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informal set-up than he's used to in his house is one thing – but personal history is another. It has nothing to do with what's in the fridge or the hot-water system or the fact that the boot-room door to the garden needs a shove to open and a tug to shut.
Anyway, missy, what about you? he's tempted to say. You and your child up here on a day's notice? He lobs a stick into the copse and Wolf streaks off to fetch it. House-sitters shouldn't ask so many questions, Joe wants to say though he can't deny he has some of his own. It's not part of the job, he wants to point out. He ought to have stayed home this morning, he ought to have made it plain that the only time his life should be of any concern to her will be clearly written on the calendar. She can consult it to know when he is due back and when he is off again so she can organize milk and bread and other basics. But he doesn't say any of this – he knows it sounds too harsh. However, that just makes him wonder if he's soft to think so.
What had possessed him not to ask for references? Most people wanting the job had presented them to him before even looking around. Pages of testimonials praising their hygiene and trustworthiness and responsibility and experience. He glances over his shoulder; she's lagging behind again, pointing things out to the baby though the baby appears to be asleep. It's difficult to tell, under the swaddling of hat, scarf, blanket, mittens and foot-cosy all made from spongy cerise fleece.
‘Look! Plane!’
She says it out loud, automatically, as if she is conditioned to conversing only with her child. As if she has been unused to adult company and conversation, down there, wherever it was that she'd come from in such a hurry. Joe looks up at the plane and his antagonism wanes a little. She does seem genuinely enamoured of the house and the remit of the job. She has mopped up dog sick and she does make a good cup of tea. How is she to know about which of his raw nerves not to touch?
Joe decides the best option, for both their sakes, is to keep the conversation anodyne. He sees he has the very opportunity, spread out in all its faded Victorian splendour in front of them. This woman doesn't know Saltburn-by-the-Sea but he does. In a few days he'll be out of the country. He does need to go through his dates with Tess but OK, it can wait until Emmeline's nap. He also needs to go the bank and Wolf is straining for a good blast on the beach. En route however, there is plenty to politely point out – landmarks for Tess, an opportunity for Joe to de-personalize the conversation.
Tess has now caught up with him. ‘These buildings are stunning,’ she says, ‘they'd cost a fortune in London.’
‘Good old Henry Pease,’ Joe says. ‘He was the Victorian gentleman who came for a walk, sat on the hillside over there overlooking Old Saltburn's single row of cottages and the Ship Inn and had a vision for the town and formal gardens you now see.’
‘Why isn't it called Pea-on-Sea then!’
‘ Pease ,’ Joe repeats but he has to smile. ‘Actually, Saltburn comes from the Anglo-Saxon Sealt Burna , or salty stream, on account of all the alum in the area. But moving on a few centuries – Henry Pease built the place with George Dickenson of Darlington in the 1860s. They constructed a model of homogeneity – uniform roof lines in slate, white firebricks exclusively from Pease's own brickworks, and no fences.’
‘You have a fence,’ Tess says. ‘ You have a tall wall with a fence on top all the way around.’
‘The house is from a later period,’ Joe says, thinking she is an argumentative thing. ‘Anyway, twenty years later the town was done – the station complex, the Valley Gardens you've just passed, the chapel, the pier and the cliff lift which back then was a glorified hoist. Best of all the Zetland Hotel – see, over there? Isn't it magnificent? It's flats now – but it was the world's first railway hotel and very grand it was too, with its