The Housekeeper Page 8

After Rob left, Emma showed me around the house. Up the first flight of stairs was their bedroom, a high-ceilinged room bigger than my entire flat, with a fireplace at one end and an oversized unmade bed at the other. Next to it was a bathroom with one of those Victorian iron tubs with claw feet set in the middle of the room. There was a walk-in shower in one corner and a toilet with a carved wooden seat, almost like a throne. I’d never seen anything like it. Next to their bedroom was another large room with four wardrobes, one in each corner, and a pair of armchairs almost hidden under piles of clothes; Rob’s shirts on top of Emma’s dresses, jeans flung over silk shirts.

  “Sort of our dressing room,” Emma said. I picked up a jacket from the floor and put it on a chair.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said with a bit of a giggle. “I try to be neat, but it’s all got into a bit of a state. You’d think I’d know how to be tidy—I’m always writing about it.” The dressing room led into another room the same size. It was empty apart from a rowing machine and a desk and chair. “This is meant to be an office for me, but I never use it. Don’t know why.”

  On the next floor were Lily and Jake’s bedrooms. Lily’s was neat, almost uninhabited-looking. In Jake’s room opposite, the floor was littered with pieces of paper, clothes, and books. It was hard to work out how he made his way to his bed at night.

  “They’re keen on their privacy,” said Emma. “Like all teenagers, I guess.”

  Along the corridor was another room with a sofa and a television. The blinds at the window were broken and hung at an odd angle. There was another floor above, with more rooms full of old suitcases and discarded computer games and toys. “I keep thinking we should clear this out,” said Emma. “Maybe one day.”

  “It’s nice to have space to store things,” I said. Despite the mess, everything had a pleasing air of stability.

  We went downstairs to the kitchen, another large, square room flooded with light. A counter topped with pockmarked and stained marble separated it from the dining room.

  “It used to be two separate rooms,” explained Emma. “We knocked the wall down and made it into one. No one lives in that stuffy way anymore. Thank goodness. So stupid.” She grinned at me in a conspiratorial way, as if to say that there were no such divisions these days at Wycombe Lodge and that we were all in it together.

  The working part of the kitchen was full of stainless steel machines (two dishwashers and one of those glass-fronted wine coolers) crammed between battered cupboards, with an enormous Sub-Zero refrigerator at one end. Everything was expensive, but nothing had been planned for efficiency. It looked like someone had taken every machine out of its box and stood it in the first available place.

  “And here’s the laundry,” said Emma, showing me a small room off the kitchen, next to a larder. There was an alarmed expression on her face when she consulted the washing machine manual, like she was explaining the Large Hadron Collider instead of an appliance in her own house.

  “I hope it’s OK for you,” said Emma, looking doubtful. “If you need anything, just say so and we can get it.” She checked her watch. “Late again. I’ve only got two meetings today, so I’ll be back by the time Jake and Lily come home from school.” She picked up her handbag and made for the door. “I’ll try not to go on about it, but really, I’m so pleased you’re here. We were using one of those agencies, but it was hopeless. Everything got lost, and we were in such a mess.”

  She had already opened the front door when I noticed her mobile and purse were still on the counter. I was about to call out to her when she reappeared at the door and I handed them over.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever made it out the door without coming back for something I’ve forgotten. Stop and think! Stop and think! I wrote an entire blog about it once, but I can’t seem to manage to do it myself. See you later. Don’t work too hard.”

  I spent the next few hours clearing away the mess in the kitchen and working out where everything went. Apart from following me with his eyes, Siggy lay motionless in his basket near the kitchen door. Every now and then, as if the effort of moving his eyeballs was too much, he sighed and closed his eyes, not even twitching when I walked past. I’d never owned a dog, but surely they were meant to move about just a bit while waiting for their owner to return. Maybe he was waiting for me to take him into the garden? I tried to gently shoo him outside, but he burrowed further into his basket. I gave up and left him in his comatose state.

  I moved through the house in a slow, pleasant haze, so different from my usual frenetic work routine. An hour passed, and then another, without self-pitying thoughts of Anton. I heard nothing except the measured pace of my own footsteps and noticed only the gradual movement of light through the house, how it played along the elaborate plaster cornices and bounced off the crystal chandelier in the hall. I’d always thought I thrived on the pressure and deadlines of a professional kitchen. Now, after less than a day in this new job, I wasn’t so sure.

  Just before Emma rushed back in (Siggy bounding out of his basket like Usain Bolt off the blocks), Lily and Jake arrived home from school. They had inherited the healthy self-esteem genome as well, with their firm handshakes and direct eye contact, their clear, well-modulated voices; the species of teenager who was used to strangers in their house and people clearing up after them.

  “Hello,” said Lily, dropping her backpack on the floor and rolling her shoulders back and forth. “Mum said you’d be here. Welcome to our madhouse.” She had Rob’s brown eyes and his broad frame. Her hair was thick and dark and captured in a ponytail. Not entirely successfully, as rebel strands had escaped and curled about her face in a chaotic frizz. Her face was arresting, with heavy eyebrows and a high forehead. One day she would be beautiful, but not just yet.

  “Heavens, we’re not that bad,” said Emma, taking off her jacket and kicking off her shoes. She bent to pat a rapturous Siggy. “Anyway, we’re quite normal, aren’t we, Jake?”

  “As normal as any family that names their dog after Sigmund Freud,” he said, heading for the refrigerator. Jake was as thin as a stick, with Emma’s golden coloring and high cheekbones. His hair was fine, the color of straw and settled in thin wisps at the base of his neck. He looked me straight in the eye, as if he’d been taught from an early age how to greet people. “How do you do.”

  They piled a plate full of food—peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, cartons of orange juice—and went upstairs, leaving their backpacks scattered about the floor. I picked them up and put them to one side.

  “I always think I should do something about healthy snacks when they come home from school,” said Emma, surveying the chaos on the counter with a quizzical expression. Her brow wrinkled. She might have been trying to understand some Tracey Emin installation at Tate Modern. “But somehow I never get around to it.” I cleared away, happy to have another small chore, a means by which to make my mark.

  At the end of that first day, I decided to walk back to Richmond. My breath rose in puffed clouds above my head as I strode past the fields. It was fully dark by the time I reached the first houses. Along the pavements was the smell of wood smoke from someone’s evening fire. I tried to remember everything Rob and Emma had said to me, although the cold made clear thinking difficult. “We’d like you to feel part of our family,” Rob said. There was a tentative upward inflection in his voice, as if he was asking me a favor.

  “And you must feel able to talk to us freely if anything upsets you, or if you need anything,” continued Emma. She rummaged in a side drawer and produced a set of house keys held together by an elastic band. “I’m sure you’ll figure out which ones work for which doors. We have an alarm, but we never use it. In fact”—she laughed—“I’m not even sure it actually works anymore.”

  Everything had been so easy, as if I was setting off down a path clearly signposted for me to follow. I picked up pace as I considered my new employers. It was clear that Rob and Emma were very comfortable, as Gran us
ed to say. But they definitely weren’t what Anton would have called high thread counts. I’d have despised them for that, just a little. Rich people were always so obvious. We used to wink when they came into the restaurant. Always a chink in the armor with a rich person. New money always that bit nervous, making them excessive spenders and good tippers but rude and demanding. Old money often so miserly, as if their first shilling from the Tooth Fairy had to see them out. But they were insecure as well, because they’d done nothing to earn it and so they would never know their own measure.

  Rob and Emma weren’t wallowing about in inherited wealth. But they weren’t entirely self-made either, because of Wycombe Lodge and Emma’s family trust that allowed them to live there. They didn’t fit into any category I’d ever heard of.

  8

  Hospitality is a most excellent virtue; but care must be taken that the love of company, for its own sake, does not become a prevailing passion.

  —Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

  The climbing rose in front of the house was now covered in fat buds and intermittent white blooms. I’d been at Wycombe Lodge for almost two months. It had taken a while, but I’d gotten the place into my kind of order. Emma had often gone by the time I arrived in the morning, while Rob was still meandering about the kitchen, taking his time to leave for the studio or his garden shed. The minute I had the house to myself, I set to work. I cleaned windows sticky with grease and wiped down skirting boards thick with dust. I scrubbed baths and basins. I mopped and polished floors. I even got up a ladder one day and vacuumed all the curtains with a special brush attachment I found somewhere. When I’d started here, everything in Rob and Emma’s dressing room was jumbled together, with boxes of shoes and clothes that Emma had ordered online not even opened. Now all their clothes were organized in color-coordinated parallel rows, all the coat hanger hooks facing the same way. Every wardrobe had been reorganized, its contents lined up with military precision.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, the cupboards were crammed with pots and pans so battered that the lids didn’t fit. But in the laundry there was a stash of copper-bottomed saucepans still in their boxes. Emma didn’t even notice that I swapped them over. In my second week at Wycombe Lodge, I found a spare front door key in the freezer. Apparently Emma had read somewhere that it was a good hiding place. The drawers had been stuffed with an eclectic but useless collection of utensils—a cherry and olive stoner, but no potato masher, an oyster knife but no spatula. Knives that would be hard pushed to cut butter.

  The laundry shelves were piled with a huge cache of liquids to clean floors, sprays to polish hobs, special bottles for windows and bench tops; each one so expensive and many not even opened. As each container emptied, I didn’t replace it. Instead I bought bottles of ordinary soap and vinegar, tins of inexpensive powdered cleanser, the cheapest brand, from the back shelves of Ahmed’s shop, and vials of tea tree oil from the health food store. Between them, they killed most bacteria, and the vinegar smell soon disappeared. I had even brought some of my own equipment into the house: my favorite paring knife, the expensive handmade Japanese knife that was one of my prize possessions, and the sharpening steel.

  “I can’t believe what we’ve done to deserve you,” cried Emma, rushing out of the house one morning. “Everything is transformed.” Silly, I know, but it felt so good to make a difference and to be needed. And really, all I was doing was putting Emma’s philosophy into practice because she was too busy to do it herself.

  As well as her work—everything growing so quickly that there was talk of another assistant to help Fiona—Rob and Emma were big entertainers. I’d never been to any of Rob and Emma’s parties, although I couldn’t help being curious about them. They had one every couple of weeks, either on the weekend or beginning soon after I left for the day; Emma running downstairs just before I said good night, dressed in floating silk pajamas, her face flushed from the shower and her hair still wet. She never heeded her own advice about making a daily timetable, right down to the number of minutes taken to apply makeup, and then sticking to it religiously.

  The parties were always Rob’s idea and he took them very seriously. Compiling each list could take days, adding some names, erasing others, sighing when Emma didn’t pay attention. Apart from Rob’s meticulous preparation of the guest list, there were never signs of any other planning. There were only the forgotten glasses in the sitting room the morning after and the crates of empty wine bottles and the boxes of dirty plates and cutlery outside the front door. All this was picked up by a van from the local deli and wine store that arrived promptly at noon. The driver was a burly Jamaican called Eric who said the same thing every time.

  “Hey, good bottle count today!” He would whistle in admiration. “Fun night, I bet. I hear all sorts of well-known rich people come here.” I would smile and nod, hoping he thought I’d been included among the guests and not wanting to admit that I hadn’t been at Wycombe Lodge the night before, but alone in my flat watching TV. On the way home one evening, I walked past the deli, curious to see what it was like. Its windows were full of platters of salads, cold salmon, and rare roast beef. I went inside, thinking I might pick up something for my own supper. A woman in front of me, dressed in gym clothes and a fur coat, picked up two small containers from the counter. “That will be forty pounds eighty-five,” said the salesgirl. I quickly walked out.

  A few weeks later, as I walked towards Wycombe Lodge, I saw Emma, dressed for meetings in one of her suits, getting into a taxi. “Hello there,” she said, clutching one of her oversized handbags brimming with papers. “I’ve been so busy and we need to catch up. Is everything going OK?”

  “Everything is great,” I said. “Thanks.” I was about to say goodbye, but she shut the door and the taxi roared off in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  In the kitchen, Rob was wandering about the breakfast mess chewing on a piece of toast, his spectacles hanging on a cord around his neck. Unlike Emma, who rushed from room to room before collapsing in complicated huddles, Rob had an elegant slouchy way of walking. He was wearing his at-home uniform, faded jeans and an old David Bowie T-shirt, so different from the preppy jackets and button-down shirts he favored for his days at the studio, giving him the air of an Ivy League professor.

  “Hi,” he said, rubbing his unshaven chin. He leaned a hand on the wall beside him. His head blocked the morning sun, so that his face darkened while all around him the light blazed.

  “Hello,” I said. “How is everything with you? And the book? Going well?”

  From snippets of overheard conversation and what I’d read on his website, I knew that Rob was writing a biography of some rogue psychiatrist called Rowan McLeish, who believed that the modern family was responsible for much of what passed as madness. He was the leader of some weird eighties commune in the countryside, and he’d died about a year ago. The name McLeish was vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t that interested. What Emma wrote about was much more relevant to how I wanted to live.

  I’d never struck up the same relaxed chat with Rob that I had with Emma, although he was around the house more than she was. It felt easier talking to Emma. The girl crush thing, as Jude called it. Rob was a bit more serious. I guess I took my lead from Emma, who was always so mindful of Rob’s well-being and his work. It wasn’t that she deferred to him all the time. It was more like she needed him to be happy so she could be happy. Maybe they really were twin souls, as she’d said in that newspaper interview.

  There was also the realization that Rob was, superficially, pretty much the kind of man I’d always been attracted to. I’d always gone for a vaguely Mediterranean cast to features, way back to Douglas, who’d been more swarthy than fair. There was that thing about the texture of olive skin, smooth and rippling under the touch.

  Rob shrugged and waved his toast about. “Everything’s OK.” He fixed me with that kind, direct gaze of his. “But how are things with you? The job I mean. Are you happy here, not too bored
?”

  “Yes, everything is good, great.” I blinked and moved away from the light, and began clearing dishes. “And I’m not bored, not at all.”

  I could have said more. I wanted to say that I was so happy to be in the house, happy that he and Emma liked me, that the family needed me. I didn’t say this. Of course not. I didn’t want anything I said to be misconstrued or to embarrass him. He could easily think I was making some kind of sad pass. I wanted to step over and touch his arm, the way he so easily touched Emma and, occasionally, me. But I felt too awkward.

  “Coffee before you go?” I asked.

  “Any excuse to procrastinate,” he said. “Oh, that sounds so rude. Thank you. I’d love some.”

  I looked about for the coffee I’d brought with me to Wycombe Lodge soon after I began working there. Two packets of a good Colombian single estate that had been on special. I disliked instant coffee, and Rob and Emma didn’t seem to go in for real beans,. They hadn’t succumbed to that caffeine neurosis thing we saw all the time in the restaurant, with customers asking where the beans had come from, how they’d been roasted, and what kind of machine we used. Anton called it coffee status anxiety.

  Behind me, Rob gave a low whistle. “The genuine deal! It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything resembling an authentic coffee bean in this house. We went through a phase a while back where we tried to make proper coffee, but then we just forgot about it and went back to the stuff in a jar.” He peered at the packet of coffee. “Emma wouldn’t know what to do with that.” He looked wistful.

  “But you could try making it,” I said. “A lot of men do. Most of the champion baristas are male.”

  “Maybe I will.” He laughed. “Although as you’ve seen, we’re not too trained up in the culinary arts.”

  “You could make a start by grinding the coffee.” And there, just like that, we’d slipped from careful conversation into an easy banter. I heard my voice soften to rise and fall in tune with his, recognized the light and laughter in it.