Now the old house had rooms and suites for let, and her aunt had the largest one on the ground floor. There was a cook for the tenants with a room off the kitchen, and a maid for those who paid extra (she lived somewhere else), and also a handyman who came in by special arrangement when things needed to be done that her aunt could not fix herself.
Gladys was given her own room there—one with a flower box in the window—that used to be a music room. A big piano would have still occupied most of the center space if it hadn’t been pushed up against the wall. There was a harp in the corner over which clothes were draped in order for them not to wrinkle, and an old fashioned phonograph too—the kind you cranked with a big sound cone and an arm with a needle you set down that scratched and crackled.
Gladys was also informed that she would be sent to a real school, and was fitted for uniforms—compliments of the local vicarage, as she was a charitable case, and they did that kind of work. She was told that her father hadn’t left her with even a pittance, because her father loved betting the ponies more than he loved her. If that didn’t qualify for pity and charity, then what did in this heartless world?
Those last bits she was told over and over again—her Auntie Gladiola was like a broken record, in fact. Gladys knew because that old phonograph with the even-older-music recordings skipped quite a bit. Still, late a night, she turned it down low and listen to the tunes that were new to her, though to the rest of the country they were pretty old. Her father used to hum them, they danced together sometimes . . . until he grew very sad and then sent her to bed while he blew his nose and wiped his eyes.
Gladys danced alone now and wondered if her mother and father had danced to this music as well. Did her aunt ever dance? Her mother’s sister was named Gladiola, by the way. Her own mother had been martyred giving birth to Gladys, and so Gladiola insisted the daughter be named after the both of them—sort of. ‘Glad’ was obvious, and from Iris was lent the last part: ‘is’, though the common spelling was Gladys, not Gladis. Better than Iriola or something equally foolish.
Gladys supposed that Gladiola meant well, but really she was quite a bitter woman. Seems her aunt thought of herself as the one who got the brains, while her twin was the pretty one, but which of that was for the better, given that Iris was now the dead one too?
But she suspected her aunt was bitter because: Why couldn’t the attributes have been shared equally between the both of them? Wasn’t that the point of twins?
Gladys figured that too much of one (good looks) and not enough of the other (brains) didn’t do either one of them much good.
Gladiola had few vices, but the ones she had were doozies. One of those was the Devil’s Sweat, which is what she called gin when she was under the influence. When her aunt took more than the usual ‘thimbleful,’ all sorts of things could happen.
Reminiscing was the worst: about their childhood and how unfair it had been when one was quite clever, but plain, and the other quite pretty and cleverness didn’t matter a bit to anyone. And given their parents—Gladys’s grandparents—were quite strict, as Gladiola claimed, how could her mother possibly meet a man like her father?
It was a mystery, and one Gladys didn’t know herself, but when they ran away together (her parents), her grandparents cut Iris off from the whole family as if she’d been hit by one of those German bombers and been blown to bits. But Gladiola finally admitted after too much rum-soaked cake (a gift from a neighbor who was quite a gossip) added to the usual mix that she too had loved Gladys’s father.
“Everybody did,” Gladiola shouted. “The Yanks like him came over to help us before their country did, and didn’t we think they were so brave and handsome and the best of men for it. Pilots, they were, wanting to fly with the RAF. How many of them never came back?”
They married in secret because of that, but soon Iris’s pregnancy showed. In any case, she was tossed from the house, and went to live with her American-pilot-husband. It was all so terrible and yet romantic, until Iris died when the brat was born—all shouted when Gladiola was drinking, and she sometimes forgot Gladys was present.
Instead of settling down with the family to raise the child after the war, instead of wanting to make a home for them all together, he became a Traveller instead. The twins’ parents died a few years apart, but they could never get word to Iris’s daughter.
It was all very sad that they were the only ones left. Still, they were family, a burden to one another, and in the end, wasn’t that the funniest joke ever?
Gladys didn’t know how to help, nor did she know what to do, so she threw herself into her schoolwork, of which she found rather easy. Within a few years, she had passed all tests required, and gone through all courses available, and the headmistress suggested she think on some career choice or even consider college.
By then, Aunt Gladiola was a mess. She’d fallen down the basement stairs more than once (she kept her gin down there), burned the kitchen curtains when she was trying to make a flambéŽ, and now didn’t leave her living room chair much, only listened to the radio and smoked cigarettes.
The woman was given to fits of anger, bouts of crying, and Gladys thought perhaps her aunt had gone a little mad, especially with her here as a constant reminder of what the woman never had.
But it wasn’t like Gladys didn’t also miss her father—she missed him terribly, and also their life before all this happened. Looking back on it now with the experience of living in a house with her own room, she realized that what they had been doing all along was called ‘living rough.’ He meant well, keeping her with him, but perhaps it had been more for him than for her own good.
She couldn’t talk about him, because Gladiola would start drinking again. Gladys went through the family albums, fascinated at the pictures of the pretty child, the smiling girl, and the lovely young woman who had been her mother. No wonder her father had fallen so deeply, and no wonder Gladiola was still so jealous.
With her aunt’s health failing fast, and the solicitor’s advisement that the family resources were overstretched, Gladys would have to find ways to pay the taxes and the grocer and the power and water and heat and whatever tradesmen wanted this or that. She thought about charging more for rent, but those few who stayed here were on fixed incomes.
She took up sewing, but she was not good at that—didn’t have the patience and the pricking made her fingers hurt and too often led to bleeding, which made her writing suffer—staining the pages sometimes.
She thought about other homebound trades, but nothing came to mind. Gladys finally resorted to helping the elderly people who also let rooms in the house. A few shillings for errands like the library, the post or the shops. Sometimes she mended things, and thankfully their aging eyes couldn’t see that the work wasn’t very good.
Those folk told others who lived along the street how handy she could be, and in turn, it finally reached those in the small building one street over that was a sort of rest home called Shady Oaks.
She would read to them as their eyes had given out, and she’d write their letters in return—dictated, trying to filter out what was to go in the letters and what was just story for her benefit. It seems that more than anything else they were lonely.
It wasn’t much of a living, but it kept her close to her Aunt Gladiola, who succumbed on occasion in what the doctor cryptically called the DTs.
Then Gladys received a proposition: Would she be interested in managing Shady Oaks on a temporary basis? The regular manager had to go on extended leave to tend to a sick relative. No one currently working there had the same qualifications as her, nor did they have the same rapport with and respect for the residents.
She agreed. It only lasted about five weeks, but it was wonderful to have responsibilities, and it was also lucrative, as the manager ensured she got appropriate wages—the first she’d ever had on a regular basis.
It was a windfall, the most money Gladys had ever seen at one time. So each week, when she got pa
id, she slipped it away into her sock drawer for safekeeping—and Gladys knew enough of her father’s ways to have put in a false bottom on the drawer first.
At the end of her employment, she counted it, all the while thinking of her father again. How much had he owed? How much was his life worth? He made it through the War, yet died so—
Didn’t pay to think like that. The past was a trap, and he had been stuck in it then, just like Aunt Gladiola was now.
Move on, my girl, that’s what her father believed—or did he?
~~~
In the next few years, she often took up the temporary duties at the rest home, and a few others in similar places, but also watching people’s homes while they were traveling. All the while, she saved her money—at least, she meant too.
But the boarding house and her aunt continued to drain her money: cracked windows had to be replaced; a toppled chimney on the roof had to be reset; shingles that were loosened in that repair had to be replaced because the roof leaked afterwards.
She had taken on more burdens than was her due, but in the end, Gladiola had been right: They were family, and one another was all they had left. She had even come to love the woman, because she reminded Gladys of her mother—in some ways. And after all, the woman had taken her in when she could have just walked away without any acknowledgment at all.
How Gladiola had come to be there that day was often something Gladys wondered, though never asked. Did the woman know her father still? Had they kept in touch after all? It was clear that the woman, her aunt, still had great regard for a man she barely knew back then. Sometimes Gladys wondered if her mother truly had, or if they had married because her mother was with child then.
Gladys had known for sometime that’s how it must have been, even when her father was alive. He celebrated her birthday, they always did, but it was also the day her mother died, and so he mourned as well—she often heard him crying. He also mourned on the wedding anniversary, which was only seven months difference, and she knew that it was the same year as her birthday.
Knowing all that, including that her father had been murdered for his gambling debts, her aunt still took her in. Gladys didn’t remember it at the time, but during the War, Gladiola had looked after her while her father was still a pilot. It was in another place, closer to where her father had been stationed then, and Gladys didn’t know where that was now, but sometimes wished that she could see it.
Familial loyalty was one thing, and Gladys was grateful for what she had. But she could never admire Gladiola, as the woman gave into self-loathing and regret far too often. She suspected that if her mother had lived, the woman would have been the same way as she aged, having been too pretty for her own good.
That could have been Aunt Gladiola’s influence, but from the old family photos, it was clear that her mother, Iris, was doted on and spoiled by everyone near her. While her aunt loved her mother, same as her father had, it was clear that Gladiola had also always been jealous. Smart girls like Gladiola were never as valued as pretty girls like Iris.
~~~
She was grateful to her aunt for sending her to school, and she thought that was that—but Gladys was wrong, because when her aunt asked her to meet someone, she could not refuse. This afternoon Gladys was having tea at a fine hotel with someone her Aunt Gladiola had suggested.
Her aunt didn’t know the young man herself, but he was the son of an old school friend whose father had been a rich businessman. They were not in contact that often—Gladiola and her friend—but the woman had married well, a younger son in the peerage—and the son was set to inherit the business that was still impressive—not to run it, but to own it.
They were meant to have tea—all three—together, but then Gladiola had opted out with a sudden headache. It was the first outing of this kind that Gladys was to have on her own, and she was nervous of what was coming. But first she had to do some shopping for her aunt now that she had the opportunity to get out on her own.
The woman needed things she wouldn’t admit, whether from modesty or frugality, it was hard to tell. Underthings, necessaries, linens—whatever you wanted to call them, the ones her aunt had were an embarrassment in the laundry.
Besides, Gladys was tired of tending to whale bone corsets that hadn’t been necessary for almost thirty years, and she suspected that Gladiola had gotten them from her own mother as well. That meant it was also a matter of respect and remembrance, doing what her grandmother had done so many years before.
It must be hard, hanging onto the past like that. What else was there for her aunt? Gladiola, the ugly sister, but smart enough to know that’s what she was. Gladys didn’t know if she was attractive herself; she hadn’t noticed herself in the mirror that much, as that seemed . . . unseemly.
But she had her mother’s dark red hair and velvety skin that some of the elderly people had called peaches and cream, with just a few freckles brushing the tops of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her brows were brown and arched, and her eyes were large and green, and she wondered sometimes if she needed glasses.
Usually that was just the dim light, as she’d learn to read mostly by campfire light, and now it was hard to remember those day as the new days were passing by fast. Sometimes, she had to think very hard to recall her father’s smile, his eyes, his laugh.
Her aunt must have been still cogent enough to arrange the meeting though, and so Gladys had hope that maybe this anniversary of her father’s death—coming soon—would come and go more quietly than the others before. Gladiola had taken to drinking and dancing with her own father’s flight jacket that he’d worn in the War—dancing with it draped across her chest like she was holding a man that close.
Where she’d gotten it, Gladys didn’t know, but would die before she would admit that she’d seen her aunt do that. She knew that her aunt would die too if she knew that she had been watched.
Gladys arrived in the hotel with her packages and waited for a few minutes in the lobby. She almost hoped that she had been stood up, but then decided that even if that was the case why not enjoy herself in the process. After all, that was her preference anyway; she was only here to appease her Aunt Gladiola.
She checked her shopping bags—a few large, but tasteful affairs with handles, along with a small box with a black cord tied in a bow. The store emblems emblazoned were notable, though they were having seasonal sales, and so the purchases were actually quite reasonable.
Even so, the clerk at the counter seemed impressed as he handed her a ticket—the number was 96. She slipped it into her handbag just as a pompous thin man strolled in, flipping his cane before him like a man of some standing. He didn’t notice her as he walked straight through, and she suspected that maybe he should be wearing glasses too.
At the drapery-covered door to the tearoom, he stood, looking expectant.
Nothing happened.
Finally, he cleared his throat auspiciously, and someone hurried over. “Yes, sir, may I help you?”
“Table for two, near a window, but not too close, I don’t wish for people to be able to view us casually. We are not to be put on display, understand me?”
The man said, “You may sit wherever you wish, sir, and the waitress will see to you when she is free.”
“Waitress? Do you know who I am, man?”
“No, sir, can’t say as I do,” the man said with some amusement.
The thin man stood up a little straighter then, and mentioned with disdain as if it pained him to explain: “Morris Nimrod Dumpey, grandson of the Seventh Earl of Pratt-on-Towst.”
“Lovely for you, I’m sure, sir. Now sit wherever you wish, and the waitress will see to you when she is free. Oh now, there you are, over there, sir,” he said, pointing. “Millie has a table all cleared off now. Enjoy, sir.”
The man bowed just a bit and slipped away. Gladys wished that she could too. Morris Nimrod Dumpey must have been the ‘dear Morris’ she was meant to meet, Gladys noted with some trepidation.
Oh well, as long as I’m here.
She came up behind him. “You must be Morris Nimrod Dumpey, grandson of the Seventh Earl of Pratt-on-Towst,” she said, with a voice appropriate for the London stage or a bad American movie where all the actors were faking their English dialect like her father sometimes had. ‘Making fun’ was the American term.
The young man (she could see he was that, now from close up) was taken aback, clearly expecting some sort of introduction instead of the real thing sneaking up behind him. Aunt Gladiola should have seen to that, but she wasn’t here, and needs must: Gladys was quite hungry, and that counted for more than a proper introduction.
She held out her hand as if she expected it to be bowed over and kissed, “Gladys Barlow, first Lady of the Music Room. Aunt Gladiola sends her regards and regrets. I assume you have an adequate table. I do so hate tea in a dimly lit room; it’s so hard to see if the cakes are fresh—but not too close to the window, as people look in. Such a bother not having betters these days . . .”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, taking her hand and bending down as if to kiss it, though not even getting close to the real thing. “There, over there, that’s an appropriate table, I think.”
He steered her over with a hand to her elbow. She didn’t like it, Gladys was only pretending, and suspected that he believed he was important for some reason she could not fathom. She didn’t, not for a minute, believe there was any advantage to being the grandson of the Seventh Earl of Anything these days. Times were changing fast, though money talked, no matter what.
A blond waitress with tight curls and dark roots and a pink dress came over soon. Her apron had been pressed crisp, but it had a streak of red in one place (strawberry jam, Gladys’s nose said) and a few spots of something that might have been cocoa, as if caught in the splash when she was pouring it.
A Little Romance: Stories for Hopeful Hearts Page 32
