Authors: Pam Weaver
Blue Moon
BLUE MOON
Pam Weaver
PAN BOOKS
To Mark and Heather Weaver –
the best brother and sister-in-law a girl could have
Contents
CHAPTER 1
Ruby Bateman glanced up at the clock in the corridor. The slow tick-tock reassured her that although time was passing, she was doing well. She was still ahead of herself and could probably get away a little earlier than she had anticipated. She pushed the heavy linen trolley towards the next room. Only three more to go. She knocked gently on the door and listened.
At the other end of the corridor Winifred Moore, the florist, looked up and waved shyly. A homely woman, she was working with a large vase of unruly gladioli on the table at the top of the stairs, her Sussex trug full of beautiful blooms at her feet on one side, with a galvanized bucket with the dead blooms on the other side. Ruby returned her smile and knocked again.
As chambermaid at the prestigious Warnes Hotel on Worthing seafront, Ruby had to follow the strict protocol that Mrs Fosdyke, the housekeeper, had drummed into her from the moment she’d arrived. She and Edith Parsons were responsible for the whole of this floor. Edith worked in rooms 20–29, while Ruby cleaned rooms 30–40. They were supposed to work quietly and
quickly and, as far as possible, to be so unobtrusive as to be invisible. Because of that, they must never go into the rooms if the guests were still there.
‘You are servants of the hotel,’ Mrs Fosdyke told them on the day they’d arrived, ‘and, as such, you must always be polite to the guests, but never treat them in a familiar manner. Remember that the guests who stay at Warnes are a better class of people.’
If, by any chance, a guest returned to the room before they had finished cleaning, Mrs Fosdyke went on to say that they should extradite themselves discreetly and come back later. They were on no account allowed to speak, unless they were spoken to, and must certainly never indulge in friendly conversation. That might have been the rule, but of course Ruby didn’t always stick to it.
At seventeen, she was an attractive girl with short, dark hair and large brown eyes. She had been born and brought up in Worthing, a town that, although often overshadowed by its larger and flashier neighbour Brighton, had a secret charm all of its own. She lived only a short walk from the hotel with her mother and father, her younger sister May and her older brother Percy. Family life was not always easy. Her father and brother were fishermen and there was always a risk, where the sea was concerned, but Ruby loved where she lived. Even though it was by the seaside, Worthing remained rustic and unspoiled. There were a few tourist attractions: the Dome cinema, the pier, and Ruby loved walking along Marine Parade. If she took a bus, within
minutes she could be on the Sussex Downs or in one of the small villages on the outskirts of the town. But most of all, she loved people. In fact she often struck up a conversation with a guest. Some were fascinating, like the very old lady (at least seventy) who had come to Warnes for a few days, before travelling back to her home in Monte Carlo. During the several days the lady had stayed at Warnes they’d talked about her career on the stage, and Ruby had got on so famously with her that Mrs Walter de Frece had given her a signed copy of her autobiography. It wasn’t until she saw the title,
Recollections of Vesta Tilly
, that she realized who she’d been talking to. And then there was the butterfly man, who’d spent the whole of last summer going out in his motor car to collect specimens from the South Downs. It broke Ruby’s heart to see them all quite dead and pinned in his cases, but he was fascinating all the same.
The hotel didn’t have any interesting guests at the moment. She’d chatted with Dr Palmer in room 31, a studious and serious man. She had discovered that he had recently retired from some big hospital in London (she’d forgotten the name) and that he was in town to give a series of lectures about the events unfolding in Germany. She had wanted to ask him what he thought about Herr Hitler, but then she’d heard Mrs Fosdyke in the corridor and had made her excuses to leave the room before she got caught.
Ruby knocked on the door of number 38 for a second time and, when there was no answer, she went in. The room was tidier than most, but the bed was unmade.
She picked up a discarded bath towel and threw it by the door, ready to push it into the laundry bag on the end of her trolley when she left the room. She moved around quickly and quietly, working methodically so that she didn’t miss anything. She made up the bed with clean linen. At Warnes – being a more upmarket hotel – every bed was changed daily.
Stuffing the soiled bedclothes and the towel into the laundry sack, Ruby reached for the bathroom cleaner. The guests at the other end of the corridor shared a bathroom, but here, in the rooms with a sea view, they had their own. She rubbed gumption onto the enamel sink and cleaned the tide-mark left on the bath. Next she polished the taps and replaced the towels with snowy-white replicas. The toilet bowl got the same treatment, and then she mopped the linoleum floor, being careful to reach into every corner, and not forgetting the area behind the S-bend. Mrs Fosdyke would check every room, and woe betide any girl if she found so much as a speck of dust or a stray hair in the bathroom. The bedroom itself had a thorough clean and, as soon as she’d finished with the Vactric vacuum cleaner, Ruby got ready to move on to the last two bedrooms.
She’d only seen the guests who occupied these two rooms a couple of times. He was small with round-rimmed specs, and Ruby guessed that he was a learned man, because he always seemed to have his nose in a book. He said little, barely even acknowledging her existence. He was staying in the hotel with his daughter, who had the adjoining room. She was a pale girl with
dark circles under her grey eyes and an anxious expression. She was about the same age as Ruby, and although she was staying in the best hotel in Worthing, she seemed a little distracted. Ruby had bobbed a curtsey a couple of times when they’d bumped into each other in the corridor, but hadn’t spoken to her.
As soon as she was satisfied with her work, Ruby took one final look around the room and was content to close the door. Another glance at the clock at the end of the long corridor told her that she was still in good time.
She had come in early today. Her normal day began at six, but because her neighbours on Newlands Road were going on an outing later on – something she herself had instigated – Ruby had come in half an hour earlier. Of course she couldn’t clean the rooms then, but she could make a start on other cleaning duties, such as the lounge and the front hall and the steps. It was a nail-biting experience asking the housekeeper if she could change her hours. Mrs Fosdyke wasn’t known for her generosity, being a notoriously mean-spirited woman, and Ruby knew she was quite capable of refusing to let her go, just for the sake of being unkind.
‘Mrs Fosdyke,’ Ruby had begun nervously, ‘my neighbours are going on a bit of an outing. We’re planning a charity concert for the Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor.’ Her heart sank as she watched Mrs Fosdyke’s lips purse together in a firm line. She was going to say no, wasn’t she …? And Ruby had been so looking forward to it. She knew that the Dispensary for
Sick Animals of the Poor, a local charity, was a cause very dear to the management at Warnes. Spearheaded by a woman in the town, it existed to help people who couldn’t afford to take their pets to a vet for treatment. There had been regular dances in the hotel to help raise funds. ‘I’ll come in early and do all my work,’ Ruby had promised.
‘And who will turn the beds down?’ Mrs Fosdyke said, in an accusatory tone.
Ruby didn’t give up. ‘Edith says she wouldn’t mind doing my rooms as well.’
‘Parsons seems to be taking on rather a lot, doesn’t she?’ Mrs Fosdyke sniffed.
‘She says she doesn’t mind,’ Ruby said feebly.
Mrs Fosdyke held her gaze for several seconds. ‘Very well, but you are not to skimp on anything, Bateman,’ she said firmly. ‘I shall be on your trail before you go.’
Edith’s reaction, when Ruby told her what had happened, was more strident. ‘Miserable old bugger!’
Ruby glanced around nervously. ‘You’d better not let her hear you calling her that,’ she chuckled.
Ruby had now reached room 40 and knocked on the door. The corridor was empty. Winnie had gone – presumably up to the next floor. She saw to the flowers every other day and it took her all morning. There was no answer, so Ruby went in. The room was a tip, and her heart sank. It was going to take some time to tidy all this. It looked as if the guest had thrown the whole of her wardrobe on the floor. A half-packed case lay on the bed. Ruby tripped over a shoe as she walked in,
and found its match on the dressing table. She began picking up dresses and putting them on the hangers in the wardrobe. The shoes went into a shoe rack. It was only as she reached the bed that Ruby noticed the blood. At first she struggled to comprehend what she was seeing. Had the guest started her monthlies in bed? She had come across that sort of thing before; not very pleasant, and embarrassing if she was in the room with the guest at any time, but an unavoidable fact of life. Yet something told her this was different. This was something more.
She heard a small moan coming from the direction of the bathroom and her heart immediately went into overdrive. ‘Who is there?’
There was no answer, but she heard a distinct intake of breath. Ruby picked up her feather duster and walked towards the door. Quite what she was going to do with the feather duster, she didn’t know, but the long handle felt like something she could use to defend herself, if necessary. Her heart was going like the clappers. Cautiously she pushed open the bathroom door and gasped.
There was blood everywhere. The pale-faced girl was on the floor. She was leaning against the bath, with her legs drawn up under her. Her feet were bloodied and her nightgown was saturated at the edge. The toilet seat was smeared with blood, and a small rivulet was running down the outside of the bowl. As Ruby came into the room, the girl looked up. Her face was ashen and tear-stained. It was immediately clear what had happened.
The girl had had a miscarriage and was in shock. Ruby grabbed the towel from the rail and draped it over her shivering body.
‘I was trying to get away,’ she whispered, ‘but it was all too quick.’
‘It’s all right, Miss,’ Ruby said gently. ‘You sit tight, and I’ll go down to reception and ask for an ambulance.’
‘No!’ The girl snatched her arm. Her eyes were wide with panic. ‘Please don’t do that. My father … he doesn’t know about the baby … If an ambulance came – oh, please, no one must know.’
Ruby frowned. Didn’t the girl understand the seriousness of the matter? ‘But, Miss, you’ve lost a lot of blood.’
‘I’m fine,’ the girl insisted. ‘Just help me up and I’ll be all right.’ She tried to stand but, as she moved, a pain in her stomach bent her double.
‘I can’t leave you like this, Miss,’ said Ruby.
‘No, please, you mustn’t,’ the girl said again. ‘If I’m found out, I shall be ruined.’
Ruby bit her lip anxiously. The girl wasn’t wearing a ring. Her naked fingers told Ruby that she wasn’t married. By losing the baby she had been spared the shame of telling her father that she was pregnant, but now, by another cruel twist of fate, he was going to find out anyway, when he saw the ambulance coming to take her to hospital. They might be living in a more enlightened age than their mothers had but, even though this was the 1930s, having a baby outside marriage was still taboo.
‘If you could just help me get cleaned up,’ the girl went on, ‘I can pretend nothing has happened.’
Ruby looked at the beads of perspiration forming on her top lip, and at her face, which was still deathly white. She shook her head. As much as she wanted to help, she couldn’t take that sort of responsibility. Supposing the girl died? ‘I can’t, Miss. I’m sorry.’