It Could Have Been Her(4)

Jane nodded.

“I have two small children, and a lovely home and wife who doesn’t really like housework. What would you think about maybe being some kind of housekeeper? Or nanny?”

Jane laughed. But then stopped. “Seriously?” she asked.

“Yes, seriously,” he replied. “Why don’t you come home with me? You can meet my wife, look at the house, see what you think.”

Jane had felt a pulse of something wrong then, a distant siren in her consciousness warning her of something she could not quite put her finger on. But also, she remembers, a little thrill of something—something dark and self-destructive, a sense of throwing it all away because she remembers feeling entirely worthless in that moment. There was no future back then that she could picture or hold on to. There was no mother, no father, no brother, no husband, no job, no sense of what on earth she even was. She remembers the feeling of her self-esteem lurking somewhere out of sight, too far away for her to grab hold of it in that moment and think: What am I doing? And so she and this tall, charming, nameless man, whom she insisted on calling Cecil all night long, sat silently together in the back of a taxi, and she remembers vividly the strange sensation of leaving the heart of loud, high-octane Friday-night London, full of vodka and recreational drugs, and finding herself twenty minutes later in a sleepy Dickensian hamlet formed of tiny lamplit alleyways and rows of mismatched houses, seemingly cut off from the rest of the world.

“Where are we?” she’d asked.

“Hampstead,” he’d said.

“This isn’t Hampstead,” she’d said, thinking of the brightly lit urban village full of bars, pubs, and boutiques.

He’d told her that the Vale of Health had been annexed from the main village in the eighteenth century as a sanctuary from the plague. The hamlet had once been peopled by the most fashionable writers and artists of the time, but now it was a quiet backwater, surrounded on all sides by the wilds of Hampstead Heath.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Fifteen years,” he replied. “It belonged to my mother-in-law. She just passed away a few months ago, and now it belongs to my wife, and me.”

She remembers her spinning head, the vertiginous mix of alcohol, excitement, and fear as the taxi crept slowly down the tiny lane, almost vanishing into the blackness.

As they slowed to a halt, Jane saw ahead of them a wooden fence that followed the curve of the Heath. Beyond that was nothing.

“Wow,” Jane had said. “It looks like the last house in the world.”

“Sometimes,” the man had said, “it feels like maybe it is.”

They walked through a green gate and onto a small driveway just big enough for the open-backed army jeep parked across it. Jane’s father once had an old jeep, similar to this one, and, like this one, it had sat outside their house for years rusting into a grotesque eyesore.

A woman had come to the window at the sound of their footsteps, a pretty woman with black hair in a feathered bob, dark eyes watching warily. At the sight of her, Jane had begun to sober up. As they approached the front door she could hear the rumble of the taxi making its way out of the hamlet, and suddenly she’d wanted to turn and run, flag it down, beat on its doors, ask it to take her home. But then the man with no name touched her elbow gently and said, “Here, let me introduce you,” and Jane had found herself, as she had so often over the course of her stupid, mismanaged life, being dragged along into someone else’s narrative, because she had never had one of her own, and so she had followed him, that tall, imposing man, into his house, and been introduced to his wife and made awkward small talk with her while the man with no name mixed her a martini, and her memories are hazy now, splashes of color, a detail or two: a brown cabinet housing a home computer, photographs of a boy and girl, both around eight or nine, a gray cat, a Liberty-print lampshade. Her image of the woman is hazy too, but she remembers a large engagement ring, a pursed mouth, and she remembers the sudden blinding, deafening realization she should not be there, that she had taken the wrong fork in the road, and then as the man passed her the martini there was a scream and a thud from upstairs that made her jump so hard she knocked the glass out of the man’s hand.

“Fuck,” he’d said, angrily, under his breath.

“I’m really sorry,” she’d said.

The woman jumped to her feet. “The children,” she’d said.

Neither made a move upstairs; there was no sound of a weeping child.

“I’ll make you another one,” he’d said.

“You know, actually, I think I’ll probably skip the drink. I think—”

“Nonsense,” he’d said, with enough force to make Jane flinch. “I’ll make you another.”

He’d gone to the cabinet again and she had smiled nervously at the wife, who had given her some kind of warning glance; Jane couldn’t tell if it was friendly or unfriendly, but there had been a long silence, she remembers that, and inside that silence she made her plan.

“Is it OK if I go outside?” she’d said. “To smoke a cigarette?”

She remembers not waiting for permission, she remembers the solid feel of the strap of her handbag held inside her fist, she remembers the pulse of adrenaline that pushed her heart up hard against her rib cage. She remembers the tall man coming toward her, a fresh martini in his hand, and staring at her. “Stay,” he’d said, holding it out to her. “Drink your martini.”