Her Ladyship's Girl (7 page)

‘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.

B
ut 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 floor 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.

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.

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.

‘Would you like a cigarette, Anwyn?’

‘I don’t smoke, Sir.’

‘Of course you don’t. Well then, I won’t either.’

He replaced the two cigarettes in a silver case, then moved past me to the library door. I thought he was going to leave and let me get on with my work, but he didn’t. He stood inside the
door and looked back at me.

‘Should I lock the door, Anwyn?’

‘What for, Sir?’

‘Why, in case someone should come in, of course.’

I may have been naive, but I wasn’t totally stupid, and I knew what he meant. Kathleen’s words came back to me and he must have tried it on with the other girls too. But I was
strangely flattered – that a man like this would find me attractive. A sophisticated man with soft hands and straight teeth and a seductive scent and words that weren’t spoken –
that were blown at me like kisses.

My legs felt weak, like they wouldn’t be able to support me for much longer, and I must have looked like a fawn that had been caught in the headlights of a car. He didn’t wait for my
reply, but turned the key in the lock and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he came back across the room – slowly, deliberately – smiling with the same set of teeth Mrs
Reynolds used to smile at me, all that time ago. And I didn’t feel like Anwyn Moyle any more, I felt like her. I was beautiful and glamorous and drinking from a stemmed glass with a green
berry and smoking a cigarette from a long, black holder. Maybe that’s why I didn’t call out – or maybe it was because, if I did and somebody came, it would be his word against
mine and who would believe me? In any case, I didn’t want to call out. I was seduced by the situation – entranced by the man’s aura – overcome by his all-pervading presence.
He wasn’t Mr Harding – he was Heathcliff, or maybe Paris, or Mr Darcy, or Edmond Dantès – or all of them rolled into one.

Up close, his skin looked tanned and seemed to glow, or maybe it was the light in the library. He had a thin moustache that was impeccably groomed and his hair was brushed back in a wave. Almost
without me knowing, his hands were cupping my face, but his touch was gentle, more a caress than a clasp. His eyes were green like the Mari Lwyd’s and they looked deep into mine, through me
and into my soul. He was looking for a word that didn’t come to my lips – a word that said either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But nothing came – no word came up from my
heart and into my mouth. Not a syllable. So he assumed the positive rather than the negative. His lips were as gentle as his fingers, barely touching mine, brushing mine, while his right hand moved
slowly down my body to my breast and there it stayed, waiting to see if I objected. His left hand moved to the nape of my neck and then down along my spine to my waist. He whispered something, but
I didn’t understand the words and had no need to – little indistinguishable sounds that meant the same thing in any language.

I wasn’t afraid in the room; in the gloom. I knew Mr Harding was a formidable man, but I wasn’t fearful of him. I had the reckless courage of my youth – of who I believed I was
– and what I believed I would become. I didn’t want to go back downstairs to the kitchen, to the skivvy I was down there. Here in the library I was Mrs Reynolds and I wanted this man to
know me, who I could be – better than all the others. He was making me feel emotions I’d never experienced before and, for the first time since I came to this place, I felt alive
– really alive, not just going through the motions. I felt eternal – part of everything, like the lady of Llyn y Fan Fach
¹⁴
or
Gwenhwyfar
¹⁵
, here in the library with him. And the books were symbolic, all around us, looking on at us making our own legend. I was soaring in the sky
and I knew who I really was.

For the very first time.

He spoke again, close to my ear. His voice was soft and sensuous and his words floated around my head like little stars. He was more than a man to me at that moment in time and I knew he could
teach me things – how to live. How to love. How to listen – and laugh. And then he’d teach me how to cry. And maybe that was something I had to learn in order to become a real
woman. Not a fake, sterile shadow of something I might become someday. Not Cook, or my mother, or Mona or Lilly, but a woman with a deeper light – a more profound identity, with a soul that
any man could float away on. A woman who needed no man to make her whole, but who could accommodate men if she felt like it – if it was something she wanted. Would Mr Harding make me that
kind of woman, or would he break me and throw me away like a twig?

But there was something about him, not just the charisma or style or charm or the scent of sage and cedarwood – something else. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly but he
had it and I wanted it. Or maybe it was just my fantasy and there really was nothing for him to give – nothing
of
him to give. Just a figment of my adolescent imagination, what I
wanted him to be. He was something and I was nothing – what could there be between us, apart from a cheap thrill? I tried to tell myself that, not to be stupid, to push him away and threaten
to call out. But I couldn’t. I wanted to be here with him because there was nowhere else worth being right then. I knew his reputation – the rumours. But there had to be more to the man
than his reputation – maybe he didn’t even know it himself. And that didn’t make it any less there; the thing about him.