The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  “The important thing here is,” Rob might have said, “is that the person who snooped was not exposed in the usual definition of the word.” Rob loved dissecting minute layers of meaning. “Their real name, where they live, and what they did for a living—all this has been protected.”

  I’d almost have fallen for that argument myself, particularly when spoken in that delicious chocolate voice of his, except that what I did, what I was trying to do, was never going to hurt anyone. I only wanted to find out about my mother and why she had left me. Was that so despicable?

  I didn’t plan on drawing so close to them. I had no idea that I’d fall in love with them, longing for their presence in my working day and their approval of everything I did, so much that I became too scared to tell the truth for fear of losing them. It wasn’t in my job description to go upstairs in the middle of a party and find Rob and Theo clawing at each other, and then hiding it from Emma, so life at Wycombe Lodge could go on as before. Nothing like this was covered in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It was just what had happened to me. I knew that I’d found myself sucked into my own version of a cult and had been brainwashed by their picture of a perfect family, until I drew back the layers of what was beneath. But knowing that didn’t stop the hurt and the anger and, again, the feeling of abandonment.

  Somehow the hours passed, every minute dragging as if under wet cement. I wanted a drink, very badly, but there was no alcohol in the flat and Ahmed’s shop was closed. At last it was time for Rob’s program. I turned on the television, my fingers shaking as they moved about the remote control. The opening credits swam onto the screen; a picture of a plaster head, with sections of the brain marked off for attributes or failings. The part for secrecy, I noted for the first time, was just above the ear. There was the opening sound track, the sound of a lone, wavering cello. The picture faded away, replaced by a shot of Rob walking in front of Kinghurst Place. “In this house behind me, now privately owned,” he said, “once flourished a community—or a cult—led by one of the most controversial and famous psychologists of the twentieth century—Rowan Donald McLeish. McLeish believed that what we see as madness was merely a response to a crazy world, and he set up his own community of mentally ill runaways and schizophrenics right here, in the middle of East Sussex.”

  The image of the house faded away, replaced by photographs of McLeish playing the piano, giving lectures, and receiving awards. There was a David Bailey black-and-white portrait of McLeish staring at himself in a mirror. Just looking at it made me dizzy.

  “It was a place with no boundaries,” Rob’s voice continued. “Orgies and wild parties were the order of the day. McLeish spurned legal drugs in favor of illegal hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline. He encouraged bizarre experiments, like attempting to drill holes in his followers’ skulls to let light into the brain, an ancient practice called trepanning. And among all this lived a small girl of five years old, uncared for and mostly unnoticed, surviving on scraps of leftover food and sometimes left alone for days on end. After her schizophrenic mother died, the girl was finally rescued by her grandmother. Here, for the first time, is her remarkable story. We’ve used the voice of an actress to protect her identity.”

  I shivered, as if someone had ripped off all my clothes. Dread stirred inside, uncoiling like a lizard. The same blurred photograph of me I’d seen on the website appeared on the screen, accompanied by a female voice speaking in a sort of Scottish accent. The caption below the photograph read: “Anne X, now in the hospitality industry.”

  “Sometimes, when I was allowed to join them, I sat on McLeish’s lap, imagining or hoping that he was my father. Most of the time, I was banned from going anywhere near them. McLeish said children were able to look after themselves, that their parents damaged them. So I was left alone pretty much all of the time.”

  I pressed the freeze button on the remote control and peered into the screen. They’d used some special effect to make the photograph of me grainy and faded, so that it matched photographs of McLeish and his followers at Kingsley House. I would be recognizable to people who knew me, but not to a casual observer. It didn’t make me feel any better. The photograph was replaced by one of the group at dinner at Kinghurst Place, the photograph I’d seen online and that Rob had showed me. The room was candlelit and the table was littered with empty plates and glasses.

  “I was only five,” the voice went on. That was when it hit me, so strongly that I lost breath. My love for them, combined with my yearning to find out what had happened to my mother, was such a convenient combination for Emma and Rob. For the past year, I’d been useful in so many ways.

  “I was left on my own for days on end, just wandering around the house eating stuff out of cans and crying for my mother. Sometimes I was so scared, I wet myself. No child should have to live like that.” On it went. The rhythms of my speech rang around the room. I couldn’t remember writing some of it, although the sense of it was accurate. It was as if Rob had mined my brain. There were interviews with other psychologists, experts on psychedelic drugs. Some spoke of McLeish as a misunderstood, caring genius who went astray. Others described him as a manipulative sociopath. I lurched into the bathroom and vomited. Jude rang after I’d rinsed my mouth.

  “There must be a way you can sue the bastards,” she said.

  “How could I do that?” I asked, still too numb to weep.

  “They can’t use photographs of you, however fuzzy, or quote your words without your permission. So we’ll see about that,” she barked. “Take a pill and go to bed. Right now.”

  I did as she said. The next morning, still groggy, I ran along the towpath, past the Hanwell asylum and Isambard Brunel’s ingenious construction of three bridges that allowed cars, boats, and trains to pass all at once on different levels. If only my own life had been so efficiently designed. I ran almost all the way to Southall, until my legs began to ache and made me forget the other pain.

  I walked back home, where I nearly collided with Faisal and Imran, carrying bags of vegetables from the local market. “There you are,” said Imran. Faisal rested his bag on a ledge outside the kebab shop. The man inside stopped tending his giant cones of meat long enough to frown and make shooing motions. We ignored him.

  “I was worried about you yesterday,” he said. “You looked so pale and you were rushing. I thought maybe you were ill.” A concerned look came over his face.

  “I was tired,” I said. “You know, the end of the week. I just needed a good night’s sleep.”

  “Did you get it?” he asked. “The sleep?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Everything is much better now.”

  “Good,” he said. “I have had news from my sister. So . . .” He hesitated. “We can have the meal together, like you said?” It was more a question than a statement. My invitation, offered in unthinking and tipsy haste. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But there was his trusting, eager face right in front of me, nodding with enthusiasm.

  “Of course,” I said, as much to convince myself as him. “It would be lovely to meet her. Let’s set a date when she gets here.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” Faisal tugged at his sleeve. Imran smiled apologetically. “Yes, I’m coming now. We must go. The cinema. I promised him.”

  I walked back to my flat to find four plaintive bleats from Emma on my phone. “We need to talk, the three of us,” she kept saying. “We can’t just leave it.”

  Jude had other ideas. “Yes, you can bloody well leave it,” she muttered. In the background, Amelia shouted that she was a naughty mummy for swearing. “Please, quiet in the backseat. Now listen. You leave all this where it belongs, in the gutter with those hypocritical rich lowlifes. You can get a great job, probably even better than the one with Anton. It’s only been a year. People haven’t forgotten how good you are in a kitchen.”

  “But what about Jake and Lily? Particularly Jake. I don’t want to leave, just walk out of his life without saying goodbye. He
’s having trouble at school and he’s getting sucked into another kind of cult. I can see it so clearly and it’s terrifying. He needs help.”

  “Write him a letter then. You can say goodbye like that. OK?”

  “OK,” I repeated. I wasn’t totally convinced. “I’ll think about it.”

  28

  Sometimes the only way forward is to make an ending. If this is inevitable, consider these three words—grace, honesty, and love. Keep them in your heart at all times.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” November 14, 2016

  I went back to Wycombe Lodge. Not the next week, or the week after, but soon after that. Emma had kept up her barrage of messages, and finally I gave in to their sheer force and number. There was a part of me that wanted to have it out with them as well. What Emma and Rob would call closure. I rang the buzzer one Tuesday morning like a stranger and walked to the open front door. The gravel was covered in rotting leaves, and the olive trees in their pots looked dead, the soil dried out with deep cracks.

  In the hall, Siggy danced around my legs, thinking it was time for his walk. I patted his head, running my hand along the soft down behind his ears to the rough fur on his neck. Everything looked the same: the hall table with the vase of overblown roses and the pile of letters, the faded red rug and the shaft of light from the dining room at the end of the hall. But it smelled different. There was a stale fustiness that made me want to fling open the French windows.

  “Come in,” said Rob. He and Emma were standing on either side of the fireplace. I wondered if they’d decided on talking to me in the sitting room the night before, if they’d rejected the kitchen as a place where I might feel more comfortable. Rob’s theory of emotional geography. They’d have wanted to choose the room where they felt superior and safe, surrounded by their pictures and their things, all the subtle emblems of their life.

  “It’s good to see you,” said Emma. She stood by the fireplace, wearing one of her trailing skirts and a shrunken pilled sweater. Her eyes were puffy. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Yes, thanks for coming,” repeated Rob, pocketing his phone. He had on his preppy uniform. His shirt collar was creased. “We wanted to see you while Jake and Lily were at school,” he said. “We told them you weren’t feeling well and were taking some time off. It seemed better that way, until everything is sorted out.” He made it sound like an agenda for a meeting, or a guest list that had to be decided upon. “Shall we sit down?”

  They chose the sofa while I sat in one of the rickety cane chairs facing the French doors. All the times I’d gazed through those windowpanes, noticing the way my perspective changed whenever I moved my head. Now I saw nothing, except specks of dirt and pockmarked raindrops. I shifted in the chair. There was a sinking feeling, as if the seat was about to give way. Split strands of cane dug into my buttocks. We sat perfectly still, not speaking. Our eyes bounced off one another, up to the ceiling, and into the corners of the room.

  In my mind I saw so clearly that first day I met them, standing on the corner of their road to catch my breath, brushing mud off my shoes before walking into this house where Rob and Emma stood, about to welcome me into their wonderful, magical life.

  Rob leaned towards me, his hands clasped in front of him. He had on his best chocolate voice. “What we need to do here,” he said slowly and clearly, “is try not to get too emotional. It’s obviously a tender subject for all of us.”

  “But . . .” I interrupted.

  “Now,” Rob said, “let me finish. We’re very upset as well. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess.”

  Again, I remembered so clearly those mornings when Rob and I sat in the kitchen, the way I felt myself bend towards him like a plant towards the sun. Their eyes fixed on me dolefully, as if their domestic pet, the one they were used to dancing attendance on them, had suddenly gone feral. “We would have told you,” continued Rob. “We would have told you at the right time. But, as Emma has told you, we’ve been under pressure and so busy, and we haven’t been thinking as clearly as we might have done. So now, I think the best thing to do is for you to take another week off and then let’s try to get everything back to normal, so we can allow the trust between us to grow again.”

  I couldn’t help it. “How can anything grow again? How can it go back to normal, after that program and after the book is published?” I hadn’t realized, but I was shouting. “You have used me to promote yourself. You told me you were writing a book of record. You told me you didn’t know anything definitive about my mother and me, but you’d try to help me. But you weren’t helping me. You were helping yourself to me and my life. It may not have been that much of a life, but it was mine. If I wanted to write about it, I would have done so.”

  There was the suggestion of a sigh from Rob. “Yes, your name is in the book, but not your surname. And Anne is scarcely an unusual first name, I think you’ll agree.”

  “But all that time, all those chats, why did you pretend you didn’t know anything when you did? You knew so much more than you let on.”

  “Anne, accuracy was important, is important. If I’d told you everything I knew, it would have colored your own images and recollections. You wouldn’t have delved quite so deeply into your own consciousness. And you have to agree that’s always beneficial.”

  “Beneficial for you? Or for me?”

  He ignored my question, continuing in the same calm tone that he used in his programs. “I think your mother was the woman in the photograph, the one they called Mary, but I can’t say that definitively. McLeish had many mistresses. For all the reasons we’ve already talked about, there was no reliable record of a child or children living there. There was the odd mention, but nothing absolutely definitive. It was very much a floating population. I think you did live there, because your recollections are pretty accurate. But again, I had a duty to my readers and to the memory of McLeish to be fair towards him.”

  “But your duty to be fair didn’t include me. It’s all right for you to say I was subjected to abuse, I was left locked up for days on end . . . It was all exaggerated, turned into something that made you look good.”

  “Anne, dear Anne,” said Emma in a low, clear voice that was new to me. “You have said yourself you had no clear recollection of what really happened, so you can’t really say what Rob wrote wasn’t the truth. The words in his book are your words after all. Rob didn’t make anything up.”

  A flush was rising in my face, spreading along my cheeks. “Did it make you feel good? Copying it all down from my notebook?” Everything was on fire. “When did you do that? That night when we were on our own, or before?”

  “I’m not sure that really matters.” She ran her foot up and down Siggy’s back. He rolled over and she began to rub his stomach. “Life is all about timing. Synchronicity. I saw the notebook in your bag that night when I went into the study to make a call. Well.” She shrugged. “There it was, right at the top. It didn’t take that long to read and I did have my phone with me. It’s not like I had to take notes or anything.”

  “I still don’t get why you did this.”

  Emma scuffed her shoe on the rug. “I thought you would have understood by now, how hard we have to work to maintain everything. It doesn’t happen by chance.”

  Jude’s words came back to me, about the photographs and my words, and how they needed my permission to use them. “I could sue you if I wanted to!” I shouted. “I may not be rich and well connected, but I have legal rights. You can’t steal my life like that. I could go to court and let a judge decide.”

  “We didn’t steal your life,” said Rob. He was so sure of himself. “Go to court, by all means, if you have the money for a lawyer. But you will find everything is in order.”

  “You never got my permission,” I said. “You needed my permission and I never gave it to you.”

  A look of victory crossed Rob’s face. “But you did give permission. My publisher has your signature.”

  I remembered th
e folded piece of paper, the one Rob said was his contract, and my signature. I gripped the arms of the chair. “You tricked me into doing that!” I shouted.

  “It would be your word against ours,” Rob said. “And we do have a certain public standing between the two of us, Emma and me. We are responsible, credible people. So you might want to think about that, and also you might want to think if you’ve got the money to pay our legal costs when you lose the case. Because you would lose.”

  “Rob is right,” sighed Emma, moving closer towards him. “It would only make things more difficult for you. And the irony is—it would probably give Rob’s career a boost.” She took his hand and stroked it.

  There was the thick, ugly thing of Rob and Theo in front of me. “How can you?” The anger rose out of me. “Why are you sticking up for him?”

  “Because we’re a family,” said Emma. “And because he’s my husband and I love him.”

  “But does he love you?” I burst out. “If he loves you so much, and values your family . . .” I couldn’t help it. The words erupted out of me. “Why is he having an affair with Theo behind your back?” I pointed my finger at Rob. “Why are you lying, pretending you’re straight? What’s the point of that kind of deception in this day and age? I saw you with him, in the bedroom, at that party. I saw what you were doing and I wanted to save Emma from it. I practically forced her to go downstairs so she wouldn’t have to see you.”

  The corners of my mouth were clumped with spittle. I fell silent. Infinitesimal bubbles of my saliva floated along the light flickering through the windows. I started up again, even though my throat was hoarse from shouting. “You hypocrite! To do that in your own bedroom, in your own house! Did it thrill you? It disgusted me.”

  They didn’t bother with any fake notions of embarrassment. Again, there was that effortless superiority, with no need to look caught out or to disguise an inconvenient expression. Rob shrugged, leaned back, and crossed his legs. Emma sat up and leaned in front of him. There was nothing tentative about her now.