What the Nanny Saw (43 page)

“I read this last term,” he said, leafing through the pages of John Brewer’s
Consumer Society
, trying to decipher the tiny notes that Ali had made in the margin.

“What conclusions did you draw?” Ali asked.

“That everything that is happening now is the logical end to what began in the eighteenth century,” Jake said. He put down the book and glanced at Ali’s phone with her unsent message to him. “We’d make a great essay-writing team.”

“I should check on Hector and Alfie,” said Ali, busily stuffing clothes back into the wardrobe.

“They’re asleep in Alfie’s bed with Leicester,” said Jake.

“It makes them feel secure,” said Ali. “Were they underneath their duvets?”

Jake put his arms around Ali from behind. His hand strayed beneath her T-shirt, and she leaned back into him.

“How come you are so responsible?” asked Jake.

“I was forced to grow up quickly,” said Ali simply. “And I’m paid to be.” The last was inaccurate. Despite the money hidden in the piano, she hadn’t been paid for weeks and she didn’t feel very responsible anymore.

“Why don’t you sit down for a moment?” Jake suggested, gently pushing her toward the bed.

“I feel too agitated,” said Ali, allowing him to nuzzle her neck. “I keep thinking about things I’ve seen, to do with your dad, wondering whether they’re relevant or whether I’ve misinterpreted them.” She paused for a moment. “I’ve heard him talking to Ned Wilbraham on the phone. I’ve seen him with papers belonging to your mum. Sorry I’m not being very articulate.”

“You think that Dad is guilty?”

“There are things that don’t add up.”

“Dad has always kept his cards close to his chest.” Jake had stopped in the middle of the room. He leaned against her.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know his parents are still alive and live somewhere up north? I found out when I was looking through some papers unearthed by the FSA during the search.”

“Do you think your mum knew?”

“No,” said Jake flatly.

“Why don’t we go out?” Jake suddenly suggested. He went over to the window and looked outside. There was no one there. Bryony’s arrest and Eleanor’s exposé had the benefit of satisfying the insatiable media hunger for a new angle about the Skinners at least for today.

“Your Mum doesn’t want you to go out at night.”

“If you’re with me, that’s different.” He pulled Ali toward him.

“It would make me complicit.”

“I know a bar on Ken High Street which might be open.”

“It will be full of your friends.”

“We could just walk? When was the last time you left this house?”

Ali tried to remember. It was when she went to see Felix Naylor, two weeks earlier.

“What about money?”

Jake pulled out a wodge of cash from his pocket.

“Where did you get that?” asked Ali.

“From the piano,” he said, and laughed.

•   •   •

Years later,
when she was coming to the end of her first tenure as a university lecturer, Ali wondered whether the way that Jake and she happened upon the Whispers club that night was by accident or design. She had retraced their steps a thousand times, searching for new clues, and reviewing old evidence. Sometimes she tripped over double negatives trying to imagine what would have not happened if she hadn’t gone there.

The facts were these: They had left the house, wandered around the dark sidewalks that hugged the edges of Holland Park, listening to peacocks shriek through the night air. They had crossed Kensington High Street and headed south through Warwick Gardens. A radio was on in the basement of one of the houses.

“Russian oligarch,” said Jake, as strange guttural voices drifted through the window.

“Ukrainian nanny,” Ali corrected him. Over the past couple of years she had developed a good ear for the different nuances of the languages spoken around her. “I know the nanny who works there. She’s from a village outside Kiev.”

They continued toward Earls Court. They walked with a sense of purpose, enjoying the freedom. Neither questioned the other’s decision to take a left turn or cross a busy road and head for a side street. They held hands in public for the first time. There were no photographers to worry about. Hector and Alfie weren’t there to slow them down. And Jake’s presence made her feel more secure than she should, wandering the streets of London at one o’clock in the morning.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asked Jake, suddenly noticing that he was wearing only a black T-shirt and jeans.

“Stop trying to look after me, Ali,” he said, but she could hear the smile in his tone. “If you look after people too much, you undermine their capacity for looking after themselves. That’s what you said about your sister.”

Ali wrapped the jacket she had grabbed from the Izzy pile tightly around her. It was black velvet with silver studs around the wrists and collar. It made her feel feminine and strong all at once. It was beautiful but totally inappropriate.

“Great jacket.”

“Your mum gave it to me.”

“My parents were always good at presents.”

“Very generous,” agreed Ali, careful not to endorse his use of the past tense.

They continued to walk in comfortable silence for a while. A group of teenage kids riding BMX bikes cycled by on the sidewalk, and Jake bumped into Ali’s shoulder as he jumped out of their way.

“London at night is something I’ve almost always experienced from the back of an Addison Lee cab,” said Jake.

“You used to take the Tube to school,” Ali reminded him.

“I mostly hitched a lift with Dad’s driver,” Jake confessed. “I wonder what’s happened to him.”

Ali recalled the driver who used to arrive at the house at seven forty-five every morning. He was so short that all you could see of him was a tweed cap hovering above the steering wheel. The cap looked out of place in central London, but he told Ali that it reminded him of the village where he was born in Armenia. Ali said that it reminded her of home, too, and he smiled and she saw that he had at least three gold teeth. Nick used to tease him that he looked like an extra from a Merchant Ivory film, possibly
The Remains of the Day
, but Mr. Artouche had never been to the cinema in England and the joke was lost on him.

“Did you know that his wife cleaned offices all night so that they could pay for their eldest son to go to private school?” Ali asked.

“I didn’t,” said Jake. “And now I’ll never have the chance to ask him because he’s gone, too. I wonder when all this is over what will actually be left? I mean, how many of Mum and Dad’s friends have stuck around? Dad’s gone. Malea’s gone. And my grandfather is slowly drowning at the bottom of a wine bottle, vengefully supplied by my grandmother.”

“It’s best not to think about the future too much,” said Ali gently. “Take each day as it comes.”

“Or each meal as it comes, like Izzy,” said Jake. “You know, sometimes I wish that I had a borderline eating disorder, just to have something to focus on that didn’t have anything to do with all this. I wish I had the luxury of spending two hours deliberating whether to eat a plate of smoked mackerel and half a Ryvita.”

They were in a side street, just off the Earls Court Road. They stopped as a small group of disheveled-looking men poured out of an imposing double door in the narrow pedestrian walkway. They were wearing crumpled suits, their shirts flapped around their hips in the breeze, and their ties, the kind with tiny elephant motifs, were askew.

“Where next? Might as well party while Rome burns,” slurred one of the men.

“Have you calculated your net worth recently?” asked another. “Because our stock’s worth fuck—in fact, it’s worth less than fuck.”

“Closed off seven percent today, and Monday’s going to be a bloodbath,” said the drunker one of the group.

“What I really don’t get, I really don’t fucking get, is why Fuld said the bank had plenty of capital and then reported a two-point-eight-billion-pound loss. It makes us look as though we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

“Skinner’s fucked us all up the arse. Made us look like a bunch of fucking criminals as well as a bunch of fucking incompetents.”

“He was right, though. He saw this one coming. Can’t take that away from him. He was just trying to hedge.” The others laughed uproariously.

“Who do you think he had on the inside?”

“I heard it was his wife.”

“Let’s get a drink,” said Ali, anxiously pushing Jake toward the door of the club. She looked at his face and could tell from the tightened jaw and curl of his upper lip that he had heard. They both looked up to see where they were heading.

“Whispers,” read the huge flashing neon sign above the door.

A naked neon woman with flashing pink nipples lay on her side on top of the W.

One of the men turned to Jake.

“Go for the Catholic girls, the guilt gives them a different taste.” He leered, pressing a finger into Jake’s chest.

A bouncer asked them both for ID. He led them downstairs into a cavernous underground room and asked them if they wanted to sit at the bar or whether they wanted a booth.

“What’s the difference?” asked Ali.

“Booth is more private.” The bouncer winked.

“Booth, then,” shouted Ali above the noise. As their eyes adjusted to the dark, Ali saw the room was full of young women in varying states of undress. On a stage behind the bar, five or six girls were pole-dancing. Men, it was mostly men, although Ali counted five other women among the audience, looked up at the dancers as they performed for them. Occasionally one waved a note at a particular girl who then bent down to allow the man to tuck it in her knickers.

“I think this is a lap-dancing club,” Jake shouted in her ear.

“Great detective work, Watson,” said Ali.

It was too difficult to be heard over the music. They followed the bouncer to the other side of the room to a crescent-shaped booth flanked with a comfortable leather-look banquette. There were two small tables at each end of the crescent. Jake headed for the middle ground, leaving a space for Ali to his right. The bouncer handed them a thick leather-bound menu, and Ali was mildly surprised to hear Jake ordering lobster Thermidor and a bottle of champagne.

“Have you ever done this before?” she shouted over a song by the Black Eyed Peas.

“Absolutely not,” Jake shouted back in her ear. “I just think it would be helpful to have something to do with our hands.” He pointed across the room. There was a man at the bar, fingers magnetically hovering in front of a pair of breasts as a woman bent over to put her arms around him. Round the corner of the booth beside them, a woman straddled a middle-aged man who feverishly kneaded her buttocks, despite the signs hanging at the bar warning that men shouldn’t touch the dancers.

“I think we should go,” said Ali, her eyes glancing back and forth along the bar that dominated the center of the room. She couldn’t pick out Katya, but she was sure this was the place where she worked. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that Katya might be one of the dancers.

“You know,” said Jake, leaning back against the faux leather banquette, “in some ways, we couldn’t have chosen a better place. There’s no way those stooges are going to let a photographer in here, and it’s so dark I can hardly even see your face. No one will notice us. They’re too busy having a good time.”

He closed his eyes in mock blindness and searched for Ali’s face with his hand. He slowly ran three fingers from the top of her forehead down over her brow and nose and onto her chin. A woman, dressed in a G-string and tiny bikini top, interrupted them.

“Do you want me to dance for you both?” she asked in an Eastern European accent. “I like to do couples. I can do half a dance each.”

“No, thanks,” said Jake politely.

“I’ll give you a discount,” said the girl, leaning toward Jake so that her breasts rested perilously close to his gaze, “it would be a pleasure to dance for such an attractive couple. Say, twenty pounds each?”

“Maybe another time,” said Jake. “Try us a bit later.”

“Why did you say that?” asked Ali, as the girl curled away on precariously high heels to the booth next door.

“I didn’t want her to feel rejected,” he said.

“I think you’re injecting too much emotion into the relationship,” said Ali. “This is a purely mercantile arrangement.”

Jake was looking at the woman dancing on the pole behind the bar, her legs slowly scissoring in the air until she was doing the splits. Her breasts somehow managed to defy gravity by remaining at right angles. It was a skilled performance, although the middle-aged men watching from tables around the bar were more interested in her body than her technique. A few cheered; one asked her to take off her knickers and do the same thing again naked. When she refused, he laughed and waved a wad of twenty-pound notes in her face. Every time she said no, he added another twenty-pound note. When he reached a hundred pounds, she took the money and gave it to one of the bouncers to look after. She peeled off her knickers, catching the heel of her shoe in the elastic, and began again. Ali noticed that the girl behind the bar discreetly removed them and neatly folded them up as you might with a child.

“I could have done this instead of becoming a nanny,” mused Ali. “Plenty of students do.”

“Selling your body is the logical culmination of the capitalist dream,” said Jake. “The globalization of the East European sex industry began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism. Everything has its price. That book on your bedside table is all about how the social contract turned into the sexual contract.”

“It’s not freedom,” said Ali.

“It’s freedom for some but not for others,” argued Jake.

The bouncer who showed them to the booth came across and asked if they were looking for a particular kind of girl. Since they had rejected the petite Eastern European brunette, he wondered if they might prefer an Oriental girl. “We have some lovely exotic Thai girls,” he explained, “and a couple of spicy Latinos. They’re very good with beginners. Very warm. There’s a few English girls, too, if you want someone who speaks the vernacular.”