Mrs. Much was speaking to Mr. Tipp, who sat at the scrubbed wood table studying the small piece of paper he held in his skeletal hands. At sixty-five, Mr. Tipp was far from a robust-looking man. Indeed, one feared the least breeze might turn him into a set of wind chimes.
“It’s not to be wondered at.” He folded the piece of paper into a postage-size square, and managed to sound as if he were listening to the housekeeper’s lamentations for the first time.
“Let me put it this way, Mr. Tipp.” She set a chocolate biscuit in his saucer and settled her comfortably large person into the chair across from him. “There’s some people that have ambitions to be doctors or bank managers or the like, but when I was a little girl, all I
dreamed about was growing up into a woman who cleaned other people’s houses. There’s nothing thrills me like scrubbing and polishing, unless it’s taking down an armload of curtains and putting them in the wash.”
For a moment Mrs. Much’s face took on a glow reminiscent of a full moon in an unclouded sky. “Think on it,” she clasped her serviceable hands, “the boundless joy of scrubbing out a bath until it’s white as driven snow! No one, and that’s the gospel truth, Mr. Tipp, will ever know the happiness I get from bringing back the shine on a piece of lino so’s it looks better than new.”
“I take your meaning, Mrs. Much.”
“But the working conditions has to be right, if you understand me, Mr. Tipp. It’s not sufficient that I get to live at Gossinger Hall and make decent wages. I can’t find professional fulfillment when I’m told off for taking down the tapestries for a wash.”
“I doubt no one could make themselves any clearer.” Mr. Tipp took a sip of tea, which tasted of bleach, but told himself manfully that it was an acquired taste and he would get to like it. He would have liked to ask for another chocolate biscuit but did not wish to appear greedy.
“Mr. Hutchins carried on about those tapestries like I was a cold-blooded murderer.” Mrs. Much’s face darkened. “It quite ruined my afternoon, until I told myself, who needs this job, when all is said and done. I’ve no idea where he’s disappeared to all this time, but good riddance is what I say. Let him report me to Sir Henry and her Ladyship. And let them give me the push. It’s no skin off my nose. I’ve a cousin as thinks I could get on where she works, but I won’t say any more about that,” Mrs. Much crossed her fingers, “in case I jinx myself. What I don’t understand is why you stay on here, year after year, Mr. Tipp. It’s not like they’ve ever
made a proper position for you now that there’s no horses in the stables.”
“Haven’t been for thirty years, not since old Major had to be put down, but it doesn’t bother me none being the odd-job man. When I see something that needs doing I write it down, and sometimes I come up with quite a list.” Mr. Tipp picked up the folded piece of paper he’d been fiddling with before he started drinking his tea. He looked at it with an expression of pleased pride before tucking it in his jacket pocket. “I’m the last of a long line of Tipps that have worked at Gossinger Hall since no one quite remembers when. Which is more than can be said for Mr. Hutchins. Not that I mean any disrespect, I’m just saying that’s one difference between us, along with him being Sir Henry’s right-hand man.”
Mr. Tipp looked decidedly anxious, and Mrs. Much hastened to put his mind at ease.
“Trust me not to breathe a word. My late husband would tell you I’m loyal to a fault. Such a lovely man, snuffed out like a light in his prime when he fell asleep in the bath and drowned.” She dabbed at her eyes in respectful memory of the deceased. “It’s a shame, that’s what I call it, Mr. Tipp, you being the junior here, at your time of life. My pride wouldn’t stand for it—" Realizing this was hardly tactful, she added quickly, “but I suppose it would be hard for you to find another job so close to retirement. Where will you go when that time comes? Do you have any family,” Mrs. Much got up to pour him another cup of tea, “any relatives at all who would offer you a home?”
“Not that I knows about.”
“You poor man.” She handed him the sugar bowl by way of a consolation prize.
“Sir Henry will see me all right.”
“I wouldn’t bank on her Ladyship,” Mrs. Much said darkly.
“She’s not the easiest to please,” Mr. Tipp conceded, “but she does love Gossinger Hall something fierce.”
“Well, good luck to her!” Mrs. Much resettled herself at the table. “Don’t take offense, because it’s clear you have your loyalties, but I can’t pour my heart and soul into a place where there’s not one fitted carpet or a color television in sight and the plumbing dates back to the Dark Ages. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when on my very first day Mr. Hutchins took me up one of those stone staircases and showed me that horrible pit toilet. I’ve never seen such a disgusting place in my life. And I couldn’t have been more thankful that it’s kept locked and I wasn’t to be put in charge of one of the keys and told to go in there and clean once a week.”
Mr. Tipp tried to look sympathetic, but as a man who had dreamed of mucking out the stables as his father and grandfather had done before him, he found himself somewhat at a loss for a response. So he wisely said nothing.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this place.” Mrs. Much got to her feet again and with a heartfelt sigh removed Mr. Tipp’s teacup from his hands. “Flora’s a nice enough girl, but I wouldn’t say she’s company. Not much spark to her, but I’m not one to pull people to pieces. Maybe she’s not strong. She’s pale enough to be a ghost, which isn’t to be wondered at after growing up in this tomb of a house! Sometimes if I wake up in the middle of the night,” Mrs. Much gave a trembly laugh, intended to indicate she wasn’t a coward by nature, “I hear noises deep down inside the walls that sound like screams.”
“There’s a lot of stories told about strange doings at Gossinger Hall over the centuries.” Mr. Tipp lowered his voice. “You’ll have heard tell about the Queen’s tea strainer that went missing. But did you know there’s some as say one of the maidservants was blamed, and punished, for taking it? Seems to me, considering
there’s been one or other of us working here down through the years, that she was a Tipp like people say.” This confession was made with a curious hint of pride. “And it could be that it’s her screams you hear of a dark night, and her who put a curse on Gossinger Hall.”
“There’s a curse on the windows all right.” Mrs. Much was looking out the one above the kitchen sink. “All those horrid little panes with so much lead on them it looks like cross-stitch. Give me a nice picture window and double-glazing any day. Mrs. Frome, the lady I worked for before coming here, had the loveliest big windows. It was that sort of house, if you can picture it, Mr. Tipp. Only five years old, with fitted cupboards everywhere you looked and all the pictures bought to match the curtains. They purchased every bit of furniture brand-new when they moved in, Mr. Frome insisted on it. And, as I told him when Mrs. Frome was taken away in the ambulance never to come home again, he could take comfort in knowing he’d nothing to regret. Don’t go reproaching yourself that you didn’t buy one of those self-cleaning cookers, I said when Mr. Frome cried on my shoulder like a
baby. Those sort of gimmicky things take all the fun out of housework. And it was true. I’d loved every minute of scrubbing the racks so you’d never think a Yorkshire pudding had come out of that oven.”
“That’s a sad little story.” Mr. Tipp looked up at the clock as he spoke.
“It was an overdose that took her.” Mrs. Much teared up. “Accidental, of course, because what woman with a fridge that makes ice cubes and a Laura Ashley bedroom would want to make away with herself? And I took it especially hard, because before Mrs. Frome I was with Mrs. Ashford who passed away, without a word of warning, minutes after finishing a bowl of mushroom soup.” Deciding that was enough reminiscing, Mrs. Much turned away from the sink. “Is something wrong, Mr. Tipp?”
“I wonder if I should go back upstairs to collect the tea things,” he replied vaguely, getting to his feet, then sitting back down again. “Flora came along to the kitchen a while back, when you were busy elsewhere, and told me Sir Henry had asked for me to tend to that task, but when I went up to the tower room her Ladyship threw a cushion.”
“That woman’s off her head.”
“She didn’t throw it at me,” Mr. Tipp hastened to explain. “There was a boy there, a boy in school uniform, with spiky hair and freckles, at the top of the stairs.”
“Perhaps he’d escaped from the tour group?” Mrs. Much suggested, as if talking about a lion at the zoo. “But however that may be, Mr. Tipp, it’s now almost six o’clock and it worries me you’ll be in hot water if Mr. Hutchins suddenly pops up and finds out you haven’t cleared away those tea things and brought them down here. Now, that wouldn’t matter if you was planning to hand in your notice along with me, but you’ve just been saying that’s not the case. So why don’t you put your skates on and explain to her Ladyship—if she’s still in the tower room—that you didn’t like to disturb her when she was all upset?”
“She was more than upset, she was ...” Mr. Tipp scratched his head as he searched for the right word, “she was ... distraught.”
“Over this schoolboy?”
“He said . . .”
“Yes?”
“That he was her sister’s grandson.” Mr. Tipp looked ashamed of himself for gossiping about his betters. He certainly knew that if Hutchins had been present he would have branded him a traitor to his class.
“And why should that get her Ladyship wound up like a grandfather clock?”
“Perhaps he’s a bad lot.”
“Come to hit her over the head, because she’d forgot his birthday?” Mrs. Much sounded as though she might be warming to the lad.
“And there was more. I couldn’t help overhearing ...”
“Of course you couldn’t.”
“... Lady Gossinger was talking to Miss Doffit about Sir Henry ... something about him changing his will.” Mr. Tipp hovered like a shadow at the kitchen door.
“Well, I never!” Mrs. Much was all ears to hear more, but (wouldn’t you know?) at that very moment Flora came into the kitchen by way of the outside door, wearing a damp mackintosh and a strained look on her face. Strands of hair had escaped from its coil to hang limply against her neck. And it seemed to Mrs. Much that the girl had brought some of the gathering darkness of late afternoon into the room with her.
“Here, let me help you off with that coat,” the housekeeper said, “and Mr. Tipp, why don’t you leave going up to the tower room for another few minutes and put the kettle on so Flora can have a cup of tea? It’s plain to see something has upset her real bad.”
“No, I’m just being silly.” The girl evaded the hands that were trying to undo her mackintosh buttons and sat down at the kitchen table. “I’ve been out looking for Grandpa, thinking he might have ... had to go out on an errand, but of course he has to be here in the house.”
“Well, I can’t say as I’ve seen him since early afternoon,” Mrs. Much said. “But I’ve been busy around the place myself and figured he’d be polishing the silver; although I can’t say for certain this is his day for it.” Sensing Flora needed cheering up she went on, “I must
say Mr. Hutchins does a lovely job of keeping all those christening cups and whatnots sparkly. That polish he makes up is a miracle. I for one have never used anything that removes tarnish the way it does, along with giving a shine that’s not to be beat.” Mrs. Much hoped she did not sound as if she felt compelled to give the devil his due: It was clear it would take more than the cup of tea Mr. Tipp carried to the table to bring the girl out of the dumps.
“I am being silly,” Flora repeated. “It’s not likely, is it, that a flying saucer landed on the lawn and an army of little green men made off with Grandpa for outer space.” But her laughter was hollow.
“Could be they wanted that recipe for silver polish!”
It was unlike Mr. Tipp to attempt a joke, and Flora found herself smiling. Suddenly she was quite sure her grandfather would turn up any minute now and make nonsense of her concerns that he wasn’t overseeing the tour group. And as if to prove her right, the door to the corridor opened. But it wasn’t her grandfather who entered the room. It was Vivian Gossinger, with his tie askew and his usually well-groomed hair flopping over his forehead.
“Miss Hutchins,” he spoke gently, “you’d better come at once. There’s been the most dreadful accident in the garderobe. Your grandfather has fallen in and—”
“Is he badly hurt?” She came slowly to her feet.
“I’m so sorry, Flora. He was dead when he was brought out.” Vivian took hold of her hand. “God bless him, we won’t see Hutchins’s like again at Gossinger.”
It rained on the day of Mr. Hutchins’s funeral, and that was a twist of the knife because Flora had always loved rainy days. Grandpa used to say that Lincolnshire rain was the softest in all England. When she was a little girl and it started to rain she would picture God wearing a pair of Wellington boots as he walked around his estates in the sky carrying a giant watering can.
Sometimes, if Flora screwed up her eyes just right, she could see God’s face in what most people would think was just another woolly cloud. She would smile at the idea of the Deity taking time out of his busy workday to peer down at the earthly garden he had planted so long ago, to make sure he didn’t miss sprinkling the tiniest continent or flower. And she would remind him that her name was Flora.
Even when she was all grown up she still loved the
way the world looked when it was smudgy and out of focus, as in a picture she had drawn herself and then rubbed out because she hadn’t got it quite right. And the best-ever part of rainy days was knowing that afterward when the sun came out the world would be put back exactly as it always was, only better because it would be all polished up, in just the same sort of way that Grandpa polished the silver every Tuesday and Thursday.
But it was different on the day of the funeral, because Flora knew that when the rain went away and the sun came back out nothing would be the way it was before the accident. It was as though all the bits and pieces of her life had got put away in the wrong drawers. And all the drawers had locks on them and she didn’t have any idea where to start looking for the keys. The key to the garderobe had been found on the floor by Grandpa’s feet when he was discovered. Along with a piece of paper on which he had written the words: