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 S?o 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.
I watched her from the front window running helter-skelter into the night and I hoped that there would be no more girls.