by Fiona Neill
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,” s
aid 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.
Jake sat upright, assiduously rubbing Lucy’s back. He started at the top, spending equal amounts of time on each shoulder blade before squeezing a trickle of coconut suntan oil down the back of her spine to the spot where flesh met bikini bottoms. His finger traced a line back toward her neck through the trickle of suntan oil, and she stretched appreciatively, like a cat in the sun.
Ali coughed and the twins shouted, but Jake and Lucy couldn’t hear them over the sound of the waterfalls. After a while the babbling started to grate on your nerves. Corfu was surprisingly noisy. Last night the cicadas chattered nonstop, occasionally outdone by screaming owls that pierced the stifling hot night air. Could you turn the waterfalls off? Ali wondered. The idea made her want to giggle. But it also made her nostalgic, because the reason she found it so intrusive was that these weren’t the sounds that she associated with the sea. She missed the greedy, reckless emotion of the North Sea and its loud, noisy seduction technique. She loved its uncompromising quality.
Then, in the middle of the night, the sound of Lucy and Jake having sex in the room above had woken her. At first she had tried to ignore them, but when Lucy’s cries got louder she got up to search through the bookshelf, hoping to find something to distract her. She quickly realized she was in a room intended for children. It was all Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dr. Seuss, and Enid Blyton. So instead she went out onto the balcony that led from her room.
On the balcony outside his bedroom in the main part of the house, Ali had noticed Nick sitting on a chair with his laptop on his knees. Once or twice he glanced over to Jake and Lucy’s room. She could see in the hazy light of the computer screen that he was chewing his upper lip. He stretched his arms, and Ali was surprised to see his hands were trembling.
When she was sure he couldn’t see her, she stood for a moment with her eyes closed, listening to the voice of the Mediterranean. Its whispered promises and dull lapping couldn’t compete with Lucy’s high-pitched animal cries, and in the end Ali resorted to a pair of earplugs that she found in the bathroom alongside small bottles of shampoo and body wash. They muffled the noise, but she could still feel the vibrations of the headboard beating against the wall. At least Jake knew how to give a girl a good time, thought Ali, although Lucy was undoubtedly the kind of girl who was polite enough to fake it.
• • •
Remembering this, she now waved at Jake, hoping to catch his attention, but he was focused on Lucy’s long brown legs. He began rubbing oil into her feet, paying equal attention to each toe. Ali watched with the twins in fascinated silence as his hand began a slow-motion drift to the edge of Lucy’s bikini bottoms. His hand lingered between her legs, and she turned onto her back to face him. The twins drew closer.
“Bosoms,” they shouted in unison. Lucy sat up in shock and reached for her bikini top from a small mosaic table. Jake stood up in front of her to provide a screen and walked toward them.
“You should have said you were here,” he reproached Ali, as Hector and Alfie jumped into the pool. “It’s not fair on Lucy. She needs her privacy.”
Ali glanced over at Lucy, who looked gratified by Jake’s response.
“We tried,” said Ali, demonstrating to Jake how she waved at him and how the twins jumped up and down shouting.
“Is this revenge for me sneaking up on you and Dad?” asked Jake, with a half-smile.
“What do you mean?” asked Ali.
“You know what I’m talking about,” said Jake.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” said Ali.
“I know what I saw.” Jake shrugged.
“Ali, would you be an absolute star and fetch a couple of Diet Cokes from the house?” shouted Lucy. “Andromede failed to stock up the fridge in the pool house last night. I’ll have a swim with the twins while you’re gone. And if you could bring my book I’d be so fantastically grateful.”
“Sure,” said Ali, going into the pool house to check whether Lucy was correct or just wanted to assert her authority. She was relieved to escape. Tita hadn’t shown her the inside of the building yesterday, and it gave her an excuse to stand still for a moment and get her bearings. Her breath was uneven. She was shaken by Jake’s outburst. It wasn’t the substance that bothered her. She could see how he had come to the wrong conclusions. It was the way his emotions were so close to the surface, threatening to spill over at any moment. Perhaps he would tell his mother what he had seen. And then Ali would lose her job and return to Cromer in disgrace, punished for the wrong affair.
“Why now?” she wanted to ask him. “Just when I’m almost perfectly happy.”
Ali looked round the pool house. It was so much more than a changing room. From Tita’s remark, she had imagined something like the garden shed where her father kept his fishing tackle and an old transistor radio that ran on batteries. Instead it was a perfectly formed Lilliputian house complete with a kitchen, bar, and sofas.
The fridge door was neatly packed with rows of beer, cans of Sprite, and orange juice. There was a large plate of watermelon on one of the shelves and half a dozen oranges on another. But there was no Diet Coke. She glanced out the window toward Lucy. Lucy caught her eye and shrugged apologetically without making any attempt to get up. She was playing Uno on the sunbed with Hector and Alfie, Jake straddled behind her with his head leaning on her shoulder. Ali slammed the fridge door in anger at Lucy’s demands. A couple of mobile phones tumbled into the sink. They must belong to Nick, thought Ali. She would take them back to the house immediately. It would take the sting out of Lucy’s request.
Ali set off back up the hill to the house, her breath quickening as the path got steeper. She enjoyed the sensation of the sun burning deep inside her lungs. When she was halfway up she stopped for a moment and sat down to look at the view across the bay. In the distance a huge passenger ship slowly crossed her line of vision. She squinted to try to make out its flag. In her hand one of the Black-Berrys vibrated. Ali looked down at the screen and pressed the e-mail icon to check whether she was delivering the phone to the right person. She was gratified to see a raft of messages relating to Nick’s deal.
“Congratulations,” read one. “Only you could make junk look so beautiful.”
There was a request from the World Economic Forum asking Nick to discuss credit markets at their next meeting in Davos. “I’m not worried about flat yield curves . . .” began another. Maybe he wouldn’t need to fly home after all, thought Ali, turning her attentions to the second BlackBerry. It would be great for the twins to spend some time with their father. They spent too much time with women.
Glancing through the e-mail messages, Ali quickly realized that the second BlackBerry belonged to Bryony. The top three messages were unread. “FT daily brief,” “4am cut,” “Lex.” The fourth one was marked confidential and had been opened. “Project Beethoven,” it said. “Russian energy bid—private and confidential.”
• • •
“Your phone,” said Ali, finding Nick still sitting at the breakfast table.
“Thanks so much.” He
smiled, pushing his sunglasses onto the top of his head so that she could see his eyes. “It’s a good sign that I forgot to bring it up with me. Means I’m not resisting the holiday. Did you bring the other one, too?”
“Do you mean Bryony’s?”
“I’m tending her phone so that she can have a lie-in.” He smiled through recently rewhitened teeth. Nick was sitting in his swimming trunks, and Ali couldn’t help comparing his upper body with Jake’s. The frame was identical, but the contours were softer. Like raw meat wrapped in cellophane. When he was home, Nick went running almost every day and came home to complete a grueling circuit of stomach crunches and weights in the basement gym.
“There’s something I wanted to mention to you,” Ali said impulsively.
“Go right ahead,” said Nick, looking amused. He closed The Economist and put it neatly on the table beside him. “I’m all yours. For the next five minutes, at least. Then I need to make some calls.”
He glanced down through the new messages on his BlackBerry. “Bear Stearns triggers Dow crash,” read the headline of a Reuters story. He opened it and swore under his breath.
“Has something happened?” Ali asked.
“One of the ratings agencies has downgraded Bear Stearns’s debt to negative from stable,” he said vaguely, as though unaware he was talking to Ali. “It was heavily invested in subprime.”
“Is this a bad moment?” Ali asked.
“A bad moment for the world economy, but actually it strengthens my argument,” said Nick, looking up from his BlackBerry. “What did you want to say?”
“Do you remember when Jake came into the drawing room in London last autumn and found me sitting on the sofa with you at five-thirty in the morning?” she said, deciding that precision was the only weapon with which to fight the embarrassment of what she was about to say.