You'll Never See Me Again Page 4

  She bought the local newspaper on the way to City Road, but although she wanted to study it right away for any situations vacant, the weather was very cold, and she thought it might snow, so it seemed advisable to find lodgings first.

  A couple of hours later, Mabel had found a room. It bore no resemblance to Mrs Halliwell’s lovely home; it was just a small shabby room with a lumpy bed, a washbasin, a single gas ring and a gas fire. But it would do until she found a live-in job.

  The house was four storeys tall, with only one very grubby bathroom and one lavatory. As there were at least four doors on each floor – her room was on the second, at the back – it didn’t really bear thinking about just how many people would be using that one lavatory. But she reminded herself she had always shared a communal privy, and had never had a real bathroom anyway, so she didn’t know why she was horrified at the prospect.

  Some of the houses in City Road were still family homes, but far more were shabby lodging houses. Yet an elderly woman she spoke to in the grocer’s, as she was buying some essentials food stuffs, said that twenty years earlier it had been home to wealthy people. She said that gradually the rich had begun to move further out of the city and she anticipated in a few more years the once fine houses would turn into slums.

  That same lady had found Mabel’s Devon accent very amusing. ‘You sound like a farmer’s wife,’ she chuckled. ‘You just mind people don’t take advantage of you or snatch your purse cos they think you’re a bit slow.’

  Mabel wanted to retort that it was rude to make personal remarks, but she bit it back; the woman was old, and maybe she meant well by warning her.

  The thought that maybe she was a fish out of water in a big city made Mabel feel scared again. All at once, she thought people were looking at her, weighing her up. She hurried back to her room, her heart thumping loudly, locking the door behind her and trembling as if she’d been assaulted.

  But the room didn’t feel safe. People shouted angrily in the rooms above her, a baby cried constantly, and when she finally plucked up courage to go and use the lavatory it smelled so bad, she gagged.

  For the first time since she’d left Hallsands she wished she hadn’t run away. Even Agnes’s sharp tongue was preferable to the strangers fighting upstairs. If she opened her front door there, the air was fresh and clean, and the only sound at night was the sea below. Here she had the carts, cabs and buses going along the street, drunks and hooligans yelling to each other, dogs barking, loud music and raucous laughter coming from the public house on the corner.

  She crawled into the bed to get warm, but even that felt slightly damp, and the sheets the landlady had said were clean on that morning smelled nasty. Was this what life was going to be like from now on?

  Huddled in the bed, hungry and thirsty, she was too cold to get the bread and cheese she’d brought back, and however much she wanted a hot cup of tea, she didn’t dare go to the bathroom to fill the kettle in case she ran into someone.

  The tears came then. Tears of remorse, guilt and loneliness. She’d thought she was heading for an adventure, something better than she had before, but it seemed it was going to be far worse.

  Two days later, Mabel walked to Clifton. The wife of the grocer in City Road had told her there were many jobs as kitchen maids, parlour maids, cooks and housekeepers going there. She said hundreds of women had left jobs in service to work in factories since the war began. She recommended Mabel did the same, as the pay was far better than domestic work.

  But Mabel didn’t want to work in a factory and carry on living in a dirty, noisy boarding house. She wanted the security of working in a private home, a clean, quiet place where she got fed, didn’t have to share a lavatory with scores of people, and would be warm. Once she’d found her way around Bristol, she could always leave and get a better job.

  It was a cold, crisp day and Mabel had been tempted to put on her best dress and hat. The dress was brown with a cream lace collar and cuffs. The matching brown hat, perched on her head at an angle, looked stylish, and it contrasted well with her red hair. She had made the dress herself, back before Martin enlisted, and he’d bought her the hat to go with it in Kingsbridge. But she’d suddenly realized she couldn’t wear such a jaunty outfit; a woman claiming to be a widow, and not in full mourning, would be accused of being ‘fast’. So she had resigned herself to wearing the hated old black dress she’d had since her father’s funeral, brushed off the mud smears around the hem, tied her bonnet under her chin, and put the dowdy black cloak on too, just to keep warm.

  She winced when she saw herself reflected in shop windows. Black drained all colour from her face and made her look ill and old. She wondered just how long she would have to keep up the pretence.

  An advertisement on the board outside a tobacconist’s in a side street caught her eye. ‘Maid of all work required. Call at 6 Harley Place. Good wages for the right applicant.’

  Just five minutes later, she was walking through the gate of an elegant, double-fronted, four-storey old house.

  She’d asked directions and was told the house was by Christchurch and looked out over the Downs, not far from the suspension bridge. The Downs turned out to be a large grassy area that appeared to go on and on. Looking to her left as she faced Harley Place, she could just see part of the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge. She remembered from school that it was another Brunel design, though he’d died before it was built. She wanted to walk over it, and to explore the Downs. But first she had to get this job.

  The front garden was small, but well maintained. She went up the steps and rang the bell. The door was opened by an older woman who was wearing a black dress almost completely covered by a snowy white apron.

  ‘I’ve called about the position of maid of all work,’ Mabel said.

  The woman looked her up and down and half smiled. ‘You’re a country girl!’

  It was a statement, rather than a question. But Mabel had a feeling the woman was kindly.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I’m from Plymouth. My husband was killed in France, and I’ve come to Bristol to find work.’

  The older woman nodded. ‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘It’s very cold today. I’m Mrs Hardy, the housekeeper. And you are?’

  ‘Mrs Mabel Brook.’

  Mrs Hardy ushered Mabel into a small room just off the large kitchen at the back of the house. The room appeared to be the housekeeper’s office; there was a desk beneath the window with a large ledger opened on it, and a brutal-looking spike held many bills. On a trolley was a pile of clean white towels, and a sizeable basket held clothes either waiting to be ironed or mended. Although it was a rather dark room, there was a cheerful fire in the grate.

  ‘Tell me about your last employer?’ she asked, turning the seat by her desk around to face Mabel, then sitting down and indicating Mabel was to take the chair close to her. ‘I will of course need a character from them.’

  ‘Oh dear! I haven’t been employed by anyone,’ Mabel said, putting on the most wide-eyed innocent look she could. ‘I helped my father, who was a fisherman, until I married, and after that I just kept house for my husband. But now he’s gone I felt unable to stay there. I want, and need, a fresh start and work.’

  Mrs Hardy nodded. ‘I am sorry for your loss, so many women have lost their menfolk in this terrible war. But tell me what you think being a maid of all work means.’

  ‘I imagine it means cleaning, lighting fires, laundry, polishing and possibly helping out in the kitchen too.’

  ‘You imagine right. Can you do all that?’

  ‘I can – and many other things, like mending and ironing,’ Mabel said. ‘I could catch you a few mackerel too, if we weren’t so far from the sea.’

  For a moment she thought her little joke was not appreciated, for the woman’s face remained stern and businesslike, but then she chuckled.

  ‘I think you’ll do fine, Mabel. But just to be sure, two weeks’ trial, and if you don’t suit, you’ll have to go.’

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p; ‘That’s very fair,’ Mabel said, and meaning it. ‘I won’t let you down. Will the mistress want to see me now?’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary. Mrs Gladsworthy is a widow and an invalid. She leaves the staff and the running of the house to me entirely. We don’t have a big staff, just me, Mrs Tweed our cook, and now you too, though we do have another woman who comes in now and then to do any rough work. You’ll be paid six shillings a month, all found, and a half-day off on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons.’

  Mabel had expected the pay to be more; after all, she’d got the same amount for a week in Kingsbridge. But she had been the housekeeper, doing everything, and she hadn’t lived in. But ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, as her father used to say.

  ‘I shall expect you to come to church with me on Sunday mornings,’ Mrs Hardy went on. ‘And your room is up in the attic. Have you a suitable black dress?’

  ‘Only this one.’ Mabel indicated what she was wearing. ‘It’s awfully shabby now, as I’ve worn it ever since my father died. That was soon after I was married … and then of course Peter was killed.’

  Mrs Hardy looked at her thoughtfully. ‘There are a couple of dresses tucked away upstairs. You could alter one of them to fit you. More importantly, when can you start work?’

  ‘Later today, if I just go back to the room in St Pauls I’ve been staying in, and collect my things,’ Mabel said eagerly. ‘Or is that too soon for you?’

  Mrs Hardy beamed. ‘No, that is ideal. But for tonight you can just settle in and start work tomorrow.’

  It was no hardship leaving the room in City Road. Mrs Hardy had shown her the room that would be hers, up in the attic, and it was pleasant, with a brass bed, a dressing table and an easy chair. It smelled fresh and clean, and there was a pretty multicoloured patchwork comforter on the bed, which Mrs Hardy said Mrs Gladsworthy had made as a young girl. She’d also seen the kitchen and the little staff room where she would have her meals. Mrs Tweed, the cook, looked about forty – plump and smiley, as cooks were supposed to look – and said she was glad Mabel was going to join the household and she hoped she’d be happy there. Then just as she was about to leave, Mrs Hardy pointed out the staff bathroom, along the corridor from the kitchen.

  ‘We are blessed here with constant hot water, heated by the kitchen range, and an inside lavatory,’ Mrs Hardy said with a warm smile. ‘There is also a bathroom upstairs and so in this house there is none of that tedious and back-breaking filling and emptying of baths for the mistress, as I had to do when I was your age.’

  Mabel could hardly believe her luck as she rushed down through Clifton to collect her few belongings. To live in a house even nicer than the one where she’d worked in Kingsbridge, to be warm and well fed, to have electricity instead of oil lamps and candles, and to be trusted without supplying a character.

  Someone was smiling down on her, and she intended to make sure she paid back that trust by working extra hard.

  Within a week at Harley Place, Mabel felt totally at home. She liked her uniform black dress, it was far better quality material than her own dress, and apart from taking up the hem it fitted as if it had been made for her. She had a grey-and-black striped apron to wear when she was doing the fires, and three snowy white ones for the rest of the time. She started work at six thirty, clearing the grates and relighting the fires; there was one in the upstairs sitting room Mrs Gladsworthy used, one in Mrs Hardy’s office and one in the staff room. She had been told the drawing room and dining room on the ground floor were only used on the rare occasions the mistress had guests.

  While the mistress was having her breakfast in her sitting room, Mabel cleared the fire in her bedroom, relaid it and lit it, made her bed and put her clothes away. She had met her new employer on her first day and felt deeply sorry for her. She was in her late forties but looked older because she was crippled by rheumatism. There was an oil painting of her as a young woman in the drawing room. She had been lovely then, in a pink ball gown with an hour-glass figure, startlingly blue eyes and long, golden blonde hair. Her eyes were still lovely, but her hair was white and her back bent.

  Mrs Hardy had told Mabel that until the mistress’s husband was killed in a riding accident in Leigh Woods, some ten years earlier, she had been a keen horsewoman and loved to play tennis too. Up until then, she’d only had odd twinges of rheumatism, but almost as soon as he died it flared up, incapacitating her completely at times. The only time she felt better was in warm weather, and in fact her doctor had recommended she move to a place with a milder climate.

  ‘She won’t do that, because her husband is buried at Christchurch. She says she can’t bear to leave him,’ Mrs Hardy said. ‘I look after his grave for her during the winter months when she can’t get out. I’d worked for them for over ten years before Mr Gladsworthy died. It is so sad. They were the golden couple, invited out all the time – in fact, no social event was complete without them – and they had so many parties here. If only they’d been blessed with children, maybe she wouldn’t have sunk so low that the rheumatism took hold.’

  Mabel murmured her understanding, yet she couldn’t help but think of all the poor people she’d met who had lost a wife, husband or child, and because of their situation they just had to get on with life. But at least Mrs Gladsworthy hadn’t become a tyrant, believing she was the only person in the world to suffer and grieve. In fact, she had sympathized with Mabel losing her husband, and said she hoped that she would find a measure of new happiness here in her home. Mabel doubted many rich women like Mrs Gladsworthy cared a jot about their servants’ happiness.

  Mabel was happy. Maybe there was more cleaning to do here than at her job in Kingsbridge, but she didn’t have the long walk there and back in all weathers. Back then, she’d also had her own house to look after, and she had to do whatever Agnes demanded. Her mother-in-law made her scrub the living-room floor every single day; she expected the fireside rug to be taken out and beaten too, with no regard for Mabel having already done a hard day’s work.

  Here it was quite different. Mrs Hardy rarely pulled her up on anything – in fact, she complimented her all the time. Mrs Tweed made delicious meals; Mabel had never been so well fed, and even if Cook did pry a bit too much about her past, she was kindly. It wasn’t even a long day, as Mrs Gladsworthy liked her supper at six, and once her tray was taken away, she didn’t ring again for anything else. Mabel did any washing-up left in the kitchen once Mrs Tweed had left for her own home, and then she stayed by the fire in the staff room, off the kitchen, to read or do any mending required. Mrs Hardy usually stayed up in her office, doing her accounts, but sometimes she came down later and she and Mabel would have a cup of tea and a chat.

  It wasn’t just the easy work that Mabel liked about the job, or the warmth and decent food; she loved the house too. Mrs Hardy said it was Georgian, as most of the houses in Clifton were, though that meant little to Mabel. She liked that it was light and bright, with elegant large windows, dainty furniture, soft carpets and so many lovely oil paintings that the Gladsworthys had collected over the years. She particularly liked one of a pretty harbour at sunset; the sea and sky had an orange tint that reminded her of how the sea had sometimes looked back home in Hallsands. Mrs Hardy said it was Weymouth and that before Mr Gladsworthy’s death, they used to stay for the whole of August in a cottage there.

  Sometimes when Mabel went upstairs to put more coal on the fire, Mrs Gladsworthy would talk to her. She always wore black, because she was still in mourning. Ten years was an awfully long time to be in full mourning, but at least her dress was beautifully cut, with pin-tucks down the bodice, and she wore pearl earrings and a pearl brooch at her neck.

  ‘Did you feel that you wanted to die when your husband was killed?’ she asked one day.

  Mabel didn’t really know how to respond.

  ‘I don’t remember exactly how I felt,’ she said carefully, yet remembering all too clearly the day she’d visited Martin in hospital and been comple
tely shocked that he didn’t seem to even remember who she was. ‘I think I was kind of numb for a while. It didn’t seem real.’

  ‘I imagine it’s a bit different if your husband is a soldier. You know it could happen. But it never crossed my mind that Mr Gladsworthy would go before me, and in a riding accident.’

  She looked so dejected, Mabel felt bad she was claiming to be a widow too. ‘I expect you feel very lonely now,’ she ventured gingerly.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she sighed. ‘So many of our old friends don’t bother with me any more, it’s very hurtful.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, ma’am,’ Mabel said. ‘But maybe they think you don’t want to see anyone. Couldn’t you send them a letter inviting them to tea?’

  ‘That is an excellent idea,’ Mrs Gladsworthy said, and gave a little tinkling laugh. ‘I should be ashamed of myself, complaining to you of all people.’

  Mabel knew straight off that her employer meant she had so much, while Mabel had nothing.

  ‘But I’m not in pain all the time, ma’am, like you are,’ she said.

  ‘What a sweet girl you are,’ Mrs Gladsworthy said. ‘I’ll make more of an effort to contact my old friends in future.’

  By the time the first warm day arrived in May, Mabel felt as if she’d be content to stay in Harley Place forever. She felt so fortunate to have found herself safe and secure in a job she liked. Clifton was a treasure trove of interesting shops, beautiful houses and so many parks and open spaces.

  Yet by moving to a big city she had come to see how ignorant she was as a result of the cloistered life she’d led in Devon. She could sail a boat, swim like a fish, grow vegetables, cook and clean, but she’d never been anywhere else, and all her neighbours and friends were just like her.