Chapter 23: Mrs Collings - The Golden Hours

Mrs Collings would tell anyone she was fond of her lodgers. Of course, she didn’t own the building, but it was her job to look after it and keep her gentlemen happy. She felt they were hers. Hers to take care of. She didn’t mind at all when Lewis needed to take that bathtub out onto the leads of the roof outside his back window; he’s quite an artistic gentleman and that’s what he needed for his photography. And he took a bathtub of his own, it’s not as if he took the bathtub out of the bathroom! And he’s always most polite and careful about the paintwork, and never brings, well, you can’t call them ladies, but he only ever brings them home professionally, to photograph. Mr and Mrs Jones in the back basement are delightful people; no noise at all and never cook at home. Mr Alberts on the top floor is a bit of a sad sack, you would be, lost two wives poor thing, but keeps the room nice. But while she quite understood that young ladies go out to work these days and need somewhere to lodge as much as the next person, she would have preferred it if they didn’t come to lodge in her house. All the smalls in the bathroom. Nylons. All the smells! Talc everywhere, and it’s impossible to sweep. The Ascot was worn out from the amount of hot water used and they always wanted more, day and night, funny hours, and gentlemen callers, which she quite simply didn’t allow and they knew that. She said they; of course there was only Miss Cazalet, she had no other single ladies at the moment, since Miss Pelling and Miss Smith had left – sharing! Well, perhaps she should have known. Anyway, she wouldn’t be taking any more. Nice English men was what she liked – Welsh at a push, but no Irish or Scotch or bloody foreigners, thank you, and preferably no northerners either. But with a regular job, or a bit of class, it didn’t matter which. Miss Cazalet had either a lot of class or none – posh girls are like that, she’d found. They’d do the most slovenly things, with the cut-glass accent ringing in your ears . . . But it’s all the same when it comes to gentlemen callers. So when, after all the being out late and the big cars coming at six in the morning and the talking back and galumphing on the stairs at all hours and laundry left for weeks over the bath, and the girl had actually said, ‘You’ve just been waiting for an opportunity to kick me out, haven’t you?’ and, ‘Where am I meant to go?’ as if it was her problem! Anyway, out she was going. She could go home to her parents, or that cousin, the slinky one with no wedding ring.

Later, in her snug with her cup of tea and her rich tea biscuit, Mrs Collings, who had never been married, and whose own brothers had kissed her firmly on both cheeks, saying, ‘We’ll be back before you know it, Dolly!’ before heading off in 1916, eighteen years old, the sweetest scamps you ever saw, identical twins, and neither of them came back at all, not even their poor bodies, not even news of them . . . Where was she? Oh yes. Her brothers would be sixty-six years old now. Still two years older than her. Still one on each arm when they went walking in the park, up on the Broad Walk, down by the Serpentine, and they’d josh her and take her elbows to swing her up in the air. Everybody knew them: Freddy and Dolly and John.