The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  “I keep telling you that you’ll move on. People usually do, if only because they have no choice.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “I’ve never felt so alone. When Gran died, I had Anton. Now Anton is gone, I have no one.”

  “You’re not listening. You have me,” Jude said sharply. “And you need to get a grip on the self-pity. The best way to get over this is to get another job real fast. Times are much better now. There are restaurants opening all over London. It doesn’t matter what they say about bankers’ scandals and austerity. Philip says there’s money to burn out there. There’s a new place in Hoxton. You’d get a job there—anywhere. There aren’t many people who are as organized in a kitchen as you are.”

  Jude was right. I did need a job. Anton’s guilt payment wouldn’t last forever. But when I looked through all the available positions—and there were quite a few—somehow I never managed to make an appointment for an interview. I couldn’t face the inevitable gossip and sly asides that I’d have to stare down in any London restaurant kitchen. I’d have to prove myself all over again. Just thinking about it gave me the jitters. I couldn’t shake off the memory of the last humiliating day in the restaurant. Everyone smirking. Anton’s nervous blinking. Others might have stayed and put up a fight. I no longer had it in me.

  3

  No matter how bad your day has been, no matter the disappointments and failures you have encountered, be mindful that it is over and take time to plan your triumphs for tomorrow. Draw strength from all your past experiences and your early life, everything that has informed you.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” February 6, 2016

  Now that I’d lost everything that made me a functioning adult—the desirable partner, the job, the long hours, and the sense of responsibility—the scared child inside me took over. I’d never heard of this scared child syndrome before, but it was something Emma Helmsley wrote about in one of her blogs. Silly I know, but in those blogs, I felt she was talking directly to me.

  I was interested in the other things she wrote about on her website, like work-life balance and successful networking, even though they didn’t have huge relevance for chefs. How to make your mark in the boardroom. Leading a winning team. Tips on time management. “Spend the first 30 minutes of every morning making a schedule for the day,” she advised. “Before an important phone call, give yourself five minutes to think through your strategy.”

  All I wore at work was a white chef’s jacket and an apron, so I wasn’t her target audience for wardrobe advice either. Still, I read what she had to say. “Keep colors neutral. You can always add a bright splash with a scarf!”

  “Plan what you’re going to wear each day at the beginning of the week. You’ll save loads of time!”

  Her household tips sometimes made me smile (“Dance while you dust! You’ll burn calories and be finished in half the time!”), but I always rushed through them to concentrate on “Taking the Moment.” If she’d suggested meditation or some contorted yoga pose while staring up at the sky, I would have dismissed it straightaway. All that was too open-ended for me. I would have moped about and thought about Anton and the mess of my life yet again. But Emma asked her followers to put aside ten minutes every day and consider a specific topic.

  She was big on the idea that as an adult, you should be your own boss and not allow the childish part of you to take control. It was so simple and apparently well known, but I’d never heard about it, or even thought about it. I found myself rereading what she’d written again and again. Emma said that often when people were scared about the future or lacking confidence in their jobs, they retreated into the childish part of themselves, the time when they were scared of the dark or frightened to be on their own. That was a mistake, said Emma. It held you back and stopped you from being happy. She wanted people to imagine one part of themselves as a nurturing parent, someone who would take care of the other part of themselves who was an unhappy child. This made me think of my own early years with Gran and the unremembered time before that. I’d never been keen to play psychological detective games with my own past, and people who droned on about their childhood invariably bored me. But maybe Emma had a point—and it wasn’t like I was pressed for time.

  * * *

  Shaftesbury, Dorset, 1986. “I came top of the class today,” I said, tucking my bag between my legs. I was six years old and I’d just started school for the first time. But I got the hang of it soon enough, although I got lost between the toilet and the classroom twice in the first week and the others teased me because I’d never heard of hopscotch and didn’t know how to play any games.

  “Don’t boast.” Gran chided me. “Ladies never boast.”

  “But I did,” I replied. “I always come top of the class. I’m good at tests.” There was a loud crunch as she changed gears. The engine spluttered, then settled into its usual rattle. “Wretched car, always going wrong.” She peered into the autumn rain through the slap of the windscreen wipers. “In any event, you mustn’t rest on your laurels.” But she couldn’t resist a congratulatory tap on my knee. “Well done, Anne.”

  “Annastasia.” I sulked, wanting something more than a tap on my knee for coming first, like a bar of chocolate or a brand-new schoolbag instead of a battered one with a broken strap. “My name is Annastasia—Annastasia Swan.”

  “Can you spell that name?” asked Gran. She swerved to avoid a pothole. Our lane was full of them. Gran had complained to the local council, but they never did anything. “Can you spell it out loud to me?”

  I shook my head. “I can say it though. Annah . . . stahsja.”

  “Well if you can’t spell it, then Anne is better, much less . . .” Gran trailed off. Her hands, covered in raised blue veins, gripped the wheel. “Much less fanciful. And even though your mother called you Annastasia Swan, her name was Marianne Morgan. And the name Morgan might be more useful than Swan, because Morgan is my surname too. If we have the same surname, then people will know we belong to each other.”

  Even then, I could see the sense of that, and I liked the idea of belonging to someone, somewhere. I knew already that I was an odd child, and I could see I was having an odd childhood. No mother. No father. Not even a family pet. I worried that I might always be looking in from the outside.

  “We do belong together now, because your mother isn’t with us anymore.” Gran made it sound as if my mother was somewhere else, which I thought for a while meant that she might come back. Eventually I understood that my mother was dead and any return was out of the question.

  The time before Gran, when I was with my mother, was always blurred and never talked about. When I was young, vague stories satisfied me. By the time I was ten, my questions became more doggedly specific. But whenever I asked about my mother, or where my father was and why he never came to see me—and I did this often—Gran wouldn’t meet my eye. She would clasp her hands together, so tightly that her knuckles whitened, and say that she didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

  “Your mother asked me to look after you, because she wasn’t well. She had an illness in her mind, something she’d had for a long time, even before you were born. Then she had a heart attack and died.” Always at this point in my interrogations, she began chewing at the edge of her mouth. “It was very sudden and sad. I never knew your father . . . When you were little, your mother and I didn’t see each other very much because you didn’t live in Dorset. So I never got to meet him.”

  A thin line would appear across her forehead that made me fall silent. Was it something I said? I would think every time. Was it something I did to make you have a heart attack? Or something I didn’t do, to make you go away?

  “I’m sorry, but you never get anywhere digging about in the past,” Gran would say, busying herself at the sink or the stove, her sign that the conversation, such as it was, had ended. “Because you can never work out what was true and what wasn’t. No one can ever tell, so it’s best to leave it. You live with me now.”


  Gran was a tall, thin woman with hair like the Queen’s, a gray bouffant helmet molded into shape each week with heated rollers skewered to her head after she had washed it. I often examined her long nose and sharp cheekbones, looking for signs of my own rounded face and pale green eyes. I never found any. Even our hands were different. Gran’s hands were narrow with long bony fingers. Mine were square and my fingers were short and chubby. She was my protector and my provider, but it wasn’t a role that came naturally to her. She always expected the worst. “I’m doing my best,” she would shout sometimes, flailing at the floor with a worn-out broom. “I’m trying my hardest to make it enough.”

  Every now and then, I thought I might have more luck asking about my grandfather. “Oh, we’re all right, just the two of us,” she said, ignoring my interrogations. “We get along perfectly fine. We don’t need anyone else.” I wouldn’t have minded a dog that slept on the end of my bed at night, but I knew that was out of the question.

  The only thing I’d known with any certainty was my name. Now that that had changed to Anne Morgan, I began to feel that Annastasia Swan was another person who had very little to do with me. It was as if my life had begun when I was five years old, when Gran came to get me from somewhere outside Cardiff, and we set off for our new existence in Shaftesbury. But where exactly was I before then? I didn’t remember. Sometimes I saw myself playing in front of a caravan, a pile of tractor tires against a tree. At other times I was running barefoot down a long corridor, the sun dancing on the floorboards. I recalled the pungent smell of a bonfire smoldering against a dull autumn sky and the sharpness of blackberries eaten from a hedge. I knew that my mother and I had moved around a lot, because Gran told me. But I never knew exactly where we’d moved, or why.

  I had only one memory of my mother. In my head there was a picture of a beautiful woman smiling into the sun with a cloud of long hair blowing behind her like a trail of gold dust. But that might have been because there was a photograph exactly like that in a silver frame on the bookcase behind the sofa. Next to it was another photograph of her sitting cross-legged on a picnic rug, holding me as a baby and smiling at whoever was holding the camera. My face was obscured by her arms, so I had no idea what I looked like. I was always sure that my father was the one with the camera.

  There was also a ring that Gran said had belonged to Marianne. She kept it in a box, next to her pearls. It was turquoise and silver with two carved beetles on either side. Over the years, the silver had scratched and the heads and claws of the beetles had blackened. Whenever I took it out, I always expected the stone to be warm, like skin, and was surprised to find it cool and tacky. Later on, the ring disappeared, and because I wasn’t meant to be snooping, I could never ask Gran what had happened to it.

  We lived in a small redbrick house set right on the lane, next to a group of tall, gloomy pine trees. A wooden shed with a rusted tin roof stood to one side. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, all through the long drive from Wales, bursting to go to the toilet and too scared to say anything until I wet my pants. Gran had to pull over by the side of the road and take off my clothes. I didn’t have anything else to wear, so she wrapped me in an old towel that she produced from under the backseat.

  “Here we are then,” said Gran as she bumped the car into the space in front of the shed. “This is where you live now.” I picked up my wet clothes and clutched the towel around me as I followed her into a narrow hall lit by a dim lamp, with a small sitting room on one side and a kitchen on the other.

  “I thought you might like some cocoa,” she said, switching on the stove. “And maybe some toast.” She produced a loaf of bread from a cupboard, cut two slices, and put them in a toaster. “But first, we’d better get rid of these.” She took my trousers and underwear and threw them into a bin. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “Now, would you like to see where you’ll sleep?”

  I nodded, and she took me into a small room with a bed, a table beside it, and a chair in the corner. The walls were painted brown, like paper bags.

  “Do you like it?” asked Gran.

  “Oh yes, yes,” I lied. “It’s lovely.” She nodded and we went back into the kitchen, full of smoke from the burned toast. Gran scraped off the black bits and buttered what was left. We sat on either side of the table and chewed in silence.

  Most of our time was spent in the kitchen. The other rooms—the sitting room on the other side of the hall and another small room with no obvious use—were too expensive to heat in winter and smelled of damp stone in the summer. The house stood in the middle of a small garden that backed onto fields. Gran was too busy working all day and then too tired at night and on the weekends to do anything about flowers or color. There were a couple of evergreen shrubs at the edges and a stunted pear tree outside the back door.

  Every day, Gran would negotiate the bends and potholes in our lane and enter the main road a mile or so before the local primary school. She dropped me off, then drove on to her job as secretary in a solicitor’s office on Gold Hill in the old center of Shaftesbury. The school had a tarmac entrance with bumps on it that caused you to trip if you weren’t looking, and an area of scrubby grass out the back where we ran around. It was full of tough-bodied farmers’ children, travelers’ offspring, and the dregs of the West Country. I’d been there for about two years when my teacher, Mrs. Armstrong, asked to see Gran after school. Mrs. Armstrong told me to sit in the library while she spoke to Gran, but I snuck back along the corridor as soon as I heard the office door close.

  “The girl has an exceptional ability in both maths and English,” I overheard Mrs. Armstrong say. “And a great appetite for learning.”

  “Oh,” said Gran. “I thought you’d called me in because there was a problem. Bad behavior. Understandable under the circumstances.” Teacups rattled. A chair scraped on the floor.

  “Not at all,” said Mrs. Armstrong. “I wanted to tell you her talent could remove her from all this into another level altogether. Not just yet, but at the right time. I think we should start preparing her for better things. I have in mind a full boarding scholarship at one of the best schools in the southwest. Stanton Hall. I’ve no doubt that your granddaughter will win one.”

  The kettle made its bubbling sound. I ran back to the library and banged rows of books up and down the shelves. I didn’t want to be removed to another level altogether. I liked Mrs. Armstrong and I loved her lessons. Everyone else in the classroom was bored and couldn’t wait to get out of the place every day. Not me. I couldn’t get enough of spelling bees and rote learning and history dates and times tables. The certainty that two times three made six every time was thrilling. The satisfaction of knowing that encyclopedia was always spelled the same way made me grin.

  I even had a best friend, Douglas, who stopped the others from teasing me about all the games I didn’t know how to play. He was the tallest boy in the class and no one dared to challenge him. I was safe. Douglas’s father cleared drains and septic tanks, and there was always a faint smell of toilets about him. Because it was overlaid by soap, I didn’t mind. We sat next to each other all the time, even when we changed classrooms each year. He taught me to ride a bicycle when I was seven. We practiced kissing when I was ten. How much better could it get?

  “Such an opportunity,” said Mrs. Armstrong, as she handed me a set of test papers during lunch hour, alone in the empty classroom smelling of dust and chalk, everyone shouting and playing outside. “A privilege to be even asked to do the exam,” Gran had said the night before. After school that afternoon, I inched closer to Douglas. “I don’t want to go,” I whispered. He shifted away. The other boys teased him for being a pansy because we played together. He walked towards the bus stop, and I whispered to the bumping satchel on his back, “I don’t want to leave you.”

  A month later, Mrs. Armstrong summoned me to her office. “You’re in trouble now,” said Douglas and everyone tittered. An envelope, already open, lay on her desk, and she drew out the p
age inside, like a magician drawing a rabbit from a hat. “Now your mind will be extended as it should be,” said Mrs. Armstrong. I burst into tears, and she took me in her arms, patting my head against her bony chest. “It’s a lot to take in, I know, all the excitement. It can be overwhelming.”

  Halfway through the summer holidays, Douglas and I returned home from tramping about the woods one afternoon to find Gran already in the kitchen, opening boxes on the table and placing clothes into various piles to take upstairs. On my bed, Gran laid out my new school uniform with reverence. Just below the pillow was a felt Sunday hat, then a white shirt with a round collar, a hideous maroon sweater, and a checked flannel skirt. Underneath the skirt were kneesocks with a little flag at the folded over bit, and on the floor were lace-up shoes. I understood in some way that I had to fill out these clothes. I had to make them my own. I felt like one of those old-fashioned cardboard dolls with paper clothes that you cut out and stuck on them in a game of dressing up.

  “Let’s see it, let’s see it on you then,” shouted Douglas. Gran ushered Douglas out of my room and shut the door. The weight of her expectation, standing outside in the hall.

  I stripped off my shorts and T-shirt and put on my new clothes. The shirt buttons rubbed against my neck. The socks scratched. The shoes hurt my heels. Everything smelled of starch and chemicals, like a dry cleaner’s shop.

  “Come in,” I said, and Gran and Douglas were beside me, Gran bursting with pleasure, Douglas scared and backing off.

  “It’s for the best,” said Gran, worried about my friendship with Douglas. The future she wanted for me did not include drains and septic tanks, human waste in all its forms. I was only eleven years old, but already she envisaged an alliance with a boy from Eton or Harrow, a brother of one of my future classmates. She wanted a successful grandchild, payment due for all that hard work.