The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  I wandered towards the fireplace mirror, an imaginary wineglass in my hand. I scraped back my hair, wishing I could do Emma’s casual flick, halfway between a toss and a twirl, as she talked to people. It would have helped if my hair had been long and smooth instead of medium length and a coarse frizz. But, ever optimistic, I gave it a try. Tilt head to one side. Brush left hand across right side of head. It didn’t work. I looked like an anxious hedgehog with a comb-over. I tried it the other way. A bit better, but in real life I would have spilled the glass of wine over my head. Behind me, reflected in the mirror, Siggy rolled onto his back. His legs scrabbled in the air and then flopped down. He farted softly and began to snore. I laughed to myself. It was a suitable response.

  In the kitchen, the wooden floor was still streaked wet in places where I had mopped it earlier, and the air was cut with the smell of tea-tree oil and vinegar. Siggy appeared and sat down in front of the refrigerator. “It’s not suppertime,” I told him. “You’ll have to wait.” He stared in that beseeching way of greedy dogs, then gave up and ambled towards his basket. He turned his usual three circles and sank down with a heavy sigh, watching me as I sorted laundry. There was a pile of clothes for the dry cleaners: Emma’s silk shirts, some of the tailored dark suits she wore to business meetings, and a bundle of Rob’s jackets. One of our jobs at boarding school had been to sort the laundry. Some girls refused to touch other people’s things. I didn’t mind, either then or now. I was pleased that Rob and Emma trusted me enough to deal with the physical intimacies left on their clothes: salty circles of sweat on Rob’s shirts, streaks of makeup on Emma’s collars, and once a spot of menstrual blood on the lining of her skirt.

  I checked Rob’s pockets, retrieving crumpled receipts and old theater tickets. The last jacket was made of hairy tweed with a red lining. The side pockets were empty, but as I placed it on the pile, I felt something inside and shook it out. Pages torn from a diary, maybe fifteen or twenty, fluttered onto the floor. I picked them up and put them on the counter to shuffle them together.

  Rob’s handwriting was tiny, thin spidery italics. There were notes for program meetings, appointments with his publisher or lunch with Theo, dates of dinners and parties, and a kind of doodle on the top left-hand corner of some of the pages. The doodle was repeated about every week or ten days, and it looked like an ancient hieroglyphic. It was familiar, but I couldn’t think how or why. I was sure I’d seen it somewhere before. A ragged memory of a dusty classroom, everyone except me tittering. The image floated, tantalizing my consciousness, then slipped away.

  I put the pages to one side and began to chop carrots. The school day memory returned and settled into something I recognized. Everyone giggling as blushing Mr. Collins attempted to teach us elementary ancient Greek. We’d had the words for power and death and then came passion, or Eros. ’´Eρως. I remembered that word more than the others because of the funny wiggle below the line.

  That was the sign I saw repeated every week or so on the pages. An affair? I attacked the carrots with fury. Why else would Rob be writing that word, and in an extinct language few people understood? Probably some doe-eyed production assistant, pandering to his ego. Or Christine? Her relaxed social code probably wouldn’t register an extramarital liaison as anything more than pleasure lightly taken. She might even think sex with Rob was perfectly acceptable, a way of keeping everything in the family.

  I left the chopping board and paced the kitchen, banging my hip on the counter with each turn. How could he? What if Emma found out and divorced him? She wouldn’t condone something like that. What if the family broke up? I slammed shut a cupboard door and kept pacing. I might lose my job. Everyone’s lives would be changed forever.

  Another fragment of memory surfaced. Mr. Collins hitching up his trousers and trying to restore order. “Silly girls,” he said. More blushing. “Eros isn’t just physical passion. It means life energy as well. Not everything is about”—and here Mr. Collins took a deep breath and almost shouted it out—“SEX!”

  Oh, the relief of that memory. I was ashamed of myself for jumping to conclusions like a jealous girlfriend, especially when I recalled that Eros was in love with Psyche. Rob was a psychologist as well as a media personality. Like everyone else, he needed to write himself a reminder every now and then. Like many other busy people, he had his own special code to jog his memory. Perfectly normal. I took the pages upstairs and put them on Rob’s bedside table. He’d never remember that he left them in his inside coat pocket. When we were next on our own in the kitchen, I’d make coffee and ask him about the déjà vu thing. He would know more about it than Wikipedia and random websites. Everything would be in its right place again.

  14

  Self-knowledge is the key to self-empowerment and self-empowerment is the key to a happy and successful life. Increase self-knowledge wherever and whenever you can. Try keeping a mood diary for a month. Write in it every day. You’ll be surprised by what you discover about yourself.

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

  I actually saw little of Rob for the next fortnight. When I arrived at Wycombe Lodge each morning, he was either out or already in his office at the bottom of the garden. “Poor man, he’s under such pressure,” said Emma during one of our early evening catch-ups, with Rob in the study and Jake and Lily upstairs. “He could really do with a proper assistant at the studio. Things have changed so much. Everything is on a shoestring.”

  She had taken to sitting on the counter, drumming her feet against the cupboards. The noise was irritating, but at least she was stationary and we were not dancing our usual clumsy gavotte as she moved from one wrong place to another. “So many things have had to be put off. Like Christine and Rebecca. They haven’t been here for ages. Normally Christine complains about Rebecca not seeing her father, but for once she’s being understanding.”

  “That’s good of her,” I said, busying myself with a saucepan of leeks and chopped parsley. “And they can always come later when things aren’t so hectic.”

  After dinner, just before I left for the night, Emma wandered into the kitchen holding the last of the dirty plates. “I was about to do that,” I said.

  “But you do so much, all the time.” She peered through her fringe. Her eyes were bloodshot again, her face drawn. “Thank you, Anne.” Her nightly chorus, regular as clockwork. “Oh, a favor. Would you mind very much putting the garbage bins out in the street when you go. Rob usually does it, but he forgot this week and I don’t want to bother him now. He’s so tired.”

  “Sure.” I pulled the bins down the side path and onto the street. Rob must have forgotten last week’s collection as well. They were so full that the lids wouldn’t shut properly. Crammed on top of the usual black bags were smaller clear recycling bags full of printed pages. One of them fell onto the pavement and split, pages fluttering into the gutter. I’d have to pick them up and then I’d miss my bus. Very annoying.

  An old woman with her aged Labrador meandering behind her walked towards me. “Are you all right, my dear?” she asked. “Do you want a hand?”

  “Thank you, but no,” I replied. “It will only take a minute to pick up.” I stuffed a handful of pages back into the bag.

  “Those bags split so easily. You’d think they’d make them stronger,” she said and moved on, the dog snuffling behind her.

  There was enough light left to see and I quickly scanned the pages as I picked them up, but with no real interest. It was all quite dull. Lists of footnotes and annotations. Academic titles about McLeish’s peers and his early work. There were pages of chapter headings with question marks beside them and a folder of printed emails. The bus roared past as I picked up the last page from the gutter. It was crumpled and damp from spilt coffee, but the words, typed in italics, jumped out at me.

  You are me and I am you

  So we are one, but

  Where are you?

  If you are me and I am you

  Then am I
me

  And who are you?

  Everything slid sideways. I forgot about the bus and being tired and annoyed. I knew these words. I knew them like I knew the alphabet, like I knew my multiplication tables. This time I couldn’t fob it off as something I might have heard or something that sounded like someone else. It was McLeish’s song, one that Rob said McLeish wrote for his followers, one of their very own cult anthems.

  I folded the page into my back pocket, tied the bag together, and piled it on top of the rest. It was late. I was confused. More than anything, I wanted to get home, sit down, and think. Perhaps I was imagining things. Or perhaps Jude and Theo were right. I needed to get out more, to think about something else except cooking and cleaning.

  Back in my flat, I snapped on the lights and unfolded the page. Rob had scrawled something at the bottom, but the spilled coffee had made his writing illegible. I stared at the words, all the time hearing the tune in my head. I didn’t understand. How was it that I, Anne Morgan, who grew up with her grandmother in Shaftesbury, Dorset, knew the words to a song that a rogue psychologist wrote more than twenty-five years ago in a gloomy house in East Sussex?

  Was it possible that I’d been there with my mother before she left me at the service station and went off to that trailer in the woods? The coincidence of it all, that I could be working for a man who could know more about my early life than I did. To think that I was cooking his meals, washing his socks, and making his bed, not realizing a thing until now! I smoothed the page again and stared at it, hoping it might reveal something more. But there was nothing except a small rip in a corner where my thumb had snagged against the damp paper.

  I missed Gran with a sudden fierce longing. I missed the way she pursed her lips when she didn’t want to answer a question, her brusque affection that disguised an unfailing love. What a solitary life we had led, disconnected all three of us. Gran, an only child, with Marianne, an only child, with me, an only child. Three generations without husbands, or aunts and uncles and cousins. We could have done with a few more members to liven up things; a family joker, a chubby uncle who came over for dinner once a week, or a maiden aunt. And a cousin or two wouldn’t have gone amiss. As far as I knew, Gran never had close friends either, just acquaintances that she kept at arm’s length. So there was no one, not one person, that I could ask about my mother.

  Gran didn’t like me mixing with outsiders, except for Douglas, whom she couldn’t deter. “Why don’t you have some of your friends over?” she would ask when she picked me up from Stanton Hall at the end of term. She didn’t fool me for a minute. Even if I’d had friends, she wouldn’t have wanted them to see our little cottage, the way we lived. “It’s fine,” I would reply and she would look relieved. “There’s such a thing,” she’d say, “as too much company.”

  I paced the room until the man below banged on the ceiling. It was almost 1 a.m. Outside, the sky was half-lit, teetering between dusk and dawn. The summer solstice was approaching, a time of the year when sleep was almost impossible. I pulled the sheet over my head. Through the open window came the noise of garbage trucks, sirens, and buses. There was the screech of brakes and shouting. I got up and shut the window and listened to the sound of my own erratic breath until finally I fell asleep. When the sun broke through and woke me, I reached for my pen and notebook and wrote the first thing that came into my head.

  Sunset. I’m knocking on the enormous black door. No one comes and I worry that I’ll have to sleep outside on my own. So scared. I wet my pants, it’s running down my legs, hot and stinging. Then a person—I’m not sure if it’s a man or a woman—opens the door. Their face is painted like a clown, white with a big red mouth, but the red paint is running down their neck and it looks like blood. Someone is playing the piano. It stops and there is the sound of heavy footsteps, the smell of smoke.

  I stopped writing and got out of bed feeling jittery, almost dissociated. The front of my T-shirt and the sheet were speckled with blood. I’d scratched myself in the night again, something I hadn’t done for months. There was that prick of nerves along the back of my neck that I thought had gone forever.

  I wasn’t so sure about this notebook business, despite what Jude had said and Emma had recommended. The aftereffects were more confusing than soothing. I went into the kitchen and chewed on my muesli. I watched the bloodstained T-shirt and sheet revolve in the washing machine. The bizarre images that I’d scribbled down without thinking, the confusion and the feeling of missing Gran, were all to do with the mystery of that song. The only person who could help me solve that mystery was Rob. I needed to find him on his own one morning. He wouldn’t mind if I confided in him, just a bit. It wouldn’t take long and he was used to people telling him things. There was no need to tell him about finding the page in the recycling bag. He might think I’d been snooping. Besides, we’d already listened to McLeish’s song together. He’d introduced the subject to me.

  The morning was humid and overcast. When I arrived at Wycombe Lodge, the doors to the garden were open. An eddy of damp, stale air hovered above the usual fug of breakfast. Siggy hauled himself out of his basket and wandered over for his daily ear scratch. And there was Rob, mooching about by the sink in the kitchen. My earlier anxiety fell away at the sight of him, just disappeared as if it had never existed.

  “Hello,” I said. “Want some coffee? You could hone your barista skills.”

  Rob laughed. I hadn’t noticed before, but he had a crooked incisor, just like Emma. “My barista skills are pretty much nonexistent.”

  “You can be my assistant then. It won’t take a minute.” I pulled out the coffee grinder and the packet of beans. “Here you go. You can’t have forgotten already.”

  He hadn’t, but there was something of a mess by the time he’d finished. I cleared it away and made two mugs of coffee. We stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, me leaning against the sink and Rob propping himself in front of the refrigerator.

  “Thanks,” said Rob. “The first decent coffee I’ve had since the last time you made some. Emma really is hopeless at that sort of thing.”

  “She’s very busy and in demand,” I said, excusing her out of loyalty, but realizing at the same time that I’d implied that Rob wasn’t so busy, or so in demand. “I mean, you both are.”

  He smiled. “Sure.”

  “Actually,” I went on. “I wanted to ask you something. Have you got a minute?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you remember when you showed me that photo of the house where McLeish and his followers lived? And then I said that weird thing about the statue. And then there was the thing about that song?”

  “I remember.”

  “Do you think it was déjà vu? I mean, can you have déjà vu experiences about two different things, like the statue and the song?”

  Rob walked around the counter and sat down at the table. Under the usual mess of breakfast, the surface was smeared with jam and spilled milk. Outside, a pair of robins pecked industriously in the cracks between the paving stones. Siggy snored softly in his basket.

  “I did check if there was a statue of a cupid in the wood at Kinghurst Place, and yes, there was. You weren’t wrong. Or mad.” He smiled. “So you were either there, or you might have seen a picture of another cupid in some other wood, or been to another house where there was a statue in the wood. It’s not such an unusual thing to see.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “It’s possible I might have been in that house at some stage of my life, maybe before I went to live with Gran. But I don’t have any proper memories of that time, only a few hazy recollections. And no one is around to tell me if I’m right or wrong.” My words began to collide with one another. Rob put up his hand. It was a relief to stop talking, not to hear the anxiety in my own voice.

  “Let’s take this slowly and sensibly, OK,” he said. “I completely understand that you’re confused and curious. Anyone would be, so it’s perfectly normal to have these thoughts.” There was th
at chocolate thing in his voice and the curve of his shoulder as he hunched over his mug. I longed to rest my head in that curve. “And off the top of my head, there are so many possible explanations.”

  “Like what?”

  “You could have gone there as a young child, maybe with your grandmother.”

  “Not with Gran. She never left Dorset. It was a point of pride with her.”

  “All right then,” said Rob. “Maybe with your mother. Do you have any memories at all about her?”

  “She died of a heart attack when I was very young, in Wales, near Cardiff. Her name was Marianne. I remember she had long blond hair, but that might have been because Gran had a photograph of her. Sometimes I think I remember disjointed things, but nothing that makes any real sense. I don’t even know where we lived. Gran refused to talk about it and only mentioned a few times to me that she had been unwell. I read the coroner’s report once, but that’s it.”

  “You can’t blame your grandmother for that. It’s typical of her generation not to talk about anything upsetting. But it does leave you in something of a maze.”

  Unexpected tears pricked at the back of my eyes. “I know you’re really busy, and Emma says you’re under a lot of pressure . . . but is there any way you could find out if I was there? Maybe my mother and I visited and I don’t remember. It’s just that I’ve never had an opportunity to find out anything about her—she was an only child too.”

  “Of course I can check a few things. But look, Anne, the thing is . . .” He leaned forward and stroked my hand. “This book is about McLeish and his work, how and why he led his community. The weird things he did, and any recollections from his followers are included, but people came and went. He had relationships with some of the women, and some were more important than others, but your mother may not be among them. If she was, it would be fascinating for me, and no doubt an extraordinary thing for you. I can check, and I’ll help as much as I can, but I might not find what you’re looking for.”