Victoria Clayton - Clouds among the Stars

There was a click followed by buzzing. Dodge was always terse on the telephone in case MI6 was tapping the line. Nikolskoye was the code word for 14A Owlstone Road, Clerkenwell, headquarters of SPIT, the Sect for Promoting Insurrection and Terrorism. I sighed. I had hoped to spend the morning peacefully mending my writing robe and reading Emily Dickinson for inspiration. I went down to the kitchen.

Next to my own attic fastness, I liked the kitchen best. It was a large room running the length of the basement, with windows at each end, and it was always warm because of the boiler, which stood in one corner. Loveday considered the boiler one of the Devil’s more fiendish creations. It required constant feeding and riddling and spewed fine ash everywhere, but I associated the smell of coke and the screeching sound of the door swinging on its hinges with the long, sweet days of childhood. In the wall opposite the boiler was the dumb waiter, a useful piece of equipment like a small lift worked by ropes that brought food piping hot into the dining room on the floor above. We children used to give each other rides in it on wet days. It marked a boundary between childhood and adolescence when our legs grew too long to be squeezed into the shaft.

The decoration of the kitchen had been entirely neglected, as my mother hardly ever visited it. Its homely fifties wallpaper – yellow blobs like scrambled egg against a grey background – and red Formica counter-tops, blistered by hot pans, were tasteless and friendly. A large table was marked by pen-nibs, scissors and poster paints. Almost my happiest times had been spent at that table, making glittering Christmas cards that buckled with too much glue or lumpy potholders knitted in rainbow wool.

Maria-Alba was frying mushrooms and bacon. She shot me a glance from small black eyes. She was cook and housekeeper to our family but to me she was far more than that. Maria-Alba’s plump breast had been my first pillow. I had insisted on entering the world feet first and my mother had been ill for a long time afterwards. Maria-Alba had fed me, bathed me and rocked me to sleep. Bron and Ophelia had been pretty babies but I was fat and plain so probably Ma was relieved that we got on so swimmingly. Maria-Alba’s nature was prickly and suspicious, but having got hold of me in a raw state, she could not doubt that my motives and intentions were innocent. From the first moment that I was capable of entertaining a feeling of confidence in anything, my trust had been in Maria-Alba.

Though she ran the household Maria-Alba was not treated as a servant. My parents had an intellectual prejudice against caste. When she wished she ate with us. Usually she preferred to eat alone in the kitchen or in her basement room, which was cosy with brightly flowered curtains and chair covers and embellished with lace mats, plates depicting windmills in relief, china donkeys and fat children peering into wishing-wells or sitting under toadstools. When I was little I loved these ornaments passionately and it was a sad day when my taste evolved to the point when I could no longer look on them with uncritical affection. From the age of about fifteen I preferred the carved ivory crucifix and the reproductions of religious paintings, which as a child I had found gloomy.

Maria-Alba’s Catholicism was quite unlike the kind practised by the nuns of St Frideswide’s Convent where we girls had been to school. The saints were her friends, good-natured and capricious, only tuning in to her incessant demands when the mood suited them. She wore her faith like a second skin and constantly upbraided God and his henchmen for their mistakes. The nuns who had taught us were placatory and subservient to God. Their saints were unsympathetic taskmasters and their religion was a system of pleasure-proscriptive rules.

Perhaps the differences had something to do with climate. Maria-Alba had spent her childhood in the broiling hills of Calabria, where the earth was the colour of cinnamon and violent storms rolled in daily from the sea. Maria-Alba’s mother had been a prostitute and had died from syphilis. I thought this might account for Maria-Alba’s abhorrence of sex and distrust of men, though she never said so.

Maria-Alba liked to cook and she was good at it. She enjoyed eating as all good cooks do and, by the time the events I am about to describe took place, she was generously proportioned even for her height, which was just under six feet. She had trouble with her legs, and her ankles had spilled out over her shoes like proving dough. Her black hair, now streaked with grey, was always a little greasy. Her best feature was her nose, which was large and curved like a parrot’s beak and gave her face distinction.

No doubt the reason Maria-Alba put up with us was because we understood and sympathised with her illness. She suffered from agoraphobia and the older she grew the worse it became. Once I was with Maria-Alba in Marks and Spencer – I must have been about twelve – surrounded by cheerful woollens and bright mirrors and comfortable smells of newness and cleanness. To my surprise, I saw Maria-Alba clinging with closed eyes to a rack of tangerine botany twin-sets. She was panting and trembling. When, in the taxi going home, I asked her what had frightened her she said that people were looking at her and thinking her crazy. She feared she had been iettata – in other words, that someone had cast the evil eye on her. Her belief in this superstition was quite as strong as her devotion to the Virgin. Frequently she made the sign to protect herself against the iettatore , the first and little fingers outstretched and the middle ones curled. After that Maria-Alba rarely went out, groceries were delivered, and I bought most of her clothes, with varying degrees of success.

‘Egg?’ Maria-Alba pointed her spatula at me.

‘No, thank you.’

‘You lose weight. Troppo frequentare with the Russians.’

I had told Maria-Alba several times that Dodge had been born and brought up in Pinner. I had been touched to discover that his real name was Nigel Arthur Wattles. The staid character this suggested was reassuring whenever Dodge, in militant mood, talked of Bond Street running with blood. But Maria-Alba persisted in believing that all anarchists were Soviets, dangerous political animals bent on the corruption of virtuous females.

‘Wearing black makes one look thinner.’

‘ E troppo lugubre .’ Maria-Alba liked to wear orange, yellow or red, which made shopping for her extremely difficult in these days of punk for anyone under twenty-five, and pastels for anyone over.

‘It’s a badge of solidarity with the workers in the textile industry who have to slave all day making gorgeous clothes for the idle rich and who can only afford to clothe themselves in rags.’

‘ Sciocchezze !’ Maria-Alba put down a plate of food in front of me and frowned. ‘You been doing bad things with that Russian.’

‘Honestly, Maria-Alba. I’m twenty-two. Years beyond the age of consent.’

‘ Allora, bene ! You admit!’ Maria-Alba’s glance was triumphant. ‘He give you a baby, certo, e poi un scandalo !’

‘How could there be a scandal? Everyone expects actors’ families to have babies out of wedlock. Pa would just be annoyed with me for being careless. Probably Ma would think it rather vulgar.’

Maria-Alba widened her eyes with indignation. ‘ E il bambino ? You bring him into the world, with no name and despise by the grandmother! Ah, povero bebè !’

‘Harriet! You’re going to have a baby!’ Cordelia, my youngest sister, had come down into the kitchen. ‘Oh, good! I’ve been longing to be an aunt for ages. I thought it would have to be you. I can’t imagine Ophelia letting that stupid Crispin stick his thing into her. Ugh!’ she shuddered elaborately. ‘I’d better find the pram and try to get the rust off.’ She had run upstairs before I could protest.