The Narrowboat Girl (27 page)

1934

Maryann carried the tray along the gold carpet of the landing, at pains not to slop tea from the large cup into the saucer. Beside the cup, arranged on delicate china
plates, were two boiled eggs, one in the cup, one tucked beside it in a cosy, three slices of buttered toast, a pot of Chivers marmalade and a starched linen napkin in a silver ring. When she
reached the last door along the landing, she set the tray down on the floor and knocked.

‘Come!’

Each day she carried his breakfast to him, after she had already been up for four hours and had had her own meal in the servants’ hall. Roland Musson liked to lie late in bed and eat his
breakfast late, and it had been long agreed by the rest of the family that he should because this was what was good and right for him.

‘On the table as usual please, Nelson.’ He was sitting, tousle-haired, on the edge of his bed, his sturdy frame wrapped in a tartan wool dressing gown although it was May and quite
warm. As usual, the room was fuggy with cigarette smoke.

‘How do you come to look so hot and rosy-cheeked,’ he complained petulantly, arms folded tightly across his chest. ‘I feel quite shivery this morning.’

Maryann smiled. ‘I keep warm working – it’s nonstop this time of day.’

Roland Musson didn’t reply, but sat looking sunk in gloom. He had the solid Musson looks, large blue eyes and a shock of thick fair hair, but his complexion was growing ruddy from too much
drink. When she first arrived at Charnwood House Maryann had found him bad-tempered, demanding and unlikeable. She asked the other housemaids why this young man, a robust twenty-seven-year-old, as
he had been then, spent his life confined in the parental home, and much of the time lounged about without purpose in his room.

‘It were the war,’ Letty, the first housemaid, told her. ‘Shot ’is nerves to bits. ’E’s better now, Mrs Letcombe says.’ The housekeeper could remember
the five Musson children as babies. ‘’E were ever so bad when ’e came ’ome. Crying, nightmares and everything. Wouldn’t ’ardly go out of ’is room for
months on end.’

‘Why doesn’t ’e go and get a job?’ Maryann asked, thinking this a rum way to go on.

Letty laughed. ‘’E don’t really need to, living ’ere, does ’e? ’E’s comfortable enough, and to tell you the truth—’ She lowered her voice to
a whisper, as the two of them were polishing the dining-room floor and anyone might be within earshot, ‘I don’t think
she
wants ’im out of ’er sight, what with John
being gone and that.’

John, the eldest Musson, an officer in an Oxfordshire Regiment, had been killed in 1917 and Mrs Lydia Musson, an elegant, though rather vague woman with a wreath of thick, wavy hair coiled round
her head, seemed to encourage her second son’s invalidity. She referred to him as ‘poor, dear Roland’ and he remained, at once petulant and pitiable, neither challenged to leave,
nor seeming to have the will or incentive to do so.

It was getting on for six years since Maryann had come to Charnwood House, four miles out of Banbury, and in that time Roland Musson did seem to get out more. He worked in the grounds in the
afternoon with Sid and Wally, the two gardeners, and he had a motorcycle on which he roared dangerously along country roads and across the fields. He had a few friends locally and they sat for
hours at a time in village pubs. Maryann, though, couldn’t help but compare his plight with that of her father, also scarred by the war, trying to adjust back to family and civilian life and
having somehow to struggle on and get jobs, keep afloat, without the cushion of wealth that Roland Musson had beneath him. And Nance’s father, Blackie Black, too, and Joel . . . But no
– she wasn’t going to think of Joel. Whenever her mind strayed down any path which would lead her to think about home she blocked out such thoughts. She had found a life that was free
of pain and trouble and she wanted to keep it that way. And over the years her dislike for Roland Musson had faded as she grew to understand him better, turning instead to a mixture of tenderness
and pity.

Sometimes when she carried Roland’s breakfast tray in he was quite jovial and chatty; other times down and sunken into himself. That morning, Maryann stirred two lumps of sugar into his
tea and handed it to him, thinking today was one of his depressed days, but he suddenly looked up at her.

‘How old are you, Nelson?’

‘Nineteen, sir. Twenty come September.’

‘You look
different
,’ he said taking the cup. ‘What is it about you?’

‘I really don’t know.’ She hadn’t changed her hair, her morning dress was as usual. She wasn’t aware that Roland ever
saw
her anyway. She was a servant, and
they had to stand to one side in the corridors when a family member passed, trying to make themselves invisible.

‘You look
yourself
– as if that’s how you’re meant to look. Chap in my unit – that’s what it makes me think of.’ Roland spoke musingly into his
teacup. ‘Went out on a night patrol – one of those bloody woods on the Somme. Can’t think what it was all for now but anyhow, they were successful. We’d heard the shots
– didn’t know who was getting it at the time. But they came back, all of them, full of it.’ Roland spoke in his odd, clipped way. ‘Anyway, this fellow was one of them. When
I saw him the next morning, he looked, well,
altered
. That’s it. That’s what you made me think of. As if he’d grown into himself overnight.’ He took a long drink of
the cooling tea and Maryann, puzzled, thought he’d finished and began to turn away. But he carried on.

‘Day after that the chap stood up for a few seconds and bang – killed by a sniper. So what was that all about? Man grows up, becomes himself overnight, then—’ He snapped
his fingers. ‘Like a bloody butterfly.’

A moment later he looked up at her again. ‘All right. I don’t expect you to have an
answer
. Off you go.’

She went back down the stairs, pausing on the landing to look out over the garden, where Wally, the elder of the two gardeners, was bent weeding the long border which edged the drive. It was at
its most beautiful at this time of year, the lawn wide and green, the beds bright with flowers, trellises of climbing roses up the outbuildings and the mock orange and laburnum in blossom. The
mingled scents drifted in through the open window. From close to the house, out of sight, she could hear the Mussons’ two dogs barking: Freddie, a wild young fox terrier with his insistent
yap, and the deeper bark of their spaniel, Lily Langtree, who was beginning to run to fat. Freddie suddenly launched himself, a black and white flash across the lawn, with Lily lumbering after
him.

Different? What had Roland Musson been on about? Maryann looked down at herself. She may be different, but it certainly hadn’t happened overnight. She had grown, of course, and filled out
on the plentiful and stodgy servants’ food at Charnwood House. When she first arrived she had had no appetite and even Mrs Letcombe cajoled her to eat.

‘Come on, girl – you’ll have no energy for the work if you eat like a sparrer.’

Gradually, she settled into the rhythm of the house. As she got to know the characters of the other servants and appreciated that she had a good employer and a comfortable life, she felt secure
and happy. She liked the predictable routine, the steady days and years. She was under-housemaid to Letty and Alice, and once she’d got used to the place, resolved that she would try hard and
work her way up through the pecking order of servants. Two years later, Letty, who was then twenty-one, had married and moved on and Maryann became second housemaid. That was a start, but the job
she had her eye on was not to be a housemaid at all. The job she wanted was Ruth’s. Ruth, who was in her mid-twenties when Maryann arrived, was lady’s maid to Mrs Musson, and to the
Misses Diana and Pamela Musson when they were at home, which Pamela still was. Ruth was a quiet, dark-haired, neat young woman, whose job seemed to be regarded in realms high above that of
housemaid. As she looked dreamily out at the spring garden that morning, Maryann was speculating excitedly about the fact that Ruth was now courting with a young baker from the nearest village. If
they were to marry, surely Ruth would leave and then perhaps . . .? But would they give the post to Alice, the first housemaid? Surely not! Alice was a good, hard worker, but she was a rough
diamond. Was she, Maryann, neat and respectable enough for the job? She had done her darndest to make herself so. Every morning she brushed out her long, black hair and pinned it immaculately in a
bun behind her head. She kept her nails short and her uniform mended. Smoothing her hand over her apron and trying to walk with Ruth’s cool serenity, she went on down the stairs. Could that
have been what Master Roland meant, she thought hopefully, that she looked like someone who wasn’t meant to be a housemaid? Was she really destined to be a
lady’s
maid?

‘’Urry
up
!’ Alice snapped when Maryann appeared down in the kitchen. ‘You should be half done with the bedrooms by now!’

Evan, who worked under the butler, Mr Thomas, winked at her over Alice’s shoulder as he passed with a tray of steaming cutlery ready for drying. Maryann ignored him. Suddenly, after a few
months of banter with Evan, he was becoming too friendly. He had started creeping up on her in the pantry and putting his arm round her. ‘Gerroff!’ she’d say to him.
‘What’re yer playing at?’ It made her feel horrible and prickly.

‘Master Roland was talking to me,’ she retorted to Alice. ‘I couldn’t just walk out, could I?’

‘Well, you’d better get on with it double quick now’s all I can say,’ Alice ordered.

Maryann made a face behind Alice’s back. Since she’d been first housemaid Alice had gone power mad.

She began on Pamela Musson’s room. Pamela, voluptuous, blonde and loud, was only two years older than Maryann and was the youngest of the Musson children. The room was pretty, decorated in
pale blue and white, with a soft, silky bedspread, curtains the colour of bluebells and a thick blue carpet. As usual, Pamela had left her nightclothes strewn across the floor and the bedding
tipped off right over the side. Her dressing table was a litter of powder puffs and perfume, there was face powder spilt on the floor, stockings dangling languidly over the edge of one drawer and
coat-hangers and underslips dropped on the floor by the cupboard. Maryann sighed. When she had arrived she found it almost impossible to take in that Pamela was the same age Sal had been. She was
both a child and a young woman, both so much more sophisticated and knowing than Sal, yet so much more sheltered and childlike in other ways. She and Diana had gone about in their
‘flapper’ outfits, or their fashionable lounging clothes in bright colours with wide flowery bandeaux round their hair and hanging jauntily down at the back. Maryann had been astonished
by their energy, their colourful freedom and confidence as they danced and giggled their way through life. Diana was married now and had stopped giggling some time soon after the ceremony. Pamela,
who had done secretarial training, did her ‘bit of work, to show willing’ and otherwise existed in a round of social visits and Young Farmers’ dos and ‘hops’ in
Banbury and kept talking about ‘getting a little job in London’. Pamela was rather hoping someone would marry her quite soon too and she sometimes told Maryann about her beaux.

Maryann gathered up and folded Pamela’s fine stockings. If she was a lady’s maid she would deal with their pretty clothes all the time and help them do their hair instead of cleaning
out grates before the sun had risen of a morning and polishing floors with beeswax and turps! She pictured herself. Maryann Nelson: lady’s maid. And then her hope withered. They most likely
wouldn’t even think of her for the post. They’d stopped wincing now every time she opened her mouth, but she’d never forgotten Diana Musson’s mirth the first time she heard
Maryann speak.

‘Where on earth,’ she screamed, between red-lipstick lips, ‘did she get that
terrible
accent?’

‘Birmingham, my dear – I gather,’ Mrs Musson told her, and Diana looked closely at Maryann as if she was a rather exotic wild animal.

‘How perfectly extraordinary! Is the child quite well? She looks so dreadfully
thin
.’

Maryann shook out the crumpled underslips and put them out for Ruth to iron. Then she stood and looked at herself for a moment in Pamela’s long mirror. A dark-eyed, serious face stared
back at her. She was no longer ‘dreadfully
thin
’, that was one thing for certain. Slender, but curving, and rounder in the face than she had ever been.

I’m a woman now, she thought, looking herself up and down in surprise. Women were supposed to marry and have babies. Maryann had spent so much time not thinking of herself, of her body, of
her past, it came as a shock to her to notice she had grown up so much.

Will I ever be able to be normal?
she thought. Questions, feelings, which she had closed off in herself, were beginning to nudge their way to the surface.

She pushed the cupboard door shut, closing off her view of herself. She didn’t want to look. It was too frightening.

Charnwood House had been a haven to her, a place where she had enjoyed a long period of calm, like an animal in hibernation. Her fondest memory of arriving to work at
Charnwood, after the nerve-racking interview with Mrs Letcombe (for which she prepared herself in the local baths with a good wash and change of clothes), was that first Christmas. By then she had
been in the Mussons’ employ just a few weeks, having arrived at Banbury in early November, and she was still thin and withdrawn, closed in on herself. Looking back on it now, she could see
that she had been really beside herself, in shock at Sal’s death, at her own cruel treatment by their stepfather, and by her feelings that Joel had betrayed her.

That Christmas she began to close the door on the past. By the time the celebrations began she was already getting used to the day-to-day work of Charnwood House. She liked Letty and Alice
wasn’t too bad, if rather petty. Letty was fair-minded and made sure everyone did their share, and life in the servants’ quarters was orderly and amiable. Mrs Letcombe was a motherly
person – indeed she was a widow and mother of four grown-up children. Cook was blunt and strange and there were rumours that she had been crossed in love. Her dearest pleasure was to moan and
mither, but most of it was just talk, and the butler Mr Thomas was touchy and pompous, but a kind man at heart. All of them assured her she had landed on her feet, and she soon found it to be
so.