The Unseen(53)

‘Nonsense! I find tea most refreshing on a hot day. In fact I’ll take a cup now, if I may.’

All day, Cat makes and serves tea to the people of Cold Ash Holt. Hester and the other women arrange pastries and scones on pretty tiered cake stands, and give out bowls of strawberries and cream. Children with water ices lick them with desperate haste as they melt in seconds, dribbling down their arms to the elbow. Thus sugared, the children are pursued around the field by frenzied wasps. Robin Durrant proceeds from stall to stall with his hands clasped behind his back like a visiting dignitary, the vicar and a small knot of men and women following in his wake. Cat watches him, nonplussed, and wonders that he has made such an impression, in so short a time.

‘So this is the Cannings’ new maid. Catherine, isn’t it?’ Mrs Avery intones, on passing by the tea table with some companions. She raises her spectacles to the bridge of her bony nose, and peers down through them at Cat.

‘I’m known as Cat, madam,’ Cat replies, not liking Mrs Avery’s manner.

‘Well, I wasn’t talking to you, girl. Pert, isn’t she? Only recently down from London, and for reasons best left unmentioned, as I understand it,’ Mrs Avery remarks to her friend. Irritation flares through Cat. She holds the teapot high in front of her, puts an empty smile on her face and affects a broad cockney accent.

‘Tea, madam? A drop of the empire’s finest?’ she chirps.

‘No, thank you,’ Mrs Avery snaps, and saunters away with her nose wrinkled in distaste.

‘Haughty old cow,’ Cat mutters under her breath.

‘Smile now, ladies! Look this way!’ a man in a brown linen suit and bowler hat calls to them. He has a camera on a tripod, all set up pointing at the tea tent.

‘Oh, it’s the newspaper man!’ Hester says. Cat walks to the front of the tent, still holding the silver-plated teapot with which she accosted Mrs Avery. She peers out from beneath the pungent canvas as the vicar’s wife and the other gentlewomen of the village straighten their backs and tip their parasols prettily. The camera gives a loud clunk.

‘And another one, if you please!’ the photographer calls. ‘Stay right as you are, big smiles now!’ Cat stares into the lens of the camera, glowering in the bright light. She stares right down it, and seeks to corrupt the picture somehow. The ladies in front of her are a mass of white lace and frills, and gauzy muslin veils; they simper and smile for the photograph. It amuses Cat to know that she will be in the background, small and dark and bad tempered. She fights the urge to put out her tongue.

Her bad mood isn’t only due to having the hottest, dullest job to do. There’s also the fact that she won’t have a moment free to enjoy the fête herself; and that when it’s over and the clearing up and packing away done, she’ll still have all her work at The Rectory to try to get done somehow. In Votes for Women that week, there had been glorious pictures of the Women’s Coronation Procession, which had taken place in London the week before, on the seventeenth of June. Horse-drawn floats adorned with the colours, magnificent with swags and ribbons and garlands of flowers. Suffragettes from all over London wearing wonderful costumes; dressed as Liberty and Justice, and as the four corners of the British Empire. Cat wishes she’d been there with them. Walking alongside the white ponies with a garland of red English roses, or carrying an eagle-topped staff. She wishes she’d been part of something so glorious and beautiful and above all meaningful. She gazes out of the tea tent as the village men begin a tug o’ war, and the women gossip and fill their faces with cake. Then the man who has just taken her photograph ducks into the tent in front of her.

‘Afternoon, miss. Is there some tea on the go?’ he asks, unloading his camera onto a table and pulling out a handkerchief to mop his face.

‘Plenty of it, and I’ll give you the fresh, not the stewed, since you’ve got to spend the day working as well,’ Cat says wearily.

‘Hotter than Satan’s toenails, isn’t it?’ the little man grins. He has a sharp face, boyish but beady, somehow feral; his cheeks and jaw sport a fur of auburn whiskers.

‘That it is, and no cooler standing next to this tea urn, I’ll tell you.’

‘Will I still get the fresh brew if I tell you that I’m about done with work for the day?’ he asks. Cat makes a show of pausing as she pours his cup, and the man grins again.

‘Which paper will the pictures be in?’ she asks.

‘The Thatcham Bulletin. I’d hoped to pick up some gossip for the society pages while I was here, but everybody is being terribly polite and patriotic. In other words, dull.’ He takes the cup of tea from her and slumps into a wooden chair with it.