Read A Fine Profession (The Chambermaid's Tales Part One) for Free Online Page A

know about. The second is… was… my best friend. We have a third and fourth, too…” she said wearily. “The reason I became Miss Lottie will also become clear. Surely, you must realise, something catastrophic must have happened for me to transform from that naive, virginal 25-year-old to this?”
    Another rhetoric. He didn't have the energy to query. He recommenced reading her tale.
     

Chapter IV
A New Beginning
     
     
    After I was released from hospital following that illness, I returned home and stayed locked away, refusing to emerge. I was in shock still. I'd lost the job I hated but was lost without it. I was unwilling to do anything about my situation. I should have fought for my position but I really did not have the energy to. I was lost at sea without a paddle, as the saying goes. My family were worried. One evening, I finally deigned to join them at the dinner table for the first time in weeks, having taken all my meals in my room up until then.
    My brother was home from medical school, my dad had just returned from a business trip to London ‒ he was in sales, agricultural machinery or something, and travelled a lot ‒ and my younger sister owned a beauty parlour in our village. My father had helped her procure her business, of course.
    My mother was a rem arkably clever woman who had foregone a career in nursing to retrain as a speech therapist. She carried out her practice at the local church hall and seemed quite content with her life. She had been the one constant through all the treatments I'd undergone, while the rest of our family had tried to get on with their lives as normal. I felt that Mum resented me a little. It was as though her life had stopped when mine did. I sensed that because I had been saved by thousands of pounds worth of hospital treatment and aftercare, she thought I should be thankful, but instead I refused to take life by the balls and make the best of what I had left. I could see nothing worth fighting for.
    The meal went a little something like this:
    “Yeah, the meetings went well. Couldn't have gone any better really.”
    My father. I often thought he wanted to articulate, even perhaps did do on occasion, but I could never be certain. I am sure most of the time he was on autopilot when it came to discussing his work at home. Solid, concise responses that were the same every time: “We did those competitors out of three years' work” or “We nailed their asses to the wall”. Mum would always tut when he swore, appearing the modicum of maternal discretion, but I knew better. Many a night had I been forced to sleep in their room with them (so they could ensure I did not die) and many a night I had heard the bestial way at which they would go at it, expletives passing between them as freely as bodily fluids. That had stopped after my last bout of chemo, but had remained in my memory (a rather irksome window into sex).
    Anyway, I honestly could not remember the last time my father and I had sat down for a proper chat. I had decided it was because he could not risk the burdens I carried becoming his. He did not need to know what his little girl suffered daily, though he quite possibly saw but did not say. If h e did not draw attention to my failings or the disappointment I was to the family , well, that was better all round perhaps.
    This day, I saw my mother whisper to him, touch his wrist, and initiate something that had obviously been previously discussed.
    “Charlotte, darling,” he muttered, in his guttural 50-year-old Lincolnshire tones, “Are you done with hotel work for now? We have all been wondering. ”
    I looked up slowly from my sausage, peas and mash, the regular meal we would have on a Tuesday night. I saw him staring at me with eyes that were trying to be kind. I turned my gaze back to the mash mountain, which I was decorating with peas and dribble s of gravy, as if to erect some sculpture that Damien Hirst might be proud of if it were his own. Three