The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  Emma’s wineglass had been traveling with a steady movement from her mouth to the table and back again, halting only for a refill. Rob glared in her direction as he picked up his water with a theatrical flourish. She ignored him and began talking about a house in Majorca that she was thinking of renting next summer.

  “We’d love it if you could come, Rebecca,” she said.

  “Maybe,” said Rebecca, flicking her hair. “I mean, thanks.”

  They began to eat, and somehow the atmosphere lifted. Rob and Theo had almost finished their first helpings and Emma was actually putting food into her mouth, not pushing it around her plate. They talked about films about to be released and a planned school excursion to the Royal Academy. Emma took care to include Rebecca and Christine in everything. Candles flickered behind Emma’s head as she asked Rebecca about her favorite television series. Breaking Bad? Or House of Cards?

  It wasn’t exactly the free-flowing conversation I’d hoped for, but it was good enough. Everyone was carefully cheery and polite. They looked like a family. Not a perfect family. After a childhood searching for one of my own, I knew they didn’t exist. But it was a functioning family nonetheless. Even Siggy was behaving like a proper dog for once, lying by the door in his basket, his head between his paws.

  The tension in my neck and shoulders seeped away as I washed the last of the pots. I took the crumble out of the oven and placed it on the counter, thinking that one of the best smells in the world had to be roasting juices overlaid by the buttery sweetness of cooked apples. Emma took the crumble and a bowl of ice cream to the table.

  “Lily helped Anne to make it,” she said and they all clapped, even Rebecca.

  My food had worked its alchemy after all. It was time to go home. Just a final wipe down and clear away, not too quickly, because I was enjoying the sight of everyone still sitting and talking at the table. Only Rob had slipped away, but he often went into his study straight after dinner.

  “Good night,” I said when I couldn’t find anything else to do. “Enjoy your evening.”

  Emma jumped up and came over to me, still holding her wineglass. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered. “You’re an absolute lifesaver. I mean it.”

  “It’s nothing.” But it felt like something, walking through the hall towards the front door, hearing the easy rise and fall of their talk.

  In the study, Rob was staring at the computer screen, wearing headphones. When he saw me wave goodbye, he whipped them off and motioned for me to join him.

  “Have a listen to this.” He handed me the headphones. I sat down and put them on. They were still warm from his ears. Such an unexpected thing, this transfer of physical heat. I brushed the feeling aside and concentrated on listening. At first I didn’t hear anything except for faint static. After a few seconds, music began.

  There it was, the clickety-click, then the banjo sound and after that, the tune I’d been unable to get out of my head. Except this time the tune had words, sung by a high, clear female voice. It was simple doggerel, almost, but not quite recognizable, like one of those nursery rhymes that you never quite remember and never quite forget.

  I am you and you are me

  We are as one and one will be

  One or two, or even three.

  There was a chorus as well; more simple lines, but I didn’t recognize the words. There was that same feeling that I’d had when I first walked into Wycombe Lodge, of entering a strange room and finding it acutely familiar. But this time there was no feeling of belonging or homecoming. This felt dark. I didn’t like it. From behind the desk, Rob sat with his hand on his chin, looking at me as if I was a clue in a crossword puzzle.

  “It’s quite interesting,” said Rob. “McLeish wrote that song. He wrote lots of songs and this was one of them. But they weren’t chart toppers by any means—they weren’t even on public release.”

  “Odd,” I said. “I guess it’s just one of those weird coincidences.”

  As I stood up to leave, my eye fell on a black-and-white photograph on the desk. It was another photograph of Kinghurst Place, taken from a different angle, showing the side of the house and what looked like a small wood in the distance.

  “There’s a statue in that wood,” I said without thinking, “of a little boy. And he’s playing a flute. He’s not wearing any clothes.”

  Even as I spoke, I knew it was gibberish, childish nonsense. I was even speaking like a child, about statues not wearing any clothes, when any sensible adult would have used the word naked.

  “How stupid of me.” I tried to laugh, but there it was again, that same feeling of fear and darkness. “All those big houses in the country—they look pretty much the same. Another of those weird coincidences. I must have gone to a house that looked just like that when I was a kid.”

  Rob gazed at me, his eyes magnified behind his rimless glasses. “Sure,” he said. “It happens all the time. We get things a bit confused. Ghosts in the machine and all that.”

  13

  Being strong doesn’t mean closing yourself off from the world and pulling up the drawbridge. True strength comes from being open about your fragilities and weaknesses, to yourself and others.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” May 20, 2016

  All the way home, I puzzled over my reaction to the song and the photograph. Unless I was going mad, which I very much doubted—I counted backwards from two hundred in nines and then in sevens and sixes, just to make sure—there had to be some rational explanation. As for my reaction—well, that could be anything at all.

  If Gran was still alive, I could have asked her if I’d ever been to such a house as a child, or if I’d spent any time in East Sussex. She might not have wanted to tell me about my mother, but she would have told me about a visit to a house. No harm there. Even she would have admitted that.

  The smell of drains rose up from the pavement as I walked towards my flat. The boy was playing hopscotch again on the street. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but he was out here on his own in the dark. He sang to himself, a strange, tuneless song without words. Something about him drew me in. His cherubic face, at odds with the shadows under his velvet eyes that made him seem older. His neat black quiff bouncing up and down as he jumped from square to square, dressed in what looked like school shorts and a thin sweatshirt.

  He kept licking his lower lip, which was swollen and chapped. His knees were knobbed and covered with chalk dust as he jumped neatly, legs together, landing like a dancer, softly on the balls of his feet. I was tempted to reach out and touch the warm nape of his neck and give him a tissue so he didn’t have to wipe his nose on his sweatshirt.

  “Hello,” I said, looking around for a parent or a carer. Anything could happen to a boy that age left on his own. “Hopscotch is a good game,” I continued awkwardly, trying to appear friendly, instead of sounding like a ponderous, aged aunt. “I used to play it when I was a child.” The boy paused, balancing on one leg. “It’s one of those games that children all over the world play,” I added. His eyes were enormous, almond-shaped, with thick eyelashes, and he glanced around as if he was scared that someone might see me talking to him.

  “I like it,” he said in a croaky voice. He smiled, a polite smile, nothing more. He hopped into the next square, then stopped so suddenly that he almost tripped over me. I smelled the oil on his hair and chocolate on his breath.

  “Sorry, sorry, Papa, I was just . . .” The boy was stuttering. I thought he was apologizing to me, needlessly, but realized he was staring at a point above my shoulder. A tall, thin man appeared from behind me. “Thank goodness I have found you,” he said, embracing the boy. “I was worried, so worried.” He stroked the boy’s head with exquisite tenderness. “Anything could have happened.” Although the man wore a shabby suit that bagged at the knees and slipped off his narrow shoulders, he had a distinguished air about him. In another life he might have been a professor or an eminent doctor, accustomed to authority. “Well, he�
��s safe now,” I said. “You must be relieved.” The man nodded and walked into a building near the corner of my street, his arm around his son.

  Jude rang just as I unlocked my front door. “You haven’t forgotten about the twins’ birthday on Sunday,” she said.

  “What sort of godmother would I be if I did a thing like that? I’ll be there. Promise not to be late.”

  I changed into an old tracksuit and turned on my computer. There had to be an answer to the puzzle of that song and the photograph of Kinghurst Place. Less than a minute later, an explanation was on my screen. Déjà vu. Already seen. The illusion of having seen something before that is actually being experienced for the first time. So simple.

  Next I typed in Kinghurst Place. There was the same gloomy picture of the house that Rob had showed me, newspaper and magazine shots of McLeish from various angles, and a series of McLeish portraits by David Bailey, moody and half-lit, looking like a gangster. Underneath these was an out-of-focus photograph of McLeish and some of his followers seated at a long dining table crowded with bottles and glasses and plates heaped with food. Groups of candles, placed at odd angles and heights, blazed. All around the table was dark. McLeish was gesticulating with both hands. He looked to be in midsentence, and everyone was leaning towards him with a rapturous expression. At the end of the table was a woman with blond, tumbling hair, her profile in shadow. There was something about the way she held her chin that reminded me of the photographs of my mother that stood behind the sofa in Gran’s cottage, but I could have been imagining it. I looked at the photograph for some time, examining my reactions for signs of recognition of anything at all. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  I scrolled down and read on. Many websites referred to the Kinghurst Place community as a cult and noted that McLeish, although a well-known academic, had no formal links to any government organizations. One site mentioned that he wouldn’t have been able to escape close scrutiny in the present digital age. It pointed out that, although the Internet had existed in some form since the 1970s, it wasn’t introduced publicly for at least another twenty years.

  There were articles on McLeish, all of them echoing Rob’s statements that he was brilliant, the most famous psychologist of his time and the charismatic leader of his very own Utopian community with no rules and no boundaries, a controversial mantra-maker back in the day of the sedative handcuff. Local newspaper archives reported complaints about noise and parties that continued all night. There was an interview with a retired teacher who referred to barbaric behavior and practices fit only for heathens. More recently there was an announcement for a biopic about McLeish starring an actor from the Doctor Who series and then another announcement that the project had been canceled due to lack of funds. There seemed no point in looking further. I clicked onto Emma’s daily email. She wished her followers a happy and productive weekend. I ate the remnants of a vegetable curry and watched a rerun of The Bridge.

  The next day I did my usual pounding run along the towpath, then drove to Primrose Hill on Sunday, the only day of the week with no parking restrictions. My old Peugeot hadn’t gotten much use since Gran died. Before that, I’d drive down to see her in Shaftesbury every fortnight or so. M4. M25. M3. A303. The motorways rolled out, other drivers accelerating past me in scorn as I kept to my steady sixty-five miles per hour in the slow lane, along with the lorry drivers and befuddled old couples unfolding their maps, until I pushed past Stonehenge and its wandering circle of tourists. These days the car mostly sat in its space behind my building. So far, it had started every time, but not without protesting hiccups and coughs like an old man disturbed from a nap.

  I parked and walked towards Jude’s house. Its gate was festooned with blue and pink helium balloons. “No chance of gender confusion here,” I said when Jude opened the door. The twins were hard to buy for. They had everything from initialed iPads to customized scooters. So each year, I gave Amelia an antique sterling silver table setting and Charlie some good red wine, stored for him at Berry Bros. & Rudd. They could do what they liked with them when they reached eighteen.

  Inside, the house was heaving with overheated children wild-eyed from too much sugar. A pair of clowns tried to keep control as their parents drank champagne in the sitting room. Philip pecked me on the cheek and handed me a glass.

  “It’s only eleven in the morning,” I said.

  “You’ll need it before the day is out,” he replied. “Now, I have to mingle.”

  “With the children?”

  “No, with their parents. Otherwise the twins won’t have any friends. Who’d have thought I’d be working the room in my own house?” Under the conspicuous spending and relentless social climbing, Philip was a devoted father.

  After the requisite one and a half hours, everyone left and Jude parked the twins in front of the television, where they immediately fell asleep, pink and blue icing dribbling down their chins. Philip went off to the gym he’d built for himself in the cellar, leaving Jude and me in the kitchen. I used to envy her that enormous, sleek room with glass doors opening onto a courtyard garden; the La Cornue stove, the custom-made copper sink, and the triple-door refrigerator. But now I’d grown attached to the kitchen in Wycombe Lodge. In fact, I preferred it, because I looked upon it as mine.

  “So,” said Jude, downing the last of her champagne. “At last I have you all to myself, face-to-face, I can interrogate you. When are you going to give up that job as a scullery maid and rejoin the real world?”

  I laughed. “You’re just like Gran—you never give up. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I like it there, and I like it more and more all the time. It’s not for life, but for the moment it works.”

  “But who will you ever meet there, in the kitchen? Don’t you want to get together with someone else? You’re so good with Charlie and Amelia. Don’t you ever think about children of your own?”

  We’d had versions of this conversation before, mainly when we were both childless and the idea of motherhood was one of those what-if scenarios that probably would never happen. But now Jude had the twins, and as she’d pointed out to me not too kindly, the time for what-ifs was passing me by. I was approaching the what-might-have-been zone.

  “Sometimes I thought about it when I was with Anton, of course. But I’m not sure if I know how the whole thing works. Mothers and daughters. I had Gran, and I know she loved me, but it never felt very maternal, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t know what to do with a child, and I’d be scared of messing everything up, scarring him or her for life. Maybe if it had worked out with Anton . . . but it didn’t.”

  Jude leaned on the counter and took my hand. “Is everything better now? I mean, are you getting over it?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I’m not obsessed anymore, and days go past when I don’t even think about him. And it wasn’t all Anton’s fault. He’d always made the parameters of the relationship clear. He was wary of saying the word ‘forever.’ I guess the end was inevitable.”

  “His loss,” she said. “Hey, I’ve got something for you.” She opened a cupboard. “Here.” She handed me a Smythson notebook bound in bloodred leather.

  I thanked her, but privately couldn’t think of a more useless present.

  “I can tell you don’t like it much,” she said. “But they’re back in fashion right now, like those adult coloring books that are all the rage. Everyone is writing everything down in the old-fashioned way and you’ll find a use for it sooner than you think.”

  “It’s great, thank you,” I said. “Really.”

  We hugged, her eyelashes fluttering along my cheek. I was about to tell her about the song and the photograph, how they could be my first entry in the notebook, but the twins woke and began throwing birthday presents at each other.

  “Time for me to say goodbye.”

  “You’ve always got me,” Jude said. “And Charlie and Amelia. We’re not going anywhere.”

  The next day, I arrived at work earlier than usual.
I wanted to ask Rob about my déjà vu experience, but he’d already left for the studio. It was a perfect early summer day with soft yellow light and gentle air. All the windows and doors were open. Fat bees hovered over the honeysuckle climbing the brick wall, and the morning light was steady without the usual jitterbug of sun and cloud.

  I found myself circling the sitting room, eyes shut, trailing my fingers along the uneven surfaces of the pictures. Rough, hard whorls of paint from the children’s efforts, fine brush marks for the family portraits, and powdery dust from the charcoal drawings. All the life going on below them, the clever talk, the casual wit, the food and drink, the children. Everything joining together in the family. If I were Emma, I’d stay here and manage my own house. I’d cook all the meals, be a wife to Rob and a mother to Jake and Lily. I wouldn’t bother with the books and the hectic rush of her speaking engagements and interviews, promoting a way of life that she didn’t actually have time to experience herself.

  I dragged Siggy round the park for twenty minutes, my continuing but often futile attempt to make him see the attractions of behaving like a dog and peeing and defecating outside the house. He suffered my attentions—a weekly bath in the laundry basin, brushing his teeth every other day with a ridged plastic device that fitted on my finger, found at the bottom of a kitchen drawer—with a weary acceptance. His heart remained true to Emma. I didn’t mind. I liked his loyalty, that he couldn’t be bought off, like most dogs, with food or attention.

  After that, I made my way through the rooms, clearing, cleaning, and making beds. The house held its silence. At the French windows, I blew clouds of condensation on the glass. The branches emerged into focus and then blurred again as I peered through a tiny bubble captured in the windowpane. I swayed from side to side, just a little. Blur and focus, blur and focus. The effect was hypnotic.