Читать книгу The Peacock - Isabel Bogdan - Страница 9

Aileen was doing overtime. Aileen was the housekeeper and cleaner for the big house and the cottages. She did the family’s laundry and changed the sheets in the holiday homes, she put out tea and biscuits when new guests arrived, and she had pretty clear ideas about what was necessary, what needed to be done and what was entirely superfluous. In short, Aileen kept the show on the road. One day she would be an excellent homemaker, but after a few short catastrophic relationships, just now she was happy on her own. She still had plenty of time to have weans, and she wasn’t worried about finding the right man to start a family. He just needed to be peaceable, not drink too much and have a job – her requirements weren’t all that exacting. She would continue to work too, of course – she enjoyed being the mistress of several cottages and all that belonged to them.

Aileen informed Hamish that a new shower unit for the bathroom in the west wing was essential. They really couldn’t subject guests to the trickle of that old lukewarm shower any more, certainly not such important guests. Hamish generally did what Aileen said, for she was considerably more practically minded than he was and so he had a new shower unit installed, one which produced unlimited amounts of really hot water. Not much could be done about the water pressure unfortunately – the old pipes simply didn’t allow for more pressure. But a hot trickle of a shower was still better than a lukewarm one.

Over time, quite a lot of junk had accumulated in the west wing. It was quite big and only rarely rented out, so the McIntoshes stored all sorts of things there when they couldn’t otherwise decide what to do with them. Boxes of books and the grownup children’s discarded toys, pieces of furniture they no longer used but which were either too nice to throw away or simply hadn’t been disposed of yet, crockery, vases, Christmas decorations, worn-out rugs, antlers, paintings and all the other things found in old houses which have been passed down from generation to generation and which nobody ever moves out of. Aileen sorted through some stuff, took this or that bit of broken furniture to the dump, and put everything else in the garage for now. It would be kept dry and out of the way there – and the garage door could simply be shut. Which of course didn’t solve the actual problem but merely relocated it. Some of the old things ought to be taken to the charity shop, and Aileen knew perfectly well that each time everything was sorted through and moved, it would prompt the Laird to part with a few more things. In that sense, this was at least a step in the right direction. And above all, the west wing could now be rented out again.

Aileen took down the long, dark red velvet curtains and took them to the dry-cleaners because they wouldn’t fit in any washing machine. She shampooed the carpets in the entire west wing, cleaned the windows, and checked inside all of the wardrobes and dresser drawers to make sure nothing had been left behind by a previous visitor, or in case the odd moth had died in any of them. She even cleaned the glass of the old framed prints. In some of them, colonies of tiny insects had settled between the picture and the glass. The print The Weighing of the Birds was particularly bad. She took it down and carried it to the laundry room so as to clean it in peace later. There were advantages to these important people coming, she thought. She could finally clean as thoroughly as she’d been wanting to do for ages. Really, she should have taken all the pictures down and out of their frames and removed the insects, but she didn’t have the time. At least the picture with the worst infestation ought to look alright, particularly given that it hung so prominently, right next to the front door. What even were these creatures which lived in the picture frames? she asked herself. What did they live off? Such infinitesimally wee bits of paper that you couldn’t even spot the damage when you looked? Dust? All that could be seen were tiny spots, which presumably came from the animals’ excretions. And where did the beasties come from anyway, how did they get into the frames? Aileen removed the tiny minibeasts with a paintbrush. The print showed a shooting party which was weighing the pheasants and grouse they had shot, on a large set of scales.

Two days before the bankers were due to arrive, the picture was hanging in its place again. The glass was now considerably cleaner than that of the other pictures, making the dirt on the rest of them even more conspicuous, but Aileen couldn’t take all the other pictures out of their frames to clean the inside of the glass now. Simply removing all the pictures wasn’t an option either, because there were large pale marks on the wallpaper behind them.

Aileen made the beds and laid out sufficient towels. When, last of all, she tried to blow and shake the dust off some old dried flowers, the posy disintegrated completely. The dried petals fluttered to the floor and Aileen had to fetch Henry again. Henry was the hoover, a small, round, red appliance with a painted smiling face. The hoover tube was attached to Henry’s nose, like a trunk. All the cottages had Henrys too, and the friendly vacuum cleaners always made Aileen smile. She was on the whole a cheerful soul and was generally good-humoured. She was in a particularly good mood today. She had taken a radio with her into the west wing and was singing along to it at the top of her voice. She and Henry cut a mean figure as they danced across the carpet to Abba – You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your… And then she got an awful shock because suddenly Lady Fiona was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching her with amusement. Aileen turned Henry and the radio off and stammered, gosh, that had startled her! How long had the Lady been standing there? Lady Fiona grinned, said, Och, and told her that the driver from the dry-cleaners had been and had delivered the curtains, and could Aileen come and help her carry them?

The two women lugged the metres of thick velvet into the west wing and hung up the curtains. Aileen stood at the top of the stepladder, the Lady passed her the heavy curtains and both of them were pleased but a little ashamed at how magnificent the curtains now looked and how necessary it had clearly been.

The postie tooted his horn at the front of the house. Lady Fiona left to see to him, and Aileen turned the radio on again. It might be a while before the Lady returned, but she couldn’t hang up the next curtain on her own, it was too heavy. She inspected the bathroom once more to see if there was anything left to do there, and she tested the new shower. She sang along to the radio somewhat less loudly this time, worried Lady Fiona might overhear her again. The water was at least nice and warm now, but it trickled out of the showerhead as meekly as it ever had. Ach well, she decided. That wasn’t her problem. If the bankers had an issue with it, then that was their bad luck. Maybe a wee bit less luxury would even do them some good. Aileen didn’t have a particularly high opinion of bankers.

The next curtains to hang up were the ones in the living room. Aileen took the stepladder through, and then Come on Eileen came on the radio. Her song! Aileen began singing at the top of her voice again, chose the ladder as her dance partner this time, and reeled with it through the living room, where her previous partner, Henry, presented an unfortunate trip hazard. Maybe he was jealous. A leg of the stepladder got caught in the hoover tube, and Aileen stumbled and fell, along with the ladder, on top of Henry. She heard a crack in her right arm. The pain was overwhelming. Dazed, she remained on the ground until Lady Fiona came back; freed her from the tangle of the grinning Henry, his cable, the hoover tube and the stepladder; turned off the – in Aileen’s words – goddamn bloody radio; and called an ambulance. It didn’t take a doctor to recognise that Aileen’s arm was broken.

It took a while for the ambulance to drive the fifteen miles from the hospital into the glen. Aileen made it into an armchair with the help of the Lady. Her arm now lay on a cushion on top of the armrest, and it hurt so much that tears kept welling up in her eyes. Lady Fiona prescribed her a painkiller. She also offered her a whisky, but Aileen didn’t want one, she didn’t drink – ever – and Fiona McIntosh knew that. Anyway, it was possible that she might need an operation, and in that case it certainly wouldn’t be a good idea to arrive at the hospital drunk. The Lady promised to look after Aileen’s dog, Britney, until she got out of hospital. And yes, she would also look by Aileen’s cottage a few miles up the glen, would water the flowers and check the post. Aileen’s parents had moved into town a few years previously, after her father’s driving licence was revoked when he was caught drink-driving yet again. In town he could use public transport to get around and didn’t need to be constantly chauffeured by his wife. Since then, Aileen had lived alone in her parents’ house. At the time, she’d been working in a restaurant along the road to the next village and saw no reason to move away with her parents. Quite the contrary, she was old enough to live alone and was pretty happy to. She loved the glen and the house. She had had a thorough clear-out, painted everything in light colours, and made a cosy, bright home out of the gloomy and cluttered cottage. She pitied her father for his alcohol consumption and her mother for putting up with it and for being just as powerless against it as her father was. But Aileen couldn’t help her parents out of the situation either and now only had sporadic contact with them.

Anyway, said Lady Fiona, Aileen definitely wouldn’t have to stay in hospital long with a broken arm – she would probably get a plaster cast and then be sent back home. Aileen should simply call when she wanted picked up. And Fiona was sure Ryszard would be happy to take care of the cottages while Aileen’s arm was in plaster.

Oh yes, he’d manage, Lady Fiona assured Aileen. Yes, he’d cope with the cleaning too. Secretly she wasn’t quite so sure, for in all honesty she was just as convinced as Aileen that no one could clean as well as Aileen did, but she reassured her as best she could. Aileen had a soft spot for Ryszard, he was big and strong and hardworking and kind, and he loved nature. But as far as cleaning was concerned, she didn’t trust him much at all. Aileen would never have admitted the former, but she was quite frank with the Lady about the latter. Lady Fiona confessed that she wasn’t really convinced of Ryszard’s cleaning talents either, she considered him more of a handyman, but she’d certainly come up with some kind of solution. Aileen wasn’t to worry about it and was to give her arm time to heal. If necessary, Lady Fiona would simply dance through the cottages with Henry herself. Aileen didn’t quite know whether she was allowed to laugh at this image or whether Lady Fiona would be offended, so she concentrated instead on dictating to the Lady what still needed to be done: which cottage had a broken kettle, where the cutlery drawer needed to be refilled, and which beds needed to be made up. Luckily, the cottages weren’t all continuously occupied at this time of year, so one or other of them could go a few days without being cleaned. Being able to at least think about work distracted her, and when the charming paramedics arrived, Aileen almost felt up to flirting. If only it weren’t for the pain.