single – except that one could not have a baby, and she herself would love to have just one, like little Eric.
Phyllis returned to the reason for her visit. ‘How is Mrs Gilmore?’ she asked.
‘She seems more herself this morning, a little less exhausted.’
‘I was horrified to see the For Sale notice on your gate. Does Mrs Gilmore really want to move?’
Even to Phyllis, Celia did not feel able to talk of financial problems; it was not the thing. So she said abruptly that the house was far too big and that they were going to renovate a summer cottage that they owned, in Meols. ‘The sea air, you know – Mother thinks it will be good for both of us. My Aunt Felicity left the place to Mother. Father didn’t like it, so it has been let for a number of years. It’s vacant now.’
Phyllis’s dejected expression lifted a little. ‘How lovely to be able to live by the sea,’ she responded longingly.
‘You’ll have to bring the family to visit us, once we’re settled in,’ Celia replied with a sudden glint of enthusiasm. ‘Sea air would do you a world of good.’ She suddenly saw an advantage to living in Meols. She could really give some relief to Phyllis by inviting her out for the day, with the children.
A sullen Dorothy arrived in response to the bell, and Celia told her to bring a pot of coffee and some biscuits and a glass of milk for Eric.
Celia’s ring had interrupted an anxious conning by Winnie and Dorothy of the Situations Vacant column in The Lady, a magazine devoted to the interests of middle-class families, which included a constant search for competent, cheap domestics.
Back in the kitchen, while she assembled the tray, Winnie glumly closed the magazine. ‘All the best jobs is in the south. Nothin’ up in the north here at all. We’d better look in the evening paper when it comes.’
‘Oh, aye,’ Dorothy agreed, as she quickly measured coffee beans into the grinder and turned the handle vigorously. ‘I were thinking I might try for a waitress’s job. You get tips then.’
‘That’s all right if you’ve got a home to go to. If you haven’t, you’ve got to find a room somewhere – and that’ll cost you.’
‘I suppose.’ Dorothy whisked the ground coffee into a pot and poured boiling water over it from the kettle kept simmering on the hob. She stirred the coffee and clapped the lid on the pot. Then, as she paused to let the grounds settle, she asked, ‘Do you know where the Missus is? I want to do her bedroom.’
‘Lying in her nice warm bath, I’ll be bound – and no hot water left for washing the tiles in the hall. You take the tray up, and I’ll put the big kettle on the fire again.’
‘Ta ever so.’
As Dorothy moved a small side table closer to Celia and then set the tray down on it, she took a quick look at Phyllis’s face. Very close to her time, she reckoned knowingly, and this was confirmed by Phyllis’s face suddenly puckering up as the ache in her back became sharper.
If I were her, Dorothy thought, I wouldn’t be sitting here drinking coffee; I’d be on my way home, I would. It was not her business, however, so she withdrew discreetly, to descend again to the kitchen and share her thoughts with Winnie.
As Ethel clumped through the hall on her way to the kitchen to get a bucket of clean hot water with which to wash the tiles of the front hall, she heard a high shriek from the breakfast room, followed by the sound of someone bursting into tears. She paused uncertainly, wondering if the Missus and Miss Celia were having a row. Then she remembered that Mrs Woodcock had come on a visit while she had been wiping down the front railings and she wondered if the lady had, perhaps, fallen over the Old Fella’s footstool – and her expecting.
She put down her bucket, wiped her hands on her sackcloth apron and ran across to the breakfast-room door. Clearly through it, she heard Miss Celia’s agitated voice say, ‘You mean it’s coming?’
Mrs Woodcock replied tearfully, ‘Yes, dear. The water’s broken. Could you ask Mrs Gilmore to come – quickly? Please!’
In response to this urgent request, the bell in the kitchen jangled distantly. Ethel tentatively opened the door, to peep round it.
Mrs Woodcock was writhing and whimpering in the Mistress’s chair. She was gasping, ‘I’m so sorry, Celia. I’m so sorry.’
In order to remove her visitor’s wide-brimmed hat, Miss Celia was trying to take out Mrs Woodcock’s hatpins, which were pulling at the poor lady’s hair as she turned and twisted.
Thumb in mouth, Eric was staring at his mother. Then he let out a frightened yell and ran to her, to clutch at her skirt and try to climb on to her knee.
Dorothy came running through the green baize door at the back of the hall. She inquired of Ethel in a low voice, ‘What’s up?’ She crowded close to the little kitchen maid, her nose twitching nervously as she peered at the breakfast-room door.
Ethel stepped back from the door and turned to her eagerly. ‘I think Mrs Woodcock’s baby’s coming,’ she replied in an excited whisper. ‘Shall I run up and tell the Mistress?’
Dorothy paused for a moment, her hand on the brass doorknob.
‘Holy Mary! Are you sure?’
‘Sounds like it.’ Ethel pointed a thumb at the half-open door. They could both hear Phyllis’s frightened little gasps and Miss Celia’s ineffectual reassurances.
‘Oh, aye. Go and tell the Mistress – quick.’ Dorothy pushed the girl aside and, feeling a little scared, entered the room. She nearly tripped over a cat which shot out and across the hall.
Celia was bent over her friend. She looked up and exclaimed through white lips, ‘Oh, Dorothy! Thank goodness you’re here. Ask the Mistress to come down. Mrs Woodcock is in great distress.’
Eric, pushed away by his mother, was sitting on the hearth rug. At the sight of another strange woman, he began to shriek in good earnest.
Over his noisy protest, Dorothy replied calmly, ‘Ethel’s gone for her, Miss. Here, let me take the little boy.’ She bent down and swept the child up into her arms. ‘’Ere, now. You just be quiet – and your mam’ll be fine.’ She spun round and picked up a Marie biscuit from the coffee tray, then walked him over to the window. She pointed out a couple of pigeons roosting on the back wall and gave him the biscuit to eat. In thirty seconds, she had reduced his howls to small sobs.
She wiped away his tears with her apron and told him he was a good, brave little boy, and, in a minute or two, his Auntie Dorothy would take him down to see the tom cat in the kitchen.
Over her struggling friend’s head, Celia looked at Dorothy with amazement; she had never seen her before as anything but an automaton who cleaned rooms and waited at table, and said dully and mechanically, ‘Yes, Miss,’ or ‘No, Miss,’ in response to whatever was said to her.
Wrapped in a camelhair dressing gown, knitted slippers on her feet, Louise came running into the room, twisting her wet hair into a knot as she came. ‘That fool of a girl said …’ Then, as she saw the little tableau by the fireplace, she realised that the message Ethel had blurted out was true.
She had been feeling helpless and deserted as she lay crying in the cooling water of her bath. But when Ethel had knocked frantically at the bathroom door and poured out her message, she had instinctively responded to the call for help.
Now, faced with Phyllis’s obvious desperate need and the necessity of saving her fine old Turkish hearth rug from being ruined by having a baby born on it, she entirely forgot her grief.
She said calmly to Celia,