Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

knees, the other half sitting on its arse. That’s what it looks like to me.’
    ‘They’ve got their own ways of being busy. Up here,’ said Nanny, tapping her forehead. ‘Where’d we be if it wasn’t for the head-workers?’
    ‘That’s what I’m saying.’
    Mrs Adams shuffled out backwards through the door to do the last bit, the bucket pulled scrooping after her.
    ‘That’s a lick and a promise if there ever was,’ Nanny said, watching her. ‘Slopping dirty water over it; it’ll be worse than before. Once it’s dried. You’ll see. Them flags always look nice and fresh wet. Wait till they’re dry, that’s all.’ After a while, she went on: ‘When it comes to me doing her job for her, then I begin to see the dawn. Just at the last moment having to cut extra sandwiches and then running for the bus like that takes off all the gilt. Either that or miss the Forthcoming Attractions and the News as well, more than likely.’ To herself, she thought: ‘Them Grecian lessons! Do they think I was born yesterday?’ But she would not imply criticism of her employer to a mere char-woman, a daily woman, paid by the hour, who left, she now observed, the half-wrung-out cloth in a slimy, smelly twist in the bucket.
    Mrs Adams came rocking back across the wet floor on her heel-edges, not to mark the clean flags. ‘That job’s jobbed,’ shesaid. As she put up her hand to straighten her hair, the inside of her arm showed grey and crêpy. ‘What now?’ she asked, wanting to get back to her baby.
    But Nanny had feelings only for the babies of the well-to-do, and even then, it was the baby’s belongings which inspired her most, the tools of her craft – the piles of dazzling folded napkins, the curved blue safety-pins, the padded baskets, the enamelled kidney-bowls. Then she was all-powerful, surrounded by such accoutrements, sitting on the low chair, the bath-apron over her lap, the napkin folded ready, pins in her mouth … ‘Is he a diddums?’ … one hand clasping the fat ankles together, the other fondly smacking the creased buttocks, then flouring the wrinkled, mauve, hanging genitals with powder … ‘and is he a diddums?’ … the little feet fighting in her hand. Oh, all that was long since. Mrs Adams’s baby was not a proper baby, was female, did not smell sweetly, was not real and could not matter, so: ‘There’s the stairs yet,’ she said. ‘If anyone should so much as run a finger down them bannisters, I don’t know, I’m sure.’
    Mrs Adams was tired and worried in her heart, for all her tart answers; and the baby, though female, though such a trouble with wind, was real to her and tugged her homewards. ‘Just a flick round then,’ she conceded, and went off with her duster to wipe down the bannisters and rub up the more horizontal surfaces of the furniture.
    Nanny feigned eccentricity as Hamlet feigned part of his madness, and for more or less the same reason, so that she could speak her mind, set herself apart from humanity and tell the truth, keep her integrity in words, at least, and have every allowance made.
    ‘Oh!’ said Margaret, coming so silently and quickly into the kitchen. ‘No cinema then, this afternoon?’
    ‘They kept the big film on all the week.’
    ‘And was it a nice film?’ Margaret condescended, in order to gain time, find her reason for being there.
    ‘It was Russian,’ Nanny said flatly, not caring for foreign countries unless the English aristocracy was settled there. ‘What are you up to?’
    Margaret came and stood on the red and black rug.
    ‘What is it now?’ The old woman could hardly stave off the sleep stealing heavily over her.
    Margaret said: ‘It’s Marion. I wanted a cup of tea for him to take with his tablets.’
    ‘One of them heads again. You’ll have to make it yourself, then. The kettle’s warm. Funny he gets these turns. A drop of warm oil down his ear, I’d try.’ (One of her darlings, Violet’s youngest brother, turning his fist