Appointment with Yesterday

by Celia Fremlin

  A housewife who is still trying to get things organised after eighteen years is unlikely to spring many dramatic improvements on you between Monday and Wednesday; and so Milly was unsurprised to find the heating arrangements unchanged—small, bronchial oil-heaters muttering and scolding in odd corners of the high, draughty rooms. The kitchen was a nice surprise, though: all the burners of the gas cooker had been turned full on, including the oven, and the dry, airless heat wrapped itself round Milly’s chilled body like a warmed blanket the moment she stepped into the room.

  Lovely! As she stood right up against the open oven door, the heat puffing gloriously against her soaked skirt, Milly hastily forgave Mrs Lane—Phyllis, that is—for all that imaginary driftwood, and for the undelivered loads of coal.

  But where was Phyllis—Milly was training herself to think of her employer by her Christian name, as requested, but it was difficult, particularly since Phyllis still persisted in addressing her, Milly, as “Mrs Barnes”. It was the sort of inverted snobbery you had to expect, Milly supposed, from people rich enough to own a draughty great house like this, with cobwebs all over its ornate, inaccessible ceilings, and an acre of neglected garden. Such indifference to the opinions of the neighbours argued money on quite a big scale … and it was at this point in her musings that Milly heard the unmistakeable sound of a row going on. Voices, suddenly raised, came from somewhere across the hall—from Mr Lane’s study, it must be…. Squelching cautiously across the kitchen in her still-soaked shoes, Milly pushed open the door into the hall and listened, agog with curiosity.

  Alas: the proverb about eavesdroppers is usually all too true: rarely indeed do they hear any good of themselves.

  “I said the filter!” Mr Lane (it could only be him) was yelling. “What the hell’s happened to the filter? Can’t you tell that bloody woman to leave my things alone?”

  Milly stiffened, and raked her conscience. What filter? What did it look like? Was it made of tin? Or paper? Or plastic? Could she have thrown it away as rubbish? Or added it to Michael’s electric train set? Or put it away in the knife-drawer with all those apple-coring gadgets and the cake-icing outfit? None of these suggestions were quite the right kind of oil to pour on the troubled waters behind that study door, so she just kept very quiet, glad to be where she was. When a man is carrying on like this, it is good to be the one who is not married to him.

  She could hear a soft pitter-patter of words from Phyllis now, evidently meant to be conciliatory: and then Mr Lane’s voice bellowed forth again:

  “Well, get rid of her, then! Why can’t you ever get a decent, capable cleaner who understands her job? Other women don’t have all this trouble with their servants!”

  It might have been Julian himself speaking! Other women can do this…. other women can do that … other women seem to manage…. Milly, lurking out in the hall, shivered with sheer thankfulness that, on this occasion, she was merely the erring domestic, and not the hapless wife. Some one else, this time, had to smooth it all down, calm the raging husband, and get the matter put right without offending the char, or the cook, or whoever. Look, Mary/Doris/Maureen, I wonder if you could possibly … if you wouldn’t awfully mind … you see my husband is rather particular about his … and so if you could possibly do it this way and not that way…. Placating, groveling, abasing herself before them, and all the while aware of Julian in the background, despising her, maddened by her devious timidity (“Why don’t you tell them what you want done? Are you mistress in your own house, or aren’t you?”).

  “Are you mistress in your own house or aren’t you …?” Mr Lane was shouting, and Milly’s heart twisted with pity for poor Phyllis, knowing exactly what she was going through. She longed to burst into the study crying: “It’s all right, it’s all right! I shan’t be offended if he shouts at me, I shan’t give notice! I daresay it is my fault about the filter, just tell me what the wretched thing is, and then I might remember what I did with it … and anyway, it’ll probably turn out that he lost it himself, and then that’ll be your fault, too …!”

  “… how the hell you can expect me to remember what I put in which drawer!” Mr Lane was blustering defensively: and from the way the drawer slammed shut, Milly knew that the filter had turned up in it, exactly where he had put it himself. “It’s impossible ever to find anything in this bloody house! The whole place is like a pigsty! What does that damned woman do with herself all those hours you pay her for?”

  “Hush, Eric! She’ll hear you!” Phyllis was trying to speak in an undertone, but her voice was squeaky with dismay. “I think I heard her come in …!”

  “You ‘think you heard her come in’! Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Is this what she calls half past two? You let her come swanning along at ten minutes to three, and—”

  “Quarter to, dear,” Phyllis interposed nervily: and Milly could almost have shouted at her. It would only make him angrier; and it wasn’t as if a matter of five minutes this way or that affected the principle of the thing.

  “… tell her you’re not standing for it! Tell her that if it happens again, she can bloody well look for another job!”—and if Milly had only realised that this was the parting shot, she would have been able to leap out of sight in time. But as it was, she miscalculated the timing entirely. She had assumed that still to come was the bit about being ashamed to bring this friends home, and about his shirts never having any buttons on … and so when he burst from the study like a charging bull, he was only just able to skid to a halt in time to avoid colliding with her.

  He was not a big man. The red, engorged face and the small bloodshot eyes were barely on a level with her own, and the first thought that flashed through her mind was: He’s not like Julian after all! Not a bit like Julian!

  “Ah! Er! G-good afternoon, Mrs Barnes,” he stammered: and giving one hunted glance into the study behind him he turned and fled up the stairs as fast as—or perhaps even faster than—his dignity as master of the house would allow.

  Milly shrugged. The husbands were all like this—terrified to a man. At the beginning of her career in domestic service, she had sometimes indulged vague, Jane Eyre-ish daydreams, in which the unhappily married husband of one of her employers found himself watching her as she worked … felt himself soothed by her quiet efficiency … and increasingly aware of the wordless sympathy in her modestly downcast eyes. But she knew by now that you could keep your eyes modestly downcast for ever, and radiate enough wordless sympathy to power the whole of the Marriage Guidance Council, and not one of these husbands would notice a thing. How could they, when at the first tremor of Daily-Helping in any part of the house, they would be off like mountain deer, dodging from ledge to ledge until the danger was over? Milly amused herself for the first part of the afternoon by studying Mr Lane’s itinerary as he slunk from room to room, alerted by Milly’s dread footfalls approaching, or by the menacing hum of the vacuum cleaner, moving in for the kill.

  Milly wondered how Phyllis was going to tackle this business of her lateness. “Tell her she can bloody well look for another job,” had been Mr Lane’s suggestion, from the safe distance at which he had been at pains to put himself: but Milly knew very well that whatever else Phyllis said, it wouldn’t be that. The charge of unpunctuality was not unjustified, Milly well knew. It was impossible, sometimes, to get away from Mrs Graham’s on time, what with lunch so often being delayed, either because Professor Graham was late, thus keeping them all waiting, or else because he wasn’t, thus interrupting his wife’s train of thought just as she was about to type her final sentence. Milly couldn’t go until she had cleared up lunch, and naturally she couldn’t clear up lunch until it had been eaten. And then there were Alison’s vitamins, often trodden deep into the carpet, and needing ten minutes’ hard scrubbing to remove them. They again couldn’t be cleaned off the floor until Alison had finished throwing them there. So, one way and another, Milly rarely got to the Cedars before twenty or quarter to three, and so far there had bee
n no fuss about it at all. Now, of course, there would have to be one.

  “Er! Mrs Barnes!” Phyllis gave a bright little laugh and edged further round the kitchen door, clutching the doorknob with hands that Milly knew were sweating. The poor woman looked as if she were going to her own execution.

  “What a wet day!” she gasped out, with a ghastly, fixed smile on her face, and not looking at Milly. “Oh, dear, yes! What a stinker! The rain, I mean. Doesn’t it? Oh, Mrs Barnes, how clever of you! Doing all those! Oh, you are making them look nice!”

  It was true, actually: and if only Phyllis hadn’t always said this about everything, Milly would have glowed with pride. All this blackened Edwardian silver had been quite a find, really. In her afternoon jobs, Milly was always on the look-out for tasks which would get her off her feet for half an hour or so, and so when she came across this lot on a top shelf of the icy great room called the library, she had pounced on them and borne them off in triumph to the nice warm kitchen. And so now, half an hour later, here she was, sitting happily at the kitchen table, rubbing the beauty back into one blackened teapot or sauce-boat after another, while lovely warmth puffed against her back from the oven, and her aching legs rested surreptitiously on the bars of a chair under the table.

  “Oh, it will be nice to have them done!” Phyllis jabbered nervously. “Oh, Eric will be pleased! He’s always saying….”

  I bet he is, thought Milly: and wondered at the same time if this was the lead-in? If so, how was it going to go? How was the unfortunate Phyllis going to work round from Mr Lane’s alleged delight in the polished silver to Milly’s shortcomings in the matter of punctuality?

  “Eric does so like to see things looking …” Phyllis went on, her words gathering speed as the crunch drew nearer. “Well, a man does, doesn’t he, when he’s fond of? I mean, so much of it has been in his family since. He was only saying today how nice the house looks since you’ve been coming, Mrs Barnes.”

  Having overheard the actual tenor of the conversation to which Phyllis was presumably referring, Milly found it hard to suppress a slight start: but Phyllis seemed to notice nothing, and continued: “And so we were wondering. It’s only a suggestion, Mrs Barnes. I mean, it’s not as if. We. I. Eric thinks. From our point of view, I mean, if you were here as long as possible? So we thought, I thought, if you could, by any chance, get here by quarter past two instead of half past …?”

  Then, when the wretched woman is a quarter of an hour late, it’ll still only be half past, and Eric won’t know a thing about it: Milly could have finished the unspoken part of the sentence for her. It was a shame—it really was—that all this conglomeration of lies was to achieve nothing.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” began Milly—and she meant it—“But it’s my other job, you see. I can’t leave there until after two, and so….”

  “Yes, yes! Of course, of course! I quite understand! Don’t worry about it for one moment …!”

  Poor Phyllis! This panic-stricken servility—Milly saw it clearly now—was largely forced on her by the fact of being rich. Moralists have been saying for thousands of years that riches are a burden: and now, in the twentieth century, it has suddenly become true, in a perfectly straightforward and practical sense. In the old days, Milly mused, anyone who could afford to own all this real silver would also have been able to afford someone to stop it getting tarnished like this. Anyone rich enough to live in a large house like this, with its vast fireplaces and high, ornate ceilings, would also have been rich enough to employ a team of living-in servants. Sturdy young girls in aprons and print dresses would have lit the fires, polished the grates, and brushed the cobwebs off the ceilings. The coal-man would have come of his own accord, and there would have been someone working full time in the garden. Service on that sort of scale was what money used to buy: now it can only buy things. And so the rich do buy things—what else can they do?—and as their possessions pile up, and there are still no extra hands to polish them, or send them to the cleaners, or get them repaired, or even to put them away—so, inevitably, does a special kind of plushy squalor begin to invade the homes of the great—a squalor that grows, like mould, on cheques and dividends, and multiplies, at an accelerating rate, with every increment of income. No wonder wealthy husbands become so irascible—the more money they bring home, the more messy and disorganised their homes become and the more distracted their wives (“I can’t understand her, she’s got everything!”—never realising that just as something inevitably takes up some of your time, so everything is liable to take up all of it). No wonder that the less efficient of the wives (like Phyllis) were tending more and more to turn their backs on the whole thing, and to pretend to be poor. This way, they hoped, gracious living would no longer be demanded of them, nor an elegant appearance; and while this did not eliminate the problem entirely, it certainly lightened it. A problem tackled in a torn jersey is a problem halved.

  Milly finished the last of the ornate Victorian cakestands, pushing her cloth in and out of the now-shining scrolls and curlicues, and realised, with a shock, that it was already nearly five. No time for the bathrooms now: even the hall and stairs would have to be skimped. Oh, well; that’s what came of possessing two bathrooms and a lot of valuable silver: you couldn’t expect to have all of them clean at once. She’d give the bathrooms a real good do, Milly promised herself, next time she came.

  Next time? When she got home that night, she found Jacko sitting on the stairs, waiting for her.

  “Thank God!” he greeted her dramatically. “We thought you were never coming!”

  A man, it seemed, had called to see her that afternoon. No, he hadn’t said what it was about—just that he wanted to make some enquiries. Sort of po-faced he’d been, like he might be from the Town Hall: Jacko hadn’t liked the look of him at all.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE POLICE! IN that instant of certainty, it was not fear that engulfed Milly’s consciousness, but fury—speechless, impotent, fury.

  After all this time! Just when I’ve really put it all behind me! Just when I’ve discovered that I don’t even feel guilty! Just when it’s all properly over, and my new life has really got going! It’s not fair! It’s not fair!

  “… but it’s all right,” Jacko was saying—and his voice, which had seemed infinitely far away, suddenly snapped near again, and hope twanged back. “It’s all right, Barney! I told him you didn’t live here! I told him we’d never heard of you!”

  He looked so pleased with himself: Milly felt the shock subsiding. Surely, if it had been the police, they wouldn’t just have accepted the word of a long-haired student, and gone meekly away? Come to that, how had Jacko guessed …?

  “Jacko, that was sweet of you: but how could you know that I didn’t want to see him?” she asked, warily. She tried to remember which of her life-stories it was that she had told to Jacko and Kevin: not one that included being on the run from the police, that was certain.

  “Well—‘enquiries’, of course,” explained Jacko knowledgeably. “It’s just another word for ‘trouble’, everyone knows that. I mean, they aren’t going to be enquiring whether you want five thousand pounds, gift-wrapped, for your birthday, are they? Besides, it wasn’t just you, Barney: it was the Mums I was worrying about. She can’t bear tenants who attract officials to the house, it’s like if they brought in lice, or leprosy. And you can’t blame her, really …” here he lowered his voice, and his eyes took on a nostalgic, faraway look, as of battles long ago: “Like the time Miss Childe got a man in to look at why her food cupboard wouldn’t shut properly, and it all ended in a van-load of inspectors swarming in to measure whether there was sixteen cubic feet of space in the downstairs loo … the Mums never got over it. So you see, Barney, we must keep him away from the house at all costs—or else pretend that he’s your long-lost brother, and even that not after 11 pm. But not to worry—” here Jacko got to his feet, and squared his rumpled shoulders proudly—“I’ll look after you, Barney. If that creep c
omes back, I’ll see that he gets what’s coming to him!—I say—” the knight-errantry faltered a bit as they set off up the stairs towards Milly’s room, “You don’t mind do you? I thought I’d better stay in your room for the evening in case anything happens, so I’ve moved some of my things in.”

  He had, too. The hi-fi set—the tape-recorder—a pair of shiny boots—half a dozen books on economics lying open on the chairs and on the bed. Milly looked around doubtfully, wondering if she wanted protection on quite this scale.

  “No, I suppose I don’t mind,” she said. “It’ll save gas, anyway.” This was magnanimous, because it was most decidedly not her gas that was being saved: a fug like this could not possibly have been built up by less than three of her precious shillings from the saucer on the mantelpiece. “Is Kevin coming in too?” she added, mentally dividing her bread, milk, and tin of Scotch broth into three, and adding a third of a banana each.

  “No, well. That’s the thing, actually.” Seeing him now clearly, under the glare of the bare electric light bulb, Milly noticed for the first time that he looked pale and tense: the jaunty manner sat uneasily on him, as though Jacko was finding the part of Jacko suddenly rather a strain.

  “What’s happened?” she asked: and suddenly it all came out. Nothing to do with the Town Hall man at all—he had evidently been a mere incident in Jacko’s harrowing afternoon, no more than a convenient excuse for button-holing Milly the moment she came in. No, his real preoccupation was quite other than this, and centred (so Milly at last gathered from his circumlocutory narrative) on the presence—yes, she was still there—of a certain Janette in Kevin’s and Jacko’s joint bedroom. She had, it seemed, been closeted there with Kevin for “hours and hours”, while Jacko had had to camp out like a refugee in Milly’s room, with nothing to do but write his essay on Statistical Method (which anyway didn’t have to be in till next week, and so it was a cock-eyed waste of time working on it now), and to brood on what was going on behind the forbidden door. It was lucky, he conceded in a choked voice, that there happened to be all those spare shillings in the saucer or he would have frozen to death, on top of everything else.