Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
9 JUNE 2005
Something has changed between the girls. And between them and Luke too – or more specifically between Livvie and Luke. I can sense it when they are in the room with me – which Livvie and Luke increasingly are not. I notice the two of them going out into the garden together after dinner, having hastily and dutifully done the washing up, and on weekends Livvie ostensibly helps Luke with his work, but I hear drifts of laughter coming from them where before there were only the busy sounds of honest toil: questions, instructions and occasional obscenities.
With Livvie and Luke I sense a romance could be on the cards; between Beatrice and Livvie it is something else – a power play, perhaps? They talk to each other like friends, they disappear into one or the other’s bedroom at times, emerging wearing each other’s clothes or make-up, and yet there’s a crackle of tension between them that is quite different from the magnetism I can see Luke and Livvie beginning to feel for each other.
Could Beatrice be jealous of Livvie and Luke? It would not surprise me – not that she would want Luke in particular, but that she wouldn’t want someone else to have what she cannot. She is a young woman who is used to getting her own way – I remember the casual fashion in which she asked me to cook meat for her evening meals, as if there was no question of me refusing because it is against my principles.
Also, she makes very little effort to help around the house. Not that I’d expect her to, exactly – but the others do. When she sees them hoovering or tidying or taking a load of washing to the launderette, she’ll reluctantly put the clean dishes away in the cupboard or flick a duster around –the most pointless chore ever, in this building site where dust breeds like the rabbits did on the hills around my grandmother’s house – before sitting down again with her magazine or going to lie outside in the sun, basking among the weeds like Maud does.
Well – I can’t object to it. I signed up for this when I had the idea of taking lodgers, even though part of me bristles and longs to snap that I am her landlady, not her servant.
And there’s something else I have just signed up to. Today I’ll be attending a meeting of the Spitalfields Preservation Trust, a bunch of local do-gooders intent on conserving the architectural heritage of the area. I think they imagined I might have plans to knock the house down and replace it with flats, and sometimes I wish I could! But in return for my turning up in smart clothes and sitting before a committee like some kind of dancing monkey, they may ‘offer me a grant’ to assist with the renovations. And God knows I need all the assistance I can get, so turn up and dance I will.
I suppose I will have to go out and buy an ironing board and an iron – which will probably result in Beatrice asking me to press her blouses for her.
My God. Writing that has brought back a memory of my grandmother overhearing me asking our maid to do just that. She exploded with rage. Don’t you think Colleen has better things to do, with this entire house to sweep and the beds to make? What did your last slave die of? You’ll iron that yourself, young lady – it’s time you learned.
Colleen left us shortly afterwards, because we could no longer afford to pay her, so my grandmother was right – it was indeed time I learned.
That has made me realise why I resent Beatrice sometimes, with her entitlement and her indolence. She is like I was at that age. Just like me.