Me Before You: a novel

Oh hell, I thought, as the reality of what I had just done began to
sink in. I’ve really blown it this time.
But Will just stared at me for a bit and, when I didn’t look away,
let out a small breath, as if about to say something unpleasant.
“Fair enough,” he said, and he turned the wheelchair around.
“Just put the photographs in the bottom drawer, will you? All of
them.”
And with a low hum, he was gone.

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5
The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life—or at least,
shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well
have your face pressed against their window—is that it forces you to
rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other
people.
To my parents, I had in four short weeks become just a few
degrees more interesting. I was now the conduit to a different world.
My mother, in particular, asked me daily questions about Granta
House and its domestic habits in the manner of a zoologist
forensically examining some strange new creature and its habitat.
“Does Mrs. Traynor use linen napkins at every meal?” she would
ask, or “Do you think they vacuum every day, like we do?” or “What
do they do with their potatoes?”
She sent me off in the mornings with strict instructions to find out
what brand of loo roll they used, or whether the sheets were a poly-
cotton mix. It was a source of great disappointment to her that most
of the time I couldn’t actually remember. My mother was secretly
convinced that posh people lived like pigs—ever since I had told her,
at age six, of a well-spoken school friend whose mother wouldn’t let
us play in their front room “because we’d disturb the dust.”
When I came home to report that, yes, the dog was definitely
allowed to eat in the kitchen, or that, no, the Traynors didn’t scrub
their front step every day as my mother did, she would purse her
lips, glance sideways at my father, and nod with quiet satisfaction, as
if I had just confirmed everything she’d suspected about the slovenly
ways of the upper classes.
Their dependence on my income, or perhaps the fact that they
knew I didn’t really like my job, meant that I also received a little
more respect within the house. This didn’t actually translate into
much—in my dad’s case, it meant that he had stopped calling me

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“lardarse,” and, in my mother’s, that there was usually a mug of tea
waiting for me when I came home.
To Patrick, and to my sister, I was no different—still the butt of
jokes, the recipient of hugs or kisses or sulks. I felt no different. I still
looked the same, still dressed, according to Treena, like I had had a
wrestling match in a charity shop.
I had no idea what most of the inhabitants of Granta House
thought of me. Will was unreadable. To Nathan, I was, I suspected,
just the latest in a long line of hired caregivers. He was friendly
enough but a bit detached. I got the feeling he wasn’t convinced I
was going to be there for long. Mr. Traynor nodded at me politely
when we passed in the hall, occasionally asking me how the traffic
was, or whether I had settled in all right. I’m not sure he would have
recognized me if he’d been introduced to me in another setting.
But to Mrs. Traynor—oh Lord—to Mrs. Traynor I was apparently
the stupidest and most irresponsible person on the planet.
It had started with the photo frames. Nothing in that house
escaped Mrs. Traynor’s notice, and I should have known that the
smashing of the frames would qualify as a seismic event. She
quizzed me as to exactly how long I had left Will alone, what had
prompted it, how swiftly I had cleared up the mess. She didn’t
actually criticize me—she was too genteel even to raise her voice—
but the way she blinked slowly at my responses, her little “hmm-
hmm” as I spoke, told me everything I needed to know. It came as no
surprise when Nathan told me she was a magistrate.
She thought it might be a good idea if I didn’t leave Will for so
long next time, no matter how awkward the situation, hmm? She
thought perhaps the next time I dusted I could make sure things
weren’t so close to the edge that they might accidentally get knocked
to the floor, hmm? (She seemed to prefer to believe that it had been
an accident.) She made me feel like a first-class idiot, and
consequently I became a first-class idiot around her. She always
arrived just when I had dropped something on the floor, or was
struggling with the cooker dial, or she would be standing in the
hallway looking mildly irritated as I stepped back in from collecting
logs outside, as if I had been gone much longer than I actually had.

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Weirdly, her attitude got to me more than Will’s rudeness. A
couple of times I had even been tempted to ask her outright whether
there was something wrong. You said that you were hiring me for my