by Fiona Neill
“Absolutely not,” said Ali. “Jake and I have never really seen eye to eye.” She was about to add that she didn’t really know him, but it sounded absurd, as though she was deliberately obfuscating. She considered the facts: he slept with his light on, he didn’t use a pillow, he once waxed his monobrow, he told his sister men didn’t fancy thin women, he used Lynx deodorant, he said “tits,” not “breasts.” Intimate stuff, endearing even, but it was knowledge filched rather than tendered.
“Attraction is like temporary blindness: you don’t need to see to feel,” said Katya.
“I just don’t think of him in that way,” said Ali impatiently.
She turned around to check that no one was within earshot. Izzy, in particular, had an uncanny sixth sense for conversations you didn’t want her to hear, although she professed to be completely bored by the overdiscussed subject of Lucy and Jake. Until the news of another mismanaged outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England, it had threatened to become the main theme of the holiday.
Lucy and Jake had disappeared again. Nick had teased Jake about being carsick when they arrived at the Petersons’ house. To judge from the ill-concealed bulge in his swimming trunks, it was a euphemism for lovesick. She just hoped they had found somewhere discreet, because apart from insect hospital, the younger children’s other main pastime was spying on them and writing up reports of what they had observed. Yesterday she had heard them all talking about sex.
“What’s oral sex?” Alfie had asked his twelve-year-old cousin, Ella.
“It’s when you have sex with someone and talk a lot afterward,” replied Ella.
It was after nine o’clock. The sun was low in the sky but engaged in a last-minute burst of energy before it dropped below the horizon.
“And he is so clever,” continued Katya. Ali looked at her blankly and realized that she was still talking about Jake. “Bryony and Nick wanted him to read economics at Oxford, but he insisted he wanted to stick with English. They even tried to persuade him to take a year off so he could think about it for longer, but he refused. I like a man who knows his mind.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Ali.
“You know what it’s like. Nannies hear everything.” Katya shrugged. “So do you think Nick and Bryony are in love?”
“I guess so,” replied Ali vaguely, admiring Leo’s persistence as he got out of the pool after yet another painful belly flop.
“Three out of ten,” trilled Maud. She was a hard taskmaster, like her mother, thought Ali.
“How can you tell?” asked Katya. “They don’t see much of each other.”
“That’s circumstance, not choice,” said Ali, “and when they’re together they seem to get along fine. They hardly ever argue.”
“That might mean there is no connection between them,” pointed out Katya.
Ali would have liked to tell Katya that she wasn’t sure that she had ever been in love and therefore felt unqualified to comment on anyone else’s relationship. But if she shared a confidence, it might provoke Katya to reciprocate with one of her own, and Ali wasn’t sure that she wanted to be the keeper of Katya’s secrets.
She considered her situation. During their yearlong affair, she had shown all the symptoms: she had listened to music that reminded her of Will MacDonald; she had read books that he recommended; she had found ways of turning every conversation back to him; and when she lay in bed with her hand in between her legs she imagined it was his fingers instead of her own. But was this love? Because when she had finally left for London, within weeks all this had faded until she found she could recall only individual features of his face, the whole having been forgotten, and even these had faded with time.
“When I see Bryony and Nick together, I think they have a marriage of convenience,” Katya continued. “It’s all too quiet.”
“Why is it convenient?” asked Ali, her curiosity outweighing her natural reticence about discussing her employers’ relationship. If Mira had been with them, she would have questioned their loyalty.
“Simple: he gives her wealth, she gives him status,” said Katya. “He comes from a really humble background.”
“If he earns so much money, then why does Bryony need to work?” said Ali. It was a question that she had wanted to ask since she moved in with the Skinners.
“Also simple,” said Katya. “With a father like Foy as your main role model, you would never consider men reliable, and she wants to impress him.”
“I don’t know about the machinations of their relationship,” said Ali, annoyed she hadn’t drawn these same conclusions, “but they are good to me, and that’s all I really need to focus on.”
“Does Nick ever flirt with you?”
Ali thought for a moment. She had never really understood flirting. “I don’t think so.”
• • •
“What are your parents like?” Katya asked a few minutes later.
An image of her mother and father companionably sharing toast and jam at six o’clock each evening, just before the shipping forecast, came to Ali’s mind. The simplicity of her parents’ relationship now seemed marvelous. She had never noticed it before she moved in with the Skinners. Even the way her mother was jealous of her father’s relationship with the sea now seemed magical.
“Normal,” said Ali resolutely. “Where are your parents?”
“I was brought up by my mother,” said Katya. It was the first time since Ali had met Katya that she had referred to her life in Ukraine. “My father disappeared. One day he was there, and then, poof, the next he was gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“My mother thinks he had another wife and family in southern Ukraine,” said Katya, rippling the surface of the swimming pool with her toes. “But we don’t know.”
“How awful,” said Ali.
“Is good life lesson,” said Katya. Ali noticed the momentary lapse of grammar. “It teaches you that anything you have been given can be taken away from you. You learn to take the moment when you can.” She raised her arm and grabbed a fistful of thin air to demonstrate. Ali followed her gaze to the swimming pool, where she was watching Thomas haul himself out of the shallow end. He ran toward Katya, and she shouted a few words in Ukrainian, and he slowed down. She pulled her long legs out of the pool and sat cross-legged so that Thomas could sit in the small warm space in the middle.
“Is that why you came to England?” Ali asked. Katya nodded gravely.
“I send almost everything I earn back to my mother for my brothers and sisters. It is my responsibility.”
“How do you know Mira?” asked Ali.
“We made the journey together. She helped me. She saved me from some very, very bad people. But it’s all over now.” Ali sensed Katya had said enough. She rocked backward and forward on her haunches, singing a Ukrainian lullaby to Thomas.
“Where are the rest of the children?” asked Katya. Ali looked toward the pool and realized that they had all disappeared. The insect hospital was intact, but the patients were busily escaping back into the wild. Some were wandering back into the very swimming pool from which they had been rescued. What did that tell you? wondered Ali. That some insects were more intelligent than others? That fate was random? Or that bad luck followed some insects around?
“I’ll go and look for them,” Ali volunteered.
“Will you take Thomas so I can swim?” Katya asked. She pushed him off her knees and stood up to stretch her long legs. There were tiny specks of dust and gravel stuck to her buttocks and thighs. She didn’t bother to wipe them off. She was wearing a bright red bikini. She reminded Ali of an exotic fruit about to burst from its skin. Katya lifted Thomas onto Ali’s hip, and he contentedly played with her hair as they headed into the olive grove at the bottom of the garden, calling for Hector and Alfie.
•
• •
When she got back to the terrace, Ali found the children eating kebabs and pieces of barbecued chicken at the table. Bryony was busily piling up dirty plates and filling glasses with water. She shot Ali a disapproving look for not being there to look after the twins, even though the Petersons’ Greek housekeeper was on hand to help. Hector and Alfie were sharing a seat and eating from the same plate, a double infraction in Bryony’s book, although everyone else commented on how sweet it was that they were so close.
“Sorry, they all disappeared at once,” Ali told Bryony. She sat Thomas down next to Hector and gave him a chicken leg coated in honey to chew on.
“This heat is so exhausting,” said Sophia, fanning herself with a napkin. “I feel almost sedated.”
“That’s what happened in The Tempest,” said Ali, anxious to win back Bryony’s approval.
Sophia looked interested, and Ali explained that the shipwrecked souls who find themselves washed up in The Tempest are overcome by the dreamy quality of the island and break free of the restraints of their narrow Milanese life to become somnambulists and dreamers.
“Some people think Shakespeare set the play on Corfu,” she explained. “Caliban’s mother is called Sycorax, and that is almost an anagram of Corcyra, the ancient name of Corfu.”
She turned to Bryony, who gave her a broad smile.
“Do you know where Leicester is?” Bryony asked.
“We left him down by the pool,” Ali explained. “We cooled him down with a bucket of water and let him go to sleep underneath a sun lounger.”
“Would you mind going to get him, please?” Bryony asked. “He doesn’t know his way round here.”
Once again, Ali set off for the pool. Leicester was no longer beneath the sun lounger, although there was a small, dusty bowl shape where he had been lying. She searched for footprints but found only bits of Lego and a couple of dead grasshoppers. Ali inwardly cursed the dog. He was punishing her for neglecting him. Then she heard a crash in the Petersons’ pool house and noticed the door was ajar.
There was a noise that sounded like a fridge door opening and shutting. Surely Leicester couldn’t open it alone? She tiptoed along the stone path that led to the pool house, regretting that she had left her shoes up on the terrace because it was so hot underfoot.
These people had so many fridges, thought Ali. There were at least five in Holland Park Crescent, and more at the house in Greece. And the Petersons were no different. She remembered her parents replacing the fridge they had owned for almost a quarter of a century a couple of years ago. It had taken almost six months of poring over catalogs, agonizing over different models, comparing prices, energy costs, size, and design, before they could reach a decision. Fridges don’t grow on trees, her father had joked when he saw the bored expression on Ali’s face after yet another discussion. “They do for some,” she could now tell him.
She went into the pool house quietly so she could catch Leicester at the crime scene. Instead she saw Ned, trousers and underpants pulled down beneath his improbably white buttocks, on top of Katya, who was naked apart from her bikini top, which was pulled up over her chest and so flimsy it barely qualified as an item of clothing. He was stroking her breasts as though they were sacred objects. They were shiny with sweat. Ned’s head was turned to the side so that Ali could see his mouth was open at a funny angle as though he might have been saying a word with long vowels like greengage. His face was tomato red. She almost giggled out loud at the absurdity of her discovery. She was reasonably confident that Katya didn’t see her, and she stepped back into the daylight.
• • •
“Can you believe the shadow chancellor was there?” said Foy on the journey home. He had persuaded Tita to accompany him in the boat again. She refused to sit down, even though she was covered in spray, preferring to hold on to the windshield with one hand and Foy’s shoulder with the other. “I liked the cut of his jib. He asked me to make a donation.”
“Julian has a sixth sense for the way the political wind is blowing,” said Tita. “He told me that he thinks Blair might make him a peer before he leaves office.”
“It’s not Julian. It’s Eleanor,” said Foy, unable to disguise the admiration in his voice. “She’s wonderfully adept at making people feel as though she is their best friend.”
“What did you think of the house?” asked Tita.
“Not enough light sockets,” said Foy dismissively.
“It’s a shame Nick has got to go back to London,” said Tita.
“It’s the same every year,” Foy said with a grunt.
14
September 2007
The day after Nick’s bank announced better-than-expected third-quarter results, Izzy meandered downstairs wearing a slouchy mohair sweater (purple bra visible beneath), short tartan skirt, tights with carefully fashioned holes, and black leather jacket, ready for a late-evening rehearsal with her string quartet at Sophia Wilbraham’s house.
They were entering a school music competition, and Sophia had asked Ali to make sure Izzy was at their house by eight o’clock at the latest, so they could run through Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor for the last time. Ali could hear the discontent and resentment in the clump, clump of Izzy’s Dr. Martens boots as she slouched into the kitchen. The cello was about to take a pounding.
It was a bad plan. Izzy was tired after school. She was bored of the cello. And she was fed up with her life being organized by other people. But Bryony had only just arrived back from Kiev and was therefore powerless to derail the plan at this late stage. And out of pity (always a questionable motive), because Sophia’s husband was having an affair, Ali had allowed herself to be steamrolled into submission. She had also agreed to collect Izzy at nine-thirty because Sophia didn’t want to take responsibility for her walking home alone, “given all her troubles.” As Izzy explained fairly articulately to Ali earlier in the day, none of this fitted with her new philosophy of taking responsibility for her destiny.
Unusually, Nick and Bryony were sitting at the kitchen table, having an early-evening drink together. They had just closed on the house in Oxfordshire, and Bryony wanted to discuss the renovation project because she was due to fly to Moscow the following day. Since his premature departure from Corfu, Nick had hardly been at home. Ali sometimes overheard scraps of conversation when he came back at night, but she didn’t ask any questions. “We’ve got a two-billion-dollar CDO that we can’t move at par . . . We’re selling it at a one-hundred-million-dollar loss . . . A quarter of Countrywide’s subprime loans are delinquent . . . We’re in a negative feedback loop.”
From Ali’s perspective the magnitude of the losses always seemed eye-watering, and somehow they impacted on Nick’s self-discipline because he abandoned his late-night exercise routine in the basement gym in favor of a bottle of wine in the drawing room.
Bryony had a deal afoot. Ali had glanced at the top page of “Project Beethoven” (private and confidential, for limited distribution) in the recycling bin and understood from skim-reading the first page that one of Bryony’s Russian energy companies wanted to bid for a British distributor. She also knew from Bryony’s fraught phone conversations that the British government wasn’t very happy about its gas supply being controlled by Russia and that most newspaper stories reflected this view. The results of the Ukrainian elections a couple of weeks earlier didn’t bode well. The pipeline that supplied Europe went through Ukraine, and the Russians were already making threatening noises because they didn’t trust the doll-like new prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.
“They already supply most of our gas, so what does it matter if they distribute it, too?” Bryony briefed journalists from the kitchen in the evening. One of her other deals was “going hostile,” which made Ali think of cowboy films. Bryony’s mood wasn’t good enough for Ali to ask her exactly what this
meant. To judge from her stress levels, it definitely wasn’t positive.
The architect’s plans were unfolded on the table, and Bryony was efficiently running through what she termed the “headline alterations.” They ignored Ali, who was discreetly searching through the bookshelf for Izzy’s sheet music, lost days ago. When Bryony was away the music practice regime dissolved.
“How much?” Nick asked.
“He’s thinking seven figures.”
“What?” Ali’s back was turned to him, but she didn’t need to see Nick’s expression to catch the exasperation in his tone.
“I’m a frugal person, Nick. It’s difficult to see how we could do it any cheaper.” Bryony’s tone was soft, almost regretful. It was as though she was playing Monopoly and apologizing for building four hotels on Park Place. Ali was grateful they couldn’t see her face as she aimlessly shuffled through the same pile of papers over and over again. Not since they had appeared in The Sunday Times rich list in April had Ali been so conscious of the Skinners’ enormous wealth.
“It includes everything,” said Bryony.
“Well, that’s good to know,” said Nick, his voice syrupy with sarcasm.
How could anyone spend so much money doing up a house? Ali wondered. It wasn’t really a moral question, although it should be. Rather, it was logistical. She now understood that a set of curtains for an early Victorian drawing room with two sash windows could cost almost £10,000, because she had seen the bill from the interior decorator to replace the set ruined at the party. Eight sets could buy you a house in Cromer, she had calculated. The new curtains were so thick that Hector couldn’t hold the edge in one hand. There was lining, interlining, weights, blackout fabric, passementerie trimming, walling. When she heard the interior decorator speak to Bryony, Ali had felt like an anthropologist who had stumbled across a secret language spoken by only a very small British tribe.
“Define ‘everything,’” Nick demanded.
