Mourning Doves. Helen Forrester
friends had called. In addition, there was a card left by her own friend, Phyllis Woodcock, who had been too far advanced in her fourth pregnancy to come to the funeral. She had scribbled a note to Celia on the back of her card to say that she would try to visit again tomorrow, after the midwife had been to check on her state of health.
Dear Phyllis! Childhood playmate and still her friend, despite her brood of awful children and her whining husband.
Tomorrow is today, thought Celia. God, I must hurry. See to poor Mother, talk some sense into her – about the maids, about the cottage, about what furniture we should take with us, what we should sell. How did one sell superfluous pieces of furniture? Go to Hoylake to see Ben Aspen, the builder recommended by Mr Billings – would he need money down or would he send a bill later on? Go to see Mr Carruthers, the bank manager, about what one did to cash the cheque from Mr Billings. Did Mother know how to cash a cheque?
After she had done all that, Celia remembered, there was the enormous task of writing letters of thanks for masses of flowers and in response to black-edged missives of condolence. Her father had been a well-known businessman and churchman, but, nevertheless, the interest engendered by his unexpected death had amazed Celia.
‘He must have known everyone in the city!’ Celia had exclaimed to her exhausted mother, who, on the day before the funeral, sat with that morning’s mail, still unopened, in her lap, while Dorothy added yet another floral tribute to the pile surrounding her father’s body in the sitting room, and Cousin Albert greeted the vicar and his wife at the door.
Louise responded wearily, ‘He did. We did a lot of entertaining.’
‘We did,’ Celia agreed, remembering the long and boring dinners, which involved so much work. She herself often helped Winnie and Dorothy on such occasions, by doing the complicated laying of the table and overseeing, from the kitchen, that the right dishes for each course were lined up, ready for Dorothy to carry upstairs. She herself rarely appeared at the parties.
Now, with her father safely in his grave and Cousin Albert back at his own home, she stood, for a moment, balancing herself against the table and looked shakily at the visiting cards. Through her tired mind rolled unusual words, like dowry, annuity, bankruptcy, land ownership. How could she deal coolly and calmly with visitors, when her tiny world was in such chaos?
Paul! Edna! Please, dears – please come soon, she prayed. She feared she might sink again into her panic of the previous night.
But Ethel was making a great dust as she cleared the ashes from the fireplace, and Dorothy was pushing the door open with her backside, as she carried in her box of brushes and dusters and her Bissell carpet sweeper. ‘Mornin’, Miss,’ she said mechanically, as she saw Celia.
To calm herself, Celia took in a big breath of dusty air and replied gravely, ‘Good morning, Dorothy.’
She went slowly out of the room and up the stairs. Her legs dragged, and she could not make herself hurry. Better leave Mother to sleep and then give her breakfast in bed, she considered. Before she wakes, I could make a list of things we must do, and, after breakfast, get her going on the more urgent ones – like seeing the bank manager.
Upstairs, she shivered as she stripped off her clothes still damp from the perspiration of the previous night. She hung up her black skirt to air, and left the rest in a pile on her undisturbed bed for Dorothy to take away to be washed.
Looking down at the smelly garments, she realised dully that she did not know how to wash clothes properly, and she wondered if they would be able to employ a washerwoman. Even during the war, when they had had to manage the house with only Winnie living in, they had been able to find women to do the washing and clean the house; they were usually army privates’ wives, living on very small army pay, who had children whom they did not want to leave alone for long. They had been thankful to come in by the day to earn an extra few shillings.
As she washed herself in the sink of the jewel of her mother’s house, the bathroom, which glittered with white porcelain and highly polished mahogany, she remembered the earth lavatory of the cottage. Such primitive sanitary arrangements meant that they must take with them the old-fashioned washstands with their attendant china basins, jugs, buckets and chamber pots; she recollected that three rooms in their present home were still equipped with these pieces of furniture. And there was a tin bath in the cellar – they would need that, with all the work that it implied – heating and carrying jugs of hot water upstairs to a bedroom, and afterwards bringing down the dirty water, not to speak of the dragging up and down of the bath itself, all chores that she herself would probably have to attend to.
While she brushed her hair and then tied it into a neat knot to be pinned at the back of her neck, she wondered resentfully whether, in addition to all the usual jobs her mother expected her to do, she was going to spend her whole future trying to deal with the domestic problems of the cottage.
Later, when she was dressed, the last button of a clean black blouse done up and a black bow tied under her chin, she paused to look at herself in the mirror, and made a wry face. She looked pinched and old. She was drained by the fears besetting her, acutely aware of her own ignorance. Even Ethel, struggling to make the fire go in the breakfast room, was not as helpless as she was. At least Ethel could make a fire and could probably cook a meal on it if she had to.
Why haven’t I learned to cook? she asked herself dully. Or even watched Mrs Walls, when she comes in on Mondays to do the washing? Or looked to see in what order Dorothy does the rooms, so that she doesn’t redistribute the dust? And as for making the cottage garden look decent, I don’t know how to begin.
The answer was clear to her. As a single, upper middle-class lady, she was not expected to know. Her job was to run after her mother, be her patient companion, carry her parcels, find her glasses, help her choose library books in the Argosy Library, make a fourth player at cards if no one else was available, write invitations and thank-you notes – and be careful always to be pleasant and never give offence to men, particularly to her father. And when her parents were gone, she would probably do the same for Edna – tolerated in her brother-in-law’s house, either because Edna had begged a roof for her or, on Paul’s part, from a faint sense of duty to a penniless woman.
‘I wish I were dead,’ she hissed tearfully at the reflection in the wardrobe mirror, and went down to the breakfast room to find a pencil and make a list.
While Dorothy and Ethel finished cleaning the breakfast room, Celia, list in hand, went down to the basement to talk to Winnie.
On seeing her young mistress, the cook hastily rose from eating her own breakfast at the kitchen table. With the corner of her white apron, she surreptitiously dabbed the corners of her mouth.
‘Don’t get up, Winnie. Finish your breakfast. I just thought I’d have a word with you, before Mother rings for her tray.’
Winnie sank slowly back into her chair and picked up her fork again. She looked cautiously at Celia, who had walked over to the kitchen dresser and taken down a cup and saucer. The girl looked as if she were on the point of collapse.
‘Would you be liking a cup of tea, Miss?’
Celia laid the cup and saucer down in front of the cook, and then pulled out another kitchen chair to sit down on. ‘Yes, please, if you can spare it from your pot.’
‘To be sure, Miss.’
While Celia slowly sipped a very strong cup of tea and Winnie finished up her egg and fried bread, both women basked in the warmth of the big fire in the kitchen range. Ethel had made it ready in anticipation of Winnie’s beginning the serious cooking of the day as soon as she had finished her own meal.
The heat was very comforting, and some of Celia’s jitteriness left her. ‘I was wondering, Winnie,’ she began, ‘if one of you could come out to the Meols cottage with me and help me clean it. I think it will take more than one day.