One Pair of Hands Read online

  ‘Monica, this is a terrible grocer’s bill! I’d no idea you were ordering such strings of things. I really can’t have you running up such bills as this, it’s absolutely scandalous. Two bottles of salad oil in one week, and all this butter. It’s absurd. Either you’re very extravagant or they’re swindling us. Let me see the invoices. I suppose you’ve kept them?’ This was rather a ghastly moment as, of course, I had never bothered to keep those grubby little lists which bore such mystic signs as 2 Dem and ½ Dig. Bisc. My stomach sank with the cold sick feeling that I hadn’t felt since my school days, when one thought the world had come to an end if one was caught talking in the cloak-room.

  I hung my head and mumbled.

  ‘Well, really,’ said my master, outraged, ‘you are impossible – you must do better than that.’ I suddenly saw red and all my Bolshie instincts rose and bade me stand up for myself.

  ‘I’m sorry about the invoices, but as to the amount of things on the bill, I ordered what was necessary for the dishes that you asked me to do. I can’t cook with air, and the store cupboard was practically empty when I came. Perhaps you would find it more satisfactory to go out and order the things yourself.’

  ‘That will do, Monica. There is no need to speak in that impertinent way. I will think about it, though it is a pity that I should be bothered with household details when I’m so busy.’

  I managed to change my involuntary snort of derision into a cough, and Mr Parrish removed himself sulkily.

  His aunt came to dinner that night, so I listened outside the door in order to make sure of entering in the middle of a conversation about me, so that I could have the pleasure of hearing them break off suddenly as I went in.

  Mr Parrish’s French wasn’t very good, but he achieved the general idea with:

  ‘Pas avant le Qweeseenyayer’ as I took in the sweet course.

  When I had gone out again, I stamped my feet with a diminuendo effect so as to sound as if I was returning to the kitchen, while I really waited outside the door, balancing the tray of meat plates and vegetable dishes on my hip.

  The aunt was quite a nice old thing and I’m sure was bored, as everyone is, by the discussion of other people’s domestic worries. However, I heard her say politely: ‘But she really seems quite a good cook; the dinner is very nice, I’m sure.’ (It had been one of my flash-in-the-pan successful evenings.)

  ‘Oh, she occasionally produces things that are quite eatable,’ said Martin Parrish in a tired voice, ‘but she’s a rotten servant really. No experience at all I should think, and a bit of a slut.’ There was a pause while knives and forks clattered a little. Then the aunt said: ‘I thought she seemed rather a nice-looking girl – quite pretty in a common way.’

  ‘Oh, d’you think so?’ said her nephew. ‘I don’t.’

  Crash! You would not have thought that one gravy tureen lid, sliding to the floor under stress of emotion, could have made so much noise. I went quickly to the kitchen and exchanged my tray for the dessert plates which I took in at once, so that when Mr Parrish said: ‘What was that? Something broken?’ I was able to say:

  ‘No, sir, one of the fruit plates just slipped out of my hand as I was bringing them in.’

  I did not dare add to my unpopularity by admitting the breakage, so my life after this was an incessant struggle to conceal the fact that one of the tureens was minus a lid. Luckily it belonged to a set still in stock at a big store, so I ordered another, but they were very slow in sending it. I had to steer him away from the idea of ordering dishes that needed both sauce and gravy, or else suggest a cold sauce, that would not arouse comment if brought in uncovered.

  He told me what he had decided about the bills.

  ‘I don’t like to run up these big bills. You are to pay the grocer and greengrocer at the door every day when they come for orders, for what we have had the day before. Be sure to keep the invoices and check them when the things are delivered. Then you can ask me for the money for what we have had before the man comes.’

  I thought this was a ghastly idea, and one calculated to give the greatest possible amount of trouble to myself, but perhaps that was the intention.

  It turned out to be even worse in practice. I have always been very incompetent about money, and hate having to deal with other people’s. What with invoices finding their way into the dustbin, or arriving on a rainy day, an illegible blur, I got into distressing muddles, and was consequently often out of pocket, through having to make good the results of my inefficiency. The question of change was very tedious, too. Mr Parrish never had any, and would give me a ten-shilling note the evening before to pay the grocer, who, after much fumbling in an ancient red leather purse concealed beneath several layers of coats and aprons, would produce one paltry sixpence. I had to toil upstairs to see whether perhaps he had some change this morning, which was rare. I generally had to pay out of my own money in the hope of refunding myself when, if ever, I got change for the note.

  One gets used to anything in time, however; even money worries become part of the routine of the day, and I began to settle down like a fairly contented vegetable into my Campden Hill life.

  The thing that was really the greatest bore was E. L. Robbins’ pertinacity. The vacuum cleaner was always giving trouble. It would work marvellously for a little, to make me realize what an indispensable joy it was, and would then suddenly develop some extraordinary disease. One terrifying day it started to give off blue smoke and sparks, and other times it would just go sullen and refuse to travel over the carpet in that effortless glide described in the advertisements. I had, therefore, to send for Ernest, and I firmly believe that, although he mended the immediate damage, he nobbled it in some mysterious way so that he would have to be called in to repair it again.

  He was quite useful at doing odd jobs in the kitchen, but it was a bit of a bore to be incessantly making tea, and fobbing him off when he said:

  ‘What do you do on your evenings out?’ I wouldn’t have minded ‘sixpenn’rth of Dark’ with the greengrocer, but Ernest did not appeal.

  In any case my evenings out were generally devoted to sleeping. Sometimes, when Mr Parrish went out to dinner, I got off quite early, but he was a lazy brute, and generally preferred to dine chez lui, often in the company of Simon Nichols.

  Christmas time approached and I wondered if he was going to have parties and be very gay at the expense of the poor cook-general. Great was my relief when he announced that he was going to spend it in the country, with Simon and his mother. I heard them discussing it at lunch one day. Kenneth sat silently crumbling bits of bread or poking his food round the plate with a fork. He wasn’t going away. I wondered if he had a nice home, perhaps his mother was a callous sort of woman who didn’t understand his sensitive little nature. However, I couldn’t make out how anyone could be less than overjoyed by the idea of London being rid of Martin for a few days; I myself was almost skipping round the table with the spinach at the thought.

  It was one of the spotty girl’s days to arrive with her paper parcel, and, still imbued with the Spirit of Xmas Cheer, I submitted quite happily to being told to walk with a piece of satin wound tightly round my nether limbs to test the practicability of the hobble skirt. As I detached myself from the clutch of Kenneth, into whose arms I had fallen after tripping over a footstool, I saw his expression change from a gentle concern to bitter resentment. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Mr Parrish had evidently answered the door to Simon while we were pre-occupied, and he was now entering the room in a beautiful smooth grey suit. Work was abandoned while he and Martin fell to discussing Christmas plans, and when I took up the tea, spotty face had gone, and Kenneth too. Mr Parrish was going away directly after lunch on Christmas Eve. I was telling Isobel this one afternoon when she was visiting me below stairs, and we were suddenly struck with the most perfect idea.

  ‘Let’s give a cocktail party on Christmas Eve, here in the kitchen!’

  ‘Marvellous! It’ll be frightfully orig
inal – I should think we could cram in at least twenty people, wouldn’t you?’

  We got down to plans and fixed it all up. Unfortunately, it happened to be one of the days when Ernest Robbins was sitting in a corner of the kitchen, doing something mysterious to the internals of my vacuum cleaner, so, as he had heard all the plan-making, we had to ask him to come. I was glad we did, because he was so frightfully pleased and excited. We told him to come about an hour later than we were going to ask the others, as he was sure to turn up much too early.

  About this time, the tradesmen began to get very obliging, in the hope, I suppose, that the master of the house would give Christmas boxes accordingly.

  ‘Some hope –’ I thought, but he did actually ask me which ones I thought ought to have tips, so I put in a good word for my special friends. I had discovered a latent charm in the baker, who, at first sight, had seemed uninteresting and stodgy as his dough. This must have been shyness, because, after we had met every day for quite a long time, he quite thawed, and we were soon telling each other our life histories with true back-door lack of reticence. It appeared that he had a daughter – ‘Just about your age, our Violet would be. Proper little piece she is, and no mistake. And smart! Keeps the boys guessing all right. She’s got a regular now though, lovely steady boy he is – got a good job in the gent’s hose at Gamidges. He give our Vi a ring too, straight he did – though of course they’ll be walking out for a coupla years or so yet.’

  I managed to see that he got something, and also the greengrocer, and the decrepit old grocer. I got my own back on the milkman by telling Mr Parrish that the Milkmen’s Union didn’t allow Christmas boxes. I hated that man, he looked capable of watering the milk with the tears of little children.

  The day before Christmas Eve there arose the important and exciting question of whether my employer was going to romp out with any sort of a present for me. Like the tradesmen, I became almost maddeningly obliging all day, and kept offering nice cups of tea. I even did most of his packing for him, and made doubly sure of not being overlooked, by arriving next morning with a box of chocolates bearing a label saying ‘A Merry Xmas from Monica’. He came up to scratch nobly, I must say, and presented me with ten shillings. I was surprised into a last-minute affection for him, as he drove off in his little cream-coloured coupé, with Mimi in her basket on the back seat. Kenneth and I waved from the front door like a couple of old family retainers. He had to stay for a little to write a few letters, but I thought he would be gone by the time I started preparing for my party. I had made most of the food, and was just going to go out to a shop nearby to get the drink, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard him leave. I looked into the drawing-room, and there he sat by the dying fire, with a writing-pad on his lap and a pen idle in his hand, staring into space. I went up to him, and saw that his eyes were filled with tears, and when I asked him what the matter was, he could hardly speak.

  ‘I’m a fool, I know,’ he gulped, ‘but it’s the ingratitude of it that I can’t bear, the awful ingratitude –’ To my dismay he suddenly burst into floods of tears, and, though I hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, it was all so tragic that I started to cry myself, and we sobbed on each other’s shoulder for fully five minutes. It was a lovely cry, just as good as seeing a pathetic film at the cinema, and when we had finished I think he felt better.

  I thought it might cheer him up to tell him about the cocktail party. I made him swear not to tell Parrish and asked him if he’d like to come. He was quite delighted at the idea, like a child, and we went off together to buy the drink. When we got back, Isobel was already sitting on the area steps waiting to be let in. I explained away Kenneth to her when he was upstairs getting something, and then he came down and helped us make the cocktails. He must have had a very weak head, poor darling, for, even after only doing a little tasting, he got wildly excited and started to enjoy himself very much. We explained to him that the party hadn’t begun yet, and he calmed down a little, but I thought he was going to become rather a handful before long. Needless to say, E. L. Robbins arrived much too early in spite of our precautions. If we had told him the right time, I believe he would have come before tea. He came in shuffling his feet and holding his hands behind his back, and eventually, giggling coyly, he said: ‘Please don’t think me a presumptuous chap, but I would like to present the two charming ladies with a little token of seasonable good wishes.’

  Thereupon he produced from behind his back two of the most ghastly brooches ever seen on the counter of any multiple store, and, thanking him gushingly, we simply had to wear them.

  People were now starting to arrive. We had said ‘area steps’ on the invitation, and it was funny to see them being amused by what was my daily trek to and from duty. We got Ernest off with an accommodating girl, and the party really went marvellously – that kitchen has never known such a cheerful atmosphere before or since. I had put away most of the crockery, but half-way through the party, Kenneth suddenly fell to the ground like a dead thing, and lay fast asleep with his head pillowed on the remnants of a vegetable dish that he had broken in his fall. We left him there, and he looked so happy and peaceful.

  I felt more than disinclined to go back to work on the day after Boxing Day, when I had to go and prepare the house for my employer’s return. He was due to arrive at about seven o’clock, so I trailed along as late as possible, and then had a terrific rush to get things tidied up in time. I hadn’t felt like clearing up after the cocktail party, and the kitchen looked a wreck. More things had been broken than I had thought, and the electric light bowl was soon pretty well crammed with pieces of china and glass, as well as the cigarette ends and odd bits of food that had been strewn everywhere in drab confusion.

  I made a list of the things I would have to replace, and was thankful that I had been given some money at Christmas, though it seemed rather a pathetic way to spend it.

  Suddenly remembering that I had not yet lit the drawing-room fire, I rushed upstairs, cleared the grate and laid it in a haphazard way, and did my usual incendiary trick with the methylated spirits. I shook up the cushions a bit to make the room look a little less neglected, and went down to finish the washing up.

  I forgot all about the fire, though I had meant to go up and put more coal on it as it burned through, and when I eventually did remember, it was practically out. There was no more methylated, so I resorted feverishly to all the dodges I had ever read of in the Home Magazine – lumps of sugar, candle-ends, etc., but all to no purpose. I held a large sheet of newspaper in front of it for ages, and was rewarded at last by a faint crackling. There was more smoke than fire, however, and Martin Parrish had to choose this inconvenient moment to arrive, tired and cross from a long cold drive. He walked into the room where I was still kneeling, and was greeted by clouds of belching black smoke. Coughing and wiping my eyes, I apologized, but he took himself off in high dudgeon to huddle over his electric fire upstairs. When the fire had exhausted itself by smoking, it quietly died. The only thing to be done was to start all over again from rock-bottom, which I did, very harassed by the fact that Mr Parrish called down that he would like to have supper as soon as possible.

  When the fire was at last beginning to burn, I hastily laid the table with what was left of the crockery and glass, and heated up a stew of rather dubious age, which had been congealing in the larder over Christmas. I put in a lot of herbs and seasoning, to disguise any possible rank taste, and he ate it all right, but gloomily.

  I wasn’t going to offer to unpack, in case he accepted, and he luckily didn’t think of asking me, so I finished up downstairs quickly, and left him crouched over the struggling fire.

  The next high spot was New Year’s Eve, and, to my intense disgust, Martin Parrish started to talk about giving a party. He and I made out an approximate list of the food and drink that would be needed, and he took it away to count up the cost. Evidently he found the total too vast, for the next thing I heard was that his ideas had
descended with a rush from having twenty people and giving them champagne, to three couples and Simon and giving them bridge and fruit punch. The dinner was to be on quite a large scale, however, and I took the first opportunity of rushing out when I should have been polishing the silver, to replace the breakages of my party.

  Mr Parrish was nosing around in the kitchen when I got back, so I had to hide my parcels in the coal cellar until he had gone. ‘Where have you been?’ he inquired, as I entered humming innocently. He had evidently forgotten that he had told me I could go out any afternoon I liked, I suppose because I hardly ever did, as there was always too much to do.

  ‘Just popped out to get some eggs, sir.’

  ‘Eggs, what for? They’re dear just now, aren’t they?’

  ‘Well, sir, I – er – thought I might make the trifle today for tomorrow’s dinner.’

  ‘Oh, I see, well, I suppose that’s all right. We seem to be rather short of glasses. You didn’t tell me you’d broken any –’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t, sir, I just put some in another cupboard, that’s all.’

  My prayers that he wouldn’t ask ‘which cupboard?’ were answered, for Mimi started yapping upstairs, so he had to hurry away. The next day was a terrible one for me. I started preparing the dinner quite early, so as not to have such a panic in the evening, and Martin chose that day to have a migraine. He stayed in bed till six o’clock and kept his finger almost permanently on the bell-push all day – I wonder the red arrow didn’t drop off. First his breakfast egg was too hard and he must have another, then he wanted some cigarettes, then orange juice, and once it was for me to go into the street and send away a barrel organ. I didn’t like to do this without giving the man any money, and as none was forthcoming from the Parrish purse, and I had none, I had to borrow it from Ernest Robbins, who needless to say was in the kitchen again, getting underfoot and altogether being a nuisance.