Chapter 37: With Counsel
Ellis Trask had been the Blackwood family’s lawyer for twenty-two years and I did not meet him once in September.
I met his effects, the way you meet weather.
On the Monday morning Mr. Foyle came and found me in the second-floor linen room and told me the position with the form.
“It’s with counsel for review.”
I asked how long a review takes.
He did the thing he does, which is to look just past your ear at a point on the wall.
“It isn’t a queue, Miss Carter. It’s a document.”
Mr. Foyle is not unkind. He is a house manager of thirty years and his whole professional life is the avoidance of a situation.
I asked whether counsel understood that the doctor had asked for it back by Wednesday.
“I’m sure that’s been communicated.”
I asked who had communicated it.
“That isn’t something I’d have visibility of.”
There is a grammar people use to remove themselves from a sentence, and I heard a great deal of it that fortnight.
On the Tuesday Constance Blackwood went home.
She left at half past ten with two bags and a box of the pears she had made Roz pack for her.
She had been there eleven days and the house got colder within the hour, which I do not think is only memory.
She came and found me. Nobody in that family came and found me except her.
“I have left instructions about your hours,” she said. “Two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Foyle has it in writing.”
I said thank you.
“And this is my number. Not the office. The house.”
She wrote it on a card with a fountain pen and blew on it, which was so old-fashioned that I laughed, and she seemed pleased.
“You may telephone me at any hour,” she said. “I mean that literally, Lily. I am seventy-one. I do not sleep.”
I put the card in the pocket of my apron and I kept it there for eight months.
I have it now. It is soft at the corners like cloth.
On the Wednesday Mrs. Alden gave her notice.
Two weeks. Effective the fourteenth of October.
She did it correctly and quietly and she told me herself before she told Mr. Foyle, which she was not obliged to do.
“He doesn’t settle for me,” she said. “I’ve had eleven placements and I have never had a child who doesn’t settle at all.”
I said it was not her, and I meant it, and I have wondered since whether she believed me.
“I know it isn’t me. That’s rather the problem, isn’t it.”
She looked at the cot for a while.
“Somebody in this house has decided that the child’s preference is a staffing inconvenience,” she said. “I have decided it is information.”
Then she went to fold something, because she was that sort of woman, and we never discussed it again.
Her notice changed everything, and not in my favor, which took me a week to understand.
I had assumed that a house which could not settle the child would have to keep the one person who could.
A house that needs you and resents needing you will not give you more. It will look for a replacement it can afford to like.
That night I had my four hours split across the day, and in the second one Ethan discovered the light switch in the nursery.
He cannot reach it. He can reach it if he is held, and he had worked out that being held is a thing you request by aiming your whole body.
Eleven times. On, off, on, off, and each time he looked at my face and not at the ceiling, because the interesting thing was not the light.
The interesting thing was that he could make something happen.
Let the record show that on the thirtieth of September, in a house doing what it was doing, a fourteen-month-old learned about cause.
On the Thursday Mr. Foyle came back.
“Mr. Trask has a query on the consent.”
I said which part, and I heard my own voice come out level, which was the single most useful thing my training ever gave me.
He read from a note with the flat carefulness of a man delivering somebody else’s words.
“Paragraph four. He wants to understand the clinical necessity of specifying which nights.”
I said nothing for a second because my mouth had gone dry.
Paragraph four is the one that says the five nights must include at least two on which the father is present in the residence and at least two on which he is not.
That is the only sentence in four pages that contains my table.
“Is that all he’s queried?”
Mr. Foyle turned the note over as though there might be more of it on the back, which there was not.
“That’s what I’ve been given.”
“Mr. Foyle, does Mr. Trask act for Mr. Blackwood, or for the family?”
He put the note in his breast pocket.
“He acts for the family,” he said, “and I would not repeat that question in the kitchen.”