The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [8]
"This minute."
"I heard you all right. You were very quick with that door. Likely you left that key outside in the lock again?"
"No, it's here, truly." Portia scooped the key from her pocket.
"You didn't ought to carry that key in your pocket. Not loose like that—and with your money too. One of these days you'll go losing the lot. She gave you a bag, didn't she?"
"I feel such a goat with a bag. I feel so silly."
Matchett said sharply: "All girls your age carry bags."
Vexed ambition for Portia made Matchett click her teeth; her belt creaked as she gave an irate sigh. The dusk seemed to baulk her; they could barely see each other—her hand went up decidedly to the switch between the arches. Immediately, Anna's cut-glass lamp sprang alight over their heads, dropping its complex shadow on the white stone floor. Portia, her hat pushed back from her forehead, stood askance under the light; she and Matchett blinked; there followed one of those pauses in which animals, face to face, appear to communicate.
Matchett stayed with her hand propped on the pillar. She had an austere, ironical straight face, flesh padded smoothly over the strong structure of bone. Her strong springy lustreless hair was centre parted and drawn severely back; she wore no cap. Habitually, she walked with her eyes down, and her vein-marbled eyelids were unconciliating. Her mouth, at this moment stubbornly inexpressive, still had a crease at each end from her last unwilling smile. Her expression, her attitude were held-in and watchful. The monklike impassivity of her features made her big bust curious, out of place; it seemed some sort of structure for the bib of her apron to be fastened up to with gold pins. To her unconscious sense of inner drama, only her hands gave play: one hand seemed to support the fragile Regency pillar, the other was spread fanwise, like a hand in a portrait, over her aproned hip. While she thought, or rather, calculated, her eyes would move slowly under her dropped lids.
It was five to four. The cook, whose night out it was, lay in her afternoon bath: in front of the pantry mirror the parlourmaid, Phyllis, was trying on a new cap. These two girls in their twenties had been engaged by Anna, and formed, as it were, Anna's party below stairs. Matchett, on the other hand, had been not a matter of choice: she had been years in service in Dorset with Thomas Quayne's motherland after Mrs. Quayne's death had come on to 2 Windsor Terrace with the furniture that had always been her charge. A charwoman, Mrs. Wayes, now came in to clean and polish, ostensibly leaving Matchett freer to maid Anna and Portia and valet Thomas. But Mrs. Wayes' area was, in fact, jealously limited by Matchett—accordingly, Matchett kept longer hours than anyone in the house. She slept alone, next the boxroom: across the same top landing the cook and Phyllis shared an airy attic with a view of Park Road.
By day, she exacted an equal privacy. The front of the basement had been divided into Phyllis's pantry and a slit of a sittingroom, which, by an arrangement Anna did not question, Matchett occupied in her spare time. Boiling her own kettles on her gas ring, she joined the kitchen party only for dinner: if the basement door happened to be left open, you could hear the fun break out when she had withdrawn again. Her superior status was further underlined by the fact of her not wearing a cap: the two girls took orders from Anna, Matchett suggestions only. The two young servants did not resent Matchett—she might be repressive, but kept herself to herself—they had learnt that no situation is ever perfect, and Anna was as a mistress amiable, even lax. No one knew where Matchett went on her afternoons off: she was a countrywoman, with few friends here. She never showed fatigue, except fatigue of the eyes: in her sittingroom, she would sometimes take off the glasses she wore for reading or sewing, and sit with one hand shading her forehead stiffly, like someone looking