Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

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 polycotton 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, aged 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 to much – in my Dad’s case, it meant that he