Authors: Rachel Hore
Instead, she took a deep sobbing breath and set about unpacking, laying her few clothes in the drawers Jenna had shown her. Her elderly towel she draped on a wooden rail next to Jenna’s, her wash bag and hairbrush she left on the chest of drawers. She wasn’t sure what to do with the books so she stacked them on the floor together with the paintbox, paper and sketchbook Mr Reagan had given her, to think what to do about later.
There was clean water in the jug on the wash-stand. She tipped some into the bowl and splashed it on her face and neck, patting herself dry with her towel. Then she turned her attention to the uniform. A starched white apron, collar, cuffs and cap lay in a neat pile on the bed. She looked down at the rough brown dress she was wearing and brushed at some streaks of mud with a corner of the towel. That would have to do. There wasn’t time to change now and, anyway, she only had one spare work dress.
As she fiddled with the new cuffs, something scraped at the window, startling her. She glanced up in time to catch a flurry of white feathers as the bird wheeled away. Feeling suddenly stifled, she moved to the window and heaved open the sash, welcoming the sudden cool breeze on her flushed skin.
The attic looked out south-west down the gardens at the rear of the house, although from this angle she could only see the tops of trees, banks of rhododendron just coming into bud, a line of laurels and a rectangular pond with a curious little building to one end. The air smelled of earth and things growing, not the salt and fish she was used to, and apart from the chatter of birds there was silence. At home there had been always the sound of water lapping against the sea wall or the rush of the wind, the eternal cries of seagulls and the shouts of the fishermen.
This new place was miraculous to her: that people should live in such a huge house in the middle of a sort of park. She hadn’t seen the main parts of the house yet, but the high-ceilinged kitchen was so light and clean compared with the hot grimy gloom of the Blue Anchor. Even the backstairs up which Jenna had led her were clear of dust, while the staircase of the pub had been cobwebbed and splashed with candle grease even before it had become blackened by the recent fire.
She turned away from the window to survey her new home once more and it was then she noticed the piece of newspaper dropped on the floor. She picked it up and unfolded it, sitting on the bed to read it for the twentieth time . . .
So absorbed was she in her thoughts, the sound of Jenna’s boots clumping up the wooden stairs hardly registered. She jumped up, and as the maid burst panting into the room, she thrust the paper in the drawer and slammed it shut.
‘Come on now, Cook wants ee something desperate. The missus is home, and Mr Charles, and they’ve brought company. You’re to help Cook take in the tea.’ Jenna screwed up her eyes shortsightedly as she looked around the room, noticing the new arrangements. She moved over to the pile of books by the bed. ‘Wha’s this then?’ She picked the one off the top, a collection of poetry by Christina Rossetti
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and opened it, a frowning look of concentration creeping across her face. Her lips moved silently, then she shook her head.
She can’t read, it occurred to Pearl suddenly, and she gently took the book from Jenna’s hand. The other girl’s face had a closed look.
‘Just something somebody gave me.’ Pearl placed it back on the pile then started towards the door. Sharing a room with Jenna was not going to be straightforward. It would be comforting for Pearl to have a friend her own age in this new world where she found herself, but the wariness clouding the other girl’s eyes threatened to sour the friendship before it began.
‘Where’s your cap?’ Jenna asked now, brisk, and Pearl, flustered, snatched it from the wash-stand where she’d dropped it and, ducking to glimpse herself in a cracked oblong of mirror on the wall, pinned it to her head. Then without further ado the two girls hurried downstairs to the kitchen.
‘But I heard it from Robert Kernow, they’re laying off more workers at the mine.’ The voice clearly audible through the slightly open door was a young man’s, passionate.
‘Oh, Charlie, no more politics now, please. Sidonie’s bored, aren’t you, my love?’ a woman’s voice protested, as Jago, the trainee footman, knocked smartly on the door and pushed it wide to admit Cook with her laden tray. Pearl, following behind with the silver Georgian teapot and hot-water jug, thanked her stars she was used to carrying heavy jars of cider.
Whilst not daring to stare round, Pearl absorbed with amazement that they were in a blue and white room like a palace with tall windows looking out onto sun-drenched gardens beyond. There was a proper carpet on the floor. When she found the courage to raise her eyes she saw there were three people sitting in the room. A young man in a tweed jacket occupied one of the fireside chairs. A plump matron in a gold tea dress sat in another, close to the white fireplace where flames leaped and crackled. The third, an elegant dark-haired woman, was perched imperiously on a small sofa, stroking a small whippet dog cuddled up beside her.
Pearl was too shy to do more than glance at her. Instead her eyes fixed suddenly upon an enormous painting above the mantelpiece, of a man in a wide hat sitting on a horse. It was only with great effort that she stopped her jaw hanging open. She’d seen a painting very like this before, in one of Mr Reagan’s books that must have been lost in the fire. Despite what she had since learned, she still thought of him as ‘Mr Reagan’.
The lady on the sofa spoke in the bossy voice Pearl recognised from a moment ago. ‘Move the table over here, would you, Jago.’ She must be the mistress then. Mr Boase, who had driven her here, had referred to her as Mrs Carey, but being of the strong and silent school had said little else useful. The mistress was still pretty, not young but not old either, fashionably dressed in a pale green gown. Her almond-shaped eyes slid across Cook putting down the tray to scrutinise Pearl, waiting behind.
‘Oh good, you must be the new girl,’ Mrs Carey said, not unkindly but matter-of-fact.
Pearl wasn’t sure if an answer was required to this statement, but Cook decided for her. ‘Yes, mum. But the gloves don’t fit, that’s why she’s not wearing un.’
The round-faced matron Mrs Carey had called Sidonie, giggled, but Mrs Carey ignored her. She studied Pearl and nodded, apparently satisfied.
‘Never mind, she’ll do to wait at dinner. She’s tall, that’s good.’
Pearl felt her face burn. How dare they discuss her as though she were a dog or a horse. She was aware of the interested eyes of the young man, Charlie, upon her and stared hard at the gold lines bordering the carpet, wishing she and the silver vessels could drop right through it.
Later that night, sitting under the oil lamps with the other servants around the long kitchen table, she was too exhausted to do more than push around on her plate the fatty pieces of lamb left over from the dinner party.
‘They ate all that seafood, eh, Mrs Roberts? You should have seen how the mistress’s eyebrows shot up when the parson asked for another helping.’ Jago – Pearl hadn’t worked out whether this was his first name or his last – smiled broadly at Jenna and winked at Pearl across the table. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves, having changed out of the tailored jacket and cravat Mrs Carey insisted he wear at table. The mistress had tried to get him to wear proper livery on occasions such as these, Jenna had told Pearl as they laid the table earlier, but Jago had refused point blank. He was a thin young man with narrow shoulders and a slight limp, possibly in service because he was not strong enough for farming, guessed Pearl. He appeared to have varied duties in and about the house, cycling off to deliver letters to the Post Office, performing odd jobs, polishing the bright Newlyn copper pots, looking after the fires and generally waiting on the family. In the absence of a butler, he, like Pearl and Jenna, answered to Cook, whose caustic comments rarely dented his chirpy manner. Only Jenna’s blank ignoring of his clumsy advances seemed to be able to do that.
‘At least they left some of that trifle,’ said Jenna, greedily licking the gravy from her spoon.
‘That’s for Family’s lunch tomorrow,’ said Cook sharply. ‘There’s the last of the stewed plum for us.’ Jenna groaned. ‘Then you can finish the pots in the scullery, sweep the floor and stoke the range. Pearl can help Jago clear up in the dining room then she had better go to bed.’
Through her veil of tiredness Pearl felt a flash of gratitude at this small act of kindness. After Pearl had helped serve tea, Cook had tossed her a large coarse apron and worked her in the kitchen without a moment to sit down. With ten to dinner it had been all hands to the pump, Cook barking orders like a sergeant major. Pearl had peeled vegetables, fetched supplies from the storeroom, washed up, cleaned floors, stirred pots and basted the joints. Dolly Roberts had praised her for none of her work, but neither had she chided her. She supposed this had to be good enough. What had been missing, though, had been any note of sympathy for Pearl, though Cook had asked after her sister-in-law and shook her head in a grim fashion when Pearl described how weak Adeline Treglown was growing.
As Jenna had shown Pearl how to arrange the place-settings with their complicated array of cutlery, the kitchenmaid didn’t stop asking questions. Pearl described the bare facts of her situation. That she could remember no other home but the Blue Anchor, that she had been to the Board School in Newlyn but, despite being praised by her teacher, had been taken away when she was fourteen looked at his watch. ouQ so she could work in the inn twelve hours a day or more, chambermaiding for any overnight guests, serving behind the bar, cooking, tidying up, cleaning, breaking up fights, all unpaid.
Then calamity had struck. Four weeks ago a fire, probably started in an unswept chimney, had destroyed most of the inn’s upper storey and killed a guest – Arthur Reagan. Pearl couldn’t talk about it without her voice shaking. Then, where they were staying with neighbours shortly afterwards, Mrs Treglown suffered a seizure and it became clear she was ill with some progressive disease.
‘She wrote to Mrs Roberts,’ Pearl told Jenna, ‘asked her to get me a place. And she’s sold the inn – or what’s left of it – and is moving in with her sister in Penzance. But there’s no room for me there.’
‘That’s hard,’ said Jenna, clearly shocked by Pearl’s story. ‘You poor duck.’
Jenna’s sympathy made Pearl wish she had the courage to tell her the rest of it. But what Adeline Treglown had revealed to her hadn’t sunk in yet, didn’t seem real. She wanted time to get used to it, and to grieve for what she hadn’t known before was hers to lose.
It had been two days after the fire, after Adeline had attended the inquest into Arthur Reagan’s death as a witness. Usually a brisk, matter-of-fact woman who got on with the job in hand, Pearl had been shocked to find her stepmother hunched over a bar table in the devastated inn, crying.
‘It’s losing this place that’s done it,’ she said, through her sobs. ‘And what happened to that poor man.’
Pearl swept the soot off the bench opposite and sat down gingerly. She stared around the bar. Although the fire hadn’t reached this room, there was soot and cinders on every surface and rubbish floated in pools of dirty water on the uneven floor. The room stank of smoke and stale beer.
‘It’s not your fault,’ was all she could manage to say. She wanted to tell Adeline that she missed him, too, that with his death something special – not just the man himself, but a glimpse of another world, a way out – was gone.
Mr Reagan had been a periodic guest at the Blue Anchor for as far back as Pearl could remember. He was a painter and would visit Newlyn for a few weeks at a time, once for several months. From the age of about six or seven, when she could escape school and Adeline’s clutches, Pearl would run down to the new pier or along the cliffs, wherever he had set up his easel, and watch him sketch and paint. Sometimes he would talk to her about what he was doing – about recreating the precise mood of the sea that day or how to represent boats far away on the horizon. Sometimes he told her about his travels. He had visited painters’ colonies in France and once spent a year in Italy. Seeing her interest, he showed her books about these places or catalogues from exhibitions.
‘They don’t get across how bright the colours are,’ he complained of the black and white plates as he tried to describe the visual shock of works by Vincent van Gogh or Paul Gaugin.
Pearl knew Reagan was married. His wife lived in Kent and they had five children, but he didn’t talk about them very much. She had the impression that his wife wasn’t happy about his visits to Newlyn and she certainly never came too.
There was something melancholic about him, she thought, studying his gaunt face with its dark beard. He never seemed to eat properly and his shabby if well-made suits hung off him as though they had been tailored for a different man, one sleeker and happier.
Sometimes he was cheerful because the Academy or the Watercolour Society had accepted one of his pictures and it had subsequently sold. ‘It isn’t so much the money,’ he would say, ‘but that the Academy approves what I’ve done.’ From that she assumed that he had some other income, although she couldn’t imagine what. Everyone she knew always seemed to be in need of money.
He was a lonely figure. Sometimes he sought the company of other painters who had settled in Newlyn, for a time sharing an old fishloft as a studio with two others. But mostly he kept himself to himself. He didn’t seem to mind sitting on his own, smoking endlessly and staring at the sea like an old sailor dreaming of past voyages.
Adeline, Pearl was surprised, seemed fond of him. She always made an effort with the cooking when he was staying and sent Pearl up every day to clean his room, while other guests would receive more cursory attention. And then, just as suddenly as he had arrived, he would be bidding Pearl goodbye, off back on the train to London – but always promising to be back ‘as soon as I can square it with Lena’, his wife.
Now, in the wrecked bar of the Blue Anchor, Adeline’s crying had turned to a long exhausting coughing fit. When she was calm again she sat, twisting a handkerchief in her fingers and staring, watery-eyed at the floor. After a while she said, ‘Arthur Reagan was your father.’