by Jo Bannister
‘He went out,’ said Ford. ‘Just as I arrived. And I’m not here to argue. I’m here to apologise.’
The sparser of Hazel’s eyebrows climbed just enough to express surprise. Nothing she had seen of Oliver Ford suggested he apologised very often. ‘Really?’ she said coolly. ‘Then you definitely need to come inside. I shall want to sit down.’
If Jack the Ripper had called round, she’d have felt constitutionally compelled to offer him coffee. It stemmed from her upbringing, and her mother’s views on hospitality. By the time the kettle was boiling, some of the awkwardness had gone out of the atmosphere.
‘I so wanted you to have a nice day,’ said Ford ruefully. ‘After what happened the first time we tried to open the damned museum. I let my good intentions get the better of me. I was … Well, I was upset when it went pear-shaped again. But I behaved badly, and I’m sorry.’
‘All right,’ said Hazel. She passed him a mug. (She’d thought about using the good cups and saucers, decided he hadn’t earned them.) ‘Your apology is accepted.’
Clearly expecting something more fulsome, he floundered slightly. ‘I – er – I should have brought you back to town when you asked.’
‘Yes, you should. Never mind, I managed.’
‘Yes,’ Ford said softly. ‘You always do, don’t you?’
‘Well, being let down is a great way to learn self-reliance.’
‘That’s a bit harsh …!’
‘Is it?’ She rounded on him, not in anger – though she had felt anger enough at the time – but in a kind of calm savagery. If he’d come here for platitudes, he was in for a surprise. ‘Of course you let me down. Big time. I was your guest. I was miles from home, without my car, when I got word that my friend’s children had gone missing. And you wouldn’t leave your bean-feast to drive me back. Well, don’t worry about it because there’s always another way. Nobody’s indispensable, Oliver, not even you.’
‘I was there to work,’ he protested. ‘I wasn’t free to leave early.’
‘Then what are you apologising for?’
She’d wrong-footed him again. She gave him no time to recover. ‘And another thing. I don’t care if you play golf with the chief constable three times a week. I don’t care if he thinks the sun shines out of your left ear. You don’t go behind my back and have my boss order me to take something I wouldn’t take from you.’ She took the plain little box out of her pocket, and the little gold pendant out of the box, and quite slowly and deliberately dropped it in his coffee.
Their eyes met. Then, quite slowly and deliberately, Ford drained his cup.
Hazel was still waiting for him to spit the thing out when he started to choke.
For a moment she simply watched, deeply sceptical, expecting him to give a sheepish little grin and let it slip out of his sleeve. But he didn’t. He bent almost double, his chest heaving, a strangled cough bubbling in his throat. Then he stood up, his eyes wild, his face red with effort, reaching for her with a desperate claw-like hand.
That was the point at which it went from a bad joke to deadly reality for Hazel. And she knew exactly what to do. Had been taught exactly what to do. She crossed the living room in two swift steps, evaded his clutching hand and positioned herself behind him. Her left hand, fisted tight, went here, and her right hand gripped it here, and it didn’t matter a damn if she broke his ribs because they would heal but he’d be dead in three minutes if she didn’t …
A split second before the considerable power of her strong young body drove all the air out of his system, hopefully dislodging the obstruction in his gullet, she felt a tap on her wrist. She looked down over Ford’s shoulder and saw the forefinger of his left hand politely attracting her attention. When he had it, he pointed to his right hand. Which went to his right ear and appeared to pull out, slowly, a length of slim gold chain.
Hazel became aware that she hadn’t taken a breath for nearly as long as Ford. She let go of him and took a step back, breathing heavily; and he, breathing heavily, turned towards her, the gold phoenix in his hand and an expression of sly humour on his face, waiting to see what she would do.
He may have expected tears, he may have expected laughter. He probably didn’t expect a swinging right hook to catch him on the jaw and spill him, startled, onto the sofa.
Hazel made no attempt whatever to help him up. She felt more inclined to hit him again. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt quite so angry.
Ford clambered to his feet, unsteady from the blow and perhaps more so from the shock. He felt his jawline, wincing at the pain, and checked his teeth – not vital, perhaps, to an historian but indispensable to a TV personality. Finally he looked at her. ‘If you’d seen the trick before,’ he mumbled thickly, ‘you only had to say so.’
‘I thought you were dying.’ Her own teeth were clenched hard.
‘So you hit me?’
Hazel regarded him, silently, with such fierce ambivalence that he began to realise she might not have finished yet. When, abruptly, she grabbed for him, he flinched.
Still, he could hardly have been as surprised as she was when, instead of round-housing him again, she kissed him.
Some people believed Gabriel Ash to be a highly intelligent man. Many people believed him to be an idiot. Ash himself suspected that the truth lay not in a comfortable median, but in an awkward combination of extremes. That he was a stupid man whose flashes of insight gave the impression of intelligence.
He had one of those flashes now.
As so often before, it was something Hazel had said which triggered it. He went to the computer and did a bit of googling. (A part of his mind not needed by his fingers reflected on the fact that a single new word, which hadn’t existed even as a concept when he was growing up, could define a whole social era. Googling. Hoovering.) He made copious notes, read them over, wrote them out again in a different order, then made some phone calls.
When he was finished he found Patience looking at him expectantly.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s a bad idea.’
The lurcher did nothing of the sort.
‘I need some help,’ he explained. ‘And I can’t keep relying on Hazel. She has her own life to lead. I need someone whose services I have the right to call on, any time I need to. Who’s paid to do what I want.’
He flushed then, as if he’d heard what he just said through the filter of someone else’s understanding. ‘Not like that,’ he assured the dog quickly. ‘I mean a nanny. I’ve been calling nanny agencies. I need a professional nanny to help look after the boys. Then those well-meaning busy-bodies from Family Support can go and worry about someone else.’
The Darling family had a Newfoundland as a nanny, Patience said helpfully.
‘That was in a play,’ said Ash; pausing then to wonder how a lurcher came to know about Peter Pan. Of course, it was entirely possible that she didn’t – that none of the things she seemed to say to him were objectively real. That it was a form of confabulation, where he projected onto his dog comments and ideas that were in fact emanating from elsewhere in his disorderly brain.
But that made it even more important that he get some professional help with raising his sons. If he really was going doolally, they’d need someone who wouldn’t wake up one morning unable to operate the toaster.
Till then, it seemed only polite to keep up his end of their conversations. ‘It’s a kind offer,’ he assured the dog, ‘but I’m not sure the social workers would be much happier about you raising the boys than they are about me. We need a genuine professional – someone who can produce her credentials like John Wayne pulling a six-shooter.
‘They’ll have people for me to interview by the beginning of the week. It was funny,’ he said, frowning at the memory. ‘They were quite shirty with me to start with. I don’t know why. The first thing I said was that if the nanny my friend recommended wasn’t available, I’d be happy to consider someone else.’
The dog appeared to c
onsider for a moment. Then: Nanny McPhee?
‘That’s the one. She must work for another agency; none of the ones I spoke to seemed to have her number.’
Patience was apparently still formulating a response when the doorbell rang. She gave what appeared to be a shrug, or as close as someone without collarbones can manage, and voiced the resigned bark of a dog doing her duty.
It was PC Budgen, from Meadowvale. He greeted Ash with cautious affability, as people tended to when they weren’t sure if they were dealing with the organ grinder or the monkey.
Instantly, the sight of the uniform drove Ash’s thoughts to his sons. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing,’ said Budgen quickly. ‘Everything’s fine. It wasn’t actually you I was looking for. It was Hazel. But she isn’t at home, and I wasn’t sure that kid who lodges with her would pass on the message. I thought she might be here.’
Ash shook his head. His heart was still racing. ‘I saw her outside the school this morning. I don’t know where she went after that.’
‘Well, if you do see her, will you ask her to give me a bell? It’s nothing urgent, but she wanted to be kept informed.’
‘I will of course. Informed about what?’
‘The guy in the hospital. You know, the one who tried to blow up the museum? She asked me to let her know if he woke up. Well, he’s woken up.’
ELEVEN
Gabriel Ash had no idea what to expect of a twenty-first century nanny. In the picture-books of his own childhood, they’d been plump, uniformed persons of severe but kindly mien wheeling sit-up-and-beg perambulators, but he suspected even this most conservative of professions might have moved on a little since then. He was determined to keep an open mind.
The first to present herself at Highfield Road arrived the following day, a tall, angular young woman with spiky hair and a nose stud. Her name was Charity. ‘But everyone calls me Chaz. Parents, kids – everyone.’
She was very far from Ash’s image of what he needed. She spoke rather loudly in a marked Lancashire accent, and appeared to dress from the rummage-box in an Oxfam shop; and when he asked about her views on discipline she gave a great honking laugh and said, ‘Well, I don’t believe in beating kids into submission! On the other hand, by the time you’re old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, you’re old enough to take the consequences of making bad choices. You can tell kids not to play with matches until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t sink in until they burn themselves. It’s my job to make sure they don’t burn themselves too badly.’
Ash wasn’t confident that a goth nanny would reassure Family Support that all was now well in the boys’ lives. In spite of that, he found himself rather warming to Chaz. They parted on good terms, and he promised to let her know.
The second candidate, who arrived two minutes early for her noon appointment, looked much more promising. She was indeed rather stout, and wore a dark suit with a silk scarf in the neckline that almost looked like a uniform, and she introduced herself as Mrs Burns. She might have been a few years older than Ash. He knew immediately that producing Mrs Burns would get Family Support off his back. She was even Scottish, which he vaguely understood was a bonus.
But there was a problem. At first he wasn’t sure what it was, but as they talked it became unavoidably apparent. Mrs Burns preferred little girls. She managed to make Ash feel vaguely inferior for only managing to father sons. She made it clear that, as a matter of professional pride, she was perfectly willing to consider a family with boys, but there simply wasn’t the job satisfaction in caring for them that there was with girls. Her whole demeanour switched between doting and disappointment, depending on which she was talking about.
Chaz the Lancastrian goth was looking more appealing by the moment. But could she do what he needed her to do, which was not so much to look after the boys, a task he could in fact manage himself, but appear a suitable person to look after them? He remembered the careful, watchful social workers who’d visited him and rather suspected she could not.
‘Third time lucky,’ he told himself, and waited for Ms Kelly, who was due on Monday morning.
When, answering the doorbell, he found himself looking clean over the top of her head, for a brief but surreal moment he thought the agency had misunderstood and sent him another child to care for. She was tiny. Even standing on the top step, she barely came up to his shoulder. So the first thing he saw was the top of her head, straight black hair pulled back into a simple knot that reminded him a little of Hazel’s – or what Hazel used to do with hers when it was long enough – except that Ms Kelly’s stayed where it was put, and Hazel’s never had for long.
‘Mr Ash?’ She looked up at him with a small, polite smile. ‘I’m Frances Kelly.’
We all make assumptions. About how people will behave based on their appearance, about how they will appear based on their names. Ash had expected Frances Kelly to be a plain but good-hearted Irishwoman, either a redhead with freckles or an olive-skinned, dark-haired west-coaster, displaying the Spanish genes that arrived in Ireland after the wreck of the Armada.
He was right about the hair, wrong about everything else. Ms Kelly had the almond eyes, peach-coloured skin and delicate bone-structure of the Far East, and she spoke English with the precision of someone who had spent years perfecting it. She looked about twenty. Only as he adjusted his filters, and listened to what she had to say, did Ash realise she was a grown woman with children of her own back home in the Philippines.
She must have realised he was doing some internal adjusting because she said, ‘I’m not what you expected.’
Sometimes it’s less offensive to be honest than polite. ‘No,’ he confessed. ‘I thought you’d be a Dubliner.’
Ms Kelly bubbled a small but genuine laugh. ‘My grandfather was from Ireland. The Philippines is a nation of immigrants.’
‘So’s Britain,’ said Ash. ‘No island is an island now, but it seems our ancestors got around even when they’d nothing but their own feet and the odd dug-out canoe.’
They talked about the boys. About how Ash came to be caring for his boys alone, and why Social Services doubted his competency. He held nothing back. It was important that she understood the nature of the job, the back-story of the people she’d be working with.
When he’d finished, Ms Kelly reflected for a moment. Then she said, ‘Where is your wife now?’
‘No one knows,’ said Ash. ‘On the run from the police. She may still be in England, she may not – I’ve no way of knowing.’
‘Are you afraid she may try to abduct your sons?’
Ash tried to answer honestly. ‘Afraid, yes. Do I think it’s likely? – probably not. I don’t think, wherever she is, she’s in any position to complicate her life any further.’
‘As a mother, she may not see it like that.’
‘That’s why I’m afraid.’
He realised he was being more open with Ms Kelly than he had been with either of the previous applicants. They talked about the legacy of the Ash boys’ unsettled early years. About their very different personalities – clever, intense Gilbert, easily moved to anger and resentment, and pleasant, easy-going Guy, everybody’s friend, the human Labrador.
On which subject: ‘How do you feel about dogs? No allergies or anything?’
‘I’m very fond of dogs, Mr Ash. Most nannies are. Dogs and small children are not terribly different, you know. Both respect fairness, and return love four-fold.’
Ash asked, as he had asked Mrs Burns, about discipline.
‘Computer games,’ replied Ms Kelly promptly.
‘You give them computer games when they misbehave?’
‘No, I take them away. I put them in a big see-through box with a padlock that I keep in the kitchen. Every time they sit down to eat, they see them. They see them, they want them, they remember how they lost them, and they think maybe they should behave better in future. Oh, computer games are a wonderful invention!’
‘When they’ve earned them. By being good, or helpful, or kind. Everything we do has consequences, Mr Ash. Positive consequences or negative consequences. I don’t think children should be burdened with the ills of the world, but we all need to try to make it a little better.’
They talked a while longer, then Ms Kelly left, in the hatchback she’d parked at the front gate. A car very like its owner: diminutive, outwardly modest, quietly classy. Ash had had to restrain himself from offering her the job on the spot. ‘I’ll be in touch with your agency.’ But before that he wanted to talk to Hazel.
Even before that, there was Patience’s opinion to consider. Behind the closed door he raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Well?’
Dogs are like children! said the lurcher indignantly. If I leave paw-prints on the kitchen floor, is she going to lock Spikey Ball away?
Spikey Ball was Patience’s only treasure. She never visited the park without him. He was pink and squidgy, and gave her the sort of guilty pleasure that a grown man might get from a collection of comic books – knowing her enthusiasm was rather childish did nothing to diminish it. (He was also, by common consent, male. Patience always referred to him as He; and, worryingly, Ash had started to do the same.)
‘I’ll get you a spare Spikey Ball, just in case.’
It won’t be the same, grumbled Patience; but she raised no further objections.
Which left only Hazel. He hadn’t seen her since their argument at the school gates on Friday morning. He thought about phoning, decided to go round to her house before collecting the boys from school. He was pretty sure he owed her an apology – another one – and it was hard to do it properly over the phone.
Her car was parked in Railway Street, so Ash expected to find her at home. But Saturday answered the door, and only shrugged when Ash asked for Hazel.
‘She isn’t here?’
The boy shook his head, slouched back to the sofa.
