The World is a Wedding (3 page)

‘Thank you,' she said automatically, heat flushing over her. Grace dragged on the corset; it was too tight over her hips and stomach, forcing her to breathe in and stand bolt upright.

‘And would madam like a brassière as well? Perhaps a Symington Side Lacer, which flattens the bust and is lined with net?'

‘Madam' sounded incongruous in this cramped shop selling coarse, drop-waist dresses: cheaply-made copies of
Vogue
fashions for poor girls who wanted to wear the chic styles but could not afford them. Was the woman being sarcastic? Grace didn't like the complexity of sarcasm, the amount of thought it demanded. It reminded her of her mother: ‘Were you thinking of cleaning the hearth, Grace?' ‘Were you thinking a man would look at you in that frock?' and the accompanying laughter that wasn't funny.

Grace fiddled with the stocking suspenders so they hung straight and barely dared look at herself in the mirror.

‘Or perhaps madam would prefer a larger size?'

Grace squirmed. ‘Is this the biggest corset you have?' she asked, closing her eyes when she spoke, emboldened by the curtain that hid her from the prim woman standing on the other side.

‘Would it be of use, madam, if you adjusted the corset? Let the buckles out?'

‘No,' said Grace, something new and stronger—an instinct to survive—rising within her.

‘I will check the cabinet drawers.'

While Grace waited she thought of the print of the
Old Lady of Salem
: it was of a woman in Capel Salem who was committing the sin of Vanity, and so the devil hid in the folds of her shawl. It was her mother's favourite painting—she had collected nine tokens from Sunlight soap powder to receive a free print—and it hung in the drawing room above the fireplace. Her mother said that when Grace looked at the woman, if she saw the devil's face, then Grace had the devil in her.

‘Here,' the woman pronounced with a distant contempt and thrust another thick corset through the curtain. ‘This is the Spencer Corset, which corrects ptosis. Seventy women in one hundred suffer from ptosis,' the shop assistant declared, ‘and the Spencer Corset cures it. It will prevent your intestines sagging out of place, resolve your figure faults and control your diaphragm.'

Grace tugged on the new corset, which reached from under her ribs to the top of her thighs.

The woman was waiting impatiently on the other side of the curtain. ‘The whalebone provides considerable support for the spine,' she added pushily.

The corset was tight and hard but it would do. She would buy it and she would be a chambermaid. She was binding her body and binding her life.

Grace dragged the undergarment off, pulled her dress on, drew the curtains apart and there, standing too close, was the woman. Grace stepped back into the changing room.

‘Is madam going to take the underbust corset, the one in blush pink?'

‘I will,' said Grace.

‘Certainly, madam.' The woman held out her hand to take the garment, showing Grace she hadn't yet paid for it so it wasn't yet hers, trotted behind the counter, wrapped the corset in crisp brown paper and tied it with string. Then she wrote out the bill with exactitude. Grace paid the nine shillings with a sense of anxiety, which she tried not to show. It was some of the money she had been given when she left Narberth.

‘Thank you,' she said, from habitual politeness rather than gratitude.

‘I hope you will find your purchase of use, madam. One mustn't let oneself go, must one?'

 

Grace sat on a bed in the maids' dormitory. She had returned to the Ritz at six o'clock sharp, collected her uniform from the housekeeper and spent the rest of the evening embroidering her initials onto the two black dresses and four white aprons she would be expected to wear from tomorrow. When she had finished, she glanced down at herself. She had thought she would have put on weight and was starving herself so as not to do so. She focused on her feet, the bones jutting out as she unrolled her threadbare stockings. Her toenails needed cutting. She used the scissors from the cheap manicure set she had bought earlier in the tobacconist's next to the dress shop; she had forgotten to pack scissors in her rush to leave.

Grace looked around at the white room with the black iron beds and the modern electric lightbulb hanging starkly from the ceiling, shocked to find herself here, somewhere so strange to her and far from home. But this stuffy dormitory under the hotel roof would do for tonight, perhaps a few weeks, a couple of months at most. Then . . . she didn't know. A time would come when she would need her own bedroom but she didn't know where to find privacy in this populated city.

A maid turned over, pulled a blanket over her head and Grace heard muffled sobs.

‘Don't mind her.' The girl sitting opposite indicated the shrouded outline of the weeping maid. ‘She's homesick. Cries herself to sleep every night. She's from the Lake District. Says Windermere isn't like London.' The girl pulled off her cap and let down her black plait, slipped out of her uniform, undid her brassière and was soon naked. Grace looked away, shocked.

‘You new? Did you answer the “Maids Wanted” advertisement in the
Evening News
?'

Grace nodded.

‘My feet are killing me,' the girl moaned, hopping into bed, her breasts wobbling freely. ‘Right, switch the electric light out. Go on, new girl.'

Grace went to the Bakelite switch on the wall and then fumbled her way across the cramped, darkened attic into bed. The lyrics of a swiftly paced song and the sound of a saxophone, full of longing, drifted upwards.

 

‘He landed with a splash in the River Nile

A-ridin' a sea-goin' crocodile.

He winked at Cleopatra, she said, “Ain't he a sight!

How about a date for next Saturday night?”

 

‘Not going to cry yourself to sleep, are you?' the girl asked. ‘I don't think I can take any more snivelling.'

‘No,' Grace said.

‘Good,' the girl retorted. ‘It only stops you sleeping.'

 

‘You have a problem with beds,' the girl with the plait stated the following morning, lifting the mattress for Grace and folding the sheet in one practised, mechanical gesture. It was Grace's first day of work at the Ritz. They were bending down to do hospital corners on a bed in the Louis XIV Suite but Grace's did not have the origami exactness of the other maid's: Grace's sheet was pleated like the edge of a puff-pastry confection. They finished the bed in silence, Grace following the other maid's lead.

‘Watch,' the girl ordered. ‘Keep copying me.' She dropped a dented yellow cushion with a plop onto the Persian rug, picked it up, thumped it and arranged it on the chaise longue. ‘That's how you plump up a cushion properly,' she explained, flicking her plait over her shoulder. ‘And the guest who's worn this,' she said, grabbing a shimmery Flapper dress abandoned over an armchair, ‘has the whole suite next door for her clothes. Can you imagine? Just her glad rags: as if they were a group of people. We'll clean that suite next. At least we don't have to change the beds because no one sleeps in them—so you'll be all right there.' The girl nudged Grace. ‘Hilda,' she said. ‘Hilda Bell.'

‘Grace. Gracie . . .' replied Grace, fumbling to find a new name for herself.

‘Where are you from?' Hilda asked. ‘You sound like you're from America.'

‘Wales,' Grace answered, immediately regretting it.

‘Is that a Welsh accent?'

Grace didn't know she had an accent. She spoke how everyone spoke in Narberth. But if she had a Welsh accent then she couldn't pretend she came from somewhere else. Where would she pretend she came from? She only knew her tiny corner of Wales, and the countries she had read about in books.

‘What's Wales like? Is it like London?'

‘No,' Grace admitted, straightening the tangled fringe on a silk lampshade.

‘You don't talk much, do you?'

Not any more, Grace thought to herself. ‘I'm shy,' she said by way of an answer.

‘Me, now, I come from Battersea. That's over the river. Me mum, she's never even been across the Thames, not in forty-two years. But not me, I want to be a chambermaid on a cruise liner.' Hilda twirled around, duster in her hand, white ostrich feathers waving. ‘But not on the
Titanic
!' She smiled guiltlessly at her own joke, but Grace felt embarrassed by the girl's affectation. Hilda seemed suddenly self-conscious, aware of showing off.

‘Well, it's better than living in Battersea all me life,' she whacked a lilac cushion roughly with the feather duster, ‘being born and dying in the same place, like me mum and her mum before her. You got any brothers and sisters?'

‘A brother,' Grace replied.

‘They're the worst. Right: you and me, next door.'

Grace followed Hilda to the next room, their footsteps muffled. She had never seen so much carpet before, nor experienced the softness and silence it created. It wasn't slate, it wasn't grass, it wasn't wood; it was thick, sumptuous, almost-bouncy carpet. Grace thought of her parents' house, which was large alongside the crouching cottages that encircled Narberth, cheek by jowl, and which were painted in hopeful pastels. The framed print of
The Prodigal Son in Misery
that hung in her childhood home and the heavy sideboards seemed burdensome compared to this glassy, modern lightness. Her parents' house was less sophisticated than she thought; less refined than her mother's pretensions had ever led her to believe.

‘Get a wiggle on,' Hilda whispered, as if talking among themselves was a conspiratorial act and they oughtn't to be speaking. Grace followed Hilda along another long quiet corridor. She pushed the trolley in front of her; it was heavy with crumpled white linen, the remains of expensive nights of tranquil sleep. Grace understood that maids were to remain unseen, like mice, busy at the business of earning a crumb, living in the hotel but unwelcome, creeping by when no one was looking.

‘Room service!' Hilda parroted politely, tapping on a door with professional obsequiousness. ‘You must always knock,' she warned Grace. ‘Don't want to find them doing
it.
' She plucked a key from a huge ring of keys in her pocket and unlocked the door, like a thief without guilt. Inside, the room was in disarray. Trunks stencilled with P
.
A
.
Lytton
lay open—one with a fur coat half-tumbling from it—and lingerie and Chinese pyjamas were splayed on the bed. Draped over the headboard was a Poiret black and white fancy-dress costume. Someone, a lady of means, had been trying on dresses and discarding them, considering ensembles of her clothes until she came to the right one, the dress she had chosen to wear, a dress which—inconceivably to Grace—must have been even more beautiful than those lying crumpled and abandoned on the unmade bed.

‘See?' murmured Hilda, indicating the umpteen trunks, hatboxes and rails of exquisite clothes.

‘So many dresses,' Grace stated, and wondered how life would approach a woman who wore dresses like these. She imagined débutante balls, grand invitations, opulent dinners, proposals of marriage and promises from men—promises kept. Grace only had one lovely dress—a yellow one; beyond that, her wardrobe was a selection of routine skirts and drab jerseys. She had been proposed to in her yellow dress. She liked her yellow silk dress, she felt beautiful in it, and it had been easy to laugh when she was wearing it. Grace remembered sitting on the picnic blanket, serving the trifle when he asked her. Clothes could change a woman's life. She recalled afterwards, taking off her yellow dress in her bedroom, and how she saw her future as a wife, which was what she had always wanted—a home of her own and a kind husband, perhaps time to read books. She remembered her reflection in the looking glass, her girliness in her chemise. Then she felt her breathing tighten.

‘Stop gawping. Start working,' Hilda ordered.

Grace picked up a pearly-white dress, its under-slip dangling out, turning it into two garments, like two bodies sewn together at the shoulders. The inside was on the outside and the outside was on the inside. She tried to unravel it but the dainty crystals and taupe sequins caught in each other. It was like a puzzle of right-way-roundness. Grace felt overwhelmed by so many new impressions, and by having so many new skills demanded of her.

‘Give it here.' Hilda held the dress with her reddened fingers, shook and unravelled it and slipped a silk-padded hanger through the neck. Then she hung it in the wardrobe that stood in the room as if it was a stern chaperone assigned to the protection of delicate clothes belonging to ladies.

‘Like this,' she said, picking up another garment and putting it neatly on a hanger.

Grace watched Hilda's deft fingers. It occurred to her that swollen red hands were capable hands; the hands that made the world go round. Hilda had strong square fingers that could do what they needed to do and would put the world to rights.

The Louis XIV Suite was cleaned as swiftly as possible, the carpet swept with a Eureka
 
cleaner, the gold-plated taps buffed and the sinks scrubbed and swilled, and Grace followed Hilda on to the next room in a long corridor of guest rooms, all in need of order and cleanliness.

 

‘Wait!' Hilda whispered, later that afternoon on Grace's first day. Grace stood behind a doorway in the foyer of the Ritz while a bride passed, walking jauntily, followed by three men in military uniform, officers perhaps. A grand piano tinkled both elegantly and jerkily—maybe it was jazz music the pianist was playing. Grace peeked out from behind the door and saw the hotel foyer for the first time. Everything glimmered as if it had been washed in the cleanest, freshest water and then lit with pearly starlight when it was still moist and glistening. Oval mirrors were painted with leaping deer and golden harts. The chandeliers were like transparent jellyfish floating on the ceiling. She saw Pan playing his pipes in the Lalique glass, and thought it was like the Elysian Fields in Homer's
Odyssey
: a quiet heaven where the worthy might come when they died, should they so choose, and, to the accompaniment of the grand pianoforte, sip exotic tea from exquisite bone china.