by Gil Hogg
Ellen became an industrious reader in later life, but at this time she had little understanding of the significance of the events of the time; the Nazi war crimes, the birth of atomic energy, the invention of a jet aircraft which would break the sound barrier, or the Churchill government, returned in 1951 with a tottering majority of fifteen. If she heard them, she did not heed the calls for emigration to a new world in Australia. For her, the boundary of the real world was the square mile enclosing Blakiston Row and Ship Street.
Ellen knew, of course, that there were many exciting events happening ‘out there’, but to her and all her friends, marriage to a young man who worked hard and was kind, children and the comfort of her family, outweighed curiosity about strange places and things; to live this out in the square mile seemed an eminently satisfying prospect. She could visualise exactly how her parlour room was going to look when she married and they rented their first house; the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the figured brass fireguard and matching coal bucket, the floral moquette covers on the chesterfield suite, the carpet square on gleaming, varnished floorboards. All these possessions would have to be acquired over time. And in her trousseau box, which Aunt Hilda had given her for her sixteenth birthday, with a lace tea cloth, was a collection of knitting patterns for baby clothes.
*
Ellen met Peter Burnham at the Palais and of all the boys she met there, he was the one for her; thick-set and strong, with a serious expression and a mat of short black hair. She was flattered by the attention of somebody five years older than herself; not simply a boyfriend, but a man. He was an apprentice motor mechanic and when you heard him talk, you could be sure that one day he would have his own garage. Even her father approved of Peter.
The marriage took place a year later when she was seventeen. The service was at St George’s on Tide Walk where she had been confirmed when she was fifteen. She wore Aunt Hilda’s old white satin gown which had gone creamy with age. Nearly a hundred guests were invited to the reception in the church hall, which might seem extravagant, but the families on both sides provided everything. The couple received enough water jugs, tea towels and fruit bowls for a lifetime. Peter said afterwards, as a matter of pride, that he would bet anyone that the quantity of beer and whisky consumed was a record.
He had drunk more than his share when they left the party at midnight after singing around the piano at Aunt Hilda’s house. The couple had a room at the Duke’s Head on Market Square and a taxi to take them there.
It was a thrill and a luxury for Ellen to spend the first night of her honeymoon in a proper hotel, not just a bed-and-breakfast house. She had never stayed in any hotel before, let alone one as posh as this. The pleasure was spoiled when Peter collapsed on the pillow as soon as he was in bed and then vomited in his sleep. She spent the night on the edge of the bed, as far as she could get from the snorting body and the stench. She roused Peter early and shamed him into checking them out of the room before the chambermaid came in and discovered the mess.
The rest of the honeymoon was in a bed-and-breakfast in Skegness. Losing her virginity with Peter in the marshes by the Ouse, on a Sunday afternoon six months before they were married, was infinitely more exciting than anything that happened during their struggles in Skegness. Ellen had been sweetly tortured by the idea of sharing a bed of her own with Peter, but it didn’t happen as she expected. When he wanted her, she didn’t quite want him and vice versa. And it rained. And rained. They loitered in the chilly streets, looking in windows. Peter was bad tempered, but she was confident that they would get used to each other after a while.
After Skegness, they came back to the creaking upstairs room at Aunt Hilda’s.
12
When Peter was conscious in the Castle Rising Hospital, he met Ellen’s request for an explanation at first with a look of affront – why should a desperately ill man be so harrassed? And then when he had been chilled by Ellen’s quiet, he managed liquid eyes. But Ellen was determined that Carol Kenny would be the first subject of conversation when Peter’s head had cleared, however badly he had been injured. She leaned over his bed and waited.
“Haven’t I paid for what I did?” he asked, tremulously.
She had to admit that Peter had paid a high price for his secret fun. The vertebrae at the base of his spine were crushed and with them, the nerves which controlled the lower part of his body. He would be paralysed for life. The enormity of the harm, in the context of years of living with it, was beyond Ellen’s grasp at that time.
The doctor had told her that Peter would be incapable of sexual intercourse, but that had no importance for her; when she thought about it afterwards, it was a relief. When the doctor started to explain sperm donation she was repulsed and didn’t listen. Now, she heard Peter’s abject declaration of love for her and his rejection of Carol Kenny as just a bit of stuff, without being moved. Carol’s vow never to see Peter again enraged her.
“Carol should come to see you. Help you get well,” she said tonelessly and she meant it.
Peter bridled as much as a man can when he is tightly sheeted down and able to move little more than his chin, mouth and eyes. “You can’t seriously mean that, Elly. It’d be wrong.”
She laughed but it was humourless. “No more wrong than what you’ve been doing. Everybody knows. Why not go on seeing each other? She could take you to the park. You know, where you used to go with her. In fact, she could look after you.”
“Never. You’re my wife. You surprise me at times, Ellen.” He spoke as though he was a moral rock.
*
It was not only Carol Kenny and Peter who had decided that Ellen was the one to nurse Peter, but Peter’s family and hers too; and all the doctors, nurses and social services officials. The hospital delivered the body (that was how she thought of it) in an ambulance, five months after the accident. The upstairs room at Hilda’s was exchanged for the ground floor back room at Mrs Burnham’s house in the next street. Ellen let Hilda and Mrs Burnham organise the room themselves.
The two old women were taking a more active interest in their own days at the prospect of having an invalid in the house; doctors’ opinions and chemists’ prescriptions were a constant subject of discussion. The lore and practice of being a carer was passed from them to Ellen in the form of instructions, although neither Hilda or Mrs Burnham had had any first-hand experience.
After a number of determined hints from Hilda and Mrs Burnham, Ellen gave up her job at the Deluxe Milk Bar and became a full-time nursemaid. Mindlessly, she lifted, sponged, changed dressings, massaged, adjusted tubes, gave pills and cooked for Peter for six months, as well as her usual duties of shopping, cleaning, washing and ironing. At times, when she was boiling the copper to wash a pile of night-shirts and sheets and the wash-house stank of shit and urine, she saw with revulsion the unending sameness of the road ahead. The neurologist, Dr Wand, took pleasure in telling her on Peter’s twenty-fifth birthday, that with the kind of care she was giving him, Peter could live until he was seventy. Dr Wand probably thought that her outburst of tears was joyful.
At first, Ellen felt only a flicker of annoyance when the doctors assumed she could be relied upon as a twenty-four hour a day body-servant; she understood that they thought only of the patient. Hilda and Mrs Burnham went further; they assumed, in so many comments made to Ellen, that it was fulfilling to empty dirty bed-pans and that a captive husband was a good husband. Ellen could only regard them both as dried out old carapaces, beyond any pleasure but listening to doctors and nibbling buttered scones at afternoon tea; but this was the natural order which nobody in the square mile would seek to question.
“You’re Peter’s wife,” Mrs Burnham said, as though it was an exceptional insight, certain that it settled everything.
Ellen tried to stifle the heat of her resentment as the days filled with catheters, soiled sheets and Peter’s choleric temper dragged on, but she couldn’t. One Sunday afternoon she was with Peter and Mrs Burnham in the
parlour. She had made fish-paste sandwiches with white bread and Peter, in his wheelchair, was gorging them. There was no talk other than the odd remark in an undertone from Mrs Burnham as she fussed around her son and the slapping sound of Peter chewing the food with his mouth open.
“I’ve got a job,” Ellen said.
At first, they hardly heard her. “What did you say, dear?” Mrs Burnham asked, brushing crumbs off the rug over Peter’s knees.
“I’ve decided I want to go out to work and I’ve got a job,” she repeated in a level voice. Both of them turned on her, incredulous, their mouths slack.
“That’s impossible!” Sticky lumps of chewed bread sprayed from Peter’s mouth. His bloated cheeks quivered. “How will I get on?”
“We can get home care,” Ellen said quickly. She had thought it through.
“And where might you be thinking of bestowing your labour?” Peter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“The Grange. I’ve got on the kitchen staff as a waitress.”
“You’ve got on the staff. Meaning you’ve gone behind our backs and fixed yourself up, like?” Peter’s voice rose thinly.
Mrs Burnham sat still, her lips crimped into a thin line, the hairs on her chin and upper lip prickling, her small eyes misted with the meaning of the wrong that was being revealed.
Peter took a long look at Ellen. “The Grange is it? That means you’ll be working nights.”
“I’ll be sleeping in at the Grange except for days off.”
Peter’s cheeks reddened. He trembled. “You fucking slag!”
“Now, Peter…” Mrs Burnham approached the wheelchair and pressed her floppy belly against Peter’s face. “Ellen doesn’t need to work. Enough of this silliness, Ellen.”
Ellen stood up and moved to the door. “I’m not going to ask the charity shop every time I want a coat or a new pair of shoes for the next thirty years.”
*
Ellen had started looking for jobs in the Barton Village Courier a long time before she made a move. It was a relief at first, a fantasy, a pretence. On at least one morning a week, after she had washed Peter, helped him into his chair and given him a meal of sausages in brown sauce, or beef mince on toast, she would walk to Barton Village. She shopped for groceries and then sat in the newspaper room of the Council Library in Church Street looking at the jobs vacant columns. At first, it seemed hopeless because she wasn’t fitted for much. Her handwriting and spelling were poor. She couldn’t compose a proper letter. She was quick with figures from her days with Reywin and the Deluxe. Shop assistant was a possibility, or a maid or waitress.
When she first saw advertisements for staff at the Grange she thought that it would be an interesting place to work, but she didn’t seriously think of applying. Everybody knew about the owners, the Marchmont family. Old Sir Geoffrey used to serve as the local Tory member of parliament and he had been Lord Lieutenant of the county. The Marchmont family were like aristocracy in the eyes of the locals. But it was the significance of the words live in in the advertisements which started her on a new line of thought; not just work, but freedom from the Burnham’s back room and Peter’s niggling, except on her days off.
She telephoned the Grange’s estate agents in Church Close, introducing herself as Ellen Colbert. On the instant, she decided to undertake this venture as Ellen Colbert rather than Mrs Peter Burnham. She was seen by the chief clerk briefly and referred to the butler Mr Grayson. She made an appointment with him by telephone and caught the bus past Barton Village a few miles, to the valley by the Nar River where the Grange Estate lay at the edge of the fen country, boggy, misty and damp. She had been in the Grange gardens twice in the past for picnics with a school party. She was a little disappointed to find that on this occasion, the tradespersons’ entrance was opposite the bus stop and led through gloomy passages directly to the kitchens.
Ellen expected, from the films she had seen at the King’s Lynn Odeon, that the butler would be a rather superior person, but Jack Grayson greeted her with a grin and a wink and in a flurry of his tailcoat, drew her into his pantry-sized office. He seemed to take only a moment to sum her up. She was plainly dressed, but his manner made her feel lively and she showed it. She lacked confidence in her charms after the disaster with Peter and used them sparingly, but she was conscious that her naturally wavy hair was lustrous; her skin, pure cream. She had a small, supple body with delicate ankles. Grayson was all hustle and bustle and silly jokes. She couldn’t help liking him. He was about ten years older than her, short, with thin ginger hair and freckles.
She tried to explain her limited experience but Grayson didn’t give her a chance. He scribbled down the name of the manager of the Deluxe Milk Bar as a reference, laughed with her at his own jokes, answered his own questions and fixed a starting date and a wage. He called Doris, whom he described as the ‘head girl’, a shrewd looking woman of thirty, to measure her for a uniform from their stock and show her the small room she would occupy with another girl. Afterwards, Grayson breezed through introductions to maids and footmen who were nearby and led her up the back stairs to the dining room.
“Take a look. This is where you’ll be working, Ellen.”
Ellen raised her hand to her mouth as she took in the grandeur of the room. It seemed as tall as the cathedrals she had seen on postcards and was hung with inverted bells of crystal. The dining table was a vista of mahogany, a lucent brown lake decked with small marble statuary and fountains of flowers. Gods and angels flew in the clouds painted on the ceiling, trailing red and blue robes. The sun pierced a stained glass window and blessed the room like a sword.
“This is where Sir Geoffrey sits.” Grayson stepped up to a blue plush chair at the head of the table, higher-backed than the others.
Her fingers caressed the carved shoulders of the chair with its gargoyles and chivalric signs; it was like a throne. She thought of Blakiston Row and Ship Street, and suddenly felt very small.
*
On Ellen’s first evening at the Grange the dinner smelt delicious; it made her digestive juices flow uncomfortably in her stomach. She was wearing a straight black skirt, low heeled black slippers, a white blouse and a starched white hat like a paper boat on her head. Her hands were covered by thin white cotton gloves. She was ‘marched in’ to the dining room half an hour before the guests were due to arrive, with Doris and two other girls. Grayson, grave-faced, inspected them. He muttered tersely if a skirt was marked, or a lock of hair out of place. When he passed Ellen a little devil gleamed from his eye. He swept a slow glance along the table they had so carefully set. He nodded to Doris. Yes, they were ready. Ellen was dismissed to stand in the corridor outside the kitchen while they waited for Geoffrey Marchmont and his guests to finish their drinks in the library and go in for dinner.
Ellen’s confidence grew as the days passed. The breakfast buffet and the occasional lunches were easy, but the dinners were tense. Her main task at first was to carry plates and tureens from the kitchen to the sideboard and occasionally, at Doris’s direction, hand them to the table. She was nervous at the sight of ten or twenty elegantly dressed people sitting under the brilliant chandeliers and afraid to do more than give a covert glance in their direction at first. The men were usually in penguin black and white, or the red or green jackets of formal military dress. The women’s hair was sculptured and studded with stones. And there was a smell of perfume wafting headily over the rich food.
After a fortnight’s experience of dinners, when Ellen was about to place a silver tray of sliced sirloin of beef on the sideboard, Doris alarmed her with an order: “You do the left, Ellen.” The heavy tray, supported by her left palm and forearm was already making her shoulder ache. She began to work along the line of diners, picking up slices with spoon and fork (a skill she had practiced) while the slices slid about in the gravy, alive; and the brown juice ran around the rim of the tray in a mini-wave. Her shoulder was numb. At the moment when she placed the last slice on a virgin white p
late, a fatty brown trickle went over the edge of the tray, on to the black silk collar of the dinner jacket beneath. For a moment, she thought the guest might not notice. She thought Doris might not notice; but Doris appeared at her elbow and took the tray with accusing eyes. Ellen stumbled out an apology.
The guest’s bloodshot eyes, as red-rare as the beef, stared up at her. He dabbed carelessly with his table napkin. “Don’t worry, my dear. I was going to get it cleaned anyway,” he said.
There was mild approval from the guests for his gallantry, but Doris was not so charitable. She dismissed Ellen from the room with a jerk of her head. In the corridor she dug her bruising fingers into Ellen’s upper arm. “You’re supposed to be an experienced silver service waitress! You don’t know a damn thing, my girl!”
Ellen was banished to the kitchen where she sat in a corner and nervously stuffed herself with smoked salmon; the austerities of war, still present in the country, seemed to have no application to this household.
After dinner, Grayson, frowning, adjudicated on the charge in his office. He listened to Doris’s harsh account.
“Anything you want to say?” he asked Ellen.
“No.” She was going to say that she never claimed any experience, but she felt a fool. She was in acute anxiety that she would have to leave the Grange, because it meant going back to the Burnhams.
Grayson paused, puffed up his chest and turned down his mouth. “Well,” he said loudly, “you’re going to have to do better!”
Ellen heard Doris’s sharp exhalation of breath and saw the look of contempt she shot at him.
*
