Sharing the Housekeeper

I shagged our housekeeper. So did my brother. By the end of August she'd had the pair of us at once, in the guest room of our dad's house, while he was in Oman being paid a fortune to explain drones to people who nod a lot. Also she turned out to be an Olympian, which is not the order you're meant to find these things out in, and tells you most of what you need to know about that summer. I should probably back up.

I'm Ben. Eighteen, A-levels sat in June, results not due till the middle of August, so the whole summer had that suspended feel, school finished, nothing decided, and Chemistry hanging over me like a court date. My brother Chris is nineteen, home from his first year at Bristol, where he reads maths, a subject he picked, as far as anyone has ever been able to establish, because the open day gave out free Domino's.

Dad is ex-Army, a widower with too much money, and he runs on a slightly different frequency to the rest of the species. Everything literal, everything to procedure. If a thing isn't said out loud, it isn't happening. You could conduct an affair in front of him at parade volume and as long as nobody put it in writing he'd assume you were doing the crossword. We love him dearly and he isn't a stupid man, but that blind spot is the only reason the summer was possible at all.

Mum died when I was nine. I'm not doing a whole thing about it, we're years past the part where people go careful when it comes up, but it matters in one narrow way, which is that the house had been run by women my whole life and then it wasn't. Mrs Ellery held the line for a decade, and when she retired to Norfolk in the spring the place went feral inside a fortnight. The recycling became a suggestion. One Sunday we ate a full roast off kitchen roll, all three of us, and nobody said anything, because none of us had noticed there was anything to say.

Dad interviewed candidates without mentioning it. One evening he walked into the lounge, muted the telly and said, 'Woman called Eleni starts Monday. Greek. Comes highly recommended. Be civil.' Then he unmuted the telly. He'd have used the same delivery if she'd turned up to the interview on fire.

I was expecting somebody's nan. What arrived was a woman of about forty in a plain dark dress, hair pinned up, wedding ring, one suitcase. She looked round our hallway and said 'I start with the kitchen,' and that was more or less the last complete sentence I got out of her for three weeks.

She was unbelievable at the job. Shirts came back ironed and hung by colour. Dinner arrived at seven, never at five past. She found the stopcock, missing presumed dead for eleven years. The face gave you nothing at all. She had the manner of a shop doing very good business that doesn't need yours.

And I spent the summer wanking about her until I nearly went blind.

I want to be honest about how bad it was, because there's no point telling this story otherwise. Eleni was fit. Forty-one and properly fit, and next to her the girls my own age looked like rough drafts. Forearms and shoulders from actual work, an arse the plain dress had clearly been instructed to say nothing about and couldn't, and legs that made no sense on a housekeeper, hard calves, long muscle, legs that had done something serious once, though I didn't find out what for weeks. There were tits too, which only announced themselves when she reached up to a high shelf, which she did about four times a day, and which I somehow always happened to be in the room for. I'd never fancied an older woman before. If you'd asked me in May I'd have said I didn't get it, the whole business, lads at school going on about someone's mum. Then she knelt down to a low cupboard three feet from me and I understood the entire genre in one go.

It wasn't only the body, though, and that's the bit I couldn't have told anyone. It was the whole apparatus of her. The pinned hair, the ring, the tights in a heatwave, that shut face I wanted to see come apart. She was a woman the way women in old films are women, fully assembled, nothing accidental, and I'd grown up in a house that had run out of exactly that.

The tights deserve their own paragraph, because it was never really about tights. After Mum died her things stayed where they were, because Dad isn't built for the kind of admin that has no procedure, and I found her stocking drawer when I was ten. I used to sit on the bedroom floor holding them, and it was innocent, they were hers and they were soft and for a long time they smelled faintly of her. Then one morning they didn't. I kept going back anyway. When I was twelve I took a pair to my own room and hid it under the socks in my bottom drawer, and it never went back, and by the time it had turned into whatever it turned into I knew never to say it aloud to a living soul.

So when Eleni came up our stairs in sheer nylon every day of a July heatwave, a drawer in me I'd nailed shut swung open on its own. I could pick out the whisper of nylon on nylon from another room, and I was wanking about her by the end of the first week, which is not the report of a well man. I tried not to, for what it's worth. Told myself she was staff, told myself she was married, told myself she was old enough to be, well. Didn't take. Every night the same reel, and I'm not proud of the edit: the tights coming down, the ring staying on, that shut face finally opening, for me. Some nights I'd finish and lie there disgusted with myself for about ninety seconds, and then start planning the next one, which as far as I can tell is just what being eighteen is.

She covered everything else. Long sleeves, collar done up, even in the heat. Once, at the sink, her cuff rode up and I saw ink on the inside of her wrist, small and faded blue, and I run enough to know five rings when I see them. She noticed me looking and pulled the fabric down, no hurry, no flicker, and I didn't dare say a word. Mum had views on tattoos. Common as muck, she used to say. I lay awake that night trying to fit the phrase to a woman with the rings on her wrist and couldn't get it anywhere near her.

It was Chris who asked, because Chris has never in his life felt a silence. Over dinner, not looking up from his plate.

'Are those the Olympic rings?'

'Yes.'

'Which Games?'

'The hot ones. Triathlon. Eat.'

And she took his plate, and that was the interview. I looked her up that night and found nothing under the name we knew her by, which told me the name we knew her by wasn't all of it, and I put my phone down and stared at the ceiling and thought, we have an Olympian doing our ironing.

I kept trying to talk to her and the material was thin. Long day? 'Normal day.' That smells amazing, what is it? 'Is chicken.' Once, running out of road, I asked if she missed Greece. She thought about it. 'It is still there.' End of interview. Chris never tried at all, thanked her for dinner without looking up from his phone, and she seemed to prefer that. She gave him seconds without being asked.

She did my room on Fridays, and around week five she started leaving my door open while she worked. I thought nothing of it. You already know it wasn't nothing.

---

The Wednesday it happened, Dad was in Oman and I came in from a run to a quiet house and Chris's coffee standing cold on the counter. I went upstairs to ask if he fancied a Chinese. That's the entire errand.

His door was on the latch. I pushed it with two fingers.

Chris lay flat on his back with his shorts round one ankle, and Eleni was astride him, riding my brother's cock with the same unhurried economy she brought to everything in that house. Her dress hung folded over the chair, because she'd got as far as his cock and stopped on the way to fold her dress. The tights were still on, ripped open at the crotch by hand, the wedding ring still on too. Upright, hands flat on his chest, thorough. Chris had his eyes shut and was breathing like a man trying not to be heard.

And her back. That was what the buttoned collars had been hiding all summer, beyond the rings. Ink ran from her shoulders down past the waistband of the tights, dense and dark, the Panagia, I found out later, the Virgin herself, robes and stars, a whole secret life drawn on a woman who wouldn't tell me what was for dinner. My mother's exact idea of common, covering the shoulders of an Olympian, and my brother had somehow got tickets.

Then she turned her head and looked at me.

She didn't stop, or slow, or cover an inch of herself. She held my eyes with the same level attention she gave the potatoes and kept working him, and even from the door I could hear how wet she was, obscenely wet, the slick sound of her taking him, and I had to grip the doorframe.

I shut the door, and through it came her voice, calm as the shipping forecast, the accent thickening the consonants. She was talking to Chris about me.

'Your brother will want to speak with me. Send him to the kitchen at six.'

Send him. Like she was booking a Tesco slot.

I went downstairs and drank Chris's cold coffee. I have no explanation for that. Nobody has ever had less of an explanation for anything.

---

At six I was outside the kitchen door. I'd been ready since twenty to, and I'd spent the twenty minutes assembling a speech, something about how it was none of my business and I obviously wasn't going to tell Dad and her job was safe, and by ten to six I had the whole thing word-perfect and by five to I'd forgotten all of it and was mostly thinking about her tits.

She stood at the stove with her back to me, everything back where it lived, dress, tights, ring, pinned hair. A small pan of honey warmed on the back ring and a cake cooled on the rack, and the room smelled of warm sponge and, underneath it, faintly, of her.

'Sit,' she said, without turning round. I sat.

'You watched.'

'The door was open. I wasn't, er.'

'You watched, and then you went downstairs and drank your brother's coffee. Cold. I found the cup.' She stirred the honey. 'The watching I understand. The coffee, no.'

'Honestly, that makes two of us.'

'Did you touch yourself after?'

'Sorry?'

'This is not a difficult question, Ben. It has two answers and one of them is a lie.'

'Yes.'

'How many times?'

'Twice.'

'And every night since I arrive, I think.' Not a question. She dipped two fingers in the warm honey, turned at last, and held them out to me. 'Taste. Tell me if it is too hot for the glaze.'

I knew exactly what was happening and I leaned in and took her fingers in my mouth anyway. The honey was warm and her fingers were strong and tasted of work, and she watched me suck them clean with that level face while I made a sound I'd been saving since week one.

'Not too hot,' she said, wiping her hand on a cloth, because she is not an animal. 'Stand up. Show me.'

'Show you what?'

'The young cock that stood at my door making decisions.' She said it the way she said chicken. 'Show me what I am dealing with.'

I have never made worse work of a drawstring. The whole time one thought went round on a loop, loud and stupid, that she'd already had Chris, that she was about to do the maths and be disappointed. When I finally got my boxers down she looked at me for a long moment, hard and aching and shining at the tip already, and nodded once.

'Eighteen,' she said. 'I have race numbers older than you. Good. Young and hard and stupid, this is the best kind. It does what it is told and it recovers fast.'

'Thank you?'

'It was not a compliment for you. You did not build it.'

Then she took the pan off the ring, dipped a spoon, and drew a thin warm thread of honey along my cock, base to tip, while I gripped the counter. The spoon went in the sink. She came down onto her knees on her own clean tiles, nylon whispering, and cleaned me off.

Her mouth was soft and scalding and the honey made everything cling, and she took her time the way she took her time over everything. I'd had two blowjobs in my life before that and both had felt like a favour being done at speed. This was a woman working to her own standard. Slow, near silent apart from wet sounds that made me grateful Dad was three thousand miles away, nothing skipped, her tongue working under the head until my legs shook. When my hand found the back of her head she took my wrist, put it back on the counter, came off me entirely and said, 'No. You finish when I allow. Not before.'

'Okay. When do you think that might be, roughly.'

The timer went off. She stood, took the second cake out of the oven, tested it with a skewer, turned it. 'The left of this oven runs hot,' she said, to the cake, not to me. 'I have told your father twice.' I stood against the counter shining with honey and spit, dying, while a woman of forty-one had views about the oven.

'You are suffering,' she said, with her back to me. It sounded like approval.

'A bit, yeah.'

'Good. Suffering is memory.' She took a chair from the table, turned it to face me, and sat. Then she drew the dress up her thighs to the tear in the tights, and through the ripped nylon she was bare, and wet, properly wet, swollen and shining with it, and it hadn't happened in the last five minutes. It had been going on under the dress all evening while she stirred honey and tested cakes.

'You watched what your brother was given,' she said. 'First you learn what it costs. Kneel.'

I knelt on the tiles she mopped every morning, and she put a hand in my hair, not gently, and pulled my mouth onto her cunt.

The taste of her got into me before I could think, salt and clean skin and the whole hidden day of her, and under my tongue she was slick and alive in a way nothing about her face had ever admitted to being. The torn edges of nylon lay against my cheeks. Her voice carried on above me, flat, instructional. Slower. Lower. There. Do not change. I did not change. Her thighs came in against my ears, strong enough that the rest of the house disappeared, and when she came it was almost silent, one long exhale through her nose and a slow rolling grind of herself against my mouth, taking the last of it the way she wiped a surface, twice, to be sure. Then she moved my head back by the hair and looked down at my face, wet with her.

'Now you have some idea what the fuss is about.'

She stood, walked to the table, moved the fruit bowl aside, hiked the dress to her waist and bent over the wood, forearms flat, and looked back at me. The same torn tights she'd ripped open on my brother's bed an hour before.

'Come here.'

'Your husband, though. I mean. The ring.' I don't know what I thought I was doing. Reading her the banns.

She looked back over her shoulder, and for the first time all summer something in the shut face might have been amusement. One degree of it.

'The ring is mine. The cunt also is mine. My husband is in Thessaloniki and I am in your kitchen and neither of us is confused about which country we live in. Now. In.'

The first push into her nearly ended the evening on its own. She was soaked and scalding and gripped me the whole length of every stroke, and she stayed completely in charge even bent over her own table, pushing back to set the pace whenever mine displeased her, the ring clicking against the wood. Once, when I faltered, she said over her shoulder, 'Harder. I am not a girl your age. I do not break,' and something in me that had been raised polite gave way. I got a hand up under the dress and finally filled it with her tit, heavy and warm through nothing, and she allowed it, which somehow felt like the biggest concession of the evening, and after that it was skin and breath and the table legs shifting on the tiles. Near the end she reached back, gripped my hip, and said, 'Now you may,' and I came inside our married housekeeper saying her name and about half the alphabet, and she made one low sound into her forearm, private, hers, not for me, and kept it.

Then she straightened, put the dress down, and looked at the table.

'You will wipe this. Hot water. Then wash your hands. Dinner is at seven.' At the door she paused without turning. 'Twice, you said. After the door. This was a lie. But I let you keep it.'

And she served dinner at seven exactly and gave Chris seconds without being asked.

---

For a fortnight, nothing. Dinner at seven, shirts by colour, not one look that admitted anything had happened to anyone. Chris and I had a single exchange the next morning by the kettle.

'So,' he said.

'Yep,' I said.

'Right,' he said.

We're British, and we're brothers, and between those two facts there was nothing further available.

One night that week she was on the phone out on the landing, twenty minutes of Greek, which was nineteen minutes more than she'd said to anyone in our house since June. She laughed twice, then the tone went flat and she said something short and hung up. Her sister, probably. She has a sister. That's everything I know about that.

We told Dad, sort of. Chris mentioned it on the Sunday call, that Eleni had been to the Olympics, and there was a pause on the line and Dad said, 'Yes. It was on her CV.' Another pause. 'Under Other Interests.' A third pause, while both of us mouthed at each other across the kitchen. 'Very transferable, endurance sport. Discipline.' And that was the entire conversation, because to Dad an Olympic Games and a food hygiene certificate are the same class of document. He'd known all summer. It simply hadn't struck him as interesting.

Results day fell in the middle of the fortnight. Chemistry behaved itself after all. Dad said 'Good man' down a bad line from Muscat, Chris said 'course you did' without looking up from his phone, and Eleni said nothing at all, but that evening there was a lemon cake at dinner that nobody had asked for, and I have never once told her lemon was mine.

Every afternoon at four she took her tea to the end of the lawn and stood with her back to the house, facing the fence, for ten minutes. No phone, no moving. In June I'd have called it strange. After the rings I decided I understood it, some finish line she still went and stood at, but that was me writing her story for her, and I never asked, and I still don't actually know what the ten minutes were.

And there was the morning she ran with me. I'd been going out at six because of the heat, chasing nineteen minutes for the 5k and not getting it, and one morning she was in the hallway in trainers and shorts, hair pinned even for this.

'I will come. You do the loop wrong.'

She sat behind my shoulder for four miles saying nothing, breathing like a woman reading a magazine, and on the rise behind the golf course she went past me without appearing to change anything and did the last mile ahead, forty-one years old, housekeeper's tan lines, running away from me on my own route. She was waiting at the gate with her foot up on the wall, stretching.

'Your last mile is a funeral,' she said. 'You die because you are frightened of dying earlier. Go out harder and have your crisis in the middle, where it is useful.'

'What was your 5k? When you, you know. Then.'

She looked at me for a moment, deciding what I was allowed to have.

'Sixteen forty,' she said. 'Off the bike.' And she went in and made breakfast, and that was the most she ever told me about the whole of it, and it was somehow filthier than anything that happened in the kitchen.

Then there was the dinner. Dad still abroad, chicken, and Eleni, who normally ate standing, brought her plate through and sat at the end of the table. Halfway through the meal something touched my ankle, and nothing else in the world feels like nylon. Her foot, out of its shoe, and the shoe had come off in complete silence, which meant it had come off before we sat down, which meant this had been on the menu when she laid the table.

She ate her chicken and read her phone propped against the water jug while her stockinged foot travelled up the inside of my leg and settled flat against my cock through my shorts, warm even through the cotton, and pressed. Her toes flexed, curling round the shape of me, learning it, and then the long smooth arch of her foot began to move, no rush at all, and I sat at my father's table opposite my oblivious brother being slowly worked off by a stockinged foot with all the urgency of someone polishing a banister. At one point she brought the second foot up and held me between both arches and gave one long stroke of the pair of them, and the sound I made got converted at the last possible second into a cough.