May was maid to the wife of the owner but did not call herself lady’s maid. She was, she said, maid-of-all work though hastened to add she did nothing truly dirty since she had a girl under her. Her employment was unusual. She came home every night when the shop shut and had Sunday off. Wilson thought this indicated a thoughtful mistress but soon learned otherwise. She was allowed home each night, May said, so as she could be paid less and forced to work twice as hard for the privilege. There were four young children in the house in Cheney Row where she worked and, though a nurse was employed, May spent half her day guarding them and was paid exactly the same as if she were indeed only a parlour-maid with nothing to do but show people in and out and twirl a duster. But for mother’s sake, she told her sister, she was resolved to stay and endure the coarseness and meanness of her mistress. She much preferred her old in-service job in Newcastle, where she had been among truly gentle folk, but touched Wilson by her understanding of how important she was to mother now that Fanny had gone to rest. Wilson saw May was developing a dignity and sense of responsibility entirely lacking in Ellen and was glad of it. At twenty, May was more mature than Ellen and also far more attractive. She was the tallest of the three sisters and the only one with brown eyes and dark hair. Already she had had what mother called ‘good offers’ and Wilson did not doubt marriage would come sooner rather than later. There was a young doctor, mother said, much smitten with May and if he made a proposal she would be pleased. May only smiled and said, ‘Where I go, mother goes.’
There had been no offers for Ellen, and Wilson was not surprised. Her sister bore all the marks of what she had suffered both in her appearance and her manner. From being so heavy, Ellen had shrunk to nothing and the loss of weight did not suit her. She looked all bone, angular and awkward, and her face, which when full-cheeked had had a certain plump prettiness, was haggard. Her hair, never her best feature – May had the best hair in the family and Wilson’s own, though mousy coloured, was curly and thick – had become lank. Scraped back from her forehead it gave her the look of an old woman. And the jolly if empty laugh had gone. Ellen no longer giggled at every possible joke and she had developed an habitual frown which made a marked crease between her eyes even when she was not in fact frowning. Wilson felt desperately sorry for her, especially when, in one bedtime conversation, Ellen confessed she still loved the man who had deserted her. Albert had been, she said, her life, and as she came out with it Wilson knew it was a statement of fact, not a melodramatic gesture made for effect.
Wilson in her turn was questioned. Mother touched lightly on Signor Righi and what had happened but Ellen probed deeper. She seemed to wish her sister to confess to a passionate love affair and a heartbreaking betrayal, and when Wilson did neither, was confused and dissatisfied. ‘Did you not love him?’ she asked, suspiciously, and when Wilson shrugged she said, ‘Well then, you were a fine one to tell me only to marry for love, Lily, not that I had the chance. What would you have married for I should like to know?’ Wilson said something about there being different kinds of love and Ellen made an expression of disgust and said she was fudging it. ‘But you look well on it, Lily,’ she ended, grudgingly, ‘to look at you anyone would declare you led a fine life and when I think where you have been and what you have seen I wish I could change places and that’s the honest truth.’ Knowing it was indeed the truth, for who would be Ellen, and Ellen in Sheffield, Wilson tried to paint a darker picture of her life but failed dismally. It was no good, as the rain pelted down, pointing out that the heat of an Italian summer was a dreadful thing, no good, as mother and sisters sank down at the end of the day with weariness, saying she was on the run morning to night with Pen, and no good, when at the end of the week their pitifully small combined wages were spread out on the table, saying she was grossly underpaid.
So she returned to London, at the end of the two weeks, more saddened than otherwise. Not even Pen’s rapturous greeting – a great shout of ‘Oh my Lily, I love you darling!’ – and her mistress’s hardly less fervent relief – ‘I thought I should die, Wilson dear, if there was one more day of this slavery!’ – could lift her depression totally. Mrs Browning asked her gently if all had been well at home and to her surprise tears came into her eyes and were noticed. She managed to say that all was well, but when pressed, squeezed Pen tighter to hide her distress and could only murmur, ‘Their life is so hard, ma’am, you cannot imagine.’ Pen stroked her face and said ‘Poor things,’ and his mother then became quite distracted by the child’s sensitivity. ‘Is he not caring, Wilson? Only listen to him, the dear, kind boy.’ Wilson kissed Pen again, as he snuggled down so comfortably in her arms, and nodded. No enquiry followed as to what exactly had been hard about her family’s life in Sheffield and the next day, when still the memory of it hung over her and her low spirits did not revive sufficiently to satisfy, there was the faintest hint of reproof in the air. ‘Come now, Wilson,’ Mrs Browning said, lightly enough but with intent, ‘brooding will not help, will it dear? Can you not be happy to be with us again? For we are happy to have you.’ And then it seemed churlish not to smile and attempt pleasantries and try to forget her unhappiness.
But in all the bustle of preparing to leave London for Paris, where they were to winter, Wilson did not forget to write home and was able to express in words feelings she had been unable to voice while she was with her family. To her mother she wrote with some passion:
I wish I had known mother what you were going to when you left your home for that stranger’s house in Sheffield and though I could have done nothing substantial to help being in Italy and without means to do so I should have encouraged you to try all other ways of staying in Newcastle. It grieves me to think of you in that house which is a mean place and not fit for you and no more yours after all than our cottage ever was and all of you dependent on the whim of the one employer and his wife. I am set to save harder than before to endeavour to rescue you from that place and return you to Newcastle and am resolved that when we have returned from Paris which I believe will be next June or July for a return visit is absolutely to be depended on I am glad to say why then I will put my case for a rise to 20 Guineas which is the sum I have been advised I warrant for the many services I perform. Then, mother, half of that can be yours, for I have been good to myself and need not be as extravagant as living in Italy has made me. And I am likewise resolved to see if I cannot find places for Ellen and May in good families in the North and bring you all together again there. I know this to be an ambitious proposal, but it is up to us all to use our talents and not always bow our heads meekly before what is wished upon us. And now mother I must close for we leave tomorrow evening and in my absence many things have been neglected which must be attended to before we leave. My mistress is in poor health and has been much pulled down by the increase in coughing and the strain on her strength through caring for the child which as you can believe has made me better appreciated. The child himself is fretful and pale and wishes to be free of the constraints he lives under in these three small cramped rooms and so we are all impatient to go though where exactly we are going to nobody seems clear.
It made Wilson tight-lipped to endure the uncertainties of the Brownings’ plans during the next few days. Mr Browning, as ever, scurried round with a distracted air inspecting lodgings and Mrs Browning, as ever, criticised everything he found and Pen would not settle until some stability was achieved. Eventually, an apartment was found in the Champs Elysées and some order restored to their days. There was a maid, Désirée, who went with the apartment they rented and she relieved Wilson of some of her more onerous duties, leaving her freer for Pen. But once more the old battle began. Paris was a sociable place and invitations to this and that poured in, invitations which surprisingly often included Pen and were accepted. At first, Wilson rather relished being in attendance at parties, but the effects on her charge were so marked she soon grew to dread them. At the parties she could hardly bear to watch the little boy simpering before a
crowd of adults ogling, but also sometimes subtly mocking him. As he grew more and more overwrought she tensed and waited for the explosion of one sort or another which inevitably came. There would be a sudden outburst of exhausted tears or a tantrum in which he hurled himself on the floor and it was her task to take him away and soothe him. It was no way to treat an infant.
Often, when finally Pen had fallen into an exhausted sleep in her arms in the quiet of their room, she would look down at him and think how she would change things if he was her little boy. No silks and satins then, but serviceable wool and cotton, no blacks and greys but cheerful blue and red; no early-hours-of-the-morning parties but a proper bedtime at six o’clock; no groups of grown-ups talking way above his head but the company of other children. She would be loving and kind but strict. She would even slap, though never viciously. And she would not pander to him, there would be no bid to be popular. He was a dear, sweet child, but he was spoiled and it did not help that his parents were the first to say so. ‘Love never spoiled a child,’ his mother said defiantly, but set Wilson wondering where love ended and worship began. They had differences almost every day now on points of Pen’s upbringing and she was growing tired of the battle. She was also not as enamoured of Paris as her mistress, though greatly preferring it to every other place they had stayed except Florence. It was lively enough and with always something to see, but she had no entrée into any kind of congenial society. Exist it must, as she had found it did in Florence, a whole network of connections between maids, but she failed to discover how it operated. Désirée taught her some French but her will to learn seemed to have vanished – she was stupid at absorbing French in a way she had never been with Italian. She felt more and more, as the winter gave way to spring, as though she was at a crossroads with no idea which way to go, only knowing that it was no longer enough to let fate decide. What had she written to mother? That it was not always enough to bow down and be meek. Precisely. Her time, she fancied, was coming, a time to bargain and gamble on her future.
Chapter Twenty
THE ROOM WAS very still, so quiet it was difficult to believe this was London. Wilson, without meaning to, realised she was holding her breath and that her heart was beating with uncomfortable speed. She was standing, hands clasped in front of her, and in a mirror on the far wall she could dimly see her reflection. I look like a penitent, she thought, about to bow my head and pray. This so annoyed her she jerked her head up and parted her hands, letting them hang instead by her sides, the fists clenched.
Her mistress had still not replied. She sat at her desk, pen in her hand, poised to write but frozen in mid-air. ‘Wilson,’ she said at last, quietly, almost tremulous. ‘Wilson, dear, I do not think I can have heard you aright. Say I did not?’
‘I cannot, ma’am, when I know not what you heard. But what I said, I can say again if you like, which is that my salary has remained at sixteen guineas for some eight years’ service and I am advised it ought to be more for what I do and would hope you would think likewise, ma’am.’
The words were fine enough but in the practising of them, while they were all still in Paris, she had not taken account of Mrs Browning’s eyes and the shock in them and the frown of pain across her forehead and the exhausted droop of her shoulders. Astonishment she had anticipated, though there was nothing to be astonished about, and even coldness, for her mistress frequently used coldness as a weapon, but distress was so very hard to bear – distress and herself the cause of it. All her instincts were to cross the carpet between them, to bridge the gap she had been careful to create before she began, and embrace the dejected figure opposite. But she did not. She stood her ground, clenching and unclenching her fists, knowing her own colour was high and that when she spoke again her voice would tremble. She tried to remember the words of Lizzie Treherne whom she had at last visited the day before, as soon as she arrived back in London. Lizzie, mother now of three children, had been overcome at first with guilt and shame at her failure to correspond all these years, but reassured that no accusations of infidelity were to be made or any rebuke contemplated, she had quickly opened her old self to Wilson and they had continued their friendship as though it had never left off. Lizzie told of how well the bakery was doing, with another shop opened and Billy helped by two partners and a move planned that very month to a better house in a more salubrious district near the fields north of Kentish Town, and Wilson told of the years in Italy and then, inevitably, for it was the real reason for seeking Lizzie out, of the coming conflict in which she felt bound to engage. Lizzie had warned her that to be resolute she must keep her distance and had recollected, as though it were yesterday, how she herself had melted at her mistress’s tears and if she had not already been married would without doubt have given up all idea of it rather than inflict such hurt. ‘She cares for you, Lily, as once she cared for me,’ Lizzie said, ‘but she cares for herself most, as people do. She likes the old order to continue, as you know by now better than I, and hates the threat of change, but that will be your trump card and mind you play it. And if you shrink from leaving her service if need be then don’t start the game or you will lose.’
Well, she had started the game and there was no going back. And she had chosen her time well, she knew. All July, since they arrived back in London on the 6th, the Brownings had depended on her more than ever. Pen had been with her almost constantly, so much so that she never had a free hour, but she had not so much as murmured against the domestic tyranny. She had taken him together with Flush to the park, to her old haunt, every afternoon, leaving his parents free to visit a seemingly endless horde of literary folk who claimed their attention, and in the evenings she had stayed with him while they went to the theatre and made the most of being in London. Even in the mornings, when Pen was used to crawling into bed with his mother, she had taken him out, the better to give her mistress the chance to rest since she vowed she was exhausted with all the socialising.
And now, if necessary, she was preparing to withdraw all that. Still she waited. At last, Mrs Browning, who had attempted all this time to stare her out, the great eyes tear-filled, lowered her head. ‘Well, Wilson,’ she said, her voice low and indistinct, ‘I will speak to my husband if you are determined as I see you are. But I hold out no great hope that we can oblige you with extra wages. We are hard pressed ourselves, as indeed you know, and it is not within our limited means to be more generous than we already are.’ There was a pause, a quick look up, and then ‘I had thought you loved us more than this request would seem to indicate, dear, and even that you felt yourself amply rewarded in love if not guineas, for indeed we do love you, greatly, and think of you as a friend more than a servant. I hope and pray you have never felt any unkindness from us in all these long years.’
‘No, ma’am, and I hope you have never felt any from me as I know I have tried at every turn to help. But servant I am, ma’am, when all is said and done and several sorts of servant though it is not recognised in my wage. And though you are hard pressed, ma’am, and I am sorry for it and would that you were not, think how much harder I am pressed and with my mother suffering great hardship and growing older and I being unable to relieve her as I ought. It is not for myself I wish more money but for her and because I am told I ought to be better rewarded.’
‘Indeed, and by whom?’
‘By everyone, ma’am.’
‘You tell everyone how poorly we pay you?’
‘I tell no one, ma’am, but those that ask and I have never yet said I was poorly paid, always taking care to express no opinion. It is others who are surprised and think my services undervalued.’
‘But they are not undervalued, Wilson. Do we not tell you, my husband and I, at every turn, how we are grateful and love you and count our blessings in having you every day? Grant that we do.’
‘I grant it readily but gratitude and love and blessings cannot pay bills or increase my savings beyond their pitiable state. And if you are not extravagant ma’am as you be
lieve yourself not to be, no more am I, hardly spending a penny on myself.’
She paused. Though her voice had grown stronger, she sensed she was being sucked into an argument where, if it persisted, she would inevitably lose out. She had vowed not to argue, merely to state her case and leave it at that, and now here she was, on the very threshold of battling it out. It would not do. She had almost, when claiming not to spend money on herself, pointed out that the only money she had spent on pleasure this past six months had been on a birthday present for Pen in March. A whole month’s wages spent on a magnetic swan which the child had seen in a shop window in Paris and craved. And the very day she bought it for him, secretly, her mistress had bought a hat for herself for twice the price. But she knew she must not bring forth such evidence to show she was ill done by for if she did she would emerge as shrill and mean and grasping. She must maintain her dignity and if that meant not being provoked into a quarrel then she must hold her peace and resist the temptation.
So she stopped short and waited yet again. The tears had gone from Mrs Browning’s eyes. Instead, the eyes were clear and full and held an expression approaching wonder. Wilson was dismissed and left the room, her legs feeling weak. Nevertheless, she took Pen to the park and sat on a bench watching him play with Flush who, though such an old dog now, cavorted around as though a puppy. When they returned in the late afternoon both Brownings were waiting and Miss Arabel had come to take Pen for an hour. There was a solemn air about them and from the moment she was called in Wilson feared the worst, but Mr Browning’s first words were promising enough. ‘Come and sit with us, Wilson,’ he said, ‘and take some tea.’
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