by Rebecca Tope
So she bundled herself into a thick coat, with scarf and woolly hat, and set out to see what Hampnett might have to offer.
CHAPTER THREE
As chance would have it, there was a service taking place in the church, and as Thea and her dog approached, the strains of organ music wafted down the grassy bank to greet her. Three cars were aligned along the edge of the grass, and as Thea strolled past, people began to emerge from the church door. Ahead of the small group came a young woman, head tucked between her shoulders as the wind nipped at her. She wore a thin coat, and looked pinched with cold.
Curious as always, Thea paused to watch this unlikely churchgoer, and as the girl reached the gate leading out of the churchyard, their eyes met. Thea smiled, and it was as if she had held out a hand to someone dangling over the edge of a deep abyss. ‘Hello,’ she said, unable to repress a slight question in her tone at the naked hope and relief on the face in front of her.
Hepzie, as so often happened, provided the necessary lubricant by jumping up at the new acquaintance, who responded with a small cry of delight. She grabbed the long soft ears and bent down to gaze into the dog’s eyes. ‘Who are you?’ she murmured. ‘Good little dog.’
The accent was marked, but not instantly identifiable. She looked up at Thea. ‘I am Janina, from Bulgaria,’ she said simply.
Thea mentally transposed the Y of Yanina into a J, remembering a student friend of the same name. ‘Oh. Pleased to meet you,’ she said. Bulgaria was well beyond her scope, she realised as she quickly scanned her memory for anything at all. Nothing. Did it have mountains? Was it east or west of places like Poland or Hungary? Or did it neighbour Yugoslavia – were the people Muslim? The girl had dark hair and eyes, but her skin was the same hue as Thea’s. ‘Do you live in Hampnett?’
‘I am nanny, over there.’ She waved a hand to a point vaguely northwards where there was a handful of farms and old stone houses. ‘I am free for half a morning, so I go to church.’
‘I see.’
‘I am not interested in church, you understand. It is the only place to escape, where I can sit in quiet. People look at me, but I close my eyes and forget them.’ The English was carefully good, the sentences constructed slightly in advance of their utterance. Thea wanted to retreat from this premature confession, this exposure of an unhappiness that she would far rather not have to face.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Six weeks,’ came the answer in a flash. Janina shivered. ‘Six long weeks.’
Why did they come? Thea wondered. What sort of life did they expect here – and was it really so much better than what they had at home? Could mere money ever compensate for the loneliness and low status and general unpleasantness?
They had begun walking away from the church, taking the small road in the direction that Janina had indicated. A car passed them slowly, the elderly female driver ducking her head to stare at them shamelessly. This, more than anything, forged a bond between Thea and the young woman. Instinctively she closed the gap between them.
‘How many children are there?’
‘Two. Benjamin is six and Nicholas is almost four. He is to have a birthday party next Saturday.’ The gloomy resignation in her voice made Thea snort with a brief laugh. ‘Yes, it is funny, I know. A party should be happy, with games and a lot of food. Perhaps that will be how it is, but only if I make it so.’
Thea murmured an encouraging syllable. ‘His mother hates me,’ Janina announced. ‘Because she is stupid and I am not. Because she has made big, big mistakes and is now in a trap. She can see that I know her to be a fool, and that makes her hate. I understand it all, but what can I do? Every time I look in her face she can see what I know.’ This emerged as a prepared speech, and Thea wondered whether the hour in church had been spent in thinking it through. ‘She is a terrible mother, with no love for the boys. She pays me to love them for her.’
‘Where’s their father?’
‘Hah! The father is Simon, who works in a hotel near Stow-on-the-Wold. He is always working, but at home I never saw a more lazy man. He drinks beer. He watches football on the TV. He says he is tired from the guests who bother him every moment of the day.’
Probably true, thought Thea. She had always considered hotel work to be amongst the most demanding and exhausting imaginable. ‘What does their mother do?’ she asked.
‘Oh…she works in advertising. She abandons her boys for such worthless work. Worthless,’ she repeated. ‘It brings no good to anybody. It is about lies and deceit and nothing more. Stupid woman.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Her real name is Beatrice, but we call her Bunny. Call me Bunny, she says as if that were a sort of gift. A grown woman, forty years old, named Bunny. That is stupid.’
Thea began to feel a flicker of sympathy for the maligned employer. This high-minded nanny must be rather a strain to live with, if indeed her scorn was as visible as she believed it to be. There was an uncomfortably obsessive element in this outpouring of bile to a total stranger.
‘My name’s Thea Osborne and this is Hepzibah,’ she said. ‘We’re here for a month.’
Janina paused, as if arrested by a firm hand laid on her arm. ‘Ah, I am sorry,’ she breathed. ‘I have talked too much. How rude. Thea,’ she repeated. ‘And Hep—?’
‘She answers to Hepzie. It was a silly choice of name. I’ve regretted it ever since.’
‘So change it,’ said the Bulgarian, as if the obviousness of this was almost beyond any need to state it. ‘A dog cares nothing for a name.’
‘Too late,’ said Thea lightly.
Janina shrugged. Not my problem, was writ large on her face.
‘Did you qualify as a nanny in Bulgaria? Your English is excellent.’ She stopped. Any more questions and it might sound like an interrogation.
The girl pouted contemptuously. ‘Qualify! What need for study to care for young children? It is crazy. I have four young brothers – that is my qualifying. I mean qualification,’ she said the word emphatically, even boastfully. ‘My mother took a new husband when I was twelve and…’ she made a hissing zipping sound, flicking one hand in a horizontal sweep ‘…then there were four small brothers, all in four years, like a magic trick.’
‘Gosh,’ said Thea faintly.
‘Fortunately, I like small boys. They are funny and warm and brave and wild. I was happy to come here to take care of Nicholas and Benjamin, for money. It is good money, I think. And the food is not bad. But the woman is…’ she looked around as if afraid of eavesdroppers ‘…she is a monster. I am sorry to say it, but it is true.’
‘Well…’ said Thea helplessly. ‘I’d better go back now. I suppose I’m rather like you. I have to take care of a woman’s animals, and her house, while she’s away. And my money’s pretty good, too. We’re the new domestic servants, you and me. It’s like it was two centuries ago, when rich women paid other women to do the dirty work.’ Even as she spoke she felt a pang of remorse at this small betrayal of Lucy, who clearly didn’t object to dirty hands at all.
‘I too have more duties,’ said Janina with a sigh.
‘I’m sure I’ll see you again. This is a very small village.’
‘It is not a village, not at all.’ The raised voice contained a genuine fury and frustration. ‘Here nobody cares for each other, no sharing, no place to gather. This church, today, I expected all the people to come. Instead there were six very old ladies, a man who seemed to be in some deep trouble inside himself, and another man, also very old, who talked aloud to himself. It was like a hospital – a place of dying. They are all there because they are afraid and hope for rescue. But they know it will not come.’ She shook her head in despair at the follies of the English that she had somehow fallen amongst. ‘I will not go there again,’ she added. ‘It was worse than my room in Bunny’s stupid house. Except for the decorations, of course. The decoration is a glory. It reminds me of Rila Monastery at home.’
‘Oh?’
‘You have not seen it?’
Thea glanced towards the church, where a knot of people still hovered in the porch. ‘I’ve heard of it. I’ll come back another day for a proper look.’
‘Any day but Sunday,’ Janina said with a shiver. ‘No more Sundays for me.’
‘Cold in there, I expect.’
Again Janina shrugged. ‘Not so cold as Bulgaria in winter. I come from Plovdiv, close to the mountains. There is snow.’ She stared wistfully at the grey sky.
‘Well…’ Thea tried again.
‘Yes, you must go. I too. No free time for me now until next Sunday.’
‘Surely that can’t be right,’ Thea objected. ‘What about the evenings?’
‘They go out, to see their friends, two, three evenings each week, so I must babysit. And why should I object? I have nowhere to go, nothing to do. The children like me.’ Her face became pinched. ‘Too much they like me. When I leave, they have to begin all over again, to like a new person. It is cruel. They are boys – they should learn about trust and security, if they are to make good husbands and fathers when they grow up. All these two learn is how to bear it when women walk away from them. It will be what they learn to expect – they will push everyone away from them. It makes me very sad.’
Thea’s eyes widened. ‘You’ve really thought about it, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘It was my degree subject – psychology. I did my postgraduate course on how children learn to form relationships. I understand too much,’ she added darkly. ‘Too much for comfort.’
It was, Thea gathered, all rather a shock for the poor overeducated clever girl, finding herself in the role of servant to a stupid woman. Could it be possible that she earned more in Gloucestershire as a nanny than she would as an academic in her own country? Why did she submit to such a miserable fate, otherwise?
‘Well, I’m glad I met you,’ she said, and then had a thought. ‘Maybe you could bring the children down to the Barn. There’s a donkey and some rabbits they could play with.’
‘Barn?’
Thea explained, and a vague promise was made. They parted with wistful smiles.
A rhythm established itself over the next three days, which left Thea quite contented. She did her routine shopping in the little town of Northleach, where life appeared to have stopped around 1955. The market square was bordered by shops selling basic requirements – bread, groceries and pharmaceuticals, with a post office added for good measure. The excessively large church, built with wool money, stood protectively to the north, but Thea did not visit it. The people she met were almost all over sixty, and she found herself imagining her widowed mother living there, readily establishing new friendships. But then she noticed a card in the post office window on which a woman in her sixties pleaded for companionship, and wondered about the drawbacks. Northleach was no Blockley, with its legions of clubs and outings and talks and exhibitions. It was calm and quiet and forgotten, entirely beautiful, and probably perfect for a week’s holiday. Further than that, she couldn’t say. But she enjoyed her visits, which she made by car, despite it being scarcely half a mile from Lucy’s Barn to the market square. One day, she promised herself, she’d make the trip on foot, discovering the hidden nooks along the way.
She set up the lacemaking cushion, but found it much more complicated than expected. Putting it back in the bag, she regretfully decided to abandon it until she could find someone to teach her.
Almost she could accuse herself of complacency. None of the dramas that had taken place during previous commissions were going to happen here. How could they, in this tiny place, with the low grey skies and almost total lack of activity?
But there was one small unexpected drama on the Wednesday; the kind of drama nobody could object to.
She had gone out to feed the rabbits as usual that afternoon. They were in no hurry to partake of the food Thea gave them, and only three emerged from the bedroom area in the cage containing the four does. Carefully, Thea unlatched the door into that section, and peered in. A pretty blue-grey ball of fluff was crouched in the corner, nose twitching, eyes wide and bulging. Thea identified Jemima, the one she had cuddled under Lucy’s scrutiny. In another corner was a nest, apparently made of hay, but with some wisps of hair protruding from it. ‘Uh-oh,’ said Thea, capturing a distant memory of rabbits owned by her younger sister, twenty-five years previously. ‘What have we here, then?’
With the gentlest probing fingers, she investigated, and found a toasty warm huddle of babies buried under layers of fur and hay. ‘And how did this happen, hmm?’ she demanded of the wild-eyed mother. ‘Oh well, you seem to know what to do. I’d better give you some extra rations.’
It was a greatly consoling thing to find. New life, the hairless helpless scraps so perfectly protected in the midst of a grey January – it suggested a whole range of happy hopeful feelings. But it also added to Thea’s responsibilities. The other rabbits probably ought to be removed, especially if one of them was an undiagnosed male. Males were unreliable around babies, and should not be permitted to cause trouble.
But where to put them? The second cage, containing Snoopy, was quite large. Perhaps the three exiles could go in there, and the buck be found some smaller temporary shelter. Meanwhile, everything appeared peaceful in the new family, and she was reluctant to interfere for the time being. Jemima was big enough to defend her offspring against the other three, if it came to it. She would see how things stood in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thursday 11th January arrived, and Thea woke early with a sense of something having changed. Curtains were closed across the small window, and everything was silent. It was half past seven – a time when it was still almost dark in January. Instead, there was a flat eerie light coming through the curtains, which Thea took some minutes to understand.
‘Snow!’ she exclaimed, when she finally went to look out. ‘Masses of it.’ Her initial reaction was a childish excitement, combined with awe at the absolute beauty of the scene. The yard between the house and outbuildings was a pristine expanse of glittering white, the sheds rising starkly to present vertical planes of muted colour, before more white obliterated their roofs. There was no flicker of life – no bird or fox or stoat seemed to have left any footprints in the snow.
‘Gosh!’ Thea muttered to Hepzie, a few minutes later. ‘This could give us some trouble.’ Quickly, she did a mental scan of food stocks, and the basic needs of the animals in her care. Water – the outside pipe would be frozen, so the donkey would have to be supplied from the house. Would the rabbits be warm enough? How would she get Jimmy out for his lavatory trips?
‘Oh well,’ she went on. ‘Snow never lasts for long in this country. It’ll all be gone by tomorrow.’
The donkey was not impressed by the change that had come over his world. He laid his ears back and shook his head firmly, standing in the open doorway of his shed. So much for Lucy’s assertion that he patrolled his patch whatever the weather. Thea fetched hay and water and left him to it. Walking across the virgin snow in her wellingtons, she was alarmed to discover that it was a good nine inches deep. Progress was exhausting, even over the fifty yards to the donkey shed and back.
The rabbits showed no sign of having noticed anything different in the weather and the nest of new babies seemed undisturbed. Jemima’s companions lolloped appealingly around their large two-storey cage, snatching eagerly at the cabbage leaves and carrots proffered by Thea. ‘Make the most of it,’ she told them. ‘It might be short rations from here on.’ There seemed little reason to start moving them, the new mother appearing relaxed to the point of complacency.
Jimmy was even less disconcerted by the snow. He picked his way to his usual toilet corner, and performed exactly as if nothing at all had happened. His pee left a yellow streak in the snow. Hepzie, in contrast, thought the whole thing was laid on especially for her. She reverted to puppyhood and cavorted ecstatically, forging a gully for herself through the cold white
stuff, getting more and more clogged with chunks of it sticking to her long hair. Thea wished there was a child with her, to justify building a snowman and throwing handfuls of snow around. As it was, she had to make do with the dog, who was already showing signs of having had enough of the novelty. ‘You can’t come in the house like that,’ Thea told her. ‘You’ll make a flood when all that ice on you melts.’
She compromised by putting the two dogs together in the conservatory, where the stone floor wouldn’t mind some wet. Then she tuned the radio to a local station, feeling a sudden need for human voices and relevant information.
The snow, it seemed, had brought civilisation to a standstill. Schools were closed, trains and buses cancelled, roads barely passable. ‘And there’s a lot more to come,’ added the newsreader, barely concealing his glee. ‘Another six or seven inches of snow is forecast for this afternoon and evening. Brace yourselves, folks – this lot could last a week or more.’ Thea felt the thrill of a crisis, a surge of adrenalin at being forced to cope alone in an isolated snowbound house. ‘We can always eat the rabbits,’ she told Hepzie and Jimmy. The glass roof of the conservatory was grey with the weight of snow, and made occasional creaks that Thea tried to ignore. She had a feeling you were supposed to clear it off this sort of roof, which was not designed to take anything heavy.
