Annie eyes me curiously when I return.
“All done,” I say. “But I guess there’s probably a family somewhere round here wondering where their beloved pet ended up. Would be good to let them know. Could put posters up, maybe?”
She looks at me aghast. “Absolutely not. The cat’s dead. If they loved it so much they should have kept it indoors.”
“How do you think it got in? To the shed?”
“No idea. Must have followed one of us in there without us noticing.”
“So you’re the gardener?”
“Gosh. No. My husband was the gardener.”
“So what were you doing in the shed?”
She narrows her eyes at me, purses her lips. “Looking for pruning shears. For the rosebush by the front gate. And talking of which, the frontage is a mess. Brambles. Chaos. Could I trouble you to tidy it up a bit?”
“Absolutely, Your Majesty,” I say. “Pass me the pruning shears and I am all yours.”
I see her shudder slightly at the idea of me being all hers, but she turns and pulls open a drawer in the sideboard behind her, and hands me a pair of pruning shears. As she passes them to me my eye is caught by other items in the drawer: the glint of a pair of handcuffs, a pair of white leather gloves, and there, smiling up at me chillingly, a plastic clown mask.
The January sun has disappeared beneath the January horizon and I am alone for now, cooking dinner for the family. It turns out that left to their own devices this family eats shit. Nobody cooks; they make meals out of toast and frozen chicken pieces, out of powdered potatoes and packet sauces. There are no vegetables in the fridge, no fruit in the bowl. They eat cereal for dinner and toast for lunch and if there’s one thing I can do to help around here it’s to get some proper nutrition into them. Hampsteadis wall-to-wall food emporiums, and I have filled their fridge with organic veg and fresh meat. Tonight I am making a chicken stir-fry with noodles, but first I really want to check inside that drawer in the sideboard because, frankly, this house has given me the creeps since the moment I arrived, and what with the dead cat and now the clown mask, I’m this close to booking into a hotel for the night.
I check the entryway into the kitchen and see that the coast is clear. Then I pull open the drawer. The clown mask still manages to make me jump, even though I’m expecting it. I touch it gingerly. It looks old. Vintage almost. It repels me in a way I can’t quite fathom. I move my fingers to the handcuffs, feel a swell of relief when I realize that they are plastic, not metal, a toy, not a restraint. But still, there is something about them that sets my nerves jangling, that makes me wonder about this family and what other secrets they might be hiding.
Annie’s not in at the moment; she’s gone to Brent Cross, her favorite place in the world according to Jessamine. Brent Cross is a shopping center out near Hendon built in the 1970s, the very first in London and beloved of those with northwest London postcodes and cars. She will return later fizzing faintly with the electricity of retail therapy, with bags that she will ferry directly to her bedroom, maybe a spritz of department store perfume on her wrists, a bale of Egyptian cotton bath towels from John Lewis. The fizz will die down slowly over the space of a few hours and then she will seat herself back in her study, the tiny room opposite the kitchen where she spends nearly 90 percent of her time. Nobody is allowed to be in that room for more than a few seconds, just long enough to deliver cups of tea and coffee on saucers. But even during such brief moments, I feel something bad in the air in there.
I tiptoe into the hallway now and gently push against the door, but it does not give. I notice that there is a keyhole halfway up and I realize that Anne has locked the door. There are other locked doors in this house, including one up in the attic that has a large piece of furniture placed in front of it, behind which you can just make out the rectangle of the doorframe,and another into an outhouse attached to the back of the house. As someone who grew up in a house with no locked doors at all, I find this unnerving.
I hear footsteps coming down the stairs from the hallway and quickly head back into the kitchen. Jessamine appears, rubbing anxiously at the nibs of her elbows inside the sleeves of a baggy cardigan. “When’s it ready?”
“Oh.” I turn to regard the ingredients still half chopped on boards. “A little while.”
“Shall I open some wine?”
“I thought,” I begin carefully, “we were knocking that on the head for a couple of weeks.”
She shrugs and backs away. “Never mind,” she says.
The atmosphere has been tense these past few sober days. I can feel the burn of Jessamine’s physical longing like a bubbling cauldron. She pretends she’s all right, but I can feel the magnetic pull that flows through the house at eleven thirty every morning, when she looks at the dog, looks through the window, envisages her table in the corner of the White Swan, the sharp, blessed blow of a vodka tonic hitting the base of her stomach, the edges of her world bleeding out, the pain of whatever it is she carries around with her, day in, day out, quickly fading away. I make sure to distract her at this time of day. I suggest a walk to the shops or on the Heath, I ask her what she wants for dinner, show her recipes on my phone, but she is short-tempered, even more so than when she is drinking; she is unhappy and she is dark.
And I can’t say I’m surprised, because there is something in this house, something living and breathing behind locked doors and in the creases between this world and another. I’m not talking about ghosts or spirits; I’m a little woo-woo, but not all the way. But there are fissures and scars in this house, something misaligned, something horribly, brutally broken, and I am determined to find out what it is.
chapter twenty-nine
ANNIE
The new au pair was a problem. She wasn’t like the first one, Sandra, who had been horribly annoying and crass and had overstepped boundaries left, right, and center, but had at least seemed to enjoy taking care of the house and the children. This one, Naomi, seemed to think she was too good for us. She seemed to think that she could run a wet cloth around the kitchen counter, put a bowl of food down for the cat, take out a bit of rubbish, cook dinner for the children, and her work here was done. Also, Allen seemed more taken with this girl: he spent more time up there in her room than he’d spent with the other one.
I didn’t like to think about this happening under my own roof, of course I didn’t, but I understood that it had to. Because worse than it happening was it not happening. Our home was not a solid home, I could see that then; our lives hung on flimsy strings, our happiness dependent on tenuous conditions.
Allen was blinkered in a way that suggested he’d written out the script of his existence and would not veer away from it for a second. Inflexible, that’s the best way to describe Allen, entirely inflexible.
But this girl, Naomi, she was pushing at his boundaries, she was creating issues. From what little I could glean, she came from a very middle-class background in São Paulo. Her parents were professionals. She had an inflated view of herself for someone who’d been selling herself to men in a Paddington studio apartment. I could barely bring myself to look at her. If she walked into a room, I left. Unlike her predecessor, she made no attempt to ingratiate herself with me or with the children. But I could hear her and Allen, bickering, griping at each other. She asked him for money. He told her not to be ridiculous. She had a huge room in a beautiful house in Hampstead, how on earth did she think she should be given money too? Do you know, he told her, how much it would cost to rent this room? Do you know, he told her, how lucky you are?
But I could feel it in the air, all the time, the heat building, the possibility of a spark setting off the whole tinderbox. Within a month, Naomi was gone.
Two weeks later, Allen came home late at night with another girl. Her name was Jane. She was very pretty, and older than the others; too old, I thought, to be of any use to us, and far too posh. She wasn’t a sex worker, she wasn’t itinerant; she was a divorcée, and felt too similar to myself for me to countenance sharing my home and my husband with her. I watched Allen that night, mixing her a drink, and I knew what he was planning. I knew it was a terrible mistake. Thank goodness for Jessamine tumbling out of bed, as she often used to back then. I saw the girl called Jane knock the drink from Allen’s hand and I realized we’d all been given a second chance. When Allen tried to get her to stay, I did not allow it.
