Day after day of waking with the birds; the attic that was an oven in summer and an ice box in winter; hands red raw from laundering; a back that ached from cleaning; weariness that permeated to the centre of my bones. ‘It was tiring. The days were long and full. There was not much time for oneself.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s how I’ve been playing it. I mostly don’t even have to pretend. After a day of rehearsal my arms are bruised from carrying the bloody tray around.’
‘It was my feet that hurt the most,’ I say. ‘But only in the beginning, and once when I turned sixteen and had my new shoes.’
She writes something on the back of her script, in round cursive strokes, nods. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I can use that.’ She continues to scribble, finishing with a flourish of the pen. ‘Now for the interesting stuff. I want to know about Emmeline. That is, how you felt about her.’
I hesitate, wondering where to begin.
‘It’s just, we share a few scenes and I’m not sure what I should be thinking. Conveying.’
‘What kind of scenes?’ I say, curious.
‘Well, for instance, there’s the one where she first meets RS Hunter, down near the lake, and she slips and almost drowns and I have to-’
‘Near the lake?’ I am confused. ‘But that’s not where they met, it was the library, it was winter, they were-’
‘The library?’ she wrinkles her perfect nose. ‘No wonder the scriptwriters changed it. There’s nothing dynamic about a room full of old books. It works really well this way, the lake being where he killed himself and all. Kind of like the end of the story is in the beginning. It’s romantic, like that Baz Lurhmann film.
I will have to take her word for it.
‘Anyway, I have to run back to the house for help and when I get back he’s already rescued her and revived her. The way the actress is playing it, she’s too busy looking up at him to even notice that we’ve all come to help her.’ She pauses, looks at me wide-eyed, as if she has made her meaning clear. ‘Well, don’t you think I should-Grace should-react a bit?’
I am slow to respond and she leaps ahead.
‘Oh, not obviously. Just a subtle reaction. You know the sort of thing.’ She sniffs slightly, tilts her head so that her nose is in the air, and sighs. I do not realise that this is an impromptu performance for my benefit until she drops the expression and replaces it with a wide-eyed gaze in my direction. ‘See?’
‘I see.’ I hesitate, choose my words judiciously. ‘It’s up to you, of course, how you play your character. How you play Grace. But if it were me, and it was 1915 again, I can’t imagine I would have reacted…’ I wave my hand at her, unable to put words to her performance.
She stares at me as though I’ve missed some vital nuance. ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit thoughtless not even to thank Grace for running for help? I feel stupid running off and then coming back just to stand there again like a zombie.’
I sigh. ‘Perhaps you’re right, but that was the nature of service in those days. It would have been unusual had she not been that way. Do you see?’
She looks dubious.
‘I didn’t expect her to be any other way.’
‘But you must have
‘Of course.’ I am overcome with an unexpected distaste for discussing the dead. ‘I just didn’t show it.’
‘Never?’ She neither wants nor waits for an answer and I am glad for I don’t want to give it. She pouts. ‘The whole servant-mistress thing just seems so ridiculous. One person doing the bidding of the other.’
‘It was a different time,’ I say simply.
‘That’s what Ursula says, too.’ She sighs. ‘It doesn’t help me much though, does it? I mean, acting’s all about reacting. It’s a bit hard to create an interesting character when the stage direction is “don’t react”. I feel like a cardboard cut-out, just “yes miss-ing,” “no miss-ing,” “three bags full miss- ing”.’
I nod. ‘Must be difficult.’
‘I tried out for the part of Emmeline originally,’ she says confidingly. ‘Now
I do not remind her that I saw the costumes first time around.
‘They wanted someone with more box-office pull.’ She rolls her eyes and inspects her fingernails. ‘They liked my audition well enough,’ she says. ‘Producer called me back twice. He said I look much more like Emmeline than Gwyneth Paltrow does.’ The other actress’s name she says with a sneer that robs her momentarily of her beauty. ‘Only thing she has over me is an Academy Award nomination, and everyone knows British actors have to work twice as hard for an Oscar nod. ’Specially when you get your start on the soaps.’
I can sense her disappointment and I do not blame her; I dare say there were many times I would have much preferred to be Emmeline than the housemaid.
‘Anyway,’ she says discontentedly, ‘I’m playing Grace and I have to make the best of it. Besides, Ursula promised they’d interview me specially for the DVD release, seeing as I’m the only one who gets to meet my character in real life.’
‘I’m glad to be of some use.’
‘Yes,’ she says, my irony lost on her.
‘Do you have any more questions?’
‘I’ll check.’ She turns a page, and something drops from its hiding spot, flutters to the ground like a mammoth grey moth, lands face down. When she reaches to pick it up I see that it is a photograph, a host of black and white figures with serious faces. Even from a distance the image is familiar to me. I remember it instantly, in the same way a film seen long ago, a dream, a painting, can be recalled through its merest shape.
‘May I see?’ I say, reaching out my hand.
She passes the photograph to me, lays it across my gnarled fingers. Our hands meet for an instant and she withdraws quickly, frightened she might catch something. Old age perhaps.
The photograph is a copy. Its surface smooth and cold and matt. I tilt the image toward the window so that it catches the light shining in off the heath. I squint through my glasses.
There we are. The Riverton household of summer 1916.
There was one like it for every year; Lady Violet used to insist on it. They were commissioned annually, a photographer brought in from a London studio, the auspicious day greeted with all due pomp and circumstance.
The resulting photograph, two rows of serious faces gazing unblinking at the black-hooded camera, would then be hand-delivered, displayed on the drawing-room mantle a while, then pasted in the appropriate page in the Hartford family scrapbook, along with invitations, menus and newspaper clippings.
Had it been the photograph from any other year, I may not have known its date. But this particular image is memorable for the events it immediately preceded.
Mr Frederick sits front and centre, his mother one side, Jemima the other. The latter is huddled, a black shawl draped about her shoulders to disguise her heavy pregnancy. Hannah and Emmeline sit at either ends, parentheses-one taller than the other-in matching black dresses. New dresses, but not of the kind imagined by Emmeline.
Standing behind Mr Frederick, centre of a shadow row, is Mr Hamilton,
