Chapter 26: The Breakfast Book
Roz’s kitchen book is a hardbacked ledger with a marbled cover. There have been nineteen of them since 1998.
She keeps them on the shelf over the dry store. Nobody has thrown one out, because nobody has ever thought about them.
I had watched her write in it for thirteen months and never read a line.
On the seventeenth I asked what was in it.
She was making stock. She does not stop for a conversation.
She makes you stand beside her and be useful, so I trimmed leeks while she talked.
“Numbers,” she said. “How many for breakfast. How many for dinner. Who is in the house.”
“Every day?”
“Every day since Mrs. Blackwood the elder had six for lunch and I made four.”
No expression at all. “In 1998.”
She dried her hands and turned the current book towards me.
Her writing is flat and upright.
The date. A column of initials. A number. The menu. A line at the bottom for anything unusual.
Mr. V — out. Miss M — in. Nursery — 1.
That was all of it. Three fragments and a number.
I did not understand what I was looking at.
I am exact about this, because afterwards people asked me when I knew.
The honest answer is that I was holding it in my hands and thinking about leeks.
“Does anybody read these?” I said.
“You are reading it.”
“I mean the family.”
She put the book back without answering, which is how she answers.
That was the morning Constance Blackwood telephoned to say she was coming on Friday.
I heard it sideways, from the second housemaid, who had been told to air the blue room.
By eleven the house had changed temperature. Somebody polished the hall a day early.
Serena came down in flat shoes, which I had not seen before.
She spoke to the housekeeper about linen in a voice with nothing wrong with it at all.
That is the thing about Serena Montigue I could never make anybody understand.
She did not rant. She never once raised her voice in my hearing.
In public she was warm the way a good hotel is warm. In private she was precise. Both settings were quiet.
On Monday she had stood on the hem of my uniform and said, “Touch him again and you disappear.”
She said it in the tone you use to correct a wine order.
Three days later she said, “Good morning, Lily,” on the landing, and meant nothing by it.
She was not angry with me. Anger would have been easier. Anger gets used up.
That afternoon I was permitted forty minutes in the nursery. Permitted is the house manager’s word.
Mr. Foyle had drawn up a sheet, and I was on it, between the physiotherapist and the cleaner.
Ethan was on the rug with the bead ball.
When the door opened he went still first, the way an animal checks, and then decided.
Then he came across the rug at speed on three limbs, because of the cast. That is a movement I hope to forget and have not.
He put his forehead on my knee and stayed there with the ball in his good hand.
Mrs. Alden sat in the window seat with a paperback and did not look up. I was grateful, and I have never told her so.
He did nine steps for me, a record, then fell sideways onto the sheepskin and laughed with his mouth wide open.
Then he saw the door and said ba, and I said no, we stay here, and he accepted it.
I have thought about his accepting it more than about most of that autumn.
At six I gave him to Mrs. Alden and went up two flights.
Fifty-two stairs. I counted them that evening and have never been able to stop.
In my room I wrote the date at the top of a clean page.
Then: ROZ’S BOOK — daily — who is in the house.
It did not arrive as an idea. It arrived as a discomfort, the way a word you cannot remember sits behind your teeth.
I had nineteen dates.
On a shelf over the dry store, a woman who had never met a lawyer had written down, every day for six months, who slept in that house.
I did not go down and look. I want that recorded too.
I sat there another hour and did nothing, because I was twenty-six and unpaid and frightened.
Twice that week I had been told I was a woman with an imagination.
At half past nine the alarm was set to the away schedule. A double chirp on the third-floor panel.
Mr. Blackwood was in Houston.
I listened towards the second floor and heard nothing at all.
It took me until nearly midnight to work out why that was the wrong thing to be relieved about.