What the Nanny Saw (29 page)

“Isn’t she always being rude about Bryony?” Ali asked.

“Absolutely,” said Katya. “She criticizes Bryony for neglecting her children in favor of her career, for wanting publicity, for the vanity of having a personal trainer, the amount of money she spends on clothes, the twins’ behavior . . . everything. But really she wants to
be
her. It’s because she is uncertain about the decisions she has made about her own life.”

It was an unusually charitable analysis of her employer. Perhaps Katya felt more sympathy for Sophia now that she was having an affair with her husband. Ali thought back to Will MacDonald and remembered how at the peak of their relationship, when lack of detection made them ever more bold (she had started regularly visiting him at his office, they had sex in the bed he shared with his wife, and they went to the cinema a couple of times), she was ever more friendly to his wife. At one point she even imagined his wife knew about their relationship and condoned it because it made him happier and therefore easier to live with.

“I know that you saw us,” Katya said suddenly, as she poured the rest of the ingredients into the stock and turned round to face Ali. Ali nodded, acknowledging the truth of her statement but unsure how exactly to respond. So she did what her father did when he found himself in a tight corner, and said nothing because people couldn’t tolerate silence.

“He’s in love with me,” Katya explained. She said it neutrally, so that it was impossible to gauge her feelings about the situation. There was no evidence of joy or unhappiness. Was Katya in love with him? Or was she merely tolerating his love for her? Did she think she might be fired if she turned him down? Ali was still running through these scenarios in her head when Katya came over and sat down on a stool beside her and put her hand on her forearm.

Ali looked nervously toward the staircase, worried that Sophia might be coming downstairs, but she could hear her barking orders at the quartet through the ceiling.
“Andante, andante, andante,”
she bellowed.

“Ned is going to leave her,” Katya said, her finger pointing up to the sitting room above, “and we are going to move in together.”

“You can’t do that,” said Ali firmly.

“It is what Ned wants.” Katya shrugged. She closed her eyes and nodded sagely, as though she had spoken some inviolable truth.

“Is it what you want?”

“She is looking for a new nanny, Ali. She wants me out of here.”

“But that isn’t something binary, Katya.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that just because Sophia wants to replace you, it doesn’t mean that you should move in with her husband. It’s what we call fucked-up logic.”

“He is in love with me,” Katya repeated.

“Are you in love with him?”

“Yes,” said Katya unconvincingly. Ali tried a new tack.

“What about Thomas? It will make him so unhappy if his parents get divorced.”

“Ned and I will get married. I will become Thomas’s stepmother. I will always be part of his life.” It sounded as though she was in a language class, practicing her use of the future tense.

“He might eventually resent you for breaking up the marriage between his father and mother. Have you thought about that?”

“Thomas and I have a special bond. He loves me.”

“And what about Sophia?”

“She will find someone else. Ned will give her money. He is a very rich man,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Ali, be happy. This is a very good option for me.”

“Are you doing this because you are worried that if you lose your job then you won’t see Thomas anymore?” Ali asked.

“Of course,” said Katya.

“But that isn’t a good reason,” Ali persisted. “Have you told Mira?”

“Of course.”

“What did she say?”

“She understands my struggle because it is also her struggle,” Katya said enigmatically. “You are very nice person, Ali, but you can’t put yourself in my boots.”

“Shoes,” Ali corrected her. “I can’t put myself in your shoes.”

“Do you know the story of how we came here?” Katya asked. She went to the fridge, took out a bottle of wine, and poured Ali a glass. Ali looked down at her watch and saw that it was almost a quarter to nine. She might as well wait for Izzy to finish and then go home.

“I’ve always felt that you and Mira didn’t really want to talk about it,” Ali said. “But I’d love to hear it.”

Katya stared straight ahead at a point located in the middle of the fridge. Ali assumed she was trying to collect her thoughts, struggling to remember an event that took place years earlier. But as Katya began to tell her story, Ali realized that it was as though she was describing something taking place before her right now. It was so vivid that she slipped into the present tense.

“I come from a village in northern Ukraine, southeast of Odessa. My family is very poor. My father leaves us, so I go to Kiev to find a job working in a bar. But I earn less than two hundred dollars a month. One day a man comes to the bar and says he is looking for girls to go and work in Europe as nannies. The man owns a travel agency in the center of Kiev. He tells me that he can get me a fake Czech passport and that I can get a student visa and work for a family in Western Europe because I speak English. He shows me pictures of different families and children, and e-mails they sent with details of the job.”

The soup on the cooker had started to boil. Bubbles of purple liquid erupted on the surface, sending small jets onto the stove that Katya didn’t seem to notice.

“I was seventeen. I was studying English in university during the day and working all night. I was so tired that I couldn’t sleep, my vision was blurred, and I was losing weight. This man wanted to help me. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

“Yes,” said Ali, who made a point of agreeing with Katya whenever possible. “So is that how you met Mira?”

“I didn’t know Mira then.” Katya paused for a moment and released Ali’s arm. Ali looked down and saw red marks where Katya’s fingers had pressed into her flesh.

“In September 1998, I meet this man at his office. There are six other girls. One of them I know from university. He points at posters of the Acropolis, Big Ben, and Florence on the wall and tells us that within a week we will be in Europe. We set off together in the middle of the night, heading for Poland. There are two Czech drivers. They teach us how to say our name in Czech and how to say hello so that we don’t have problems crossing into Poland. We drive through the night. I worry about the passport they have given me because the ink is smudged.

“We eat some of the food we have brought with us, and we hide any money we have in our shoes because they say it will be taken from us at the border. I have one hundred dollars. When we get to the border they give us our Czech passports and we cross to the other side, and then they take them away from us again.”

Katya stopped and picked up her handbag from the floor. She drew out a small leather purse and pulled out two fifty-dollar bills from the side.

“This is the money. I keep it to remind me where I come from and what I had to do to get to where I am.” Then she took the bills, ironed them flat with her hand before carefully folding them into four and putting them back inside the wallet again. This had obviously been repeated so many times that Ulysses Grant’s features were completely impressionistic.

“Once we cross the border we go in a different vehicle with different drivers. Two more girls join us. There are other men with us. I don’t talk to anyone. Not even the girl from university. We are so afraid people might hear us. We travel at night. Sometimes we stop in a wood to sleep. When we reach the Czech border we are divided into small groups so we don’t draw attention to ourselves. I am lucky because the passport they have given me has two German stamps in it. One of the girls is refused entry, and they just leave her. I wish it is me, because I don’t trust the people we are with.”

“So where were you now?” Ali asked, wishing she had paid more notice to the geography of central Europe when she was at school.

“Czech Republic,” said Katya patiently. “More cars pick us up. I am back with the original group of girls. This time the drivers speak Russian. We leave the border, and we drive for maybe two days. My food has run out. We stop once at a garage and I manage to fill my water bottle. Then that afternoon the car turns off the road and we go down a track through a forest.”

Ali noticed that Katya’s hands had begun to shake. Upstairs she could hear raised voices. Someone shouted. Footsteps stamped across the floor. A door slammed. Then there was silence. She should go up, but nothing seemed more important than listening to Katya, who was oblivious to the commotion above.

“I think they are going to kill us. One of the girls starts crying. The men just laugh and offer us vodka, but all of us refuse. I have paid one thousand dollars for the passport in Kiev, and they start saying that I owe them more money for organizing the journey. They tell me that I will have to work for them until I have paid them back. I tell them I have a job as a nanny in England, and they laugh in my face.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ali asked.

“Because I look forward, not backward,” said Katya, “and sometimes if I talk about it I have nightmares.”

“Would you rather stop now, then?” Ali asked. Katya shook her head, closed her eyes, and began talking again.

“We reach a river. It is so wide you can’t see the other side, and we wait there until it is dark. They get drunk and forget to take back the passports. Then they put the car on a raft and we get inside and the raft sets off across the water. It is so bumpy that some of us are sick. I put my passport in a plastic bag and hide it down my trousers. We have almost reached the other side when the raft hits something in the water and turns over. Two of the girls drown. They can’t swim, and it is so cold. They scream for me to help them, but there is nothing I can do. I see them go underwater, and then they are quiet. I hear people calling us, and I try to swim toward their voices. The current is strong, but I manage to get to the riverbank. When I get out I find another group of Ukrainians. One of them is Mira.

“The man from the car comes over and says that I belong to him and they should hand me over. Mira argues with him in Russian. In the end she gives him two hundred dollars to let me go with her group. The other two girls stay with him. Mira’s guide tells me the man I escaped from was working for a group of Ukrainians who traffic women to work in the sex industry. There were no jobs as nannies. It is all lies. My friend from university was never seen again. Her parents have never heard from her. They think she was maybe taken to Athens and forced to work as a prostitute. Or maybe Israel. Or England.”

“That is so awful, Katya,” Ali said.

“It is the way of the world. Since the fall of communism women have just become another commodity. Like oil and gas.”

“Does Ned know all this?”

“Ned wants a woman who will look after him and make him feel good about himself. Anyway, my experience is worse than some but better than most. I am free.”

“What happened to the man who trafficked you?” Ali asked. “Was he caught?”

“The man who owned the travel agency?” Katya asked. Ali nodded. “He is now one of the richest men in Ukraine. He’s one of Bryony’s clients, actually.”

“How do you know that?” Ali asked.

“Ned told me.”

“How does he know about Bryony’s clients?”

“From Nick.”

“But they hardly ever see each other.”

“They talk on the phone,” said Katya. She paused for emphasis. “A lot, a lot.”

 15 

On her way back to number ninety-seven, Ali’s phone rang. Izzy was in the middle of a tirade about Sophia Wilbraham, which Ali was diplomatically ignoring, although she sympathized completely with its sentiment. She could easily have derailed the diatribe with a couple of questions, but she was too intrigued to hear about what had occurred upstairs. Besides, it provided a useful counterpoint to distract her from what Katya had just told her. Ali looked down at the screen, saw it was her mother, and decided to let it go on to voice mail, where it joined the other drifts of messages her parents had left over the past couple of months.

“There’s no such thing as a short conversation with my mother,” Ali joked, investing the relationship with a lightheartedness that didn’t really exist.

“Tell me about it,” sympathized Izzy, before returning to the subject of Sophia.

“She told me I hadn’t practiced enough and said that if I devoted as much energy to my music as I did to chasing boys then the third movement wouldn’t be such a mess.”

Ali smiled because Izzy was doing a very good impersonation of the sanctimonious tone adopted by Sophia when she passed judgment on other people’s shortcomings. “At which point Martha went as red as that soup Katya makes, so I knew she was the source. Then Sophia said it was a shame that instead of my mother being around to instill discipline, I was abandoned in the third movement of my childhood to the whims of an unknown and inexperienced twenty-something nanny from the sticks.”

Ali bristled. The curious thing about Sophia Wilbraham was that it took only the tiniest exposure for any positive feelings you might have about her to curdle. So any residual pity for her husband’s betrayal immediately evaporated.

“How did you respond?”

“I told her that most of my energy was devoted to sustaining my borderline eating disorder, and if Martha was anything to go by, then sexual abstinence was no prerequisite for musical flair, as demonstrated by the huge love bite she was trying to cover up on her neck.”

“Brilliant.”

“I’m always much more articulate when I’m angry. I think listening to Joy Division helps me to mine it more efficiently. It’s all to do with externalizing feelings rather than being passive. Loathing rather than self-loathing.”

Jake was right. Izzy was beginning to sound a little like a self-help book.

“Then she made Martha undo her shirt and saw the love bite. She started shouting at her, and Martha threw her violin on the floor, stomped out of the room, went upstairs, and Sophia declared the practice session over.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said we needed to speed up the adagio. The other girl said the teacher had told us to slow it down, and she said he was completely wrong and that she’d heard way more live performances than he’d eaten hot dinners. She literally barked at us.”

Ali’s phone rang a second time.

“Bad use of ‘literally,’” said Ali, glancing down at the screen to see that it was her mother again. “If you say that, it means she actually did bark.”

“Don’t be pedantic. Anyway, Sophia makes Leicester look submissive, and her voice sounds way more animal than human.”

“Good use of ‘pedantic,’ though.”

Again Ali ignored the phone in her bag and instead pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

“I won’t say anything,” Izzy promised.

“Thanks,” said Ali, as she took a deep drag and considered how to handle her parents.

She had resolved to get in touch with them when she got back from Corfu at the end of August. But she’d held back because she still hadn’t established when she could have time off. Bryony was working almost every weekend for the next month. This Sunday she was meant to fly to the United Arab Emirates. The following weekend she would be visiting an aluminum smelter in Kazakhstan. The Saturday after that she had another meeting with the builders and the architect in Oxfordshire. It seemed incredible how she could crisscross the globe while Ali found it difficult to leave Holland Park.

She was less certain of Nick’s movements, but even if he were around he wouldn’t want Ali to leave him alone with the children. Izzy had once let slip that he’d never looked after them alone for more than a couple of hours at a time.

So Ali wanted to avoid her mother until she could appease her by confirming a date. She also wanted to avoid any conversation that ended with her defending the Skinners from accusations that they were taking advantage of her good nature. It had become a bit of a theme of late, as it dawned on her parents that she wasn’t going back to university this year. Just before the summer, Ali had finally told them that she was considering staying for another year, and revealed exactly how much money she was earning. Her mother had fallen silent at the other end of the phone.

“I think actually she is a man . . . her hands are enormous, like great hams . . . She clicked her fingers at Katya . . . She said Alfie and Hector made Romulus and Remus look positively domesticated,” Izzy continued.

“Disturbing,” said Ali, but really she was thinking about her parents.

“Is this what happens to women if they give up work once they’ve had children?” asked Izzy. “I thought Mum was pretty controlling, but at least she has to let go when she goes to work.”

“Maybe Mrs. Wilbraham has invested her chance at happiness in just one thing. It’s a high-risk gamble: it could reap huge benefits, but it also increases her exposure if things don’t work out. She’s overleveraged.”

“You sound like Dad talking about his bloody job.” Izzy laughed. “What I don’t understand is why Martha’s dad married her. He’s so relaxed about everything. She should have been shelf-bound, don’t you think?” She was using Foy’s favorite phrase to describe an unattractive woman who, in his view, didn’t merit a husband.

“She probably wasn’t like that when he married her. It’s difficult to keep perspective when you have children. They swallow you up until they’re ready to spit you out, and then you’re left wondering what remains of you.”

“Is that what happened to your mother?”

“My older sister, Jo, swallowed us all up.”

“What do you mean? In a predatory way? Like a shark?”

“She wasn’t intent on destruction, but she somehow managed to chew up everything around her. Jo had lots of problems, and that didn’t leave much room for the rest of us. Mum, Dad, and I were all focused on her.”

“What kind of problems?” Izzy asked. Ali hesitated for a moment, weighing up whether to tell the truth.

“Drugs,” she said finally. “But don’t say anything.”

“Weed?”

“Everything. She wasn’t picky.”

“So did you come here to escape all that?” Izzy asked.

“In part,” said Ali vaguely.

“Is that why you were so worried about me at that party?”

“Among other things,” said Ali. “I was worried about you because you’re my responsibility and if that boy had put that clip on YouTube, then it would have happened on my watch. And even if we’d managed to get it taken down, that’s what everyone would remember about you.”

“You really care about us, don’t you, Ali? You don’t just think we’re spoiled and worthless?” Izzy asked nervously.

“Of course not,” said Ali cautiously. “Your life is just very different from mine.”

“In what way?”

“You don’t have to worry about money in the same way. You have unimaginable opportunity. You take things for granted. But I don’t think this necessarily buys you freedom. It just buys you choices and a bigger burden of expectation.”

They had reached the steps outside the Skinners’ house. For a moment, Ali stopped and stared. By night the house looked even more imposing. Two spotlights attached to the railings reflected back onto the façade, picking out the bay windows of the drawing room on one side and a huge camellia growing in a pot on the other. Ali coolly observed the blue plaque on the side of the house, the icy surface of the chrome number on the front door, and the high-gloss black railings. It was still difficult to believe that she really lived here, cheek by jowl with this family, that she was on first-name terms with the next-door neighbors, that the car sitting outside on the off-street parking had been bought for her, that she had helped the twins plant in the wildflower window boxes sitting on the window ledges on either side of the front door. What did it say about someone if she could adapt so seamlessly to the rhythms of another family’s life and so quickly forget her own?

There was a light on in every room on the first three floors. In the drawing room she could see Bryony examining invitations on the mantelpiece. In the adjacent window she thought she glimpsed Foy’s hair poking above an armchair. Downstairs in the kitchen Malea was scrubbing saucepans. Little vignettes of contented domesticity that reminded Ali of an Advent calendar. She smiled at Izzy as she got out her keys and expertly turned the lock. The Skinners were insulated from the outside world, and she was happy to take her place in their cocoon.

“By the way, did you know Martha thinks her dad is in love with their nanny?” Izzy said as they went into the hallway. “That’s why she always whistles the theme tune to
The
Sound of Music
when Katya comes in the room.”

“Martha has a very fertile imagination,” said Ali a little too quickly.

•   •   •

Down in the kitchen,
Ali paused for a moment to listen to her phone messages as Izzy said good night to her mother and grandfather. There were four. The first one was from Bryony, wondering when she would be home to discuss the daybook. The rest, disappointingly, were all from her mother. Rosa had stopped phoning, no doubt fed up with the way it took so long for Ali to return her calls. She hadn’t heard from Will MacDonald in more than six months.

“Jo’s home,” the messages from Ali’s mother said. Or, more accurately, “Jo’s hum.”

The sound of her mother’s slow, undulating accent with its elongated vowels and lilt at the end of the sentence made Ali smile. The English language was born in East Anglia, her mother had told her when she first noticed Ali’s efforts to erase her Norfolk accent. She should feel proud of it. It was a piece of advice Ali remembered, because her mother’s interventions in her life were so rare. She closed her eyes and for a moment allowed herself to be enshrouded in its familiarity.

Any fleeting pleasure, however, was swiftly supplanted by irritation at the deadpan tone of the rest of the message. It was impossible to tell whether her mother was elated or discomfited by Jo’s return. There was no note of either triumphalism or exhaustion. Ali knew it was a ploy to force her to call back to see what was going on so that she would be drawn into another drama involving her sister. She felt guilty for feeling irritated, and further irritated that she should feel guilty. It was an old loop: Ali’s desire to be free from the shackles of family expectation, followed by the claustrophobic sense of responsibility. Something the Skinner children could also identify with. She dutifully dialed her mother’s number.

“Hi, Mum, it’s Ali,” she said as her mother picked up the phone after just one ring.

“Alison, is that you?” her mother responded.

“I said it was me,” said Ali, trying to suppress her impatience. “I just picked up your message.”

“I left more than one.”

Outside, she could hear Leicester barking plaintively. She went to the window and saw that the sliding doors were covered in muddy paw prints. Where was Malea?

“I can’t hear you, you’re cracking up.”

“Breaking up.” Ali smiled. She opened the sliding doors just enough to allow Leicester in. He looked affronted, and Ali apologized, informing him she wasn’t to blame.

“Who are you talking to?” her mother asked suspiciously.

“The dog.”

“Are you listening to me?” her mother asked. “You don’t call us for months, and then you give the dog more attention than me.”

“How’s Jo?”

“She’d love to see you.”

“Why hasn’t she called me, then?”

“Don’t be difficult, Ali.”

“Can I speak to her now?”

“She’s gone out.”

“How does she seem?”

“The same,” said her mother carefully.

“The same good or the same bad?” Ali asked, knowing that she would never get a straightforward answer because her mother was permanently pitched between the desire to believe that Jo was all right and the dread that perhaps she was lurching into a new crisis.

“Your dad tried to get her to go out on the boat with him, but she wanted to stay in bed.” This was bad news. Ali slumped down on the sofa, and Leicester jumped up to sit beside her. She was used to these vague answers, and over the years had come to appreciate that perhaps they contained a more essential truth than a simple black-and-white response. Her father believed, as did Ali, that the sea had a curative effect on the soul. Ali loved watching the lights of Cromer fade and the soft pink tones of dawn emerge on the horizon, as they headed away from shore to check the crab pots. When Jo was well, she agreed with them. When things were bad she saw the sea as her tormentor, which it could be after five hours in a boat when it was blowing up rough.

“She’s thinking about another clinic. It’s expensive. We’re not sure whether it’s the right place, Ali. We can take out more money against the mortgage, but it’s a stretch.”

“Do you want me to come home?”

“Yes,” said her mother emphatically.

•   •   •

Ali took a deep breath
and gently pushed open the drawing room door. Foy peered around the top of his seat by the fireplace and squinted at her.

“It’s the Sparrow,” he boomed. “What news do you bring from the kingdom of birds? What’s your tweet of the day?”

“Hello, Mr. Chesterton,” said Ali, coming into the room.

“Call me Foy, for God’s sake, otherwise you make me feel old,” he shouted through stained teeth. Ali noticed an almost empty bottle of red wine on the table beside him.

“One thing about sparrows that you should know, Ali. They mate for life. Although the odd single sparrow has been known to try and steal someone else’s mate.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Ali.