فصل چهارم

When I got downstairs, Sandra was nowhere to be seen, but I could smell some kind of delicious, savory scent coming from the far side of the hallway. Remembering that that was where Sandra had ushered the dogs, I moved forward, cautiously. But when I pushed open the door I found I had stepped into another world.

It was like the back of the house had been sliced off brutally and grafted onto a startling modernist box, almost aggressively twenty-first century. Soaring metal beams went up to a glass roof, and beneath my feet the Victorian encaustic tiles of the hall had abruptly stopped, replaced by a poured concrete floor, polished to a dull sheen. It looked like a combination of a brutalist cathedral and an industrial kitchen. In the center was a shiny metal breakfast bar, surrounded by chrome stools, dividing the room into the bright kitchen area, and beyond it the dimly lit dining space, where a long concrete-topped table ran the length of the room.

In the middle was Sandra, standing in front of a monstrous freestanding stove, the largest I had ever seen, and ladling some kind of casserole into two bowls. She looked up as I came in.

“Rowan! Listen, I’m so sorry, but I forgot to ask, you’re not veggie, are you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I eat pretty much anything.”

“Oh phew, that’s a relief, because we’ve got beef casserole and not a lot else! I was just frantically wondering if I had time to do a baked potato. Which reminds me.” She walked across to the huge steel fridge, tapped an invisible button on the fridge door with the knuckle of one hand, and said, enunciating her words clearly, “Happy, order potatoes, please.” “Adding potatoes to your shopping list,” replied a robotic voice, and a screen lit up, showing a typed list of groceries. “Eat happy, Sandra!” The shock of it made me want to laugh, but I pushed down the urge and instead watched as Sandra put both bowls on the long table, along with a crusty loaf on a board and a little dish of something like sour cream. The bowls were bone china and looked as if they were probably Victorian, hand-painted with delicate little flowers and embellished with gold leaf details. Somehow the contrast between the mathematically severe modernist lines of the glass room and the fragile antique bowls was almost absurd, and I felt slightly off-balance. It was like the rest of the house in reverse—Victorian stuffiness punctuated by splashes of space-age modernity. Here, the modernism had taken over, but the bowls and the heavy floral whirls of the silver cutlery were a reminder of what lay behind the closed door.

“There we go,” Sandra said unnecessarily as she sat down and waved me to the seat opposite her. “Beef stew. Help yourself to bread to soak up the juices, and that’s horseradish crème fraîche, which is very nice stirred in.” “It smells amazing,” I said truthfully, and Sandra shook back her hair and gave a little smile that tried to look modest but really said, I know.

“Well, it’s the stove, you know. A La Cornue. It’s almost impossible to screw up—you just pop the ingredients in and forget about it! I do miss a gas range sometimes, but we’re not on the mains here, so it’s all electric. The burners are induction.” “I’ve never used an induction burner,” I said, eyeing the stove rather doubtfully. It was a beast of a thing, six feet of metal doors, knobs, drawers, and handles, and on top a smooth cooking surface that seemed to be zoned in ways I couldn’t even begin to guess at.

“They take a bit of getting used to,” Sandra said. “But I promise you, they’re really very intuitive to use. The flat plate in the middle is a teppanyaki. I was rather skeptical about the cost, but Bill was insistent, and I have to admit, it was worth every penny and then some.” “Oh,” I said. “I see,” though I didn’t really. What on earth was a teppanyaki? I took a mouthful of the stew—which was thick and rich and delicious, the kind of meal I never had the time or organization to cook for myself at home—and let Sandra plop a blob of crème fraîche on top and ply me with a crusty chunk of bread. There was a bottle of red wine already open on the table, and she poured us out two glasses in beautifully etched Victorian goblets and pushed one across to me.

“Now, would you rather eat first and then talk, or shall we get started?”

“I . . .” I looked down at my plate, and then gave a mental shrug. No point in putting it off. I tugged my skirt down and sat up a little straighter on the metal stool. “Get started I suppose. What would you like to know?” “Well, your CV was very comprehensive, and very impressive. I already contacted your previous employer—what was her name? Grace Devonshire?” “Er . . . yes, that’s right,” I said.

“And she couldn’t say enough good things about you. I hope you don’t mind me taking up references before the interview, but I’ve been bitten a few times with unsuitable candidates, and I think there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time dragging you up here only to fail at the last fence. But Grace was positively gushing about you. The Harcourts seem to have moved, but I also spoke to Mrs. Grainger, and she was very complimentary as well.” “You didn’t contact Little Nippers, did you?” I said slightly uneasily, but she shook her head.

“No, I completely understand. It’s not always easy job hunting in an existing post. But perhaps you could tell me about your employment there?” “Well, it’s pretty much like I explained on the CV really—I’ve been there for two years, in charge of the baby room. I wanted a change from one-family nannying, and a nursery seemed like a good option. It’s been excellent experience having a bit more managerial responsibility and having to organize staff schedules and stuff, but quite honestly I’ve found I miss the family feel of nannying. I love the children, but you don’t get to spend as much one-on-one time with them as you do with a private position. What was stopping me making a change was the idea of taking a step backwards in terms of pay and responsibility, but your post seems like it might be the challenge I’m looking for.” I had rehearsed the speech inside my head, on the train on the way up, and now the words rattled out with a practiced authenticity. I had been to enough interviews to know that this was the key—to explain why you wanted to leave your current post without running down your existing employer and looking like a disloyal employee. But my—slightly massaged—version of events seemed to have done the trick, for Mrs. Elincourt was nodding sympathetically.

“I can quite imagine.”

“Plus, of course,” I added, this on the spur of the moment, for I had not thought this particular line through, “I’m keen to get out of London. It’s so busy and polluted, I guess I’m just looking for a change of scenery.” “That I can quite understand,” Mrs. Elincourt said with a smile. “Bill and I had the same long night of the soul a few years back. Rhiannon was about eight or nine and we were beginning to think about secondaries. Maddie was a toddler, and I was so sick of pushing her around dirty parks and having to check for needles in the sandpit before I let her play. This just seemed like the perfect chance to break away completely—build a new life, find a really super independent school for Rhi.” “And are you glad you made the move?”

“Oh, totally. It was tough on the children at the time, of course, but it was definitely the right thing. We adore Scotland—and we never wanted to be that kind of family who buys a second home and then puts it on Airbnb for nine months of the year. We wanted to really live here, become part of the community, you know?” I nodded, as though second-home dilemmas were part of my everyday existence.

“Heatherbrae House was a real project,” Sandra continued. “It had been totally neglected for decades, lived in by a very eccentric old man who went into a care home and then allowed it to fall into disrepair until his death. Dry rot everywhere, burst pipes, dodgy electrics—it was a case of really stripping it back to the bones and completely revamping it. Two years of absolute grind, reconfiguring the rooms and doing everything from rewiring to putting in a new cesspit. But it was worth it—and of course it made a wonderful case study for the business. We have a whole folder of before and after, and it really shows that good architecture can be as much about bringing out the spirit of an existing house as creating a new one from scratch. Though we do that too, of course. Our specialty is vernacular architecture.” I nodded as though I had a clue what this meant and took a gulp of wine.

“But that’s enough about me and the house—what about yourself?” Sandra said, with the air of getting down to business. “Tell me a bit about what attracted you to nannying?” Wow. That was a big question. About a dozen images flashed through my mind, all at once. My parents, shouting at me for getting Play-Doh in the carpet tiles at age six. Age nine, my mother, shaking her head over my report card, not bothering to hide her disappointment. At twelve, the school play no one bothered to come to. Age sixteen, “What a shame you didn’t revise more for history,” instead of congratulations on the As I got in maths, English, and science. Eighteen years of not being good enough, not being the daughter I was supposed to be, eighteen years of not measuring up.

“Well . . .” I felt myself flounder. This was not part of the story I had practiced, and now I cursed myself for it. It was an obvious question, one I should have prepared. “Well, I suppose . . . I mean . . . I just like kids.” It was lame. Very lame. And also not completely true. But as the words left my mouth, I realized something else. Sandra was still smiling, but there was a certain neutrality in her expression that had not been there before, and suddenly I understood why. A woman on the cusp of her thirties, going on about how much she likes kids . . .

I hurried to repair my mistake.

“But I have to say, I’m in awe of anyone who wants to be a parent. I’m definitely not ready for that yet!”

Bingo. I could not miss the flash of relief that crossed Sandra’s face, though it was quickly suppressed.

“Not that it’s an option right now anyway,” I said, feeling confident enough for a little joke, “since I’m firmly single.”

“So . . . no ties to London then?”

“Not really. I have friends of course, but my parents retired abroad a few years back. In fact, once I’ve sorted things out with Little Nippers there’s really nothing keeping me in London. I could take up a new post almost straightaway.” I carefully avoided saying your post, not wanting to seem like I was making assumptions that I would get the job, but Sandra was smiling and nodding enthusiastically.

“Yes, as you can probably tell from our talk earlier, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a significant factor. We’re coming up to the summer holidays, and we absolutely must get someone in the position before the schools break up or I’ll be sunk. Plus there’s a really, really important trade fair in a few weeks, and both Bill and I really need to be there.” “What’s your deadline?”

“Rhi breaks up towards the end of June, which is what . . . about three or four weeks? But the trade fair begins the weekend before she breaks up. The truth is, the sooner the better. Two weeks is doable. Three weeks is . . . well, just about okay. Four weeks would be starting to get into disaster zone. You said your notice period is four weeks?” I nodded. “Yes, but I was figuring it out while I unpacked, and I have at least eight days holiday owing, so I can definitely get it down to just over two weeks, if I factor in my leave, and maybe even less. I think they’ll be prepared to negotiate.” In actual fact, I had no idea how helpful they would be, and my suspicion was, not very. Janine, my boss and current head of the baby room, wasn’t my biggest fan. I didn’t think she’d be particularly sorry to see me go, but I didn’t think she’d bend over backwards to help me. However, there were ways and means—nursery workers weren’t allowed to come into work for forty-eight hours after a vomiting bug. I was prepared to have a lot of vomiting bugs around the middle of June. Again, though, I didn’t say that to Sandra. For some reason, no one wants a nanny with a flexible moral code, even when she’s flexing it to help them out.

As we ate, Sandra ran through a few more interviewing-by-numbers questions of the kind I had come to expect—outline your strengths and weaknesses . . . give me an example of a difficult situation and how you handled it . . . all the usual suspects. I had answered these before in a dozen other interviews, so my responses were practiced, just slightly tweaked for what I thought Sandra in particular would want to hear. My standard answer to the question about a difficult situation concerned a little boy who had come to his settling-in day at Little Nippers covered in bruises—and the way I had dealt with the parents over the subsequent safeguarding concerns. It went down well with nurseries, but I didn’t think Sandra would want to hear about me snitching on parents to the authorities. Instead, I gave a different story, about a little bullying four-year-old at a previous post, and the way I had managed to trace it back to her own fears over starting primary school.

As I talked she looked through the papers I had bought with me, the background check, the first aid certificates. They were all in order, of course; I knew that, but I still felt a little flutter of nerves beneath my ribs as she reviewed them. My chest tightened, though whether that was down to nerves or the dogs, I couldn’t quite tell, and I pushed down the urge to pull out my inhaler and take a puff.

“And the driving license?” she asked as I finished my anecdote about the four-year-old. I put down my fork onto the smooth polished concrete top of the table and took a deep breath.

“Ah, right, yes. I’m afraid that’s a problem. I do have a full UK driving license and it’s clean, but the actual card was stolen last month when I lost my purse. I’ve ordered a new one, but they wanted an updated photo and it’s taking an age to come through. But I promise you, I can drive.” That last part was true after all. I crossed my fingers, and to my relief she nodded and moved on to something about my professional ambitions. Did I want to get any additional qualifications. Where did I see myself in a year’s time. It was the second question that really mattered; I could tell that from the way Sandra set down her wineglass and actually looked at me as I answered.

“In a year’s time?” I said slowly, frantically trying to figure out what she wanted to hear from me. Did she want ambition? Commitment? Personal development? A year was a funny length of time to choose; most interviewers said five years, and the question had thrown me. What was she testing?

At last I made up my mind.

“Well . . . you know I want this job, Sandra, and to be honest, in a year’s time I would hope to be here. If you were to offer me this position, I wouldn’t want to uproot myself from London and all my friends just for a short-term post. When I work for a family, I want to think it’s a long-term relationship, both for me and the kids. I want to really get to know them, see them grow up a little bit. If you’d asked me where I saw myself in five years . . . well, that’s a different question. And I’d probably give you a different answer. I’m ambitious—I’d like to do a master’s in childcare or child psychology at some point. But a year—any post I took now, I would definitely want to think of it lasting longer than a year, for all our sakes.” Sandra’s face broke into a huge grin, and I knew—I just knew that I had given the right answer, the one she had been hoping for. But was it enough to get me the post? I didn’t honestly know.