Grasshopper Read online

  The ‘light housework’ never, in fact, came into it as a woman came in to clean and put the washing in the machine. Liv would have much preferred housework to childcare. This woman must have been rather like Beryl, cheerful, chatty, hard-working and herself the mother of a family, and she had been coming in three times a week since before Cyrus was born. Liv said, though not quite in these words, that this woman was the only permanency in the children’s lives, the only human being they could be sure of regularly seeing. It was she who hugged them and talked to them and called them ‘darling’. If their parents ever did these things, it must have been in the night and Liv had neither the time nor the inclination. She came to hate them and this made her feel guilty and ashamed. But she had so much to do.

  The school run was a recurring nightmare, especially as she was afraid of the Range Rover and never in perfect control of it. Both the baby and Marcus had to be strapped into child seats in the back and unstrapped and lifted out to accompany her if she needed to shop. Once Marcus lay on the supermarket floor, screaming and kicking. He often did this at home, he seems to have been a deeply disturbed child, and there she tried to ignore him, for she was afraid that otherwise she would strike him and do him a serious injury. Another time, while Cyrus was at school, she left Marcus and the baby strapped into their seats while she went to buy milk, bread and baby cereal. When she came back to the locked car a crowd of angry people were round it, some of them shouting at the children not to be afraid, it was all right, and where was their mummy. Both were screaming and Marcus was beating on the door with his fists. The terrible thing was, Liv said, that while she was in the shop she had half-hoped someone would come and abduct them.

  Why didn’t she make a fuss, say this wasn’t what she was engaged for? She seldom saw Claudia or James, even at the weekends they were mostly out, saying they needed ‘space’, they needed ‘a break’. But of course she sometimes saw them and then she did complain. She said it was too much for her, she wasn’t qualified to be a nanny and had no experience.

  They were incredulous. But surely there wasn’t all that much to do, no cleaning, for instance, no washing, no cooking, she had her three evenings off a week and her nights were never disturbed. That last part at least was true, but rather through her own determination than from any edict of theirs. She had decided from her fourth day there, her evening beginning only when James came home at nine, that no matter what happened she wouldn’t be summoned by Marcus or baby Georgia in the night, and she never had been. But in spite of her dislike of children, she suffered pangs of conscience and shame when she heard Marcus screaming at two in the morning and the baby left crying piteously. If she’d gone to them, she’d have been useless the next day, which was also perhaps Claudia’s own excuse for turning over in bed and going back to sleep.

  Sometimes she told herself she was making a fuss. It was true what Claudia said, many of the jobs she had thought would fall to her lot were done by the cleaning woman. She usually got her evenings off unless the Hindes asked her to babysit because they had ‘an absolutely unbreakable engagement writ in stone’ and then they paid her for the extra hours she put in. Money was no object, money flowed. She told James at breakfast she needed to buy milk and a packet of baby porridge and he gave her a £20 note, next morning shrugging at the change she held out to him, pushing her hand away and saying, ‘Keep it for next time,’ but next time, no matter how she protested, another £20 or £40 or £50 was handed over. She began keeping this money.

  She put it in a tin. The food delivery van brought meat and fish and fruit and vegetables and innumerable tins of fancy biscuits, cookies, crackers, wafers, cheese straws, chocolates. One of these, a small round dragée tin, she took to use as a money box. She kept it in her bedroom, on the floor of the clothes cupboard. Her stash of money quickly grew. If anyone had told her when she was a good dutiful schoolgirl in Kiruna that in a year’s time she would be stealing from her employers, she’d have laughed at them.

  It was this accumulating of money that didn’t belong to her which stopped her getting in touch with the London branch of the agency. If she complained they’d find out. They might also find out how often she screamed at Cyrus and how, more than once, she had hit Marcus. Her own parents she did tell of her plight, but not about the money, making frequent phone calls to Kiruna at James and Claudia’s expense, though she knew that if she told them they’d have waved away her offers to pay for the calls and said she was welcome. Her mother said she should try it a little longer, that was no way to start out in life, giving up as soon as something was more arduous than you had bargained for. What she was making so much fuss about, her father said, he didn’t know. Looking after children came naturally to women. She had no chores to do. He was deeply impressed when she let slip that Georgia’s disposable napkins were delivered to the door.

  In the night, when the children’s screaming woke her, she would get out of bed, light the candle she preferred to a bed-lamp, find the dragée tin at the bottom of the cupboard and count the money. Sometimes she took the tin back to bed with her and held it, as a child might hold a teddy bear, until she fell asleep. It comforted her, it was like a hot water bottle. Before she came to London she had never thought much about money. At home they lived comfortably but not luxuriously – her father constantly complained of Sweden’s high taxes – she had her small allowance and supposed that one day she would earn for herself. The Hindes corrupted her. They taught her the ugly side of money. They earned it and spent it, wallowed in it and threw it about with a feckless disregard for what happened to it, for more would come. Yet they weren’t entirely profligate. Once, at a rare moment on a weekend when both Hindes were at home, she heard Claudia shouting angrily down the phone at some dress-shop manager who had overcharged her by £25. She’d noticed only when she got her credit card account. Liv’s English was getting better and she had no difficulty in understanding Claudia’s abusive language, that the woman was a disgrace to the famous shop she worked for, that she was a thief and a perpetrator of fraud.

  Liv learnt then what Claudia’s anger sounded like, what power she had and that she knew all about the processes of litigation. She learnt too that the Hindes were not so careless in money matters as she had supposed. Until then she would never have imagined either of them scrutinizing a credit card statement or checking items on it against a bill. The thought came to her that she would be wise to hand the contents of the tin to James and say to him that this was what had accumulated out of the notes he had handed to her. She couldn’t do it. The money in the tin was her reason for living, for being there at all. Adding to it was what made the agony of looking after these children worthwhile. And it was the only interest she had, a kind of hobby, the sole distraction – unless you counted Jonny.

  Jonny ‘chatted her up’, to use one of Silver’s old-fashioned phrases. She was leaving the car park one afternoon with Cyrus beside her and Marcus and Georgia in the back, strapped into their child seats, and she’d handed him the £50 note Claudia had given her that morning.

  ‘Didn’t your old man give you anything smaller, sweetheart? You’ll clean me out of change, you will.’

  ‘Old man?’ said Liv, unfamiliar with idioms used neither by the cleaning woman nor James and Claudia.

  ‘Husband, partner, feller.’ Jonny stuck his thumb out in the direction of the back seat where by this time Marcus was screaming and kicking and Georgia was whimpering. ‘Looks like he’s been busy.’

  Fortunately, or not as the case may be, Liv understood very little of this, but she knew what ‘husband’ meant. ‘I have no husband, I am nanny.’ By then she had stopped describing herself as the au pair. If she was going to kill herself for these children, she might as well have the dignity of the title. ‘Wait and I am looking for money.’

  She found the pound coin and the 20p piece, or whatever was needed. Jonny took it from her, holding her fingers at the same time.

  ‘If you’re a free woman with free eve
nings maybe, how about coming out for a drink with yours truly one of these fine nights?’

  Marcus continued to scream. The baby sobbed. Cyrus turned round and made a hideous face. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  ‘Language,’ said Jonny, who habitually used such expressions himself. ‘Needs his mouth washed out with Dettol.’

  ‘Yours truly?’ said Liv.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. What fine night?’

  ‘When are you off? No time like the present. I tell you what. I’ll meet you at nine in the Robert Browning – you know where that is?’

  ‘I know.’

  She hadn’t exactly said yes. For one thing, she was unsure whether Claudia would come home at eleven or at eight. She drove off to the accompaniment of screams and sobs, Cyrus letting loose a stream of abuse she suspected was foul but which had no particular effect on her and none at all on Marcus and Georgia.

  When she was getting them all out of the car Cyrus said, ‘He’s been in the slammer, that car park guy. My friend Craig’s father told him and he told me.’

  But Liv had no idea what a slammer was.

  I drove up to Hampstead and Downshire Hill. The bags of debris had been removed from the Clarksons’ front garden. In the circular flowerbed in the middle of the paving someone had planted a Japanese cherry, the petals of its pink papery flowers already shed, and in tubs on either side of the front door cone-shaped bay trees. I thought of Silver and the mimosa and the nursery in Clifton Villas. Its goodies hadn’t reached this far. The bay trees might have looked less distressed if someone watered them. I rang the bell and the nanny came. Was she as harassed and put upon as her employer had once been? She looked far from serene. Mrs Clarkson was on the phone, she said, but if I would like to come into the ‘lounge’ and take a seat, she would soon be with me. I sat on a kind of padded bench the shape and colour of an aubergine and the nanny handed me a pile of magazines like the shampoo girl in a hairdresser’s.

  I heard her run upstairs. The children had been left alone up there, spoiling things, very likely damaging things and themselves. Was she a ‘real’ nanny or just an au pair elevated against her will? History repeats itself and it may be that just as received wisdom has it that people who have been abused in childhood abuse their own children, so women leading the lives of overworked beasts of burden condemn others to the same fate when they get the chance. Liv had been so tired in the evenings that all she really wanted once Claudia or James returned was sleep. But that evening Claudia got home at twenty to nine and that gave her just enough time to get to the Robert Browning and meet Jonny.

  I used to believe that whereas men only go about with women they want to go about with, that they can choose, women often take up with men they don’t even like much, just for the sake of having someone and being seen with someone. Since then I’ve revised this opinion and now I doubt if even the first part is true. People take what they can get, not what they want, and often not much choosing comes into it. Liv didn’t much like Jonny or fancy him but still she let him make love to her (if you don’t mind I will omit the cruder version) in a dark passage off Shirland Road that smelt of cats and tandoori takeaway. Up against the wall it was, what Silver called a ‘knee-trembler’. She neither liked nor desired Jonny but she needed him. He was someone to talk to, someone outside the James-Claudia-children ménage. She saw him too as her means of getting away, without knowing what kind of escape she meant.

  Instead of reading the magazines I thought about her, what she’d told me and what Silver had, the things she’d told me about Jonny and what at last made her ask him for asylum. Jonny lived at Silver’s from time to time. They had met on a roof. Silver had been on the roof and Jonny emerging on to a balcony from a fourth-floor window with a backpack full of someone’s jewellery. When he knew Silver wasn’t going to shop him he went back to 15 Russia Road with him and in through the window I had seen Wim enter by that first time I was there. Silver said afterwards that if the jewellery Jonny had taken had been a lifetime’s accumulation of treasured pieces, a wedding and engagement ring, for instance, a cameo handed down from a grandmother – he claimed he would have been able to tell – it would not have been in his power to make Jonny put them back, but nor would he have made Jonny welcome and offered him sanctuary and a bed for the night. The house Jonny had raided was well-known to Silver, as were a lot of houses in Maida Vale. He was quite aware that it wasn’t divided into flats, that one wealthy couple lived in the whole of it. He examined Jonny’s haul carefully, said it would certainly be insured, and Jonny was to give ‘a tithe’ to the poor, by which presumably he meant underpass dossers. (Well, no, I’ve never seen them but I know they’re there.)

  I don’t know whether Jonny ever did so. Probably not. But he must have made a promise because he soon became a permanent if irregular resident of Silver’s place. And it was there that he took Liv when she escaped and needed sanctuary.

  She was on the phone a very long time. I was beginning to think she had forgotten about me when she walked into the room, smiling brightly. Never in the past had we shaken hands but we did now, Liv assuring me how delighted she was to see me and calling me by my Christian name at the end of almost every sentence. Again she looked as if she’d spent hours on her appearance. She was wearing a very short almond-green knitted dress and jacket and almond-green suede shoes, not the sort of clothes to put on when you’re going to cuddle an infant but perhaps she never did, as Claudia had not. Her hair looked like a wig, it was so blonde, dense, shiny and symmetrical, its natural stripiness all gone, and her face like beautifully painted china.

  She sat down opposite me, showing knees that were smooth and rounded yet with that sharp angle at the patella that defines perfect legs. I realized, amused, that I’d seldom seen her legs before, not counting the night they were splashed all over with blood. In those days they were almost always covered up in jeans. She twisted her diamond engagement ring nervously. Rubbing against the wedding ring, it made a small metallic scraping sound.

  ‘I wanted to tell you, Clodagh, how happy we are with the lights. You really can get thirty-six different versions of lighting in this room, it’s amazing.’

  I said gravely, ‘I’m so glad.’ Had she fetched me all the way over here to tell me that? Surely not. ‘It’s a beautiful house.’

  ‘Yes.’ She made a conscious effort to leave the ring alone. ‘We had to do a great deal to it, of course.’ It would have taken a good ear to detect that London was not her birthplace nor English her cradle tongue, so rarely did the lilt return. When she was tired or even more anxious than she was now the difficulty with her ‘Ws’ might come back. In the Russia Road days it had been her biggest problem with English. It used to make Jonny laugh when she said ‘ve’ for ‘we’ and ‘ven’ for ‘when’, he who would have been incredulous had anyone suggested he learn a foreign language. ‘What made you become an electrician, Clodagh?’ she asked.

  ‘I fancied it and I thought I’d be good at it.’

  ‘And you are, as I very well know,’ she said ingratiatingly.

  I could think of many things to say next but they would have been unkind. It was evident she disliked any reminder of Russia Road or Jonny, the roofs or the borderline and worse of criminal activity. Even less would she care to be reminded of Wim. Yet it must have been to touch on these subjects at least that she had summoned me here. What else did we, who were so different and who had grown even further apart in the intervening years, have to discuss? What else did we have in common? Did she, I wondered, expect me to begin it? And if she did, how?

  I was about to make some mild reference to w 9, a simple inane remark perhaps about the chaos caused by the new traffic lights at Maida Hill, when she said very quickly, ‘I want to ask you a favour, Clodagh. Will you do me a great favour?’

  The classic answer is the one I gave. ‘That depends on what it is.’

  ‘It’s easy. It’s not at all difficult. It’s just that… Oh, I d
o find it very hard to say.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Take your time.’

  The sing-song lilt was back. For a moment she was the old Liv again. ‘Those days,’ she said, ‘when we were all together in that place, me and that boy – what was he called, not the very fair one?’

  ‘You mean Jonny?’

  ‘Right. Jonny. Oh, Clodagh, I’ve practised saying this to you, I’ve – what’s the word? – rehearsed it, but I’m still getting in an awful mess. Clodagh, my husband, Angus that is, Angus, he knows nothing about any of that, what we did and those boys and that other boy, the one who was crazy about the – the roofs, he knows nothing about any of it. He’s rather – well, he’s rather –’

  ‘Prudish? Stuffy? Idealistic? Puts you on a pedestal?’

  ‘Something like that, yes. All those, Clodagh. If he knew those things, he’d never feel the same again about me. He wouldn’t – love me so much. I’m sure he wouldn’t.’ She said ‘vouldn’t’ and her coral-pink lower lip trembled.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ I said. ‘I’ve never spoken to him and I doubt if I ever will. Why should I tell him?’

  She got up and went across to a very brightly polished steel table with a circular top of black glass. On it lay a small green suede handbag, the same colour as her shoes. I thought – I really thought – she was fetching from it some proof of Angus Clarkson’s love, a letter maybe or just a photograph of the two of them together. She sat down again, opened the bag and began taking out £20 and £50 notes. The bag was stuffed full of money, probably several thousand pounds. She held out a fistful to me. I stared at the money, then at her, saying nothing, beginning to understand.