The Nanny (32 page)

The arsehole cop presses his lips together. ‘We’ve got the details, miss. If the little boy isn’t back in twenty-four hours, we can issue an alert—’

‘It’ll be too late by then!’

The door opens again, and a policewoman ushers Clare in. She looks ten years older than she did this morning. Dark circles smudge her eyes, and her face is pinched and drawn.

‘Clare, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the money!’ I burst out. ‘I had no idea Marc was going to do something like this. I didn’t think it
mattered—’

She shrugs dully. ‘Even if you’d told me, it wouldn’t have made any difference.’

‘But maybe you could have stopped him—’

‘Let’s go home,’ she says tiredly. ‘This is hopeless, Jenna. No one believes me. They probably think I’ve abducted him myself. We’ll find Rowan ourselves.
I’ll call Davina. She’ll know what to do.’

‘I have a friend in the Canadian High Commission,’ Davina says briskly. ‘They’ll have a watch on the airports by the time his plane lands. If
that’s where he’s gone, of course, though I can’t think where else he’d be. You need to go and see Nicholas Lyon again first thing in the morning, Clare. He’ll deal
with the legal end of things.’ She sighs. ‘The Canadians are a bit French, admittedly, but they’re perfectly civilized. We’ll soon have this all sorted out.’

Clare refuses to go to bed, spending a sleepless night fully clothed in an armchair downstairs, ready to leave at a moment’s notice if Rowan is found. Upstairs, I pace the hallways with a
fretful and miserable Poppy, who’s clearly unsettled by the absence of her twin. I should have told Clare about the bag of money before. I just didn’t think of it. How could I be so
stupid
?

The next morning, she insists I go with her to see the divorce lawyer, for moral support. We’re ushered into Nicholas Lyon’s conference room by a sympathetic secretary, who pours us
coffee and offers us doughnuts and warm croissants. As if either of us could eat.

Nicholas comes in and gives Clare a warm hug. ‘Don’t panic,’ he tells her firmly. ‘We’re going to get Rowan back. I’ve already been in touch with the Canadian
Consulate, and the moment Marc sets foot in the country he’ll be brought before a Canadian court and ordered to return Rowan to the UK.’

‘Suppose he refuses?’ she asks anxiously.

‘Canada is a signatory to the Hague Convention on Child Abduction. He’ll be forced to bring Rowan back here so that the matter can be decided by a British court.’

Why is everyone so fixated on Canada? That’s the first place everyone will look; and, if I were Marc, the last place I’d go.

‘How are you going to force him?’ I demand. ‘I mean, all these conventions and stuff are fine, but haven’t we actually got to
find
him first?’

‘There’s a port alert in place, Jenna,’ Nicholas says. ‘As soon as he arrives, they’ll hold him. Don’t worry, they’re very much on the ball. One of the
more helpful by-products of all the 9/11 security,’ he adds wryly.

And if he’s not in Canada?
I think.
What then?

When Rowan and Marc have been missing for twenty-four hours, the police finally take Clare seriously. An alert is issued, but it’s as if Marc’s vanished into thin
air. He doesn’t use his credit cards, an ATM or even his mobile phone. I start to wonder if Clare’s right, and Marc
has
done something terrible.

For three days we don’t leave the house, jumping every time the phone rings. If Clare loses any more weight, she’ll snap. I wish I could get in touch with Xan. He’s the only
person I can think of who might help Clare through this.

On the fourth day, Nicholas calls.

‘I’ve just heard: Marc and Rowan were on a British Airways flight to Lebanon three days ago,’ he says wearily when I pick up the phone. ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost
him.’

I feel sick. This is my fault. I was the one who left Rowan at the swim class. I didn’t tell Clare about the money. I let this happen.

Even Nicholas sounds defeated. He explains that Lebanon isn’t a signatory to the Hague Convention. If Marc doesn’t bring Rowan back of his own accord, Clare will never find him. She
may never see her son again.

Davina hires a private investigator with contacts in Lebanon, but we have so little to go on. We have no idea which part of the country he’s in, or even if he stayed there. It’s like
looking for a needle in a haystack full of needles.

In desperation, Clare calls Marc’s parents in Montreal, but they either won’t, or can’t, help us. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mother put him up to this. According to
Clare, she’s never approved of her career-oriented daughter-in-law.

With every day that passes, Clare gets quieter and more withdrawn. It’s as if the life’s being sucked out of her. She’s lost all interest in her shops; desperate to distract
her, I insist on driving the three of us to Fulham every morning, and we sit and watch Poppy playing at our feet in her baby gym, blissfully unaware of the drama going on around her. She misses
Rowan, but she’s only seven months old. She has no comprehension of what has happened. How could she?

For her sake, I try to stick to our old routine as much as possible. I take her to Baby Swim (Clare sits at the side of the pool, taut as a bowstring, constantly scanning the water) and to the
park. Every night I bathe her and put her to bed, trying not to notice the empty space where her brother should be. Clare won’t let me wash Rowan’s sheets, or make up the cot properly.
It’s as if Rowan has died.

One night, four weeks after Rowan has vanished, I’m upstairs dressing Poppy in her pink pyjamas, trying to tame her dark curls with a soft teddy-bear hairbrush. A particularly wild tendril
keeps getting in her eyes, so I reach for the nail scissors to trim it for her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

I jump. Clare stands in the doorway; Rowan’s blanket, as ever these days, is in her hand. She watches me coldly for a few moments.

‘I said, what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Her hair was getting in her eyes—’

‘Did I say you could cut it?’

‘No, but—’

She crosses the room and snatches the scissors out of my hand. ‘I’ll decide if I want my daughter’s hair cut, thank you. I’m Poppy’s mother, not you. You
work
for me. You’re not her family. You have no right.’

‘I just thought—’

‘I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to do your job.’

I pick up the hairbrush again. She can’t help it. Given what she’s going through, it’s amazing she’s still sane.

I read somewhere once that 90 per cent of parents split up after they lose a child. They’re so consumed by their own grief, they don’t have time for each other. They turn in on
themselves, and instead of being drawn closer by their shared loss, they’re driven further apart.

Clare doesn’t seem to understand that I’m hurting too. She barely speaks to me; she’s like a stranger these days. She’s always been self-controlled, but she’s so
tightly wound now, I’m terrified what might happen if the dam breaks.

She doesn’t apologize for her outburst the next morning, or even ask if I mind working yet another Saturday; I haven’t had a day off since Marc took Rowan. Instead, we go to the
Fulham shop as usual. I flick on the computer in the corner of the shop and go through the staff rotas while Clare sits on the floor and plays with Poppy. After a while, I swivel and watch her. She
doesn’t have an ounce of patience to spare for anyone else these days, but she’ll sit and thread flowers on a fine wire for her daughter as if she can think of nothing else she’d
rather be doing. Two months ago, the idea of spending ten minutes entertaining Poppy would have scared the shit out of her.

I’m distracted by the doorbell, and look up.

Clare gets to her feet as Cooper Garrett walks in, still wearing his long leather coat, apparently heedless of the summer heat, as dusty and travel-stained as if he’s just ridden across
the desert with a vital message to save the world.

‘I’ve found your son,’ he says.

Lolly was right. She tends to be: the advantage of eighty-some years on this planet. She’s taken care of me since the day I was born; if she says there’s such a
thing as love at first sight, I believe her.

I walk into Clare’s flower shop on a bright May morning, my head filled with Ella. I’ve thought of nothing else since she pitched up two months ago in North Carolina, my
brother’s ashes in an urn tucked under her arm. Jackson’s mysterious widow: the woman who was married to him for eleven years, and cheated on him for most of them.

I fucked her out of revenge, and then found I couldn’t forget her. Trying not to think about Ella is like telling someone not to think of pink elephants: suddenly it’s all you can
imagine. I’m so eaten up with anger, I have nothing else left. Anger at Jackson, for dying at forty-two and making a mockery of everything I’ve given up; anger at Ella, for stealing my
breath and robbing my soul. Anger most of all at myself, for letting any of it matter a damn.

And then Clare looks up, her sad smile reaching her tired eyes, and my anger evaporates like it never was, and I realize:
Lolly was right.

I’m forty-nine years old: cynical, battle-hardened, bitter and weary. I have no one, love no one, bar Lolly, an eighty-two-year-old black spinster who has nowhere else to go. I lost my
parents in a fire at seventeen; I turned my back on music and Juilliard to look after my brother, and now I’ve lost him too. In my years as a journalist, I’ve seen human nature in all
its forms; I’ve witnessed the best and worst it has to offer. I’ve grieved for the charred corpses of children bombed in Baghdad and interviewed a mother in New Orleans who gave birth
to her baby in a tree during the floods. I’ve been there, done that, and I thought I’d lost my ability to be surprised.

‘How can I help?’ Clare asks pleasantly.

Words are my living. Every intelligent one deserts me.

‘Flowers,’ I blurt.

Flowers? Dear God, is that the best you can do? You’re in a flower shop, for Chrissakes. Of course flowers! Flying carpets are next door.

Clare moves towards a bank of pink peonies; and suddenly I hear my mother’s slow Southern drawl as she guides me, an itchy, impatient boy of nine, around her hothouse: ‘The peony
grants its recipient the power to keep a secret. Be careful who you give them to, Cooper.’ Forty years later, and the memory is sharp enough to make me feel the punch of loss in my gut.

‘Not those,’ I say. ‘She has enough secrets.’

Clare looks at me properly for the first time. Suddenly it’s important she doesn’t see me as another customer, an ignorant American. It’s important that she
sees
me. I
almost forget why I’m buying flowers at all.

‘Yellow tulips?’ she suggests, with a dryness I only notice later.

‘Hopeless love and devotion? Hardly. Nor,’ I add, as she reaches for anemones, ‘abandonment.’

Wedding ring on her finger. I’m ambushed by a blaze of disappointment.

A clerk babbles behind me. I still can’t take my eyes off Clare, though of course I don’t yet know that’s her name. I only discover later that she has twin babies, a boy and a
girl, whose existence amazes and terrifies her in equal measure, and a husband she talks of as if he’s a third child. I don’t know that she’s the most honest, trustworthy person I
will ever meet, that she’s exhausted, bled dry, with the effort of trying to take care of everything and everyone, that her worst enemy is herself. All I know is that I’ve met the woman
I was meant to marry; and she’s married to someone else.

I only learn these details of her life later, but by then they don’t matter; the bell has rung. I return to her flower shop two and three times a week, unable to keep away. I don’t
fail to appreciate the irony: in order to see Clare, I have to feign obsession with Ella. I turn down an important assignment from
Time
magazine. I spend a fortune on London taxis. I
apologize to Jackson a thousand times in my head for not getting it: for not understanding what you would do for a woman, the right woman.

I know from the start it’s pointless. A woman like Clare would never cheat on her husband. If she did, she wouldn’t be the woman for me.

I can’t stay in London for ever
, I tell myself, pushing open the door to Clare’s shop and stepping into the damp gloom one afternoon in mid-June. Sooner or later, I’ll
have to pick up my life. I’m used to being alone. Jackson’s dead, but he lived half a world away. Nothing’s really changed. So why in hell do I feel so lonely?

Clare emerges from the back room, and I savour her smile of recognition.
The small things.

‘How’s Ella this week?’ she asks.

‘Recovering at home.’

‘Oh, I’m so pleased.’

Ella has just gotten engaged to William; to my surprise, I find myself wishing them well. I glance at a bucket of zinnias. Not my favourite flowers, but they’re cheerful, and I imagine
Ella’s tired of lilies. The zinnias, bold and brash and colourful, seem appropriate.

I never know how to talk to Clare, and so I just watch as she bundles up the flowers with a twist of raffia wrapped around her wrist. She always works fast, not wanting to keep me waiting; but
it’s the waiting I come here for. She’s lost more weight, I note with concern. I can count the knobs of her spine through the thin knit sweater.