The Maid(14)

“Tell me something, do you know Mr. Black very well? Have you ever had conversations with him, beyond just about cleaning their suite?”

“No,” I reply. “Mr. Black was always aloof. He drank a lot and did not seem partial to me at all, so I stayed clear of him as much as possible.”

“And Giselle Black?” the detective asked.

I thought of Giselle, of all the times we’d conversed, of the intimacies shared, hers and mine. That’s how a friendship is built, one small truth at a time.

I thought back to the very first time, many months ago, when I met Giselle. I’d cleaned the Blacks’ suite many times before, but I’d never actually met Giselle. It was in the morning, probably around nine-thirty, when I knocked on the door and Giselle let me in. She was wearing a soft pink dressing gown made of satin or silk. Her dark hair cascaded onto her shoulders in perfect waves. She reminded me of the starlets in the old black-and-white movies that Gran and I used to watch together in the evenings. And yet there was something very contemporary about Giselle as well, like she bridged two worlds.

She invited me in and I thanked her, rolling my trolley in behind me.

“I’m Giselle Black,” she said, offering me her hand.

I didn’t know what to do. Most guests avoid touching maids, especially our hands. They associate us with other people’s grime—never their own. But not Giselle. She was different; she was always different. Perhaps that’s why I’m so fond of her.

I quickly wiped my hands on a fresh towel from my trolley and then reached out to shake her hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” I said.

“And your name?” she asked.

Again, I was flummoxed. Guests rarely asked my name. “Molly,” I mumbled, then curtsied.

“Molly the Maid!” she roared. “That’s hilarious!”

“Indeed, madame,” I replied, looking down at my shoes.

“Oh, I’m no ‘madame,’?” she said. “Haven’t been for a long time. Call me Giselle. Sorry you have to clean this shithole every day. We’re a bit of a mess, me and Charles. But it’s nice to open the door and find everything all fresh after you’ve been here. It’s like being reborn every single day.”

My work had been noticed, acknowledged, appreciated. For a moment, I wasn’t invisible.

“I’m at your service…Giselle,” I said.

She smiled then, a fulsome smile that reached all the way to her feline green eyes.

I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. I had no idea what to do next, what to say. It’s not every day that I engage in a real conversation with a guest of such stature. It’s also not every day that a guest acknowledges my existence.

I picked up my feather duster and was about to begin my work, but Giselle kept the conversation going.

“Tell me, Molly,” she said. “What’s it like being a maid, cleaning up after people like me every day?”

No guest had ever asked me this. How to respond was not a subject covered in any of Mr. Snow’s comprehensive professional development sessions on service decorum.

“It’s hard work,” I said. “But I find it pleasing to leave a room pristine and to slip out and disappear without a trace.”

Giselle took a seat on the divan. She twirled a lock of her chestnut mane between her fingers. “That sounds incredible,” she said. “To be invisible, to disappear like that. I have no privacy, no life. Everywhere I go, I have cameras in my face. And my husband’s a tyrant. I always thought being the wife of a rich husband would solve all of my problems, but that’s not how it turned out. That’s not how it is at all.”

I was speechless. What was the appropriate response? I had no time to figure that out, because Giselle started talking again. “Basically, Molly, what I’m saying is, my life sucks.”

She got up from the divan, went to the minibar, and grabbed a small bottle of Bombay gin, which she poured into a tumbler. She returned to the divan with her drink and plopped back down.

“We all have problems,” I said.

“Oh really? What are yours?”

Another question for which I was not prepared. I remembered Gran’s advice—Honesty is the best policy.

“Well,” I began. “I may not have a husband, but I did have a boyfriend for a while, and because of him, I now have money problems. My beau…he turned out to be…well, a bad egg.”

“A beau. A bad egg. You talk kind of funny, you know that?” She took a big gulp from her glass. “Like an old lady. Or the queen.”

“That’s because of my gran,” I said. “She raised me. She wasn’t very educated in the official sense—she never went beyond high school, and she cleaned houses all of her life, until she got sick. But she schooled herself. She was clever. She believed in the three E’s—Etiquette, Elocution, and Erudition. She taught me a lot. Everything, in fact.”

“Huh,” said Giselle.

“She believed in politeness and treating people with respect. It’s not your station in life that matters. It’s how you conduct yourself that counts.”

“Yeah. I get that. I think I would have liked your gran. And she taught you to talk like that? Like Eliza from My Fair Lady?”

“I suppose she did, yes.”