Isobel's Story

by Jennie Walters

  Then a door slammed upstairs, and I remembered my errand. In the dining room, Mr Huggins was darting around the mahogany table like a humming bird, straightening cutlery and flicking away any specks of dust with a linen cloth. There were three crystal glasses at every place and enough gleaming knives, forks and spoons to last a week of meals. (Thank goodness it wouldn’t be me having to work out which ones to use!) A name card in a silver holder had been put beside each starched white linen napkin and two huge silver candelabra stood in the middle of the table, along with pots of white orchids from the greenhouse. I could smell their sweetness in the air, mixed up with beeswax polish and woodsmoke from the fire.

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ Mr Huggins had noticed me during one of his swoops on the table. Usually he’s the very picture of dignity, slow and solemn, but that evening he was practically skipping about. ‘Reminds me of the old days. Dinner parties were nothing out of the ordinary then, oh no. Run of the mill, you might say. And how is everything in the kitchen? I trust Mrs S is performing her usual miracle.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Huggins. The menu sounds lovely. She’s sent me to beg some red wine for cooking, if you can spare any. And she says did you know that Major Winstanley’s one of the guests?’

  ‘Indeed I did, young lady. The decanters are brimming and I’ve fetched an extra bottle of single malt from the cellar in case of emergencies. We are prepared for everything! Now come along to the pantry with me and we’ll fill that jug.’

  I followed Mr Huggins back to the butler’s pantry which he unlocked with a key from the pocket of his green baize apron, humming under his breath. Every surface seemed to be covered in bottles, and several cut-glass decanters stood about with silver name labels on chains around their necks. ‘Whisky’ was certainly full to overflowing, dribbling into a puddle on the tray. The cellar book lay open on a table, its pages splattered with a trail of purple droplets, while cloths soaked up another spillage on the floor.

  ‘Brigade headquarters,’ said Mr Huggins, sniffing up the winey air with great satisfaction. ‘The command centre of the operation!’ He reached for an unlabelled bottle beside the sink which had already been uncorked. ‘This should do the job.’ The wine splashed in a gurgling crimson stream into my jug. ‘And a couple of inches left over - criminal to waste them.’ In a second, he’d fetched two small tumblers from the cupboard and filled them too. I noticed his hand was shaking slightly. ‘Join me in a toast, my dear. We shall drink to the success of the evening!’

  I’d never tasted wine before, but Mr Huggins seemed in such a jolly mood that it would have been a shame to disappoint him. ‘To the success of the evening,’ we chorused, and clinked glasses. Ugh! I’d sooner have drunk cough medicine.

  Back in the kitchen, Gran was opening oysters with a silver knife. ‘Was everything all right out there?’ she asked as I handed over the jug.

  ‘I’ll say. You should see Mr Huggins!’ I told her. ‘He’s positively dancing on air.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, and looked worried.

  Three

  It isn’t clever to suffer cold feet in miserable silence. Natty ankle socks and stout brogues are very comfortable, they can be very smart and always look so intellectual.

  From Miss Modern magazine, April 1939

  ‘I think that’s everything.’ Gran stood, hands on hips, surveying the table. The soup was made, the oysters sat in their scallop shells, waiting till the last minute to join the beef that was sizzling in the top oven, the potatoes were coming to a boil, and the carrots and cabbage were in saucepans ready to be cooked. ‘How are you getting on with the prunes, lovie?’

  ‘Nearly done. It was a good idea to cut them in half.’ I was wrapping the prunes in rashers of bacon and threading them on a skewer; a fiddly job, but good to sit in the toasty warm kitchen with something easy to do.

  Gran looked at the baking tray and sniffed. ‘Hardly worth the effort. I might whip up a few cheese straws to bulk them out if there’s time.’ She reached for the flour tin. ‘The company should be arriving before long. Oh, where’s that Eunice?’

  ‘Here, Mrs S,’ she said, gliding into the room and making us both jump.

  ‘Good,’ Gran said. ‘Will you keep an eye on Mr Huggins for me? Something tells me he’s brewing up.’

  ‘What do you mean, Gran?’ I asked, when Eunice had gone. ‘Brewing up for what?’

  ‘Grate some cheese for me, dear, if you’ve finished the prunes,’ she said by way of a reply. ‘And don’t ask so many questions.’

  ‘But why does Mr Huggins need an eye kept on him?’ I persisted, coming back from the larder. ‘He seemed on top form to me.’

  She sighed. ‘Oh, all right, then. You’ll probably find out soon enough anyway. Mr Huggins had a hard time of it in the war. His nerves aren’t what they were and sometimes he gets a little … over-excited, you might say. When that happens, he’ll come down to earth with an almighty bump and it’s the last thing we need tonight.’

  In less than five minutes Eunice was back; I’d never seen her move so fast. ‘I can’t find him anywhere,’ she panted. ‘He’s not in the hall, the dining room, the drawing room or the pantry, and not in his room, neither. I think he must be … you know.’ She pointed downwards with a meaningful look.

  ‘Oh, good heavens above!’ Gran wiped her hands on a drying-up cloth and looked at the clock. ‘Well, we can’t leave him there. You’ll have to go and fetch him. Take Isobel - you won’t be able to manage on your own.’

  Eunice seized my arm and pulled me out of the kitchen by the side door. She hurried me along the passage and then opened a door under the stairs that I’d never noticed before. A flight of steps stretched before us into the pitch black. ‘Mind you don’t fall,’ she warned. ‘It’s steep, and there’s no stair rail.’

  How could I begin to tell her? This was my worst nightmare: being shut in a confined space in the darkness. I’ve the sanatorium to thank for that - or more particularly, the iron lung which stood in its own special room in the hospital. It was meant to help you breathe, though nobody ever explained exactly how. You lay in the thing and a close-fitting lid was brought down over your body with a mask and breathing tube attached to your face. I never had to be put inside it, thank goodness, but the girl in the bed next to me did and I can still hear her screaming as they dragged her off. It gave us all the heebie-jeebies.

  ‘Eunice, I’m sorry but I can’t go down there,’ I said, hating myself for being so feeble. ‘I’m afraid.’

  She turned around and shot me an unsympathetic look. ‘Well, you’d better buck up and get un-afraid pretty sharpish. This is an emergency. Anyway, there’s a light burning at the bottom. Hold on to my apron strings and you’ll be all right.’

  So that was that. She grabbed my hand, tucked it through the sash of her apron where it was tied at the back, and set off down the stairs with me in tow. There was no time to kick up a fuss; all I could do was cling on for dear life, fix my eyes on her broad back in front of me and try not to think about anything else. The air smelt fusty and stale, and somewhere near the bottom of the steps a strand of something damp floated across my face. I couldn’t help gasping and tasted it sooty in my mouth.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Eunice said over her shoulder. ‘Keep going. Look, there’s the light.’

  We stepped out on to the level and I saw a couple of dim bulbs hanging from the cellar’s low, vaulted ceiling. The walls and floor were hewed from rough stone, and all along one side were stone cubbyholes: most of them bare but some containing a few cobwebby bottles that looked hundreds of years old. Three or four iron-banded wooden barrels lay against the other wall, one upended and empty.

  ‘You might as well get used to it down here,’ Eunice whispered (something about the place made you want to lower your voice). ‘This is where we’ll be if the German bombers come over - the Vyes and us lot all hugger mugger together. I wonder what they’ll make of that?’

  I couldn’t speak. In the silence, we both becam
e aware of a low keening sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Eunice stiffened, peering into the gloom. ‘There he is.’ She took my hand again; her own was clammy and I suddenly realised she was frightened too. It made me feel better, in an odd sort of way. ‘Come on, we’ll have to go and get him.’

  I don’t know how we made it from one end of the cellar to the other, but we must have done somehow because suddenly there we were, looking down at a huddled shape on the floor that was Mr Huggins - although a very different Mr Huggins from the one I’d seen upstairs an hour before. It was as though someone had opened a valve and let all the air out of him. He was sitting against the wall, rocking his head against his knees and moaning quietly. ‘Can’t do it,’ I heard him say. ‘No use, no use at all. No use to anyone.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Huggins.’ Eunice bent over him. ‘You come along with us.’

  She took one arm and I took the other, and together we hoisted him to his feet. He wasn’t a big man but a dead weight all the same, and it was hard work, half-dragging, half-carrying him back to the stairs. We stopped at the foot of them to catch our breath.

  ‘Phew!’ Eunice said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. ‘Now we’ll have to go single file.’

  She hooked her arms under Mr Huggins’ shoulders and started heaving him up backwards, feeling gingerly behind with her foot for each next step. I carried his legs and tried to take as much of his weight as possible, to help her. We had to go slowly; Eunice stumbled once and nearly fell, which gave us an awful fright. Each time she hoisted Mr Huggins up, I could tell by the strain on her face and the noise she made that the effort was nearly killing her. He was silent now. All you could hear in the darkness was the two of us grunting and groaning, and the thump of his body against stone.

  At last - at long, long last - we reached the top and staggered out into the light of the corridor. Between us we propped Mr Huggins against the wall, and Eunice straightened her lopsided cap with one hand. ‘Well, I’m not going back down there in a hurry. Let’s get him to his room for a lie-down. He won’t be doing any more work tonight.’

  So what would become of Her Ladyship’s dinner party now?

  ‘Mr Oakes?’ Eunice stared at Gran. ‘You’ll never get him to pass for an indoor servant, not in a month of Sundays.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ Gran replied sharply. ‘Somebody has to carve the beef and I should think he’s capable of taking everyone’s coats and telling them dinner is served.’

  ‘What’s he going to wear?’ Eunice asked. ‘He’ll never fit into Mr Huggins’s livery.’

  ‘I’ve found a tailcoat in the linen room that’ll probably do - he’s putting it on now in the pantry. There’s a clean apron here for you, too. I knew you’d get yours in a mess, down in that filthy cellar. And uniform for Isobel.’

  ‘Me?’ I asked, startled, as Gran handed me a neatly folded parcel of black silk with a white cap and apron on top. ‘But I’m going to be staying in the kitchen with you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Not tonight, dear. Eunice can’t manage on her own if she’s to wind up Mr Oakes and point him in the right direction. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I stammered. ‘But I probably won’t make a very good parlourmaid.’

  ‘Just do as Eunice says and you’ll be fine.’ Gran sent me off to wash and change with a gentle push. ‘And don’t tell your mother, whatever happens, or she’ll have forty fits. Quickly now! There isn’t a minute to spare.’

  ‘It’s all very well,’ Eunice grumbled as we hurried along to the drawing room a little while later. ‘Nobody asks me whether I mind all this toing and froing and rooting about in cellars. I shouldn’t have to put up with it and I won’t for much longer, that’s the honest truth. Everything’s topsy turvy - ’

  This monologue was interrupted by a ring on the doorbell. ‘Oh no! Somebody’s here already.’ She shrank back against the wall. ‘Where’s Mr Oakes?’

  We were overtaken by a tall figure loping past us down the hall. Mr Oakes was wearing evening tails but the trousers that went with them weren’t nearly long enough and flapped around his ankles, revealing a pair of scuffed black shoes. His hair had been brushed down flat with water and stood out around his head like nothing so much as a stiff black lampshade. ‘Look at him,’ Eunice whispered. ‘Frankenstein’s long-lost brother.’

  Mr Oakes opened the front door, letting in a blast of cold air. ‘Yes?’ He seemed reluctant to let anyone through it.

  ‘Oh, good heavens,’ Eunice said. ‘Stay here, Izzie, while I rescue the company, and then follow me into the drawing room.’

  Now my legs turned to water. Lord and Lady Vye would be sitting there, waiting for their guests to arrive. What would they say when they saw me dressed up as a parlourmaid, let alone Mr Oakes in his Frankenstein outfit? But Eunice was already discreetly tugging him back from the door by his tails, forcing him to open it wider - and our first couple for dinner stepped over the threshold.

  ‘Huggins not about?’ enquired the red-faced gentleman, shrugging off his overcoat and dumping it in Mr Oakes’ unresponsive arms while Eunice helped his wife out of her furs.

  ‘On holiday, Major Winstanley,’ she replied promptly, adding the stole to Mr Oakes’ load. ‘Would you care to come this way?’ And she started off towards the drawing room.

  Straightening my cuffs, I took a deep breath and followed on behind the Winstanleys, trying to look as much like a proper parlourmaid as possible. The black frock smelt of mothballs and didn’t fit me very well, but Gran had hidden that by bunching up the silk and tying my apron extra tightly over the top. This was it! Despite my nerves, the tiniest flutter of excitement danced in my stomach. I was about to find out what happened at a posh dinner party.

  Lord Vye was standing by the drawing-room mantelpiece with a glass in his hand, dressed in evening tails with a white bow-tie. I’d come across him a few times since arriving at the Hall and, while this might sound odd, he struck me as rather airy-fairy, somehow - too insubstantial to be a viscount. You could walk into the room and not even notice he was there. He had wavy light brown hair and kind eyes, and seemed to spend a lot of time painting in his studio (which Gran told me used to be the old servants’ hall, in a wing that was mostly shut up).

  Her Ladyship was sitting in an armchair on the other side of the fire. Her eyes flickered over me for a second before she rose to greet the Winstanleys. ‘Barbara! Reginald! How delightful to see you, and how prompt you are, as always.’ An ivory satin evening gown, cut low at the front and with hardly any back at all, swirled around her feet as she walked, and a pearl choker with a diamond clasp circled her slim neck. She had thick, honey-coloured hair set in a Marcel wave and the same grey eyes as Nancy and Julia, but there was something cold and remote about the way she stared at the world down her long elegant nose, head tilted slightly to one side. Gran said it was because she was short-sighted, but then why didn’t she just wear spectacles?

  Eunice nudged my elbow. ‘Ask the lady if she’d like a drink. I’ll see to the Major.’

  Mrs Winstanley was a dumpy lady in a brown crêpe frock: a dull peahen next to her peacock of a husband in his scarlet hunting coat with shiny gilt buttons. ‘A small sherry, please,’ she ordered, which was easy enough because the decanter with its name label was waiting next to a tray of glasses on the side table.

  I poured the sherry and was about to take it over when Eunice thrust a silver salver me. ‘On a tray,’ she muttered. ‘Nothing by hand.’

  That was a close shave; I decided to trail Eunice from now on and take my cue from her. She approached Major Winstanley and hovered by his elbow with a glass of whisky on a tray, waiting for him to notice her when he felt like it, so I did the same with Mrs Winstanley. Eventually she took the sherry without a glance at me and without a pause in her conversation.

  ‘Will you excuse me for one second, Barbara?’ Lady Vye asked graciously, and I felt an iron hand in the small of my bac
k as she took me off. When we were a safe distance away, three icy words were whispered into my ear.

  ‘Change your shoes.’

  I was wearing brown lace-ups. They were the only shoes I had, apart from a pair of summer sandals, tennis pumps, wellington boots for outside and slippers for indoors, but I couldn’t start explaining that to Her Ladyship, could I? So I put down the tray and walked as unobtrusively as possible out of the room, then took to my heels and flew down the hall to the kitchen.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Gran clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘I clean forgot about your feet.’

  ‘But I haven’t anything else! Whatever shall we do?’

  ‘Run upstairs to the linen room and root about in that big wardrobe. You should be able to find something in there. So long as they’re black, no one’ll notice. Hurry, now! The doorbell’s just gone again.’

  There were two pairs of black button-strap shoes at the back of the wardrobe: one big and one small. I could never have squeezed into the smalls, so the bigs would have to do. Having fastened them as tightly as possible, I clattered downstairs and back to the drawing room, wondering how many more mistakes I’d be making before the evening was through.

  ‘What did you think of it, then, Isobel?’ Eunice asked through a mouthful of meringue. ‘Your first taste of high society.’

  The dinner party was almost over. Nearly everyone had gone; only Major Winstanley was left in the dining room, smoking and drinking brandy with Lord Vye, while Her Ladyship entertained his wife next door in the drawing room. In the kitchen, we were finishing off the queen’s pudding (which wouldn’t keep) and waiting for them to leave so that we could wash up the last few glasses, cups and saucers. Mr Huggins was sleeping it off in his little room next to the butler’s pantry and Mr Oakes was on duty in the hall, ready to give the Winstanleys back their coats and usher them out into the night.