The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 4

  “Soft on the kids. Devoted as a Great Dane. Snapped the wing mirror off the car. Throws reds in a white wash.” Marge licks her lips. “Mr. Harrington told me all about you,” she adds, with a note of unmistakable rivalry.

  Rita wishes Walter had thought to warn her too. Divide and conquer. She can imagine him thinking that. (Also, she hasn’t buggered up the white wash for months.)

  “I can turn my hand to anything, Rita. You’ll find I’m extremely flexible,” Marge says, in a manner that suggests the contrary. “I can get here in no time, any hour of the day.” She nods toward the door. “That’s my trusty motor out front.”

  Rita recalls the rusting heap of metal under the honeysuckle.

  “Faster than it looks, actually,” Marge says with a sharp sniff. “I’ve worked these country houses for years. Ever since my husband died. Drowned in the Severn. Tsk.” She clicks her tongue, as if remembering his stupidity. “The tidal surge.”

  “Gosh, I’m so sorry.” Rita looks at her feet, then steals a sidelong glance up the stairs. What is Teddy doing?

  “I manage just fine on my own.” Marge speaks with grim pride, as if she’s pummeled her life into shape against the odds.

  Rita warms to Marge a bit more then. They share the common ground of independence, at least. In London there was camaraderie among the domestics, most of them unmarried, dispensable, burrowed into the attic bedrooms or with roommates in cramped flats. The live-outs would emerge early in the morning, worker bees, swarming from grimy districts into London’s wealthy streets and mansions to look after other people’s children—feed them, delouse them, iodine the gashes on their knees. They’d keep the houses unmarked by their charges, and then, as night fell, they’d scramble onto buses or sink back underground, returning to their lodgings, leaving no trace, as if they were never there at all.

  “Not that the work’s a piece of cake.”

  “Of course not,” Rita rushes to agree.

  “Houses don’t do well not lived in round here. Turn into a right shambles, they do. The forest reclaims them. Damp. Mildew. Mice. Wood beetle. No point keeping the place if you don’t use it.”

  Rita nods. She struggles to understand how anyone could have a whole house they didn’t use, let alone care about. What she’d give just to have a tiny flat of her own.

  “If it weren’t for me, there’d be dog roses growing through the rafters.”

  Rita laughs, rather liking this idea. But another loud thump from upstairs—more showering plaster—sobers her again. She needs to Teddy-proof. Check there are no low windows open. No heavy furniture leaning perilously against uneven walls. If there’s an accident waiting to happen, Teddy will find it. “I’d better check on the children,” she says, picking up the suitcases again. “Sounds like Teddy’s making himself a bit too much at home.”

  “This isn’t an easy place to live.” With no warning, Marge grabs the sleeve of Rita’s blouse. Her nostrils flare. She releases the sleeve, sizing Rita up. “Know the forest, do you?”

  Rita shakes her head. Her heart starts to beat faster. If you lose both your parents on a lonely forest road and you’re plucked from the smoking wreckage, a half-dead thing, you have nightmares about trees. But she refuses self-pity. She was six. And the memory of the car crash is, mercifully, a blank.

  “Didn’t think so. A Devon girl, Mr. Harrington said.”

  “That’s me.” Sky and ocean. Just thinking about it makes her long to look out of a window and see a paintbrush streak of horizon, the gray-green smudge where water meets cloud. She remembers sea salt, its fine crystal crust on her lips, and her mouth waters.

  “You’ll need to keep your wits about you here, then. Adders. Death cap mushrooms. Ticks. As for branches in a high wind? By the time you’ve heard the creak, it’s too late. Old mines open up under your feet. Oh, yes, there’s a pile of felled tree trunks near the garden gate. If Teddy climbs on that, the whole lot will come tumbling. Roll him out like puff pastry.”

  “Well, it’s good to be warned,” she manages, trying to seem undaunted. This place sounds like a nanny’s nightmare. Through the window, the green mass sways queasily.

  “Poachers. Dangerous lot. But the foresters shouldn’t give you any bother, if you leave their sheep alone. Ancient grazing rights.” She stops. Something fires in her eyes. “Oh. I beg your pardon. I should warn you about Fingers Jonson.”

  “Fingers?” She’s beginning to wonder if the woman is slightly unhinged, or if the fuggy heat and woodsmoke in the room are distorting her own judgment. Also, she really needs the toilet. It was a long drive.

  “Loner. Tall. Albino. Wanders the woods. Our Green Man.”

  Rita pictures the mythic man of folklore, a face formed of twisted sticks and leaves, acorns for eyes. Horrible. A large moth batters against the window.

  “Oddballs are drawn here. Always running from something. Fugitives. Druggies. Price we pay for living in the last bit of wild in England.”

  Rita’s hands instinctively fist. She’d lay down her life for Hera and Teddy. “The children will be safe with me, Marge.”

  “You do seem very sure of yourself for such a young woman, I must say.” Marge sniffs, irritated by this. “I suppose at your size, you’re more than a match for any man.”

  Feeling the familiar tightness in her chest, hearing the whispery chant of old school playground insults—“Rita Rex,” “Rita Heifer,” “Mr. Rita Murphy”—she decides she’ll have to make a break for it.

  “And it’ll shred those shoes of yours.” Marge nods down at Rita’s feet as she places one brown Clarks sandal on the stairs. She hates her feet. More than this, she hates people looking at them.

  There’s a rush of fresh air and yellowy-green light. Rita turns to see Jeannie in the doorway.

  “I was wondering if you could be a darl—” Jeannie stops. Her face falls. “Marge,” she says, quickly rearranging it.

  “Mrs. Harrington.” Marge smooths down her overall in rapid, jerky movements.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be here today,” Jeannie says.

  “Your husband asked me to help bed you in,” Marge says, managing to sound both obsequious and superior.

  At the mention of Walter, Rita colors. The damning words “our little arrangement” start fluttering in her head again, trapped there, like the moth at the window.

  “Bed me in, Marge?” Jeannie recovers a smile—she’s well practiced at maintaining a gracious front, and then, Rita suspects, going upstairs to scream into a pillow. “Goodness. I’m thirty-three, not ninety.”

  Marge ignores this and her eyes dart to Jeannie’s ring finger, as if to check the wedding band’s still there.

  With an unpleasant bump, Rita’s mind lands back on the sleety evening in December when she’d pressed her own engagement ring into the hands of a bewildered tramp on Waterloo Bridge, then carried on walking, tears rolling down her face. Earlier, she’d called Fred to confess. She can still hear the tremble in his voice: You betrayed me, Rita. And the line—and the future she’d thought was waiting back home—gone dead, cutting her adrift.

  “I’ve given the house a good airing,” Marge continues. “The fire will help get rid of the damp, Mrs. Harrington.”

  “You can call me Jeannie now.”

  “Do I have to?” Marge says after a beat, in a voice that could pickle onions.

  Last year, returning from The Lawns, Jeannie also insisted that Rita call her by “my name, not my husband’s.” It felt strange at first, but she has gotten used to it. She’s gotten used to many things she’d once thought extraordinary.

  “As you wish, Marge.” Jeannie walks across the room—her patent leather heels clopping—and turns to the large silvered mirror above the console. She balks at her reflection, as if she were expecting someone different.

  Marge hovers. “You’ll be happy here, Mrs. Harrington.
I’ll make sure of it,” she says firmly, as though happiness were something that could be conjured with a bit of elbow grease, like shine on a parquet floor.

  “Thank you.” Jeannie’s smile falters. A silence spreads.

  “And the children will have tree sap running in their veins before you know it,” adds Marge. “The forest will knock the city out of them, don’t you worry.”

  Jeannie’s eyes widen. Rita stares at the floor, hit by a sudden nervous urge to giggle.

  “Well, I’ll start on dinner,” continues Marge, undefeated. “How does a bit of lamb sound? Spuds?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. A simple nursery supper will be fine. Rita can rustle something up.”

  “But Mr. Harrington instructed that I cook you supper.” Marge shoots an offended look in Rita’s direction.

  “Well, I instruct you not to. You’ve worked very hard to get the house ready. Go home and put your feet up.”

  Marge stands stubbornly in the entrance hall, as if held there by a deep taproot. “You look so tired, Mrs. Harrington. Thin as a rake. If you’re here to convalesce, you must have a good square meal.”

  “Convalesce?” Jeannie manages a small laugh and lifts her hair from her neck, airing it. “Dear me.”

  “Well, I’ll let you get on,” says Marge, sounding unrepentant, turning to the front door.

  Rita follows Marge’s smudged reflection moving across the mottled sky of the mirror. As soon as she’s gone, Jeannie says, “My god, she’s not changed a bit. Damn it, she’s clearly been enrolled as one of Walter’s spies.”

  A rush of shame and guilt hisses through Rita, like hot water in a pipe. Our little arrangement. Somewhere in the house a cuckoo clock squawks, a shrill mechanical mimicry of the real birds outside.

  Jeannie sits on the bottom step of the stairs. She rests her face in her hands and peers up at Rita through her long curled lashes. “We need to talk, don’t we?”

  Her stomach flips. Jeannie knows. She gestures upstairs. “The children . . .”

  “Oh, they’ll survive.” Jeannie pats the stair. “Sit next to me.”

  Rita lands heavily, simultaneously horrified and relieved at being exposed. All that’s left is to confess first. “I’m so sorry, Jeannie.”

  “Sorry? What on earth are you talking about?” Jeannie looks at her, bemused. “Gosh, you really are a funny old thing, Rita. I wanted to say thank you. For coming with us. Really, from the bottom of my heart.”

  Robbed of her confession, she doesn’t know what to say.

  A lozenge of toffee-brown sunlight penetrates the dappled, dirty window, revealing a cyclone of dust motes, rotating in the middle of the hall.

  “I won’t lie to you, Rita, you’re in for the most boring summer of your life.”

  She can feel heat crawling up her neck like a rash.

  Jeannie studies her with a puzzled expression that softens into one of sympathy. “Fred’s no longer on the scene, is he? Your butcher chap. I suppose you don’t need to travel back home to see him at least.”

  “No,” she stutters, floored that Jeannie even remembers Fred’s name. She’s always assumed she ceased to exist for the Harringtons outside her job. Maybe she does. Toward the end of her engagement—although she’d had no idea it was the end, not until that phone call—Fred used to say she’d got so suckered into the Harringtons’ London life she’d not got one of her own; she’d attached herself to the family like a limpet to the side of the Titanic. For some reason it felt too exposing to reveal the deeper reasons she stayed, so she chattered about the salary she was saving, much better than anything she could earn back home, the little house they’d buy one day. She knew he’d never understand the way being in a family, even as staff, bolted down something loose and rattling inside. Nannying wasn’t just a job. It felt necessary on a level she didn’t really understand. When she wasn’t working, she felt lost, unrooted. Fred was a good man—and half an inch taller. But there were lots of things she couldn’t tell him.

  “You’re unlikely to find new romance here,” continues Jeannie, with a sigh. “I warn you now.”

  This suits Rita just fine. After what happened with Fred, she’s sworn off men for good.

  A sharp rapping sound. They both turn. And there’s Marge standing in a doorway, clutching a jailer’s bouquet of keys in one hand and, in the other, held high, laces dangling, a pair of large scuffed leather boots. “I just swiped these from the woodshed, Rita. Belong to our woodsman and carpenter, Robbie. He won’t miss them. As I said, you’ll need a good pair of shoes. Look about the right size, eh?”

  Men’s boots. Embarrassing.

  “Well, I’ll leave you in peace then.” This seems unlikely. Marge doesn’t move. The battered leather boots crouch beside her, like dogs awaiting instruction.

  “Is there something else, Marge?” Jeannie says tightly.

  “I don’t know if it’s my place to say this . . .”

  Then don’t say it, Rita silently pleads, remembering how Mrs. Pickering from number 35 had begun with “You can always have another, Jeannie,” in the same way. Jeannie’s hands start writhing in her lap. They always betray her.

  Marge licks her front teeth. “I heard about your baby, Mrs. Harrington,” she says, the words hurrying out, as if prepared in advance. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  The silence stretches. Rita remembers the morning after the baby was born: the stew of newspapers she cleared up from the master-bedroom floor, soggy with blood; the forgotten heap of stained towels on the window seat; the ferric blast in the air. The empty cradle.

  Marge starts to shuffle back into the corridor.

  “Wait,” says Jeannie suddenly.

  Marge stands to attention. Rita braces.

  “Thank you.” Jeannie’s hands are still on her lap. Her diamond ring glitters in the earthy brown light. “For acknowledging my baby existed. Not many people do.”

  Marge’s relief is almost palpable. “Oh, I forgot. One last thing.”

  That’s it. She’s never going to leave, Rita thinks.

  “A man phoned earlier this afternoon. Before you arrived. Asking to speak to you.”

  Jeannie straightens instantly, like a thirsty plant, watered. “Not Walter?”

  “Most definitely not.” Marge’s eyes narrow. She watches Jeannie more carefully. “Called three times. But he wouldn’t give a name.”

  Oh, no. Something in Rita flattens. Not him. Not here.

  “How odd,” says Jeannie weakly. The air in the room thins. A moment passes.

  “You have a lovely evening, then.” Marge retreats, her bunch of keys clinking.

  Jeannie covers her mouth with her hand. Rita sits very still, not daring to say anything, listening to Jeannie’s breath quickening, all that damage and desire threading between delicate diamond-weighted fingers.

  7

  Hera

  Don Armstrong used to be Daddy’s best friend. They were at Eton together, and in the old school photo that Daddy smashed against the wall at Easter, they’re grinning at each other rather than at the camera, like they’re in on a joke. Years later, Don took Daddy to the party where he met my mother. The legend goes that outside the party, her stiletto heel snapped off in the pavement grating. Don gave her a piggyback ride to the taxi. Daddy sat in the cab and escorted her safely home to her room in Kensington. “A team effort,” Mother used to say.

  In my parents’ wedding album they’re there again, arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. Don, best man, looks pretty much the same as now—tanned, broad-faced, all his features fighting to be top dog, dirty-blond hair. Daddy used to joke—in the days when he made jokes, and Don’s love life was an amusing topic of conversation, rather than a seeping open wound—that Don had kept his hair because he hadn’t gotten “bogged down” with a family or done a proper day’s work in his life. Don inherited a fo
rtune of stocks and shares, Daddy a doddery old glass company and an unprofitable quartz mine in Africa. Don got adventures. Daddy got meetings and cone furnaces and striking workers to worry about.

  Don would go traveling a lot. Mother would gaze out of the window and say things like “Walter, when did we last see Don? I hope he’s not in a fix somewhere,” and her voice would always sound a bit too high.

  After a while—days or weeks, we never knew—Don would pitch up on the doorstep again, crumpled from a flight, eyes blue beads in the tan of his face, the pockets of his sun-faded khaki jacket stuffed with stories and presents for me and Teddy: a tiger’s tooth; a gold Indian bangle; a wooden mask with slits for eyes that laughed in my nightmares.

  At dinner he’d do astonishing things like helping Mother in the kitchen, something my father would never ever do in a zillion years. “Budge up and let me baste the potatoes, Jeannie,” he’d say, making a huge mess, all the dripping flying everywhere, potatoes skidding across the counter, while my mother leaned back against the refrigerator, laughing, not at all bothered by the oil slick gleaming on the kitchen floor, as she normally would be.

  Afterward, the conversation would no longer be about what the Pickerings had done to their front garden (“To pull up those old roses!”) or whether the Smith-Burnets had bought a holiday house in France. We’d be transported.

  Don would sit in Daddy’s chair. No one else was ever offered it: the leather was molded to my father’s shape, like a saddle. Don would lean back, the ice crackling in his whiskey glass, and as he talked about his travels, it felt like the globe in the drawing room started to spin on its axis. Marrakesh. Paris. Bombay. Hunting game in Kenya was his favorite thing. He relived it as he talked: the eardrum-crack and shoulder-punch of the gun; the thrill of a huge beast falling. “The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel,” he’d say.