What the Nanny Saw (27 page)

An image of her mother and father companionably sharing toast and jam at six o’clock each evening, just before the shipping forecast, came to Ali’s mind. The simplicity of her parents’ relationship now seemed marvelous. She had never noticed it before she moved in with the Skinners. Even the way her mother was jealous of her father’s relationship with the sea now seemed magical.

“Normal,” said Ali resolutely. “Where are your parents?”

“I was brought up by my mother,” said Katya. It was the first time since Ali had met Katya that she had referred to her life in Ukraine. “My father disappeared. One day he was there, and then, poof, the next he was gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“My mother thinks he had another wife and family in southern Ukraine,” said Katya, rippling the surface of the swimming pool with her toes. “But we don’t know.”

“How awful,” said Ali.

“Is good life lesson,” said Katya. Ali noticed the momentary lapse of grammar. “It teaches you that anything you have been given can be taken away from you. You learn to take the moment when you can.” She raised her arm and grabbed a fistful of thin air to demonstrate. Ali followed her gaze to the swimming pool, where she was watching Thomas haul himself out of the shallow end. He ran toward Katya, and she shouted a few words in Ukrainian, and he slowed down. She pulled her long legs out of the pool and sat cross-legged so that Thomas could sit in the small warm space in the middle.

“Is that why you came to England?” Ali asked. Katya nodded gravely.

“I send almost everything I earn back to my mother for my brothers and sisters. It is my responsibility.”

“How do you know Mira?” asked Ali.

“We made the journey together. She helped me. She saved me from some very, very bad people. But it’s all over now.” Ali sensed Katya had said enough. She rocked backward and forward on her haunches, singing a Ukrainian lullaby to Thomas.

“Where are the rest of the children?” asked Katya. Ali looked toward the pool and realized that they had all disappeared. The insect hospital was intact, but the patients were busily escaping back into the wild. Some were wandering back into the very swimming pool from which they had been rescued. What did that tell you? wondered Ali. That some insects were more intelligent than others? That fate was random? Or that bad luck followed some insects around?

“I’ll go and look for them,” Ali volunteered.

“Will you take Thomas so I can swim?” Katya asked. She pushed him off her knees and stood up to stretch her long legs. There were tiny specks of dust and gravel stuck to her buttocks and thighs. She didn’t bother to wipe them off. She was wearing a bright red bikini. She reminded Ali of an exotic fruit about to burst from its skin. Katya lifted Thomas onto Ali’s hip, and he contentedly played with her hair as they headed into the olive grove at the bottom of the garden, calling for Hector and Alfie.

•   •   •

When she got back
to the terrace, Ali found the children eating kebabs and pieces of barbecued chicken at the table. Bryony was busily piling up dirty plates and filling glasses with water. She shot Ali a disapproving look for not being there to look after the twins, even though the Petersons’ Greek housekeeper was on hand to help. Hector and Alfie were sharing a seat and eating from the same plate, a double infraction in Bryony’s book, although everyone else commented on how sweet it was that they were so close.

“Sorry, they all disappeared at once,” Ali told Bryony. She sat Thomas down next to Hector and gave him a chicken leg coated in honey to chew on.

“This heat is so exhausting,” said Sophia, fanning herself with a napkin. “I feel almost sedated.”

“That’s what happened in
The Tempest
,” said Ali, anxious to win back Bryony’s approval.

Sophia looked interested, and Ali explained that the shipwrecked souls who find themselves washed up in
The
Tempest
are overcome by the dreamy quality of the island and break free of the restraints of their narrow Milanese life to become somnambulists and dreamers.

“Some people think Shakespeare set the play on Corfu,” she explained. “Caliban’s mother is called Sycorax, and that is almost an anagram of Corcyra, the ancient name of Corfu.”

She turned to Bryony, who gave her a broad smile.

“Do you know where Leicester is?” Bryony asked.

“We left him down by the pool,” Ali explained. “We cooled him down with a bucket of water and let him go to sleep underneath a sun lounger.”

“Would you mind going to get him, please?” Bryony asked. “He doesn’t know his way round here.”

Once again, Ali set off for the pool. Leicester was no longer beneath the sun lounger, although there was a small, dusty bowl shape where he had been lying. She searched for footprints but found only bits of Lego and a couple of dead grasshoppers. Ali inwardly cursed the dog. He was punishing her for neglecting him. Then she heard a crash in the Petersons’ pool house and noticed the door was ajar.

There was a noise that sounded like a fridge door opening and shutting. Surely Leicester couldn’t open it alone? She tiptoed along the stone path that led to the pool house, regretting that she had left her shoes up on the terrace because it was so hot underfoot.

These people had so many fridges, thought Ali. There were at least five in Holland Park Crescent, and more at the house in Greece. And the Petersons were no different. She remembered her parents replacing the fridge they had owned for almost a quarter of a century a couple of years ago. It had taken almost six months of poring over catalogs, agonizing over different models, comparing prices, energy costs, size, and design, before they could reach a decision. Fridges don’t grow on trees, her father had joked when he saw the bored expression on Ali’s face after yet another discussion. “They do for some,” she could now tell him.

She went into the pool house quietly so she could catch Leicester at the crime scene. Instead she saw Ned, trousers and underpants pulled down beneath his improbably white buttocks, on top of Katya, who was naked apart from her bikini top, which was pulled up over her chest and so flimsy it barely qualified as an item of clothing. He was stroking her breasts as though they were sacred objects. They were shiny with sweat. Ned’s head was turned to the side so that Ali could see his mouth was open at a funny angle as though he might have been saying a word with long vowels like
greengage
. His face was tomato red. She almost giggled out loud at the absurdity of her discovery. She was reasonably confident that Katya didn’t see her, and she stepped back into the daylight.

•   •   •

“Can you believe
the shadow chancellor was there?” said Foy on the journey home. He had persuaded Tita to accompany him in the boat again. She refused to sit down, even though she was covered in spray, preferring to hold on to the windshield with one hand and Foy’s shoulder with the other. “I liked the cut of his jib. He asked me to make a donation.”

“Julian has a sixth sense for the way the political wind is blowing,” said Tita. “He told me that he thinks Blair might make him a peer before he leaves office.”

“It’s not Julian. It’s Eleanor,” said Foy, unable to disguise the admiration in his voice. “She’s wonderfully adept at making people feel as though she is their best friend.”

“What did you think of the house?” asked Tita.

“Not enough light sockets,” said Foy dismissively.

“It’s a shame Nick has got to go back to London,” said Tita.

“It’s the same every year,” Foy said with a grunt.

 14 

September 2007

The day after Nick’s bank announced better-than-expected third-quarter results, Izzy meandered downstairs wearing a slouchy mohair sweater (purple bra visible beneath), short tartan skirt, tights with carefully fashioned holes, and black leather jacket, ready for a late-evening rehearsal with her string quartet at Sophia Wilbraham’s house.

They were entering a school music competition, and Sophia had asked Ali to make sure Izzy was at their house by eight o’clock at the latest, so they could run through Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor for the last time. Ali could hear the discontent and resentment in the clump, clump of Izzy’s Dr. Martens boots as she slouched into the kitchen. The cello was about to take a pounding.

It was a bad plan. Izzy was tired after school. She was bored of the cello. And she was fed up with her life being organized by other people. But Bryony had only just arrived back from Kiev and was therefore powerless to derail the plan at this late stage. And out of pity (always a questionable motive), because Sophia’s husband was having an affair, Ali had allowed herself to be steamrolled into submission. She had also agreed to collect Izzy at nine-thirty because Sophia didn’t want to take responsibility for her walking home alone, “given all her troubles.” As Izzy explained fairly articulately to Ali earlier in the day, none of this fitted with her new philosophy of taking responsibility for her destiny.

Unusually, Nick and Bryony were sitting at the kitchen table, having an early-evening drink together. They had just closed on the house in Oxfordshire, and Bryony wanted to discuss the renovation project because she was due to fly to Moscow the following day. Since his premature departure from Corfu, Nick had hardly been at home. Ali sometimes overheard scraps of conversation when he came back at night, but she didn’t ask any questions. “We’ve got a two-billion-dollar CDO that we can’t move at par . . . We’re selling it at a one-hundred-million-dollar loss . . . A quarter of Countrywide’s subprime loans are delinquent . . . We’re in a negative feedback loop.”

From Ali’s perspective the magnitude of the losses always seemed eye-watering, and somehow they impacted on Nick’s self-discipline because he abandoned his late-night exercise routine in the basement gym in favor of a bottle of wine in the drawing room.

Bryony had a deal afoot. Ali had glanced at the top page of “Project Beethoven” (private and confidential, for limited distribution) in the recycling bin and understood from skim-reading the first page that one of Bryony’s Russian energy companies wanted to bid for a British distributor. She also knew from Bryony’s fraught phone conversations that the British government wasn’t very happy about its gas supply being controlled by Russia and that most newspaper stories reflected this view. The results of the Ukrainian elections a couple of weeks earlier didn’t bode well. The pipeline that supplied Europe went through Ukraine, and the Russians were already making threatening noises because they didn’t trust the doll-like new prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.

“They already supply most of our gas, so what does it matter if they distribute it, too?” Bryony briefed journalists from the kitchen in the evening. One of her other deals was “going hostile,” which made Ali think of cowboy films. Bryony’s mood wasn’t good enough for Ali to ask her exactly what this meant. To judge from her stress levels, it definitely wasn’t positive.

The architect’s plans were unfolded on the table, and Bryony was efficiently running through what she termed the “headline alterations.” They ignored Ali, who was discreetly searching through the bookshelf for Izzy’s sheet music, lost days ago. When Bryony was away the music practice regime dissolved.

“How much?” Nick asked.

“He’s thinking seven figures.”

“What?” Ali’s back was turned to him, but she didn’t need to see Nick’s expression to catch the exasperation in his tone.

“I’m a frugal person, Nick. It’s difficult to see how we could do it any cheaper.” Bryony’s tone was soft, almost regretful. It was as though she was playing Monopoly and apologizing for building four hotels on Park Place. Ali was grateful they couldn’t see her face as she aimlessly shuffled through the same pile of papers over and over again. Not since they had appeared in
The Sunday Times
rich list in April had Ali been so conscious of the Skinners’ enormous wealth.

“It includes everything,” said Bryony.

“Well, that’s good to know,” said Nick, his voice syrupy with sarcasm.

How could anyone spend so much money doing up a house? Ali wondered. It wasn’t really a moral question, although it should be. Rather, it was logistical. She now understood that a set of curtains for an early Victorian drawing room with two sash windows could cost almost £10,000, because she had seen the bill from the interior decorator to replace the set ruined at the party. Eight sets could buy you a house in Cromer, she had calculated. The new curtains were so thick that Hector couldn’t hold the edge in one hand. There was lining, interlining, weights, blackout fabric, passementerie trimming, walling. When she heard the interior decorator speak to Bryony, Ali had felt like an anthropologist who had stumbled across a secret language spoken by only a very small British tribe.

“Define ‘everything,’” Nick demanded.

“Building the kitchen extension, reroofing, insulation, resurfacing the tennis court, installing a security system, swimming pool, home cinema, games room, the orangery . . . It’s all here.” She tapped the plans impatiently, indicating that he should look at the spec. He picked up the eight-page document and started reading.

“You’ve agreed to spend eight grand on a reconditioned burnished-copper bateau bathtub? I’m not fucking Henry the Eighth, you know, or have you already included a velvet loo seat?”

“Copper is a great electrical and thermal conductor,” said Bryony calmly. “It’s the best material for a bath. Retains the heat really well, so actually you save money on hot water.”

“Bryony, you cannot seriously talk about saving money on heating bills when you’re washing your bits in a bath that costs more than a new G-Wiz.”

“I’ll pay for the bath,” Bryony said with a shrug.

“Replastering, thirty thousand pounds?” continued Nick. “You’re spending too much time with Russian oligarchs.”

“The Jacobean ceiling moldings need to be completely reconditioned,” Bryony explained. “We need to sample the original mortar to try and come up with something that matches the original plaster. The architect says it will probably be a combination of one part calcium carbonate to twenty-five parts lime. There are only about two people in Britain who can actually do it. It’s a listed house. We need to be faithful to the original spirit of the building.”

“I just don’t get why we need to do all this. The people we’re buying from have been living quite happily there for almost half a century.”

“It’s what we agreed. You were at the meeting. And their taste is diabolical. I can’t live with all that chintz.”

“We can’t afford it.” Now it was Bryony’s turn to look incredulous. She paused for a moment, then leaned toward him on her elbows, fingers firmly entwined until her wedding ring was hidden, and smiled.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Nick,” she said calmly.

“Why can’t we do half now and the rest later?”

“That will end up costing even more, and it will be even longer before it’s all finished. I don’t see what you’re so worried about.”

Bryony picked up the newspaper and flicked through to the business pages until she found today’s story about Lehman’s results.

“It says here that things are better than expected and that your bosses think the worst of the contraction is over.” She ran her finger over the headline until the tip blackened. “‘Lehman Net Falls Less Than Expected.’ You’re being too much of a bear.”

“Fuld is deluded. They’re on a spending spree when everyone else is tightening their belts. They’re buying hedge funds at the top of the market, buying back stock to impress investors, investing in real estate when they should be selling it. We have loans on our books worth thirty-four times the value of the bank. I honestly think they’ve gone mad. And I’m not alone.”

“Have you spoken to anyone senior?” Bryony asked in a tone that suggested she hoped that he hadn’t.

“In a conference call today, I tried to point out that in June, Merrill had nineteen CDOs that couldn’t be moved at the right price. They told me I was being overcautious and uncreative,” Nick said. “We’re at the top of the market. I can smell it. And Fuld still wants more risk.”

“Lehman’s shares have gone up today again, and you’re sitting on a pile of stock, so please can we just give the green light to the architect, and then I can put this to one side and focus on work again?” Bryony paused for a moment. “I can always put some of my money into it and ask Dad to chip in with the rest.”

“You are not to do that, Bryony,” Nick said, his hand curling into a fist.

“I want to have Dad’s seventieth-birthday party at the new house next June. Time isn’t on our side, Nick.”

•   •   •

So when Izzy slouched
across to the table, carrying a bowl of muesli and yogurt, the early-evening snack recommended by the eating-disorders counselor, instead of praising her for eating sensibly, Bryony and Nick flew at her over her choice of outfit.

“You cannot go to the Wilbrahams’ house looking like that! What will she think?” spluttered Bryony. “You look like a punk.”

“I am a punk,” retorted Izzy, through thick layers of purple lipstick that reminded Ali of the raspberry jelly the twins had eaten for tea.

“Punk died in the 1980s,” said Bryony.

“Jacobean houses died in the sixteenth century,” said Izzy. “Anyway, I’m a post-punk.”

“Seventeenth, actually,” Bryony corrected her.

“I don’t care if you’re a prehistoric punk, you look a mess,” said Nick, shaking his head at Bryony as though this was all her fault. “I can’t believe your school tolerates you dressing like this.”

“All my school cares about is how I perform in my exams,” Izzy retorted. “Anyway, I might look like a mess on the outside, but I’m less of a mess on the inside. You’re always saying in front of the counselor that you love me for what I am, not how I look, so you should try and see beyond the shell to what lies beneath.”

“You’re being completely unreasonable, Izzy,” said Bryony. Her tone softened. “Why don’t we go to Selfridges this weekend? I’ll call my personal shopper and book an appointment. You can buy what you like. God, I can even see the Oxfam label hanging off that leather jacket.”

“Has your BlackBerry buzzed to remind you to spend quality time with your daughter?” said Izzy. She was holding a small mirror and applying kohl around her eyes. When she had finished she snapped the mirror shut and stared at Bryony.

“If I spent my days shopping and baking cakes or sat with you while you did your homework, wouldn’t you question the purpose of your education?” Bryony asked. “I’m not going to apologize for having a job. And one day you’ll thank me for it.”

Jake came into the kitchen and announced he was going out with friends. He was meant to be working in the weeks before he started at Oxford in the first week of October, but despite endless discussion of work-experience possibilities—a week with Julian Peters at the BBC, a couple of days of filing for his godmother at the Financial Services Authority, and a stint at an advertising agency belonging to another friend of his parents’—nothing had materialized, because Jake couldn’t be bothered to make the calls. Ali half wondered if she could volunteer to go instead of him.

“What makes life worth living isn’t the pursuit of happiness but the happiness of pursuit. I’m trying to move away philosophically from the concept that money buys you happiness, because I don’t see much evidence to endorse that particular belief system around here,” Izzy continued. “And I can’t do this Saturday because I’m spending the day at Aunt Hester’s. Rick is giving me his old electric guitar. I’m done with the cello. The Beethoven quartet is possibly my swan song.”

Ali winced. Izzy really knew how to deliver the knockout blows.

“I can’t deal with this, I need to get to work,” Nick suddenly announced.

“Dad, it’s eight o’clock at night,” said Izzy.

“Come on, Nick,” said Bryony, her tone softening. She leaned over the kitchen table and rested her hand on top of his. Nick’s fingers tensed beneath. “Lehman’s has just written down seven hundred million dollars from their balance sheet to cover subprime losses, surely you’ve covered your back?”

“By my calculations we have about twenty-two billion dollars illiquid and impossible-to-price level-three mortgage assets on our books,” said Nick, his nails scratching the table backward and forward beneath Bryony’s hand. “No one wants to touch CDOs, Bryony.” He leaned over the table toward her. “When this ship sinks, it will make Enron look like a storm in a teacup, and if you go on like this it’ll take us down with it. The entire New Labour project is nothing more than temporary prosperity built on illusion. This has all the classic signs of a bubble bursting.”

“So what shall I tell the architect, Nostradamus?”

“I don’t care.” Then he got up from the table, straightened the architect’s plans, lined up pens and pencils, and left the room.

•   •   •

“I’m not getting changed,”
Izzy reiterated, as Nick went upstairs.

“Are you trying to make yourself as unattractive as possible?” Jake asked his sister as he came downstairs and headed straight to the toaster with a couple of slices of white bread. Malea rushed forward to take them from his hand and put them in.

“I want to write my own script, not follow someone else’s,” Izzy said. “It’s a noble aspiration.”

“Which self-help book are you channeling today?” Jake responded.

“At least I’m exploring my own individuality instead of subsuming my ego in a middle-aged relationship. It’s pathetic the way you and Lucy are joined at the hip.”

This was a new theme in Jake’s post-Corfu relationship with Lucy. It had been noted by Foy in front of the rest of the family and within earshot of Ali on the last day of the holiday that Lucy referred to herself only in the first person plural. (“When we are back in London . . . When we invite friends round for dinner . . . When we go to Scotland with my parents.”)