Cover Her Face (3 page)

“That was a lovely dinner, Martha,” he said. Deborah had turned from the window and was wrapping her thin, red-nailed hands around the steaming mug.

“It’s a pity the conversation wasn’t worthy of the food. We had a lecture from Miss Liddell on the social consequences of illegitimacy. What do you think of Sally, Martha?”

Stephen knew that it was an unwise question. It was unlike Deborah to ask it.

“She seems quiet enough,” Martha conceded, “but, of course, it is early days yet. Miss Liddell spoke very highly of her.”

“According to Miss Liddell,” said Deborah, “Sally is a model of all the virtues except one, and even that was a slip on the part of nature who couldn’t recognize a high-school girl in the dark.”

Stephen was shocked by the sudden bitterness in his sister’s voice.

“I don’t know that all this education is a good thing for a maid, Miss Deborah.” Martha managed to convey that she had managed perfectly well without it. “I only hope that she knows how lucky she is. Madam has even lent her our cot, the one you both slept in.”

“Well, we aren’t sleeping in it now.” Stephen tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. Surely there had been enough talk about Sally Jupp! But Martha was not to be cautioned. It was as if she personally and not merely the family cradle had been desecrated.

“We’ve always looked after that cot, Dr. Stephen. It was to be kept for the grandchildren.”

“Damn!” said Deborah. She wiped the spilt drink from her fingers and replaced the mug on the tray. “You shouldn’t count
your grandchildren before they’re hatched. You can count me as a non-starter and Stephen isn’t even engaged—nor thinking of it. He’ll probably eventually settle for a buxom and efficient nurse who’ll prefer to buy a new hygienic cot of her own from Oxford Street. Thank you for the drink, Martha dear.” Despite the smile, it was a dismissal.

The last “good nights” were said and the same careful footsteps descended the stairs. When they had died away Stephen said, “Poor old Martha. We do rather take her for granted and this maid-of-all-work job is getting too much for her. I suppose we ought to be thinking of pensioning her off.”

“On what?” Deborah stood again at the window.

“At least there’s some help for her now,” Stephen temporized.

“Provided Sally isn’t more trouble than she is worth. Miss Liddell made out that the baby is extraordinarily good. But any baby’s considered that who doesn’t bawl for two nights out of three. And then there’s the washing. Sally can hardly be much help to Martha if she has to spend half the morning rinsing out nappies.”

“Presumably other mothers wash nappies,” said Stephen, “and still find time for other work. I like this girl and I think she can be a help to Martha if only she’s given a fair chance.”

“At least she had a very vigorous champion in you, Stephen. It’s a pity you’ll almost certainly be safely away at hospital when the trouble starts.”

“What trouble, for God’s sake? What’s the matter with you all? Why on earth should you assume that the girl’s going to make trouble?”

Deborah walked over to the door. “Because,” she said, “she’s making trouble already, isn’t she? Good night.”

Despite this inauspicious beginning Sally Jupp’s first weeks at Martingale were a success. Whether she herself shared this view was not known. No one asked for her opinion. She had been pronounced by the whole village to be a very lucky girl. If, as so often happens with the recipients of favours, she was less grateful than she ought to be, she managed to conceal her feelings behind a front of meekness, respectfulness and willingness to learn, which most people were happy enough to take at its face value. It did not deceive Martha Bultitaft and it is probable that it would not have deceived the Maxies if they had bothered to think about it. But they were too preoccupied with their individual concerns and too relieved at the sudden lightening of the domestic load to meet trouble half-way.

Martha had to admit that the baby was at first very little trouble. She put this down to Miss Liddell’s excellent training since it was beyond her comprehension that bad girls could be good mothers. James was a placid child who, for his first two months at Martingale, was content to be fed at his accustomed times without advertising his hunger too loudly and who slept
between his feeds in milky contentment. This could not last indefinitely. With the advent of what Sally called “mixed feeding” Martha added several substantial grievances to her list. It seemed that the kitchen was never to be free of Sally and her demands. Jimmy was fast entering that stage of childhood in which meals became less a pleasant necessity than an opportunity for the exercise of power. Carefully pillowed in his high chair he would arch his sturdy back in an orgasm of resistance, bubbling milk and cereal through his pursed lips in ecstatic rejection before suddenly capitulating into charming and submissive innocence. Sally screamed with laughter at him, caught him to her in a whirl of endearments, loved and fondled him in contemptuous disregard of Martha’s muttered disapproval. Sitting there with his tight curled mop of hair, his high-beaked little nose almost hidden between plump cheeks as red and hard as apples, he seemed to dominate Martha’s kitchen like a throned and imperious miniature Caesar.

Sally was beginning to spend more time with her child and Martha would often see her during the mornings, her bright head bent over the pram where the sudden emergence of a chubby leg or arm showed that Jimmy’s long periods of sleep were a thing of the past. No doubt his demands would increase. So far Sally had managed to keep up with the work allotted to her and to reconcile the demands of her son with those of Martha. If the strain was beginning to show, only Stephen on his fortnightly visits home noticed it with any compunction. Mrs. Maxie inquired of Sally at intervals whether she was finding the work too much and was glad to be satisfied with the reply she received. Deborah did not notice, or if she did, said nothing. It was, in any case, difficult to know whether Sally was overtired. Her naturally pale face under its shock of hair and her slim brittle-looking arms gave
her an air of fragility which Martha, for one, thought highly deceiving. “Tough as a nut and cunning as a wagon-load of monkeys” was Martha’s opinion.

Spring ripened slowly into summer. The beech trees burst their spearheads of bright green and spread a chequered pattern of shade over the drive. The vicar celebrated Easter to his own joy and with no more than the usual recriminations and unpleasantness among his flock over the church decorations. Miss Pollack, at St. Mary’s Refuge, endured a spell of sleeplessness for which Dr. Epps prescribed special tablets, and two of the Home’s inmates settled for marriage with the unprepossessing but apparently repentant fathers of their babies. Miss Liddell admitted two more peccant mothers in their place. Sam Bocock advertised his stables in Chadfleet New Town and was surprised at the number of youths and girls who, in new, illfitting jodhpurs and bright yellow gloves, were prepared to pay 7s. 6d. an hour to amble through the village under his tutelage. Simon Maxie lay in his narrow bed and was neither better nor worse. The evenings lengthened and the roses came. The garden at Martingale was heavy with their scent. As Deborah cut them for the house she had a feeling that the garden and Martingale itself were waiting for something. The house was always at its most beautiful in summer, but this year she sensed an atmosphere of expectancy, almost of foreboding, which was alien to its usual cool serenity.

Carrying the roses into the house, Deborah shook herself out of this morbid fancy with the wry reflection that the most ominous event now hanging over Martingale was the annual church fête. When the words “waiting for a death” came suddenly into her mind she told herself firmly that her father was no worse, might even be considered a little better, and that the house could not possibly know. She recognized that her love
for Martingale was not entirely rational. Sometimes she tried to discipline that love by talking of the time “when we have to sell” as if the very sound of the words could act both as a warning and a talisman.

St. Cedd’s church fête had taken place in the grounds of Martingale every July since the days of Stephen’s great grandfather. It was organized by the fête committee, which consisted of the vicar, Mrs. Maxie, Dr. Epps and Miss Liddell. Their administrative duties were never arduous since the fête, like the church it helped to support, continued virtually unchanging from year to year, a symbol of immutability in the midst of chaos. But the committee took their responsibilities seriously and met frequently at Martingale during June and early July to drink tea in the garden and to pass resolutions which they passed the year before in identical words and in the same agreeable surroundings. The only member of the committee who occasionally felt genuinely uneasy about the fête was the vicar. In his gentle way he preferred to see the best in everyone and to impute worthy motives wherever possible. He included himself in this dispensation, having discovered early in his ministry that charity is a policy as well as a virtue.

But once a year Mr. Hinks faced certain unpalatable facts about his church. He worried about its exclusiveness, its negative impact on the seething fringe of Chadfleet New Town, the suspicion that it was more of a social than a spiritual force in the village life. Once he had suggested that the fête should close as well as open with a prayer and a hymn, but the only committee member to support this startling innovation was Mrs. Maxie, whose chief quarrel with the fête was that it never seemed to end.

This year Mrs. Maxie felt that she was going to be glad of Sally’s willing help. There were plenty of workers for the actual
fête, even if some of them were out to extract the maximum of personal enjoyment with the minimum of work, but the responsibilities did not end with the successful organization of the day. Most of the committee would expect to be asked to dinner at Martingale and Catherine Bowers had written to say that the Saturday of the fête was one of her off-duty days and would it be too much of an imposition if she invited herself for what she described as “one of your perfect weekends away from the noise and grime of this dreadful city.”

This letter was not the first of its kind. Catherine was always so much more anxious to see the children than the children were to see Catherine. In some circumstances that would be just as well. It would be an unsuitable match for Stephen in every way, much as poor Katie would like to see her only child eligibly married off. She herself had married, as they said, beneath her. Christian Bowers had been an artist with more talent than money and no pretensions to anything except genius. Mrs. Maxie had met him once and had disliked him but, unlike his wife, she did believe him to be an artist. She had bought one of his early canvases for Martingale, a reclining nude which now hung in her bedroom and gave her a satisfied joy which no amount of intermittent hospitality to his daughter could adequately repay. To Mrs. Maxie it was an object lesson in the folly of an unwise marriage. But because the pleasure it gave her was still fresh and real, and because she had once been at school with Katie Bowers and placed some importance on the obligations of old and sentimental associations, she felt that Catherine should be welcome at Martingale as her own guest, if not as her children’s.

There were other things that were slightly worrying. Mrs. Maxie did not believe in taking too much notice of what other people sometimes describe as “atmosphere.” She
retained her serenity by coping with shattering common sense with those difficulties which were too obvious to ignore and by ignoring the others.

But things were happening at Martingale which were difficult to overlook. Some of them were to be expected, of course. Mrs. Maxie, for all her insensitivity, could not but realize that Martha and Sally were hardly compatible kitchen mates, and that Martha would be bound to find the situation difficult for a time. What she had not expected was that it should become progressively more difficult as the weeks wore on. After a succession of untrained and uneducated house-maids, who had come to Martingale because domesticity offered their only chance of employment, Sally seemed a paragon of intelligence, capability and refinement. Orders could be given in the confident assurance that they would be carried out where, before, even constant and painstaking reiteration had only resulted in the eventual realization that it was easier to do the job oneself.

An almost pre-war feeling of leisure would have returned to Martingale if it had not been for the heavier nursing which Simon Maxie now needed. Dr. Epps was already warning that they could not go on for long. Soon now it would be necessary to install a resident nurse or to move the patient to hospital. Mrs. Maxie rejected both alternatives. The former would be expensive, inconvenient and possibly indefinitely prolonged. The latter would mean that Simon Maxie would die in the hands of strangers instead of in his own house. The family could not afford a nursing home or a private ward. It would mean a bed in the local hospital for chronic cases, barrack-like, overcrowded and understaffed. Before this final stage of his illness had fallen upon him, Simon Maxie had whispered to her, “You won’t let them take me away, Eleanor?” and she
had replied, “Of course I won’t.” He had fallen asleep then, secure in a promise which both of them knew was no light assurance. It was a pity that Martha had apparently so short a memory for the overwork which had preceded Sally’s arrival. The new régime had given her time and energy to criticize what she had at first found surprisingly easy to accept. But so far she had not come into the open. There had been the veiled innuendoes but no definite complaint. Undoubtedly tension must be building up in the kitchen, thought Mrs. Maxie, and after the fête it would probably have to be coped with. But she was in no hurry; the fête was only a week away and the chief consideration was to get it successfully over.

On the Thursday preceding the fête Deborah spent the morning shopping in London, lunched with Felix Hearne at his club and went with him to see a Hitchcock revival at a Baker Street cinema in the afternoon. This agreeable programme was completed with afternoon tea at a Mayfair restaurant which holds unfashionable views on what constitutes an adequate afternoon meal. Replete with cucumber sandwiches and homemade chocolate éclairs Deborah reflected that the afternoon had really been very successful, even if a little low-brow for Felix’s taste. But he had borne up under it well.