The Turn of the Key

“Gosh, they’re very good!” I said, genuinely impressed. I had nannied enough children to know that five-year-olds getting dressed on command definitely wasn’t a given. Even eight-year-olds tended to need supervision. Sandra rolled her eyes.

“They know not to play up in front of visitors. But let’s see if they’re actually doing as they’re told . . .”

She pressed a button on an iPad lying on the counter, and a picture flickered into view. It was a children’s bedroom, the camera obviously sited up near the ceiling, pointing downwards at two little beds. There was no sound, but the noise of a door slamming was loud enough to filter down the stairs, and a teddy bear on the mantelpiece rocked and fell. As we watched, Maddie stamped angrily into view at the bottom of the screen and sat crossly on the left-hand bed, her arms folded. Sandra pressed something else and the camera zoomed in on Maddie’s face, or rather the top of her head, for she was looking down at her lap. There was a faint crackle coming from the iPad now, as if a microphone had been switched on.

“Maddie,” Sandra said, “what have I told you about slamming doors?”

“I didn’t.” The voice came small and tinny from the iPad speaker.

“You did, and I saw you. You could have hurt Ellie. Now get your clothes on and you can watch some TV. They’re all laid out on your chair, I put them out this morning.”

Maddie said nothing, but she got up and pulled off her pajama top, and Sandra shut down the screen.

“Wow,” I said, slightly taken aback. “Impressive!”

It was not the word I was thinking. Stalkerish was closer to the mark, though I wasn’t completely sure why. Plenty of places I’d worked had nanny cams, or baby monitors with built-in speakers and cameras. Perhaps it was the fact that I hadn’t known about it until now. I hadn’t noticed any cameras last night, so wherever they were, they must be well hidden. Had Sandra watched me go up to bed last night? Had she seen me look into Petra’s bedroom? The thought made my cheeks flame.

“The whole house is wired up,” Sandra said casually, dropping the iPad back onto the counter. “It’s very handy, especially in a place with several floors. It means I don’t have to always be running up and down to check on the girls.”

“Very handy,” I echoed faintly, suppressing my unease. The whole house? What did that mean? The children’s rooms, clearly. But the reception rooms? The bedrooms? The bathrooms? But no, that was beyond possibility. And illegal, surely. I put the remaining bit of toast back on the plate, my appetite suddenly gone.

“Finished?” Sandra said brightly, and when I nodded she swept the bit of toast into a waste-disposal unit and put the plate with the girls’ porridge bowls by the sink. The ones from last night had disappeared, I noticed. Had the mysterious Jean come and gone already?

“Well, if you’ve had enough, let me give you the grand tour while the girls get dressed.” She scooped Petra out of her high chair, scrubbed her face with a damp washcloth, hitched her onto her hip, and together we reentered the old part of the house and crossed the stone-flagged entrance hall to the two doors on each side of the front door.

“Right, so just to give you the layout—the hall is the center of the house—out the back is the kitchen, and leading off that is the utility room, which you’ve already seen, of course. That was part of the old servants’ quarters, the only bit that survived, actually. The rest we had to pull down. At the front of the house we have the grander rooms—that’s the old dining room”—Sandra waved a hand at an opening to the right of the front door—“but we found we were always eating in the kitchen, so we’ve converted it into a study slash library. Have a peek.”

I put my head around the door and saw a smallish room with paneled walls painted a beautiful rich teal color. Ranged at one end were bookshelves from floor to ceiling covered in a mix of fiction paperbacks and hardback books on architecture. It could have been a small but perfectly formed library in a National Trust historic property—except that in the middle of the room was an enormous glass desk with a huge double-screen iMac sprawling across it, and a kind of aeronautical ergonomic chair facing the screens.

I blinked. There was something disconcerting about the way the old and new combined in this house. It wasn’t like most homes, where modern additions rubbed up alongside original features and somehow combined into a friendly, eclectic whole. Here there was a strange impression of oil and water—everything was either self-consciously original or glaringly modern, with no attempt to integrate the two.

“What a beautiful room,” I said at last, since Sandra seemed to be waiting for some kind of response. “The colors are just . . . they’re fabulous.”

Sandra smiled, jiggling Petra on her hip in a pleased sort of way.

“Thank you! Bill does all the technical layout stuff, but the interior design is mostly me. I do love that shade of teal. This particular room is really Bill’s domain, so I reined myself in, but you’ll see I’ve gone a bit to town on it in the living room. I figure, it’s my house, I don’t have to please anyone else! Come through and have a look.”

The room she led me into next was the living room she had mentioned, a cluster of deep button-backed sofas arranged in a square around a beautiful tiled fireplace. The ceiling and woodwork were the same shade of teal as the paneling in the study, but the walls themselves were startling—covered in a rich, intricate wallpaper with a design almost too convoluted to make out in deep blues, emeralds, and aquamarines. As I peered closer I saw that it was a mix of brambles and peacocks—both stylized and intertwined to the point of being practically unrecognizable. The brambles were dark green and indigo black, the peacocks iridescent blue and amethyst, their tails curling and spreading and tangling with the brambles into a kind of nightmarish labyrinth—half aviary, half briar thicket.