What the Nanny Saw

by Fiona Neill

  “Someone should start a campaign,” said someone else.

  “It’s a bit of a minority issue,” said Felix Naylor. Ali caught his eye, and he raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t get much traction with the British public, methinks. Millionaires complaining about billionaires doesn’t exactly engender much sympathy.”

  “Nick, tell me about these formulas the credit agencies are using to measure risk,” said the woman who worked at the Treasury. She spoke in a soft drawl, with an accent that slipped from English into American, depending on the vowel. It was difficult to place her geographically. “These derivatives have got so complex that you need an economics degree and an MBA from Harvard to understand how they work.”

  “The Gaussian copula is used most widely,” said Nick, scribbling an unintelligible formula onto a napkin “In statistics a copula is used to couple the balance of two or more variables.”

  “Do you foresee any problems with it?”

  “I’m concerned it doesn’t use historical data going back far enough to measure the risk properly. It just uses market data that’s been around for less than a decade. And I worry that everyone is using the same formula. But it’s helped us to speed up the issue of CDOs.”

  “There was a piece in BusinessWeek about the boom in these hybrid securities and how even though they’re backed up by complicated derivatives, they’re packaged like triple-A bonds so they appear as safe as houses. Sometimes I think they look like a giant Ponzi scheme.”

  “So what do you think Brown will do?” Nick asked.

  “He’ll continue with the light touch regulation,” she sighed. “New Labour is in thrall to money. They’re dangerously obsessed with the idea that there is a correlation between wealth and intelligence.”

  “Do you think he’ll force banks to increase their capital reserves?”

  “He’s more Greenspan than Greenspan,” she joked.

  The geeks have inherited the earth, thought Ali. Felix rushed back into the dining room, having tended another call. He knocked Tita’s arm, and a small pool of white wine tipped onto her pale silk dress.

  “God, Tita, I’m so sorry,” said Felix, using his shirtsleeve to absorb the wine.

  “Don’t worry, my dear. Now, tell me when you are going to come and visit us in Corfu.”

  Across the table, Ali saw Bryony shake her head at her mother. Everyone left before midnight. Not a sign of a great evening out, thought Ali, as she went into the drawing room to tell Nick and Bryony that she was going up to bed. They were sitting on the pale beige sofa. Nick had his arm around Bryony and her head rested against his shoulder, the cascade of red hair tickling his nose.

  “It was a very productive evening,” said Nick. Bryony wordlessly concurred. It struck Ali as a strange adjective to use. Surely a party was meant to be fun. “You’re so good at this kind of stuff.”

  “Isn’t Sophia Wilbraham ghastly?”

  “Awful,” agreed Nick. “But at least we don’t need to invite her again for another year.”

  7

  November 2006

  By the time Nick and Bryony were settling in to early-evening drinks at Dick Fuld’s ranch in Idaho after a strenuous day hiking up and down Bald Mountain, their daughter Izzy had drunk rather more than half a bottle of vodka and was inexpertly smoking her first joint with a boy from Jake’s school at a party in Notting Hill. As her mother gratefully accepted a glass of Clos du Mesnil 1995 from a Salvadoran maid in full uniform, Izzy followed the boy into a room with a view across London and a large double bed that wouldn’t be occupied that night by the owner of the house or his new girlfriend, because they were in Marrakesh for the weekend.

  At more or less the same time, Ali found herself wandering into Nick and Bryony’s bedroom to keep vigil for the taxi that was due to bring Izzy home from the party. It was already ten minutes late. Of course, Ali could have observed the street from the drawing room, but the same impulse that led Izzy to allow a boy she didn’t know to guide her hand inside his trousers compelled Ali into the forbidden territory of the second floor of Holland Park Crescent. Like Izzy, she was marginally surprised to find she felt less like an intruder and more like an explorer mapping new territory.

  Ali closed the door behind her and stood for a moment to admire the daring gold-and-black wallpaper, the crystal light fixture, and the gold mirror above the original fireplace. Bryony and Nick’s bed was enormous, and the duvet as smooth as glacé icing. There was no trace of the couple that slept there. No wrinkles in the sheets. No tissues on the bedside table. No stray hairs on the pillow. She tried to imagine them in a state of abandoned entanglement and found she couldn’t.

  She went into the bathroom. There were matching gray towels as thick and smooth as Leicester’s coat, reconditioned silver art deco bath taps shaped like fish, and a rolltop bath that matched the bed for scale. Room for three, thought Ali. The room made her think of Miami—haughty pink flamingos on a pale gray background—even though she had never been there. Not surprising, because the interior decorator was American. Ali had met her the other day. All smiles and sunny Californian bonhomie until she realized she was speaking to the nanny, not Bryony’s daughter.

  The bathroom cabinet exceeded expectations: Seconal, Restoril, and Ambien for insomnia (prescription in Nick’s name), Vicodin and Percocet to relieve pain (also in Nick’s name), and Xanax and Ativan to treat anxiety. There were also two full packets of Fluoxetine. But no Citralopram or Sertraline, which was a good sign. Bryony was on the Pill.

  Ali undid the zipper of her jeans and pulled down her knickers to pee in the minimalist Philippe Starck toilet. The contrast with the overembellished sink and bath was too obvious to be accidental. It seemed to suggest a kind of shyness with bodily functions that was totally at odds with the vast floor-to-ceiling mirror that covered the wall opposite. She wondered if Nick and Bryony ever had sex in front of it. There was a hint of narcissism in their worked-out bodies, and she could imagine Nick admiring the way his buttock muscles clenched as Bryony wrapped her legs around his thighs. Ali watched her reflection and used the loo roll with particular flourish, trying not to imagine Nick and Bryony doing the same. Then she flushed the loo twice, in case they noticed that someone had used it.

  Izzy was meant to be home by midnight. Ali didn’t need to consult the two pages of typed instructions that she found when she went back down into the kitchen to know Izzy should have been collected in a cab at eleven-thirty. Ali stood by the kitchen island, staring at her crumpled Tube map, trying to make sense of how long it might take a taxi to drive from a party in Notting Hill to Holland Park. She now understood that the scale of the Underground system bore little relation to the actual topography of London. But when she saw the two were adjacent on the Central Line, her stomach knotted, because it certainly shouldn’t take an hour.

  She called Izzy and left another message, this one more frantic than the last.

  “Izzy, you are now more than half an hour late, and we’re all worrying about you,” she said into the phone, making a swift decision to suggest that others were now involved in the drama. “Please call us as soon as you get this message.”

  She checked that there were no messages on the answering machine and then called the taxi company that was meant to bring Izzy home. Ali had learned from her mother that action was nearly always the best antidote to anxiety over children who had missed their curfew. Sensing he wasn’t the object of her attention, Leicester came and sat on her foot. Ali tried to shake him off, but he growled so grumpily that she relented.

  The woman who answered the phone told her that Izzy’s friend had been dropped in Warwick Gardens at around eleven forty-five but that the journey to Holland Park Crescent had been canceled. Izzy must still be at the party, concluded Ali, because there was no way that she could walk far in the high-heeled ankle boots she had pilfered from Bryony’s wardro
be.

  “You were meant to drop her home,” Ali rounded on the cab operator.

  “We’re a taxi company, not a child-minding service,” said the woman. “The driver says she refused to come. Imagine the aggro if he’d forced a drunken teenage girl into the car.”

  “You could have let me know,” said Ali truculently. “Can you please send a cab to come and collect me and take me to the same address right away?”

  “Not for another hour,” the woman said. “It’s Saturday night.”

  “This is an emergency,” insisted Ali.

  “Then dial nine-nine-nine.”

  • • •

  Ali turned to the last page of Bryony’s instructions. There was a comprehensive list of people she might want to contact in an emergency, even though she was unsure whether Izzy’s failure to come home yet constituted an emergency because she was still only three-quarters of an hour late. The ill-defined parameters of the crisis preoccupied her. Ali lurched from benign explanations—Izzy waiting for a cab that hadn’t turned up, Holland Park Avenue closed because of an accident, a drunken friend who required assistance—to malevolent images inspired by incidents in the past involving her own sister. Her father finding Jo in a park being held down by a group of teenage boys (the details were never talked about), Jo found by the police in a pool of her own blood in Norwich (she was sleeping on the street and had her period), Jo taken to hospital from a party with chest pains (incompatible drug experience involving cocaine and ecstasy).

  Images of Jo and Izzy became entangled in Ali’s mind, and she felt a familiar pressure in her stomach, as though someone was squeezing her very tight. It was a sensation she associated with living at home. She suddenly remembered a weekend almost three years earlier, just before her A-levels, when Jo had arrived home unannounced after another long period “away” and told her parents she wanted to clean up.

  By this time Ali’s parents were fluent in the language of rehabilitation. Experience, however, had made them wary, and they huddled together at the table in worried silence as Jo outlined her plan. She stood in the middle of the floor, niggling a piece of loose linoleum with her toe, unable to look them in the eye. Ali had melted into the background, both repulsed and compelled by her sister’s appearance: the pale doughy skin, the dead brown eyes, the scabby arms, the bony legs encased in a pair of sticky jeans. She reminded Ali of an insect. There was no attempt to hide what was going on, which meant that either she had reached rock bottom and wanted to find a way out of the nightmare she had created for herself or she no longer cared what people thought.

  “What can we do to help, Jo?” her mother had asked. Her tone was guarded, as though she wanted to believe Jo might go through with her plan but didn’t want to fully embrace it in case she was disappointed.

  “I’ll need lots of bottled water, Gatorade, Night Nurse, and peanut butter sandwiches,” Jo began earnestly.

  “Peanut butter?” Ali questioned, knowing that her interest signaled involvement.

  “It’s what they feed prisoners who are detoxing in American jails,” Jo explained. “It’s easy to eat, and it raises endorphin levels. And if they’ve got any valerian root, that would help with the anxiety. I’ll need lots of clean sheets, because I’ll get the sweats, and hot baths to stay warm, so can you leave the hot water on all the time please?”

  The whole process would take no longer than ten days, a period that coincided almost exactly with Ali’s exams.

  “What about me?” Ali wanted to ask. “How am I going to revise? How am I going to get enough sleep? Who is going to make sure that I’m fine?” But she didn’t, because she knew that if she had, no one would have responded. Jo hadn’t done it on purpose, Ali kept telling herself. Heroin was worse than the most jealous lover: it didn’t allow for anyone else in her life.

  Her mother had diligently made a list. Ali was instructed to take Jo for a walk to the end of the pier and back, nothing strenuous, while her parents went shopping. It was cold and windy, and the sea was angrily foaming around the steel girders of the pier. Jo and Ali walked as far as they could. Ali could tell she was getting twitchy for her next fix.

  “If I jump in over the edge, will you promise to give up drugs forever?” Ali asked her sister. Jo had nodded, and Ali had climbed onto the railing, stood there for a moment, and then jumped, fully clothed, into the sea. It was a reckless act. Her long coat weighed her down. She held her breath underwater for as long as she could. She wanted Jo to know what it was like to worry that someone might die. When she came up Jo had disappeared.

  She had already gone into town and scored again. When her parents came home, Ali told them what had happened. Ali watched her mother’s face and felt anger and pity for the concertina of lines across her forehead. It occurred to her as she remembered this incident that her mother was probably younger than Bryony but looked at least fifteen years older.

  • • •

  Ali ran her finger down the list, pressing the paper hard to stop her fingers from shaking. It stopped beside Nick and Bryony and tapped their names. There were details of where they were staying: Short Hill Ranch, Bald Mountain, Sun Valley, Idaho, read the address. Bryony had left four mobile phone numbers and a landline number of the country retreat that belonged to Nick’s boss. Where the fuck is Idaho? thought Ali in panic, as she tried to work out what the time might be there. Were they seven hours ahead or seven hours behind GMT? She needed a map. One that stretched from Notting Hill to the Rockies. She searched for an atlas in the bookshelf, Leicester trailing behind, viewing her presence without the master and mistress of the house with snuffling disapproval.

  The temptation to call Bryony and Nick, to pass on responsibility, was almost overwhelming. As Ali punched numbers into the phone she realized that this weekend was the first true test of her competence, and she didn’t want to admit defeat quite so readily. Besides, there was nothing they could do. It struck Ali that a man who missed the birth of his first child because he was on a business trip might not bother to come home because his daughter was late home from a party. And if Bryony panicked and opted to return alone, their weekend together would be ruined. They barely spent more than a couple of consecutive nights under the same roof each week.

  Not that Bryony had relished playing the role of corporate wife. Ali recalled the scene in their bedroom on Friday morning, when she had been called upstairs as a last resort after Malea couldn’t find a pair of walking boots that needed to be packed for the trip. Ali found Malea silently packing suitcases, carefully wrapping dresses in tissue paper and laying out cosmetics for Bryony’s approval. She noticed that not only was Malea well versed in the rhythms of Bryony’s menstrual cycle, she had also lined up a packet of diazepam and a half-consumed packet of antidepressants.

  “Can you believe we all have to go hiking together?” Bryony asked Ali as she emerged from the walk-in wardrobe carrying shoeboxes. Ali sensed no response was required. “A bloody forced march through the Rockies with a man who calls his wife by her surname. The first year we went a woman turned up with a fake plaster cast to avoid any exercise and then another appeared with a real cast announcing that she was still planning to head up the mountain. That’s what I’m up against.”

  Her face was flushed as she recklessly pulled out shoes and Malea carefully placed the rejects back in boxes.

  “During the day you have to wear this ridiculous walking gear, and then the evening is like a Paris catwalk. And Fuld questions you about your children as though he really cares, when it was his fault that Nick wasn’t there when Jake was born.”

  “Ridiculous,” Ali agreed when Malea didn’t respond, although for someone who had never left Europe the prospect sounded enticingly exotic.

  “The wives are all suspicious of me because I have a proper job,” Bryony continued furiously, “and on Sunday the men have to play golf and they all wear shirts wi
th the logo from their country clubs, apart from Nick, who doesn’t belong to a golf club and spends so much time in bunkers that he comes home with his feet practically exfoliated. While he’s undergoing this ritual humiliation I have to trawl antiques shops. Then we all go to a restaurant and order a lunch that no one eats. God, it’s all so suburban. I hate fucking smart casual.”

  Remembering this outburst, Ali allowed her fingers to run farther down the list. She immediately ruled out the GP, the dentist, and Leicester’s vet. Sophia Wilbraham lived a couple of streets away, and her number was at the bottom of the list, but Ali knew that Bryony wouldn’t want her to bear witness to a domestic crisis involving one of the children, because her version of the story would reflect badly on everyone involved: Bryony would be cast as the feckless working mother, Ali as the incompetent nanny, Izzy as the wayward teenager deprived of parental attention at a crucial stage in her development.

  Ali penciled a star beside Foy and Tita, knowing that although Foy would overreact and possibly be drunk, he would at least be available. Bryony’s sister was out of the question, because Stoke Newington was so far away it didn’t even seem to warrant its own Tube stop, and she had noticed the current of tension whenever Bryony spoke to Hester on the phone.

  Malea’s name didn’t appear. She rarely left the house of her own volition except to take Leicester for a short walk to the end of Holland Park Crescent once a day. She famously once got lost going to Sainsbury’s. Ali could now at least trace the route to school from the back of the cab that picked them up every morning at eight o’clock. She could negotiate her way round Holland Park. And she had discovered a cut-through to the butcher, where Bryony frequently sent her to pick up the sausages that Izzy favored during her binges.

  But as far as she was aware, she had never been to Notting Hill central, although she was fairly sure that it was due north. For a moment Ali wished that her father were here. He could negotiate the North Sea in the thickest pea soup, when you couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of you. As a child she remembered making him close his eyes, spinning him round so fast that his waders creaked in protest, and then asking him to point north. He was always right.