Her Ladyship's Girl Read online

  And it was such a long time ago, as I remember, that time when there were witches in Wales and I was so young, like a little coal-smeared bird that flew across the corrugated hills. And I sang this song to myself sometimes –

  Mi sydd fachgen ieuanc ffôl.

  Yn byw yn ôl fy ffansi

  Myfi’n bugeilio’r gwenith gwyn,

  Ac arall yn ei fedi.

  Pam na ddeui ar fy ôl,

  Rhyw ddydd ar ôl ei gilydd?

  Gwaith ‘rwyn dy weld, y feinir fach,

  Yn lanach, lanach beunydd!

  I am a young and foolish lad

  Who lives as I please

  I lovingly tend the ripening wheat

  And another reaps it.

  Why not follow me

  Some day after another?

  Because I see you little lass,

  Purer and purer each day!

  – in memory of the Maid of Cefn Ydfa. And we played hide-and-seek under the desecrated slopes and waited out the young years until some of us decided to leave – to get away from the smell of scarcity and the soul-destroying days of unemployment that were to come and drive us all down into the coal dust. And we scavenged for lumps of coal with chapped red fingers in the wintertime, in the wheel-rutted snow, amongst the ghosts of previous generations who did the same and died of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Their cold voices called to me from the fading distance as I trudged uphill to my house, a hessian sack across my shoulders and my younger sisters and brother trudging behind.

  At night the haunted streets stood still, like the inside of dark train tunnels and I was often afraid to look out my bedroom window, in case a grinning witch with an Anwyn puppet and a pin might be looking back at me. The wind through the trees made noises like a wheezing banshee that whispered to the trolls that lived in secluded places and around street corners. I said my prayers to my Druid gods and asked them to keep me safe from the Christian god and the mine-owning speculators and to deliver me from all evil.

  Amen.

  Because my father couldn’t work, my mother had to. No one in the village had much money to spend, so sometimes she worked for food – a few vegetables if the growing in the garden wasn’t good, or a scrawny chicken or a leg of mutton or a brace of rabbits or a poached duck. She would distemper people’s walls and they always used dark colours so the dirt and coal-dust wouldn’t show. As the eldest, I used to help her when I wasn’t at school or reading, and at twelve I got my own cleaning job for which I was paid a little pocket money. I gave it all to my mother, to help ease the burden of her heavy life. She also took in washing and I helped her hang and fold for them who were too feeble or too foolish to do it for themselves. So, it was no easy life, but us children didn’t complain too much, because we thought everyone else was in the same boat – we didn’t know until later, when we grew a little older, that there were other children who had everything they wanted – and the reason they had everything they wanted and didn’t have to do anything to get it was because they were riding on our scrawny backs.

  When I finally turned fourteen, I was able to leave school, even though I was sad to do so. I missed the books and the learning, and my grandmother had died, so there were no more stories about Rhiannon and Pryderi, or Gronw and Blodeuwedd, or Culhwch and Olwen. After working part-time in the pub and on the cow farm, I got a job in Maesteg as a dogsbody in a hat shop. I wasn’t allowed to serve the customers or anything like that. I had to stack and sweep and make tea for the saleswomen and run errands to other shops and milliners and people who mended and repaired the feather pillboxes and wide-brimmed wools and felt skulls with Bakelite badges and cherry-black straws and brimmed flappers.

  Maesteg was two and a half miles from Llangynwyd and I had to walk it every day in hail, rain or snow – and all for 1s/6d. But they had a long low table in the shop for the ladies who were waiting to be fitted and the gentlemen who were waiting for the ladies who were waiting to be fitted. And the table was always stacked with the latest magazines. Vogue and Women’s Sphere and Le Petit Echo de la Mode and Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire and Collier’s and La Femme Chez Elle and Hemmets and Life.

  And the hat-buying ladies would shimmy in looking like Jean Harlow or Greta Garbo in bias-cut slip dresses and cap sleeves and ruffles and maxi lengths and crêpe silks and shoulder pads. I studied the magazines every chance I got and could soon identify Grecian styles and bolero jackets and high-fronts and low-backs and I soaked it all up and wished that someday I, too, would wear a Schiaparelli or a Maggy Rouff or a Lucien Lelong or a Robert Piguet. But how would that ever happen for a rag-tailed girl from the valleys who liked to read books and dream the impossible?

  And that brings me to the Henry Pollak, which was a green wool supra felt hat with a wide ribbon and an artificial beige spray. I found it in a fitting room I was cleaning out one day. I knew it wasn’t one of the shop’s hats, because we didn’t sell that particular design. I took it to the shop manageress and she remembered the woman who came in wearing it.

  ‘That’s Mrs Reynolds’ s hat.’

  Mrs Reynolds was the wife of Arthur Reynolds, a very rich man who made his money exporting coal to America. The manageress fished out Mrs Reynolds’s address and handed the hat back to me.

  ‘You better run it round to her, Moyle.’

  She said that as if it was just round the corner. So off I went on my tired feet, traipsing all the way out to the financially correct side of the suburbs. The address was a big two-storeyed house out in Mount Pleasant, with six red-brick steps leading up to the large green front door that had an arched fanlight and a gold knocker. The outside walls were also red brick with a frontal arch supported by four Corinthian columns. The roof was gabled and hipped and two prominent exterior chimneys stood either end, framing tall casement windows with green shutters. I’d seen houses like that before – in the magazines.

  I was half afraid to trudge up the gravelled driveway, for fear I might be taken for a tramp and the dogs set upon me. But I had no choice. I knocked as softly as I could and waited for the barking – but there wasn’t any. So I knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer. I didn’t want to have to come all the way out here again, so I left the hat in a bag by the front door. I was halfway down the steps when the door opened. A woman of about forty stood there with the reddest hair I’d ever seen and a figure that rivalled Mae West’s and a set of pearly white, smiling teeth. She was wearing a dress I recognised from Vogue as a Madeleine Vionnet and she was smoking a cigarette in a long, black holder.

  ‘What’s up, honey?’

  Her accent was American and friendly. I took the hat from its bag and held it out to her.

  ‘You left this in the shop.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Oh, that old thing! Don’t tell me you came all the way out here to bring it back?’

  ‘Yes, Madam.’

  ‘Why, you must be exhausted. Come in.’

  She opened the door wider and I didn’t know whether to go inside or make a run for it. She smiled her American smile again.

  ‘Come on, honey, I won’t bite.’

  I shuffled my way past her and into a big reception room. She closed the door and walked ahead of me into what looked like the National Library of Wales. I’d never seen so many books in one place. She saw my surprise and was amused by my awe.

  ‘You like books?’

  ‘I love books!’

  ‘Have one.’

  I thought she said ‘Have one’, but that couldn’t be right. I must have misheard.

  ‘Have two . . . or three. We got plenty.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met anyone like her before.

  ‘Oh no, Madam, I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘Why not? Nobody in this goddamn house reads them, they’re just for show.’

  I tentatively approached the shelves and looked along them, running my fingers across the spines. They felt so exotic – so seductive.

  ‘Go ahead, honey,
pick three or four.’

  Row upon row, title after title – some of the authors I’d heard of before and some I hadn’t. I stopped at Mathilda by Mary Shelley and she urged me to pick some more. I ended up with Self-Made Woman by Faith Baldwin and a translation of The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs.

  She was drinking something from a stemmed glass that had a green berry on a stick floating in it.

  ‘You want a cocktail? No, I guess you’re too young. What about a soda?’

  I didn’t know what a soda was, so I thought I’d better not accept her offer in case it was something I didn’t like.

  ‘No thank you, Madam. I’d better get back.’

  She looked at the hat as if it was something nasty that had blown in on the wind.

  ‘I left the hat there deliberately. It’s out of fashion. I thought you’d just throw it in the trash.’

  I started to move towards the door, in case she changed her mind and took the books back.

  ‘I’ll bring the books back when . . .’

  ‘Nah, you keep them, honey.’

  She reached for her handbag.

  ‘Hey, let me give you a tip.’

  ‘Oh no, Madam, I’m not allowed to take money from customers. I’d lose my job.’

  ‘I got to give you something for coming way out here on a wild goose chase.’

  I told her the books were enough and I was ever so grateful to her for her kindness and kept edging closer and closer to the door.

  ‘OK, look, take the hat. You want the hat?’

  Of course I wanted the hat. I loved the hat and would never be able to afford one like it. I put up my hands in false protest, but she threw it to me and I caught it.

  ‘I’ll never wear it again.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you, Madam.’

  I replaced the hat in the shop bag and was bowing and trying to curtsey in gratefulness, as if I was in the presence of a duchess or a dame.

  ‘I didn’t get your name, honey?’

  ‘Anwyn Moyle, Madam.’

  ‘Nice. Well, so long, Anwyn Moyle.’

  She smiled that big smile of hers and I left her standing by the front door, watching me hurry down the gravel drive. She was smoking another cigarette from the long, black holder and looking like she’d just stepped off a Hollywood movie set. And how I wanted to look like her – when I grew to be a woman.

  I knew the manageress wouldn’t believe that Mrs Reynolds gave me the hat and books, so I had to hide them somewhere before I went back to the shop. I thought of secreting them in a storeroom round the back, where we kept cardboard boxes and wrapping and other stuff like that, but if they caught me leaving with them, I’d be accused of stealing and probably arrested. There was nowhere else around where I could leave such valuable items and be sure they’d still be there when I came to collect them after work. There was only one thing for it – I ran the two-and-a-half miles home and hid the hat and books in my bedroom. Then I ran the two-and-a-half miles back to the shop. The manageress wasn’t too pleased when I came panting in.

  ‘And what kept you, Moyle?’

  ‘Sorry, miss, I lost my way.’

  ‘You lost your way?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘A likely story, Moyle.’

  She was convinced I went skiving off round the shops or met some friends or larked about in the park for a while before coming back.

  ‘I’m sorry, miss.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough, Moyle. I’m going to have to let you go.’

  I’d been there nearly a year and I was fed up with wearing out my shoes for 1s/6d a week anyway. I was also coming up to sixteen and Mrs Jones the school janitor said she could get me a job in service through an agency she once worked for when she was younger. And so I said goodbye to Maesteg and the hat shop and, a few weeks later, I was on a train, skimming past towns like Swindon and Reading and Slough – all the way to Paddington in the fabulous city of London.

  And when I went, I took the green hat with me.

  Chapter Five

  But that was back then, before I knew anything about being a skivvy, when I saw London through a glass darkly and imagined a life of glamour and glitz awaiting me in the big city. The reality of it broke the spell and I saw things as they really were – face to face. I’d been at the Hampstead house for nearly a year now and had turned seventeen. Nobody celebrated my birthday and I felt something sad – a loss, like something had died. Maybe it was my innocence and maybe it was just my optimism. Mind you, I looked older than my years and could pass for twenty on a good day. But most of my time was spent scrubbing and shining and I usually looked like something the cat dragged through a hedge backwards.

  The big sink was always full of greasy pots and saucepans that the dishwasher couldn’t handle, and the steps always needed red-polishing and the letterbox brassing and the drawers dusting and the daily grind constantly threatened to swallow me up – to overpower me until I wouldn’t be able to breathe and I’d expire there on the cold scullery floor.

  The routine of the work was worst – the same thing every day. Mrs Harding liked to have the latest gadgets in her house but, even with all these, it was still the same thing over and over and over again. I could do the jobs with my eyes closed by now and I longed for something new and challenging, so I watched Cook and picked up some culinary techniques, although the Beadle was hardly the best mentor in the world. But I learned how to make a soufflé and a variety of sauces and bake a partridge pie and a loaf of soda bread.

  I watched and learned how to stuff a quail and quenelle a rabbit and croquette a pheasant. I also followed Mona around whenever I could, seeing the things she did as she went about her lady’s maid duties, until she saw me and shooed me away – and I wondered if all these dormant talents would ever come in useful as I made my way through the windswept world. Sometimes I thought about Mrs Reynolds, who gave me the green hat, and her wide, American smile, and I wondered what it felt like to be her – with nothing to do all day but drink from a stemmed glass with a green berry on a stick floating in it and smoke cigarettes from a long, black holder and look beautiful.

  I hadn’t seen much of Mr Harding since that day in the kitchen, when he came looking for Mr Ayres and found me instead. I just caught fleeting glimpses of him every now and then, here and there in the distance, like an abstraction – a figment of my adolescent imagination. He never seemed to notice me, but I remembered him – his presence and the closeness of him to me; the scent of sage and cedarwood and the taste of his breath on the side of my face, almost overpowering me. Then, one day, Mr Ayres sent me to clean a stain from one of the bookcases in the library. I took my cleaning cloths and my vinegar and polish and proceeded to the big room. I always loved being in the library, even though I rarely had occasion to go inside, because the parlourmaids were responsible for cleaning in there. It was every bit as big as the library in Mrs Reynolds’s house on the outskirts of Maesteg, only I got the feeling that these books were not just for show – they were read.

  I ran my fingers across the leather bindings and looked at the titles – there were books on history and politics and more on exotic places around the world – and philosophy and gold-mining and memoirs and encyclopaedias and poetry and novels. I liked the novels best. I loved to read translations of folklore stories, like East of the Sun and West of the Moon and wild romances like that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and women’s writing like Orlando by Virginia Woolf and The Visioning by Susan Glaspell. They were all here, in this library in Hampstead and I was in love with the room.

  But daydreaming over the books wasn’t getting the work done, so I started gingerly applying the vinegar solution to the stain, making sure I didn’t discolour the wood. The stain was dark and reddish, almost blood-like, and I wondered what had made it. It was an irregular shape, like a splash, and I supposed it could have been port wine or claret. But, if something like port or claret splashed on the bookcase, wouldn’t there be some on the fl
oor as well? It was none of my business what the stain was – it could have been anything. And who did I think I was, Miss Marple?

  As I worked, I started to hum a tune I’d heard the other girls singing. It was ‘Two Cigarettes in the Dark’ by Bing Crosby. Then I started singing the words – softly – to myself.

  Two, two cigarettes in the dark

  He strikes a match ’til the

  Spark clearly traces

  One face is my sweetheart

  It was then I sensed I wasn’t alone in the library. I looked towards a high-backed, studded leather chair that was facing away from me, just as a match struck and nearly made me jump out of my uniform. Mr Harding stood up, holding two cigarettes and a lighted match. He started to sing – softly – to me.

  Two, two silhouettes in a room

  Almost obscured by the gloom

  We were so close yet so far apart

  It happened that I stumbled in

  Upon their rendezvous

  Then the match burned his fingers.

  ‘Ouch!’

  He started to laugh. I laughed with him, even though that probably went against some other outdated etiquette.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t know anyone was in here.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. It’s Moyle, isn’t it? Or is it Anwyn?’

  ‘Both, Sir.’

  He came closer, still holding the two cigarettes, until I could feel his breath on my face, smell the scent of sage and cedarwood. Again.