The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  “Didn’t he keep any records?” I asked.

  “Yes, he did, but of his own work and theories, and his views about the people who lived there. But mostly they didn’t use their real names, or he gave them pseudonyms. Keep in mind that these were people who might have run away from institutions and weren’t keen to give too much information about themselves.

  “Also, it was a private house, not an institution. Imagine trying to work out who’d come to Wycombe Lodge over the years. It would be almost impossible. We don’t keep a visitor’s book and neither did McLeish. No one checked in and out. And no one was looking at him or what he did at Kinghurst Place too closely.”

  Rob moved his hand away from mine and held the mug to his mouth. All I could see were his brown eyes, full of kindness and concern. He sipped his coffee slowly, then put his mug on the table. “But back to you and the mystery of were you there or weren’t you there? Our memories are incredibly complicated, and there are so many different theories about how they work. People can remember things that never happened and people can forget things for all sorts of reasons. There are so many different forms of amnesia. Then there’s PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. If something traumatic has occurred, you can get flashbacks and panic attacks, remember things that did happen, but are very distressing.

  “I could go on and on, but all right, lecture over,” he said. “Back to Kinghurst Place. I’ll see what I can find. But, as I said, it’s entirely possible that if your mother was there, she went by another name. It’s also possible that you might have been there. That would explain the song and the statue, although those two things might not have any real connection.”

  He scratched his chin. “It goes without saying that our conversations are just between us. Jake and Lily needn’t know anything, and Emma—well, I discuss everything with her, but not in such close detail. I want you to feel comfortable talking to me, about anything at all, and know that it won’t go any further.”

  “Thank you. You’re so kind. And I wouldn’t mind about Emma. She says in her blog that we shouldn’t be scared of the past.”

  Rob nodded. “She’s right—and she told me that you sometimes read her. She was so flattered.” He made it sound that, out of her many thousands of readers, I was the only one who mattered.

  “I read ‘Taking the Moment.’ Some of the things Emma has written have made me think a lot about life and relationships. They’ve been a great help.”

  “Really,” said Rob, sitting straighter with a proud look on his face. “Good. Anyhow, let me see what I can dig up.”

  I could have kissed him. “Thank you, thank you.”

  Rob looked at his watch and stood up. “It’ll be a pleasure to do something for you, after everything you do for us. But it may take me a bit of time, maybe a week or more.”

  He handed me his empty mug. “See you later then. I need to get down to some work.” He meandered down the garden, unlocked the door of his office, and closed it behind him. Through the reflection of the mangled shrubs in the window, he swayed from side to side before settling at his desk.

  I slowly cleared the kitchen. In restaurants there was no time to think or remember. Everything was more relaxed here, with time for thoughts and feelings to surface, the frightening what-ifs of it all. What if my mother had been one of McLeish’s followers? What if she had been his lover, his muse? And then—what if McLeish was my father and I was the child of a cult leader, a man disgraced? Everything in my life turned upside down and everything solved. It was both terrifying and exciting.

  Before Jake and Lily came home from school, I sat at the kitchen counter and took out my notebook. It had rained in the afternoon, but there was a quick blare of sun that made me blink in surprise as much as anything else. Light flickered orange against my eyelids and there it was, another unbidden image.

  I’m hungry and scared. It’s dark in this hall, just a chink of light from the room where they are. I’m not allowed in. I’m meant to be asleep, and I can’t make any noise. I sit down behind the door. The floorboards are rough and splintered against my legs and there’s something beside me. I pick it up. It’s a can of baked beans, already open. I scoop them out with my fingers, cold and slimy. The edge of the can cuts my finger. It stings and I cry but no one comes.

  My writing was jagged and spiky, running off at angles across the page. There was that prick at the back of my neck again, although it wasn’t completely frightening this time, right here in the kitchen at Wycombe Lodge, with Rob at the end of the garden. Part of me wanted to race down to him right then, give him my notebook, and ask him to make sense of it, to try to authenticate my early unknown life.

  But these were only disjointed images, of no use to anybody. I didn’t want to show Rob these scrambled thoughts, these half-formed things that brought with them a sense of shame, that came from some part of me that I didn’t recognize. He might think I was an unreliable narrator, as they said these days. He might think I’d made them up to get his attention. Apart from anything else, they were intensely personal and I wanted to keep them private until I was more certain of what they meant. There was another thing as well. Disjointed and scrambled they might have been, but they made me realize for the first time how much I longed to know something, anything, about my mother.

  15

  Every daughter is entwined with her mother and every mother is entwined with her daughter. In short, an emotional minefield.

  —Rob Helmsley, Madhouse: The Life and Times of Rowan McLeish

  I wrote in my notebook each morning. Images came out more readily, almost like a flood. I didn’t want to call them memories just yet. They were more a series of incoherent moments that had nothing to do with linear time.

  I’m sitting on a man’s lap, rubbing my cheek against the rough wool of his sweater that smells of tobacco. I smell earth and cloves, cigarettes and wine, and recognize the scent of my mother. I feel her hair, the way she rubs my back, the tips of her fingers tracing the knobs of my spine . . .

  On my own. They’ve left me, all of them, gone away laughing, not noticing I’m forgotten. At night I hide in the cupboard by the kitchen with a knife, too scared to go upstairs. Something runs over my foot. Scream and scream and scream and no one comes . . .

  Sunlight, dancing, the smell of hay and wild strawberries. Whirling around, hanging on tight to strong hands, the world upside down then righting itself, everything breaking into different colors until I fall over and crawl into the hedge . . .

  The man has the knife again, the one with the sharp point, and he says he’ll draw a picture for me, but he starts to cut into his face instead, so quickly that I can see what he has drawn before the blood starts dripping down his face. He has drawn a cat with a curly tail. The knife is covered in blood. I can smell it, sharp like metal. He puts the knife into his mouth and I run away, all the way up to the roof, where he can’t find me.

  The more I wrote, the more I cooked, concocting my version of a perfect family, dish by traditional dish: spaghetti and meatballs, roast chicken, lasagna, cakes and pies.

  It was the middle of the school summer holidays. Emma said they usually went away in August to Greece or Italy, places with drinkable wine and reliable sunshine. But they were too busy this year. Jake and Lily didn’t seem to mind being at home. They spent most of their time asleep or out of the house.

  “I cannot say one more word about anything,” Emma sighed as she came into the kitchen. She’d been in Bath all day promoting her latest book on how to build a corporate empire from the kitchen table. Her face was pale, and her smart linen suit was crumpled, with a dribbled coffee stain on the jacket. The smell of the city hung about her, gritty fumes from the train and a faint, stale whiff from being cooped up in a mini-cab all the way from Paddington. She disappeared upstairs and came down half an hour later, wearing a faded tracksuit and new fluorescent green-and-orange running shoes. She foraged in the wine cooler for an open bottle and poured herself a glass.

>   “Won’t you? Just once share a glass with me?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t like drinking at work, where even one small glass was enough to unbalance me.

  “Poor Rob, he’s still working so hard,” Emma said. Siggy rolled onto his back and she rubbed his stomach with her shoe. “Clever clever dog.” His stumpy tail thumped on the floor. “Oh, he mentioned you might have spent some time near Kinghurst Place when you were a child.”

  “Yes,” I replied, expecting her to ask about my mother, and almost looking forward to talking to her about it. Instead she wandered towards the door leading to the garden, Siggy dancing at her heels. “I never understand why people doubt coincidences,” she said, examining her reflection in the glass. “To me, they’re the most natural things in the world.”

  Dinner that evening was uneventful, with just the four of them. There was a goat’s cheese and tomato tart, then cold chicken and salad. It was too warm for anything more complicated. All the doors were open to the garden. It was still so light that for once Emma didn’t light any candles. Nobody said much. Lily was in a rush to get to the cinema, and Jake looked half-asleep, with spikes of hair sticking up at the back of his head. He yawned all through the meal and disappeared the minute it was over.

  “I might go up and have a bath,” said Emma as she brought a pile of plates to the counter. “To get rid of that train journey. I thought it would never end. Thank you, Anne, that was delicious.” She’d barely eaten a thing. Under the wisps of her fringe, a blue vein pulsed on her forehead.

  I tidied the kitchen and prepared to go home. Moths fluttered about the lamps. I turned the lamps off and waited for the moths to fly outside before shutting the doors. It seemed too cruel to leave them crashing against the light until they fell exhausted to their death. The house was almost dark. The only light downstairs came from the study, where Rob was working. I walked past and said good night.

  “Hey, come in,” he said. “Look what I found.”

  I stepped into the room, and he showed me, with something of a flourish, a photograph of Kinghurst Place similar to the one I’d seen online, but from a different angle and even more out of focus. Again, the room was lit by candles and most faces were in shadow, turned away from the camera towards McLeish, who sat at the head of the table. I stared at it, willing myself to remember something, but I didn’t.

  “There’s a photograph a bit like this on someone’s website,” I said. Rob looked a bit put out. “But this is a much better one,” I went on quickly. “McLeish’s face is so much clearer here.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now, there was a woman at Kinghurst Place for a while, who was close to McLeish. Some of the residents were jealous of her position. But McLeish and the others called her Mary, which could be a shortening of Marianne—or another woman altogether. Does Mary mean anything at all to you?”

  I shook my head. What about me? I thought. What about me? Was I there with her?

  Rob picked up his pen and began chewing on it. “This might be difficult for you—do you want me to go on?”

  I gripped the edge of the desk and nodded.

  “The woman called Mary was his mistress, his preferred mistress for some time.” With his free hand, he produced another photograph from a folder and motioned for me to sit down. “This is a photograph of the two of them.”

  Something in the back of my throat made me splutter. Rob slid the photograph across the desk. I turned it around to see a bald, shiny-headed woman with shaved eyebrows wearing a long white dress, shapeless like a nightgown. She was barefoot and looked like an alien angel, certainly not human and certainly nothing like the woman in the framed photograph that used to stand behind the sofa in Gran’s house and now stood on a shelf in my flat. Her hands were clasped behind her back and she gazed up at a man who I recognized as McLeish. His hair was long and curly. He wore a patterned Indian caftan and sandals and faced the camera lens with a broad, confident smile. His teeth crossed over at the front. A lit cigarette dangled from his hand.

  Where were they? It was hard to tell. Maybe on the crest of a hill. The remnants of a picnic lay scattered about their feet. Summer sun blazed around them. They looked like they were about to float away.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s in profile. I can’t see her eyes. I can’t see her hands.”

  “Why do you mention her hands?” asked Rob.

  “She had a turquoise-and-silver ring. I would have recognized it.” I traced the outline of her head with my finger. The photograph was faded, almost sepia. It was impossible to tell if her skin was fair or olive, what color her eyes were. “I wish there was something here I remembered.” I heard the break in my voice, the disappointment it conveyed.

  “It’s because she’s . . .” The woman in the photograph looked like something skinned alive. I thought of my mother’s glorious blond hair, how it floated like a halo around her. “. . . shaved her head. Is that something they did?”

  He reached over and slid the photograph back across the desk. The rasp of the paper on the wood made me start. “There was a time, maybe for six months or so, when all the women shaved their heads to prepare themselves for trepanning.”

  “The what?”

  “Trepanning. It’s when a hole is drilled into the skull, exposing the outermost layer of brain membrane. People did it to release what they thought were evil spirits, to literally let light into the brain. It’s one of the oldest operations, goes back to prehistoric times. Sometimes it was used in conventional medicine to reduce pressure on the brain.

  “At Kinghurst Place, they tried to do it themselves, in an effort to become permanently high. It was Mary—if that is her real name—and McLeish’s idea. They believed it was a tool for mental enlightenment. McLeish bought an old dental drill and some books showing them how to do it. But the drill broke and it didn’t work.”

  “But even if the drill hadn’t broken, the women were willing to do that to themselves? To drill holes in their own heads?”

  “Yes,” said Rob. “They were willing to do anything they were told.”

  Silence fell between us. I struggled for a moment to imagine this, how a man could hold such power over women that they would shave their heads and try to drill a hole in their skull just because he told them to; how a woman would collude with such a man and help persuade people to do such a thing. It was madness, literally. Rob said McLeish had been a brilliant scholar; that his ideas, however bizarre, came from a place of caring about vulnerable, ill people, whom society had shunned. I didn’t have a degree from UCL, but ordering people to drill holes in their heads sounded horrifying, like a twisted power game. Again, the thought, like a punch in the stomach. What if this man was my father? What if this woman, who Rob said was his accomplice, was my mother? I pushed this last image away. It could not be true.

  From upstairs came the sound of padding footsteps and muted television laughter. Any minute now Rob would put the photograph back in his folder and say good night, and that would be the end of it. I would have to go home, no closer to finding out anything more about my mother and me. Again, it was as if Rob knew my thoughts.

  “Just because you don’t recognize the woman in the photograph doesn’t mean your mother wasn’t there,” he said quietly. “I’ll look through other papers and you can keep thinking about it, see what turns up in your mind.”

  “Can I see the photograph again?” He slid it back across the desk. This time I looked carefully at their surroundings, the plates and glasses on the ground next to the picnic basket. There was something in the corner, almost out of frame. A sandal, a child’s sandal with the strap undone.

  “Here,” I said, showing it to Rob with a shaking hand. “This means there must have been a child there. It might have been me.”

  Rob put on his spectacles and peered at the photograph. “How crazy that I didn’t spot that before. Now it makes sense.”

  “What?”

  “In an interview I did with one of the residents,
a man called Harry, he mentioned a kid several times. The kid got in the way, or the kid made him laugh. But when I pressed him on it, he said he didn’t remember too clearly, and then he said the kid was his nickname for another man who lived there, because he was so small and slight.”

  He took my hand and patted it in the same kind way as before. “It’s not very satisfactory, is it?”

  I bit my lip. “I spent most of my life not thinking about this, not even caring about it—and now I can’t seem to stop. I just wish I knew.”

  “So do I,” said Rob. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

  “Not really. Just odd bits and pieces that make no sense and probably never happened.”

  “Well,” said Rob. “I’m here, you know that. Talk to me at any time.”

  “Thanks,” I said and picked up my things, ready to leave. It seemed as if I’d never be certain about anything.

  Later that night, back home, hip-hop music rising from the street through the open window, the fag end of a breeze playing around my feet, I lay on the sofa and wondered why I hadn’t pulled my notebook from my bag and just showed it to him there and then. I might have done so if it had been pages of neat handwriting with legible sentences and organized into days and weeks. But I was too ashamed. Such an antiquated word, but it was the only one that conveyed the way I felt. Everything was scribbled at odd angles and often upside down. Sometimes I wrote with such force that my pen tore the paper. Sometimes I wept uncontrollably as I wrote and my words were smudged and almost illegible. I didn’t want Rob to see that manic part of me,

  I closed my eyes. Images emerged. Dark eyes staring out from bushy eyebrows. A woman with her face turned away, shivering in excitement, like a dog. A door warped with damp and age, with a gap between the door and the frame, so that I could see into the room if I stood on tiptoes and cranked my head to one side. Holes in the wall where someone had stabbed an imaginary intruder. The screaming, the hideous soft thunk as someone’s head pounded against the wall.