What the Nanny Saw (35 page)

“What are you doing here?” a languid voice inquired. As her eyes grew used to the dark, Ali could make out Jake nestled in a narrow lead gap between the window and a chimney pot, where he had the best view of the party. Ali stopped abruptly, unsure whether to retreat or go forward, scanning the area for Lucy.

“She’s not here.” Ali could detect the sweet smell of grass hanging in the still night air. There was an open bottle of champagne beside him.

“Smoke?” Jake offered. He held out a small, carved clay object to her. “Pipe of peace.”

“No. Thanks.”

“Come and sit down, at least,” said Jake. “We’ve got the bird’s-eye view.”

Jake removed his dinner jacket and created a makeshift cushion in the space beside him. He motioned her toward it. Music coiled up from the room below to fill the silence between them. She stared at the jacket.

“Come on, Ali,” he said. “I could do with the benefit of your wisdom. The four years of experience that you have on me. Tell me, what is the kindest way that a man can dump a girl?”

“You’re stoned,” said Ali. It was less recrimination than statement of fact.

She thought for a moment. Jake looked down at the party, as though disinterested in whether she stayed or went. His ambivalence gave her confidence, and she carefully made her way forward, removing her shoes because it was easier to grip the lead roof with bare feet. She sat down beside him and peered over the edge.

The ground was farther away than she expected. There was a small, decorative balustrade that ran across the front of the roof. It was only a couple of feet high. Ali pressed her feet against it, wondering what would happen if a piece gave way.

She might not fall, but she could kill someone standing below. She told herself that she should tell Jake to come down now. But Jake was no longer her responsibility. And besides, she could see the appeal of watching the party from this vantage point. So instead she found herself taking a deep slug from the bottle of champagne he was pushing toward her, and overlooking the pipe.

“I think you need to be completely honest and tell her it’s over. Don’t give her any hope. It’s kinder in the long term. Don’t be personal about the things that bother you about her. Keep it simple and say that it was a fantastic relationship while it lasted but it’s time for both of you to move on, that you’re both too young to be involved in something so serious.”

Jake put his hand in the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a chewed pencil and his train ticket. He started writing on the back of the ticket.

“What are you doing?” Ali asked.

“Taking notes,” he said. “What you said was word perfect.”

“If you learn it by rote, it won’t sound sincere.” Ali laughed.

They fell silent for a moment. But it was a comfortable silence. They both leaned forward toward the balustrade to gaze once more at the crowd down below. Their shoulders were touching. She could feel the warmth of the top of Jake’s arm through his shirt.

The lighting around the garden highlighted the area below like a stage. Everyone on the terrace was visible. Even the darker shapes that had graduated to the Sundial Garden could be seen in the flicker of candles that lit the pathways. They saw Izzy draped over one of Jake’s university friends. She was wearing a black dress that she had found in Camden Market. She had taken up the hem, removed the sleeves, and created an off-the-shoulder look that made her look much older than seventeen.

“Don’t worry. He’s gay,” said Jake, as Izzy and the boy disappeared together.

“Did I tell you that the last time Lucy came to Oxford to stay the weekend, she brought a vacuum cleaner with her?” Jake said. “Can you imagine the relentless piss-taking?”

“You got too domestic too quick,” said Ali. “It’s a good lesson to learn.”

“Not something you’ve experienced?” asked Jake.

“No, my relationships have been a little less conventional,” Ali said, deliberately vague.

“I like the sound of ‘unconventional,’” said Jake. He pondered for a moment. “Don’t tell me, you slept with your tutor? That’s the oldest one in the book. Up there with sleeping with your nanny.”

“Maybe it’s good to get a few clichés out of your system early on in life,” said Ali. “Then you avoid them later.”

“So if Ned Wilbraham had shagged his nanny when he was younger, then he wouldn’t have done it later on in life?” Jake asked.

There was an awkward silence as they considered the content of their banter.

“What do you think of the view?” asked Jake.

“Fantastic,” said Ali, “although a long horizon without any sea always makes me feel landlocked and homesick.”

“I feel like that at home in London,” said Jake. “Not homesick. More claustrophobic. As if I can’t breathe because everyone is watching everything I do all the time. Every cricket score, every Latin test, every friendship, every detail of my life held up to scrutiny and found wanting. I don’t know how you can tolerate living with my family. Ambitious perfectionists aren’t a bundle of laughs.”

“Because it’s not my family.” They both laughed.

“Did you have a happy childhood?” asked Jake.

“You sound like a therapist.”

“Don’t be evasive. You know so much about me and I know nothing about you. It’s a lopsided arrangement.”

“I had a childhood of two extremes,” conceded Ali. “The first half was all buckets and spades and picnics on the beach. Sometimes, if the weather was good and it wasn’t blowing up rough, I went out with my Dad in his boat to work the crab pots.”

“He’s a fisherman?”

“Seventh generation,” Ali confirmed. “There are tombstones with carvings of fishing boats belonging to my ancestors in the churchyard in Cromer. I’d get up with him early in the morning, get in his truck, head for the prom, and load up boxes of bait onto the boat. You go out after high water and come back on the ebb tide. We’d leave Cromer in the dark, with the lights twinkling behind us, and head toward the horizon as dawn was breaking. It’s really beautiful. You should do it someday.”

“Did you ever get seasick?”

“Never. We’d spend hours at sea, winching up pots, taking out crabs, rebaiting them, and chucking them back overboard. The boat has GPS, but Dad knows where all the potting grounds are just by lining up landmarks.”

“Sounds idyllic,” Jake agreed. “So when did the skies darken?”

“When I was twelve my sister began smoking lots of dope. She got really heavily into drugs. Heroin, mostly. A couple of years later she moved to a squat in Norwich and stopped going to school. My parents imploded. My mother became someone who struggled to get through each day. My father escaped by spending more and more time on his boat. Sometimes my sister would come home and try to clean up. Then she’d disappear for months. Bad times. Last year I paid for her to go into rehab. She’s still there, so we might get a happy ending yet.”

“That’s a lot to deal with,” said Jake.

“All families are frayed round the edges. Most don’t completely unravel. We’re all stronger than we think.”

“Sounds like a good life philosophy,” said Jake.

Lucy came out of the house, pale and floaty in her cream dress, and steered a steady course toward the tent, where she stopped at the entrance by an arch draped in pale pink roses and peonies and turned toward the terrace, scanning the crowd for Jake.

“Like a bride abandoned at church on her wedding day,” Ali observed, as Lucy nervously flicked her hair back from her face.

“Don’t,” Jake said with a groan.

“You need to confront the situation head-on,” said Ali, this time taking a toke from the pipe. Most definitely a sackable offense, she thought to herself. It occurred to Ali that perhaps she wanted to be sacked. She could feel herself starting to distance herself from her job with the Skinners. Disturbed by these thoughts, she drank some more champagne, a little too quickly, as though, having decided that she wanted to lose herself, she needed to apply herself to the job in hand.

Down below on the terrace in front of the house, small groups were milling about. A stream of waiters and waitresses carrying trays of drinks flowed between them. Bryony was talking to Felix. Their heads were bowed as though neither wanted to catch the other’s eye. Foy was talking to Eleanor Peterson, looking hopefully over her shoulder for some diversion. Occasionally someone stopped to shake his hand or kiss him on the cheek, but Eleanor’s possessive body language was easily interpreted, and they quickly peeled away.

Eleanor was wearing a floor-length gold taffeta dress that suggested her style was irreversibly forged in the 1980s. She was tanned from an early-summer trip to Corfu and her hair was dyed an odd shade of honey blond.

“She looks like an Oscar,” Ali said, and giggled.

“Talking to a Toby Jug,” said Jake. They saw Leicester, head tilted toward them, barking furiously, and slid back into the shadows in case he gave them away. “My grandfather had a relationship with her. Years ago. I discovered it . . .”

“I know,” Ali interrupted him.

“There isn’t a lot that you don’t know about my family, is there?” Jake asked.

They watched as Eleanor leaned toward Foy and spoke into his left ear.

“His good ear,” observed Jake, passing her the bottle again.

The bubbles burned her throat, and she choked. Jake thumped her on the back, and the third time she felt the tip of his finger linger somewhere in the middle of her spine. She edged forward away from him. Imperceptibly, so that he didn’t think it was an accusatory gesture, but enough that she couldn’t feel the heat from his hand burning through her dress. Something in their relationship had shifted, but Ali wasn’t sure that this new ground was any less treacherous than the old.

“I should go,” said Ali.

She looked back over her shoulder at Jake, and he leaned toward her. This time Ali didn’t move away. There was a noise from the terrace below. The cord was broken, and they leaned over the edge of the balustrade to see Eleanor shouting at Foy. They watched in riveted silence. Jake put his arm around her. Sublime, thought Ali, exquisitely aware of the current between them through the fog of dope and champagne. Foy stared at the ground, nodding vigorously so that his chins wobbled. He fiddled with the knot in his bow tie and undid the button beneath. His mouth looked odd, as though the lower lip was trying to get as far away from the upper lip as possible. There was a moment when Foy and Eleanor stared at each other with the hot flash of former lovers, and then she lifted the glass of champagne in her hand, threw it in his face, and smashed the glass on the terrace.

“I’m going to tell Tita everything,” she shouted, as Tita came over to see what was going on. One look at Foy’s face told Tita everything she needed to know. She stood openmouthed as Foy lurched toward Eleanor, hand in the air, as though about to embark on a complicated Scottish dance. Was he going to strike her? wondered Ali. Instead he toppled over and lay at her feet in a crumpled heap. Eleanor knelt down beside him and began screaming.

“I’ve killed the man I loved,” she cried, pulling Foy to her chest. The sleeve of her dress had slipped down so that her well-engineered bra was visible. Her words hung in the warm evening air, and anyone who was outside could hear them. Tita stood immobile, so dizzy she couldn’t bend down to touch her husband. Julian Peterson came over and managed to peel his wife off Foy.

It was difficult to work out the exact order of events, because apart from Tita and Foy everyone was in motion. It was as though everything was happening in fast-forward, thought Ali. Bryony raced into the house to phone for an ambulance. Hester ran over to Tita and put an arm around her. Rick laid Foy on his side in the recovery position. Felix Naylor found himself propping up Eleanor, pulling up her bra strap, and trying to get the sleeve of her dress to stay in place while Julian ran to fetch a chair.

“Shit,” said Jake. “We’d better go down.”

They stood up, and from the terrace below Ali saw Lucy looking back up at them on the roof.

 20 

Foy moved in with Bryony and Nick to convalesce after he was discharged from hospital in Oxford at the end of June, two weeks after the party. Nick reluctantly conceded that it was impossible for him to go home, principally because Tita refused to have him. Tita argued that Foy couldn’t climb the stairs of their house unaided, that he needed help to wash and get dressed, and that he shouldn’t be left alone. Having told Bryony and Hester she had been captive to her marriage for more than forty-five years, she calmly explained that she didn’t want to become a prisoner in her own home.

In the days after the party, Ali heard Bryony and Hester speak together more than she could ever remember as they tried to broker peace between their parents.

“It’s difficult enough to forgive an affair in the middle of a marriage but impossible when you uncover it at the end,” Ali heard Hester say to Bryony. “I wish I’d told her before.”

“You knew about this?” Bryony had asked.

“Of course I did,” Hester had impatiently replied. “You knew, too. You just couldn’t admit it to yourself. Don’t you remember how Dad and Eleanor always used to go on those evening walks together in Corfu when we were children? You chose to ignore the evidence because you didn’t want to knock Dad off his pedestal. The eyes of the favorite child were blinkered.”

When Bryony offered to pay someone to come six hours each day to help, Tita gently but firmly told her she was leaving for Corfu midweek, as planned, to prepare the house for the summer, and no one could persuade her to change her mind. A new air-conditioning system was being installed, and it was “imperative” she be there to oversee the work. Nothing was discussed. Eleanor wasn’t mentioned. And as far as Ali could remember, her name was never spoken again in front of Tita.

“I’m not having a fucking stranger wipe my arse,” Foy protested when Bryony proposed finding live-in help for him while Tita was away. Hester was adamant that her father should stay at home. It was less conviction than negotiating position, because Rick refused to have Foy living with them. So Malea was summoned to the drawing room and doubled her salary overnight by accepting a job as Foy’s part-time carer until he was fully recovered and Tita had come home.

It was meant to be a temporary solution to the problem of Foy’s limited mobility and Tita’s impending absence. Foy approved of the arrangement. So Ali was dispatched to his house to retrieve clothes and essential possessions from a list headed “Foy’s Paraphernalia” that he had dictated to Izzy because his hand was still too shaky to write. Its length and precision suggested Foy didn’t expect to be going home very soon. The list included tomato plants that wouldn’t ripen until the end of July, golf clubs, his favorite jacket, and the wedding photograph from the mantelpiece in the sitting room. Tita offered to drive everything to Holland Park Crescent later that day. She explained that she would also be delivering three unopened boxes containing copies of Foy’s self-published autobiography that should have been given to guests at the end of the party.

“They’ll make good kindling,” she suggested archly. She then kissed Ali good-bye in a way that had a certain finality.

“I have spent most of my life pleasing other people rather than pleasing myself,” she told Ali. “Make sure you don’t do the same.”

Nick’s office on the ground floor of Holland Park Crescent was hastily cleared out, and a single bed installed. A chest of drawers was found for Foy’s clothes. Ali helped arrange Foy’s belongings in his new bedroom. When she pointed out that Eleanor was one of the guests on the far side of the family lineup outside the Oxfordshire church where they had got married almost half a century earlier, Foy asked Ali to remove her from the photograph.

“I need to excise her from my life,” he said dramatically, as he watched Ali cut a careful line until Eleanor floated to the floor. Ali picked up the narrow strip of black-and-white photo and wiped Eleanor’s face, as if searching for clues that might indicate whether the affair had started before or after the wedding. He instructed Ali to chop Eleanor into tiny pieces and to burn them in an ashtray. Ali found a matchbox, but inside was a small pile of SIM cards, so she fetched her lighter instead. Foy held the ashtray with trembling hands until Eleanor turned to ash. The smoke alarm had gone off, but Foy didn’t appear to notice.

“This isn’t going to resolve your problem,” Ali advised him.

“Why did she wait all those years?” Foy asked, shaking his head in wonder.

“Guilt?” suggested Ali.

“How could she expect Tita to forgive her?”

“Then revenge,” Ali said. “Perhaps she wanted to make you as unhappy as she is.”

Tita was right. Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, Foy was already looking for other people to blame. A nurse came to the house with what she called “disability aids,” which Foy quickly named his “lack-of-sex toys.” A grab rail was put in the bathroom next door, and a stool placed in the shower. He was encouraged to wear an alarm round his neck in case he fell over and couldn’t get up on his own.

The nurse explained that his mobility would improve, the tiredness would fade, and his speech might come and go for a while, but there was no reason to believe there would be any permanent side effects. The chances of having a more serious stroke over the next three months were high, and as well as taking blood-thinning medicine and aspirin every day, she urged Foy to make immediate changes to his lifestyle.

“No alcohol, fatty food, or salt,” Bryony instructed Malea in front of Foy, the day after he was permanently installed at Holland Park Crescent. Bottles of whiskey and other spirits were removed from the drawing room, where he would spend most of the day. Cigarettes were hidden. “Brown rice and chicken for lunch, and a short walk to Holland Park in the afternoon. No other excitement. Ali will read to you from the newspapers in the morning and evening. It’s important to rest after a stroke.”

“I haven’t had a bloody stroke,” said Foy petulantly. “It was a transient ischemic attack.” His speech was slurred and his mouth drooped to one side, but he seemed to have no problem expressing himself. He still pulled up the twins when they made grammatical errors and managed to persuade Malea to hide a saltcellar in the Chippendale chest of drawers in the dining room where he ate all his meals because he couldn’t get downstairs.

“That’s just a fancy way of saying ‘mild stroke,’ Grandpa,” Izzy chided him, as she wrapped a rug around his legs. Since the stroke his legs were always cold. “And if you don’t look after yourself, you’ll have another one, and then Granny will never have you back.”

Sometimes, as Ali was reading to him, Foy would fall asleep in the sitting room chair and call out for Tita in his sleep.

“She’s gone,” Ali would whisper.

“I feel like someone who’s had his leg amputated but still feels as though he’s got the limb,” said Foy. “I’m at forties and fifties.”

Ali thought of the days that followed as the calm after the storm. Much later, she would realize they were more akin to the eerie interlude of quiet found as the eye of a hurricane passed over. Bryony was optimistic that the changes made at the top of Lehman’s would see the bank through the credit crunch, with Nick’s position enhanced. It looked as though the Korea Development Bank might be interested in a deal. The new regime had asked him to investigate the real value of collateralized debt obligations that had originated in Europe, to get a more accurate idea of the scale of losses facing the bank. Bryony saw this as a positive sign of Nick’s rising currency in New York. She allowed herself to imagine them all moving there for a couple of years and asked Ali if she would consider coming with them. Her enthusiasm was so convincing that even Ali began to imagine vliving on the Upper East Side and maybe enrolling in a graduate program at Columbia.

The twins made a new friend, a girl called Storm, who came to the house and invented a game called triplets that involved her dressing up in exactly the same clothes as Hector and Alfie. Jake stayed in Oxford to work in a wine bar. Bryony worried that it did nothing to enhance his CV, but Nick seemed unconcerned. Ali got a text message from him. “Come and visit.” She didn’t respond, and erased his number from her phone in case she was tempted to call.

Sophia Wilbraham got a new, much older nanny and found a top marriage guidance counselor who prescribed weekends in country hotels and less focus on her children. Ali’s parents stopped calling to give updates about her sister. Eventually, Jo came out of her clinic and claimed to be cured. She wanted to come and stay with Ali. Ali refused. Jo wrote a letter saying that she understood Ali’s reticence and respected her boundaries. She also said that she had found a part-time job in Cromer and would start paying back the money Ali had spent on rehab. A week later a check for the first thirty pounds arrived in the post.

Nick went to work early and came back very late. Bryony came home earlier. There were no deals for her to work on. She spent her days firefighting negative stories in the press on behalf of clients whose share prices were tanking because of the credit crunch. In the evening, everyone now headed to the drawing room to keep Foy company. It added a cozy dimension previously lacking from life in Holland Park Crescent.

Then, at the beginning of July, Nick came back from another trip to New York with even gloomier news about the scale of bank debt. They were sitting in the drawing room with Foy. Ali was reading a newspaper piece to Foy about Gordon Brown’s first year in office.

“Two-thirds of Britons think Gordon Brown is an electoral liability,” Ali began.

“Just shows how sensible the British public is,” grunted Foy. When he was tired he spoke without really moving his lips so that he sounded like a second-rate ventriloquist. Ali couldn’t remember a day when she had managed to read an entire article from beginning to end without Foy interrupting. Being sedentary made him even more belligerent, especially if Nick was in the room.

“How did your presentation go?” Bryony asked Nick.

“I told them that the Product Control Group hasn’t checked the price of around a quarter of CDOs. Then I had to explain that they seemed to have used the same mathematical models as the traders to value the rest, which means they are worth even less than we thought. Some of them are probably worth a thirtieth of the value they ascribed. With CEAGO, they actually used a lower rate for the high-risk tranches than they did for the low-risk senior debt. Mad.” Nick looked exhausted.

“What’s CEAGO?”

“It’s the biggest CDO position held by the bank at the moment. Lehman’s has around one-point-two billion dollars in CDOs and CEAGO accounts for five hundred twenty million dollars. It’s difficult to know how much it’s really worth but I reckon we still hold ninety-seven percent of it.”

“So how did they take it?” Bryony asked.

“Beside the real-estate losses, it didn’t look so bad.” Nick gave the quick half-smile that had become shorthand for further bad news. “We’re a hundred twenty billion down there.”

“If you hadn’t tried to make a fast buck selling mortgages to poor people who couldn’t pay them back when interest rates went up, then you wouldn’t be in this position,” said Foy. He had developed an unfortunate habit of dribbling if he spoke too fast. Malea had tied a colorful blue-spotted scarf around his neck to mop up the spit. Behind his back, Nick referred to him as the Milky Bar Kid.

“Home ownership was one of Mrs. Thatcher’s most fundamental beliefs,” pointed out Nick.

“You’ve been too greedy. You’ve corrupted yourselves, and you’ve corrupted the political system. All those bloody Labour politicians are in thrall to the City.” Foy ignored Nick’s comment.

“I didn’t see you complain when Nick bought you
The Menace
,” muttered Bryony.

“You bastards are going to bring down the whole financial system,” said Foy. Then, mercifully, he fell asleep.

“At least they see you as a steady hand on the tiller,” said Bryony quietly.

“There is no tiller,” said Nick.

“Why do people always use nautical metaphors to describe the crisis?” Ali had asked one evening, after yet another conversation in the drawing room about when Lehman’s might hit the iceberg. Nick had looked at Ali as though he wasn’t sure how she fitted into his life. He was so tired that he wasn’t even sure how he fitted into his own life. Instead he had given Ali a blank look and turned back to Bryony to tell her that the numbers were unreal and it was difficult to find the right adjectives to describe how bad it all was.

He then described the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic at the New York office. He told Bryony how Dick Fuld had come down from the top floor to address everyone through the internal communications system and had then attended a meeting with senior management in which he kept telling people to stop talking about losses and to fight back.

“He’s losing it,” said Nick.

“No, I’m not,” shouted Foy, suddenly waking up.

•   •   •

Shortly after this,
Felix came to the house unannounced one Friday evening while Nick was still at work.

“Ali,” he said distractedly, looking over her shoulder for Bryony. “How are you?”

“She’s with Foy in the drawing room,” said Ali.

Felix had put on weight. Ali could see his paunch challenging the buttons on the front of his shirt. He was wearing a jacket and tie, but everything was lopsided. Ali followed him into the drawing room, where she was in the middle of a game of cards with Foy. He wanted to teach her to play poker, but they had compromised with rummy to avoid excitement. Felix stood by the mantelpiece, speaking breathlessly. He picked up invitations, glanced over them, and then unthinkingly put them back without noticing whether they were upside down or on their side. He took off his jacket, and Ali saw big fat circles of sweat under his arms.

At first Ali put his behavior down to nerves. He was never completely relaxed around Bryony. Then, as she listened to what he was saying, she realized he was punch-drunk with news from the City. He explained that he had come straight from his office, later than anticipated, because a bank in Pasadena had collapsed, causing the oil price to spike, the Dow to plunge, and Lehman’s shares to sink to an all-time low. He wore the happy fatigue of someone for whom the crisis meant front-page stories and a nice fat byline.