only too eager to show him their version of a really good time.
He was standing by the dresser painstakingly checking the cameras he would be taking with him and piling rolls of film into the small case which would accompany him on to the plane.
Ignoring Josh, he turned that unnervingly direct dark blue gaze upon Maxine.
‘Now, are you sure you’re going to be able to cope whilst I’m away?’
She wished she’d had time to brush her hair before stumbling downstairs. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage,’ she replied evenly, thinking that he’d be stuffed if she said no. ‘And you’ll have Paula’s mother coming in to keep an eagle eye on me in case I’m tempted to do anything drastic, like tape their mouths up and lock them in the cellar.’
‘We haven’t got a cellar.’ Ella, dive-bombing the elephant into her cereal bowl, looked triumphant.
‘In that case, it’ll just have to be the attic.’ Maxine confiscated the elephant. For the first time that morning, a glimmer of a smile crossed Guy’s face.
‘There you go then,’ he warned. ‘You’d better behave yourselves. A week in an attic wouldn’t be much fun, would it?’
Ella, who was devoted to Coronation Street, said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if I could have a television up there.’
‘Oh, you could have a TV set,’ Maxine exclaimed, cheering up and buttering herself a slice of toast. ‘But no plug.’
The next week, despite Maxine’s misgivings, was a greater success than either she or Guy had anticipated. After one or two inevitable power struggles as the children tested the limits of her patience and she in turn exerted her own particular brand of authority, they settled into a routine of sorts and began to enjoy each other’s company. Josh and Ella could be noisy, argumentative, boisterous and infuriating but Maxine, retaliating in kind, found she didn’t hate them after all. In some ways, she realized with amusement, they reminded her quite a lot of herself.
‘Yuk, I don’t like cauliflower,’ declared Ella, her tone fractious.
To the child’s astonishment Maxine replied, ‘Neither do I,’ and promptly lobbed the offending vegetable out through the kitchen window. ‘Let’s have frozen peas instead.’
‘We like Big Macs,’ said Josh hopefully the following evening.
Maxine, who had been burrowing through the contents of the freezer in search of fish fingers, because she knew how to cook them, closed the door with relief. ‘OK,’ she said to Josh’s amazement and delight.
Berenice had always been a stickler for proper, home-cooked meals. ‘But don’t tell your father.’
Guy phoned every evening. Maxine, hovering unseen in the doorway, eavesdropped shamelessly whilst his children sung her praises. Nannying wasn’t so bad once you got the hang of it, she decided, priding herself on her success. And letting the children stay up until midnight had been a stroke of genius; no more horrendous six-thirty starts. She couldn’t imagine why more households hadn’t cottoned on to such a perfect scheme.
‘Everything all right?’ Guy would enquire, when she was summoned to the phone for interrogation. ‘Perfect!’ Determined to impress the hell out of him to pay him back for ever having doubted her, she boasted, ‘They’ve been absolute angels.’
Josh and Ella, sitting on the stairs, collapsed in giggles. said Guy, not believing her for a second. ‘In that case you’ve got the wrong children. Return them to the spaceship and make sure the real ones are home by the time I get back.’
‘You didn’t tell Dad you’d reversed his car into the gatepost,’ Josh reminded her when she had replaced the receiver.
Maxine’s smile was angelic. ‘Don’t you remember, darling? That stupid man in the Reliant Robin drove into the back of the car whilst we were parked on the seafront.’
‘No he didn’t. You reversed into the gatepost.’
‘Fine.’ She picked up the phone once more. ‘I’ll call and tell your father now. Oh, and maybe you’d like to explain to him how you managed to smash the kitchen window with your sister’s Sindy doll ...’
Josh’s shoulders sagged and he waved his hands in a gesture of defeat. He might have known he didn’t stand a chance against an expert like Maxine. ‘OK, OK. Put the phone down.
You win.’
But whilst being with the children was fun, it had its restrictions. Maxine found herself yearning for adult company. By Thursday she realized she was even looking forward to Guy’s phone call from Paris, and felt absurdly put out when he spoke to Josh and Ella, then hung up.
‘He was in a hurry,’ Josh explained. ‘He said some people were waiting for him and he had to go out.’
‘How nice for him,’ said Maxine sourly. It was five o’clock and the evening stretched ahead interminably. All she had to look forward to was beating Josh and Ella at Monopoly and maybe the added thrill of washing her hair.
Janey, who enjoyed washing her hair, was in the bath when the phone shrilled at six o’clock. Inwardly cursing but unable to leave it to ring – there was always that infinitesimal chance that it might be Alan, after all – she climbed out of the bath and made her way, naked and dripping bubbles, into the sitting room.
‘Big favour,’ Maxine beseeched, on the other end of the line. ‘Big, big favour. How would you like to save your poor demented sister’s life?’
‘Not very much.’ If Maxine was planning a moonlight flit from Trezale House, Janey didn’t want her flitting back to the flat. With a trace of suspicion she said, ‘I thought Guy was away this week.’
‘Exactly,’ declared Maxine, then giggled. ‘What a strange thing to say. I wasn’t asking you to play hired assassin.’
That was a relief, Janey supposed. Shifting from one foot to the other, she watched the bath bubbles melt into the carpet. ‘So what do you want?’
