Instinct warning Nell that mention of Germany, West or East, might bring on an explosion, she boldly said that she did not know and was rewarded with a discontented order for ‘my usual’ which sent her hurrying to the kitchen.
“Is it Betty’s boy-friend already?” said Mary, stooping with groans to take a batch of scones from the oven. “Him and his ‘usual’ … now what would it be? Scones or Bourbons? I think it was Bourbons it is, and two of them, but I’m not quite sure. Take him the Bourbons, dear, and try.”
But there was that in Mary’s grey eye which made Nell decide to take the scones, and she was rewarded with a mumble of ‘nice and hot’ as they disappeared into her first customer’s mouth.
He lingered on until nearly eleven, while she successfully served five other coffee drinkers and, concealing excitement, gathered up one and sixpence in coppers. Her first tips. The money was cool and heavy in her hand; grimy, worn, common pennies and halfpennies that nevertheless seemed to her more real and satisfying than the neat packet of notes she had received at Akkro Products every Friday afternoon. She put them into the little bowl on the shelf at the back of the room, and took the last load of used cups back to the kitchen, where on Mary’s advice she stacked them for Tansy to deal with on her return. She contemplated, wrestled with and decided against the notion of asking Mary why she had given her wrong information about the old gentleman’s ‘usual’. It might make trouble, and trouble on her first day there was something that Nell did not want; however, a note of warning went down against large, poetic-looking, fascinating Mary with the wet grey eye.
No sooner were coffees dealt with than it became time to stand by for lunches. Miss Berringer, descending from upstairs where, she told Nell, she had a duck of a flat and had been having a breather and a gasper, took over the finer details of cooking while Nell made herself useful by polishing glasses, writing menus, greasing basins for two large puddings, making custard under instruction (“I’d like to give them the real stuff instead of this packet muck but I can’t afford the eggs, of course, and ten to one they wouldn’t like it if I did”), and arranging various jugs, pots and dishes filled with prepared food to keep warm around the outer precincts of the electric stove.
Miss Berringer threw out information as she worked.
“We do two hot dishes every midday; can’t manage more and it wouldn’t pay if we did; now put some water in that jam; not too much but a little works wonders; fill up those dishes with it, not more than a dessertspoonful in each, and arrange them over there; Mary, if you nearly fall into that bowl of lettuce once more I shall have kittens; shove it farther under the table, will you; Nell, have you got a black dress? You ought really to have one; I don’t mind particularly what you wear, but I know from experience that people are more likely to tip the waitress well if she looks like a waitress; otherwise you might be my niece, and they don’t know whether to or not. Great God in Heaven, there’s someone crashing round in the restaurant already and its barely half-past; go and stifle them, will you, Nell, and say lunch is coming up.”
The morning flew by; the kitchen grew hotter and the pile of washing-up mounted, while Mary toiled groaning between table and stove and Miss Berringer apparently grew cooler, darting about with not a grey hair out of place; sometimes coming to the curtain which shut off kitchen from dining-room and advising Nell with a murmured word as the latter moved quickly between the tables with laden trays, but spending most of her time in the kitchen, assembling the orders which Nell brought back from the sunlit room now full of quietly-talking, placidly-eating customers.
Nell had no time to think whether she liked what she was doing. She had the sensation now and again of racing against the job, keeping pace with the demands that were made upon her speed and her memory, but not once did she have to say to an amiably expectant face, “I’m sorry—what did you say you would have?”, nor did she receive a single scowl for keeping anyone waiting, and when at last, at a quarter to two, she sat down to a plate of indifferentish stew with hardish potatoes and cabbage à l’ Anglaise on the corner of the crowded kitchen table, she was enjoying for the first time in her life the sensation of having worked hard and—yes, she had—enjoyed it.
Miss Berringer told her not to hurry over the weakish coffee, that morning’s brew re-heated. Hiccoughs were the reward of waitresses who bolted their lunch, and hiccoughs either amused or revolted the customers; Betty had been the only waitress Miss Berringer had ever known who could bolt her lunch and not get hiccoughs. Mary showed a tendency to wonder, with a gleam in her eye, what Betty was doing now; Miss Berringer shook her head lightly yet quellingly; and Nell rested her feet and thought about the bowl on the shelf, which was now full of coppers and even contained an exciting gleam or two of silver. She had given up counting, for there simply had not been time, and had dropped her loot into its place as she passed on her way to and from the kitchen. She seemed to have been at The Primula ever since she could remember, and Akkro Products was a thousand miles away.
Soon, very soon, the teas were upon them. The kitchen cooled down; Tansy returned and washed up, while relating a long story about ‘my Julian’ which Nell only heard in snatches because she was moving between restaurant and back premises laying up; and just before half-past three she found time to comb her hair and refresh her flushed face.
Mary turned out a batch of small cakes adorned with cherries, and Miss Berringer produced from some cranny two iced sandwiches. An elderly man brought in a trayful of pink, green and apricot-jammy ‘fancies’, and slammed them down on the floor because there was no room anywhere else, while exchanging badinage with Mary. Miss Berringer described the new arrivals as pastry-muck which the customers insisted upon having. There was a type of customer which she called Tea-and-Pastries, and, she added darkly, a tea-and-pastries mind to go with it. When she had gone upstairs, Tansy said that to her mind the pastries was very nice; what was wrong with the pastries? Her Julian was very fond of pastries. Lady Bottlewasher had some funny ideas. Nell’s feet punishing her? Try Tiz. You could get it at Boots. If Nell thought this was a rush, let her wait till Easter, then she’d see something. Queues halfway down the street and for the toilet too. If she was still here at Easter, said Mary mournfully. The place wasn’t so bad, it might be worse, said Tansy, assuming what Nell was to come to know as her shut-in face, and then sounds from the restaurant indicated that the first of the teas were arriving.
The teas were quieter than the lunches. Presumably, as they were mostly female and elderly, or young and in romantic couples, they had not spent the morning in office or shop and were less in need of restoratives; be that as it may, the morning’s sensation of keeping pace with demands was not repeated, and Nell had opportunity to enjoy the sunlight while leaning against a table in the only unoccupied corner, near the begging-bowl, which was to her the most interesting object in the place. She had no idea how much it contained, having lost control of the sum she was trying to carry in her head somewhere around half-past one, but she knew that whatever it was would be all hers, because Miss Berringer had told her that tips were only shared amongst the staff at Easter and the Bank Holidays.
She thought that on her way home she might buy something nice for the parents’ supper—then decided that such a display of affluence might be imprudent. Yet sooner or later they would have to be told, for she liked working here; she liked it very much; and she intended, with every ounce of determination she possessed, to go on working here—if Miss Berringer would have her. As she civilly advanced to welcome a weak and cautious countenance which she rightly diagnosed as a Tea-and-Pastries, she wondered whether Miss Berringer was satisfied with her new waitress. That cheerful face with the delicate well-bred nose gave nothing away.
“Er—do you like China tea, Hilary? Good, so do I. China tea, please, and scones” (pronounced to rhyme with bronze) “no; no cakes, thank you.” (Sixpence.)
“Tea and pastries, please, miss.” (Twopence.)
“A pot of tea
for two, please, miss, and scones,” (pronounced to rhyme with bones. Twopence).
“Just bread and butter for one, please, dear, and a pot of tea.” (Threepence.)
And on one awful occasion:
“Miss. This cup’s got lipstick on it.” (Twopence. Coals of fire.)
“Dirty cat,” observed Tansy, impartially referring to herself, on Nell’s giving her, with outward calm but some inward trepidation, the offensive cup. She proceeded to scour it, while Mary, sitting at the table bathing in tea, indignantly suggested that the complaining customer had left the lipstick there herself.
“It was a him,” said Nell, sipping her own tea and eating one of Mary’s characterless cakes. Mary said the more shame to him, the dirty beast, and before Nell had time to explain, the bell, which had an unearthly silvery note, summoned her again into what was now the tea-room.
It was getting on for five o’clock, but people were still coming in, attracted to the Heath by the first brilliant weather after the cruel winter, and Nell began to realize that she would not be away by six, having been warned that there would be clearing-up to be done after the teas were over. She would probably not be home until seven. She could only hope that her mother might have been out on one of those long rambles over the Heath and up and down the back lanes of Hampstead village which she lately seemed to enjoy, and not return until after Nell herself had arrived.
But at ten past six—“Put up the ‘closed’ notice and shut the blighters out,” commanded Miss Berringer, running downstairs and putting a perky blue feather cap and expertly-rouged cheeks round the kitchen door, “I’m off. You be off too, Tansy; your Julian will be clamouring for his telly. (I still think you’re making a mistake about that, but never mind.) Snacks all ready; that’s right, Mary. And here’s Mrs. Cooper. Nell, I’m glad to see you’ve survived your first day in the madhouse. See you tomorrow. Nighty-night, all.” She was gone.
There was a silence. Then Mary said.
“You’re not the only one that’s making a mistake, Tansy dear. Where are we meeting the fancy-boy tonight?”
“Car was parked outside The Everyman, as per usual.”
Tansy was twisting a scarf neatly round her head into a turban. Nell, who had been carrying out Miss Berringer’s order concerning the Closed notice, caught only the end of this exchange as she returned to the kitchen, but she did see Tansy’s lightning grimace of warning and she saw also a grin lurking on the face of Mrs. Cooper, the evening girl, a slim young matron in slacks, a dyed lovelock, and an immovable cigarette, who was leisurely combing her hair.
“There. She’ll be tired, no doubt, after her first day,” Mary said, surveying Nell with affected benevolence. She heaved herself to her feet. “Well, I’ll be tootling. I hope I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, but it depends on my stomach and that’s the truth. Good night to you all, girls.”
When she had made a leisurely exit, to which they paid formal tribute by watching in silence, Mrs. Cooper uttered a tinkling laugh.
“Poor Mary and her stomach.”
“Yours is a young one; let’s ’ope it keeps its ’ealth,” Tansy said sharply. “Not but what Mary don’t give one the creeps with ’ers. Well, I’m next. My Julian’ll be thinking I’ve fallen down a hole. So long, all.”
Nell began to think that she might be going, too. She said something pleasant to Mrs. Cooper, who was trying to change into a black dress without removing the cigarette from between her lips and who uttered in reply a peculiar noise whose intonation was, however, undoubtedly amiable in intent, and marched into the tea-room to collect the begging-bowl.
Standing alone in the wide, white, sunny room, with the homeward traffic rushing past up the High Street, she poured her hoard onto one of the tables and, sitting down, began in some excitement to count it.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. And four pennies.
One pound two shillings and fourpence. Hers: earned by this undignified pleasant work which she found hard on the feet but amusing, absorbing, and, in some way, satisfying.
She jingled the pennies in her hand; standing now in the white apron which already bore a stain of tea in one corner, and looking thoughtfully out of the window at the late sunlight shining between one of the High Street’s sycamore-trees. I like being a waitress, she thought. Perhaps most people wouldn’t, I don’t know; all I know is that I like it, and I’m going to keep on being one, until I’ve saved enough out of my tips to start a tea-shop of my own.
The idea burst upon her without warning. At one moment she was a girl with no aim in life; counting pennies at the end of a day’s work which she must keep concealed from her parents because it was ‘not the kind of thing’ educated girls did; living rent-free in her aunt’s house, wearing shabby clothes, perpetually hungry because she had to lunch every day off a bar of chocolate or a fourpenny roll; worried about her parents’ future; not knowing what she wanted from life; and given to bad attacks of loneliness about which she alone knew. The next moment she was a girl with a definite and sensible ambition in life, one which she could work for; ladies do run tea-rooms; parents and aunts could even approve. She saw the sign floating in the air, as she stared out of the window at the bowl of magenta and yellow primulas painted on a wooden board. The flowers had changed to roses; plain, large, pink roses. The sign said simply: NELL. HOME-MADE CAKES.
Sweeping the takings lavishly into her apron, she flew off.
“Well, did you get your shoes?” Anna asked, when they were sitting at supper in the shabby dining-room, with the very last rays of sunlight sparkling through the plane-trees outside the window and sliding over the ceiling. “Where did you get to? I didn’t go out until half-past four this afternoon and you weren’t back then. Daddy would like some more bread, dear,” and, as Nell leapt to the sideboard to fulfil this opportune wish, “do you know, I saw a girl so exactly like you this afternoon in one of the tea-shops in the High Street. I was so late in going out that I wondered if I should have some tea, and I stopped to look there. (Terrible prices; I didn’t have any, of course.) This girl was the waitress. She was exactly like you. It was quite uncanny.”
“Was it?” Nell squeaked, beginning to hack at a second enormous slice of bread.
“She even had your white blouse and grey skirt. (But she was wearing an apron, of course.) I only saw her for a moment. She vanished at the back somewhere. But I have never seen such a likeness; it wasn’t just that she reminded me of you; she might have been you.”
Nell laid down her knife amidst the wreckage of the loaf, and turned round. As well now as later on.
“It was me,” she said calmly, and, at the sight of their two slightly puzzled faces; safe, and embedded in the solidity of middle age, and not knowing oh! one quarter of what was going on all around them, she gave an irrepressible giggle.
“How could it have been you, dear?” Anna said at last, “you were in London buying your shoes. And this girl was the waitress.”
“No …” Nell came back to the table, handed her father his piece of bread, and sat down, “I didn’t go into London. I’ve been at The Primula all day, being the waitress. You see …” her eyelids just flickered towards her father, who had laid down his knife and fork, and she rushed on, “A friend of John’s told me what a lot of money you can earn being a waitress. Sixteen pounds a week—”
“Sixteen pounds a week!” Martin’s tone held a kind of sick outrage; he might have been speaking for all the underpaid schoolmasters and half-starved parsons and struggling scholars in the world, “waitressing?”
“Yes …” she turned to him quickly, “but not always, of course. Usually it’s about eight or nine—with tips, if you’re in a busy place. So … you see, I’ve made twenty-two shillings today apart from the pound they paid me, just in tips.”
She was darting glances from one face to the other; guessing, weighing, trying to tip the balance over into approval.
“That’s where the cake came from,” Anna said slowly. She had rested her el
bows on the table and put her chin into her hands and was studying Nell. Her expression was thoughtful; no more. “I wondered. I thought you must have economized on your shoes, and I was going to blow you up about it. Though it’s a very nice cake,” and she smiled rather uncertainly; half at the ‘walnut gâteau’ which Nell had been unable to resist buying in a shop that was just closing, and half at the daughter whom, she had just decided, was a stranger.
Her feelings were extraordinarily confused. She was cross with Nell, and she approved of her independence and courage, and she was strongly aware of how upset Martin was, and over and above all other feelings she was shocked.
All the names from her past rose before her: Aunt Nancy and Aunt Eleanor, her father and mother, the neighbours in the large white houses under the great elms, the Lyddingtons, the Trevelyans, the Peytons. Most of them had died years ago, and their houses had been pulled down or converted into flats, yet her first thought was: what will they say? Anna Meredith’s daughter has become a waitress. How extraordinary; how unthinkable; how shocking; Anna must have gone mad to let her.
Then, becoming amidst her whirling thoughts aware that Nell was looking at her with a mixture of anxiety and defiance, while Martin was still sitting with sunken head staring at his plate, she pulled herself together. She had been trained to think: she must see the situation, not as it theoretically was, but as it was in fact; and, in fact, it could not possibly have happened in the Hampstead of 1920.
It would have been unthinkable, as the marriage of a black man with an heiress of the Smiths or the Vanderbilts in the New York of 1895 would have been unthinkable; something which no-one ever even visualized because it lay beyond the bounds of imagination. Yet now, this evening, her daughter’s being a waitress was a fact.
And was it such a shocking fact? Let me look at it sensibly, thought Anna; after all, I do come of a family that talked and thought about everything under the sun. Nothing was banned.
Here Be Dragons Page 15
