What the Nanny Saw

by Fiona Neill

  The wind caught the woman’s skirt so that it ballooned around her hips as though someone had inflated her. Had Jake been at the party that was raided by the police at the weekend? She smiled. There was a moment when Bryony drew a breath before replying that he had been revising for his exams on Saturday night. She glanced over at Ali, who felt another knot of anxiety in her stomach. She had no idea where Jake had been, although she knew he wasn’t home until two in the morning. The woman wouldn’t leave them alone. She started pressing Bryony for information about English tutors for her sixteen-year-old daughter.

  “I’m looking for someone who can help unlock Thomas Hardy,” she said intensely, turning her back on Ali.

  “Is he stuck in your cellar?” asked one of the twins equally seriously.

  “She’s doing Far from the Madding Crowd,” said the woman, smiling benignly at the twins. “But she says she can’t relate to any of it. Especially all the agricultural stuff. Even though we showed her some Costa Rican peasants plowing a field with oxen. I’ve spoken to her teacher, and she says she just needs to read the book again.” She laughed a little too heartily.

  “I don’t think I know anyone,” said Bryony.

  “Hardy’s a tough nut to crack,” said Ali, unable to suppress herself any longer. “And fate is a difficult concept for teenagers. I think it’s better to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles first and then go back to Far from the Madding Crowd. If you get the concept of forbidden love in Tess, then it’s easier to understand Bathsheba’s dilemma.”

  Afterward, she tried to work out just whom she was trying to impress. Was she attempting to compensate for the muddle in the car by reminding Bryony of other reasons that she had given her the job? Was she trying to force this woman into acknowledging her existence? Or did she suddenly realize that there were other ways she could earn a living in London?

  Either way, it backfired horribly. The woman asked if she was a family friend, and Ali, gratified by the attention, explained that she was working for the Skinners and that she had almost finished her undergraduate degree in English literature. The woman did a half-pirouette so that she was facing Ali, and started asking whether she would be interested in earning a bit of money doing some extra tutoring on her days off.

  “Can’t help,” interrupted Bryony apologetically. “Ali works for us full-time, and if she has any free time she goes back to Norfolk to see her parents.” It was said in a way that suggested this was an immutable routine that had evolved over years. Bryony put a protective arm around Ali’s shoulders. The woman finally backed off.

  “We need to establish a schedule for Martha and Izzy to practice their quartet together, don’t we?” she asked. “Shall I organize it with Ali?”

  “Yes, please,” said Bryony.

  “I’ll need her details, then,” said Sophia, a note of triumph in her voice, as she strode away with Ali’s mobile number saved in her list of contacts.

  “I knew this was going to be a problem,” said Bryony so venomously that Ali was worried she would be heard. “Sophia Wilbraham won’t let it go. She’s like a supertanker, sweeping through the ocean, capsizing anything that gets in her way. And did you notice the way that she implied that Jake was at that party? Because I’m a working mother, she wants my children to fail.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Ali said, unsure exactly what she was apologizing for, and taken aback by the ferocity of Bryony’s reaction to the strange bell-jar woman. “I haven’t really driven a car with gears since my driving test.”

  “I can’t believe she tried to poach you so flagrantly in front of me,” said Bryony more thoughtfully. “Nanny-napping on your first week of work. Extraordinary.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ali in confusion.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Bryony, as they continued down the road. “It’s the risk we take employing someone like you.”

  “It was dangerous, and I shouldn’t have done it,” said Ali in confusion.

  “Forget the car and move on,” said Bryony almost impatiently. “We’ll get you a small automatic and you can do some more lessons. Or would you prefer a G-Wiz? People your age are very environmental, aren’t they? Of if you don’t want to drive at all, then you can use the taxi account all the time.”

  “Isn’t that a little premature?” stammered Ali, who hadn’t yet worked out that generally Bryony posed only questions she had already answered. “I mean, I might not work out. My trial period isn’t even up yet. I’ve only been with you for ten days.”

  Bryony waved away her concerns and let go of Alfie’s, or perhaps it was Hector’s, hand to tap a message into her BlackBerry. The private line, noted Ali.

  “Jake will need a car to learn in soon,” she said.

  Ali felt unnerved by the generosity of Bryony’s reaction. At the time she put this down to the cost entailed in buying her a car and the uncomfortable sensation that she was being bought. Then she became caught up in the idea that it didn’t matter that Bryony was trying to buy her, it was the fact that she wasn’t worth purchasing. Which brought into relief the idea that Bryony’s judgment was somehow off-kilter. Which reminded her of the way her sister sometimes reacted to things.

  It was only much later that she realized it was the inappropriateness that bothered her. She should have been the object of Bryony’s wrath rather than her understanding. It was reckless of Ali to drive the car without any practice. But it was more reckless of Bryony to tolerate her behavior. Bryony’s priorities were completely wrong.

  “Well observed,” said Rosa, during a late-night phone conversation later that day. “Professor MacDonald would be proud of your insight. He was asking how you were getting on the other day. He wanted to know whether your boss was in the mold of Mr. Rochester or Sir Pitt Crawley.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said that you’d completely forgotten about us all.” Rosa giggled. “We were doing a tutorial on whether Frances Burney was Jane Austen’s literary godmother.”

  “Of course she is,” said Ali. “She mentions her in Northanger Abbey, and don’t you remember the last line of Burney’s second novel?”

  “No,” said Rosa.

  “‘The whole of this unfortunate business . . . has been the result of pride and prejudice,’” quoted Ali. “Conclusive evidence.”

  “This is why I miss you,” Rosa said with a groan. “When are you coming to visit?”

  “I’m working most weekends,” said Ali.

  “What about Christmas and New Year?”

  “They’ve asked me to go skiing with them to look after the twins. If I go they’ll double my salary for the week.”

  “God, they must be loaded.”

  “They are,” said Ali, walking away from the chimney in case Jake was upstairs and could hear her conversation.

  “At least they’re not boring,” said Rosa.

  “The Skinners are not ordinary or average,” responded Ali, “but at least I know it’s them that’s strange, not me.” She could tell that Rosa was bored of discussing people she had never met. So instead she described how she came home from the school run to find that the pug had done a shit in her shoe.

  “We’re in a fight for supremacy,” Ali joked.

  “At least it means you’re a player,” said Rosa.

  6

  October 2006

  “Are you the Skinners’ new nanny?”

  Ali was too taken aback to respond. She had been doing the school run with the twins for almost a month now, and this was the first time that anyone had spoken to her. Unless you included Hector and Alfie’s teacher, who had taken her aside twice: once to say that the twins seemed to enjoy playing with each other more than with other children, and then again a few days later to inform Ali that they wouldn’t go to the bathroom separately and were speaking a languag
e that no one at school could identify, although the music teacher thought it might be Swahili. It wasn’t. Ali had diligently gone to the bookshop at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury and bought a dictionary with some of the £100 spending money Bryony left out each day. But when she tried out Swahili words on them, Hector and Alfie were unmoved.

  “Czy ty Skinner?” the woman persisted, repeating the question in Polish, as she put the brake on a heavy-looking stroller with a sleeping baby in the bottom. She was pale and small, with an asymmetrical fringe that covered one eye.

  “Czy pochodzisz a Ukrainy czy ze Slowacji?”

  “I’m English,” said Ali emphatically, wondering if the word nanny didn’t exist outside the English language or whether it was one of those nouns that had gone global, like hamburger or pornography. Except Ali knew it wasn’t a new word. The night before her first interview she embarked on some last-minute research and discovered that “Nanny” was a nineteenth-century diminutive of Annie. An explanation as prosaic as the job she was applying for, Ali suspected.

  “She’s our nanny,” said Alfie and Hector in unison. They had come out of school as they did almost every day, holding hands and singing “Two Little Boys,” a song that they had learned in music, about a couple of friends who fight alongside each other in the American Civil War.

  “Did you think I would leave you dying when there’s room on my horse for two?” they sang as they marched out of the playground. At first Ali had found this touching. But as the days went by, she saw other children evil-eye them when they began. She found herself feeling protective over them as she saw how the proximity they craved alienated other children. Now lines from the song intruded on perfectly rational conversation.

  “What would you like to do when you’re grown up?” their grandfather had asked the other day.

  “When we grow up we’ll both be soldiers, and our horses will not be toys,” Alfie had told Foy solemnly.

  The baby in the bottom of the stroller started crying, and the woman deftly lifted him out and swung him over her shoulder. He was tiny and mewed like a hungry kitten as she soothed him with a familiar song in a foreign tongue.

  Ali reflected on her interactions with the twins. She felt like a comedian trying to get a decent act together. It was mostly improvised. Hit-or-miss stuff. Mostly miss. The books on how to raise children that Bryony left in Ali’s bedroom with yellow stickers marking key passages were completely unhelpful. “Silent but deadly,” Izzy would say after Ali had discovered they had glued one of Bryony’s favorite leather gloves onto the door of her bedroom or gone into the larder and opened every single can of Diet Coke and drank as much as they could before throwing up on the floor.

  Her most successful strategy for distracting Hector and Alfie involved telling them stories in the Norfolk accent Ali had spent much of her life trying to suppress. The legend of Black Shuck and his retributions for infractions like hitting your sister or refusing to go up for a bath were far more effective than a spell on the naughty step. And they definitely had an ear for dialect.

  The woman’s proficiency as she quietened the baby highlighted Ali’s inadequacies. When she took the twins to the park, she sat and read Tristram Shandy, one of her eighteenth-century literature texts, while they played, arguing to herself that if their mother couldn’t be bothered to get on her hands and knees in the sandpit, then why should she? She bribed them with sugary-coated sweets that made them hyperactive and then calmed them down with all the television programs proscribed by Bryony. She had learned a lot about uppers and downers from her sister through the years.

  “I’m Mira,” said the woman, holding out one hand to shake Ali’s hand while the other held the baby in place on her shoulder. The baby’s cries became less plaintive, and it shut its eyes. Mira rhythmically jigged from side to side, the beat increasing whenever the mewing noise threatened to intensify.

  “Sorry,” she apologized. “I need to get him back to sleep. Just give me a few minutes.”

  Sophia Wilbraham had ignored Ali since the incident on the first day of term, although the impact of the perceived slight was diminished by the fact that so had everyone else. When she went to pick up the twins, Ali felt like the outsider in a Venn diagram. Everyone else was connected. The tall, shiny American mothers overlapped with their bigger-breasted, stripy-topped English counterparts and a small mutable huddle of working mothers who exchanged greetings with the antipodean nannies. The latter kept themselves apart from other foreign nannies, who herded according to nationality.

  There were cheerful and noisy Filipinas who laughed more than anyone else; timid Indian women in flip-flops and saris, who never made eye contact; and then the group to which Mira belonged, who spoke whichever Eastern European language happened to be in the ascendant that day. Sometimes Ali found herself caught in the slipstream of different conversations that wafted down the road. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the parents at her old school in Cromer having similar exchanges.

  “We’re doing Cape Cod this year . . . David’s trying to blag a villa in Tuscany from one of his clients . . . Bombay is too wet in summer . . . There’s a five-star hotel where you can stay to see the Komodo dragons . . . Forget the Portland, have the baby at Cedars-Sinai . . .”

  Then yesterday: “He bit my son . . . He bit my daughter . . . He needs to be assessed by the ed psych . . . He has a new nanny . . . His parents are never around.” Ali knew they were talking about Hector and must have realized she was within earshot. She felt a sting of hurt and anger on his behalf but was too unsure of herself to retaliate.

  Ali was aware that Mira had carefully deposited the baby back in the stroller and was waiting for her to say something. Worried that she might appear unfriendly, she began to describe herself in greater detail, mentioning that she came from a coastal town in East Anglia and had come to London to find a job to pay off her student debts.

  “It’s the bit of England that looks like a head,” Ali explained. “The east wind comes straight across the sea from the Urals. So do some of the birds, the starlings for sure, and sometimes we get tiny song thrushes. We’ve probably grown up breathing the same air. Where do you come from?”

  “We were wondering if you wanted to have coffee with us,” Mira said, ignoring Ali’s attempt at geographical inclusion. Ali flinched. No one she had met seemed to have any interest in her life before she began working in London. Maybe that’s what happened in a city of migrants. Life was lived in the present tense. She thought of the occasions that she had tried to engage Malea in conversation about the Philippines. Where exactly are you from? Do you still have family there? Will you go back one day? Malea sidestepped every question with an enigmatic laugh, as though Ali was making a joke.

  Then yesterday, as Jake passed her on the top flight of stairs, he had stopped to explain how Malea had three children of her own, who lived with their grandmother in a village five hours by bus from Manila. The youngest was the same age as the twins, and she hadn’t seen him for almost two years.

  “That’s so awful,” said Ali. But Jake had already disappeared up to his room.

  “I’m meant to go straight home and do half an hour of maths with each of them,” Ali told Mira. “We have quite a strict timetable.”

  “Please, Ali, can we go to Starbucks?” pleaded Hector, pulling on her hand.

  “I beg you,” said Alfie melodramatically.

  Ali laughed.

  “We won’t tell Mummy,” said Hector.

  Ali did a quick calculation in her head. Bryony was working late. By tomorrow, today would be a distant memory for the twins. “That would be really nice.”

  “We couldn’t decide whether you were lonely or aloof,” said Mira.

  Ali was uncomfortable with the way she had been the subject of their conversation. Neither lonely nor aloof was an adjective anyone would want to
attach to herself. But she did like the way Mira said “aloof,” emphasizing the final consonant so that it hung in the air like smoke rings. It was obviously a word she had learned recently, because during this first encounter she used it several times. It reminded Ali of the way Hector and Alfie experimented with new words.

  “Lonely,” Ali said. “But not terminally.” She wondered whether Mira would understand but didn’t want to patronize her by searching for another word.

  “Benignly lonely,” said the woman with approval. “You must have a Ukrainian soul.”

  They headed into the busy road that Ali recognized from the first and last time she did the school run in the car.

  “There are still punks, but they are paid by the council to attract foreign tourists . . . They are very aloof . . . An almond croissant at the Bluebird Café costs three pounds . . . Tesco Metro stays open until almost midnight . . . The number twenty-two and number eleven are the only buses that don’t turn off into side streets . . .” said Mira, thrilled to be in a position where she could educate an English person about her own country.

  “What’s this road called?” Ali asked as they passed a tall man with a red Mohawk and so many rings in his eyebrow it resembled a Lilliputian curtain rail.

  “The King’s Road,” Mira said. “I can’t believe you don’t know it. It’s so important it has the definite article in front of it. Only the most important roads in London have an article.” She began running though a list: the Earls Court Road, the Portobello Road, the Finchley Road, the Limehouse Link . . .”

  The way she spoke was odd. She enunciated each word carefully, and her grammar was almost perfect, but it sounded so old-fashioned.

  “How long have you lived in England?” asked Ali.

  “Many years,” said Mira vaguely.

  “Where did you learn to speak English?” Ali asked.

  “I studied English literature at Kiev University years ago.” Mira shrugged.