I was twenty-six years old and I wasn’t really sure what I was. Up until I lost my job I hadn’t even given it any thought. I supposed I would probably marry Patrick, knock out a few kids, live a few streets away from where I had always lived. Apart from an exotic taste in clothes, and the fact that I’m a bit short, there’s not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn’t look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.
‘You must wear a suit to an interview,’ Mum had insisted. ‘Everyone’s far too casual these days.’
‘Because wearing pinstripes will be vital if I’m spoon-feeding a geriatric.’
‘Don’t be smart.’
‘I can’t afford to buy a suit. What if I don’t get the job?’
‘You can wear mine, and I’ll iron you a nice blouse, and just for once don’t wear your hair up in those –’ she gestured to my hair, which was normally twisted into two dark knots on each side of my head ‘– Princess Leia things. Just try to look like a normal person.’
I knew better than to argue with my mother. And I could tell Dad had been instructed not to comment on my outfit as I walked out of the house, my gait awkward in the too-tight skirt.
‘Bye love,’ he said, the corners of his mouth twitching. ‘Good luck now. You look very … businesslike.’
The embarrassing thing was not that I was wearing my mother’s suit, or that it was in a cut last fashionable in the late 1980s, but that it was actually a tiny bit small for me. I felt the waistband cutting into my midriff, and pulled the double-breasted jacket across. As Dad says of Mum, there’s more fat on a kirby grip.
I sat through the short bus journey feeling faintly sick. I had never had a proper job interview. I had joined The Buttered Bun after Treena bet me that I couldn’t get a job in a day. I had walked in and simply asked Frank if he needed a spare pair of hands. It had been his first day open and he had looked almost blinded by gratitude.
Now, looking back, I couldn’t even remember having a discussion with him about money. He suggested a weekly wage, I agreed, and once a year he told me he’d upped it a bit, usually by a little more than I would have asked for.
What did people ask in interviews anyway? And what if they asked me to do something practical with this old man, to feed him or bath him or something? Syed had said there was a male carer who covered his ‘intimate needs’ (I shuddered at the phrase). The secondary carer’s job was, he said, ‘a little unclear at this point’. I pictured myself wiping drool from the old man’s mouth, maybe asking loudly, ‘DID HE WANT A CUP OF TEA?’
When Granddad had first begun his recovery from his strokes he hadn’t been able to do anything for himself. Mum had done it all. ‘Your mother is a saint,’ Dad said, which I took to mean that she wiped his bum without running screaming from the house. I was pretty sure nobody had ever described me as such. I cut Granddad’s food up for him and made him cups of tea but as for anything else, I wasn’t sure I was made of the right ingredients.
Granta House was on the other side of Stortfold Castle, close to the medieval walls, on the long unpavemented stretch that comprised only four houses and the National Trust shop, bang in the middle of the tourist area. I had passed this house a million times in my life without ever actually properly seeing it. Now, walking past the car park and the miniature railway, both of which were empty and as bleak as only a summer attraction can look in February, I saw it was bigger than I had imagined, red brick with a double front, the kind of house you saw in old copies of Country Life while waiting at the doctor’s.
I walked up the long drive, trying not to think about whether anybody was watching out of the window. Walking up a long drive puts you at a disadvantage; it automatically makes you feel inferior. I was just contemplating whether to actually tug at my forelock, when the door opened and I jumped.
A woman, not much older than me, stepped out into the porch. She was wearing white slacks and a medical-looking tunic and carried a coat and a folder under her arm. As she passed me she gave a polite smile.
‘And thank you so much for coming,’ a voice said, from inside. ‘We’ll be in touch. Ah.’ A woman’s face appeared, middle-aged but beautiful, under expensive precision-cut hair. She was wearing a trouser suit that I guessed cost more than my dad earned in a month.
‘You must be Miss Clark.’
‘Louisa.’ I shot out a hand, as my mother had impressed upon me to do. The young people never offered up a hand these days, my parents had agreed. In the old days you wouldn’t have dreamt of a ‘hiya’ or, worse, an air kiss. This woman did not look like she would have welcomed an air kiss.
‘Right. Yes. Do come in.’ She withdrew her hand from mine as soon as humanly possible, but I felt her eyes linger upon me, as if she were already assessing me.
‘Would you like to come through? We’ll talk in the drawing room. My name is Camilla Traynor.’ She seemed weary, as if she had uttered the same words many times that day already.
I followed her through to a huge room with floor to ceiling French windows. Heavy curtains draped elegantly from fat mahogany curtain poles, and the floors were carpeted with intricately decorated Persian rugs. It smelt of beeswax and antique furniture. There were little elegant side tables everywhere, their burnished surfaces covered with ornamental boxes. I wondered briefly where on earth the Traynors put their cups of tea.
‘So you have come via the Job Centre advertisement, is that right? Do sit down.’
While she flicked through her folder of papers, I gazed surreptitiously around the room. I had thought the house might be a bit like a care home, all hoists and wipe-clean surfaces. But this was like one of those scarily expensive hotels, steeped in old money, with well-loved things that looked valuable in their own right. There were silver-framed photographs on a sideboard, but they were too far away for me to make out the faces. As she scanned her pages, I shifted in my seat, to try to get a better look.
And it was then that I heard it – the unmistakable sound of stitches ripping. I glanced down to see the two pieces of material that joined at the side of my right leg had torn apart, sending frayed pieces of silk thread shooting upwards in an ungainly fringe. I felt my face flood with colour.
‘So … Miss Clark … do you have any experience with quadriplegia?’