“I don’t think we have anything as sophisticated as a coffee grinder.”
“Yes you do.” I bent down and retrieved it from what I privately called the leftover appliance cupboard, full of machines worth hundreds of pounds. There was a gadget to dry fruit, something to cure fish, a pasta maker, a bread machine, and one of those mini grills. None had ever been used.
“It’s pretty simple. You put the beans in, plug it in, and turn it on.”
He crinkled his eyes. “Then what? We don’t have one of those French press things. Jake broke it and we never got round to replacing it.”
“I’ve got it covered,” I said.
He poured beans into the grinder, spilling a fair few in the process, and turned it on. The grinder was too noisy for conversation and we stood in silence, our shoulders almost touching. He was so close that I could see the occasional gray bristle on his chin, the hairs in his nose, and the tiny glop of butter at the corner of his mouth. We watched the beans spin and break into chunks, and then into smaller and smaller particles, until they became something else altogether.
I filled the kettle and turned it on. Steam rose in plumes across the sunlight slicing through the window. I made the coffee in one of the simplest and best ways I knew. In the leftover appliance cupboard were some cone-shaped ceramic coffee filters and some filter papers. I found two clean mugs, measured the coffee into the filters, and poured the water over it. Immediately, the rich dark scent cut through the smell of charred toast.
“You need fresh water for good coffee,” I said. “And the water should be just off the boil. Then you can drink it pretty much straightaway. With or without?”
“Without.”
I handed him the mug and watched him sip it, anxious for him to like it, that my trite and obvious coffee-making lesson had worked.
“Terrific,” he grinned, clutching his mug. “Really good.” He had elegant hands, tanned, with long, straight fingers and neatly tended fingernails. Outside there was a loud screeching from the parakeets as they flew overhead, their flight path creating flickering shadows on the ceiling.
“They’re so loud, those parakeets,” I said. “Do you think they’re forcing out the native birds? Poor things, they’re so much smaller.”
“Apparently not,” said Rob. “Somehow or other they’ve worked it out between themselves.”
He blew on his coffee and took another sip. Again he fixed me with that kind, direct gaze. “So, Anne Morgan, the person who’s transformed life here at Wycombe Lodge, tell me something. Who do you go home to every night? There must be someone, surely.”
I wasn’t prepared for such a direct question. I hadn’t thought up one of those socially acceptable bland statements that people come out with after relationships end: it had run its course; we both wanted different things; our lives went in different directions. And then the lie. But we’re still friends, of course. Of course.
“There was someone,” I said bluntly, “in the restaurant. He was the owner and the head chef. We were together for two years, but he met someone else. Just before I started here.”
“That sounds tough.” Just three words, but his voice soothed me. I remembered what the critics said, about Rob having a chocolate voice and how he had a way of making people want to tell him things. There was a pang of remembered pain, almost a compulsion to tell him everything about Anton right then.
I might have been mistaken, but I thought he was about to move towards me and pat my arm the way he’d done once before, when there was a scrabbling at the kitchen door. Siggy had been snuffling about the garden. Now he wanted to be let in. Rob’s face creased with annoyance. He didn’t like Siggy. I sometimes thought he was jealous of the way Emma patted and fussed over him, never reprimanding him for bad behavior. Outside, Siggy began to whine. He was used to getting his own way. Any second now he would begin to bark. Giving in to him was the only one way to shut him up. I went to the door and opened it. When I turned around, holding a triumphant Siggy panting his meaty breath all over me, longing to continue talking, Rob had already put his mug in the sink and was looking around for his phone.
“I’d better start work,” I said, putting Siggy down. I didn’t mean it. It was just something to say, to disguise my disappointment that our conversation had ended. “I’ve taken up too much of your time already.”
“No, no,” he said. “We should talk more, really. But I guess it is time to hit the desk.” He stepped outside and walked across the lawn towards his little cottage, leaving a meandering trail of footprints on the dew-covered grass. As I cleared the table, I saw him in his office, pacing up and down and then sitting at his desk, still on his phone. He looked up and waved. I waved back, holding a stack of cereal bowls with one hand, sodden cornflakes bobbing in their milky sea.
9
If you want to achieve something, try your hardest to succeed in getting it. Never underestimate the power of your own intuition. Listen to it and learn from it.
—Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” April 19, 2016
As I set to work clearing the kitchen, I constructed a story whereby we hadn’t been flirting, however mildly and harmlessly, but getting to know each other better because of Emma. He might have been curious about the person Emma chatted to so easily in the kitchen when he was still down in his office or reading in the study before dinner. Maybe she’d told him that she enjoyed my company, in the same way that I’d told Jude how much I liked Emma, and he wanted to find out why.
Last night’s lasagna cartons lay congealing by the oven, and splotches of dried meat sauce covered the counter. Fiona, the assistant, had said that the job was general housekeeping rather than cooking, but Emma’s schedule meant that she was too busy to manage even simple meals. As far as I could make out, the family lived mostly on takeaways or semiprepared meals from the supermarket. Judging from the contents of the kitchen bin each morning, Thai green curry was a favorite, then pasta and pizza.
That evening, I waited for Emma to come home, even though she’d texted me to say she would be late. She came into the kitchen and sank down on a stool. Her hair was pulled back with a clip and there was a dark smudge on her shirt. Above the sharp lines of her clothes, her eyes sagged with tiredness. Siggy danced about her feet and she bent down to pat him. When she sat up, her face was drained and bloodless.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I could take over the cooking and food shopping. It’s just that, with everyone out of the house all day, I’m running out of things to do.”
“But what about you?” She unclipped her hair. It fell about her shoulders in a tangle and she raked her fingers through it. “We can’t have you working day and night. It wouldn’t be fair. It would ruin your evenings, surely.”
“I’m used to working in the evenings. I’ve done it since I was fifteen.” My offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. I wasn’t doing anything else in the evenings except sitting by myself, and it would be easier to clean the kitchen then, instead of the next morning, when everything was crusted and hard to scrub clean.
Emma looked puzzled, and I worried that she might think this was a roundabout way of asking for more money. “I could start a bit later, if it suited,” I said. “So the hours would be the same.”
“It’s not that,” she said.
“Not what?” said Lily, walking into the kitchen.
“Anne says she could do the grocery shopping and stay on and cook supper,” said Emma. “But it seems too much.”
Lily grabbed a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. “Mum, don’t be totally mad. It’s not like we’re doing MasterChef or America’s Test Kitchen every night down here. Just say yes!”
Emma turned to me. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Well, then. I’ll just say yes.”
Lily lifted the carton in a victory salute, slopping juice on the floor. “Quick, in case she leaves her senses.” She took my arm and marched me out of the kitchen into the study. “This i
s the computer for the shopping. Dad uses it as well, but only in the evenings. It’s an old one. I’ll show you how to log on. It’s so easy.”
Later, on the way home, nothing could penetrate my personal climate of well-being. I was so happy to be cooking for other people again. And not strangers, but people who I liked and who I thought liked me. It wasn’t the same cooking solitary suppers for myself. Besides, like most chefs, I wasn’t interested in anything more complicated out of hours than a good takeaway curry, grilled fish and salad, or poached eggs on toast. The satisfaction came from feeding others.
Despite Jude’s misgivings—“Chief cook and bottle washer now! Not to mention personal food shopper! You have moved up in the world!”—I was enjoying myself at Wycombe Lodge, even more than I’d expected.
Before I took over the food shopping and cooking, I saw that the Wycombe Lodge idea of buying groceries was to log on to the supermarket website every week, press click, and repeat the existing order. Whoever unpacked the bags crammed everything in front of last week’s slimy vegetables and rancid cheeses with the edges nibbled away, and left slabs of raw meat on the top ledges with trails of dried blood congealed beneath them. In the wine cooler next to the refrigerator, I counted five open bottles of Chablis.
At the restaurant, we pickled carrot peelings, and made burgers from meat trimmings. We concocted flavored oils and butters from prawn and lobster shells. “I’d rather you stuck toothpicks in your eyeballs,” Anton would shout, “than throw away something that can be eaten.”
I saw the waste of everything at Wycombe Lodge, their careless domestic inefficiency, despite the constant bleats of no money and Rob rushing through the house complaining about Emma’s late night Net-a-Porter habit. I didn’t care. It made Rob and Emma seem more human behind their busy social media lives, their entertaining, and their work. I felt more connected to them.
Emma liked to chat in the kitchen as I prepared supper. She always wore the same type of clothes at home, some version of a tracksuit and thick-soled trainers as if she were about to go running. I’d gotten used to her style of dressing in reverse, Emma going out looking ready for bed, in thermal vests, or silk pajamas and some kind of flowing dressing gown, then lounging around the house in clothes designed for a strenuous workout. I’d learned as well to translate her office wardrobe. For meetings and public appearances, she wore tailored suits, silk shirts, and high-heeled shoes. If she didn’t have to leave the office, she stuck to shrunken tops and trailing skirts, the type of thing she’d worn when I first met her and Rob.
“Chicken, how wonderful!” she exclaimed one night. “With broccoli and potatoes. Delicious!”
You’d think she was talking about a double-starred Michelin experience, the kind of thing we did in the restaurant, culinary still lifes with vegetable spirals and flavored foams, instead of a tray of baked chicken and potatoes with steamed vegetables on the side. Emma was big on praise, whenever possible. There was a whole section on it in one of her books. She called it “learned competence.” The idea was that if you kept telling someone that they were good at something, then they worked towards excelling themselves, often without being aware of it. Apparently it was very effective.
Emma leaned against the refrigerator in that way she had when she wanted to talk. “I imagine you’ve worked out that we like to entertain a lot, in our own messy kind of way.” She smiled. “Not that we expect you to do anything. You have enough to do, cooking and cleaning up after us. Are you sure you don’t mind, about the parties? There’s sometimes a bit of a mess the morning after.”
“I don’t mind one bit,” I said. “A house like this should be used, be full of people.”
“Good,” she said. “I mean, we have lots of dinners and parties anyway, probably far too many for our own good. Although you’ve probably realized that we don’t get too carried away with the catering. I just ask Fiona to call the deli place. They deliver and send people to help serve and clear up. Then someone comes and picks up the plates and stuff the next day.” She fiddled with one of her earrings. “We’re thinking of having something a bit bigger in a couple of months, better organized. Rob’s working on this book, and well . . .” She paused. “Publicity never hurts, particularly for biographies, things like that. What I do is different. It’s easier to sell.”
Here was my moment to tell Emma I read her blogs and took to heart her daily messages. Up to now, there had seemed no easy way to insert this into our casual chats about what I was cooking for dinner or where I had walked Siggy that day. I could scarcely tell Emma that I’d ordered two organic chickens because they were on special and then all of a sudden segue into “Oh, by the way, your thing about dream diaries is really terrific. I’ve started one myself,” before reverting to grocery deliveries.
“I think what you do must help a lot of people lead happier lives,” I said carefully. I rinsed out the sink and turned off the tap. “I’ve looked at your website and your blog—you give great advice.”
“Really? I’m so pleased.” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe what I’d just said. “That is very kind. Thank you very much.” She brushed a speck of something from her sleeve. “Sometimes I think it gets a bit monotonous, so it means a lot to me that you like it.” She shrugged. “Anyhow, what do you think? About the party, and parties in general?”
Emma always asked me what I thought, as if my opinion was a domestic deal breaker. I always told her what I thought she wanted to hear, but I was flattered nonetheless. I wasn’t the most gregarious person in the world, but I didn’t mind parties, the excitement of the preparation and the postmortem the next day. Often the before and after were more enjoyable than the actual event.
“I think it’s a great idea,” I said, peering inside the oven. Everything was browning nicely. I turned to get the broccoli out of the refrigerator, but Emma was in the way.
“Sorry,” she said, moving to the sink just as I wanted to turn on the tap. A lot of people who don’t cook are like that. They always stand in the wrong place in the kitchen.
“Sorry,” she said again, stepping towards the refrigerator. “I never know where to put myself.”
“It doesn’t matter.” A companionable silence settled. Sometimes I thought Emma might be lonely in spite of the dinners and her job, her life with Rob and the children. Not long ago, I overheard her saying to someone on her phone, “Rob and I are so fond of Anne, even though she hasn’t been with us for that long. We feel she’ll become a proper friend.”
Future images frolicked in my mind as I filled the dishwasher. The three of us sharing a fresh pot of coffee in the mornings, the sun skittering through the kitchen windows as we had one of those meandering, inconsequential conversations enjoyed only by people who know one another well. Rob and Emma confiding in me about Jake and Lily, the details of their working days.
I skipped through the rest of my work that day with an energy I hadn’t felt for some time. Flattery. It worked more often than you thought. But later that night at home, I told myself not to get carried away, that Emma and Rob had enough friends of their own without having to add another whom they paid by direct debit on the first day of every month. It was the sort of thing that people like Rob and Emma said all the time, a harmless yet endearing habit to make me feel at ease and not like just the hired help.
It was also a typically Emma thing to say. She was probably a little uncomfortable with the idea of having a housekeeper because it was too reminiscent of her own family. I’d seen the photographs in her bedroom of the honey-colored stone manor house in Gloucestershire, the ponies in the field, and the woodland picnics with her little gang from boarding school. I’d picked up the letters addressed to “The Honorable Mrs. Emma Helmsley.” In more lateral London, married to Rob whose father was a butcher from Manchester, she didn’t like talking about her privileged childhood.
Emma leaned against the refrigerator, pushing her fringe to one side. “We’ll get proper caterers in for the party this
time.” Her fringe was far too long, down past her eyebrows. Under the strands of hair, her eyes were bloodshot. “Although you’d probably have a better idea than us of what to do, with all your restaurant experience. And it would be fun, have the house really heaving with people.”
“I’d love to help,” I said. “As much as I can.”
Emma picked off a piece of broccoli and nibbled at it. A tiny floret caught on the corner of her lip. I wanted to brush it off, but scratched my own mouth instead.
She hitched up her tracksuit bottoms. Another thing I’d noticed since I began working here. Emma was too thin, hipbones jutting out, wrists too big for her arms. She only pretended to like food. A lot of the time she pushed it around the plate, and every night Siggy slipped silently under her chair, his tongue hanging out.
“It’s such a busy time for Rob and me. And these days, I’ve got a mind like a sieve, can’t remember a thing.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Oh, it is,” she replied. “Rob and the children are always teasing me about it.”
I put the broccoli on the side of the sink. Emma did occasionally forget names and places, probably because she had so many other things to remember. There were her books, her speaking engagements up and down the country, all the children’s activities, and everything to do with Rob and his job. I opened the oven and prodded the potatoes. They were still a bit hard.
“Everything will be ready in about fifteen minutes. I’ll put the timer on, so you’ll know. Then just wait until the water boils and put the steamer on top. About five minutes should do it.”
“Thank you, Anne, for everything.”
Emma said this every night, accentuating every word. Jude would have laughed if I’d told her, but every night I felt the same small ping of pleasure.
“I’ll take the laundry upstairs before I go.”
The Housekeeper Page 9