The Good Plain Cook Read online

  Mrs Steinberg’s face was blank. ‘Anything else?’

  Perhaps they were vegetarians. Lou’s husband Bob said that some of these bohemians were. ‘Fruit fritters… and,

  ‘Nothing more… continental, Kitty?’ um…’

  ‘I can do cheese puffs, Madam.’

  Mrs Steinberg laughed. ‘Well. Never mind. I hope you won’t mind doing some housework, too. I’m not very fussy about it, but there’ll be a bit of sweeping and dusting now and then, keeping the place looking generally presentable.’ She twisted round in her seat and looked again at the hole above her head. ‘It will be easier for you when Mr Crane and Arthur have finished knocking these two rooms together, of course. One large, light, all-purpose room, that’s what we want. I don’t believe in all this compartmentalisation, do you?’

  ‘Yes, Madam. I mean, no, Madam.’

  ‘Stop calling me that. It makes me sound like a brothel-keeper. You can call me Mrs Steinberg.’ The woman’s long fingers rummaged at her scalp as she spoke. ‘Now. Would you like to ask me anything?’ She perched on the edge of the armchair and held the wave of her hair back from her forehead with both hands. ‘Anything at all.’

  Kitty looked at the woman’s clear forehead for a moment.

  ‘Anything at all, Kitty.’

  ‘Are there any other staff here, Mrs Steinberg?’

  ‘Just Arthur, the gardener and… handyman, I suppose you’d call him. He doesn’t live with us, but he’s here most days.’

  Kitty shifted in her seat. ‘There’s no housemaid or parlour-maid?’

  ‘You won’t be expected to wait on us, Kitty, if that’s what you’re worrying about. We don’t go in for all that.’

  ‘No, Madam.’

  There was a pause. Kitty squeezed the green shoe in her hands.

  ‘Are we settled, then? Could you start next week?’

  She must ask it. ‘Will I be expected to – what you said about when you’re not here… your daughter…’ She mustn’t be the nanny. That was not what the notice said. ‘What I mean is, what will I be doing, exactly?’

  ‘Kitty, I’m probably the only bohemian in the country who likes order.’ Mrs Steinberg smiled and widened her eyes. ‘Let’s see. Start with the bedrooms. There are four rooms, one for myself, one for And one for Geenie… Mr Crane, of course.’ She paused. ‘Then a guest room. And, downstairs, sitting and dining room – soon to be one – bathroom, a cubby-hole that’s supposed to be a library, but you don’t have to bother with that: only I go in there. So it’s not very much. A little cleaning and polishing, fires swept and laid when it’s cold, which it is all the damn time, isn’t it? And the cooking, of course, but we quite often have a cold plate for lunch, and only two courses for dinner, unless we’ve got company. Geenie eats with us; we don’t believe in that nonsense of hiding children away for meals. And we don’t go in for any fuss at breakfast time, either. Toast will do for me, but Mr Crane does like his porridge.’

  Kitty blinked.

  ‘He has a little writing studio in the garden, you probably noticed – it’s where he works. But, if you’ll take my advice, you won’t go in there. The place is always a mess, anyway, and he hates to be disturbed. He’s a poet, but at the moment he’s working on a novel.’ Here she paused and smiled so brilliantly that Kitty had to smile back. ‘I’m encouraging him all I can. That’s why he’s living here, you see; it’s a vocational thing, really; if one has artistic friends, one must help them out.’

  Kitty looked about the room for a clock but couldn’t find one. How long had she been here? Her stomach felt hollow. She thought of sausage rolls, of biting into the greasy pastry, the deep salty taste of the meat.

  ‘And then there’s Geenie. Well, of course, I would really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on her occasionally but she’s my responsibility now.’

  If Kitty didn’t move, her stomach might not growl.

  ‘Children need their mothers first and foremost, don’t they?’

  Kitty nodded, relieved. ‘Oh yes, Mrs Steinberg.’

  There was a pause. The growl was building in Kitty’s stomach, pressing against her insides as if some creature were crawling around the pit of her.

  ‘So. Can you start next week?’

  As she nodded, Kitty’s stomach gave a long, loud rumble. Mrs Steinberg raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘It’s lunchtime, isn’t it? Yes. I must let you go.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Kitty, I think you’ll do nicely. Forty pounds a year, and two afternoons off a week, all right?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Steinberg.’

  The woman stood, and Kitty followed.

  ‘Are you still holding that shoe?’ Mrs Steinberg laughed. ‘Why don’t you keep it? As a welcome gift. We might even be able to find the other.’

  Kitty looked at the sodden shoe. It was at least two sizes too big for her. ‘Thank you, Mrs Steinberg,’ she repeated.

  · · · Two · · ·

  Geenie walked into a sitting room full of dust. Her shoes made a strange scrunching noise on the floorboards and she could taste something in the air: a cloud of powder, like the stuff Ellen threw about her face every evening.

  Her palms were still smarting from gripping the willow tree in the back garden. It was a new game: holding on to the ridged bark with all her strength, digging her nails in, seeing how much matter would lodge beneath her fingertips, then going in the house and telling Ellen that she’d fallen. Showing the marks on her palms, she usually got a frown from her mother. Just occasionally, though, she was rewarded with a short spell on her lap, which, although not wide, was always warm, and she could run her hands along the smooth skin of Ellen’s knees and listen as she breathed close to her ear. ‘You’re too old for this sort of thing,’ her mother would say. ‘Girls of eleven shouldn’t be sitting in their mothers’ laps.’

  Blotto trotted behind as she walked into the sitting room. ‘Ellen!’ she yelled. ‘Ellen!’

  The dust fell. Blotto sniffed the air.

  Then she saw it. A hole right through to the next room. Pressing her palms together, she approached, and Blotto followed. She stood for a minute, examining the gap where wall had once been. The dog sniffed the pile of rubble at her feet and gave an interested half-bark. Geenie ignored him and pushed a finger into the damaged brick. A few crumbs fell on her shoes and she smiled. Now they would be scuffed, but it wasn’t really her fault, because there was a hole in the wall. She pulled a loose bit of plaster away and a cascade of brick dust covered both shoes. Again, not her fault, and more interesting, even, than the willow tree game. Brick made a greater imprint than bark, and the sound of it falling around her bare legs distracted her from the familiar afternoon noises that had begun to seep from her mother’s bedroom.

  Blotto sniffed at the new pile of debris, whimpered, then retreated.

  After a bit more working, her knuckles scraping on the rough brick until they were peppered with blood, the hole was big enough for Geenie to put a leg through, so one patent T-bar shoe touched the floorboards in the dining room, whilst the other remained in the sitting room. The broken brick dug into her inner thigh as she shifted her leg until her foot was planted firmly on the floor. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live between two rooms like this: one foot always in the sitting room, the other in the dining room. If the hole were large enough to walk through, they could have their dinner and Blotto need not be shut in the other room, because there would be no other room. That would be good. But it would also be bad, because she wouldn’t be able to shut herself in the dining room as tightly as she liked. There was a particularly useful cupboard in the corner of the dining room, which smelled of sherry and dust, whose door made a lovely clunkety-click noise when opened or closed. The bottom shelf was big enough for Geenie to curl into, and if she hooked her finger round the knot of wood by the handle in the right way, she could hold the door almost closed and breathe its dark sherry air and no one would know she was there. Then she could listen to George and Ellen as
they argued or kissed, and she could think of the times when Jimmy, who was gone now, had read to her whilst they sat together in the cupboard under the stairs in their London house, eating sherbet.

  The familiar noises from her mother’s bedroom had become more drawn out. Geenie called for Blotto. If the dog came back, they could howl together, and then she wouldn’t have to listen to the bedroom noises. She called him again, and waited for the tick-tick of his claws on the floor. But the dog did not come.

  She looked at the pile of rubble by her sitting-room foot and noticed the wooden handle of the lump hammer amongst the destroyed brick. She reached down, her dining-room leg catching on the teeth of the hole, and ran a finger along the hammer’s cool head. Bringing her finger to her face, she considered the dust there. It had lodged in all the ridges of her skin. If she were to pick the hammer up and then drop it on her shoe, she would probably break her toes, like the Chinese women who had their feet smashed and bound so they could wear small shoes. Ellen often said she wished a kindly aunt had broken and bound her own nose when she was younger than Geenie, so that one marvellous day she might have unravelled the bandages to reveal a tiny nose, tip-tilted like a flower, which is what it said in the Tennyson poem, and what Geenie’s nose was like.

  If she dropped the hammer, it would make a noise so loud that Ellen and George might run downstairs. They might stop kissing, or arguing, and rush to her aid, because they would hear a loud noise and not know what it was, and a loud noise meant trouble.

  Geenie twisted her body so that she faced the sitting room. She picked up the hammer and held it in both hands. She lifted her arms above her head. Breathing out, feeling the stretch in her muscles as her dining-room leg struggled to remain planted on the floorboards, she stayed still for at least a minute, focusing on the middle pane of the front window. This was necessary in order to concentrate on the banging coming from above. It was becoming more insistent, and there was now a low grunt accompanying every bang. Still Geenie held the hammer above her head and waited. Her arms began to ache. Then it came, familiar and awful: her mother’s long ‘yes’.

  As the ‘yes’ grew louder, Geenie swung her body round and slammed the hammer to the wall with all her strength.

  · · · Three · · ·

  Mrs Steinberg had told her to make herself at home, and said they would like lunch at half past twelve, if she could manage it. She hadn’t said what they would like for lunch or how Kitty was to prepare it. They’d walked through the kitchen – they had to, to reach Kitty’s room – but the American woman hadn’t mentioned anything useful, such as where the pans were kept, where an apron might be, or what was in the larder. She’d just waved a hand and said, ‘Isn’t that lantern absolutely beautiful? My first husband brought it back from China. But everything else is brand new.’ The lantern, hanging over the central table, was made of red silk; a greasy yellow tassel trailed from its base. The tassel was so long that it almost brushed the tabletop, which couldn’t be hygienic.

  Mrs Steinberg had been very generous, though, Kitty reminded herself as she looked around her new room: forty pounds a year was more than she’d ever been paid before, and the room wasn’t bad, either. There were a couple of small multi-coloured woollen rugs for the tiled floor; a chest of drawers; and a wardrobe, so Kitty didn’t have to hang her clothes on the back of the door. Mrs Steinberg had also provided a picture above Kitty’s bed of a naked woman beside a waterfall, at which Kitty now stood and stared. She hadn’t liked to look at it too closely when the other woman was in the room, but her initial impression had been right: the woman’s flesh had a greenish tint, and was full to bursting. Her neck seemed unnaturally long, and her head twisted to the side as if she’d just heard a stranger approaching through the ferns. Kitty imagined the woman was thinking about plunging in, but had first to pluck up enough courage to submerge herself in cold water.

  The first thing Kitty did was place the framed photograph of her mother and father, sitting very upright, on the chest of drawers. Her mother’s gaze was steady, her mouth fixed; her father looked off to the side, as if he were about to move. They must have been quite young when it was taken, as her father had died in his early thirties, when Kitty was five, but to Kitty they already looked unreachably old. Perhaps it was something to do with her mother’s high lace collars, which she would sew on to make an old dress new. Kitty had mended those collars herself during her mother’s illness, spending hours darning them with her finest needle.

  Opening the wardrobe, she was surprised to smell not mothballs but perfume: something powdery and sweet, like cinnamon. Onto the top shelf she bundled her cloth bag of scraps. Then she took up her wooden work-box, sat on the narrow bed, and opened the lid.

  Now she was going to live in this new place, it was important to see that everything was there, all the things she’d carefully collected together over the years. She brought out the odd pink suspender clasp (had it been Mother’s?); the paper packets of sharp and between needles; the dirty lump of beeswax, deeply scored; the scissors with the tortoiseshell handles which she saved for her embroidery; her other, sharper scissors, for cutting out; her star-shaped cushion, studded with steel and ribbon pins; her woollen strawberry, for cleaning needles; several reels of cotton of differing thicknesses; a card of hooks and eyes; a smooth copper thimble, which she hated using but kept anyway; and buttons of various shapes and sizes. The buttons were the most precious items in Kitty’s work-box. Her favourite had always been the large lilac one with the wooden surround, but she’d recently come into a set of four tiny mother-of-pearl buttons which Lou had cut from a nightie before shredding it for dusters, and it was one of these that she now rubbed along her bottom lip, relishing its smoothness.

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was too late to put the sewing things away in the workbox, so she stood in front of the bed, hoping to conceal them.

  ‘Come in.’

  Geenie loomed in the doorway. She was wearing a long white cotton robe with wide sleeves and a square neck, together with a thick gold necklace. Her large eyes were rimmed with black kohl. ‘What’s for lunch today?’

  Kitty stared at the girl, trying to make sense of her appearance. The girl stared back.

  ‘I – don’t know, Miss.’

  ‘I hope it’s not salad.’

  The kohl had left a black smudge in the corner of the girl’s eye, like a piece of soot. Why was the child dressed like that, at half past ten on a Monday morning?

  ‘I need to speak with your mother,’ said Kitty. ‘It’s up to her, Miss.’

  ‘Dora used to decide for herself, and she always made me plain omelettes.’

  ‘Well. I’ll ask your mother what she thinks…’

  Why wasn’t that girl at school?

  Geenie stepped into the room. Pointing to the bed, she asked, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s my work-box. I was just looking at it. Sorting it, I mean.’ Kitty started gathering up the sewing things and putting them back in the box.

  ‘Let me see.’

  The girl was close to her now; she had an earthy scent. It was what Kitty had noticed about the children at the school where she’d cleaned – the smell of them, warm and yeasty, like the scent of excited terriers. But this girl smelled fresher than that.

  Geenie sat on the bed. Her white robe rustled as she bent over the box and peered inside. She picked out a large cardigan button. ‘What sort of wood is this?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss.’

  The girl tossed the button back into the box. Then she rummaged again and found the cut-glass button from Lou’s wedding dress. Bob had paid for everything, even tea at the White Hart Hotel, and he hadn’t allowed his bride to have a home-made dress run up by her sister.

  ‘This one’s pretty.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kitty smiled. ‘It’s from my sister’s wedding dress.’

  Geenie ignored this. ‘Is it the kind of thing Cleopatra would wear?’

  ‘I don’
t know, Miss. Possibly.’

  ‘I’m Cleopatra today.’

  ‘Are you, Miss?’

  ‘Do you think I make a good one?’

  Kitty hesitated. She knew she should say yes, but she wasn’t really sure what a good Cleopatra should look like.

  ‘You look very pretty, Miss.’

  Geenie looked at Kitty. ‘Do you like pretty things?’

  ‘Yes Miss,’ said Kitty. ‘Everybody likes pretty things, don’t they?’

  The girl lay back on the bed. ‘My mother says pretty’s not enough. Things ought to be beautiful.’

  There was another knock at the door. Before she could answer, Mrs Steinberg was standing on the rug.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Geenie.

  The girl did not sit up or reply.

  Mrs Steinberg straightened her navy blue jacket and stepped towards the bed. ‘I suggest you stop bothering the cook. She’s got a lot to get on with.’ She pulled her daughter up by one arm. Geenie dangled before Kitty, her feet hardly touching the floor.

  ‘May I show you to Mr Crane before lunch, Kitty? He’s got a gap in his writing schedule and has asked to meet you.’

  Kitty closed the work-box.

  . . . .

  ‘The writing studio,’ said Mrs Steinberg, opening the door to the little house at the bottom of the garden. ‘Kitty, this is Mr Crane.’

  The room smelled of flowers, gas and dog. On the windowsill, a row of hyacinths bloomed in glass bowls, their flowers stiff and bright, like the coral Kitty had seen once, in the aquarium at Bognor. The curtains were flame yellow, and in the corner of the room a gas burner sputtered. Beneath the window, there was a desk strewn with papers, amongst which was an old typewriter. Under the desk was a pile of dirty blankets.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Kitty.’

  He was tall and his nose was long and straight, but his left eye drooped a bit, making his face seem slightly lopsided. His clothes were too large for him, his long green cardigan patched at the elbows. As Lou had said, he didn’t look like a poet. Not that Kitty knew what poets were supposed to look like. The only picture she’d seen was a painting of Byron in a schoolbook, and he wore a very white shirt and had lots of unruly hair. Mr Crane’s hair was dark and quite neat.