Spare Brides (2 page)

She wished Dickenson would get a move on too. The goose bumps that were erupting all over her body looked ugly. She robustly rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Ought she to pop on her own drawers and brassiere? She didn’t mind doing so; dressing herself was actually what she preferred, but Dickenson invariably made such a fuss if Lydia did take the initiative, grumbling, ‘Is Lady Chatfield trying to do me out of a job?’ Silly really, since they both knew that Dickenson’s duties extended far beyond those traditionally associated with a lady’s maid, and that, in truth, she was stretched, often frazzled. As Lydia wondered whether she ought to reach for her silk dressing robe again, Dickenson burst into the room.

‘You’ll catch your death, standing around that way,’ she cried. Then, almost as an afterthought, ‘Sorry I’m late, my lady.’

‘It’s fine.’ Lydia’s eyes did not rest on Dickenson even for an instant. She didn’t need them to. She knew what her maid looked like. She was petite, meticulous and she put Lydia in mind of a bird, because when she moved, she darted. She was always dressed in a black frock with a plain white collar, as was proper and required. From October to March she wore a dreary knitted black shawl that would have been better suited to a woman thirty years older. She pulled it close around her shoulders and held it there with an amber brooch that, if Lydia recalled correctly, had been willed to her by her aunt. Her eyes were so dark it was impossible to see her pupils; there was rumour of her having Continental blood, but no one ever probed. Her nose was long and narrow and her mouth was slightly sombre, even woeful. She didn’t often laugh. She appeared old. She was not.

Lydia’s gaze stayed trained on her own reflection, which anyone would have to admit was altogether more pleasing, more modern. It took a moment to adjust to; she was still getting used to her short bobbed hair. Like every fashionable woman she wanted to wear her hair cropped at the ear, as she favoured close-fitting cloche hats. Over fifteen inches had been lopped just before Christmas. She felt light and exhilarated, although Lawrence hadn’t been overjoyed; on more than one occasion he’d wrapped a scarf around her neck whilst they sat by the fire or at the dinner table, making jokes about her feeling a draught. She smiled, indulging him, although she didn’t find the joke especially funny; hadn’t done so even the first time he made it. She suited the modern style. Her glossy black blunt-cut fringe framed her startling blue eyes and added a hint of danger and drama to her pale skin. When she’d worn her hair long she’d looked like a medieval queen – passive, protected; now, there was an edge to her, something thoroughly modern, and equally mesmerising. Her high cheekbones, creamy, pearlesque skin and full, almost fat lips were all the more notable now her hair was chopped. If only her nose was a little thinner. Sleeping for four years with a peg nipping the end had failed to do the job her governess had promised it would.

‘I got held up, my lady. I was with the new cook.’

‘How is she settling?’

‘She’s competent.’ Dickenson drew her lips a fraction closer together. Lydia understood at once, but chose not to comment. She found running a house wearisome and would always prefer not to waste her time and breath on the domestic matters that she knew were ultimately her domain. Her maid, however, could not imagine a subject more fascinating or worthy and, unaware of her mistress’s deep-seated indifference, pursued the subject with fervour. ‘She’s not at all happy with—’

‘The workload,’ Lydia guessed. ‘No one is.’

‘I chipped in. Helped with the …’ Dickenson broke off and glanced at her red fingers, swollen so that they looked like raw sausages. Lydia followed her gaze, but had no idea that the experienced hands that would soon be running through her glossy locks, fixing a diamanté comb above her left ear, had just moments ago been scrubbing garden vegetables. She couldn’t imagine such a thing because she’d never consciously given any thought as to how vegetables – or meat or bread for that matter – were prepared to grace her table. Lydia was aware that the house was functioning on a skeleton staff. She knew the problems, and the solution too, but patience was required. No one could ever say so – it was practically criminal, certainly disrespectful, to even think it – but the fact was they were all waiting for her father-in-law, the old earl, to die.

‘We all have to do our bit. Things aren’t what they were. They can’t be,’ she commented as she put her arms through the straps of a brassiere that Dickenson was holding for her. Dickenson ran around her mistress then touched the smooth, pale skin in between her shoulder blades, silently indicating that she needed to bend forward to lower her breasts into the supporting cups. Lydia obliged, then straightened and stood still as Dickenson continued to dance around her, hastening to fasten the small hooks and eyes and adjust the lace shoulder straps so they sat flat and comfortable. Lydia allowed the maid to drop a silk chemise over her head, the material fluttering around her like insect wings, then waited as Dickenson laid a napkin on the plum velvet stool in front of the dressing table. Lydia sat down carefully. She wished she was allowed to sit on the soft velvet – she liked the malleable, slightly crunchy feel of it beneath her – but Dickenson said it was unhygienic and caused unnecessary cleaning work, and insisted on the starchy napkin. ‘Yes, we must all do our bit,’ Lydia repeated.

If the maid was tempted to comment that Lydia did not seem to be doing anything at all, let alone her bit, she was wise and disciplined enough not to do so. Janice Dickenson had started her career as a kitchen maid in Lady Chatfield’s family home. In those days Lydia called Janice Janice and Janice called Lydia Miss Lydia. It would surprise Lydia to realise that Janice was only thirty-one, just three years older than Lydia herself. The maid had joined the household at the age of twelve, when Lydia still inhabited the narrow corridors that led to a stuffy schoolroom but no other world at all; she had assumed that a girl with a job and an income, no matter how modest, must be properly grown up, maybe even ancient, an assumption Janice’s mother as well as the staff and the entire family at Hemingford Manor also made.

The two girls had been friends, or at least friendly, then. On more than one occasion Lydia’s governess had caught Lydia running in the street or spied her in the village without a bonnet, misdemeanours that resulted in Lydia being lectured on decorum and sent to bed without supper. On these unfortunate evenings Janice would sneak up to the nursery room with fruit, bread and cheese. This was at the housekeeper’s instruction – Janice would never have risked taking food from the pantry of her own volition – although Lydia never knew as much and considered Janice an ally in her austere, unrepentantly strict home. Someone who could be relied upon if need be. Someone who might cover and console.

Lydia had married the Honourable Lawrence Chatfield eight years ago. She was a young, pre-war bride, awash with optimism and first love, a recognised society beauty. They were all so proud of her, so pleased for her, scoldings about undemure, hatless behaviour long forgotten. Marrying the third son of an earl was fitting, appropriate to her own rank and beauty. Lydia, naturally nervous at the thought of moving so far away from her family home, remembered Janice, who she had imbued with feelings of sympathy and sentimentality. She had plucked the girl, who was by then an under house parlour maid, from oblivion and asked whether she might like to be a lady’s maid. Janice was not fuelled with unreasonable ambition, but she was fed up of plunging her hands into icy water every morning, cleaning fireplaces and front steps, polishing the shoes and boots of everyone in the household and washing endless pots smeared with goose fat and gravy (that particular task grated the most because, by rights, it should no longer have been her responsibility; there was a new kitchen maid employed for such menial work). She’d accepted Lydia’s offer of advancement immediately.

No one had thought that the Honourable Lawrence Chatfield would ever climb to become the heir apparent, that Lydia might one day become a countess, but within two years of their marriage both of Lawrence’s older brothers were dead. The middle son, a member of the British Expeditionary Force, died at the Battle of Mons, just weeks after war was declared. There were calls for the eldest son to enlist immediately, to justify and honour his brother’s death presumably. No doubt he would have done, but before he could respond to Kitchener’s pointing finger, he fell off his horse and broke his neck whilst chasing a fox with some pals and a pack of hounds. The consequences of these terrible losses were that Lawrence became the earl’s only chance and Lydia’s name appeared on a great many more invitation lists.

Janice too metamorphosed; she became Dickenson and, as such, she visited the finest houses in Britain, twice saw the King through a window and, now that peace was restored, had travelled with her mistress to Cannes, in France, and Lake Garda, in Italy. Whilst by Janice’s standards Lady Chatfield’s house, Dartford Hall, here in Hampshire, was very impressive – and certainly enough work to manage – she’d now seen enough to know that there was better out there, far better. Houses with a confusion of staircases and countless gilded rooms, coats of arms, turrets and chimneys aplenty, manicured lawns and hectares of hunting grounds. No one had hoped for as much for Lady Chatfield, but now it was acknowledged to be not only possible, or probable but a certainty. When the current Earl of Clarendale finally did die, Lydia would be raised to new echelons. His house, in West Sussex, sat in a six-hundred-acre deer park; it had more rooms than Janice could hope to count, and a full staff was guaranteed. There would be no need for her to chip in with the kitchen staff and scrub vegetables. The old duffer wasn’t in hail health; he’d had a bad bout of bronchitis before Christmas, his third attack in eighteen months. Many said he was just hanging on to see a grandchild.

Dickenson knelt before Lydia, carefully drawing delicate silk stockings over her feet and smoothing them high up her legs to the top of her thighs. Lydia rose, allowing the maid to fit the long stays of pink coutil round her hips and clip suspenders to the stockings, then Janice carefully spread a pair of peach satin drawers in a ring on the floor, and Lydia stepped into them. Dickenson bent to pull them up, her ear inches away from Lydia’s mound of pubic hair. Neither woman ever considered the intimacy of this process excessive. Janice did the dressing. Lady Chatfield was dressed. It was what it was, as it had always been.

‘What will I wear tonight, Dickenson?’

‘A man arrived from France just half an hour ago, my lady.’

‘The dress!’ Lydia clapped her hands with excitement.

‘Yes, my lady. It’s being steamed this very moment.’

‘A delivery on New Year’s Eve! Gosh, aren’t the French wonderful?’ Lydia was glad she hadn’t voiced her earlier opinion about their friends on the Continent. It didn’t do to appear too changie-mindie; this was one of the many reasons Lydia rarely spoke up. ‘So tenacious,’ she added.

Janice sighed and conceded, ‘They certainly value the gown, my lady. I’ll say that.’

S
ARAH GORDON AND
her sister Beatrice Polwarth waited patiently in the drawing room for their sister-in-law, Cecily, to join them. They sat with straight backs and did nothing; they did not fill their hands and time with embroidery, or a book, or even a glass of sherry. Instead, Sarah silently noted that the silverware was gleaming, but the hearth rug was becoming rather worn, especially in the left-hand corner where people walked through the room; it probably needed turning. Beatrice listened to the fire cracking and popping in the hearth; she appreciated its woody scent as well as its almost too ferocious heat. Bea was rarely warm enough.

The sisters were never certain, until the moment of her appearance, whether Cecily’s arrival could be guaranteed. Their brother, Samuel, was extremely unlikely to join them tonight. He rarely went out, and never to a ball; if he did venture forth, it would be to attend afternoon tea at the home of a close friend, something he’d accomplished twice in three years. No one blamed him, but it would be wonderful if Cecily joined them this evening; jolly. Samuel and the children were already in bed; they’d all be asleep before half past eight. Surely Cecily wouldn’t choose to spend the last day of the year alone in her bedroom. She couldn’t want that, could she? Everyone was aware that she needed some respite, although no one would ever say as much out loud, least of all Samuel’s devoted sisters. The sad fact was that Cecily’s life was as truncated as her husband’s body. Her ability to have fun – even her sense of entitlement to fun – had been blown away with Samuel’s limbs on 9 October 1917; flesh and hope splattered across Flanders and buried deep in the mud there.

The word Passchendaele haunted the house. It could be heard in the tick-tock of the clocks, in the tip-tap of the servants’ footsteps on the wooden floorboards. Passch-en-daele, Passch-en-daele, Passch-en-daele. It could be heard in the swoosh of the water pouring from the jug as Samuel’s bath was filled; a heartbreaking weekly exercise that Beatrice in particular hated. Naturally, the manservants assisted willingly enough, and they had trained themselves not to recoil at the sight of their master’s half body, but Beatrice could never bear to think of her brother naked and exposed so. Passchendaele was whispered by the wind as it whipped down the chimneys and crept into every room and could be heard in the thud of the gamekeeper’s axe when he chopped firewood, and in the horses’ hooves on the cobbles of the courtyard.

It was never heard on anyone’s lips.

A carriage clock ticked out the oh-too-slow minutes. Seconds were fused as the hand relentlessly progressed and gobbled up time.

‘Do you think Cecily will join us this evening?’ Beatrice asked her older sister. The question was so frequently addressed that she knew the reply by rote, but at twenty-six years old, she still felt compelled to fill silences. She had not, as yet, met any that were comfortable and was only acquainted with the awkward variety.