by Morag Joss
‘There’s been a breakage,’ Jean announced. ‘Today, while I was dusting. A teapot on the sideboard. Blue and white, Chinese, with silver mountings. Not very large.’
There was another wait while Shelley prepared the tone of her reply and Jean heard the breathing grow unmistakably irritated. ‘Well, you’ve just proved my point. We have to fork out the excess on that now. You’ll need to find it on the inventory and notify us and we’ll have to tell the owners. You have got the inventory, haven’t you? It was in with the rest of the paperwork, with our letter and the owners’ list, you know, all their do’s and don’ts?’
‘Yes, I’ve got the paperwork. And the list, all the do’s and don’ts. Plenty of them.’
‘Yes, well, that’s their prerogative. People can go a bit over the top, especially when they can’t meet the sitter themselves. The Standish-Caves had to fly out the day before you arrived, that was all explained, wasn’t it?’
The list of instructions and grudging permissions for the house sitter that had come from the owners, via the agency, filled several typed pages. They were wide-ranging: no open fires, no candles, do not use the dining room or drawing room, use TV in small sitting room, use only kitchen crockery, do not use the cappuccino machine or the ice cream maker, always wear gloves to dust the books, beeswax polish only- no silicone sprays, you are welcome to finish any opened jars, unplug the television at night. Jean hugged her cardigan closer.
‘You’d think I’d never house-sat before. You’d think I don’t know the first thing.’
‘Well, you can’t blame them, can you, especially not now something’s broken. It is their house.’
‘I could have a go at mending it. I’ve still got the bits.’
‘Don’t touch it! They’ll want it properly mended, if it’s even worth doing. These clients are very particular, that’s why they’re using us. That’s why you’re there. Oh, Jean.’
There was more laborious breathing from Stockport until Jean finally cleared her throat and said, ‘Sorry.’
Shelley said, rather quickly, ‘Well, I’m sure you are but I mean this is the point, isn’t it? This is just the point. You are sixty-four. Suppose it happens again? Suppose you had a fall or something- well, our clients are paying for peace of mind, which they’d not be getting, would they, not in that particular scenario. No way they’d be getting peace of mind if Town and Country let their sitters go on too long.’
‘It’s only small. They probably wouldn’t even miss it, there are hundreds of things here.’
‘Jean, you’re in a people business. The client’s needs come first. That’s key. Isn’t it? You’re in the client’s home.’
Jean sniffed. ‘You don’t have to tell me that. I have been doing this eighteen years.’
‘Yes, and maybe that’s why it’s time to call it a day, isn’t it? After all, we’ve all got to retire sometime, haven’t we? I should think you could do with a rest! Where is it you’re retiring to, again?’
There was another wait while Jean said nothing because she did not know, and Shelley shored up her elective forgetfulness against the disturbing little truth that for eighteen years the agency had corresponded with Jean, on the very rare occasions when there was a gap between house-sitting assignments, care of a Mrs Pearl Costello (proprietrix) at the Ardenleigh Private Guest House in East Sussex somewhere. St Leonard’s, was it? This year Jean had asked as usual for an assignment that would span Christmas, and they had nothing for her until this one at Walden Manor, beginning on January 3rd. Shelley sighed with an audible crackle as her jacket shifted on her shoulders. All right, so Jean had no family. But today was Shelley’s first Monday back from ‘doing’ Christmas for fourteen people of four generations in a three-bedroomed house, and she told herself stoutly that family life could be overrated. Jean probably had a ball at the Ardenleigh.
‘Going to retire to the seaside, are you, Jean?’
‘I’m looking at a number of options. I haven’t decided.’
‘Good for you. Right, well, I’ll let you get on. Send us on a notification of the breakage. Oh, and can you remember in future when you answer a client’s phone, you should say, “Walden Manor, the Standish-Cave residence, may I help you?” It’s a nice touch. You don’t just say hello, all right? Company policy. And careful with that duster, at least till you’re enjoying a long and happy retirement!’
Jean put down the telephone in the certain knowledge that Shelley in Stockport was doing the same with a shake of the head, a crackle of her clothing and a despairing little remark to the office in general about it being high time, getting Jean Wade off the books.
That evening Jean lit a fire in the drawing room. When it was well alight, she drew the agency’s letter from her pocket and laid it carefully over the flames. Its pages curled, blackened and blazed up as the logs underneath settled with a hiss and a weak snap of exploding resin that sounded to Jean, smiling in her deep armchair, more like an approving sigh followed by faint and affectionate tutting. Only as the flames died, and to her surprise, did she become aware of a dissatisfaction with the emptiness of the room. Jean did not acknowledge loneliness. She had long recognised that two states, solitariness and a kind of sadness, were constants in her life, merely two ordinary facts of her existence. The two things might have been related, but as far as she could she left that possibility unexamined. Because even if they were, what could she do about it? Like many people who cannot abide self-pity, Jean sometimes felt very sorry indeed for a buried part of herself whose very existence irked her. And of course she was alone now, sitting in the glow of the fire and of warm-shaded lamps, in the low, beamed drawing room with its deep rose carpet and the heavy drapes pulled against the dark outside. She occupied a solid wing armchair, one of several chairs in the room which, along with two sofas, were covered in materials that were all different but belonged to the same respectable family of chalky old shades of green, pink and grey. She had never been more comfortable in her life, and she was, of course, alone. And so what dissatisfied her suddenly, she thought, could not be simple loneliness, not some unmet desire for a companion, but more a regret that she was the only person in the world who had seen the short but satisfying burning of the letter. For it had been a ceremony of a kind, watching the maroon, swirling print of the letterhead ‘Town & Country Sitters for total peace of mind’ go up in flames; and ceremonies should be witnessed even if they are not quite understood, Jean thought. She could not say exactly what the significance of hers had been, whether it marked an end or a beginning, a remembrance, an allegiance, a pledge- but it had been in a way purifying, and there should have been somebody else here to watch it with her. Somebody who might afterwards stay a while, and to whom she might talk in her underused voice, all about the letter, and Mother, and houses and growing old, and who, occupying the other chair by the fire, would nod and understand. And who, later perhaps, almost carelessly admiring her cleverness and good taste, would assure her that one smashed teapot among so many half broken things did not matter, that all would be well, even that her ill-chosen cardigan was, in fact, a beautiful shade of amethyst.
***
I felt that way about the objects even before the teapot. And also before the teapot, there was another thing. I felt, walking through the house, that time itself had stopped passing or rather, since that is impossible, that its passing had begun to seem irrelevant in the way that a war fought in another country becomes, eventually. For it seemed to me that in this house the only purpose of time, before it grew dark, was to let something beautiful happen to the light that was coming in through the windows. The hours of those first afternoons just moved over and made space for me to be quietly entertained by the light entering, fading and then leaving us, the things and me. I thought it was the kindest present I had ever been given.
I tested this second feeling for the first few days and reached an accommodation with it. I realised that in a house like this time passes so gently it seems not to be doing so at a
ll unless you pay attention to the way light changes. Time had stopped pulling me along the way it had begun to, with that letter. It was as if time would let me linger for as long as I wanted, would even linger along with me, but so quietly that I would not notice it at my side.
All this is the wisdom of hindsight, of course. I couldn’t have put it into words at the time. All I could have said for certain back in January was that I was happy in a beautiful house. Also that I saw, for certain, that people are mistaken when they say that joys are fleeting. It’s the opposite. I had arrived thinking, worrying, really, that it wasn’t long until September. But in the first week here I learned that a part of joy is the apparent infinity of it. When you are happy, happiness stretches out ahead of you, its end forever receding even as you suspect that something this good can’t last. But it does. It goes on, and you’re confounded, you ought to be expecting it to finish, and it doesn’t. Then something quite giddy gets into you, and then you start to think you need it to go on. And it does, it does. It’s one of the things about it. Suddenly, because I was happy, the time until September was so, so far away. Happiness surrounded me like trees so I couldn’t see September, waiting.
She had not told Shelley the half of it about the teapot. When it fell and shattered on the dining room floor after what seemed the merest push from the feather duster, it had spilt keys. Several, perhaps forty of them, had skittered and skidded across the flagstones like enamelled seeds from a spent case. Jean was at first offended by the accident, feeling that she had been almost forced into it. The owners’ list had commanded, ‘Use the feather duster. Do not lift objects to dust them’ and Jean had so far been obedient. So really, the breakage could be said to be their own fault, for if she had been using a cloth, or if she had been holding the teapot instead of pushing the stupid feather thing at it as it sat on the sideboard, it would not have slid off and smashed.
But the broken teapot ceased to matter when she picked up the keys from across the floor and considered them, for this was a house with a great many locked doors. Householders varied, Jean had found. Some encouraged a house sitter to move in and treat the place as their own, proffering so much access that it was embarrassing. In her time Jean had been invited to use computers, drinks cupboards, dubious videos, occasionally a sauna and once the client’s electric hair rollers. Others were less profligate but still welcoming, sometimes dust-sheeting and closing unneeded rooms as much for the house sitter’s convenience as their own. But few locked rooms the way these people had, without explanation, but still leaving open four empty bedrooms upstairs and all the downstairs rooms that Jean was supposed to clean and maintain but not use. They had also locked what they called, in their instructions, the pool pavilion, the garages, the potting sheds and implement store. Desk drawers and small cabinets throughout the house also had been locked and the keys taken away. And had been placed in the blue and white teapot at the back of the sideboard, Jean now supposed, lifting and dropping handfuls of keys, letting them clank softly in her palm. Or to be more accurate, placed in the teapot so that they would be hidden from her. Her vague offence over the owners’ behaviour was warming into resentment. They were practically saying they did not trust her. Did they assume that a humble house sitter would be unable to resist the temptation to sully their beautiful and valuable possessions?
The keys that were obviously for cars were of no interest to Jean, who had never learned to drive. Nor did she think she would ever need or want to operate garden machinery using the keys with paper tags marked mower, old saw and new saw. But the largest mortice keys would surely open the locked doors upstairs. They would show her the rooms that were thought too good for her, which would offer up their spaces, grateful that she had come to claim them. The smaller keys, she guessed, would be for cupboards. They would reveal even finer things that would console her for the destroyed teapot, treasures yet more precious, even now waiting to be brought into the light. And the smallest keys would surely turn the locks of some of the carved boxes, of hidden drawers in exquisite cabinets; they would yield with scarcely a click and she would pull out tiny handles and lift lids on secrets that these people, in their insulting way, had thought to keep from her. Next to these pewter-coloured keys, whose dullness merely disguised the scale and richness of what they protected, the bright blue and white, silver-mounted teapot was already losing its glamour. Jean retrieved the porcelain shards, now as discarded and irrelevant as shed skin, and put them in a bag.
***
You might think it’s a perfect recipe for bitterness, living all alone in the house of somebody much richer than you are, but I don’t think I have ever fallen into that particular trap. Besides, this house isn’t the biggest place I’ve done or the most luxurious, nor did I mind not having neighbours. It’s a solitary job anyway, you accept that, and a mile from the village isn’t really that far. Thinking about it I’ve been much more solitary in towns, behind electronic gates in huge opulent houses full of expensive trash, usually in places that are both popular and disgusting, like Bournemouth. Or Wilmslow. I could never be anything other than solitary in places like that. Those houses have carpets so thick you think you’re walking on squashed animals, and big upholstered chairs with huge cushions, like corpulent women in tight dresses in too young a colour. Most often it’s peach. In places like that you are lonely, comfortable and revolted all at the same time.
So, this house, the fifty-eighth, is not the biggest, nor the loneliest nor the richest. It is the most gracious. Put simply, it is beautiful. From the first, I knew it was the first truly beautiful house I’d ever seen, because I could imagine really living in it, as distinct from just staying a while. It’s beautiful in the old way, quietly. I don’t think I’m a snob but there’s such a thing as good taste- though there’s more to it than that. I never really associated this house with its owners. It seems strange even to call them that. I thought about them, a little, in the first week or so, but gradually less, and hardly ever after Michael came.
When I arrived, three of the rooms upstairs were locked. So was the door to the cellar, various other cupboards around the place, and the garages and outbuildings. I was a bit cross about that, clients shouldn’t do that. First of all, one of my jobs is to keep rooms aired and how can I if they’re locked? Second is the fire risk. What if there’s an electrical fault, and a fire starts that you can’t get to? You’re wondering all the time what could happen behind the door and all you can do is rattle the handle and pray that everything’s unplugged. People just don’t think about that, not until they’ve experienced a house fire for themselves. The irony was that on that very long list of things they wanted me to do or not do, they’d put ‘avoid any fire risks’! So, no candles, no open fires, unplug the television. I could have taken that personally, but I kept reminding myself they knew nothing about me and fires and houses. They couldn’t, because Town and Country Sitters didn’t; if they had I should never have been taken on at all. No, the ‘owners’ were just being cautious in case I was as stupid as they were afraid I’d be, being only a house sitter.
Other things on the list that annoyed me: after ‘no open fires’ it said that the radiators were turned off in the library, drawing room, dining room and upstairs, but not in ‘my’ bedroom or the smallest bathroom, or in the small sitting room where the television was. That was an assumption, wasn’t it? That I’d just watch telly and go to bed. Well, I may have been in the habit of doing so, but I didn’t care for the assumption. Straightaway it reminded me of the Ardenleigh where it’s a choice between the bedroom (heating off, discouraged in the daytime) or what they call the lounge, where the television is on all day with nobody watching it but not really doing anything else either, except looking offended. And oh yes, the Aga kept the kitchen warm, the list said. If that wasn’t a hint about where I belonged I don’t know what was.
So almost from the very beginning I lit a fire in the drawing room every evening, right up till the beginning of June. There are e
nough logs stacked outside in the open shed in the courtyard to last for years and plenty of trees round about anyway. Michael has been lighting a fire again since last week. August evenings can be chilly.
Anyway, I’m supposed to be trying to explain. I admit I wasn’t in the best frame of mind about Mr and Mrs Standish-Cave, but it wasn’t malice. It was more a case of things just coming round in a particular way, starting with me coming here after another Christmas at the Ardenleigh. The Ardenleigh is dreadful at Christmas. It’s half holiday guesthouse and half old people’s home. She (Mrs Costello) takes anybody who pays as long as they’re not geriatric, and I daresay it suits her to have people there all winter. But at Christmas it’s neither one thing nor the other. A plastic snowman on every storage heater, wisps of tinsel (turquoise to match the carpet) sellotaped on to the pictures, the barometer and the cuckoo dock, even on the stainless steel cruet on every table. This year there was an artificial Christmas tree with flashing lights that played Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, until one of the residents had a nightmare about it and wet her bed. It was the talk of the place, would she be allowed to stay? The pictures on the walls are like the tablemats and the tablemats are like the pictures, and I’ve never known grapefruit segments in syrup (first course on Christmas Day) improved for being eaten off a coaching scene from Olde Englande. It’s not uncomfortable exactly; you get used to the sound of the traffic outside and the television, and at least the heating goes on in the bedrooms at six. But the irony was that even though I loathed the Ardenleigh it was better than where I would probably end up, because I wouldn’t be able to afford even the Ardenleigh’s terms for permanent residents after September.
