by Fiona Neill
“I walked off, because I had seen Eleanor on the other side of the room,” explained Foy dreamily. “From behind. She looked gorgeous. Her back was bare. She was wearing a lemon-colored dress that I hadn’t seen for half a century, one of those fifties numbers with a wide skirt. I ran my fingers down her back and felt her lean toward me. She had a young person’s back, if you know what I mean. Her skin tone was even, there were no loose folds or ugly moles. I whispered in her ear that we should go upstairs and get away from all these old fogies.”
“Gosh,” said Ali.
“We had a thing for a couple of years when we were on holiday together. Ages ago,” Foy explained quickly, hoping to preempt any further interruptions. He didn’t wait for Ali to register any response, assuming correctly that his philandering was widely known. “But when she turned round, her face was old and wizened like everyone else in the room apart from me. I realized that having propositioned her, I was going to have to go through with it.”
He stopped for a moment, and Ali realized he was trying to get out of the chair again. He closed his eyes to focus his energy, took a deep breath, and then pushed down again on the armrests. This time he succeeded and began slowly to shuffle toward the table, where Ali was standing.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“So did you?” asked Ali. “Did you go through with it?”
“What do you think it all means?” asked Foy.
“I think Nick’s therapist would have something to say about it all.” Ali smiled tentatively. This was not the kind of conversation she could have ever imagined having with Bryony’s father. But the rules of engagement had evolved beyond recognition since that first visit two weeks ago from Felix Naylor, warning Bryony that there were rumors about Nick sweeping the City. There was something about disasters that made people reveal more of themselves than they might have thought prudent in normal circumstances.
“Ha,” said Foy triumphantly. “Ha, ha! I knew I’d learn something significant from you. The question is, does Bryony know?” Ali immediately realized her mistake and held up her arms in defeat.
“He saw her a couple of times at most,” she said reluctantly, trying to calculate how much information would satisfy Foy and what exactly he could do with it. “Toward the end, when everything had started to unravel. I don’t think Bryony knew.”
“Why was he seeing a therapist?” asked Foy.
“Lots of people see therapists,” Ali said with a shrug. “Especially rich people. One of Bryony’s friends even took her therapist skiing last year. She couldn’t manage a week without him.”
“Not investment bankers,” muttered Foy. “Especially not one of the rainmakers.” He had now edged his way forward until he was standing right next to Ali. She could see a small patch of gray bristles on the side of his face that his razor had missed. It reminded Ali of a shave you might get in the hospital or in an old people’s home. It made him look old and vulnerable. His rib cage rose and fell a little too quickly as he struggled to catch his breath now that he was standing. Ali realized that his sense of victory had been quickly eclipsed by doubts over how this piece of information could be used in Bryony’s favor. “Nick is a significant figure. It would be seen as a sign of weakness. His judgment would have been called into question. There’s no place for emotional incontinence in the boardroom. It’s all about appearing confident. You don’t want to hand millions of pounds over to a weak-minded ditherer.”
“He didn’t know that I knew,” Ali lied.
“A spy within our midst?” questioned Foy.
“Someone else told me,” said Ali.
“A friend?” Foy pressed for more details.
“Something like that,” conceded Ali.
“I can’t believe Nick was seeing a shrink.” Foy shook his head in disbelief. “He was always so vociferously opposed to anything alternative. God, he wouldn’t even drink herbal tea in case people thought it made him look soft.”
“Was the story of your dream true?” asked Ali. Foy nodded.
“What happened next?” Ali asked.
“I woke up because I needed to pee,” Foy said, and laughed. “Then the phone rang, and it was Julian telling me that there was nothing he could do to help me control the stories coming out about Nick and Bryony. He said he didn’t know anyone in management at the BBC, even though his son works there, and that the best thing we can do is to batten down the hatches and hope something bad happens in Afghanistan to take us off the front pages. So it was another night of insomnia.”
They stood in companionable silence and surveyed the scene on the table before them. It reminded Ali of an elaborate tombola. Except that there was nothing random about any of the items, and instead of cheap soaps in pastel colors and bubble bath that made your skin go red, there was expensive-looking jewelry and silverware that Ali had never seen before. There was a diamond teardrop-shaped pin with a handwritten label attached that said “Cartier, 1920s,” and a Franck Muller watch.
“Quite a spread,” said Foy, frowning. “It will keep the wolves from the door, at least. They’ve frozen their bank accounts. Did Bryony tell you?”
“I read it in the paper,” said Ali.
“They’ve got to live off three hundred fifty pounds a week.” Foy snorted.
It was, Ali agreed, a ludicrous proposition. She noticed that Foy’s forehead had developed an intricate network of horizontal and vertical lines. It was a hard-fought battle between anger and self-pity, thought Ali, before turning her attention to the table again. A thin shard of sunlight seeped through the window and highlighted a gold bangle with two green enamel frogs on either end. The frogs had emerald eyes and tiny diamond warts encrusted on their backs. Beside them sat a pair of matching earrings. Ali was puzzled. Bryony would never wear something so gaudy, and Nick was too cautious to buy something so exotic for his wife without her blessing. Not that cautious was an adjective many people would attach to Nick Skinner right now.
Ali glanced over at the windows to check that the curtains were closed. Then she picked up the bracelet and closed it around her wrist, running a finger across the diamond warts. It made her shiver in the same way that it did when the twins ground their teeth at night or Izzy picked at the skin around her fingernails until it bled. She held the bracelet up to the light and slowly turned her wrist from one side to another, wondering when anyone would wear something so ugly.
“Take it, Ali. You deserve it,” Foy said gruffly. Ali wondered what he was talking about and then realized that she had wandered to the other side of the table with the bracelet still on her wrist. “I got it for Bryony when she got engaged, but she never wore it. It’s a David Webb animal suite. The sort of thing that was popular in the seventies. I thought the frog was a good symbol of my first success persuading a British supermarket to stock smoked salmon.” Ali looked confused.
“Well, it’s an aquatic animal,” Foy continued, misinterpreting Ali’s silence. “If they’d done a diamond-encrusted salmon I would have bought that. It was symbolic.” He didn’t understand. It was the egocentricity of the present that amazed her, the fact that even at the beginning of Nick and Bryony’s relationship it had been all about him rather than them.
“It’s probably worth about fifteen thousand pounds, and I can’t see how you’ll get paid for the next six months. Take it in lieu of salary,” Foy insisted, “or as a wedding present when you finally get hitched.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Ali said primly.
“You don’t have a boyfriend?” repeated Foy in mock horror.
“The job wasn’t conducive to relationships,” Ali explained, noting that she was talking about it in the past tense, “and the bracelet isn’t really yours to give away.”
“I bought it,” said Foy petulantly.
“It was a present,” Ali insisted.
“That’s the problem with you, Ali,” Foy said, and sighed. “You’re incorruptible.”
“What are you trying to give away, Dad?” Bryony had come into the room. She was breaking her own rules and padding across the carpet in a pair of Ugg boots, leaving a thin trail of mud that would insinuate itself into the thick pile. Her hair was pulled off her face and tied into a rough ponytail at her nape. A few strands had already escaped. She had a kind of bruised beauty. Anxiety had taken away Bryony’s appetite, and she had lost weight. Her green eyes overwhelmed her face. Her jeans and cashmere sweater hung off her frame. Without makeup she looked even more fragile. It was difficult to believe she was forty-six years old.
Bryony was no longer wearing work clothes, although she still got up earlier than anyone else to check her e-mails and pound the treadmill before sitting down to breakfast with her children. She stressed to Ali the importance of sticking to routines, pointing out that throughout World War II, Winston Churchill rose at exactly the same time every morning, had the same breakfast, and read the newspapers in the same order before disappearing into his bunker.
“I’m concerning myself with Ali’s welfare in case she gets lost between the cracks,” said Foy. Ali immediately removed the bracelet and placed it carefully beside the earrings. “Why don’t you sell this table?”
Bryony didn’t answer.
“You should sell this table,” said Foy more insistently. “It’s a Jupe, isn’t it? It must be worth something.”
“Nick bought it for our tenth wedding anniversary,” said Bryony, protectively patting its shiny surface. “There’s only a couple this size in Europe.”
“I don’t think you’ll be a popular dinner party destination for the next couple of years,” said Foy. “If you sold this table you could free up enough cash to pay the mortgage for the next six months, and then you’d have one less thing to worry about.”
“Stop interfering, Dad,” said Bryony
“I’m just trying to be practical,” said Foy, turning round to calculate the distance that now stood between him and the armchair.
“The table stays,” said Bryony firmly. “I want to keep it for when Nick comes home.”
“What about the mirrors?” He pointed to a pair of eighteenth-century Italian silver gilt mirrors that hung on either side of the fireplace. “You’d get a good price for those.”
There had been heated debate the previous evening about the table, although it was its location, not its value, that was up for discussion. Bryony had suggested that it was essential the antiques dealer view the objects under natural daylight, and it should therefore be shifted to the other side of the room, parallel to the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto Holland Park Crescent.
Her sister Hester vehemently argued against moving it closer to the prying lenses of the photographers who periodically congregated with their stepladders on the other side of the crescent. Even such a minor change could provide them with a useful new angle for their story, especially if their telephoto lenses could pick out exactly what was on the table. They had all waited for her to finish. Hester’s point of view might have sounded more coherent, but it wasn’t necessarily completely objective. In the following breath she told everyone that the problem with owning the biggest house on one of the most expensive streets in London, apart from the obvious public relations problem that it now presented, was that its location at the center of the arc of the crescent provided fantastic breadth of vision for photographers.
“Of course, if you were a teacher and lived in my street in Stoke Newington, it would all be much easier,” Hester had said, venting one of her longer-term resentments.
“If I was a teacher in Stoke Newington, there wouldn’t be photographers outside the house,” said Bryony dryly. Foy had laughed, signaling victory to Bryony.
“What do you think, Ali?” Foy had asked. One of the few merits of the current crisis was that people sought Ali’s opinion. At the outset she assumed this was a tactic to ensure that she didn’t run out on them like Malea, the Philippine housekeeper who read the runes and defected on day three to a family from the twins’ school. Then she thought it was because she was an impartial observer to the crisis being played out before her and that her opinion was valuable. It was only yesterday after the argument over the table that she realized that her presence meant they could avoid discussion about the one subject really worth debating. Was what the papers were saying about Nick true?
After a few minutes Ali had concurred with Bryony. Not because it was easier—disagreeing with Hester was far more difficult—but because it was right. She pointed out that most of the snatch shots were taken by photographers after midday, when the sun no longer blinded their vision. Then she offered to make absolutely sure that the curtains were kept closed, to prevent anyone from seeing what was going to take place in the dining room the following morning.
This meant primarily preventing the seven-year-old twins, Hector and Alfie, from opening the curtains. Since the scandal had broken two weeks earlier, the twins had longed to be photographed so that their picture would appear in the paper and they could show their friends at school how famous they had become. Ali didn’t have the heart to tell them that it was a futile exercise because they probably wouldn’t be going back to their school in Kensington in September and they had dropped to the bottom division in the playdate league.
Foy, on the other hand, actively encouraged their plan. He helped them draw up elaborate strategies for sneaking into the dining room and hiding under furniture until the room was empty and they could stand in full view of the windows. He bought them World War II Commando comic strips and showed them The Great Escape for inspiration. He encouraged them to stockpile supplies around the house.
So Ali would find rotting apple cores and biscuit wrappers underneath the walnut tallboy and empty cartons of orange juice stuffed down the sides of chairs. Bryony didn’t care. Beyond meetings with an interior decorator when a room needed overhauling, Bryony never had more than a functional interest in her surroundings. And although Ali played the role of the enemy in the twins’ game, she was more like a double agent, because it cheered her to see them happily distracted from the crisis. It compensated for the fact that most nights they crept into her bed at the top of the house, and some mornings she woke up to find the sheets sopping wet.
The two older children were more complicated. Initially, Izzy’s phone had buzzed with interest. Her excitement at being the center of attention had rapidly diminished as she absorbed the implications of what was happening around her. Quite often Ali would find her sitting at the kitchen table, reading newspaper stories about her parents. She soon stopped returning text messages. Ali encouraged her to go out and meet friends, but Izzy dreaded running the gauntlet of photographers outside the front door, in case they took a picture of her.
Jake was a different proposition. Since he had come home from university, he came and went as he pleased. Apart from Ali, no one seemed to notice what he was up to. He had stopped referring to his father from the moment the first stories appeared in the newspaper. Once, as she was getting up with the twins, she had bumped into Jake coming up the stairs on his way to bed. He was standing unsteadily in the middle of the landing.
“He did it, Ali,” Jake said, gripping her arm so tightly that she could see the blood drain where his fingers were wound round her wrist. Ali peeled his hand away.
“We don’t know anything for sure,” she tried to reassure him.
“He was never honest,” Jake insisted. “You know that.”
“He was always good to me,” said Ali.
“You’re as deluded as the rest of them,” whispered Jake.
• • •
How would she keep the twins occupied today? Ali wondered. She needed to get them out of the house. The next-door neighbors had initially seemed willing to allow them safe passa
ge over the garden fence, through their basement, and out the front door, where they could escape incognito to Holland Park. But a few days ago the ladder mysteriously disappeared from their side of the fence.
Bryony now suspected the Darkes were behind an anonymous neighborhood flyer that had appeared through letterboxes this week, demanding the Skinners retreat with their “media circus” to their country home. The idea that she could control the press had made Bryony laugh. “Clients pay me hundreds of thousands of pounds to do just that,” she had told Ali yesterday, “and I have known some of the people writing these stories for almost twenty years. But I can’t control what they say about my own family. Don’t you think that’s ironic?” Ali didn’t have the heart to point out that even after a year of renovations, the house in Oxfordshire was still unfit to live in.
“Ali, any ideas on how they got hold of this?” Ali was aware that Bryony was talking to her again. She jumped as Bryony slid a newspaper across the table toward her. It landed on the floor.
“You should complain. Your picture credit is so small you can hardly read your name,” she said. Ali picked up the paper from the floor. It took her a moment to recognize the photograph, because she had taken the original in color and this was reprinted in black-and-white: it was of the entire family in Corfu during the summer.
“Absolutely no idea,” Ali said. She looked over toward a table to the left of the dining room door and saw a space where the picture used to stand.
“Someone must have stolen it,” said Foy, shrugging his shoulders in disbelief. “This is my Conrad Black moment”—he laughed so hard that he started to wheeze—“except I’m dressed as a Greek peasant woman, not Cardinal Richelieu.”
The picture was part of an elaborate joke conceived by Foy after a long lunch one afternoon during their summer holiday in Greece. He had recently purchased a twenty-acre olive grove adjacent to his estate in Corfu to celebrate his retirement, joking that he was becoming a gentleman farmer. The olive trees produced enough oil for about a hundred one-liter bottles, and Foy wanted to have a photograph of everyone dressed up as a Corfiote peasant family to print on the label on the front because it would amuse his friends.