source of Rachel’s elegant hairstyle was obvious.
Nat took May and Sam through the tiny passageway to the back of the house where an unplumbed bath sitting on decorated metal feet had been squeezed into one corner. A cake of pink Lifebuoy soap in a saucer balanced on the edge. Outside they were shown a tiny yard with a meat safe, the shed that housed the privy, and an earth-filled wooden box in which some bedraggled sprouts clung to life. Ducking under the line of washing May could just make out a door leading into the back alley.
There were two bedrooms upstairs, one for Nat and Sarah, light and sunny and dominated by a pretty bed piled with cushions and brightly coloured shawls from beneath which something lacy and feminine peeped. Nat paused at the second door.
“This is Rachel’s boudoir,” he said, laughing at his use of the fancy word for the only room in which clutter had got the better of orderliness. A large dresser took up most of the opposite wall, its shelves crammed with Russian icons and gilt candlesticks, the wax of the half-melted candles arrested mid-drip. Beside the dresser was a full-length mirror with faded photographs and postcards stuck all around the frame. A small bookcase hung just inside the door, supporting, instead of books, a row of flower and coronet embellished mugs, each one bearing the portrait of a British king or queen. There was Edward VII and his queen, Alexandra, on their coronation day, his son George V and Queen Mary on theirs, and the same regal couple again on the occasion of their silver jubilee only last year.
“Only one more room to show you,” Nat said as he moved a ladder into position and began to climb.
Stacked along one side of the attic from ceiling to floor were dozens of bolts of material, the overflow from Simon’s workshop, Nat explained. But on the other side was a child’s brass bed with gleaming copper knobs at each corner. A coal fire was already lit in the corner grate but May’s attention went at once to the skylight. By standing on the bed and craning her neck a little she had a terrific view right up the adjoining Cyprus Street towards the war memorial.
“Auntie Edith always said you were trim,” Nat said, clearly delighted by May’s pleasure at the room. “So we hoped you would be able to squeeze in here. At least you will have it to yourself. I am afraid that Sam will have to stretch out on the sofa downstairs.”
A room of her own, whatever size, with a ladder leading nowhere except to a door of her own was something May had always longed for. At home in Barbados, despite the comfortable size of the house, she had always slept in her old childhood room, which led through a connecting door to her parents’ bedroom on one side and down to the stairway on the other. She had never liked the sense of being within earshot of her parents and their ineffectively muffled arguments, but out of habit, she had never thought of asking to move.
The house in Barbados had once been a splendid dwelling with its elegant Jacobean proportions, curved staircase, British-designed cornices and beautifully carved wooden doors. But the West Indian sugar export business was no longer thriving as it had in her grandparents’ day. Financial strain following the Great Depression in Britain and competition from other sugar-growing countries had eroded the demand and May had been conscious of the necessary economies her parents had been forced to make. In the past few years the number of household staff had dwindled from a dozen servants down to a couple of maids who came in to clean and dust and to help Bertha, the rotund and cheerful cook. Bertha prepared all the meals for the family as well as lunch for the plantation workers. Her pillow of a shoulder was famously available for any member of the community to lean on or weep on whenever they wished. Bertha’s husband, Tom, completed the complement of staff, a man whose strength lay in his head for figures as he organised the weekly accounts with impressive precision. The ancient plantation chauffeur had died two years ago and it had been Duncan’s idea to replace him with his own, unpaid daughter. Even the Rolls-Royce, for so long the pride and joy of May’s grandfather and father, had begun to show irreversible signs of age, no matter