Reprieve over Tea

Day 2. conclusion

We took the long route to the tea-room. Nerves were still frayed and once we had arrived, tea took a long time to reach the table. Sid dithered, quite deliberately, to point out that they were very busy and short-handed, because a key member of the team was licking the arse or less metaphorically, lapping up the crumbs from the master’s table. I ignored Sid and added rules 3 and 4 to the list. Once done, Vera used the time to get me acquainted with some of her plans, which, I suspect, were only just beginning to crystallise in her mind.

'Millicent, I want you to keep a diary of our talks and give it all to me at the end of your employment. Do them in the first person. It will help me analyse your side of the argument.'

'Good idea. And we should both make a list of things to discuss and activities to do. We can compare notes tomorrow. '

'Take the rest of the morning off to get on with it. Keep the receipts for new tights and dry cleaning and let me have them. Meet me at eight tomorrow and we’ll talk tea kitchens, while I show you the house.'

She finished her tea, gave me a tender smile, waved at Sid and left the café.

I stayed on and finished the shift in the café. The sun was gaining in strength as it rose in the cloudless sky. The ancient trees scattered around the grounds were a zillion dots as the powerful breezes sent their leaves in a chaotic dance of a million greens, juxtaposed against the blue backdrop of a cloudless sky. Summer can be breath-taking. 

I suppose I’m trying to say I don’t belong upstairs with Vera - downstairs is more comfortable, so long as I have a view like the one from the café! Does that make Millie a bourgeois lackey? Probably. At the moment I’m only dancing with the enemy. So long as I don’t end up sleeping with them.

Visitors were pouring in and I realised it would be a good tip day. Furthermore, Vera had spoken openly about remuneration, but hadn’t put a figure to it. ‘Never trust a rich bitch,’ my grandfather would have told me, so a shift in the café allowed me to hedge my bets a little.

We knocked off around four-thirty. Sid and I found ourselves wandering, arm in arm, back to Church Cottages. She was bursting with curiosity, annoyed that the busy lunchtime and afternoon, had made it impossible for her to catch up on the morning’s events at the house.

I filled her in on the major issues and some of the impending rows Vera and I narrowly avoided.

'But you parted best of buddies,' was her summary of the day. 'I’d have slapped the stuck-up cow, that’s for sure. And when are you going to address this Millicent nonsense? No one has ever, in the history of anywhen, called you Millicent. I nearly spat in her tea yesterday, when she kept calling me Sidonie. I made the mistake of mentioning it at home, now they are all doing it.'

I had to laugh. Mirth subsided. 'No one will ever know about Vera calling me Millicent,' I promised. 'And I can’t be too hard on her. I really put her through the wringer over her stuck-up conventions and she parried the argument using a torpedo, with ‘Marxist dialectic’ painted on the side.'

'Wow!' was all Sid could manage. 'Respect.' 

Sid gave me a big hug at the gate to our cottage and walked on, past the church, to her house. To be honest, it was a bit of a hovel, stuck down in a dell with huge mature oaks and sycamore robbing the windows of daylight. Her family were dysfunctional, rarely spoke to each other and Sid couldn’t wait to leave home. I doubted anyone ribbed her over being called Sidonie. That would have meant a communication. 

I watched her male walk, in baggy but fashionable dungarees, disappear behind the church fence. Her clothes, gait, the use of a boy’s name, were all part of her affectation not to be a girl. She was a tad overweight, but certainly didn’t have a boy’s figure – rather the opposite, although she never revealed her curves. And she knew she was stuck at home for the foreseeable future. Her first task was to get her younger siblings through school and keep them off drugs and alcohol, for they were the vices that took most young villagers, who didn’t have functioning parents. There were plenty. Sometimes I think rural poverty is worse than being poor in the towns.

Her sexual orientation remained a mystery even to me, her best friend, perhaps her only friend. The other teenagers and twenty-somethings in the village had her down as a raving lesbian. I was only spared the same accusation due to my lascivious lifestyle, which made me something of a celebrity among the lads. Sid always took my arm, hugged me and kissed me lingeringly on the cheek when she got the chance, but she never overstepped the mark and embarrassed me. One day I will discuss things with her and find her a boyfriend, which I think, is what she really wants. But having driven herself into the ‘butch dyke’ corner by playing the butch dyke for the last decade, the lads were understandably a bit reluctant.

I took out the notepad Vera had given me, which from now on I’ll call ‘Vera’s notepad,’ and wrote in it, ‘Discuss Sid’s problem with Vera!’

My Dad pulled the ancient van into the drive and stopped by the poultry. He looked over at me as if he were expecting me to be downcast. I grinned back and gave him a big thumbs up. I had mastered my first day, working as a lady in waiting, or as Vera preferred, a companion.

Why not just be friends?