The Advert

The advert was in the back of a parish magazine her mother had left on the kitchen table the morning her mother died.

Iris had not, at first, seen the advert. She had seen the magazine. The magazine had been folded in half, in the way her mother folded magazines, with the spine creased once at the centre — the only way a paper magazine ever ought to be folded, Iris, anyone who tells you otherwise has not been raised properly — and the magazine had been weighted down, at the top corner, with the small green plate her mother used for her morning toast.

There had been no toast on the plate. There had been crumbs.

Iris had stood in her mother's kitchen on the Tuesday after the funeral and had looked at the magazine and at the small green plate and at the crumbs, and Iris had thought, in the very precise way she thought about things she did not want to think about, she made toast. She made toast that morning. She made toast and she opened this magazine to this page and she put the small green plate on the corner so the magazine would stay open, and then she went upstairs, and then she did not come back down.

Then Iris had reached for the magazine.

The page the magazine had been folded open to was page forty-six. Page forty-six was the back-of-the-magazine page, the pages no one read, the pages that carried the cleaner-wanted advertisements and the rooms-to-let advertisements and the companion sought, references essential advertisements that nobody Iris had ever met in her life had answered.

Halfway down page forty-six, in a small ruled box, in a font slightly heavier than the boxes around it, was the advert.

—

The advert read:

LIVE-IN CARER REQUIRED. Quiet, refined household on the Glen Drosse estate, Wester Ross. Companion / personal-assistant duties for elderly lady. References preferred but not essential. Generous remuneration. Accommodation, board, full keep provided. Position open immediately. Apply in handwriting to: The Housekeeper, Glen Drosse House, by Achiltibuie, Ross-shire.

There was no telephone number.

There was no email address.

There was no postcode.

There was, instead, at the bottom of the small ruled box, in a typeface that had not been used in print for forty years, a single thin line that read:

Applicants may expect a reply.

Iris read the advert four times.

Then Iris closed the magazine. Iris put the magazine back on the table. Iris repositioned the small green plate on the corner. Iris went upstairs to the bedroom in which her mother had died, and Iris sat on the edge of the bed, and Iris said, out loud, to the perfectly-made counterpane, 'Mum. What did you do.'

The counterpane did not answer.

—

Three weeks later, on a Friday morning that smelled of November, Iris stepped down from the train at Garve.

She had a leather suitcase that had been her mother's. She had a thermos that had been her mother's. She had, in the inside breast-pocket of her good coat, the reply that had arrived at her bedsit eleven days after she had posted her handwritten application — a reply on cream paper, weighted by hand, with a watermark she had been able to feel under her thumb when she had run her thumb over the lower right corner of the page.

The reply had read:

Dear Miss Connell, Your handwriting will do very well. A car will collect you from Garve station on the Friday morning of your convenience. The carer's room has been freshly made. The lady you will be attending is named Mrs Drosse. She does not, at present, take her tea with milk, although this has been known to change. Yours, S. McCance, Housekeeper

The reply had been written in old handwriting. Slanting. Confident. A capital S with a flourish that had taken up more space than it ought.

It had also been written, Iris had been very certain, by a different hand than the one that had set the advert.

—

The car was waiting at the kerb of the station car park.

It was an old dark-green Bentley with running boards. The driver was a man of perhaps sixty, dressed in a tweed cap and a knitted jumper that had not been knitted for him, and the driver was holding a small card on which had been printed, in the same slanting hand, Miss Iris Connell.

Iris said, 'I'm Iris.'

The driver said, 'Aye, you'll be Iris. In you get.'

He opened the back door for her. He did not offer to take her case.

Iris got in.

The seats of the Bentley were the soft cracked leather of a car that had been someone's grandfather's. The car smelled of dog and beeswax and something else, very faintly, that Iris would later identify as bergamot. The driver shut her door. The driver got into the front. The driver started the engine, which started on the first try, and the driver said, into the rear-view mirror, without looking at her —

'Mrs Drosse will be glad you've come.'

Iris said, 'Has it been long since the last one?'

The driver was silent for the length of two seconds.

The driver said, 'Aye. It has.'

Then the driver pulled the Bentley out of the car park and onto the single-track road, and turned west, and drove.

—

It was forty-seven miles to Glen Drosse House.

The driver did not speak again for forty of them.

He spoke, eventually, when the Bentley had crested the third ridge of the Coigach pass, and the sea had appeared, very abruptly, between the shoulders of two hills, slate-grey and unhurried. He spoke without taking his eyes off the road.

He said, 'Miss Connell.'

Iris said, 'Yes.'

He said, 'There's a thing I'm meant to tell you, before we get to the house.'

Iris said, 'All right.'

He said, 'Mrs Drosse will know you. She will speak as if she knows you. She will use your name. She will use it before you have given it to her. I'm telling you because the last one, she didn't take it well, and I'd rather not have it happen again.'

Iris looked at the back of the driver's head.

Iris said, 'The last one. The carer before me.'

The driver said, 'Aye.'

Iris said, 'What happened to her.'

The driver said, 'She left in the night. We don't know where to. Mrs McCance posted her wages on. They came back.'

He paused.

He said, 'I've not been asked to say more than that.'

And the Bentley rounded the last bend of the single-track road, and the road dipped, and the trees opened, and below them, on a low promontory above the sea, sat Glen Drosse House — three storeys of grey stone, eight chimneys, a yellow lamp lit in a single upstairs window on a morning that did not yet need a lamp.

Iris's hands, which she had taught not to do this, made a small involuntary movement in her lap.

She put them, very carefully, on top of one another.

—

The housekeeper was waiting at the front door.

She was a small woman of perhaps sixty-five. She wore a grey wool dress and a grey cardigan over it, and she had pinned a small enamel brooch shaped like a thistle to the collar of the cardigan. Her hair was iron-coloured, cut short, pinned back from her forehead with two plain black grips. Her hands were folded in front of her at her waist, the right one over the left, the fingers very still.

She said, 'Miss Connell. You'll be tired. Come in. I'll show you to your room, and then you'll come down for tea, and then I'll take you up to Mrs Drosse.'

Her accent was Highland, soft, with something else underneath it — something faintly older, faintly more careful — that Iris would catch herself listening for, later, and would never quite place.

Iris said, 'Thank you, Mrs McCance.'

The housekeeper said, 'Just McCance, dear. We don't bother.'

She turned and walked into the house.

Iris followed her.

The driver, behind them, lifted Iris's suitcase out of the boot. The Bentley's boot lid closed with a small definite sound — the sound, Iris would think later, of a door she had not yet noticed being shut.

—

Iris's room was on the second floor, at the back of the house, facing the sea.

It was a small room, papered in a faded green pattern of tiny ferns, with a single bed made up in a white counterpane and a small writing desk under the window. On the desk, in a glass jar, were three sprigs of heather. The heather was fresh. The heather had been picked, Iris thought, that morning.

McCance set Iris's suitcase down at the foot of the bed.

McCance said, 'There's hot water from six. The bath is at the end of the corridor. Breakfast is at seven-thirty, in the kitchen with me. Mrs Drosse takes her own breakfast in her room. You'll see to that, from tomorrow. Today you'll meet her and that will be enough.'

Iris said, 'Mrs McCance — McCance — thank you. Could I ask — the lady before me. Was there anything I should know about — about the routine, or —'

McCance was looking out of the window.

McCance said, without turning, 'The lady before you was named Bridget. She was here eleven months. She was good at the work. She and Mrs Drosse got on. One Tuesday in August she packed her case and left. She left a note on the kitchen table that said I'm sorry, but I have to go. She did not take her wages with her. She did not take the photograph of her sister she kept on this desk. She has not been heard from since.'

McCance turned.

McCance looked at Iris.

McCance said, very gently, 'You will be wanting to know if she is dead. I don't know if she is dead. None of us do. I wish I did.'

Iris said nothing.

McCance said, 'Tea is at four. I'll come back for you.'

McCance left the room. The door shut behind her with the small precise click of a door that had been hung properly and maintained properly and that closed exactly when you asked it to.

Iris sat down on the edge of the bed.

Iris looked at the sprigs of heather in the glass jar on the desk.

The sprigs had been arranged. Whoever had picked them had brought them upstairs and put them in the jar and turned the jar so the tallest sprig pointed towards the window.

Iris's mother had done that, with cut flowers, all of Iris's life.

—

Mrs Drosse was sitting up in bed when Iris was shown in.

The bed was a four-poster, very old, the canopy hung with dust-blue silk. Mrs Drosse was perhaps eighty, perhaps eighty-five — Iris was bad at guessing, with the very old — and she was wrapped in a cardigan of dove-grey wool that was almost the same colour as McCance's. Her hair was white and her hands, which she had folded on top of the counterpane, were very thin. There was a glass of water on her bedside table, and a small leather notebook, and a fountain pen, and nothing else.

There was no photograph on the bedside table.

There was no photograph anywhere in the room.

Mrs Drosse looked at Iris. Mrs Drosse's eyes were a clear pale grey, the grey of the sea outside the window, and they took Iris in slowly, from her shoes upwards, and they rested, for a long second, on Iris's face.

Then Mrs Drosse smiled.

The smile was small. The smile was not the smile of a person who was meeting a stranger. The smile was the smile of a person who had been waiting for a very particular guest, and had now been given that guest, and was, in a small contained way that she would not allow to show on the rest of her face, relieved.

Mrs Drosse said, 'Iris. Come in, child. Sit down. I have been wanting to see you.'

Iris stood very still in the doorway.

McCance, behind her, said softly, 'I'll bring up the tea.'

McCance left.

The door shut.

Iris and Mrs Drosse were alone in the room.

Iris said, in the careful voice she had taught herself for difficult clients, the one she had used to dress her mother three weeks ago, the one she had used at the funeral, 'Mrs Drosse. Hello. I'm Iris. The agency sent me.'

Mrs Drosse said, very gently, 'Yes, dear. I know who sent you. Sit down.'

Iris did not sit down.

Iris said, 'May I ask — how did you know my name? Mrs McCance hasn't —'

Mrs Drosse turned her clear pale-grey eyes on Iris, and the smile widened, just slightly, just enough that Iris could see that two of Mrs Drosse's lower teeth had a small chip in them, the small chip of a child who has fallen off something young.

Mrs Drosse said, 'I have known your name, dear, since the day you were born. Now sit. The tea is coming. We have a great many things to talk about, you and I, and we shall need a great many afternoons in which to talk them.'

Iris sat.

Outside the window, the sea was the same colour as Mrs Drosse's eyes.

Iris's hands, on her lap, made the small involuntary movement they had made in the Bentley.

She did not, this time, put them on top of one another.

She let them shake.

She said, 'Who are you.'