The Snow Globe (18 page)

Mrs. Forbes had been to the kitchen. There was no alternative. Christmas lunch would have to be delayed, she'd said, in order that Mr. Forbes's ankle could be dealt with and the swelling given time to subside. “I know, I know,” she'd said as Mrs. Jessop dropped a wooden spoon onto the bench and raised her hands in the air.

“It's most unfortunate and I can't apologize to you enough, Mrs. Jessop, but these things happen. And I absolutely insist that you all dine first. The family can wait.”

It didn't seem right to Mrs. Jessop: Never in all her years had the servants eaten their Christmas dinner before the family. But as she said to Nancy, who was she to cast
spersions
.

When Mrs. Jessop finally untied and removed her apron, she waved it about her hot, flushed face and then sat down next to Nancy. Mr. Blundell said grace: “For what we are about to receive
may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.” Then he raised his glass, “To the cook,” he said. “To Mrs. Jessop.”

“Well, tuck in, everyone, and a happy Christmas to us all,” she said, trying to smile.

There were eight of them seated at the table, including their guest, Mr. Blundell's friend, Mr. Brown—the butler from Beacon House, whose family had gone to a place called Saint Morrits for the duration. He was an odd combination: a sweaty little man, sulky in the face and a bit of a show-off, too, Mrs. Jessop thought, which seemed wrong for someone in his position—even if his family were in the Alps. He seemed only to want to talk about that place, which the family had taken him to, once—and to imagine and then announce what the family were likely to be doing at any given moment. Each time he'd gone silent, whenever Mrs. Jessop had asked him—because he'd been hovering about the kitchen for that long, watching her—if he was quite all right, he had simply shrugged his shoulders. Not once had he asked if he could help, even when Hilda—more slack-jawed than ever—dropped the jug of bread sauce on the stone floor. It wasn't her fault, Hilda said; she had been distracted. And it was a fair comment.

“Glue-vine?” Hilda had repeated, on her hands and knees, mopping up the spilled sauce.

“Yes, it's a local drink,” said Mr. Brown.

It sounded quite disgusting to Mrs. Jessop.

The man had then said how magnificent the
shallies
were “when seen twinkling across the mountainside at night.” Mrs. Jessop presumed they were some sort of nocturnal animal with eyes like a cat
or a fox: A wild shalley perhaps? And Hilda must've thought the same.

“So you don't see them during the day?” Hilda asked.

Mr. Brown had laughed. “Why, yes, of course,” he'd said. “Many of them are huge, as big as this house.”

The man was clearly a fantasist, Mrs. Jessop thought, either that or on some queer medication. Then, more sympathetically, she wondered if Mr. Brown was in fact a war veteran like her husband.

The table, the long one from the kitchen, had been moved back into the servants' hall—where it used to be when there'd been more of them and they had taken their meals there and not in the kitchen. Nancy and Hilda had decorated the room with paper streamers and tinsel and bits of holly. And everyone looked ever so smart in their civvies, Mrs. Jessop thought: Smart as carrots, they were. And the table, with a proper linen cloth on it, very nice. Yes, ever so nice, she thought with a sigh, finally picking up her knife and fork.

Mrs. Jessop liked Christmas Day. She liked being there at the big house, cooking. Well, it was the best day of the year for any cook, and she'd rather be cooking there than in her own pokey kitchen. And his lordship was always very generous at Christmas, always made sure they got a few bob extra in their packet—as well as the wine, which she now sipped; then she nodded across the table to her husband.

Poor Old Jessop,
she thought, watching him. But he enjoyed his food. And, like her, he enjoyed the occasional tipple. He enjoyed the simple things now, and had done so for many a year.

He'd only just been appointed head gardener when she first
came to Eden Hall. They'd married the following year. He'd been older than she'd anticipated a husband to be, and quieter and less passionate—a good deal less passionate. But by that time she'd known all about the repercussions of passion, and settled on him for his kindness and honesty and reliability. And, after all, she'd been no spring chicken herself.

It was the year after their marriage that Stephen had arrived and, a few years later, the war. She hadn't realized, none of them had, that it was the beginning of an end, or that it would go on for so long, or that afterward, even those who came back, who'd been spared, would be so . . . different.

Three years in the trenches had knocked it out of her husband. And it had taken her a while to realize that, to understand. Because he'd never spoken of it—of any of it—and even early on, when he first came back and had nightmares and night sweats—which still happened from time to time—and the shakes, tremors and headaches, well, it was enough for her to know that the things he didn't speak of lived on, with him, and with them. In her mind, in her memory, the war was a thick, dark mist that had descended and engulfed them so that they'd all been lost. When they finally emerged, nothing was the same. There was
before
the war and
after
the war. That was all.

The Isaac Jessop who had gone off to war had never come back. But sometimes, when he smiled or stared back at her with those watery blue eyes—eyes forever damaged by mustard gas and fire and a vision of hell—she caught a glimpse and was reminded. But there were still those private moments, moments when she wished her husband could be more like one of the heroes in the True
Romances
that Nancy passed on to her to read: the ones who told their women what was what and where they were headed (usually to London, and in a fine carriage). She liked to read them in bed with her cocoa as her husband slept beside her, and then compare notes with Nancy over their elevenses: whether the hero had been right to shield his young ward from the truth about her errant mother, or errant father, or her spent or unspent inheritance, and whether they'd have lived happily ever after. She liked to continue the story, speculate on what would and could have happened after The End. She always imagined lots of kiddies and long and blissfully happy lives, but Nancy usually foresaw obstacles: the evil brother or cousin in the West Indies or one of the colonies—or the one killed in the war not being dead at all—returning to England to claim Something or Other Towers or whatever the place was called.

Mrs. Jessop wished her husband had a bit of an imagination, and she wished he still had opinions, too, because it got ever so lonely having opinions on your own. But he seemed to have left all of that
over there
. All that talk of what they'd do, the places they'd see, what would happen in their lives, had come to an abrupt halt in 1914. They had still not been to Brighton, and now she doubted they ever would.

But it is what it is and that's that,
she thought now, watching him in his yellow paper hat and three-piece suit, with his pa's old watch chain hanging across his waistcoat.

In truth, it had been an emotional few days, what with it being Christmas and after so many late meals, and then seeing That Woman at the carols last night, and again at church this morning.
And thinking of poor Madam and all she had had to put up with, and with That Woman and all her swank in Madam's house and as bold as brass sitting at Madam's table on Christmas Day, eating Madam's turkey and goose, and pulling Madam's crackers. Well, it was wrong, plain and simple wrong. And she felt guilty. She felt like a traitor, as though she had been inadvertently colluding with the enemy, or worse, she thought with a shudder, as though she were a
German
.

Thinking of all of this—That Woman, the Germans and the war—had quite put Mrs. Jessop off her food. For her, the meal was spoiled. She pushed her sprouts to the side of her plate, put down her knife and fork. And then, glancing about the table, she wondered if any of the others felt the same. It would never have happened in Mrs. Reed's day, she thought, none of it.
She
would have done something. And she would never have allowed for any sulkiness or bragging in
her
kitchen, either.

She had been at Eden Hall for almost two years when Mrs. Reed, the former cook, who everyone knew was really Miss Reed, retired and went to live in lodgings situated between Birch Grove, the home for unmarried mothers, and the Golden Hind Tea Rooms. These three buildings were right beside the bus stop, which was very handy for Mrs. Reed, and also handy for the women with straining coat buttons and small suitcases that Mrs. Jessop had often seen on her day off from her usual table by the window at the Golden Hind. Months later, she had sometimes seen and recognized one or another of these women again, more streamlined but still clutching a small suitcase. And as she'd watched them at the bus stop she had pondered the tragedy of it all. To have to travel to
foreign parts, wait to give birth, then give away a baby and catch a bus home.

One day, watching one she vividly remembered from the time before, because she looked ever so young, Mrs. Jessop had found herself quite overcome, had had to wipe away a tear and fight the urge to get up and go out across the wet road to . . . She wasn't sure what, maybe offer the girl comfort. And it was made worse because the girl seemed to look right back at her. Mrs. Jessop had raised her hand above the arrangement of plastic carnations, had tried to smile; then the bus came, and as it stood there belching smoke into the drizzle, Mrs. Jessop hoped with a burning passion that when it moved on the girl would still be there, and if she was—if she was still standing there—she would go out to her and offer her something more than either of them knew at that moment. But the bus departed, and the girl with it. And Mrs. Jessop still thought of her, like Michael.

“Not like you to have no appetite,” she said, glancing at her son's pale face. He had been a loving son, dutiful, kind and ever patient with her husband, and she hoped with all her heart that his recent restlessness wouldn't take him too far from her.

Stephen felt rotten. He couldn't remember what time he'd gone to bed, but his alarm had gone off far too bloody soon; that was for sure. It had been a struggle to get himself up and get the car round the front in time. And no sooner had he got back from church and put his head on the pillow than Nancy was at the door, telling him he had to get back down there because Mr. Forbes had had a fall.
Now his head pounded and he kept having flashbacks of himself and Tabitha Farley, the barmaid from the Coach and Horses. And though he could remember only some of what had happened the previous night, he had a pretty good idea, and an idea where his missing jacket might be.

“Eat up! You won't get anything like this in New Zealand, you know,” said Hilda.

“New Zealand?” Nancy repeated. “That's in Australia, isn't it? Are you thinking about emigrating, Stephen?”

“Just an idle dream, Nancy.”

“Well, I'd thank you to keep your dreams closer to home. What's wrong with round here?” his mother asked.

“They don't have Christmas in Australia,” said Hilda through a mouthful of food.

“Don't they? Do you hear that, Stephen? They don't even have Christmas in Australia,” his mother repeated.

“Oh, but they do,” said Mr. Brown. “It's just that in the Southern Hemisphere it happens to be in the summer.”

“In the summer? Well, that's plain wrong,” said Nancy. “Christmas is meant to be in December . . . it's our Lord's birthday and you can't go and change that willy-nilly and as you please.”

“Ah, but you see,” Mr. Brown began, putting down his knife and fork and adjusting his paper hat—which kept slipping down his balding head to his bony nose, “the summer is in December down there.” And as the conversation sank to a new level of confusion, Stephen rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. He had neither the inclination nor the energy to join in this particular debate.