A Countess Below Stairs (2 page)

A month later, they reached England.

CHAPTER ONE

‘You cannot be a housemaid. Anna,’ said Miss Pinfold firmly. ‘It is quite absurd. It is out of the question.’

‘Yes I can. Pinny. I must. It is the only job they had vacant at the registry office. Mersham is a very beautiful house, the lady told me, and it is in the country so it will be healthy, with fresh air!’

Anna’s long-lashed Byzantine eyes glowed with fervour, her expressive narrow hands sketched a gesture indicative of the Great Outdoors. Miss Pinfold put down the countess’ last pair of silk stockings, which she had been mending, and pushed her pince-nez on to her forehead.

‘Look. dear. English households are not free and easy like Russian ones. There’s a great hierarchy below stairs: upper servants, lower servants, everything just so. And they can be very cruel to an outsider.’

‘Pinny, I cannot remain here, living on your hospitality. It is monstrous!’ Anna’s ‘r’s were beginning to roll badly, always a sign of deep emotion. ‘Of course I would rather be a taxi driver like Prince Sokharin or Colonel Terek. Or a doorman at the Ritz like Uncle Kolya. Much rather. But I don’t think they will let women—’

‘No. I don’t think they will either, dear,’ said Pinny hastily, trying to divert Anna from one of her recurrent grievances. ‘And as for living on my hospitality, I’ve never heard such nonsense. If you and your mother stayed here all your lives, I could never repay the kindness your family has shown to me.’

They were sitting in the tiny parlour of the mews house in Paddington which Pinny, by sending home her savings, had managed to purchase for her old age. Pinny’s sister, who had been living there, had tactfully gone to stay with a cousin. Even so, the little house was undeniably crowded.

‘It’s all right for Mama, Pinny. She isn’t well and she’s no longer young. But I… Pinny, I need to work.’

‘Yes, Anna, I understand that. But not as a housemaid. There must be something else.’

But in the summer of 1919 there wasn’t. Soldiers back from the war, women discharged from the armament factories and work on the land - all haunted the employment agencies seeking jobs. For a young girl, untrained and foreign, the chances were bleak indeed.

The Grazinskys had arrived in London two months earlier. Virtually penniless, their first thought had been for Petya. The countess had caught typhus in the squalor of the transit camp in Constantinople and was too weak to do anything but rest, so it was Anna who had braved the Grand Duchess Xenia at court and extracted from that old friend of her father’s the offer of Petya’s school fees at a famous and liberal public school in Yorkshire.

But for herself Anna would take nothing.

‘You will see, Pinny, it will be all right. Already I have found a most beautiful book in your sister’s room. It is called The Domestic Servant’s Compendium by Selena Strickland, and it has two thousand and three pages and in it I shall find out everything?

Miss Pinfold tried to smile. Anna had always been in possession of ‘a most beautiful book’: a volume of Lermontov from her father’s library, a Dickens novel read during the white nights of summer when she should have been asleep.

‘If you would just be patient, Anna. If you would only wait.’

Anna came over and knelt by Pinny’s chair. ‘For what, Pinny?’ she said gently. ‘For a millionaire to ride past on a dapple-grey horse and marry me? For a crock of gold?’

Pinny sighed and her sister’s budgerigar took advantage of the ensuing silence to inform anyone who cared to listen that his name was Dickie.

‘All the same, you cannot be a housemaid,’ said Pinny, returning to the attack. ‘Your mother would never permit it.’

‘I shan’t tell my mother. I’ll say I’ve been invited down as a guest. The job is not permanent; they’re taking on extra staff to get the house ready for the new earl. I shall be back before Petya comes home from school. Mama won’t notice, you know how she is nowadays.’

Pinny nodded, her face sombre. The last year had aged and confused the countess, who now spent her days at the Russian Club playing bezique and exchanging devastating ideas on how to economize with the other émigrés. Her latest suggestion, attributed to Sergei’s mother, the Princess Chirkovsky - that they should buy chocolate cake from Fullers in bulk because of the discount, had given Anna and Pinny a sleepless night the week before.

‘You’d better keep it from Petya too,’ said Pinny drily, ‘or he’ll leave school at once and become an errand boy. He only agreed to go because he expects to support you in luxury the day he passes his school certificate.’

‘No, I certainly shan’t tell Petya,’ said Anna, her face tender as always when she spoke of her brother. Then she cast a sidelong look at her governess, seeing if she could press her advantage still further. ‘I think perhaps it would be sensible for me to cut off my hair. Short hair will be easier under a cap and Kira writes that it is becoming very chic’

Kira, whose family had fled to Paris, now had a job as a beautician and Anna regarded her as the ultimate arbiter in matters of taste.

But Pinny had had enough. The comical dusky down that had covered Anna’s head in early childhood had become a waist-length mantle, its rich darkness shot through like watered silk with chestnut, indigo and bronze.

‘Over my dead body will you cut your hair.’ said Winifred Pinfold.

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Three days later, carrying a borrowed cardboard suitcase. Anna trudged up the famous avenue of double limes towards the west facade of Mersham. still hidden from her by a fold of the gentle Wiltshire hills.

The day was hot and the suitcase heavy, containing as it did not only Anna’s meagre stock of clothing, but all two thousand and three pages of Selina Strickland’s Domestic Compendium. What the Torah was to the dispersed and homesick Jews and the Koran to the followers of Mahommet. Mrs Strickland’s three-volume tome, which clocked in at three and a half kilos, was to Anna, setting off on her new career in service.

‘ “Blacking for grates may be prepared by mixing asphaltum with linseed oil and turpentine.” ‘ she quoted now. and looked with pleasure at the rolling parkland, the freshly-sheared sheep cropping the grass, the ancient oaks making pools of foliage in the rich meadows. Even the slight air of neglect, the Queen Anne’s lace frothing the once-trim verges, the ivy tumbling from the gatehouse wall, only made the environs of Mersham more beautiful.

‘I shall curtsy to the butler,’ decided Anna, picking up an earthworm which had set off on a suicidal path across the dryness of the gravel. ‘And the housekeeper. Definitely I shall curtsy to the housekeeper!’

She put down her case for a moment and watched a peacock flutter by. displaying his slightly passe tail to her. There was no doubt about it, she was growing very nervous.

‘ “The tops of old cotton stockings boiled in a mixture of new milk and hartshorn powder make excellent plate rags,” ‘ repeated Anna, who had found that quotations from The Source helped to quieten the butterflies in her stomach. ‘ “A housemaid should never wear creaking boots and -” ‘ She broke off. ‘Chort!’

The avenue had been curving steadily to the right. Suddenly Anna had come upon the house as abruptly as William Kent, the genius who had landscaped the grounds, intended her to do.

Mersham was honey-coloured, graceful, light. There was a central block, pillared and porticoed like a golden temple plucked from some halcyon landscape and set down in a hollow of the Wiltshire hills. Wide steps ran up from either side to the great front door, their balustrades flanked by urns and calm-faced phoenixes. From this centre, two low wings, exquisite and identical, stretched north and south, their long windows giving out on to a terrace upon which fountains played. Built for James Frayne, the first Earl of Westerholme, by some favourite of the gods with that innate sense of balance which characterized the Palladian age, it exuded welcome and an incorrigible sense of lightness. Anna, who had gazed unmoved on Rastrelli’s gigantic, ornate palaces, looked on, marvelled and smiled.

The next moment, blending with the pale stone, the blond sweep of gravel, a huge, lion-coloured dog tore down the steps and bounded towards her, barking ferociously. An English mastiff with a black dewlap like sea coal and bloodshot eyes, defending his master’s hearth.

‘Oh, hush,’ said Anna, standing her ground and speaking softly in her native tongue. ‘Calm yourself. Surely you can see that I am not a burglar?’

Her voice, the strange, low words with their caressing rhythms, got through to the dog, who braked suddenly and while continuing to growl at one end, set up with the other a faintly placating movement of the tail. Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.

For a while, Anna scratched on and Baskerville, shaking off five years of loneliness while his master was at war, moaned with pleasure. When she picked up her case again he followed her, butting her skirt lovingly with his great head. Only when he saw that, unbelievably, she had turned from the front of the house and was making her way through the archway which led towards the servants’ quarters did he stop with a howl of disbelief. There were places where, as the earl’s dog, it was simply not possible for him to go.

‘Snob!’ said Anna, leaving him with regret.

She crossed the grassy courtyard and found a flight of stairs which seemed to lead towards the kitchens.

‘I shall curtsy to everybody,’ decided Anna and went bravely forward to meet her fate.

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Waiting to see what the London agency had sent them this time, were Mrs Bassenthwaite, the housekeeper, and the butler, Mr Proom.

Their expectations were low. They had already received, from the same source, an under-gardener who had fallen dead drunk into a cucumber frame on his first day and a footman who had attempted to hand a dish of mutton cutlets gloveless and from the right. But then, having to recruit servants from an agency was in every way against the traditions of Mersham and just another unpleasantness resulting from the dreadful war.

Mrs Bassenthwaite was a frail, white-haired woman who should have retired years earlier but had stayed on to oblige the Dowager Countess of Westerholme, shattered by the loss, within a year, of her adored husband and handsome eldest son. She was a relic of the splendid days of Mersham when a bevy of stillroom maids and laundry maids, of sewing girls and housemaids had scurried at her lightest command. Once she had prowled the great rooms, eagle-eyed for a speck of dust or an un-plumped cushion, and had conducted inquests and vendettas from which ashen-faced underlings fled weeping to their attics.

But now she was old. The austerities of war, the informality of modern life, its motors and telephones confused her and she increasingly left the running of Mersham to the butler, Mr Proom.

There could have been nobody more worthy. Cyril Ploom was in his fifties, a bald, egg-headed man, whose blue eyes behind gold spectacles gazed at the world with a formidable intelligence. An avid reader of encyclopaedias and other improving literature, Proom, like Mrs Bassenthwaite, had once been head of a great line of perfectly drilled retainers: under-butlers and footmen, lamp boys and odd men, stretching away from him in increasing obsequiousness and unimportance.

To this epoch, the war had put an end. More than most great houses, Mersham had given its life’s blood to the Kaiser’s war. Upstairs it had taken Lord George, the heir, who fell at Ypres six months after his father, the sixth earl, succumbed to a second heart attack. Below stairs it had drained away almost every able-bodied man and few of those who left were destined to return. A groom had fallen on the Somme, an under-gardener was drowned at Jutland; the hall boy, who had lied about his age, was blown up at Verdun a week before his eighteenth birthday. And if the men left to fight, the maids left to work in munitions factories, in offices or on the land; creating, as they departed, a greater and greater burden for the servants who remained.

It was during those years that Proom, sacrificing the status it had taken a lifetime to acquire, had rolled up his sleeves and worked side by side with the meanest of his minions. With the rigid protocol of the servants’ hall abandoned, Jean Park the soft-spoken head kitchen maid, was even persuaded to step into the shoes of Signor Manotti, the chef, who returned to his native land.

Lady Westerholme had done what she could to ease the pressure on her depleted staff. She shut up the main body of the house and retired, with the earl’s ancient uncle, Mr Sebastien Frayne, into the east wing, trying, amid a welter of planchettes and ouija boards, to follow her loved ones into their twilit world. Inevitably, her sadness and seclusion and the economies forced upon her by two lots of death duties, took their toll. The shrouded rooms through which only the dog, Baskerville, now roamed, grew dusty and cold; in the once trim flowerbeds, wild grasses waved their blond and feathery heads; the proud peacocks of the topiary grew bedraggled for want of trimming. Finally, when the armistice was declared the servants, waiting anxiously for news, wondered if Mersham was to share the fate of so many great houses and go up for sale.

For the whole hope of the House of Frayne now lay in the one surviving son, Lord George’s younger brother, Rupert. The new earl had spent four years in the Royal Flying Corps, his life so perilous that even his mother had not dared to hope he might be spared. But though his plane had been shot down, though he’d been gravely wounded, Rupert was alive. He was about to be discharged from hospital. He was coming home.

But for good? Or only long enough to put his home on the market? Remembering the quiet, unassuming boy, so different from his handsome, careless elder brother, the servants could only wonder and wait. Nor were there any clues in the instructions the new earl had sent from his hospital bed: the state rooms were to be re-opened, everything that needed to be done to bring Mersham up to its old standard was to be done - but any new staff engaged to make this possible were to be strictly temporary.