by Fiona Neill
“They’re watching television downstairs,” said Bryony.
“I imagine in the circumstances that regulating screen time isn’t a priority,” said Hester.
“Correct,” said Bryony.
“I saw shares in Nick’s bank took another hammering today,” said Rick. “We live in incredible times.” He then handed over a basket of vegetables from his allotment. “Every little bit helps, I know. You can send Jake and Izzy over whenever you like to dig up vegetables. There’s a lot of pleasure to be gained from the simple things in life. That’s a lesson you’ll all have to learn now.”
“Thank you,” said Bryony, with barely concealed fury.
“I can think of better examples,” Jake muttered to Ali.
“Now, have you thought what to do about schools? What are your local options?” Rick asked.
Bryony explained that an antiques dealer who Nick had known for years was going to come round in the next few days to value some of their possessions so that they could pay the school fees next term.
“This should all be sorted within the next month,” she said breezily.
“Oh,” said Hester, sounding almost disappointed. “What happens if they decide to charge him?”
“They won’t. He’s innocent,” said Bryony.
“Where is the protagonist of this great drama?” asked Rick, in full English-teacher mode, searching around the room as though Nick might be hiding behind a piece of furniture.
“Nick has gone to ground,” said Bryony, walking toward the mantelpiece to busy herself, stacking up invitations to events that they now wouldn’t attend. She had her back to them, but Ali could see her face in the reflection of the mirror. She looked more worried than she had even on the day of the raid. Even her lips were pallid.
“Probably a good idea to keep a low profile,” said Rick.
“He won’t be coming home for a little while,” said Bryony, shuffling the invitations in her hand like a deck of cards. “It’s a tactic to try and divert press attention.” She took a deep breath and turned round to face them.
“Do you mean Dad has moved out?” asked Jake slowly.
“For the moment,” said Bryony.
“When is he coming back?” asked Izzy.
“Once the media attention has died down,” said Bryony. “The story about Dad is dovetailing with the news about Lehman’s. They’re trying to sell the bank, but they can’t find a buyer. It’s their only lifeline now.”
“You mean Daddy’s bank might collapse?” asked Izzy.
“There’s still a couple of possibilities, but it’ll probably be a take-under rather than a takeover,” said Bryony, sounding more composed.
“What does that mean?” Jake asked.
“It means it will be bought at a price below where the shares are trading. It’s catastrophic but less catastrophic than the alternative.”
“So where is Dad right now?” asked Izzy.
“He’s staying with a friend,” Bryony said, so vaguely that Ali wondered if she really knew. “We just need to sit this out for a couple of months until we hear if he’s going to be charged. If they decide to prosecute, then everything becomes sub judice, so journalists can’t write about us anymore. If they don’t, we can go back to life as normal.”
“When did he go?” asked Foy. “He didn’t bother saying good-bye to me.”
“Nor me,” said Bryony quietly. “Sometimes it’s better that way.”
23
August 2008
These were the things Ali didn’t tell Felix Naylor the second time she met him in the café in Bloomsbury. She didn’t explain how an old friend of Nick’s had come round the day after he disappeared and paid £150,000 in cash for the frog with the emerald eyes and the jewel-encrusted warts, the two Caffieri bronzes, and the small picture by Augustus John that hung in the dining room. Apparently it was less than Bryony should have gotten, because of the problems with provenance. The antiques dealer had explained that he couldn’t sell them on the open market, so they would probably find their way to Russia at a slightly lower price. He had counted out the money in £1,000 piles, which Bryony hid in the piano. A temporary measure until a better hiding place could be found, she told Ali, as she pressed six weeks’ wages into her hand and told her to suspend the twins’ piano practice routine.
Nor did she tell Felix that Nick had disappeared (if you believed Foy) or taken refuge with a friend (if you believed Bryony). This omission was an act of charity. She didn’t want to give Felix the idea there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. It was obvious to Ali since she had first come across Felix that he cared for Bryony more than he should.
And she didn’t tell Felix that every night since the trip to the park six weeks earlier, she put the twins to bed and then went up to Jake’s room, because she understood that as long as their relationship was secret, it remained viable.
Since the beginning of the crisis, the children and Ali had taken over the top two floors of Holland Park Crescent. Bryony was too busy to come up and had made her office on the kitchen table in the basement, because she wanted to be in what she described as “the bowels” of the house.
“So this time she can see the shit before it happens,” Foy had wryly observed from the chair in the drawing room where he spent most of the day. Tita visited him every morning to help him in and out of bed, but she never mooted the possibility of his returning home. Once Ali had caught Tita hiding a bottle of whiskey down the side of Foy’s chair.
“She’s trying to do away with me,” Foy had joked.
From that table, Bryony spent her hours on the phone to lawyers, colleagues at work, and the few friends who still bothered to stay in touch. She spent a lot of time dealing with debts, pleading clemency with banks, trying to prioritize payments, canceling direct debits, and learning the art of living off £350 a week. An enterprising tabloid photographer had managed to snatch a photograph of her pushing an amateurishly packed shopping cart in the Costco parking lot. Someone else had told a newspaper that she was selling clothes on eBay. It was just as well the long lenses couldn’t reach the basement kitchen, where they would have found the double sink permanently piled with dirty dishes, the chrome cooker smeared with cooking oil and caked with food, and a floor that was cleaned up mainly by Leicester. Bryony and Ali periodically tackled the laundry pile and filled the dishwasher in an irrational way that would have made Malea tut with disapproval.
Since Malea had left, the whole house had descended into disarray, but nowhere more than on the top two floors, which had developed a particular flavor of their own. The curtains at the front of the house were kept shut in case a vigilant photographer spotted an opportunity, adding to the dark, murky atmosphere. Beds were no longer made. Sheets were unchanged. The carpet was never vacuumed. The guinea pigs roamed freely, eating the remains of food raided from the larder by Hector and Alfie. Or perhaps the tiny droppings that Ali found belonged to mice. Books, football cards, remote-controlled cars, DS games were strewn from inside the twins’ bedroom to the landing outside. They watched television and played computer games whenever the urge seized them.
The landing had become a communal area where they all played together: Old Maid (the twins’ favorite) and Monopoly (Izzy’s favorite) to while away time. Sometimes they watched television in Ali’s room. Since the Darkes had removed the ladder from their side of the garden fence, no one wanted to leave the house in case there were photographers stationed outside, although Nick’s departure seemed to have dampened the enthusiasm for pictures.
Izzy’s room looked as though it had been ransacked. You had to wade through clothes to reach her on the bed in the middle of the room. She spent her days reading or watching films. She stayed away from Facebook and e-mail, where everyone was talking about what was happening to her family as though it was a reality TV show, and
she assiduously avoided newspapers.
The top floor, however, belonged to Jake and Ali. The air in the room was a musky mix of pheromones and the faint smell of sex. Any adult sensitive to the signs of uninhibited sexual abandonment would have taken one look at the twisted sheets, the stains on the duvet, and the paraphernalia of last-minute contraception to know that its inhabitants were in the throws of a passionate affair. But Foy couldn’t get up there, and Bryony didn’t bother.
At first they had locked the door, but as the days turned into weeks and everyone seemed impervious, they got more blasé. Only Izzy noticed a certain thawing in their relations, commenting on how Ali and Jake argued less than they used to and spent more time with each other than they did with anyone else.
“I know Ali won’t shop me to the press,” Jake told his sister.
They spent hours in his bed. Jake said the red-and-purple lava lamp reminded him of the gentle undulations of Ali’s body, especially her breasts and her arse. Ali said that it reminded her of the inside of her head and the sensation she was floating away from reality in a bubble of pleasure.
Sometimes, they would lie beside each other and see how long they could talk before desire took over. Jake would tell her how he loved the way she climbed on top of him and fucked him slowly without looking away. Ali would tell him how she loved falling asleep with her thigh glued to his after they had sex. Jake would describe how, when he buried his head between her legs and made her come, her nails scratched at the sheets so hard the cotton had worn through. Then they would have sex again. Sated for a while, they might discuss their situation in general terms. They agreed they were out of control and there was little point in talking about specifics.
Ali read a piece in the paper that said that in the early stages of romance the chemical makeup of men’s and women’s brains was no different from those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jake said that he thought about her all the time and kept pieces of her clothing hidden in his room, so that he could smell her even if she wasn’t there. Ali said he sounded like Leicester dragging his bedding round the house.
They were in that state where every detail of each other’s life was fascinating to the other and everything was imbued with significance. So when they discovered that they could both hold their breath underwater for more than a minute and they had the same nightmare about drowning as children, it cemented their sense of destiny.
Sometimes Ali drew up a list in her head of all the reasons she shouldn’t be having a relationship with Jake: she was the family nanny; he was only nineteen; she was abusing Bryony’s trust; it was the kind of story the tabloids could exploit; it would only end badly. She would resolve to end it or at least try to avoid him for a couple of hours. But then Bryony would ask her to go upstairs and check whether Jake wanted something to eat, or Foy would request a book that was in his bedroom, or the twins would ask Ali to persuade him to play poker, and the whole cycle of desire would begin again.
“How long do you think this thing with your dad will go on?”
“Forever, hopefully,” Jake had answered. A response, from Ali’s perspective, that had the merit of being both right and wrong.
“Aren’t you worried about him?”
“All I think about is you,” Jake said, and shrugged. “Dad will either be proven guilty or innocent, and although I think he’s guilty, he’s got a good lawyer, which means he’ll probably be found innocent.”
They laughed a lot and then felt guilty when they went downstairs and found Bryony sitting tensely at the kitchen table in exactly the same position as when they had left her a couple of hours earlier. She was nearly always on the phone. Sometimes she would be talking to clients. She would tell each of them the same thing.
“My work is completely separate from my husband’s . . . He isn’t living with us . . . He hasn’t been charged with any offense . . . The accusations against him have no impact on my ability to do the best possible job for you . . . This isn’t the time to be test-driving a new financial PR company . . . You need someone who knows your company inside out . . .”
Aside from the Ukrainians, at least two other clients had fired Bryony from their accounts and another three were considering their position. One said they needed “a fresh pair of eyes to look at their relations with the media in these challenging economic times.” Ali knew this because Bryony had asked for the e-mail to be forwarded to her BlackBerry. Once Ali heard Bryony speaking to Nick.
“Can’t you at least come and see the children?” she whispered into the phone. “Or maybe we could come and meet you somewhere? Where are you?”
“You’ll be trailed by reporters,” Ali heard Nick reply.
“I don’t understand why you can’t come home,” Bryony said. “There’s even more people camped on the doorstep since you left.”
“It would be worse if I was there,” Nick said. “And you’ve got more chance of keeping your clients if I’m out of the picture.”
“It couldn’t be worse. And I could bear it more,” Bryony said flatly. “Ned Wilbraham’s still at home.”
“Throw the press a couple of bits of bait about him to get them off your back,” said Nick. “No one’s dished the dirt on his affair with the nanny. You know he still sees her?”
“How do you know that if you never see him?” Bryony asked.
• • •
Two days after this exchange, Ali, Jake, Izzy, and Foy were sitting on the sofa in the drawing room with the curtains closed when the doorbell rang. It sounded throaty, exhausted like the rest of them, although actually this was probably due to lack of use. Ali couldn’t remember the last time that someone had dared come to the door without calling first. Everyone, from Bryony’s colleagues to the personal trainer who came to get the money Bryony owed her, knew to call to say exactly when they would be arriving.
They had all seen the picture in the newspaper of the unwitting pizza delivery man who arrived at the house at the end of a long, fruitless day for the photographers gathered outside. In his nervousness at the long lenses trained on him as he rang the doorbell with one hand and held three Margheritas aloft in the other, he had tripped and dropped all of them on the ground. The following day he found himself on the cover of a tabloid newspaper below a headline that read something like “Fat Cat Pizza Delivery Falls Flat.” So when the bell rang, the four of them glanced at one another, shared worried looks, and then did nothing.
“Photographer?” suggested Ali.
At the beginning of the scandal, an occasional enterprising tabloid photographer might have rung on the doorbell, hoping for an early-morning snatch shot of Bryony without makeup, looking harassed. The early birds sometimes caught Foy collecting the newspapers from the front doorstep, and the first week he obligingly helped them fill column space by making pompous declarations of his son-in-law’s innocence. “My daughter will stand by her husband,” he told them one day. “My daughter is not the kind of woman to walk away from a man at the first sniff of trouble,” he said on another. Both sparked news stories. It caused profound irritation to Bryony, who felt as though she not only sounded guilty by association but was being presented as a latter-day Tammy Wynette, standing by her man. Foy was apologetic and gave in to her pleas to exchange nothing more than pleasantries with journalists, who sensed a man who couldn’t resist giving an opinion when asked.
Now everything was more streamlined. After complaints to the police by the Darkes, when photographers congregated they mostly remained stationed behind an invisible cordon on the opposite side of the road. Their presence provided a useful barometer of unfolding events. If the Financial Services Authority was about to release more information or “someone close to the family” had sold a story, their numbers would mysteriously swell hours before anything was officially announced. They were like sharks. More intuitive than sharks, decided Ali, because they seemed to an
ticipate the bloodletting before it happened.
Today there were so many that the photographers had once again resorted to stepladders. There was even a television crew. All of which made the unexpected visitor in their midst even more worrying. The bell started to ring in a long, continuous drone. Leicester threw himself at the front door, barking furiously. Without the table, the flowers, and the piles of newspapers in the hallway, there was nothing to absorb the noise of his high-pitched yelp. The dog scratched and pawed at the door, skidding on the piles of unopened post. He hadn’t been out for a proper walk in almost three days. Since Malea had left, no one took responsibility for him.
Finally Foy got up and edged slowly toward the drawing room window. He tentatively pulled the outer edge of the heavy curtain to one side and craned his neck to try to identify who was standing at the top of the stairs. His hand trembled. Ali saw him shaking his head in disbelief at this new betrayal by the body that had been his ally for so many decades.
“Where are Hector and Alfie?” Foy asked breathlessly, half turning toward Ali. “Could it be them?”
“Downstairs. Watching TV,” Ali said. Foy returned to his position of watchfulness.
“It’s an adult,” he said after a long silence.
“Well, that narrows it down,” said Ali, trying but failing to rouse a smile.
“Could it be Dad?” Jake asked, his tone neutral. “Maybe he’s in disguise?”
No one laughed. Jake and Izzy often discussed the possibility of their father making a clandestine visit to the house to explain to his family what was going on. His absence increasingly felt more like betrayal. They didn’t entertain the possibility that Nick might never come back.
“Could you be a bit more descriptive?” Jake suggested without moving from the sofa. He was going through the file of newspaper cuttings amassed by Foy. He was in the middle of a piece from The Sun describing how Nick Skinner’s guard dog had set upon the newspaper’s photographer. There was a picture of a leg with stitches and a large photograph of Leicester, looking quizzical and distinctly unmenacing. He was wearing a white diamante collar that Nick had bought Bryony as a joke to celebrate Leicester’s birthday. “White-collar criminal,” read the caption beneath the picture. Jake laughed, pushed the piece into Ali’s hands, and kissed her on the inside of her wrist. Ali anxiously looked round to see if Foy or Izzy had noticed. They hadn’t.
