Who Loves You Best Page 3

  When I finish my shower, Jamie has gone.

  I sweep up the shards of his coffee mug—still warm—and run my finger lightly over the new dent in the bedroom wall. It’s been two months now. He’s got to talk to somebody who knows how to help him. I’m not sure how much longer I can cope with this on my own.

  Maggie is standing on the doorstep when I arrive at the Hasselbachs’. She thrusts Tatiana into my arms with a glare. The two-year-old promptly spits in my face.

  “Well, you can’t blame her,” Maggie snaps. “You’re late.”

  Yeah, three minutes. I watch Maggie stalk down the front steps. Should I tell her she’s got her executive skirt tucked into her tights?

  Tatiana spits at me again.

  Screw it.

  Three-year-old Galen is slumped on the floor of the living room, transfixed by SpongeBob. I turn the TV off. (“Please understand, Jenna, the children are not permitted to watch television. We believe it Rots Young Minds.”) Galen yells and turns it on again. I turn it off. Galen kicks my leg and lunges for the remote. I put Tatiana down, take the remote away and put it on a shelf out of his reach. The little sod pulls his sister’s hair, upends the LEGO table, and throws himself on the floor in a tantrum. So far, so normal.

  In the kitchen, Maggie has left her usual list (heavily underlined) weighted to the hand-hewn butcher’s block with an empty bottle of avocado oil: Her subtle way of telling me to buy a new one.

  I skim my errands for the day. “Collect dry cleaning. Tati haircut (remember we are growing out her bangs). Galen needs new shoes, not leather—”

  Christ. That’ll mean a trip to the fancy vegan shoe store on the other side of town.

  “Birthday present for Lottie’s party (nothing made in China). Toilet roll. Crushed garlic. Organic salmon fillets x2 (fresh). Pick up tile sample from Bathstore. NB dishwasher man coming 2 pm. Do not—” (triple underlined) “—let him leave without fixing problem under any circs.”

  “D’you think she expects me to sleep with him?” I idly ask my BFF Kirsty later.

  “Would it help?”

  “Not unless he’s into necrophilia. I look like death.” I jam the phone beneath my chin and rip open my second packet of Alka-Seltzer. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into that last tequila. I’m too old for this shit.”

  “Stick the kids in front of the TV and sack out for a couple of hours.”

  “I can’t. Maggie’s left me a list of jobs a mile long.”

  “So? She doesn’t pay you to organize her entire life. You’re a nanny, not a bloody slave. You need to put your foot down. If I was you, I’d—Hector, leave that alone! You know Mummy doesn’t let you—oh, fuck. Hang on, Jen.”

  I knock back the Alka-Seltzer, and root around in Maggie’s cupboard for the expensive shortbread biscuits she always hides at the back. Upstairs, Galen and Tatiana are battling it out in the playroom. It’s my policy not to intervene till there’s blood on the floor.

  “Little bastard,” Kirsty pants, picking up the phone again. “He broke that vase on purpose. If Fran tries to knock it off my wages, I’ll quit.”

  “Yeah, as if. You’ll never get a job this good again. She didn’t even fire you when she caught you smoking on the nanny-cam.”

  “Only because she knows I’d go to Rod and she’d get fucked in the divorce.”

  “Maggie’s got no idea what a pain it is dragging two kids all over town,” I mumble through a mouthful of shortbread. “You need a bloody physics degree to get them in and out of those fancy car seats of hers. It’s not fair on the kids either. No wonder they’re so bratty, they’re bored out of their minds. She might as well—oh, shit. She’s on call-waiting. I’d better go.”

  “Who were you talking to?” Maggie demands.

  “Cold caller—”

  “Yes, well, never mind that. You need to take the children to get new ski outfits this afternoon,” she snaps. “We’ve decided to go to Val d’Isère at half-term after all. And you’ll have to buy yourself a decent jacket; the one you wore last year was totally inadequate.”

  Yeah. That would be the one you made me pay for myself, Maggie.

  It suddenly registers. “Actually, Maggie, I’m off that week—”

  “So? You can have the week after off instead.”

  “But I’m going to Málaga with Jamie. We discussed it months ago—”

  “I can’t be expected to recall every little conversation, Jenna.”

  “I’ve already booked the flights!”

  “Well, you’ll have to change them. I can’t possibly go skiing without a nanny.”

  Has she got any idea how up her own arse she is?

  “Perhaps Jan and Curran’s au pair could—”

  “Oh, yes, that reminds me. We’re doubling up this year to save money, so you’ll be looking after their three boys, too. You’ve got to go with Galen and Tati to ski school anyway, so it’s not as if it’ll put you out.”

  “Maggie, I really can’t,” I say desperately.

  “Jenna, there isn’t much point me having a nanny if she’s not going to be there when I need her,” Maggie says pointedly. “Most girls would be thrilled at the idea of a holiday in France, especially when someone else is paying for it.”

  The threat hangs in the air. We both know how much I need to keep this job, with Jamie not working. I’m two months behind on the rent already, and my credit cards are maxed out.

  “Yes, Maggie,” I say dully.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Maggie promises, now that she knows she’s won.

  How many times have I heard that line before? Sorry I was three hours late and you missed your mother’s birthday dinner, but I’ll make it up to you. I know I said you could have Christmas off this year, but this trip is really important, I’ll make it up to you. We can’t afford to give you a pay raise this summer, but don’t worry, we’ll make it up to you.

  I have no idea how I’ll break it to Jamie. He’s been pinning everything on this break.

  I’m exhausted by the time Maggie gets home, late, as usual. The children have been absolute fuckers; dragged from pillar to post on Maggie’s errands, they’re fractious and overtired. As soon as she walks in the door, they fling themselves dramatically at her, clinging onto her legs like tree frogs, and she glares at me accusingly. What, you think I’ve kept them locked in the coal cellar and fed them stale bread and water? Suddenly I’m not sorry I gave the kids chocolate biscuits and Coke as a treat after tea. They’ll be bouncing off the walls all evening.

  When I pull up forty minutes later outside our block, I see Jamie has every light in the flat blazing. I sigh inwardly. He can’t bear the dark these days.

  “Jamie?” I throw my keys on the hall table. “Sorry I’m so late. Maggie was an hour late because of some meeting, and then—”

  I never even see the punch coming.

  “Live-in,” I say casually.

  Annabel looks surprised. “I understood you’ve always preferred live-out?”

  “I need some … personal space.”

  Her eyes flick towards my bruised cheekbone, then back to her screen. “I haven’t had a chance to go through your file properly yet. Remind me, how long is it since Caroline placed you with the Hasselbachs?”

  “Two years.”

  She gives me a beady look. “The salary’s pretty good. What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing really,” I fib. “I think the relationship’s just gone stale. You know how it is. We both need to find someone else.”

  “Before this, you were with the Corcorans for just over a year.” Annabel scrolls down, tapping her red nails on the screen. “Two boys, eight months and a-year-and-a-half. But just one other family before that, I see?”

  “The Martindales were my first nannying job. Maeve, their little girl, was on my county swimming team. When she was about eight her mum got sick, and they asked me to look after her full-time,” I say, thinking that, actually, it was Anna Martindale who rescued me, “and,
well, it sort of went from there.”

  “I hadn’t realized you were on the county team. We should put in on your CV.”

  “I was in the nationals. I had to quit when I got knocked off my bicycle and broke my shoulder, so I started coaching instead.”

  She looks pitying. There’s no need. I was gutted at the time, of course, but I’m over it now. It’s been nine years, after all. You can’t keep thinking what if.

  “We’d be able to get you a much better placement and salary if you had a degree in early childhood education or some other child-care qualifications,” Annabel muses. “Parents can often be funny like that. They’d rather have an eighteen-year-old with a bit of paper than someone experienced like you.”

  “I didn’t exactly plan this as a career,” I say mildly. “It just sort of happened.”

  “Well, your references from the Corcorans and Martindales are fantastic, and I’m sure Mrs. Hasselbach will give you a glowing one, too. I’ve got at least three lovely families on my books that I think will suit you—let me make a few calls. When can you start?”

  “As soon as you can find me a job,” I say.

  ———

  Jamie and I were in trouble before The Accident (he insists on referring to it like that, as if he’d been hit by a car, or slipped and fallen down a flight of stairs). We’ve been together too long; we aren’t the same people anymore. Six years is a long time. I’m twenty-seven now, not twenty-one. People change.

  When we met, Jamie was the weekend rugby captain at the South London Sports Center where I coached part-time after taking the job with the Martindales; I fancied him, and he knew it. A couple of years older than me, he was everybody’s friend: laughing loudest and drinking heaviest. He could stop a tank with one massive fist, and lift me onto the bar without breaking a sweat. I was the club princess, everybody’s sweetheart (people say I look like a younger Sandra Bullock, only with green eyes); most of the rugby team fancied the pants off me, and I knew it, too. Of course we ended up together. We were the Homecoming King and Queen of Stockwell.

  Friday nights to Monday mornings were just one long party. Sometimes I wished we could spend more time alone together, just the two of us, but as Jamie said, you’re only young once. Plenty of time to stay in and watch TV when we’re collecting our pensions.

  I don’t know when his drinking tipped from sociable last-man-standing into a serious problem, because it happened so gradually I didn’t notice. Or told myself I didn’t notice. But around a year ago people began to take me aside and ask if something was wrong at home. (There wasn’t, unless you count a chronic reluctance to grow up.) Jamie started missing rugby practice, turning up late to games, or not turning up at all. Most nights, he fell asleep on the sofa in front of the TV, a dozen empty beer cans on the floor at his feet. I tried to speak to him, but he brushed it off. Eventually, the club had no choice but to drop him from the team. I felt sorry for him, of course, even though it was self-inflicted; I knew exactly what he was going through. But Jamie couldn’t pull himself out of it. He just sat around feeling depressed and sorry for himself. I still cared about him, but it got harder and harder not to lose my patience.

  I was pretty sure he was building up to ask me to marry him on Christmas Day; he’d turned thirty in November, his plumbing business was doing really well despite his drinking, and his mum was dropping heavy hints about grandkids. I couldn’t let it drift on any longer. I had to end it. I was just waiting for the right moment.

  And then he had his “accident,” and everything changed.

  I don’t know what Annabel’s idea of a “lovely family” is, but I think their surname might be Addams.

  The first family lives in a huge fuck-off McMansion in Notting Hill. I’m mentally doubling my salary as I sit in a lounge the size of my parents’ townhouse, and wondering if I should ask for a car too (Kirsty has the use of a brand-new Mini Cooper) when they offer to show me around. “My” room turns out to be a single bed in the corner of their two-year-old daughter’s nursery.

  “We have a lot of guests,” the mother says brazenly. “We can’t afford to tie up a good bedroom on a permanent basis.”

  The second family lives in Wimbledon, near the tennis club. The house isn’t that big, but I’d get the whole attic floor to myself, including a small kitchen. The wages are a bit more than I’m getting now, and best of all, I’ll have eight weeks off every summer when my charge, a seven-year-old boy, goes to California to stay with his dad.

  Then I meet the kid.

  “He’s a fucking psycho!” I yell to Annabel later. “His mother left the room to answer the phone, and the bastard stapled the cat’s tail to the rug! He just grinned when he saw me watching—I swear, that little bastard’s another Ted Bundy. Why did his last nanny leave?”

  “Personal reasons,” Annabel says uncomfortably.

  “How much did the mother pay her to keep quiet?”

  “She had a very generous severance package—”

  “I’ll bet. How many nannies has he had so far?”

  A pause. “You’d have been the eighth.”

  “Annabel—”

  “You’ll love the next family,” she promises quickly. “Two little girls aged four and six, private health insurance, great salary—”

  I take to the mother immediately, and the little girls are sweet, too. My own room, a car on weekends, decent wages. It’s a bit too near home—I don’t want to run into Jamie at the supermarket—but other than that, it seems ideal. Until the father puts his hand on my bum as he shows me around and tells me he and his wife are very comfortable with nudity.

  “You said no babies,” Annabel retorts, when I complain. “That rules out an awful lot of nice families.”

  “It’s too hard.” I sigh. “I fall in love with them. It’s going to break my heart to leave Tati. There must be something else—”

  “Are you quite sure you actually want to leave Maggie, Jenna?”

  I hesitate. Maggie pays good money, and the children are OK, really; I could probably limp on in this job for another year, till Galen’s at kindergarten. But the situation with Jamie won’t wait. I can’t give up on him completely, after what happened to him. But I’m not going to stick around to be his punching bag. I have to move out now, ease him into the idea of us splitting up gently.

  “Fuck it. OK, what the hell,” I tell Annabel. “Give me babies.”

  “One baby, Annabel,” I mutter, staring up at the smart Chelsea townhouse with its shiny black front door and gold door-knocker. “No need to go overboard.”

  I’m tempted to keep right on walking. Not just because it’s twins (“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Annabel said innocently, after I’d already agreed to the interview. “Never mind, if you split your focus, you won’t get so attached”); but because I know people who live in Cheyne Walk are never going to hire someone common like me. The leafy street is lined with Bentleys and Jags; as I skulk on the front steps, an old woman with more bling than Elizabeth Taylor walks past, giving me a dirty look and the kind of wide berth you reserve for dog shit. These people can afford a posh Norland Nanny in a cap and uniform who knows the difference between napkins and serviettes. Forget it. Even if they give me the job, I don’t want to spend my life being treated like a bloody serf.

  “Are you—are you Jenna?”

  I turn back. A tall, fragile woman is peering around the shiny door, one infant cradled awkwardly in her thin arms, another strapped to her chest in a filthy baby sling. Her fine blond hair needs a good wash, and her pale face is etched with tiredness. Baby puke stains both shoulders of her cashmere sweater, and she’s barefoot, despite the freezing February weather.

  “Mrs. Elias?”

  “Oh, thank God!” she cries, and bursts into tears.

  In one swift motion, I shoo her into the house, take the baby she’s holding, unfasten the other infant from her chest, and settle us all in the lounge, nudging a box of tissues towards her with my elbow.

  �
�I’m so sorry,” she sobs. “You must think I’m a complete disaster. I’m just so tired—two of them—never sleep—no idea how much work—hungry all the time—”

  I let her cry it out, not understanding most of what she says, rocking the babies in my arms. The Corcorans’ two boys were only eleven months apart, so I’ve had a bit of practice handling two wrigglers at the same time. I dip my head to them. God, I’d forgotten how yummy babies smell.

  The twins stare up at me with the intense, old-soul gaze of very young infants. They don’t look a bit alike. The girl (dressed in the kind of pink-and-white smocked top only posh people who’ve never had babies buy) is dark and plump and the color of honeycomb, with eyes like Maltesers; the boy (in a navy sailor suit you know will run in the wash) is more of a Milky Bar kid, all pale angles and ashy hair and velvet-gray eyes. Neither of them cries. I love them already.

  Their mother blows her nose, and leaps up. “I’m a terrible hostess. What must you think? Did you have a good journey? Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, Mrs. Elias—”

  “Please, call me Clare. You must be thirsty. Or hungry. Are you hungry? I’ve got some lovely—”

  “Mrs.—Clare—it’s OK. Really. I’m sure you’ve got lots of questions you want—”

  “The other girls were so dreadful,” she blurts suddenly, plonking back down, “and you look so nice and normal. I was beginning to despair; you’ve no idea. The first girl we interviewed sounded pleasant on the phone, and then she turned up in spiky red heels and a skirt so short you could see her knickers—I’m sure she was very sweet, but really … and then the next girl was a vegan, which doesn’t matter at all, of course, but she was so thin, I just couldn’t see how she was going to manage, not with all our stairs, and Marc said even with his bonus we couldn’t afford to feed her special organic beans and things, and she had this dreadful cold—”

  I add another hundred a week to my asking salary.

  “—then there was a girl who didn’t speak a word of English and couldn’t drive, and a Russian girl who spent the whole interview making eyes at my husband—”