The Wonder Worker (9 page)

The following morning I reviewed my references. The personnel officer at my last permanent job testified generously to my competence as a cook, the temporary agency which had given me work vouched for my reliability as an employee, and Aunt’s elderly solicitor proclaimed that as a human being I was sober, clean, courteous and with no criminal record. So far so good. But the main problem still had to be tackled: my appearance.

At six o’clock that morning I had washed my hair and trimmed all the split ends. I now spent half an hour applying make-up before wedging myself into my best outfit: the navy jacket and skirt with the navy-and-white polka-dot blouse, the navy shoes and the navy gloves. (Aunt had been very keen on gloves.) After contemplating myself in the full-length mirror I decided I looked drab but not actually repulsive. At least no one could doubt my respectability.

I was now well on my way to the next miracle. Leaving the cottage at last, I took the number eleven bus past Victoria station and began to walk west from Buckingham Palace Road towards the glistening mansions of Belgravia.

I

Lady Cynthia
was a streamlined fifty-something with a large amount of layered, tinted, streaked, curled and cosseted brownish-gold hair, a creamy, velvety skin and cat-like green eyes set wide apart over high cheekbones. Her eyelashes, heavily dosed with mascara, were so long that I even wondered if they were false, but I thought she was probably old enough and classy enough to think false eyelashes vulgar. Her sculpted jawline hinted at a first-class face-lift, but maybe face-lifts too would be considered vulgar and the jawline was achieved solely by dieting. I guessed that in her prime she had been highly favoured by society photographers and hotly pursued by hordes of eligible young men.

She wore an exquisitely tailored dress, pale mustard in colour, and no jewellery apart from a rock or two on her fingers. Her manner was business-like but not snooty; indeed it became increasingly pleasant. Far from putting her off, my appearance seemed to reassure her. Fat girls didn’t have menfriends who would cause trouble, and if they
spoke passably and dressed sensibly, the odds were they would also know how to behave.

Lady Cynthia was delighted that I should live so near Smith Square, such an attractive little corner of London, and did I know some very dear friends of hers in Lord North Street called … But to the surprise of neither of us I didn’t know her friends, and honesty compelled me to explain that Aunt had only been the tenant of her cottage.

“But what a heavenly place to be a tenant!” said Lady Cynthia kindly, unaware that Aunt had picked up the tenancy dirt cheap during the war when the Smith Square church was a bombed ruin and no one wanted to live in such a blitzed little patch of Westminster.

After displaying her kindness—which I appreciated—Lady Cynthia got down to business. My references were inspected. I was cross-examined with efficiency. The salary was disclosed (a bit mean but I had to remember the free flat) and the bureaucratic details skimmed in a survey which included vague remarks about national insurance contributions, tart comments on the hellish jungle of employment legislation and rapturous praise of her “divine” accountant who always told her exactly what to do whenever she jousted with the Inland Revenue. She then said I could use her car to do the shopping, and did I have a licence? I did, but I felt I had to add that Aunt’s car had been sold some years ago and I hadn’t driven since.

“So you’ll be a bit rusty,” said Lady Cynthia, apparently unruffled by this confession. “Never mind, I sold the Bentley after my husband died, so if you were to have a prang it wouldn’t matter too much. Nowadays I drive a dear little thing called a Polo and it’s so much easier than the Bentley to park.” That concluded our conversation about driving, but I sensed Lady Cynthia had noted my honesty and savoured it. I also sensed that by this time she had decided to hire me.

I was taken to inspect the kitchen, which was oldish but not past its sell-by date. To my relief there was no Aga; one never knows where one may stumble across these cherished hulks, but personally I prefer an electric oven with a gas hob, both of which were on offer in Lady Cynthia’s kitchen. Agas always remind me of Old English sheepdogs: warm, large and lovable but something I can happily live without.

I was then shown the basement flat which Lady Cynthia had described as “tiny,” but I saw at once it was palatial to anyone threatened
with the world of bedsits. Never mind that the front room was dark, sunk well below the level of the pavement. Never mind that the back room was gloomy, sunk well below the level of the garden. Never mind that the kitchen smelt musty and the bathroom smelt damp. After the previous cook’s recent death from old age, the rooms had been freshly painted and there was no sign of mouse-droppings. The furnishings were sparse but that meant there would be room for Aunt’s antiques. The flat also appeared to be devoid of central heating, but I noticed a couple of plug-in, oil-filled radiators, and anyway I was used to wearing several sweaters in winter in order to economise on heating bills.

“I have a rule forbidding calor gas stoves and paraffin appliances,” said Lady Cynthia firmly. “The fire risk is too great. There’s an immersion heater for the water, and there’s a telephone which you may wish to have connected, but if you decide to do without please remember that my telephone is never to be used without my permission. Other rules include no parties, no more than three guests at a time and all visitors must use the basement entrance … Now the moment’s finally arrived! It’s time for you to meet Mortimer.”

I suddenly realised my entire future was to be settled by Lady Cynthia’s dog. Would he or would he not approve of me? As she went upstairs to retrieve him from her bedroom I could only hope feverishly that he was in a benign mood.

I was eventually presented with an animal which looked like a beribboned rat. “Isn’t he adorable?” demanded Lady Cynthia, cradling him in her arms and gazing at him with a doting expression.

“Gosh!” I said, quite unable to dredge up a single lie which could pass for a compliment, and added idiotically: “He’s very small.”

“I hate big messy dogs,” confided Lady Cynthia, apparently interpreting my “gosh” as an exclamation of rapture. “In fact I hate messiness of any kind.” And as she continued to gaze adoringly at Mortimer, I finally saw her not as an aristocrat nor even as a beautiful, confident woman but as someone vulnerable, someone who chose to pour out her love on an easily managed little dog because big, unmanageable humans had in the past proved too hurtful with their muddled, messy demands which had led to muddled, messy relationships. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder how she had become involved with St. Benet’s, and I wondered too when she and Nicholas had first met.

“Well, I’ll check your references, of course,” Lady Cynthia was saying,
“but if I find they’re satisfactory, I shall wish to offer you the job. I hope you feel the position would suit you.”

It was hard not to shriek: “YES!” and punch the air in triumph, but I managed to say in my most repressed middle-class voice: “Yes, indeed. Thank you, Lady Cynthia.”

“How soon can you start? Oh, wait a minute, you’re clearing up after a funeral, aren’t you, how beastly—of course you’ll need at least another two weeks to get everything straight. Supposing you move in on the thirty-first and start work on April the first?”

“Yes, I’m sure I could manage that,” I said without having the least idea whether I could or not.

“Splendid! What a huge load off my mind—I must phone Nick straight away to tell him the good news! I’ve already been in touch with him, of course,” she added, opening the front door to show me out. “I would have cancelled the interview if his opinion had been unfavourable, but he assured me straight away that you were a woman of integrity.”

My heart gave the impression of disconnecting itself, turning a complete somersault and plugging itself back into position all within the space of three seconds. I had a hard time finding the words to say goodbye, but seconds later I was surging along the pavement of Eaton Terrace with the job nailed, an income guaranteed and a home assured. Within the space of twenty-four hours my life had yet again been transformed.

I decided I was becoming thoroughly addicted to miracles.

II

The
next day Francie reappeared on my doorstep. Much to her surprise I had firmly rejected her offer to attend the funeral (of course she never realised how much I had longed for a little time alone with Nicholas) but now here she was again, apparently still delighted to see me, and with her this time was the young red-headed clergyman who had taken so long to fetch me the glass of water when I had fainted at the healing service. He was introduced to me as Nicholas’s curate, the Reverend Eustace McGovern. “But nobody’s called Eustace nowadays,” he said, “so I’m known as Stacy.” He talked like the characters in
Bread
so I knew he was from Liverpool, but he told me his parents had come from Dublin and I always felt Stacy was more Irish
than English. He was very nearly beautiful, but true masculine beauty is rare and Stacy missed the mark because his pale skin was splattered with freckles; I decided straight away he wasn’t sexy. He was so tall that he seemed to overflow the armchair I had offered him, and his limbs were so long that he knocked over the coffee-table when he impulsively stretched his legs.

“Really, Stacy!” scolded Francie, who treated him just as a nanny would treat a wayward child.

Francie was dressed in a tawny tweed suit. Her dark hair, disarranged by the March gale blowing outside, was still trying to wave in the right directions, but as I left the room to make coffee I saw her whip a mirror from her handbag to make the necessary repairs. If Francie hadn’t been so kind I would have felt intimidated because she was so attractive. However, I knew now she was older than she looked. When discussing cookery during one of our meetings she had disclosed she had attended a finishing school in the late fifties, a fact which I calculated made her about forty-five.

By this time I had also heard more about her work as a Befriender, one of the team of volunteers trained in listening skills and assigned to meet those who turned up at St. Benet’s for help. If more than a listening ear was required the Befriender would classify the problem and refer the caller to either Nicholas or Lewis Hall—or Val the doctor—or Robin the psychotherapist—or Daisy the social worker who liaised with the local authorities. Francie had started by working three mornings a week but now worked full-time.

“Francie’s our Befriender-in-Chief,” said Stacy that morning after Francie had explained how thrilled she’d been that I’d landed such a “super” job and how she’d felt she simply had to call in person to congratulate me. “She’d befriend the Devil himself if you gave her a chance.”

“Stacy, what a thing to say!” Francie was genuinely shocked. “If Lewis were here he’d hit the roof!”

Stacy blushed and apologised but I could see he had no idea why Francie was making such a fuss. Francie, being very English, had taken his words literally, but Stacy, being very Irish, hadn’t meant to be literal at all.

“How
is
Mr. Hall?” I said quickly, trying to divert her.

“My dear, a martyr to his arthritis, he’s getting less and less mobile. I can’t understand why he doesn’t have that hip replaced.”

“Maybe he wants to be in one piece for the Resurrection,” said
Stacy, this time giving me a wink to signal that he wasn’t serious, but Francie just exclaimed: “Stacy,
honestly!”
and looked scandalised again. That was when I realised that although Francie had many virtues, her sense of humour wasn’t as well developed as it might have been.

“Stacy’s substituting for Lewis this morning,” she explained to me after she’d recovered from this latest clerical clanger. “In fact he’s substituting for Nick too. You’re representing the clergy of St. Benet’s here this morning, aren’t you, Stacy?” she added unnecessarily in a meaningful voice designed to remind him of his professional duty.

“Yep,” said Stacy, guzzling one of my chocolate-chip cookies. “Wow, these are great, Alice!”

“Have another!” I said delighted, passing him the plate. “I made them myself.”

“Brill!” He started guzzling again.

I wondered how old he was. Twenty-five? He seemed more like a teenager. “I miss my mother’s cooking!” he was saying with a sigh.

I asked him if he had any siblings.

“Three beautiful sisters,” said Stacy at once, pleased to be asked. “They’re all older than me. Siobhan and Sinead have been married for some time but Aisling only got married the other day and I still can’t believe she’s gone, I’m going to miss her so much—”

“Where’s she gone to?”

“Oh, just down the road from our Mam, but it’s never the same after they get married and I’ve been feeling really down about it—”

“Stacy,” said Francie repressively, “Alice has her own sadness to deal with. She doesn’t need yours as well.”

“But I was going to take her mind off the funeral by showing her my best picture of Aisling in her wedding dress!”

“Nevertheless I’m sure Nick would say—”

“Talking of Nicholas,” I said in another heroic attempt to divert her, “I’ve been so absorbed in my troubles that I’ve never once asked you how you met him. When did you first go to St. Benet’s?”

“Oh, I knew Nick long before he came to London to work!” said Francie, rising at once to the bait. “I was at finishing school with his wife Rosalind. She and Nick married in 1968.”

“Oh, I see … And had they known each other long before they got married?” I asked this question not merely to satisfy my rampant curiosity but to divert her yet again from Stacy, now pigging out on a third cookie.