Canarino. Katherine Bucknell

tightly against her ear and pressing two fingertips of her other hand against her other ear to shut him out.

      Mr Richards stopped dead in his tracks. He was a big man, suntanned, vigorous, crisply turned-out, used to making an impression on women. He quelled his sense of insult with difficulty. It must be long-distance, he decided. An emergency in London. And he made himself wait, staring angrily at the cream linen stretched tightly across Elizabeth’s thin, square shoulders.

      ‘And I’ve had to rearrange a number of the objets,’ she was saying in a caustic tone. Then there was a pause.

      Mr Richards didn’t like telephones. And he didn’t like fax machines and e-mail. And especially cell phones. What he liked was working outdoors at his own pace and making a perfect job of it. He knew how to get things done and how to manage workmen and he didn’t like interruptions or, he was discovering, being bossed around.

      This woman, he thought, has too many gizmos at her fingertips. She is fussing at the speed of sound. Or maybe the speed of light; Mr Richards wasn’t sure about the technology. Everyone has to know all about it the minute she isn’t happy. Her beauty is—wasted. It’s a lot to waste, too, he thought. He had been simply amazed at the airport: Easily the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, he had concluded.

      He looked around the room at the shelves loaded with old leather-bound volumes. It had a sort of eighteenth-century look, he was thinking, sort of Thomas Jefferson. Serious study, high ideals, Virginia gentleman. It had what people called an aura. An aura which ought to suit such a woman. She has certain qualities. If she had been born in an earlier time, she might have had to practice a little patience, Mr Richards mused, she might even have been forced to place herself in the hands of someone a little stronger and trust him to look after her. That’s what her sort of beauty is really meant for, he thought, to give her half a chance in tough circumstances. Nowadays looking like that is completely unnecessary. It just throws everything off, skews the balance; women do everything they want for themselves anyway. It’s not a fair fight, not with all her extra pulling power. But maybe it’s just because I think like that that I’m the farm manager and she owns the goddam farm.

      She knew what she was up to, pulling all this together. And unbelievable amounts of money.

      But her kids! They need supervising on a farm. Neither one of these London women has a clue.

      Elizabeth said into the phone, very patiently, ‘The maid should have been given all the diagrams for the shelves. You have to teach new staff everything. And she shouldn’t be moving figurines from one part of the room to another, anyway.’

      Something has been smashed, Mr Richards was thinking. Could it possibly matter more than the kids? He cleared his throat. Then he said, boldly, ‘Mrs Judd!’

      She started and sat up, still with her back to him, saying very quietly into the phone, ‘Hang on a second, Joshua. There’s someone here.’ She put one hand over the mouthpiece and slowly, carefully turned, looking serious, attentive. She bent all her concern onto Mr Richards, narrowing her gemlike, unnerving blue eyes in concentration. Gravely, politely, she said, ‘Yes?’

      Mr Richards refused to be cowed. ‘Something has happened to the children’s nanny, Mrs Judd. I found them—Gordon and Hope, isn’t it?—in the stream. They were calling for help. They’re pretty upset.’

      Elizabeth’s face was still.

      Mr Richards was thinking,This woman doesn’t like to be rushed.

      Then she put the receiver back to her ear and said in her languid, melancholy way, ‘Josh, I’ll have to call you back.’

      She put the phone down and stood up, brushing herself off, as if she were covered with crumbs, though Mr Richards couldn’t see any.

      ‘What were the children doing in the stream?’ Her voice was calm, detached, a little sad; her eyes wistful, burdened.

      He sensed that she felt painfully disappointed in the children. Suddenly she looked very solitary, very slight. Was she going to cry? he wondered. He felt confused by her sorrow, the heavy feeling of it between them. Without realizing it, he took a step toward her. Though he couldn’t have said why, he found himself wanting to cheer her up, to reassure her.

      ‘They said they went for a drink of water. The nanny told them to drink plenty in the heat, which is good advice. But they shouldn’t be drinking from that stream, Mrs Judd. It’s not clean water. Full of run-off, fertilizer, God only knows what. The trouble is, they couldn’t find their way back to the house, and they liked the look of the willows—cool, you know, irresistible.’

      Elizabeth wrung her white hands, not hard, then pressed the tips of her long thumbs against one another, silent. She stared at the desktop. Then she looked back up at Mr Richards.

      ‘What happened to Norma?’ It was a perfectly ordinary request for information; her voice expressed no anxiety, no irritation.

      ‘That’s the nanny? I have no idea. Although I think maybe I know where to look for her. But, Mrs Judd, your children are crying.’ Now Mr Richards wasn’t certain he had expressed his concern with enough urgency; his voice ratcheted upwards. ‘I left them with the chef, but they don’t know him; they’d be better off with you, Mrs Judd.’

      Elizabeth reflected. At last she said, ‘All right.’ And she brushed herself off again, in preparation.

      The children weren’t crying. They were sitting up on stools at the kitchen counter eating English muffins with butter and honey on them. Hope looked around as her mother came in; she was chewing loudly. A shadow moved through Hope’s blue eyes. She shut her mouth, rubbed all around it with her small fingers, wiping it clean, then went on chewing, silently.

      The chef stepped back from the counter where he had been leaning over the children, stood up straight, said nothing.

      ‘Norma needs an ambulance, Mummy. We were coming to tell you.’ Gordon took another bite of muffin.

      ‘Would you make me some coffee, please,’ said Elizabeth, not looking at the chef. ‘Just black.’

      She touched Gordon’s back, giving it a half-stroke, then another, fitfully.

      ‘Why did Norma leave you alone?’ she asked lightly, as if it wasn’t of much importance.

      ‘Norma didn’t leave,’ said Hope, putting the remaining piece of her muffin down onto her plate with both hands, ‘we did.’ She looked at her mother anxiously, expectantly.

      Elizabeth stood holding her hands in front of her, the fingertips loosely curled inside one another. She squeezed them tightly for a moment, then relaxed.

      ‘You ran away from Norma?’

      ‘No, Mummy, we didn’t run.’ Hope shook her head soberly. She knew she was right about this.

      Gordon said, ‘Norma fell over in the maze, Mummy, and she didn’t get up, so we had to find our own way out, and then Hope fell into the stream and got scared and started yelling.’

      Mr Richards came into the kitchen. He announced that he had found Norma sitting on the brick path near the entrance to the maze with an arc of vomit around her. She was badly scratched, had a coconut-sized lump on the back of her head, and had failed in her evidently tenacious effort to crawl out of the maze after the children. Her hands were icy, and she had begun to cry and shake all over when he tried to help her up.

      ‘I need some help getting her into my car,’ he went on. His voice was robust, with an edge of adrenalin. ‘She needs an X-ray. She’s got the mother of all lumps on her head and she’s puking everywhere; I’m sure it’s a concussion. I just hope her skull’s still in one piece or her brain will be swelling right through the cracks.’

      Elizabeth winced. She placed her hand on Mr Richards’s forearm and looked at him in silence with pleading, dewy eyes.

      He was taken aback. ‘I need help!’ he repeated, shrugging his shoulders.

      Elizabeth