I mostly stuck to reading horror stories, the spookier and scarier the better, but I wanted to find out more about this Esther.
‘What happens to her? Does she keep her baby? Does she get a job? She doesn’t get married at the end, does she?’
‘I haven’t got that far yet. OK, you can borrow it after me. Or some of my other books if you want. I’ve got a whole lot of Victorian ones sorted out because of my project.’
‘Oh, Jamie, you would!’ I said. Then I suddenly realized this was my golden opportunity. ‘So, I might come round to your famous Victorian house sometime and see your books. What number Oxford Terrace, eh?’
‘Number sixty-two,’ said Jamie.
I felt my stomach squeeze. Number 62. Jo’s Rosen family lived at Number 58, next door but one to Jamie. What if he saw her going into their house? What if Jamie’s mum nipped along the road to have a cup of coffee with Mrs Rosen when Jo was dashing around with a duster? What if Jamie’s mum thought Jo looked dead handy with a hoover and offered her a job? I was proud that she was working so hard but I couldn’t stand the idea of her cleaning all Jamie’s junk.
‘Has your mum got her own cleaning lady?’ I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Jamie blinked at me, baffled. ‘What? Why? Are you scared you’ll get all dusty if you come round to my house?’ he said.
‘Does your mum do her own dusting?’ I persisted.
‘No. Mum’s hopeless at any sort of housework. We did have a cleaning lady once but then she got ill and—’
‘You’re not looking for another one, are you?’ I asked, horrified.
‘My dad does the housework now. The hoovering and that. Mum might do the bathroom, and I’m supposed to do some stuff, me and my brother, only we skive off mostly. Why?’
I shrugged elaborately. ‘I – I’ve got interested in the whole idea of housework and stuff because of my servant project,’ I said.
Angela and Lisa put their heads round the classroom door.
‘Come on, Charlie. Playtime’s nearly over. What are you doing?’ said Angela.
‘Of course, we don’t want to interrupt anything if you and Jamie are busy,’ said Lisa, giggling.
‘I’m coming,’ I said, charging over to them.
But then that idiotic Jamie put his great big foot in it. ‘So, you’re coming round to my house after school tonight, right?’ he said, in front of Lisa and Angela. Their mouths dropped open. Mine did too.
‘Wrong!’ I said, and rushed off.
Lisa and Angela rushed too.
‘We were just kidding you before. But you really have got a thing going with Jamie, haven’t you?’ said Angela.
‘You’re going round to his house!’ said Lisa. ‘Oh, I do wish Dave would ask me round to his house.’
‘I’m not going round to Jamie Edwards’s house,’ I insisted. ‘He was just going on about these boring boring boring Victorian books and he seemed to think I was mad enough to want to look at them, that’s all.’ My heart was thumping a bit as I said it. I knew I was kind of twisting the truth. But I had to stop Lisa and Angela getting the wrong idea once and for all.
So all that day I sent them notes under the quivering Beckworth nose as often as I dared, with silly caricatures of Jamie and rude little rhymes about him. Jamie saw his name and must have thought I was writing a note to him. He peered over my arm and read it. I’d just written a very rude bit about him. (Sorry: far too rude to be repeated where adults like Miss Beckworth might whip this book out of your hands at any minute!) Jamie read the very rude bit. He blinked. He didn’t look baffled this time. He looked upset.
Still, it was his own fault, wasn’t it? He shouldn’t have been nosy enough to read my private note. I passed it to Angela and she cracked up with silent laughter and then she passed it on to Lisa and she read it and snorted out loud and had to protest to Miss Beckworth that she had a horrible cold and couldn’t help it. Lisa and Angela and I all fell about helplessly when we came out of school.
I certainly didn’t go round to Jamie’s house after school. Lisa and I went round to Angela’s house first because her big brother had just got some dead flash roller blades for his birthday and we were hoping we’d get to her home from our school a good half-hour before he got back from his school, so we could all maybe have a sneaky go on his blades. But he’d got wise to Angela’s wily ways and installed a brand-new padlock on his bedroom cupboard. We found his old skateboard stacked in a corner but we weren’t really into skateboarding any more, and anyway, one of the wheels was all wobbly.
Angela’s mum was doing a day shift at the hospital so she couldn’t fix us anything exciting to eat so we all went round to Lisa’s instead. That was far more promising, because Lisa’s mum was being a hostess for a jewellery party that evening and so she was making all these fiddly little vol-au-vents and tarts. She let us sample them while she got busy icing a cake. Lisa wanted us to go straight up to her bedroom, but I hung around her mum for a bit, watching how she did the icing with this natty little squeezy bag.
‘I always wondered how people wrote those little messages,’ I said. ‘Is it difficult?’
‘No, pet, it’s easy as anything,’ said Lisa’s mum, and when she had finished she let me practise icing these cookies she’d baked. I iced my name and then Lisa’s and then Angela’s. That was dead crafty, because we got to eat them!
I asked Lisa’s mum how she made the cake and she thought I was angling for a slice of that too.
‘Sorry, pet. I’m saving it for the ladies at my party. Hey, maybe your mother would like to come?’ She hesitated. ‘I mean, just for the chit-chat at the party. I know she’s not really in a position to buy any jewellery right this moment.’
‘She goes to bed really early now. Because she has to get up at five for this new job,’ I said.
Lisa’s mum’s smooth face went into a crease of pain.
‘Oh my goodness. She’s being so brave,’ she said, as if Jo went and wrestled with a pit of poisonous snakes instead of one unwieldy industrial cleaner.
‘But I really would like to know how to make a sponge cake like that. We don’t make cakes at home,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s so simple. And really not very expensive. Tell your mother you just need to put the butter and the sugar and the flour in the blender and—’
‘No, we haven’t got a blender.’
Lisa’s mum stared as if I’d said we hadn’t got a kitchen.
‘Oh. Well. I suppose you could mix it all by hand. I know!’ She went to her shelf of cookery books beside the spice rack and pulled out an old fat book; the pages had gone a little yellow. She flicked through it.
‘Aha! This was my mother’s cookery book. She certainly didn’t have a blender. Yes, there’s a whole section on cake-making. Do you think your mother would like to borrow it?’
‘It’s not for Jo, it’s for me. I’d love to borrow it,’ I said eagerly. ‘I want to suss out how to make cakes. Proper ones, not the packet sort.’
‘Well, good for you. I wish my Lisa would get interested in cookery. You’re a strange girl, Charlie. You’ve always seemed such a tomboy. I never thought you’d get keen on cake-making. Still, you’re all getting older. It’s only natural you’re changing.’
‘I’m not changing,’ I said quickly.
‘What’s that saying? “Too old for toys but too young for boys.” Though my Lisa has certainly started on boys already. It’s Dave this and Dave that until we’re sick of the sound of him! Which boy do you like, Charlie?’
‘None of them,’ I said firmly.
‘Give it another six months,’ said Lisa’s mum, smiling at me.
I had to stay polite because she’d just lent me the cookery book but when I got home to Jo I moaned like anything.
‘She’s treating me like I’m retarded or something,’ I said. ‘Like I still play with my Barbie dolls.’
‘What’s wrong with Barbie dolls?’ said Jo.
She used to buy me lot
s of Barbies with all their different outfits and we’d dress them up and drive them round in their Cadillac and take them to the disco and make them bop up and down on their tiny high heels. I think Jo liked playing Barbie games just as much as I did. If not more. I wanted to chuck all mine out ages ago but she wouldn’t let me.
‘Store them in a drawer and keep them for your daughter,’ she said.
So they’re stored. I took off all their glitzy little outfits and laid them on their backs in my underwear drawer and covered them with bits of old pillow case, playing one last ritual game with them. Mortuaries.
Jo got totally unnerved when she opened the drawer looking for spare socks.
‘Have you come to view the corpses?’ I said.
‘You are a seriously weird child.’
‘It’s coming from a single-parent family,’ I said. ‘I’m seriously deprived. It’s no wonder I’m weird.’
I was only joking of course. I like being a select family of two. Jo and me. And that’s the way it’s always going to be.
TOYS AND BOOKS
I cannot believe the toys the children have here! Victor has a dappled rocking horse as big as the old pony in the field behind our cottage at home. It’s such a splendid creature, with a curly mane and a long tail of real horse’s hair, a red saddle and reins and great green rockers. Louisa begs and begs Victor to let her take a turn but he will rarely agree. Once when the children were downstairs with the Mistress I stood staring at the rocking horse. Before I knew what I was doing I had hitched my skirts above my knees and clambered into the saddle. I fingered the curly mane and stroked the smooth shining wood, and then I dared lean forward and rock once, twice, three times. The rockers creaked and I did not dare persist in case they could hear me down below.
Louisa’s china doll seemed to watch with her blue glass eyes. Her painted red lips were open as if she might tell. But I must not be fanciful. She is only a doll. But a beautiful doll all the same, with golden ringlets and three sets of fine clothes. She even has little lace mittens for her tiny china fingers, imagine! I have had to help Louisa on and off with those clothes, stripping the doll right down to her white silk drawers. She has three petticoats, two silk and one flannel, and white cotton stockings and little soft kid shoes, three pairs, in black and grey and pink for parties. Three pairs of shoes for a doll that cannot walk. Rose and Jessie and I have never had soft shoes. We’d run around barefoot in the summer and plod in our old boots throughout the winter. How Rose and Jessie would love Louisa’s dolls, and the dolls’ house with all the furniture – little chairs and tables, a four-poster bed no less, and even a miniature mop and mangle in the scullery!
We had our own halfpenny dolls at home, one each in our Christmas stockings, and we’d sew them little dresses and make them a home in an old wooden crate, the same crate that was once our Frank’s boat and carriage. Sometimes I gave baby Ada-May a ride in that old crate and she crowed with delight . . .
Oh, how I miss her How I miss Rose and Jessie. I even miss Frank. I miss dear Mother most of all. I write to her once a week, unburdening my heart. I hope Rose reads my letters properly to Mother. She can read well enough when she wants, but she hurries so over the words. Mother was kept at home as a child to mind her own young brothers and sisters so she never learnt to read. She used to marvel after I went to the village school and learnt to spell out words.
Miss Worthbeck let me read aloud to the children on Friday afternoons from wonderful story books, Alice and The Water Babies and some of Mr Dickens’s books. I do not wish to boast but she once said I had Shining Intelligence.
My Shining Intelligence is tarnishing rapidly now I am a nursery maid.
FAMILY
It was Grandma and Grandpa’s Pearl Wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks.
‘We’re not having a party,’ said Grandma. ‘That’s not our way.’ She spoke as if parties were incredibly vulgar, on a par with naked mud wrestling in pig sties. ‘We thought we’d like to celebrate the occasion with a special Sunday lunch.’ She paused. ‘Just for the family.’
She meant Jo and me. Once she was off the phone we moaned and groaned, trying to think up wild excuses to get out of it. We don’t like going to Grandma and Grandpa’s at the best of times.
‘And this will be the worst,’ said Jo. ‘They’ll talk about their wedding and their anniversaries, all thirty of them. Grandma will fiddle with her wedding and engagement and eternity rings. She might even get out their wedding album. Oh help, she might even delve in the trunk upstairs and come out with this truly horrible yellowy-white lace veil and then her voice will go all shaky when she says she kept it specially for me to wear at my wedding. And then she’ll stop and sigh because I didn’t ever have a wedding. Watch out, Charlie. She’ll be saving it for you now.’
‘I’m not going to get married!’ I insisted. ‘I’m going to stay here with you. I look old for my age and you look young so by the time I’m grown up we’ll just be like two sisters. I’ll be earning too so it’ll be easy-peasy, simple-pimple paying that old mortgage.’
‘I wish!’ said Jo.
We didn’t have any spare cash for Pearl Wedding presents so we had to be inventive. Jo bought a half-price droopy pot plant and fed and watered it until it stood up straight and grew new glossy leaves. She bought some pearl-white ribbon and then tied thirty tiny bows all over it.
‘There? Do you think it’ll do?’ she said, tying the very last bow.
‘It looks lovely.’
‘It’s nowhere near as impressive as your cake.’
Yes, I’d made Grandma and Grandpa a proper cake! I used Lisa’s mum’s recipe book. I couldn’t do a fruit cake because the ingredients were too expensive. I just did a sponge. Well, I did three sponges if you must know. I didn’t quite get the hang of it the first time and failed to realize you had to mix it all like crazy until your arm practically falls off. There was just this surly sulky crust at the bottom of the tin when I took it out of the oven. The second go was better, but I was too eager, opening the oven door a couple of times to see how it was getting on. It didn’t rise properly and so I left it in longer and then it got a bit burnt. I cut off the burnt bits and made it into a trifle, but even so, I was starting to think I was squandering money instead of saving it. Jo said I should have one more go and this time it was third time lucky. My sponge was perfect.
Now I could get started on the best bit. I covered it with apricot glaze to stop any crumbs getting mixed up with the icing. Then I piped Happy Aniversary across the top of the icing and made little rosettes all the way round and studded it with tiny pearly balls. It took ages but I was so proud when I’d finished. Jo looked worried when I showed it off to her.
‘What?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘They’ll love it.’
Ha! They didn’t love it. Or Jo’s plant. Grandpa nodded and said, ‘How delightful. Thank you so much. How thoughtful of you. But you really shouldn’t have.’
That sounds OK down on paper. But my grandpa speaks in this slow serious voice with hardly any expression. He doesn’t go Wow! or hug or kiss. If he ever touches me accidentally he wipes his hands on his hankie afterwards, as if I’m sticky.
Grandma uses enough expression for two. ‘Oh, darlings, we weren’t expecting presents. Especially in your current circumstances. Josephine, I’ve been very worried about your new job, you’ve hardly told me anything about it.’
‘Look at the cake Charlie’s made you. She did it all herself. It took her ages,’ said Jo.
‘Yes, it’s lovely, dear. Yum yum. We’ll all have a slice for tea.’ But Grandma sighed. ‘What a pity!’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I can’t wait to sample this cake,’ said Jo quickly. She was sending signals with her eyebrows to Grandma. Grandma ignored them.
‘It’s such a shame you left out the “n”, dear.’
I’d left out one of the ‘n’s in Anniversary. Even though I knew how to spell it. I couldn??
?t stand it. I’d thought it really was perfect.
‘As if that matters,’ Jo said, furious with Grandma for pointing it out.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do think spelling matters although I know they don’t pay much attention to it in school nowadays,’ said Grandma, putting my cake on her kitchen table. She took the pot plant to the sink.
‘It doesn’t need watering yet. I did it yesterday,’ said Jo.
‘I just want to perk it up a little,’ said Grandma.
She should have watered Jo and me. We were visibly drooping. I can never work out if Grandma knows what she’s doing. She’s certainly an expert at chewing you up and spitting you out in tiny pieces. No wonder it took Jo months and months before she dared tell them she was going to have me.
Grandma and Grandpa still treat her like a schoolgirl in disgrace. Grandma kept on and on about her old job while she put the vegetables on to cook, prodding Jo as sharply as the potatoes. Jo lied a lot but she’s not as good at it as me. Grandma didn’t even shut up when we started eating.
‘What do you mean, Josephine? What does this new supermarket job entail?’ Grandma attacked her grapefruit, jabbing at it with a serrated spoon. ‘You’re being deliberately evasive. Are you sure you’re not working as a cashier on the tills?’
Jo suddenly flung down her own spoon, going as red as the glacé cherries Grandma used for decoration. ‘I am not a cashier,’ she said. ‘I am a cleaner at the supermarket. So now you know.’
Grandma sputtered like the hot fat cooking her roast beef. She gave Jo a roasting all the while we chewed on our meat. She told Jo it wasn’t a suitable job when she’d been a manager for nearly a year, as if Jo had deliberately turned down umpteen other manager’s jobs just to be contrary. She told Jo she was being an irresponsible mother going out early in the morning and leaving me, and that made me so mad I had to put in my two-pennyworth.