servants’ life, but Mrs Kendrick said, ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ so that was the end of that.
The stairs can seem endless – there are five floors – but I’m pretty used to it now. There is a cranky little lift, but I’m not wild about cranky little lifts. Especially cranky little lifts which might break down and leave you trapped at the top of a lift shaft, with no way down …
Anyway. So I take the stairs every day, and it counts as cardio. I arrive at the top, push my way into the light, attic-level office and greet Clarissa.
Clarissa is my colleague and is twenty-seven. She’s the administrator and also does a bit of fundraising, like me. There’s only the two of us – plus Mrs Kendrick – so it’s not exactly a huge team, but we work because we’re all simpatico. We know Mrs Kendrick’s little ways. Before Clarissa, a girl called Amy joined us for a while, but she was a bit too loud. A bit too sassy. She questioned things and criticized our methods and ‘didn’t quite fit in’, according to Mrs Kendrick. So she was axed.
Clarissa, on the other hand, fits in perfectly. She wears tea dresses a lot, and shoes with buttons which she gets from a dance-wear shop. She has long dark hair and big grey eyes, and a very earnest, endearing way about her. As I enter, she’s spritzing the plants with water, which is something we have to do every day. Mrs Kendrick gets quite upset if we forget.
‘Morning, Sylvie!’ Clarissa turns and gives me a radiant smile. ‘I’ve just got back from a breakfast meeting. It was so successful. I met six prospects who all promised to put Willoughby House in their wills. So kind of them.’
‘Brilliant! Well done!’ I would high-five her, but high-fives are very much not a Mrs Kendrick thing and she might walk in at any moment. ‘Unfortunately, mine wasn’t quite so good. I had coffee with Susie Jackson from the Wilson–Cross Foundation and she told me the V & A are having an event the same night as our Fabulous Fans launch.’
‘No!’ Clarissa’s face crumples in dismay.
‘It’s OK. I told her we’d be giving away handbags as a gift and she said she’d come to ours.’
‘Brilliant,’ breathes out Clarissa. ‘What kind of handbags?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to source some. Where do you think?’
‘The V & A shop?’ suggests Clarissa after a moment’s thought. ‘They have lovely things.’
I nod. ‘That’s what I thought.’
I hang up my jacket and go to put my receipt for coffee in the Box. This is a big wooden box which lives on a shelf, and mustn’t be confused with the Red Box, which sits next to it and is cardboard, but was once covered with red floral wrapping paper. (There’s still a snippet of it on the lid, and that’s how it got the name the Red Box.)
The Box is for storing receipts, while the Red Box is for storing faxes. And then, next to them is the Little Box, which is for storing Post-it notes and staples but not paper clips, because they live in the Dish. (A pottery dish on the next shelf up.) Pens, on the other hand, go in the Pot.
It sounds a bit complicated, I suppose, but it’s not, when you get used to it.
‘We’re nearly out of fax paper,’ says Clarissa, wrinkling up her nose. ‘I’ll have to pop out later.’
We get through a lot of fax paper in our office, because Mrs Kendrick sometimes works from home, and likes to correspond backwards and forwards with us by fax. Which sounds outdated. Well, it is outdated. But it’s just the way she likes to do things.
‘So, who were your prospects?’ I ask, as I sit down to type up my report.
‘Six lovely chaps from HSBC. Quite young, actually.’ Clarissa blinks at me. ‘Just out of university. But terribly sweet. They all said they’d make us legacies. I think they’ll give thousands!’
‘Amazing!’ I say, and draw up a new document. And I’ve just started typing when there’s the sound of unfamiliar feet on the staircase.
I know Mrs Kendrick’s tread. She’s coming up to the office. But there’s another person, too. Heavier. More rhythmic.
The door opens, just as I’m thinking, It’s a man.
And it’s a man.
He’s in his thirties, I’d say. Dark suit, bright blue shirt, big muscled chest, dark cropped hair. The type with hairy wrists and a bit too much aftershave. (I can