Abdication: A Novel (10 page)

Apart from Simon wobbling away in his bedroom, the house was empty. Glad for the rare chance to be alone, May went into the parlour where a two-day-old newspaper was lying on the leather sofa. Nat was fascinated by politics and had heard long ago that
The Times
was the paper of the educated classes. His neighbours, if they were interested at all in reading the news, got their daily information from the
Daily Worker
. But Nat had become friendly with a butler, a customer from a big house in the West End, for whom Nat had made a smart black working jacket and matching pair of trousers. Each morning, the butler would collect the previous day’s copy of
The Times
from his employer’s
smoking room, have a quick look at the sports pages and then pass the paper on to Nat. They would meet at the bus stop on Bethnal Green Road when the butler was on his way to work or at Goides, the Whitechapel café where Jewish intellectuals went to discuss politics and literature over small cups of thick Turkish coffee and glasses of lemon tea.

May turned the pages of Nat’s secondhand paper, looking for the names of the latest winners of the Littlewoods football pools. Sam had suggested the pools might make their fortune.

“Every day someone wakes up to a morning of good news,” he argued, “and to a means of escape from a hard life. Maybe one day it will be me. Then I will buy a yacht,” he promised, “and we can sail round the world like kings and queens.”

But May could find no reference in the dog-eared newspaper to anyone celebrating a windfall. The first few pages were covered with columns of boxed-in advertisements. The front page carried notices from financial advisors, personal advertisements from spiritualists promising to “restore confidence” for those living in uncertainty, and details of a sumptuous antique Persian tapestry for sale at a bargain price of two hundred pounds. The second page was devoted almost exclusively to educational positions in boys’ schools but on the third she came across the columns reserved for domestic situations. Most required skill in the kitchen and May’s culinary expertise was based on little more than watching Bertha preparing huge mounds of rice and peas for the plantation workers’ lunch back home.

May tucked the paper under her arm and went upstairs, passing Simon’s now closed door, climbing the complaining ladder to look through her skylight from where she gazed yet again at the memorial stone with its poignant message of sacrificing life for duty. She began to wonder what sort of occupations would have awaited those young men had they not lost their lives before life had barely begun. A man’s
world had been on offer for those boys, but it had been replaced by one top-heavy with women.

A man’s world … snippets of a conversation with Nat the day before began to reform in her mind. Nat was proving quick to notice anything that interested her. On the morning after their arrival the Greenfelds, the Castors and the Thomases had gone for a brisk walk in nearby Victoria Park and as they crossed the road May had been conscious of Nat studying her face.

“Tell me, May,” he had asked, “am I mistaken or do you have a secret passion for these smelly machines?”

May blushed at his observation but nodded, admitting to being mesmerised by the sight of so many beautiful cars.

“Why not look for a job as a chauffeur?” Nat said. “Loads of women drove cars professionally in the Great War. Women wore the trousers in those days. And many still do,” he said, darting a look in Rachel’s direction. “Even though there is talk down at the workshop of another war,” Nat continued, his eyes meeting Sarah’s, who was nodding in agreement, “none of us think it will come. Even Mosley and his fascist thugs are losing power in this country and anyway, Baldwin will do everything in his power to prevent it.”

Nat did not sound optimistic.

“But whatever happens there is no reason for women drivers to wait for another war to give them a professional role. Especially if they have a real skill for it.”

“What sort of car would I drive?” May asked. “And who would be inside it?”

“Well, they say the test to drive a London taxi is a hard one. You have to know all the streets of London backwards as well as forwards. They call it ‘the Knowledge’ and it is said to be more difficult to pass than the exam to get into Oxford or Cambridge!”

“She’s a quick learner,” Sam interrupted with brotherly pride.

“I am sure she is,” replied Nat, “but it might be an idea to see if any private work is advertised in the paper. Perhaps a
Times
reader would be looking for her in the same way that she’d be seeking them?” he suggested.

May sat on her bed and opened the newspaper once more, beginning again with the third page. She ran her finger down the situations-vacant columns. With the cutting back of numbers of servants since the Depression, even the grandest houses were looking to double up on staff roles. That day the advertisements for “cook-generals” outnumbered all the others, a euphemism that according to Nat disguised something closer to general slave labour.

“You would never have found such a job advertised before the war,” he had said.

Even so, a parlour maid was required for a family in South Kensington and a head housemaid was needed to head a team of four other servants near Southampton, the advertisement assuring all applicants that the employers were a “titled family.” Neither position sounded at all what she was looking for. Further down the page, however, May drew in her breath a little. Her finger hovered for a moment and then, putting her hands in her lap, she read the few compact lines slowly.

Discretion is an essential qualification for the successful candidate who applies to work as
chauffeuse,
with additional general secretarial duties for a busy member of Parliament, based both in London and in Sussex
.

Flexibility, a willingness to work hard, a head for bookkeeping, a smart appearance and an impeccable driving record are all requirements
.

May circled the advertisement with a pencil, went downstairs and waited for Sam and Nat to come home. She planned to seek their advice
even though her mind was already made up. Later that evening, she rang the number printed in the newspaper from Nat’s workshop telephone, and an arrangement had been made for May to take the train from Victoria down to Polegate station where she would be met and driven to Cuckmere Park. She had been told by the housekeeper, who in a deep voice introduced herself as Mrs. Cage, that Sir Philip Blunt would be at the house and would be pleased to interview her himself.

“He needs to be certain of getting the right one this time,” Mrs. Cage had said. “And he’s not the only one here at Cuckmere who doesn’t want any more balls-ups, pardon my French,” she continued. “Spent too much time abroad with men and their bad ways with language, I have. Mind you, a woman might cause a bit of attention behind the wheel. I hope you scrub up nice and smart,” a note of warning in her voice as she replaced the receiver.

Nat had made Sarah a warm coat for the winter in thick tweed. Sarah insisted that the coat was ideally suited to May’s neat figure and would be perfect for impressing Sir Philip. She also leant May a pair of cotton stockings. May, who had never worn such things before, pulled the stockings up and clipped them to the suspenders just as Sarah showed her. She did not know that legs could experience claustrophobia, even though Sarah assured her the stockings would soon expand and wrinkle at the knees and ankles. At the last moment Nat had produced a striped, battered box from which he lifted a small black velvet hat with a jaunty feather on one side.

“Mum would be honoured to think of the daughter of her favourite sister wearing her best hat on such an important day. This is the only piece of clothing the prison returned to us after Mum died. All her other clothes had been burned because she was too thin to wear them.” Nat’s voice faltered. “But Mum didn’t mind. ‘Anything for the suffragette cause,’ she always used to say. I always wish she had lived on just a
bit longer to see women given the vote and Lady Astor taking her seat in Parliament. Then she would have known the fight was worthwhile.”

“Well, I want to try and do Aunt Gladys
and
her hat proud,” May said, reaching up to give Nat a kiss on his cheek. “So here comes a woman aiming for a man’s job.”

Placing the hat on May’s head, Sarah pronounced it a perfect fit.

As May sat on the train in her third-class carriage she passed innumerable back gardens and yards. The scene passing her eyes was as strange as anything she had seen at the pictures. Some of these tiny patches of horticulture were pristine in their winter tidiness, the flowerbeds turned and forked with the care given to the potato topping of a meat pie, paths swept of leaves and the still stark trees forming a skeletal silhouette against the sky. Other gardens were overrun with weeds, and sometimes, just visible in the thick mist, the train passed an abandoned swing settee, its seat rotting in the damp, a reminder of summers past. Most of these small plots were devoid of life, although as the train slowed down for a station, May spotted a sleepy cat curling itself around the back fence of a house and a bent-over figure emerging from his potting shed, probably escaping the demands of domesticity in the house. And yet this unlikely jigsaw of semi-tended earth, despite the apparent mismatch of the pieces, slotted together to form the overall effect of a satisfying collage.

As the London suburbs gave way to the muddy greenish-brown of the Sussex winter countryside, a thin white frosting covered the fields. May had never seen snow before. The pictures illustrating Hans Christian Anderson’s icy queen in her white fur coat were the closest she had come to such a sight. There was no one in the empty railway carriage to whom she could show her excitement. Sam had wanted to come with her but that day he had an appointment on board HMS
President
, the huge ship permanently moored at King’s Reach near the Law Courts at the Embankment. She wondered how he was getting
on. His hope that the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve would take him on as a rating was a long shot but even so Sam was confident that he would soon be wearing a jacket with the volunteers’ herringbone stripe at the cuff.

Nat had also offered to come with May on the journey, but she assured him she would manage fine on her own. Just at that moment she felt deliriously independent. The train made its way through the frozen landscape, the bosomy undulation of the South Downs rising into view as if the backdrop of a theatre had just been changed for a new scene. May tried to count the number of flint churches with pencil spires that pointed upwards towards the grey skies and felt the return of an old tumble of words from a poem that her mother used to read to her when May was very small, the rhythm of it dependably sleep-inducing even if the words did not then mean much.

Faster than fairies, faster than witches
,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle
,

All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain

As the painted stations of the Sussex Downs whistled past her window, May only just had time to read the letters on the wooden signs announcing the successive towns of Plumpton and Lewes, Glynde and Berwick, until at last the train began to slow down and a ripple of nerves overtook her. Sarah had suggested she might suit a bob cut, and had offered to give her a shining blond Jean Harlow–style, with a little help from her infallible tin of bleach. May had resisted the offer but wondered whether she had been right to do so. Now she could only hope that her hairpins would hold their place.

A man in overalls was standing at the far end of the platform, holding a tweed cap. He raised a hand to May in greeting. She waved back. A sharp gust of wind lifted off her black velvet hat and, bending to retrieve it, the pins that she had carefully tucked into her hair two hours earlier slithered out onto the ground.
They will never take me seriously now
, she thought, as she stood up, juggling hair, hat and pins and made her way towards the man who was standing beside a beautiful car.

C
HAPTER
S
IX