ever since I had left school and jewelry was no longer banned by uniform codes. Even as a child I’d worn it at weekends and whenever I could get away with it, ignoring my mother’s sighs and her comments about cheap nasty rubbish that turned your skin green. It had been a present for my first birthday, and now, after more than two decades, it felt like part of myself, something I barely even noticed, even when I reached to play with it in moments of stress or boredom.
Now I noticed it.
An ornate silver R on the end of a dangling chain. Or rather, as my mother had so frequently reminded me, not silver, but silver plate, something that was becoming more and more apparent, as the brassy metal beneath shone through where I had rubbed the pendant absentmindedly with my fingers.
There was no reason to take it off. It wasn’t inappropriate. The chances of anyone even noticing it were very low. And yet . . .
Slowly, I reached round to the back of my neck and undid the clasp.
Then I put on a slick of lip gloss, straightened my skirt, tightened my ponytail, and prepared to go back downstairs to Sandra Elincourt and give the interview of my life.
When I got downstairs, Sandra was nowhere to be seen, but I could smell some kind of delicious, savory scent coming from the far side of the hallway. Remembering that that was where Sandra had ushered the dogs, I moved forward, cautiously. But when I pushed open the door I found I had stepped into another world.
It was like the back of the house had been sliced off brutally and grafted onto a startling modernist box, almost aggressively twenty-first century. Soaring metal beams went up to a glass roof, and beneath my feet the Victorian encaustic tiles of the hall had abruptly stopped, replaced by a poured concrete floor, polished to a dull sheen. It looked like a combination of a brutalist cathedral and an industrial kitchen. In the center was a shiny metal breakfast bar, surrounded by chrome stools, dividing the room into the bright kitchen area, and beyond it the dimly lit dining space, where a long concrete-topped table ran the length of the room.
In the middle was Sandra, standing in front of a monstrous freestanding stove, the largest I had ever seen, and ladling some kind of casserole into two bowls. She looked up as I came in.
“Rowan! Listen, I’m so sorry, but I forgot to ask, you’re not veggie, are you?”
“No,” I said. “No, I eat pretty much anything.”
“Oh phew, that’s a relief, because we’ve got beef casserole and not a lot else! I was just frantically wondering if I had time to do a baked potato. Which reminds me.” She walked across to the huge steel fridge, tapped an invisible button on the fridge door with the knuckle of one hand, and said, enunciating her words clearly, “Happy, order potatoes, please.”
“Adding potatoes to your shopping list,” replied a robotic voice, and a screen lit up, showing a typed list of groceries. “Eat happy, Sandra!”
The shock of it made me want to laugh, but I pushed down the urge and instead watched as Sandra put both bowls on the long table, along with a crusty loaf on a board and a little dish of something like sour cream. The bowls were bone china and looked as if they were probably Victorian, hand-painted with delicate little flowers and embellished with gold leaf details. Somehow the contrast between the mathematically severe modernist lines of the glass room and the fragile antique bowls was almost absurd, and I felt slightly off-balance. It was like the rest of the house in reverse—Victorian stuffiness punctuated by splashes of space-age modernity. Here, the modernism had taken over, but the bowls and the heavy floral whirls of the silver cutlery were a reminder of what lay behind the closed door.
“There we go,” Sandra said unnecessarily as she sat down and waved me to the seat opposite her. “Beef stew. Help yourself to bread to soak up the juices, and that’s horseradish crème fraîche, which is very nice stirred in.”
“It smells amazing,” I said truthfully, and Sandra shook back her hair and gave a little smile that tried to look modest but really said, I know.
“Well, it’s the stove, you know. A La Cornue. It’s almost impossible to screw up—you just pop the ingredients in and forget about it! I do miss a gas range