Meg smiled warmly. ‘Swinging London, probably! But I’m sure she’ll keep in touch. I chat with my mother on the phone almost every day.’
Lizzie wished Meg hadn’t mentioned Swinging London. Her parents probably hadn’t heard of it before but were bound to worry about it now that they had.
‘Are you Elizabeth’s friend who works as a waitress?’ asked Mrs Spencer.
‘I was explaining how really quite nice girls work in your catering company,’ Lizzie put in quickly, trusting that Meg would pick up her mother’s anxieties and put them to rest.
‘Oh yes,’ said Meg. ‘It can get quite annoying. The waitresses meet their friends among the guests and just gossip instead of getting the trays round. And lot of them have titles.’
That seemed to go down well.
‘I will phone you as often as possible, too. There’s no need to worry about me working.’ Lizzie regarded her parents tenderly. She knew they loved her and she knew they worried about her, but she couldn’t let this stop her living her own life.
David served sherry and both Lizzie’s parents accepted a glass, along with some Twiglets he’d put in a cut-glass dish. However, they drank it quite quickly and got to their feet.
‘We should be going, darling,’ said her mother. ‘I had wanted to see your bedroom, just to make sure it’s – er – you know …’
Lizzie did know. She wanted to make sure it didn’t harbour bedbugs or cockroaches but with luck her mother felt reassured now.
‘I’ll show you out,’ Lizzie said. She really didn’t want her parents seeing the flapping wallpaper and hearing the creaking floorboards.
Once the front door was open and Lizzie felt the joy of the soon-to-be-released, her father stopped, one foot still in the house.
‘Seems a bit strange, being able to get a plumber on a Sunday night. Especially one who seemed to know where everything was, including the sherry.’
Lizzie had been dreading this, but in dreading it, she had thought up something to say. ‘He’s a family retainer, Daddy. But he also does plumbing. As a sideline. He’s really awfully handy. If any little thing goes wrong, if a light bulb needs changing, he comes round and does it for us.’
Mrs Spencer nodded. ‘I thought it must be something like that. Alexandra does come from a very aristocratic family, doesn’t she?’
Lizzie nodded, very happy to be able to speak nothing but the truth for once. ‘Yes, she does.’
She kissed her parents goodbye several times and then, at last, watched them drive away.
She went back downstairs to the kitchen. ‘You’re a family retainer, David, who does plumbing on the side. Now please can I have a glass of sherry? I’mpractically shaking! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry!’
‘Me too!’ said Meg. ‘I kept asking myself, what sort of plumber could serve sherry so elegantly?’
‘One ’oo’s an hactor,’ said David, ‘’oo ’appens to ’ave plumbin’ skills!’
Chapter Ten
It was four days before the dinner party. Lizzie was at the kitchen table with a list. It had many crossings out and she was considering starting again and writing it all out neatly so she could read it.
Meg was making Béarnaise sauce, flicking bits of butter into the top of a double boiler and mixing it in with a bunch of birch twigs, as preferred by Mme Wilson, who was convinced a metal whisk would spoil the delicate emulsion.
Alexandra was scraping glue off the edge off the arm of a cherub she had bought, broken, for very little money, at Portobello the previous weekend.
Clover was snoring loudly in front of the gas fire, happy to be surrounded by well-occupied humans.
‘I don’t know why you’re making that sauce again, Meggie,’ said Alexandra. ‘You’re brilliant at it already.’
‘Not brilliant,’ said Meg. ‘And Mme Wilson has been very tough on me lately. Besides, I want to add it to my repertoire. People like it.’
‘I do wish Madame would just tell us what she’s going to ask us to make,’ said Lizzie. ‘Why can’t she have a more conventional method of testing us? The way she picks on someone at random and orders them to make meringues, or a béchamel or whatever, is just terrifying.’ She had experienced this the previous week and was still shaken.
‘Your meringues were fine, Lizzie!’ said Meg, laughing at the memory.
‘Only just!’ said Lizzie, remembering the scene in detail. ‘And Madame was definitely disappointed that the egg white didn’t flop on to my hair when she made me hold the bowl upside down over my head.’
