Seven Lean Years

by Celia Fremlin

  Of course the curtain wasn’t moving; even if it was, it was only the draught, as Nurse always said. It would be ridiculous to scream for Nurse—“A big girl like you, Miss Laura, past eighty years old!” Laura tried to smile in the darkness, but she couldn’t because of all the wrinkles round her mouth. Sometimes she could actually feel the wrinkles in her face, dry and rigid and constraining; they seemed like something superimposed on her soft young skin.

  It would be ridiculous to scream, too, because Nurse was dead. It would also be terrifying; for Laura had always known that if Nurse should ever not come when she screamed …

  Your own wickedness? Your own cruelty? Must one really still count that brief insanity of rage … so long ago, and so justifiable? Had resentment really smouldered longer, more deeply, than she was consciously aware of—more deeply than even an injury like that could warrant? Oh, this dreadful “new” theory of the subconscious—would it never become old and outdated? Must Leonard still prate about it now, just as advanced young men had done thirty years before he was born?

  “It’ll be better in the morning.” How those old nursery sayings became true at last! For Laura knew that it really would be better in the morning—if only she could get to the morning through the dark wastes of time that lay ahead. There was no nursery saying that helped one with this problem. Shouldn’t there be nursery rhymes for the very old as well as the very young….?

  “Hush-a-by Grandmama on your dark bed

  When the wind blows you must cover your head

  For the darkness is deepening and soon it will fall

  On waking, and sleeping, and breathing and all….”

  What horrible lines! But then the original lines were horrible too—she had always thought so, even as a tiny child. But where could she ever have heard this new version? Or had she made it up herself in some dark, queer corner of her mind? Laura knew all too well that her brain was less clear than it had once been; and yet, now and then, at unpredictable moments, some obscure pocket of it would flare up into lurid life, bringing her a sudden queer enhancement of wit, or memory, or vision, more brilliant than she had ever possessed in her prime. Wonderful it could be, or terrible; for who knew what ghastly thought might leap like a dying squib into her mind if she went on lying here, neither sleeping nor waking, on the dreadful borderlines of consciousness?

  Laura forced herself to open her eyes into the darkness, and with difficulty she drew herself up against the pillows and reached out for the bottle of sleeping tablets that she always kept by her bedside. With fingers weak and a little shaky with tiredness she managed to unscrew the stopper and extract one of the tablets—and only then did she realise that her accustomed glass of water was missing. Ellen had forgotten to put it there—or perhaps Laura had never asked her to. How awful it was to go visiting around like this in different houses, where people had to be asked for these things instead of taking them for granted. Without water, the pills were useless. Laura knew that she could never swallow one dry; she would choke, and no one would come.

  But it would never do to call Ellen, either. The poor child was doing her best—look at that hot water bottle waiting like an old friend amid all the confusion and desolation of the strange bed set in the ghostly ruins of the library.

  The library. Yes, this was the library. Then it couldn’t be so very far to the kitchen. Just through the baize door—only the baize door wasn’t there any more; past the butler’s pantry —only that was just a place for ladders and deckchairs now—and the kitchen was the first door after that. She could get water from the new sink—at night, Laura still thought of it as the new sink, though it had been there for more than forty years.

  Still clutching her pill, Laura managed to crawl slowly out of bed. More slowly still she felt her way across the room in the darkness, and in her painstaking efforts to avoid the big old leather-topped table that had not been there for thirty years, she twice banged into strange, flimsy bits of Ellen’s bedroom furniture. She knew there was an electric light switch by the door—had been for years—but by the time she reached the door she had forgotten about it, and her hand did not reach for it in the automatic way it had reached for the non-existent candle by her bedside.

  How cold the stone floor of the passage felt to her old bare feet. No wonder the servants had complained about it—not in Mama’s day, of course—no servant ever complained about anything in that golden time—but in her, Laura’s day, when she had become mistress of this big house, and everything which had once run smoothly and graciously began to creak and groan; when money suddenly became scarce and servants scarcer, and the whole world was slipping, as if down a preci-pice, into a new, sharp, ungracious age. But at the time she hadn’t known it was the whole world: she had thought it was just herself, poor, silly, incompetent Laura, whose “fingers were all thumbs” as Nurse used to say; the young woman whose dreamy awkwardness had so amused Dick before he married her, and so infuriated him after….

  With an almost physical effort, Laura forced herself back into the present. How absurd to have expected to find the stove glowing and murmuring its welcome; to have looked forward to the ancient comfort of Cook’s warm, faintly sticky rag rug under her chilled feet! The cold, half-rusted stove stood silent under its burden of old newspapers and disused jam jars, and the moonlight streamed without warmth across the plastic cloth with which Ellen now covered the old scrubbed wooden table; it gleamed emptily on the washed-up supper things, left to dry overnight on the draining board.

  Mama would never have allowed that; nor, indeed, would Laura, if she could ever have prevented it. As she swallowed her pill with a gulp of icy water, Laura remembered with dreadful vividness the tussles she had had on this very subject with the succession of sullen or haughty young women who had succeeded Mama’s faithful retinue—a type of young women who seemed to have sprung into existence fully fledged, as if from dragons’ teeth, at the turn of the century. She remembered the awful feeling of being trapped, as though paralysed, between their determination not to be put-upon and Dick’s ever increasing irritability at her inability to “manage the servants”.

  Well, the servants weren’t in the kitchen at the moment, anyway; they must have gone up to their rooms to change. Now she would be able to put the finishing touches to tonight’s dinner party in peace, without two pairs of scornful eyes watching her every movement. The trifle was made, but it still remained to decorate it. Whipped cream and almonds were Laura’s plan—a restrained yet delicious combination that would be exactly right. The almonds were already blanched, and the cream they had sent up from the farm was good and thick; it would whip beautifully. Laura pictured the lovely snowy mounds topping the trifle in the cut-glass dish, with the delicate polished spikes of almond spearing up like the petals of some stiff new flower, and almost began to enjoy herself. The dinner party would be a success. It must be.

  Yes, it must be. Tonight or never, Laura felt, she would prove to the world—and above all to Dick himself—that she was a fitting mistress for his house—a capable housekeeper and a gracious hostess: that he had not, after all, made a mistake in marrying her. For who was she, when all was said and done?—simply a friendless orphan, the daughter of a distant poor relation, brought up to this kind of life solely by the charitableness of Dick’s parents.

  It was difficult, though, with only two servants—even if they had been good ones—to produce the kind of dinner party that Mama used to give. Wasn’t Dick being unreasonable to expect it? Wasn’t he altogether unreasonable in the criticisms and complaints which, it seemed to Laura, had been growing steadily sharper and more frequent ever since their wedding day?

  Laura frowned in deep thought and wondered if she was imagining the change. For hadn’t Dick always been critical and demanding, from his earliest boyhood, and hadn’t Laura always worshipped him for those very qualities when she was a little girl?

  Yes, she had: and perhaps that was what had changed—not Dick himself, but her worship of
him? For marriage had changed their relationship in a way that Laura still could not quite understand; all the light-heartedness had gone out of it. The teasing, half-humorous bullying that had seemed so fascinating, so lovable when Dick had been, as it were, an elder brother to her, no longer seemed the same now that he was her husband, with real authority over her. And perhaps he, on his side, found that the shy, scatterbrained little cousin who had been such delightful company during his holidays at home, made a sadly inefficient wife for a man in his position, a poor mistress of his once perfectly run home.

  But it couldn’t be run as efficiently with two servants as it had been with six—to avoid delving into the heart of her problem, Laura fixed her mind once again on this relatively simple piece of injustice. And they hadn’t the money to spend that Mama had had—Dick didn’t take that into account, either. It was a mistake, really, to be trying to carry on in this sort of style at all; too much was having to be sacrificed to it, but of course Dick wouldn’t see it that way. He wouldn’t see, either, that they ought to be starting a family. He saw children simply as a threat to this life of comparative ease and luxury, as indeed they would be, and he was all for these new ideas—new, at least, in Laura’s circles—of picking and choosing when to have children. “Plenty of time,” he would say airily, as a man in his thirties well may. For a woman in her thirties, though, it is rather different.

  Laura roused herself. If she stood about dreaming like this the dinner party would never be ready! As she set off to the pantry to get the cream, she went over in her mind, for the twentieth time, the list of preparations. Flowers: done. Polish silver cruets: done. Repair fasteners on black dress: done. Light drawing-room fire: too early yet—no point in using up coal too long before the guests arrive….

  But the cream! Could this be it—this thin, watery stuff in the brown earthenware jug? So rich, so thick it had seemed this morning—what on earth could have happened to it? Why, she would have to beat it for hours….

  How heavy the jug was … and how tired she felt by the time she had got it to the kitchen table and had found a fork for beating. If only the light in here was better … that’s what made everything seem so difficult, so tiring…. She must see about the light some time … not now … she was too tired … and worried … and time was getting on….

  The fork clinked and tapped against the sides of the jug. Laura’s arm began to ache—her shoulder—her whole back—and still she went on beating. She must—she must—whip the cream stiff. How could she possibly serve a trifle without whipped cream? At the table of Mr Richard Fortescue a trifle without whipped cream!

  And now it had grown quite dark. All the afternoon she must have been beating that cream … nothing else had been done at all! The guests would be here any minute now, and nothing had been cooked—why, the stove wasn’t even alight! Laura lunged across the room, and tried frantically to pull it open; but the rusty door held fast. It was cold as ice! It must have been out for hours! And what was all this stuff on top of it, where soups and sauces should be simmering, potatoes bubbling? In the last of the dying moonlight Laura clawed feebly at the newspapers and the jam jars and the bits of string. Long-established spiders scuttled away into the darkness, but Laura did not see them as she called and called for her vanished maids, and listened in panic for the ring on the bell which would herald her first guest. And she hadn’t dressed yet … and the table wasn’t laid … or had the maids been doing it all this time? … She must run, run to the dining-room and see if it was ready….

  But why was running so hard? It was terrible to be in such a hurry and only able to shuffle along panting, gasping … and the floor like ice beneath your feet, and never a candle to show the way….

  But there were candles in the dining-room. Great glorious clusters of them, shining down on to the glittering glass and silver, and Dick, at the far end of the table, was telling one of his amusing stories. It was all going off beautifully after all. The soup had been perfect … and now the parlourmaid was moving quietly and decorously round the table with the fricassée. Colonel Watson, on her right, was leaning towards Laura admiringly…. She must be being witty, amusing … a perfect hostess. Dick, from his end of the table, would notice and be proud of her.

  But why was Colonel Watson looking at her like this, his smile vanished? Staring … recoiling … the whole table dropping into silence and staring too? Staring at her. What was it….

  She was wearing her nightdress. In her hurry she had come down to dinner wearing her nightdress. For a moment, Laura’s sick horror was like nothing she had ever experienced … and then she realised that it must be just one of those dreams. Everyone has them at some time or another—dreams of appearing in public in some such inadequate garment. When that sort of thing happened, you just knew that the whole thing was a dream, and you were safely asleep in bed.

  But she wasn’t. Laura touched the chill polished mahogany of the dining-room table; she pinched the flannelette folds of the nightdress, pressed them against her skin; she felt the harsh, felted texture of the garment after its many washings. It was real all right. She was wearing her nightdress.

  CHAPTER XIII

  ELLEN WOKE EARLY, and her first conscious feeling was one of inexplicable dread and dismay. She felt, for a curious moment, that some ghastly and irrevocable disaster had occurred last night, and that in a few seconds the memory of it would come flooding back into her mind.

  But it didn’t; and as she became more fully awake she realised, with a sort of uneasy surprise, that no disaster had in fact occurred. Nothing was the matter at all, except that her limbs were stiff and aching after her night on the hard billiard room couch. And nothing in particular had happened yesterday, either, except that Cousin Laura had come to stay; and that was at most a nuisance, certainly not a disaster. And Leonard had gone away for a few days, and that wasn’t very dreadful either. In fact … But perhaps that was the disaster … that feeling of guilty relief …?

  Guilty, that’s what she felt: and guilty, too, in a quite childish way, about having after all slept in the billiard room in defiance of Father’s express wishes. She hadn’t meant to defy him; her policy, as always, had been to humour him to the very limits—and beyond—of what the other inhabitants of the house would stand. But it was very late by the time she had both the old people settled; and as she tiptoed upstairs, her arms full of blankets—past the sleeping tenants on the first floor and up the creaking stairs to the attics, she began to find that her very efforts to be quiet were making her nervous. Each board that creaked under the pressure of her foot made her stop and listen for other boards, creaking less explicably, above or below. It was with real dismay that she discovered that the builders had filled not one attic but two with their equipment; the only one left to sleep in was the Rose Room. The Rose Room with its dim, damp wallpaper, its bare iron bedstead, and the vast, ancient chest. The moonlight would be shining full into it now, lighting up every single thing; but that didn’t make the prospect seem better at all; in some queer way it even made it seem worse.

  It was too silly for words, of course; but no sooner had Ellen told herself not to be so babyish, and had made to fling open the Rose Room door, than she found herself stumbling pell mell back down the stairs, tripping, staggering, grabbing at her disintegrating armful of blankets, careless now of whom she might disturb, and not stopping until she reached the safety of the ground floor.

  She had heard nothing; seen nothing; the silliness of it all was past belief; but anyway here she was, with all her bedding, at the door of the billiard room. Surprisingly, no one seemed to have been disturbed by her precipitate descent—perhaps, even in her panic, she had still been unconsciously taking precautions against noise. She waited for a moment, listening, but there was no movement anywhere, Father, as well as everyone else, must be asleep. He needn’t even know she had slept in the billiard room.

  Not if she got up early and cleared everything away, anyhow. Ellen roused herself from t
he memories of last night, scrambled off her uncomfortable couch, and began to dress in the dusty, unused room. Tonight she would certainly sleep in the Rose Room. At least there was a proper bed there; better the intangible terrors of the imagination than a Victorian horsehair couch—or so it seemed to Ellen as she rubbed her aching limbs in the light of a bright June morning.

  Even now she was up and dressed, Ellen could not quite shake off the feeling that some appalling tragedy had occurred last night. Was Father all right….?

  Her anxiety on this point was quickly removed by the sound of Mr Fortescue’s voice in the kitchen: but other, more familiar anxieties on his account were simultaneously redoubled, for his voice was raised on the aggressive, hectoring note that meant he was talking to Mrs Butler. At seven o’clock in the morning, too: Ellen almost groaned. What had he been up to now?

  It was Mrs Butler’s milk. Ellen herself was taken aback by the wild spattering of milk which covered half the table and traced a crazy semicircle of white drops on the surrounding floor. She stared in bewilderment.

  “What on earth …?” she began.

  “It’s the way she puts the jug down,” explained Mr Fortescue, nodding in the direction of Mrs Butler, and adopting a sort of truculent what’s-all-the-fuss-about air which he had evidently decided on as the attitude most likely to infuriate her. “She’s always in such a hurry, you see, she bangs it down—like this——” —illustrating with the half-empty jug—“Naturally it flies all over the place. Bound to. Always in a rush and hurry, she’ll be dead before she’s forty. Well, fifty, then,” he amended, casting a studiedly assessing glance over his victim, who was now trembling slightly with suppressed fury, and growing pink.