People LIke Her(44)

By the time Emmy and Coco get up and start going through clothes and picking an outfit for today’s shoot, it’s eight fifteen and I feel like I’ve done a full day’s work already.

It is clear that Emmy and I need to get our childcare arrangements sorted, pronto.

Among the many little bits of domestic admin I’ve been assigned to do while Emmy’s out at this shoot with Coco and Bear today is the task of finding a nanny. We have, in the end, decided to go about finding a suitable candidate in the conventional manner, after Emmy and Irene investigated without success a potential partnership with a nanny agency and I had vetoed Irene’s suggestion we hold a competition to find one on Instagram. Given that Emmy’s agent was probably at least half joking, I was perhaps a bit more snappish about this last proposal than the situation demanded. Emmy gave me a long, cool stare.

“Well, why don’t you sort something out, then?” she asked.

She’d then gone to do something in the bedroom that involved quite a lot of banging around and drawer-slamming while I stomped through to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and grab my laptop. About twenty minutes later I stuck my head around the bedroom door to tell Emmy I’d signed us up with a new online matchmaking service for families in search of nannies and nannies in search of families. We sat down later that evening with a glass of wine in front of the telly and filled in an online form about who we are and the sort of person we’re looking for.

While Emmy is getting Bear ready and Coco is watching cartoons at the kitchen table on her iPad I log back into the site and find we’ve had seven responses overnight. I cross off the one with mysteriously long gaps in her CV. Ditto the one with three typos in her personal description. I do not much like the look of the one with the nose rings and slightly divergent eyes and the purple hair. Judge me. That still leaves four promising leads. Of these, three are smiling and one looks very serious. Of the three smilers, one is twenty-two, one is forty-five, and one is in her midsixties. I can just imagine Emmy’s reaction if I chose the twenty-two-year-old. The forty-five-year-old mentions in her profile that she considers herself spiritual. And so, in the space of less than ten minutes’ scrolling and clicking, we have our winner. Annabel Williams, sixty-four, an Edinburgh-born, London-based childcarer with three decades’ experience. Her look? No-nonsense. Nannyish, if you will. Someone reliable, trustworthy, unflappable. Just the sort of person we’re looking for. She has qualifications and references. She can start immediately.

Well done, Dan, I think.

I click APPROVE and the system matches us up and invites me to submit a time for a face-to-face meeting, an interview. I do so.

I’m already imagining how casually, how smugly, I’m going to drop this into conversation with Emmy.

Two minutes later I get an automated message saying we’ve been rejected, with no further information.

As I am waiting for the kettle to boil and thinking about what to do next, Winter turns up. She’s late, of course, as usual. Evidently not having expected any of us to be around, she clomps into the kitchen, gives a little start, says good morning, glances at the clock, pretends to be surprised by what time it is, puts her Starbucks down on the kitchen table, asks Coco how she is doing.

“Fine,” Coco answers, without looking up.

It’s then that the day really goes tits up.

It’s then that—having shrugged her coat off and settled herself diagonally opposite me at the kitchen counter and plugged her phone in and taken a slurp of coffee—Winter asks me where her laptop is.

I ask her where she left it.

She gestures vaguely toward the corner of the countertop where all the chargers are.

At that exact moment, Emmy walks in, carrying Bear (who’s wearing, I note, a bear outfit).

“What?” she asks.

I tell her.

The next half an hour is spent turning the house upside down to make sure the laptop is definitely gone. While Winter floats around looking in all sorts of implausible places (laundry basket, bread bin), I root through the boxes of toys and jigsaws and kid’s books in the playroom and Emmy checks the bedrooms upstairs.

The laptop is definitely not here. The inevitable conclusion is that it was taken in the burglary—Winter, of course, what with it having been the weekend and then with all that drama yesterday, hasn’t needed it since, and neither Emmy nor I ever use the thing.

While Emmy is on the phone to Irene, explaining what’s happened, I keep reminding myself that things could be worse. It was not like it had been particularly expensive, that laptop. All the contents were password protected. Whoever stole it—no doubt some junkie—had probably wiped the thing and sold it by now. Irene can afford to replace it. We just need to inform the police, update our insurance claim. It wasn’t Winter’s fault, really. I probably should have put the thing away somewhere, in one of the drawers, before we went out.

By the time Emmy gets off the phone she’s already almost an hour late for the shoot. “Right,” she says to Winter and me. “Dan, you need to call the police and insurance people, okay?”

“Sure thing,” I say. “That had already occurred to me, actually . . .”

“Winter?”

Winter puts her phone down.

“Irene is couriering another laptop over so you can get on with stuff here. Is that okay? Same username, same passwords as before. Once it gets here, you are good to go.”