Nannyland

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  She nodded. “It’s upstairs by my bed, in a pink bottle.”

  I poured her a glass of water and made her sit down at the kitchen table. Now that the crisis was over, my own hands were shaking so badly that the water slopped onto the table as I set the glass down. I wanted to collapse alongside her with a gigantic gin and tonic and have someone massage my shoulders and tell me how brave I was. Instead I said, “You sit here and rest while I run up and start Henry’s bath and get your medicine. Okay?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “Okay, young man,” I said briskly. “Let’s get you into that hot bath.”

  “I don’t need a bath,” he protested. “The rain washed me.”

  “Get upstairs!” I barked. If I could intimidate a roomful of derivatives traders, I could sure as hell get one six-year-old boy into a bath. Sulkily, he trudged up the stairs behind me.

  I started the bath and ordered Henry out of his sopping clothes, then found the medicine bottle in Mary’s room and tucked it into my shirt pocket. As I headed for the stairs, I heard gasping sounds at the end of the hallway and tensed again. Now what? Had Mary followed us up and had another attack? Dear God, what now?

  — – — – —

  I followed the sounds around a bend in the hallway, flung open the door, and saw the unlovely, slightly hairy bottom of a shaggy young man pumping away atop the enthusiastic body of—wait for it—the missing nanny.

  I exploded. “Deirdre! What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Do you realize that Henry almost drowned and Mary almost died while you were up here? Get out! Get out before I call the police!”

  The young man leaped off her, wilting visibly in the face of my fury, and Deirdre snatched at a blanket to cover her nakedness. “Get out!” I screamed at him, and he grabbed a pair of trousers from the floor and fled.

  Remembering Henry’s bath, I hurried back to the bathroom to shut off the taps and make sure he wasn’t having his second near-drowning experience of the day. He was playing happily with a collection of plastic soldiers who apparently lived in the bath, so I left him to it and hurried back to Deirdre. Then I remembered Mary’s medicine, so I ran down to the kitchen, where she was sitting quietly in the chair with a book in her lap, and gave her the medicine, and ran back up to Deirdre. Christ, this was more exhausting than the trading room!

  Deirdre was sitting on the side of the bed, coolly smoothing her purple leggings and pulling on high-heeled boots. She glanced up at the sight of me. “You can go back to your cottage now,” she said coldly.

  “I don’t think so,” I returned, equally coldly.

  “You threw out my boyfriend. You made me look a fool. Now get back to your little vacation and leave me alone.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said again. At the very least, I thought, I should call John and tell him what had happened. Find out if Mary needed to go to the doctor. Make sure Henry didn’t catch pneumonia. Mental note: Google “children and pneumonia.”

  “If you don’t leave, then I will,” she warned. She got up and sauntered to the mirror, peering into it and pursing her lips for an application of gloss. At the sight of her self-satisfied preening, a rush of pure rage swept through me. I thought of all my childhood nannies who had ignored me and scolded me and wheedled extra money out of my mother when she didn’t get home at the dot of seven. Because I was so difficult.

  “Get out,” I ordered her. “Get out of this house and don’t come back. You’re fired.”

  “You can’t fire me,” she returned. She dropped the lip gloss back into her makeup case and took out an eyeliner pencil, leaning toward the mirror and frowning in concentration.

  “Oh, yes, I can,” I said. “You’re lucky I don’t call the police and have you arrested for reckless endangerment. Or child neglect.” I had no idea what the laws were in England, but it sounded good.

  Infuriatingly, she laughed. “So now you’re a solicitor, too, are you?”

  I walked over to her, picked up the makeup case, opened the casement window, and flung it down onto the cobblestoned courtyard below. I heard a gratifying crash of broken glass and turned back to the staring girl. “You. Are. Fired,” I said loudly and clearly.

  “Fine!” she shouted. “You take care of these brats all day and see how you like it!” She threw the eyeliner pencil at me and stormed out the door, stiletto heels clacking loudly on the beautiful old wooden floors.

  I was all alone with the children.

  Chapter 9

  WELL! ANYTHING DEIRDRE could do, I could do better. I squared my shoulders and marched back into the bathroom. “Henry,” I said firmly, “finish washing and get some warm clothes on.”

  “I’m hungry,” he whined. “Tell Cook I’d like some bangers and mash for lunch.”

  “Please,” I prompted automatically.

  “Please.”

  I ran back down to the kitchen, aware that I was still wearing my cold, soaked jeans and muddy sneakers. I had left snails of mud on the lovely Oriental runner and high-polished oak floors. “Where’s Cook?” I asked Mary, still sitting quietly with a book in her lap.

  “Cook has a half-day on Tuesdays. She goes to her niece’s in Bourton.”

  “Oh. How about, um, the housemaid?”

  “Maisie doesn’t come in every day.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, Henry wants bangers and mash.”

  “Uh-huh.” She turned a page of her book. “I’ll have a fruit plate, please, if it’s no trouble.”

  Fruit plate I supposed I could do, but bangers and mash? What were bangers and mash, anyway? “Uh, Mary?” I ventured. “What’s the password for the kitchen computer?”

  Google defined bangers and mash for me, so Henry was soon forking sausages and mashed potatoes into his mouth with the relish of a hungry boy. Mary picked at her apples disinterestedly; I watched both children, biting a nail as I wondered how I would break the news to their father. The kitchen phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, is Deirdre there? Or Lord Grey?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Is Deirdre on her way, then?”

  On her way somewhere, I thought, but probably not where you think. “I’m sorry, on her way where?”

  “To school, of course, to pick up Katherine. Matron is getting quite impatient.”

  “Uh, can’t she walk home? Or isn’t there a school bus?”

  Pause. “To whom am I speaking, exactly?”

  Once again, I turned to Mary. “Do I have to pick up Katherine and Jane at school?” I hissed.

  A girl of very few words, she nodded.

  I turned back to the phone. “This is Jordan Greene. I’m temporarily in charge of the children. Can you give me directions to the school?”

  Afraid to leave Henry and Mary alone at the house, I bundled all of us into the Volvo station wagon—“estate car,” Mary called it—and headed down the road at approximately six miles per hour. Looking exhausted, Mary leaned her head back against the shabby leather upholstery and closed her eyes, but Henry shouted out enthusiastic instructions to me.

  “Watch out, Jordy! Didn’t you see the stone wall on the side of the road? Man oh man, is Daddy going to be mad at you! Mary, did you see her scrape that wall? And now she said a curse word! But I won’t tell Daddy on you, I promise!”

  Katherine’s running commentary, when the Volvo jerked to a halt and stalled in front of her school, was hardly more uplifting. “Do you really know how to drive? Do you have a driver’s license? Do you know how to cook? Because I’m hungry and you’re very late, you know, and Matron said if you’re late again, she’s going to have to speak to Daddy, and do you know that your hair is sticking straight up in the back?”

  Jane, when I finally found her school, said, “I didn’t know where Deirdre was, so I called her cell phone and she said you fired her, so I called Dad
dy and he said you should call him immediately. What happened?”

  “You fired Deirdre?” Katherine shrieked.

  “You fired Deirdre?” Henry echoed. “Good-o.”

  “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” Katherine sang, and Henry joined in. “Ding-dong, the Wicked Witch is dead.”

  I winced at the scraping noise as the car collided with a large bank of shrubbery on the left side of the road.

  Henry laughed. “Now the right side matches the left!”

  — – — – —

  “You fired Deirdre?” John barked incredulously into my ear. “Why the bloody hell would you do something like that?”

  “John, I’m sorry, but you can’t imagine—”

  “You’re bloody right, I can’t imagine what could have possessed you to do such a thing. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that I couldn’t allow—”

  “You weren’t thinking!” he shouted back. I glanced around at the ring of interested small faces surrounding me and backed out of the kitchen, clutching the phone to my ear.

  “—don’t know what gives you the right to fire my employee and leave my daughters waiting until you found the time to fetch them from school, and is it true that you scraped both sides of a perfectly good Volvo? How is it even possible to scrape both sides of a car?”

  I was accustomed to unreasonable, loud males—any trading room is full of them—so I waited for him to finish, tapping an impatient foot as I held the phone away from my ear. Finally, he wound down.

  “If you’re finished,” I said icily, “I will tell you exactly why I fired that girl and why I think you’re criminally negligent to have left your children in her care.”

  “I am all ears. Do proceed.”

  “While Deirdre was upstairs having sex with her boyfriend—”

  “What?” he exploded.

  “You heard me. While Deirdre was upstairs having sex with her boyfriend,” I repeated inexorably, “Henry was trying to row out to the little island in the pouring rain, and Mary was having an asthma attack in the kitchen.”

  Silence.

  “I pulled Henry out of the water, put him in a warm bath, found Mary’s inhaler, and fired Deirdre. Do you still want to yell at me?”

  More silence. He sighed. “Perhaps you’re not entirely to blame—perhaps I even owe you thanks—I knew that Deirdre was a problem, but she was only temporary . . . it’s been so difficult to find someone suitable for the children since . . .”

  I stiffened my resolve against sympathy. “Well, now you’ll have to find someone better,” I said. How hard could that be?

  “Oh, bloody hell,” said John.

  I sympathized with that sentiment.

  “Jordy?” His voice was tentative, wheedling. I knew that male trick, too.

  “No,” I said.

  “Just for a few days? Until I can find someone suitable? It would be a great kindness to me—and to the children.”

  “No,” I said again. “I have a book to write, and I don’t know anything about children.”

  “Neither do I,” he said in a burst of honesty.

  “I’m sorry. I really can’t,” I said.

  He sighed heavily, and I waited interestedly for the next ploy.

  “I’ll pay you,” he offered. “Would five hundred pounds per week be sufficient?”

  Five hundred pounds! On a good trading day, I could clear that in a few seconds. “Don’t insult me,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I am at your mercy. What can I say to persuade you? It’s just for a few days, I promise.”

  “What about your mother? Surely a doting grandmother would leap at the opportunity to bond with her—”

  John groaned. “Jordy,” he said. “Please.”

  I remembered what Jane had said about her grandmama and reconsidered. Even I might be better than that.

  Just then, someone tapped tentatively on my arm and I looked down to see Jane’s pale face. “Jordy? Henry’s just been sick all over the kitchen floor.”

  “I hate you,” I muttered into the phone. Then I hung up and went into the kitchen to clean up the vomit.

  Chapter 10

  I HAD TO move into the great house; the children couldn’t be left alone at night. We stumbled along until the week’s end with no further crises. At least nothing absolutely disastrous. I burned my fingers on the toaster oven when I was trying to fish out some soggy bread that had fallen between the cracks; the Volvo acquired a dent in its front bumper and a really ugly scratch along the driver’s-side door; and Katherine informed me that I would never catch a husband if I didn’t take better care of my hair, which was badly missing its professional blowouts at Dry Bar on Wall Street.

  John called every night to check in, and our conversations deteriorated over the course of the week. I would inquire how the nanny search was going; he would groan and tell me that the only two applicants were a Latvian prison matron and a pregnant fifteen-year-old; I would hiss some threats at him, and we would slam down our respective phones. Surely with his money and connections, he could get Mary Poppins if he wanted her; I simply could not understand what the problem was, which infuriated me even more. He kept offering me more money and I kept refusing, which annoyed us both in equal measure.

  By Friday morning, the children and I had fallen into something of a routine. The day would start with my cell phone alarm going off at seven A.M. I would squint hazily at the time, wondering why I had allowed myself to sleep so late when the Japanese markets had been open for hours. Then I would remember that I was no longer a hedge fund manager but a nanny, and drag myself out of bed. No matter how early I woke the children, they were sluggish in the mornings, and we always seemed to be running late.

  “Henry! Mary! Katherine! Jane! Get up, you don’t want to be late for school.”

  Jane would emerge, already dressed in her drab school uniform and bent almost double under the weight of her backpack. “We wouldn’t be late if you got us up earlier,” she would reprove me. “I’ll get Henry dressed, you do something about breakfast.”

  As we both knew by now, “something about breakfast” would mean stale muesli and burned toast that I tossed at the children as we raced into the car. Then I would propel the Volvo, in an uncomfortable series of fits and jerks, down the country lane while Katherine realized that she had forgotten her games uniform and Henry remembered that he was supposed to bring the football snack today. Mary and Jane sat quietly, struck dumb by the magnitude of my incompetence.

  The children finally deposited at school, the Volvo and I would limp home together. I would cajole Maisie into doing some laundry so I could stare at my computer in the sunny morning room until it was time to start picking up the children and ferrying them to their after-school activities. Every now and then I would glare at John’s cool, aristocratic profile in the family portrait that hung over the fireplace. He would pay for this, I promised myself. One way or the other.

  John’s assistant Maitland had arranged for Cook and Maisie to come every day, so we sat down to a succulent shepherd’s pie and fresh-tossed salad on Friday night. I had exchanged barely two words with Cook; her dialect was so strong that I could understand only one word in three, and she kept very much to herself. The children dug into the meal with an air of almost palpable relief. I had brought my iPad to the table—if they could have their electronic toys, why couldn’t I?—and the silence was disturbed only by the occasional sound of Jane turning a page or the pinballs clashing on Henry’s Pocket Arcade.

  Katherine glanced up from her iPhone. “Can you drive me to a party tonight?”

  I grimaced. “Can’t anyone else take you?”

  “No. You have to drive me. It’s in Stow.”

  Now Jane looked up. “At the Ormonds’? Katherine, you can’t go to that party. It’s all older ki
ds.”

  “You’re just jealous because they invited me and not you,” Katherine countered. For the first time, I was glad I was an only child.

  “I’m not jealous, because I would never want to hang out with those kids, and you shouldn’t, either. Daddy would never let you go to that party!”

  “Daddy’s not here, is he? So Jordy will take me.”

  “Jordy will not take you,” I said.

  Katherine burst into tears.

  Henry let out a wail of anguish. “My Pocket Arcade died! I got all the way to Level Four and it just died! Look!” Big fat tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  “Jordy,” Jane said in alarm, “Mary’s starting to wheeze.”

  I glanced at Mary in alarm; sure enough, the girl’s cheeks had gone dead white, and her eyes were filled with tears as she struggled for breath. “Mary!” I said sharply. “Where’s your inhaler?”

  At that moment I heard the front door open and slam shut. John walked into the room and surveyed the scene in grim silence.

  — – — – —

  “I told you I had no business taking care of children,” I protested. It was two hours later. Katherine had been soothed with the promise of a riding lesson tomorrow; Mary’s inhaler had been located and used; Henry’s game had been resuscitated with new batteries; and Jane had withdrawn to her room in her usual silence. John and I sat together in the morning room, nursing brandies.

  “I don’t think you quite explained the extent of your inexperience,” he replied.

  “Now that you’ve witnessed it firsthand, don’t you think it’s in everybody’s best interest for you to find a real nanny?”

  He hesitated. “Yes. I certainly do. But I have to be back in London tomorrow. I’m sorry, Jordy, truly I am, but I’m afraid you need to carry on for just a little longer. I even swallowed my pride and asked my sister, Pamela, to pitch in for a day or two—”

  I perked up; this was the first mention I had heard of an aunt. Why, of course! The children would adore having their beloved auntie Pam to come care for them! Perhaps she cooked and cleaned and sewed errant buttons back on games uniforms.