Chapter 19: Thirty-One Pieces
Christmas Day.
I was up at twenty to seven and the house was still dark and the fire in the hall had gone to grey.
Morning was the usual. Church for those who went.
Presents in the drawing room at eleven, in order, youngest first.
Julian gave me a coat.
It was a very good coat and it was the correct size and I still have it.
I gave him a pair of gloves and a book about a bridge engineer, and he was pleased with the book, genuinely, and read the flap twice.
Margot gave me a scarf and said it would go with the coat, which meant she had known about the coat, which is the kind of thing you notice and file and do nothing with.
Lunch was cold and quick because the evening was the event.
Then everybody went to lie down, and I did the silver.
Thirty-one pieces.
Two candelabra, seven branches each. A pair of sauce boats.
Twelve serving spoons and forks.
A soup ladle. A rose bowl.
Four salvers. The tray I carried the coffee on. Three cruets.
A christening cup nobody had used in sixty years.
You do it at the kitchen table with newspaper down, a tin of paste, a bristle brush for the chasing, and two cloths, one for on and one for off.
The trick is the interval.
You put the paste on, and then you leave it, and the leaving is the part people get wrong.
Four minutes.
If you take it off at two it comes up cloudy in the hollows and you have to start again on the chasing, and the chasing on those candelabra is acanthus leaf and it holds everything.
So you work in a rotation.
Paste on piece one, paste on piece two, back to one, off, on to piece three.
I could run five in a rotation and hold the timing in my head without a clock, and by that afternoon I had done it enough times to be very good at it.
It took three hours and forty minutes.
I started at half past one and I finished at ten past five.
My hands were black to the second knuckle.
Silver paste gets into the sides of the nails and stays for two days, and it is why I always did the silver on a Thursday if I could, so that Wednesday was clean.
That afternoon it did not matter.
There was no Wednesday coming that week.
I want to say something about doing that job, because it will look, from outside, like the worst kind of servitude, and that is not how it was in my hands.
For three hours and forty minutes nobody spoke to me and nothing was required of me except an interval, a rotation, and a bristle brush.
It is the only kind of work I have ever been any good at.
Repetition with a standard in it.
That is judo, incidentally. That is the entire sport.
You do one thing forty thousand times and the fortieth thousand is the one that counts.
I laid the table at half past five with Mrs Bell and a girl from the village called Aimee who was doing her first Christmas and was terrified of the glasses.
Twenty-two places. Two tables joined. Forty candles.
Thirty-one pieces of silver with nothing cloudy in the hollows.
It looked like a photograph of something.
It looked, in fact, exactly like a family.
I went up at six and washed my hands twice and got the nail brush at the sides and changed into a dark green dress with a high neck.
I chose the high neck because of the collarbone, which I will come back to.
The guests came between seven and twenty past.
The Prices were early.
The rector was late and apologised to everybody individually.
Vaughan arrived at ten past seven in a car that somebody else was driving, and Damon met him at the door before Margot got there, which I noticed.
Dinner was called at eight. Soup at ten past.
Goose at twenty to nine.
I was seated between Aunt Celia and one of the partners' wives, and I did what I had done at every large dinner for three years, which is to be pleasant, ask questions, and take up as little space as a person can take up while sitting down.
It went beautifully. I need you to understand that it went beautifully.
Ninety minutes of a genuinely good evening.
Someone sang a verse of something and everybody joined in badly.
At about twenty past nine the plates were going out and I got up to carry a salver of the roast potatoes down to the second table, because Aimee could not lift it.
And behind me, from the middle of the long table, in a voice pitched for twenty-two people, Damon said:
“She ought to be doing that on her knees.”