Debutantes (4 page)

Morgan had finished painting the walls of the tiny room when Daisy got back. He had even nailed some black tar paper over the cracks in the wooden shutters and door.

‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’ He glanced around proudly. ‘Look, I’ve whitewashed a piece of board on one side and covered it with brown paint on the other. I’ve hung it on this nail behind the door. You can turn it to the white side when you want to project the film – so now you have a perfect studio. You can start using it tomorrow morning. Look, it’s almost dry already.’

‘Hollywood, here I come,’ said Daisy, with a grin that stretched from ear to ear. ‘You’re wonderful. This place is perfect.’

‘You’ll be a bit cold, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘but you couldn’t have a fire even if there was a chimney. Those rolls of film burst into flame very easily. I have an idea though. There are shelves of those stoneware hot water bottles in the back pantry over there. Before you start work you could fill four or five of them with hot water from the kitchen and you could put your feet on one and warm your hands on another. The place is so tiny they will even warm the air a bit. Now I’d better be off. Your father will be back soon, and who knows, he may have something he wants me to do in the village.’

Daisy managed to thank him properly before he disappeared. She was amused at his concern for her. She and her sisters were used to the cold in this freezing big house. Morgan’s cottage was definitely a much cosier affair, she thought.

She had just finished arranging things to her satisfaction when Rose came in.

‘Oh, I say,’ was her comment as she looked around, but a second later she blurted out what was on her mind.

‘Daisy! That letter! Let me see it!’

Daisy took it from her pocket and handed it to her younger sister. She had suspected that Rose’s busy imagination might be at work on the mysterious letter. Rose was now counting laboriously on her fingers. It took her two attempts, but then her face shone with enthusiasm.

‘Do you know who wrote this?’ she demanded, holding up the letter.

‘No,’ said Daisy, and could not help adding, ‘but definitely not Great-Aunt Lizzie, so put that out of your head.’

Rose ignored her. ‘I can guess,’ she said triumphantly. She waited for a second and then hissed dramatically, ‘It was Maud’s mother.’

‘What!’ exclaimed Daisy. ‘But who was Maud’s mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ returned Rose. ‘And she doesn’t know either. She told me that. She’s an orphan. She was left outside the door of the workhouse when she was a tiny baby. Nobody knows who put her there – that’s what she told me.’

‘Yes, but—’ began Daisy.

‘But . . . don’t keep saying “but”,’ interrupted Rose. ‘Do you know how old Maud is?’ She didn’t wait for an answer but rushed on. ‘She is sixteen – that’s all she knows.’ She held up the letter triumphantly. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look at the date on that – 1906. This letter was written seventeen years ago.’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said a voice in Daisy’s ear.

Daisy was glad to wake up. She had been having a strange, confused dream where Maud the scullery maid had taken over the house at Beech Grove Manor and had set all four girls to work in the kitchen. She sat up in bed sleepily and pushed back her curly hair.

Poppy was sitting bolt upright on her bed, an old rug round her shoulders and her breath forming steam in the cold air. Daisy pulled in her hand that had been outside the blankets and eiderdown and lay on it to thaw out her frozen fingers. There were frost patterns on the windows but the sun was beginning to melt their intricate designs. It was going to be another fine day – but getting out of bed and washing in cold water was always a bit difficult in the winter.

‘Wake up,’ said Poppy impatiently.

‘I am awake,’ said Daisy. ‘I heard you. You have an idea.’ She was going to say something sarcastic about Poppy and her ideas, but was still too sleepy to bother.

‘It’s about Violet – I was thinking that we should have a party for her eighteenth birthday.’

‘Great-Aunt Lizzie will say that we can’t afford it,’ said Daisy automatically. That was her response to most of the girls’ suggestions.

‘Needn’t cost much,’ said Poppy laconically. ‘The jazz band will provide the music. Free! In fact,’ she went on, ‘Morgan was saying that we should try to have some practice in playing at real live venues, not just amusing ourselves at the cottage.’

Daisy smiled into her pillow. She should have guessed that it would be about music. Ninety per cent of Poppy’s thoughts were connected with jazz and her clarinet. Still, it was not a bad idea. If there was no response from the Duchess to the gift of the photograph, then Violet would badly need cheering up.

‘Nothing to wear,’ she said sleepily.

‘Well, there are lots of mother’s old frocks up in that trunk in the attic. Do you remember? We used to dress up in them. Violet could probably make something for herself – and for us – out of them. She’s good at that sort of thing. And she spends all her pocket money on fashion magazines so she must know what to do.’

‘A party . . .’ Daisy was beginning to wake up. She half sat up and then lay down again. The room was very cold. Then she thought of an objection.

‘Who’s going to be dancing?’ she asked.

‘Violet, you, me, Edwin, Simon – all the gang. And what about that fellow who turned up yesterday? What was his name? Justin. He could dance with Violet. Then there’s Baz for me and George for you – he likes you – and Simon’s mad about Violet.’ She giggled. The jazz band were forever teasing Simon about Violet – he always turned bright red when she appeared. ‘And Edwin could dance with Rose – the jazz band would have to take turns, of course . . .’

Daisy thought about it for a moment and looked at it from Violet’s point of view. She hadn’t seemed to like Justin much, but she would certainly consider the members of the jazz band too young for her – and she wasn’t too keen on Simon, calling him ‘wet behind the ears’. Yes, it would be a good idea to ask Justin. And it would be jolly to dress up and dance. Daisy forgot about being cold and sat up in bed.

‘It would be fun!’ she said. ‘We’ll do it properly – send out invitations and all that. Great-Aunt Lizzie has probably got plenty of invitation cards. I saw the label on her desk drawer and if it’s anything like her drawer of writing paper, it’s absolutely full up. They probably date from the good old days when money was plentiful. Let’s get up.’

Before her courage could fail her at the thought of the icy cold water in the jug on the washstand in their dressing room, Daisy jumped out of bed, got washed and dressed herself in her riding breeches and her two warmest jumpers, pulling a pair of fingerless mittens over her cold hands. It was only then that she noticed the hands on their alarm clock.

‘You’ve woken me up at seven in the morning, Poppy, you idiot,’ she shouted through the door, where splashes were punctuated by small shrieks.

Still, now that she was up, she was glad to be early. Her mind was full of the photographs that she had taken yesterday. This portrait had to be something special. She grabbed the alarm clock – all those chemicals needed to be so carefully timed – and went down the back stairs, softly in order not to wake Great-Aunt Lizzie.

The dairy pantry was startlingly cold, but it had one addition since the previous night. A heavy black curtain had been nailed to the outside frame of the door and now not a single chink of light would come in to spoil her film. She picked up two of the stoneware heaters and carried them into the kitchen. For the film’s sake as well as her own, that dairy needed to be heated up a little.

Maud was there, piling coal into the enormous black range that did all of their cooking and made the kitchen the warmest room in the house. Thinking about what Rose had said the evening before, Daisy examined the scullery maid carefully as she explained about filling the bottles with boiling water. Was it possible that the girl was anything to do with the Derrington family? Her mother could have been a maid in the house, but who was her father? Not my own father, thought Daisy; that was certain. Michael Derrington had been very much in love with his own wife – he could still hardly speak of her without a break in his voice and sometimes Daisy would come into his library to find him with a small photograph of Mary Derrington in his hands and tears in his eyes. In any case he would probably have been out in India when Maud was conceived.

But what about his younger brother? Robert Derrington was another subject that it was not safe to mention to their father. Robert had been the heir to the earldom as, after nine years of marriage, Mary had shown no signs of having a son. He had been killed in the Boer War in 1899, and that was when Denis – Dastardly Denis as Rose called him, a distant cousin of her father’s – had become heir. Any mention of Robert’s name threw the Earl into a state of depression as he brooded on how well he and his younger brother would have managed the estate.

It did seem odd for a scullery maid with so little education to be as clever as Maud was. I wonder whether Robert was good at mathematics? Daisy thought.

‘I can fill some more bottles for you, my lady,’ Maud was saying. ‘It’ll be perishing cold in that pantry. Lucky it’s so small.’ She didn’t wait for an answer from Daisy, but took down some more of the stoneware bottles from the shelf above the range and poured boiling water into them, fitting the stoppers quickly and efficiently.

‘Oh, my lady,’ she called when Daisy was carrying the last two bottles out to place under the workbench, ‘Morgan left this for you last night.’ She held up a discoloured and water-stained print of a mouldering cottage with a hay wagon in front of it. The print had two large safety pins in its top corners. ‘Look,’ she said, turning it over. ‘He’s lettered that on the back. You see, my lady, it says N
O
A
DMITTANCE
. Morgan thought you should pin this on to the curtain when you’re working – so that no one opens the door accidental-like. He told me to make sure that you got it and to give you these frames too – you can choose which one you like the best when you have the photograph developed. I’ve washed the glass and polished the wood a bit. Morgan thought they looked like new.’ The girl’s voice was enthusiastic and her pale cheeks blushed at the memory of the chauffeur’s praise.

‘That’s lovely’ said Daisy admiringly. She smiled at the girl. ‘You and Morgan are friends, then,’ she said teasingly. Great-Aunt Lizzie would have a fit if she overheard her. She and Mrs Pearson, the housekeeper, had gone to great lengths in the past to keep male and female staff apart. Nowadays the only men apart from Morgan were the elderly stableman and, of course, the butler, but he was seventy if he was a day.

‘It’s just that we’re both orphans, my lady,’ said Maud demurely. ‘That makes a bond between us. Now, I’d better be getting on with cleaning the grates, if you’ll excuse me.’

Daisy forgot about Maud as soon as she seated herself at her workbench, as she had named the old rough pine table. She put her camera in front of her and started to get ready for the work that had to be done in total darkness. Her godfather, Sir Guy Beresford, had trained her to do this, giving her some useless films so that she could practise again and again until she almost felt that she could do it in her sleep. She laid out everything that she would need: the can opener, the metal film reel, the film tank.

Then she put the materials needed at the second stage on one of the shelves: a film developer, the dish for the stop bath, the fixer with hardener, and another dish for a hypo eliminator bath.

By this stage there were footsteps outside on the kitchen corridor. Nora, one of the housemaids, was chatting to Mrs Pearson and the voice of Mrs Beaton, the cook, could be heard scolding Maud for not having enough hot water on the stove. Daisy felt a little guilty as she moved her feet on the warmers under the bench, but Maud did not reply. She was probably used to it.

Then Daisy forgot about everything. Now was the tricky moment. She lit the covered lantern, went across the room and turned out the light, came back and blew out the lantern. It was essential that there was not one chink of light while she took the film from the camera and fed it on to the metal spool. She had done this so often with her head stuck in the cupboard in the dressing room that she was able to do it quickly and neatly, especially now she had so much extra room for her elbows. Then she picked up the spool and carefully inserted it into the film tank, covering it over with an airproof lid.