W orking as a housekeeper for a woman of ‘advancing years’ with serious delusions of grandeur was not where I had seen myself ending up. But I kept telling myself that this was a stopgap, just until I got myself sorted. Whatever that meant. After a couple of days, I found myself quickly settling into a routine. I realised then it was exactly what I needed, for I was still in shock. Unlike the movies, you don’t just leave your home, your marriage and everything you knew and simply start a new life. There is a bit in between where you’re just breathing – like a drowning man who clings to a rock. You know you’re alive, you can move, even speak, but something is missing.
So I performed my tasks. I woke in the morning and prepared breakfast
for Madame Bowden (a boiled egg and English muffins with thick-cut marmalade). After I’d cleared up, I made her bed and tidied her room while she dressed, then I lit the fire downstairs. The house was old and chilly – she had refused central heating; said that the pipes would destroy the aesthetic. She had fiercely strong opinions about everything, which honestly baffled me. Mainly because I couldn’t remember ever having an opinion on anything. My father had the only opinions that mattered in our house. My mother never spoke at all. Nowadays, people would call her non-verbal, but when I was a child, the people in my village called her other names.
Madame Bowden, on the other hand, read the papers aloud, contradicting every opinion piece and making speeches about what she would do if she was in charge. I largely ignored her, getting on with vacuuming the carpets and doing the laundry. She was not unkind but not exactly friendly either, which suited me just fine. I ate my dinner in my little basement room every evening, mostly beans on toast, and took to walking along the river late in the evenings, when the office workers had gone home and the city was quiet. Well, quieter at least.
It felt like I was thawing out after a very long winter. Every day I felt my muscles relax a little more and even when I went shopping for groceries in the supermarket, I hardly checked behind me to see if he was following. Until the day Eileen, Madame Bowden, decided to succumb to ‘the ruination of the twentieth century’ and ordered a television. I was busy in the kitchen making her lunch (poached salmon and baby potatoes) and when I took her tray into the living room and saw a man walking through the front door, I dropped the tray and stood frozen to the spot.
‘Ah, sorry, love, I knocked but the door was open,’ he said, clearly mortified and struggling with the heavy package.
I kept staring at him, trying to trust my eyes. It’s not him, I kept repeating silently; It’s not him. I recovered as quickly as I was able and began to clear up the mess. My hands were shaking so badly that he offered to help. I couldn’t even look him in the eye, I was so embarrassed.
The following morning, Madame Bowden asked me to give a good dusting to her study, a small room on the first floor facing the street. It had gorgeous flowery wallpaper and a writing desk beside the window. The other walls were fully shelved and, just like a library, were filled with books.
‘It’s time for a good spring clean in here,’ she announced and directed me to take down each and every book and with a damp cloth, wipe the dust off every single one.
‘No, not too damp!’ she warned, then gave me a dry towel to remove any moisture afterwards.
While the task seemed overwhelming at first, I soon developed a method to make things easier. I took one shelf at a time and brought all of the books to the floor, placing them on an old sheet. I put a cushion under my knees and carefully wiped each and every book. Some of them were very old and threatened to come apart in my hands. Others were in foreign languages I couldn’t understand. Madame Bowden must have been highly educated, I thought, envying her. Books and I never really got along. No, that wasn’t right. Books made me nervous. Always had done. For as long as I could remember, I’d had this kind of reaction to them. Almost like they were a threat to me. I preferred to read people. People were easier than books. My mother taught me how to read a person’s story without them ever having to utter a word.
Like Madame Bowden: I knew she was afraid of getting senile and that was why she was so angry with the world. I knew that my mother was carrying some emotional pain that she didn’t have words for. And I knew that the English man outside my window was in love with a woman called Isabelle. For the longest time I assumed everyone could do this, but it was only when my friends became angry with me for finding out their secrets that I saw it was a gift belonging to me alone. Or a curse. The real curse was how I couldn’t read my husband after I fell in love with him. They say love is blind and for me it was truer than for most. So I never saw the violence coming. Come to think of it, neither did he, or I would have sensed it. What made him change? Was it me? Something I had done wrong?
His favourite taunt was to yell at me, ‘You think you’re special, don’t you!’
And he was right. I did. Not in a vain way, but in the kind of way where you think you’re meant to be something greater in this life. That your path will somehow lead to something better because you’re really good at
something or you have a destiny. Well, he didn’t like that. Nobody liked it, in fact. And so I learned to hide these thoughts. I hid them so well that I’d forgotten where I put them. Because now, I didn’t think I deserved any better than this. A battered face, a broken marriage and a job cleaning someone else’s beautiful home. I knew I didn’t deserve better, but somewhere inside, I still hoped. That’s what was making me miserable: the hoping. I realised then that I would have to give up one or the other, happiness or hope.
