The Echo of Twilight Page 4

  My beloved Kitty had taught me more than prayers and proverbs. And my desire for betterment—to remove myself from the ignominy of my birth and have a place in the world—was no doubt due to her. She had encouraged me to go into domestic service. It was a life, she said; you got a bed to lie in, a good meal each day and a roof over your head. But it took a very superior sort of girl to be a lady’s maid, she told me.

  That evening, Mr. Watts introduced me to the others. They all lined up and shook my hand. He informed me of the monthly servants’ dances, and of the “social evenings”—of cards, dominoes and general-knowledge quiz games, and of “Her Ladyship’s raffle,” which included such prizes as bath salts, handkerchiefs, chocolates, books, and, at Christmas, a hamper from Fortnum & Mason. It was, he said, a very happy household. Later, he took me aside and quietly reminded me that, as Her Ladyship’s maid, I represented her to the other servants and must therefore be mindful of my conduct, and of gossip.

  I learned from Mr. Watts that collieries in the north and returns on investments in mines as far away as the Argentine had added to Lord Hector Campbell’s fortune, but that despite the name and Scottish ancestry, the estate in Scotland actually belonged to Lady Ottoline. It was where she had spent each long and happy summer of her childhood. And picturing the child Ottoline, and trying to picture the place, I asked him if the estate had a castle.

  “I suppose it could be described as such . . . but it’s really more of a fortified house.”

  I was disappointed. I didn’t much like the notion of a fortified house, and though the name of the place—Delnasay—evoked an almost fairy-tale image, and I continued to see towers and turrets, I scaled it down, and removed the drawbridge and moat.

  “However, if it’s castles you’re after, Miss Gibson, you’ve come to the right part of the world,” said Mr. Watts. “We have more than our fair share, you know, including one at Warkworth. I imagine you know it from Mr. Turner’s famous painting, or perhaps from Shakespeare?”

  I didn’t, but I smiled and nodded.

  I ate a lot during those first days at Birling. Some of the food was different, new to me: black pudding, pease pudding, stottie cakes, kippers. And at breakfast, all sorts of eggs: large, small, colorful and speckled—from ducks, water hens, lapwings, and other birds on the estate and common to those parts. Every day there was a proper luncheon and dinner: steak and kidney with dumplings, pigeon pie, roast lamb with mint from the garden, and endless steamed puddings. Usually, at my other houses, it was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday, served cold on Monday and followed by cottage pie or rissoles on Tuesday, or sometimes liver and bacon; then, another joint midweek—invariably mutton—and, of course, fish on Friday. However, after my time with Mrs. B.—who’d survived on a diet of hard-boiled eggs and consommé, and had expected her handful of poorly paid servants to thrive on the same—it was like Christmas every day at Birling. I had never worked in a household where food was so plentiful or the servants so well fed, and I wondered if it would be the same in Scotland, because I enjoyed my food.

  Stirring was the single word Lady Ottoline used to describe Scotland. She was standing in front of the long glass in her dressing room—where we were selecting woolens and tweeds—adjusting a deerstalker hat. “I imagine you’ll find Scotland quite stirring,” she said. I stood on my toes and pushed the amethyst and silver thistle hatpin into the cloth. “It’s a wild, wild place . . . Possibly my spiritual home,” she added. And as she surveyed her reflection, turning her head this way and that, the already scaled-down castle of my imagination changed location to a desolate, empty place and became shrouded in thick, swirling mists. She unpinned the hat and turned to me. “It’s not like here . . . It’s a little more primitive, I suppose, but all the same, terribly romantic.”

  I tried to smile, but I couldn’t get excited about primitive. I had spent nearly ten years catching trains and omnibuses, trudging down muddy lanes to remove myself from any sort of primitive to take myself to comfort. And I couldn’t picture Her Ladyship in any wild-wild place—or in any primitive fortified house. She was to me, even by then, a woman of infinite decorum and grace, a gentle woman of soft skin and temperament. And so I began to feel some trepidation about Scotland, particularly in view of the constant mutterings of an impending war, and I wrote to Stanley to tell him of my misgivings: We’re supposed to be leaving in a matter of days, at the end of the month at the latest, but I’m not altogether sure about it now. In fact, I’m secretly hoping fate might intervene and our trip north be canceled . . . Not that I want a war, of course . . .

  Though I had yet to receive any letter from Stanley, I was too busy to give his silence much thought, too busy learning Ottoline’s routine; her likes, dislikes and preferences. She was eager for me to view Birling as my new home, and insisted on showing me about the grounds herself.

  We stepped out from the drawing room to the flagged terrace, onto which the tall windows of all the rooms on the southern side of the house opened, and where Mr. Watts was busy lowering sunblinds with a hooked pole. Ottoline pointed to a shape in the distance: the tower at Warkworth Castle, she said.

  “Is it haunted?” I asked.

  “Of course. All the best places are haunted . . . Warkworth has the Gray Lady.”

  I wanted to know about the Gray Lady, but when I turned, Ottoline had moved on. With her parasol lowered, she stood beneath a wisteria-covered pergola. And as I walked toward her, I saw her close her eyes, move her cheek, nose and then her mouth back and forth over one of the dangling blooms, as though kissing it—and lost in some private reverie.

  Quickly, I glanced over at Mr. Watts. Luckily, he had his back to us.

  Ottoline opened her eyes and smiled at me. “Heavenly. Quite intoxicating.”

  She put up her parasol and we strolled on.

  At the other end of the terrace was a stone construction with pillars and arches. The loggia, Ottoline called it. From there, steps led down to a sunken Italian garden with a large square pool, a bronze fountain with a sculpture of a boy with a dolphin at its center. Further on, across the immense lawns, beyond a huge deodar and monkey puzzle tree, was a gate to a wood, which, Ottoline said, a succession of snowdrops, primroses, daffodils and bluebells carpeted each spring.

  We stood in silence watching the skylarks, singing in flight, over the meadow. “A nightingale once sang in Whittingham Wood,” Ottoline whispered, abstracted. “It was the month I first came here, June ’ninety-three . . . Yes, that was the last time a nightingale sang in these parts.”

  We walked on, to the east of the house and the large, square stable yard, with its coach house and big black-painted sliding doors on one side, and loose boxes, tack room and chaff room on the other. Here, the familiar smells of horses and saddle soap, warm hay, oats and linseed infused the air, and as Ottoline chatted with one of the grooms about his mother—who, I gathered from their conversation, was the absent housekeeper, Mrs. Carney—I heard her say to him, “You must absolutely assure her, John, that her job will still be here for her when she gets out of hospital. What’s important is that she get well.”

  Down a narrow lane, past weatherboarded cowsheds, pigsties and woodsheds, we entered the walled kitchen gardens: a peaceful, gently sloping expanse with row upon row of green vegetables and strawberries under low nets. Inside the long, interconnecting glasshouses were tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, nectarines and melons, and vines heavy with grapes. Ottoline picked two and handed one to me. “No, not at all ripe yet,” she said, rolling the small fruit between her fingers. She turned to me. “You’ve eaten it?” I had. I couldn’t possibly spit it out in front of her. She said, “But you must never eat the pips of grapes, Pearl. They can bring on appendicitis.”

  Early on, Ottoline spoke to me about how to address her. She was my lady, and that was how I must address her, she said. We also decided that rather than use my surname, she would call me by my C
hristian name, “because it’s such a pretty one.” This, too, made me happy. I had loathed being Gibson at Mrs. B.’s and had always been Pearl before that.

  Early on, I realized that Ottoline Campbell was different. I saw how she was with the other servants—her staff, as she preferred to call them—and I had barely been there two weeks when she gave me a silk blouse and a pair of real kid gloves she said she had no use for. I knew I’d been fortunate.

  However, there were two things that made me uncomfortable—both in quite different ways. One was Ottoline’s driving.

  Only a few days after my arrival, she had taken delivery of a new motorcar. It was called a Lagonda and was a present from her husband. She was keen to take it out for “a spin” about the lanes and insisted I accompany her. I had been in a motorcar only once or twice and didn’t much care for them, and it seemed to me—before we were even at the end of the driveway—that Ottoline drove very fast and very dangerously. Rather than stop at a junction, she simply honked the horn. Luckily, the roads around Birling were quiet and devoid of other motor vehicles that day, but we had a very narrow squeak when we came round a bend upon a slow-moving pony and trap, mounting the grass verge and whizzing past so close, I threw myself into my lady’s lap.

  The other thing that made me uncomfortable was Ottoline’s lack of inhibition.

  First, there were the Swedish exercises she did in her room each morning, in her underwear, and during which she sometimes spoke to me with her body folded over and her legs behind her head. Then there was the nudity.

  I had been shocked the first time she’d walked into the bathroom—where I was filling the tub for her—completely naked. Naturally, I’d averted my eyes, but as I tried to leave the room, she’d gone on talking to me, so that I had to stand there, looking at the floor as she spoke about the impending war—as though it were perfectly normal to engage in conversation without a stitch of clothing covering one’s body. The Swedish exercises were one thing, the brazen nakedness quite another. You see, I knew it wasn’t usual for a maid to see her lady naked, for bathroom doors to be left wide-open, for chatter to continue. Certainly—and thank goodness—I had never seen Mrs. B. without clothing. In fact, I had never seen any other woman in that state before. Even when I shared a bedroom with other girls, we’d all managed to pull on our nightgowns before removing our underwear, and put our underwear back on beneath them the following morning. No one would have dreamed of walking about naked—not even in the height of summer when those attic bedrooms were often like a furnace.

  And I should have known by this alone, perhaps, that there was more to come.

  Like most married people of their kind, Lady Ottoline and Lord Hector slept in separate rooms. However, they appeared to me to have a happy and contented marriage. His Lordship was attentive and quite obviously filled with pride and admiration whenever he gazed upon his wife. He called her Lila, and each evening before dinner, when he stepped into her dressing room, he complimented her on how she looked and commented how very lucky he was. I saw for myself their exchange of smiles, witnessed him kissing her hand, her cheek, and heard him call her “my darling.”

  But late one evening, as I was unpinning Her Ladyship’s hair—having curled and pinned it up earlier, before dinner—she said, “I shall have to brace myself, Pearl. Gigi will be with us in Scotland.”

  “Gigi?”

  “Virginia Parker. She’s my husband’s special friend . . . if you understand.”

  “Ah yes,” I said. Because I knew a lady’s maid didn’t ask questions. A lady’s maid listened and acknowledged; that was all.

  “Of course, her husband, Larry, will also be with us.”

  She smiled back at me in her looking glass, then picked up the glass bottle filled with rose water. “And Hugo and Billy have, as usual, invited a few of their friends, too,” she went on, referring to her “almost grown-up” sons—both Honourables—both of whom were due to arrive home any day. She dabbed the fragrant water onto her forehead with her fingertips. “So there’ll be any number of adorable young men to distract me.” She leaned forward, peering at her reflection: “And Felix, I hope . . . at some stage,” she added, though clearly more to herself than to me.

  I picked up the hairbrush and began the one hundred strokes as Ottoline continued to reel off the names of our houseguests in Scotland. We were to be away for all of August and September, a whole two months, and I was thinking about Stanley and how he’d react to that, because I had already suggested that he come north and visit me, and I had completely lost track of what number I was up to when Ottoline swiveled round and said, “You probably know him better as Mr. Asquith?”

  I shook my head. Unsure of the question, I said, “I’m afraid I’ve not met the gentleman, my lady.”

  Ottoline smiled. “Well, you will soon, Pearl . . . Unless this beastly situation escalates further, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  At every house I’d worked at there had been rules for servants to abide by. Some were a matter of common sense, others more specific to station, but in general they were the same: A servant should rarely, if ever, be heard beyond the servants’ hall and kitchen, and should always make way for his betters, stand when being spoken to and look a person in the eye; a servant should never initiate conversation with the ladies and gentlemen of the house, offer an opinion—unless asked—and never talk to other servants in the presence of his employers; a servant should never be heard calling from one room to another; any maid found fraternizing with a member of the opposite sex was nearly always dismissed without any hearing. In most houses, including Birling, only the butler was allowed to answer the main doorbell. But unlike in other houses, the rule about not receiving visitors—friends or relations—into the house was not strictly applied. And as well as the staff dances—to which we were allowed to invite a partner, if we so wished—and the Christmas party, there was also a summer garden party, to which staff were encouraged to invite family. Without any family to invite, I was pleased I had missed this.

  Birling was awash with servants: footmen, parlormaids, under-parlormaids, housemaids, kitchen and scullery maids, gardeners and outdoor staff. There were also a number of old retainers living on and around the estate, and Harry, our thirteen-year-old hallboy.

  In a dark gray suit, which had undoubtedly once belonged to his father, or even to his grandfather, Harry scurried about the servants’ hall each evening, waiting on us and clearing our supper plates before Mr. Watts, Mrs. Lister, Charles—Lord Hector’s valet—and I retired to take our dessert and coffee in the Pug’s Parlor, a sitting room–cum–dining room reserved for the exclusive use of us upper servants. I was at the very top of a hierarchy I’d once pretended to sneer at; it was Harry and his ill-fitting suit that reminded me, and a camaraderie in our no uniform (top and bottom) status was sometimes shared in a quiet exchange of smiles.

  One afternoon, as I stood in the laundry, pressing one of Ottoline’s blouses, Harry appeared in the doorway. Sloppy in his suit, he leaned against the doorframe, picking at the peeling paint with his bitten fingernails.

  “What is it, Harry? Is something the matter?”

  I could see from where I stood that the stiff collar of his shirt, gaping about his pale neck, was gray with dirt, and I was wondering whether to offer to wash it for him when he said, “Do you think there’s going to be a war, Mrs. Gibson?”

  I put down the iron. “It’s Miss, and I’ve told you before, you can call me Pearl . . . I really don’t know about a war, but I don’t think you need to worry. You’re only thirteen.”

  “Fourteen next month, Miss Pearl.”

  “Fourteen,” I repeated, as though it made all the difference. “Well, that’s nice,” I said. “We’ll both celebrate our birthdays in Scotland.”

  He glanced up at me and shook his head. “They’re not taking me . . . But Mollie says if there’s a war, you’ll al
l have to come back anyway . . . She says if there’s a war, everything here will change.”

  “All this talk of war!” I said, lifting the iron.

  “Best be prepared, Miss Pearl.”

  “It’s Pearl, Harry . . . just Pearl . . . and do stop picking at the paint.”

  He stood up straight, pushed his hands into his oversize pockets. “It’s not that I want there to be a war—it’s not that, Miss . . . Pearl—but I’m not sure about staying in service. And Mollie reckons it’ll be years before I have enough money saved for a uniform. She says no one’s going to take me seriously till then.”

  I said, “And does Mollie know everything? I don’t think so. Between you and me, I think she has a few too many opinions for a kitchen maid.” I looked down, pressed the iron onto the sleeve of Ottoline’s blouse. “I’m sure your uniform will be taken care of when the time comes . . . and if you continue to work hard, there’s no telling where you could end up. Who knows?” I said, glancing up again and smiling, about to say, You may even be the butler here one day—but he’d gone.

  Heeding Mr. Watts’s advice, I elected to keep to myself below stairs, and though I overheard one or two of the younger maids refer to me as “hoity-toity,” and loud enough so that I knew I was meant to hear, I ignored them. And as I had yet to learn Her Ladyship’s views on politics, and as I was not a political person myself, I elected not to enter any of the heated discussions and talk of impending war.

  But I did listen. And from what I could gather, the King himself was now involved, which—and I imagine Kitty would’ve agreed—suggested the headlines were not all lies, and that the current crisis was perhaps more serious than I had thought. Certainly, this was the general consensus in the servants’ hall, and though I quickly gathered that not all of those employed at Birling were of the same political persuasion, everyone appeared to be fervently patriotic. For “God Save the King!” resounded about the hall each evening—after grace.