CHAPTER FOUR
There's a sunburnt man standing in on the front steps. Redheaded, tall and broad, wide-mouthed, wide-shouldered, my age or about, and he looks from Agnes to me and back again. No one speaks. He flushes, and the burn darkens.
The advertisement.
I stare at him. He's wearing gabardine trousers that shine at both knees from wear and a coat that was tailored a long time ago for someone else. A scarf knotted at his throat. His dark red hair has been slicked back with water and the back of his hand rather than a comb. He has high cheekbones, a thick jaw, jug ears, and both elbows slightly bent in what looks like an effort to hide the coat's too-short sleeves. His body has the solid, compact blockiness of one that is only used for labor. His collar sits askew because of the muscles in his shoulders. He is returning my stare without even a hint of deference, through eyes that are a startling bottle-green.
Only one thing is clear to me: I've made a mistake. All I have to do now is shake my head, tell this man the job is filled, give him an apology. Go upstairs. Don't look after him as he walks back down the lane. Hire the next vinegar-smelling clod who knocks, or else do all the work myself.
Instead I hear myself ask him in, ask his name: "Tulloch, sir," he answers, a spit of consonants, and then recalls himself with a sideways glance at Agnes and adds, "My lord," with a grimace. Agnes stares steadily at me. I never told her I'd sent a notice in to the papers; I didn't want an argument. But now she's figured it, and me, out. I ignore her eye. There's a worn brown envelope in her hand- his references, I suppose- and he clears his throat and in his sticky lilt says to her, "I could start today, if it pleases." He is speaking to her but looking at me. His gaze is so direct as to be uncomfortable. His nose has been broken.
I watch myself nod, hands behind my back, hear myself assenting, hear myself ask Agnes to please look over the papers. It occurs to me that I've felt a similar anxiety before: as a boy on a train thundering past unlit stations, away from my prior life.
Agnes gives me a long and silent look, turns and beckons him into the study. This is not what I had meant to happen. I'd expected another version of Jepson, I see now, with the same grey cowlick and sour squint, the same stubbornness. Or just any one of the blurred men I see in the fields as I pass on the way to the city, all interchangeable in their coveralls and crushed straw hats. Just a groundskeeper: quiet, unremarkable. Not at all what I'd meant to happen.
.
Instead of invading the study and issuing my apologies I walk quietly and bend to the crack in the door. Agnes' voice is flat with disapproval but polite- a thin, well-modulated ribbon of sound winding through the crack. I can't make out her words. Now he's asking a question. I can hear the lilt broadening, rising at the end. Her voice answering, terse. And then he laughs, a delicious sound rolling low through the room. "Yes, ma'am," he's saying, now.
I want to know what has made him laugh. More pressing, I need to stop this. But I hold my ear against the door.
Agnes' voice over the crinkling of paper. "I see no address. Is that correct?"
"Yes, ma'am," he replies, cheerfully. Itinerant. A vagabond. I stand up. Isn't this what I asked for, I tell myself. Isn't that what matters most, I ask myself, lying. For a moment I lean against the wall, chewing at the splinters in my knuckle, and then the decision is made for me, involuntarily, by something roaring inside myself.
I go to the kitchen to ask Rosalind to set an extra plate at dinner.