Crawling on her elbows in the fine ash under the Harringtons’ marital bed, snagging her cow’s lick, Rita eventually found the flesh-pink velveteen shoe bag, stuffed like a belly, with a cot blanket, frilled bootees and a silver Tiffany’s rattle that the baby never got to shake. But as she was trying to exit, almost stuck – always harder to get out of tricky situations than into them, she’d noted – she spotted a small kitchen knife tucked into the mattress wire, just below the pillow, as if awaiting Jeannie’s hand to dangle over the bed to grab it. Still spooks her. Rita doesn’t know what to think. Does Jeannie feel threatened by her husband? Has he ever hurt her? Walter would say his wife is paranoid, the knife another worrying sign of her tragically churned mind, the illness that’s shamed the family. But Walter would say that.
After all, it was Walter and his doctor who had sent Jeannie to The Lawns a month after the baby died. Rita, dispatched to collect her eight long weeks later, will never forget it, the country-house façade, the dead-eyed women drifting around the gardens in long white nighties. She’d got talking to a sweet old lady, rocking a pillow in her arms. She said she’d been there for fifty-three years and hadn’t had a visitor for forty. Rita had had no idea such places existed. And she vowed to make sure Jeannie never went back.
‘Here. We. Are.’ Rita turns off the engine. The hush is thick and soft, like her ears need to pop.
Looking around, she notices a small brown car, violently pocked with rust, parked under a slump of honeysuckle. It’s not the only thing in a state of disrepair. Foxcote’s struggle with the forest was clearly lost some time ago. Fat tree roots have punched clean through the garden wall in many places, leaving nettles to swagger through the cavities and thorny brambles to reach across the drive, as if intent on crawling inside the house. The whole place has gone to seed. Rita hopes the energy of the children will lift it.
‘Woo!’ yells Teddy, throwing open the car door and launching himself towards Foxcote’s timber porch. Air rushes in, smelling sharp and chlorophyll-green, and, oddly, familiar to Rita, something long forgotten. It makes the fine hairs on her arms bristle statically, as if rubbed against a balloon.
‘What are we actually doing here?’ Hera hurls the question, like a rock, from the back seat.
The mood takes a perpendicular dive. At first, Rita says nothing, careful not to step on Jeannie’s toes. She watches, tensing, as Jeannie pushes her sunglasses into her dark wavy hair, and eyes her thirteen-year-old daughter in the rear-view mirror, with a look of wary tenderness.
Hera glares back with unblinking eyes of such a pale Arctic blue you can see right to their backs – Walter’s eyes. Her fringe falls jaggedly over her forehead. Last week she used the blunt kitchen scissors to give herself a haircut that made her mother actually scream.
When Jeannie still says nothing, Rita twists in her seat. ‘We’re escaping the grimy city for the summer,’ she says cheerily, even though she loves London in August, its fractious energy and greasy hotdog heat. ‘While the house is being done up.’
Jeannie shoots her a small grateful smile.
‘But you’ve always hated Foxcote Manor, Mother,’ Hera points out. Teddy, literal and trusting, doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Hera understands far too much, and won’t stop prodding at her parents’ version of events. She didn’t miss her parents arguing in the hotel foyer earlier: Walter holding Jeannie by the arms, as if to impart some sense to her, Jeannie snapping her head away, refusing to look at him. Something about Hera’s expression today makes Rita think of a simmering pan of milk about to boil over.
‘Not at all,’ Jeannie lies softly.
Rita bites the inside of her cheek, and feels awkward. She knows Jeannie had no choice but to come here. Not if she wanted the children to stay in her care. She’d felt a punch of shock when Jeannie confided she’s no access to the family’s money either, only housekeeping, that a privileged married woman has less freedom than her nanny.
‘But –’ begins Hera, enjoying having her mother’s full attention for once.
‘That’s enough,’ Jeannie interrupts. ‘Not today, okay, darling? And stop gorging on sweets. You’ll ruin your tea.’
Hera slams the car door. Rita watches her stomp towards the house on her mottled plump legs. If Jeannie’s halved in size since the baby died, Hera has doubled. Rita finds sweet wrappers everywhere, in Hera’s pockets, under her pillow. Last month, she was caught stealing from her school’s tuck shop, twice.
Something was damaged in Hera the night the baby was lost. Rita’s tried to get her to talk about it many times. But Hera closes up like a clam. All Rita knows is that the events of the last year are somehow externalized in Hera, the turmoil a shadow in her pale eyes. And it’s her job to contain Hera’s flare-ups, and shelter her and Teddy from the worst of their parents’ humdinger rows, which shake the house to its foundations. (Rita often feels about as useful as an umbrella in a force-nine gale.)
‘Bodes well,’ says Jeannie.
‘Don’t worry. She’ll come round.’ For some reason Rita’s got faith in Hera. The febrile girl touches her heart. ‘I’ll grab some luggage and settle her in.’ She unfolds her long legs from the cramp of the driver’s seat and strides round to the boot, knowing it’s not luggage she’s after.
As the lid lifts with a satisfying clunk, Rita exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
‘So has your precious cargo survived?’ Jeannie calls from inside the car.
‘Yes!’ Rita calls back, grinning. Her natural optimism returns. ‘Alive and well.’
‘I told you it’d be fine wedged between the suitcases, Rita.’
A glass conservatory shrunk to finger-doll size, Rita’s terrarium is the only possession she cares about. The only thing she owns that has no practical purpose. On the night of the fire, after tugging Jeannie and the children down the smoky stairs in the dark, she’d tried to return for it, but the blazing heat beat her back. She rescued it the day she went to get the baby’s things. It was like reuniting with an old friend, a dear silent companion. Housing the most perfect mossy rock and, among other plants, a maidenhair fern she’s named Ethel and another she’s grown from a tiny black spore (Dot), the terrarium is the one constant between her unlikely nanny’s life, and Life Before.
Since she was little – though always the biggest in the class, least likely to be chosen as an angel for the nativity play or, later, asked to a dance – her dead father’s botanical plant case has been on her windowsill. She gazes into it as other young women might a mirror. If she squints through the half-moon of her lashes, she can retreat inside its glass, and crouch down in all the landscapes she’s ever created: the beach made from a handful of sand; a baby bonsai, its trunk like a twisted grey school sock; the prairie of dandelions rescued from a paving crack; all her old selves at different ages, different sizes, travelling the world in her mind, containing it, controlling it with her fingers. Keeping the scary big one out.
Resisting the urge to carry the terrarium safely inside the house first, she extracts the children’s suitcases and walks around to the front of the car, the weedy gravel crunching beneath her feet. She stoops down to Jeannie, who’s not moved. ‘Shall I grab your bag too?’