The World is a Wedding (15 page)

‘Good morning, ma'am,' Hilda said, and bobbed into an obsequious curtsey.

Lady Lytton smiled then turned back to her toilette, selecting a sapphire necklace from a velvet-lined box, coiling the jewellery round her neck and stretching elegantly as she hooked the clasps. She smiled at Grace and Hilda's reflection anodynely and, if she recognised Grace, she didn't reveal it.

‘Get in the bathroom!' Hilda whispered, pulling Grace's cuff. Once inside, door shut, they scooped up the scattered bath towels and rolled them into a fluffy bundle for the laundry. Grace buffed the enormous silvery mirror, reaching to its outer edges, while Hilda straightened the shower curtain, Welsh-combing the white silk with her fingers. She dried the steel flower that was the showerhead, then jerked out the bathplug so the bathwater slurped into the bowels of the city.

When they emerged from the bathroom, Lady Lytton turned fractionally and lifted a pink teacup to her lips, holding its gold handle delicately.

‘You may go,' she stated, addressing their reflections in her cool, smooth voice, then picking up a paint set and looking at the small, vibrant squares of colour.

‘The bed, ma'am?' Hilda asked anxiously.

‘This maid will finish it.' Lady Lytton indicated Grace. Grace saw Hilda disguise her surprise. Hilda took the order like one who only knew how to obey and not to reply. She nodded obediently and left, taking her maid's trolley with her.

‘Grace!' Lady Lytton exclaimed, turning round fully. ‘I haven't seen you at Mrs. Garrud's classes,' she said with concern. ‘And you didn't come to the last few Suffragette meetings.' Her enthusiasm revealed her youth, despite the lacquer and polish that money bestowed upon her. ‘When I failed to see you here, I thought you might have lost your employment.'

A wave of tension came over Lady Lytton's beautiful, painted countenance. ‘Are you well? I wondered what had happened to you.' She took a long look at Grace and bit the corner of her lip. ‘I thought I might not see you again.' Suddenly she put her hand to her eyes and let out a strangled sob. ‘I see you and I see my sister.'

Grace watched quietly, unmoved, standing in front of, and apart from, the other woman who was crying, her face creased with deep pressure, lost in herself. Grace looked at this woman who had had a sister whom she'd lost and Grace thought of her brother and how she hated him and wanted him dead.

‘I would do anything to see her again,' Lady Lytton confessed, her voice cracking into a high pitch on the word ‘anything'. ‘She was only twenty-eight. You look so much like her. You even frown like her.' She dabbed her red eyes elegantly and pulled her kimono around herself with trembling fingers. ‘And when I saw you and you looked so much like her, and I began to wonder if you were
enceinte
. . .'

Shock went through Grace.

‘I thought you couldn't tell,' Grace said coldly. ‘I thought it was hidden.'

‘It's hidden if it's not acknowledged,' Lady Lytton replied. ‘It was the same with my sister. She had an abortion—or tried to. You won't do anything silly,' she asked pleadingly. ‘Will you, Grace?'

It had occurred to Grace. But her father was the only person in Narberth who would have known how to do it. She had tried with a knitting needle, but it hadn't worked. If it had, it would have ended her problems; she would still have had to leave home but she would have had a future, a life, her own life, instead of this constant sliding down a slippery black hole, like Alice in Wonderland, all the while getting bigger and bigger. Could she still get one now? This was London. But it was surely too late.

A silence fell. It seemed Lady Lytton grasped that she had sown an idea in Grace's mind; contaminated another woman's thoughts with a desperate measure.

‘It's too late for you now,' Lady Lytton stated.

‘Is it?'

‘Yes.'

But Grace saw that Lady Lytton didn't know for certain. Her father was a doctor: he always knew what he was speaking about when it came to operations and surgery, and he never spoke in that breathy way.

‘It isn't,' Grace said, after a moment, hope rising in her.

‘Don't be foolish, Grace. Think of yourself. Think how your sister would feel if something happened to you. Do you have a sister?'

‘No.'

‘Then think of your mother. And your father. Or your brother.'

Grace didn't reply.

Lady Lytton still held the powder puff, now crushed in her fingers. ‘I shouldn't have said anything,' she said suddenly. ‘How foolish of me.'

‘Am I dismissed?' Grace asked.

‘No!' Lady Lytton inhaled, self-consciously trying to gather herself, and, Grace thought, if she hadn't been so well brought up she might have raised her voice. Some kohl was smudged along Lady Lytton's cheek when she had dabbed her eyes. She turned back to the mirror and began patting the marks with a ball of cotton wool, then she wiped the cotton wool across her cheekbones, smoothing her skin. When she had finished, she took a sip of tea, then half-turned.

‘You may leave the bed unmade. Here is my name card, with my address. You are dismissed,' she ordered, unfastening the strap of her gold wristwatch and holding it out for Grace to take. ‘Thank you, Grace. That will be all.'

 

Grace left the Ballantyre Suite, hurriedly pushing the gold watch inside her brassière, where the metal clasp dug into her hard breasts. Lady Lytton was the third person to give her money—Wilfred immediately after their divorce, her father as she left Narberth, and now Lady Lytton. She needed money, but what she wanted most of all, she thought with exhaustion, was a home, a refuge, someone and somewhere to support her, rather than having to survive on her own. Of what use was a gold watch to her? What would she do with it?

She ran her hand over her breast; the watch made an odd metal lump so she shoved it down further and it disappeared into her contours, then she rushed down the corridor looking at the crystal doorknobs, searching for a
MAID CLEANING
sign. When Grace found the sign, she knocked on the door and Hilda came out and looked at her suspiciously.

‘What did she want?' Hilda demanded.

‘To finish tidying the beds.'

‘And she wanted you to do that on your own? Is there something wrong with me, then?'

‘No.' Grace could see that Hilda's sense of importance as the more senior chambermaid had been dented.

‘Right. Start cleaning. You make the beds. Let's see if you've still got a problem with hospital corners.' Even though she was aggrieved, Hilda talked: only now her talk expressed her hurt. ‘I can do beds as good as any of them,' she boasted. ‘What's the matter with you?' she asked Grace chippily. ‘Lost your tongue?'

‘No,' Grace mumbled, aware of the bullying tone that Hilda had adopted. But Hilda was right: she had lost her tongue. She'd lost her tongue the moment she had been forced by her brother and hadn't found it since. He had silenced her. She talked when she had to, replied when questioned, said what needed to be said as briefly as possible, but that was all. Her tongue lay heavy and useless in her mouth; like something she owned but no longer used. She had lost her tongue and got a child.

‘You ought to talk more. It's boring for me. You're not the only one in the room. It's warm in here, isn't it?' Hilda said, parodying conversation and goading Grace to speak.

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, I give up with you,' Hilda said, throwing the starched sheet over the mattress, then flinging the feather pillows onto the bed.

Grace knew now to move away from people who were gathering themselves up to be violent in one way or another.

‘If you'll excuse me,' Grace said, ‘I'm going to lie down in the dormitory. I'm feeling unwell.'

‘Well! That's a cheek,' exclaimed Hilda, working herself up into a steam and clearly with much more to say, but Grace had put her duster on the trolley and was walking away.

‘You could lose your job for this!' Hilda called after her.

 

Relieved to be back in the dormitory and away from Hilda, Grace picked up a postcard that was waiting for her on her bed. She knew who it was from. It was a picture of Chelsea Barracks. She turned it over and glanced at it. No, Grace didn't want to meet Madoc for a cup of tea. She ripped the postcard into tiny pieces, then stood up heavily from the dormitory bed, put her hands on her waist and arched her lower back, which was aching. She pushed her stomach out—she couldn't help herself—dropped her head back and sighed.

‘Grace Rice! How
dare
you leave all the work to me and come up here?' Then Hilda's mouth fell open in shock. ‘Are you . . .?' She stood, speechless, her cap hanging loosely in her hand. ‘Are you having a baby?' Hilda asked. ‘You're having a baby! You've been hiding it.' She gasped ‘Mr. Sharp will kill you.'

Grace looked at Hilda.

‘Mr. Sharp! The butler.'

‘Oh,' Grace replied, utterly unperturbed.

‘Don't you care what Mr. Sharp will say?'

Grace regarded this girl in front of her who was so gauche and without understanding, whose whole life was this great cruise liner of a hotel that sailed serenely, coddling and entertaining its wealthy passengers and its employees from the storms and turbulence of their times.

‘You don't understand,' Grace said.

‘I do. You're having a baby. And you're not married. You'll lose your job.'

Grace, comprehending, dragged her suitcase from under the bed, then opened and emptied the two drawers in her bedside cabinet, pushing her scant and shabby belongings into her case. She opened the zip pouch inside the suitcase lining. There was her money, wrapped up in the envelope her father had given her—it was all she had that belonged to him. And a family photograph, but she hadn't looked at it since she left Narberth. She quickly packed her case, clipped the clasps and glanced at the stark dormitory and barred window. It wasn't much: it wasn't a home but, she reasoned, it was a roof.

‘Where are you going to go?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You don't know?' Hilda replied. ‘Here, you've forgotten your stockings.' She passed them to her. ‘You've sinned,' she stated, as if the thought had just struck her. ‘It says in the Book of Hebrews “for fornicators and adulterer, God will;—”'

‘Have I?' Grace interrupted. She was finding words, but with a sudden sense that the feelings she had held down for so long were being unloosened and could surge up inside her.

Hilda flicked her plait over her shoulder. ‘Tell me about him,' she nudged Grace. ‘What's he like? What was
it
like?'

Grace didn't answer. For a brief moment, the hierarchy between them, where Hilda was the senior chambermaid and Grace the meek and silent one, fell away. Grace knew something about life that Hilda didn't.

‘You're not going to tell me, are you?' There was a pause. ‘I expect I'll find out one day. When I'm married.' Hilda looked at Grace's rounded stomach with awe. ‘Let me help you,' she said.

Grace held back some noise or sound, a primal wail breaking within her in response to Hilda's unexpected warmth.

Hilda yanked open and checked inside the drawers and got down on all fours to look under the bed to make sure that Grace had all her possessions.

‘Is that your hair clip?'

Grace shook her head.

Hilda glanced at the door. ‘You must go before the other maids come back. If Mr. Sharp finds you . . . Do you want to go back home to Wales?'

‘No.'

‘Do you know where to go?'

Grace reached for her coat, her hands shaking as she did up the buttons. She should have thought about the future, but she had been living from moment to moment, almost asleep.

‘You can't stay here,' Hilda stated. ‘Do you know the kitchen backstairs, behind the ballroom?'

‘No.'

‘Quickly, I'll show you.' Hilda grabbed Grace's suitcase and darted to the door. She looked both ways down the empty, windowless corridor. ‘There's no one here. Come on.' They hurried unceremoniously along the corridor, then down echoing staircase after staircase, their feet clattering loudly on the hard floor.

‘Don't fall,' Hilda told Grace.

Grace held onto the cold, black handrail, her throat dry with exertion, trying to catch her breath.

‘No wonder you were always such a slowcoach,' Hilda said, glancing back at Grace and waiting a moment for her to catch up.

At the bottom of the stairs was a big black door.

‘It's locked,' Hilda said. ‘We need the key—I'll ask Jack. He might know how to get one.'

Grace stood shivering with fear in the shadows while Hilda charged up the stairs to the kitchen. She had money, she should find lodgings, she must find lodgings, she must cope, she told herself. She hung onto the suitcase in her hand. At least Madoc wouldn't find her now. Hilda soon returned, trailed by a skinny boy with dirty blond hair.

‘Open the door, Jack,' she told him impatiently. ‘Open it, then.'

The boy put the key in the lock and held the door open for Grace, staring at her open-mouthed.

‘Sorry I wasn't always kind,' Hilda said. She put her hand to her neck and pulled out a small gold cross on a chain. ‘I would give you this, only my godfather gave it to me at my christening and he'd have kittens if I wasn't wearing it.' She rummaged in her apron pocket and brought out an expensive comb. ‘Take this. I found it, but you can have it. It's for you.' She dropped the tortoiseshell comb into the pocket of Grace's coat. ‘You can comb your hair with it.'

‘I've got to get back to the kitchen,' Jack said nervously—he looked frightened. ‘I'll be in trouble with Cook if she sees I've taken the key.'

So Grace turned and left the Ritz.