The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  “Your lack of understanding here is disappointing.” There was that patient, slow tone in her voice again, as if I were a particularly dim student. “I am married to Rob. I will always be married to Rob, whatever the situation. Being together is so much better for both of us, for our lives and our careers and reputations and for Jake and Lily, than being apart. I hoped that your time in our house would have taught you something, got you out of your conventional little ways of thinking.”

  “You’re the ones who are being conventional, pretending like this. Who cares? People can sleep with who they like and not lie about it. Being homosexual is legal in this country, haven’t you heard?”

  Again, I recalled my first meeting with them in this room, when they moved together and smiled, when I felt that they believed in me, that they liked me more than I liked myself; that I was worth something. The things that happen in the air between people, after dull, gray nothingness.

  Emma moved forward, so close that I could smell that woody herbal scent she always wore. “Did you imagine that I didn’t know? Well, you’re not as smart as I thought. All that has nothing to do with our marriage, how we are as a couple and how we are as a family, nothing at all. You haven’t understood a thing.”

  “I could go to the newspapers—tell them the truth about the so-called power couple.” I was floundering by now. We all knew it.

  “Oh, puh . . . lease,” sniffed Emma. “You wouldn’t get past first base and you know it. That is a rock-bottom empty threat.”

  Things blurred after that. I remembered it only as a series of sounds. The clink of my set of house keys as I flung them on the hall table. Rob’s audible puff of annoyance. The clack of Siggy’s toenails on the hall floor. The squeak of the gate leading onto the street and the slamming of the front door behind me. I got myself home and lay on the sofa and wept.

  Isabella had written that a housekeeper had to consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress. But didn’t the mistress have responsibilities as well? It seemed an unequal equation.

  Jude came the next evening, on her way to Heathrow to pick up Philip. She hugged me, a fierce embrace. “It won’t always be like this. Keep telling yourself that. Have they called, begging you to come back?”

  “Not again. They put a month’s pay into my account.”

  “Blood money,” said Jude. “And Theo?”

  “He rang, left a message saying he was sorry that he wasn’t going to see me again. No mention of anything else.”

  “You need to get working,” she said. “Find a job. Keep busy. The other stuff will solve itself if you just give it enough time. You have to stop worrying at it like a dog with a bone.” She produced a bottle of wine, something from Philip’s enormous cellar, and surveyed my kitchen. “When was the last time you cooked a meal in here?” She foraged about for a corkscrew. “The oven looks straight out of the box.” She opened the bottle with an efficient twist and poured us half a glass each. After her first sip, she opened the oven door. “You’ve never even used it.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “How come the labels are still stuck on the trays?” That was the thing I loved about Jude. She always made me laugh. “Seriously,” said Jude. “You’ve got to do something.” Her bracelets clinked as she stood up. “I need to go—don’t want to be late. The Heathrow run is part of my occasional wifely duties. It makes Philip go all warm and fuzzy when I’m there instead of a chap with a cap. You should try it one day.”

  “What? Being a chap with a cap at the airport?”

  “No. Being with someone who likes you, who’s your mate, and you stick with them for life. It’s not so bad.”

  29

  The mistress of the house . . . ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment; and that it is by her conduct that its whole internal policy is regulated.

  —Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

  For a month I moped and wept. It seemed I’d returned to the same dismal place I’d inhabited a year ago after Anton, except now there was no daily message from Emma to brighten my life. For the first week, I pressed the delete button each day with a stab of fury. Then I unsubscribed from her emails, which made me feel even more desolate.

  I’d like to say that I managed to forget all about Rob and Emma and Jake and Lily, but I didn’t. Particularly I missed Jake. I missed Siggy, the way he rolled over for me to scratch his stomach, his rough fur and his meaty breath. And I kept thinking about my mother and Kinghurst Place and McLeish. I thought about all of them every single day. Not all the time. But at night before sleep, and in the morning, I indulged in my fantasies.

  I saw myself setting off on my own hunt for information about McLeish. I would find someone else who’d lived at Kinghurst Place, someone whose mind was still clear, who remembered my mother and me. Somehow I would make sure that Rob and Emma knew that I had proved to be the better detective after all.

  I imagined Wycombe Lodge falling to pieces without me, a slovenly set of rooms with the sour smell of dust and flaked skin and damp towels everywhere. I conjured up images of burned food, dirty dishes piled in the sink, and soiled clothes heaped everywhere. Each morning I checked my mailbox in case Jake had replied to the letter I’d written to him. Each morning it was empty. I sent him a message through Facebook. No reply.

  There was the irresistible Google alert. I was surprised how often I was notified, even before the book was published. I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of Rob’s programs, but I read about his guests, their reminiscences and regrets. I knew about Emma’s regular appearances on that daytime television show and also that she was planning a new book on househusbands. There was a photograph of them on the opening night of a National Theatre production, smiling at their new friend Dominic Butler, the star of the play.

  I avoided the corner store in case I ran into Imran and Faisal. The thought of making jolly chitchat with them was too much. But I knew I couldn’t go on like this forever. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t afford it. Jude was right. I needed a job.

  A week later, I had an interview in a Richmond restaurant called Gunya. It was small and tucked away in a pedestrian lane near the Green, owned by an Australian couple with broad smiles and a ferocious appetite for hard work. “Gunya means ‘home’ in the Wiradjuri language,” said Mimi as she deftly plucked pin bones from a fillet of cod. “They’re an Aboriginal tribe. Their land was near where I grew up.” She put the fish to one side and swept the bones into a bin. “So what do you think? We don’t go in for that traditional old-world kitchen hierarchy thing. It’s more a team effort. We take it in turns to decide the menu and to work the pass. You happy with that?”

  I nodded. “Good,” said Toby, her husband. “It might feel a bit chaotic to start with, but it works for us.” His clear green eyes looked me up and down. “Do you want to begin now, or tomorrow?”

  I laughed, but he wasn’t joking. I started the next day.

  The kitchen was tiny and poorly equipped compared to the one at Anton’s, with its enormous Rorgue range and its walk-in refrigerators full of vegetables and perfectly hung pieces of meat. Gunya had Ikea tables and chairs, and battered secondhand ovens and commercial hobs. Mimi and Toby scavenged nettles and dandelion leaves from Richmond Park, grew herbs in their allotment, and scorned city bankers’ favorites of beef fillet and turbot.

  “Why would you want to cook stuff like that?” asked Mimi, wrinkling her freckled brow. “A person might die of boredom.” Local residents must have agreed with them. The restaurant was always full and I liked the look of the customers. There was no one famous or particularly well dressed, and the prices were low enough for young couples and sometimes even entire families.

  Within a week, I was back into my old rhythms of fifteen-hour days, chopping and braising and roasting. I liked their style of cooking. It was honest and unpretentious. They didn’t concern themselves
with delicate arrangements of herbs or swirls of sauce. They served their version of good family food and it happened to be mine as well. I started early and finished late. At the end of my shift, my muscles ached. I was worn out, but in a good way. There was a kind of pleasure in being too busy to think.

  But I didn’t stop missing Jake and Lily, and I didn’t forget about Rob and Emma. I certainly didn’t forget about the book, due for publication any minute now, according to the most recent Google alert. Sometimes, flushed from late night glasses of wine with Mimi and Toby, I conjured up a photograph in a glossy magazine of us accepting our first Michelin star. It would be proof to Rob and Emma not only that I had survived, but that I had triumphed.

  Then the next week, as I walked to work, all the shops full of fake snow and Christmas baubles, I saw the book, Madhouse, in the window of a bookshop. I stopped, almost tripping up the person behind me, and made my way into the shop slowly, like someone who’d been attacked. I picked up the book. The inscription on the front page read: “To Emma, always.” I stood there, not moving, not flicking through the pages until someone bumped into me, breaking my trance. The woman at the till glared at me. I bought a copy and hurried out of the shop.

  There was a moment when I strode along the Green, past the theater and the elegant terraced houses, when I wanted, more than anything, to turn around and rush home. But I remembered Jude’s advice. Sitting inside my own walls doing nothing would be futile. I needed the oblivion of a hard day’s work that wouldn’t allow the luxury of anger or despair. There had been enough of that. I didn’t stop all day. In the lulls between lunch and dinner, I scrubbed shelves and cleaned refrigerators and mopped floors.

  “What’s got into you?” asked Toby. “You’re like a whirling dervish.”

  “Just feel like it,” I muttered, looking up from my bucket, annoyed that the hours had gone so quickly. Now I had to face everything all over again. On the bus home, I opened the book and turned to the blurred pictures of myself. A girl about eighteen sat beside me, smelling of wine and cigarettes. She leaned towards me and I snapped the book shut, not wanting her to see the photographs. For a mad moment, I thought she had recognized me, and that she was about to turn and shout to the other passengers and tell them who I was. But she was only pulling her phone from her pocket.

  At the corner shop, I bought a bottle of wine. I swallowed half in one gulp and poured the rest into the sink before I could finish it. An hour or so passed in a blurred haze before I dozed off. I woke just before midnight with my head squashed between two cushions. I levered myself upright and picked up Rob’s book. Jude told me not to read it, but I couldn’t just leave it on the table unexamined. And why had I poured the last of the wine down the sink?

  The windows were closed, the noise of the city shut out. Everything around me was silent except for the sounds of a building closing down for the night; the sigh of settling timbers, the hum of appliances. Straightaway I opened the book at the sections devoted to Kinghurst Place, to my story. Hope and dread sprang up in equal measures. I read it scrupulously, turning each page with a shaking hand. But there was little that hadn’t been covered in Rob’s television program or in newspaper and magazine articles.

  It was after 1 a.m., but it would be impossible to sleep now. I read on, to the recollections of McLeish’s followers and their stories of why they came and why they stayed. Everyone mentioned McLeish the savior, McLeish the daddy they never had, and McLeish the man who opened his arms when the world shut them out.

  “I was in hospitals or institutions all my adult life,” said one man, who called himself Johnny. “They said they could fix me, or that I could stay, and then they told me I could leave when I wanted to, which was their way of telling me to get out, that I didn’t count for anything. McLeish was different. He cared. In the beginning he really cared about all of us.”

  The recollections turned grim. McLeish was not always the loving father of the extended family, the benevolent caregiver. After a while, he spoiled some and spurned others. “It got bad towards the end,” said another follower. “The drink was getting to him and the drugs too. I see now that it’s better to take the meds, so you know what’s going on. I didn’t think like that back then. I was keen on going with the madness. We all were. But it turned sour. Weird and cruel, especially the dancing thing. McLeish took to humiliating this woman who’d been one of his favorites, as much as he had favorites. He told her she was getting old, that she’d lost it. He said it was time for a bit of a jiggle up, whatever that meant. I only remember because after that she tried to kill him. She just flew at him. I didn’t see her much after that.”

  This time, I didn’t need to reach for my notebook or wait for an image to surface. Everything was there, right behind my eyes.

  Summer and I’m playing outside, no clothes on, the grass warm under my feet. I’m dancing with Marianne in the sun and then there’s that tobacco smell. He sits beside us and draws on his cigarette. “She’s a pretty little thing,” he says, and I’m pleased, because he always used to call me a brat and tell me to go away. Now he lets me sit on his lap. “I think she’ll enjoy it. Children do, you know. I’ve been reading about it. They get to love a bit of jiggling.” And Marianne is between me and him, and her arms are around me and there is that fierce metallic smell rising from her, and we run away as fast as we can.

  Something was making a noise. It was my teeth, chattering. Something was moving. It was my knee, jumping in a jagged rhythm that wouldn’t stop until I hugged my legs to my chest, my whole body shaking with the force and clarity of the memory, clear as if it had happened yesterday. I prayed to any and all gods who had ever existed that Rowan McLeish was not my father.

  Work became my Prozac, numbing the unspoken thoughts that had knotted in my mind. Gunya was busier than ever and we barely had enough time to sleep. It was a month before Christmas, overcoat weather, and we cooked golden food: saffron risotto, osso buco, and slow-cooked stews with thyme and lemon zest.

  “We’ve been thinking, me and Toby,” said Mimi one Friday after lunch. “You’re doing a third of the work, so you should get a third of the profit. As I said, we don’t go in for hierarchies. Too old-world for us. What do you think?”

  Behind her, Toby grinned. “So, are you ready to commit? Don’t go all English on us and say you have to think about it.”

  I heaved the last of the baking pans onto the overhead rack. “I am thinking about it,” I said, my back towards them. “Very hard.” I turned towards them. “OK. I’ve thought about it now. My answer is yes.” There was the unfamiliar feeling of the stretch of a smile across my face.

  30

  I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of a family’s discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.

  —Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

  Mimi’s menus over the past weeks had been full of traditional English food, tasty but without a hint of chili or what I called a proper spice. It was time for a trip to Southall. I drove past the Church of Eternal Truth. The sign outside the church read: DEATH. THE END OF EXCUSES. THE BEGINNING OF ETERNITY. Could it get any cheerier?

  Still, the thought of perhaps seeing Jake again was irresistible. I parked the car and crossed the road. Inside the church, near the table of cups and saucers, I saw the old man with the tombstone teeth. “You came back.” He beamed. “How splendid.”

  “Somehow I just couldn’t help myself.” I sat at the back, where I could watch everyone walk in and out. The church was already full. There was the same airless atmosphere, the same group of teenagers at the front, the same sea of red caps. Only the preacher was different. This time, a skinny man with a Northern accent stood on the dais with his cordless microphone. He was dressed entirely in black and looked like Johnny Cash. I didn’t listen to his words, just to his voice as it rose and fell with rhythmic monotony. Every few minutes, the congregation murmured approval. Occasionally they clapped.

/>   I wasn’t so put off this time. I almost envied them—the way these people were able to walk into this broken-down hall, dump their faculties of reason, their doubts, and their failings at the door, and emerge an hour later refreshed for the week ahead. I could only imagine the joy of that. Then I must have nodded off, because the next thing I realized was that my head was jerking up and down and people were walking past me. Jake was one of the last to come out. He stopped when he saw me. His face was expressionless and I thought he was about to walk away. I followed him outside.

  “I’m not stalking you,” I blurted. “I wanted to see you.” My breath condensed into frosty puffs that wavered between us. “I was so sorry not to say goodbye to you and Lily. Everything happened all at once. I sent you a note, trying to explain things and asking how you were. And then some messages through Facebook.”

  “I never got the note,” he said. “But that’s no surprise. A load of stuff gets lost in our place. And I don’t do Facebook anymore. But I’m fine, thanks.” Even in less than two months, his voice had deepened, and there was much more golden fuzz about his chin. “It’s good to see you, really good. Lily and I, we’ve missed you.” He didn’t ask, but the question was there, unspoken.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. I wanted to embrace him, to tell him how much I’d missed him and how often I’d thought of him. “Maybe it’s best not to try.” A man wheeling a pram came up from behind us and we moved away to let him pass. “I’m getting a curry across the road. Want to join me? And then I can drive you back home.”

  He waggled his head about for a bit. “Sure. Why not?”

  I’d never been properly inside the restaurant before. I’d just hung around the front counter until my takeaway was ready. The dining room was like every other old-fashioned Indian restaurant: flocked red wallpaper, statues of Hindi gods and goddesses, and an enormous flat-screen television blaring from the back. Jake looked around warily.