The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  “Hmm, maybe you’re right,” said Theo. “That’s the problem with philosophy. Everyone has their own ideas.” Emma was the only one who laughed. Theo took her hand. “You’re the only person who truly understands me.” He kissed her wrist, a smacking sound loud enough for me to hear at the sink as I scoured everything with extra vigor and rinsed with scalding hot water.

  The man with the salt-and-pepper beard was called Terence. He was a columnist for the Guardian. “I don’t understand why English people don’t respect philosophers or psychologists. In France, they’re treated like rock stars. I wouldn’t mind being Bernard-Henri Lévy. Rich as Croesus, film star wife, on the telly all the time. Sounds good to me. And there’s Dr. Phil in America, his own show on TV, plus all his other stuff. He’d have to get on a very large ladder to count all his millions. But no one here has cracked it like that.”

  Rob gave a hollow laugh. “Don’t look at me. No one’s knocking on my door.”

  After dinner, Jake and Lily retreated upstairs and everyone except Theo went into the sitting room. He wandered over to the sink and thanked me for dinner. “I wish I could cook, even just a bit,” he said. “Then maybe I could find the love of a good woman. I’ve been told I’ll never find anyone unless I learn to cook and clean.”

  I didn’t smile and I made sure my eyes met his. “Maybe you’re not looking for the love of a good woman.”

  He flung his arm around my shoulder and drew me to him. There was that close smell again, the one I remembered from the night of the party, when I saw him and Rob. “But I am,” he said. “Truly I am.” He grinned and turned to join the others. I switched on the dishwasher and went to leave, wanting fresh night air on my face.

  In the sitting room, Rob was holding court, a little drunk. He caught my eye and waved good night, raising his glass in an extravagant salute. As I opened the front door, he said, “There goes our magnificent Anne. Dust and dirt have been banished from our house, and thanks to her concerns about such matters, not to mention her culinary skills, we dine like kings and queens every night.” Sabine and Terence tittered as I closed the door behind me, blushing with embarrassment.

  Part of me was flattered to be acknowledged in public like that. But as I walked to the bus stop, I felt put down as well. It was my work that allowed their blessed carefree life. It was my loyalty to Emma and my concern for Jake and Lily that kept Rob’s secret safe. The cook, the cleaner, the online grocery shopper—everything I did, everything I took so much care about, so easily transformed into a tipsy late night joke, so quickly replaced by takeaway meals, domestic agencies, and websites with smart cookies.

  The bus home was unusually full, the smell of musty clothes heavy in the air. I unlocked my front door and climbed the stairs, picking up an empty crisp packet on the landing. Tiny fragments smelling of stale grease, salt, and vinegar spilled into my hand. I wiped my fingers clean and felt around my handbag for my car keys. I didn’t want the emptiness of my own flat right then. I needed to go somewhere.

  My familiar friend, that sense of abandonment, is never just one thing. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It just topples over sometimes and creates its own self-pitying trajectory, taking you back to places you know are a big mistake.

  Even as I drove past Anton et Amis, I told myself I was over him and it was mere curiosity that had propelled me to Mayfair. I told myself again that the breakup wasn’t his fault and that I should turn for home. But I didn’t. I thought instead of the black, heavy punch of grief when he left me, how it had taken on its own life and reached back to the loss of Gran and my mother before that. All my losses had become one. I’d found it almost unbearable.

  I parked around the corner and crept through the darkness between the streetlights. It had stopped raining, but the pavement was still slippery and wet. Every window in Anton’s flat was illuminated, slices of light pouring onto the pavement. The woman he had left me for was standing in the kitchen, arranging flowers in a vase. Carefully, all the time in the world was hers. Standing back to see the wide-angle effect, moving forward to rearrange an awkward stem. What was it to her if a strange woman was lurking behind a lamppost across the street, taking care not to be seen? She knew nothing.

  She looked away, appeared to hear something, and left the room. Perhaps someone had called to her. It might have been Anton, wanting her advice on something. The sensor lamp by the side door of the restaurant flashed on, and there was Anton, his dark, bulky figure outlined against the golden light, swinging keys in his hand, a gesture so familiar it hurt. “Hurry up,” it said. “Don’t keep me waiting.” I almost forgot myself and ran to join him. Only her shadow on the steps behind him and the sound of the door shutting prevented me. I ducked down behind a car, but not before I saw them link arms and smile at each other. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. There was the familiar iron wire feeling in my stomach, and I swallowed hard, crouching like a thief.

  One image turned over and over in my mind: the way they linked arms, such an easy, affectionate gesture. Affection was steadier than fickle lust and obsession. It was kinder. It lasted longer. I may not have had much of it in my own life, but I recognized it in others.

  Back home, I turned on the television and watched a ginger-haired man solve a murder in record time. Driving past Anton’s house was a relapse, I told myself, like falling off the wagon or smoking a cigarette after years of nicotine freedom. It was a temporary weakness—one not to be repeated.

  Just before bed, as I undressed, I noticed something sparkling on the floor of the wardrobe. It was a jeweled clip. Fake, of course, but it looked good in dim light. It had fallen off an expensive dress, black, well cut, and flattering. Others much like it hung on either side. Below the dresses were my pointy-toed shoes with thin high heels. I’d bought all of it for Anton, for our dinners together. I saw now that I’d made myself up into someone I thought he would prefer, someone I hardly recognized anymore. I hung the dresses at the front of the wardrobe, ready to take to the charity shop that weekend.

  23

  True friends are with you all your life, enriching every experience. Make time to keep up with those closest to you, not just a quick catch-up, but a genuine heart-to-heart connection. List the qualities that make them dear to you and memorize them.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” October 2, 2016

  A bright Friday evening with the scent of the last honeysuckle flowers mingling with the smell of fallen leaves. The radiance of summer was spent. Rob’s gingerbread cottage was luminous in the dusk. Above it, the glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak amber heights.

  Emma arrived home early. “No dinner for me,” she said. “Huge lunch.” I doubted it. Her watch hung slackly off her wrist. We were in our usual positions in the kitchen—me at the sink and Emma sitting on the counter banging her feet against the cupboards. She appeared already slightly drunk, slurring her words and forgetting to end her sentences, jumping down to scrabble in the drawer for a corkscrew and immediately opening a bottle of wine.

  “I keep asking,” she said, pulling out two glasses and offering one to me, raising an eyebrow. I shook my head, and she filled her glass almost to the brim and sipped at it quickly, tossing her head up and down like a thirsty bird. She caught her hair in one hand and wandered towards the sink. She leaned over it, as if she was about to throw up, but then she straightened in that elegant way of hers.

  “So good to be home, the end of the week. And to have the place to ourselves. What a triumph.”

  Rob was at a BBC dinner and Lily had gone to the cinema with her gang. Jake was out as well, but hadn’t said where he was going. The fact that we were alone in the house wasn’t planned, but Emma made it sound that way; that we had fooled the others and were now set to enjoy our own delicious conspiracy against the world. She raised her glass.

  “Bliss, absolute bliss. I’ve been so on edge lately. Rob and his work. I wish I’d never heard of bloody Rowan McLeish. And now the school wants to see
us about Jake. I suppose I’ll have to work out a time. They’re probably going to complain about his homework or something. Why can’t the teachers just sort it out among themselves, the way they did when I was at school?”

  She flopped her arms on the counter, a dull thudding noise. “Sometimes I’d like to give up the whole thing and move to Scotland or somewhere and live on my own.”

  “You don’t mean that.” After the television interview and her dismissal of my worries about Jake, I no longer felt valued as her kitchen confidante. In her eyes, my position as housekeeper might never have counted for anything more than dust-free surfaces by day and protein and three veg by night, despite her daily automatic flattery. I was annoyed with myself for being so readily seduced and forgetting what I’d told myself in the beginning. Friends, real friends, weren’t paid by direct debit on the first of every month. I should have listened to Jude more carefully. “It’s Friday and you’re done in.”

  “Yes I am. But I’ve also had it up to here.” She drew one finger across her neck and grimaced. “Living up to everyone’s expectations, being the one-woman cheer squad. Always making out that everything is fine. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it just isn’t.” She picked up the empty glass and held it out like an offering. “Oh, won’t you have a drink with me? Please, please. I hate moaning on my own like this.”

  There was no dinner to be cooked, no mess to be cleared away. All I had to do was return to an empty flat and watch the last remaining episode in the final series of Wallander. “Thank you,” I said. “I’d love one.”

  Emma grinned in triumph and poured me a glass. “Let’s not sit here,” she said in a girlish rush. “We’re always in the kitchen. My bum hurts after I’ve been sitting on the counter for a while. Let’s sit at the table, like grown-ups.” She waved the open bottle about. “I’ll take this. Can you bring another one with you?”

  She jumped down and walked past her usual place at the head of the table to sit in the middle, facing the garden. I picked up a bottle of wine and the corkscrew and followed her, choosing one of the rickety chairs on the end. I’d never sat here before with Emma. It felt odd and good at the same time. We were no longer separated by the stuff of kitchen life: saucepans in the sink and food in the oven, pots simmering and the soft hiss of the refrigerator door as it opened and closed.

  The wine was good. I hadn’t eaten much all day and its warmth quickly spread through me, creating a pleasant buzz. The doors were open and Siggy snuffled about happily, looking up every now and then to check that Emma hadn’t moved. Vague shadows from nearby trees fell over the garden. Windows and doors of neighboring houses were flung open and the dusk seemed made more from their sounds than anything else. The tinkling of a piano, the muffled voices of the evening news bulletin.

  “My mother would really disapprove of our lack of effort in the garden,” said Emma. The first bottle of wine was already empty. She opened the second one and refilled our glasses.

  “Does she come here ever? I’ve never met her.”

  “Not in the summer. We’re only graced by her presence in darkest winter. She doesn’t like to leave her precious garden, even for a day. Oh, my mother’s garden.” Emma raised her glass in a mock salute. “It is renowned throughout the county. Color-coordinated in supreme good taste and manicured from spring to autumn. Never a weed or a lawn without perfect stripes. She spends all of her time in it. She says it never talks back, unlike her ungrateful children.”

  Emma had never spoken about her childhood before, but that night it spilled out like a flood. The classic lonely princess, the youngest of three daughters. All the silver-framed photographs in her bedroom came to life, but it was a different existence to the one I had imagined.

  “Everything was pretty hideous actually. When I was about seven, my father cleared off for someone who lived nearby, a widow. My sisters had left home by then, and they told me I shouldn’t mind, because at least the widow was in the same circles as us. It was kind of in the family.”

  So both our lives had changed at about the same age. Emma and I had more in common than I’d thought.

  “I knew the woman,” Emma went on. “But it wasn’t until I was an adult myself that I realized she’d been my father’s mistress for years. She often came to the house and she was always so nice to me, really made a fuss. That’s how I knew, later I mean, because there was no reason to pay me any attention, apart from trying to seduce my father through me.”

  She drained her glass and walked back to the kitchen, returning minutes later with another bottle, already open. “I thought she really liked me. She was a wonderful rider and sometimes she’d come over and give me lessons.” She refilled our glasses again. “You know, keep the reins level, leg on, elbows in. Aren’t children gullible?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” I replied.

  “And after that, I was packed off to boarding school. God I hated it.” In spite of everything I’d told myself, it was a thrill to hear her confide in me like that. The glow inside, like being a child again, hiding in the hedge and sharing secrets with Douglas.

  The pleasant buzz of the first couple of glasses had turned into a careless languor. I’d drunk them too quickly and I spoke without thinking. “So did I. Absolutely loathed boarding school. I kept running away, until they gave up and kicked me out.”

  “Gosh,” said Emma. In the nicest possible way, she was surprised. She tried to cover it up and hoped I hadn’t noticed. But I had. Not that I minded, because I understood that people who worked as housekeepers hadn’t often gone to schools where you packed your pajamas along with your textbooks.

  “I got a scholarship,” I said by way of explanation. “I always thought they must have made a mistake with the exam papers. Anyhow, it was a long time ago. I never made it to university. I went into restaurants instead. I don’t regret it.”

  “I met Rob at university,” she smiled. “So things got better. He saved me in all sorts of ways. And of course, the children.”

  A companionable silence.

  “This is good, isn’t it,” said Emma. “Just us, no Jake and Lily, no Rob.”

  “It’s nice when they’re around too.”

  “Yes, but I meant what I said about living by myself. However, that’s never going to happen. Rob will only leave this house and this family in a body bag, and even then we might have problems getting him out of the place.”

  I felt a slip in the air between us, a possibility of boundaries falling away, bringing us closer together. I could have told her about Theo and Rob right then. The memory of them together was so clear that I could almost smell it. The shape of them in the dim light of the bedroom. The wet slopping sound. Long shadows danced on the lawn. The moment passed.

  Emma refilled our glasses. I forgot my earlier resentment and concentrated instead on the part of me warmed by Emma’s bloom. This is what I’d always wanted, my early dreams of confidences shared, the intimacy of family and close friends. In my mind, it had seemed something gilded and precious, but beyond my grasp until this evening.

  “Rob delivers his manuscript next week—thank heavens,” she said, leaning her head on her elbow. “Sometimes I wish he’d go back to teaching. It’s not as if . . .”

  Emma was about to say it wasn’t as if they needed the money, but stopped short. She wasn’t that drunk. “It’s just that when you start out, you feel you can do anything—that you can carve a place for yourself out of granite, if need be. But as you go on, every year there’s a new surge of graduates who feel just the same way. And in the meantime, we’re just getting older and more tired.”

  “But I thought Rob said everything was going well—I ask him about it sometimes in the morning, before he disappears down into his office.”

  Darkness fell around us. I shut the doors and turned on the lights. Kamikaze moths thudded against the glass.

  “Really,” she said. Her words slurred together and she slopped some wine on the table. “I know I shouldn’t, but I get so bored
with all of it sometimes. I just stop listening. Marriage is like that. You love the other person, you want the best for them, but you get bored.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never been married.”

  She gazed at me across the table, holding her glass to her mouth, as if she was deciding whether or not to say something. “Well, it’s hard work. You have to be strong.” She studied the puddle of spilt wine. “I nearly left him once, you know, when the children were little. I was infatuated with someone else. We weren’t lovers, but it was very deep. Rob doesn’t know a thing, of course, and I’ve never regretted staying with him.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Well, almost never.” Her eyes were heavy-lidded with alcohol.

  “Hey,” she said. “I bet if we’d gone to the same hideous boarding school, we would have been best friends. We’re simpatico. I felt it from day one.”

  Everything began to lose focus and take on a golden blur. “Tell me about yourself. I want to know. Really, we’re friends, aren’t we?” There was something so sweetly plaintive in her voice. Sitting on my side of the table, Siggy snuffling at our feet, it felt like that semiconscious moment between sleeping and waking when everything was about to change, when everything was possible.

  “Nothing very unusual,” I said, moving my glass about the table. The light shone through the smeared imprint of my mouth around the rim. “My mother was a bit of a hippie. She died when I was young and my grandmother brought me up. And then I went into restaurants. I liked it there—it was sort of a family.”

  Emma stroked my hand and nodded in a gentle, understanding way. “And now, you’re with us,” she said, her voice soft as a whisper.

  I couldn’t help myself. Tears ran down into my mouth, bitter and salty.

  “You’re family now,” said Emma in the same soft whisper. “Our family. Don’t ever forget that.” She moved her hand away with a tender pat on my arm. “This calls for another drink. I’ll hunt out another bottle.”