Between Friends (30 page)

She did well, Mrs Stewart told her. She was neat and quick and self-effacing. She moved about her new sphere with the instinctive grace and care of someone who loves fine things and her work, hard as it was, became a joy to her. She took pride in the high shine she put on rosewood and mahogany loo tables, on chiffoniers and card tables and pedestal and celleret sideboards, the names of which she had never known until she began to care for them. Her hands were gentle and dexterous as they cleaned the soft apple green, the biscuit and wedgwood blue and madder of the plaster relief which adorned the high and beautiful ceilings, all set about with scrolls, wreaths, fan tracery, medallions and festoons of leaves and flowers, and
her
windows sparkled like crystal when she had done. To handle the exquisite Wedgwood urns – when Ethel allowed it – the white biscuit porcelain, the Meissen bowls which were scattered so carelessly about the drawing-room delighted her and she took enormous care in dusting and replacing them, not perhaps exactly where they had been, but where Megan Hughes thought they looked best! No-one seemed to notice, least of all Ethel who was glad to have the services of such a good worker, she said.

‘I’m going to try you in the drawing-room, Megan,’ Mrs Stewart said when her three months was up, for really the girl was wasted in merely cleaning. She was a credit to her training and with her restrained comeliness, her immaculate appearance and neat efficiency she knew that Mrs Hemingway would be pleased to have Megan about her. ‘Just serving tea to start with in the
drawing-room
or the winter garden. You will have a black silk dress and a white frilled apron and cap. Agnes will show you what to do. Speak when you are spoken to and not before. The mistress will ring for tea at four. The tray will be prepared by the kitchen staff but you will hand it round to the company after the mistress has poured the tea or coffee, and Agnes will pass round the cakes and biscuits. You will be parlourmaid, Megan. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘Yes Mrs Stewart.’

‘Good girl.’

Megan moved through that winter with the passive and yet vigilant watchfulness that her meeting with Benjamin Harris had produced in her. Though she had challenged his authority over her then, defying him bravely she was not absolutely certain that if she should encounter him again as he had promised, she would be able to do it again. She could tell Mr Hemingway, she supposed, which had been her first instinct when she had recovered from the fright he had given her, but then she had done that the last time and look where that had got her! She was more in danger now than she had been then for Harris’ stay in prison had turned his mind to revenge and she, or Tom, were to be his targets. She would tell Tom and Martin, she decided but each time she made up her mind to it Harris’ face would come between her and her intentions, his dreadfully cold and glinting grey eyes which told her he meant everything he had said and the words he had spoken would ring in her head, repeating over and over again his threat against Tom. In his capacity as gardener and general handyman about the Silverdale estate Tom often worked alone and far from the house and it would be a simple matter for a couple of the ‘criminal fraternity’ Harris had talked about to slip into the woods and catch him, cripple him! And there was Mrs Whitley to consider. She lived alone in her cottage down by the gate and though the lodge keeper and his wife were within shouting distance she was old and frail and just the sight of Harris could kill her. Her only protection, it seemed to Meg, was silence and the immediate safety of the house. And yet, was it rational to believe it would happen?

She lay awake in the night and dwelled on the menace of it, a hundred times telling herself that it had been an idle threat, something Harris had brooded over during his months in prison, then, in a fit of rancour, taken it into his head to blame her for
it
. Bitter and resentful at what had been done to him he had waylaid her, the one he believed was the cause of it, in the spinney, but now, surely, he would be long gone from the district, the incident, if not forgotten, at least one he was no longer obsessed with. But dare she take the chance? Dare she?

She would toss about on her narrow bed at night, shifting from the certainty that he had left Liverpool where his past would haunt him, gone to greener pastures, she was positive, to the dreadful doubt that he hung about the estate waiting just for her! They would not let her rest, the misgivings crowding to her mind the moment she put her head on the pillow. They would not allow her to go far from the house and yard alone. She longed to beg Tom to be careful – about what, he would ask – and they separated her not only from her young, fellow maidservants but from Tom himself. The girls with whom she worked had accepted her as ‘stuck-up’, unapproachable, a good worker, mind and always willing to give a helping hand to anyone who was behind but not someone to have a laugh or a ‘natter’ with to make the deadly routine of the day pass more quickly. They let her alone, some of them resentful at her rapid promotion from scullery-maid to the drawing-room of Mrs Hemingway herself, and envious – now that her growing beauty was fully revealed by the stark black and white simplicity of her ‘afternoon’ uniform – of the attention she received from the men servants!

She was not aware of it. She did her work well and was recognised by Alice Hemingway who made a note to speak to her husband about it when he came home. That winter he and Hunter had spent most of their time in America where, on the long straight stretch of smooth sand at Ormond-Daytona Beach, Florida, Fred H. Marriott in his Stanley steam car which looked rather like a canoe with wire wheels had made a new flying record of 127.57 miles per hour, outstripping the great names of racing, Hémèry, Lancia and Satori in their petrol driven motor cars! Mr Robert had set his heart on his protegée and the sleek-lined ‘flyer’, beating this record but though Martin and his machine spent many hours of each day skimming the miles of straight course in practice he could not better the record.

They had raced at Grosse Point horse-racing track in Detroit and in the American Grand Prix at Savannah and the ‘Hemingway Flyer’ had acquitted itself well and the blighted hopes at Ormond-Daytona Beach had been somewhat made up for. As Mr
Robert
said, Martin was young yet, a novice but just let that daredevil Marriott wait a year or two and young Martin Hunter would make mincemeat of him!

They attended the Paris Motor Show before returning to England, ‘to see the opposition’, Mr Robert said, tapping the side of his nose slyly and were impressed by the vast multitude of European and American motor cars assembled there. They rubbed shoulders with the élite of the motoring world. Vanderbilt, Rolls, Royce, Marriott and the great S. F. Edge, famous for his twenty-four hour record on the newly opened Brooklands Track. There were more than a few minor royalty of Europe present since the growing world of the motor car and the racing of one machine against another, the gaining of ‘speed’ records which was their obsessive goal, was fascinating to many others beside the Hemingways and young Martin Hunter.

They had returned home at the end of February, ready, they said, to tackle the French Grand Prix on the Dieppe Circuit, the Tourist Trophy in the Isle of Man, a speed meeting which was to be held on the promenade at Blackpool, the Welsh and Irish Trials and the Ironbridge Hill Climb. Robert Hemingway described it all to his Alice and was barely interested, listening with only half an ear as she pronounced on the great success of ‘that child’ he had brought into their house last year and, his attention taken up entirely with the latest edition of the motoring magazine
The Autocar
which he had missed whilst he had been abroad, an odd word here and there was all he heard.

‘… and she really is most diligent, Mr Hemingway. Her movements are so neat and graceful with none of the nervous clumsiness usually shown in a new parlourmaid. Her manners are perfect and her appearance is delightful. Mrs Stewart cannot speak highly enough of her. She says she is sensible too, and can be trusted to do any job she is asked without supervision.’

‘Really, that is most gratifying.’

‘… and the young man also …’

‘How splendid.’

They were sitting companionably together, their wicker chairs side by side in the humid warmth of the late Lucinda Hemingway’s winter garden. A ‘tunnel of flowers’ it had been described as and so it was and the old couple sat at its far end. Alice gazed out serenely at the glory of the early daffodils which blazed in her garden clustering about every tree trunk, and wildly carpeting
the
lawn; at hyacinth, anemone and crocus, lining every path with a riot of colour as far as the eye could see. Men laboured diligently at each bed, weeding and hoeing. A path of crazy paving led away from the door of the winter garden, not straight and purposeful, but meandering gracefully through the flower beds towards the lawns which stretched to the stand of trees and beside it a tall, bright-haired young man was bending to something on the path.

‘Look! There he is now.’

‘Who dear?’

‘The young man I was speaking of.’

‘Which young man is that, Mrs Hemingway?’ Robert and Alice were of the generation which never, except in the privacy of their bedroom, addressed one another by their Christian name.

Alice Hemingway sighed resignedly.

‘The young man who was involved with Megan in the fire at the emigrant house. You remember him! He worked as boot boy and then …’

‘Oh yes … John … or was it Jack …?’

‘Tom, I think. Atkinson tells me he has a real feel for the garden.’

As they watched, their old faces nodding in gentle interest over the quite ordinary pursuits of their gardener, Alice and Robert Hemingway were surprised when the young man rose slowly to his full height, glanced furtively about him and with the definite air of someone who is up to something he shouldn’t, darted swiftly into the stand of trees.

‘What’s up with our Meg, Mrs Whitley? Has she said anything to you? I just can’t make her out these last few months. Every time I speak to her she jumps a foot in the bloody air – sorry Mrs Whitley – and all she seems to care about is the colour of the curtains in the sitting-room and the charming arrangement – her words, not mine – of the ornaments. She’s got nothing else in her head and when I
do
get her on her own, which is difficult, that’s all she seems to want to talk about. She won’t even come over here unless I practically drag her!’

Tom paced the small crowded room which had become the centre of Agatha Whitley’s contented world in the year she had lived on the Silverdale estate and his tall, rangy restlessness made it appear even smaller and more cluttered. Mrs Whitley watched
him
anxiously, turning every now and again as if to consult the other occupant of the snug kitchen, her face, plump and rosy in the glow from the fire, begging for understanding.

‘She seems alright to me.’ Martin spoke with the lazy indolence of one who is convinced the whole conversation and its contents was a storm in a teacup. ‘Keen to get on, I’ll grant you but what’s wrong with that. Mrs Stewart told me the mistress has got her eye on her and you know what that means in a house that size. Even old Ferguson can’t fault her. In fact I’d have said she’s fallen on her feet has our Meg, as we
all
have …’

‘You’ve been away too long, Martin, that’s your trouble and you’re so taken up with them machines you can see no further than what goes on under their damned bonnets. Can you not remember how lively she was? Jesus – sorry Mrs Whitley – it’s only been just over a year! She used to drive us all barmy with her joking and her everlasting poking her nose into everybody’s affairs. Questions! She never stopped and if she thought there was a day out in the offing she’d never let up until she was included …’

Mrs Whitley nodded her head sagely. ‘It’s true, Martin.’

‘… and now all she has to say is what lovely carpets there are in the drawing-room …’

‘Well, it’s true …’

‘That’s not the bloody point and you know it. She refuses to come into town with me on her day out and that’s not like her …’

‘She’s growing up, that’s all. She’s sixteen and girls are funny at that age. Besides she feels she has a position of responsibility she told me and …’

‘Balls!’

‘
Tom
! I’ll not have language like that in my house …’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Whitley but he makes me so wild. If he can’t see the change in her then he must be blind! Still, what can you expect? All he ever thinks about, cares about, talks about is motor cars and circuits and speed and chaps with names we’ve never even heard of and
we’re
supposed to be interested but when you ask him to discuss something important like our Meg he …’

The lounging length of Martin Hunter rose unhurriedly from the depths of Mrs Whitley’s best armchair, the one in which only she usually sat. His sun-browned face, warmed by hundreds of hours in the fierce sunshine of Florida was deceptively mild but his eyes had darkened to the deep colour of treacle and the muscles in his jaw clenched ominously. He was smartly, even ‘nattily’
dressed
in what was known as a ‘lounge suit’, the very latest in fashion with broad shoulders which needed no padding on his well muscled frame. He might have been taken for one of the Hemingway’s select circle of acquaintances and not, as he really was, a servant, since he mixed with the cosmopolitan and wealthy assembly into which his situation as Robert Hemingway’s skilled racing driver and favoured protegée had placed him. There was beginning to be a certain polish about him, a style, a confidence he had always had but which was now to do with his growing knowledge of good hotels, fine food and wine, the conversation and company of those whose education had been gained not only at the public schools most had attended but in the privilege and birthright of their class. He was almost nineteen years old but looked older, his maturity far outstripping the boyish, unfledged youthfulness of Tom. Side by side it was difficult to remember that they had grown up together and had been tutored in the same rough school of life. If Martin was the almost complete confirmation of young manhood, Tom was a rough draft, an outline of what one day he would finally become!