1
Alice
January 1936
The winter sky was yellowish-grey and it sagged wearily over the frozen world. It had snowed last night, but disappointingly; a mean scattering of dirty white that had frozen into sharp crystals – nothing you could make a snowman from (would she be allowed anyway? Probably not). The cold slapped Alice’s cheeks and burned deep into her bones as she trudged miserably after Miss Lovelock.
They had taken their usual route, along the west carriage drive and round the edge of the lake, where last autumn’s leaves still lay in a mouldering rust-coloured carpet. The gardens at Blackwood Park were extensive and elaborate; once they had been the jewel in its crown, but now, with only elderly Patterson and a simple boy to maintain them they were overgrown and out of bounds. Alice’s daily walk (non-negotiable: Miss Lovelock was a great believer in the benefits of Fresh Air) was over the rough parkland, past sheep that eyed her with hostility. After eleven days it had already taken on a familiarity that was oppressive rather than comforting.
Eleven days. Was that all?
The unsettled feeling in her tummy was back as she thought of all the days that yawned ahead until Mama came home. She stopped, focusing on the white swirl of her frozen breath and the poker-like plants at the edge of the water. Bulrushes, Miss Lovelock said. Alice had heard of them in the bible story of Moses, but had never seen them before she came to Blackwood – there certainly weren’t any on the banks of the Serpentine or by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, or any of the other places she went for winter walks with Mama (sometimes followed by tea at Maison Lyons or Gunters, or – if they had got cold and wet – crumpets at home, toasted together in front of the parlour fire). She stared hard at them, making herself notice their compact shape and velvety texture, because noticing those things distracted her from the sick, hollow feeling in her tummy. She would have liked to break one off, to take back up to the house so she could sketch it with the beautiful set of pencils Mama had bought her for Christmas (twelve different colours, like a rainbow in a tin) but she suspected that wouldn’t be allowed either. Grandmama had taken the pencils away when Alice had arrived, ‘for safekeeping’. Drawing was not encouraged at Blackwood Park.
‘Alice! Come along, child – quick march!’
Miss Lovelock’s voice, bristling with impatience, carried back from the point far ahead to which her brisk pace had taken her (‘quick march’ was not so much an expression, but a command. She was extremely fond of marching.) Everything about Miss Lovelock was brisk and no-nonsense, from her lace-up shoes and mannish ties to her fondness for arithmetic and Latin verbs – subjects with exact answers and no room for ‘what if?’
(Mama said that ‘what if?’ was always a good question to ask. She turned it into a game that they played on the top of the motorbus: what if you could be invisible for a day – what would you do? What if animals could talk? What if Parliament was filled with women instead of men?)
Alice left the bulrushes and began to trudge dutifully towards Miss Lovelock. The governess’s arms were folded across her wide chest and, even at this distance, Alice could see that her brows were drawn down into a single black line of exasperation. Much as Miss Lovelock liked Fresh Air, Alice knew she was eager to get back to the house and hand over her charge so she could spend the afternoon listening to the wireless in the warmth of her room. Even so, passing the old boathouse Alice couldn’t resist pausing to press her face close to the mossy window, peering in at the tangle of fishing rods in the corner, the pile of moth-eaten cushions, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghosts that slumbered there dreaming of long-ago summers; of boating parties and picnics and swimming in the lake …
Blackwood Park was full of ghosts. Its empty corridors echoed with the whispers of lost voices and snatches of old laughter. It was a house where the past felt more vivid than the present, which was nothing more than a stretch of endless days fading into uniform blankness. It had been Mama’s house when she was growing up, and she had told Alice how she, Aunt Miranda and Uncle Howard would play hopscotch on the marble floor in the entrance hall and French cricket on the nursery corridor with the footmen, in the days before the Great War when there had been footmen at Blackwood (and when there had been an Uncle Howard – though of course he hadn’t been an Uncle then, and never would be a living one). Alice thought it might be their voices she heard. Their laughter, their footsteps.
‘Alice Carew, will you please get a move on!’
Her sigh misted the greenish glass and she turned reluctantly away. The light was bleeding from the January sky and a pale smudge of moon had appeared above the trees. Behind Miss Lovelock the house loomed, dark and imposing, its windows blank, its secrets hidden. With a leaden heart Alice walked towards them both.
* * *
In the nursery corridor, high up at the top of the house, it was hardly much warmer than it had been outside. Alice’s breath, instead of appearing in cavalier plumes, hung about her in a ghostly wreath. Her footsteps, as she followed Miss Lovelock to the day nursery, made no sound on the bald carpet, as if she were no more substantial than the childhood shadows of Mama, Aunt Miranda and Uncle Howard.
There had been no nanny or nursemaids at Blackwood for twenty years. The nursery corridor, on which the schoolroom was also situated, had been closed up for much of that time, the forgotten dolls and stuffed animals in the day nursery left to contemplate a more glorious past, the rocking horse to gallop, riderless, over the same patch of faded rug. The rooms must have been hastily cleaned and aired before Alice’s arrival, but pockets of stillness remained where Ellen’s careless duster hadn’t quite reached, and the air had a stale quality, like in a museum.
There were no lessons after lunch at Blackwood, unlike at the girls’ day school Alice went to in South Kensington. There the afternoons were spent in companionable industry, doing art or needlework or domestic science (Miss Ellwood, the principal, was a forward-thinking woman who was fully aware that even the most well-bred young ladies must be able to fend for themselves in a world where the Servant Problem was becoming increasingly acute). Miss Lovelock, having deposited Alice in the day nursery with the instruction to read something ‘improving’, retreated to her room with indecent haste and closed the door firmly. A moment later Alice heard the muted crackle of the wireless set.
She went across to the window and sank down onto its cushioned seat. As well as the strange feeling in her tummy there was a tight, painful lump in the base of her throat, which made it hard to swallow, hard to breathe. She wondered if she might be coming down with some illness, and felt a tiny rush of hope. If she was poorly – really poorly – surely Mama would have to come back?
Outside the dusk was falling fast, swallowing up the bleak expanse of parkland. The frost lay thick in the folds and hollows that the sun’s weak fingers hadn’t touched, and it glowed palely in the gathering gloom. If you drew it like that it wouldn’t look real, she thought, but she would have liked to try. She thought of the pencils again and the lump in her throat swelled.
She didn’t know what she’d done to make Grandmama dislike her. While Grandfather, who was old and unwell, seemed merely indifferent, Alice felt Grandmama’s disapproval curling around her like an icy draught, but one whose source remained a mystery. As far as she could remember she’d never disgraced herself in front of her; never been disagreeable or disobedient or shown off. In fact, before two weeks ago when she’d arrived at Blackwood she’d barely spent any time with her grandparents at all, which was why the news that she was to stay with them while Mama accompanied Papa on a business trip to the East had come as such a shock. They were strangers.
It wasn’t fair.
The smell of toasting muffins drifted along the corridor from Miss Lovelock’s room. Hunger pinched at Alice’s hollow tummy and cold cramped her feet and fingers. There was a fire laid in the nursery grate, but she knew very well that she wasn’t allowed to light it, and that Miss Lovelock would be cross if she knocked and asked her to (she would feel guilty that she had forgotten, which would make the crossness worse). There was a frayed tapestry cord by the fireplace which you could pull to ring a bell in the servants’ hall downstairs, but it was Polly’s half day, which meant it would be Ellen who would come. Ellen, who (Polly said) was seventeen, and had her head stuffed with the nonsense she and Ivy, the kitchen maid, read in magazines – film stars and hairstyles and all sorts of beautifying treatments that involved raiding the pantry for baking soda and honey to smear on their faces. Alice had almost smiled when Polly told her that, but she was still a bit afraid of Ellen. She looked at the cord, but she knew she wasn’t brave enough to touch it.
She tucked her legs up against her chest and hugged them tightly. The nursery had subsided in shadow so she turned her face back to the window, but there was nothing to see now except the pale oval of her own reflection.
She should get up and switch on the lamp (she thought she was allowed to do that?) and choose a book from the shelf, but the minutes dragged by and she didn’t move. Reading never brought her much pleasure because the words always seemed to shimmer and shift in front of her eyes, rearranging themselves until they made no sense. It wasn’t just the cold that made her feel sluggish and numb, but the sense of being full to the brim of something that could spill over at any moment if she wasn’t very still. So she stayed where she was, balled up against the cold, listening.
A door slammed far below. Distant voices swelled and retreated again – from Miss Lovelock’s wireless, the servants’ stairs or the vanished past she couldn’t tell. Cold air shivered across her cheek, and strands of the rocking horse’s tail fluttered as if touched by the fingers of invisible children. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her throat was burning now, and there was a pain in her jaw from clamping her teeth together to stop them chattering. The sudden, close-by sound of a door opening set her heart banging against her knees.
She edged back, trying to hide herself behind the curtain, aware of how silly Ellen would think her if she saw her crouching in the dark like this. She prayed for the footsteps to pass, but a figure loomed in the doorway and a second later the electric light flicked on.
‘Oh my Lord—’ Polly clamped a hand to her chest. ‘You gave me the fright of my life! What are you doing, sitting all alone in the dark? Alice? Oh my lamb…’
The kindness was her undoing. Polly crossed the room with swift strides, opening her arms as the sobs that Alice had been holding back came spilling out. Polly held her, rocking and crooning until they had spent themselves, and then she gathered Alice more securely onto her knee and wiped her wet cheeks with a handkerchief.
‘There, there, my pet … That’s better … Polly’s here now. It’s just as well I came back early today – Lord alone knows how long you might have sat here in the dark otherwise. That useless Ellen, I could strangle her. Do you want to tell me about it, sweetheart? What’s got you so upset?’
‘N-n-nothing…’ The lump in her throat had dissolved, but her head throbbed from crying. Her breath was coming in odd little gasps. ‘It’s just … I m-miss my mama.’
‘Oh pet, of course you do … it’s only natural that you would, and there’s not much here to take your mind off it, is there?’ Polly’s hand rubbed a soothing circle on Alice’s back. ‘Especially not with the weather being so dreadful. Blackwood’s a gloomy old place at this time of year, that’s for sure. I tell you what—’ The rubbing paused as she smoothed a strand of hair off Alice’s cheek. ‘Why don’t I light the fire and get this place warm, and you can sit at the table there and write a nice long letter to your mama and tell her all about it. Not just about missing her, mind, because that would make her sad and we don’t want that, but I’m sure if you try hard you can find some cheerful things to write. And thinking of cheerful things might even make you start feeling a bit more cheerful yourself.’
Alice shook her head. ‘I’m not allowed. Miss Lovelock said. I’m to write one letter a week and make sure it’s my best writing with no spelling mistakes because Grandmama will check it before it gets sent to Mama. I wrote on Sunday.’
It had been a miserable letter. Not outwardly, of course; the words on the page had been as bland and careful as she could make them, but the spaces between them had echoed with all the loneliness she wasn’t allowed to express and the questions she couldn’t ask. Why can’t Papa sort out the business with the mineworkers on his own? How far away is Burma? When will you come back? Her tummy had felt very strange indeed by the time she’d signed her name beneath the few polite lines. She hated the thought of her mother reading it and thinking she was being cross and difficult.
‘Well, that seems a shame to me.’ Polly’s voice was unusually curt. ‘There’s nothing nicer than getting a letter from home when you can’t be there.’
‘It’s because it’s so expensive. Grandmama said it costs a lot to send a letter all the way to Burma, and to the boat Mama and Papa are sailing there on.’
‘Did she now?’ Gently, Polly tipped Alice off her knee and went over to the fireplace. Her movements were jerky as she lit a match and held it to the paper in the grate. When the flame caught she turned back to Alice with a strange sort of smile. ‘Well, I’m sure it can’t be that much – and to my mind it’ll be cheap at the price if it cheers you and your mama up. Look, why don’t I go down and see if I can find some notepaper and you can write again, and say anything you like. I’ll post it myself when I go into the village next.’
‘Really?’ Tremulous hope quivered in Alice’s voice. ‘You don’t have to … I don’t want you to get into trouble…’
‘I’m not going to get into trouble, because no one’s going to know except us two.’ Polly went to the door, turning round to look back at Alice. ‘And just between you and me, it won’t be the first time I’ve risked my job to help your mama out.’ There was something sad in her smile. ‘Now, you wait here while I get that paper.’
Copyright © 2019 by Iona Grey
