Читать книгу The Secrets of Greystone House - Marcus Attwater - Страница 7

It is Monday afternoon, and Dolly is checking the laundry list in the servants’ pantry. ‘One of Mr Arthur’s shirts is missing,’ she grumbles, ‘And I got one here which has a different mark entirely. Look.’

‘That’s the Wentworth mark, the laundry must’ve mixed ‘em up,’ Aunt Helen says.

‘Well, I hope he’ll not be wanting it, is all I can say, if it doesn’t come back till next week.’ She nudges a modest pile of clean clothes in my direction ‘Here, at least yours have all arrived. Gladys! Where’s that girl got to? Gladys, come and take these sheets upstairs, there’s not room for them here.’

I take my things up to the attic, burying my nose in the clean cotton. It is the first time I have had my clothes washed by someone else than mum, and they smell a bit different. I suppose it doesn’t matter when you have lots, but I hope the laundry won’t lose one of my three shirts.

Arthur doesn’t have to wait another week for his, though, because just after tea the hall-boy from the Old Hall is at the kitchen door, with the shirt in his bicycle basket. ‘Housekeeper thought they might’ve been mixed up,’ he says, ‘So I offered to come and ‘change ‘em, see?’

‘And I suppose you wouldn’t say no to a piece of seed cake for your trouble?’ Aunt Helen says. ‘And how is Mrs Yorke keeping?’

‘Very well, I’ll tell her you asked. Dinner for thirty this week-end, so she was on her mettle. Her baking’s not a patch on yours, though.’

Dolly sticks her head round the door, ‘Albert, will you tell Mrs Yorke that we’ve still got some of the apricot preserve left, if she’s interested.’

He nods with his mouth full.

‘Cheeky fellow,’ Aunt Helen says when he has left. But she is smiling all the same.

‘Why are you giving the cook at the Hall your apricot preserve?’

‘Because then she’ll let me have some of her strawberry jam when she makes it – we never get enough strawberries here to bother. Now get out from under my feet, you, I need to see to the dinner.’

‘Can I have a piece of seed cake?’

‘You’ve just had your tea! Oh, all right, just a small slice.’

I like being part of this world of banter and barter ‘below stairs’, and it takes me a while to realise that the Hambletons don’t even know it exists. It is almost as if the servants are keeping their work secret from the family. Madam should never be bothered by the things that at home keep my mother busy all day: shopping, baking, washing, dusting, cleaning out the grate. It is not just that Mrs Hambleton does not need to do them herself, it is as if they are all keeping from her that they need doing at all. Dolly and Gladys move about the house like benign ghosts, tidying the rooms she has just left and flitting out of sight before she enters them again. She consults with my aunt once a week to decide on the menus for luncheon and dinner, but it is Aunt Helen who makes up the grocery order, and deals with the butcher and the baker. I do not see her often, and I wonder what she finds to do all day.

By contrast the kitchen is always as busy as a hive. Most mornings Bobby Erskine comes to the door, and Aunt Helen gives him a cup of tea, and somehow Dolly always manages to be downstairs at the same time. Bobby always gives me his cigarette card when he has bought a pack of twenty, and offers me a smoke he knows I’ll refuse. He’ll have his cuppa, and a joke with Dolly, and a chat with Thompson about the weather and the garden, and then he gets back to Vickers’ farm. No one in the house ever sees him, Ian hadn’t even known his name. In the same way, they are all used to seeing the telegraph boy scooting along the drive on his bicycle, but they don’t know that he rarely leaves without a slice of cake or a scone baked by Aunt Helen because ‘boys that age need feeding up’, just like the hall-boy who came with Arthur’s shirt.

‘Who lives at the Old Hall?’ I ask Ian, when I have left the kitchen and found him practising his serve on the tennis lawn.

As usual he’s not very forthcoming. ‘Can you throw me that ball? It’s rolled under the azaleas. Baronet Wentworth and his family. Why?’

‘I heard someone talking about the house, that’s all.’

He relents a little. ‘Gwendolyn’s friend Francis is the baronet’s son. But we don’t see the family otherwise.’

Another thing to think about, this. Ian is only a year or two younger than Albert and the telegraph boy, but their paths have diverged so far already that they might as well live in different worlds. And although the families at Greystone House and the Old Hall appear to be on the same level from my vantage point, it turns out there are even finer distinctions I am not privy to.

While the world of the servants is stable and predictable, the Hambleton household changes all the time. This week Rory and Jamie’s parents are staying. When they leave they will take Ian with them, to deliver him at the house of a chum, but the twins will remain here. Then the week after that Gwendolyn will have a friend to stay, and next month Mr and Mrs Hambleton will be going for a holiday to her sister in Cornwall, leaving the children at Greystone. And then when term starts they’ll all be off to their boarding schools, and Felicity will be the only child left.

I think I can just recall having been away from mum and dad once before, when I was five. I stayed with Aunt Helen then as well, but my uncle was still alive and they lived in a cottage. I don’t remember for how long I was with them, only that I shared a room with my cousin Dick. Apart from that I have slept in my own bed at home every night until I took the train to Abbey Hill this summer.

I think the shifting composition of the household probably explains something else which has been puzzling me. I don’t believe Mr and Mrs Hambleton know I am here. The last time Mrs Hambleton was in the nursery she took me for a friend of Ian’s, and she kindly asked my name. It was clear she did not recall hearing it before. I can imagine her husband being ignorant of my existence, since he is here only at the week-ends, but I’ve said ‘good morning’ to Mrs Hambleton several times since my arrival. I ask Aunt Helen if she thinks the Hambletons don’t know I am still here.

‘Well, your dad wrote to Mrs Hambleton to enquire if you might stay with me, and he made a contribution to the household money for your keep. She wrote back to say it was agreed, but she may well have forgotten all about that by now. She doesn’t keep too close a watch on what happens in the schoolroom and the nursery, as a rule.’

This curious semi-visible state of mine means that although I participate in any pastime embarked on by Ian or Gwendolyn, whenever there is a family outing I stay behind. The others go to the public swimming baths with Nanny, and to the pictures with Mrs Hambleton, to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Felicity comes back entranced). We all go to the village fête, but as soon as Ian is hailed by the Norwood boys he pretends not to know me. I don’t mind missing the treats so much – I haven’t brought my swimming togs and I’ve seen the picture already – but it is strange to be part of the group at one moment and then completely outside it the next.

II

One sunny morning at the end of July, it turns out that I am not the only invisible occupant of Greystone House. The kittens are Jamie’s secret. Until the day when they are suddenly all over the place, nobody thinks that Jamie is capable of keeping quiet about anything. She always blurts out exactly what she thinks (‘Oh, Aunt Beatrice, that frock makes you look like a grandmother!’) and none of us would dream of telling her anything in confidence. But from the moment she discovers Bluebell’s nest in the attic behind the cistern, Jamie says nothing. She brings mother and kittens scraps she saves from tea. She plays with the little ones without telling her brother or showing them off to Felicity. Two years ago Bluebell also had a litter, and the kittens were summarily drowned. Jamie is not going to let that happen again. But she hasn’t reckoned with the little ones having ideas of their own.

‘Oh, no!’ she cries, when she sees one of her darlings rubbing itself against the banister on the landing, ‘Oh, help me hide him, Jack, or they’ll get Thompson.’

She explains about Bluebell’s last litter, and we succeed in capturing the errant kitten and returning it to its mother in the attic. But the next day there is no catching them. Aunt Helen shoos a kitten out of the kitchen door, thinking it has got in from somewhere else, and Bluebell patiently carries it inside again by the scruff of its neck. Mrs Hambleton fishes a coloured-silk-festooned tabby out of her workbasket, and carefully unwinds it. Arthur comes into the drawing room with a tiny tortoiseshell in his top pocket, wanting to know who it belongs to. Although they seem to be everywhere, when Bluebell has assembled her litter on the sofa for us to admire, it turns out there are only five.

‘We’ll just have to find a home for them,’ Mrs Hambleton says to Dolly, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to keep one of them for ourselves at least. And perhaps the children’s friends—’

I think I would quite like to have a kitten, but I know that as a guest I shouldn’t be the first to ask. When Mrs Hambleton suggests no other options, though, I venture that we could keep one in the shop. We only have an old mouser, and there is plenty of room for a second cat. Mrs Hambleton says she has no objection, but I must write to my parents and ask for permission (it is not clear to me if this means she has remembered who my parents are). I promise to do this, and write my weekly letter a day early, anxious that someone else will snap up the little grey one I have secretly chosen. But after that first day, inexplicably to us, the grown-ups lose all interest in the kittens. Dolly arranges for one of them to go to the Rectory when it is old enough, and the other two to Vickers’s farm, and then they just get on with life as before.

Mr Braithwaite goes home every Friday afternoon, and comes back on Sunday ready for lessons again the next morning. When he is not teaching us he reads, or plays chess with Arthur, or goes for long walks. And on Wednesday afternoons he takes Nanny to the pictures. I see them once when I am at the post office in town to buy stamps, but somehow I know that this is a fact I had better not mention to anyone else. I’m sure there is nothing wrong about Nanny and Mr Braithwaite going to the pictures together, but then I also think there is nothing wrong with Rory and Jamie spending time with me in the kitchen when Aunt Helen is baking, and yet Mrs Hambleton says they shouldn’t. And although no one has told me in so many words, it seems wrong for me to be in one of the front rooms without Ian or Gwendolyn, which is why I start guiltily when the doorbell rings as I’m crossing the hall in search of the twins.

‘Jack, get that, will you?’ Dolly shouts from the back, not minding where I am as long as I make myself useful.

Somewhat nervously, I open the front door. There is a boy standing there, older than Ian but younger than Arthur.

‘Good morning,’ he says stiffly, ‘Is Miss Hambleton at home?’

I know how this goes. ‘Who shall I say it is, sir?’

‘Graham Johns. We had agreed to play tennis together.’

‘Please come into the drawing room, and I’ll find her for you.’

But before I need to go and look Gwendolyn herself comes downstairs. ‘Oh, Graham, you could have come around the back. Francis is here already.’

I might as well not be there, for all the notice they take of me. I can’t find Ian and his cousins anywhere, and so I go upstairs to talk to Mr Braithwaite. He is in his room, reading a book called 1066 and All That.

‘Mr Braithwaite?’

‘Yes, Jack?’

‘I like having lessons with Ian and Rory and Jamie. Only, I’m not sure if I should.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, Mr Hambleton and Rory’s father, they’re paying you to teach them, not me.’

‘I see.’

He ponders for a moment. Then, as so often, he does not directly answer the question, but tells me something else instead: ‘When the holidays are over I am to start teaching at a school. I may get a class of twenty boys when I am teaching one form, and then again there may be thirty in another. Do you think the school will pay me less when I teach the smaller class?’

I shake my head.

‘Precisely. I have been engaged to teach here for a specific period, not for a specific number of pupils. So it really makes no difference to me if you join in.’

I am not entirely satisfied by this. I have a feeling that it would matter to Mr Hambleton if he knew. But the idea of explaining the whole situation to him is too formidable a task to contemplate, and I do want to continue lessons with Mr Braithwaite. I decide to go on being invisible.

III

It’s raining steadily again, and at Felicity’s insistence we are playing hide-and-seek in the house. Ian is it. This puts me at a disadvantage, because all the others know Greystone much better than I do, but I think I’ve spotted a place they haven’t thought of. There is a window halfway up the stairs, on the landing, with a broad sill and curtains drawn back on both sides. A slender person could stand behind those curtains invisible to anyone above or below. He would be spotted at once from outside, but hide-and-seek is indoors only. As soon as Ian starts counting I go down the first flight and haul myself onto the high sill. I pull the curtain out just a little, and it’s perfect. I can hear Jamie’s footsteps retreating down the backstairs, and Rory clumping up to the attic, and then all is silent except for Arthur speaking on the telephone in the hall below. I haven’t heard anyone use the ‘phone before, and the children are absolutely forbidden to touch it. Although Arthur is hardly a child, I’m not sure he should either. Then I see Gwendolyn, at the top of the stairs. She isn’t looking for a hiding place, she’s listening. She stands stock still, just behind the newel post, so Arthur cannot see her even if he looks up.

‘Listen, I know I shouldn’t be ringing, but we’ll have to cancel Thursday. They’re having a bridge party, mother only just told me. No, we’d better not risk it, you never know how long they’ll stay. Because I wanted— well, you understand. Yes. Soon.’

Arthur puts down the receiver and disappears into the drawing room, and Gwendolyn starts downstairs. I stand behind the curtain trying not to breathe, but I can’t help crying out when she casually puts her hands on the windowsill and scrambles up beside me. She is as startled as I am, but she smiles and whispers, ‘This is a good place, isn’t it? I never told the others about it.’

I’ve forgotten all about the game. ‘Does Arthur have a girlfriend?’

But she just shakes her head. ‘Shh! Ian’s coming.’

She doesn’t betray my presence, and she doesn’t sneak on Arthur.