by Fiona Neill
“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 gratif
ied 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.
“That smoked salmon is paying your school fees,” said Foy. “Don’t knock it. Just wish I’d thought of pickling it in formaldehyde and selling it to Tate Britain.”
“Actually, I’m paying the school fees,” Nick interrupted loudly.
He was standing on one side of the long, thin island that dominated the other end of the kitchen, examining bottles of wine he had brought up from the cellar. He looked like a lonely plane that had fallen off the edge of a runway. It was the first time he had spoken since his father-in-law had come into the kitchen. Now it was his turn to admonish himself. What was he trying to prove?
“Hello, Nick, how’s business?” Foy asked, moving swiftly toward the end of the kitchen island to shake his son-in-law’s hand. For a man of sixty-eight, he moved remarkably fluidly. “Is it a bull or a bear?”
Nick laughed loudly, as though it were the first time Foy had ever posed this question. Over the years Nick had tried to explain to his father-in-law that the vagaries of the stock market didn’t have any impact on the daily rhythms of his work, but Foy simply ignored him because he liked the sound of the question.
“Actually, we’re still benefiting from the fall in interest rates. Means people aren’t getting a good return from government bonds or savings,” said Nick, putting down the bottle of wine he had been examining. “We’re making a killing on these investment products called collateralized debt obligations. It’s like a never-ending party.”
Foy looked at him quizzically, because Nick wasn’t following the established routine. Foy’s question was usually the cue for Nick to ask him about his latest news.
“Sounds fascinating,” said Foy, unable to disguise his lack of enthusiasm.
“It is,” said Nick, deliberately misreading his father-in-law’s tone. “House prices are rising, people are taking out loans to spend on cheap goods made in China. Everyone is getting rich, especially the Chinese, and they’re keeping interest rates low by buying U.S. treasury bonds.”
“Are you going to open that bottle of wine, or do you want me to?” asked Foy jovially, stretching toward the Girardin Puligny-Montrachet that Nick was holding. Nick possessively held on to the neck of the bottle. The bottle opener remained on the worktop.
“We’re pooling debt, adding it together, and selling it on as bonds paying different interest rates depending on the risk,” said Nick. “Most of it is subprime mortgage debt but it could be credit-card debt or emerging-market debt, doesn’t matter, really. We sell it on to a company we’ve created to buy it so the risk is off our books, and then it gets sliced and diced. We get a fee on every deal, and there’s revenue from repayment.”
“Who buys debt from people they don’t know?” asked Foy incredulously.
“People like your pension fund, for example, or your bank,” said Nick. “They’re looking for the best return on their investment.”
“Surely you need to know who’s borrowing the money in case they can’t pay it back?” pointed out Foy.
“We have formulas to assess risk, and agencies like Moody’s who rate the debt,” Nick said, and shrugged. “It’s practically infallible. Anyway, as long as people are making money, they don’t ask questions. They’re riskier for investors, but the returns are much higher.”
Foy shook his head and picked up the bottle opener. It was clear from the way he kept turning it in his hands that he had no idea how to use it.
“The more leverage, the more potential return. That’s our mantra,” continued Nick. He knew from meetings with investors that there came a point in the discussion where people were unwilling to admit they didn’t understand and simply capitulated to his superior knowledge of the jargon. “We’re operating in the outer frontiers of finance.”
“To go where no man has ever gone before,” joked Jake.
“Like the olive, the stock market is both a good servant and a hard master,” said Foy eventually, misquoting Lawrence Durrell.
“It is,” agreed Nick.
“So you’re still just selling bits of paper,” said Foy.
“Yes, but the color of the ink is different,” replied Nick firmly, finally releasing the bottle from his grip.
“There’s got to be something wrong with a world where people aren’t just spending what they earn but spending what they don’t earn, too,” said Foy finally.
He made no attempt to put forward his favorite argument that the growth of the financial sector in London was killing innovation in British manufacturing. It was clear to everyone in the room that Nick had just won an argument. It just wasn’t obvious what it was about.
“You’re being boring, Dad,” Jake shouted grumpily from the middle of the room, where he was leafing through a copy of Kerrang! at the kitchen table, one iPod earphone in his ear, the other drifting across a plate of butter.
“What’s Dad talking about?” Izzy asked her mother.
“His work,” said Bryony. “Don’t worry. No one understands what he does. Not even me.”
“Are you going to open that bottle? Or are you waiting for us to pay further homage to the high priest of finance?” Nick picked up the bottle opener. “Nothing’s obvious anymore,” Foy complained, “just look at that gadget. You need to read an instruction manual to operate it.”
“That was a present from my team,” said Nick. “It’s probably the most evolutionary bottle opener on the market. You can open two thousand bottles of wine before you even have to think about recalibrating it.”
“It’s like your electric salt and pepper mills,” continued Foy. “I can’t help thinking that the phallic nature of all these inventions is to compensate for the fact that men spend so much time in offices staring at spreadsheets on computer screens and so little time outside hunting and gathering. At least the smoked salmon industry kept me fit.”
“I’m perfectly fit,” said Nick. “I run four times a week. And there’s not much need for hunting and gathering in the age of Internet shopping.”
Foy retreated from Nick like a kicked dog and headed open-armed toward Malea, who had emerged from the storeroom in the basement beneath the kitchen. The area below the kitchen was Malea’s domain. It was the beginning of the production line for the three meals she prepared each day. It was where she slept and bathed, and the front line for the laundry effort. There was a room at the back on the garden side that doubled as a playroom during the day and a place for Jake and his friends to watch
TV and play snooker at night. It was also Malea’s favorite location for ironing. Malea looked pleased but embarrassed as Foy picked her up and hugged her.
“Honey with walnuts,” he said, pressing a couple of jars into each hand.
“Mr. Chesterton,” she said in embarrassment, “you are spoiling me.” Everyone giggled. Jake shifted uncomfortably in his chair because he was the one who had taught Malea to say this without telling her about the Ferrero Rocher advert. Although his worldview was limited by his parents’ wealth, at seventeen he had enough insight to know that it wasn’t cool to take the piss out of the person who ironed his pants.
“A taste of Greece, to entice you to visit us,” Foy said.
Nick busied himself with bottles of wine, trying to hide his annoyance with his father-in-law. It wasn’t for Foy to invite Malea to Greece. She worked for him and Bryony, not Foy and Tita, and they needed her at home even when they were away. Besides, the idea that his father-in-law’s indomitable Greek housekeeper would ever accept such an interloper was ridiculous.
“Stop pissing all over my territory,” Ali was taken aback to hear Nick mutter under his breath. He tried to focus on the bottles of wine. Malea, who obviously wasn’t privy to the fish embargo, told Foy proudly that she was cooking salmon en croute in his honor. Foy didn’t flinch.
“Hope it’s wild salmon. The farmed stuff is full of crap,” he said virulently.
Nick looked up at him in surprise. Foy normally talked about the salmon business in terms of revolution. Of how he had introduced salmon to the masses, how he had brought democracy to the dining table by selling it in supermarkets, how he had improved the nation’s health long before fish oils had become fashionable. But the Che Guevara diatribe was gone. This was a new angle.
“Those fish are no better off than battery hens,” he said. “Covered in fleas, pumped with more chemicals than an East German weightlifter. God knows what they do to a man’s libido.”
