Nothing.
“But you won’t give an inch, will you?”
A temptation was building inside her to say something, anything, to bait a response. It would have been better than the silence. Except that would also have defeated the point of apologising and, in a perverse way, would have felt like letting Jennifer win. And how had she gone fromI have hurt this person and must make amendstoThis is a competition in which somebody must losein less than three minutes?
“Fine,” Audrey said instead in a desperate bid to showcase hermaturity. Which she promptly ruined by adding, “be that way then.”
Because this was so typical of Jennifer Hallet. Here was Audrey, doing her best, making the first move, like you were meant to, admitting responsibility and generally beinggreat. Meanwhile Jennifer was sulking like a…like a dick. Probably under Audrey’s quilt. And, yes, if you wanted to get allreasonableabout it, Audreyhadfucked up and Jenniferwasentitled to her privacy. Just like she was entitled to stop Audrey publishing Doris’s story. But she wasn’t entitled to stop Audrey speaking to a fellow contestant. Just on her own time. For her own reasons.
Defiantly, Audrey went to look for Doris.
August 1947
Things was…simple for a bit (Doris was saying, sitting next to Audrey on the sitting-down log as the sunlight was fading over Patchley House and Park). Me and Emily, we wasn’t—we was young and we was friends more than anything. Not even that really. Sometimes we’d go a day or a week and she’d not come looking for me at all. But she’d kiss me when she were in the mood, and each time she did, it was like a gift. Like something she’d saved up just for me.
They started winding up evacuation in forty-four, and since I was eighteen by then I was one of the first ones back. It was good to see the family again, though only one of my brothers made it home from the front. Still, it’s not that you want to hear about, is it? It’s this house.
(It was not, Audrey had long since suspected, really the house that was interesting to her, but she let Doris talk.)
I missed it, you know, when I first got home. I’d not been as young as some of the others but I’d still grown into a bit of a country girl. Got used to the trees and the grass and having sheep andcows and horses just a little ways off from when you wake up in the morning. We wasn’t far from the Thames, where I come from, but—well—walking by the river at Patchley and walking by the river in Wapping ain’t the same thing now are they?
And I missed…I suppose I missed the house, and everything that came with the house.
Which is why when I was twenty-one, I come back.
Service was good work in them days. Not so good as it used to be, of course. The Downton Abbey days was gone and we’d not see that world again, but folk still needed maids, and I was a good one. A good enough one that they took me on at Patchley.
The train ride down was different than the one from thirty-nine. I was bigger for a start, and the trains had been nationalised so it was British Rail that took me to Tapworth this time, and there was no little evacuee boy sitting opposite me. There was just me, on me tod, with a suitcase not much different from the one I’d had with me the first time around.
There was no little line of us neither, no welcome from the master of the house. Just the housekeeper—Mrs. Loris her name was, she’d been there while I was a kid and all, and she’d liked me well enough back then. Remembered me when I come back, too. Said as I’d always been a good girl and that she knew I’d do well.
Got to sleep in the big house, then. Below stairs. The room weren’t that much better than I’d had in the Lodge but it felt different. Closer to the heart of things.
And Iwasclose. Not touching close—I weren’t a lady’s maid, just a housemaid—but I’d set the family’s tables and turn down their beds. I’d be there in the background—seen but not heard was the rule for children when I were a girl and it was the rule for servants when I were a young woman, and I don’t think it’s changed much since.
It was hard, them first few weeks, because I knew my place and my duties, but every now and then—maybe more often than that now I look back—I’d be in the room with her, with Emily, and she’d look at me. Though there was normally company of one sort or another, she’d look at me with those knowing-too-much eyes of hers, and she’d smile.
Of course, she smiled at everybody.
I remember it was shooting season. A devil for the shooting was Sir Arthur, and Emily was no slouch with a shotgun herself. A party was up from, well I think it was London, though if I’m honest they didn’t tell the likes of us, and we was all of us working double time to look after them. They’d go out in the morning, come back with the kills, and dine on game in the evening. ’Course what with meat needing to hang that weren’t normally thesamegame, but most sportsmen don’t know much about cooking so they didn’t seem to mind the difference.
They was having a game pie that evening. Nice thing about a pie is it’s basically a stew in a crust so you can use birds as hasn’t been hung for so long, or the ones what’s been gut-shot that you wouldn’t want to leave around anyway. I didn’t cook it, didn’t even help to cook it—that was the cook and the kitchen-maids’ jobs—but I set the table ready so’s there’d be a centrepiece when the guests came in.
And that’s when I heard her.
“Hello, nymph.”
I’d just got time to put the pie down nice like before I dropped it. And when I turned around I saw her—really saw her, not just cross-the-room saw her. She was dressed in tweeds for the hunt and she’d got a brace of birds over one arm. I reckon they was grouse, though I weren’t so good at telling one bird from the otherin them days. Gone too city in my time at home. “Hullo,” I said, like I were fourteen again and I’d just caught her throwing rocks at frogs.
“Ithoughtit was you.” She came closer. There was a swagger to her. She’d always had a swagger, but it’d grown with her. Spilled off her like the sea off a mermaid. “My God you’ve barely changed.”
“Neither’ve you,” I said. And it was true. In a way. But also not true. She was everything she’d been and more. And I remember wondering if this was what the first Mrs. de Winter had been like when she were alive. This picture of everything a woman could ever want to be.
“The uniform suits you. Do something with these, will you?” She tossed me the birds underarm and I caught them. They’d not been dead long—I could feel they were still warm under my hands, and the blood was still wet where she’d shot them out the sky.
I nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“Oh don’tyes ma’amme, nymph.” She was closer now. Closer than was normal for a servant and mistress, though not so close as I’d have wanted. “We used to be friends, didn’t we?”
