Kitty’s Infernal Machine, by Charlie Britten

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I offered to help wash up after afternoon tea, but Cook wouldn’t let me. “Thank you kindly, Thomas Atkins. We can manage for ourselves.”

“Just trying to do my bit, Mrs Pearson. Many hands make light work.”

“I’m sure young Mr Edward’s gentleman’s gentleman has his own work to do.”

“Indeed. And if you’d be so good as to show me where the ironing board is, I will press his trousers before dinner.”

She flung out a plump arm, bared to the elbow. “Beside the copper.”

I observed the two dingy waist-high curtains in front of me. “I see two coppers. ‘Pon my word, what a lot of laundry you must do here at Waltham Hall. Is my employer’s father’s family very dirty?”

“Now, now. Remember your place, young man, and that you arrived just this morning.”

“I’ve been in Mr Edward’s service since the end of the war, ma’am. In his rooms in London.” Spotting the ironing board at last, I set it up with two ear-splitting creaks which drowned out even the sound of the parlour maid clanking crockery. I thought I observed her placing cups and saucers into the copper, but, with the evening light streaming through the room, I daresay my eyes deceived me.

“You were in the army, Thomas Atkins?”

“I served in Flanders.”

“Mr Edward was in Flanders. Mentioned in dispatches, he was.” The parlour maid dropped lye soap into the copper, then lowered the lid. I raised my eyebrows at Cook but she went on talking. “Rescued an wounded soldier under enemy fire, he did, without heed to his own safety. It was all in the ‘Evening News’.”

“That soldier was me.”

Her eyes widened then scrunched into slits.

I nodded. “He was the best officer a soldier could hope for. A true gentleman.”

“He is indeed. Very well regarded here at Waltham Hall is Mr Edward. A crying shame that he came back from the war… the way he is.”

“We keep going. One day at a time. Now, what are you doing, my dear?” This was to the parlour maid, who was now dropping into the copper a pipe attached to a steam pump on the floor. I glanced again at Mrs Pearson.

“Don’t let the water get too hot, Kitty, dear,” she said after a moment. “We can’t be washing the patterns off Madam’s Royal Worcester again.”

Kitty, the parlour maid, walked back to the pump, and adjusted a valve. Seconds later, water hissed through the pipe, pattering like hail inside the copper, then discharging as soapy effluent into a zinc pail. I closed my eyes, wincing for the cups with thin delicate handles, but, a few minutes later, she raised the lid, and, giggling like a little girl, lifted out a clean side-plate.

“Well done, Kitty,” said Cook.

I looked inside the copper myself. “Gordon Bennett! What-”

“Our washing up machine, Thomas Atkins. My niece, Kitty’s, invention.” Mrs Pearson nodded at the parlour maid who was now removing the rest of the crockery and lining it up on the shelves with the handles all pointing the same way. “She doesn’t say much but she’s good with machinery, our Kitty. Like your Mr Edward. Always tinkering with motor cars, he was.”

He had been good with a different sort of machinery during the war, if you can call weaponry that.

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“Pull yourself together, dear boy,” shouted his father, Sir Charles Saunders, unaware that I was next door in the dressing room. “You’re twenty-one next month. Key to the door and all that.”

Silence.

“How about that, Edward?”

Silence.

“Your mother and I would like to hold a party for your coming of age. Haven’t had a shindig round these parts since before the war.”

More silence.

“Say something, damn you.”

It was a wonder to me that any of the men returning from the trenches managed to put words into their mouths.

“All I do, Atkins, is tell young men to go over the top and get killed. I can’t do it anymore.” This was the last thing he said to me; in fact I think he might have decided there and then that it would be the last he would say to anybody.

“We need to talk about your future,” Sir Charles went on. “You can’t hang around here doing nothing. I bought you the Bentley but you don’t use it. It’s just sitting there, in the old stable block, gathering dust.”

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Sir Charles wasn’t quite right about this because every few days Kitty used to pop down to look at it; I even saw her flicking about with a yellow duster.

“I don’t know where she gets it from, her mechanical bent. Not from my poor sister, her mother, I’ll be bound,” said Mrs Pearson, watching her from the kitchen window.

“I don’t recall Mrs Pearson’s sister,” said Robert, the footman, in my ear. “Nor does anyone else round here. If you get my meaning.”

I did.

“Kitty grew up at Waltham Hall. About the same age as Mr Edward, she was. Used to play together as children, always making model engines. Then he went away to Eton and she went into service.”

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That was before we started preparing for the twenty-first party, working all the hours there were, moving furniture, polishing the silver, getting out the Royal Worcester and the Waterford Crystal, all of us except Kitty, who just loaded crockery in and out of the washing up machine.

Unfortunately, on the afternoon of the party, the washing up machine went wrong; it flooded the kitchen floor. It had been leaking slightly for several days but this was more serious. As Kitty mopped the floor, the silence in the kitchen was deafening; the truth was we servants had come to depend upon the thing and this evening we were looking forward to a hundred guests, with sherry glasses, four-piece place settings, wine glasses, water glasses, cups and saucers.

“We can manage without that infernal machine,” said Robert at last, kicking the copper. “The Good Lord gave us hands and washing up bowls, didn’t he?”

Kitty stormed out of the kitchen, her apron over her head, her howls echoing down the corridor.

“She makes a lot of noise for a girl who never speaks,” he said. “She’s not right in the head.”

“I’ll trouble you not to speak of Kitty like that in my presence, Robert Bates,” said Mrs Pearson, thrusting her hands on her hips. “I think you’ve spoken enough in the last few minutes. Haven’t you any work to do?” She rounded on me. “And you, Thomas Atkins, standing there gaping.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, refusing to yield to Cook’s glare. “What are you implying, Robert?” I felt my fists clenching, almost of their own accord, and my chin jutting forward. “Seeing as my master also cannot speak.”

“Thomas Atkins,” said Mrs Pearson, pushing me towards the kitchen door, “I’m sure Mr Edward needs you. There. I think I heard his bell.”

Spinning round on my heels, I marched out the kitchen; it was time to help my master dress, as it happened. I had laid everything out on the chair, his evening jacket with velour lapels, evening trousers, starched tuxedo and white tie, yet the man himself lay in his bed, the eiderdown pulled almost over his head, his eyes shut, and the curtains closed. I braced myself. No space for me and servants’ quarrels now.

“Sir.”

No movement.

“Sir, it’s time to get ready.”

He pulled the sheet further over his face.

I felt my shoulders lift and tighten, as if in between us lay no man’s land, into which my ordinary voice wafted aimlessly then faded away, beyond it barbed wire guarding memories too painful to revisit.

I drew back the curtains, releasing the sunlight of the English summer afternoon back. “We ought to get going.”

He winced at the light, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“Yes. It is a bit bright, isn’t it?” I re-closed the curtain, just a little. ‘Keep talking, Thomas. It’s the only thing,’ I muttered under my breath. “Lovely evening, sir. Would’ve been awful if we’d had rain.”

He turned his face back into the pillow.

“Come on, sir.”

He didn’t move.

“Sir, it’s half past five and it all kicks off at half past six.” No movement.

Had he been younger, I would have dragged off the covers and thrown them down the stairs, then grabbed his feet and swung them off the mattress and on to the floor. I knew about children, being the oldest of eight and I’d given our Ernest this treatment more than once. I itched to do it now, my fingers reaching out to the eiderdown in my mind.

But it wouldn’t do.

“Come on, sir.” I picked up the hair brush on the dressing-table and put it down again. “Let’s get this thing over with, shall we?”

Still he didn’t move.

“What could I say to you to divert you? The news? Mr Lloyd George is still Prime Minister. The Bolsheviks are carrying on their revolution in Russia. Ah, now. Maybe this is more to your liking. The ‘Daily Mail’ reports that the British dirigible R34 has landed in New York. The first Atlantic crossing by airship.”

He opened his eyes. A glimmer of hope.

“British engineering, eh? You can’t beat it.” I wished I’d read the article properly because I couldn’t remember anything more.

His eyes drifted down to the eiderdown, following the swirly pattern on the fabric.

‘Keep talking, Thomas,’ I reminded myself again. “Are you aware, sir, that downstairs in the kitchen, here at Waltham Hall, we have a machine which washes up dishes? It was devised by Kitty, the parlour maid.”

His eyebrows rose, just a fraction. Hopeful?

“But this afternoon it malfunctioned. Most inconvenient.”

Silence, but he moved, raising his bent elbows above his head as if he were stretching his armpits.

Seizing the moment, I fetched his clothes from the dressing room and got him inside them, then we parted, he to the bathroom, me to lend my assistance in the dining room. On my way to the butler’s pantry to fetch more decanters, I poked my head round the kitchen door, meaning to make my peace with Mrs Pearson, but she beckoned me inside, muttering, “I can’t be doing with this, Thomas Atkins.”

“About Robert, I fear I forgot myself-“

“Never mind Robert Bates. He needs taking down a peg and two from time to time and that’s the truth. But look. Look at them. I know my place, but I cannot have the Family in the kitchen at a time like this.”

Kitty and my Mr Edward crouched beside the washing up machine, an open toolbox at their feet, he staring at the pump, fingering the gasket around the pipe housing and reaching for a screw driver. Kitty looked on, pointing and grunting.

“Let them be,” I breathed. “Let them be.”

Illustration by Rob Torno

They worked together, in silence, each anticipating the other’s thoughts so as to hand up the correct tool or to squeeze droplets of oil on to a joint. The other servants worked around them, busy, with no time to do more than toss them an occasional curious glance, even Mrs Pearson who returned to the range and her pots. Only I must watch the kitchen clock.

Six o’clock, ten past six… They replaced the pipe on the pump, tightening the repaired gasket. “Sir.”

He reached for the lever which switched on the pump.

“Begging your pardon, Mr Edward,” cried Mrs Pearson, “but I cannot have water all over my kitchen floor again.”

He pressed the lever down anyway.

We waited.

Kitty’s chest rasped as she drew in her breath, puffing out her cheeks and going red in the face.

I caught a gurgle somewhere in the pump. So did he. His eyes widened.

As he cast a sidelong glance at Kitty, we all heard the familiar hiss in the pipe, then the torrent of water in the copper.

With a loud giggle, Kitty jumped a little girly jump on the spot.

Scrambling to his feet, he brushed the dust from the knees of his evening trousers. He held up the sleeve of his dress shirt, stained black with oil and brown with dirty water. “Atkins-“ he said.

He spoke. Yes, he spoke. I wanted to cheer, to clap him on the back, to say “Well done, sir. Very good, sir,” but I knew it wouldn’t do. Instead, I answered, “I’ll get you another one.”

As I walked out, I indicated my watch again.

Nodding, he followed me back to the dressing room. He didn’t speak again that evening, but I knew that he was beginning to mend at last.