The smile came again. ‘And then,’ she said in a much lighter voice so that it was almost as if a different person sat there, ‘and then, my dear, there came a day when I knew I must leave behind that poor beaten thing who had loved and lost and been hurt. I knew I must find a way of shaking off the darkness. I had a little money stored up by then: not very much, but a little.’ A pause.
‘There’s a bit there you aren’t telling, isn’t there? Is it about how you got the money?’
‘Yes, there’s a bit there I’m not telling, and yes, it is about how I got the money. But one day I will tell you. When you’re a bit older.’
‘OK. Don’t stop the story though.’
‘By that time,’ said Alice, ‘there was no one to know or care where I went or what I did. So I vowed that I would become an entirely different person.’ The slanting smile came again.
‘I also vowed,’ said Alice softly, ‘that if I could become another person, it would be someone who would make people sit up and take notice. A person who would make a stir in the world.’
A stir in the world. The idea had been exciting and frightening – can I do it? How can I do it? What could I become?
Her parents had been so pleased when Alice had gone into what they called good service, although they had been anxious when, later on, the family had asked Alice to go with them to that foreign place. They were nervous of Abroad, although Alice’s father had been in France during the Great War – Alice had only been a child at the time, of course – and once they had gone on a day trip to Ostend, which they had not much cared for.
But it would be all right for Alice to travel Abroad in this way because she would be with the family, and the family would look after her. Alice’s mother had been a parlourmaid in the house of a titled gentleman; her father had been his lordship’s valet. They had got married late in their lives, doing so timidly and unobtrusively, and Alice had been born a good many years afterwards, taking them by surprise since they had ceased to hope the good Lord would send them a child.
But altogether they had been in service for forty years, they said proudly, and they knew that the upper classes looked after their servants. Why, only look at how his lordship had given them something called an annuity when they had reached the end of their working lives. They did not rightly understand how it worked, but what it meant was that they were given a sum of money every week for as long as they lived. Oh no, it was not a large amount, but the rent of this little house was very cheap, and if necessary, Alice’s mother could always do a little plain sewing for the ladies who lived on the Park; her father could take on a bit of carpentering. They were very grateful to his lordship for taking care of them.
They were gentle and unworldly and unambitious and trusting, and Alice was torn between exasperation and love for them.
Respectable service. Honourable work. What was so honourable about one human being waiting on another? What was respectable about fetching and carrying for the aristocracy who thought themselves too grand even to dress themselves? And at the end of it all, being grateful for a few miserable shillings every week in your old age, and even then having to take in sewing? All that when you had worked for more than forty years, every day from six in the morning until midnight! For goodness’ sake, hadn’t that kind of humility and gratitude been blown away by the war, by feminism, by women gaining the vote?
Whatever else I may do in the future, vowed Alice during those days in Vienna, outside of illness or old age I will never again wait on another human, and I will never expect another human being to wait on me!
In the small room she had rented in the Old Quarter, just off a cobbled alley, rather sinisterly named the Blutgasse – Blood Alley – she considered how difficult it would be to throw off the quiet lady’s maid and replace her with a completely new person. It was exciting and terrifying, but if she did it, it might mean she would no longer have to submit to the prodding hands and insistent bodies of all those nameless men in anonymous hotel rooms.
I could be anything and anyone I wanted, thought Alice with a little thrill of excitement.