The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  Ellen quickly learned the skills of waiting at table and began to look about her. She began to recognise the different members of the family. She particularly noticed John Marchmont, Geoffrey’s nephew, whom she guessed was about her own age. He was often the only young person present. He was strongly built with straight corn-coloured hair and wide blue eyes. His face was smooth and good humoured. It was a pleasure to look at him, when she could, without being noticed. She thought about him romantically when she was walking in the gardens, or in the room she shared with Laura. She also thought of John sometimes when she was in her bed, beside Peter’s, on her nights off. If only she could have a lover who seemed so gentle and was fair. All the boys she had ever known were dark and awkward and never laughed much except when they’d been drinking beer.

  None of the Marchmont family, including John, or their guests, seemed to notice the staff as people. Grayson and Doris received rather cursory or jocular greetings but Ellen often felt she was invisible, or at least a mere machine when she was waiting a table.

  She came to realise that Grayson, a bachelor, liked her more than the others. And she liked him. He didn’t abuse his position with the girls, although he could have had any of them. There was gossip that he might marry Doris, but Ellen knew that she had only to encourage Grayson a little and they could be serious. He wasn’t the sort of person that she felt anything physical for; in fact he looked rather silly with his frizzy hair and the faces he pulled trying to be funny; but he was a safe, capable man and if ever she was to marry again, he might be the kind of man she would choose.

  In the meantime, she was glad to escape from Ship Street, wear a silly white hat and serve the politicians, soldiers, diplomats and magnates connected with the Marchmont fortunes. Under the muted light scintillating through the chandeliers she watched powerful and beautiful people gorge food and drink. When she retreated to her room after these events, she often felt dazed rather than tired, much as if she, rather than the guests, had stuffed herself with chocolate truffles and tasted too much vintage port. The excitement of a dinner took time to subside.

  When the headiness had passed, her mind would often move along the folorn terraces of houses she had known since childhood; Blakiston Row, Wharf Street, Ship Street, Channel Street, Gunter’s Alley. The old families were there and always would be there, living within a few blocks of each other all their lives, generations of them. The world for them stretched from King’s Lynn to Barton Village on the west and to Castle Rising on the east. Norwich city was far away; the people there were different. London was another country.

  For Ellen, being at the Grange was like standing on a hill and glimpsing an exciting and unexplored land in the distance.

  13

  One Friday night in summer, when Ellen had been at the Grange for three months, she finished work at 10pm intending to go back to Ship Street for the weekend. She had to catch the last bus, but Stan, Sir Geoffrey’s chauffeur who had to pick up a passenger at the railway station, offered her a lift. Although the bus would have taken her nearer to Ship Street, she couldn’t resist a ride in the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, refurbished like new after being commandeered for government service in the war. She was with Laura, the two of them in the back seat, giggling amid the smell of hide and cigars. At Market Square, Stan smoothed the car into a space between the market traders’ deserted stands and offered them a drink from the bar.

  “I reckon I’ve got near enough a clear half hour,” he said, taking off his peaked cap and slipping into the back with them. The three sat drinking ten-year-old malt Scotch whisky with ginger ale from the bar; they listened to music on the car radio from the sound-track of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Limelight’. Ellen wasn’t keen on whisky, but she enjoyed pretending that this was her lifestyle if only for a few minutes.

  They gossiped about the Grange and then there was a tap on the window; they all started. Even in the near dark Ellen recognised John Marchmont, the silky light-coloured hair, the grin. He was alone. Stan jerked forward with a groan and stumbled out of the door mumbling an apology.

  “Don’t worry, Stan,” John Marchmont said. “The train was early for once. Glad to see you’re being hospitable.” He handed his small suitcase to Stan and climbed in the back door beside Ellen and Laura. “Now, introductions please. And don’t I recognise these two faces? Helen and Lorna from the house?”

  They gently corrected him; Ellen and Laura didn’t feel in the least embarrassed at first; they couldn’t help laughing, especially when John passed Stan’s drink to him through the glass partition and insisted that he finish it, sitting behind the steering wheel with his cap on. John laughed too and even Stan managed a feeble smile. They chatted airily for a few minutes until Ellen put down her drink and opened the door on her side, saying that she would have to go. Laura went with her and they faded into the night with John protesting that he would get Stan to drive them home.

  *

  Ellen dreamed about John Marchmont when she was in her hard bed at the Burnhams’, with Peter snoring drunkenly in the bed next to hers. Friday night was party night and Peter’s carers carried on the tradition by making sure he had a quarter-bottle of whisky. In the morning Ellen banished her dreams and imaginings. John Marchmont was light-years away from her. She would remain as invisible as all the other servants.

  She was anxious on Monday, the morning of her return to the Grange, when John appeared on the south terrace where she was helping Laura and Doris prepare a table for a buffet lunch. He stood by the terrace door with his hands in his pockets, watching them work. He wore an old sweater with holes in the elbows; his hair was tousled and he blinked in the sun. His face looked sleepy and unwashed. The servants worked without apparently noticing him, but they did notice, every detail.

  “Can I have a word with you, please, Ellen?” he asked casually and moved away from their table.

  Ellen blushed. Doris frowned and hesitated, then she said, “I expect you have to see what he wants.”

  Ellen followed John into the shade of the house, her chest pounding.

  “Let’s go and have a drink at the Green Man sometime when you’re free, OK?”

  He spoke as though he had known her for an age and he was addressing a girl of his own class.

  Ellen knew she should play dumb and uncommunicative, but she couldn’t. “I can’t go out with you. I’d probably lose my job.”

  He put his head on one side, weighing her words. “No, I’ll see to that.”

  “I’ll think it over,” Ellen said, turning away, anxious to get back to Doris and Laura.

  He touched her arm. “Please.”

  She wanted to say, “Yes, I’ll come and have a drink with you, yes, yes, yes!” but she jerked herself free and went back to the glare of the terrace.

  “What was all that about?” Doris asked.

  She thought Doris could feel her heartbeat and the tingling in her breasts. “Nothing.” She resumed polishing the cutlery.

  “I hope you refused to go out with him?” Doris jolted one wine glass against another, chipping it.

  It was no use pretending that John’s approach was something else. “I did,” she lied.

  *

  On their first date at the Green Man, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, they basked in each other’s atmosphere; their actual conversation, blurred by the chatter in the bar, was about the village, the town, the old house, anything. The words flowed without either of them taking much notice of what was actually said. John had ordered a half of lager for her and a pint for himself and draped himself in a chair opposite, still wearing his unravelling sweater, with his unwashed golden hair piled untidily over his forehead.

  Ellen had tied her full wavy dark brown hair back in a short ponytail. She wore a thin print dress, sandals and no makeup, confident that in these simple clothes John couldn’t help focussing on the woman beneath. She was conscious of her slender body which she thought would stand any competition. She had the pale-skin and dark hair and
eyes of her family and many of the villagers around the mouth of the Ouse, but the zest in her features was hers alone. She thought to herself, I don’t care what or who this man is, or what I am, I just want him to make love to me.

  She didn’t feel shy with John or bothered that she was a servant and he was a member of a distinguished family. She was drawn to him just as she was repelled by life at Ship Street with Peter Burnham; status and rules didn’t come into it at that moment, but she knew that the status and the rules were there.

  As they walked back to the Grange from the Green Man, John invited her to dinner on the following Friday night. It was like a Woman’s Home Journal romance, where lovers were always asked out to dinner. Folks from the square mile didn’t do that; they had fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, or a milkshake at the Deluxe. Ellen made up a story for Mrs Burnham about having to stay at the Grange on Friday night and promised to be at Ship Street on Sunday afternoon.

  Ellen felt grand being driven to Wisbech by John in one of the estate’s new Morris Minor saloons. He took her to the United Services Club on a borrowed membership card; it was crowded and smoky. She was wearing a lilac crepe dress in a fashionable style, which she and Laura had made in their room; it clung to her, outlining every curve in her figure, even to her slight embarrassment, her nipples. She was going to be asked to order from a menu and be waited on for the first time in her life.

  Ellen did not behave as wide-eyed as she felt. She had watched the behaviour of the rich at table enough to be able to imitate them. You chewed slowly with your mouth closed and didn’t wave your knife or fork in the air. She couldn’t hide the slight burr of her Norfolk accent, but the mirror told her that her dress would pass and that the young woman inside it was as attractive as any you might see. Her dark brown hair had been parted in the middle and waved back to mid-neck length in the latest style; Laura’s work with a curling iron. She looked round at the other diners, at the officers with their gold braided sleeves and shoulders and the lavishly made-up women. She wondered whether it was true, as they said in the kitchen, that Winston Churchill and all the aristocrat types were finished.

  She melted into John on the dance floor to the Glen Miller sound of the big band, picked at the food and sipped sweet white sparkling wine. She wasn’t at all used to ballroom dancing. She had taught herself the waltz, foxtrot and quick-step with her girlfriends at home on rainy Saturday afternoons – Carol Kenny had been one of them. She had not had much practice at the Palais, where she met Peter, because the boys regarded dancing as wet. The Palais was a place where the boys went, after half a dozen beers, to pick up a girl after a nominal couple of dances, to walk home. But John knew the dance steps and all she had to do was to follow him instinctively.

  It was after midnight when they left the club and she was elated and a little in love. Buried in her mind, but nagging her, was how to tell John that she was a married woman with a disabled husband. She tried to banish the thought. When they got into the Morris Minor, John said, “That was fun, but we couldn’t talk, could we? Where to, do you think?”

  Ellen had already thought of that. “What about Coronet Park?” she said, where Carol Kenny had told her she used to go with Peter. The huge park had a crumbling brick fence and was not locked at night.

  John parked the car in the warm moonlight between rows of pines and talked easily about himself. “My mother died when I was three. There was just me and my old man. He was a rather minor Horse Guards officer who retired before the war. He spent the rest of his life in the members’ bar at the Royal Sandwich Golf Club, waiting…”

  “What for?”

  “The inheritance, my love. The old boy had enough brass to buy pink gins, but if his older brother or one of his uncles had died, he had reasonable hopes of being seriously rich. Never happened, of course. Maybe he died optimistic.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “Damned if I know, Ellen. Enjoy myself!”

  “You’re not studying?”

  “Dropped out of Oxford. Probably would have been pushed. I only got in because of my rugger and family name. It must have been that, because I had an abysmal school record. And Geoffrey knew a key don. Probably a case of ‘help this poor orphan’.”

  To Ellen, how a person earned money to live was a first thought. “How will you manage?”

  “Oh, well, like my old man I have a modest family trust. Not much, but enough.”

  She had never met a man so careless and irreverent as John Marchmont, or as charming and candid. The young men she knew were inert rather than hesitant and tongue-tied, especially about personal subjects.

  “I’ve spent my life being shuffled around the family when I wasn’t at prep school in Salisbury, or at Sherborne, Ellen. I never knew from one summer to the next where I’d be. Usually with one aunt or another and occasionally here with Geoffrey. Something between a guest and a handy-man.”

  “Were you lonely?”

  “Not a bit! Families are poison. Far better to be on the fringes.”

  Ellen thought about that. A couple of years ago she would have said it was nonsense. She had defined herself as part of Blakiston Row and Ship Street.

  “You could say I’ve shared the Marchmont lifestyle without being able to support it,” John chuckled. “There’s a sense of pride in the family, particularly among the female members, that waifs and strays who are relations have to be given shelter like ancient grannies and pensioned nannies.”

  “Where did they get their money?”

  “Merchants trading with China and India in the nineteenth century. Silk, opium, tea. They built mansions in London and the counties, like the Grange. They endowed a college at Oxford. As the clippers gave way to steam, the family fortunes followed. By the 1930s we owned a fleet of refrigerated vessels… but it’s all gone to pot now.”

  Ellen noticed the ‘we’. Although he put himself on the fringes of the family, John nevertheless saw himself as part of it, in what she suspected was almost a possessive way.

  “They brought frozen meat from Australia, Argentina and New Zealand for the European and North American markets. And the family often owned some of the foreign cattle stations and freezing works which supplied the meat for their vessels.”

  To Ellen, John’s family was like a constellation of stars, expanding to infinity, while her own family pressed around her, wanting to control her, cementing her into Ship Street and Wharf Street and Blakiston Row. Her brothers, her sister, her aunts and uncles and their children, all settled to live and die within a few miles of each other, mired forever.

  But tonight, at least, she was free of invisible strings. She let John kiss her. They never spoke about what to do next. The night was warm, even for high summer. The air was silky. Coronet Park had provided them with a deserted place. One look at the back seat of the Morris Minor was enough for both of them to reject it and instead they lay on the ground. The earth was warm, prickly pine needles under her bare bottom instead of the soft cushions of the Rolls-Royce. She wondered whether Peter and Carol had been near this place, limbs tangled in the back seat of one of Lacey’s cars and the springs squeaking. It made love with John so much sweeter.

  *

  Ellen found it easier to be forgiving to Peter after John; she began to think she could go on working and visiting Peter indefinitely. On her days off she took over full nursing duties. She washed Peter, lifted him, gave him his bedpan and pills and changed his clothes. She had to touch him, her palms on his bull neck and withered thighs. After Coronet Park she had some of the sympathy of a nurse. The injustice of her own imprisonment had subsided, but had not been extinguished.

  The arrangements for Peter’s care with visits from the district nurse, physiotherapist, and the Meals-on-Wheels ladies worked well. Her sister Ivy and Mrs Craigie next door took turns in the house and she paid them. By the time she had given Mrs Burnham something there was very little money left for herself but life for her was infinitely better.

&n
bsp; Ellen’s determination to go on working rankled with Peter. Peter’s mother tried to sooth his periodic explosions of foul temper. Whenever he erupted, she would make him a plate of chocolate nut fudge, or hot buttered pikelets, and feed him until he fell asleep. He achieved the same effect with whisky on Friday and Saturday nights when they could afford it. He wasn’t a reader and his old taste for car magazines had gone. Time passed slowly for him, dozing by the radio. For an hour on one or two days every week he punished himself with dumb-bells. He pumped iron until his body was saturated with sweat. He exercised his fingers and forearms on a set of springs which Uncle Fred had given him. Peter’s various helpers, including his mother, complained under their breath, but faithfully sponged him down and changed his clothes after these sessions. While his legs wasted, Peter’s hands, forearms, biceps and shoulders became powerful. He liked to crush tin cans, twist cutlery and bend pokers. His nature, never equable, had worsened over time. The lads from Lacey’s garage had stopped visiting after a few months, tired of his tantrums.

  Peter had become wary of Ellen and less outwardly surly, except for occasional outbursts. She had established that she could think and act independently, a characteristic which was almost non-existent amongst the females in their families. His suspicious glances and down-turned mouth, rather than words, expressed his ingratitude for her efforts.

  As far as Mrs Burnham and Hilda were concerned, Ellen’s efforts fell well short of wifely duty; they showed this in quiet chilliness and their frequent mention of how devoted Ivy was.

  Mrs Burnham allowed Ellen no privacy for the few possessions she kept in the closet and dresser in the bedroom she shared with Peter. A week after Coronet Park, Mrs Burnham found something in the course of ‘tidying’. It was Friday night. Ellen had just arrived. She was in the kitchen putting cheese on buttered water biscuits as a snack for Peter before he went to bed.

  Mrs Burnham came into the kitchen holding out her open hand and squinting at Ellen. “What’s this then?”