of becoming a dancer.

Sometimes when I was dusting the big mirrors in the drawing room I would study myself, and I saw that I had over-large green eyes while my face was small and pale. My hair, which was fair like my mother’s, was always pinned up out of sight beneath my big cap.

We maids weren’t encouraged to show any vanity – far from it. We did have our own bathroom, down the
corridor from our dormitory, where we had a flushing toilet and even had piped hot water to fill our copper bath, though the water was more like a lukewarm trickle by the time it reached our attic.

I would bathe myself carefully whenever it was my turn. I would also wash my hair and rinse it with a little vinegar I’d taken from the kitchen. There was no mirror, but sometimes as I stood and dried myself I would look down at my body. I was too thin, I knew, and my breasts were too small. And I wouldn’t be in there long before someone would bang on the door and shout, ‘Sophie! Are you going to be in that blessed bath all night?’

I wrote to Mr Maldon about the crystal set.
Robert danced with Mrs Burdett to ‘Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody’. Do you know it? I imagine you hear all the latest music, wherever you are.
But I wanted to write,
I miss you. I think of you.

Now that the war was over there were more parties at Belfield Hall than ever, even though the Duke was an invalid; and in the June of 1919 I remember there were forty guests staying for two weeks. It was a long, hot summer and, often, as the younger ones played tennis in the cool of the early evening, I would catch a glimpse of them through a window – we all did, as we scurried round the house like invisible creatures, rushing to complete our many lowly tasks and be out of sight before the guests came back in.

The footmen, hot in their full livery, served iced lemonade and gin and tonic out on the lawns, with some savoury French delicacies that were called
canapés
,
though Cook grimly pronounced them
canopies
. Lady Beatrice arrived one evening from London in her blue two-seater; a second motorcar followed behind containing her trunks full of clothes and a gramophone more modern than Mrs Burdett’s, which someone placed in a ground-floor room so that with the French windows open, the music could be heard out on the lawns.

The younger guests got into the habit of dancing in the open air once they’d finished their tennis, and they played their favourite records again and again. During the warm nights, as the lamps inside the big house glowed, the music filled the gardens. I still remember those tunes note for note, especially ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and ‘All I Want Is You’.

On the sixth night after Lady Beatrice arrived, something happened. Whether it was because the guests were still outside so most of us were free of our duties for a brief while, or whether it was the sight of all the young people in their beautiful clothes dancing out in the dusk, I don’t know. But for some reason quite a few of the servants – led by Robert, of course – began to dance too in the servants’ hall, where the music was loud and clear as anything.

What had happened to the upper servants, who were usually so strict with us? The housekeeper Mrs Burdett had been taken poorly with the heat, that I knew, and was resting in her private room, which was some distance away. Where Mr Peters and Cook were, I can’t recall. All I remember is that a lot of servants were
jigging around to the music, and though I’d stood aside, suddenly Robert was grabbing my hand.