Canarino

‘They said they went for a drink of water. The nanny told them to drink plenty in the heat, which is good advice. But they shouldn’t be drinking from that stream, Mrs Judd. It’s not clean water. Full of run-off, fertilizer, God only knows what. The trouble is, they couldn’t find their way back to the house, and they liked the look of the willows—cool, you know, irresistible.’

Elizabeth wrung her white hands, not hard, then pressed the tips of her long thumbs against one another, silent. She stared at the desktop. Then she looked back up at Mr Richards.

‘What happened to Norma?’ It was a perfectly ordinary request for information; her voice expressed no anxiety, no irritation.

‘That’s the nanny? I have no idea. Although I think maybe I know where to look for her. But, Mrs Judd, your children are crying.’ Now Mr Richards wasn’t certain he had expressed his concern with enough urgency; his voice ratcheted upwards. ‘I left them with the chef, but they don’t know him; they’d be better off with you, Mrs Judd.’

Elizabeth reflected. At last she said, ‘All right.’ And she brushed herself off again, in preparation.

The children weren’t crying. They were sitting up on stools at the kitchen counter eating English muffins with butter and honey on them. Hope looked around as her mother came in; she was chewing loudly. A shadow moved through Hope’s blue eyes. She shut her mouth, rubbed all around it with her small fingers, wiping it clean, then went on chewing, silently.

The chef stepped back from the counter where he had been leaning over the children, stood up straight, said nothing.

‘Norma needs an ambulance, Mummy. We were coming to tell you.’ Gordon took another bite of muffin.

‘Would you make me some coffee, please,’ said Elizabeth, not looking at the chef. ‘Just black.’

She touched Gordon’s back, giving it a half-stroke, then another, fitfully.

‘Why did Norma leave you alone?’ she asked lightly, as if it wasn’t of much importance.

‘Norma didn’t leave,’ said Hope, putting the remaining piece of her muffin down onto her plate with both hands, ‘we did.’ She looked at her mother anxiously, expectantly.

Elizabeth stood holding her hands in front of her, the fingertips loosely curled inside one another. She squeezed them tightly for a moment, then relaxed.

‘You ran away from Norma?’

‘No, Mummy, we didn’t run.’ Hope shook her head soberly. She knew she was right about this.

Gordon said, ‘Norma fell over in the maze, Mummy, and she didn’t get up, so we had to find our own way out, and then Hope fell into the stream and got scared and started yelling.’

Mr Richards came into the kitchen. He announced that he had found Norma sitting on the brick path near the entrance to the maze with an arc of vomit around her. She was badly scratched, had a coconut-sized lump on the back of her head, and had failed in her evidently tenacious effort to crawl out of the maze after the children. Her hands were icy, and she had begun to cry and shake all over when he tried to help her up.

‘I need some help getting her into my car,’ he went on. His voice was robust, with an edge of adrenalin. ‘She needs an X-ray. She’s got the mother of all lumps on her head and she’s puking everywhere; I’m sure it’s a concussion. I just hope her skull’s still in one piece or her brain will be swelling right through the cracks.’

Elizabeth winced. She placed her hand on Mr Richards’s forearm and looked at him in silence with pleading, dewy eyes.

He was taken aback. ‘I need help!’ he repeated, shrugging his shoulders.

Elizabeth kept her hand on his arm, pressing it. ‘The chef will help you,’ she whispered.

But Gordon had already caught it all. ‘Her brain is swelling through cracks in her skull? Oh, Norma!’ His eyes were alight with horror.

‘What’s “puking”, Mummy?’ asked Hope.

Elizabeth didn’t answer. She looked sorrowfully at Mr Richards. He smiled and turned to Hope.

‘Puking’s throwing up, sweetie,’ he said.

Hope nodded.

‘Sounds like it,’ said Gordon. ‘Sounds gross.’

‘You’d better get her to the hospital, then,’ said Elizabeth in a tone of voice that suggested they might never go at all unless she urged them to. Let’s get this episode over with, she was thinking, seizing the initiative as if it had been her own all along. She smiled graciously at the chef. ‘I can wait for my coffee, Pedro; it’s no problem. I’ll watch over the children and spend a little time with them.’

As Pedro took off his apron and rushed out after Mr Richards, Elizabeth picked up the telephone. ‘Shall we call Daddy, children? I’ll bet he’s waiting to hear from us.’

She paced around the kitchen with one hand on her slim hip, the phone jammed against her ear, ringing forlornly. Then she looked at her watch and counted off the five-hour time difference on her fingers. It’s nearly eleven there, she thought, why hasn’t he called us? Maybe his flight into Heathrow was delayed.

She dialled both numbers again, the cell phone and the house. No answer. Then Elizabeth made herself put the phone down. Leave it alone, she told herself, he’s somewhere. Eventually he’ll call.

And she repeated it out loud to the children, smiling through her frustration and her sense, all over again, of not being missed.

‘Daddy’s somewhere,’ she said, ‘and he’ll call eventually.’

‘Is he taking care of Puck?’

‘Don’t worry about Puck, Gordon. Francine will take care of Puck.’ Grimly she thought to herself, God knows, I’ve paid her enough.

The gleaming, cavernous kitchen seemed chilly to Elizabeth. There was no food cooking, the wide counters were empty. Row upon row of saucepans and pots hung clean and ready, row upon row of knives. Industrial, uninviting. This could never be her domain. She budged in between the children’s stools, and circled her arms around them, giving them each a squeeze.

‘Are you tired, you two?’

They didn’t answer, recognizing this as a trick question.

So Elizabeth tried, ‘Do you want anything else to eat?’

Gordon said, ‘What else can we have?’

She stepped away and opened the refrigerator. What she saw inside made her feel even colder; she was reluctant to break in on the chef’s mysterious, suspended preparations—heads of lettuce, a whole pimpled yellow chicken, meat marinating in something red with yellow slicks of fat hardened on the surface, packages wrapped in white paper and sealed with light brown tape, the prices scribbled on the outside in waxy red crayon. She made herself open a drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator. She couldn’t engage with any of it—could hardly recognize it as appetizing or imagine why anyone would want to eat it.

‘There’s fruit,’ she said without expression. ‘I can make you some fruit. Or salad? Do you want me to wash some lettuce for you?’ She shivered, thinking of the icy water.

Gordon said, ‘That’s okay. Thanks.’

Hope piped up, ‘I like grapes and strawberries for fruit.’

‘Okay, grapes.’ Elizabeth went to the sink with the plastic bag of grapes, rinsed them and shook them off and brought them to the counter. She didn’t open a drawer or a cupboard to look for a colander or a cloth or a napkin or a plate.

‘I don’t know where anything is,’ she explained, as if the children might have views on her lack of culinary commitment.

Beads of water clung to the grapes and spread over the counter where she put them down. Her hands were wet. She shook them and the drops fell on the floor. She wondered why Pedro was taking so long.

Hope plucked the grapes off one at a time, munching, staring into space. Then she said, ‘We couldn’t find any horsies, Mummy.’

Elizabeth said nothing. She felt a flush of anxiety rise under her eyes.

‘We looked in all the fields.’