What the Nanny Saw (23 page)

“Mrs. Thatcher was doing that a quarter of a century ago,” Foy said.

“Well, we all owe her a big debt of gratitude,” said Nick.

Bryony shot him a grateful look. When he was on his own territory Foy could be insufferable.

“I thought we would have a simple dinner tonight and save ourselves for tomorrow’s celebrations, when Hester and Rick are here,” said Tita, looking straight ahead at the door, even though it was now closed. She said Rick’s name as though she was spitting out an orange pip. “You don’t mind, do you . . . ?” Her voice drifted away.

“Sounds perfect.” Nick smiled agreeably.

Bryony’s attention swiftly moved to Jake, who drifted into the hallway wearing a pair of baggy swimming shorts with an improbably bright sea anemone print. His arm was around Lucy. They were sharing a towel across their shoulders. Bryony hugged him.

“You look like a piece of mahogany,” she teased him, patting his solid, polished torso. She then kissed Lucy once on each cheek. Lucy and Jake held hands throughout.

“They’re actually glued together,” joked Foy. “We haven’t yet seen either of them without the other. They leave their billet together in the morning and retire there together at night.” Everyone laughed. Lucy had tied a sarong around her hips, and everyone was doing their best to look away from her white bikini top.

“Shall we go back in the pool, Lucy?” Jake suggested.

“I was hoping you might show Ali around,” suggested Bryony. Jake winced.

“Hector and Alfie would probably find it less of a chore,” he said.

“We want to go in the pool,” they protested.

“If you point me in the right direction, I’m sure I’ll find my bearings,” said Ali awkwardly. To her surprise, Tita offered to give her a tour.

•   •   •

“I’m a member
of the Mediterranean Garden Society,” said Tita, as she led Ali into the garden. “I’ve tried to stick to as many indigenous plants as possible. My only weakness is for Chinese jasmine. Its smell is enchanting.” She pointed to the front of the house, where the jasmine ran unfettered up the entire right side, infusing the area around the front door with its heady, sweet mustiness. Tita closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nostrils. It was a curiously unself-conscious gesture from a woman whose personality was defined by what she held back. Out of politeness, Ali did the same, keeping one eye open to make sure that Tita wasn’t waiting for her.

Ali understood at once that although Foy might talk more about the Villa Ichthys than anyone else, its soul belonged to Tita. It surprised her, because Tita mentioned Corfu less than even Nick. Perhaps her silence was a way of keeping the relationship secret. The best love affairs were clandestine, thought Ali wistfully.

Tita referred to the plants like old friends, “the oleanders, my dear myrtle, sweet arbutus, stoic salvia,” occasionally reaching out to touch a leaf or a flower. Otherwise, she didn’t say very much, a trait that Ali appreciated because it allowed her to form her own relationship with the landscape.

“Jasmine is used in ayurvedic medicine to calm the nerves and heal anxiety,” said Tita, “so if Hector and Alfie are playing up and you need to unwind, then come here to relax. I’ve planted it around the terrace beside the pool, too, but there are always so many people . . . Go to the bench at the front of the house. No one ever thinks to sit there.”

Her sentence drifted into the air, and Ali was once again unsure whether she had finished. She opened her mouth to say something, but then Tita started up again. “You wouldn’t guess to look at it, but jasmine is related to olive. They’re all from the Oleaceae family. Like forsythia, privet, and lilac.”

“I’d never seen an olive tree before today,” said Ali.

“Well, you’ll see more than your share here,” said Tita. “Some of the trees have been here since the twelfth century. When Corfu was occupied by the Phoenicians, they paid people for every olive they planted. The Corfiotes could even pay taxes in olive oil.”

Tita stopped for a moment to describe the layout of the garden. Ali would have felt guilty for removing her from the relative cool of the house into the midday heat, but she quickly realized that the tour was for Tita’s diversion, not her own. Tita continued. There was an orange grove at the bottom of the house, away from the pool. They were picked daily and squeezed to make juice. To the left of the house was a large courtyard covered in vines, where most meals were eaten. There was a more formal terrace at the front and a parterre with a mirror sculpture by Barbara Hepworth at the center.

“She came to stay after it was installed,” said Tita. “Just before she died.”

“I’ve seen this before,” said Ali.

She realized that during a visit with the twins to Foy and Tita’s house she had spent some time staring at a large landscaping plan framed on the wall. It was drawn in black ink, with small symbols to indicate different shrubs and plants.

“You notice everything, don’t you,” said Tita. Statement not question, decided Ali quickly. “I planned it all myself, and then Christos the gardener followed my instructions. We had to ship in fourteen thousand cubic feet of soil from another part of the island to encourage the roots to grow. Plants need to feel sure of the soil beneath them to flourish. Like humans, really.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Ali, suddenly feeling thirsty.

“Do you feel sure of the ground beneath your feet?” Tita asked. “I used to think I did, and now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s because every day another part of me is slowly disintegrating.” She laughed.

“A garden is a good legacy,” said Ali, pleased to find the right words for once.

“It’s taken years,” said Tita, staring over Ali’s head to the sea beyond. “Before Foy retired I used to spend quite a lot of time out here on my own.”

“It must be nice for you to spend more time here together, then,” said Ali, knowing even as she said it that it wasn’t true.

“As you can imagine, Foy isn’t good at pottering,” said Tita, with a vague smile. “You know a bit about gardens, don’t you?”

Ali couldn’t remember Tita ever asking her any questions about herself, and felt shy about responding. “I’ve seen you deadheading the roses in London.”

“My mother gardens,” mumbled Ali. “It’s difficult by the sea. The salt and sand take their toll.” Tita ignored her response.

“
Lavandula pinnata
, looks lovely but smells of nothing,” Tita said, thoughtfully addressing another plant. “A plant of no substance. A bit like Lucy.”

They walked silently down a winding path flanked by olive trees at the back and lines of santolina at the front. Every step took them closer to the sea. At the bottom of the path the landscape opened out to a swimming pool that overlooked the ocean.

It was enormous and pleasingly unsymmetrical. At one end, built into one of the original terraces, were a couple of artificial waterfalls. The pool was painted cobalt blue to match the Ionian Sea. There was a covered pavilion with a large marble table at its center, where people could have lunch.

“It’s a saltwater pool,” said Tita. “The waterfalls block out the sound of the traffic on the road below. It can get quite busy in the summer.”

“Nick mentioned the cars,” said Ali.

“And probably nothing else,” murmured Tita. “He resists the lure of Corfu. It’s probably Foy’s fault. Most things are.”

“What’s that?” asked Ali, pointing to a small building to the right of the pool, built in the same style as the main house.

“The changing rooms,” said Tita, waving her hand dismissively. “I never go in there.”

Tita sat down at the table. She put the palms of her hands on the flat marble surface. Her hands were large, totally unlike Bryony’s. They were starting to twist with early arthritis, and their gnarly appearance reminded Ali of the corkscrew hazel that her mother had in the garden at home. Tita stared silently out to sea. She explained that Ali’s bedroom was in the annex built on the side of the building that housed the original olive press. On the third floor, opposite the twins. Her voice had shrunk to a whisper.

“Go back to the house now,” she instructed.

“Can I get you a drink of water?” Ali asked.

“I’m happy here,” said Tita, smiling at her. Her face was lit by the late-afternoon sun creeping across the sky, and for a moment Ali wondered whether she might simply float, Chagall-like, into space.

•   •   •

Ali heard voices
from the olive-tree path and decided to return to the house on the route Tita had pointed out through the orange grove. The front door was still open, and the hallway blissfully cool with its stone tiles. On the left was a small cloakroom with bundles of hats, tennis rackets, and walking sticks hanging on old oak pegs. Ali went in and washed her face with water, drinking thirstily from the tap.

She went past a sitting room and saw Nick on the phone through the half-open door. It was an old-fashioned phone with wires, which meant he couldn’t pace up and down the room as he did normally. So he sat on a white sofa, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He was delivering instructions to someone.

“We need to get this on by Tuesday,” he repeated a couple of times down the line. “Tuesday, not Thursday, otherwise we’ll be too late. Have you got that, Ned?”

They must be working together on a deal, thought Ali, as Nick gently pushed the door shut with the tip of his foot.

 12 

Ali sat on the terrace, eating breakfast with Hector and Alfie. They had insisted she should join them at the far end of the huge marble table at the center of the open-air pavilion, even though no places were laid there and all the food was set out in a picturesque arc of baskets and ceramic bowls at the opposite end.

It was a quirk that would irritate Bryony if she appeared, because she would see it as part of Hector and Alfie’s desire to be separate from everyone else. The fact that Ali not only was invited to join them but had been asked to position herself between them would also be viewed with suspicion, as though she condoned their eccentric behavior. But Bryony never seemed to emerge before eleven and it was too hot to argue, so they sat in a neat row, contentedly glued to one another’s thighs with a viscous mix of sweat and suntan cream.

They faced the door that led back into the house from the terrace as though willfully ignoring the more obvious and spectacular view out to sea. Hector and Alfie each picked out a croissant and a
pain au chocolat
from the basket carried from the other end of the table by the elderly Greek housekeeper. They took a bite out of one, then the other, their movements as rhythmic as a metronome. Ali ruffled their hair and put an arm around each of them, and they snuggled into her ribs.

“What shall we do today?” she asked.

“Palanguyan,”
said Hector immediately.

“Yes,” agreed Alfie,
“palanguyan.”

“Pool it is, then,” confirmed Ali, who had compiled a list of more than a hundred words and phrases for the educational psychologist, who had seen them the month before. They reached for their glasses of orange juice. Ali tried to break the pattern by holding down Alfie’s arm as Hector struggled to stretch his small fingers around the glass. But Alfie, generally the more malleable of the two, roughly shook her off and muttered something incomprehensible to his brother.

“Please try and do things at different times,” pleaded Ali.

“Why?” said Alfie.

“Because it upsets Mummy,” said Ali, choosing her words carefully. “She’s worried that as you get older if you keep doing everything at the same time then you’ll be different from other people.”

“We are different from other people,” protested Hector.

“We are genetic clones,” agreed Alfie, repeating a phrase he had heard the educational psychologist use.

“She wants you to learn to do things on your own because one day you’ll each meet a girl and fall in love and you’ll have to learn to live apart,” explained Ali.

“We’ll fall in love with the same girl,” insisted Alfie.

“And live in the same house,” added Hector.

“Maybe we’ll marry you,” said Hector.

“Then you won’t ever leave us,” said Alfie, leaning back into his seat as though he had resolved some great conundrum.

“I’m not going anywhere for a while,” Ali reassured them, “and the more you do things apart from each other, the longer I’ll be able to stay.”

•   •   •

Ali had recently sent
a carefully worded e-mail to her tutor, asking to defer her place at university for another year. She had pleaded continuing insolvency and the chance to earn enough money to graduate without any debt. Will MacDonald had immediately sent back an e-mail agreeing to her request. It seemed a simple negotiation. But the truth was as gnarly and twisted as the raspberry plants that Tita was growing below the terrace.

Katya, clearly suspicious, had questioned Ali closely when she brought Thomas and Leo to play with the twins. They had sat in the playroom and talked while the children watched television. Ali explained to Katya that she wanted to stay with the Skinners because life with them was more entertaining than life without them. She was too attached to Hector and Alfie to leave suddenly. Bryony needed her. And she didn’t want to become embroiled in her sister’s problems again.

She told Katya how she had overheard Bryony on the phone telling someone that she couldn’t run her life without Ali. Katya pointed out that the Skinners had managed their affairs perfectly well before Ali’s arrival and would probably do so after her departure.

Ali dismissed Katya’s comment as jealousy. Perhaps she even wanted Ali’s job. The widely held view among the nanny community was that Ali had landed the plum but lacked the credentials to endorse her as its rightful owner. Then Katya had hugged her and said that she was delighted Ali was staying but wanted to make sure she was doing it for the right reasons.

“You mustn’t live your life through another family,” Katya warned her.

“You do,” Ali retorted.

“That’s because I have no choice,” said Katya.

“Well, this is my choice,” said Ali.

Ali would have liked to tell Katya the truth, but she worried it might have weakened her resolve. Besides, she was pretty sure that Katya had secrets of her own and would forgive the deceit. So she mentioned nothing of the lust-fueled, hurried entanglements in pitch darkness in the back of Will MacDonald’s Volvo station wagon after babysitting his children. She had never told anyone about their relationship, not even Rosa, not because she feared their disapproval but because she wasn’t convinced by it. It reinforced Ali’s sense of being an observer to life rather than someone in charge of her own destiny.

Ali considered the outbreak of the relationship. One minute she was in the passenger seat of her tutor’s car discussing whether
Tristram Shandy
was the first postmodern novel, the next he pulled over on the side of the road, confessed that he had never got beyond volume three, and kissed her chastely on the lips. No warning. No preamble. Until that moment she had never even fantasized about Will MacDonald. I am a homunculus, Ali remembered thinking, as she kissed him back, eyes open. There followed a more disorderly kiss that lasted so long that the next day the muscles in Ali’s cheeks ached.

Nor did she mention the way he carefully put the children’s car seats in the trunk to make room in the back, or how he used baby wipes to clean the sperm from her thigh and his stomach. She didn’t mention how she believed in Will’s desire for her but couldn’t quite believe in her desire for him, which meant she often felt curiously detached from the sexual act. As though she was both performer and critic. Nor did she describe how the initial thrill of illicit attraction had curdled into a sour mixture of passion and guilt, until all that remained was the guilt.

He had tried to convince her to stay. His relationship with his wife was as cold as permafrost. They hadn’t been happy for years; they no longer had sex; she didn’t understand him. It all sounded so passive, thought Ali, who imagined marital disharmony as a dramatic plate-throwing affair. The day after he said he might leave his wife for her, Ali had cut out the advert in
The Spectator
. Perhaps she wasn’t so dissimilar to her sister: they both ran for the hills in a crisis.

•   •   •

“Did you know
we are made from the same egg, Ali?” asked Alfie self-importantly.

“And it’s impossible to separate yolks,” said Hector.

“One day you will have to go your own way,” said Ali firmly.

“One day,” conceded Alfie.

“But not today,” said Hector adamantly.

Ali looked down and saw that both of them were gripping her arms. Then she leaned over to kiss each of them, but it was no more than an excuse to sniff the small craters in their napes. Why had no one ever mentioned how small children smelled so beautifully sweet? It was the scent of innocence, before the false trail of hormones was laid.

She stroked their hair gently at the line where their necks became visible, aware that she was now synchronizing her movements to mimic theirs. She remembered how at the end of term the teacher had taken Ali aside to tell her about another incident on the playground. Hector had been bitten on the arm. Her relief that Hector was the victim rather than the perpetrator was immediately tempered by the teacher’s description of how Alfie unexpectedly started crying and rubbing his arm, even though he was inside reading to a classroom assistant. Ali couldn’t bring herself to tell Bryony that the teacher thought they could feel each other’s pain. It could undermine the reprieve she had won, allowing them to be in the same class the following year.

Bryony couldn’t see the magic in their relationship. She found their closeness spooky and blamed herself for compounding it by going out to work. As far as Ali was concerned, it was the purest form of love that she had ever seen. There was mutual support, understanding, empathy, generosity of spirit. They shared everything, they hardly ever argued, and they were always there for each other.

“If you hurt him, you hurt me,” Alfie told the boy on the playground who specialized in winding up Hector.

Once Ali had shared a similar relationship with her sister. Now it was difficult to believe that Jo used to be the filter for all Ali’s uncertainties. Why did her mother view the sea as a rival to their father’s affections? Why did Jo fancy only other girls’ boyfriends? Why didn’t she think the air in Cromer smelled better than anywhere else she had ever been? But then came the drugs, the psychosis, and the uneasy march toward recovery and the disappointment of relapse, where the person she knew turned into someone else and their relationship became a lopsided affair in which one of them cared too much and the other not at all. She was determined that the bond between Hector and Alfie should not be prematurely severed.

Ali breathed in deeply. The heady, sweet-smelling jasmine growing up the columns of the open-air pavilion and the strong odor of fish from the rice dish Andromede had just brought out on a tray made her feel nauseated.

“What is this?” she asked, stirring the yellow rice mixture to unearth hard-boiled egg, mushrooms, smoked haddock, and a strong smell of curry.

“It’s kedgeree,” said a voice emerging from the terrace below. Nick appeared, wearing a pair of soggy swimming trunks, a copy of
The Economist
tucked under one arm. When he saw Ali, he wound a towel around his waist and sucked in his stomach. Hector and Alfie ran across to throw themselves at him.

“Why are you all cramped so closely together around this huge table?” Nick asked, as Hector and Alfie clung monkeylike to each leg. His tone was bemused rather than belligerent. He put down the magazine on the table beside the rest of his holiday reading. It was an eclectic mix, giving away nothing about the personality of the reader:
The
Assault on Reason
by Al Gore,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson, and
The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. No doubt he would plow through them in the same methodical way he swam fifty lengths up and down the pool each day.

Searching for a talking point, Ali looked at the cover of
The Economist
. It depicted a businessman constrained in a tight corset. “A good time for a squeeze,” it read. Ali understood that it related in some way to Nick’s conversation in the car.

“Will you come swimming with us, Daddy?” the twins pleaded, pulling at the towel.

“I’ve got to get on with some work this morning,” Nick said, bending down on one knee until he was at their height. “Maybe later.”

It wouldn’t happen, thought Ali. Bryony and Nick always seemed to have reasons not to spend time with their children.

“But I will have breakfast with you now,” he added.

He sat down and began spooning the kedgeree onto his plate. The twins started playing a rhyming game.

“A tiger from Niger.”

“A squid from Madrid.”

“A bongo from Congo.”

“An impala from Kampala.”

“A loon from Cameroon,” suggested Nick. They looked at him in astonishment.

“How do you know how to play, Daddy?” they asked.

There was a bell on the table, which he rang, and Andromede appeared. He politely requested fresh coffee and orange juice. She gave him a long, silent stare and went back into the kitchen.

“Isn’t she terrifying?” said Nick. “She is Foy’s eyes and ears.”

“Does Andromede speak English?” Ali asked.

“Not a word,” said Nick, “but she understands everything.” He put a spoonful of kedgeree onto Ali’s plate. Ali was grateful for the gesture, even though she didn’t want any. He held the serving spoon awkwardly in his fist, and she could see the skin around his nail was shredded until it was raw. When he saw her looking he hid his thumb inside his fingers.

“Is this a Greek dish?” Ali asked.

“Couldn’t be more English, really,” said Nick. “It dates from the Raj. Fits with Foy’s postcolonial pretensions. They always ate fish for breakfast in India, because it would have gone off by the evening. It’s one of the Corfu rituals.”

He laughed and Ali smiled, uncertain whether it was permissible to laugh with him. His attempts at intimacy always seemed to be at someone else’s expense and had the unfortunate habit of reinforcing their distance.

“I was thinking maybe you could go out together with Jake and Lucy one evening?” Nick proposed. “There are a couple of bars in the village. All very low-key. You might want to escape from the fray. It’s difficult to be alone here, and it can get a little intense when the whole family is together.”

“I think I might cramp their style,” said Ali politely.

“Isn’t it a burden, always being so sensible when you’re only twenty-two?” Nick suddenly asked. “You hardly ever take a weekend off, and when you do, you never seem to go out.”

“I don’t mind staying at home. I’ve got quite used to it, really,” said Ali, getting up from the table and urging the twins toward the pool.

•   •   •

They followed the path
that Tita had shown Ali the previous day. Hector and Alfie arrived at the pool before her, and she found them staring open-mouthed at Lucy, who was lying on her stomach on a comfortable-looking sunbed while Jake coated her in suntan oil. She was wearing the same white bikini bottoms from yesterday but no top. Jake was in a different pair of shapeless trunks in similarly loud colors. They billowed around his thighs in the faint breeze that blew from the sea.