What the Nanny Saw (26 page)

“What a fantastic coincidence,” she trilled.

“Yes, lovely to see you, too,” said Bryony, trying to muster enthusiasm.

Sophia was wearing an expensive-looking floaty silk top over a pair of white trousers, and when she stood up she reminded Ali of a sailing boat turning toward the wind.

“I bumped into Sophia in the supermarket. We know her parents. So do Foy and Tita.” Eleanor beamed at Bryony. “Such a small world.”

“I didn’t realize you were planning to come to Corfu,” said Bryony, in a tone that suggested had she known she might have reconsidered her holiday plans.

“I booked it ages ago, then completely forgot to mention it to you. I’m here for the whole month, but of course I don’t have to rush back to work. Martha would love to see Izzy. Did she bring her cello? They could practice their quartet together.”

Izzy made throat-slitting gestures behind Sophia, in full view of Eleanor Peterson, who nervously suggested she might like to go and swim in the pool with the other children. “Sophia’s nanny is down there, looking after the little ones.”

“Do you fancy a swim, Martha?” Izzy asked, peeling off her T-shirt to reveal a black bikini top and a rib cage like a rack of lamb. It was for Martha’s benefit. Ali knew she was the one who had instigated the snide comments about Izzy’s weight the previous year. Martha remained sullenly in a chair beside her mother. There was nothing in her demeanor to suggest she relished the prospect of spending time with Izzy.

“Would you like a towel, Izzy?” Eleanor inquired.

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

“How about you, Jake? Would you and Lucy like to swim?”

“The cold water would do you good,” said Foy.

“I’m fine, thanks, Eleanor,” said Jake, his voice muffled because Lucy was draped over his knee, obscuring his mouth. He was unerringly polite to Eleanor, but he couldn’t look her in the eye. Lucy shifted in his lap. They settled still and sticky on each other. At one point Ali caught Jake lazily licking Lucy’s shoulder blade.

Sexual attraction is exhausting, thought Ali. Like eczema. The more you scratch, the worse the itch. A memory of her at university, sitting in a lecture on Daniel Defoe, suddenly came to mind. Will MacDonald had been speaking about Defoe’s representation of women. His mouth had opened and shut, but she could hear nothing of what he said, and the sheet of paper on which she was meant to take notes was blank. Yet she could recall the exact sensation of his finger trailing up the inside of her thigh the previous evening as he drove her home from babysitting.

Immediately after the class she went up to his office in the English faculty. She couldn’t speak as he opened the door and then locked it behind him. “Ali,” he whispered throatily as he pressed himself against her. Ali remembered feeling sick with longing. Entwined, they headed in ungraceful side steps toward a coffee-stained sofa beneath the window, pulling at each other’s clothes. He was wearing a belt, and it seemed to take ages for them to get it undone. He pushed a couple of books on the floor, and she lay down on a small pile of unmarked essays. Then he was on top of her, and they kissed so eagerly that their teeth clashed. His hand quickly found its way inside her bra.

An image of Jake as a child stumbling upon Eleanor and his grandfather in the pool house came to Ali.

•   •   •

“Would you like a drink?”
Eleanor asked her.

“No, thanks,” said Ali, holding on tightly to the twins’ hands, more for her own comfort than theirs.

“How about you, Foy?” Eleanor asked. “Shall I get your usual?”

Eleanor’s face was a mass of contradictions that reflected the conundrums life had unexpectedly thrown her way since her husband’s best friend first put a hand on her knee beneath the dinner table in Holland Park Crescent all those years ago. She had been one of the first women in the country to have a face-lift in the 1970s, Foy had told them over a recent Sunday lunch. If you looked closely, you could see the scars from the staples behind her ears. It was one of those dangerous facts that enthralled the twins. She had become a kind of Frankenstein figure to them.

Of course, Foy’s attention had been flattering, but even Eleanor must have realized that it had less to do with her and more to do with the fact that she was married to Julian. Foy and Julian might have been childhood friends, yet his instincts were purely competitive. But Ali knew that if you have sex with someone a couple of times, it can easily develop into a habit, and she imagined that neither Eleanor nor Foy were prone to analysis.

So once the relationship had started it probably seemed easier just to keep going. Perhaps it was pleasurable. Foy was undoubtedly a more generous lover than he might otherwise have been, because he knew Eleanor would be drawing comparisons. According to Katya, who had described all this in great detail but refused to reveal her source, Foy took unbelievable risks—in a bubble lift that got stuck while they were skiing in Val d’Isère, knowing Julian and Tita were waiting in the restaurant beneath them; in the bathroom at Nick and Bryony’s house, with Mrs. Thatcher watching them from that photograph; in the pool house in Corfu. Apparently this was the last time.

Which was why, when Foy had finally ended it, it must have been all the more devastating. Although she knew that she was never the only one, the relationship had nourished her for the best part of thirty years, and when it was over Eleanor must have felt as though she was finally enshrouded in the invisible cloak of old age. Undoubtedly the one person in whom she would have liked to confide was married to the man who had caused her so much pain.

“You’ve brought out the wrong olives,” said Julian. Eleanor flushed.

“These are delicious,” said Foy, cramming two or three into his mouth at once. “Much better than mine.” He bent down to give one to Leicester, who spat it out in disgust. Another couple arrived as they were leaving the terrace. He looked vaguely familiar. Julian introduced him to everyone as though he had just produced a rabbit from a hat.

“Chatham House rules, please,” said Julian pompously as he did a round of introductions, which included all the adults present. The new arrival was a friend of their eldest son’s. They had been at Oxford together. He was staying with friends in the village.

Ali didn’t catch his name, but she could tell from the way Foy headed toward him that it was someone who merited attention. They began talking about the yacht anchored on the other side of the bay opposite the Rothschild residence. It belonged to a Russian oligarch, Foy explained.

“It’s one of the biggest yachts in the world. There’s a helicopter pad on the roof and a swimming pool on the prow. Makes my Silvestris look like a rowing boat.”

“I’ve been on it,” said the new guest, knowing everyone would find this tantalizing.

“How was the décor?” Eleanor asked.

“All gold taps and leather,” Ali heard the guest say as she headed off down the path toward the pool with Leicester and the twins.

It wasn’t until the journey home that Ali realized it was the shadow chancellor and his wife.

•   •   •

“Do you think
they’re still in love?” Katya asked Ali as they sat companionably at the edge of the enormous new pool, their feet dangling in the water, watching the children swim. It was the sort of question that Katya liked to slip into conversation, and one of the reasons that made her both exhilarating and exhausting company. She stumbled from distance to intimacy like a child fiddling with a camera lens.

Ali was still struggling to adjust to Katya’s surprise appearance at the Petersons’ party. It said a lot for her friend’s adaptability that she didn’t seemed remotely phased.

“I think they’re too young to know. When you’re eighteen, love and lust mean pretty much the same thing.”

“I didn’t mean Jake and Lucy.” Katya laughed as they both stared at them. “I meant the golden couple, Nick and Bryony.”

Ali did a quick head count in the pool because Katya had eyes only for Thomas, even though he was wearing armbands. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” Ali murmured under her breath as she accounted for all the children in her charge.

Hector and Alfie were with Thomas in the shallow end, playing a game that involved rescuing insects from the pool with a fishing net and nursing them back to health in a makeshift Lego hospital they had built under the long, thin shade of a cypress tree. Leo was at the other end receiving a diving lesson from Hester’s oldest daughter, Maud.

Izzy and her younger cousin, Ella, were working out a synchronized swimming routine. Izzy’s black bikini showed off her newly pierced tummy button to best effect. All that remained of her post-punk credentials were the jet-black hair and black nail varnish, the pale foundation and dark lipstick that she had put on for breakfast washed away by the water, but the dyed eyebrows survived.

“Although Jake is definitely feet.”

“You mean fit,” Ali corrected her. Katya’s English was impeccable, apart from when she attempted colloquialisms. Then it collapsed in a mishmash of mispronunciation and malapropism.

“I guess I don’t look at him that way.”

“Don’t be so coy,” Katya teased, using one of her favorite new words. “When you see him rubbing Lucy with suntan cream, don’t you ever wish it was you?”

“Absolutely not,” said Ali. “Jake and I have never really seen eye to eye.” She was about to add that she didn’t really know him, but it sounded absurd, as though she was deliberately obfuscating. She considered the facts: he slept with his light on, he didn’t use a pillow, he once waxed his monobrow, he told his sister men didn’t fancy thin women, he used Lynx deodorant, he said “tits,” not “breasts.” Intimate stuff, endearing even, but it was knowledge filched rather than tendered.

“Attraction is like temporary blindness: you don’t need to see to feel,” said Katya.

“I just don’t think of him in that way,” said Ali impatiently.

She turned around to check that no one was within earshot. Izzy, in particular, had an uncanny sixth sense for conversations you didn’t want her to hear, although she professed to be completely bored by the overdiscussed subject of Lucy and Jake. Until the news of another mismanaged outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England, it had threatened to become the main theme of the holiday.

Lucy and Jake had disappeared again. Nick had teased Jake about being carsick when they arrived at the Petersons’ house. To judge from the ill-concealed bulge in his swimming trunks, it was a euphemism for lovesick. She just hoped they had found somewhere discreet, because apart from insect hospital, the younger children’s other main pastime was spying on them and writing up reports of what they had observed. Yesterday she had heard them all talking about sex.

“What’s oral sex?” Alfie had asked his twelve-year-old cousin, Ella.

“It’s when you have sex with someone and talk a lot afterward,” replied Ella.

It was after nine o’clock. The sun was low in the sky but engaged in a last-minute burst of energy before it dropped below the horizon.

“And he is so clever,” continued Katya. Ali looked at her blankly and realized that she was still talking about Jake. “Bryony and Nick wanted him to read economics at Oxford, but he insisted he wanted to stick with English. They even tried to persuade him to take a year off so he could think about it for longer, but he refused. I like a man who knows his mind.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Ali.

“You know what it’s like. Nannies hear everything.” Katya shrugged. “So do you think Nick and Bryony are in love?”

“I guess so,” replied Ali vaguely, admiring Leo’s persistence as he got out of the pool after yet another painful belly flop.

“Three out of ten,” trilled Maud. She was a hard taskmaster, like her mother, thought Ali.

“How can you tell?” asked Katya. “They don’t see much of each other.”

“That’s circumstance, not choice,” said Ali, “and when they’re together they seem to get along fine. They hardly ever argue.”

“That might mean there is no connection between them,” pointed out Katya.

Ali would have liked to tell Katya that she wasn’t sure that she had ever been in love and therefore felt unqualified to comment on anyone else’s relationship. But if she shared a confidence, it might provoke Katya to reciprocate with one of her own, and Ali wasn’t sure that she wanted to be the keeper of Katya’s secrets.

She considered her situation. During their yearlong affair, she had shown all the symptoms: she had listened to music that reminded her of Will MacDonald; she had read books that he recommended; she had found ways of turning every conversation back to him; and when she lay in bed with her hand in between her legs she imagined it was his fingers instead of her own. But was this love? Because when she had finally left for London, within weeks all this had faded until she found she could recall only individual features of his face, the whole having been forgotten, and even these had faded with time.

“When I see Bryony and Nick together, I think they have a marriage of convenience,” Katya continued. “It’s all too quiet.”

“Why is it convenient?” asked Ali, her curiosity outweighing her natural reticence about discussing her employers’ relationship. If Mira had been with them, she would have questioned their loyalty.

“Simple: he gives her wealth, she gives him status,” said Katya. “He comes from a really humble background.”

“If he earns so much money, then why does Bryony need to work?” said Ali. It was a question that she had wanted to ask since she moved in with the Skinners.

“Also simple,” said Katya. “With a father like Foy as your main role model, you would never consider men reliable, and she wants to impress him.”

“I don’t know about the machinations of their relationship,” said Ali, annoyed she hadn’t drawn these same conclusions, “but they are good to me, and that’s all I really need to focus on.”

“Does Nick ever flirt with you?”

Ali thought for a moment. She had never really understood flirting. “I don’t think so.”

•   •   •

“What are your parents like?”
Katya asked a few minutes later.