Chapter 9
NINE
‘No, Bibi!’ Her face scarlet and tear-streaked, Parker squirmed away from Beatrice and set off across the room as fast as her toddler legs could carry her, her whimpering turning to screaming. ‘No, no, no!’
Beatrice watched her for a second, hands on hips, then set off in pursuit. It was Friday afternoon and she was more exhausted than she could ever remember being before – not when she’d been up all night studying for her final exams at college, not when she’d got back from three nights at Burning Man and couldn’t let on to her parents that she hadn’t spent the weekend chilling at a friend’s place in the Hamptons, not after the first night she’d spent with – what was his name again? – and struggled through a day of lectures dazed with sex and lack of sleep.
In a little over two weeks working as Slate and Parker’s nanny, she’d had one day off. Strictly speaking, her weekends were meant to be free unless she was accompanying the family on a trip out of town, which had happened the first weekend. On the second, Frances had pleaded with her to come and help out at Slate’s fourth birthday party, offering to pay her so handsomely that Beatrice had been unable to refuse. After spending the morning blowing up balloons and making sandwiches, the afternoon wrangling twenty-five sugar-hyped pre-schoolers and the evening clearing up, she’d barely left her hotel bedroom the following day, only to have to get up at six on Monday morning and face another week of children.
In her worst nightmares, she couldn’t have imagined it would be so full-on. From the moment Frances left for work until the moment she returned home, there was no let-up. Even after she’d dropped Slate off at preschool, there were Parker’s tantrums and demands for play and snacks to deal with. Even when Parker was having her nap, there were countless tiny socks to be paired and put away, food splatters worthy of a Jackson Pollock painting to be wiped up, the next meal to be thought about before the kids became totally unmanageable with hanger.
Even her identity was no longer her own – it hadn’t taken long to realise that Beatrice was too difficult a name for Parker’s two-year-old tongue, and once she’d started calling Beatrice Bibi, her brother and even her parents had followed suit.
Thank God , she said to herself, thank baby Jesus and all the angels I no longer believe in for a day off tomorrow and another the day after that.
‘Parker, honey,’ she said. ‘Come on. We’ve got to go get your brother from school and that means you’ve got to put on your coat.’
‘Nooo!’ Parker howled, flinging herself to the floor, her arms and legs thrashing. ‘I don’t want to!’
At least she, having no emotional connection to the children whatsoever, was able to deal with them as dispassionately as if she’d been charged with looking after someone’s pet snake.
Still, it was already three thirty. Slate needed to be picked up by four, otherwise a hefty fine would be added to Frances and Peter’s bill and – worse – Beatrice would look incompetent. It was time for some UN-level negotiation.
She squatted down next to Parker, who ignored her and kept screaming.
‘Now, Parker,’ Beatrice said calmly. ‘We’re going to get your brother. It’s cold out, so you can’t just wear your fairy dress. You can choose whether you want to put on your pink or your silver rain boots – how about that?’
Parker stopped screaming and opened her eyes. Beatrice’s mind flashed to the tin of chocolate-chip cookies she and Parker had baked earlier that morning – more fucking splatters, not to mention Parker knocking over the jar of chocolate buttons, which had skidded across most of the apartment. But resorting to bribery was a high-risk strategy – next thing she knew, the kid would be refusing to get dressed at all without large doses of sugar. Which Beatrice didn’t mind in principle, but would be liable to make Parker even more hyper.
Plus, she might tell her mother.
Then Beatrice had an idea.
‘Tell you what,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘You can wear my scarf. Come on, up you get.’
Startled by the sudden change in Beatrice’s tone, Parker stopped screaming and scrambled to her feet.
‘Wait there.’ Beatrice hurried to the entryway and snatched the scarf from the closet. It was Givenchy, a silk and wool blend with the designer’s name woven in white on to a black background, and she’d picked it up in a thrift store in the Meatpacking District.
‘Scarf,’ Parker said, reaching out a hand to grab it.
‘Scarf,’ Beatrice confirmed. ‘Only we’re going to turn it into a coat. Now, let’s play mannequins. Arms out like this. Stand very still.’
Beatrice hunkered down again, looking from scarf to child and back again. This shouldn’t be too hard. She draped one corner over Parker’s shoulder, wound the length around her body like a sash, crossed it over the other shoulder, wrapped it around her waist and knotted the ends securely together.
Then she stood up and surveyed the result. Not terrible. She looked like a papoose, but she’d be warm enough.
‘Silver rain boots with that, I think,’ she said firmly.
‘Silver,’ Parker agreed meekly, her hands pressing into the soft fabric like starfish half submerged in sand.
‘Good girl. Come on then, let’s make a move.’
Hurrying now, Beatrice pushed her arms into her own coat, slung her purse over her shoulder and pushed the button to summon the elevator. A minute later they emerged on to the street, Parker’s small, sticky hand clasped tightly in Beatrice’s.
‘Four hours,’ she breathed to herself, like an affirmation. ‘Four hours, then I won’t have to see them again for two whole days.’
On Sunday, Beatrice woke up feeling almost human, having slept for twelve hours straight. She’d spent the previous day in bed, sleeping and mindlessly watching old episodes of Friends on the small, flickering screen of her hotel room television. She’d ventured out at lunchtime with her sketchbook, thinking she’d explore the local area a bit, but got no further than McDonald’s before returning to bed.
Was this what it was going to be like? Months and months of living in a country where she couldn’t learn to feel at home and a city she was too shattered to even see, all her hopes and intentions coming to nothing because she was simply too tired to actually live?
The weather helped: a glorious, sunny day, full of the warmth that spring had so far failed to deliver. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweater, Beatrice walked away from the cluster of glass high-rise towers, following the bend of the river towards the City. She wanted to explore: to find the neighbourhood where the old men in Clonmara had told her the family’s house had been located. But also, she needed to find a place to live; two weeks in a hotel – even such a basic one – had eaten into her funds alarmingly, even with her parents’ contributions.
She didn’t get very far before hunger made her stop, and she went into a café and ordered a full English breakfast. Mopping up beans with her toast, adding three spoons of sugar to her tea – the only way to make it drinkable, she figured – and even sampling the scab-like disc of black pudding, she hoped she might be mistaken for a local.
But she wouldn’t, of course – no local would have an A–Z map book and a Rough Guide to London open next to them, studying it closely as they ate.
She could quite easily walk as far as the Tower of London, and check that out. She could get the Tube into central London and wander round Topshop and Selfridges. She could visit an art gallery or even the Fashion and Textile Museum.
But she knew she would do none of those things. She’d come here with a purpose: everything – the job that her parents had arranged for her, her insistence on taking a gap year before finding a proper job or a grad school programme, her insistence on refusing Peter and Frances’s offer of accommodation – had been for one thing.
Only now that she was here, she had no idea how to actually go about it.
She rooted in her purse, found her notebook and placed it on top of the open A–Z , flicking through the pages. She hadn’t added anything since arriving in London; the final entry was still there, the four words, one crossed out and corrected: Big house in Spitalfields.
She cast her mind back to that dingy, low-ceilinged room, its walls still stained yellow from the tobacco no one had been permitted to smoke for over a year. It was practically a miracle she’d managed to write it down at all, given how thick the men’s accents had been and how many glasses of peaty Irish whiskey they’d insisted on buying her.
They’d told her that, yes, there’d been a big house in the area, long ago, and that a wealthy family had lived there.
‘More than ten years ago, it would have been, since the old woman was taken into care.’
‘Her son died some twenty years ago and his wife had run off years before.’
‘He was one for the drink, and the ladies.’
Beatrice had done some rapid mental arithmetic. If the old woman had been old enough to go into a care home ten years ago, her son and daughter-in-law would surely have been too old to be of any relevance to Beatrice.
‘Did they have any children?’ she asked. ‘A daughter?’
‘Sure there was a girl.’ The speaker scratched his head. ‘But she went off to college in Dublin and no one ever saw her again.’
‘Fair broke the old lady’s heart.’
‘And the house was sold and torn down, and they built bungalows on the land.’
Beatrice hadn’t been able to stop her disappointment from showing in her face. She half-stood, beginning to thank the men for their time.
‘Ah, stay and have another drop of this good whiskey with us, do.’
‘Wait, there was another house, wasn’t there?’
‘In London.’ The old man’s face brightened. His friend gestured to the bartender and more whiskey was poured. ‘In the East End, I believe.’
‘The Doyles were after buying big houses.’ A phlegmy cackle. ‘Before they lost all their money, that is.’
‘It would’ve been the old woman and her husband that bought it. Some notion of family history, because it was in Spitalfields that they first made their fortune, back when all the Irish weavers crossed the sea to work there.’
‘But they never lived there, because the war came.’
That was all the information Beatrice had been able to glean. The name of a place – Spitalfields – and a family – Doyle.
The nib of her pen hovering over the notebook, she traced the area on the page of the map. The yellow and white lines of the roads, their names printed in black, gave her no clue as to what the place might actually be like. But there it was, Tower Bridge to its south, Whitechapel to its east, the City of London to the west and Shoreditch and Hackney to the north.
None of those names meant anything to her either, yet they felt somehow mysterious and full of promise. She could almost taste the words as she formed them silently with her tongue.
Leaving the dregs of her tea and most of her black pudding, Beatrice tucked a ten-pound note under her saucer, pushed back her chair and stood up, tucking her books back into her bag. Now that she was almost there, almost within touching distance of a goal of sorts, she felt newly apprehensive, tempted to return to the familiarity of her hotel and Friends , and sleep some more.
But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t get another chance until next weekend and she couldn’t afford to waste another week with no longer-term home and all her questions still unanswered.
She pushed open the door of the café and headed out into the street, the sunshine dazzling her before she lowered her shades over her eyes and started walking.