through it quickly, unable to concentrate on any stories and almost ready to throw the entire thing on the fire when I came upon the “Situations Available” page, where a particular notice caught my attention.
An “H. Bennet,” of Gaudlin Hall in the county of Norfolk, was advertising for a governess to attend to the care and education of the children of the house; the position needed to be filled without delay by a qualified candidate and the remuneration was promised to be satisfactory. Applications should be despatched immediately. Little more was said. “H. Bennet,” whoever he was, did not specify how many children required supervision, nor did he offer any details regarding their ages. The whole thing lacked a certain elegance, as if it had been written in haste and submitted to the newspaper without proper consideration, but for some reason I found myself drawn to the urgency of the appeal, reading it from start to finish over and over, wondering what this Gaudlin Hall might look like and what kind of fellow H. Bennet might be.
I had only been outside London once in my life and that was a dozen years before, when I was nine years old, in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death. Our small family had lived together in a state of considerable harmony during my early childhood. My parents had a marked characteristic that distinguished them from those of most of my school friends: they were affectionate towards each other. The things which seemed natural in our home—the fact that they parted everymorning with a kiss, that they sat side by side in the evening reading their books rather than in separate parlours, that they shared a bedroom and laughed together and were unsparing in how often they touched or shared a joke or simply remarked upon how happy they were—were alien in the homes of others. I knew this quite well. On the rare occasions when I visited the houses of neighbouring girls, I found a distance between their parents, as if they were not two people who had met and fallen in love, exchanged intimacies and joined each other at an altar with the purpose of spending their lives together, but a pair of strangers, cell mates perhaps, thrust into a mutual confinement with little in common except the decades that they were forced to endure each other’s company.
My parents could not have been more different in their behaviour, but if their affection towards each other was obvious, it was as nothing compared to the fondness they displayed towards me. They did not spoil me; staunch Anglicans both, they believed too much in discipline and self-restraint for that. But they delighted in my presence and treated me with great kindness and we were a happy group until, when I was eight, they sat me down and informed me that I was to have a younger brother or sister in the spring. Naturally they were delighted, for they had hoped for a long time to be blessed with a second child and, with the passing of the years, they had grown to believe that it was not to be. But to their great delight, they announced that our small family of three would soon expand to four.
I confess that when I look back on those months, I did not comport myself with as much dignity as I wish I had. I did not feel the same degree of joy that my parents felt at the notion of welcoming a baby into our home. I had been an only childfor so long that selfishness may have hidden in my heart and displayed itself in unruly passions on a number of occasions. Indeed, so ill behaved was I, so uncharacteristically naughty, that Father took me aside during the last month of Mother’s confinement and told me that I was not to worry, that nothing would change, for there was enough love in our house to be shared with a new baby, and that I would look back one day and find it hard to imagine how I had ever done without this younger brother or sister, whom I should very soon grow to love.
Sadly, this expectation, which I had begun to come around to,