The Sea Horse Door

by Gina Rossi

  Inside the house, on the one hand, something doesn’t sit right. On the other, I’m having a second wind thanks to the involuntary power-nap in Skeet’s car. I’ve entered an unbelievable space. A huge hallway, with that handsome, focal-point set of broad, bare stairs up to said gallery. It’s borderlining Gone with the Wind, beach-house style, with a little scuffing and no carpet. I turn around, full circle on a vast, faded, thin rug that’s worn bare in large spots, the only item of furnishing I can see apart from a pair of big, dark oil paintings of old Boston harbour. There are wide window seats—minus cushions—and no less than two fireplaces, one with—unfortunately—a moose skull and antlers mounted above the mantel.

  “Sorry,” Lucas says, coming down the stairs. “We’ve been having a tooth-brushing argument.” He glances at his watch and looks up at the gallery. “Quit fussing and get down here, Liz!”

  A shriek from above. “No!”

  “Okay, you go to bed without meeting Lara.”

  “Wh—” I say. What’s happening here? I look from Lucas to the gallery and back again. He’s watching the top of the stairs. There’s the patter of little feet and a smile spreads across his face, bringing his eyes out of the darkness.

  “Good girl.” He looks at me, eyebrows raised and then back at the little figure on the stairs. “Progress,” he says, nodding.

  “Um—”

  A little girl, three or four years old—actually I haven’t a clue—dressed in blue pyjamas with most of the buttons missing, jumps down the last step. “Look at my big jump!” she says, and runs to Lucas. He goes down on his haunches, catches her, and levels his eyes on hers.

  “Lara, this is Alice, and Alice, this is Lara.” He points up to me. “She’s come all the way from England to look after you while Daddy’s away, okay?”

  “But, um,” I say. “Hello, Alice.” I bend and scoop a handful of curly hair out of her eyes. It looks clean enough, but could do with a thorough brushing. She smiles back, all dimples and then, overcome by shyness, she moves close to Lucas, peeping up at me over a not-too-shabby bicep. Plenty of room to hide there. He stands, picking her up. She buries her face in his neck.

  “What about a goodnight kiss for Lara?” he asks. She shakes her head. “What about tomorrow night?” She nods. “Good.” He backs toward the stairs. His eyes meet mine. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  “So—” I begin, but he’s turned his back.

  “Ten at the most.” His voice floats down from the gallery. “Kitchen’s straight on through. Help yourself.”

  I am thirsty, so I go across the hallway and open the double doors in front of me. Not the kitchen it turns out but a long, narrow conservatory-style studio of some kind. There are three workstations illuminated by low-level industrial lighting. Technical drawings and printouts are pinned and stuck to every wall. I go into the room and look at the high-tech drawing board beneath the central skylight. There’s a computer-generated diagram on it of God knows what: pipes and tubes and cubicles and ladders and tanks and a lot of criss-cross metalwork like a crane. I look at the logo in the corner. Ocean Zen, it says, and underneath Ocean Zen 14, Fixed Platform 1500 metres, Leg 3.

  In the corner of the room, away from the windows, there’s a functional spiral staircase that ends against the high ceiling, leading nowhere.

  None the wiser, that’s me, and I doubt I should be in here. I turn to go, and my eye falls on a work surface against the wall of tall windows. One of the desks. There’s a letterhead. Ocean Zen, again, and an address in Boston. At the bottom of the page I see Oil & Gas Platform Design & Maintenance followed by a list of names, directors, with plenty of letters after their names. There’s even one I recognize: Lucas Dalton, Owner, Harvard and M.I.T. I touch the paper and it moves slightly, revealing a professional headshot of me—the one I sent Clarkson’s Careers with my CV. I stare down at my groomed, dark brown hair, smoky-but-subtle eye makeup, and lips helped to full quirkiness by neutral lip pencil and Mac’s To the Future. The way I feel right now, that person is not me. I’m looking at a stranger. What happened?

  Unsettled, I leave the room, pulling the doors shut. There’s no sound from upstairs, so I explore further and find the guest toilet—not too clean but I’m desperate—and whoa mirror! That person is not me. My hair is thrilled. It’s sprung, joyous, from the confines of Lauren’s industrial strength, New York salon-brand products and hair-straightening tools, which she thrust upon me with concern and alarm in her eyes, while nervously fingering her bob by Mizu—as round and shiny as a liquorice lollipop—already licked. I’m pale and my eyes are over-bright. I blame the fog. Where’s To the Future when I really need it? I find a tube of clear lip-gloss in my pocket. It doesn’t help. I look like a rough sketch of Plain Jane by Botticelli—one he crumpled up and threw away.

  Finally, the kitchen. A lovely room, high-ceilinged with tall windows and spectacular views of fog. Why doesn’t someone draw the blinds? I look around. There’s mess on every counter. The dishwasher’s open, overloaded with dirty stuff and the recycling bin’s overflowing. The sink’s piled with plates and glasses and there’s a huge black beast, a cat—I think—on the draining board, his head inside a pot, licking away to his heart’s content. I shoo him away, except he doesn’t move. He lifts his head, looks at me with utter disdain in his yellow eyes, licks his fabulous whiskers and carries on. Thank God I’m not the cleaner in this place.

  Deciding not to trust the bottle of chilled tap water in a fridge full of empty containers and limp vegetables, I cross the kitchen on a sticky floor and hunt for a glass in the cupboards. No luck. Every receptacle is used. I rinse a coffee mug—thoroughly, under very hot water—barely able to move the mixer tap over the stack of washing-up in the sink.

  Lucas comes into the room. “Scram, Buster,” he shouts, clapping his hands, and the giant cat scarpers. “Meet Buster the Eunuch,” he says.

  “Buster the…”

  He grins, shooting brief light into those sombre eyes. “Alice’s cat. Her best buddy. Bit of a party animal in his youth so, in spite of his pedigree, he had to be fixed.”

  “Oh.”

  “So Alice is down. She’s a goner. She was really looking forward to meeting you, so that shy act was a surprise. Drink?” He opens the fridge, pulls out a bottled beer and holds it up.

  “Er, no thanks.”

  “Glass of wine, maybe?”

  “Well, if you have.”

  “Sure. Have a seat.” There’s half a bottle of red on the counter. He opens it, somehow locates a rare clean glass, fills it, and hands it over. “Cheers.” He downs a third of the beer in one glug. I sit, and sip the red. It’s disgusting. Worse, there’s black-confetti residue, a clue to how long the bottle’s been open.

  Lucas doesn’t notice. He’s standing on the other side of the table, beer in one hand, phone in the other, intent on the screen, texting with his left thumb. Eventually, he tosses the phone onto the table, pulls out a chair and sits opposite. “Sorry,” he says. “Business. Do you have any questions?” He looks at his watch.

  “I do.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Um, when do I meet Liz?”

  “Who?”

  “Liz Dalton, the lady I’m here to look after.”

  “But you’re here to look after Liz.”

  “I am, yes.”

  He’s looking at me with wary eyes. “You met her. Alice. My daughter. She calls herself Lis. So do a lot of people.”

  “Lis? No. I don’t understand.” I reach for my bag and take out the printed contract and job description forwarded to me by Amy, my top contact at Clarkson’s Careers. “Look.” I flip the pages and fold them back on one another. “Here.” I point, showing him. “Liz Dalton, seventy-four, and here, further down, general care and companionship while son, I skip, widower—Lucas Dalton, thirty-five years of age—oh? I didn’t see that. I had fifty-five in mind. Perhaps I should have read the contract better—a frequent traveller away from home, conducts his
business affairs in—”

  Lucas takes the papers out of my hand and reads the page, frowning, his beer forgotten. “Shit,” he says, at the end.

  “What?”

  He gets up, turns his back, spits out a monumental sigh, and swears again.

  “What?” I get up, sit back down. He’s gone to stand by the window, where he’s staring at nothing, both hands jammed into his hair.

  “We’ve screwed up,” he tells the fog on the other side of the pane.

  He yanks down his hands, leaves the room, returning seconds later with a small laptop in a durable cover. Like his watch, it looks like it works a hundred metres underwater. He sits again, at the table—next to me this time, opens the laptop and scrolls quickly through his emails. “Fuck.”

  I push my wine glass away, and wait.

  After a few minutes, he sits back and looks sideways at me, eyes anxious. “I had over fifty applicants for this care job.”

  Well he would, wouldn’t he? The salary’s amazing. I nod. “So?”

  “I chose you. You were the third attachment I opened and you stood out, waist, head and shoulders above any of the others.”

  “Thank you.”

  He turns the laptop to face me. “Read that email.”

  I do. It’s from Amy, at Clarkson’s.

  Dear Mr. Dalton,

  We are delighted to confirm that Miss Lara Fairmont is available to care for your daughter, Alice, aged four years from 20th June…blah, blah, blah. We’ve screwed up all right! Hang on a minute. We?

  I stop reading, and swivel the laptop to face him. “Look, I’m definitely not caring for a four-year-old. I―”

  “The glitch happened in the contract. I didn’t read it.”

  “You what? How can you not read contracts?” Aren’t I the one to talk? “You’re the owner of a company!”

  His eyes sharpen. “How do you know that?”

  I look away. “I went into your office by mistake. I thought it was the kitchen. I saw a letterhead on the desk.”

  “On the desk? That’s quite a way in.”

  Guilty! I stare at my wine glass. “I was lost.” I was. I am.

  “What else did you see in there?”

  “Nothing I understood.” Not even the photo of that me-woman among his documents.

  He lets it go. “How’s your wine?”

  “To be honest,” I say, to change the subject and swing the blame. “It’s vile.”

  “Sorry.” He grins, gets up, snatches the glass off the table and pours the contents into the heap of pans in the sink. He goes to the fridge and opens it, studying the scummy contents from top to bottom. “There’s a bottle of white.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got water. I’d rather sort out this problem—”

  “Which problem?”

  “I’m here to care for a seventy-four-year-old woman. That’s the job I agreed to do. She doesn’t exist, so I need to contact the agency, get back to the UK, probably, and start over. Unless Amy can transfer me to another job in the US.”

  “But I’ve, er…” He’s hunting everywhere for a clean glass. Finding nothing, he rinses the black confetti out of my old glass, glances around for a tea towel, I presume, gives up, shakes the glass upside down a few times over the pot mountain, and fills it with white wine. “I’ve paid your airfare.”

  “The contract states—”

  “I told you, I didn’t read the contract. I’ve been working with Clarkson’s for three years, and it’s always the same contract. I sign it, and they send someone. That’s how it’s worked ever since Lis and I have been alone.”

  I’m done with treading lightly. I take the offered glass of wine and put it on the table, “What happened to Lis’s mother?”

  “She died. When Lis was a year old.” He sits down.

  “I’m sorry.” I am sorry, but it’s not my problem. “Where,” I ask after a suitable moment or two, “and who is Liz Dalton?”

  “My mother. She died last year. Heart problems. Clarkson’s helped me out with her care. Dad couldn’t cope.”

  “I’m really sorry.” Is everyone in this family dead?

  “Dad went through a bad patch, but things are a lot better now. He’s met someone and moved out of town. She owns a B&B in the Florida Keys. They’re planning to get married next year.”

  I sip my wine. It’s chardonnay, but hey.

  Lucas sits up, like he’s waking from a dream. “What are we going to do? I have the person I chose for the job I need done. You have, apparently, been led astray.”

  “Yes, um…”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I should probably—”

  “Look, how different can it be? Caring for a kid can’t be that different from an older person. A kid’s a person, after all.”

  “But I have no experience, no training.” And no desire whatsoever to get involved in the sticky realms of childcare.

  “Oddly, experience and training aren’t always the best qualities. At least, that’s what I’ve discovered over the years I’ve been trying to balance career and childcare.”

  I have never heard a man say something like that.

  “It’s more the type of person,” he goes on. “More about personality, less about convention.”

  “It’s…it’s not what I want to do. I’m sure Alice is a lovely little girl, but we should sort this out and I should go home.”

  Lucas is anxious, and irritated—who wouldn’t be?—and there’s a trace of distress in his eyes. Is he hurt because I haven’t fallen at his beloved daughter’s feet? Also, there’s something about his mouth—the way he won’t let it soften even when his eyes do—that tells me he’s not as hard as he makes out.

  “I’ll pay you more,” he says. “Double.”

  I hold my breath. He doesn’t mean that. “Mr. Dalton, I—”

  “Lucas.”

  “I’m not—”

  He raises a hand, to stop my words. “Listen, you’re here now. You’ve come all this way. I leave tomorrow morning and I’ll be gone six weeks at least, so, would you be prepared—” he looks straight at me—“to help me out for now?”

  “This is not the job I want. I know nothing about children.” I don’t, apart from the fact that they make you sick and tired before they’re even born. My sister, Julie, is expecting her first baby and spends all her time with her head in the toilet or asleep.

  “I don’t need this,” Lucas says. “Please? Help me out.”

  “I don’t need this.”

  “Yeah.” He puts his face in his hands and rubs his eyes with his fingertips.

  “Amy will sort you out with someone fabulous. I know she will.”

  He drops his hands and looks at me, eyes empty. If I hadn’t seen those letters behind his name on that letterhead lying on the desk, I would say he’d graduated M.Sc and Ph.D cum laude from the University of Brutal Knocks. “And will that person be available, suitable, here—” he spreads out his hands—“before I leave tomorrow morning?”

  “Well—”

  “I put a great deal of effort into finding the right person. I don’t leave Lis with anyone. She’s all I’ve got.”

  Okay, no need to make me feel guilty. None of it’s my fault. I refuse to feel bad. I also have no idea what to say. I drink wine and ask for ice.

  He brings it from the ice machine in one perfect hand—apart from a scar running across all four knuckles like someone tried to chop off his fingers—and drops it into my glass, bringing the level up to the brim.

  “Thanks,” I say, looking at his other hand, unmarked and big, with the teeniest trace of hair, strong fingers and healthy, short rectangular nails. His hands match his teeth: perfect, with character.

  Why am I even thinking about these things?

  “Look,” he says. “All Amy did was get my mother’s and Lis’s names mixed up.”

  All? What about the seventy years separating the two? “Can’t you postpone your trip?”

  “We’re dec
ommissioning a rig in the North Sea this week. One of the legs needs urgent assessment. There’s a corrosion problem. It’s an emergency so, no, I can’t postpone my trip.”

  “Well, I can’t stay.”

  He shrugs. “Then you will be responsible if that platform collapses, dumping everyone in the sea. Their chances of survival will be zero. Husbands, sons, brothers, fathers of children will be drowned—”

  This is not jolly. “It’s not my fault that Ocean Kazang has a wonky leg!”

  “Ocean Zen. And as it happens, it is not an Ocean Zen rig that has the problem. It’s the Trident 202. It’s not your fault, of course, but it will be your fault if I have to delay my departure and something bad happens.”

  Blackmail! “How ridiculous to design an oil rig with corrosive legs.”

  “Corrodible.”

  “There’s no such word.”

  “Corrodible. Believe me I know.”

  Honestly!

  He sits again, opposite, and rests his jaw in his hand, the one with the scars, and studies me. “The ocean is a hard taskmaster, Lara Jasmine Layla Fairmont. We fight a constant battle.”

  Well, at least he’s read my CV.

  Something occurs. Could I be at the wrong house? Is there a sweet elderly lady waiting for me in mist-shrouded Lobster Cove, wondering where the hell I am? If only.

  “Um.” I look in my bag for my phone. “I’m going to call Amy.” Amy’s given me a twenty-four-seven emergency number—the kind of thing you think you’ll never need. It’s terribly late in the UK now, but I’m going to ring her. An emergency’s an emergency, after all.

  Amy answers the call on the second ring, wide-awake. She knows exactly who I am. There’s no blank pause while you have to explain who you are. She sounds absolutely delighted to hear my voice. I apologize for phoning so late and explain what’s happened.

  “Give me a moment,” she says, unfazed. “Let me get my laptop up and running. Please hold.” Music comes down the line, spilling soft, soothing notes into my ear. Everything’s going to be all right.