Chapter 46: Interim Arrangements
It went up on Friday morning in the staff corridor, in the glass case by the back stairs.
Next to the fire notice, and the fire notice from 2011 that nobody has ever taken out.
One sheet of paper. Typed. Twelve-point, with the numbers in bold.
NURSERY — INTERIM ARRANGEMENTS. Effective 16 October 2026.
Issued by the house manager on the advice of counsel.
Five numbered paragraphs.
One. No member of the household staff other than the appointed nurse shall be alone with the child at any time.
Two. All contact with the child shall be recorded at the nursery door: name, time in, time out, and the second adult present.
Three. The nursery corridor door shall be secured from 20:30 to 06:30.
The code is held by the appointed nurse, the house manager, and the principal residents.
Four. No personal recording or photographic device shall be operated within the residence in connection with the child.
Five. Any concern regarding the child’s welfare shall be raised with the house manager in the first instance.
I read it four times, standing in a corridor that smells of boot polish.
Here is what I have to say about it, and it took me a week to be able to say it.
It is good policy.
I would have written one, two, three and five myself.
I would have written them in March.
If you had shown me that sheet in August, in a house where a child had been hurt in a hall with the camera off, I would have said that somebody had finally done their job.
That is what made it unanswerable, and I could not say one word against it.
Paragraph four is the only one that is aimed.
It does not name me, and it does not have to.
There are eleven staff and one recorder in that building, and everybody in the kitchen knows whose it is.
Paragraph one ends the log. Not on paper, where nothing has been said about it at all.
In fact.
I am never alone with him, so I am never the only observer.
So I am never awake at 02:14 with a stopwatch, and there is no entry twenty.
Paragraph three puts a door with a code between me and the room from half past eight at night until half past six in the morning.
Every episode in six months began inside that window. All nineteen of them, without exception.
I did the arithmetic in the corridor.
Then I did it again upstairs, because I did not believe it the first time.
Whoever wrote that sheet had drawn a line exactly around my column.
Or nobody had, and it was counsel being careful after an incident.
The two are indistinguishable from where I was standing, and they still are.
There was an acknowledgment sheet on a clipboard under the case.
I signed it fourth.
By Friday evening there were fourteen signatures on it, including Roz’s, which is a small flat R and a long A.
Serena Montigue’s name is not on that sheet, because the arrangements bind household staff.
She is a principal resident. Principal residents hold the code.
I took Karin Doyle’s advice on the Friday afternoon and I have never stopped being glad.
I wrote to Mr. Foyle.
Half a page, three questions, dated, and I kept a copy.
Whether the appointed nurse is instructed to record time of onset and duration for any breathing event.
Whether the physician’s protocol of the second of October has been given to her.
Whether, in the event of an episode, I would be permitted through the corridor door.
He replied on Monday in four lines and initialed it, which is more than I expected.
Yes to the first. He would inquire as to the second.
The third was a matter for the principal residents.
A matter for the principal residents. I have that note. It is in the same envelope as the closure code.
The contact book went up on the Friday too.
A school exercise book on a shelf by the nursery door, with a pen on a string, and columns ruled by hand.
I signed into it at 09:02 on the sixteenth of October, and out at 11:02, and wrote C. DEVLIN in the fourth column.
I stood there holding a pen on a string and understood what I was looking at.
Name. Time in. Time out. Who else was in the room.
For six months I had been the only person in that building writing down who was with that child at what hour.
Now the house was doing it. Every day. In ink. In a book by the door.
They had built me a second ledger and hung it on a nail, and they had done it to keep me out.
It cut exactly both ways, and I did not know for four months which way it would cut first.