by Fiona Neill
“Ali needs to look after the twins, unless you want them on the table, too?” said Bryony, calling his bluff.
“Lucky escape,” Jake muttered from the back of the group. He had just arrived from the train station, a fact that prompted a round of comments about his newfound evangelism for public transport. He explained that he’d be driving back to Oxford with friends the following day. He looked tanned and relaxed, comfortable in his skin, thought Ali. His hair was so long and curly that it reached his improbably long eyelashes. He stood slightly apart from the rest of the family, joking with Ali about the potential pitfalls of being seated next to his grandfather.
“Lucy, then,” Foy proposed.
“Fine by me.” Jake shrugged.
“Won’t she be upset if she’s not sitting next to you?” Tita questioned Jake.
“She’ll take it as a compliment,” he reassured her.
“She’ll interpret it as a sign that she has been taken even deeper into the bosom of the Skinner family,” Izzy teased him.
“What should we do with Eleanor, then?” asked Bryony, as though trying to decide how to dispose of an unwanted Christmas present.
“Stick her next to Sophia Wilbraham’s father,” said Foy. “Or Sophia’s boring husband.”
“He’s not boring, Grandpa,” said Izzy. “In fact, he’s very unboring.”
“More significantly, he’s not coming,” interjected Bryony. “So we don’t need to talk about him at all.”
As she went into the tent, Bryony fielded calls on her BlackBerry: No, it wasn’t possible for the chief executive of the Ukrainian energy company to speak directly to the editor of the Financial Times about negative coverage; in fact, given his past, he should keep his profile as low as possible. Yes, she could pull the press release about the French supermarket chain that was going to put in a bid for its English counterpart next week, because the deal had been delayed.
In between calls she issued short, clear responses to last-minute questions posed by Fi Seldon-Kent, who had been charged with organizing the party. Yes, Foy would need a microphone to make his speech. No, presents shouldn’t be brought into the tent. Yes, champagne should be available all evening. No, there weren’t any restrictions on where guests could mingle. This was welcome news to Jake and Izzy, who had each been allowed to invite twenty friends and were now regretting the responsibility that rested on their shoulders to make sure they had a good time.
“I can’t believe this is our house,” said Jake, who had seen it only once before.
“Most of it isn’t,” Nick observed wryly.
“What do you mean?” asked Jake.
“The bank owns most of it,” said Nick.
The only person who sounded as though she belonged to the house was Bryony. She had already absorbed its history as if it were her own. She explained to Foy that it had been constructed in 1624 by a merchant, during the consumer boom fueled by the price of wool. Foy said that was more romantic than the house being bought by a banker who had made a fortune on a credit boom fueled largely by selling dodgy mortgages.
“He couldn’t have bought it without me, Dad.” Bryony bristled. She went on with her story. The same family had stayed here for almost three centuries. The crests depicting rams’ heads and sparrow hawks in the hall belong to them.
Their tenure ended when the then lady of the manor fell in love with a local squire and poisoned her husband with laudanum. The house was sold to a Victorian art dealer who then bought most of the oak and walnut furniture that still remained. In the early twentieth century it had been used as a billet by the army and then been abandoned until its last makeover in the 1950s.
“I see they think Lehman’s is going to be the next domino to fall, Nick?” said Foy.
“This isn’t the moment, Dad,” warned Bryony.
“I can’t believe they sold mortgages to those samurais,” said Foy.
“Do you mean ninjas?” asked Nick. “No income, no job or assets?”
“Whatever,” said Foy, his argument weakened by his misuse of the terminology. “Knowing that after two years they’d be paying ten percent interest. And I can’t believe that you turned these into securities that were meant to be as low-risk as government bonds and that my pension fund has bloody well bought them.”
“If house prices had kept rising there wouldn’t have been a problem,” said Nick. “People could have kept taking out equity to pay their mortgage.”
“To be fair, Nick has been trying to raise this issue for more than a year,” interrupted Bryony. “He’s really put his head above the parapet.”
“Your shares in Lehman’s must be worth half what they were a year ago,” said Foy. “You should have got out then. It’s knowing when to call the market that sorts the men from the boys.”
“Just as well Mum works, too, then,” said Izzy, who had become almost as good at dissipating tension as she was at heightening it. Bryony smiled gratefully at her.
“Well, I hope this party is paid for with real money,” said Foy. “Now there’s a credit crunch, organic food is going the way of the dodo and farmed smoked salmon is about as popular as a pedophile at a children’s party, so I can’t help out.”
“Enough, Foy,” said Tita firmly. He fell silent. Not a good idea to be rude to someone who will be making a speech about you in eight hours’ time, thought Ali. She looked at Nick’s face, but it revealed nothing. It struck her that she might have worked in his home for the best part of two years, but she knew little more about him than when she first walked through the door.
19
Sitting at the dinner table later that night with Alfie and Hector, Hester’s younger daughter Ella, and an assortment of other children in the center of the tent made Ali both conspicuous and inconspicuous. She was highly visible as the only adult at the table, yet no one at the party wanted to talk to her apart from the children. They were drunk on forbidden fizzy drinks begged from waitresses who weren’t accustomed to refusing requests from demanding guests. And there were too many children to interrupt the supply chain. One of them had eaten the decorative rose petals scattered on the table and choked so much she had been sick. Another had stuck a chip so far up his nostril that he had a nosebleed.
This was the only part of Bryony’s plan that had failed. Katya was meant to be here to help Ali. After yesterday’s news, however, she was persona non grata, although as Ali wandered around the garden with the twins before dinner it seemed every other conversation involved her name. “Thomas hasn’t stopped crying since she left . . .” “Did you know she pretended to be pregnant . . . ?” “She used to be a prostitute . . .” “Apparently she’s done this kind of thing before.”
It was inaccurate to say the battle lines were quickly drawn over Katya and Ned’s affair, because that would suggest some people allied themselves with the twenty-seven-year-old Ukrainian who had been foolish enough to believe she was the object of a man’s love. Katya was portrayed as a scheming siren who had beguiled a good man by stealing his wife’s place in the kitchen and then the bedroom. Ned was viewed as a weak man, unable to resist the advances of a femme fatale. No one knew where Katya had gone. Not even Mira. Katya had given her mobile phone back to Sophia and left no forwarding address. Ali had received one message from her.
“I am expendable,” it read.
“So am I,” Ali wrote back. Mira was right. It was a mistake to view her job working for the Skinners as anything more than a straightforward business transaction. All it would take was one lapse of judgment and Ali would share the same fate as Katya. Why was there any reason to believe that her messy arrival into their life wouldn’t be followed by her messy departure? The Skinners were careless with people, even those they called their friends. Ali’s thoughts were rambling and incoherent, like the contradictory currents of a tide turning.
Twice during the meal, Hector accidentally spilled his Coca-Cola over the black dress that Bryony had pressed into her hands the previous evening, insisting it would suit Ali better than it suited her, and suggesting that if she didn’t like it she could sell it on eBay. Ali left the tent to go to the bathroom in the house to wipe down the dress. Each time she considered not returning. Once she got as far as the first-floor library and stared out across the countryside, wondering where the nearest town was. It was dusk, and instead of finding the soft pastel sun setting behind the hills uplifting and bucolic, she felt claustrophobic.
“Landlocked,” she muttered as she forced herself back into the tent. No one heard, and if they had, no one would have been interested. The only person who had greeted her by name so far was Felix Naylor, who had made a point of coming over to the dinner table to say hello and to ask whether she could recommend him a good book. Julian Peterson had walked straight past her.
Although the stain on her dress was invisible, the sugar made it stick unpleasantly against her thigh and ensured that Leicester wouldn’t leave her alone. Ali slouched on her chair behind the bowl of flowers in the middle of the table, grateful for the pole supporting the roof of the tent that stood beside her. Her table was called Cromer Crab in her honor, the only one not named after an Indian province.
Her feelings of alienation were magnified by the fact that Bryony had forgotten to warn the catering staff that there was an adult at the table. So Ali found herself eating tiny burgers made of organic steak with chips as thin as matchsticks and drinking Coca-Cola while everyone else tucked into kumquat lamb tagine and spiced poussins with salt lemon and drank Domaine de Sahari.
“We need to pee,” said Hector, pulling at her dress.
“You can go together,” said Ali, pushing his glass into the middle of the table again.
“What happens if the ghost of the woman who threw herself out of the window lands on us just as we’re going through the door?” Hector asked.
“Ghosts don’t weigh anything,” smiled Ali, stroking his cheek. “You’ll be fine. Your brother will look after you.”
After pudding was served, Nick stood up and announced that he wanted to make a toast to Foy, who would then respond with “a few words of his own.” As Nick hoped, everyone roared at the absurdity of Foy limiting himself to a few words. He efficiently raised the microphone by a couple of inches, telling the audience that he would lower it again for his father-in-law, prompting another wave of laughter. Despite her mood, Ali smiled. She saw Rick roll his eyes. Nick’s two inches of superior height had always been a ridiculous bone of contention between him and Foy. Nick took a conventional approach to speech making. At least at the beginning. He delivered a witty and concise round of thank-yous that, to her embarrassment, included Ali, “the linchpin of the Skinner family.”
“Enough of the pretense that I’m part of the family,” she wanted to shout. “I’m not a saint. I’m paid to be helpful.” He remembered to say thank you to both Bryony and Hester for organizing the party, even though Hester had done little apart from shuffling the seating plan to her advantage at the last minute. On cue, Maud and Izzy presented their mothers with bunches of flowers that were bigger than they were.
Ali stopped listening for a few minutes. Everyone knew that Nick and Foy disliked each other, or at least Nick disliked Foy, because most of Foy’s opinions were short-lived, and it seemed an absurd charade to hear him extolling his virtues like this. Then it occurred to her that perhaps other people didn’t realize because they weren’t exposed to the same conversations that she was.
When she looked up again, the mood in the tent had shifted slightly. People were sitting up a little too straight in their seats. They were a little too attentive. Their smiles with a touch of rictus. Ali caught sight of Julian Peterson. His hard mouth was tighter than usual, a single line of disapproval.
Nick was praising his father-in-law’s spirit, his restless energy, his childlike enthusiasm, and his focus. He described how Foy did everything in pairs. “He reads two books at the same time, he buys two cars at once, and he buys his beloved wife two birthday presents.” At this, Foy leaned over to Tita and kissed her once on each cheek, his lips barely brushing her skin. It was a well-choreographed performance that Ali remembered well because they rarely showed any physical affection. Tita smiled, and with dramatic flourish, blew two kisses back at him.
There was a smart quip about two presents being the least Foy could do for Tita, a woman who had endured almost fifty years of marriage to a man who considered it a big sacrifice not to be allowed to have two wives. A nervous ripple of laughter wound its way round the tent, and at that moment Ali realized there wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know that Foy Chesterton had spent the best part of his married life sleeping with the wife of his best friend. Then, having proved a point to himself and Bryony, Nick backtracked.
He told his favorite story about Foy. This time it highlighted his qualities.
There were two empty cottages on the piece of land owned by Freithshire Fisheries. A Vietnamese family had moved to the village, and they wanted to work at the fish-processing plant. Foy found them all jobs and gave them a house to live in. It had a couple of outhouses that they agreed to rebuild in lieu of rent. They bought a car. They paid him back the rent they owed. They gave up their jobs. They even gave Foy and Tita round-trip first-class tickets to Phnom Penh. At the end of the year they disappeared overnight. The police arrived the following day and discovered both houses had been turned into hydroponic marijuana-growing factories. Nick told this story because he said it showed Foy’s generosity of spirit, his lack of prejudice, and the way he supported the small man. Ali thought it also showed his poor judgment, but she clapped anyway.
Then Foy stood up. He thanked Nick for his kind words. He said his audience would be relieved to hear that he wasn’t going to make two speeches. He folded the two pieces of paper he was holding in half, and put them down on the table. He faced his guests for a moment and began to speak movingly about his family and friends being the tide that had carried him through the past seventy years, and how pleased he was that so many of them were here to help get him through tonight. His comment prompted more laughter than it should, because his audience was looking for release after Nick’s discomforting remarks. He talked of the early days at Freithshire Fisheries, when he had slept in his office to save money on hotels and eaten nothing but smoked salmon for lunch and dinner for weeks at a time.
“I am a self-made man,” he said proudly. “I have worked hard, and I have played hard.” Then he turned to Tita. “I have not always been a good husband. I am not an easy person. But let no one say I haven’t loved this woman for a lifetime.” He described the first time he saw Tita standing on a Scottish moor, standing “in a sea of heather, like a harbor in a storm.” He added something about how Tita was forever associated with the subtle beauty of the moor in all its wild, untamed freedom, an image that Ali found totally at odds with the reality of the constraints of her life. He praised Tita for being her own person, for allowing herself to love him, against her own better instincts (neither of which Ali was sure was true), and for the gift of his two beautiful daughters. He continued in this vein and Ali noticed several people wiping their eyes. Then he looked down at the papers in his hand and asked everyone if they would allow a seventy-year-old man a surprise indulgence.
Bryony and Fi Seldon-Kent exchanged concerned looks at this point, because Foy was deviating from the plan. He took the microphone from its stand, stepped back a couple of paces, and signaled to the pianist in the corner. He played a couple of chords. The pianist at least was in on the secret.
“I want to sing you the song that was playing on the radio the first time I met Tita,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.
Then Foy started singing “American Pie.” At first he was a little hesitant, trying too hard for a Don Mc
Lean–style American accent. His voice was uncertain, rough round the edges, but he could hold a tune. He urged people to join in, and to Ali’s surprise many people in the room began singing the chorus with him, even Jake’s and Izzy’s friends. As he gained confidence his voice became smoother. By verse three he was the only person in the tent who knew the words. He sang all six verses. And then he went over to Tita, embraced her, and gave her a small box containing a necklace. “Seventy is the beginning of something, not the end,” he told the crowd. Everyone broke into spontaneous applause. Some gave a standing ovation. At the head table only Eleanor Peterson remained seated. Her face was ashen. Julian stiffly put his hand on top of his wife’s, but she savagely shook him off.
• • •
After this, Ali handed over the other children to their parents and left to put the twins to bed. Their room was on the first floor of the house, directly below Ali’s. They made her push the two single beds together and search the cupboards for monsters. They said it was too dark, so Ali put on the bedside lamps and opened the curtains. They worried about the way the breeze blew the curtains into the room and about the shadows cast by the lamps, so Ali shut the curtains, closed the window, and switched off the lights. Then they started talking about how the wooden paneling might hide secret passageways and made Ali tap every corner of every panel to see if any of them opened. In the end Ali promised to sit with them until they had fallen asleep in the same bed and to come and sleep in the one beside them later.
“Why can’t we just have one house and stick with it?” Alfie sobbed into his pillow.
