My Little Blue Dress (12 page)

“
You
're not our mummy,” a high voice echoed around the spacious marbled foyer. I looked for its source. The only figure visible was a bust of Beethoven, but then I raised my gaze and found two kids staring down at me through the bars of the banister, as if this were a zoo and I were a polar bear.

“You must be Peter and Veronica,” I said amiably. “Good to meet you. I'm your new nanny.”

“Well, we think you're just
beastly
.” It was the girl who said this. Her features were sharp and pinched just like her father's.

“You won't ever leave uth will you, Nanny?” squeaked
the boy. “Not like Mummy?” Veronica jabbed her brother in the ribs and glared at him.

I thumped myself hard between the tits with my fist. “Clear as a bell, Peter. I'm not going anywhere. Now which of you little scamps is going to show me to my quarters?”

Veronica ran and locked herself in her bedroom. Peter tumbled down the stairs, hugged my leg like a man being winched out of the sea by a helicopter, and then led me up the stairs to my palatial suite of rooms.

This dynamic persisted for several weeks—Veronica resenting me and being standoffish; Peter following me around like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe, his large soulful eyes growing even rounder and sadder whenever the lavatory door swung shut, separating us. Until one morning at the beginning of February when I strode into the breakfast room to find both children planted rigidly in their chairs, wide-eyed and respectful.

“Morning,” I said, shaking the coffee pot. “Is something the matter?”

Both their tiny heads vibrated, then Peter nudged Veronica. “Nanny,” she shrilled, “Peter says he saw you slide
up
the banister last night.”

With one smooth motion I filled my cup with coffee and slid easily into my chair, cogitating furiously behind this silky demeanor. The truth of the thing was that I had nipped downstairs for a sandwich around midnight, accidentally become extremely drunk while doing so, and been forced to rely more heavily than usual on the banister's support during my subsequent ascent—but no way was I going to tell
them
that. There was an opportunity here. A chance to seize power. “
Up
the banister? Is this true, Peter? You're awfully young to be losing your entire brain.”

“I'm thorry, Nanny. I wathn't thpying on you. I thought I heard a noithe and wath coming to invethtigate.”

“Golly, aren't you brave,” muttered Veronica without a sliver of irony. “But is it true, Nanny? Did you slide
up
the banister?”

I cradled my coffee in both hands and blew on it, letting the steam moisturize my face “No, of course not, Veronica. Who ever heard of a person sliding
up
the banister?”

And at that they both gasped.

Why, reader?

Because there on my face was a
mysterious little smile
.

I
HAD NO
more trouble with Veronica after that, and the magic was free to begin.

Mornings, during education, I kept things very businesslike and straitlaced, but in the playroom after lunch I would let down my hair and with a few well-chosen words unlock the doorway to a parallel universe of imagination that was visually identical to our own but with much higher stakes. The coal cellar might become a distant planet where alien creatures had laid their black, irregular eggs, and to which a team of scientists (played by Peter and Veronica) had been dispatched with teaspoon-shaped “probes,” or the dumbwaiter that ran from the basement kitchen to my quarters in the attic might suddenly become the arterial system of an Important Man into which a team of miniaturized doctors (Peter and Veronica) armed with ultrasophisticated “pencil lasers” had been injected in order to track down and
destroy a cushion-shaped tumor in his brain—thereby saving the globe. None of it was true—obviously—but my inventions filled that draughty old house with squeals of wonder where before there had been sighs and tears, dispelling once and for all the cold fug of bereavement that had been so palpable on my arrival.

But also there was a truth behind the lies, a lesson I wanted to teach them: that no matter how black things get in one's life, no matter how dire the situation, a little imagination can make the pain just go away. After all it had worked for me. Beyond the playroom window, the nineteen thirties were whizzing by without entangling me one iota in their complexity, and I could feel my strength returning on a daily basis, my Information gland regenerating by a few hundred cells an hour until one afternoon at our weekly meeting, Mr. Montgomery segued elegantly from congratulating me on the fantastic job I was doing raising his kids to bemoaning the fresh round of trouble we English were suddenly having with the Germans in Europe and rather than melt before his eyes into a puddle of tears and sweat, as I surely would have done just a few weeks earlier, I found instead that I was
interested in what he was saying
. Another war was looming. Another big one. Whereas the First World War had been played out entirely overseas in Europe, it was Mr. Montgomery's opinion that this terrible sequel would be a genuinely global affair, its monstrous black fingers poking into every last crevice and cranny of the Earth, from Antarctica to Zambia, touching people's lives, altering them. There would be no hiding places.

Now, obviously, to the woman I had been at the start of the thirties, who couldn't even look at a week-old racing form without breaking out in a rash, this would have been
the worst news possible. But did I panic, reader? There in his study? Reader, to my own surprise and elation I did not. As my employer delivered his grim hypothesis I directed my gaze out the window and allowed my mind to be filled by a vision, a vision of myself knee deep in History alongside my countrymen, ducking bombs and cheering victories, stealing farewell kisses amid clouds of steam on railway platforms, zipping around the place in a nurse's uniform, possibly yanking people out of rubble or something and when the meeting ended I walked sedately out into the hallway, closed his study door, and pumped my fist with wild abandon.

Because, reader, I was well again.

O
N THE LAST
afternoon before the war the rain ran thick down the playroom windows as Peter and Veronica ventured forth on their final mission: scouring the globe (the playroom) as wildlife conservation officials for specimens of nearly extinct species (their scattered toys), which they were charged with transporting unharmed to an ultra-high-tech government-sponsored game reserve, a.k.a. the toy closet. When it was done we built a fire in the grate and sat around it in armchairs, staring into the flames and thinking our own thoughts.

“Nanny?” blurted Peter who was sitting in my lap. “Will you and Father get married?”

Reader, it was that kind of afternoon: when you just said whatever was on your mind, with no fear of embarrassment, for who knew when you'd get another chance?

“No,” I responded.

“Why not?” asked Veronica. I looked over at where she sat. The firelight was dancing in her spectacles, casting
shadows on her sweatshirt. She wasn't a little girl anymore, I noticed. She could probably handle the truth.

“Because I'm not in love with him.”

“Why not?” Peter twisted to pout up at me.

“Well, because . . .”

And I paused.

Why
not
marry Mr. Montgomery and make a life with him and the kids?

It wasn't the stupidest idea I'd ever had. Not by a long chalk. While I'd only intended my nannyship as a temporary thing, just till I got back on my feet psychologically, the fact was I had found
stability
here, almost a form of happiness . . .

Actually, no.

Mr. Montgomery was a
man
.

Just like Davey had been a man.

I wasn't going down that road again.

“Why not?” asked Peter again.

I smoothed a prong of his jammy hair. “Oh Peter. This is all complicated adult stuff. Your father is a wonderful man but . . . I don't know. He works in a bank.”

“For which he is very well compensated,” said Veronica.

“Yes I know . . . I know. You're right. But money isn't everything. There's . . . companionship and . . . Look, I'm a lesbian, is the truth of the matter. I like having sex with women.”

We fell to thoughtful silence, examining the demon dance of flamy shapes as they formed and intermingled in the bowels of the fire.

Presently the front door clunked shut and in walked Mr. Montgomery, looking even glummer than usual.

“It's war,” he said and went to turn on the radio, a hulking brown wardrobe of a thing in the corner of the playroom.
There were some whistling noises, some static, and then the air was filled by the rich, roast-beef voice of Mr. Winston Churchill, one of England's highest-ranking statesmen at that time, delivering a speech that would change all our lives.

“Today . . .” he began, and went on to explain that the Germans, led by Adolf Hitler, had just invaded one of the countries with whom they shared a border . . .

I began to feel sick, and then suddenly . . .

POP!

The radio went dead.

“Father,” Veronica straightened in her chair. “I told you the valves in the radio were corroding. Did you buy me the new valves from the ironmonger as you promised?”

He patted his pockets unconvincingly. “Ah . . . sorry, no. I've had much on my mind of late.”

“If only I had the valves I could repair the radiophono-graph in one instant.”

“Gosh you are
clever,”
Peter said. Then he frowned, touched a finger to his lip. “What'th a valve?”

Veronica took off her glasses and polished them on her sweatshirt. “Well, think of it as a tube with a wire in it . . .”

She was right, I reflected later, extinguishing the gaslamps in my dingy attic quarters and climbing into bed. A valve was a tube with a wire in it.

But like the dictionary says a valve was also a sort of access
hole
, an access hole that could suddenly pop open in the skin of something you thought you had all nicely sealed off, allowing the awfulness to come flooding in again.

I wasn't better, I admitted as I lay there in the dark. I wasn't better at all. Those few morsels of data that I'd been fed by Winston Churchill before the radio crapped out were still lodged in my gut like lumps of indigestible clay, making
me want to vomit. My information-phobia was back with a vengeance. And on the eve of a major world war, a war from which there could be no hiding, well that was fucking bad news indeed.