Park Lane (3 page)

The museum is awake. Aristotle, Plato, a Venus or two stare from the tops of their wooden pillars. Spreading along the walls, each one a good three or four yards long, oil panoramas of cactus-strewn deserts, bubbling swamps and mountain ranges, are all waking up. Tiny figures of men bent double with pickaxes, or over ladders of iron being laid on to the ground, wriggling into life just in time. For in every case an engine, steam puffing, is somewhat improbably tearing in from the edge of the frame.

Above the fireplace is a portrait of a bushy-eyed man towards the end of his life, a half-smile on his lips. He’s a listener who never frowns or butts in but sits there patiently until Bea has talked herself to conclusion. On the table in the centre sits a map of his world, covering Australia to the Arctic Circle, but the mountains have always been Bea’s favourites. It’s a close call as to which she likes the most. Really it should be the Rockies or the Andes, for those are the ones she can at least reach to run her fingers over, but Bea likes the Carpathians. Not just because they’re out of reach, but because people so often forget them.

Might she have gone there with John? John and his dreaming porcelain face had offered Bea a life beyond the drawing-room limits. No prison of a rural manor – that was his elder brother’s – no ties to anywhere at all. She and John had talked of life among artists and writers, and of travel. Not just of Paris and Venice, Vienna and Prague, but the vast open spaces of North America, Africa, Siberia even. They would climb mountains and camp. He would draw animals rarely seen, she would write accounts of their travels and become a new Isabella Bird. However, they had not gone. Or rather, Bea hadn’t gone.

She wonders for a minute whether it is these thoughts that are giving her a headache, rather than the lateness of last night. She turns back to the map, and runs her fingers over the lines that cross it, the lines that make it different to any other map. Thick,
black, they are so out of scale that the width of each single one swallows whole cities in its path. They cross swamp and desert, tunnel through mountains and cross vast countries. Australia, America, India and even China, there is not a continent left across which her great-grandfather, the man looking down from the fireplace, did not build a railway. And then he, William Masters, came to London, and built this mansion in which his dynasty would live according to the social rules of the wealthy – whom he had joined. It is curious, Bea often thinks, that he founded an empire by breaking great boundaries of nature, then came here and willingly let his family be bound by a set of small-minded conventions – from which it does not appear very easy to escape.

3

IT IS SUNDAY, GRACE’S SECOND AT PARK LANE. SHE
has been to church with the other servants and now she’s sitting a foot away from Michael on a wet wooden park bench. They are looking at muddied grass that stretches for yards and yards, as far as the lake. In front pass families, couples and even the odd person alone, all bundled up to their chins against the chill and damp.

Grace’s calves are cold. The air is coming in through the bottom of her skirts and she envies Michael’s trousers, even though he’s jiggling his legs away in them. Maybe Grace should turn up in a pair. And what would he say to that? Michael, with all his wanting to change the world, might just be impressed.

In a minute or two he’ll turn his face to hers, all dark eyebrows and jawbone, that dimple on his chin and skin already browning in the winter sun. They’re both dark. Where’d that come from, others asked back home, the Campbells look a family of gypsies.

‘My hands are freezing,’ says Michael. His hips go forward and he’s slouching back on the bench, hands in his pockets. Then he fixes his black eyes on Grace’s with a stare. He wasn’t angry when they were small. He’d tease her, my Gracie, tie her plaits into one, then persuade her to run round the corner and down one of the small streets to peer into Mrs Biggs’ backyard. They’d climb up the wall to look over at the privy with the door falling off, and they’d
laugh almost too much for their feet to carry them home. Grace doesn’t like to think of that laughter as gone. She’ll get it back; if she can get anything, she can get Michael’s sweetness back. She’d like to knot all that resentment into a cloth and throw it away. Mind you, there’s a lot more she wants to get, besides.

‘Look at you, in your gloves. Quite the lady. Proud of you, I am.’

Michael pulls his mouth back, lips stretched but it’s not really a smile. He glances down, away from her. He seems, as ever, so torn this way and that that sometimes Grace thinks he looks as if he might burst into tears, though she knows he won’t. More likely to punch someone, is Michael. She wants to reach out and put an arm around him, but he’s not one for being touched any more. He does love her, though, she knows that. She’s only been in London a month but he spends every Sunday with her. Grace pulls her gloves down over her wrists. Underneath, her hands are red and sore.

‘You’ll be looking after me soon,’ Michael continues, softening with it.

‘But not with you in the law, Michael.’ She’s quick back.

‘No, Grace, I’m just a clerk in barristers’ chambers. There’s no going higher than that for the likes of me.’ He turns to her, and for a moment it’s almost the old Michael. ‘But you’ll show them, Grace.’

And as he nods back over his shoulder to the edge of the park, Grace thinks, Yes, I’ll show them.

The park looks different on Sundays. Not that Grace gets much time in it during the week; still, she sees it out the window. On Sunday the weekday walkers and all their frills and silks and canes are at some country house and it is the people who work who come to the park. The men wear long tweed coats and bowler hats, the women in bonnets. Grace wears a blue one she came down to London in.

‘Is that new?’ Michael asks.

Grace hesitates. She’s tempted to say yes to impress him. One
more tiny lie wouldn’t make much difference. But she shakes her head.

‘Well, there’s no money to waste,’ he says.

They reach the Serpentine, as Michael tells her the lake is called, and he walks ahead of her on the path around it, eyes forward, a horse pulling at its reins. Grace’s shoes are beginning to rub and she hobbles a little, almost as if she were in one of those skirts that Miss Beatrice wears. Michael doesn’t notice. That revolution, Grace thinks, the battle’s taken up all his head.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she tries, for that’ll start him talking again.

He doesn’t reply, so she tries another question.

‘What are you up to in the evenings?’ She always tries to nose around, check there’s no woman’s got her claws into him. That’s not in her plan, some woman who will take him away. In her plan, she and Michael will share a house and, not married, Grace can go on working in the office she wants to be in. Then think of all they could send home. Grace’s chest puffs out just at the thought of it.

But if Michael gets a sweetheart, Grace, well, she’d … she’d push her into the Thames. Grace’s heart lifts for an instant. Then she holds her breath, can’t believe she’s had thoughts like that. On a Sunday, too. Is that Hell for her? Grace turns her head away from Michael. It’s not as if she’s being straight with him either. It’s hardly as though there’s nobody to look at in Number Thirty-Five. Then she stops herself. She can’t think that.

‘You know I study in the evenings,’ he says.

‘Trying to change the world?’ she teases. ‘You sound like the sermon this morning.’

‘Brief and to the point?’

‘Michael!’ How can he say such a thing, straight after church on a Sunday? Then it occurs to her that he might not have gone, the thought of it a weight in her stomach, and she can’t not ask.

‘How was yours?’

‘Non-existent.’

‘Ma will have a fit,’ says Grace, thinking that the number of things that Ma mustn’t know is growing.

‘Then don’t tell her.’

‘I mind.’ No church is the beginning of a slide. That’s every family’s fear, falling towards rags. What she and Michael are doing in London, part of it, is working so that they don’t all fall down into one of those dirty terraces. And when a family starts falling there’s none that dares come near it for fear of falling too.

‘Oh, I was out looking for God in my own way.’

‘Say your prayers, Michael, promise me that.’

As he tells her, ‘Off then now, sister,’ he reaches over to squeeze her hand.

The pressure of his fingers pushes the wool of her gloves into the cracks in her skin and she flinches. If he notices he doesn’t say anything at all.

Next morning, the rain’s coming down and Grace is by the tradesmen’s entrance, trying to get the floor clear of muck. Third time today, and Mrs Wainwright, her salt and pepper hair pulled back from her wide face so tightly that it’s a wonder she can speak at all, said to get up from dinner and finish by one o’clock just as though Grace hadn’t done it at all. Mrs Wainwright being housekeeper, Grace has to up and to it, lickety-split. Weather like this, just one pair of shoes and there it is again, wet city filth and spreading in every direction. You’d’ve thought the others were doing it on purpose, walking over it again and again, trying to prove Grace is not up to it. They’re still at it, too, about the way she speaks. Not that they have dainty voices themselves, but Susan, who thinks herself Queen Mary even if she’s only first housemaid, holds her spike of a nose to ‘talk like Grace’, and even Mary, friend that she’s supposed to be, has to stifle her giggles. Changing to speak like they do, though, would be giving in; Grace is not going to give in any further than she has done already, just by being here.

Mary and she are working it out all right, even though Grace is below her. Grace is still two years older, and they can all tell that. Mrs Wainwright likes Grace, Mary says. Not that Grace would know it for Mrs Wainwright is always over Grace’s shoulder, asking why she isn’t doing the next thing, and it’s as hard as getting something done proper, remembering what she’s to be doing after. The morning fires, Grace has the measure of now. It’s nerves that make the clatter. The silver, that’s something else altogether. Grace had never held a piece of silver before she came here. Their only silver spoon sits in a box on the mantelshelf. To sell it, Ma says, would be selling the fact that my ma was lady enough to own a silver spoon. Now Grace has to worry about all the cutlery you can imagine, not to mention the bowls and serving dishes, and pots and shakers, and the photograph frames. You don’t even have to touch them for them to dullen black and need as much elbow as a loom worker.

Grace laughs to herself at this. None of them are doing that, Ma says, not after it was her mother’s family who had
owned
a mill. There’s a thousand places to sink to before being trapped at the looms.

But at least the looms do as they’re asked, more or less, thinks Grace, as she works away at the floor. There’s none of this who’s saying what to whom, and not knowing what’s around each corner. Who’d’ve thought that men and women in service would have such a high opinion of themselves. It is almost as though, wherever you’ve come from, if it earns wages then service is a Step Up, and don’t you forget. They all know, there’s not much hiding it, that Grace hasn’t been in service before. Grace wonders if they assume that her family has fallen already, which Ma would say was true. Lord, let them not find out where she thinks she can go, or about her lessons with Miss Sand. Then it’d be all about Grace’s hoity-toity ways, no matter that they’re as keen as anyone on their manners and who hands what to whom when. More than once, Susan has said that it’s not some charity, being in service. Particularly not here, at Thirty-Five Park Lane, and working for a family that’s a
household name. How Grace has persuaded Mrs Wainwright to take her on is beyond any of them.

The only other servant that’s down from the table is the one Grace would like to see. Who wouldn’t want to look at Joseph, all six foot that he is, just like one of those statues in the museum of a room at the back of the house, except he’s all in the black and gold braid of his livery. Though underneath he must be almost as white as the marble itself … Grace Campbell, what are you thinking? She’s shocked herself and feels herself redden. You finish your mopping now, Grace, and keep your mind on his sandy hair and green-brown eyes, bits you can see.

Second footman, he is, Joseph, but as calm and steady as if he were the butler himself. At least he’s calm and steady with Grace, makes her feel that if she tripped he’d catch her before she fell. He smiles at her as though he’s pleased she’s come to the house and Grace hopes that she’ll find herself alone by the piano in the servants’ hall with him again. Last time he relaxed into his Somerset accent and it made Grace feel less of an outsider. ‘I’m just a farm boy,’ he whispered to her, and Grace giggled.

Now she knows he’s up in the dining room. Three for luncheon, even though Lady Masters isn’t due back until that evening. It’s Master Edward’s guests, that’s all they know, and Master Edward was in late last night, Joseph told her when they were doing the china that morning. Those large platters are hard to hold with one hand while she scrubs with the other and she doesn’t know which is worse, bacon fat or egg. When she’s talking to Joseph, it’s that much harder to keep her mind on the job and hold on tight to the plates.

‘I let him in at five o’clock in the morning,’ Joseph told her, his blond hair bobbing above Grace, leaving her eyes level with the shadow of roughening on his chin. She can never quite bring her eyes to his, and he has teased her for this. ‘You won’t turn to stone, you know, Grace,’ but that just makes it worse.

Five o’clock in the morning, though, Grace doesn’t want to
think where he’s been, and on a Sunday. What’s more, a gentleman, as even Grace knows, shouldn’t be spending a Sunday in London.

Joseph comes down from the dining room. All in a rush he is. She can’t not look up as he passes, and he calls to her.

‘There’s a cart. It’s stuck. In the rain. It’s blocking the road. You can see it from the dining room.’