I used to make the coffee for breakfast myself; Walter liked
it better when I made it and that pleased me, for I had never
made coffee before and I felt proud now, that I should do it
well. It had to stand for fifteen minutes after it was made,
so I had to be downstairs earlier than Walter; that too was fun,
I thought. It gave me a sense of competence to be down in the
dining-room with the coffee all ready before he came.
Now, sometimes, I felt very ill in the mornings, and it was an
effort to get up. Once when I got downstairs I turned faint and
sick and had to sit down in the chair, and Mrs. Simms, the charwoman,
came in and brought me a cup of tea. I can’t remember why she
came there so early, or why it was she who brought the tea, but
it was.
‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know how you feels. Take a cup o’ tea,
mum, that’ll do you good.’
I drank the tea and she talked to me and told me how many children
she had had; eight, I think it was, and five of them dead and
how ill she had been with every one of them; but Simms had been
good to her, she said,—Simms was her husband, of course. He would
bring her a cup of tea in the mornings before she got up. ‘It’s
the putting your feet to the ground that does it. I know that,’
she said.
And I thought:
‘How funny it is that Mrs. Simms should know what I feel like,
and Walter doesn’t.’
And I thought:
‘How funny it would be if Walter brought me up cups of tea.’
At home we had had tea in the mornings even when we felt quite
well, and I had supposed that we would still here, but Maud had
stopped that. She said it was an unnecessary expense.
‘Especially,’ she said, ‘if it is China tea.’