Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [68]
Mrs. Jones always heard her knees creak on the steep staircase. She moved faster. Forty-three wasn't so very old.
'Hetta is your only child?' asked Mary.
Had the girl read her mind? 'That's right,' answered Mrs. Jones lightly.
She still bled, sometimes. Forty-three wasn't impossible. There had to be the kernel of another child inside her. There had to be a son.
It was the longest morning of Mary's life. Dogged and straight-backed, she moved through her tasks in the order allotted. She'd never lived anywhere like this. Everything in the high, narrow, terraced house was to be cleaned over and over, it seemed, week after week. Susan Digot had never managed to ward off dirt this way, in their basement on Charing Cross Road where ants came up the walls every summer.
Not that Mary told Mrs. Jones that. She let the woman assume that Mary and her widowed mother had lived together in a quiet, respectable way until a sudden fever had carried off Su Saunders before she could make any provision for her dearest daughter except the letter she wrote her old friend. Whenever Mrs. Jones's questions probed too far, that first morning, Mary bent her head as if grief were welling up inside her.
The wretched woman seemed to feel that the best cure for a motherless girl was to be kept busy every minute of the day. There were so many petty rules to learn. At nine o'clock—after they'd all been up and working for two hours already—Mary was to ring the little bell for breakfast. She couldn't see the need for it, in such a small house, but 'the master prefers it,' Mrs. Jones explained; 'he says it raises the tone.'
On Mary's way to breakfast Mr. Jones overtook her in the passage, moving as lithely as any man. He swung into the tiny parlour and took the head of the table, next to the Chinese tea-kettle bubbling over its tiny flame. His oiled birch crutches lay under his chair like dogs. Mary had never eaten with a one-legged man before. She had to resist the temptation to bend down and look under the table at his stump, as if she were at a freak-show.
Brown curls escaped from the edges of the little manservant's short wig. At least Daffy was less unpleasant to look at than the dried-up wet-nurse Mrs. Ash, who hunched over the table to examine the newcomer. Mary glanced down nervously at her blue holland gown; she'd brushed the dirt out of it as best she could.
'Do maids wear hoops, then, in London?' enquired Mrs. Ash.
Mary swallowed her tea with difficulty. 'I was never a maid in London.'
'I see.' The words appeared like frost.
Mr. Jones tapped the table with his fork. 'Now, now, good Mrs. Ash.'
Good Mrs. Ash's grey skirts sagged as much as her breasts. Her chest resembled a salt-barrel, Mary decided. She couldn't be more than forty, but she had the manner of an old woman.
'We must all make Mary welcome,' the mistress added quietly. 'She's never set foot in her own town before, can you imagine?'
Mary tried to look grateful. Her own town; what nonsense. As if this misbegotten spattering of streets meant anything to her. And she'd be damned if she'd give up wearing her improvers, just to fit in with these country-dwellers!
Abi brought in the porridge, moving like a sleepwalker. Hetta babbled on about wanting toasted crusts instead, but the maid-of-all-work didn't seem to hear the child. She gave no sign of understanding English, in fact. How strange for her to have ended up here in Monmouth; she was the first dark face Mary had seen since the Strand. Mary watched Abi sideways as she served them, the coal gloss of her standing out against the whitewashed walls. She had cheekbones you could cut butter with. She disappeared back into the kitchen as soon as all the porridge was ladled into their bowls. Would she eat afterwards, alone?
'Is Abi an African?' asked Mary, once the door had shut.
'Oh, I don't think so,' said the mistress, sounding a little alarmed.
'On the contrary, my dear,' said Mr. Jones to his wife between two spoonfuls of porridge,