It wasn’t just the main overhead light—in fact that was turned down very low, giving off nothing but a kind of faint golden glow. The reading light by the bed had come on too, as well as a standing lamp next to a little table by the window and some fairy lights twined around the bedhead.
My surprise must have shown on my face, because Sandra gave a delighted laugh.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it! We do have switches, obviously—well, panels, but this is a smart house. All the heating and lights and so on can be controlled from our phones.” She swiped at something, and the main light grew suddenly much brighter, and then dimmer again, and across the room a light turned on in the en suite bathroom and then flicked off again.
“It’s not just lighting . . . ,” Sandra said, and she pulled across another screen and tapped an icon, and music started playing softly out of an invisible speaker. Miles Davis, I thought, though I wasn’t very well up on jazz.
“There’s also a voice option, but I find that a bit creepy, so I don’t often use it. Still, I can show you.” She coughed, and then said in a slightly artificial raised tone, “Music off!”
There was a pause, and then the Miles Davis shut off abruptly.
“Obviously you can also control the settings from the panel.” She pressed something on the wall to demonstrate, and a white panel lit up briefly as the curtains on the window opposite swished closed and then opened again.
“Wow,” I said. I really wasn’t sure what to say. On the one hand it was impressive. On the other hand . . . I found myself coming back to Sandra’s word. Creepy.
“I know,” Sandra said with a little laugh. “It’s a bit ridiculous, I do realize. But being architects it’s a professional duty to try out all the cool gadgets. Anyway . . .” She looked at her phone again, checking the clock this time. “I must stop talking and get the supper out of the oven, and you must take off your coat and unpack. Shall I see you downstairs in . . . fifteen minutes?”
“Sounds good,” I said, a little faintly, and she gave me a grin and disappeared, closing the door behind her.
After she had gone I set my case on the floor and crossed the room to the window. Outside it was completely dark, but by pressing my face to the glass and cupping my hands to my temples I could just make out a star-spattered sky and the dark shapes of mountains against the horizon. There were almost no lights.
The realization of how isolated this place really was made me shiver, just for a moment, and I turned my back on the window and set about surveying the room.
What struck me instantly was that it was an odd mixture of traditional and modern. The window was pure Victorian, right down to the brass latch and the slightly rippled glass panes. But the lights were twenty-first century—no boring bulb in the center of the ceiling. Instead, there was a plethora of spotlights, lamps, and uplighters, each focused on a different part of the room, and tuned to a different warmth and brightness. There were no radiators either; in fact I couldn’t see where the heat was coming from, but clearly there must have been some source—the night was cool enough for my breath to have left white mist on the windowpane. Underfloor heating? Some kind of concealed vent?
The furniture was more conservative, with a strong air of an expensive country-house hotel. Opposite me, facing the window, was a king-size bed covered with the ubiquitous array of brocade cushions, and beneath the window was a small plumply stuffed sofa, with a little table beside it—the perfect space for entertaining a friend, or having a drink. There were chests of drawers, a desk, two upright chairs, and an upholstered blanket chest at the foot of the bed that could have done duty either as storage or additional seating. Doors led off to each side, and opening one at random I found a walk-in closet filled with empty racks and shelves, spotlights flickering into life above the bare shelves automatically as I pulled open the door. I tried the second one, but it seemed to be locked.
The third was ajar, and I remembered it was the one that Sandra had lit up to show the bathroom inside. Venturing in, I saw there was a panel on the wall, like the one Sandra had pressed by the main door to the room. I touched it, not entirely expecting it to work, but it glowed into life, displaying a confusing configuration of icons and squares. I pressed one at random, not completely sure what was going to happen, and the lights became slowly brighter, revealing a state-of-the-art wet room with a huge rainwater shower and a concrete vanity unit the size of my kitchen counter. There was nothing faux Victorian about this room at all. It was space-age in its complexity, sleek and modern in its styling, and had more glamour in one metro tile than most bathrooms possessed in their entirety.
I thought of my bathroom at home—hair in the rusting plughole, dirty towels kicked into the corner, makeup stains on the mirror.
God, I wanted this.
Before . . . I don’t know what I had wanted before. I had focused on nothing except getting here and meeting the Elincourts and finding out what was at the end of this advert. That was it. I honestly hadn’t even thought about actually getting the job.
Now . . . now I wanted it. Not just the fifty-five thousand a year, but everything. I wanted this beautiful house and this gorgeous room, right down to the sumptuous, marble-tiled shower, with its sparkling limescale-free glass and polished chrome fittings.
More than that, I wanted to be part of this family.
If I had had any doubts about what I was doing here, this room had crushed them.
For a long, long moment, I just stood at the vanity unit, my hands splayed on the counter, staring at myself in the mirror. The face that stared back at me was somehow unsettling. Not the expression exactly, but something in my eyes. There was something there—a kind of hunger. I must not look too desperate in front of Sandra. Keen, yes. But desperation—the kind of hungry desperation I saw staring back at me now—that was nothing but off-putting.
Slowly, I smoothed down my hair, licked a finger, wetted an unruly brow back into place. Then my hand went to my necklace.
I wore it every day—had done so ever since I had left school and jewelry was no longer banned by uniform codes. Even as a child I’d worn it at weekends and whenever I could get away with it, ignoring my mother’s sighs and her comments about cheap nasty rubbish that turned your skin green. It had been a present for my first birthday, and now, after more than two decades, it felt like part of myself, something I barely even noticed, even when I reached to play with it in moments of stress or boredom.
Now I noticed it.
An ornate silver R on the end of a dangling chain. Or rather, as my mother had so frequently reminded me, not silver, but silver plate, something that was becoming more and more apparent, as the brassy metal beneath shone through where I had rubbed the pendant absentmindedly with my fingers.
There was no reason to take it off. It wasn’t inappropriate. The chances of anyone even noticing it were very low. And yet . . .
Slowly, I reached round to the back of my neck and undid the clasp.
Then I put on a slick of lip gloss, straightened my skirt, tightened my ponytail, and prepared to go back downstairs to Sandra Elincourt and give the interview of my life.
When I got downstairs, Sandra was nowhere to be seen, but I could smell some kind of delicious, savory scent coming from the far side of the hallway. Remembering that that was where Sandra had ushered the dogs, I moved forward, cautiously. But when I pushed open the door I found I had stepped into another world.