“Three. Four. I think.”
It’s currently 11 a.m. and Jane is impressed that Dexter was able even to get to the door, let alone appear fresh-faced and raring to go. He returns a moment later in the same sweatshirt, with a pair of oversized jeans and a baseball cap, and says, “Let’s go.”
The address on the piece of paper that Hester the vet gave her sounds familiar: “Thornwood, The Vale of Health, NW3.”
It brings a kind of flickering image to Jane’s mind—a strange house at night, a Victorian streetlight, a sense of dread—but she can’t put the image into any kind of context. It’s only as she and Dexter head through Hampstead Village and down into the Vale of Health that she starts to remember.
“Oh,” she says, as they descend into the Vale, toward the hamlet. “I think I—”
She stops, her breath held.
“What?” says Dexter.
“Nothing,” says Jane.
A man. A tall man. A bar in Soho.
Jane was twenty-nine. It was the year 2000 and she’d just left her first husband, the Viscount. She’d been single and heartbroken and a bit desperate. She was very thin, she remembers, had barely eaten for weeks, and she was, she is sure, very drunk and possibly crying. He was older than her, the man, probably in his mid-forties and looked like a character from a black-and-white movie.
“You look like you should be called Horace,” she’d said, “or Cecil.”
He hadn’t told her his real name, merely smiled and bought her another drink. “Why are you so sad?” he’d asked her, and she’d told him about the Viscount, who’d turned out to be a huge disappointment, more interested in his old school friends than in Jane and his young, motherless children. “And now,” she’d said, “it’s just me again, a tragic orphan rattling around this big old world with nobody to hold on to.”
“You’re very pretty,” he’d said. “And utterly charming. It won’t be too long before you’re snapped up again.”
She’d clocked his wedding ring then and asked him about it. “Ah,” he’d said. “Yes. Very happily married. For nearly ten years.”
“So why are you talking to me?”
“Because you looked like you needed a friend.”
He’d told her he worked at a department store in the West End. He’d told her that they were hiring staff; he could, he told her, get her an interview as a shop-floor assistant.
“I’m not sure I’m a shop-floor kind of a person,” she’d said. “I’d get complaints and be sacked in a week.”
He’d looked at her with wry amusement and then said, “You know, our au pair girl just left, went back to Brazil. You said you’ve been living with small children?”
Jane nodded.
“I have two small children, and a lovely home and wife who doesn’t really like housework. What would you think about maybe being some kind of housekeeper? Or nanny?”
Jane laughed. But then stopped. “Seriously?” she asked.
“Yes, seriously,” he replied. “Why don’t you come home with me? You can meet my wife, look at the house, see what you think.”
Jane had felt a pulse of something wrong then, a distant siren in her consciousness warning her of something she could not quite put her finger on. But also, she remembers, a little thrill of something—something dark and self-destructive, a sense of throwing it all away because she remembersfeeling entirely worthless in that moment. There was no future back then that she could picture or hold on to. There was no mother, no father, no brother, no husband, no job, no sense of what on earth she even was. She remembers the feeling of her self-esteem lurking somewhere out of sight, too far away for her to grab hold of it in that moment and think: What am I doing? And so she and this tall, charming, nameless man, whom she insisted on calling Cecil all night long, sat silently together in the back of a taxi, and she remembers vividly the strange sensation of leaving the heart of loud, high-octane Friday-night London, full of vodka and recreational drugs, and finding herself twenty minutes later in a sleepy Dickensian hamlet formed of tiny lamplit alleyways and rows of mismatched houses, seemingly cut off from the rest of the world.
“Where are we?” she’d asked.
“Hampstead,” he’d said.
“This isn’t Hampstead,” she’d said, thinking of the brightly lit urban village full of bars, pubs, and boutiques.
He’d told her that the Vale of Health had been annexed from the main village in the eighteenth century as a sanctuary from the plague. The hamlet had once been peopled by the most fashionable writers and artists of the time, but now it was a quiet backwater, surrounded on all sides by the wilds of Hampstead Heath.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” he replied. “It belonged to my mother-in-law. She just passed away a few months ago, and now it belongs to my wife, and me.”
