Helen Forrester - Mourning Doves

Exactly how does one cash a cheque, she worried inwardly, and she wished passionately that Paul and Edna were in England to advise her.

They were exhausted by the time they returned home, and were further alarmed by the notice hooked on to their front gate. It announced that This Desirable Property was For Sale. The estate agent, in response to Cousin Albert’s instructions that he wanted a quick sale, had not wasted any time.

Louise immediately broke into loud cries of distress, and it was with difficulty that Celia and Dorothy, the house-parlourmaid, got her into the sitting room. The pretty, formal room, ordinarily used for teas and at homes, still smelled faintly of hyacinths and lilies, despite having been carefully aired after the funeral, and Celia felt slightly sick from it.

While Dorothy fled upstairs to her mistress’s bedroom to get a fresh container of smelling salts, Celia laid Louise on the settee. She carefully removed her bonnet and put cushions under her head.

Then she kneeled down by her and curved her arm round her. ‘Try not to cry, Mother. Everything will be all right in the end. Please, Mother.’

Louise shrieked at her, ‘Nothing’s going to bring your father back – or my boys! Nothing! Nothing!’ She turned her back on Celia, and continued to wail loudly. ‘My boys! My boys!’

‘She’d be better in bed, Miss.’

Startled, Celia looked up. Winnie, the cook, had heard the impassioned cries, and had run up from her basement kitchen to see what was happening. Now, she leaned over the two women, her pasty face full of compassion.

‘This isn’t the right room to have her in, Miss. What with the Master having been laid out here, like.’

Celia herself, frightened by the faint odour of death, would have been thankful to run upstairs to her own bedroom, shut herself in and have a good cry. Instead, she rose heavily to her feet.

‘You’re quite right, Winnie. Will you help me get her upstairs?’

‘For sure, Miss.’ She turned towards a breathless Dorothy, who dumbly held out the smelling salts to her.

Winnie took the salts and said above the sound of Louise’s cries, ‘Now, our Dorothy, you go and fill a hot water bottle and put it in the Mistress’s bed. And put her nightgown on top of it to warm.’

Dorothy’s face looked almost rabbitlike as her nose quivered with apprehension. She turned to obey the instructions, but paused when the cook said sharply, ‘And you’d better put a fire up there. It’s chilly. You can take a shovelful of hot coals from me kitchen fire to get it started quick.’

The maid nodded, took a big breath as if she were about to run a marathon, and shot away down the stairs to fetch the hot water bottle and the coals.

As Celia and Winnie half carried Louise up the wide staircase with its newel post crowned by a finely carved hawk, the widow’s cries became heavy, heart-rending sobs.

‘She’ll feel better after this,’ Winnie assured Celia. ‘A good cry gets it out of you.’

Dorothy stood at the bottom of the staircase, hot water bottle under one arm, in her hands a big shovel full of glowing coals, and waited for the other women to reach the top. The shovel was heavy and she dreaded setting the stair carpet alight by dropping a burning coal on it.

Have a good cry? And what had she in her fancy house to cry about? Her old man had probably left her thousands, and not much love lost between them. And here she was howling her head off and the house up for sale, and never a word to her maids as to what was happening. Proper cruel, she was.

Would she turn Winnie and Ethel and herself off as soon as the house was sold? And, if not, where would they be going to live?

As her coals cooled, Dorothy’s temper grew. She plodded up the stairs after the other women, handed the hot water bottle to Winnie, and then skilfully built the bedroom fire, while Winnie and Celia partially undressed the sobbing Louise, removed her corsets and eased her huge Victorian nightgown over her head.

Behind the blank expression on Dorothy’s pinched, thin face, anger seethed. Winnie must ask the Mistress what was to happen to them. She must! If they had to find new situations, they should start now. Although there was a demand for good domestic help, the big mansions in the country were being closed down in favour of London apartments, and their domestic staffs dismissed; in consequence, a lot of competition faced a middle-aged house-parlourmaid like herself. And it was always difficult to find a considerate employer. She sighed. She had not felt that Timothy and Louise were particularly considerate, but she had become accustomed to them. Ethel, the maid-of-all-work, was young enough to try for a factory job, but she herself was in her forties – getting really old – and Winnie must be nearing fifty – it would be hard for her to get another job of any kind.

She took fresh lumps of coal from the fireside coal hod and laid them on top of those she had brought up. She ensured that they had caught and that the fire was beginning to blaze and then swept the hearth. Then she got slowly to her feet, and picked up the shovel.

As she contemplated her future, she began to feel sick. She berated herself that she had not saved some of the good wages she had earned in an ordnance factory during the war years. She had spent like a king until the factory closed down at the end of the war, and then she had come to work as a house-parlourmaid for the Gilmores, because domestic work was all she was skilled at.

She turned from the fireplace and paused to stare at the scene before her.

Seated on the side of the bed beside her mother, Celia held a small glass of brandy to Louise’s lips and encouraged her to sip it between sobs. Winnie had folded back the bedclothes ready for the sufferer to lie down.

Nice woman, Miss Celia – but that useless, you’d never believe it. No spirit. Never had any fun, the Master being so difficult to please, especially so, Winnie said, since he lost his son with that Lord Kitchener, and then Mr Tom in France, poor lad.

Her own father had been a bit of a cross, she remembered, and not past beating her if she did something he didn’t like – but when he had work, even if he was fair wore out by the end of the day, he could make the family laugh and they’d have a neighbour or two in and do some singing, with a drop of ale to drink by the fire. Old Gilmore had done nothing but complain, complain – and order you around as if you were muck.

She wondered if Celia’s sister, Edna, was like her. She had never seen her, but she had heard she was a real beauty, and at least, it seemed, she had had enough sense to get out from under her old man by getting married.

Winnie impatiently glanced back over her shoulder and said, ‘Get downstairs, Dot, and look to the soup for me. Give it a stir. I’ll be down in a minute.’

Dorothy nodded, and went sulkily down to the basement kitchen, carrying her shovel carefully so that she did not drop a bit of ash on the stair carpet, which, every morning, she had to brush, from cellar to attic.

Louise finally cried herself to sleep, and an exhausted Celia was persuaded by Winnie to put her feet up on the old chaise longue in the breakfast room at the back of the house, while the cook put together a dinner tray for her.

‘The Mistress didn’t tell me what to make for dinner, so I made this nice thick soup, but I’ve got some cold beef, if you feel like something more. And the bread come out of the oven only a couple of hours ago.’

Celia nodded wearily, and said that the soup sounded lovely. When it was brought to her, she drank it slowly while Winnie stood and watched her anxiously.

When Celia’s bowl was finally empty, Winnie removed it, and then hesitantly inquired if Celia could tell her what was going to happen to them all. ‘Seeing the For Sale sign was a proper shock, Miss,’ she explained. ‘And Dorothy and Ethel is all upset. They’re asking me what they should do.’