CHAPTER 13

ALL THROUGH the years of working for the Thai Government, and revelling in the experience of motherhood, I had the joy of seeing Emmet build a reputation for being the splendid doctor he was and, not unlike my childhood experience with my father, sharing in some part of his professional life. We had had time to enjoy our beautiful house, clean the girls off the front steps, and engage the first of a series of servants whose eccentricities were to mimic, but never to surpass, those of my parents’ household.

Diary never kept after the disastrous publication of my teenage romanticisms, I nevertheless started, upon marriage, to keep a menu book—far more useful. I not only can remember the guests but the food and the wine (a sharp pang of regret when I contemplate the wine). Still limited by rationing, clothing and petrol had slid off first. Eggs, butter and cream followed. Not until 1954 were we able to discard the black market butcher and the horse meat steaks in French restaurants. During clothes rationing, Great Aunt Juliet’s heavy tasselled and fringed white linen guest towels had been blithely chopped up to provide nappies for a friend’s new baby, and I marked in the book the celebratory fillet steak on the night meat came off the ration—July, 1954.

We had celebrated our first week in the house by acquiring a butler and cook, Mr and Mrs Hawkins, who, we were to discover almost immediately, fitted into the pattern of married couples as staff, recognised—but not soon enough by us—universally. A bad egg almost always shares a nest with a good egg.

On their first night in attendance, Mrs Hawkins cooked us an impressive dinner. Hawkins was impressive in every respect. Resplendent in white jacket and gloves, he held out my chair in the candle-lit dining room, silver gleaming, fire softly glowing, napkins stiffly awaiting, wine impeccably poured. We left the house walking on air, preceded by Hawkins, car door opened with a bow and a flourish. On our arrival home, Hawkins, who must have had his nose pressed to the window, flew out the front door, and, with another bow and another flourish, ushered us inside. What bliss to find curtains drawn, lights lit, bed turned down, night attire waisted and reposing invitingly on our bed.

The following night we went in to dinner with happy anticipation. Candles were still lit. The wine splashed a little. The dinner was fine, Hawkins not quite so solicitous, and something amiss with his tie. Halfway through the second course, a tieless and jacketless figure lurched through the door.

‘Mrs H says,’ it bellowed at us, somewhat belligerently, ‘do you want any more veg?’

The next morning, as I dried Mrs H’s tears and studiously ignored the snores coming from their bedroom, I learned we were not the first of their employers to have enjoyed such a brief period of euphoria. Mr H was the bad egg. They left that day, Mrs H in tears, Mr H shouting abuse, kicking aside the empty bottles—ours—cluttering their bedroom floor.

Shortly after this, by whatever telephonic grapevine I have forgotten, I managed to trace splendid, funny and fondly remembered Nancy—mad, Scottish Nancy—who in my parents’ house had so memorably lightened my Australian youth and had given my father such magnificent excuses for tease.

She was thrilled to hear from me, caught the train from Scotland at once—it did not occur to me to question the oddity of her, the perfect servant, being so immediately available—and re-entered my life. The house sparkled. I was cosseted. Emmet’s suits were pressed and his shoes shone. Telephones were answered. Bliss again.

One day Nancy appeared blushing furiously and near to tears. She thrust a package into my hands. It had come through the post, addressed to her. Inside was a condom—used. We had just managed to clear most of them, along with the girls, off our front steps in the mornings, so it could not have been the first Nancy had ever seen, but this one had been directed, addressed, aimed at her.

The nice police inspector who came at our request gently questioned Nancy in Emmet’s surgery: was it possible that she had any local acquaintance who could have done such a dastardly deed? Nancy blushed more furiously and rushed from the room. I felt dreadfully for her and was about to follow and comfort when I saw the policeman and my husband exchange looks.

‘Do you agree with me, doctor?’

‘’Fraid so,’ said Emmet, ‘but thank you very much for coming.’

Patiently, he explained to me that he and the police officer had come to the same conclusion: Nancy had posted it to herself, having first scooped it up with the early morning’s cleaning.

Nancy’s psychosis (for such it was) escalated with alarming rapidity, triggered by my first confinement. Whilst I was in hospital giving birth, Nancy sang around the house, and took to wearing lipstick. On my return, she was as caring as ever, keeping me in bed for several days and pampering me with meals on trays. When I got up to dress for the first time, I discovered the shelf on which I kept my underwear empty.

‘How sweet of Nancy,’ I thought, ‘and how unnecessary. She has washed all my underclothes.’

But, no, Nancy’s blank incomprehension mirrored the blank shelves. I had nothing to wear.

Emmet began to ask me what I had done with his underpants.

We had an old-fashioned coke boiler in our basement. Brassiere straps and scraps of linen were amongst the debris he discovered in the embers one morning. Mine. His, however, were discovered, unwashed, under Nancy’s pillow.

We were driven to the lengths of bed-searching by a chance entry by Emmet into her bedroom. Lamps were disconnected and shoved under the bed. Looking glasses were pasted over with newspaper.

It was evident that Nancy thought evil rays were directed at her through lamp and mirror. A classic symptom, it seemed. But she was wonderful with the baby. And wonderful as always in every other way. A harmless lunacy seemed a small price to pay. Underwear was reasonably expendable.

Sadly, it came to an abrupt end the day she told our daily cleaner that I was trying to poison the baby. Next step, Emmet told me, would be that she would poison the baby. By that night, all of us in tears, Nancy was packed off—to a nursing home—protesting and furious, but safe. All of us.

The Hawkins, and then Nancy, were to prove the first indication that I, like my mother, would attract eccentric servants. Nancy had never seemed unusual to me in the lexicon of servants of my childhood, all of them delightfully dotty.