by Fiona Neill
“Literature?” asked Ali. Mira nodded.
“What books did you read?” Mira didn’t reply straightaway. Instead she stopped the stroller, fussed with the baby, and asked Hector and Alfie whether they were enjoying school.
“To Kill a Mockingbird, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Shakespeare, Byron, anything we could get our hands on,” she said eventually. “It was a long time ago.”
“So how did you learn to speak with such a good accent?” Ali persisted.
“We listened to tapes,” said Mira, “and sometimes my father listened to American radio, but it was dangerous for him to do that.”
“Why?” asked Ali.
“Under communism, it was prohibited,” she explained.
“Were you happy when the wall came down?” Ali asked.
“New regime. Different problems,” said Mira.
“Like what?” asked Ali.
“Corruption,” said Mira abruptly. “We’ve arrived.”
They went into the café, and Mira adroitly weaved the stroller between tables. There was a small group of women, whom Ali recognized from outside school. They were all sitting beside identical multistory strollers with babies tucked in the bottom and the occasional toddler sipping organic juice in the seat above.
She sat down, grateful for the company, and managed with surprising proficiency to order a skinny latte with an extra shot of coffee. Hector and Alfie sat at a table beside Ali with another boy, whom she recognized from their class.
She was intrigued to find these nannies speaking English to one another. Except because of the mispronunciation, the heavy accents, and the hesitant cadence, it sounded like a different form of English. They all mispronounced words in the same way. A rolling r that came from the front of the tongue rather than the glottis had been introduced. Maybe this is how everyone will speak in fifty years’ time, thought Ali, as she sipped at her coffee. At the very least it might become a dialect or a kind of patois.
Mira introduced them to Ali. They all had exotic-sounding names: the one with the toddler was Raisa, the older woman with the perpetually worried expression was Ileana, then there was Katya. They all smiled warmly and shook her hand. Ali recognized Katya as the nanny standing beside the woman in the circular skirt at the beginning of term. Actually, Ali recalled, Katya had stood unobtrusively three paces behind Sophia Wilbraham and one pace to the side, a technique she noticed other nannies adopt when they were with their bosses. The etiquette between nanny and employer was as byzantine as the court of Louis Quinze.
Katya was tall and pale. Her hair was harshly scraped back off her face into a ponytail. She wore no makeup and a shapeless white shirt over a pair of jeans, but even despite this minimalist attire, Ali could see she was beautiful. After acknowledging Ali with a quick smile, she continued with the story she was telling.
Ali sipped her coffee, grateful for an excuse to stare at her. She was wasted spending her days looking after someone else’s children, thought Ali. She should be on MTV or modeling for Stella McCartney or presenting a cookery program on Eastern European cuisine.
A small child sat on her lap, nestling into her breast. He was half asleep, his thumb was in his mouth, and he kneaded a scrap of rag with his remaining fingers. She stroked his blond curly hair, winding it round her finger into ringlets.
“Thomas’s mother is away for a long weekend in New York,” she explained. “I say he misses her terribly but only because his mother needs to hear that. Which I find odd because if I were his mother I would want to know that he is happy, don’t you agree, Ali? Wouldn’t you be happy that he is happy with me?”
Ali nodded, grateful to be included in the conversation.
“In truth, life is easier when she is away, because we get into a good routine. He goes to bed earlier because he’s not waiting for her to come up at night, and Leo is kinder to him.” She leaned over, patted the boy sitting next to Alfie and Hector on the head, and bestowed a small kiss on Thomas’s hot-looking face. The child opened an eye and smiled up adoringly at her. “If he can’t sleep, I let him come and lie on my bed, and sometimes he ends up spending the whole night there.”
“Doesn’t the mother mind?” Ali asked, feeling grateful the twins showed no similar urge. “I mean, the twins’ mother is very particular about their routines, and I can’t imagine her allowing them to do something like that.”
“Sophia doesn’t know, and her husband doesn’t mind.” Katya smiled. “But I think if you leave a child for thirteen hours a day with another woman, then you have to expect the child will become fond of her. Don’t you think? We are happy together.” She gave him another kiss and put a protective arm around him.
“Of course,” said Ali, who didn’t agree at all. The idea that she would fill any maternal void for Hector and Alfie was appalling. She didn’t want the responsibility.
“What does she do all day if you’re looking after Thomas and she’s not working?” asked Ali.
“She goes to the gym,” said Katya. They all laughed.
“Molokho, Katya, molokho bud’laska.” The little boy stirred. He didn’t open his eyes. Katya pulled a bottle of milk from her handbag.
“Dakoyu.”
“He speaks better Ukrainian than English,” said Katya proudly.
“Why do you all speak to each other in English?” Ali asked.
“Because not all of us understand each other.” Mira smiled, smoothing down her bangs so that they covered one eye. “Ukrainians in the south can understand Polish because we were invaded by Poland, and those in the north can understand Russian because they were invaded by the Russians. I speak both because I learned Russian at school when Ukraine was still Communist.”
She went on to explain that although the Czechs and the Slovaks could understand each other, since partition their languages were beginning to drift apart. Both, however, could understand Polish, because they were all West Slavic languages that were written in the Latin alphabet. Macedonians and Bulgarians could understand each other, but Bulgarian was a South Slavic language that used the Cyrillic alphabet.
It would make a good topic for the linguistics component of her degree, thought Ali. Perhaps she could even write a paper in her spare time to prove to Will MacDonald that she was serious about returning to finish her course.
“But Ileana is the real problem, because she is Romanian.” Mira smiled again. “She speaks four languages, but none of us understand any of them.” She asked Ileana to translate an English sentence into Italian, French, Spanish, and finally Romanian to demonstrate the similarities.
“She always closes the window before dinner,” Ileana said seriously, smoothing down the front of her A-line skirt.
“Illa semper fenestram claudit antequam cenat is Latin,” she said, making Ali repeat the sentence out loud. She did the same in Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, finishing up with Romanian.
“Ea închide totdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina,” Ileana said triumphantly. Everyone applauded, including someone at another table.
“How come you’ve ended up in London, Mira?” asked Ali. There was an uncomfortable silence. Ileana looked at her hands. Katya put a lid on the bottle of milk.
“Is long story, Ali,” said Mira, making a rare grammatical mistake.
“So what’s it like?” Katya asked suddenly, turning to Ali.
“What’s what like?” replied Ali.
“What’s it like working for the Skinners?”
“It’s fine,” said Ali, checking to see whether Alfie and Hector were listening, but they were too involved in scooping froth off the top of their babyccinos to make milk mustaches. She could see the disappointment on Katya’s face.
“Early days. All a bit strange. They look after me well.”
She fell silent, aware that she hadn’t delivered. If they beca
me friends she might tell them that after almost two months living with the Skinners, this was what she knew: Bryony didn’t eat; Izzy ate a lot but then threw up, mostly Cumberland sausages that cost £11 a pound from the butcher in Holland Park Avenue; the twins’ friends all had strange names (Star, Ocean, Canteloupe); Nick didn’t need much sleep; and the under-floor heating was perpetually switched on in the kitchen, even when it got so hot that Malea had to open the sliding doors into the garden. She might have told them how music could be piped through the ten rooms on the bottom two floors from a centrally controlled panel in the kitchen and that as recently as this week she had discovered a new room in the basement: a home cinema with seats wide enough to fit two adults. Or she could have mentioned the bags of clothes that arrived from Net-a-Porter every other week. Some of the dresses cost thousands of pounds. Ali knew because she had seen the receipts in the top drawer of the desk in Bryony’s office. Many of the bags sat in Bryony’s dressing room, the clothes wrapped in tissue paper, never to be used, because she didn’t have time to try them on.
She thought of the £100 spending money that Bryony left on the kitchen table every morning, and the irritation on her face if Ali tried to return the change in the evening; the way the larder was stacked with food and drink from floor to ceiling, like a supermarket, because Bryony made exactly the same Internet order every week, even when the huge American fridge was already full. She recalled waking up a couple of nights earlier and hearing raised voices arguing somewhere in the house and assuming it was Nick and Bryony, only to discover the next morning that Nick was still in Asia, and she thought about the apologetic expression on Jake’s face when he told her about Malea’s children. Although she was sure that he lied to her more than any of the other children, Jake occasionally demonstrated random acts of kindness that made Ali feel less alone at Holland Park Crescent.
“Nick and Bryony aren’t around very much. They seem to work very hard,” she explained. “Nick travels a lot. I’ve only seen him four or five times since I started the job.”
“That’s good,” said Katya. “It can get a bit confusing for the children if there are too many people telling them what to do.”
How could it be good that the twins hardly ever spent any time with their dad? Ali wondered. She spent long hours with her father as a child. But would it have mattered if she hadn’t? She wouldn’t have known that if the wind was blowing off the land, then it was safe to fish. More significant, she wouldn’t have known that if the wind was blowing from the northeast round to easterly, then it was best to stay on land. When it was like this her father described it as “blowing up a hooligan.” She smiled at the memory. Nor would she have known that the seabed in Cromer is made of sand, chalk, and flint, and that it was this combination that made the crabs smaller and sweeter.
“Is that what you find?” asked Ali, wondering what it would be like to work for someone like Sophia Wilbraham.
“No,” Katya said with a smile, “there is a very clear chain of command and room for only one person at the top. We call Sophia the dominatrix.” She laughed loudly. Mira looked at Katya disapprovingly, as though Ali wasn’t quite yet worthy of such confidence.
“She is someone who is not afraid of her own tongue,” said Mira, muddling metaphors in a way that made Ali smile. “But she has a big heart.”
“And a big arse,” said Katya.
“Katya doesn’t like her anymore, because she thinks Sophia wants rid of her,” explained Mira.
“Sophia’s husband told me that she thought I was too good-looking to live in a family home and that I cooked too many meals with him in mind,” said Katya, rocking Thomas in her arms. “As though I was trying to seduce him with my kapusniak.”
“Kapusniak is a Polish dish,” Raisa interjected.
“Actually, it is also Ukrainian,” said Mira. The conversation descended into a discussion about the origins of various Eastern European dishes.
“So what did you do?” interrupted Ali, who was intrigued by this dynamic.
“I found out her favorite dishes and started to cook them,” Katya said, and shrugged.
“So will you be going to Corfu with the family like the other nannies?” asked Mira.
“Of course,” said Ali, although Bryony had mentioned nothing.
Why did she lie to Mira? She decided later that it was because she didn’t want to acknowledge how dislocated she still felt from Bryony. Although they spoke two or three times a day and it was rare that Bryony didn’t send an e-mail every couple of hours, their relationship was functional and devoid of any context. This week Ali had received an e-mail outlining the problems of underbrushing the twins’ teeth, followed a couple of days later by an e-mail warning her of the perils of overbrushing. This had rapidly been followed by a magazine article about how to encourage intellectual curiosity in small children, suggesting Ali cut out a piece from the newspaper each day to discuss with the twins in between their maths homework and piano practice.
She thought of the most recent e-mail, sent at five fifty-three a.m., when Bryony was probably warming up in the basement gym. Subject matter “Snagging,” a hybrid of snogging and nagging, Ali assumed, until she read the attachment instructing her to go through every room in the house looking for problems the builders might have overlooked at the end of their recent refurbishment. Light fixtures missing from wardrobes and bathroom cupboards, unstable bathroom sinks, missing curtain hooks, loose wires, defunct lightbulbs, sloppy paintwork, grouting issues, leaking radiators. Bryony’s list was exhaustive.
Then she remembered their first meeting after she had been given the job. On reflection, it was little more than an elaborate list of dos and don’ts. The dos included reading to the twins each night for at least twenty minutes, but no more than thirty, alternating between fiction and nonfiction in a ratio of roughly sixty-forty. At this point Bryony had suggested Ali might want to take notes, and had pushed a pen and notebook toward her across the dining room table.
Then there was an extensive discussion on healthy snacks and a list of forbidden foods, including most sweets. This was particularly important for Izzy, Bryony said, because she was ill disciplined and putting on weight. Ali could, however, ask Malea to make blueberry muffins using honey instead of sugar, and on Fridays everyone was allowed an organic chocolate bar (as long as it contained at least sixty percent cocoa solids). She then talked about carbohydrates in terms that reminded Ali of the war on terrorism. They hid in foods. They needed to be routed and exposed and made accountable for their actions.
“Definitely on the axis of evil,” Ali had joked, but Bryony hadn’t responded, because she had moved on to screen time. She accepted Ali’s assertion that it would be difficult to monitor how much time Jake and Izzy spent on their computers because they were in their bedrooms. The twins were allowed to watch no more than half an hour of television each day. Computer games were completely off-limits. At the end Bryony casually suggested that Ali might want to avoid “getting embroiled” in the nanny mafia that spent too much time gossiping in cafés.
• • •
“How long have you been with Thomas?” Ali asked Katya, in the same way she might ask a friend about a new boyfriend.
“Since he was born. Almost.” Katya smiled. “They had a maternity nurse at the beginning. But they discovered that she was giving Thomas medicine to make him sleep through the night. I’d been working as their cleaning lady for six years, and so they fired the maternity nurse and I got the job.”
“That’s awful,” said Ali. She paused for a moment. “What’s a maternity nurse?”
“It’s someone who gets paid to look after newborn babies,” Katya explained. “Really good money, but you change jobs every three weeks. The mothers can be really neurotic, and you have to get up in the night all the time.”
“Unless you drug the baby,” said Ali. Everyone laughed. Hect
or and Alfie came over to see what was going on.
“I love it here,” said Hector, leaning in toward Ali. She put out her knee and pulled him into her lap. This was the first time she could remember him spontaneously seeking her affections. She gave him a piece of half-eaten cake, and his body relaxed into her own until he was almost supine. He began humming the same song again. Ali gently wound one of his curls around her finger, and it slipped through like threads of silk.
“You need a haircut, Hector,” she said, remembering Bryony’s latest e-mail.
“No,” responded Hector adamantly.
“If you join the army, they cut off all your hair,” she teased him. He frowned as if unsure whether to believe her. Alfie came over and stood beside them. “In the army they shave it down to your scalp.” She made a noise like an electric razor and pretended to cut their hair with her fingers, tickling the backs of their necks until they crumpled into a giggling heap.
“I have something for you boys for being so good,” said Katya. She searched in her handbag until she had found a lollipop for each of them.
“Thank you, Katya,” they trilled in unison, ripping off the wrapper. This afternoon’s sugar intake represented the biggest lapse in rules since Ali had started work. On balance she would get away with it. They would probably be in bed before Bryony was home. And tomorrow night she was unlikely to ask about whether they had eaten any sweets the previous day. If they ate the lollipops now it would buy her another twenty minutes of company with Mira and her friends. She had enjoyed sitting with this group of women in the warm café, even if her contribution to the conversation was sporadic. She liked the way they gently chided and teased one another and gave one another advice about how to deal with tantrums or cook custard without burning the bottom of the saucepan. Katya was indiscreet and entertaining. Mira’s employers were seeing a marriage guidance counselor. Sophia’s oldest daughter was sleeping with her English tutor. Bryony had turned down an offer to appear in Vogue as one of Britain’s top businesswomen. Mira admonished Katya without conviction.
