She steps over the threshold into the hall. The same flags inside, patinated grey with centuries of mud and scrubbing. Buttermilk walls lead to a black-studded garden door, their plaster so lumped and loosened by age that much of it is only held on by the layers of paint on top. A bunch of keys that could double as an offensive weapon sits on a console table. Rows of heavy-duty iron coat-hooks trail down the walls, fixed to boards, Shaker-style. Each one is empty.
Low, wide doors – doors designed for short people in wide dresses – lead off the hall, to the right into a dining room where a naked, scrubbed oak table crouches between – she counts them – eighteen upholstered modern chairs which she recognises from the Ikea catalogue. The nearest Ikea is in Bristol, she thinks: I suppose it would be worth the trip if you were buying eighteen chairs at once.
To the left, a drawing room: white walls, tapestry curtains, three sofas, each big enough to host an orgy, surrounding a coffee table that would roof an entire house in parts of other countries. A fireplace fit for tree-trunks yawns dark and cold beneath monstrous beams. A pair of large and gloomy ancestors fills the alcoves either side of the fire. Somewhere in the distance, the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of a clock.
Bridget has never been in private rooms this size without paying for a ticket before. She understands now why whoever-it-is has left the door open; it is, if anything, letting warm air into the house from the outside, even though it's November.
She checks her watch. Still ten minutes early.
“Hello?” she calls, tentatively.
A clitter of nails on black-stained floorboards, and a smiling cocker spaniel appears at the far end of the dining room, wags its way towards her. Pleased – oddly relieved – to see another living creature, she drops to her haunches, chucks him behind the ears and is rewarded with a squirm of elegant backside and an onslaught of enthusiastic pink tongue.
“Hello, boy,” she says, laughing and holding the grinning head away from her mouth. “Where's your master, then? Eh? Where is everyone?”
The dog glances over her shoulder into the drawing room, pulls back from her clasp and heads suddenly, decisively, back the way it has come. Bridget follows. The curtains here are thick blue velvet, hanging down from ceiling height to cover window seats let into walls three feet thick. The windows themselves start some six feet up in the air: too high to afford a view to a standing person, let alone one sitting. This must have been some sort of business room, she guesses: a place where smock-clad tenants waited to be summoned into the smaller reception room – panelled, carpeted, cosy, less imposing than the ones she’s seen so far – that she glimpses through the door to her right, in the wing of the U. The dog trots on through the door ahead of her and she follows. A kitchen, industrial-style. Stainless steel oven and eight-ring burner built into the old fireplace; warmer-cupboard, double butler’s sink, American fridge-freezer: all incongruous with old pine cupboards and drainers, the tiny, stone-framed window that looks out over a waterlogged lawn. More flags on the floor: she can feel the winter seep up through the soles of her shoes.
There is another door on the far side of the kitchen, closed.
“Hello?” she calls again.
Still no response. The dog sits – crouches to keep his rump from the flags – by the door, looks at her over his shoulder with big, sad eyes. Raises a forepaw and strokes the panel with it. She notices, as she lifts the latch, that it has a lock. Puts her head into a cobbled lobby where more industrial equipment squats: washing machine and tumble-dryer, vacuum cleaner and sheet press; tangles of retractable washing lines above her head. To her right, another room – once, she guesses from its panelling, an ante-room to the receiving room. A chaos of broken furniture, high-piled lampshades, cardboard boxes and paper. A dead room; the sort of room you only find in urban houses when the occupants have been carted away by Social Services. Old magazines. Photograph albums. Legless chairs. Chairless legs. Things that are sharp and things that are heavy and things that are coated with the dust of decades.
Yasmin flashes through her mind. I’ll have to keep this locked, she thinks. And if there isn’t a lock, I’ll have to fit a bolt, out of her reach. There are things in here that could kill her.
There are things everywhere that could kill her, Bridget. The world is full of deadly situations for six-year-olds. She could go under an SUV on Brixton Hill, for God’s sake. Her school could catch fire. She could get her hands on any number of chemicals under the sink in that cramped little kitchen, fall head-first from a climbing frame, get snatched from the street. She’s so precious and so vulnerable. Did I used to be like this before Kieran? Did I worry, every second of the day, like this? Was that why I made such a mistake? That I thought he was strong, that he’d protect me?
The dog slips past her, shows her a path between tables and cupboards and plinths that leads to a narrow door, which stands ajar. She can see an equally narrow staircase beyond; steep steps between the damp-stained walls of a lean-to. And, at last, a sound of movement above: bumping, the sound of something heavy being dragged. A dead body? She wonders. It could be… this could all be a front to get women alone in a –
She kicks herself. “Hello?” she calls again.
The movement stops, as though someone is listening. She hears, once again, the clock in the distance. But it’s not a clock: the rhythm isn't quite right, isn’t quite regular enough. It’s more like something flicking, flicking, flicking against a floor somewhere.
“Hello?”
Footsteps. A man’s voice: reedy, open-voweled, indisputably posh.
“Hullo?”
“Hello?” she calls again.
He’s on the stairs, now, coming down. She sees the hammer in his hand before she sees his face.
“Who's that?”
“Bridget Sweeny.” She’s started calling herself by her mother’s maiden name recently: the one on her birth certificate, though few people know that. Her feelings towards her married name have changed with experience, but, more importantly, if she’s going to pull this off, she needs to distance herself from the stuff Kieran will remember.
“Ah.”
He is framed in the doorway. Spare, like the voice; a jutting Adam’s apple and dark hair that has receded into double-V peaks from his forehead. He’s in his late thirties, she guesses – half a decade older than she is – and favouring the older end of his age-group, his skin not helped by clumps of rosaceous scarring that pit his cheeks.
“You’re early,” he says, an edge of reproof to his voice.
“Sorry,” she replies. “It’s hard to get the timing bang on, coming down from London.”
He misses the nuance. “Never mind. Better than being late, I suppose. I’d been hoping to get the flat a bit more sorted out before you got here. The last incumbent left it in a bit of a… Tom Gordhavo.”
She momentarily thinks that this must be some local idiom before she remembers that this is his name. “Nice to meet you,” she says, shaking his hand.
“How do you do,” he says.
Chapter Three
Well, she seems respectable, he thinks. Though of course you can never tell at first sight. But in Tom Gordhavo’s experience, dishonesty is usually accompanied by overfriendliness, and this woman is, if anything, a bit stand-offish. He likes that, though. He doesn't have time for staff who want to share every detail of their history and health issues. She merely asks if it would be possible to put a gate in the hedge which divides the garden off from the old pond, to prevent her six-year-old from wandering down there by herself, which seems a reasonable request to him. He’s been meaning to do it anyway, as a couple of the renters have complained about the risk over the last year and an accident would very likely be a bit of a dampener on his inclusion in the brochures, so he agrees readily enough. He deliberately keeps a bit of a Frances Hodgson Burnett vibe about the grounds as a USP for the house, but there’s stuff renters see as colourful and stuff that is simply dangerous. He stores the suggestion away a
s evidence that she shows signs of having some sense about her. Proactive, she would probably call it, being infected, no doubt, by the buzzword vocabulary of London business. He decides to try the word out, to see.
“I need someone,” he says as he walks her through the dining room, “who can be a bit proactive.”
There’s the tiniest of pauses behind his back as she takes the word in, suppresses a grin. “Well,” she says evenly, “I ran my own business for several years before I had my daughter. So I think I’m reasonably used to making decisions.”
“Oh yes?”
Own business, he thinks. Could be anything. Public Relations. Envelope stuffing. Could have gone bankrupt, for all you know. Why else would someone be applying for a housekeeper’s job, if they’d had any other options?
“What sort of business?” he asks, trying to keep the suspicion from his voice.
“I was a florist.”
They come to a halt at the front-door end of the room, in front of table which carries a giant display of immortelles and thistle heads in an old ginger pot. They’ve seen better days, he thinks. It must be ten years since they were put there.
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. I had a shop on Lavender Hill. In London,” she continues, as though anxious that he won’t understand that she’s been trading in the capital. "Though I did business right across most of the south-west of the city. Flowers for boardrooms and reception areas, that sort of thing. Parties. Weddings. Weekly deliveries to ... " she pauses as she considers whether it’s the right phrase to use with a rich man, as he obviously must be, decides he’s not the type to approve of princessish manners - "save the Ladies Who Lunch from having to actually do anything... you know. I had three employees, at one point. And a delivery driver. It was a pretty successful outfit, I guess. For a small business."
“I see. So why, if you don't mind me asking, don’t you go back to that?”
“Lots of reasons.”
She runs a finger over the table, leaves a long stripe in the dust.
“The last housekeeper left a month ago,” he says, hurriedly, “in a bit of a rush. And I don’t think she'd really been doing her job very well for a while before that.”
She rubs index finger and thumb together, studies the ingrained grey in the pads noncommittally.
“My husband died eighteen months ago,” she tells him. Glances in his direction to see if he’s picked up on the lie. She needs to be convincing, if this is going to work. “So it’s just me and Yasmin now. And running a shop doesn’t really go with single motherhood. Especially not that sort of shop. The five-in-the-morning New Covent Garden run isn’t really compatible with normal nursery hours.”
It always amazes Tom, the way people can talk about bereavement with such seeming equanimity. She can’t be more than thirty-five, he guesses, yet she talks about her widowhood with none of the rage that he knows would assail him if he were in the same position. He noticed it with his mother, as well: she seemed to accept his father’s death with a calm that, three years on, he still hasn’t achieved. And yet, he thinks, there probably isn’t a person on the earth who guesses about his moments – those times when he sees a view his father would have enjoyed, when he longs for his father’s counsel, when he is driving up the drive to Penwithiel for the Sunday lunch he has eaten there throughout his adulthood and remembers, once again, that he comes from a family of three, not four, and a wave of sadness breaks over him so strong that he feels it will suck him under. Does she, he wonders, lie awake at night and weep for this dead husband? Or is her life so hard, now, so full of coping, that she has no time for emotions? Certainly, she looks as though life is toughening her up. It’s easy to see that she used to be pretty under that mop of home-cut mousy hair, that she probably could be again; just hard to see how it would be achieved.
“I’m sorry,” he says lamely. “It must be hard for you.”
Bridget shrugs. “These things happen,” she says. “I don’t suppose many of us have the lives we thought we’d have when we were fifteen.”
“I should think not. I was definitely going to be a pop star when I was fifteen.”
She laughs. “And I was going to be a model.”
It hangs in the air between them: Only one of us has ended up with the money, though.
Ironic, she thinks. Having money was definitely part of the game-plan for Kieran and me. We definitely encapsulated the Yuppie dream. He was going to go up in the City, get onto the trading floors, not be a backroom boy forever, and I was going to open Branches. Be the Oliver Bonas of flower arranging. It was part of the attraction, part of the reason I picked him, out of all the choices I had: that he was going places. That we were going to go places together. And instead, look at it: I marry a man who was going to help me be rich, I put my ambitions in someone else's hands, and now he's got money and I've ended up hostage to poverty, and bailiffs, and the curse of the CSA.
She stamps on the train of thought. Can’t afford self-pity. Have to be an optimist. It’s the only thing I’ve got left.
“So…” she sweeps a hand through the air, gesturing round the room, “aren’t you worried, leaving all this stuff here for holiday tenants? They’re never exactly careful, and you never know who they might be… they could turn up with a removal van, for all you know.”
“Well, yes, that’s one of the reasons we need a housekeeper,” he says. “Keep an eye on things. But don’t worry. You're not actually looking at a houseful of priceless antiques. They’re repro. We bought most of it as a job lot in Indonesia and brought it back in a container.”
“But the pictures?”
“Good, aren’t they? All family stuff, of course. Just not the originals. You’d be surprised how convincing a finish you can get nowadays, with computerisation. It’s only if you look closely that you can see that the brush strokes aren’t actually related to any actual images.”
She steps close to a huge portrait of an eighteenth-century squire, gun over his shoulder, square felt hat on his head and boxy dog at his feet. He is standing, she notices, in the fields through which she has just driven; Rospetroc, tiny in the background, is surrounded by a whole clump of yews where the solitary one still stands. “Gosh,” she says.
“We find people like having portraits. Even more than landscapes and stuff. Gives them more of a sense of authenticity.”
“Yes, but I can see why you wouldn’t want to trust the originals to them.”
“Absolutely. It would be like having someone smash your family gravestones, if anything happened to them. This chap’s in my parents’ –” he corrects himself, as he still has to after three years “ – mother's house.”
“Who is he?”
“Another Tom Gordhavo. My… I’d have to work it out how many great-greats he is to me.”
“Did he live here, then?”
“No. This house came from my mother’s family. Though obviously the two families have been related on and off for hundreds of years, the way things tended to be run. The Gordhavos owned the big house.”
Bridget wonders how big the big house can be if this isn’t it.
“So if you don’t mind my asking, why doesn’t one of the family live here now? How can you bear to be letting a place like this out to strangers?”
He has no intention of telling her the full story. Knows through the generations that servants are prone to superstition and will immediately start seeing things if told about them. They’ve not managed to recruit a housekeeper from the local vicinity since the war, despite the constant laments about lack of local employment and incomers driving people from the land.
“The family isn’t as big as it used to be. And this is the most isolated of the houses we’ve got. It made sense not to have one of us flung miles away from all the others.”
She accepts this without murmur.
“You’d be all right, would you,” he asks, “with the isolation? You can’t really walk to any of the neighbours, and the village is a good c
ouple of miles away.”
“To be honest, it sounds like heaven, after London,” she tells him wholeheartedly, thinking of the grease-caked whores who work the pavements of her small patch of Streatham.
“Because,” he says, “we’ve had a few disasters with housekeepers down from the city. They all think they can handle the isolation, but I don’t think many people take in what it actually means. The Winter’s a long, dark thing, even down here. Nobody to bump into on the streets even if you do get down to the village; they do everything by car in the winter. And we don’t have many renters, out of season…”
“I understand what you’re saying,” she says. “There’s a school in the village, though, isn’t there? What’s it like?”
“Not bad, as far as I know.” He’s a governor, of course, but it’s unlikely any child of his would pass through its doors for anything other than the charity bring-and-buy.
“Can't be any worse than where she is at the moment.”
“Granted. Let me show you the rest.”
She follows him through the drawing room with its bungalow-sized fireplace. “TV, video, DVD in here. You’d be amazed. They think they’ve come down for a communal week in the country, but they can’t do without EastEnders. Fireplaces are all working, of course. You’ll need to clean them out daily when visitors are here. Weekly hoovering, dusting, polishing. Bathrooms, top to bottom between parties and a quick daily wipedown when they’re in situ. Kitchen seems to need a total revamp every time it's used. You’ll be surprised how long it takes.”
No I won’t, she thinks. It's huge. The drawing room alone would fit her flat twice over beneath its blackened beams.
“You need to make up all the beds and strip them and do the laundry, of course. Between groups, or weekly, if they’re staying longer. There are two full sets for each bed, plus the odd spares against wear-and-tear. The turnaround in the Summer can be quite hellish. Checkout’s at ten and the new ones arrive at three. There are a couple of women in the village on standby to come in and help out with the fast turnarounds, but you’ll have to do it all yourself most of the time. I’ll need you to keep me updated on what needs replacing, of course, and there’ll be a petty cash fund for cleaning stuff.”
Hold My Hand Page 2
