What made the initial month or so difficult was that there was something going on between the husband and wife. It had been strange that Mrs Yount wasn’t there on 27 December, and never fully explained, and Matya could sense the heavy atmospheric pressure around the subject of her absence. Also, the fact that the husband had hired her clearly made the wife feel uneasy, and she had been difficult at the start – watchful, resentful, and insisting on a four-week trial period, something he hadn’t mentioned. The way she said it was a clear warning that if there were a reason to get rid of Matya, she would take it.
But more than three months had gone by, and all that was now in the past. Arabella did not object to the idea of holding a grudge, being difficult, giving people a hard time; but in practice, her fundamental laziness wouldn’t let her. Anger and spikiness were, over a sustained period, just too tiring, not worth the effort. Matya, who had had a difficult childhood and had come to London to get away from things, and who was very good at holding grudges and keeping score, found this refreshing. She sensed that Arabella would have quite liked not to like her as a way of getting at her husband, but found that she did like her, so let the feeling go. Also, Matya made her life easier, by being so good with the children, and it was clear that Arabella felt a deep, sincere affection for anyone who made her life easier. When the delivery men carried boxes of groceries into the house, Arabella would tell them, ‘You’re an angel,’ and in such a way that it seemed she really meant it – as indeed, in a small way, she did.
The great thing about Arabella was that she wanted things to be fun, to be easy, and acted as if they were – which went a long way to making them so. It was catching. One morning, handing over the boys to Matya when she arrived at nine o’clock and heading upstairs, as she said herself, for ‘a long soak’, she caught sight of Matya’s shoes. They were a pair of flat tennis shoes with a grey and white check pattern.
‘My God! They’re fantastic! Must have! Where where where?! I can tell, you’re going to tell me it’s some mad little boutique tucked away in some souk in Budapest!’
‘Tooting,’ said Matya.
‘More exotic still! Right – we’re going there this minute.’
‘This minute’ was a flexible concept for Arabella. She still had to have her bath and do her face and make a few phone calls, but when that was done, by about eleven, sure enough she bundled Matya and Conrad and Joshua into her BMW and insisted on Matya’s directing her to the shoe shop, with her energy and excitement about the outing carrying all four of them along, giggling and shrieking. Arabella had bought, as she herself put it, ‘half the shop’, and insisted on buying two pairs of shoes for Matya in the process, with generosity so unthinking and instinctive it was almost as if it were not generosity at all – it was as if it were something else, an overflow of energy; or as if there were no such thing as money, as if things did not cost anything, so it was perfectly natural to give them to other people, because they were free to start with. Matya had never met anyone like that; she had had a few employers who were rich, but they tended to be very careful about money, vigilantly checking change and receipts and making small mistakes always in their own favour when they totted up hours worked. It was hard not to like Arabella’s open-handedness.
The best thing about the job, however, was Joshua. Conrad was back at school now, so she only saw him from 3.45 or on his holidays and days off. He was a good-hearted boy, though with a short temper and not used to being denied things, so he was not always easy to manage. At the moment Conrad was mainly interested in superpowers and his conversation tended to turn on them. He would announce that he could fly, or ask Matya whether she could shoot heat-vision rays out of her eyes, and if she couldn’t, why not? Or he would announce that he had ‘power of double-punch!’ and shove both his fists out. He liked trying to say ‘invincible’ but was not clear on the difference between that and being invisible, so all three of them played games in which invincibility and invisibility went together. So Conrad was fun. It was different, deeper with Joshua.
Joshua was hers every day. He and Matya were in love, and made no attempt to conceal the fact from each other. On some days he would be sitting on a chair by the window looking for her as she came in, like a dog waiting for its owner; that made her heart do a little flip. Then he would come running to the door and grab her hand and drag her behind him while she fought to take her coat off with her free arm before he had wrestled her into the sitting room and launched into whatever game, story, or demand was in the front of his mind. He was always, at the start of the day, in mid-thought; he had something he needed to get off his chest, or a plan that demanded immediate action. If Matya came in the room and Joshua was lying or sitting on the sofa, she knew that he was ill, and that it would be a ‘floppy day’, as Arabella called it.
Other things Josh liked included going to the pond on the far side of the Common to feed the ducks, and stopping for an ice cream at the café by the bandstand on the way back; standing by the edge of the skateboard park and watching the older boys zoom and swoop down the ramps (also up the ramps, on the edges of the ramps, backwards, sideways); riding the bus, anywhere, for any reason; going to the Aquarium, where he was fascinated by the idea of the sharks but also scared of them – in contrast to his attitude to the rays, which he was also a bit scared of but loved to reach into the tank to stroke, and afterwards was thrilled with himself (and with the rays), so the contrast between his attitudes to the two fish precisely drew the line between stimulating excitement and fear. As for food, that took a while for Matya to work out, and it was by no means a stable arrangement – he seemed to like baked potatoes, rice and chips, but not steamed potatoes; he sometimes did and sometimes did not like mash, he loved broccoli but hated cabbage, he liked cheese on some days but not on others, but always liked parmesan so long as it was grated, he liked meat but not burnt bits, dark bits, bits which had the appearance of potentially containing gristle even if they contained no gristle, bits which looked bloody or underdone; he disliked green flecks such as herbs, under all circumstances; he disliked the sight of dark spots which might be pepper; he disliked fizzy drinks but liked sweet ones; he liked fish fingers; he would not eat any kind of sausage except a hot dog; he liked pasta and pesto but not pasta with any other kind of sauce; it was impossible for anyone including Joshua to tell in advance of the food being put before him whether this would be one of the days on which he loved or hated bacon. A useful rule of thumb was that Joshua liked anything to which he could add tomato ketchup or soy sauce.
It was strange for Matya, finding herself so deeply in love. At the start of her time in London three years before, she had had fantasies of meeting a perfect man, and of finding children to look after who she really liked. Neither thing had happened. With her looks, attracting men had not been a problem; attracting men who she actually felt something in common with, who treated her respectfully, who were employed and responsible and good fun, was much less straightforward, and the one man who had seemed to be those things, and who she had begun to properly go out with, had turned out to be half-mad with control-freakery, much of it linked to the question of money. He wanted to treat her to things and then act as if she were his property. He had rages, he would go silent, then she would look out the window of her flat at four in the morning, woken by who knew what, and see him sitting outside in his car looking up at her, looking angry and lost, like a little boy trying to reclaim his dignity after recovering from a tantrum. When she finally, irrevocably broke with him – by putting it so plainly that he actually understood she didn’t want to see him any more – he did something which, even by the standards of men and their irrationality and unreasonableness, was amazing. He sent her a bill for the holiday they had taken together, the holiday whose whole point, according to him, had been that he wanted to treat her to a week in Ayia Napa, clubbing and swimming and having sex. When she opened the letter she had laughed with rage – and also with delight, because this gave her the chance of definitively finishing things. She wrote him a cheque, which cleaned out her bank account, but left her feeling free of him, for good. She knew he would have one more go at getting back with her, as indeed he did, sitting in his car outside her flat one morning. But she had no difficulty in telling him to go away and leave her alone, and this time even he could tell that she meant it. Since that, six months ago, no men.