found him so attractive.
‘I suggest you travel up on Sunday,’ he said. ‘There’s a good train at twelve o’clock. I’ll arrange to have you met at Leeds. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve a lot of last-minute things to do.’
‘I can’t begin to thank you,’ she stammered. ‘I’ll do everything I can to make them happy.’ As she stood up, she swayed and had to clutch at the edge of the desk to stop herself falling.
‘You’d better start eating properly,’ he said, getting out his cheque book. ‘Twenty pounds for travelling, twenty-five pounds in advance for your first week’s salary.’ He handed her a cheque for forty-five pounds.
Harriet found herself fighting back the tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning her head away. ‘I’m just not used to getting breaks. You can’t give me that much money.’
‘I want you to look after my children properly, not just moon around the house. Now, I don’t anticipate Mrs Bottomley will try and rape you, so I’ll see you again towards the end of February. You’ll probably find it easier to settle in without my poking my nose in all the time.’
After she’d gone, still stammering her thanks, he sat down to work again. Then, a minute later, he got up and looked out of the window. Harriet was walking down the road. He watched her take the cheque out of her bag, examine it in amazement, hold it up to the light, then give a little skip of joy, so that she nearly cannoned into a passer-by.
Before she rounded the corner, she turned round to look up at the window, and waved at him timidly. He waved back.
I’m a bloody idiot, he told himself. I could have got any Nanny in London and I end up with a waif with a baby — which means four children to look after instead of two!
He looked at the photograph of his wife and his face hardened. He poured himself another stiff whisky before settling down.
Chapter Ten
Once the euphoria of landing the job had worn off, Harriet grew more and more apprehensive. She had difficulty enough looking after one baby. What right had she to take on two children, who were probably spoilt and certainly disturbed?
I won’t be able to cope, she kept telling herself as the train rattled through the Midlands the following Sunday. Each mile, too, was taking her further and further away from Simon, and the remote possibility that one day she might bump into him in London.
As promised, a car met her at Leeds station and once they were on the road, William, who had yelled most of the journey, fell into a deep sleep, giving the exhausted Harriet a chance to look at the passing countryside. It did nothing to raise her flagging spirits.
The black begrimed outskirts of Leeds soon gave way to fields and woodland then to wilder and bleaker country: khaki hillsides, stone walls, rusty bracken, with the moors stretching above, dark demon-haunted, Heathcliffe land. Harriet shivered and hugged William closer. No wonder Noel Balfour had run away from such savage desolation.
They drove through a straggling village of little grey houses and then the road started climbing steeply upwards.
‘There’s Erskine’s place, up yonder ont’ hill,’ said the driver. ‘The Wilderness, they call it. Wouldn’t like to live there myself, but these stage folks have funny notions. I suppose you get used to anything if you have to.’
The big grey house lay in a fold of the moors, about half a mile from a winding river. Surrounding it was a jungle of neglected garden. Pine trees rose like sentinels at the back.
Harriet knocked nervously at the huge studded door, which was opened by a middle-aged woman with piled-up reddish hair and a disapproving dough-like face. She gave Harriet a hostile stare, but seemed far more interested in stopping a large tabby cat from escaping.
‘Ambrose! Come here, you devil!’ She just managed to catch the cat by the tail and pull him squawking into the house.
‘Miss Poole?’ she said icily, very much on her dignity. ‘I’m Mrs Bottomley.’
‘How do you do?’ said Harriet, trying to shake hands and clutch William and the luggage at the same time.
As she walked into the hall, two children rushed down the stairs, dragging a black labrador, and stopped dead in their tracks, gazing at her with dark, heavily lashed and not altogether friendly eyes.
‘Jonah and Charlotte,’ said Mrs Bottomley, ‘this is Miss Poole.’
‘How do you do?’ said Harriet nervously. ‘This is William.’
‘Did you have a good journey?’ said the little girl in a formal voice. ‘We’re so recited to see you. Ambrose is on heat; that’s why he’s not allowed out. We thought he was a “he” when daddy bought him.’
Mrs Bottomley picked up one of her suitcases.
‘I’ll show you to your room,’ she said coldly, starting up the stairs.
‘Watch the string,’ said Harriet in anguish, but it was too late. The string snapped and the contents of the suitcase — all the dirty laundry — her own and William’s that she hadn’t had time to wash before she left — cascaded onto the floor with a crash.
The children shrieked with laughter. Chattie went into hysterics of excitement. Nothing could have broken the ice more completely as they rushed round putting things back.
Mrs Bottomley, frostier than ever, led Harriet along a winding passage to her room. The house, in contrast to its grim exterior, was positively sybaritic inside. Whoever had chosen the moss-thick carpets, the watered silk wallpapers, the brilliantly clashing curtains, had had an inspired eye for colour, if no regard for expense.
There were also looking glasses everywhere, in the hall, on the stairs and at the end of the landing. Harriet tried not to look at her worried, white-faced reflection.
‘What a lovely house, and how beautifully you keep it,’ she said, making a feeble attempt to remove the rigid expression of disapproval from Mrs Bottomley’s face. The housekeeper ignored her.
‘You’re in here,’ she said, showing Harriet into a little grey and white room with yellow curtains and yellow flowered four-poster bed. ‘The child can sleep next door,’ she added coldly. It was as though she couldn’t bear to acknowledge William’s existence.
‘Chattie and Jonah are at the far end of the passage, but there’s a device you switch on, so you can hear if they wake in the night. I’ll see them to bed tonight. Your supper will be ready in an hour.’
All this time she had not looked Harriet in the face. Oh dear, sighed Harriet, she really does resent my coming here.
Later, feeling more and more depressed, Harriet found a place laid for one in the huge green Victorian dining-room.
She looked at Mrs Bottomley timidly:
‘Won’t you come and eat in here with me?’ she asked.
‘I have my meals in my own part of the house. I hope that will be all,’ said Mrs Bottomley.
But as she stalked majestically towards the door, she heard a muffled sob and, looking round, she saw that Harriet’s face had disintegrated into a quivering chaos of misery, as she fished out her handkerchief.
Mrs Bottomley’s heart melted. She padded across the room and put an arm round Harriet’s shoulders.
‘There, there, my lamb, don’t cry. You’ll get used to it all in no time. I know it seems an out-of-the-way place for a young girl, but the children have been so excited, especially with you bringing the baby, and you’ll be company for me. I get lonely of an evening.’
Harriet wiped her eyes. ‘You don’t mind about William, and me not being married?’ she said.
‘Never gave it a thought,’ lied Mrs Bottomley, who had been boasting in the village that she’d soon put the hussy in her place.
‘You come and eat in the kitchen with me. You’ll feel better when you’ve got something inside you. We’ll have a drop of sherry to cheer ourselves up.’
