started to wail but they all kept their smiles fixed.
‘It’s either this or nothing,’ Christian shouted as he jabbed at the machine.
‘So.’ Ruth turned to Aggie. ‘Sorry about that. Right, well, let’s see. I suppose Christian has filled you in on us a bit.’
The girl blushed and tried to answer but nothing came out.
‘Sorry, Betty commandeered her,’ said Christian.
Ruth felt defeated before she’d even begun. ‘So you haven’t said anything about Hal yet?’
‘No, not yet, I was waiting for you.’ And there it was, the perfect get-out.
Ruth composed herself. ‘Sorry, Aggie, let me explain. Hal’s nearly three and he’s never eaten anything. Not ever. He lives off bottles of milk. I’ve taken him to the doctors but they say he’s perfectly healthy. Maybe a bit behind developmentally; I mean, he hardly speaks, but apparently that’s not overly worrying. We don’t know what to do next. I’ve got an appointment with a great nutritionist in a few weeks, but I guess our most important question to you is how you feel about food?’
Agatha looked at the back of Hal’s head. She liked the idea of looking after a freak. And she’d babysat and nannied for enough of these ridiculous women to know what to say. She imagined the Donaldsons’ fridge, all green and verdant and organic at the top, but beating in the cold heart of the freezer would be the fat-laden, salt-addled reality.
‘Well, I think what you feed kids is reflected in their behaviour. Obviously I try to get them to eat five fruit and veg a day and I only buy organic, but I’m not evangelical or anything. I think the odd sweet or biscuit is fine.’
Ruth nodded approvingly while Christian stared oblivious out of the window. ‘That’s pretty much how we feel, but we’ve had such problems with Hal. The doctor says we should go with it for now. She even told me to try giving him things like chocolate to get him used to the idea of eating. But that’s absurd, don’t you think?’
Agatha thought it sounded sensible. She had been brought up on a diet of frozen burgers, oven chips and chocolate. Pot Noodles, if she was lucky. And it hadn’t done her any harm. But of course she shook her head disapprovingly.
‘And what about discipline, where do you stand on that?’
‘I do believe in rules.’ Agatha could remember her last employer screaming at her children after telling Agatha in her interview that she thought a raised voice was a stupid voice. They were fucking priceless these women. ‘But I think they should be rules we’d obey anyway, like be polite and kind and don’t hit or snatch, those sort of things. And I don’t like to threaten anything I’m not prepared to carry out.’ Agatha wasn’t confi dent she should say this as Ruth Donaldson was in all likelihood another of those crazy women who wouldn’t be left in charge of their kids if they lived on the local estate but somehow got away with it because they lived in half-a-million-pound houses and knew a few long words. But then again these women were usually addicted to parenting programmes and so had a fair idea for how they should be behaving even if they couldn’t manage it themselves.
‘I put on the advert light household duties, are you okay with that? I meant a bit of laundry and keeping things a bit straight and maybe a bit of food shopping.’
‘Oh, absolutely, that’s fine. Of course I’d do that.’ That was the part Agatha liked the best. Putting everything into its right place. Sorting the house and making her employers marvel at her efficiency. She had been a cleaner many times in her life and she always proved herself indispensable. A lot of these families lived in near slum conditions. Agatha had learnt that they were the sort of people who you’d look at from the outside and wish you could be part of them. You’d covet their clothes and their house and coffee maker and £300 hoover and fridges in bright colours. But they couldn’t even flush their own toilets, most of them. They didn’t understand that the world had to be neat and that keeping things in order was very simple.
‘And as you know, Christian and I both work long hours. I try to be home for seven, but Christian never is. Are you okay with that? Maybe sometimes putting them to bed?’
‘Of course, I’m used to that.’ By the end of most jobs Agatha would have preferred it if the parents had disappeared; she liked to imagine them vaporised by their own neuroses. Handling children was always so much easier than adults.
‘So, Aggie, tell us about yourself.’
Agatha was used to this question now, she knew these types of people liked to pretend they cared, but it still roused a dread inside her. The other answers hadn’t really been lies. It wasn’t like she was going to feed the kids crap whilst hitting them and shovelling the dirt under the sofa. She was going to be a good nanny, but she couldn’t tell these people about herself. She had experimented with a couple of answers in the past few interviews, but she’d found that if you said your parents were dead they felt too sorry for you and if you said they’d emigrated they still expected them to call. This was the first time she’d tried out her new answer: ‘I was brought up in Manchester and I’m an only child. My parents are very old-fashioned and when I got into university to study Philosophy my dad went mad. He’s very religious, you see, and he said Philosophy was the root of all evil, the devil’s work.’ She’d seen this on a late-night soap opera and it had sounded plausible, or maybe fantastic enough to be something you wouldn’t make up.
Ruth and Christian Donaldson reacted exactly as she’d expected, sitting up like two eager spaniels, liberal sensitivity spreading across their faces.
‘He said if I went he’d disown me.’
‘But you went anyway?’
Agatha looked down and felt the pain of this slight so hard that real tears pricked her eyes. ‘No, I didn’t. I could kick myself now, but I turned down the place.’
Ruth’s hand went to her mouth in a gesture Agatha doubted to be spontaneous. ‘Oh, how awful. How could he have denied you such an opportunity?’ She was longing to say that she would never do anything so terrible to her own children.
‘I stayed at home for a while after that, but it was terrible. So many rows.’ Agatha could see a neat suburban terrace as she said this with a pinched man wagging a finger at her. The air smelt of vinegar, she realised; maybe her mother had been a bad cook or an obsessive cleaner, she wasn’t sure which yet. She wondered along with this kind couple sitting in front of her how he could have been so mean. ‘I left five years ago and I haven’t spoken to them since.’
‘But your mother, hasn’t she contacted you?’
‘She was very dominated by my dad. I think they’ve moved now.’
‘Do you have any siblings?’
‘No, it’s just me. I’m an only child.’
‘Poor you,’ said Ruth, but Agatha could already see her working out that they were getting a nanny who was clever enough to get into university, and for no extra cost.
When Agatha got back to her grotty room in King’s Cross she felt tired and drained. She was still trying to work out why she might have told the Donaldsons she was called Aggie when no one had ever called her anything but Agatha. She supposed it must have sounded friendlier and she’d have to go with it now. Her room-mate’s mobile was ringing. She answered with a curt hello and then started waving
