The Expensive Halo by Josephine Tey — Read

"Well, I always say that no life's a hard life when you haven't to get up in the morning," said Mrs. Marsden, who had been told that the attics could be done last instead of first to-day because Gareth was still asleep. "I don't care 'ow late it might be before I was to stop work at night, so as I could lie and snooze in the mornings." She said it as one speaks of a vision of heaven. "The only time in me life I didn't 'ave to get up in the morning was when I was in 'orspital with scarlet fever. Thirteen, I was. And then they woke yer at five to wash yer face. Time we 'ad a noo banister brush, eh?"

It was now half-past nine and the day was already old for Mrs. Marsden. She had given breakfast to her out-of-work husband and three-year-old baby, tidied her two-roomed home, prepared a meal for Marsden to take at mid-day, washed and dressed the child and taken it along to her sister's to be cared for until she called for it on her way home, and walked a further mile and a quarter to the Ellis household, where she would stay until the mid-day dinner things were cleared up, about three o'clock. She was twenty-five, and looked nearly forty. She had been married for five years to a man of her own age, who had never in those five years kept a job longer than was necessary to qualify for the dole. He had had a job when they married, specially for the occasion, and had given it up a week later. Mrs. Marsden talked about him with a weary tolerance, as one talks of an old corn. She had four absorbing interests in life: contraception, the price of boiling beef, the rent money, and the Duchess of York. For her child she seemed to have no great affection; it stood in her mind for a detachable part of her husband, a part for which he refused to be responsible. She did her duty by it, and took a sort of melancholy pride in the fact that it was well-dressed and clean, but to her it was merely another responsibility, not an outlet for emotion. What emotion she possessed was reserved for the Duchess; and Mrs. Marsden could tell you what the Duchess liked in the way of table decoration, what her toilet set was made of, what she had for breakfast, what she had said to the Duke when he was late for her tea-party (very funny, that was; to think of her telling off her husband just as if she was an ordinary woman), what the little princesses wore underneath, and at what hour they went to bed. The only occasions on which she had forgotten her duty to her family were those on which it had been possible to see the Duchess in the flesh. That had happened twice; the first time she had got a cold in the head through having wet feet, and the second time she had ruined a pair of stockings by getting them torn on the railings. But it had been worth it.