What the Nanny Saw (34 page)

“I don’t know why you feel sorry for him,” said Izzy, outraged. “He deserves to have his bollocks cut off.”

“Izzy!” said Bryony.

“It’s a bad situation for everyone,” said Nick, trying to backtrack. “Not something you want a lot of people to know about. And everyone obviously does. How did they find out all the gory details?”

“Martha hasn’t set the personal setting on her Facebook page,” Izzy explained.

“Then what happened?” asked Bryony. They both turned toward their daughter, totally focused on what she might say next.

“Katya told Sophia that Ned wanted to leave her and they were planning to move in together. She said they were in love and they’d been having an affair for more than a year. Ned denied all of this, apart from the length of time they’d been seeing each other, and said straightaway that he had no intention of separating from Sophia.”

“I can’t believe any man would seriously contemplate divorcing his wife to marry the nanny,” said Bryony.

“Easier than introducing a stranger into the family,” observed Nick. “The children love her, and Ned says she’s a great cook.”

“When did he tell you that?” Bryony asked.

“We’re getting off message,” said Izzy, using one of her mother’s favorite phrases.

“Poor Katya,” muttered Ali unthinkingly. She checked her phone to see if there were any messages from her. Bryony and Nick turned round. They had evidently forgotten that Ali was in the room with them.

“Did you know anything about this, Ali?” Bryony asked in an interested rather than accusatory tone.

Ali stared at the computer screen for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “She’s had a difficult life,” she stammered, and her face reddened.

“It’s no excuse,” said Bryony, clearly uninterested in Katya’s background. “I’ll give Sophia a call right away and see if there’s anything we can do to help. And I don’t want Katya in this house again. Please, Ali.”

“In case she’s contagious?” interrupted Izzy. “Why are you all blaming her?”

“I can’t believe it,” said Nick, shaking his head.

“Which bit?” asked Bryony.

“I can’t believe she’d sleep with an ugly bastard like him,” he said, and laughed.

Bryony glanced down at the guest list for Foy’s party and struck off the Wilbrahams with a flourish of black pen.

“Makes rejigging the seating plan easier, anyway,” observed Nick.

“Have you got something to wear for tomorrow night, Ali?” Bryony asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Because there’s a dress that doesn’t fit me that I think will really suit you. It’s Marc Jacobs.”

“Thanks, Bryony,” said Ali, who had the distinct feeling that she was being bought off but was unsure of the exact nature of the deal. Was Bryony trying to reassure her, to underline that she didn’t think Ali would do anything like that with her husband? Or was it an attempt to buy her loyalty because she thought she might?

“I’m not for sale,” Ali wanted to tell her.

•   •   •

Thornberry Manor
did not improve on acquaintance, but Ali suspected it was the style of architecture rather than the atmosphere inside the Jacobean house. The paneling and mullioned windows made the interior gloomy, and the endless carvings and cornicing made Ali feel queasy, as though she had eaten too much Christmas cake.

It was, however, a great venue for a party. It stood on a hill in twenty acres of gardens and woodlands. From the first floor there were wide views across the undulating Cotswold countryside. There were several rooms big enough to hold hundreds of guests, and even though the building work wasn’t yet completed, it was far from the disaster anticipated by Bryony four weeks earlier.

A series of painted murals of sibyls and prophets in the great chamber on the first floor hadn’t yet been restored, but a clever interior decorator had covered the peeling paintwork with a couple of Barcheston tapestries decorated with flowers and mythological motifs. The library was completely untouched but wouldn’t be needed. And work had only just begun on the ribbons-and-roses plaster in the Long Room, where later there would be a disco with a DJ chosen by Jake. As Bryony explained, during a tour of the house for her family and Ali, these were minor details, because most of the party would take place in the tent erected on the front lawn.

The house reminded Ali of Foy. The outside was a strange combination of bluster and conservative restraint. It was built in a rigid, symmetrical E shape. But the five tall gables and eleven heavily ornamented bay windows across the front immediately contradicted this rigor. Inside were ornately carved wall panels. Then, suddenly, there were touches of wild excess: pendants that dripped from ceilings like icing, bacchanalian friezes painted on the walls, and fireplaces carved with swords and shields. The roof was a garbled complex of shaped gables and domes that could be reached from the long hall that stretched across the whole of the third floor. The house demanded attention.

“She’s got a very big house, a very big house in the country,” Izzy sang to the tune of a Blur song as she tried to keep up with her mother, who was leading them through the arched doorway at the front of the house and into the garden.

“I can’t see,” said Alfie, blinking away tears from his eyes as he walked from the dark oak-paneled hall into the glare of the June sunshine.

“I don’t like it here,” declared Hector. “I want to go home.”

“You’ve done a wonderful job, darling,” said Tita. “I can’t imagine where you find the time.”

“Everyone needs an Ali.” Bryony smiled warmly as she explained that Ali had worked almost every weekend for the past couple of months to allow her to visit the house to monitor progress. Ali would have described it differently. It was Bryony’s sheer force of will that had driven the project. The architect was terrified of the way her cajoling, friendly tone could so quickly turn threatening. He had once confided in Ali that he felt as though he was involved in an abusive relationship.

Bryony continued the tour. She explained that the Sundial Garden adjacent to the lawn where the tent was pitched had box-edged beds filled with the heady scent of Hidcote lavender, roses, clematis, and salvias, planted by the previous owners of the house. And since it looked as though the weather was going to hold, not many of the elderly guests would even need to go into the house, except to use the bathrooms on the ground floor, where their attention would be taken up by the restless trails of vines and flowers, ribs and pendants on the ceiling of the main entrance hall, and a montage of photos of Tita and Foy taken over the years.

“The able-bodied should go up to the long gallery on the first floor and take a look at the view across the Cotswolds before it gets dark,” suggested Bryony.

“Great excuse to escape from a drudge,” Foy boomed. “Don’t want to get cornered by Eleanor Peterson.”

“You’re meant to be sitting next to her at dinner,” Bryony warned him.

“Can’t I have a young filly instead?” whined Foy. “How am I meant to make a speech about seventy being the new fifty when I’m sitting next to someone who makes me feel as though I’m the old eighty?”

“Like who?” asked Bryony, aware she needed to both humor her father and keep him in line. Not for the first time, she wondered how her mother had managed to walk this tightrope for the past fifty years.

“How about Sonia Gonzalez?” suggested Tita. “She’s a psychologist. Very interesting—”

“I don’t want interesting, I want entertaining,” interrupted Foy.

“Sarah Kempe?” said Bryony.

“Too home counties and she falls asleep when she’s drunk.”

“Caroline Peploe?”

“Doesn’t let me get a word in edgeways.”

“Who do you propose, then?” said Bryony.

“Ali?” said Foy hopefully.

Everyone turned to stare at Ali, who felt herself blushing as pink as the roses in the flower bed behind her. She stared fixedly at the sundial, wondering whether the arrows were set correctly, or if the builders had inadvertently turned them the wrong way. If they asked her to sit next to Foy she would have to invent an illness or throw herself out of a window on the first floor, like the lady of the house in the sixteenth century who discovered her husband had fathered a child with a chambermaid. Foy was impossible when he was drunk.

“Ali needs to look after the twins, unless you want them on the table, too?” said Bryony, calling his bluff.

“Lucky escape,” Jake muttered from the back of the group. He had just arrived from the train station, a fact that prompted a round of comments about his newfound evangelism for public transport. He explained that he’d be driving back to Oxford with friends the following day. He looked tanned and relaxed, comfortable in his skin, thought Ali. His hair was so long and curly that it reached his improbably long eyelashes. He stood slightly apart from the rest of the family, joking with Ali about the potential pitfalls of being seated next to his grandfather.

“Lucy, then,” Foy proposed.

“Fine by me.” Jake shrugged.

“Won’t she be upset if she’s not sitting next to you?” Tita questioned Jake.

“She’ll take it as a compliment,” he reassured her.

“She’ll interpret it as a sign that she has been taken even deeper into the bosom of the Skinner family,” Izzy teased him.

“What should we do with Eleanor, then?” asked Bryony, as though trying to decide how to dispose of an unwanted Christmas present.

“Stick her next to Sophia Wilbraham’s father,” said Foy. “Or Sophia’s boring husband.”

“He’s not boring, Grandpa,” said Izzy. “In fact, he’s very unboring.”

“More significantly, he’s not coming,” interjected Bryony. “So we don’t need to talk about him at all.”

As she went into the tent, Bryony fielded calls on her BlackBerry: No, it wasn’t possible for the chief executive of the Ukrainian energy company to speak directly to the editor of the
Financial Times
about negative coverage; in fact, given his past, he should keep his profile as low as possible. Yes, she could pull the press release about the French supermarket chain that was going to put in a bid for its English counterpart next week, because the deal had been delayed.

In between calls she issued short, clear responses to last-minute questions posed by Fi Seldon-Kent, who had been charged with organizing the party. Yes, Foy would need a microphone to make his speech. No, presents shouldn’t be brought into the tent. Yes, champagne should be available all evening. No, there weren’t any restrictions on where guests could mingle. This was welcome news to Jake and Izzy, who had each been allowed to invite twenty friends and were now regretting the responsibility that rested on their shoulders to make sure they had a good time.

“I can’t believe this is our house,” said Jake, who had seen it only once before.

“Most of it isn’t,” Nick observed wryly.

“What do you mean?” asked Jake.

“The bank owns most of it,” said Nick.

The only person who sounded as though she belonged to the house was Bryony. She had already absorbed its history as if it were her own. She explained to Foy that it had been constructed in 1624 by a merchant, during the consumer boom fueled by the price of wool. Foy said that was more romantic than the house being bought by a banker who had made a fortune on a credit boom fueled largely by selling dodgy mortgages.

“He couldn’t have bought it without me, Dad.” Bryony bristled. She went on with her story. The same family had stayed here for almost three centuries. The crests depicting rams’ heads and sparrow hawks in the hall belong to them.

Their tenure ended when the then lady of the manor fell in love with a local squire and poisoned her husband with laudanum. The house was sold to a Victorian art dealer who then bought most of the oak and walnut furniture that still remained. In the early twentieth century it had been used as a billet by the army and then been abandoned until its last makeover in the 1950s.

“I see they think Lehman’s is going to be the next domino to fall, Nick?” said Foy.

“This isn’t the moment, Dad,” warned Bryony.

“I can’t believe they sold mortgages to those samurais,” said Foy.

“Do you mean ninjas?” asked Nick. “No income, no job or assets?”

“Whatever,” said Foy, his argument weakened by his misuse of the terminology. “Knowing that after two years they’d be paying ten percent interest. And I can’t believe that you turned these into securities that were meant to be as low-risk as government bonds and that my pension fund has bloody well bought them.”

“If house prices had kept rising there wouldn’t have been a problem,” said Nick. “People could have kept taking out equity to pay their mortgage.”

“To be fair, Nick has been trying to raise this issue for more than a year,” interrupted Bryony. “He’s really put his head above the parapet.”

“Your shares in Lehman’s must be worth half what they were a year ago,” said Foy. “You should have got out then. It’s knowing when to call the market that sorts the men from the boys.”

“Just as well Mum works, too, then,” said Izzy, who had become almost as good at dissipating tension as she was at heightening it. Bryony smiled gratefully at her.

“Well, I hope this party is paid for with real money,” said Foy. “Now there’s a credit crunch, organic food is going the way of the dodo and farmed smoked salmon is about as popular as a pedophile at a children’s party, so I can’t help out.”

“Enough, Foy,” said Tita firmly. He fell silent. Not a good idea to be rude to someone who will be making a speech about you in eight hours’ time, thought Ali. She looked at Nick’s face, but it revealed nothing. It struck her that she might have worked in his home for the best part of two years, but she knew little more about him than when she first walked through the door.

 19 

Sitting at the dinner table later that night with Alfie and Hector, Hester’s younger daughter Ella, and an assortment of other children in the center of the tent made Ali both conspicuous and inconspicuous. She was highly visible as the only adult at the table, yet no one at the party wanted to talk to her apart from the children. They were drunk on forbidden fizzy drinks begged from waitresses who weren’t accustomed to refusing requests from demanding guests. And there were too many children to interrupt the supply chain. One of them had eaten the decorative rose petals scattered on the table and choked so much she had been sick. Another had stuck a chip so far up his nostril that he had a nosebleed.

This was the only part of Bryony’s plan that had failed. Katya was meant to be here to help Ali. After yesterday’s news, however, she was persona non grata, although as Ali wandered around the garden with the twins before dinner it seemed every other conversation involved her name. “Thomas hasn’t stopped crying since she left . . .” “Did you know she pretended to be pregnant . . . ?” “She used to be a prostitute . . .” “Apparently she’s done this kind of thing before.”

It was inaccurate to say the battle lines were quickly drawn over Katya and Ned’s affair, because that would suggest some people allied themselves with the twenty-seven-year-old Ukrainian who had been foolish enough to believe she was the object of a man’s love. Katya was portrayed as a scheming siren who had beguiled a good man by stealing his wife’s place in the kitchen and then the bedroom. Ned was viewed as a weak man, unable to resist the advances of a femme fatale. No one knew where Katya had gone. Not even Mira. Katya had given her mobile phone back to Sophia and left no forwarding address. Ali had received one message from her.

“I am expendable,” it read.

“So am I,” Ali wrote back. Mira was right. It was a mistake to view her job working for the Skinners as anything more than a straightforward business transaction. All it would take was one lapse of judgment and Ali would share the same fate as Katya. Why was there any reason to believe that her messy arrival into their life wouldn’t be followed by her messy departure? The Skinners were careless with people, even those they called their friends. Ali’s thoughts were rambling and incoherent, like the contradictory currents of a tide turning.

Twice during the meal, Hector accidentally spilled his Coca-Cola over the black dress that Bryony had pressed into her hands the previous evening, insisting it would suit Ali better than it suited her, and suggesting that if she didn’t like it she could sell it on eBay. Ali left the tent to go to the bathroom in the house to wipe down the dress. Each time she considered not returning. Once she got as far as the first-floor library and stared out across the countryside, wondering where the nearest town was. It was dusk, and instead of finding the soft pastel sun setting behind the hills uplifting and bucolic, she felt claustrophobic.

“Landlocked,” she muttered as she forced herself back into the tent. No one heard, and if they had, no one would have been interested. The only person who had greeted her by name so far was Felix Naylor, who had made a point of coming over to the dinner table to say hello and to ask whether she could recommend him a good book. Julian Peterson had walked straight past her.

Although the stain on her dress was invisible, the sugar made it stick unpleasantly against her thigh and ensured that Leicester wouldn’t leave her alone. Ali slouched on her chair behind the bowl of flowers in the middle of the table, grateful for the pole supporting the roof of the tent that stood beside her. Her table was called Cromer Crab in her honor, the only one not named after an Indian province.

Her feelings of alienation were magnified by the fact that Bryony had forgotten to warn the catering staff that there was an adult at the table. So Ali found herself eating tiny burgers made of organic steak with chips as thin as matchsticks and drinking Coca-Cola while everyone else tucked into kumquat lamb tagine and spiced poussins with salt lemon and drank Domaine de Sahari.

“We need to pee,” said Hector, pulling at her dress.

“You can go together,” said Ali, pushing his glass into the middle of the table again.

“What happens if the ghost of the woman who threw herself out of the window lands on us just as we’re going through the door?” Hector asked.

“Ghosts don’t weigh anything,” smiled Ali, stroking his cheek. “You’ll be fine. Your brother will look after you.”

After pudding was served, Nick stood up and announced that he wanted to make a toast to Foy, who would then respond with “a few words of his own.” As Nick hoped, everyone roared at the absurdity of Foy limiting himself to a few words. He efficiently raised the microphone by a couple of inches, telling the audience that he would lower it again for his father-in-law, prompting another wave of laughter. Despite her mood, Ali smiled. She saw Rick roll his eyes. Nick’s two inches of superior height had always been a ridiculous bone of contention between him and Foy. Nick took a conventional approach to speech making. At least at the beginning. He delivered a witty and concise round of thank-yous that, to her embarrassment, included Ali, “the linchpin of the Skinner family.”

“Enough of the pretense that I’m part of the family,” she wanted to shout. “I’m not a saint. I’m paid to be helpful.” He remembered to say thank you to both Bryony and Hester for organizing the party, even though Hester had done little apart from shuffling the seating plan to her advantage at the last minute. On cue, Maud and Izzy presented their mothers with bunches of flowers that were bigger than they were.

Ali stopped listening for a few minutes. Everyone knew that Nick and Foy disliked each other, or at least Nick disliked Foy, because most of Foy’s opinions were short-lived, and it seemed an absurd charade to hear him extolling his virtues like this. Then it occurred to her that perhaps other people didn’t realize because they weren’t exposed to the same conversations that she was.

When she looked up again, the mood in the tent had shifted slightly. People were sitting up a little too straight in their seats. They were a little too attentive. Their smiles with a touch of rictus. Ali caught sight of Julian Peterson. His hard mouth was tighter than usual, a single line of disapproval.

Nick was praising his father-in-law’s spirit, his restless energy, his childlike enthusiasm, and his focus. He described how Foy did everything in pairs. “He reads two books at the same time, he buys two cars at once, and he buys his beloved wife two birthday presents.” At this, Foy leaned over to Tita and kissed her once on each cheek, his lips barely brushing her skin. It was a well-choreographed performance that Ali remembered well because they rarely showed any physical affection. Tita smiled, and with dramatic flourish, blew two kisses back at him.

There was a smart quip about two presents being the least Foy could do for Tita, a woman who had endured almost fifty years of marriage to a man who considered it a big sacrifice not to be allowed to have two wives. A nervous ripple of laughter wound its way round the tent, and at that moment Ali realized there wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know that Foy Chesterton had spent the best part of his married life sleeping with the wife of his best friend. Then, having proved a point to himself and Bryony, Nick backtracked.

He told his favorite story about Foy. This time it highlighted his qualities.

There were two empty cottages on the piece of land owned by Freithshire Fisheries. A Vietnamese family had moved to the village, and they wanted to work at the fish-processing plant. Foy found them all jobs and gave them a house to live in. It had a couple of outhouses that they agreed to rebuild in lieu of rent. They bought a car. They paid him back the rent they owed. They gave up their jobs. They even gave Foy and Tita round-trip first-class tickets to Phnom Penh. At the end of the year they disappeared overnight. The police arrived the following day and discovered both houses had been turned into hydroponic marijuana-growing factories. Nick told this story because he said it showed Foy’s generosity of spirit, his lack of prejudice, and the way he supported the small man. Ali thought it also showed his poor judgment, but she clapped anyway.

Then Foy stood up. He thanked Nick for his kind words. He said his audience would be relieved to hear that he wasn’t going to make two speeches. He folded the two pieces of paper he was holding in half, and put them down on the table. He faced his guests for a moment and began to speak movingly about his family and friends being the tide that had carried him through the past seventy years, and how pleased he was that so many of them were here to help get him through tonight. His comment prompted more laughter than it should, because his audience was looking for release after Nick’s discomforting remarks. He talked of the early days at Freithshire Fisheries, when he had slept in his office to save money on hotels and eaten nothing but smoked salmon for lunch and dinner for weeks at a time.

“I am a self-made man,” he said proudly. “I have worked hard, and I have played hard.” Then he turned to Tita. “I have not always been a good husband. I am not an easy person. But let no one say I haven’t loved this woman for a lifetime.” He described the first time he saw Tita standing on a Scottish moor, standing “in a sea of heather, like a harbor in a storm.” He added something about how Tita was forever associated with the subtle beauty of the moor in all its wild, untamed freedom, an image that Ali found totally at odds with the reality of the constraints of her life. He praised Tita for being her own person, for allowing herself to love him, against her own better instincts (neither of which Ali was sure was true), and for the gift of his two beautiful daughters. He continued in this vein and Ali noticed several people wiping their eyes. Then he looked down at the papers in his hand and asked everyone if they would allow a seventy-year-old man a surprise indulgence.

Bryony and Fi Seldon-Kent exchanged concerned looks at this point, because Foy was deviating from the plan. He took the microphone from its stand, stepped back a couple of paces, and signaled to the pianist in the corner. He played a couple of chords. The pianist at least was in on the secret.

“I want to sing you the song that was playing on the radio the first time I met Tita,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

Then Foy started singing “American Pie.” At first he was a little hesitant, trying too hard for a Don McLean–style American accent. His voice was uncertain, rough round the edges, but he could hold a tune. He urged people to join in, and to Ali’s surprise many people in the room began singing the chorus with him, even Jake’s and Izzy’s friends. As he gained confidence his voice became smoother. By verse three he was the only person in the tent who knew the words. He sang all six verses. And then he went over to Tita, embraced her, and gave her a small box containing a necklace. “Seventy is the beginning of something, not the end,” he told the crowd. Everyone broke into spontaneous applause. Some gave a standing ovation. At the head table only Eleanor Peterson remained seated. Her face was ashen. Julian stiffly put his hand on top of his wife’s, but she savagely shook him off.

•   •   •

After this, Ali handed over
the other children to their parents and left to put the twins to bed. Their room was on the first floor of the house, directly below Ali’s. They made her push the two single beds together and search the cupboards for monsters. They said it was too dark, so Ali put on the bedside lamps and opened the curtains. They worried about the way the breeze blew the curtains into the room and about the shadows cast by the lamps, so Ali shut the curtains, closed the window, and switched off the lights. Then they started talking about how the wooden paneling might hide secret passageways and made Ali tap every corner of every panel to see if any of them opened. In the end Ali promised to sit with them until they had fallen asleep in the same bed and to come and sleep in the one beside them later.

“Why can’t we just have one house and stick with it?” Alfie sobbed into his pillow.

“Why do we have to be on the move all the time?” Hector began to cry.

They were interesting questions. Ali came up with a few hypotheses in her head. Because unhappy people are restless. Because if you earn shitloads of money you have to find a way to spend it. Because if you measure success by what you earn, then the only way to impress other people is to show off what you can buy. Because you are never satisfied with what you’ve got because someone else always has more than you.

“Because you are lucky,” she said. “Imagine yourselves as the wildebeest that we saw in the David Attenborough program, migrating from one place to the other across the African plains. You lead a really exciting life compared to most children.”

They sensed the lack of conviction in her voice.

“Think how many of the wildebeest die during the journey,” whispered Hector.

Ali started to recite from their favorite Dr. Seuss book. “‘Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more . . . oh, ever so much more . . . oh, muchly much-much more unlucky than you!’”

“We could be like the Crumple-horn, Web-footed, Green-bearded Schlottz,” said Hector, “with a tail that’s tied in knots that can’t ever be undone.”

“Or the man who mows the lawn but the faster he mows the faster it grows,” said Alfie. Their eyes finally started to close.

Above her, Ali could hear the dull thud of music coming from the Long Room. Razorlight, Black Eyed Peas, Kaiser Chiefs. All the same music that she used to listen to with Rosa, Maia, and Tom. She felt lonely. Jake and Izzy were dancing with their friends. She would have liked to be there with her own friends, or maybe even to join them. After all, they were only four years younger than her. But it wouldn’t be appropriate, or at least it wouldn’t feel appropriate.

Instead she decided to head upstairs to her own bedroom to collect her belongings. Outside her room, she noticed that the trapdoor that led to the roof was completely open. She craned her neck and saw a perfect square canvas of stars and moon in the sky above. The collapsible ladder was half folded but just within reach. She stretched up to pull it down and climbed up the rungs until she found herself on the lead-tiled roof. It was surprisingly flat. She stood up slowly, tried to get her bearings, and tentatively walked forward a couple of paces, worried about the irresistible pull toward the edge. She guessed she was close to the front of the house on the south side, behind the tip of the gabled window of the twins’ room beneath.