Jilly Cooper - Harriet

‘Have you any idea what you’ll be in for?’ he said. ‘It’s a dead-end part of the world. Nothing ever happens there. All the locals ever talk about is hunting. I go up to work there because it’s more peaceful than London. Could you throw yourself into looking after two children? Because if you can’t, there’s not much point your coming. How old are you?’

‘Nearly twenty,’ said Harriet.

‘But Mrs Hastings said you’ve got a degree.’

‘No, I dropped out when I got pregnant.’

‘But you do have experience with children?’

‘I’ve looked after friends’ children a lot.’

‘But I gathered you’d had a job, or was that just part of Mrs Hastings’s meticulous inaccuracy? How long did it last?’

Harriet shuffled her feet. ‘Only one night,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It was a housekeeping job for a man in the country.’

‘And?’

‘He. . he tried to rape me the first night.’

Cory Erskine raised an eyebrow. ‘Quick work! How did he manage that?’

‘He came into my bedroom j-just after I’d turned out my light and. .’

‘And you didn’t feel it worth your while to capitulate. Very admirable.’

Harriet flushed angrily. If she had expected sympathy, she was quite wrong. Cory Erskine’s face was without expression.

‘And the baby,’ he went on. ‘Is he good? Does he cry much?’

Harriet took a deep breath. She might as well be honest, as she obviously wasn’t going to get the job.

‘Yes, he does; but I think babies are barometers. They reflect the mood of the person looking after them. I mean,’ she floundered on, ‘if I were happier and less worried, he might be, too. It’s just that I haven’t been very happy lately.’

Cory Erskine didn’t appear to be listening. He was examining the page in his typewriter. He turned it back, and typed in a couple of words with one finger.

Bastard! thought Harriet. How dare he be so callous!

‘Well, if he cries that’s your problem,’ he said without looking up. ‘We’ll put you both at the far end of the house, and then no-one but you will hear him.’

Harriet gave a gasp.

‘You can cook and drive a car?’ he went on.

She nodded.

‘Good. You don’t have to do everything. There’s a housekeeper, Mrs Bottomley. She’s been with our family for years, but she’s getting on and the children exhaust her. Jonah’s a weekly boarder at a prep school, and Chattie goes to day school. You’d have to look after them when they’re at home, ferry them to and from school, see to their clothes, cook for them, etc. I’m going to France for at least a month from tomorrow, but when I come back, I’m coming up North to finish a couple of scripts.’

‘Do you mean you’re really going to hire me?’ asked Harriet in a bewildered voice.

He nodded. ‘I only hope you won’t be horribly bored.’

‘Bored?’ said Harriet slowly. ‘That’s like asking a drowning man if he’d be bored by a lifebelt.’

It was the first time Cory Erskine had smiled, and Harriet could suddenly see why Noel Balfour had once 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.

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.’