She shrugs again and tries to look as if that’s exactly what she thought I meant. I feel bad for her, so I smile, a sly, flirty smile. “I might also have thought a bit about how pretty you are.”
“Ha!” Her response is so loud it makes me jump. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says.
“Why?” I say. “Why is that ridiculous? Doesn’t he ever tell you you’re pretty?”
“No,” she says sniffily. “Because I’m not.”
I pull my chair roughly across the terra-cotta floor and it squeaks horribly. I reach her side of the table, and I stare at her. “You,” I say, “are pretty.” I stare a bit longer, enjoying the array of mixed emotions passing across her face. Then I push myself back again. “Listen,” I say. “If I’m making you feel uncomfortable, I’ll leave. I have no interest in making you feel weird, I promise. Just say, and I’ll be on my way.”
“No,” she says, her eyes suddenly dark and urgent and on me—fully. “No. Don’t go. Please… just… stay.”
chapter seventeen
JESSAMINE
Granny died two days after her seventieth birthday. Daddy was frantic about everything. He saw Mummy hanging laundry one day and nearly cried. He talked about getting a housekeeper, but Mummy said we couldn’t afford one. Then a few weeks later Daddy told us that a nice girl was coming to stay to help look after us. “An au pair girl,” Daddy had said. But Sandra didn’t look like an au pair girl and Daddy wasn’t talking to her like an au pair girl. I glanced across at Mummy, who was watching Sandra with her arms folded across her chest and her jaw set tight. She seemed angry. But she wasn’t doing anything about it. Just watching… I didn’t know what to make of the girl. She looked cheap, rough. I didn’t understand what she was doing here, in our home. I followed my father into the other room and said, “She doesn’t look like an au pair girl.”
“Well, she is.”
“Aren’t they meant to be foreign?”
“Not always.”
“It feels weird having her here.”
“You’ll get used to it, poppet.”
I shook my head. I knew already that I never would.
But Daddy was right, I did get used to having her around. By the time she’d been living with us for a few weeks I almost liked her.
She was so different to Mummy and Daddy, so modern compared to them. It was the year 2000 but Mummy and Daddy still acted like it was the olden days. They were very private, they didn’t have friends or go to parties, they just wanted to be with each other, or with us. They told us we were better than everyone else, and I decided to believe them. But with Sandra around, I started to see the world differently. It wasn’t bad, I realized, to wear cheap clothes. It wasn’t bad to leave the ends off your words or not brush your hair three times a day or have bare feet indoors. It wasn’t bad to have a loud laugh, or fillings, or to bite your nails. None of these things made you a bad person. Sandra was a good person, I could see that, and I wanted at that young age, just in the grip of adolescence and in my second year of high school, to be more like Sandra and less like Mummy.
Mummy noticed the changes in me. She saw the badly painted fingernails in a color called Wild Cherry, she saw me change the way I did my hair; I didn’t want tight plaits anymore, and hard-scraped-back ponytails. I wanted small braids in my hair, cute clips. Sandra bought me things from Claire’s Accessories, including a pair of clip-on earrings that I pranked Mummy with one afternoon. “Look!” I said, entering the kitchen. “Sandra took me to have my ears pierced!” I pulled my hair away so that Mummy could see.
Immediately I knew that something had shifted. Everything tilted in the wrong direction, Mummy’s face turned hard, I saw her nostrils flare, and then I saw her stride across the kitchen to Sandra and slap her around her face. There was a terrible moment of silence and Sandra’s hand went to her cheek, her eyes went wide, and then, and I don’t know why, Mummy slapped her again, even harder, hard enough to unbalance Sandra and nearly knock her over.
I saw that there was a small trickle of blood coming out of Sandra’s nose and I wanted to go to her, to offer her a tissue, to check she was OK, but I was too scared.
“How dare you?” Mummy said to Sandra. “How dare youmutilatemy child?”
“Oh my God,” said Sandra, touching the blood on her lip with the side of her finger and looking at it in horror. “Calm down. They’re fake. It was a joke.”
I saw Mummy’s nostrils flare again; I saw her eyes absorb the extent of her overreaction; I saw her double down on everything. When my father walked into the kitchen she said to him, “Get this woman out of here. Now.”
I watched my father open the door of his jeep to Sandra, then close it after she put herself in the passenger seat. I saw her little wheelie suitcase on the back seat, her puffy winter coat, a shopping bag bulging with clothes. I could still see the red mark on her cheek from where Mummy had slapped her. She looked tired, resigned. She turned just once to look back at the house, to smile at me, and then she was gone.
Two days later, Daddy brought back another au pair girl. But this one didn’t live in the guest room, she lived in the attic. This one didn’t smile, and this one wasn’t allowed to talk to us.
chapter eighteen
Jane heads back to the Vale of Health later that day. Mr. Tucker pulls open the front door of Thornwood and looks at her with an expression of displeasure and annoyance.
“Hi,” says Jane. “Sorry to bother you.Again. But—” She stops at the sight of the white Westie appearing from behind the man’s legs, his tail wagging hard. “Hugo!” she calls out, and he runs from the doorway to the gate. Jane crouches and pets him through a gap. Her feelings for this dog seem strangely disproportionate to the amount of time she has known him. She wishes she’d never brought him back.
“I wondered,” she says to the man, “if I could have a minute of your time? To talk?”
He scowls at her and folds his arms across his rotund middle. “What is there to talk about?”
