The Unforgiving Shore Page 12

  It took a second for Ellen to realise that the thin gold ring in Mrs Burnham’s palm was her own gold wedding ring. “You know what it is! Stay out of my drawer!”

  “So we’re a single woman now, are we?”

  “None of the kitchen and waiting staff at the Grange are allowed to wear rings.”

  Mrs Burnham’s face was pinched in disbelief when Peter banged the door open with the footrest of his wheelchair and propelled himself into the room. “What’s going on then?”

  *

  On Saturday afternoon Ellen was alone in the house with Peter; they were in the parlour. She was taking away his afternoon tea plate and wiping spots of food off his chest when she noticed grey hairs at his temples; greying at twenty-six. She leaned over and touched the once-glossy black mane. Peter pressed his forehead between her breasts. She felt a surge of compassion for the broken captive.

  She moved gently after a moment to disengage herself. Instead, she felt his arm tighten around her waist. “Please, Peter.”

  His free hand groped for, and found, the neck of her thin woollen sweater. With a powerful wrench he ripped it open revealing her white brassiere. He snapped the brassiere ribbons. His teeth sought one of her nipples. She screamed with a sound that made the room vibrate. She rained a panic of blows on Peter’s skull, but with her small fists it was like beating a marble bust. She howled against a rising tide of pain in her spine as he bent her backwards, forcing his head against her breasts. At the same time, with an arm round the small of her back, he was drawing her toward him. She pushed and threw herself forward, the only movement left to her to relieve her spine. She thrust herself over his head as the chair rolled across the floor, jerked to a stop on the edge of a mat and overbalanced backwards. They both crashed to the floor.

  Peter groaned now, feeling his own pain. He had loosened his hold and Ellen rolled out of reach. He was moaning, watching her, but unable to move his body. He reached across the floor and clamped her ankle with his fist.

  The lower part of her body was white hot. “No, Peter, no!”

  “I’ll choke you, you slut!” He dragged her closer.

  She grabbed a heavy glass ash-tray which had fallen from an occasional table in the melee. She struck him on the shoulder. He loosened his hold of her ankle, but caught his fingers in the waistband of her skirt. She hit him again and again and again on his shoulder and back, until he let her go. She slid out of reach.

  He lay on his stomach now, his face contorted in agony, mouth wide open, breath rasping in his throat, his eyes staring like a fish landed on a dock. She watched him in horror, calculating through her own hurt whether she had the strength to stand.

  She stood up slowly and gingerly. She stumbled toward the door, skirting him. The ash-tray was still in her hand. Peter had won it a week before their marriage on the rifle range at the Barton Village Show. He had presented it to her in a flare of macho pride. She limped into the bedroom, took a rug from the bed and threw it over him on the floor. She dragged herself up the street to the callbox to get an ambulance. Then she returned to the house and sat in the bedroom alone, waiting.

  Mrs Burnham returned from her visiting before the ambulance arrived. Ellen heard her go into the parlour. She heard her cries and Peter’s moans. Ellen made no move to get off the bed. Her back hurt so much she could hardly walk.

  “Where is that woman?” was Mrs Burnham’s quavery cry as she burst into the bedroom. “Leave this house forever and never, never come back!”

  “That’s what I intend to do, Mother. Look at me!” Ellen lifted her sweater to show the bleeding lacerations and purpling bruises on her breasts. “This is the work of your precious son!”

  Mrs Burnham’s face screwed up like a dried walnut shell. “It’s no more than you deserve, you hussy!”

  *

  Mrs Burnham went in the ambulance with Peter and when they had gone, Ellen did her best to ignore her pain. She packed the old cardboard suitcase under the bed with the few clothes she wanted to take, resting two dresses and her winter coat over her arm. She had a last look around the sad room which desperately tried to be bright, with white-washed walls and new blue candlewick spreads over the two narrow beds. The wedding presents were still in beer cartons on the floor and on top of the wardrobe. She could leave all the vases, tea towels and water jugs without regret.

  She let herself out of the house, limped a block to Dock Street and knocked at the door of a terraced house around the corner from the one she had lived in as a child. Carrie Chatwin, bent, with a fuzz of thin white hair, took her inside protectively when she saw the red eyes and the suitcase; she made a cup of tea and listened to Ellen. Ellen showed Carrie her breasts and they both cried.

  When she had calmed a little, Ellen went to the telephone box on the corner. She couldn’t reach her brother Arthur at the transport cafè where he worked, but she did get Reg, a shiftworker on the railways, at his lodgings. He listened to her quietly.

  “I don’t hold with knocking a woman about, Elly, but the lad’s got a tough number and you’re his wife…”

  “I’m not going to hang around and get murdered,” Ellen said, hanging up.

  She called her sister Ivy next and Ivy was even less inclined to see her point of view. “If I know you, you started the row anyway…” Ivy said hotly.

  Finally, Ellen rang Aunt Hilda who had been a mother to her and was looked upon as the head of the Colbert family. Hilda was brisk, dismissive. “I’ve already had a call from Rose Burnham about it. It’s a storm in a teacup.”

  “Auntie, I have teeth marks on my breasts; my back’s nearly broken!”

  “What you and Peter need is a place of your own. I was talking to Jim Cosby at the council. Peter has special priority. It may only take a few months. We need to put in an application…”

  “No, Aunt Hilda.”

  “May I ask why, girl?”

  “Because Peter is a murderous bastard who hates me because I’m whole.”

  “That’s how you feel today because you’re smarting.”

  “I’m not just smarting. I’ve been attacked. I’m in pain. I’m not going to live with a man I’m afraid of.”

  Hilda exhaled disbelief. “Pshaaaaw! Think of tomorrow, Ellen. You’re Peter’s wife and when you two get a house of your own…”

  Ellen put down the receiver, sobbing at the unfairness.

  When she said goodbye to Carrie Chatwin that evening and caught the bus back to work, she sat aching as it rocked and rattled through the darkness. She was on her own for the first time in her life, heading into the unknown. The Grange and John were unknown, glittering, beckoning perhaps, but frighteningly unknown. Ship Street and Blakiston Row were part of her; even the Hildas and Mrs Burnhams would always be there if she wanted, if she followed their rules.

  14

  A few weeks later, Grayson asked to see Ellen in his office, an alarming sign. Her affair with John Marchmont was the talk of the servants at the Grange, not that Laura gossiped; it became obvious when they were occasionally seen together in the grounds, or at the Green Man. Ellen sat opposite Grayson in his tiny room. His usually jovial face was pale and set.

  “There’s a house rule, Ellen, about staff mixing socially with the family or the guests.” His freckles speckled darkly on his cheeks.

  “I know.”

  “A damn silly rule, because you can’t mix unless they permit it. But as usual, we get the worst of it.”

  Her job, the security and comfort of the Grange, the distance it put between her and Peter, the glimpse of a brilliant life, even if it was the brilliant life of others, all these precious things had faded in her mind with her passion for John; their importance came back to her as though she was clearing her head from a fever. “Are you sacking me?”

  Grayson came around the table. His hand on her arm was white with golden hairs. “Never, my dear. I’m so fond of you.”

  She didn’t know whether she was reprieved. She smelt his mint mouthwash; a per
sonal servant always attends to his breath. She liked him. She felt tearful.

  “I’ve had my thoughts Ellen, as you probably know. A woman always knows. At least the tender kind of a woman you are. I’d hoped we might get together. I’ve got a good place here, and with you… you’d become housekeeper in a few years and it would be perfect.”

  His dreams had gone a lot further than hers. He gave her a vision of a very different life. Mrs Jovey, the present housekeeper, was nearly seventy and would retire soon. A trusted butler with a capable wife could influence the choice of housekeeper. Butler-housekeeper was the kind of pairing which made families feel safe. Mr and Mrs Grayson would be a comfortable couple at the Grange, living in a genteel style they could never have afforded outside. Life would be ordered; they would have an apartment in the mansion; they would have money and eventually retire, probably to a cottage on the estate. Grayson wasn’t offering merely sincere affection and marriage, but partnership in a respected and assured style of life.

  Despite his penchant for tomfoolery, Jack Grayson was a competent and well regarded figure in the eyes of the Marchmonts; Ellen believed that all he had suggested was likely to happen to whoever became Grayson’s wife.

  “I like you very much, Jack.” She patted his hand, noticing how long and slender her hands were beside his short and puffy fingers. “But I haven’t told you. I’m already married. My husband’s in a wheelchair. I can’t think of settling down with anybody else at the moment.”

  Grayson showed no surprise. “I had heard about it, Ellen. You know how they talk. What you say doesn’t need to matter. We have plenty of time. Will you think of what I’ve said and give it some time? I’m sorry it’s come out this way. I’m a bit mixed up. I’m supposed to be warning you and I’m proposing. The day I first saw you at the kitchen door you might as well have hit me over the head with a poker. I saw stars. It’s true.”

  Ellen couldn’t imagine making love to Jack Grayson, much as she liked him. She could see herself as housekeeper, controlling the servants, treating guests and family diplomatically; she had the imagination and confidence for that and the lifestyle would be dear to her. But poor Jack didn’t arouse the slightest sexual feeling in her. She really had no choice. It was an offer she couldn’t accept, even if she had not had John. She said, “I’m twenty-one, Jack. I’ve got a husband who’s no good. I want a bit of fun!”

  Grayson retreated behind his desk. He stiffened himself up. “I understand, Ellen. Excuse me for being so personal.”

  “It’s good that we spoke, Jack.” She stood up, leaned over the small desk and kissed him on his balding forehead.

  He sighed. “I’ve lost the track of what I have to say. All I can say is that if old Geoffrey finds out what you’re up to you could get the boot. But nobody on the staff is going to tell him. We think too much of you.” He managed a wink.

  Ellen knew she was walking on the edge of a precipice. Her work was all she had apart from John. She imagined what it would be like to be told to go, to get on the bus with her few clothes in a bag, to be rattled into Barton Village, to get out of the bus in a cold easterly with a few pounds in her purse. Would John come to look for her? How attractive would she be to him serving spaghetti at the Deluxe, or lodging in the back room at Carrie Chatwin’s?

  But she knew she would continue to walk the precipice. She wasn’t going to give John up. She didn’t think it was love, not romantic love, handsome as John was. She was conscious of the abyss between them in background and upbringing but they were capable of being very close. She acknowledged to herself that her feelings were selfish. John filled her days with a radiance from a different life and with sexual pleasure. He had opened the door a crack on a world she had only seen in the movies, or over the shoulders of guests in the Marchmont dining room.

  *

  Ellen told John her story, all of it, honestly, one night in Coronet Park; it had become too burdensome for her to conceal it any longer. They sat together after making love, with their backs propped against the trunk of a pine tree, wrapped in a car rug.

  John accepted it all without comment and with a slightly reflective smile; he thought for a while. “What do you want to do?”

  “Get away from Peter Burnham, his mother, Aunt Hilda, Reg and Arthur and Ivy, all of them.”

  “Funny that. I don’t have anybody to get away from. I’ve always been rather irrelevant to my family, fitting in here and there when it suits them, or bumming an invitation to keep a roof over my head for a few months when they’ve forgotten I exist. The complete reverse.”

  Most of the time John wasn’t serious about anything but now there was a tinge of bitterness in his voice.

  As summer decayed into autumn, John continued to behave without any mention of the future and Ellen tried to shut her mind to the inevitable; she was on the edge of a dark void.

  *

  One day they were sitting in one of their favourite places, a remote part of the estate on the high side of a sunny field overlooking a stretch of the Nar River. The branches of the trees were beginning to point angrily at the sky. The air was chill.

  “I’ve nearly worn out the welcome mat with Geoffrey,” John said, “and I’m going to have to move on. And he knows about you.”

  She had a pang of anxiety. “What did he say?”

  John imitated his uncle’s mincing voice. ‘“Leave the girl alone. Don’t be such a damned cad. I hear she’s very well-liked and good at her job!”’

  Ellen wasn’t amused. “What’s he going to do? And what are you going to do? Go somewhere miles away where I’ll never see you?”

  He paused and looked at her with his pale blue eyes innocently wide. It was as though she was about to fall into a pool which might embrace her with its warmth, or shock her with its iciness. She couldn’t tell. Her reflection was there too, a tiny speck poised above the pool.

  “It’s not what Geoffrey’s going to do, Ellen. Or what I’m going to do. It’s what we’re going to do.”

  We! Ellen couldn’t have heard a more important word.

  John stretched out on his back, sucking a straw, in no hurry to explain. “I think we’ve earned a holiday!” he said, sitting up and kissing her.

  As long as there was something! A holiday didn’t mean much to her. She had never had one, unless you could call an annual outing to Hunstanton Beach with the Barton Village Working Men’s Club a holiday. She had never travelled more than fifty miles from King’s Lynn. The people she knew didn’t have holidays. If they had time off work, they dug the garden, or papered the parlour, or went more often to the pub.

  “Why don’t we take a voyage on a big ship? See the world? I’d like to go to Australia,” John asked dreamily.

  “Are you serious, John?”

  “Sure!”

  “You must have had this in mind all along.”

  “Damn right I have!” he yelled, throwing himself on her and burying his face in her neck. “One long party, I promise!”

  As she unwrapped herself from his arms, the idea of a voyage was marvellous to her, but the thought of Australia wasn’t so attractive. Why couldn’t it be Paris or Rome? Of course, she knew virtually nothing about Australia. She remembered Grayson sitting in the kitchen at the Grange reading aloud from a copy of The Times which he had retrieved from the breakfast room. The girls were cleaning the silver and he was telling them that the British were testing atomic bombs on the Monte Bello Islands near Australia. He said Australia was a desert where the British could do things they wouldn’t do in their own back yard.

  *

  Ellen asked Grayson if she could talk to him in his office. He must have known it was a bad omen. He shouldered her inside. He looked quite modest taking his seat beneath a framed cartoon of the Admirable Crighton on the wall, with a pile of new menu cards beside him on one side and a wire basket of kitchen accounts on the other.

  “I’m leaving, Jack. I’m very sorry to be going. I’ve been happy here.”

  “
I hope you won’t regret this, my dear.” He massaged his ginger quiff uncertainly.

  “I’ll tell you, I’m going to Australia with John.”

  “John? Er… John Marchmont? Thank you for telling me… I’m a bit at a loss, but I thought…” He stood up, bowed slightly and eased himself out of the door. “I’ll get Doris.”

  After a few minutes, Doris came in. Grayson didn’t return. “You’ve upset him. Only you could do that,” she said.

  Doris had long, dry fair hair and a firm jaw. Work and anxiety had carved vertical lines on her face which overlaid a map of smaller and more intricate lines. “I won’t say I’m sorry to see you go, Ellen. But woman to woman, I think you’re barmy. That young toff will drop you like a hot coal when he’s ready, mark my words.”

  Ellen hardly weighed her words. “Doris, there are hundreds of jobs for servants in hundreds of mansions like this, but there’s only one young toff offering to take me to Australia in my life and I’m going!”

  Doris had had ten years more experience than Ellen, two marriages and two children, but she thought about what Ellen had said and eventually assented with kindly understanding. “That’s the spirit girl, if it doesn’t spoil things for you!”

  “Why should it spoil things for me?”

  Doris didn’t answer.

  *

  Ellen couldn’t face Hilda’s unswerving contempt. She had only telephoned Hilda a few times since their conversation on the day she left Ship Street, but she felt obliged to try to find out how Peter was; this seemed to be more urgent now that her life was about to change. In their last talk, when Ellen repeated that she was afraid of Peter Burnham, Hilda had been scornful. “Rubbish! Get and do your chores my girl!”

  Now, Ellen summoned her will; she took some small coins to the callbox on the main road near the service entrance of the Grange. She couldn’t go away for months without letting Hilda know; John had said it could be months.

  “Hello, Aunt Hilda.”

  “Oh, it’s you. You’ve taken your time.” Hilda gave a theatrical sigh.