Saturday

Can you believe this weather?” Pauline stood by her back door, shading her eyes against the sun. “The middle of October.”

“I know. It’s wonderful.” Audrey tightened the belt of her dressing gown as she approached the dividing hedge. “I’m a disgrace, not dressed yet. Any news?”

“Not really, things have been quiet. You?”

“Nothing much. Looking forward to the midterm break in a couple of weeks. Not that I’ve any big plans, but I’ve two rooms that need painting, and I was thinking of bringing Dolly out to the lake at some stage, see what she’s like in the water.”

“Oh, we’re going there tomorrow. Kevin has been pestering me, and the forecast is good. Why don’t you and Dolly come with us?”

Audrey shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ve earmarked tomorrow to stain the shed. I’ve been putting it off long enough, and the weather mightn’t hold.”

They both turned to regard the shed at the bottom of Audrey’s garden, and Pauline tactfully didn’t comment.

“Well, I’d better see what that fellow is up to,” she said, turning towards her house. “Talk to you later, Audrey. Enjoy the sunshine.”

In the kitchen Audrey wrote her shopping list: wood stain, dog food, milk, custard, chicken, steak and kidney pies, veg, toothpaste, eggs, bath oil. She tore the page from her notebook and tucked it into her purse, then pulled it out again and added chocolate.

Her biscuit jar had a supply of little Kit Kats and Penguin bars to have with a cup of coffee, but it wasn’t Saturday night without some proper chocolate.

—————

“I did the first bit,” she said, handing over the form. “I put in my name.”

Her name, he read, was Carmel Ryan. Her writing was childish, the letters carefully but unevenly formed, the C of Carmel not quite large enough. Michael scanned the rest of the form.

“Date of birth,” he said, unscrewing his fountain pen, and she told him. Her birthday was in September, a couple of weeks before his, and she was just gone twenty-two. He wrote Irish after Nationality and ticked the small box beside Female.

Address. He filled in his own, aware of her watching as the words flowed across the page. Telephone. He looked up.

“I take it you don’t have a mobile phone.”

“No.”

He filled in his number.

Qualifications. He left it blank. Nothing he could make up there.

Previous Employment. He paused, and then wrote Housekeeper, and put his own name and the shop address under References.

Additional Information. He looked up again. “Anything you were good at in school?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t mind art.”

He wrote Hobbies: painting, walking. For all the good that particular piece of information would do, but it was something to fill an inch of space.

“I like children,” she said then, her color rising. “I like bein’ with them, I mean.”

“Have you any experience of being with them, apart from Barry?”

“I minded another boy, in the squat. When his mother was—” She broke off abruptly, and then added, “sick.”

Michael wrote Childcare experience, aware of the inadequacy of the claim. Keeping an eye on an addict’s child now and again when the mother was high on whatever substance she pumped into herself hardly qualified as childcare in the proper sense of the word. But the girl had also raised her own son for three years in difficult circumstances, which must count for something.

To be sure, Barry was overly quiet and not exactly bursting with energy, but with so much stacked against him it was probably a minor miracle that the lad was still breathing.

“Anything else?” he asked, without much hope. “Any holiday jobs when you were younger? Waitressing, shop work?” Before you went near drugs, and left the real world behind.

She shook her head.

Michael scanned the form, well aware of how pitifully sparse the information was. It would have to do; they had nothing else.

“Bring me the other ones,” he told her. “Put your name on the top again and I’ll fill in the rest.”

“Thanks,” she said, getting up quickly and leaving the kitchen.

Michael felt—what? Pity, he supposed. If she was to be believed—​and the more he got to know her, the more he felt that she might be—the odds had surely been stacked against her from the start. A dysfunctional family, an abusive father, and an education system that had failed her. If she was to be believed.

But she was drug-free now, that much of her story at least was true. Michael would know if she wasn’t; he’d had painful firsthand experience of what being high looked and sounded like, and since her arrival here she’d exhibited none of the signs he’d seen in Ethan.

And he had to acknowledge that she looked after her son as far as she was able; he had to give her that. The way she looked at the boy across the kitchen table sometimes reminded Michael poignantly of how Ruth had looked at Ethan. She might be wincingly rough around the edges, but she wasn’t incapable of tenderness.

Maybe, after all, she’d done the best she could with the hand she’d been dealt.

—————

When the interval between popping sounds began to stretch, Zarek took the saucepan off the heat. He tipped the pile of warm popcorn into the large blue bowl that normally held their fruit supply, and sprinkled it with salt. In the living room he placed the bowl on the couch, between Anton and himself.

“Merci.”

Anton dipped his hand into the bowl as Zarek inserted the DVD and pressed play. After the usual preliminaries, the opening credits of The Remains of the Day began scrolling up the screen.

On the Saturday nights when Zarek wasn’t working, the two men’s routine of DVD and popcorn rarely varied. They took turns to choose and rent the DVDs, but Zarek consistently popped the corn, it being tacitly agreed that Anton, after cooking dinners all week, deserved a break.

Now and again Pilar joined them, but tonight she’d gone for a drink with a fellow Lithuanian, much to Zarek’s, and he was pretty sure Anton’s, quiet relief. Pilar seemed unfamiliar with the concept of silent watching, preferring to keep up a steady, full-volume commentary anytime she sat in front of a screen.

Zarek stretched an arm along the back of the couch and watched the butler interacting with the recently arrived housekeeper. The subtitles they’d selected were in French, Polish not having been among the offered languages, so Zarek did his best with the spoken word.

At first the nuances of their exchanges were largely lost to him—he generally aimed for the bigger picture when he watched a film in English—but as the film progressed, by studying the body language and facial expressions he slowly became aware of the butler’s unspoken feelings for the housekeeper, and of the man’s tragic inability, or unwillingness, to recognize until too late that his feelings were reciprocated.

And as the closing credits rolled, Zarek Olszewski could appreciate the exquisite irony of watching that particular film with Anton.