“Okay,” he said crossly to Isla. “Show me. How to do precious washing up your proper way.”

She looked at him. “It’s like you’ve never done the washing up before?” she said in incredulous disbelief. He didn’t like that one bit; she sounded like she was looking down on him. And also it was true.

Isla took the spray faucet and the scourer in disbelief and showed him how to wash out the pots before you put them in the dishwasher, which ran fast and hot, and left him to it.

It took him ages, particularly with Gaspard jeering that he had no idea what it was going to be like when they got a real kitchen going and how he was going to have to get ten times faster than that, and his finger really was hurting now and he was having, in fact, a very, very bad night indeed, which got even worse when they handed him a mop and bucket.

He could only imagine the laughter of his friends if they could see him now. They certainly wouldn’t believe it. Well done, Daddy, he thought sullenly. You wanted to bring me down a peg or two and you’ve certainly done it now.

At last, having done a frankly terrible job of mopping, he sat down at the staff table and Gaspard finally handed him a plateful of food. The combination of tiredness, his finger, his predicament, and the amazing scent and taste of the food was so overwhelming that for the tiniest split second, Konstantin thought he might cry.

Isla, sitting opposite him, noticed this with some surprise. It made absolutely no sense to take a job and then hate it so much. He was such an odd person.

“Go to bed,” she said, when they’d finished and there was just the staff meal to clean up. “I’ve got this.”

Konstantin was instantly taken aback by the kindness and, annoyingly, the very obvious fact that he was absolutely shattered. But he couldn’t think about that now; he had half a steak wrapped in a napkin that he needed to get upstairs, so he simply nodded and scuttled upstairs without a backward glance, fed Bjårk, took him out on the roof again, and fell into bed, absolutely out for the count.

Chapter 19

S tupid Bugglas was in the way again. If there was one thing Agot really hated, it was how distracted her beloved uncle Joel had gotten ever since the baby had arrived. Even when Joel had been on the outs with various other members of her family, Agot had adored him from the get-go, which Joel found slightly alarming. He didn’t really know how to talk to children. This was 100 percent what Agot liked about him. He treated her entirely like the small adult she fully believed herself to be.

This was one of the long number of things Douglas had completely ruined, in Agot’s eyes. Uncle Joel was always staring at the stupid baby, or picking up the stupid baby, or asking her if she’d seen what the stupid baby could do now. The things the baby couldn’t do—dance, play shinny, sit up for a tea party, look at pictures of ice-skaters, watch ice-skating on television, talk about ice-skating, and pester her father to watch old Torvill and Dean videos and skate about the kitchen floor on clean dishcloths, pretending to be an ice-skater, much to the annoyance of anyone else trying to get anything done or anyone who didn’t want Boléro in their heads for the next six months—were huge. Agot was trying to shout louder to get them to pay her some attention, but it didn’t seem to be working.