Since then she had discovered that being in love wasn’t all bad, but to fall in love with someone you really didn’t know was the height of folly. It was not going to happen to her, however good-looking the man might be.
She’d grown stiff during the long journey and staggered a little as she climbed down off the train. A man in blue overalls, who had somehow identified the English nanny, greeted her in heavily accented French she could only just understand.
‘Mademoiselle! You are late! You must hurry. I am late too now! My name is Bruno.’
‘Bonjour, Bruno. My name is Alexandra,’ she said but he didn’t listen. Instead he took her new little case with her new clothes in it while she clutched on to the airline bag and her handbag. In these two bags were her tools for life and she’d be lost without them.
Bruno seemed friendly, but in a great hurry.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there has been a small calamity.’
How could a calamity be small? Alexandra wondered.
‘The housekeeper, Mme Carrier, has been called away. Her mother is ill.’
‘Oh? The same as the mother of the nanny?’
Bruno didn’t know or care about the nanny. ‘You will have to cook for the children. But don’t despair’ – Alexandra wasn’t given to despair and she didn’t intend to start now – ‘the gardener will bring you vegetables and fowls. Food from the estate. As normal.’
Although she was struggling to understand Bruno’s dialect and his speed of delivery she heard ‘fowls’ and hoped he meant fairly young chickens, not tired old boilers who were only good for stock. She gave a mental shrug (being in France was beginning to affect her) and thought that maybe the chateau would also have a Larousse Gastronomique. In a month she’d have time to get to grips with it all.
He led her to an old blue truck and put her case into the back which, going by the odour, had last contained animals. She hauled herself up on to the seat beside him. While he went round to get in himself she wondered how Mme Dubois in Paris would have described this agricultural vehicle.
Her chauffeur talked and gestured and exclaimed as they rattled through the smaller roads and lanes until at last the chateau came into view at the end of an avenue of trees.
It wasn’t enormous by chateau standards, but it was still a substantial property. It was square with large, fat towers at either end and seemed to grow out of the soil. It was constructed of huge stone blocks and looked as if it had been designed to withstand anything. Now, creeper that was beginning to turn the colour of fire in the afternoon light covered a good part of the walls. Castellations on the towers could have been decorative or could have indicated the chateau was of a great age, and the hills behind made it seem protected. Alexandra had a sudden strange feeling that it looked like home.
But as Bruno charged up the avenue Alexandra reminded herself that it wasn’t home, the job was only for a month. However, she found her heart was beating faster – she wanted to do a good job. She’d promised the children’s father he could trust her, and she couldn’t let him, or the children, down.
Bruno hammered at the front door of the chateau using the knocker, which was the ring in the nose of a bronze model of a bull’s head. Immediately a deep barking started, obviously from a large dog. Alexandra jumped but Bruno was unimpressed. He huffed impatiently when no one opened it instantly, although it wasn’t long before the big door was dragged back.
‘Ah, bonjour!’ said Bruno as the door opened wider. ‘I have brought you your new nanny!’
The dog, who was indeed large, was black and white with floppy ears and a thin tail, trotted out. He sniffed Alexandra and gave her hand a cursory lick.
Once she knew she wasn’t about to be eaten, Alexandra looked at the three young people who were guarding the door more effectively than the dog. The eldest was a girl of about fifteen wearing slacks and a roll-neck sweater – she could hardly be described as a child. There was a boy, almost as tall but obviously younger, and another smaller girl in a faded dress with smocking and puff sleeves who seemed the only one who was the right age for a nanny. Her heart went out to them. She’d had nannies inflicted on her when she was past the age for it to be appropriate and it wasn’t fun. She understood why the older girl and her brother were looking at her with a mixture of hostility, resentment and defiance. The little girl was anxious, and clung to her brother.
The eldest two looked very like their father, with his hair that was nearly black and his dark, heavily fringed eyes and mouth made for smiling, although they certainly weren’t smiling now. The youngest one looked quite different, with fair curly hair. Her big brother had his arm protectively around her. She must take after her mother, Alexandra thought.
‘We don’t need a nanny,’ said the eldest girl, her chin up, speaking French.
‘I’m sure you don’t,’ said Bruno. ‘But your papa says you have to have one. And here she is. I must go now.’ He ran back to the truck, collected Alexandra’s case from the back and almost pushed her through the door. Then he roared off, making Alexandra feel her only friend had just left her, and was shooting off down the avenue.
Her three charges looked at her and Alexandra looked back. She recognised her young self in their expressions and cast her mind back to nannies she’d got on with – there’d been a couple. She’d liked them because they respected her and didn’t talk down to her.
‘Hello,’ she said in English. ‘Do you speak English?’ She had been told that they did as their mother was English, which was why they’d wanted a native English speaker to be their nanny.
The eldest girl lifted her chin.
Alexandra repeated herself in slow, schoolgirl French.
‘Non!’ said the girl.
Alexandra asked them their names in the same way, slowly with a very English accent to her French.
The eldest girl didn’t speak but her brother said, ‘Félicité,’ using the French form of the name and gesturing to his older sister. ‘I am Henri. And this is little Stéphanie. The dog’s name is Milou.’
Alexandra nodded. That was what Tintin’s dog was called in the French version of the books. If these children knew those books it would be something she could talk about, although she was determined to speak to them in English. They may well not want her to know they spoke English and she decided that she would keep the fact she spoke French more or less fluently a secret too. People were allowed secrets, she felt.
