“No, sorry. Have you looked in Buttercup’s hidey-hole?” Buttercup had rolled over on the floor in front of me and was looking as cute and innocent as if she’d never dream of dragging gloves, socks, and shoes away and bringing them out again only after they were chewed to bits. I tickled her tummy at length and talked to her in baby language (she loved that!), before getting up and following Mia toward the kitchen, or rather toward the coffee machine. Buttercup followed me, not that she was after coffee. She had her eye on the plate of cold roast beef that Ernest had just put on the breakfast table.
We’d now been living in London for almost four months, in this large, comfortable brick house in Hampstead, but although I really liked the city and for the first time in years I had a large, pretty room all to myself, I still felt rather like a guest.
Maybe that was simply because I’d never learned to feel at home anywhere. Before Mom met Ernest Spencer and decided to spend the rest of her life with him, she’d moved house almost every year, along with Mia, Lottie, Buttercup, and me. We’d lived in Germany, Scotland, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, and of course in the United States, where Mom came from. Our parents had divorced when I was eight, but Papa was no keener than Mom on staying in one place. He was always glad when his company sent him to a new job in a country that he didn’t know yet. Papa was German, and at the moment he and his two suitcases (he used to say no one needed more stuff than would fit into two suitcases) were living in Zürich, where Mia and I were going to stay with him for the Christmas holidays.
Was it surprising that all these years we’d wanted nothing more fervently than to settle down in one place? We’d always dreamed of a house where we could stay put and have all our things around us. A house with plenty of space, a room for each of us, a garden where Buttercup could race around and play, and an apple tree to climb. Now we were living in a house almost exactly like that (there was even a tree to climb, only it was a cherry tree), but it wasn’t quite the same, because it wasn’t our house: it belonged to Ernest Spencer and his two children, the seventeen-year-old twins Florence and Grayson. As well as the twins, there was also a friendly ginger cat called Spot, and they’d all three lived their whole lives here. But however often Ernest repeated that this house was now our house, it didn’t feel like it. Possibly because there were no notches in any of the door frames with our names beside them to show how we’d grown, and because we couldn’t connect any stories with the dark patch on the Persian rug or the cracked kitchen tile. Because we hadn’t been here seven years ago, when a napkin suddenly caught fire while the family was eating fondue, or in the case of the tile, when Florence, aged five, had been so furious with Grayson that she threw a bottle of fizzy water at him.
Maybe it would just take a little longer. But we certainly hadn’t left any traces behind us or created any family stories in the short time we’d been here.
Mom was already working on that problem, however. She’d always insisted on the three of us having a big breakfast together early on Sunday mornings, and she’d lost no time in introducing the same custom to the Spencer household, much to the annoyance of Florence and Grayson, particularly today. Judging by Florence’s expression, she was in the mood to throw another bottle of water at someone. The twins had been out at a party until three thirty in the morning and couldn’t stop yawning, Florence with her hand in front of her mouth, Grayson with no such inhibitions about yawning widely in front of us all and making sounds of exhaustion. At least I wasn’t the only one having to fight off my weariness, although our methods of dealing with it differed. While I gulped great mouthfuls of coffee and waited for the caffeine to get into my bloodstream, Florence spiked orange segments on a fork and carried them elegantly to her mouth. She obviously thought vitamin C was the answer to tiredness. I felt sure the shadows under her caramel-brown eyes would soon go right away and she’d look as immaculate as ever. As for Grayson, he was shoveling mountains of scrambled eggs and toast into himself and had no shadows under his eyes at all. But for the yawning, no one would even have noticed how tired he was. He badly needed a shave, all the same.
Mom, Ernest, and Lottie had obviously slept well and were beaming at us cheerfully, and for once Mom was fully dressed and had done her hair, instead of coming down to breakfast all a mess in a revealing negligee, as she often did on a Sunday morning. Relieved, I smiled back.
Maybe I also smiled back because Mom’s happiness was kind of infectious, and everything was so homey and Christmassy. The winter sun shone through the bay windows, which had wreaths decorating them; the red paper stars shone in the sunlight; there was a scent of melted butter, orange, vanilla, and cinnamon in the air (Lottie had been making a great mound of waffles that were smiling at me from the middle of the table); and Mia, sitting beside me, looked like a rosy-cheeked little Christmas angel in glasses.
Not that she behaved like an angel.
“Are we at the zoo here or what?” she asked as Grayson almost dislocated his jaw for about the eighth time, yawning.