Kept (44 page)

I
s that you, Emma?”

“Yes, Mrs. Latch.”

“I am still abed, I’m afraid. You had better bring me a cup of tea, if you would.”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

Esther lay in the big brass bedstead listening to the sound of the servant’s footsteps descending the rackety stair. The fire, lighted three hours previously, had begun to go out, and she could feel the cold creeping back into the room. She remembered William standing with his back to it as he had bade her good-bye. Turning towards the bedside clock, Esther found that it was nine o’clock. She lay motionless for a moment or two longer, her gaze fixed on a jacket that for some reason William had left draped over a chair back, and then, rising out of the bed with an effort, got up and began to put on her clothes.

As she dressed she peered curiously out of the window. Six months in the metropolis had not dimmed Esther’s interest in the complex organism of which she was a part. Even now, embarking on some solitary journey by train or omnibus, or out with William at some place of entertainment, she found herself mesmerised by the volume of people, the noise that they made and the costumes that they wore. “How many people live in London?” she had asked, a fortnight into her stay at Shooter’s Buildings, and William had told her a million or maybe two, but what did it matter, eh? Curiously, his matter-of-factness reassured her, gave her confidence in his ability to forge out patterns in the city’s immensity. For her own part, she remained awed, impressionable, and in the matter of windowpanes and the views from railway carriages ever inquisitive. Now, however, there was only fog pressing against the glass and a handful of plane trees all but lost in vapour, and she
turned regretfully back, curiosity quenched by a memory forming in her mind.

William had said something to her before he went out. What had he said? That he would be back late? That there was a message for Mr. Grace that should be given to him if he called? She could not remember. Sitting on the bed once more to button her boots, she tried to imagine William’s face as he had spoken the words, thinking that this would help her to recall them, but her head was still fuddled with sleep and she gave up the attempt, threw a last glance around the high, angular room and the window of fog and then went out onto the landing and carefully down the staircase.

A noise of fire irons being clashed together told her that Emma, the maid-of-all-work, had transferred her operations to the drawing room. The promised tea lay sending up steam from the kitchen table, and she drank it gratefully, the warm cup cradled in her hands, looking round the kitchen for signs of Emma’s industry (experience had made her an exigent mistress, not a tolerant one) and finding them in the row of burnished saucepans and the tray of vegetables brought that morning from Shepherd’s Bush market. Emma’s wages were twelve pounds a year, and this both alarmed and comforted her, for she knew that six months before she had been earning the same sum herself, casting the same covetous eye over the remains of a joint that Emma cast as she carried it back from the dining-room table.

The noise of clashing fire irons had now given way to a dull thudding sound suggestive of a mat being belaboured with a stick. A double rap at the door announced the arrival of the postman, but Esther, going to investigate, found only a single letter marked
Urgent: Mr. Wm. Latch
. In any case, as she reminded herself, no one ever wrote to her, for with the exception of her mother no one knew where she was. Returning to the kitchen, she poured a second cup of tea from the pot which Emma had left stewing, examined the bowl of lump sugar to assure herself that it had not been pilfered from and took the cup and saucer into the parlour, where she sat down immediately in a chair and began to brood.

She became aware, without consciously registering the fact, that she was thinking of William. This did not surprise her, for she knew that
this was, had been for as long as she could remember, the single topic on which her thoughts ran. In the half year since she had left Easton Hall, she had come to acknowledge that William, if not the paragon of her imaginings, was a reasonably fair-minded and unexceptionable specimen of male humankind. This realisation, which had come gradually upon her, did not distress her, for she knew—years of observation had taught her—that there were worse than William, who did not at any rate mistreat her, take conspicuously more than was good for him to drink or swear more than ordinarily. Evidence of his regard, moreover, lay everywhere around her—in the house in which they lived, the third of a row of dwelling houses known as Cambridge Villas, in the person of Emma, whose deference Esther still found highly agreeable, and in the half-dozen dresses and other items of clothing, newly bought, that now constituted her wardrobe. In all, Esther declared herself more than satisfied with William. To be sure, the “Mrs. Latch” with which Emma daily saluted her was a fiction—and she believed that Emma knew it to be a fiction—but, again, this did not distress her for she knew it to be a consequence of the step she had taken and the world in which she now moved and had her being.

And yet there were mysteries pertaining to her new life that she could not fathom, no matter how hard she tried. The first, and the most pressing to her mind, was the nature of William’s business, how he came by his money, everything in fact that occupied him in the many hours that he spent beyond the walls of Cambridge Villas. Undoubtedly, he worked for Mr. Pardew—he was “Mr. Pardew’s man,” he told her proudly—and Mr. Pardew, she understood, was a bill discounter. Esther knew about bills—they had not been altogether absent from previous establishments in which she had worked—but what William had to do with their negotiation and collection she could not determine. Mr. Pardew she had met but once, at a house to which William had escorted her in Kensington—a civil old gentleman, she had decided, with a jutting jaw, who had let fall the single remark that it was a fine day. Others of Mr. Pardew’s satellites—Dewar of the melancholy visage and a sharp-faced man named Pearce—she encountered but rarely. It was Grace that she saw most often and with whom, indeed, William seemed to spend the larger amount of his time. To
meet with Grace, to talk with Grace, to plot with other persons in Grace’s company: these, so far as she could establish, were the principal occupations of his day. To this end, he went (she had picked this up from stray scraps of his conversation) on boat trips to Greenwich, to an office in the City—quite where in the City Esther knew not—and half a dozen other places. Yet the nature of the business on which he was detained she could not begin to elaborate.

“William,” she had asked at the end of the first month of their association, having already meditated on the subject for some time, “what is it that you do all day with Mr. Grace?”

“What do we do?” William did not seem displeased by this enquiry, nor indeed by anything, that she asked him. “Why, we are Mr. Pardew’s men, you know, and we do his business.”

“Does that mean that you collect his bills? Or do you sit in his office? It is only interest that makes me ask.”

“Well, now…not exactly. Today he and I were in Southwark, where we had an affair to settle, and then we had Mr. Pardew’s instructions to see a party at the Green Man.”

“And all this is to do with money?”

“Well, yes. That is…not exactly.”

More than this William would not say. Esther, seeing that some mystery hung over his silence, forbore to ask. And yet her curiosity was roused, still more at the time three months ago when they had exchanged the modest eyrie in Shooter’s Buildings for the comparative splendour of Cambridge Villas. Of the financing and maintenance of Cambridge Villas—it was rented at forty pounds the half year, for Esther had seen the receipt—William said not a word. He merely informed Esther of the change of lodgement, engaged a wagon for the transfer of their possessions and the deed was done. There were other changes that Esther noted at this time, quite apart from their removal to Shepherd’s Bush. One was William’s habit of darting up from his chair if a knock came at the door. Another was the look of vexation that passed across his face if he judged that a stranger was staring at him in the street.

“You won’t guess who I saw today, Esther,” William exclaimed one
evening at about this time, standing in the parlour with the dust from the street clinging to his clothes.

“No. Who?”

“Sarah! I was stepping out of the Green Man with Mr. Grace, and there she was, walking up Wellington Street towards me. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.”

“What is she doing in London?” Esther wondered.

“Ladies’ companion. Upper servant. That kind of thing, she said. I took her address, so you must go and see her, Esther.”

“I should like to,” Esther said truthfully.

In the event, the piece of paper with Sarah’s address turned out to have vanished from William’s pocket—it was quite mysterious, William declared, how it should have disappeared—and this desirable scheme had perforce to be abandoned.

Grace was frequently seen at Cambridge Villas. He had a habit of arriving in the early evening for supper, sleeping the night in the back bedroom and being found in the kitchen cooking himself an early breakfast in a frying pan.

It was with Grace, and at Cambridge Villas, that William had commenced on the most curious undertaking of all. Coming back to the house one afternoon after an excursion to Shepherd’s Bush market, she had found a quantity of dark, rectangular bricks piled up on the kitchen table, together with a large pair of bellows. As she examined them, William came in from the parlour.

“Why, William, what are these?”

“These? Why, they are firebricks. And that is a pair of bellows unless I am much mistaken.”

“Firebricks?”

“Well…yes. The thing is that Grace and I have decided to go in for the business of making leather aprons.”

“Leather aprons?”

“I declare you sound like a parrot, Esther. Yes, leather aprons. The fact is that we have some capital secured between us, and this seemed the best way of laying it out. Grace knows all about it.”

William explained that they intended to carry out the work in the
back bedroom. As this involved the generation of a great deal of heat, it would be necessary to remove the stones from the hearth and replace them with firebricks. He added that leather aprons were valuable items and much sought after, and that they fully intended to make their fortune. And yet Esther could not help noticing that the project was remarkably short-lived. A week, perhaps, was spent in this endeavour, during which the house grew so hot that Esther frequently retired into the kitchen. Afterwards nothing more was said of it, and the back bedroom once more became Grace’s occasional sleeping place and a store for the few things they had brought with them from Shooter’s Buildings. Going in there on some errand in the days after the work had ceased, Esther found that the floorboards next to the hearth had been scorched quite black.

The tea had gone cold in her hand. Starting up in her chair, Esther became aware that the morning was now well advanced. Beyond the window the fog had risen, to be replaced by a weak and watery sun. The thoughts of William, Sarah, Bob Grace and the charred boards in the back bedroom still turning in her head, Esther went upstairs to her room and sat once more upon the bed. Driven by an instinct she did not quite comprehend, she got up and moved to the wardrobe where William kept his suits of clothes and plunged her hand into the pocket of the nearest. There was nothing in it, however, save a solitary guinea piece, which, having inspected it for a moment or two, she somewhat guiltily replaced. The instinct continued to oppress her, and presently she went over to a trunk that lay in the corner of the room and returned with a small packet of papers. Among these was the letter that Mrs. Ireland had entrusted to her on the day before she had left Easton Hall, and she examined it carefully, allowing her mind to wander over the scenes it conjured up. Again, somewhat guiltily, she replaced the packet in her trunk, having first concealed the letter among several larger items, and retraced her steps to the vestibule. Here she selected an umbrella from the basket that contained William’s walking sticks and went in search of Emma, now at work in the kitchen.

“Emma! I am going out for an hour or two.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If Mr. Latch returns, you had better say that I shall be back in the afternoon.”

“I can do that, ma’am.”

This instruction was superfluous. William, once he had quit the house after the breakfast hour, was never known to return to it before the evening. Leaving Cambridge Villas, the umbrella swinging restlessly in her gloved hand, Esther wandered at first in the direction of Shepherd’s Bush, where there were certain shops she might examine and certain necessary purchases she might make. The weather was less forbidding now, and she walked more rapidly, with a sharp eye for her surroundings and the people she passed, yet she knew that her journey had no obvious motive. Gradually, Shepherd’s Bush market having no charms for her, she found herself moving eastward.

Eventually, she stepped onto an omnibus which took her to the Charing Cross Road, and having alighted halfway along this thoroughfare—dense now with the noise of wagons and carriage horses stamping their feet as they waited at the crossings—continued into a vicinity that was familiar to her from her days in Shooter’s Buildings. It occurred to her that such wanderings might bring her to William, much of whose business was still conducted in this former territory, but she forbore to approach the entrance to Wellington Street or put her head in at the door of the Green Man and instead walked along the Strand in the direction of Fleet Street. The memory of having come this way six months before now assailed her, and she bit meditatively on her lip. The tap of her expensively shod boots on the pavement reminded her of the shabby footwear she had worn that day, and she marvelled at the transformation that had come upon her. There was a flight of steps to her left leading down into a little shabby courtyard, and here a young woman of about her own age, rising to the topmost step, stopped and regarded her keenly.