It was like the back of the house had been sliced off brutally and grafted onto a startling modernist box, almost aggressively twenty-first century. Soaring metal beams went up to a glass roof, and beneath my feet the Victorian encaustic tiles of the hall had abruptly stopped, replaced by a poured concrete floor, polished to a dull sheen. It looked like a combination of a brutalist cathedral and an industrial kitchen. In the center was a shiny metal breakfast bar, surrounded by chrome stools, dividing the room into the bright kitchen area, and beyond it the dimly lit dining space, where a long concrete-topped table ran the length of the room.
In the middle was Sandra, standing in front of a monstrous freestanding stove, the largest I had ever seen, and ladling some kind of casserole into two bowls. She looked up as I came in.
“Rowan! Listen, I’m so sorry, but I forgot to ask, you’re not veggie, are you?”
“No,” I said. “No, I eat pretty much anything.”
“Oh phew, that’s a relief, because we’ve got beef casserole and not a lot else! I was just frantically wondering if I had time to do a baked potato. Which reminds me.” She walked across to the huge steel fridge, tapped an invisible button on the fridge door with the knuckle of one hand, and said, enunciating her words clearly, “Happy, order potatoes, please.”
“Adding potatoes to your shopping list,” replied a robotic voice, and a screen lit up, showing a typed list of groceries. “Eat happy, Sandra!”
The shock of it made me want to laugh, but I pushed down the urge and instead watched as Sandra put both bowls on the long table, along with a crusty loaf on a board and a little dish of something like sour cream. The bowls were bone china and looked as if they were probably Victorian, hand-painted with delicate little flowers and embellished with gold leaf details. Somehow the contrast between the mathematically severe modernist lines of the glass room and the fragile antique bowls was almost absurd, and I felt slightly off-balance. It was like the rest of the house in reverse—Victorian stuffiness punctuated by splashes of space-age modernity. Here, the modernism had taken over, but the bowls and the heavy floral whirls of the silver cutlery were a reminder of what lay behind the closed door.
“There we go,” Sandra said unnecessarily as she sat down and waved me to the seat opposite her. “Beef stew. Help yourself to bread to soak up the juices, and that’s horseradish crème fraîche, which is very nice stirred in.”
“It smells amazing,” I said truthfully, and Sandra shook back her hair and gave a little smile that tried to look modest but really said, I know.
“Well, it’s the stove, you know. A La Cornue. It’s almost impossible to screw up—you just pop the ingredients in and forget about it! I do miss a gas range sometimes, but we’re not on the mains here, so it’s all electric. The burners are induction.”
“I’ve never used an induction burner,” I said, eyeing the stove rather doubtfully. It was a beast of a thing, six feet of metal doors, knobs, drawers, and handles, and on top a smooth cooking surface that seemed to be zoned in ways I couldn’t even begin to guess at.
“They take a bit of getting used to,” Sandra said. “But I promise you, they’re really very intuitive to use. The flat plate in the middle is a teppanyaki. I was rather skeptical about the cost, but Bill was insistent, and I have to admit, it was worth every penny and then some.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see,” though I didn’t really. What on earth was a teppanyaki? I took a mouthful of the stew—which was thick and rich and delicious, the kind of meal I never had the time or organization to cook for myself at home—and let Sandra plop a blob of crème fraîche on top and ply me with a crusty chunk of bread. There was a bottle of red wine already open on the table, and she poured us out two glasses in beautifully etched Victorian goblets and pushed one across to me.
“Now, would you rather eat first and then talk, or shall we get started?”
“I . . .” I looked down at my plate, and then gave a mental shrug. No point in putting it off. I tugged my skirt down and sat up a little straighter on the metal stool. “Get started I suppose. What would you like to know?”
“Well, your CV was very comprehensive, and very impressive. I already contacted your previous employer—what was her name? Grace Devonshire?”
“Er . . . yes, that’s right,” I said.
“And she couldn’t say enough good things about you. I hope you don’t mind me taking up references before the interview, but I’ve been bitten a few times with unsuitable candidates, and I think there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time dragging you up here only to fail at the last fence. But Grace was positively gushing about you. The Harcourts seem to have moved, but I also spoke to Mrs. Grainger, and she was very complimentary as well.”
“You didn’t contact Little Nippers, did you?” I said slightly uneasily, but she shook her head.
“No, I completely understand. It’s not always easy job hunting in an existing post. But perhaps you could tell me about your employment there?”
“Well, it’s pretty much like I explained on the CV really—I’ve been there for two years, in charge of the baby room. I wanted a change from one-family nannying, and a nursery seemed like a good option. It’s been excellent experience having a bit more managerial responsibility and having to organize staff schedules and stuff, but quite honestly I’ve found I miss the family feel of nannying. I love the children, but you don’t get to spend as much one-on-one time with them as you do with a private position. What was stopping me making a change was the idea of taking a step backwards in terms of pay and responsibility, but your post seems like it might be the challenge I’m looking for.”
I had rehearsed the speech inside my head, on the train on the way up, and now the words rattled out with a practiced authenticity. I had been to enough interviews to know that this was the key—to explain why you wanted to leave your current post without running down your existing employer and looking like a disloyal employee. But my—slightly massaged—version of events seemed to have done the trick, for Mrs. Elincourt was nodding sympathetically.
“I can quite imagine.”
“Plus, of course,” I added, this on the spur of the moment, for I had not thought this particular line through, “I’m keen to get out of London. It’s so busy and polluted, I guess I’m just looking for a change of scenery.”
“That I can quite understand,” Mrs. Elincourt said with a smile. “Bill and I had the same long night of the soul a few years back. Rhiannon was about eight or nine and we were beginning to think about secondaries. Maddie was a toddler, and I was so sick of pushing her around dirty parks and having to check for needles in the sandpit before I let her play. This just seemed like the perfect chance to break away completely—build a new life, find a really super independent school for Rhi.”
“And are you glad you made the move?”
“Oh, totally. It was tough on the children at the time, of course, but it was definitely the right thing. We adore Scotland—and we never wanted to be that kind of family who buys a second home and then puts it on Airbnb for nine months of the year. We wanted to really live here, become part of the community, you know?”