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ever did leave Race, she would definitely go back there, pick up the old threads. She might be far happier without him. Or would she? Maybe she was jumping the gun. Maybe Celia was just a flash-in-the-pan thing. Young and vibrant, what would she want with an old fool like him? Sooner or later she’d tire of him, especially when he started to show his temper, which was never a nice experience.
    Maybe it would be wise to stick it out, hope he’d see sense or Celia meet some younger man with money? Because it was Race’s money she was after, Millie was certain of that.
    Best then to bide her time. She didn’t want any more rows with him. Let dear, darling Celia find out for herself how nasty he could be. At least there was some satisfaction to be got from that thought.

Four
    She was getting fair fed up with Race tearing himself inside out making endless arrangements for this fabulous party of his.
    ‘Honestly, yer’d think he was inviting the blessed king ’imself to come and attend,’ Millie said to Mrs Dunhill, whose services would not be required on that evening, Race hiring professional catering staff and all the trimmings. Mrs Dunhill had been given to understand that her cooking would not be good enough for such a do. Feeling somewhat put out, she could only sympathise with her employer’s wife.
    ‘Just as well I’m not doing it though,’ she’d said to Millie. ‘All that worry would only have given me more grey hairs than I’ve already got.’
    Millie wasn’t particularly interested in Mrs Dunhill’s problems – she had enough of her own.
    ‘I sometimes wish he’d never come into all this money,’ she said as she sat in the kitchen while her cook worked around her. She enjoyed sitting here. It felt homely, a little closer to what she had been used to in London, though her kitchen had been tiny compared to this one and nowhere near as tidy. But there she’d had nothing to worry herself about, not all that much money, so not many of the problems she had discovered money, or more accurately a man with too much of it for his own good, could bring. And with Mrs Dunhill there was no need to put on the posh talk. Mrs Dunhill was like herself, a plain woman with no time for airs and graces.
    ‘I think we was ’appier before he came into all this wealth,’ she went on, watching the woman rolling out pastry for the steak and kidney pie for their dinner. She was a plain cook, hence, Millie supposed, the need for fancy catering staff for Race’s grand Guy Fawkes party, him showing off like bloody royalty, the soppy arse, no idea people were probably laughing at him.
    Like his damned stupid ballroom. True, it did hold quite a lot of guests, but
ballroom
? Hardly, even though he fancied his luck showing it off to them.
    ‘I really detest that room,’ she mused as Mrs Dunhill carefully laid the rolled-out pastry over the meat in the pie dish. ‘Ballroom he calls it, ain’t nothing cosy about it, ain’t nothing cosy about this whole blinkin’ house. Did yer know we used to live in a two-up-two-down terrace in London?’
    ‘Yes, I remember you saying,’ Sarah Dunhill murmured as she began to brush beaten egg on top of the pastry. She felt comfortable with Millie Butterfield, who had no airs and graces and asked her to call her by her first name, and in turn called her Sarah. They were two of a kind; Millie might have been an East End person of modest means, but Sarah too was of modest means for all she lived in a village surrounded by countryside, her home a tiny three-roomed bungalow with a small kitchen, no bathroom and an outside toilet. Having lost her husband to appendicitis that turned to peritonitis, she lived with her daughter Ann who was getting married next year. Her work as a cook to a family who paid quite well helped supplement her widow’s pension.
    ‘And that damned stupid chandelier he had put up. Thinks it’s the real bee’s knees! I just think it’s out of place. Apparently it used