Appointment with Yesterday Page 6

  By this time there was not a crumb nor a scraping of anything eatable left, and Milly realised with sharp dismay that she had no idea what the time was! Why, she might already be hours late for her wonderful new job! Ten o’clock, Mrs Graham had said.

  “What’s the time?” she cried, rudely interrupting an account of Jacko’s true self versus the Admissions Board: and for a moment her two companions seemed rather taken aback. They found her anxiety about being in time for work puzzling, and a little shocking: and though they were too kind actually to say it, it was plain enough to Milly that integrity was not really compatible with punctuality. However, they were broad-minded lads, and when they realised that Milly really was worried, they took counsel, and Jacko clattered amiably down the stairs to consult the household clocks. He came back with the reassuring news that since the kitchen clock said twenty to eleven, and the chiming clock in the dining room had just struck seven, it couldn’t possibly be later than half past nine. Earlier, very likely. Milly would soon get the hang of it, he assured her, after she’d lived here a while.

  *

  “Off to work, Mrs Barnes?”

  Whether by chance or cunning, Mrs Mumford had materialised in the hallway just as Milly was letting herself out of the front door: and Milly seized eagerly on the opportunity (such opportunities having become increasingly rare of late) of speaking the truth.

  “Yes,” she said happily, meeting the landlady’s watchful eyes with a smile. “I have to be there by ten….” and so saying she stepped triumphantly forth into the frosty, silver-yellow morning.

  “Off to work!” How safe, and solid, and successful the phrase sounded! Milly fairly danced along the icy, unfamiliar street, the sea-wind whipping at her scarlet head-scarf, and her ungloved hands pushed deep into the pockets of her winter coat. Off to work! Off to work! What price mustard-and-cress now, eh, Julian?

  CHAPTER VII

  “AH, GOOD MORNING, Mrs—er—! Do you think you could start in the kitchen? There’s not much to do really, just one or two things that don’t go in the dishwasher; and then if you could just go over the floor with the Squeejee? That’s all it needs, it’s specially surfaced, you see. I don’t believe in hard scrubbing, do you, Mrs Er—all that down-on-hands-and-knees business? I believe in labour-saving, my kitchen is modern throughout, all the latest equipment. I don’t believe in making work….”

  By the time Mrs Graham had reached this point in her credo, the two of them had reached the kitchen doorway, and Milly came into full view of the one or two things that wouldn’t go in the dishwasher. Grease-caked saucepans, burnt baking-tins and frying pans … and on every surface in sight lay mountainous, half-dismantled mechanisms, each trailing a greasy length of electric flex, and most of them plastered with ancient remnants of food, each in accordance with its function.

  “Yes … yes, of course,” agreed Milly faintly, trying to conceal her dismay as she contemplated all these rejects from the labour-saving paradise about which Mrs Graham was still prattling so blithely:

  “… can take up to four loads in a morning!” she was saying proudly, patting the dishwasher as if it was a favourite pony: and Milly now turned her awed gaze towards the subject of this eulogy. It dominated the scene like a queen termite, its huge white bulk throned on what had once been a roomy draining-board, but whose effective area had now been reduced to a strip two or three inches wide, on which (Milly could see already) it would be impossible to balance anything much bigger than a teacup.

  “The washing-up is nothing now!” Mrs Graham was explaining happily. “Just a few cooking things which can be left till it’s convenient” (like now, I suppose, thought Milly) “and all the rest goes straight into the dishwasher! All the cups, saucers, spoons, plates—unless they’re very greasy, of course …”

  It seemed to Milly that the thing liked washing up exactly the same things as everyone else likes washing up, and it avoided anything at all difficult or unpleasant: the only difference being that it got away with it. Mrs Graham was right now beaming on it with loving pride, as if it had just passed its O-levels….

  “It cost me £200!” she informed Milly in hushed tones, “and it’s been worth every penny! It’s time, you see, Mrs Er, that I’m short of: for a person like me, time is money!”

  It was for Milly, too, of course: in her case, an hour equalled seven shillings, as Mrs Graham of all people, should have known. But Mrs Graham seemed to feel that the predicament was so specially hers that Milly hadn’t the heart to point out its universality. Instead, she listened with respectful attention while her employer continued:

  “You see, I happen to have a degree in Sociology, and if a woman has had any sort of higher education I feel she has an obligation to use it, even after she’s married, don’t you agree, Mrs Er? It’s difficult, though, working at home: people seem to think that just because you’re at home, they can interrupt you just as much as ever they like. They think they can come in and out bothering you about every tiny thing! My other woman was like that.”

  Her voice trailed off into a deprecatory little laugh, and she shot an anxious glance at Milly. Clearly, she wanted to make sure that the point had got across, but was fearful lest it might have offended her new Mrs Er in the process. Milly suppressed a tiny smile and was agreeably aware of the first stirrings of a sense of power. Mrs Er’s were few and far between.

  But after Mrs Graham had gone, and she found herself alone in the messy, alien kitchen, the brief feeling of confidence left her, and she felt something approaching panic. Where should she start? Where was everything supposed to go? Where was the Vim … the washing-up liquid …? In the weeks to come, she was to learn that this attack of panic when confronted by a strange kitchen was one of the occupational hazards of being a Daily: and she was to learn, too, how quickly it passed: how, if one set oneself quietly to doing just one thing, however trivial, the other tasks would mysteriously sort themselves out and become manageable while one wasn’t looking. But this morning, in her very first job, she didn’t know any of this: she thought it was herself, her own inadequacy, that was to blame.

  I can’t! she thought, I can’t! Her hands were trembling, and her mouth was dry, exactly like someone about to make a public speech for the first time: yet even while she panicked, she began, whether by good luck or instinct, to do the right thing. That is, to do something. She began blindly pulling the pans out of the sink and stacking them on the floor beside her.

  And suddenly, wonderfully, she found that a miracle had happened! She had done one thing! She had cleared the sink! Now all things were possible.

  Humming a little tune in sheer relief, she turned on the hot tap to its fullest extent, and as it surged clean and steaming against the stainless steel, she began with real enthusiasm to select an assortment of objects to begin on: she was now positively enjoying the enormity of the mess confronting her. She had joined battle with it, and she was going to win!

  But here came the next setback. No dishcloth. Not just that she couldn’t find a dishcloth: there simply wasn’t one. Not anywhere. Nor a floorcloth either, nor any rag of any kind. How on earth was she to wash up all this stuff without one—not to mention the wiping of all these streamlined labour-saving surfaces, now revealed as a mass of grease, old tea-leaves, and smears of gravy? Milly’s fingers itched to get at it all with a lovely, hot, well-wrung-out cloth: and for a moment she stood motionless, surveying the smears and spills, weighing them up against Mrs Graham’s degree in Sociology.

  Then, her decision made, she marched boldly out of the kitchen and knocked firmly on the sitting-room door.

  “No dishcloth?” Mrs Graham was blinking, vaguely, as she looked up from her typewriter, like a kitten just roused from sleep. “No dishcloth? But of course there isn’t a dish cloth. We have a dishwasher—I showed you, Mrs Er—and so we don’t need a dishcloth. It’s an automatic machine, don’t you see? The washing up is done automatically.”

  She spoke wearily, as if it was the t
wentieth time she had had to repeat this same elementary fact. You could see her visibly resigning herself to the idea that Mrs Er was going to prove just as stupid as My Other Woman.

  “It’s an automatic dishwasher,” she repeated, stealing an impatient glance down at her typewriter: but Milly stood her ground.

  “It’s all those saucepans,” she pointed out. “The things that won’t go in the dishwasher. The baking-tins. And the mincer. And the burnt chip-pan. And all that white, sticky stuff in the Mouli-Mixer—”

  “Oh dear. Well.” You could see that Mrs Graham was interrupting the recital because she knew it by heart. She must have gone through it many a time with My Other Woman and her predecessors, and she had learned, the hard way, that stupidity has to be humoured.

  “You want a rag, I suppose?” she diagnosed wearily. “I’ll see what I can find.” And with a huge sigh she got up from her typewriter and began rummaging in the bottom drawer of a big mahogany desk. Embroidery silks—hemstitched tray-cloths—postcards—cotton wool—they boiled up like soapsuds round her elbows as she stirred and prodded: and at last, in weary triumph, she produced a torn nylon slip and the half-unravelled sleeve of a knitted sweater.

  “Here you are,” she said: and such was her air of having secured these objects against unimaginable odds that Milly hadn’t the heart to point out that they were almost useless for the job in hand, and that what she needed was something absorbent, like an old towel or piece of sheeting.

  So she simply thanked her employer meekly, and went back to the kitchen. It took much longer than it would have done, if only she’d had a proper rag, and the final result was not all that she could have wished: but it was certainly greatly improved, and Milly fairly glowed with pride when her employer came in, an hour later, and surveyed the clean and shining surfaces with real approval.

  “They’re marvellous, aren’t they, these dishwashers?” she observed, looking blandly round at the results of Milly’s labours. “See how clean and tidy they keep the kitchen! You’ve no idea the mess we used to be in, before we had one! I’m going to make a cup of coffee now, Mrs Er, could you put the kettle on? I drink a lot of coffee when I’m working. I expect you’d rather have tea, Mrs Er, wouldn’t you?”

  Milly thought quickly. Did this mean simply that My Other Woman had preferred tea? Or was it a veiled command—coffee in short supply, or more expensive, or something?

  Well, and suppose it was a veiled command? Who was it, anyway, who had to be careful not to annoy whom? At this invigorating thought, Milly’s courage returned.

  “No—actually I prefer coffee,” she declared boldly: and registering only the faintest flicker of surprise, Mrs Graham took the Nescafé from the shelf, and proceeded to make coffee for the two of them.

  “I’m on a special diet, I don’t take sugar,” she observed, stirring two heaped teaspoonfuls into Milly’s cup as she spoke; and Milly accepted the sickly-sweet concoction without protest. In the first place, she could quite see how the specialness of Mrs Graham’s diet would be spoiled by other people not taking sugar either: and in the second, she could feel in her body an unwonted craving for sweetness. Even after all those Ricicles, she still felt half-starved, and she watched, almost dizzy with greed, as Mrs Graham reached for a tin of biscuits, opened it, and peered inside.

  “All sweet ones!” she said disgustedly. “Arnold—Professor Graham, that is to say—he will buy the sweet ones! I’ve told him a million times …! For two pins I’d do the shopping myself, but it’s so convenient for him, the supermarket’s right on his way back from the University….”

  Milly watched, sick with disappointment, as Mrs Graham began replacing the lid—but just at that moment, something seemed to arrest Mrs Graham’s attention. She cocked her head on one side, and set the biscuit tin absently on the table: and Milly, pretending to think it had been passed to her, snatched greedily into the tin.

  Had this behaviour looked very odd? Mrs Graham was staring at Milly unbelievingly, and Milly, covered with shame and confusion, was just about to apologise, when Mrs Graham herself began to speak.

  “I can’t understand it!” she was saying, “I can’t understand it at all! Alison always sleeps till lunch time! Now what am I going to do?”

  By now Milly could hear the sounds too—the unmistakeable protests of a baby who considers that her morning sleep is over. Mrs Graham pressed her hand against her white forehead despairingly.

  “And Arnold will be back at one, wanting his lunch, and I’ve still got my correlations to finish! Look, Mrs Er, would you mind seeing to her for me? Do you know anything about babies? If you could just get her up, and change her nappy? And then keep her with you while you do the dining-room? She’s no trouble: you just have to see that she doesn’t pull down the ornaments, or open the sideboard, or put anything in her mouth, or interfere with the papers on the couch, or get at the china in the cabinet, or play with the lamp flex, or pull the books out of the bottom shelf, or pinch her fingers in the door—Oh, and watch out for the vases, won’t you, Mrs Er? She’s mad about flowers. And the clock too: now that she can climb up to the clock I just don’t know what we are going to do. And whatever you do, don’t let her cry, because I must get on with my correlations, I just can’t be interrupted any more this morning.”

  With which instructions, she whisked up her cup of coffee and fairly fled into the sitting-room, shutting the door behind her with a finality that was almost a slam. Milly was left to locate the baby as best she could.

  Not that it was difficult. The screams were reaching a crescendo now, and Milly opened the door behind which they resounded with a good deal of trepidation. She was no automatic baby-lover: she only liked them if they were nice, and there was so far no evidence at all that this one was going to fall into any such category.

  At the sight of the furious, red-faced little creature, standing up clutching the bars of its cot and jigging up and down in its rage, all Milly’s most non-maternal feelings surged into her breast.

  “There, there! Now, come along, then!” she forced herself to squeak ingratiatingly across the uproar: and at the sound of her voice Alison at once stopped screaming, presumably from sheer shock. For a moment the two glowered at each other in mutual dismay. Traumatic, that’s what it must be, thought Milly glumly, to have a complete stranger walk in like this and yank you out of your cot and start changing your nappy. Surely, even a mother without a degree in Sociology might have thought twice about it?

  Still, everything has its bright side: it seemed, mercifully, that the effect of traumatic experiences on Alison was to stop her screaming for minutes on end: long enough for Milly to change her nappy, get her leggings on, carry her into the dining-room, and set her down on a rug, where she sat, sucking the plug of the Hoover with ferocious intensity, and following Milly’s every movement with unblinking concentration. She remained in this felicitous state of shock for long enough to allow Milly to dust all the furniture, and even to wipe the window-sills and mantelpiece with a damp cloth. After that, inevitably, recovery set in, and Alison began to feel well enough to screw up her face ready for a new bout of crying. At this unwelcome sign of returning vitality, Milly hastily gave the child a pair of nutcrackers out of the sideboard drawer, together with a small brass tray to bash them against: and while Alison was thus employed, she herself got on with the hoovering. By now, she was feeling really pleased with herself. She was managing the job splendidly. Mrs Graham had been really pleased with the kitchen, and surely she would be pleased with this room, too: it was beginning to look very nice, with all the furniture polished and shining, and the last of the crumbs disappearing off the floor like a dream … and it was just then, just as she switched the Hoover off, that the telephone began to ring.

  It was ridiculous, of course: why on earth shouldn’t Mrs Graham’s phone ring now and again? Why in all the world should it be anything to do with Milly? And yet, as she stood there, behind the closed door of the dining-room, Milly felt her pulse
quicken. Her palms began sweating … soon her heart was leaping in her throat with great, panicky thuds, and her legs trembled so that she could hardly go on standing. She heard Mrs Graham cross the room, lift the receiver….

  “Seacliffe 49901,” Milly heard her say briskly, and held her breath as she listened. In a moment now it would be all right. She would hear Mrs Graham saying something like: “Oh hullo, Christine …!” or “Thank you so much, Tuesday will do splendidly …!” something of that sort, something to show conclusively that it was nothing whatsoever to do with Milly. Well, of course it wasn’t. How could it be? No one in all the world knew she was here … how ridiculous to panic like this about nothing!

  “Ye-es,” she heard Mrs Graham saying, in a guarded sort of voice: and then, more decisively: “Yes, she’s been here since ten o’clock….” And after that came a pause, which to Milly’s ringing ears seemed to last a lifetime. Then Mrs Graham’s voice again: “Well, I can’t help that, can I? But who told you about her? How did you know?”

  By this time, if only her legs would have carried her so far, Milly would have been out of the dining-room window and sliding down whatever drainpipe there might or might not be to the ground three storeys below: but so paralysed was she with the sheer, incredible horror of it, that she could only stand there. Who had traced her …? How …? Or had it all been a plot, a police trap carefully laid for her? What a fool she had been …! Why hadn’t her suspicions been aroused by the incredible ease with which she had walked into this job …? Why hadn’t she realised that it was a trap, that Mrs Graham must be in league with the police …? Even as these speculations rang and rattled through her whirling brain, she realised that the telephone conversation had broken off: Mrs Graham was crossing the hall … opening the dining-room door … and now she was standing there, in the doorway, fixing Milly with a hard, suspicious stare: and behind the suspicion, there was the faint, unmistakeable flicker of fear….