by Ruth Ware
“The three youngest, yes. Maddie is eight, Ellie is five, and the baby, Petra, is just eighteen months, so they’re all in bed.”
“And your other child?” I asked, thinking of the flash of red I’d seen between the trees on the drive up. “You said in the advert you had four?”
“Rhiannon is fourteen going on twenty-four. She’s at boarding school—not really our choice; I’d prefer to have her at home, but there’s no secondaries close enough. The nearest day school is more than an hour’s drive, and it would just be too much every day. So she boards over near Inverness and comes home most weekends. It breaks my heart a little bit every time she goes, but she seems to enjoy it.”
If you want her at home that badly, why don’t you move? I thought.
“So I won’t meet her?” I asked. Sandra shook her head.
“No, unfortunately not, but to be honest your time would be spent mostly with the little ones. Anyway—it means we can have a lovely chat now, and you can get to know the kids tomorrow. Oh, and I’m afraid my husband—Bill—can’t be here either.”
“Oh?” It was a surprise—a shock even. I wasn’t going to meet him, then. I had been so sure that someone would want to meet the person they were considering hiring to look after their children . . . but I tried to keep my face neutral. Nonjudgmental. “Oh, that’s a shame.”
“Yes, he’s away, working. It’s been a pretty horrendous struggle, I have to say, with so many nannies leaving this year. The children are understandably very destabilized, and the business has really suffered. We’re both architects in a two-man firm. Well, one man, one woman!” She flashed a smile, showing very white, perfectly even teeth. “It’s just me and him, and it means that in busy periods when we’ve got more than one project going on, we can get terribly stretched. We try to juggle it so that there’s always one of us around, but with Katya leaving—she was our last nanny—it’s just been chaos. I’ve had to pick up all the slack here, and Bill’s been trying to hold the business together—I need to be completely honest and say that whoever does get the post isn’t going to get a very smooth introductory period. Normally I try to work from home for the first month or so to make sure everything is going okay, but that just won’t be possible this time. Bill can’t be in two places at once, and we have projects that desperately need me to be there and on the ground. We need someone very experienced who isn’t going to be fazed by being left with the kids early on, and they need to be able to start ASAP.” She looked at me, a little anxiously, a furrow between her strongly marked brows. “Do you think that describes you?”
I swallowed. Time to shed my doubts and step into the role of Rowan the Perfect Nanny.
“Definitely,” I said, and the confidence in my voice almost convinced myself. “I mean, you’ve seen my CV—”
“We were very impressed with your CV,” Sandra said, and I gave a little blushing nod of acknowledgment. “Quite frankly, it’s one of the most impressive ones we’ve had. You tick all the boxes we need in terms of experience with the various age groups. But what’s your notice period like? I mean obviously”—she was talking quickly now, as if slightly uncomfortable—“obviously getting the right nanny is the most important thing, that goes without saying. But actually we do need someone who can start pretty much . . . well, pretty much now, if I’m being completely honest. So it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that’s not a factor.”
“My notice period is four weeks.” I saw Sandra’s mouth twist in a little worried moue—and added hastily, “But I think I could probably negotiate an earlier finish. I have quite a bit of annual leave left . . . and I’d have to sit down with a calendar and do the sums, but I think there’s a good chance I could get it down to two weeks. Maybe less.”
If Little Nippers were prepared to be flexible, that was. God knows, they hadn’t given me much reason for loyalty.
I didn’t miss the flash of hope and relief that crossed Sandra’s face. But then she seemed to realize where we were.
“Look at me, keeping you talking in the hallway. It’s hardly fair for me to be interviewing you before you’ve even got your coat off! Let me show you to your room, and then we can retreat to the kitchen and have a proper talk while you get some food inside you.”
She turned and began to make her way up the long curving flight of stairs, her feet silent on the thick, velvet-soft carpet. At the first landing she stopped and put her finger to her lips. I paused, taking in the wide sweep of space, the little table with a vase of blush peonies just beginning to shed their petals. A corridor disappeared off into semidarkness, lit only by a rose-tinted night-light plugged into a wall socket. Half a dozen doors led off from it. The one at the far end had wonky wooden letters stuck on it, and as my eyes got used to the low lighting, I made out the words. Princess Ellie and Queen Maddie. The door closest to the stairwell was slightly open, a night-light shining dimly in the recesses of the room. I could hear a baby’s soft snorting breath coming through.
“The kids are asleep,” Sandra whispered. “At least, I hope so. I heard some pattering earlier, but it all seems to be quiet now! Maddie in particular is a very light sleeper, so I do have to tiptoe around a bit. Bill and I sleep on this floor, but Rhi sleeps upstairs. This way.”
At the top of the second flight, three more doors led off a slightly smaller landing. The middle one was open, and inside I saw a small cupboard housing a jumble of mops and brooms and a cordless Hoover charging on the wall. Sandra shut it hastily.
The door to the left of it was closed and had FUCK OFF, KEEP OUT OR YOU DIE written across the paneled wood in what looked like smeared red lipstick.
“That’s Rhiannon’s room,” Sandra said with a slight lift of her eyebrows that might have indicated anything from amusement to resignation. “This one”—she put her hand on the knob of the door to the far right of the stairs—“is yours. Well, I mean—” She stopped, looking a little flustered. “I mean, it’s where we always put the nanny, and it’s where you’ll be sleeping tonight. Sorry, don’t want to be too presumptuous!”
I gave a slightly nervous attempt at a laugh as she opened the door. It was dark inside, but instead of groping for a switch Sandra pulled out her phone. I was expecting her to turn on the torch, but instead she pressed something, and the lights inside the room flickered into life.
It wasn’t just the main overhead light—in fact that was turned down very low, giving off nothing but a kind of faint golden glow. The reading light by the bed had come on too, as well as a standing lamp next to a little table by the window and some fairy lights twined around the bedhead.
My surprise must have shown on my face, because Sandra gave a delighted laugh.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it! We do have switches, obviously—well, panels, but this is a smart house. All the heating and lights and so on can be controlled from our phones.” She swiped at something, and the main light grew suddenly much brighter, and then dimmer again, and across the room a light turned on in the en suite bathroom and then flicked off again.
“It’s not just lighting . . . ,” Sandra said, and she pulled across another screen and tapped an icon, and music started playing softly out of an invisible speaker. Miles Davis, I thought, though I wasn’t very well up on jazz.
“There’s also a voice option, but I find that a bit creepy, so I don’t often use it. Still, I can show you.” She coughed, and then said in a slightly artificial raised tone, “Music off!”
There was a pause, and then the Miles Davis shut off abruptly.
“Obviously you can also control the settings from the panel.” She pressed something on the wall to demonstrate, and a white panel lit up briefly as the curtains on the window opposite swished closed and then opened again.
“Wow,” I said. I really wasn’t sure what to say. On the one hand it was impressive. On the other hand . . . I found myself coming back to Sandra’s word. Creepy.
“I know,” Sandra said with a little laugh. “It’s a bit ridiculous, I
do realize. But being architects it’s a professional duty to try out all the cool gadgets. Anyway . . .” She looked at her phone again, checking the clock this time. “I must stop talking and get the supper out of the oven, and you must take off your coat and unpack. Shall I see you downstairs in . . . fifteen minutes?”
“Sounds good,” I said, a little faintly, and she gave me a grin and disappeared, closing the door behind her.
After she had gone I set my case on the floor and crossed the room to the window. Outside it was completely dark, but by pressing my face to the glass and cupping my hands to my temples I could just make out a star-spattered sky and the dark shapes of mountains against the horizon. There were almost no lights.
The realization of how isolated this place really was made me shiver, just for a moment, and I turned my back on the window and set about surveying the room.
What struck me instantly was that it was an odd mixture of traditional and modern. The window was pure Victorian, right down to the brass latch and the slightly rippled glass panes. But the lights were twenty-first century—no boring bulb in the center of the ceiling. Instead, there was a plethora of spotlights, lamps, and uplighters, each focused on a different part of the room, and tuned to a different warmth and brightness. There were no radiators either; in fact I couldn’t see where the heat was coming from, but clearly there must have been some source—the night was cool enough for my breath to have left white mist on the windowpane. Underfloor heating? Some kind of concealed vent?
The furniture was more conservative, with a strong air of an expensive country-house hotel. Opposite me, facing the window, was a king-size bed covered with the ubiquitous array of brocade cushions, and beneath the window was a small plumply stuffed sofa, with a little table beside it—the perfect space for entertaining a friend, or having a drink. There were chests of drawers, a desk, two upright chairs, and an upholstered blanket chest at the foot of the bed that could have done duty either as storage or additional seating. Doors led off to each side, and opening one at random I found a walk-in closet filled with empty racks and shelves, spotlights flickering into life above the bare shelves automatically as I pulled open the door. I tried the second one, but it seemed to be locked.
The third was ajar, and I remembered it was the one that Sandra had lit up to show the bathroom inside. Venturing in, I saw there was a panel on the wall, like the one Sandra had pressed by the main door to the room. I touched it, not entirely expecting it to work, but it glowed into life, displaying a confusing configuration of icons and squares. I pressed one at random, not completely sure what was going to happen, and the lights became slowly brighter, revealing a state-of-the-art wet room with a huge rainwater shower and a concrete vanity unit the size of my kitchen counter. There was nothing faux Victorian about this room at all. It was space-age in its complexity, sleek and modern in its styling, and had more glamour in one metro tile than most bathrooms possessed in their entirety.
I thought of my bathroom at home—hair in the rusting plughole, dirty towels kicked into the corner, makeup stains on the mirror.
God, I wanted this.
Before . . . I don’t know what I had wanted before. I had focused on nothing except getting here and meeting the Elincourts and finding out what was at the end of this advert. That was it. I honestly hadn’t even thought about actually getting the job.
Now . . . now I wanted it. Not just the fifty-five thousand a year, but everything. I wanted this beautiful house and this gorgeous room, right down to the sumptuous, marble-tiled shower, with its sparkling limescale-free glass and polished chrome fittings.
More than that, I wanted to be part of this family.
If I had had any doubts about what I was doing here, this room had crushed them.
For a long, long moment, I just stood at the vanity unit, my hands splayed on the counter, staring at myself in the mirror. The face that stared back at me was somehow unsettling. Not the expression exactly, but something in my eyes. There was something there—a kind of hunger. I must not look too desperate in front of Sandra. Keen, yes. But desperation—the kind of hungry desperation I saw staring back at me now—that was nothing but off-putting.
Slowly, I smoothed down my hair, licked a finger, wetted an unruly brow back into place. Then my hand went to my necklace.
I wore it every day—had done so ever since I had left school and jewelry was no longer banned by uniform codes. Even as a child I’d worn it at weekends and whenever I could get away with it, ignoring my mother’s sighs and her comments about cheap nasty rubbish that turned your skin green. It had been a present for my first birthday, and now, after more than two decades, it felt like part of myself, something I barely even noticed, even when I reached to play with it in moments of stress or boredom.
Now I noticed it.
An ornate silver R on the end of a dangling chain. Or rather, as my mother had so frequently reminded me, not silver, but silver plate, something that was becoming more and more apparent, as the brassy metal beneath shone through where I had rubbed the pendant absentmindedly with my fingers.
There was no reason to take it off. It wasn’t inappropriate. The chances of anyone even noticing it were very low. And yet . . .
Slowly, I reached round to the back of my neck and undid the clasp.
Then I put on a slick of lip gloss, straightened my skirt, tightened my ponytail, and prepared to go back downstairs to Sandra Elincourt and give the interview of my life.
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 unnecessari
ly 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?”