Free Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor

she now – surprisingly to Amy – asked.
    “The war?”
    “Where were you? During it.”
    “I stayed with my mother. James was a little baby, and Nick was in the R.A.F. Why?”
    “I’ve wondered what it was like – what London, being in London – was really like. Were you here, in this house?”
    “No, in Kent?”
    “Did you have bombs?”
    “Yes, of course. Nearly everyone had bombs.”
    “What was that like, then? Being bombed?”
    “I’ve practically forgotten.” (I’ve practically forgotten, Martha noted.) “Heavens. All that time ago, and I believe one only remembers those sort of happenings when one goes on talking about them, and bombs we didn’t talk about.”
    “Why ever not?”
    “Perhaps because someone else would always have had a bigger one; or because there were too many to make any sort of intelligent conversation about; we could have bored one another silly. Frightening and commonplace – an awful combination. The worst of everything. Well, at least I remember it being so. You surely don’t want me to describe sirens and shelters,and coming up in the morning to see what had been destroyed. It’s all been written about and about.”
    “I just wanted to know about
you
in the war.”
    “What was it you had special to show me?” Amy asked, fed up with the war:
    “First, I’II take the tray out. Turn left, and down? Yes?”
    “But Ernie…” Amy began to protest. Martha, with the tray, had gone.
    Servants’ basements have been written about and about, too, she was thinking as she descended the stairs.
    “Ah, goodness deary me,” Ernie said, coming to the opened door. “Allow me, please.” His teeth clicked, his tongue seemed to cling to them. He took the tray from her. She firmly followed him into the kitchen. It was a warm and cheerful room. She had not read of such basements in novels. As it was Ernie’s private room, he thought she should have asked permission to enter it.
    “Something smells good,” she said. She lifted the lid off a little pan of sauce, letting out a savoury smell. Anger hit him. “Delicious.” she murmured, beginning to be affected by Amy’s way of talking. “Shall I teach you some time how to make Chilaly?”
    “Perhaps you would ask Madam about that,” he said, turning his face away from her. “If she wishes me to…” He went to the sink and began to wash up the tea things, meaning to imply that the conversation was over; but, to his horror, she picked up a towel and begin to wipe a cup.
    “That is the glass cloth,” he said primly.
    “Don’t you get fed up being down here by yourself all the time?”
    Spying, he thought. “I have my days off.”
    He lifted his delicate hands from the suddy water, flicked them, and began to dry them carefully.
    “So what do you do then?”
    He felt like saying, “I mind my own business.” To such a customer, when he had been in the bar, he would have done; but Martha was Madam’s guest and not a customer in the pub. He said aloofly, “I go up to my Jazz club in Town and have myself a ball.”
    “That’s interesting,” she said. “I should have thought you too quiet a type for that.”
    “You don’t hardly know me.”
    “Why, no. That’s true. I don’t know you at all. Where do
these
go?” She swung two cups from her fingers.
    “If I may.” He carefully unhooked them from her hands and took them to a cupboard, feeling excited now, for no one in the world talked to him about himself. Amy’s indifference he was accustomed to. She asked no questions, scarcely listened to him, and when she looked at him seemed to find him transparent.
    “You have a sort of ambience.” Martha’s hand described a vague sort of halo in the air. He did not know what she meant, but he approved of unusual words. “I miss the master,” he said, “and I have this trouble with my dentures,” he said, as if he were explaining all.
    “He was a nice man,” Martha agreed, ignoring the dentures, as Amy did.