Roots of Evil(30)

CHAPTER NINE




Incredibly, it had been as unfussed and as straightforward as that. Supper that first night was a delicious chicken casserole with fresh fruit afterwards, and one of the very first lessons to be learned was that eating and cooking meals in this house was friendlier and much more interesting than in Pedlar’s Yard.

The evening meal was called supper and the midday meal was lunch. Quite early on, Alice said, ‘We’ll see about school for you – there’s a good one just beyond the village, I believe. During the term you’ll have your lunch there, of course, but when you’re at home – weekends and holidays – I might not always want to be bothered with breaking off what I’m doing to prepare a meal. Or I might be out – there’re various church activities I like to be part of, and charity things. Sometimes I meet one of my friends or a friend comes to lunch here. We shan’t want children around while we gossip, and you’d be bored anyway. I’m a selfish lady, my dear, but I’ve lived on my own for a long time, and I don’t think I can change at my time of life. So we’ll work round that, and we’ll draw up a few house-rules. All right?’

‘Yes.’ The idea of a set of rules to work to was unexpectedly comforting. It gave the feeling of knowing where you were and what you could and could not do.

‘One of the rules,’ Alice said, ‘will be that if it’s half-past twelve or one o’clock and I’m not around, you can sort out some food for yourself. There’ll always be soup in the larder that can be heated, and cheese and fruit in the fridge. Have what you want, and wash up afterwards. You can do that, can’t you?’

‘Oh yes.’

The evening meal was usually eaten together, at the gateleg table in the room overlooking the garden. It might be one of Alice’s delicious casseroles, or a chicken or fish cooked in unfamiliar ways.

‘I quite enjoy cooking,’ Alice said. ‘I learned all those years ago when I was a lady’s maid. Your mother told you about that, didn’t she? About my having been a maid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Miss Nina – the young lady I was maid to – liked me to cook for her when the family was out.’

This was another of the incomprehensible things about Alice’s life. In Pedlar’s Yard it had been assumed that all women could cook, and the men had expected to be waited on by their wives and daughters. The concept of a woman who could not cook, and who expected to be waited on, was unfamiliar.

‘Couldn’t she cook for herself, that Nina?’

‘Nowadays you’d think so,’ said Alice. ‘But this was a very long time ago – the nineteen-twenties – and they were a very rich family. It would never have occurred to Miss Nina to so much as make a cup of tea. It would never have occurred to anyone else that she should even have to do so.’

It was exciting listening to Alice talk about Mother’s stories, and to know she was talking from inside them. She was the stories. She was the seventeen-year-old girl with whom the handsome young man had fallen in love, but because she had been a servant, they had had to part. It was not quite possible to ask about this – although it might be possible one day – but there seemed no reason not to ask about Vienna.

‘You lived there?’

‘Yes. It’s a beautiful city. You’ll go there one day, and you’ll love it.’

‘Will I?’

‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’


Evenings in the Priest’s House, after the supper things had been cleared away and homework diligently dealt with, were best of all. Often they watched television, but sometimes Alice played records – wonderful music by Bach and Schubert and Mozart. ‘I like music,’ she said. When the real winter came and darkness had enveloped the fens by the middle of the afternoon, the curtains were drawn and the fires glowed in the hearths, and it was a time when other stories could be told.

‘Tell about the first time Miss Nina’s lover came to the house and saw you.’

‘In the exact same words as always?’

It was a joke between them by this time.

‘Stories always have to be in the exact same words.’

‘Or you might find they’ve changed when you come to tell them again?’

‘Yes. Yes.’ This was one of the good things about Alice; she understood about stories having to stay absolutely the same, just as Mother had understood.

‘What a fussy little owl you are. Well, then—’ She leaned back in the rocking-chair with the vivid cushions behind her – rather unexpectedly she liked vivid jewel colours in her house – and began to speak.

And even though it was a wholly unfamiliar world, Alice made it so real that it sometimes felt as if her words were weaving themselves into a magic carpet that could fly back to those long-ago days. The music-filled city of Vienna fifty years ago, and the gaiety and the colour and the dazzling palaces…The way the big houses were lit when a grand ball was given, even with lamps hung from the trees lining the carriageways…The sound of an orchestra striking up for waltzes and polkas, or of a single musician bringing music rippling and cascading from a piano or a violin…The palaces and the coffee houses…The swish of silk gowns and the drift of expensive perfume, and the taste of Viennese chocolate and Viennese sachertorte…