فصل بیست و پنجم

Inside, I expected Jack to fumble for a panel or pull out his phone, but instead he reached out, flicked something, and as the lights came on, I saw a perfectly ordinary light switch made of white plastic. The relief was so absurd, and so great, that I almost laughed.

“Don’t you have a control panel?”

“No, thank God! These were designed as staff accommodation. No point in wasting technology on the likes of us.” “I suppose so.”

He flicked on another light, and I saw a small, bright sitting room, furnished with good basics and a faded cotton sofa. The remains of a log fire smoldered in the little stove in the corner, and I could see a kitchenette on the far side. Beyond was another door, that I supposed was his bedroom, but it didn’t seem polite to ask.

“Right, sit here,” he said, pointing at the sofa, “and I’ll be back with a proper dressing for that cut.” I nodded, grateful for the sense of being taken care of, but mostly just content to sit there, feeling the warmth of the fire on my face and the reassuringly cheap and cheerful Ikea cushions at my back while Jack rummaged in the kitchen cupboards behind me. The sofa was exactly like the one Rowan and I had back in our flat in London. Ektorp, it was called, or something like that. It had been Rowan’s mum’s before she handed it down to us. Guaranteed to last for ten years, with a washable cotton cover that had once been red, in Jack’s case, but had faded to a slightly streaky dark pink with sun and repeated launderings.

Sitting on it was like coming home.

After the luxurious split personality of Heatherbrae, there was something not just refreshing, but endearing about this place. It was solidly built, and all of a piece—no sudden disorienting switches from Victorian opulence to sleek futuristic technology. Everything was reassuringly homey, from the mug stains on the coffee table, to the medley of photos propped on the mantelpiece—friends and their kids, or maybe nieces and nephews. One little boy cropped up more than once, clearly a relative from the family resemblance.

I felt my eyes closing, two sleep-deprived nights catching up with me . . . and then I heard a cough and Jack was standing in front of me, a dressing and some disinfectant in one hand, and two glasses in the other.

“D’you want a drink?” he asked, and I looked up puzzled.

“A drink? No, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure? You might need something to take the edge off when I put this stuff on. It’s going to sting. And I think there’s a wee bit of glass or something still in there.” I shook my head, but he was right. It did sting like fuck, first when he dabbed it with antiseptic, and then again when he pushed a pair of tweezers deep inside the cut, and I felt the sickening grind of metal against glass, and the sting of a forgotten shard sliding deeper into my finger.

“Fuck!” The groan slipped out without my meaning to voice it, but Jack was grinning, holding something bloodstained up at the end of his tweezers.

“Got it. Well done. That must have hurt like a bastard.”

My hand was shaking as he sat down beside me.

“You know, you’ve stuck it out longer than the last few.”

“What do you mean?”

“The last couple of nannies. Actually, I tell a lie, Katya made it to three weeks, I think. But since Holly, they’ve come and gone like butterflies.” “Who was Holly?”

“She was the first one, the one who stayed the longest. Looked after Maddie and Ellie when they were wee, and she stayed for nearly three years, until—” He stopped, seeming to think better of what he had been about to say. “Well, never mind that. And number two, Lauren, she stayed nearly eight months. But the one after her didn’t last a week. And the one before Katya, Maja her name was, she left the first night.” “The first night? What happened?”

“She called a taxi, left in the middle of the night. Left half her things too; Sandra had to send them on.” “I don’t mean that, I mean, what happened to make her leave?”

“Oh, well . . . that, I don’t really know. I always thought—” He flushed, the back of his neck staining red as he looked down at his empty glass.

“Go on,” I prompted, and he shook his head, as if angry at himself.

“Fuck it, I said I wouldna do this.”

“Do what?”

“I don’t bad-mouth my employers, Rowan, I told you that on the first day.”

The name gave me a guilty jolt, a reminder of all that I was concealing from him, but I pushed the thought aside, too intent on what he had been about to say to worry about my own secrets. Suddenly I had to know what had driven them away, those other girls, my predecessors. What had set them running?

“Jack, listen,” I said. I hesitated, then put a hand on his arm. “It’s not disloyalty. I’m their employee too, remember? We’re colleagues. You’re not shooting your mouth off to an outsider. You’re allowed to talk about work stuff to a colleague. It’s what keeps you sane.” “Aye?” He looked up from his contemplation of the whiskey glass, and gave me a little wry smile, rather bitter. “Is that so? Well . . . I’ve said half of it already, so I might as well tell you the whole lot. You’ve maybe a right to know anyway. I always thought what scared them off—” He took a breath, as if steeling himself to do something unpleasant. “I thought it was maybe . . . Bill.” “Bill?” It was not the answer I had been expecting. “In—in what way?”

But the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew. I remembered his behavior on my own first night, the spread thighs, the persistent offerings of wine, his knee insinuating itself, unwanted, between my own . . .

“Shit,” I said. “No, you don’t need to say. I can imagine.”

“Maja . . . she was on the young side,” Jack said reluctantly. “And very pretty. And it crossed my mind that maybe he’d . . . well . . . come on to her, and she’d not known what to do. I’d wondered before . . . Bill had a black eye one time, when Lauren was here, and I did think maybe she’d . . . you know . . .” “Belted him one?”

“Aye. And if she did, he must have deserved it or she’d have been sacked, you know?” “I guess. Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Bit hard to say, Oh, aye, by the by, ma boss is a wee bit o’ a perve, you know? Difficult to bring it up on a first day.” “I can see that. Fuck.” My cheeks felt as flushed as Jack’s, though in my case it was more than half wine. “God. Ugh. Oh yuck.” The sense of betrayal was all out of proportion, I knew that. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known. He’d tried it on me, after all. But somehow the idea that he’d been systematically preying on his daughters’ carers, time after time, careless of the fact that he was helping to drive them away . . . I suddenly felt a desperate urge to wash myself, scrub all traces of him off my skin, even though I’d not seen him for days, and when I had, he’d barely touched me.

Ellie’s voice filtered through my head, her reedy little treble. I like it better when he’s gone. He makes them do things they don’t want to do.

Was it possible she had been talking about her own father, predating the young women and girls his wife had picked out to look after his children?

“Jesus.” I put my face in my hands. “The absolute fucker.”

“Listen.” Jack sounded uncomfortable. “I could be wrong, I don’t have any proof of this, it’s just—” “You don’t need proof,” I said wretchedly. “He tried it on with me the first night.” “What?”

“Yup. Nothing—” I swallowed, gritting my teeth. “Nothing I’d get very far with at an employment tribunal. All vague remarks and ‘accidentally’ blocking my way. But I know when I’m being harassed.” “Jesus, God, Rowan, I’m so— I’m so sorry— I’m just—”

“It’s not your fault, don’t apologize.”

“I should have bloody said something! No wonder you’ve been a bag of nerves, hearing blokes creeping about in—” “No,” I said forcefully. “That’s nothing to do with it. Jack, I’m a grown woman, I’ve been hit on before; it’s nothing I couldn’t handle. The attic stuff is completely unrelated. This is—it’s something else.” “It’s fucking disgusting, is what it is.” His cheeks were flushed, and he stood, as if unable to contain his anger while sitting still. He paced to the window, then back, his fists clenched. “I’d like to—” “Jack, leave it,” I said, urgently. I stood up too, and put my hand on his arms, pulling him round to face me, and then— God, I don’t even know how it happened.

I don’t have the words for it, without writing it like a trashy novel. Melting into each others’ arms. Lips coming together like a crash of waves. All those stupid clichés.

Except there was no melting. No softness. It was hard, and fast, and urgent, and more than a little painful in its intensity. I was kissing and being kissed, and then I was biting, my own skin between his teeth too, and then my fingers were in his hair, and his hands were fumbling my buttons, and then it was skin against skin and lips against lips and—I can’t write this to you. I can’t write this but I can’t stop remembering it. I don’t know how to stop.

Afterwards, we lay in each others’ arms in front of the wood fire, our skin slicked with sweat and stickiness, and he fell asleep, his head on my breast, rising and falling gently with every breath I took. For a while, I just watched him, the way his skin paled to milk white below his hips, the brush of freckles on the bridge of his nose, the dark sweep of his lashes on his cheeks, the curl of his hand around my shoulder. And then I looked up, to the mantelpiece above us both, where the baby monitor sat, silently waiting.

I could not go back. And yet I had to.

At last, when I could feel I was beginning to slip into sleep myself, I knew that I had to get up or risk lying here all night, and waking to find the girls making their own breakfast, while I conducted a chilly walk of shame back to the main house in the dawn light.

And there was Rhiannon too. I couldn’t take the chance of her finding me here when she did come back from wherever she was. I had enough explaining to Sandra to do already, without adding nighttime walks to the agenda.

Because I had to fess up to her. That was the only possibility, I had realized that as I lay in Jack’s arms . . . maybe I had even known before. I had to fess up to everything, and risk losing the job. If she sacked me—well, I couldn’t blame her. And in spite of everything, in spite of the financial hole I would find myself in, with no job, and no money, and no references, in spite of all that, I would just have to suck it up, because I deserved it.

But if I explained, if I really explained why I had done what I’d done, then maybe, just maybe . . .

I had my jeans almost on when I heard the noise. It was not over the baby monitor but coming from somewhere outside the house, a noise halfway between a crack and a thud, as if a branch had fallen from a tree. I stopped, holding my breath, listening, but there were no more sounds, and no squawking wail from the baby monitor to indicate that whatever it was had woken Petra and the others.

Still, I pulled out my phone and checked the app. The camera icon marked Petra’s room showed her flung on her back with her usual abandon; the picture was pixelated and ill-defined in the soft glow from the night-light, but the shape was clear. As I watched, she sighed and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

The camera in the girls’ room showed nothing at all, I’d forgotten to switch their night-light on when I tucked them in, and the resolution was too poor to show anything except grainy black, punctuated by the occasional gray speckle of interference. But if they’d woken up they would have switched on the bedside light, so the absence was good news.

Shaking my head, I buttoned up my jeans, pulled my T-shirt over my head, and then bent and very softly kissed Jack on the cheek. He said nothing, just rolled over and murmured something indistinct that might have been, “ ’Night, Lynn.” For a moment my heart stilled, but then I shook myself. It could have been anything. ‘Night, love. ‘Night then. And even if it was ‘Night, Lynn or Liz, or any other name, so what? I had a past. Maybe Jack did too. And God only knew, I had too many secrets of my own to hold someone else’s up to the light to condemn them.