The Collected Stories

she’d been engaged to when she was twenty-two, another employee in the factory, had made her pregnant and had then, without warning, disappeared. He was a man called Bert Fask, considerate in every possible way, quiet and seemingly reliable. Everyone said she was lucky to be engaged to Bert Fask and she had imagined quite a happy future. ‘Don’t matter a thing,’ he said when she told him she was pregnant, and he fixed it that they could get married six months sooner than they’d intended. Then he disappeared. She’d later heard that he’d done the same thing with other girls, and when it became clear that he didn’t intend to return she began to feel bitter. Her only consolation was the baby, which she still intended to have even though she didn’t know how on earth she was going to manage. She loved her unborn child and she longed for its birth so that she herself could feel loved again. But the child, two months premature, lived for only sixteen hours. That blow was a terrible one, and it was when endeavouring to get over it that she’d come across Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement, on a page of a newspaper that a greengrocer had wrapped a beetroot in. That chance led her to a contentment she hadn’t known before, to a happiness that was different only in detail from the happinesses of the other servants.

On the morning July 12th 1974, a Friday, Tindall knocked on Mrs Abercrombie’s bedroom door at her usual time of eight forty-five. She carried into the room Mrs Abercrombie’s breakfast tray and the morning mail, and placed the tray on the Queen Anne table just inside the door. She pulled back the bedroom’s six curtains. ‘A cloudy day,’ she said.

Mrs Abercrombie, who had been reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints, extinguished her bedside light. She remarked that the wireless the night before had predicted that the weather would be unsettled: rain would do the garden good.

Tindall carried the tray to the bed, placed it on the mahogany bed-table and settled the bed-table into position. Mrs Abercrombie picked up her letters. Tindall left the room.

Letters were usually bills, which were later passed to Plunkett to deal with. Plunkett had a housekeeping account, into which a sum of money was automatically transferred once a month. Mrs Abercrombie’s personal requirements were purchased from this same account, negligible since she had ceased to buy clothes. It was Tindall who noticed when she needed a lipstick refill or lavender-water or more hairpins. Tindall made a list and handed it to Plunkett. For years Mrs Abercrombie herself hadn’t had the bother of having to remember, or having to sign a cheque.

This morning there was the monthly account from the International Stores and one from the South Western Electricity Board. The pale brown envelopes were identification enough: she put them aside unopened. The third envelope contained a letter from her solicitors about her will.

In the kitchen, over breakfast, the talk turned to white raspberries. Mr Apse said that in the old days white raspberries had been specially cultivated in the garden. Tindall, who had never heard of white raspberries before, remarked that the very idea of them gave her the creeps. ‘More flavour really, ‘Miss Bell said quietly.

Plunkett, engrossed in the Daily Telegraph, did not say anything. Mrs Pope said she’d never had white raspberries and would like to try them. She’d be more than grateful, she added, if Mr Apse could see his way to putting in a few canes. But Mr Apse had relapsed into his more familiar mood of silence. He was a big man, slow of movement, with a brown bald head and tufts of grey hair about his ears. He ate bacon and mushrooms and an egg in a slow and careful manner, occasionally between mouthfuls drinking tea. Miss Bell nodded at Mrs Pope, an indication that Mr Apse had heard the request about the raspberries and would act upon it.

‘Like slugs they sound,’ Tindall said.

Miss Bell, who had small tortoiseshell glasses and was small herself, with a weather-beaten face, said that they did not taste like slugs. Her father had grown white raspberries, her mother had made a delicious dish with them, mixing them with loganberries and baking them with a meringue top. Mrs Pope nodded. She’d read a recipe like that once, in Mrs Beeton it might have been; she’d like to try it out.

In the Daily Telegraph Plunkett read that there was a strike of television technicians and a strike of petrol hauliers. The sugar shortage was to continue and there was likely to be a shortage of bread. He sighed without making a sound. Staring at print he didn’t feel like reading, he recalled the warmth of Tindall’s body the night before. He glanced round the edge of the newspaper at her: there was a brightness in her eyes, which was always there the morning after he’d visited her in bed. She’d wept twice during the four hours he’d spent: tears of fulfilment he’d learnt they were, but all the same he could never prevent himself from comforting her. Few words passed between them when they came together in the night; his comforting consisted of stroking her hair and kissing her damp cheeks. She had narrow cheeks, and jet-black hair which she wore done up in a knot during the day but which tumbled all over the pillows when she was in bed. Her body was bony, which he appreciated. He didn’t know about the tragedy in her life because she’d never told him; in his eyes she was a good and efficient servant and a generous woman, very different from the sorrowful creature who’d come looking for employment twenty years ago. She had never once hinted at marriage, leaving him to deduce that for her their arrangement was as satisfactory as it was for him.

‘Moussaka for dinner,’ Mrs Pope said, rising from the breakfast table. ‘She asked for it special.’

‘No wonder, after your last one,’ Miss Bell murmured. The food at the schools where she’d taught geography had always been appalling: grey-coloured mince and soup that smelt, huge sausage-rolls for Sunday tea, cold scrambled egg.

‘Secret is, cook it gently,’ Mrs Pope said, piling dishes into the sink. ‘That’s all there’s to it if you ask me.’

‘Oh no, no,’ Miss Bell murmured, implying that there was a great deal more to moussaka than that. She carried her own dishes to the sink. Mrs Pope had a way with moussaka, she added in her same quiet way, which was why Mrs Abercrombie had asked for it again.

Tindall chewed her last corner of toast and marmalade. She felt just slightly sore, pleasantly so, as she always did after a visit from Plunkett. Quite remarkable he sometimes was in the middle of the night, yet who’d have thought he’d know a thing about any of it?

Mr Apse left the kitchen and Miss Bell followed him. Tindall carried her dishes to the sink and assisted Mrs Pope with the washing up. At the table Plunkett lit his first cigarette of the day, lingering over a last cup of tea.

As she did every morning after breakfast, Mrs Abercrombie recalled her husband’s death. It had taken place on a fine day in March, a day with a frost in the early morning and afterwards becoming sunny, though still cold. He’d had a touch of flu but was almost better; Dr Ripley had suggested his getting up in time for lunch. But by lunchtime he was dead, with the awful suddenness that had marked the deaths of his father and his grandfather, nothing to do with flu at all. She’d come into their bedroom, with the clothes she’d aired for him to get up into.

Mrs Abercrombie was sixty-one now; she’d been thirty-four at the time of the death. Her life for twenty-seven years had been a memorial to her brief marriage, but death had not cast unduly gloomy shadows, for after the passion of her sorrow there was some joy at least in her sentimental memories. Her own death preoccupied her now: she was going to die because with every day that passed she felt more weary. She felt herself slipping away and even experienced slight pains in her body, as if some ailment had developed in order to hurry her along. She’d told Dr Ripley, wondering if her gallstones were playing up, but Dr Ripley said there was nothing the matter with