The Jeweller's Skin (19 page)

Emmie, she could see, could not resist being consulted.  ‘They are a bit worn, all ours,’ she said to Narcisa, but softly, as if he shouldn’t hear.

‘Good! Fine!’ Narcisa said suddenly, as if the words had been waiting to burst out of her, since before today even.  She threw the duster in her hand to Emmie.  The salesman looked startled.  ‘We take!’ she said happily.  ‘Emmie, how many we take?’

‘A dozen?’ But the man had already lifted out a tied bundle.  ‘That will be four shillings the dozen,’ he said.  ‘And for you two beautiful ladies, the two in your hands I will give you for free.’

Narcisa took the purse from the dresser drawer, and looked at Emmie, who nodded.  ‘That’s right!’ said the man, who seemed to miss nothing; but she thought he looked tired now; perhaps a four-shilling sale was a lot to him.  ‘She can tell they’re value!  Now, a receipt for your books, of course.’

She told Emmie to make him tea, and went back out to the washing, feeling herself walking more lightly than usual.  She paused in the open air, a streak of sunlight touching the side of her face. Then suddenly the rare gaiety he had opened closed down again.  A door-to-door salesman; and she was flattered he wanted to flirt with her!  She put the towels through the mangle angrily, turning the handle as fast as she could manage, keeping the rollers tight so it was hard.

What do you expect when you’re a housekeeper? No more English gentlemen
like Edwin Humphreys, sitting correctly on the edge of his chair, listening deferentially to your father.  Not with your history.

She waited till she’d heard the back gate shut, then went indoors and sat down, pushing the bundle of dusters away with her elbow.  So am I going to marry a man like that?  She made herself consider the idea, without flinching.  He was attractive; she would not be enduring a man who repelled her.  He was lively, and most likely would be kind, and grateful to have a woman concerned for him.  No doubt he would enjoy being a father.  Am I just thinking of status, after all?  You have no status here, Narcisa Humphreys; or only that of a cook-housekeeper, and even there you still have to prove yourself.

She stood up; she had a pie to make, and the grocer’s man would be coming with the order.  But music, she thought; discussion.  There came back, perhaps for the first time since before the asylum, the sense of what she’d been missing.  The piano; concerts; people discussing politics.  I am sure the salesman would buy you a piano, she told herself drily.  But it was not one single thing, to say, oh no, I couldn’t like without
that. 
She measured flour onto the scales; how cooking helped one think, it was so ordered.  She had lived without everything, or so it had seemed at times.  I am a strong person; I have had to be.  Before the asylum I would never have known that.

I don’t mind working; it isn’t that.  Making pies seemed no worse than embroidering cushions.  It was simply that her future was terrible.  Clara’s wrong, she thought, it will take more than money.  She mixed the dough, feeling the texture of the fat and flour combining, adding the milk a little at a time.  I will spend the rest of my life without a husband, because I could not live with a good man like that, and the men that I might want will never see me.

It was better to be saying this; to make herself hear it.  She concentrated on the pie for some time.  The stewing-beef was not good; she would have to work out how to make her complaint to the butcher.  It will be tender enough, I suppose, cooked slowly.  And they will not starve.  Miss Grey’s and Miss Ainsworth’s opinions seemed not to matter, in view of the rest of her life.  Well, that was something.

It was her afternoon off.  She walked and walked, up past the house where they took the soup she made, onto the hill-top where the horses were exercised.  The race-track was down far to her left, misty in the cold light.  Out of breath at the top, rubbing her gloved hands on her cheeks for warmth, she recognised what it was she was still not facing.  It is too terrible, she thought, standing up straight, letting the tears fall and not wiping them.  I have to go on living in this country, with its cruel politeness and charitable works.  There seemed in the future she was at last looking at – the low English hills blurred in the weak light, houses with red roofs spreading up the slopes – no time, no rooms, in which she could have her daughter to live with her.  But I do not know that for sure.  There may be something.

Walking back down the steep streets, with their dull evergreens and their pruned-back roses, she realised she could tell no-one what she’d just learned, not even Clara.

1930

Miss Ainsworth stood up, and turned off the radio.  ‘I suppose he knows what he’s in for there,’ she said.

‘The PM? Oh, I’m sure he’ll have thought about it a great deal.’

‘Mm, well, let’s hope so.’  She looked round the room as if something might be missing.  It was getting colder; there was a draught from the door.  Miss Grey leaned over the sewing-box, unwound a yard or so of rose-pink thread and snipped it.  ‘Just one more seam,’ she said.  ‘Just this sleeve.’

‘You’ll ruin your eyes.’  Miss Ainsworth was putting Shakespeare back on the bookshelf.  It was her school prize copy, fat, with a tooled binding, the plays printed in two columns on india-paper.  ‘I could have sworn it was
Twelfth Night,’
she said.  ‘There we are.  Do you remember in Brighton…?’

‘That ghastly Malvolio with his cross-garters?’ Miss Grey looked up, laughing.  Her eyes were still the same blue, Miss Ainsworth thought.  Well, perhaps slightly faded.  She shuffled the books together, and pushed the bookend hard against the end one,
Ivanhoe. 
‘Met the new vicar again this afternoon.’

‘You’re quite right, Leah, I can’t see to do this.  It’ll have to wait till the morning.’  Miss Grey folded the sewing.  She was making a dress for a little girl, the daughter of the fruit-and-veg woman.  Not the child’s fault about her mother’s habits.  Another one on the way, she wouldn’t wonder.  ‘What did he say to you?  The vicar, I mean?’

There was the sound of rain on the French windows.  Miss Ainsworth raked at the fire, till the ash fell into the pan, and the coals brightened and settled lower.  A spark flew out towards Miss Grey’s feet.  ‘Sorry.  Oh, he’s a poor thing, if you ask me.  Long neck, great Adam’s-apple like a turkey.’

‘And after poor Mr Chadwick.  Oh dear.’

‘Come on, Lettie, you’re taking an awful time.’

They tidied the room; Miss Ainsworth put up the fireguard, Miss Grey turned off the wall-lights, and put her sewing things back in the side cupboard.  ‘Did you check the French windows? You still haven’t told me what the vicar
said
.’

‘Oh, he was worried about the Christmas crib.  I told him, the ladies in this parish have always managed, no doubt we still will.  I know he’s a man of God, but he should have a little more sense by now.  And respect.  Oh, and then he said,’ – she went into a rather anxious high male voice – ‘
Christmas is Christmas for the servants too, we must remember.
’

‘Really, what a…’ Miss Grey struggled with piety.  ‘I hope you put him right.’

‘I said, I’m afraid you won’t see our cook-housekeeper in church.  And I knew he was thinking we wouldn’t let her because of the dinner.  So I let him, just for a minute, and then I said, She’s RC, you know.’

Miss Grey leaned on the newel-post on the landing.  Her back was aching: lumbago, she supposed.  She hoped Leah hadn’t gone too far.

‘He looked quite shocked, but I said, Yes, I know, but in our considered view she’s a good Christian, and a good housekeeper too.  And there I left it.’  She put up her hands to begin removing hairpins.  The straight grey hair uncoiled, in a long tail.  ‘By the way, what
is
Humphreys doing for Christmas dinner?’

‘Oh, I said to her, nothing fancy: a joint of veal, perhaps, or a leg of lamb.  And pudding, of course; she’s already done the puddings.  They were good last year, weren’t they?’

They might have been tasting the brandy butter.

‘I expect he will need all our support,’ Miss Grey said.  She looked round suddenly.  ‘Is Humphreys…?’

‘Up in her room, of course; where else do you want her to be at this hour?  She can’t hear from up there.  I didn’t say she doesn’t go to the RC church either.  Do you think I should have?’

They stood pondering a moment.  ‘He can always decide to come and visit her,’ Miss Grey said in the end.  ‘He’ll know what to do.  After all, if Mr Chadwick never managed.  I doubt if he’ll get any joy.  Well, good night, Leah.’

‘Night, Let.’

They went, Miss Ainsworth reluctantly, to their rooms.

Only the sleet stopped her going away again.  The sleet was wheeling along the village street – was it a village, in the endless stretch of suburbs?  If she gave up, she’d have to walk back to the station, into the wind, the sleet blown in her eyes.  She hunched further into her coat collar, lifted one hand from her pocket, knocked at the door.

The knocker seemed too substantial for the house: a stone cottage, right onto the street, with no front garden.  The footsteps came too soon to the door, to open.

‘Mrs Humphreys?’

Then she was inside the small parlour, the room looking out on the street, with thin net curtains – would she be visible? – and the reason she’d come right opposite the window.  The piano.

‘It is only an upright,’ the piano teacher was saying.  She’d thought he would be an older man, a plain, balding man, like Schubert in the engraving, only much older.  ‘However, you will find it is quite good.  It is
overstrung,’ –
he said the word solidly, as if he had just learnt it in English; she knew the tone.  ‘It is not mine,’ he adds, ‘but belongs to an English colleague.’

She wanted to warm her hands at it, like a fire.  She took off her hat and coat, and put them somewhere.  She went to sit on the piano stool, but stopped herself quickly, and looked at him.  ‘Please, please,’ he said.

She stretched her hands out over the keyboard; but they had forgotten.  Everything.  She let them fall to her thighs.  The cold from outside seeped from them, through her skirt.

She wanted him to understand, but of course he didn’t.  He nodded helpfully.  A broad, pleasant face, and russety hair.

The sleet slapped at the window behind them.  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.  ‘I am being very forgetful.  You see it is not my house.  Would you like a cup of tea? You must be cold.’

She shook her head.  ‘It is too long ago,’ she said.  ‘I do not remember.’

‘Of course,’ he said cheerfully.  ‘In your letter you wrote that it has been a long time.  But I would like to know what you used to play, even though naturally it will not be fluent.  Perhaps we can find…’  She stood up from the piano stool, and he brought out handfuls of sheet music, which he piled on the sideboard, on top of a lace runner.

The paper was heavy, the covers creased, with elaborate engravings.  One worn fat volume, the Beethoven sonatas, was so known that she lifted it, closed, and sniffed in the smell; then smiled, embarrassed, and laid it aside.  No, Chopin.

She settled her weight on the piano stool, and leaned forward to flatten the music with both palms.  Sat up straight, and breathed out, as Madame had taught her.

Her left hand felt stiff and mechanical; she struggled to achieve any sense of flow.  Then the melody in the right started to come, the feeling of searching, like walking up a mountain she used to think, a bit higher, a bit higher, the view still hidden.  Her body leaned into the rhythm: not good enough, not right – there, too slow, she was losing the shape of it – but the piece had gathered her in like a dancing-partner.  Until – Oh no, wrong – painful – she stopped.

‘I can see you lack practice,’ he said, solemn.  Ah.  She must have been terrible; must have caused him pain; he was a musician, and had to endure this.  ‘But do not despair!  This can be remedied!’

He was very young.  Only recently she had begun to see people as young.  When did anyone ever say to her
Do not despair?

‘I cannot practise.’

‘Ah, of course.  I am sorry!  You said this in your letter.  You have no piano at home?’

‘Herr Untermeyer.’  He looked a little startled.  That was his name?  ‘I am a servant. A housekeeper.’

‘Of course.  Forgive me.  But the family has…?’  She was shaking her head already; he was young, he was only a musician; what did he know of the disentitlements of service?

‘Can you teach a pupil who will not practise?’  She was almost kindly, almost teasing him.

‘Of course,’ he said again, and looked at her, this impossible pupil – so she thought he saw her – this shabby woman who will never learn.  But he was young; he believed in the future.  ‘You will simply have to work very hard when you are here.  Now, the opening…’

So it started.

‘Miss Grey,’ asked Narcisa, having rehearsed herself
(I am reliable.  It will not change the routine). 
‘I like to change my afternoon off.  I like to have Thursday, instead of Tuesday.’

‘I
should
like, Humphreys,’ Miss Grey corrected her.  ‘Well, I will have to see what Miss Ainsworth thinks.’

‘I don’t think she’ll take advantage,’ Miss Grey told Miss Ainsworth, hoping she’d agree.  Better to give in to minor requests, she thought; keeps them good-tempered.

That was one thing arranged.  Felix Untermeyer, of course, had nothing to arrange.  Thursday was already his free afternoon, when the boys at the school played rugby, or read in Tacitus about tortoise-formations, or did anything except music and German.  As for Alfred Michaels, the English master, whose home it was: it was his idea that Felix should give lessons:  ‘Don’t play it enough.  Better get it tuned before you start.’

During the lessons Ita Michaels sat upstairs, not doing the things Alfred set out for her – ‘Perhaps you’d like to try some watercolours’ – in tones of increasing perplexity and concern.  Ita listened as the woman pupil (she had looked surreptitiously out of the bedroom window) attempted again and again the lifting phrase.  Oh, she’ll never get there, Ita thought, enraged.  Sometimes, shocked at herself, she hated the pupil; perhaps for her hour of Felix Untermeyer’s attention.  I should have married a musician, Ita thought: someone passionate, who would understand my moods, and enter with me – but what they might enter together she couldn’t quite say.  The parlour door sighed open, then the front.  ‘Thank you,’ she heard the woman pupil say; an older woman, rather dowdy, Ita thought, and smoothed the skirt of her new linen dress.

It must be Thursday, Elias Smith concluded, walking back slowly from the library, Lamb’s essays and the history of the Stuarts under his left arm.  His right hand grasped the head of his walking-stick, as if it were some moral principle: the staff of faith, perhaps.  On Thursdays someone endeavoured to learn Schubert.  No, no, he wanted to say, pausing on the pavement outside the house, to get his breath as much as anything.  That’s far too slow; why doesn’t the teacher tell him?  He imagined the pupil a boy, twelve or thirteen, the age when they want to be doing something else.  But the boy was progressing, he’d grant him that, as the C flat major impromptu started again and flowed on, expressively, he would admit, as far as where – but Elias lost patience; he was getting cold (it was early March by now, the wind still biting).  He prodded the pavement dismissively with his stick.

So it continued.  On the train back, and up the hill from the station, Narcisa carried the music as long as she could, in her chest, she thought, or her now stilled gloved hands.  This is my way of practising, she told herself later, wiping over the cleared shelves of the larder, her right hand wanting to start on the first theme.  But the music left her too soon, driven out of her head by arithmetic – the tradesmen’s books – or the two women’s orders.  I shall never get there, she thought, lying awake, the night after Elias Smith had stopped to listen.  This is foolish; I am deluding myself.  A housekeeper cannot learn to play the piano.  I will go and tell him.  Probably he’ll be relieved.   But when she went there, the next Thursday, the sun was shining, an almond tree was in flower in a front garden.  ‘I like – I
should
like,’ she corrected herself, ‘to learn a piece that is modern.  That I did not know as a girl.’  ‘Good! Excellent!’ said Herr Untermeyer, and produced, not from the piano-stool but his music-case, some crisp sheet music.

They began working on a piece by Bartok.  It gave her no comfort; it was angular, she thought: more suited, perhaps, to an odd pupil like her.  ‘Ah, Herr Untermeyer,’ she said, in the fourth week (how expansive she was becoming in this room!) ‘I am not a real pianist.  It is difficult for you?’  She looked up; there was the sound of driving rain.  She found herself suddenly anxious about his judgment.  And would he think she was flirting?  She was serious; she had forgotten years ago how to flirt.

He opened his eyes wide (light brown, she saw, the colour of caramel) and began to laugh.  ‘Of course!’ he said, ‘when you play it as if it were Mozart!  Now, please, a little more
nervousness,
Mrs Humphreys.’

On the step, the shower having passed, the tarmac bright, a baker’s boy cycling past, one split-tin loaf left in the front basket, he kept her talking, first about harpsichords, then by some train of thought Vermeer.  He had to say it more than once for her.  ‘Yes, yes!  But I have seen only - ’ she searched for the word.

‘Engravings? Then you must see the paintings.  You cannot respond to Vermeer in black and white.’  Then in a little rush he said he would see to it, if she liked; they could go one Sunday, if she could take the time, to some house in North London.  ‘It is essential that you see this painting.’  ‘Essential?’ she asked, ‘for my playing?’  But she would do it.

*

She had thought she was paying for the pleasure of learning music.  A good deal out of her wages; but what else could she spend it on?  She hadn’t thought about getting male company; he was meant to be old and strict, as she’d now told him.

When had she last had a conversation with a man?  She was at the sink, scouring the Yorkshire pudding pan. There was jasmine tapping at the kitchen window.  A bee tried to get in, and bounced back. -  Apart from the functional talk: coalman, greengrocer; once, reluctantly, the doctor: bronchitis, but Miss Grey had worried about TB. 
I have seen tuberculosis,
she could have said:
many people, all round me;
but it would hardly have been reassuring.

She emptied the sink, rinsed and wiped it round, dried her hands.  The previous vicar, once; but she’d had so little English.  Which indeed had helped her, in that case. 

The fact was, she thought, taking down Mrs Beeton, for the Sussex pond pudding they liked so much, which she never remembered properly; the fact was, she didn’t have conversations.  This struck her as both astonishing and obvious.  And the people I’ve been around, ever since Edwin, they have been just women.  At the asylum, at Mrs Pilgrim’s and after, when Edwin had paid for her lodgings and she’d learned all this, kitchen stuff, from one or other woman; and now, here.  At the asylum the only men who came to the women’s section were the doctors.  And then not often, she thought, remembering Clara coughing up blood, and they had told the attendants, even the Matron, and how long before they did anything for her?  It was a miracle that Clara had lived, and that she’d not had tuberculosis herself.  I must have been fit even then, she thought, and stretched her arms, there in front of the window.

What would Clara say about Herr Untermeyer? 
You got an eye on him?
That was her phrase. 
You got your eye on him, Nora? 
Though Clara surely would have men as friends, men she liked talking to, who weren’t her husband.  Or would the husband disapprove of that?  Stan, he was called:
He’s a good man,
she’d written,
though a bit fat!  Still with my history I think I’m lucky. 
Would Edwin have disapproved of her talking to men?

She brought the ingredients together on the table: lemons, suet (she must order more suet), flour, sugar.  Baking-powder.  Four eggs.  The sun made its way through the kitchen window, and lit up the paring-knife and the two lemons.