by Tina Seskis
‘You sure you’re all right, Christie?’ Paul said, at last.
‘Hmmm.’
Paul raised an eyebrow. She hesitated, unsure whether to try to explain. She didn’t want him to think she didn’t trust him, which was ironic when she came to think about it. And yet the atmosphere didn’t feel right to tell him somehow. Maybe she just needed to give them both a break.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘D’you fancy popping to the pub in a bit?’
Paul hesitated. ‘Not really, love,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow, and then a team night out in the evening.’
‘I thought that was Thursday?’
A look came over Paul’s face that normally she wouldn’t even notice, but it was there, and she did. Was he lying?
‘No, it got moved, Christie,’ he said. Was there annoyance in his voice, at being asked? Or unnatural neutrality? She wasn’t sure.
Christie went into the living room, picked up her book and stuck her nose into it. Her heart was racing. What was going on? Why was she doubting him over something so trivial? Surely she shouldn’t be letting a medium affect how she felt about the man she was going to marry in a few weeks.
Christie had read the same page three times by the time Paul came in, and he’d made her a mug of tea, with just the right amount of milk, and he’d brought her two chocolate Hobnobs. And as he leant over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, she decided she was being completely mad, and that it must just be pre-wedding nerves.
6
ELEANOR
‘So, Eleanor, what brings you to London?’
Eleanor was sitting in a sunny, cluttered living room, full of toddler paraphernalia, which smelled ever so faintly of biscuits. Her interviewer was one of those very smiley women who managed to smile even when she was talking, which Eleanor had always thought was quite a feat. She seemed nice though, and was giving off a very good vibe – and yet it felt so alien to Eleanor for someone to be friendly that it disarmed her. She put her hands to her face and discreetly pressed on her cheeks, as if to push at her tear ducts, stop the drops forming.
Eleanor knew this was her chance. It was her fifth interview for an au pair position, and in the interim she’d been staying in the fleapit hostel in King’s Cross, feeling as though she were inching closer and closer to the abyss. The last four interviews she’d attended had ranged from disastrous to fruitless, but she’d learnt from each one, and today definitely felt the most promising yet. The job was based somewhere in North London that wasn’t even on the subway and had consequently taken Eleanor an age to get to. Lizzie and Oliver Davenport. A little boy, Barney. His twin sister, Jessica. The father worked for Hewlett-Packard, and might even like Americans in that case, although he wasn’t actually here, apparently leaving such decisions to his wife. Hopefully though, Eleanor would get the job, and Lizzie would give her a nice room at the top of the house, and a weekly allowance, and Eleanor would do a great job for them, and that would be her escape route out of the unfathomable mess she’d landed herself in. This could be her opportunity to prove something to herself, and to everybody else too. She’d been praying that this would be the one. She was down to her last fifty pounds now, so in truth it had to be.
Lizzie coughed gently. ‘I said, what brought you to London, Eleanor?’
Eleanor jumped.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she said, and then hesitated, before deciding on a different tack from the one she’d taken in her previous interviews. An honest one. ‘A boy,’ she said, at last.
‘Oh?’ Lizzie replied, her eyebrow raised.
‘It didn’t work out.’
‘Oh . . . OK,’ said Lizzie, her smile fading ever so slightly. ‘And so why do you want to be an au pair?’
‘Well, I love kids,’ said Eleanor. ‘And I used to babysit lots back in New York for my dad’s neighbours.’ She swallowed hard, and raised her tone a notch, and as she spoke, she could hear her voice wavering. ‘And, anyhow, I don’t want to just give up and go home, I want to make a go of it in London – and I think this job would be perfect.’ She smiled then, and after a tiny pause Lizzie smiled back, and it was as if there was a bond between the two women somehow, as if Lizzie understood exactly what Eleanor was going through, had maybe experienced something similar.
Eleanor looked about the room and thought how nice it was, with its stripped wooden floors and terracotta linen curtains at the windows, the deep-blue shag rug, the deluge of brightly coloured toys adding to the atmosphere rather than detracting from it. Photos of curly heads danced at her from the mantelpiece, and they looked so healthy and happy. This was a home, Eleanor knew that much. A real family home. It seemed it was what she needed right now.
After a few more enquiries as to where Eleanor was from, and what visa she had, and what she thought of London so far (not much if it was all like King’s Cross, Eleanor had said, and Lizzie had laughed), and how it was different from America, Lizzie said OK, that was enough questions. Perhaps it was time for Eleanor to meet the twins.
7
CHRISTIE
It was three weeks to the wedding and until a minute or so ago Christie had been feeling pretty much back to normal about her fiancé. She’d been looking forward to a girly weekend with Alice and a couple of her closest friends, as Paul was heading to Blackpool for his stag do, which had been organised by his best man, Martin. There were twelve of them going for two nights, and they were staying in a cheap hotel just off the promenade, and Martin had arranged a stripper.
‘He’s done what?’ said Christie when Paul mentioned it, as casually as if Martin had booked the lads into a tea dance at the Tower Ballroom. She and Paul were outside in the minuscule back garden of their two-up two-down cottage, and Paul was conducting a mass pruning session. Christie was potting out some pink cyclamens she’d bought from the garden centre, which she thought would brighten the place up. She’d managed to get potting compost everywhere, and it was mixing with water into a kind of thick black paste, making an awful mess of the patio, but Paul, ever tolerant, hadn’t said anything.
‘That’s appalling,’ Christie said at last.
‘I know. But it’s what blokes do.’
‘Not my bloke.’
‘Oh, come on, Christie. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘What doesn’t mean anything? The fact that you’re objectifying women? Or how I might feel about it?’ Christie picked up the hosepipe, turned the tap on full and started watering dangerously. ‘Obviously not.’
Paul moved sharply out of the way. She could see his shears glinting in the sunshine, and it made her feel sad that it was such a beautiful day, and they were gardening in the little house they’d scraped together to buy, and they were about to get married, and they wanted to start a family, and this was the nineties, not the dark ages, and he was getting a stripper. Maybe he’d even get off with her, as that’s what some men did on those kinds of stag dos. But this was Paul. Her Paul. He wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise what they had . . . would he?
‘Where?’ she said now.
‘What do you mean, where?’
‘Where is this stripper booked for?’
Paul looked a little sheepish. ‘In one of the hotel rooms.’
Christie shook her head. ‘That is disgusting,’ she said. She threw down the hosepipe and water spiralled crazily, indiscriminately. Dark piebald patches appeared on Paul’s faded jeans and the concrete path, contrasting with the jewel-like patterns that hung and spun in the sunshine-filled air. The earth-sludge on the patio was transforming into shallow pitchy puddles.
‘Hey,’ Paul said, but more in surprise than in anger, as Christie stalked into the house and slammed the back door, ignoring his plaintive defence that Martin had booked the stripper without consulting him, and that at least he’d had the decency to tell her.
8
ELEANOR
Eleanor adored the Davenport twins, for the most part. They were cute little bundles of mischief, and somehow looking after a
pair of rambunctious four-year-olds helped Eleanor largely forget that this wasn’t how moving to London was supposed to have panned out. But every cloud has a silver lining, she reminded herself, and perhaps she and the Davenports were meant to have come into each other’s lives. And so she’d gotten down to the business of learning how to be an au pair, which as well as getting the twins dressed and breakfasted and ferrying them to and from nursery seemed to involve copious amounts of washing and cooking, and remembering such details as how Barney liked peas but not carrots, and that Jessica would only eat toast if it was cut into triangles, and what time to serve the twins’ tea to ensure they would be ready for their mother to get them in the bath as soon as she came home from being a refugee legal advisor, whatever that was. And every single day Lizzie would burst through the door at six o’clock on the dot and scoop the twins into her arms and bury her face into their soft curly heads and tell them over and over that she loved them, and those were the times that Eleanor would feel her own losses the most. Rufus. Her father. Her mother. Even her beloved dog Teddy, who’d had the temerity to die of old age and had looked up at her with sad, soulful eyes, knowing there was nothing either of them could do about it.
Sometimes, Eleanor wondered whether people were destined to always let her down. Perhaps there was even something she did to encourage it. After all, her own mother had never seemed able to love her the way Lizzie did the twins, and that fact was a revelation to Eleanor. She had always needed to strive to be smarter, or thinner, or better at piano or algebra to gain her mother’s approbation. The house had had to be kept pin-neat, even when she was little. It had been exhausting – no wonder she’d given up in the end. And now that she was so far away from home, she felt almost disconnected from the past, unable to fathom what the truth was about anything any more. She’d tried so hard to forget about Rufus, but perversely it was only now that she was settled, and safe, that she realised how much she missed him. Sometimes, in the evenings, Eleanor would go up to her cosy room in the attic and lie on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and wonder how she had got here, living in a part of London she’d never heard of, with a hitherto unknown family, and she’d try to guess what life was due to serve up to her next. Lizzie would almost certainly have been a willing confidante, but Eleanor didn’t want to burden her employer – or risk alienating her. And Eleanor rarely spoke to Oliver Davenport at all, of course, and it seemed that there was an unwritten code between young blonde au pairs and the husbands. Eleanor knew there was a line, and she was so grateful to Lizzie for giving her this chance, and she’d grown to love the twins so much, that she was determined never ever to cross it.
It was a few Fridays later, and Eleanor had picked up the twins from nursery, and was busy ferrying them out of the post office, where she had finally gotten around to mailing a letter to her mom, telling her what a cool time she was having, how London was OK now she’d got used to it, how she and Rufus were going great. Well, it was nearly all true. The line in the post office had taken ages, and Eleanor was trying to hurry the twins up, stop them dawdling, as they were running late to get home in time for her to make tea. Jessica was walking along the main drag chirpily as ever, her little hand sticky as it held on to Eleanor’s, but Barney was lagging behind them, dressed as Spider-Man, dragging his book bag along the sidewalk, clearly exhausted at the end of another long week.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ Eleanor cajoled him for the hundredth time, with zero effect, as they turned into their own street at last. In fact, the little boy was trailing further behind than ever now, and she could see the weariness in his entire polyester-clad body. She raised her voice into a jaunty sing-song and tried a trick that had always worked with the kids she’d minded in New York.
‘Last one to the door is a big banana!’ she said. As predicted, that got Barney running, and Jessica too, and it was almost too adorable to see. Just as the twins reached the gate, neck and neck, twenty yards or so in front of her, the next-door house’s front door opened and a young man, about the same age as Eleanor, exited. There was something about his demeanour that she noticed immediately, as if he wished he could fold up inside of himself as soon as he saw her. His face was thin and spotty, and his hair was longish. She was about to nod politely, say hi, but at exactly that moment Barney tripped over and fell flat on his face, thereby losing both the race to the door and his cool.
‘Shit,’ Eleanor said under her breath, and started running.
‘Oh, Barney,’ she said as she reached him. ‘Are you OK, sweetie?’ She was blushing furiously, mortified both that Barney had grazed his knee thanks to her stupid game, and that the neighbour had seen. As she picked Barney up, dusted him down, shushed his screams, her neighbour continued to hover, gawping.
‘I think he’ll be OK,’ she said, setting the little boy down.
‘Yes,’ said her neighbour, still making no move to leave, as Eleanor grappled in her bag to find her keys.
‘Er, I’m Eleanor, by the way,’ she said at last, to fill the silence. ‘I’m the au pair.’
Still he said nothing. She flashed him her most friendly, reassuring smile.
‘Hey, what’s your name?’
‘Gavin.’
‘Good to meet you, Gavin. I guess I’ll be seeing you around then!’
‘Yes.’ Gavin paused, looked as if he might be about to say something else, was maybe trying to think of it . . . but Eleanor needed to get the twins in. As she finally shooed them through the front door, she was both relieved and unable to quite decide whether Gavin was a creep – or just shy.
A quarter of an hour later Eleanor was in the kitchen hurriedly peeling carrots. Normally she would have sorted out tea before the twins came home from nursery, but today she’d felt so incredibly tired she’d gone up to her room and fallen asleep on her bed, where she’d proceeded to have a long, confused, spiralling dream that she’d found hard to recall when she woke up. All she knew was that it had started off innocuously enough, before melding into a full-on nightmare, the details of which, unfortunately, she could remember in full Technicolor glory. Rufus, in a scarlet bandana, placing a massive sparkly ring on a chimpanzee’s finger . . . Eleanor attacking the chimpanzee, trying to pull at its fur, get at its hand, grab the ring . . . the fur coming off in one thick dark pelt, unveiling a beautiful naked girl, covered in blood, like a newborn . . . Eleanor’s mom, in the guise of a giant black bird, wagging her talon fingers at her, shrieking, ‘I told you so!’ Eleanor had awoken screaming and sweating and had taken an age to compose herself. In fact, she’d only just made it to nursery pick-up on time.
Eleanor put her hands to her eyes and breathed deeply, tried to shove away the images. She still felt out of sorts somehow and she couldn’t wait until she could knock off for the evening and go to bed. She was still so tired but, as her dad used to say, trauma always got to you in the end, and she supposed he should know.
‘When will Mummy be home?’ Barney said now, as he wandered in from the lounge, a waterproof Band-Aid proudly attached to his grazed knee.
‘After tea, darling. Like always.’
‘Will you play Lego with me?’
‘I can’t right now, sweetie. I’m making your tea.’
‘Please, Ellie.’ He stuck out his bottom lip, did his best to look cute.
‘No, Barney. Go find Jessie, baby.’
Barney started to grizzle then, and Eleanor couldn’t bear to hear the misery in his voice, and so she put down the peeler, leant over and picked him up. He wrapped his little legs round her middle and started bawling. It was odd how he was so much needier than his sister, and he was so heavy, so she plonked him down on the kitchen counter – on top of the carrot peelings, as it happened – and turned to grab a tissue to wipe his eyes.
The kitchen door opened suddenly, and Oliver entered, home from work a good two hours earlier than usual. He was wearing a smart dark navy suit and shiny brown brogues, and his hair was swept back off his forehead. Eleanor noticed his ey
es were green and ever so slightly too close together, which suited his face in a way. He was holding a briefcase, which he immediately set down on the floor, and then reached out for his son.
‘Hey, little guy, what on earth are you doing up there?’
‘Daddy!’ said Barney, trying to squirm off the counter towards his father, in distinct danger of falling. Eleanor rushed to pick him up, just in time, and as she passed the little boy over to his father she felt Oliver’s hand brush against her midriff. She stiffened.
‘He was only there for a second,’ said Eleanor, wincing at the whine of apology in her voice.
‘Hmm,’ said Oliver, as a long strand of carrot peeling fell from his son on to the wooden floor. There was a prickle of something in the air and Eleanor could feel her face flush. She’d tried not to notice the vibe Oliver gave off sometimes. Maybe she was mistaken.
‘What’s happened to his knee?’ Oliver said now.
‘Oh, he just tripped up outside, didn’t you, Barney?’
‘Ellie made us have a race,’ said Barney.
‘Hmm,’ said Oliver again, still staring at her.
‘I’m running a little late with tea today,’ she said, biting the inside of her cheek.
‘So I can see.’ His face was impossible to read.
‘Sorry.’ She looked away from him, picked up the peeler again. Seemingly taking the hint, Oliver left the room, still carrying Barney, leaving Eleanor feeling confused and anxious about what her boss was thinking, how she was feeling . . . furious with herself for appearing like a useless au pair . . . and attacking her next vegetable victim with a rage that seemed to have come out of nowhere.