by Fiona Neill
Perhaps this was why Bryony always had a photographer on hand. The normal mess of family life disappeared so quickly that they needed constant visual reminders of what they had actually done together. The shelves in the den were stacked with up-to-date photo albums in chronological order. The kitchen walls had a montage of carefully chosen pictures of the family at play.
The staircase was filled with tasteful black-and-white portraits of the children at various stages of their life. There was one of Hector and Alfie as toddlers, sitting on the branch of one of the beech trees at the end of the garden; there was Jake surfing, and Izzy riding a horse. The pictures had a deliberately casual feel, as though the photographer had caught them off guard, but Ali already knew this was an illusion: there was nothing spontaneous about the life of the Skinner children. Their schedules were as tightly controlled as the flight plan at Heathrow Airport.
On the landing outside Nick and Bryony’s bedroom there was a huge picture of them taken at a party. They were dancing together, Nick pressed against Bryony’s back, the sun on their face, so they stood out among the crowd of people as though they were blessed. Nothing can go wrong for these people, thought Ali, whenever she walked past it. All this visual suggestion had the effect of making people think they weren’t having quite such a good time as the Skinners, which made Ali wish she hadn’t agreed to go out with Katya and Mira.
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Ali said, quoting Johnson to give her courage on her first night out alone in the city. One eye on the mirror, she settled on the jauntiest angle for her woolly hat, checked her eye makeup for any smudging, and rummaged in her bag to make sure that she had her map of London, wallet, cigarettes, the piece of paper with the security code for the front gate, and keys. Then she left the house unchallenged. It seemed incredible that no one had asked where she was going or who she was meeting.
The twins were asleep upstairs. Izzy was having dinner with her parents in the kitchen, a painful process that consisted of Bryony trying to avoid eating while monitoring every mouthful that Izzy consumed. Jake was going out with Lucy. He hadn’t told her, but standing by the fireplace in her bedroom, Ali heard him agreeing to meet her in a bar in Kensington High Street.
Desmond Darke was standing on the sidewalk as Ali shut the gate behind her. He emitted a reluctant grunt of recognition. She hurried down the street, aware that Katya and Mira would be waiting for her, rehearsing what she would tell them about the party. If people didn’t share any past, it left only the present to rake over. Ali enjoyed living life in the moment, but their collective lack of history added a certain edge, as though the narrative of life had to be written even faster.
Ali was meeting them in a pub in the Portobello Road. She walked down Holland Park Avenue, past Jeroboams, past the butcher’s, past the estate agent’s, and turned the first left after Daunt Books. Two significant thoughts suddenly occurred to her: For the first time she had got her bearings without having to consult her map, and the pub was very close to the house where she and Jake had rescued Izzy from the party.
She walked faster, London speed, hoping that Bryony had worn in the ankle boots that Ali had found outside her bedroom this morning with a note saying they were too big for Izzy and too bohemian for her.
The pub was a cozy hum of Sunday-night drinkers. It was Victorian, with a series of wood-paneled rooms constructed around a long thin bar. Ali traipsed through a couple before coming across Mira and Katya sitting at a table at the far end. The Romanian nanny that she had first met in Starbucks was also there. They were all drinking Guinness, and Ali ordered the same, even though she had never really enjoyed its bitter taste. They got up and hugged her. Ali sat down beside Katya, feeling vaguely self-conscious that she was the only obvious native English speaker. Ileana was talking about a Romanian film that had won a best first film award at the Cannes Film Festival.
“It’s called A Fost Sau n-a Fost? in Romanian,” she explained. “In English I can’t remember. Maybe East of Bucharest or something like that.”
“What’s it about?” asked Mira.
“It’s about a man who claims he was part of the revolution in Romania but actually was drunk most of the time while other people were overthrowing . It questions the nature of historical memory. It’s very, very funny. We all wanted to be heroes, but most of us weren’t.”
“What was it like back then?” Ali asked. “I was only four years old in 1989.”
“Put it this way, Ali: I thank my lucky stars every time I take the Pill.” Ileana laughed. “My mother had ten children. No one was allowed to use birth control. Until she was forty, my poor mother was constantly pregnant.”
“What happened then?” asked Ali.
“After forty, as long as you had at least four children, you were allowed to have an abortion,” Ileana explained.
“Do you know what Thomas said to me today?” Katya asked. Mira looked at her watch.
“Eleven minutes forty-six seconds.” She laughed as she turned to Ali. “I time Katya to see how long it takes before she mentions Thomas. This is a record, actually.”
“He told me that he only wants to eat food that I cook,” said Katya triumphantly.
“That’s a big compliment,” said Ali.
“It is because Sophia is such a terrible, terrible cook.” Katya laughed. “Her meals look like her. They are legendary.” She said the last word carefully, as though she had learned it only recently. “The other day I cooked the food for her dinner party. She always makes me promise not to tell anyone, but then she had an argument with Martha because she came home late.”
“Where was she?” asked Ali.
“Some party near here,” said Katya vaguely. “So Martha took revenge by telling everyone that I had done it all. She pointed out that the person with the purple hands and fingernails had obviously made the beetroot soup. Sophia tried to laugh it off. After everyone left she had a big, big tantrum.” Katya stretched out her arms to demonstrate its breadth. “She told me that now everyone knew, I would have to leave and that I had betrayed her trust.”
“What happened next?” asked Ali.
“Her husband, Ned, tried to reason with her. He told her that it wasn’t my fault and that if anyone was to blame, it was Martha for revealing the truth or Sophia for creating a dinner built around a lie. So Sophia threw the remains of the beetroot soup at him, and he called her a fucking cunt.”
“God, how awful,” gasped Ali, trying to imagine a similar scene in the Skinner household. To judge from Mira’s and Ileana’s muted response to this drama, it was not an uncommon occurrence.
“So what did you do?” asked Ali.
“I cleared up the broken dish,” Katya said with a shrug. “She’s looking for an excuse to get rid of me.”
“Well, you just have to make sure that you don’t give her one,” Mira warned.
“Her husband sounds kind,” said Ali.
“He is very nice.” Katya nodded so vigorously that the head of the Guinness slopped over the edge of the glass. “But he is very chicken-pecked.”
“Hen-pecked,” Ali corrected her, giggling.
“One day he will rise up against her,” said Katya.
The conversation turned to food. There was a shop in South London where you could buy horilka z pertsem, announced Katya. “In Old Kent Road.”
“In the Old Kent Road,” said Mira. “It is one of those streets that takes the article.”
Mira countered with another shop in West London where you could buy authentic pampushki.
“You can make that yourself,” said Katya. “Yeast, sugar, egg, garlic sauce. Thomas loves pampushki.”
“What do you eat in Romania?” Ali asked Ileana.
“Our food has the same influences as the rest of Romanian culture,” said Ileana. “From the Turks we have meatb
alls, from the Greeks musaca, from the Bulgarians vegetable dishes like ghiveci, vegetable stew and , chopped peppers and eggplant, snitel from the Austrians.” As she spoke Ileana closed her eyes.
“Are you remembering meals from your childhood?” Ali asked cautiously. Ileana’s eyes flashed open.
“God, no! There were food shortages all the time. That is why we talk about food so much now.”
They all laughed again.
“Do you know why I will always love England?” asked Mira. She didn’t wait for Ali to answer. “Because I learned English from listening to the BBC World Service, and speaking English has saved my life.” She leaned back in her chair for dramatic effect.
Katya teased her for going native.
“She even eats Marmite,” she said.
“If I didn’t speak English I wouldn’t have made it here,” continued Mira, ignoring Katya.
“Mira is a political refugee,” said Katya. “She can get very serious about things.” Ali saw Katya give Mira’s calf a gentle kick under the table.
“What did you do before you came here?” Ali asked Mira.
“I was a bank manager,” said Mira. “When I got to London I worked nights cleaning offices in the City. Then I became a cleaner. Then the family I worked for hired me to help with their children.”
Ali stared at her.
“You are wondering how someone who had a good job ended up degrading herself by cleaning other people’s toilets?” asked Mira. “It’s simple. I could only keep doing my job in Kiev if I was corrupt. After the wall came down there were a lot of problems with corruption. Businesspeople made a lot of bad money through selling natural resources. They wanted me to siphon it off to American bank accounts with a cut for myself. I refused. They came after me, and I had to leave the country.”
“Let’s not talk about the past,” urged Katya, fidgeting in the hard-backed wooden seat. “It’s too gloomy.”
PART TWO
11
August 2007
“The house is on the right side of the island but the wrong side of the road.” Nick smiled, turning round to face Ali in the middle row of the Land Rover. “I’m afraid you have to deal with the worst excesses of Greek drivers before you manage to get to the beach.”
Since the driver sitting beside Nick in the front not only was Greek but also spoke reasonable English and the precipitous route down to the village of Agios Stefanos from the main road was almost deserted, Ali was unsure how to respond. She didn’t want to contradict Nick but it felt wrong to cast aspersions on a house she had never visited, especially one that occupied such a disproportionate place in family mythology. The comment reflected his mood, more mercurial and impatient of late, and Ali was relieved when Bryony intervened.
“It’s hardly a busy road, and the view over the bay more than compensates, doesn’t it, Nick?” said Bryony. She leaned across to give Ali a reassuring pat on her arm but missed because the driver was negotiating another hairpin bend. “It’s fabulous.”
“Fabulous,” agreed Nick.
“Fabulous,” trilled the twins from the row of seats in the back.
“I’ve seen the pictures,” said Ali politely. “It looks like paradise.” Actually, she had seen just one and that had only recently replaced the picture Nick had defaced in the downstairs bathroom a year before. It was in soft focus and steeped in muted yellow, but Ali could just about make out an old farmhouse in the background. To tell from Tita’s caftan and Foy’s flared trousers, the photo dated from the 1970s.
“The house is constructed around an old olive press,” explained Bryony. “The main building dates from the seventeenth century. Foy built another wing about twenty years ago and then another, and now, of course, there’s the olive farm.”
“A work in progress,” said Ali, using one of Foy’s favorite phrases. Nick and Bryony laughed, as she knew they would at this blend of affectionate familiarity and confidence.
Ali’s currency in the household had never been higher. At Christmas she had accompanied the Skinners on a family ski trip. She had picked up the twins from their lessons with a private instructor just before lunch and looked after them for the rest of the day so that Nick and Bryony could make the most of their holiday. She had won plaudits for ensuring that the music practice regime seamlessly continued. And she had finally dared to tell Bryony that the language the twins spoke was Filipino, without insinuating that it was because they had spent so much time with Filipina nannies when they were little. It was one of the few times she saw Bryony look embarrassed.
In the Easter holidays, when Izzy’s obsession with losing weight had become more than a passing fad, Ali decided to tell Bryony about her visiting websites that promoted anorexia. Bryony had seemed more concerned about the amount of time Izzy spent on these sites when she should have been doing homework rather than their content, but was nevertheless very grateful to Ali for alerting her to the problem in the months leading up to Izzy’s end-of-year exams. She agreed that Izzy should see an eating-disorders counselor that Ali had researched. When Izzy came top in English, Ali was given credit for all the hard work she had put in, helping with homework.
At the beginning of the summer holidays Ali had organized a party for the twins’ sixth birthday, themed around SpongeBob SquarePants. A replica of SpongeBob’s pineapple home and the Krusty Krab restaurant had been set up in the garden. Inside the restaurant a man dressed up as SpongeBob served hot dogs disguised as Krabby Patty burgers. His sidekick, a Latvian woman, dressed up as Squidward, organized games themed on the sea, and painted portraits of the children. Everyone agreed it had been an even bigger success than the Clifford party the previous year, when the old nanny had merely commissioned bone-shaped cupcakes. At Christmas, Ali had been declared “responsible” and “reliable.” By the summer she had become “indispensable” and “essential,” and had even heard Bryony describe her as “the bedrock of the family.”
Jake was the only thorn in her side. Their communication remained a muddle of misread signals, mangled questions, and confused responses. All seen through the prism of false assumptions drawn from that encounter in the drawing room, when Jake had wrongly concluded he was witnessing an uncomfortable piece of postcoital choreography. Ali had tried to talk to him about it after New Year’s, but had been so violently rebuffed that she swiftly retreated back into uneasy silence.
Holland Park Crescent now felt more like home than anyplace else. There were pictures that the twins had painted with Ali hanging in frames on the walls of the playroom in the basement. A couple of photos of Ali with Hector and Alfie had made their way into the montage of family pictures hanging on the kitchen wall. The weekly supermarket order had been updated to include some of Ali’s favorite foods. Most significant, at the beginning of the summer, someone had stopped to ask Ali the way to Earls Court from Bayswater Road, and she found she could describe the best route without referring to her A–Z.
Ali smiled as she weighed up all this. They were passing through a small hamlet. The sun beat on the white walls of old houses so that they seemed to glow. Ali picked out the tall, stabbing shape of a cypress tree silhouetted against the blue sky. Every element of the landscape was perfectly outlined against the vivid blue canvas. The cypress seemed always to grow alone, unlike the friendly clusters of olives, whose branches stretched sociably toward one another. But there were compensations for being on your own, thought Ali. There was no one else to block out your sunlight.
“Alfie and Hector will probably want to spend all their time in the pool, anyway,” said Bryony. “Then you can concentrate on your suntan without worrying about the Greek drivers.”
She smiled across at Ali. Bryony had a clever way of couching work as pleasure, making Ali feel as though she was the object of her munificence rather than her bidding. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her cheeks revealed previously un
noticed constellations of freckles. She had gathered her hair into an unruly ponytail, from which rebellious strands of red curls escaped. Without lipstick her lips were too pale, but she looked younger than ever.
“How’s their swimming?” Bryony asked.
“They’re very buoyant,” said Ali. Once a week she took Hector and Alfie for private lessons at a center where instructors taught children to feel an innate connection with the water before learning any strokes, a technique that Ali felt had more to do with avarice than science because it was taking them so long to learn. “Their floating technique is amazing. Almost balletic. Everyone comments on it.” She didn’t mention the fact that it was the way their swimming was completely synchronized that caught people’s attention. Over the past year she had grown to understand that Bryony favored a sanitized version of her children’s daily life.
“Can we go in the pool as soon as we get there, Ali?” pleaded Hector.
“Ali needs time to settle in,” said Bryony firmly, tending to a message on her BlackBerry. “Traveling is always so exhausting. I’ll take days to recover.”
Except that the journey couldn’t have been less stressful. Nick’s driver, Mr. Artouche, had delivered them to a hangar beside Heathrow airport, where a small private plane, a six-seater Hawker, was waiting for them. A NetJet pilot had shaken hands with each of them, raising a laugh from the twins by shaking Leicester’s paw up and down. Their luggage was transferred from the back of the car to the back of the plane, and within ten minutes they were in the air. There were no queues to try the patience of parents and children, they were liberated from the stench of a hundred pairs of shoes being removed as people were slowly herded through security checks, and no squabbling over window seats because there was one for everyone.