The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  Stanton Hall was near Salisbury, twenty miles away. It had stone entrance pillars wider and taller than our house. The gates were black, shiny wrought iron, with an emblem emblazoned in red and gold on a circle: a lion clawing at a shield. We drove through. On the backseat, taking up all the space, was Gran’s old brown suitcase studded with brass nails. There was a rasping noise as my shoes and clothes, each item identified by carefully sewn on name tapes, slid from one end of the suitcase to the other. The drive curved through clumps of tall oaks and past a dark lake edged with bullrushes. “Oh, how beautiful!” Gran exclaimed. “How lucky you are!”

  We passed playing fields with white fences and hockey nets, then tennis courts. Gran crunched the gears around a sharp corner, and ahead of us loomed a gray stone building with a series of columns and wide steps leading to a terrace. Among all this, girls roamed in pairs or packs, wearing with ease the uniform that I had struggled to put on that morning. One girl had pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. She looked casual, almost elegant. Another had flung it around her shoulders, like a model in a magazine. How confidently they loitered, all the same, as if they had joined a club in the womb, a club that made them better than everyone else.

  Gran pulled up and opened her door. “Remember, you’re just as good as all these girls,” she whispered. “Just as good.”

  A red-faced man heaved my suitcase onto a barrow and wheeled it towards the dormitories. “This way,” he said, mopping his forehead with his sleeve. Gran gave me a brusque peck on my cheek and pushed me out of my seat. “It’s for the best,” she said, her voice quivering. She snapped on her sunglasses. “Remember that.” She drove off, not looking back.

  4

  Define your dream and work to make it reality. Never be afraid of what you might achieve right now, at this very second. The past and the future are beyond our control, so be mindful of the present and the joys it can offer us all.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” February 9, 2016

  It wasn’t my normal practice to hang about for a daily update from a stranger, but Emma’s messages, delivered to my inbox punctually every twenty-four hours, had become one of the few reliable structures in my day. I’d even developed a ritual about the whole thing. I’d read aloud what Emma had to say and then sit cross-legged on the floor and set the timer on my phone for ten minutes. I just waited for thoughts to enter my consciousness. I’d always considered knowledge to be a collection of facts and conclusions that I could gather together, like herding sheep into a pen and shutting the gate. Boxes to be ticked. Right or wrong. Yes or no. This was completely the opposite. Sometimes I almost fell into a trance until the ping of the timer jolted me back into reality.

  When I told Jude about Emma, she laughed and called it a girl crush. I suppose it was. I bought her books and looked at her Facebook page and the photos on her Instagram account. There she was with Rob at a Lucian Freud retrospective at the Royal Academy, their heads curved towards each other like mating birds. A handsome pair, fashionably disheveled. Soon after the Freud exhibition, there was Emma at a party for the London Book Fair, chatting to a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. The author looked as if he was laughing at something Emma had said. There were more pictures of Emma, on a government committee discussing the need for increased maternity leave, her finger pointing to an unseen person. There was a link to a recent Vanity Fair poll listing them as one of London’s Top 20 power couples.

  There were links as well to Rob’s Facebook page and his website. Compared to Emma’s breezy advice and multiple exclamation marks, his stuff was dull. There were lists of his academic articles, reviews of biographies he’d written of famous psychologists and psychiatrists. They sounded more like textbooks than something you might want to read on a bus or train. There were photographs of people he had interviewed for his BBC television program. The list was impressive. Paul McCartney. Stephen King. Bill Gates. You get the picture. He’d been presenting it for more than ten years. People compared it to Desert Island Discs, except guests talked about their fears and neuroses instead of their favorite pieces of music. As well as choosing either books or music to take with them to their favorite place, they could also choose parts of themselves to leave behind, like their fear of flying, or crippling social anxiety. There were reviews of the program as well. Critics said he was perceptive and insightful, that he had a chocolate voice and a way of making people tell him things.

  In between reading Emma’s advice and checking out her life online, I slept at odd hours for too long and found myself eating breakfast at midnight or lunch at dawn. Not that it mattered. For once, food was not my preoccupation. I tried not to think about the blankness of my life, the lack of a job, the absence of Anton. I missed the routine of the kitchen, the jokes and easy camaraderie in the run-up to the lunch and dinner service. I told myself that I was free for the first time in years, and I was. But that didn’t make it any less lonely.

  Every memory stung, like a bandage ripped off too quickly—the thing that was meant to heal you instead tearing your skin apart, leaving it raw and jangling. I guess it was inevitable when a person found herself unemployed for the first time in two decades, when she’d been accustomed to fifteen-hour working days with no time to think about anything except how to do her job as well as humanly possible. The interminable hours between morning and evening, how they seesawed between anxiety and boredom.

  “Too much time on your hands,” said Jude a fortnight later. “Is Anton still leaving messages?”

  “Not so many now,” I said. It was almost noon and I was still in pajamas. I hadn’t washed my hair for a week. “Maybe one in the past ten days.”

  “Have you deleted them?”

  I didn’t reply immediately, but she knew me too well.

  “Delete them. Right now. Then text him and tell him not to call you again.” I did as she said and paced up and down. The small flat made me feel trapped. The thought of another day here on my own was unbearable.

  I showered and dressed and set off on a long pounding run along the Brentford Locks on the Grand Union Canal. At first my muscles protested and my lungs burned, but after a while, I settled into my familiar rhythm. I enjoyed running, the pleasurable shock of my feet hitting the ground, the change in my rate of breath, the pull on my leg muscles. I liked the way I felt connected to everything around me—the smell of grass and cars, my own sweat, the air that cleared my mind as I pushed through it—and still felt so free.

  The towpath was deserted. There was just the thump of my footsteps and the slap of the water against the banks, with an occasional splash from ducks paddling by. After about half a mile, a high stone wall replaced the bare trees. Halfway along there was the glint of a bronzed plaque, made iridescent by the reflection of the water. I stopped to read it and drink some water. Behind the wall was once the largest asylum in the world, built by the renowned master builder of the Victorian age, William Cubitt. Nearby was a bricked-up door, where coal and food had once been unloaded from barges for the inmates locked away from the world, so close to the river but never allowed to see the sun dance on the water.

  It started to rain just as I turned for home, not a polite London drizzle, but a heavy winter downpour, like the Dorset storms of my childhood.

  * * *

  Shaftesbury, Dorset. 1989. “We can’t go out in this,” said Douglas. The rain was falling hard. We couldn’t see to the end of the path and the leak in the kitchen had started up again. “So what are we going to do all day?” We’d already explored the downstairs rooms, and I worried that Douglas might become bored and not come anymore, so I took him upstairs to Gran’s bedroom. I wanted to show him the jewelry box with Gran’s pearl necklace and my mother’s turquoise ring. This was before it disappeared. But Douglas wasn’t interested in jewelry. “I’m not some bloody poofter,” he said, looking around the room. “What’s that up there?” He pointed to Gran’s hatbox.

  “Nothing much. Just boring old hats,” I said. I’d never
been tall enough to reach it. Douglas pulled down the hatbox from the top of the wardrobe and untied the navy ribbon. Dust puffed under his fingers. He dropped the lid onto the floor and began rummaging through Gran’s straw hats and felt berets. He put a scarlet beret on one side of his head and danced about the room. “Hey, look at me,” he laughed. “I’m a jolly Frenchman.”

  “Put it back,” I shouted. “She’ll find out and then we’ll be in big trouble.”

  “Killjoy,” he retorted, but he took off the beret and threw it back into the box. “What are those papers at the bottom?” asked Douglas. “Your Gran’s old love letters?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “No one’s ever been in love with her. Anyway, they’re private.” But I took them out anyway. We sat next to each other on the bed and unfolded them.

  The papers weren’t anything to do with love. They were all about my mother’s death, every detail neatly laid out in an official report from the Cardiff Coroner’s Court. We had to look up some of the words, like schizophrenia, in the dictionary. A long-term mental disorder, we read, involving delusions and inappropriate behavior. “Gran always said she had an illness in her mind,” I said.

  “Bloody hell,” said Douglas. “This means your mother was a bloody nutcase. She should have been in the loony bin.”

  “Gran said she was ill,” I whispered. The shock and shame, to have a nutcase mother. “Ill in the head . . . You won’t tell. I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Not a word, not even to Dad.” He felt in his pocket and produced a half-empty packet of crisps. We ate in silence and read the report. Crumbs and grains of salt fell on the pages. I brushed them away, but tiny oily specks remained. The coroner, someone called Dr. Edward Langbridge, said a hiker had found my mother’s body in an abandoned trailer in the middle of a wood outside the city. Dr. Langbridge said there were many aspects of this sad case that he found unusual and puzzling. Although there was a record of a diagnosis of schizophrenia (a sad and often tragic illness, he said) at eighteen years of age, and then a record of my birth (father unknown), there was nothing after that date. My mother had to be identified by her dental records, as she wasn’t registered anywhere. There was no mention of her name on any electoral rolls, in hospitals or welfare organizations. It was as if she had moved through the world like an invisible person. Maybe that explained why I always imagined I was invisible as well, until Gran came to collect me and I could be seen again.

  There was a statement from her (Mrs. Florence Morgan, Shaftesbury Dorset, England, mother of deceased, unable to attend because of work commitments and child care duties). Apparently my mother had rung her from a telephone box in a service station along the M4, just after the Severn Bridge, and asked Gran to pick me up and look after me for a while. The service station manager (David Llewellyn, Chepstow, Monmouthshire, Wales, also unable to attend because of work commitments) stated he’d found a young child in a distressed state wandering between parked lorries. He was under the impression that the child had been alone for some time. He was about to call the police when the child’s grandmother arrived and took the child with her. The hiker (Chad Cooper, firefighter, Vancouver, Canada) wrote that he had telephoned the police as soon as possible after he found my mother’s body. The discovery was shocking and he still had nightmares about it.

  Then we heard Gran’s car in the lane, and quickly put everything back into the hatbox before she walked in, gray-faced with tiredness and carrying bags of cut-price shopping. That night, I lay in bed, my mouth moving around the edges of the new word I had learned. “Schiz.” My teeth closed against each other. “O.” My mouth opened into a surprised circle. “Phrenia.” My front teeth bit down on my bottom lip until I winced in pain.

  I was odd enough already, the only person in my class with no mother or father, just Gran with her heated rollers and pursed lips. Now I had a nutcase mother who should have been in the loony bin instead of wandering around Wales like a shadow, leaving no trace of herself anywhere, except when she died. I held the pillow tight over my head. If only I could stop breathing and thinking. I remembered a magazine article I’d read in the dentist’s waiting room once. The article was called “Making Boxes,” and I thought it was something I might be able to do with Douglas. He liked woodwork. But the article was about another type of box, an imaginary one. See the things and memories that upset you, the article said. Imagine a box, something sturdy with a lock and a key. Open the box and put the memories and things that upset you inside. Take care. Don’t hurry. Don’t be distracted. Close the lid. Lock the box and throw away the key. Now throw away the box.

  * * *

  By the time I had run home, my arms were mottled blue with cold and goose pimpled. Even my socks were wet. I changed my clothes, but as I grew warm again, I became so drowsy that I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up hours later in a blaze of afternoon sun. The rays were skittering along the gutters and roofs of nearby buildings, setting the room on fire.

  There was that fraction of time before I registered that I was no longer with Anton. It still hurt. But maybe Emma Helmsley was right. Maybe I should say goodbye to the scared child and her fear of abandonment, the one who hated boarding school and all those snobby girls who sneered at me because my house was smaller than one of their many garages. That was more than twenty years ago. Time to get over it.

  I went to my computer. Among the lists of jobs for chefs in hotels and country houses, there was one for a sous-chef in a new restaurant in Knightsbridge. Before I could think further, I rang the number and made an appointment for the next morning.

  The restaurant was in a redbrick building in a side street behind Harrods. I’d expected the usual overdone velvet and plush and was surprised by the bright bare room with its pale wooden floors and the open-plan kitchen with the staff on show. But I had my roll of sharpened knives and I’d worn my sensible shoes. I was prepared.

  “This way, please come,” said the skinny head chef. His name was Lars. He was at least ten years younger than me and had a pronounced Danish, or it might have been Swedish, accent. His office was large, with pots of basil and thyme placed at regular distances on steel shelves. His desk was empty apart from a small open laptop.

  “Yes,” he said, examining the screen. “Very experienced, I see.” I’d emailed my résumé the night before. “But here, we are different. Not so much butter and cream all the time. More foraging and natural cuisine.”

  “I can adapt, I think,” I replied. “I mean, maybe.” Behind his head, through the glass window, I recognized one of the pastry cooks. She’d started at Anton et Amis at the same time as me, but had left after about eight months. She’d flirted with Anton. I’d never liked her. She glanced across at me and turned to whisper to the man snipping herbs next to her. He looked up. They nudged each other and rolled their eyes. In front of me Lars was waiting for a more convincing reply.

  “I’m not sure. I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know if I could cope. I don’t feel very well. I have to go.” I rushed out, my sensible shoes squeaking loudly on the wooden floors. When I reached the street, I saw Lars through the window looking perplexed while behind him people whispered and giggled. Shame rushed through me. I could never work there, or anywhere else in my former world. I’d been a fool to think I could.

  5

  Too often we look at our failures as the end of something, when they can actually be a beginning of something new and exciting. All of us can learn positive things from our failures, but only if we allow ourselves to.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” March 19, 2016

  I emptied the washing machine and draped my damp clothes about the flat. Of all Emma’s messages that I’d considered so far, this was the most difficult. It was almost annoying, as if underneath all the empathetic words and pithy advice Emma didn’t have a clue about my life or anyone else’s. I thought of my meager bank balance and how the mortgage and utility bills ate so much money each m
onth. I wasn’t rich and successful like Emma. Perhaps many of her followers could hang about waiting for something new and exciting to show up. I couldn’t afford that luxury much longer. Perhaps her followers went to parties and dinners where they came across new and exciting people who transformed their lives on a daily basis. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been invited to a party or a dinner.

  Apart from Jude, my most frequent human contact was with Ahmed, the surly man who owned the corner store where I bought my groceries. He was middle-aged and stocky with cheeks covered in gray stubble, and he always grabbed the money from my hand as if I was about to do a runner with my loaf of bread and pint of milk. Last night, I walked in to buy laundry detergent. There was an old woman in front of me at the checkout, carefully laying out her items. A small jar of instant cocoa. Two small cans of cut-price salmon. A large can of spaghetti hoops and, doubtless her special treat, an economy pack of chocolate bars. Ahmed drummed his fingers on his thighs as the woman counted out her money.

  “It’s been a nice day,” I said, just to hear the sound of my own voice talking to someone other than Jude. Ahmed and the woman ignored me. I imagined her at home, taking time to open the cans with her swollen arthritic fingers, sucking on her chocolate bar in front of the television. She had almost finished packing everything into a used carrier bag when the can of spaghetti hoops rolled onto the floor. I picked it up and returned it to her. She grabbed the can off me, like she’d caught me trying to steal it. It was a warning of a possible future, one I didn’t like the look of.

  The next morning I sat on the floor, closed my eyes, and considered how to turn my failures into something new and exciting. It didn’t work. There was nothing new and exciting about any restaurant job that I might apply for. I was either going to be the kitchen joke, the scorned woman who was so dim she didn’t realize her boyfriend had someone else, or I would have to move away from that small circle of top London restaurants and get a job at some country hotel where the food was delivered in plastic bags and reheated to order and none of the customers even noticed. OK. I was exaggerating. But I was still rattled by my experience in the Danish restaurant, the scornful look on the pastry cook’s face. I still yearned for Anton.