All The Days of My Life by Hilary Bailey Read Free Book Online

wish to. I must have your full and willing agreement – or someone else will have to be found.”
    â€œI don’t know what it is yet, of course,” I said, temporizing. A flight of shrilling starlings swooped over, blackening the sky.
    â€œYou’ll have to read it first,” he told me.
    I walked away from the window. It was an April day, nearly evening. The garden below was beginning to grow green. So I walked across to take the file from his outstretched hand. I, a young man, who should properly have been excited and intrigued by a part of my new responsibilities, and proud of the trust I knew my father was suddenly reposing in me, felt, nevertheless, a chill. A second later, the file in my hand, I did feel all the appropriate, dignified emotions, and I remember saying, as coolly as possible, “Then I’ll just sit down and take a look at it.” I attempted to suppress my enthusiasm, my curiosity and delight, and to sound the proper man I was proposing to become. I remember walking back from the window, sitting down and beginning to read.
    I have the file by me now, and the others which followed it. I was curiously reluctant to open it and see again that one sheet of paper, with the two addresses on it. When I opened the file – lo – it was gone! That seems so disappointing, now. There is no mystery – it was otiose, anyway, conveying no useful information: possibly, after all these years, it had either deteriorated to the point where a tidier hand thanmine decided to remove it, or had merely dried, or the holes had torn and it had fallen from the file without being noticed. Nevertheless I recall it as clearly as if I held it in my hand now.
    The hot days of June 1941 continued and the days at Allaun Towers fell into a regular pattern. It did not take Mary long to comprehend the differences, physical and moral, between her London life and her country one. Her sheets, in the little servant’s bedroom, with the faded roses on the wallpaper, were changed once a week by Mrs Gates. Her new brush and comb, which stood on the marble top of the washstand, were washed in the bath with her every Saturday night, when Mrs Gates bathed her. Her few clothes had to be put in the small chest of drawers in the room, or hung in the pine wardrobe. She woke every morning at seven-thirty, when she heard Mrs Gates creak heavily out of bed in the room next to hers. Then she got up and looked out of the window over the stretch of tiles below, where the roof extended, and off into the sunshine on the lawn where the blackbirds flew, settled, pecked at the dewy grass.
    â€œYou up? Good girl,” Mrs Gates would say, putting her grey head, still tousled, round the door. “Get yourself washed now.”
    There was a stone sink on the landing. Mary’s flannel hung on a brass hook above it. Her toothbrush was in an enamel mug, with Donald Duck painted on it. She would put on the tap and, standing on tiptoe, wash her hands, face and neck with the flannel and a big bar of yellow soap. The water was cold. Then she would go back into her room, wrestle off her nightdress and put on a cotton dress, clean white socks and her new red sandals with the strap with the buckle.
    Mrs Gates had stood four-square on the carpet in the drawing room, facing out Lady Allaun who sat, half-turned, at the writing desk. “Only one pair of knickers,” she had told Lady Allaun forcibly, “and those hardly fit for dusters.”
    Lady Allaun, blinking as the sunlight flooded in through the long windows said, a little sharply, “Oh, Good Lord, Mrs Gates. I’m writing to Sir Frederick.”
    â€œShe’s nothing at all to sleep in,” Mrs Gates continued remorselessly. “In her pants and vest, she said. Think of that.”
    â€œDon’t tell me any more,” said Lady Allaun, turning back to herdesk, on which the half-finished letter lay. Mrs Gates did not move. After a pause Lady