ON OUR FIRST NIGHT in London I dreamed of Hansel and Gretel. Or, to be precise, I dreamed that Mia and I were Hansel and Gretel and Mom had taken us into the forest and left us there. “It’s for your own good!” she said before she disappeared among the trees. Poor little Hansel and I wandered helplessly around until we came to a mysterious gingerbread house. Luckily I woke up before the wicked witch came out of it, but I felt only a second of relief, and it occurred to me that my dream wasn’t all that far from the truth. Mom had said, “It’s for your own good!” about seventeen times yesterday. I was still so furious with her that I felt like grinding my teeth nonstop.
I did realize that even people over forty have a right to a full and satisfactory love life, but couldn’t she have waited until we were grown up? A few years weren’t going to make much difference to her now. And if she absolutely had to spend time with Mr. Change of Plan, wouldn’t a weekend relationship be enough for her? Did she have to turn our whole life upside down? Couldn’t she at least have asked us?
Mr. Change of Plan’s real name, incidentally, was Ernest Spencer, and he had driven us here in his car last night, making conversation all the time in such a cheerful, casual way, you’d have thought he didn’t even notice that Mia and I were so disappointed and furious that we were fighting back tears and didn’t say a word. (And it was a long drive from the airport into the city.) Not until Ernest was taking our baggage out of the trunk of the car did Mia get her voice back.
“Oh no,” she said, with her very sweetest smile, handing him back the plastic bag with the dismembered cheese in it. “This is for you. A present from Switzerland.”
Ernest exchanged a delighted glance with Mom. “Why, thank you both. That’s really nice of you!”
Mia and I grinned at each other quite happily—but that was the only good moment of the evening. Ernest went home with his stinking, ruined cheese, after kissing Mom and assuring us of how much he was looking forward to tomorrow evening. Because we were invited to his house then, to meet his children.
“We’re looking forward to it too,” said Mom.
You bet your life.
* * *
The moment we first laid eyes on him, we were suspicious of Ernest I’m-just-like-my-stuffy-old-first-name Spencer. He’d even brought presents, which showed he was in dead earnest about Mom. Normally the men in Mom’s life don’t show any interest in sucking up to Mia and me—far from it. They’d always done their best to ignore us as much as possible. But Ernest had brought me a book about secret messages and codes and how to decipher them, which really did look very interesting. Only with Mia he didn’t get it quite right; he gave her a book called Maureen the Little Detective, but now that she was nearly thirteen, she was a few years too old for it. However, the mere fact that Ernest had asked about our interests made him different.
And Mom was besotted with him—don’t ask me why. It couldn’t be his looks. Ernest had a large bald patch, enormous ears, and teeth that were far too white. It was all very well for Lottie to insist that Ernest was a handsome man; we just couldn’t go along with her opinion. Maybe he did have nice eyes, but with ears like that who was going to look into his eyes? Not to mention that he was ancient—over fifty. His wife had died more than ten years ago, and he lived in London with his two children. Mia the little detective and I had Googled to check up on him at once. Google knew all about Ernest Spencer because he was one of those star lawyers who are always getting into the papers, whether it’s outside the Royal Courts of Justice or on the red carpet at a charity gala. And his late wife had been two hundred and first, or something like that, in line to the throne of England, so he moved in the top circles of society.
By all the laws of probability, Ernest and Mom should never have crossed each other’s paths. But a mean trick on the part of fate, and Ernest’s special subject—international commercial law—had taken him to Pretoria six months ago, and he and Mom had met at a party. Idiots that we were, we’d even encouraged her to go to it, so she’d have a nice evening and get to know people.
And that had landed us in this mess.
* * *
“Keep still, dear!” Lottie was tugging at the hem of my skirt, but it was no use; it was too short.
Lottie Wastlhuber had come to us twelve years ago as an au pair and stayed on ever since. Which was a good thing, because otherwise we’d have had to survive on sandwiches. Mom usually forgot about meals, and she hated to cook. Without Lottie, no one would have braided our hair into funny German styles, but then again, no one would have given birthday parties for our dolls or decorated the Christmas tree with us. In fact, we probably wouldn’t even have had a Christmas tree, because Mom didn’t think much of customs and traditions. She was also terribly forgetful, the very image of an absentminded professor. She forgot absolutely everything: fetching Mia from her flute lessons, the name of our dog, and where she’d parked the car. We’d all have been lost without Lottie.
Not that Lottie was infallible. She’d bought my school uniform a size too small, the same as every year, and also the same as every year, she was trying to blame it on me.
“I just don’t see how anyone can grow so much in a single summer,” she wailed, doing her best to button the blazer up over my breasts. “And then there’s all this up here! You did it on purpose!”
“Yes, sure!” Although I was as cross as I could be, I had to grin. Lottie might have congratulated me. “All this up here” might not be especially impressive for someone nearly sixteen, but at least I wasn’t flat as a board anymore. So I didn’t think it was so bad if I had to leave the blazer unbuttoned. Along with the skirt being too short, it gave me kind of a cool look, and it did show off as much of my figure as possible.
“It looks much better on Liv,” complained Mia, who was already dressed in her own outfit. “Why didn’t you buy mine a size too small as well? And why are all school uniforms dark blue? And why is the school called Frognal Academy when it doesn’t have a frog on its crest?” She sullenly patted the embroidered crest on the breast pocket of her blazer. “I look dumb. Everything here is dumb.” She turned slowly on her own axis, pointing to the unfamiliar items of furniture around us and saying in an extra-loud voice, “Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Right, Livvy? We’d been looking forward so much to the cottage in Oxford, and instead we end up here.…”
“Here” was the apartment where Ernest had dropped us off last night, on the third floor of a rather grand block somewhere in the northwest of London. It had four bedrooms, gleaming marble floors, and a whole lot of furniture and other stuff that didn’t belong to us. (Much of it was gilded, even the sofa cushions.) According to the nameplate beside the doorbell, it belonged to some people called Finchley. They obviously collected china ballerinas. There were ballerinas all over the place.
I nodded. “We don’t even have our favorite things here,” I said in a voice just as loud as Mia’s.
“Shh,” said Lottie, glancing anxiously over her shoulder. “You both know perfectly well that this is only temporary. And the cottage was a catastrophe.” She had given up tugging at my uniform. It didn’t do any good.
“Yes, so Mr. Spencer says,” said Mia. (We were supposed to call him by his first name, but we pretended we’d forgotten.)
“Your mother saw the rat with her own eyes,” said Lottie. “Do you two really want to live in a house where there are rats?”
“Yes,” Mia and I replied in chorus. First, rats are better than their image (we’d found that out when we saw Ratatouille), and second, you could bet the rat was just as much of an invention as the rest of it. We weren’t as dumb as all that—we knew exactly what was going on here. Mom had laid it on just a tiny little bit too thick to convince us last night. Apparently the cottage had smelled of mold, the heating didn’t work properly, there’d been crows nesting in the chimneys, the neighbors had been rude and noisy, and the surroundings looked dismal. Furthermore, public transport wasn’t good, and the school where we’d originally been going to go had a bad reputation. That, said Mom, was why she’d had to back out of the rental agreement and find this apartment instead—on a temporary basis, of course. (Like everywhere else we’d ever lived.)
Well, yes, Mom admitted, all that had happened behind our backs, but only because she hadn’t wanted to spoil our vacation with Papa. Anyway, she said, it was for our own good—she’d be commuting to Oxford every day so that we could go to an excellent school here, and also—“to be honest, mousies!”—wouldn’t it be cooler to live in London than out in the country?
Of course none of this had anything at all to do with the fact that Mr. I-know-what’s-good-for-you Spencer just happened to live in this part of London himself and wanted to have Mom as close to him as possible. Also entirely by chance, the school we’d be going to now just happened to be the school where Ernest’s own children went. The kids we were going to meet at dinner tomorrow.
There was nothing short of a disaster on the way, that was clear. The end of an era.
* * *
“I don’t feel well,” I said.
“You’re only nervous.” Lottie patted Mia’s shoulder reassuringly with one hand while she put a strand of hair back behind my ear with the other. “That’s perfectly normal on your first day in a new school. But believe you me, there’s no reason for you two to have an inferiority complex or anything. You’re both very, very pretty girls, and clever as you are, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with your studies.” She smiled lovingly at us. “My wonderfully clever, wonderfully beautiful, blond elfin girls.”
“Yup, wonderfully clever, wonderfully beautiful, blond elfin girls, and me with braces on my teeth and nerdy glasses and a nose much too long for me,” muttered Mia, ignoring the fact that Lottie was feeling so emotional that her big, brown, round eyes had gone a little damp. “Two girls of no fixed address.”
And with a totally deranged mother, probably the oldest au pair girl in the business, and a whole heap of shattered dreams of life in the country, I added silently, but I couldn’t help responding to Lottie’s smile. She was so sweet, standing there beaming at us, full of optimism and pride. Anyway, none of this was her fault.
“You’ll only have to wear the braces for another six months. You’ll easily see that through, Mia-mouse.” Mom had come in from the next room. As usual, she’d heard only the part of the conversation that she wanted to hear. “Those are really attractive school uniforms.” She gave us a sunny smile and began rummaging around in one of the moving company’s boxes labeled SHOES.
Of course Mom’s shoes had arrived in this stuffy old apartment, while my crates of books were gathering dust in some container belonging to the same firm, along with my secret notebooks and my guitar case.
I glared at Mom’s slender back. It wasn’t surprising that Mr. Spencer had fallen for her. She looked pretty good for a professor of English literature. She’s a natural blonde, long legs, blue eyes, great teeth. She was forty-six, but you wouldn’t guess that except in bright daylight when she’d drunk too much red wine the evening before. On good days she looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. Although her new haircut was frightful. She must have been to the same hairdresser as Duchess Camilla.
Mom dropped the shoes she didn’t need on the rug behind her. Our dog, Butter—full name Princess Buttercup, formerly known as Dr. Watson (the name Dr. Watson dated from before we’d realized that she was a girl)—snapped up a jogging shoe and dragged it off to her improvised sleeping place under the coffee table, where she began chewing it with relish. None of us stopped her; after all, she wasn’t having an easy time either. I bet she’d been looking forward to the cottage with the garden as much as we had. But of course no one had asked her opinion. Dogs and children had no rights in this household.
Another jogging shoe hit me on the shin.
“Mom,” I said fretfully, “do you have to do that? As if it wasn’t chaotic enough here already?”
Mom acted as if she hadn’t heard me and went on rummaging in the box, while Lottie gave me a reproachful look. I stared grimly back. If I wasn’t even allowed to speak my mind anymore, this really was the end.
“There they are.” Mom had finally found the shoes she wanted—a pair of black pumps—and held them triumphantly aloft.
“That’s all that matters, then,” said Mia venomously.
Mom slipped the shoes on and turned back to us. “Right, as far as I’m concerned we can go,” she said cheerfully. She didn’t seem a bit bothered that Mia and I were looking at her in a way that could have curdled milk.
Lottie hugged us. “You’ll be fine, dears. I mean, it really isn’t your first first day at school.”