The Nanny (24 page)

“Don't worry about me.”

“Fine.” Sally shrugged.

“I'm just a bit down.”

“We've established that.”

“Sorry.”

“I don't really care for your sympathy, Josh.”

“Sorry.”

“Not half as sorry as I am for you.”

Josh nodded. “Yep. That makes sense. I'm a complete mess.”

“Yeah well, I'm a tidy girl—”

“I know—”

“No room for mess—”

“I know—”

“So seeing as you're an immature, messy scrap of humanity who can't bin something he doesn't need anymore, and I'm the adult in this ‘shagationship,' it looks like I'll be the one who's binning you.”

Josh tried to smile again.

“Consider yourself binned, Josh.”

“Thank you. You're a truly good person.”

“Don't patronize me, you sod.”

“Sorry.”

“I'd bought a basque as well,” she muttered.

“Sorry.”

She got off his desk. “It's alright,” she said. “Just because you won't be seeing it, doesn't mean no one else will.”

“I have every faith—”

“Don't
patronize
me.”

“Sorry.”

And with that, Sally walked away, head high, ignoring the rib ache from her basque.

Josh stared at his phone, wondering how long the journey from London to Niblet-upon-Avon was.

 

Jo arrived at the station. Two whole minutes earlier, she'd stopped crying. Then she spotted her father standing alone on the platform and started all over again. They shared an awkward embrace and headed off to the hospital in silence. The hospital was tiny. It was where Jo had been born, and as they approached it, Bill started recounting his feelings on walking there twenty-three years earlier. He touched on the previous miscarriages Hilda had suffered, the doctors' gloomy prognoses, and their joy when Jo was born. The nearer they got, the more Jo felt she was still carrying her rucksack.

“She's just down here,” said her father, as they approached a ward to the right. Jo kept her eyes ahead and followed him as he veered toward the end bed.

They found Hilda wide-awake. Smaller than Jo remembered and with slightly more squashy hair, but apart from that, surprisingly similar to before. She even managed a glint of recognition and half a smile on seeing her daughter.

She was already making clear sounds and just beginning to move the left side of her body. The nurse explained that if the physiotherapy and
speech therapy went to plan, she should be almost good as new within six months.

When Jo and Bill returned home later that evening, they were too tired to eat. Bill sat in the lounge, flicking through the channels, and Jo shut the lounge door and sat in silence in the hall by the phone. She looked down at her mother's spidery writing on the notepad.
Jo's phone numbers
, it said. There was her mobile number and the Fitzgeralds' number.
Best times to ring: Weekdays—between 9pm and 11pm and weekends—not in the morning!
Jo rested her head in her hand.

“Cuppa?” Her dad appeared in the hall.

“Mm, lovely,” she said, and picked up the phone. She left a message on Shaun's voicemail. She tried Sheila and did the same. She told them she was home and would love to see them. She didn't phone Pippa.

 

Vanessa was still in the office midevening when her phone rang. It was Dick.

“So how did it go?” he asked.

“How did what go?” asked Vanessa warily, hiding a Silly Nibble chocolate bar in her top drawer.

“The pitch. Did you get it?”

“Oh yes!” said Vanessa. “We got it.”

Dick nodded slowly. He should have guessed.

“Well done, Mzzz Superwoman,” he said. “Even with your home life crashing around your ears, you still don't miss a single rung up that ladder.”

“Did you actually phone for a reason, Dick?”

“Just wanted to say well done.”

“That was ‘well done,' was it?”

“Yes. Would you like me to say it again?”

“No I certainly wouldn't. Anything else?”

“Just to say that after such hard work, you really deserve a fortnight off with the children.”

“Just remember the deal. If Jo's gone for more than two weeks, it's your turn.”

“Fine,” said Dick generously. “I could definitely do with a break.”

“Is that all you called about?” she asked.

“Nope. Thought you might like to know that the children are going to bed now and send their clever mummy all their love.”

“Thank you,” said Vanessa. “Tell them Mummy's looking forward to
using up two weeks of her precious holiday looking after them while Daddy sits in an empty shop scratching his balls.”

“Oh, I have to go, darling,” rushed Dick, “one of them needs the toilet.”

“I hope it's Tallulah,” replied Vanessa, “because the others have been managing on their own for a while now.” And she slammed down the phone.

Dick held the phone away from his ear, then very slowly put it down. Then he started rocking backward and forward, head in hands.

Jo was so busy in her first week at home that she didn't have too much time to brood on why Shaun hadn't returned the phone message she'd left him on her first day back. Looking after her mother was far harder than looking after any children because Jo was so emotionally drained. Hilda needed twenty-four-hour care and could only move fractionally. It was like looking after a baby, while coping with the grief of losing a parent.

However, her mind wasn't so one-tracked that she didn't notice something was up with Shaun. She started replaying recent conversations with him and realized they'd hardly spoken more than twice a week in the past month, and even then their conversations had been short and full of unspoken resentments. She kept thinking back to when he'd come to visit her in Highgate. On the surface, things had gone well between them—if anything, they'd been happier than they had been for a long time. And then she thought of how things had felt under the surface. And then she pushed all thoughts of Josh to the back of her mind. Until nighttime, when in the safety of her bed, in the safety of the dark, she scrunched her eyes shut, faced the bedroom wall she'd faced all the way through childhood, and let her mind free-fall from a great height, whizzing past heaven and landing in hell, just thinking of him.

When she had a spare moment from worrying about her mother, musing over Shaun, and dreaming of Josh, she thought about Sheila. Sheila had also not phoned her back since her return. It dawned on Jo that she hadn't actually spoken to Sheila since the call when Sheila had asked about Pippa, when Jo had had to leave midconversation. It only occurred to her now, in the cold light of day, how insensitive that was. And that was weeks ago—or was it months? Sheila hadn't returned one of her voice messages since then.

When Shaun finally phoned, a week and a half after she'd got home, she hardly recognized his voice.

“Oh hello,” she said warily. “How are you?”

“Fine thanks,” said Shaun. “You?”

“Mm. Fine.”

She was just about to ask him whether he'd got her message, when he asked how her mother was. She did a little hop, skip, and jump over concern and landed on anger.

“Fine.”

“Oh good.”

“She's back home.”

“I'm pleased to hear it.”

“Thank you.”

They arranged to see each other that Friday night—in two days' time, nearly a whole two weeks after she'd come home. Neither seemed particularly excited about it.

 

Things were going just as badly at the Fitzgerald home. Vanessa stood motionless in the middle of her kitchen, silence percolating through every pore, her naked eyes fixed on the clock—11:15
a.m
. Were the clock batteries running low? She considered going back to bed until Tallulah needed to be picked up. Ironically, taking this time off to be at home had felt, at first, like supremely beneficial timing—she hadn't had to face Anthony after their scramble in the Silly Nibble cupboard. But as the time had passed, she realized it was the worst thing she could have done. All it meant was that she hadn't been able to tell him immediately that she'd made a terrible mistake. She'd had to nurse her guilt for a whole fortnight, her only company being all the loved ones she'd betrayed. It bordered on torture.

She had thought about phoning Anthony at the office, but that would have implied that their dalliance—dalliance? Did it even count as that?—held some significance for her. And also someone at home might find out. Oh God, had it come to this? Added to the stress of that, the isolation of being at home was doing her head in. Every morning, she had her daily update phone call with Tricia and Max, but their efficient brusqueness against the background office noises cut like a knife. Every time they were about to say good-bye she had to stop herself asking them to stop and chat. Was she like this on the phone when she spoke to Dick, in his empty shop? Did she make him feel this excluded, this irrelevant? And then the phone call would be over and Tricia and Max would hang up abruptly, leaving her to a day of relentless, mind-numbing silence.

She felt like her soul was slowly shrinking. And in only a few days, she
had become a different person. She hardly recognized herself. She'd become dangerously introspective and started talking to herself. Her beautiful home had transformed into a prison, and she felt swamped by a need to get out of it. Unfortunately, the more swamped she felt, the less she was able to extricate herself from it. But when she did manage it, she seemed to have turned into a madwoman. She'd start striking up inane conversations with shop staff, she'd try and make eye contact with passersby, she'd even chatted to the
Big Issue
seller she usually ignored, until his eyes glazed over. Her all-time low was one morning when she'd managed to rationalize to herself the possibility of inviting in the dustmen for coffee. She wasn't one for poetry but after nearly two weeks at home as a full-time mother, she felt like she was a flower rooted in the shade, wilting silently against a cold brick wall. The thought that she might never again find a nanny like Jo, who would stay with them for long enough to give the children stability, and that the only possible solution might be that she give up her day job, had started to haunt her in the dead of night.

It wasn't as if she was idle. Keeping house—to the standard she'd grown used to with Jo living there—was a thankless, invisible, and twenty-four-hour-long job. It made her office job look like sheer bliss. At least with an office job, everyone at the office might treat you as a form of underclass, but the outside world treated you with some respect. At home not even your own children respected you. In those seemingly endless hours between afternoon and evening when the children needed her attention most and when she had least reserves of energy or emotion, she'd think of Jo and want to weep.

As she stood in the silent kitchen, thinking such thoughts again and again, the phone made her jump. Was it Max? Anthony, maybe? She braced herself and picked up the phone. “Hello, Vanessa Fitzgerald,” she announced.

“I should hope so,” said Dick cheerfully. “Otherwise, I'll have to start paying you.”

“Ha-ha.”

“How's it all going?”

“The kids are at school, and I'm just about to make a coffee to give me enough energy to kill myself.”

“Oh. Don't do that, darling.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Who'd pick up the children?”

She slammed down the phone and cried until it was time to pick up Tallulah.

 

With only one more day to go before the weekend, Vanessa wore mascara to celebrate. Three layers of it. She spent twenty minutes doing her makeup. It probably made her weigh two pounds more, but it had been worth it. Tallulah had watched with awe and, once permission was granted, had played ecstatically with mummy's pinkest lipsticks, and they'd managed to while away almost an hour tidying her makeup drawer.

They hadn't bothered with Tumble Tots or ballet all fortnight—Vanessa decided they might as well make the most of just being together, and anyway, she wasn't exactly sure where they were held and didn't want to interrupt Jo on her time off. She also didn't want to risk getting Tallulah's hopes up and then not be able to find the place.

On their last Thursday together, by the time they were ready for their teatime walk, both were pleased with the way their afternoon had turned out. Tallulah was wearing Summer Sunshine nail polish and Vanessa had a tidy makeup drawer. Tallulah had learned how to make pizza from scratch, and Vanessa didn't have to prepare any tea. It didn't give her the same buzz that her job did, but it did make her feel she wasn't such a failure as a mother.

The next morning, her last Friday off from work, Vanessa woke with a start after dreaming of falling down a hole in the ground and never reaching the bottom. She got out of bed in one bound.

 

While Vanessa clattered round the kitchen, Josh lay awake listening. He'd been having problems sleeping again, just like old times. And every time he woke up in the morning, after a night of thinking it would never come, his first emotion was dread. He hated walking through Jo's room. Every time, the same thoughts, the same feelings. He'd try not to, but end up looking at her bed and remember lying on it watching her falling asleep the night she'd got her dad's call; then he'd think about her with Shaun and remember the noises he'd heard through the stud wall when Shaun had come to stay; then finally, he'd think about them being together now. And then after his shower, he'd walk back through her room again into his room to dress and have exactly the same memories, the same thoughts, the same feelings. And then he'd have to walk through
her room again, out into the kitchen and have exactly the same memories, the same thoughts, the same feelings. Three little journeys to hell every morning before breakfast.

And every evening he'd have to listen to Vanessa and Dick arguing about giving up on Jo and getting a new nanny. Vanessa was adamant Jo was coming back, Dick was concerned that she wasn't and they'd never find a nanny as good as she, or one who would stay. One evening when Dick had suggested that maybe after all, the children just needed their mother, they'd had the biggest row he'd ever heard.

After work, Josh climbed up the steps from Highgate Station, slowly but surely, and made his way to his dad's shop. Although there was a light drizzle, the spring evening smelled of flowers trying to bud. There was an almost tangible optimism in the air, like God's own version of supermarket's baked bread and Muzak. Summer would be here before he knew it. And yet he was depressed. He watched the traffic as he paced through Highgate.
Weird
, he thought as he neared the shop.
I never noticed how popular white Clios were before.

 

Jo wiped her mother's mouth gently with the napkin and put the spoon back in the bowl.

“There,” she said. “Well done. Can you believe Dad made it out of his own brain?”

Her mother smiled a slow wonky smile that squeezed at Jo's heart.

“He never even knew there was such a thing as a parsnip before making it,” Jo said briskly. “You almost had parsnip soup without the parsnip.”

Hilda laughed as Jo put the bowl on her bedside table.

“Do you want to wait a bit before you move on to the cheese and crackers?”

Hilda nodded.

“Sheila still hasn't called back,” said Jo quietly. Hilda looked at her. “I think I upset her when I was in London,” she explained. “Didn't call enough. Made her feel used.” She looked up at her mum. “I don't think I called anyone enough,” she whispered. Very slowly, Hilda lifted her hand and placed it on Jo's. They exchanged thin smiles. Jo picked up the plate with the cheese and crackers.

“Right,” she said. “Tell me when you've had enough.”

 

They'd phoned! Three o'clock on the Friday before Vanessa was due back and they'd phoned! It had taken them two weeks to need her, but need her
they did! Vanessa was buzzing. She had a deadline—Max wanted some facts and figures that only she could provide, and he wanted them fast. “Fucking fast,” in fact.
Tra bloody la,
thought Vanessa. A few emergency phone calls and she was back in the driver's seat. Tallulah sat with Mummy at the kitchen table and pretended to be an advertising accounts manager while Vanessa delegated the most basic of jobs and got one of the most efficient PAs she'd ever had. Better still, it stopped Vanessa thinking too much about Anthony, her marriage, her responsibilities, and the mess she was making of her life.

 

“Thanks for coming straight from work,” said Dick to Josh. “I really appreciate it.”

“Anytime, Dad,” said Josh. “You must know that.”

“Yes but on a Friday,” said Dick. “I know all you city types usually go out for a well-deserved drink—”

“Yeah and I hate it. I'd much rather be here.”

Josh never ceased to be amazed that his father didn't realize that he'd probably swallow fire for him. That's the way parenting works. Children could smell parental love like dogs could smell fear. Love your child unconditionally and they could one day leap up and ferociously attack you. Act as if you don't really care, and they slavishly adore you.

“What's the latest, Dad?” he asked.

Dick sighed. “I'm giving up on Jackie.”

Josh stared at his father, then started nodding slowly.

“I can't rely on her anymore,” said Dick. “And I may not have the time. I need someone I can really rely on. Someone I can trust.”

“Mm?”

Dick grinned at his son. “You're going to make me ask you, aren't you?”

Josh mirrored his father's grin. “Oh yes.”

“Josh.”

“Dad.”

“I'm sacking my accountant. Please will you do my accounts?”

Josh sucked in air and shook his head, pretending to consider.

“Of course I'd pay you!” rushed Dick.

“Don't be ridiculous—”

“I'm not being ridiculous,” said Dick. “I have, amazingly enough, still got my pride. God knows how, but—”

“Dad, it would be like a hobby for me—I mean, I'd love to actually keep the books for a place I care about instead of some massive, faceless company—”

“Well we certainly aren't massive.”

“I don't want the money.”

“Stop it, Josh—you're doing more than enough already.”

“Hardly. And as we both know, if it wasn't for that bloody stupid n—”

“It wasn't Jo's fault—”

“I know!” broke in Josh, astonished. “I was going to say that stupid
night,
not that stupid
nanny
. If it wasn't for that stupid night and me being a prize moron, we'd be in a much better position—
you'd
be in a much better position. It's my fault, so the least I can do is help out.”