What the Nanny Saw (28 page)

“Jake should be playing the field,” Foy had drunkenly complained to Julian Peterson over a whiskey on the terrace one evening. “She’s the kind of girl who’ll only give a man a blowjob if she thinks there’s a wedding ring involved.”

“Not like my wife, then,” Julian had said. Foy had looked almost hurt by the comment and muttered something about Eleanor being the type of woman that any hot-blooded man would want to “decant” from her dress, as though Julian should have taken his wife’s infidelity as a compliment to his taste rather than an insult to his masculinity.

Then, back in London, Lucy had compounded the situation for Jake by buying him a pair of expensive sheepskin slippers for his nineteenth birthday and insisting that he open the present in front of the rest of his family. As if on cue, Lucy now came downstairs to let Jake know that they were expected for an early-evening drink at her parents’ house.

“Don’t eat white bread, Jakey,” she said, removing the plate of toast from Jake’s hand. “I bought you that really nice three-seed loaf.” For a moment they both held the plate. Ali and Izzy watched the standoff in fascinated silence.

“Can’t we just go straight-out?” asked Jake, finally allowing Lucy to take it.

“We agreed to show them the photos of Corfu,” Lucy said. Ali turned round and caught his eye. He looked at his feet in embarrassment. He wasn’t even a deer caught in the headlights, thought Ali, searching for the right metaphor. A deer could run away. He was more like Laurel and Hardy stuck in the cage in the twins’ bedroom, eyes pleading for the purpose of their life to be revealed.

She knew from the sounds conducted by the chimney flue in her bedroom that sex between Jake and Lucy had become somewhat perfunctory. She felt mildly ashamed of herself for listening, but the dynamic of their relationship in retreat was too interesting. So she knew that Jake wanted a long, drawn-out performance. He wanted to keep the light on and observe the subtle changes in the muscles around Lucy’s mouth as his hand slowly mapped previously unexplored territory. He wanted to make her come with his mouth. He wanted depth and disinhibition, while she was content to swim in the shallows, to do nothing more than keep her side of the bargain. So, while it wasn’t unpleasant, and Lucy always seemed willing, there was a sense that the quicker it was all over, the better.

Ali heard Jake tell his friends that he had read enough of his sister’s magazines and seen enough porn to know there was a world of pleasure that he was being denied and Lucy was denying herself. So when one of his friends started telling him how hot he thought Lucy was, Jake did nothing to discourage him.

“Shall we leave the delightful Mr. and Mrs. Skinner to their domestic idyll and head down the road?” Izzy proposed.

Lucy bristled, but her natural self-restraint meant that her fury went into angrily buttering Jake’s toast. Jake simmered beside her. When Ali said good-bye, he ignored her.

•   •   •

Sophia Wilbraham answered
the door almost as soon as Izzy rang the bell. Ali stood beside Izzy, holding the cello in front of her body, pleased to have ballast between herself and Sophia, even though she knew she looked like a bag handler.

Sophia eyed Izzy over her half-moon reading glasses. Ali noted the self-satisfaction seeping into her face as she absorbed the holes in Izzy’s tights, the purple lipstick smeared on her front tooth, and the chipped black nail varnish. Not competition for Martha, Ali could see her think.

This reminded Ali of being with her mother in Cromer when she was a teenager and her sister’s decline had become the talk of the town. Ali recognized the expression on Sophia’s face: the self-congratulatory smile, the disapproval, and a sense of relief that her own children weren’t on such an obvious trajectory to imminent self-destruction. Ali hadn’t learned about schadenfreude until she joined Will MacDonald’s tutor group. There was a lot of it around in the eighteenth century—Henry Mackenzie’s
The Man of Feeling
, for example—and Holland Park was steeped in it.

“Such an eye-catching outfit,” Sophia said as she urged them inside, out of the cold. “You put things together so . . . decoratively.”

“Thanks,” said Izzy, who was sufficiently aware to know Sophia’s comment was dishonest even though she didn’t understand her motivations.

“Sorry we’re a bit late,” said Ali, even though they weren’t. “Bryony just got back from Russia, and she wanted to see Izzy.”

She immediately regretted saying this because she knew Sophia collected information about other people and used it as a currency to be banked and traded at a later date. Even the most innocuous facts—Foy’s birthday, the subject of Izzy’s latest English essay (a party in which a girl accidentally falls out of a window), or the name of Jake’s girlfriend—were collated and filed.

“How long has she been away?”

“Weeks,” Izzy said with a sigh.

“It must be exhausting for her,” Sophia said, “and for you, Ali.” She gave one of her most ingratiating smiles, waiting for Ali to respond. “Such a big responsibility when I imagine Nick works long hours, too. And the twins are at such a difficult age.”

“She’s only away for a couple of days at a time. At most.”

Sophia gave her a suspicious look, as though trying to gauge whether Ali had been instructed to withhold detail. She lacked the psychological skills to intuit that Izzy might have her own reasons for casting her mother in the worst light possible. Instead she clung on to her easy-bake stereotype of Bryony as a typical working mother paying the price for her selfish ways with a wayward daughter and freaky twins. She preferred not to dwell on Jake, who had learned he had three A’s in his A-levels when they were in Corfu.

“Bryony should have come and had a drink with us,” Sophia said.

“She’s too busy discussing the new house with Daddy,” Izzy countered. Ali poked Izzy with the tail spike of the cello. Izzy ignored her and took a side step. “It needs a lot of work.”

“What house?” asked Sophia.

“You know how Mum always has to have a project,” continued Izzy. Sophia nodded so vigorously that her glasses nudged to the end of her nose and her double chins gently undulated. She stared at Izzy, intently awaiting further information.

“Well, they’ve bought a house in the country,” Izzy explained, “an old Jacobean pile in Oxfordshire. I haven’t actually seen it yet. But we’re all going there this weekend, when Mum gets back from Russia.”

“She’s going away again?” questioned Sophia.

“Just for a couple of days,” Ali interrupted.

“Well, at least I’m on hand to fill in the musical gaps,” Sophia said.

“Thank goodness,” said Izzy. Sophia gave a harrumph of satisfaction that made the button on the side of her skirt pop open.

“How much revision have you been doing for your mocks, Izzy?” Sophia asked as they trailed after her into the house.

“Four hours every night,” Izzy said politely. Sophia looked at her in confusion, torn between worry over the revelation because Martha’s schedule was definitely lighter and uncertainty whether Izzy was telling the truth.

“Beethoven calls,” she said finally, urging Izzy into the sitting room. “We’re going to focus on the third movement.”

Ali went in behind Izzy to hand over the cello. Martha was tuning her violin at the piano. She gave an embarrassed half-wave to Ali, caught her eye for a moment, and then quickly looked away. Ali thought back to the party in Notting Hill. She considered the gulf between Sophia Wilbraham’s perception of Martha and the reality of her life. It was the same with Bryony and Izzy. It could be argued that Bryony was even less insightful because she had worried less about Izzy when she was on track to develop a full-fledged eating disorder than she did now that she was slowly recovering.

Then Ali thought of her mother and Jo. Even when it was obvious to Ali, at age fourteen, that the way her sister came home in the early hours of the morning and then slept until four o’clock in the afternoon had more to do with drug time-tabling than the adolescent body clock, her mother still wanted to believe that Jo was simply going through a phase common to most teenagers in Cromer. Her father had been more realistic. He noticed the acne, the way Jo stopped wearing short-sleeved tops, the sunken eyes, and pleaded with his wife and daughter to get some outside help. Perhaps this blind spot was something common to all mothers. Maybe they didn’t want to see, or they thought the antidote to their children’s problems was simply to love them more.

She noticed Martha was wearing a shirt with the buttons conservatively fastened almost to the top. She couldn’t get rid of the image of her breast in the boy’s mouth. Ali felt a stab of compassion. She knew from Izzy that the boy hadn’t spoken to her since and had complained on his Facebook page that she had hairy nipples. Martha had subsequently gone to a beautician and not only had all these hairs removed but had a Brazilian, too.

“Don’t you think women should sign a nonproliferation of depilation treaty, Ali?” Izzy had said after she told her this story. “Or the boy who wrote it should be given a Brazilian?”

“The latter sounds more practical,” Ali had said, and laughed.

Ali smiled as she recalled this conversation. Now that Izzy was eating more, she was less moody. Although she had confessed to Ali that she still kept a diary in which she recorded everything that she consumed, including the number of times she brushed her teeth each day, because toothpaste contained calories, she said she hadn’t deviated from the target weight set by the counselor. Most important, she had stopped visiting the awful pro-ana websites.

Ali was reassured by her openness because she had read enough on the Internet to know that secrecy was one of the main components of anorexia. And although Bryony didn’t see it this way, Izzy’s imperfect appearance was a good measure of the distance she had put between herself and her eating disorder. It was Bryony who told Ali that anorexia and perfectionism went hand in hand, but she didn’t seem to be able to apply the reverse logic to her own daughter.

“She’s put on weight,” said Sophia, as she led Ali back into the hall and suggested that she go downstairs into the kitchen to find Katya. Ali was about to explain that it was a terrible idea to say something like that within earshot of a girl climbing out of the abyss of an eating disorder. But she stopped herself because she realized Sophia was fishing for information to confirm the diagnosis.

“I’ll just say a quick hello,” said Ali, who had avoided being alone with Katya since the summer.

•   •   •

Katya was
in the basement kitchen, cooking. She was cutting beetroot and cabbage on a chopping board, her precision seemingly uncompromised by the speed of the knife. Her hands were blood red with juice. On the cooker two large, spicy-smelling sausages were slow-frying in a pan.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, coming over to hug Ali. “I’m making borscht. It’s Thomas’s favorite. He must be the only three-year-old in London who chooses beetroot soup over fish fingers. I swear his soul is Ukrainian.”

Ali listened halfheartedly. When it came to Thomas, Katya was worse than the most indulgent mother or obsessed lover.

“Maybe Sophia ate lots of beetroot when she was breast-feeding,” Ali suggested.

“She didn’t breast-feed,” said Katya a little too quickly. “I fed Thomas bottled milk.”

“I just came down to say hello,” said Ali, pointing at the staircase. “I’m going to come back to collect Izzy later. Bryony’s just arrived home.”

“You don’t need to explain,” Katya said in her curious clipped accent. She continued chopping, the knife now gliding expertly backward and forward across an onion. There were no tears. Her hair was tied back off her face, and she was wearing a simple vest top and black miniskirt. The ingredients and saucepans were lined up in orderly fashion beside the cooker as though trying to impress her with their cooperation.

There was no recipe book. Unlike Malea, who had taken to Delia Smith’s
How to Cook
as if it were a sacred text, and then refused to deviate, Katya cooked from memory and instinct. She tore up parsley, sprinkled it into the stock, leaning over to sniff the aroma, then chopped up a clove of garlic and did the same thing again.

She had a smooth way of moving that reminded Ali of treacle sliding off a spoon.

Ali couldn’t stop watching her. She wondered whether Katya was conscious of the attention she attracted. And even though she meant to leave straightaway, Ali found herself perching on a stool beside the kitchen island, observing her as she cooked and talked about Thomas. Even when she dropped a small spice jar on the floor and bent down to pick it up, it seemed part of a single fluid movement. She was liquid. No wonder Sophia Wilbraham’s husband wanted to slide into her at any opportunity.

Ali had never got beyond the front door of the Wilbrahams’ house before, and she was taken aback to find that the kitchen was almost an exact replica of the one she had just left behind a couple of streets away. The stove was a different color. The worktop was a slightly darker shade of granite. But the layout was so familiar that when she opened the cupboard to the side of the staircase, she knew she would find plates on the bottom shelf and soup bowls on the top.

“She used the same architect and interior decorator,” said Katya, noticing Ali’s expression. “If I had so much money I would try and be more original, but Sophia has big crush on Bryony.” She shrugged.

“I thought they loathed each other,” said Ali.

“Love and hate often sleep in the same bed, don’t you think?” Katya said.

Which bed do you sleep in? Ali wondered. Then she reproached herself. She wanted limited engagement. Low-intensity conversation. A frugality of detail that was totally at odds with Katya’s personality. She knew Bryony would be at home, waiting to discuss the daybook. Ali had written a week’s worth of notes the previous evening. She had used a different-colored pen for each day, and had recklessly embellished incidents involving the twins and details about Izzy’s progress at school, as much for her own entertainment as to assuage Bryony’s curiosity about the life her children led when apart from her. But Katya always posed more questions than she answered, and Ali always found it difficult to resist.