The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  Emma jabbed her mobile. “Have a nice evening. Would you mind telling Jake and Lily that supper is almost ready?”

  Lily’s door was open, but I still knocked. She was straightening books on her desk.

  “Supper’s ready in about a quarter of an hour,” I said, putting the pile of clean clothes on her bed. Her room smelled of patchouli oil. For a teenager, she was uncharacteristically neat. Her bed was always made, her clothes hung in color-coordinated rows. She made lists of things to do, dividing each day into quarter-hour chunks. Wash hair. Finish history homework. One hundred sit-ups. Things like that.

  “OK,” she replied in a flat voice, still moving her books about. “What is it?”

  “Chicken.”

  “Not fried?” A note of alarm.

  “No, I roasted it and you can take the skin off. There’s broccoli. And potatoes, but you don’t have to eat them.”

  “Hey,” she said, fixing me with her steady brown-eyed gaze. “Thanks. Before you came, Jake and I thought we were going to overdose on takeaway. The MSG levels were seriously out of control. Everything is better now—the food, the house. The people before who came to clean chucked things out or stole them. We could never work out what was going on. The whole place was chaos.”

  I didn’t expect to feel so pleased, but I did. “That’s good, thank you.”

  “Mum says you worked in a restaurant, as a proper chef, like on all those TV programs.”

  “I wasn’t on TV, but yes, I did. Do you like cooking?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never tried.”

  “We could cook something one afternoon after school, if you like. I mean, if it doesn’t interfere with homework.”

  “I’d love that,” she said, her voice rising. “Really, do you mean it?”

  “Sure. I’d like that too. Maybe some of your friends might like to join in. Anytime.”

  I looked across to Jake’s empty room.

  “He went out about an hour ago. He told me he’d be back in time for supper,” said Lily. “Some film club thing.” She raised her eyebrows. “So he says.”

  The floor around Jake’s bed was scattered with clothes and shoes. He’d stuck some posters on the walls for bands I’d never heard of. Although all the members had long hair and some wore untidy beards, everyone had a wholesome, untouched appearance. Lily had told me that he didn’t like people poking about his room, but I couldn’t help myself. I found space for the clean clothes in his cupboard and started picking things up. A marker pen had fallen on some crumpled T-shirts, bright yellow blotches flaring like sunflowers. I searched for the top of the pen and saw it lolling in the binding of an open book on the bedside table. Of course I peeked.

  It was more a thick pamphlet than a proper book, published by something called the Church of Eternal Truth: “Death and Hell will deliver up the sinners in our midst. And every man and woman will be judged according to their works. There will be no exceptions and no excuses.” I turned it over and saw that the church was less than ten miles away, in Southall.

  It was probably something to do with their homework. Jake and Lily often had eccentric assignments that appeared to have nothing to do with the subject at hand: maths projects that required written essays and history essays asking for poems or short stories instead of facts and dates. It was a feature of their school, fashionable and alternative, popular with media types and actors. I dumped the T-shirts into the laundry basket and went downstairs.

  10

  Cooking . . . is the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilization.

  —Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

  Late April. One of those unexpected downpours, as if winter were trying to beat back spring. The rain flung itself at the dining room window, splinters of light bouncing off the branches of the beech tree. Emma was laying the table. She liked doing it herself. She said it was the least she could do, when I offered to stay on to serve dinner and clear up afterwards.

  Every piece of cutlery was mismatched; bone-handled knives, split and dulled from the dishwasher, next to modern stainless steel, mixed in with proper old-fashioned silver forks, every tine tarnished beyond cleaning. All the plates were different too; delicate faded floral patterns and cheerful rustic earthenware thrown together with the occasional plain white circle. On any other table it would have looked a bad taste jumble. But somehow here, it seemed elegant, a style beyond fashion. That was Emma’s gift, even though she sometimes didn’t lay enough places and occasionally even forgot the glasses.

  But she always remembered to light the candles. There were so many of them: tea lights in small silver jars on the table, fat cream church candles on the side table, and tall, slim candles burning in the wall sconces. Every candle burned at a different rate and height. Sometimes I’d look up from the hob to see their heads suffused by a halo of light and all around them in flickering shadow.

  Just the four of them tonight, plus Rob’s friend Theo, and one of his girlfriends, a silent PhD student with lots of bedraggled hair. Theo was a psychologist as well and lectured at University College London, where Rob used to teach. He was a kind of ex-officio family member, always barging into the house unannounced like an extra from a soap opera.

  “I just had to meet you on my own, have you to myself for a bit,” he’d said when we first met. He’d bypassed the front door and squeezed past the bins down the narrow path at the side of the house, flinging his bag by the door and embracing me like an old friend.

  “Rob and Emma haven’t stopped talking about you, how you’ve transformed their lives. And isn’t this the most fabulous house? Aren’t we the lucky ones!” He stepped back and rubbed his hands together in pleasure, then gave a little jump like a small boy.

  Theo had the appearance of a bouncy middle-aged leprechaun, with ginger curls flopping about his freckled face. “I’m a lost orphan in need of a family, so I’m almost a permanent fixture around here. Do you mind? No one else seems to. I’m Rob’s friend although really I’m in love with Emma, always have been. That’s why none of my women stick around for very long. But a man must follow his heart, don’t you agree?”

  He didn’t wait for me to reply to any of his questions. Theo had an infectious enthusiasm for pretty much everything and often began conversations about the need for slate shelves in the pantry to keep food cool, or whether grass-fed beef was better than grain-fed. Not in a patronizing way, but as if he was really interested. He occasionally joined me in the kitchen after dinner, when Emma and Rob retreated to their computers and Jake and Lily had disappeared upstairs. I liked those moments, when he asked me about recipes and told me about plays and exhibitions. I had the feeling that we were the older siblings in an extended family with Rob and Emma at its head.

  “We’ve got to get you out of that apron and into the wider world,” he said one night. “It’s only fair after everything you do for everyone here. You’ve got to see that play at the National—everyone is raving.”

  “I’ll get there,” I said, doing a last wipe down, hoping he might ask me to join him. But he began talking about something else. Maybe he was shy.

  That night, I’d decided on mushroom risotto, then grilled sea bream and salad for dinner. Emma had finished lighting the candles and was wandering about with a smoldering match in her hand. Her hair, still wet, dripped down her neck. She wore a top I hadn’t seen before, of oyster-colored silk with flowing sleeves and a complicated neckline. She’d either forgotten to take off her tracksuit bottoms or couldn’t be bothered. The effect was schizophrenic, like she’d got dressed in front of two mirrors, each one showing only one half of her body. Her toenails were glossed black. On her feet she wore a pair of those flimsy disposable sandals that beauty salons hand out after pedicures. Siggy kept trying to nibble them. Finally she took them off and gave them to him. He wagged his tail and began chewing and shredding them everywhere.

  She peered into the saucepan. “Rob and I once tried risotto, but it end
ed up like porridge and we had to throw it out.”

  “It’s not that hard,” I said, deciding that the tracksuit trousers probably had something to do with one of her blogs. Emma had been talking a lot about what she called “the naked self” lately and the freedom that came from doing away with elaborate social disguises of clothes and makeup. “I’m going to teach Lily how to cook it one day after school. After her homework, I mean.” I didn’t want Emma to think I was disrupting any after-school routine, but Emma just smiled.

  “We’re so lucky to have you. And I’ll have to take your word for it about risotto. Far too complicated for me.”

  It’s not actually. A lot of people think risotto is difficult, too last-minute, but you can get it to the halfway stage and then leave it until you’re fifteen minutes away from serving. It’s not a prima donna dish. Not like a soufflé. I don’t get involved in that debate about butter or oil. If people don’t like butter, they should cook something else. I like to use proper stock, not a cube. And carnaroli rice, not arborio. It has a firmer texture and keeps its shape better. The important thing about a risotto is the mantecatura, right at the end when you take the pan off the heat and whisk in the butter and Parmesan cheese. You need to put a bit of muscle into it, otherwise it won’t be creamy and smooth.

  Emma was always asking me to join them at the table, but I never did. I preferred to serve them from my side of the counter, watching them eat as I slowly cleared away, so I could hear their conversation.

  Jake took the bowl of risotto to the table. He put it down and slopped some grains of rice on the table. Emma scooped them up in her fingers. A piece of mushroom covered in melted Parmesan dripped onto her shirt and she brushed it onto the floor.

  Something else I’d gotten used to since I started work here. There was no polite handling of knives and forks at Wycombe Lodge. Gran would have been shocked. Rob and Jake reached over each other and grabbed food, sometimes abandoning cutlery altogether and eating with their fingers. Emma and Lily were less primitive, but often used their knives as forks.

  Emma noticed my reaction and wiped her fingers on a napkin. “I’m afraid they’ve taken on my boarding school grab,” she said. “I hope you’re not offended.” I wasn’t. As usual, I envied her confidence in dispensing with such bourgeois notions as table manners and clothes that matched. When they finished, Jake brought the plates back to the counter. They were all empty. A warm feeling, like I’d done something right, the way we used to feel at the restaurant when the plates came back scraped clean.

  At the table, Rob was talking to Theo about a program he was planning on cognitive therapy. He occasionally did documentaries as well as his Desert Island neuroses and fears series, and this was his latest idea.

  “It shouldn’t matter so much about what happened in your childhood,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be the determining factor. Because although you can’t change your character, you can change your behavior.”

  Opposite him, Lily interrupted. “But how can you separate them? Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “Not necessarily,” replied Rob. He mentioned this brother and sister he’d been reading about in his research. Their parents had been heroin addicts. They had been fostered and then abused by pedophiles throughout their childhood.

  “They’ve grown up. They have jobs, families of their own,” Rob said. “They’re OK now. They haven’t let what happened in their childhood dictate everything in their adult lives. Of course they’re marked by events and the terrible things that were done to them, but they have survived. That’s the idea here . . . You don’t allow yourself to be tyrannized by past events, by the child that you once were.”

  It was an intriguing idea, like Emma’s blog about the scared child. Was it possible to cut out a part of your life that had damaged you, like a lizard dropping its tail after an attack and then growing another one?

  I patted the sea bream dry with a paper towel and scored the skin to stop it shrinking. All that was left to do was rub it with salt and a little oil so the skin would turn crisp, then put it under a very hot grill. Not for too long, because it keeps cooking after you take it out. People forget that, as if you can stop a natural process bang in its tracks, just by moving it from one place to another. Food and people have a lot in common. Both need care and time. Both need to collect themselves before presentation to the outside world.

  The plates were already on the counter and the salad was prepared. I put a piece of fish on each plate, taking care that it didn’t break. This time Lily jumped up and took everything to the table. The rain had eased and I could hear more of the conversation.

  “Other people’s neuroses are so exhausting,” said Rob. “And it’s only Tuesday. How will I keep going until the weekend?”

  Theo laughed. “I feel sure you’ll manage.”

  Rob sighed, a mock theatrical whoosh of air. The candles on the table guttered, throwing a flickering shadow on his face before steadying and burning brightly again. “I’m not so sure. I’ve still got the final part of this book to finish. Everything is taking so much longer than I thought.”

  He waved his fork as he spoke, scattering bits of fish around his plate. “I don’t know why, but somehow I thought it would be so easy to find most of the people who lived in that community with McLeish. But many are proving hard to track down. I guess they’re not the types to go on Facebook. Also, I didn’t realize that all his papers were in such a mess, complete and utter chaos.”

  I scrubbed the pots. Cold water does a much better job than hot to remove starchy food. Grains of rice, speckled an oily gray from the mushrooms, blocked the drain. I scooped them out and flung them into the compost bin.

  “McLeish sounds so weird,” Theo’s girlfriend said, speaking for the first time. Her voice was loud and grating. Even Theo flinched. “What was it like? You know, the place where they lived.”

  “I’ve got photographs,” said Rob. “Somewhere in the study.” He jumped up and left the room, returning minutes later with a plastic folder. “The house is called Kinghurst Place. It’s in East Sussex.” He delved into the folder and spread a pile of glossy color photographs over the table. “Here it is now. Quite the hedge-funder’s paradise.”

  I finished wiping the pots and slid them into a drawer under the counter. I looked across and saw a large Edwardian-style house painted white, surrounded by swaths of perfectly striped lawn, a tennis court, and a turquoise swimming pool. Everything reeked of money. There were photographs of the interior as well: drawing rooms and billiard rooms and vast halls, all shiny and new.

  “And this . . .” He pulled out a smaller cardboard folder and opened it. “This is what Kinghurst Place used to look like, when McLeish reigned supreme back in the eighties.” He held up a grainy photograph of a gloomy liver-colored brick house standing at the end of a cracked tarmac drive. What looked like a giant yew tree, draped with torn flags, leaned against one side of the house.

  The saucepan drawer closed and a faint beat started in my head, like castanets. Clickety-click, clickety-click, followed by the strumming of a banjo, or it might have been a guitar.

  “What a depressing-looking place,” said Theo. The clickety-click stopped, then started again, in time to a simple tune without words.

  “It wasn’t really gloomy,” Rob continued, “because all the residents were free to explore themselves and their creativity. And don’t forget this was during a time when governments had cut funds for mental health, and many sick people were going without any kind of treatment. What conventional society at the time saw as madness, which could only be dealt with by knockout drugs or being locked away in an institution, Rowan saw as an intelligent response to an intolerable situation. It was very humane. He was a remarkable man.

  “Writers and academics came from all over the world to visit. It was famous and kind of glamorous in its own way. For a while, it was very popular with Hollywood actors and directors. It was incredibly hip.”

  Rob heaped his
plate with salad. “I don’t think I would have finished my degree if he hadn’t been my tutor. He was absolutely brilliant, a professor before he was thirty. And a talented musician as well—nothing he loved more than playing jazz on the piano.

  “He set up Kinghurst Place a bit before I became his student and moved between there and the university. The fact that he was such a respected academic and that he also ran what he called this experimental community meant he and his work got a lot of attention, but also that no one pried into the activities of Kinghurst Place. If anyone had investigated, they would have seen that he hardly ran things by the book. Weird goings-on. He was like a dictator with a harem on tap, and he wasn’t averse to the odd psychedelic drug, long after most of the psychiatric community had abandoned their use for treatment. What he did was completely unorthodox, but everyone who knew him worshipped him like a god.

  “He was a hero to the whole university—standing room only in all his lectures. Rolling Stone once did a cover story on him. His book, Anti-Memoir, sold about six million copies. It was on the bestseller lists for more than a year. And to think I was lucky enough to have access to his intellect and ideas. He blew my mind, as we used to say back then.”

  “Oh Dad, come on.” Lily shook her head and grinned. “We’re sheltered kids, we don’t need to know about your druggy days back at university.”

  “Not that druggy,” said Emma. “We both did well, remember. You don’t do loads of drugs and get first-class degrees at the same time. We had to put the work in. Although I always envied Rob that he knew McLeish and I didn’t. My tutor was so dull. No one would bother writing a book about him.”

  Theo turned to the girl. Her name was Amber. Judging from the puzzled expression on her face, she had no idea what anyone was talking about. “McLeish died a year ago, and left all his papers and stuff to Rob. A bit of a bolt from the blue.”

  “I didn’t expect it,” said Rob. “It was a complete surprise. Who knows why he did it? Because we lost touch with each other a couple of years after I graduated. The last time I saw him was maybe ten years ago, when he appeared on my program. He was drinking pretty heavily by then and his reputation was going downhill. Kinghurst Place was no more and he’d left academic life, said he was bored by the administrative nightmares and pettiness. But he still hankered after the Kinghurst Place days, said they were his finest hour.”