Please tell her to stop the vacum!
I climbed off my bed and walked through the apartment until I found Ilaria, who was pushing the vacuum cleaner furiously just outside Agnes’s study door, her head dipped as she wrenched it backwards and forwards. I swallowed. There was something about Ilaria that made you hesitate before confronting her, even though she was one of the few people in this zip code shorter than I was.
‘Ilaria,’ I said.
She didn’t stop.
‘Ilaria!’ I stood in front of her until she was forced to notice. She kicked the off button with her heel and glared at me. ‘Mrs Gopnik has asked if you would mind doing the vacuuming some other time. She can’t hear her music lesson.’
‘When does she think I am meant to clean the apartment?’ Ilaria spat, loud enough to be heard through the door.
‘Um … maybe at any other point during the day apart from this particular forty minutes …?’
She pulled the plug from the socket and dragged the cleaner noisily across the room. She glared at me with such venom that I almost stepped backwards. There was a brief silence and the music started up again.
When Agnes finally emerged, twenty minutes later, she looked sideways at me and smiled.
That first week moved in fits and starts, like the first day, with me watching Agnes for signals in the way that Mum used to watch our old dog when her bladder got leaky. Does she need to go out? What does she want? Where should I be? I jogged with Agnes and George every morning, waving them on from about a mile in and motioning towards my hip before walking slowly back to the building. I spent a lot of time sitting in the hall, studying my iPad intently when anybody walked past, so that I might look as if I knew what I was doing.
Michael came every day and briefed me in whispered bursts. He seemed to spend his life on the run between the apartment and Mr Gopnik’s Wall Street office, one of two cell-phones pressed to his ear, dry-cleaning over his arm, coffee in his hand. He was completely charming and always smiling, and I had absolutely no idea if he liked me at all.
I barely saw Nathan. He seemed to be employed to fit around Mr Gopnik’s schedule. Sometimes he would work with him at five a.m., at others it was seven in the evening, disappearing to the office to help him there if necessary. ‘I’m not employed for what I do,’ Nathan explained. ‘I’m employed for what I can do.’ Occasionally he would vanish and I would discover that he and Mr Gopnik had jetted somewhere overnight – it could be San Francisco or Chicago. Mr Gopnik had a form of arthritis that he worked hard to keep under control so he and Nathan would swim or work out often several times each day to supplement his regime of anti-inflammatories and painkillers.
Alongside Nathan, and George the trainer, who also came every weekday morning, the other people who passed through the apartment that first week were:
– The cleaners. Apparently there was a distinction between what Ilaria did (housekeeping), and actual cleaning. Twice a week a team of three liveried women and one man blitzed their way through the apartment. They did not speak, except to consult briefly with each other. Each carried a large crate of eco-friendly cleaning materials, and they were gone three hours later, leaving Ilaria to sniff the air, and run her fingers along the skirting disapprovingly.
– The florist, who arrived in a van on Monday morning and brought enormous vases of arranged blooms to be placed at strategic intervals in the communal areas of the apartment. Several of the vases were so large that it took two to carry them in. They removed their shoes at the door.
– The gardener. Yes, really. This at first made me slightly hysterical (‘You do realize we’re on the second floor?’) until I discovered that the long balconies at the back of the building were lined with pots of miniature trees and blossoms, which the gardener would water, trim and feed before disappearing again. It did make the balcony look beautiful, but nobody ever went out there except me.
– The pet behaviourist. A tiny, birdlike Japanese woman appeared at ten a.m. on a Friday, watched Felix at a distance for an hour or so, then examined his food, his litter tray, the places he slept, quizzed Ilaria on his behaviour and advised on what toys he needed, or whether his scratching post was sufficiently tall and stable. Felix ignored her for the entire time she was there, breaking off only to wash his bottom with what seemed like almost insulting enthusiasm.
– The grocery team came twice a week and brought with them large green crates of fresh food, which they unpacked under Ilaria’s supervision. I caught sight of the bill one day: it would have fed my family – and possibly half my postcode – for several months.
And that was without the manicurist, the dermatologist, the piano teacher, the man who serviced and cleaned the cars, the handyman who worked for the building and sorted out replacement light bulbs or faulty air-conditioning. There was the stick-thin redheaded woman who brought large shopping bags from Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue and viewed everything Agnes tried on with a gimlet eye, stating: ‘Nope. Nope. Nope. Oh, that’s perfect, honey. That’s lovely. You want to wear that with the little Prada bag I showed you last week. Now, what are we doing about the Gala?’
There was the wine merchant and the man who hung the pictures and the woman who cleaned the curtains and the man who buffed the parquet floors in the main living room with a thing that looked like a lawnmower, and a few others besides. I simply got used to seeing people I didn’t recognize wandering around. I’m not sure there was a single day in the first two weeks when there were fewer than five people in the apartment at any one time.
It was a family home in name only. It felt like a workspace for me, Nathan, Ilaria, and an endless team of contractors, staff and hangers-on who traipsed through it from dawn until late into the evening. Sometimes after supper a procession of Mr Gopnik’s suited colleagues would stop by, disappear into his study and emerge an hour later muttering about calls to DC or Tokyo. He never really seemed to stop working, other than the time he spent with Nathan. Even at dinner his two phones were on the mahogany table, buzzing discreetly, like trapped wasps, as messages filed in.
I found myself watching Agnes sometimes as she closed the door to her dressing room in the middle of the day – presumably the only place she could disappear – and I would wonder, When was this place ever just a home?
This, I concluded, was why they disappeared at weekends. Unless the country residence had staff too.
‘Nah. That’s the one thing she’s managed to sort her way,’ said Nathan, when I asked him. ‘She told him to give the ex their weekend place. In return she got him to downscale to a modest place on the beach. Three beds. One bathroom. No staff.’ He shook his head. ‘And therefore no Tab. She’s not stupid.’
‘Hey, you.’
Sam was in uniform. I did some mental calculations and worked out he had just finished his shift. He ran his hand through his hair, then leant forward, as if to see me better through the pixellated screen. A little voice said in my head, as it did every time I’d spoken to him since I’d left, What are you doing moving to a different continent from this man?
‘You went in, then?’
‘Yeah.’ He sighed. ‘Not the best first day back.’
‘Why?’
‘Donna quit.’
I couldn’t hide my shock. Donna – straight-talking, funny, calm – was the yin to his yang, his anchor, his voice of sanity at work. It was impossible trying to imagine one without the other. ‘What? Why?’
‘Her dad got cancer. Aggressive. Incurable. She wants to be there for him.’
‘Oh, God. Poor Donna. Poor Donna’s dad.’