What the Nanny Saw (6 page)

“I can see that you got eleven GCSEs and top grades in your A-levels,” said Bryony, pushing a piece of paper toward Nick, who glanced down the page and gave an appreciative whistle of approval. “So you’d obviously be able to help the children with schoolwork. We both work long hours, so this is a priority.”

“Absolutely,” said Ali.

“Latin?” questioned Bryony. Ali nodded.

“Apart from babysitting, do you have any experience with children?” Bryony asked.

Ali started to explain how, as part of a program to reduce teenage pregnancy, girls at her school had all been given a fake baby to look after for a day. The doll was programmed to cry if it wasn’t fed or its nappy wasn’t regularly changed. She had proven to be totally responsible.

“What about the other girls in your class?” asked Nick.

“One of them dropped the doll off the end of the pier by mistake, and another was already pregnant and it made her lactate,” said Ali, pleased to find a verb that was suitably scientific.

Nick and Bryony stared at her in silence for a moment. “We’re not familiar with this program,” Nick said finally, and smiled. Bryony looked nonplussed.

“We’d also expect you to help organize our domestic life for us,” Bryony said, trying to pull the interview back to familiar territory. “Anything from birthday parties to collecting dry cleaning, getting the car serviced, and buying clothes for the children. Would you be happy to do that?”

“Sure,” said Ali enthusiastically.

“Do you have any questions for us?” Bryony suddenly asked. Ali muttered something about driving in London being a very different prospect from driving in Cromer.

“You can use Addison Lee,” said Bryony.

“Is he your chauffeur?” Ali asked. Nick and Bryony laughed, and Ali felt herself blush again.

“It’s the name of a taxi company,” Nick explained. “We have an account with them.”

This was what she remembered of the interview years later. There were no questions about how to recognize the symptoms of meningitis or what to do if a child was choking. Both were questions Rosa said her mother always asked a new nanny.

Instead there had been more talk about Ali’s ability to schedule the lives of four children and of the hours she would be expected to work. She compared it to revision timetables for exams and they reveled again in her academic qualifications. The Skinners liked the facts that she would be able to help the children with schoolwork and that she was a strong swimmer. They agreed that it was unfortunate that she didn’t ski, but then neither did three of the other applicants for the job. Ali pointed out that cooking might be a problem, and they explained that they had a Philippine housekeeper, Malea, who took care of most of the meals and cleaned the house. Nick had joked that she seemed to be talking herself out of a job. Ali responded by saying that she wouldn’t be able to commit to spending more than twelve months with them. There was more laughter as Ali unwittingly proved their point.

Then they said that if she agreed to an extra six months they would pay her a bonus worth two terms of tuition fees. It would mean that Ali wouldn’t return to her course the following academic year, but she didn’t hesitate as she agreed to their terms. It was just eighteen months of her life, Ali argued.

“Is there anything more you want to know about me?” Ali asked. She thought of a recent discussion with Rosa about how everyone had three significant events that defined their character for better or worse. Rosa cited her mother’s alcoholism, the way she moved school every four years because her father was in the forces, and how her younger sister had stolen her boyfriend.

“I am a good person who has done a bad thing. I once helped my sister score heroin. I don’t inhale,” Ali had told Rosa. These three had come to mind straight away and then just as quickly been forgotten.

“Obviously you’ll have to sign a confidentiality agreement. And we would like you to agree to cancel your Facebook account. We are a family that values its privacy,” said Bryony. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all,” said Ali, ignoring their invasion of her privacy.

“And if you have a boyfriend, we’d prefer you to stay with him,” said Bryony.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” said Ali firmly.

“Then I think that we’ve covered all the ground,” said Bryony, efficiently organizing papers until the file that said “Nanny No. 6” was on the top of the pile. “How many families are you choosing between?”

“Sorry?” said Ali in confusion.

“How many other interviews are you doing?”

Ali was unsure what to say. She glanced from Bryony to Nick and saw that he was holding up three fingers away from his wife’s field of vision.

“Er, three,” said Ali.

“Your room would be on the fifth floor, across the landing from the twins and round the corner from Izzy,” Bryony said. “It’s got a wonderful view over the garden, and there’s a small kitchenette and sitting room. The only downside is that you don’t have an en suite. I hope this isn’t a big problem.”

“Not at all,” said Ali, who didn’t want to tell them she had never had her own bathroom.

“And we have a busy social life,” said Bryony, looking up from her list. “So you’d sometimes need to be around in the evenings to help look after the children. We used to have a weekend nanny, but it’s too disruptive, so we’re looking for someone who can do everything.”

“Great,” said Ali.

 4 

September 2006

“Olio Chesterton,” Foy Chesterton called out in a singsong voice as though he was manning a market stall. “First press. Extra-virgin. Get Malea to use it to make a
stifado
.” He stood on the bottom step of the stairs that led from the raised ground floor down into the kitchen on the lower ground floor until he was certain that everyone was looking at him, and then triumphantly removed a bottle of murky liquid from a beach basket.

Improbably for London in September, Foy was wearing a pair of muddy-brown shorts, a perfectly ironed short-sleeved shirt, and deck shoes with ankle socks. His calves and thighs were tanned and hardened from two months of playing tennis every day in Corfu, his face as dark and wrinkled as one of the olives picked from his farm. When he stepped into the kitchen, Foy instinctively stooped, as tall men do, and then quickly unfurled again. The huge room didn’t seem big enough to contain his energy. The twins surged forward to greet him, and clung on to his legs like limpets. He didn’t flinch.

“Where’s Cerberus?” he boomed. On cue, Leicester barked from the garden, furiously throwing himself against the glass door as he realized he was excluded from the festivity inside.

“Thanks, Dad,” said Bryony, stepping forward to take the olive oil from his hand. “Maybe we should save it? Does olive oil have vintage years? Does it improve with age?” She quickly kissed him once on each cheek.

“Like me, do you mean?” said Foy, bending down extravagantly to pick up a twin under each arm. “You should drink a spoonful of that stuff every day so that your bones grow as strong as your grandfather’s,” he told them as they tried to wriggle free. Making suitable noises of disgust, Hector and Alfie buried their noses into his neck and ruffled his soft, gray hair until it stood on end.

“Do you have something for us?” they pleaded. He unceremoniously dropped them on the floor, slapped his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders.

“I forgot,” he said dramatically. He noticed Izzy standing by the kitchen table and gestured for her to come forward. Like a magician, he pulled out a brightly colored sarong and matching bikini from the basket and threw it toward her in a high arc over the twins’ heads. She caught it as it fluttered between her outstretched hands. The twins took advantage to make for the bag, but Foy caught them and held them aloft, laughing as their little legs hopelessly pedaled in the air.

“For my most beautiful granddaughter,” he said dramatically.

“Thanks,” said Izzy cautiously. Izzy glanced at the bikini long enough to see that the top and bottom consisted of little more than bits of string with four triangles attached. She stuffed the bikini inside the sarong and made a careful ball until it was small enough to hide behind the toaster. Even in the heat of the Corfu summer it had been difficult to persuade her out of jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. When she swam in the pool she wore a conservative black swimsuit and a top. It was ludicrous to consider she would ever wear something so skimpy. She rubbed her tummy, loathing the plump childish contours, and breathed in until she could feel her ribs. Then she relaxed again and began reciting one of the mantras she had found on a pro-anorexia website: “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.”

“What else do I have in here?” asked Foy, rummaging in the bag and pulling out a chess set carved from olive wood. “Where’s my cleverest grandson?” Jake lazily raised a hand from where he was sitting at the kitchen table. Foy pretended not to see him. So Jake stood up and went over to collect the chess set. Foy pulled him close and ruffled his long hair, muttering something about how he was looking forward to being taught how to play by his oldest grandson and how pleased he was that he had been tipped for Oxbridge by his school.

“Pull your trousers up, Jake,” he called out as Jake slouched back toward the kitchen table. Jake made a perfunctory gesture, grabbing the belt loop at the back, but the trousers immediately slumped back down to reveal his underpants.

“Big oversight, Tita! We didn’t get the twins anything,” Foy called upstairs for his wife to come down. Tita slowly emerged. She came down the stairs cautiously, with a sideways step, holding firmly onto the banister because she had recently developed a fear of falling. She hadn’t told anyone this, and people sometimes mistook her slow, dignified descent down stairs and across rooms for imperiousness.

On the floor by the bottom step, the twins feverishly searched in the bag at Foy’s feet, their faces growing redder as the tears pricked. They pulled out an unread copy of
The Telegraph
, a packet of photographs, and a swollen copy of a novel by John Grisham that had spent too much time getting wet beside the swimming pool. They ignored their grandmother, who was carrying an identically shaped package under each arm.

“They’re wrapped up.” Tita gestured to the parcels.

“Of course,” said Foy. By now it was a double bluff. Tita had clearly done the shopping, and it wasn’t clear whether Foy really had forgotten to bring them something or was pretending to have forgotten. The twins were too worked up to absorb what their grandmother was telling them and continued to skirmish in the bag like stray dogs searching for food.

Tita now stood on the same step as Foy. Beside him, she looked pale. It wasn’t just her skin—she wore a wide-brimmed hat whenever she went outside in Corfu, even if it was just to count how many cars were in the Rothschilds’ driveway—it was the pale linen dress that she had chosen and the pink Elizabeth Arden lipstick that always left comedy kiss marks on people’s cheeks. He was so vital and present. She looked as though she should be staked to the ground to avoid floating away.

Foy took the parcels from Tita and presented them to the twins. They whooped and ripped open the plain brown packaging to reveal two ships hand-carved in wood from their grandfather’s olive grove. One said “Hector” on the side. The other said “Alfie.” They ran around the kitchen table, boats held aloft, shrieking wildly.

“Did you give Nick and Bryony the olive oil?” Tita asked over the din.

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” Foy said apologetically. “What were you doing up there?”

Tita glanced over at him disapprovingly. She pouted petulantly and put a hand on her hip. It used to be her most flirtatious look. Now she looked a little like a drag queen. Her lips pinched together tightly, creating tiny ragged islands of cracked lipstick.

“You have no self-control, Dad,” Bryony quickly chipped in, then looked as though she immediately regretted saying it.

“Just as well you don’t take after me, then,” said Foy. It was a rebuke. Ali soon learned that Foy claimed responsibility for the positive traits in his children and grandchildren. Any bad characteristics were blamed on Tita’s side of the family (“stubborn, overcautious and overbearing”) or Nick’s (“intolerant, anal and passive-aggressive”), even though he had met Nick’s parents only once, at his daughter’s wedding more than two decades earlier.

“In answer to your question, I was parking the car,” Tita explained as she finally stepped into the kitchen and took a drink from the tray that Malea was holding.

“Thank you, Malea,” she said, without looking down at the tiny housekeeper.

“Granny, I can’t believe that you get in the car to drive four hundred meters down the road,” commented Jake. “What about your carbon footprint?”

“What about yours?” countered Foy. “When I was your age I hadn’t even been to the continent. You fly abroad at least once every holiday.”

“What’s the continent?” asked Alfie, putting down his boat on the kitchen floor.

“It’s when you pee in your pants,” Izzy responded. “Like Hector.”

Hector surged toward Izzy, throwing himself with all his strength at her thighs in an effort to topple her. He failed and instead battered her legs with angry fists until she pleaded for mercy.

“That’s incontinent,” pointed out Jake over the noise.

“That’s where I’m heading,” said Foy, but no one was listening. Everyone shouted at Hector to stop. Instead he continued to hurl himself at Izzy like a battering ram. Izzy was sturdy and gave no ground, which further infuriated Hector.

Ali stood back, taking stock, unsure whether to intervene. On the one hand, she was farthest away from the fracas, sitting on the edge of the sofa, beside the enormous sliding doors into the garden. On the other, Bryony had asked her to join them for lunch to keep an eye on the twins. Bryony had emphasized the need to keep them reasonably quiet at the other end of the table and the importance of making sure they didn’t use their fingers to eat. She hadn’t mentioned anything about mediating fights.

Nor was Ali sure what to do as Hector grabbed at Izzy’s long, dark hair and Izzy responded by kicking him in the calf with a heavy-looking leather ankle boot. None of the child-care books that she found carefully piled on the desk in her bedroom at the top of Holland Park Crescent when she moved in the previous Saturday addressed the issue of children physically fighting with one another. She could vaguely remember squalling with her sister, but she couldn’t recall how her parents responded. And surely if Nick and Bryony were in the room, then she shouldn’t undermine their authority by getting directly involved.

“Stop that, you two,” bellowed Foy, who was closest, but they took no notice of their grandfather.

Alfie headed purposefully toward Hector, carrying his brother’s ship, apparently unperturbed by the noise and managing to avoid the flailing limbs. At least Ali assumed it was Alfie, because in less than a week he had already proven himself to be less volatile than Hector. Hector hurled himself at life, while Alfie was more reticent. Their temperament was their only distinguishing feature, although some days Ali suspected they pretended to be each other.

Alfie said something unintelligible to everyone but his twin brother.
“Tigil mo yan, Hector.”

Their identical blue eyes met, and Hector let Izzy’s hair gently slide through his fingers. Just as suddenly as it had started, the argument fizzled out. Hector took the ship that his brother was proffering him, and they headed off to play together. Bryony shot a look at Ali.

“What did he say?” Tita asked. “Was that English?”

“Twin-speak,” said Bryony dismissively. “Now, Mum, tell me what you’ve been up to this week.”

She linked arms with her mother and led her toward the nearest sofa at the garden end of the enormous open-plan room. They were now close enough to Ali that she could hear Tita mutter something about the pace of retirement not suiting Foy. Expecting to be introduced, Ali pushed a stray strand of hair behind an ear, but neither Bryony nor her mother looked up at her.

Instead she stood alone by the sliding doors. Ali’s anxiety pricked again. She wondered whether she had done something wrong. Bryony was difficult to read. She gave meticulous instructions for apparently trivial tasks and then never bothered to follow up to see whether Ali had fulfilled the brief.

At the beginning of the week, for example, she spoke to Ali for almost twenty minutes about the optimum method for testing times tables. “Forward, backward, forward, backward, random. Backward, forward, backward, forward, random,” she had said in a tone as rhythmic as a metronome, “and then forward, backward, forward, random, forward, backward.” She made Ali repeat a couple of times what she had said, and then explained that research showed that it was essential for children to recite things three times to ensure the memory was properly laid down in the frontal cortex.

“Surely the twins don’t do times tables yet?” Ali had asked.

“If they learn some of them now, then it will be easier later,” Bryony said. “It’s good to be ahead of the game.”

On Tuesday she had even called to check exactly how many times Ali had tested them the previous day.

“I can’t remember exactly,” Ali had said.

“Then you should write it down in the daybook,” suggested Bryony.

The following evening Bryony had spoken to her about her worries over the secret language the twins sometimes used to communicate with each other. Apparently the boys were late talkers, and their language emerged in tandem with their first words. Bryony had asked Ali to research the subject and see if it was something common to twins and get back to her in a couple of weeks with her conclusions. She had also instructed her to analyze the words to see if she could decipher what they meant and to compile a rudimentary dictionary. Not wanting to be awkward or appear unwilling, Ali had quickly agreed.

It occurred to her that if Bryony was as worried as she professed to be, then it was surprising that she hadn’t done anything before about the problem. But equally she was gratified to be entrusted with such a serious issue after just a couple of days into the new job.

So far Ali had only two words to show for her efforts. Right now, however, she was too far from them to hear what they were saying. She could see Bryony looking up from the sofa and pointing toward the twins, mouthing, “pen and paper.” Using a similar gesture, Ali pointed upstairs to indicate her notebook was in the bedroom. Bryony stared at her for a little longer than was comfortable but was quickly distracted by Jake, who had begun to question his grandfather about the smoked salmon business he used to run.

“How many flights did you clock flying smoked salmon around the UK?” Jake asked Foy as they sat at the kitchen table. “You told me once that it was all flown to Poland to be packaged and then back here again to be sold. You’d need to buy a slice of the Amazon to compensate for that kind of level of carbon emissions.”

“We’re not talking about that,” Bryony interrupted.

Earlier in the year Foy’s business partner of twenty-five years had mounted a coup to get him taken off the board of the company that he had founded back in the seventies. Although it was couched in friendly terms as retirement and Foy retained an important-sounding but ineffectual title, he had effectively been bought out and left without a job. The hasty purchase of the olive grove the previous year was Bryony’s idea to lift his spirits and give him a new project. Everyone was under strict instructions not to mention fish of any kind.