Woman Who Spoke to Spirits Read online

  Her eyebrows shoot up and instantly he wonders if he should have said he couldn’t start till the following month, or that he’d have to consult his present employer regarding the length of notice required. But it’s too late now.

  Then she says – and he offers up a brief and sincere little prayer of thanks – ‘Oh, of course, you’ve just been working abroad, you said. In France, so naturally you would not be employed here in England.’ She makes another note. He can see from where he sits that the pages headed F. P. D. M. Wilbraham are now covered in her neat, economical hand.

  She puts down her pen and stands up. She holds out her hand, and he takes it. ‘Let us agree to a month’s trial, Mr Wilbraham, to determine whether we suit each other. The wage is as set out in the advertisement. I assume that is acceptable?’

  ‘It is.’

  She relinquishes his hand and steps round her desk to escort him to the door. ‘Until next Monday, then.’

  ‘Until next Monday,’ he echoes. ‘Good day, Miss Raynor.’

  He walks at a sedate pace to the end of Hob’s Court and off up World’s End Passage. It is only when he is quite sure he is out of her sight and earshot that he punches the air and gives a great shout of glee.

  TWO

  It is a Friday afternoon early in Felix’s second month of employment at the World’s End Bureau. The preceding weeks have gone quite well, or so he feels; his rather enigmatic employer doesn’t give very much away, and quite well is as far as he dare go (and this is more because of his natural and fairly resilient optimism than from any great faith in his ability as a very new clerical assistant). Lily – he thinks of her as Lily, although he is careful to be utterly correct and call her Miss Raynor – is busy at her desk in the inner office, or the sanctum sanctorum, as Felix calls it in the privacy of his own head. Lacking anything very pressing to do just now, he mentally reviews his performance. He has been here longer than the month stipulated for his trial term, so does that mean he has passed the initial test of his first few weeks?

  Filing: yes, pretty good, he’s sure he has improved on the pre-existing system. But this, he admits honestly, is no great feat, since Lily explained that she hadn’t really had the chance to instigate a system and it was up to Felix to organize the Bureau’s paperwork as he thought best. Anyway, Lily seems satisfied with what he’s done, so, against the first entry in the report card he sees in his mind’s eye, there has to be a tick.

  Preparation of invoices: well, he reflects, there is really very little room for error here, since he can write neatly, legibly and rather dashingly, and it is many years since he grew out of dropping ink blots on the paper. He can spell, he can add up and he knows how such documents should be set out. He has also found a tactful way to let his employer know that there are methods for extracting payment of overdue bills from even the most recalcitrant debtor, and the Bureau’s finances have accordingly taken a small step for the better. This area of his work, too, surely warrants a tick.

  Correspondence: the same comments about his writing and his knowledge of laying out documents as above, he tells himself. Since he has largely written letters as directed by his employer, any fault in the content – not that he has detected any – is hers and not his. Moreover, she has acceded to his suggestion that they acquire new stationery printed with the name and details of the Bureau, appreciating his expressed view that it is well worth the cost since these innovations have instantly made the Bureau look a great deal more professional. Once again, a tick.

  Plant watering: oh, dear. On his own admission, Felix knows very little about plants, other than the flowering variety found in large, extravagant, fragrant bouquets and in the exquisite corsages pinned to tightly boned bosoms above which soft globes of smooth, creamy flesh spill out … All of which, he reproves himself firmly, are a very far cry from Lily Raynor’s potted plants. She appears to favour a sage-green-coloured sort of thing with long, spiky leaves that grow up to perhaps a foot or more, four of which are ranged on shelves around the outer office. None of them have responded at all well to Felix’s enthusiastic attentions; sadly, it was only with hindsight that he realized they might be related to the cactus family (they are certainly aggressive enough) and therefore should be watered sparingly. Plant-watering, he is sure, has a large cross against it in his imaginary report.

  But to counter this failure, he reminds himself cheerfully, his employer appears to be pleasantly surprised by his ability to make a decent pot of tea, toast and butter a teacake and even prepare a plate of ham rolls with mustard, all with the minimum of fuss and without leaving a mess in the kitchen. The mustard, indeed, caused Lily to raise her head from whatever matter held her in deep thrall at her desk to give him an appreciative nod and a brief, ‘Very tasty, thank you.’

  For a man who went to a good public school, there are huge gaps in Felix’s academic knowledge. To make up for this, however, he has some surprising talents (his familiarity with the mysteries of the kitchen is a good example), largely because he’s been fending for himself since he left school. He has had some unlikely jobs, he has learned from experience that if you’re picky about your food then you’ve never experienced true hunger, he has discovered that when you’re really on your uppers (particularly if you speak like he does) you’re far more likely to receive a helping hand from the poor than the rich, who, in Felix’s experience, tend to cling very tightly to the belief that poverty is largely self-inflicted.

  Felix parted company from his wealthy upper-class family not long after he finished with Marlborough College, or rather Marlborough College finished with him. His father, apoplectic at his son’s expulsion (‘YOU HAVE BROUGHT THE MOST PROFOUND SHAME UPON THIS FAMILY!’ – he had definitely been shouting in capital letters – ‘HOW DARE YOU, BOY?), immediately set about organizing a tutor, in the hope that it wasn’t too late for Felix to make up for lost time and still get the Cambridge (or at worst Oxford) place that his father had set his heart on. Felix refused. They argued, the arguments turned to all-out rows, to increasingly wild and violent threats that, in the end, made Felix burst out laughing: ‘You’re going to beat me, Father? How, may I ask? I am almost a head taller than you and two stone heavier, and I box.’

  That laughter signalled the end.

  Felix left without saying goodbye to anyone but the cook, who had contrived to get food to him when his father tried to starve him into submission, and the head groom, who had once memorably muttered, not quite far enough under his breath, that Felix’s father was an arsehole. Felix packed a small bag, took all the money he could lay his hands on and marched off down the long, lime-tree-lined drive to the majestic old house, and he has not been back.

  He prefers not to think of the early months of his self-imposed exile. To begin with he was able to put up with friends who had gone on to varsity, sleeping on floors, surviving on their generosity, relying on the fact that they had liked and admired him as the class clown, the rebel who went his own way. But their tolerance ran out.

  He went to London. He learned the cruel ways of the city, and how to survive them (just). He has had terrible times, he has had wonderful times.

  And now he is the new clerical assistant at the World’s End Bureau.

  Something else that Felix has had to fathom out in the course of these first weeks in addition to plant-watering, correspondence and filing is the structure of the household. He has encountered the force of nature that is Mrs Clapper, and learned within the first few minutes of meeting her that his best option is to keep right out of her way on the three days that she comes to 3, Hob’s Court. Clearly she is fiercely loyal to Lily, as Felix has learned somewhat dramatically: in those short minutes that constituted their first and, so far, only significant encounter, he was out in the little kitchen and about to pour himself a glass of water. Mrs Clapper, bursting in on him like one of the Eumenides, caught sight of what he was up to – her words – and her small, deep-set eyes widened as if she’d caught him in the act of slitting open
his own belly.

  ‘Put that down!’ she shouted at what he very much hoped was the top of her voice, the incredibly loud, shrill noise making the kitchen window rattle.

  Turning, the polite greeting he’d prepared as he heard her approaching footsteps freezing on his lips, he said innocently, ‘Put what down?’

  She rushed at him like a terrier on a rat and grabbed the glass from his hand. ‘This!’ she screeched, right in his face. ‘That’s cut glass, that is, proper crystal, and it’s one of old Mrs Raynor’s best, and they was a wedding present!’ As if further explanation was necessary – as her deeply scathing expression seemed to suggest she thought it must be, he being no more than a mere man – she added, ‘There’s six of them, see, and Miss Lily, she don’t want none of them getting broken!’

  Meekly Felix took a chipped tumbler off the wooden draining board and filled that with water instead.

  The other occupant of the house is a permanent resident, and Lily has explained briefly that she rents the rooms on the middle floor (Lily, it seems, lives at the top of the house). Her name is Avdotya Aleksandrova, but it appears that Felix won’t have to attempt the challenge of pronouncing this as both Lily and Mrs Clapper refer to her as the Little Ballerina; Mrs Clapper, indeed, in such corrosively scathing terms that Felix is shamefully aware of being glad there’s someone in the house that Mrs Clapper dislikes more than him.

  Unfortunately, he met the Little Ballerina in rather embarrassing circumstances. He had taken advantage of Mrs Clapper’s going upstairs to ‘turn out your rooms, Miss Lily’ to slip along the passage and through the kitchen and the scullery to the lavatory, the door to which is situated just outside the door to the garden. He was opening this door to return inside the house when its handle was pulled sharply out of his grasp and the door flung open from the other side.

  He found himself face to face with a tiny woman with the skinny, bony body of a ten-year-old girl who didn’t get much to eat. Surely no ten-year-old girl, however, even a very hungry one, could have looked up at him with such venom in her narrow black eyes.

  ‘You use lavatory!’ she hissed.

  ‘Er, well, yes –’ there was no point in denying it since the Niagara Falls of the flush was clearly audible – ‘I’ve just done so, but I—’

  ‘You scatter!’ she said furiously. ‘Men always scatter, they are so very dirty, I will not share with a man!’

  ‘I assure you I never scatter,’ Felix replied with as much dignity as he could summon at such short notice.

  She leaned towards him, staring hard at him. He noticed several things: first, that her long black hair was very greasy and plastered to her narrow skull; second, that she had been lazy about removing the very pale greasepaint that she must have applied for her last performance, probably several before that too, and it made a sort of crusty tide around the edges of her face; third, that she had a crop of blackheads in the whorls of her left nostril; fourth, that the voluminous but flimsy cotton garment she was clutching to her – he thought it was the sort of indoor robe that the Japanese favour and call a yukata – was far too long and trailed on the ground and had what looked like scrambled egg down the front; fifth, that she stank.

  She seemed to be done with her examination of him and she elbowed him out of the way. ‘Go,’ she said in disgust, making shooing movements with her tiny, skeletal hands as if he were a dog that had just cocked its leg in an inappropriate place. ‘Go!’ she repeated.

  He went.

  Now, on this quiet Friday afternoon, he risks a glance through the partly open door into the inner office. Lily is still absorbed in her task. She absented herself from her desk some half an hour ago, and, although since her return he has heard her muttering to herself, he hasn’t actually seen her properly nor spoken to her since her brief absence. Now, though, even as he tries surreptitiously to see what she’s up to, suddenly she’s on her feet and striding across the room, flinging wide the door and emerging into the front office.

  She has changed from the white high-collared shirt and rather severe skirt in black barathea that is her habitual office wear into an outfit that, even if it scarcely warrants the epithet frivolous, at least is considerably more fashionable and à la mode – the phrase leaps out of Felix’s colourful, cosmopolitan past – than her usual attire. The skirt and matching bodice are in what his experienced eyes inform him is a fine wool and silk mix, and the deep forest-green fabric has a subtle checked pattern of lighter greens and a touch of turquoise blue. The bodice – he can’t help noticing both that it fits her extremely well and that she has a figure whose splendour he has not up to now fully appreciated – manages to be both modest and … promising, is the best word he can come up with. It is edged with a delicious little frill piped in silk that is exactly the shade of Lily’s eyes. She has abandoned those workman’s boots in favour of something a lot more delicate in dark green kid, buttoned and heeled, and topping off the outfit she wears a small, neat hat pulled forward over her forehead which has a discreet veil and a dashingly curled feather.

  ‘Miss Raynor, you look magnificent,’ he says.

  The smile breaks out before she can stop it, but it is swiftly reined in. ‘I have been invited to take tea at the Rose Tea Room,’ she says. ‘I hope this will be suitable.’

  She doesn’t say this as if it’s a question, but he feels sure that it is. Does she believe his knowledge of the mores of the Rose to be superior to hers? Almost certainly it is, and he rummages around for a way of telling her she’s dressed just right without it sounding patronizing.

  The Rose Tea Room is situated at the near end of Regent Street, at pavement level beneath the utterly exclusive and astronomically expensive Brougham Club. The Rose is owned by the Club, and it is where the members of the Club – all of them male – are allowed to entertain their female guests, for not a single one of the fair sex is or has ever been permitted to ascend the narrow stairs into the Club itself. The Rose is richly appointed in magenta velvet and dark wood, with swoops and swaggers of curtains at its windows to frustrate the curious eyes of the common man and, all around its walls, a series of little booths with high-backed, padded seating separated by partitions where members of the Brougham may treat their ladies to delicious little teas without anybody necessarily knowing. The Brougham membership knows the meaning of discretion, and the prospect of a fellow member even thinking of gossiping about an afternoon assignation he might accidentally have seen with anyone else, even his accountant or his wife, is as unimaginable as a doctor sharing the secrets of the consulting room or a priest those of the confessional. The staff of the Rose Tea Room might have been deaf and blind for all they appear to notice of the carryings-on over the fine bone-china cups and saucers and the three-tiered cake stands.

  Lily is still waiting – somewhat apprehensively, Felix detects – for his comment. ‘Eminently suitable,’ he pronounces. It would have been enough, but he can’t resist. ‘As far as I recall,’ he adds, ‘most of the women there have little or no idea of when to stop, and believe that piling on the jewels and the furs and the latest offerings from Paris only enhances, whereas, as anyone with an ounce of style knows, they simply detract. You, Miss Raynor, will stand out like a diamond on a dung heap.’

  She looks quite shocked, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the vulgarity of the simile or the fact that he’s alluded to one of the most prestigious places in London as a dung heap. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. He genuinely is sorry, for his intention was solely to bolster her confidence and not to alarm her.

  But the smile is trying to force its way out again. ‘So I was right to leave off the fur tippet, the mummer’s streamers, the enormous sunburst brooch and the eight-strand pearl necklace,’ she murmurs. Now the smile is winning, but before he can enjoy it she has spun round and gone back into the inner office, from which she returns carrying a very smart little bag in soft green leather.

  ‘The man who has invited me may have a job for the Bureau,’ she says
. The moment of levity, clearly, is past. She fixes him with a firm glance. ‘I shall tell you the details on my return, provided he decides in our favour.’

  Our favour. Oh, he likes that.

  He nods. ‘Very well.’

  She looks at his almost bare desk. ‘If you have nothing else to do, there is a crate of books in my office which I should like you to unpack and arrange on those shelves.’ She points.

  ‘Of course.’

  She is smoothing on her gloves. ‘I shall return, I hope and expect, before six o’clock.’

  He calls out a soft ‘Good luck’ as she is going out through the street door, but he doesn’t think she hears. In any case, she makes no response.

  He is all at once struck with the realization that his new employer has just left him alone and in sole charge of the World’s End Bureau for at least three and a half hours.

  If that doesn’t demonstrate her confidence in him, he doesn’t know what would. ‘Bugger the bloody plants,’ he says aloud, thinking back to the one undoubted failure on his imaginary report card, ‘I think I’ve passed!’

  He has unpacked, dusted and arranged the crate of books, most of which are heavy and learned tomes on such subjects as the history of London, the British judicial system and the peerage, but with one or two delightful surprises such as a slim volume on poisons and a salacious account of some of the most establishment-rocking divorce cases of recent years. He stands back to view his handiwork. The books look good; some are leather bound and gilt stamped, and his attentions with the duster have given the leather a soft sheen.

  He wanders back to his desk. He takes the empty crate out to the yard, where he pauses to make himself a cup of tea. Now, back in his chair, he sips it. He is on the point of fetching that book on hair-raising divorces when he hears the street door open and, after a brief pause, the sound of hesitant footsteps advancing along the hall. One of the shoes making the footsteps squeaks.