A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

Rupert entered, Baskerville at his heels. The door shut behind him. The servants crept slowly forward again. Till the door flew open and a dishevelled, blond-haired man shot out into the hallway and collapsed in a heap on to the mosaic tiles…

- - - -*

Very late that night, Proom, on his last rounds, found a light still burning in the gold salon and went to investigate.

Lying sprawled on a sofa, his head thrown back against the cushions, one arm flung out - was his lordship. His breathing was stertorous; the decanter of whisky on the low table beside him was empty.

For a long moment, Proom stood looking down at his master. Something about the pose of the body, both taut and abandoned and the weariness of the slightly parted lips, half-recalled an entry he had seen in one of his encyclopaedias … Something about ‘Early Christian Martyrs’, he thought. Then suddenly it came to him: Botticelli’s altarpiece of St Barnabas in the Uffizi.

He leant forward to shake his lordship by the shoulder. Whereupon the earl opened an unfocused eye, pronounced, with perfect clarity, a single word - and at once passed out again.

‘Tut,’ said the butler, expressing in the only way he knew, his deep compassion.

Then he went downstairs to order James to come and help him carry his lordship to his bed.

- - - -*

On the following day, the last before the wedding, Mr Proom received a telephone call. It was from the station master at Maidens Over and informed him that a family by the name of Herring had been apprehended while trying to cheat the Great Western Railway of two fares.

‘Where are they now?’ asked Proom when he had digested this piece of information.

‘They are locked in my office, Mr Proom, pending further investigations. What would you wish me to do with them?’

‘If you would be so kind as to keep them there, Mr Fernby,’ said Mr Proom. ‘Just keep them there. On no account let them out till I arrive.’

‘It will be a pleasure, Mr Proom,’ said the station master.

But when he had replaced the receiver, Proom did not go to find the earl or the dowager. Instead he stood for a long time lost in thought. Mr Proom remembered Melvyn Herring. He remembered him very well…

‘It is impossible,’ said Mr Proom to himself after a while. And then: ‘It is absurd. I must be losing my reason even to think of such a thing.’

He continued to stand by the telephone, the light reflecting off his high, domed forehead. ‘Quite absurd,’ he repeated, ‘and in the worst possible taste. Yet could anything be worse than things as they are now?’

They could not. And presently Proom went first to find James to tell him that he would have to deputise for a few hours, and then to Mr Potter to ask if he could spare one of the cars.

- - - -*

Leo Rabinovitch was working in his study. He had retired from the rag trade, but his business sense was inborn and since he and Hannah had come to the country their wealth, due to his astute investments, had trebled. Now it seemed as though his fortune would go, not as he had hoped, to further the interests of the Cohens or the Fleishmanns or the Kussevitskys, all of whom had sons whose mothers had watched Susie reach marriageable age with unconcealed interest, but to the Byrnes whose record in matters like the burning of the synagogues in medieval York, for example, was far from impressive. Still, there it was. Tom was a nice lad and Susie’s very spectacle frames, since the ball, seemed to have turned to gold.

It was at this point that the parlourmaid, round-eyed with wonder, announced Cyril Proom. Proom had come to the front door, a gesture which had brought beads of perspiration out on his forehead, and the maid had nearly fainted. Not because she had expected him to come by the back door either. She had simply expected him to be for ever at Mersham; immaculate, planted, there.

Rabinovitch looked up - and was at once attacked by a deep, an almost ungovernable lust.

Hannah was a good housekeeper. The Towers ran well, the food was excellent, the rooms clean and cared for. But Hannah, sensibly knowing her limitations, stuck to women servants, and these she treated in the traditions that prevailed in the village homesteads of her youth. In the servants’ quarters of The Towers nothing was secret, nothing, felt Leo Rabinovitch, was spared .

The Rabinovitches’ maids got the shingles and the piles and were nursed by Hannah. They were crossed in love and their sobs floated up to the study where Rabinovitch was trying to read his company reports. They dreamt about nesting crows and royal babies and fire engines and told him so while serving breakfast. They walked in their sleep, their aunts fell off bicycles, poltergeists infested their cousins’ cottages - and every disaster, minutely chronicled, reverberated through the rooms and corridors of his house.

But if Proom had come to offer his services … If Proom were to take over the running of The Towers… Leo’s eyes momentarily closed and a series of dizzying vignettes flashed through his mind. Himself sitting at dinner while a totally silent footman, an English footman, inscrutable and powdered, approached with the lebernockerl and sauerkraut. Himself arriving after a day in the city, handing his hat and coat to Proom himself and receiving only a pleasant: ‘I trust you had a successful day, sir?’

But as he looked at Proom, standing respectfully before him in his unaccustomed lounge suit, Leo knew that all this could not - should not, even - be. For Proom belonged to Mersham. Proom was Mersham.

‘You will sit down, Mr Proom?’

‘No, thank you, sir.’ The mere idea had made Proom flinch. He was extremely embarrassed now, wondering why he had come, and putting off the moment when he would have to make his request, he said, ‘May I be permitted to felicitate you on the news of Miss Rabinovitch’s engagement? The event gave great satisfaction below stairs.’

‘Thank you. How are things at Mersham?’ enquired Rabinovitch.

Proom, in pursuit of his plan, made no attempt at polite evasion.

‘Bad, sir,’ he said with finality.

Rabinovitch nodded. ‘You know we shall not be visiting any longer?’

‘I had heard, sir. There will be a number of changes -and none of them for the better.’

Rabinovitch waited. ‘I can help you, perhaps?’

Proom cleared his throat. ‘A long time ago, sir, you said that if I ever needed help, I had only to come to you.’

Leo nodded. ‘I said it and it is true. Never shall I forget what you did for Susie.’

The incident to which Rabinovitch referred had taken place shortly after they came to The Towers. They had all gone in a party to a local race meeting, taking along the twelve-year-old Susie. Susie had patiently watched three races, after which she had drawn a book out of her pocket and settled herself on a folding stool to read. She was deep in her story when a Bugatti coupe, incompetently parked on a slope, began to roll towards her and it was Proom, standing guard over the picnic hampers, who had seen what was happening and pulled her to · safety.

Proom plunged. ‘I need a considerable sum of money, sir. Immediately. And in cash.’

He mentioned it and Rabinovitch’s bushy eyebrows shot up in surprise. The sum was one which would keep a man and his family in comfort for a year.

‘You shall have it, Mr Proom. But I wonder whether you are wise to take it in this way. If you are considering the purchase of a cottage for Mrs Proom, for example, it might be wiser—’

‘It’s not for me, sir,’ said Proom, shocked. ‘I’d never ask it for myself, sir. I can take care of myself; I’ve a bit saved.’