When I stand to leave, she asks me to come again and I tell her I will. I mean it too. I wonder why I have not done so sooner: she is a kind person and neither of us has other contacts in London. She walks me to the door and we say goodbye.
As I turn to leave, I see something on her reading table. Lean closer to make sure.
A theatre programme.
I’d have thought nothing of it, only the name is familiar.
‘
‘Yes.’ Her own gaze drops to the table. ‘I went last week.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was enormous fun,’ she says. ‘You really must go if you have the chance.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I had planned to.’
‘Now that I think of it,’ she says, ‘it’s really quite a coincidence you should come today.’
‘A coincidence?’ Coldness spreading beneath my skin.
‘You’ll never guess who I went to the theatre with.’
Oh, but I fear I will.
‘Alfred Steeple. You remember Alfred? From Riverton?’
‘Yes,’ I seem to say.
‘It was really quite unexpected. He had a spare ticket. Someone cancelled on him at the last minute. He said he was all set to go alone and then he remembered I was in London. We ran into each other over a year ago and he still remembered my address. So we went together; it was a shame to waste a ticket, you know what they cost these days.’
Do I imagine the pink that spreads under her pale, freckled cheeks, makes her seem gauche and girlish, despite being at least ten years older than I?
Somehow I manage to nod goodbye as she closes the door behind me. In the distance a car horn sounds.
Alfred, my Alfred, took another woman to the theatre. Laughed with her, bought her supper, walked her home.
I start down the stairs.
While I was looking for him, searching the streets, he was here, asking Miss Starling to accompany him instead. Giving her the ticket intended for me.
I stop, lean against the wall. Close my eyes and clench my fists. I cannot rid my mind of this image: the two of them, arm in arm, smiling as they relive the evening’s events. Just as I had dreamt Alfred and I would. It is unbearable.
A noise close by. I open my eyes. The landlady is standing at the bottom of the stairs, gnarled hand resting on the banister, spectacled eyes trained on me. And on her unkind face an expression of inexplicable satisfaction. Of course he went with her, her expression says, what would he want with the likes of you when he could have someone like Lucy Starling? You’ve got too big for your boots, aimed too high. You should’ve listened to your mother and minded your place.
I want to slap her cruel face.
I hurry down the remaining stairs, brush past the old woman and into the street.
And I vow never to see Miss Lucy Starling again.
Hannah and Teddy are arguing about the war. It seems everyone across London is arguing about the war these days. Enough time has passed and, though the grief has not gone, will never go, distance is allowing people a more critical eye.
Hannah is making poppies out of red tissue paper and black wire, and I am helping. But my mind is not on my work. I am still afflicted with thoughts of Alfred and Lucy Starling. I am bewildered and I am cross, but most of all I am hurt that he could transfer his affections so easily. I have written him another letter, but I am yet to hear back. In the meantime, I feel strangely empty; at night, in my darkened room, I have been subject to the odd rush of tears. It is easier by day, I am better able to put such emotions aside, affix my servant’s mask and try to be the best lady’s maid I can. And I must. For without Alfred, Hannah is all I have.
The poppies are Hannah’s new cause. It’s to do with the poppies on Flanders fields, she says. The poppies in a poem by a Canadian medical officer who did not survive the war. It’s how we’re going to remember the war dead this year.
Teddy thinks it unnecessary. He believes those who died at war made a worthy sacrifice but that it is time to move on.
‘It wasn’t a sacrifice,’ Hannah says, finishing another poppy, ‘it was a waste. Their lives were wasted.’ Those who died and those who came back; the living dead, who sit on the street corners with bottles of liquor and beggars’ hats.
‘Sacrifice, waste, same thing,’ says Teddy. ‘You are being pedantic.’
Hannah says he is being obtuse. She doesn’t look up as she adds that he would do well to wear a poppy himself. It might help stop the trouble in the factories.
There have been strikes lately in the Luxtons’ factories. They started after Lloyd George ennobled Simion for services during the war. It seems a lot of their factory workers were in the war themselves, or lost fathers and brothers, and don’t think too much of Simion’s war record. There is not a lot of love lost for folks like Simion and Teddy who are seen to have made money off the deaths of others.
Teddy doesn’t answer Hannah, or not fully. He mutters something about folks being ungrateful and how they should be pleased to have a job in these times, but he does pick up a poppy, twirling it by its black wire stem. He is quiet for a while, pretending absorption in the newspaper. Hannah and I continue to twist red tissue paper to bind the petals onto stems.
Teddy folds his newspaper and tosses it onto the table beside. He stands and straightens his jacket. He is off to the club, he says. He comes to Hannah’s side and threads the poppy lightly into her hair. She can wear it for him, he says, it suits her better than it does him. Teddy bends and kisses her cheek, and then he strides across the room. As he reaches the door, he hesitates as if he’s remembered something, and he turns.
‘There’s one sure way to lay the war to rest,’ he says, ‘and that’s to replace the lives that were lost with new ones.’
It is Hannah’s turn not to answer. She stiffens, but not so that anyone would notice who wasn’t looking for the reaction. She does not look at me. Her fingers reach up and slip Teddy’s poppy from her hair.
Hannah has still not fallen. It is a continuing bone of contention between them. She and I do not discuss it and I do not know her feelings on the matter. In the beginning I wondered whether she was somehow preventing herself falling with some remedy or another. But I have seen nothing to support that. Perhaps she is just one of those women not disposed to falling. The lucky ones, my mother used to say.
In the autumn of 1921, an attempt is made on me. A friend of Deborah’s, Lady Pemberton-Brown, corners me at a country weekend and offers me a position. She begins by admiring my needlepoint then tells me that a good lady’s maid is hard to find these days and she would very much like me to come and work for her.
I am flattered: it is the first time my services have been sought. The Pemberton-Browns live at Glenfield Hall and are one of the oldest and grandest families in all of England. Mr Hamilton used to tell us stories about Glenfield, the household against which every other English butler compared his own.
I thank her for her kind words but tell her I couldn’t possibly leave my
