Mrs MacGlone, of course, was absolutely furious.
If, up until then, Zoe had managed to keep on fairly neutral territory with her – mostly because Mrs MacGlone didn’t expect her to stay; didn’t expect anybody to stay and deal with Shackleton’s sloth, Mary’s unbelievable rudeness and Patrick’s non-stop chattering (she could not have known how bittersweet but still welcome a noisy child was around the place to Zoe’s ears) – this was like a declaration of war; on Mrs MacGlone’s turf, no less. She’d let Shackleton touch the chandelier!
Of course she realised she wasn’t able to keep the house up to the standards old Laird Urquart would have found acceptable. There were three housemaids in those days, a cook, a laundress, a housekeeper and a butler as well as the garden staff. That’s what it took to keep things straight, whatever thing this slip of a girl thought she was doing. Suppose she thought she was very smart, showing up Mrs MacGlone as lazy or sloppy, which she most certainly was not; it was everything she could do to keep the kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms more or less straight, the carpet vacuumed and their clothes clean, doing everything the way she’d always done it, since she was not much older than Mary was now. By the time she’d sorted out food and done the shopping, there wasn’t a second left to spare.
She had quite the furious speech all ready to make to Ramsay the following day so it was doubly annoying when, as was his wont, he shut himself up in his library all day and was nowhere to be seen.
And if young missy thought she was going to get round those children with fancy food and pancakes and filling them with all sorts of nonsense, she had another think coming. Bribing them would never last for long; she’d seen it before. Maria-Teresa had tried to bribe them with all sorts of sugary junk which had ended up in Patrick losing a tooth because she didn’t supervise teeth brushing, and Mary refusing to eat anything at all and a stand-up row between all of them that had ended, inevitably, with Maria-Teresa and her bag at the end of a drive. Sometimes the girls hitchhiked out. Maria-Teresa had, not altogether unstylishly, driven the green Renault to Inverness station and ditched it with the key in it. Nobody had stolen it by the time Ramsay had got Lennox to drive him up there to fetch it.
She approached Zoe early in the morning before they entered the kitchen.
‘What’s been going on here then?’ she sniffed.
‘Oh,’ said Zoe, smiling nervously. ‘I thought we could give you more of a hand round the house?’
‘So you don’t think I’m up to it?’
Mrs MacGlone’s mouth was a hard line.
‘That’s not what I think at all! I think you do an amazing job!’ said Zoe. ‘I just thought it might be good for the children to . . . help?’
‘So you’ve been here five minutes and you know what’s best for them?’ said Mrs MacGlone. Zoe bit back the retort that little could be worse than the huddle of awkward people she’d stumbled across, like a tiny lifeboat of stragglers left after a shipwreck, washed up, clinging to the kitchen tiles.
Mrs MacGlone stepped up to her.
‘People come and go frae these children’s lives,’ she said in a voice made more threatening by its low tone so nobody could hear her. ‘They come in, they faff about, they make nothing better – and then they leave and we’re right back where we started. The less you do and change, the better, missy.’
‘Maybe I’m not like that,’ said Zoe, her voice quivering.
‘Och aye, you’re different,’ said Mrs MacGlone. ‘Here you come, on your holidays frae that London, dragging that wee laddie, looking for a free bed. You’ll be here and as soon as you’re back on your feet, you’ll be off again, back to England.’
She said ‘England’ as if it were a swear word. And the children slouched past on their way to breakfast and didn’t bother saying good morning and it was like nothing had changed at all.