CHAPTER 1
Saoirse: Thursday 2 December
The weather outside is frightful. Horizontal rain and slate-grey skies. And inside it is, actually, delightful: in the creche of The Montague Hotel, at least. Less delightfully, it’s my final day working here. It’s been a fantastic temping gig for the past month, but now it’s up.
And that means no job.
No money.
I only left Ireland a month ago and here I am, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, with no bloody clue what I’ll do for cash. The prospect of slinking back home, my tail between my legs, is becoming alarmingly likely.
I’ll miss this place. You’d think in a hotel as posh as The Montague, smack bang in the middle of Knightsbridge, that the creche for the guests’ children would be stuffed into a basement corner. But no, The Playroom is a glorious square room, with huge windows looking out over Knightsbridge on one side and Hyde Park Corner on the other.
It’s particularly glorious at this time of year. Over the past month, The Playroom’s team of nannies, myself included, have been sweating glitter and sniffing far more glue than isappropriate in what should be a safe environment for children. Our efforts have paid off, and The Playroom is a festive utopia. All the parents say so.
Well, most of them.
I’ve found myself sitting here late at night, long after the nannies have handed over to the cleaners. While the vacuum whirrs, I sit on a sofa, listening toNow That’s What I Call Christmas!and building endless paper chains, snipping at fold-out snowflakes with some nice sharp scissors I keep safely tucked away in my bag.
It’s lovely here. Just lovely. Far nicer than my bedsit in Park Royal that smells of the kebab shop downstairs. My flatmate, Keeley, is a nanny here and got me this job. Keeley’s Irish too, just with a more English-friendly name. The Playroom may be the kids’ turf, but everything about it screams luxury. I nearly fell over in excitement when I first saw the stationery press (they call pressescupboardsover here. I can’t get used to that).
But the month has passed. I’m trying very hard to ignore this fact, and to focus instead on the delights of playing with my new little friend, Bea.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her in here, but she certainly knows her way around, and she’s making it very easy for me to forget my financial woes. We’re both covered in glitter and are sticky from PVA glue. Bea has a few tendrils of hair sticking out at a right angle just above her ear, hardened from the glue. Now we’re happily playing with dolls. The wonderful aroma of gingerbread still hangs in the warm air, and Michael Bublé punches out his take on the Christmas classics.
'My dolly is going to the party now.’ Bea smiles her adorable, crooked little smile. 'She needs some red shoes to wear with her red dress.'
'How about two pairs of shoes?' I ask. 'One pair for the party, and one pair of flats to wear on the tube?'
'My dolly doesn't take the tube! She hasa driver.' Bea furrows her brow and gives me a stern look as if to saycome on! Have some self respect.
That single sentence tells me all I need to know. Bea can’t be more than four, and yet her version of reality is quite obviously vastly different from my reality of the past twenty-eight years. This tiny girl has interlocking Gs on the soles of her black patent shoes. Gucci shoes on a four-year-old! How long will they last before she outgrows them? Four, five months, tops?
‘What’s Bea’s gig?’ I ask Keeley when Bea is momentarily distracted by dressing her doll. ‘She says she has a driver. And she seems to know this place better than me.’
Keeley speaks out of the side of her mouth. ‘Her dad owns the hotel.’
‘The hotel?’
‘Miles Montague. Like, Montague. Come on, I’ve told you about this guy.’
She has mentioned the owner of the hotel, but I haven’t absorbed much or made the connection that he has a little girl.
‘It rings a vague bell.’
‘Believe me, if you saw him, you’d find him impossible to forget. He. Is. A. Ride. Grumpy as fuck, but so hot, I can’t even… But maybe I’m being unfair. His wife did bugger off to the States, so he has a pretty good reason to be grumpy.’
‘She left? Him and Bea?’
‘Yep. It was a massive scandal over here. She’s gone to LA, I think. Ran off with some yoga entrepreneur just before lockdown.’
‘Oh my God. That’s terrible. Poor Bea!’
‘Seriously. That kid is a rockstar. I wish I had a tenth of the grit she has.’
‘She’s such a lovely little girl. So cute. And she seems a happy little thing.’
Keeley deftly sorts the dolls’ clothes into plastic bins. ‘He’sdone a grand job with her, to be fair. But she’s very clingy to the nannies here. I noticed that over the summer; she was in here a fair bit. I think she craves female attention. So heartbreaking.’
