What the Nanny Saw (44 page)

He was like a kindly and patient waiter, relaying news of today’s specials.

“Can you explain how it all works?” asked Jake. “We’re novices here.”

“Absolute beginners,” reiterated Ali.

“A topless dance costs twenty pounds, and it’s ten quid more if the girl is naked,” he explained. “There’s a no-touching rule. You have to keep your hands on the bench. She can touch you, but you can’t touch her.”

“Do you have to pay to talk?” asked Jake.

“Time is money.” The man smiled. “Twenty minutes of hospitality costs two hundred pounds. If you want to talk, phone a friend.”

“Are there any tall, blond, long-legged Ukrainian girls with large, firm breasts?” Ali asked him.

“Ali,” Jake said, laughing, “we’re not going there.”

The bouncer pulled out a tiny flashlight from one pocket and a handwritten list from another and searched for names.

“How about Lara?” he asked, pointing to a bored-looking woman sitting at a table beside the bar.

“Bigger breasts and longer legs,” Ali requested.

“Are you doing this for me?” Jake asked. “Because big-breasted blondes aren’t really my thing.”

“Or the girl dancing at the moment?” the bouncer suggested. “She’s more expensive than some of the others.”

“Why?” asked Ali.

“Watch her dance and you’ll understand,” he said.

Ali stood up and took a couple of paces toward the bar out of Jake’s line of vision. The girl on stage wound herself around the pole like a snake. She moved languidly, almost lazily, without looking at the men gathered below. Ali turned to the bouncer and beamed.

“Great,” she said. “We’ll have her.”

“I’ll get her after she’s finished. Tonya’s on for fifteen minutes, then she’s all yours,” said the man. “If you’re interested we have even more private facilities upstairs.”

“Just one more thing,” Ali asked. “Are they all named after characters in
Doctor Zhivago
?”

•   •   •

“I can’t believe
you’ve done that,” said Jake, shaking his head so vigorously that his dark curls bounced from side to side. He poured himself another glass of champagne. It spilled over the edge of the glass. “What are you going to do when she comes over?”

“We’ll negotiate a price, and then we’ll get her to dance for us,” said Ali. “You can’t go to a lap-dancing club and leave without a lap dance. It’s like going to Corfu without tasting the honey, or going to Cromer without eating a crab, or going to Australia without stroking a koala . . .”

“I get the picture,” interrupted Jake, “although I doubt many other people would see it that way.”

“How would they see it?” asked Ali.

“They would find it seriously dodgy that the family nanny took me to a lap-dancing club and then chose a girl to dance for me,” said Jake. “Can you imagine the headlines?”

“Don’t be so tabloid about it, Jake,” said Ali. “Fathers used to take their sons to prostitutes for their first sexual experience.”

“You’re not my dad, and this is not my first sexual experience,” Jake pointed out.

“But I do have authority over you.” Ali smiled, leaning toward him to kiss him on the lips.

“And where will you be while all this is going on?” Jake asked.

“Right here beside you,” said Ali. “In case anything goes wrong.”

“What could go wrong?” Jake asked.

“You might be tempted to touch her,” Ali suggested. “Or you might finish early. Or you might get a cricked neck from staring up at her breasts.”

“I can’t have a lap dance with you sitting beside me,” said Jake. “What will you do while I’m having it?”

“I’ll eat the lobster Thermidor,” said Ali.

“It just wouldn’t feel right doing it in front of you eating a lobster, Ali,” pleaded Jake.

“Then I’ll have the prawn and avocado instead,” said Ali.

“It’s got nothing to do with the food, it’s to do with you,” said Jake.

“These men are all doing it in front of their friends,” said Ali, pointing at three men on the adjacent table.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” said Jake, nervously eyeing the woman coming toward them. She was wearing a tiny miniskirt, gold shoes, and a red sequined top. Except, as she sashayed into the booth, Jake realized that he knew her.

“Katya?” said Jake, the expression on his face alternating between astonishment and relief. Ali nodded.

“I got you good.” Ali laughed.

“Did you know she’d be here?” Jake asked.

“Curtain open or closed?” Katya smiled.

“Closed,” said Ali.

“I took a punt,” said Ali. “I want to ask her some questions. I think she might be helpful to your mum.”

“Hello, Jake.” Katya ran a hand through Jake’s curls, saying something in Ukrainian.

“He has grown into a handsome man,” she said admiringly before sitting down between them.

Katya’s clothes were garish, and the heavy makeup drew too much attention to her eyes and lips. She had lost weight, which accentuated her long legs and broad shoulders.

“Welcome to the land that feminism forgot.” She smiled. Her breasts were precariously tethered in the well-engineered red top, somewhere between a bra and a bikini.

“I am truly sorry for everything that has happened to your family,” said Katya apologetically, turning toward Jake.

“It’s no worse than what happened to you,” said Jake.

She leaned over and took a drink from Ali’s untouched glass of champagne. The bouncer poked his head through the curtain.

“Give them a special hospitality rate,” she instructed him. She turned to Ali. “Otherwise you’ll end up spending two hundred pounds for twenty minutes of my time.”

“So what’s it like working here?” Ali asked.

“I’m going to tell you the only three facts about lap dancing that you need to know,” said Katya, taking another sip of Ali’s champagne. Jake offered to pour her a glass, but she said she didn’t drink on the job. “One, it’s ideal for English men, because they can’t dance. Two, it makes it difficult to like men. And three, you double your tips when you’re ovulating.”

“How do you know that?” asked Jake.

“Some American scientists did a study,” said Katya.

“Couldn’t you do something else?” asked Ali.

“I earn good money.” Katya shrugged. “I’m the best dancer, so they look after me well. The other girls are great. Most of them are students, but there are a couple of nurses and a prison warden, and a couple of nannies. It’s a good club. But I miss Thomas, and some of the men are awful.”

“Have you seen him since you left?” Ali asked.

“Ned has brought him to see me a couple of times,” Katya said.

“Have you seen Ned since this scandal broke?” Jake asked. Katya eyed Ali.

“We won’t say anything,” she promised. Katya nodded.

Ali explained to Katya that Bryony had been arrested and accused of passing on information about her clients to Nick. Katya shook her head.

“She didn’t do it,” she said. She paused for a moment. “But Ned and Nick did. Nick spied on Bryony to get the information for Ned.”

“Would you tell the FSA what you know?” asked Jake.

“Sure,” agreed Katya.

•   •   •

It was the early hours
of Monday morning when Jake and Ali arrived back at Holland Park Crescent. They found the twins asleep, lying in exactly the same position on their sides, facing each other, thumbs in mouths. Perfectly symmetrical. They were wearing pajama bottoms but had removed their tops, and Ali could see their torsos glistened with sweat. She opened the window. The long, hot summer had sucked the energy out of the night air, and the breeze barely stirred the curtains. The duvet was lying on the floor, and both guinea pigs were asleep on top of it. All the lights were on. Ali kissed them both on the cheek, gently closed the door, and headed up to Jake’s room.

Ali smiled as she came in and saw the signed Arsenal shirt and the White Stripes poster. She went over to the photos of Jake hanging on the wall and touched them tenderly. Her hand drifted to the chest of drawers. There was such an array of objects scattered over its surface that the wood beneath was barely visible. An out-of-charge iPod, hair ties belonging to Ali, an empty box of condoms, loose cigarettes, a couple of tampons, a silver bangle of Ali’s that Jake liked wearing, an eyeliner. Ali’s hand hovered above them. She was about to remove her stuff from the pile, then changed her mind. She liked this casual entanglement of their lives. It suggested a permanence that was comforting.

The room was like an old and familiar friend. She loved the way it smelled of them. She loved the deep red walls. She loved the way that no one else came in here, not even Leicester, who had taken to roaming the length and breadth of the house with his blanket in his mouth in search of a secure berth. Mostly Ali loved the way it belonged to them. It was the only place they could be completely uninhibited together.

Her ears were still ringing from the noise of the music at the lap-dancing club. Whispers had been an assault on the senses. It was too loud, too dark, and too airless.

This must be intentional, so that no one could think clearly about what they were doing there, decided Ali. Otherwise they might notice that the dancer who collected the £20 notes had an ugly bruise on her right buttock, that her bikini top was old and frayed, and that her smile stopped as soon as the money was paid.

“What are you doing?” asked Jake, who was already lying on the bed, hands behind his head, legs splayed, with an erection so big that it made Ali smile at the comedy of the human body. “I’ve got a lot of pent-up frustration that needs releasing.”

Ali laughed. She began slowly undressing in front of him, tantalizingly removing her clothes, rolling them into a ball, and throwing them at his head. Jake pleaded for mercy. She felt pleasantly drunk. Tomorrow they would tell Bryony what they had learned from Katya. Perhaps, later, they could even tell her about their relationship.

“There wasn’t a dancer in that club more gorgeous than you.” Jake sighed as Ali sauntered naked toward the bed.

“Do you want a lap dance?” she teased.

“As long as it lasts longer than two minutes,” he said, and groaned.

“I think those clubs encourage premature ejaculation,” said Ali as she slid along his body.

•   •   •

On the other side
of the Atlantic, a lonely figure was also making his way home, after a long weekend at the office. Dick Fuld, guest of honor at the Skinners’ Christmas party two years earlier, was being driven to his New York apartment from Lehman’s office at 745 Seventh Avenue. He looked impassively ahead, as if paralyzed, as the car sped through the empty streets. The usual arrogance and bluster had disappeared as he absorbed the news that the last-minute deal with Barclays had fallen apart and his bank was to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in what would be the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Downstairs in the kitchen at Holland Park Crescent, Bryony was watching these scenes on television.

“The ships have all sunk at once,” she muttered to herself. The screen was now showing the front page of
The Wall Street Journal
: “Crisis on Wall Street As Lehman Totters, Merrill Is Sold and AIG Seeks to Raise Cash.”

A panel of experts began discussing the repercussions of this new catastrophe. One of them described it as a “financial tsunami.” Felix Naylor pointed out that Lehman’s employees were unusual in that they owned a third of the company through share options that were now worthless. Someone mentioned greedy bankers and cited the example of the insider-trading charges against Nick Skinner and Ned Wilbraham, “two of the highest-paid bankers in the City.”

Bryony glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it was seven o’clock in the morning. She checked her new pay-as-you-go mobile phone to see if there were any messages from Nick. There were none. She went up into the drawing room and peeked through the curtains to find a crowd of photographers waiting outside. She needed to get everyone downstairs to face this day together.

Ablaze with nervous energy and pent-up anxiety, Bryony ran upstairs, two at a time, until she reached Jake’s room. She didn’t bother to knock on his door. Instead she clumsily turned the handle, immediately waking up Ali, the lighter sleeper of the two. Ali watched as Bryony stood in the doorway, squinting to adjust to the poor light in the room. She calculated that she had a couple of seconds until Bryony absorbed the scene before her.

Ali forced herself to take shallow breaths. She remained completely still, lying on her side, naked, on top of the duvet, beside Jake. They were facing each other and holding hands. Ali tried to disentangle her fingers, but Jake resisted and instead gripped hers tighter in his sleep, pulling Ali toward him, nuzzling her neck. Bryony took a half-step back toward the door, as though she had been winded.

For a moment Ali wondered whether Bryony had seen them and decided that this was a problem she was going to confront later, when she had dealt with other more pressing issues. Or perhaps she didn’t mind that her son and her nanny were sleeping with each other, as long as they didn’t advertise their relationship in public. The truth was, for a couple of seconds, Bryony was frozen.

Ali closed her eyes, remembering how Hector and Alfie used to think that no one could see them if their eyes were shut, and wishing it were true. There were a couple of seconds of respite, and then the sound of Bryony screaming pierced the silence. Ali couldn’t remember what she did first. Did she try to pull the duvet around her? Or was the weight of Jake’s body too heavy to gain any purchase? Maybe she grabbed Jake’s arm to wake him up? Probably the latter, she decided, because the noise Bryony made was so animal that she could hear the twins stir in her bedroom below. Ali saw the look of revulsion on Bryony’s face and knew her relationship with Jake was over.

“What’s going on?” Jake asked sleepily as he sat up, rubbing his eyes.

Bryony wasn’t looking at him. In a storm of anger, she rushed to Ali’s side of the bed and began picking up clothes randomly from the floor and throwing them at her. Knickers, bras, trousers, T-shirts. Many of them belonged to Ali. Some of them had even once belonged to Bryony, a fact that seemed to enflame her further. She noticed Ali’s things on the chest of drawers and swept them all onto the floor with her arm. Her eyes were flashing, and her hair was wild. Ali imagined she might physically attack her.