‘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…
‘Miss Nina’s parents were important and wealthy,’ Alice said, her eyes inward-looking, her head leaning back against the cushions in her chair. ‘And she had a great many beaux.’
This was a new word. ‘“Bow”?’
‘No, a French word.’ Alice wrote it down, the singular and then the plural. ‘In those days it meant suitors. Boyfriends. Young men wanting to marry her – it might have been the money that attracted a lot of them, of course, although she was very pretty. The master held a great many receptions for her; dinners and soirees – that’s a musical evening. There was always so much music in Vienna in those days. Famous singers and musicians came to the house to give recitals or concerts.’