What the Nanny Saw (24 page)

Jake sat upright, assiduously rubbing Lucy’s back. He started at the top, spending equal amounts of time on each shoulder blade before squeezing a trickle of coconut suntan oil down the back of her spine to the spot where flesh met bikini bottoms. His finger traced a line back toward her neck through the trickle of suntan oil, and she stretched appreciatively, like a cat in the sun.

Ali coughed and the twins shouted, but Jake and Lucy couldn’t hear them over the sound of the waterfalls. After a while the babbling started to grate on your nerves. Corfu was surprisingly noisy. Last night the cicadas chattered nonstop, occasionally outdone by screaming owls that pierced the stifling hot night air. Could you turn the waterfalls off? Ali wondered. The idea made her want to giggle. But it also made her nostalgic, because the reason she found it so intrusive was that these weren’t the sounds that she associated with the sea. She missed the greedy, reckless emotion of the North Sea and its loud, noisy seduction technique. She loved its uncompromising quality.

Then, in the middle of the night, the sound of Lucy and Jake having sex in the room above had woken her. At first she had tried to ignore them, but when Lucy’s cries got louder she got up to search through the bookshelf, hoping to find something to distract her. She quickly realized she was in a room intended for children. It was all
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Dr. Seuss, and Enid Blyton. So instead she went out onto the balcony that led from her room.

On the balcony outside his bedroom in the main part of the house, Ali had noticed Nick sitting on a chair with his laptop on his knees. Once or twice he glanced over to Jake and Lucy’s room. She could see in the hazy light of the computer screen that he was chewing his upper lip. He stretched his arms, and Ali was surprised to see his hands were trembling.

When she was sure he couldn’t see her, she stood for a moment with her eyes closed, listening to the voice of the Mediterranean. Its whispered promises and dull lapping couldn’t compete with Lucy’s high-pitched animal cries, and in the end Ali resorted to a pair of earplugs that she found in the bathroom alongside small bottles of shampoo and body wash. They muffled the noise, but she could still feel the vibrations of the headboard beating against the wall. At least Jake knew how to give a girl a good time, thought Ali, although Lucy was undoubtedly the kind of girl who was polite enough to fake it.

•   •   •

Remembering this,
she now waved at Jake, hoping to catch his attention, but he was focused on Lucy’s long brown legs. He began rubbing oil into her feet, paying equal attention to each toe. Ali watched with the twins in fascinated silence as his hand began a slow-motion drift to the edge of Lucy’s bikini bottoms. His hand lingered between her legs, and she turned onto her back to face him. The twins drew closer.

“Bosoms,” they shouted in unison. Lucy sat up in shock and reached for her bikini top from a small mosaic table. Jake stood up in front of her to provide a screen and walked toward them.

“You should have said you were here,” he reproached Ali, as Hector and Alfie jumped into the pool. “It’s not fair on Lucy. She needs her privacy.”

Ali glanced over at Lucy, who looked gratified by Jake’s response.

“We tried,” said Ali, demonstrating to Jake how she waved at him and how the twins jumped up and down shouting.

“Is this revenge for me sneaking up on you and Dad?” asked Jake, with a half-smile.

“What do you mean?” asked Ali.

“You know what I’m talking about,” said Jake.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” said Ali.

“I know what I saw.” Jake shrugged.

“Ali, would you be an absolute star and fetch a couple of Diet Cokes from the house?” shouted Lucy. “Andromede failed to stock up the fridge in the pool house last night. I’ll have a swim with the twins while you’re gone. And if you could bring my book I’d be so fantastically grateful.”

“Sure,” said Ali, going into the pool house to check whether Lucy was correct or just wanted to assert her authority. She was relieved to escape. Tita hadn’t shown her the inside of the building yesterday, and it gave her an excuse to stand still for a moment and get her bearings. Her breath was uneven. She was shaken by Jake’s outburst. It wasn’t the substance that bothered her. She could see how he had come to the wrong conclusions. It was the way his emotions were so close to the surface, threatening to spill over at any moment. Perhaps he would tell his mother what he had seen. And then Ali would lose her job and return to Cromer in disgrace, punished for the wrong affair.

“Why now?” she wanted to ask him. “Just when I’m almost perfectly happy.”

Ali looked round the pool house. It was so much more than a changing room. From Tita’s remark, she had imagined something like the garden shed where her father kept his fishing tackle and an old transistor radio that ran on batteries. Instead it was a perfectly formed Lilliputian house complete with a kitchen, bar, and sofas.

The fridge door was neatly packed with rows of beer, cans of Sprite, and orange juice. There was a large plate of watermelon on one of the shelves and half a dozen oranges on another. But there was no Diet Coke. She glanced out the window toward Lucy. Lucy caught her eye and shrugged apologetically without making any attempt to get up. She was playing Uno on the sunbed with Hector and Alfie, Jake straddled behind her with his head leaning on her shoulder. Ali slammed the fridge door in anger at Lucy’s demands. A couple of mobile phones tumbled into the sink. They must belong to Nick, thought Ali. She would take them back to the house immediately. It would take the sting out of Lucy’s request.

Ali set off back up the hill to the house, her breath quickening as the path got steeper. She enjoyed the sensation of the sun burning deep inside her lungs. When she was halfway up she stopped for a moment and sat down to look at the view across the bay. In the distance a huge passenger ship slowly crossed her line of vision. She squinted to try to make out its flag. In her hand one of the Black-Berrys vibrated. Ali looked down at the screen and pressed the e-mail icon to check whether she was delivering the phone to the right person. She was gratified to see a raft of messages relating to Nick’s deal.

“Congratulations,” read one. “Only you could make junk look so beautiful.”

There was a request from the World Economic Forum asking Nick to discuss credit markets at their next meeting in Davos. “I’m not worried about flat yield curves . . .” began another. Maybe he wouldn’t need to fly home after all, thought Ali, turning her attentions to the second BlackBerry. It would be great for the twins to spend some time with their father. They spent too much time with women.

Glancing through the e-mail messages, Ali quickly realized that the second BlackBerry belonged to Bryony. The top three messages were unread. “
FT
daily brief,” “4am cut,” “Lex.” The fourth one was marked confidential and had been opened. “Project Beethoven,” it said. “Russian energy bid—private and confidential.”

•   •   •

“Your phone,” said Ali,
finding Nick still sitting at the breakfast table.

“Thanks so much.” He smiled, pushing his sunglasses onto the top of his head so that she could see his eyes. “It’s a good sign that I forgot to bring it up with me. Means I’m not resisting the holiday. Did you bring the other one, too?”

“Do you mean Bryony’s?”

“I’m tending her phone so that she can have a lie-in.” He smiled through recently rewhitened teeth. Nick was sitting in his swimming trunks, and Ali couldn’t help comparing his upper body with Jake’s. The frame was identical, but the contours were softer. Like raw meat wrapped in cellophane. When he was home, Nick went running almost every day and came home to complete a grueling circuit of stomach crunches and weights in the basement gym.

“There’s something I wanted to mention to you,” Ali said impulsively.

“Go right ahead,” said Nick, looking amused. He closed
The Economist
and put it neatly on the table beside him. “I’m all yours. For the next five minutes, at least. Then I need to make some calls.”

He glanced down through the new messages on his BlackBerry. “Bear Stearns triggers Dow crash,” read the headline of a Reuters story. He opened it and swore under his breath.

“Has something happened?” Ali asked.

“One of the ratings agencies has downgraded Bear Stearns’s debt to negative from stable,” he said vaguely, as though unaware he was talking to Ali. “It was heavily invested in subprime.”

“Is this a bad moment?” Ali asked.

“A bad moment for the world economy, but actually it strengthens my argument,” said Nick, looking up from his BlackBerry. “What did you want to say?”

“Do you remember when Jake came into the drawing room in London last autumn and found me sitting on the sofa with you at five-thirty in the morning?” she said, deciding that precision was the only weapon with which to fight the embarrassment of what she was about to say.

“Vaguely,” said Nick.

“Well, he seems to have drawn the wrong conclusions,” said Ali, adopting a forthright tone that seemed appropriate in the circumstances.

“What exactly do you mean?” asked Nick, leaning forward to squint at Ali with his piercing blue eyes.

“He thought that something had happened between us,” said Ali, staring at Nick without blinking.

“Why on earth would he think that?” asked Nick in astonishment.

“Your zip was half undone, and I suppose I was only wearing a T-shirt and cardigan, and maybe we looked as though we had been . . . as though we might have been . . . intimate,” she continued, immediately berating her absurdly Victorian choice of adjective.

“I see,” said Nick in a neutral tone. “Is this what Jake has indicated to you?”

“He has always been cool toward me, but today he specifically insinuated that this is what he believed,” said Ali, sounding calmer than she felt.

“And what do you want me to do about it?” asked Nick.

“I don’t know,” said Ali, looking down at her feet. “Maybe tell him the truth?”

“What did you see when you came into the drawing room?” asked Nick. Ali was surprised by the question.

“I saw you sitting on the sofa with your zip halfway down, looking at something on Jake’s computer,” she said.

“And what did you assume?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ali lied.

“I think that you thought I was looking at porn,” said Nick, “and that I was using Jake’s computer so it wouldn’t come up on my history.” There was a long silence.

“I never imagined having this conversation with my children’s nanny,” said Nick, shaking his head. The sunglasses slid onto the table, but he didn’t attempt to pick them up.

“I don’t judge you for looking at porn,” said Ali quickly, “but you need to tell Jake that’s what you were doing, because frankly it’s the lesser evil.”

“How about I had just come home from the mother of all trips and I was assuming that no one would come into the room, so I’d undone my trousers and let it all hang out and was using two computers because I wanted to look at yield curves on one screen and write a document on the other?” said Nick.

“Then I would say that I made the wrong assumptions, too,” said Ali. Nick gave a hollow laugh.

“I’ll have a word with Jake,” he said, tapping the table with his fingers. “You know there is a historical precedent for this.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ali. Nick took a deep breath.

“When Jake was little, about ten years old, he caught Foy having sex with Julian Peterson’s wife, Eleanor, when they were on holiday here together.” Nick sighed. “It was before they had bought their own house. Jake went down to the pool house one night to fetch a jar of grasshoppers that he had collected. The door was open, he went inside, and he saw Foy screwing Eleanor Peterson. They didn’t see him. Can you imagine what a sight that was? Foy’s trousers halfway down his arse and Eleanor’s skirt up around her waist. Granted, Eleanor is a good-looking woman who has grown old more gracefully than many, but she was almost sixty at the time. Between them, there was more than a hundred years of flesh lying on the table.”

“The table?” repeated Ali.

“She was lying on the table, like a buffet,” said Nick distractedly. “Jake came and found me and told me what was going on. We never said anything to anyone else. Tita must have known. Bryony and Hester have no idea.”

They heard the sound of voices approaching.

“Can I have Bryony’s phone, please?” said Nick, holding out his hand. He took the phone and for a brief moment their fingers clumsily touched. Ali blushed with embarrassment. Foy appeared from the front of the house wearing a pair of sandy-colored shorts that did up above his belly button, emphasizing his girth.

“Les invités sont arrivés!”
Foy announced triumphantly. He came outside with Hester’s daughters under one arm and Izzy under the other, commenting on how tiny Izzy felt in his embrace. But it was a ruse to underplay the more conspicuous changes to Izzy’s appearance: she had dyed her hair crow-black and cut a ragged fringe high on her forehead; her nails were painted with black nail varnish, and she was wearing purple lipstick; her eyebrows were dyed black. She was wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off, a short miniskirt, and big black boots.

“God, Izzy, what have you done to yourself?” said Nick. “Bryony! Bryony! Come out here.”

Bryony emerged from the house with Tita and Hester. Hester had obviously added to the drama of the occasion by mentioning nothing to her sister or mother.

“She’s become a post-punk,” said Hester in the face of Bryony’s awed silence.

“Why have you made yourself so deliberately ugly?” asked Bryony. She looked as though she was about to cry. She turned to Hester.

“How could you let her do this?” she asked.

“It had nothing to do with me,” Hester protested. “She went to Camden Market looking perfectly normal and came back looking like this.”

“It’s all about self-expression,” said Izzy. “Hester had nothing to do with it.”

“If you try and tell me that this has happened because I work full-time, I will probably resort to physical violence,” Bryony shouted at Hester.