by Fiona Neill
“I was wondering if you could look after the children so that I can go into Norwich and see my friends tonight,” said Ali impulsively. “I want to see if I can photocopy a couple of reading lists and maybe borrow some books so that at least I can keep up with some of the work.”
Her mother looked pleased, and Ali felt guilty.
“Of course,” she said. “Maybe they’ll be able to talk you round.”
“I’ll have to stay for at least another year,” said Ali firmly.
“She will.” The twins nodded.
Outside, a flock of seagulls was squabbling over a bag of chips that a child had dropped on the promenade. The twins observed in fascinated silence. Izzy watched, no doubt wondering how seagulls could get away with eating so much carbohydrate.
• • •
As she sat on the train from Cromer to Norwich that same evening, Ali recklessly sent a text message to her old tutor asking if he wanted to meet up for a drink. She wrote the message quickly, before she had a chance to analyze her motives, and immediately deleted it so that five minutes later she wondered whether she had sent it at all.
She hoped Will would sense the ambivalence implicit in such a last-minute arrangement. If she had really wanted to see him, she would have got in touch days ago. Or perhaps, it occurred to her, he might interpret it as an act of desperation. It might look as though she had struggled to resist his lure and then her resolve had disappeared as her train pulled in to a city filled with memories of him. And what if his wife picked up the phone and saw the message? Its informality, its brevity, its implied intimacy would give her away immediately.
His wife was always so nice to her when she babysat for them. Sometimes Ali fantasized that she appreciated Ali’s sleeping with her husband because it was one thing that could be struck off the roster of domestic duties. Other times, Ali felt annoyed with her for not realizing what was going on. How could she be so dim-witted about her husband’s motives for driving their babysitter home once a week? For her to uncover the affair now would be disastrous.
She needn’t have worried. Will was well practiced in the dark arts of double-crossing his wife and wrote back within a couple of minutes, suggesting that he pick her up from the station, thus circumventing the pub and returning to their original modus operandi.
“Why did I do that?” she wondered, as the train drew in to the station. It was a fitting epitaph to her relationship with Will. Whenever she was with him, it seemed a perfectly plausible coupling, but as soon as they were apart she couldn’t quite believe how she had managed to weave such a complicated web of deceit for herself. She had gone through the motions of love without really feeling it. Then it occurred to her that Will MacDonald was simply a bridge from one part of her life to another.
“You’ve got a new car,” Ali said as she climbed into the front of the Saab station wagon just outside Norwich station. He kissed her chastely on each cheek, one eye on the other people pouring into the parking lot. He smelled faintly familiar, but it wasn’t until afterward that Ali realized it was toad in the hole. She guessed he had had tea with his wife and children, perhaps helped with bathtime and then made an excuse about returning to his office to collect essays he had forgotten to mark. The persona of absentminded intellectual provided good cover. Infidelity was easy once you had learned the basic principles. Fidelity was the challenge. It was a lesson she was glad she had learned earlier in life than most.
“We’ve had another baby,” he said, pointing at a baby seat in the middle row. “It’s got a great boot. Two adults can stretch out across it diagonally. She’s six months now.”
There was so much wrong with these four sentences in terms of syntax and content that for a moment Ali was tempted to erase them with some aggressive verbal red pen. You said you never had sex with your wife? Was this new baby conceived while our old affair was going on? How do you know the trunk is big enough for two adults to lie across it? And who were you with when you made this discovery? But close questioning might make her appear jealous, and Ali realized that she didn’t care enough to make a scene.
She glanced across at him as he headed out of the city on the Yarmouth Road. He looked just the same. White T-shirt. Black jeans. Old green jacket. Three days of stubble. Very rock-and-roll for someone who spent his life trapped in the straitjacket of eighteenth-century literature. His hair was a little longer and a little thinner.
“How’s London?” he asked. He switched on the CD player, and it started to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
“Shit,” he said, pushing buttons until Leonard Cohen came on.
“It’s great,” said Ali. He put a hand on her thigh as Suzanne went down to her place near the river. Ali was mildly surprised to feel a familiar throb between her thighs. It was a year since she had last had sex, and she was relieved to discover that the chemistry of desire hadn’t been neutralized by the asceticism of her existence in London. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to pick up where she left off with Will, but the sensation wasn’t unpleasant, so she allowed his hand to linger and leaned over toward him so that her head rested on his shoulder. She half thought about unbuttoning his zipper and sucking his cock. They had done this before when he was driving. It had felt pleasurably reckless, and she was worried that if he spoke anymore he might kill her desire.
She rested her hand on his groin and started to pull down his zipper. He was already hard. His breathing became throatier, competing with Leonard Cohen. He made a noise that reminded Ali of the twins’ guinea pigs. It seemed to come out of both his nose and mouth at the same time. Ali stifled a giggle. Will’s foot accidentally pressed down on the accelerator as he spread his legs to give her more room, but Ali was already worrying about what would happen to the twins if he crashed the car and they woke up in unfamiliar surroundings without her to reassure them. So she sat up and adjusted her seat belt. The cord was broken. Desire was like religion, thought Ali. If you stopped believing, the other person’s certainty seemed faintly ridiculous.
“I’ve had some problems with my neck,” she mumbled by way of an excuse. She exaggeratedly rolled her head in different directions. Then she picked up his hand from between her legs and held it. It was large and heavy, and she couldn’t find a comfortable way for their fingers to fit together. She was used to the sticky warmth of the twins’ hands, so tiny that she could hide them within her own. “Carrying children.”
“Tell me about it,” he said, glancing over at her to see whether everything was still fine, because he understood better than most the ephemeral nature of lust.
“I read something about the woman you work for in the paper last week,” he said. “She sounded quite impressive.”
“She is,” said Ali, “although, of course, close up to any family you realize there are going to be flaws. It’s only from the outside that other people’s lives look perfect.” He took his hand away to push down the turn signal and headed along a country road that Ali didn’t recognize. They didn’t touch again for the next half-mile, until he turned into a lane beside a church and stopped the car.
“It said she was the daughter of a multimillionaire. That must have given her a head start.”
“Perhaps.”
“How are the kids? Spoiled, I imagine,” he said as he got out of the driver’s seat and headed toward the trunk. He climbed inside and carefully spread out a couple of tartan rugs whose last outing was probably on a family picnic. “And emotionally deprived in that way that upper-class English families specialize in.”
Ali tried not to show her irritation.
“The twins are odd because they are twins, but they are really sweet,” she called to him from the front. “They share this strange language and keep insisting I should learn it. They’ve sort of allowed me into their world because I accept it rather than trying to force them out of it. They don’t have many friends, becaus
e most children are put off by their impenetrability. They have lots of stuff and they’re always going on exotic holidays, but really all they care about is being together.”
“You sound like their analyst,” he said, urging her to join him in the trunk.
“I’ve probably picked it up from their educational psychologist,” Ali said, resting her bare feet on the dashboard.
“Izzy is more troubled. I’d love to take her out of London and send her up here for a while so that she can forget about impressing other people and find out what impresses her. She compares herself unfavorably with her mother all the time, and because Bryony is extraordinary, she’s a difficult act to follow.”
“Are you going to join me, Ali?” Will asked. He held up a lit joint as bait.
Ali got out of the car and slammed the door. She turned her head skyward. It was a clear night, and she knew without looking that she would find a quarter-moon, because it had been a neap tide that morning. For a moment she stood, head craned toward the sky, momentarily overlooking the fact that she was meant to have a cricked neck.
She had forgotten how many stars there were on a clear night in Norfolk. It was as though the universe was filled with a million eyes watching over her. She remembered as a teenager going out into the garden and asking the stars to take care of her sister when she hadn’t come home. Sometimes her father would join her and she would embarrassedly explain what she was doing and he would tell her that he sometimes did the same thing.
She thought of the map of the stars on the door of her old bedroom in Cromer. Her father had taught her about different constellations almost at the same time as she learned to read. So she knew that this time of year Ursa Major would be firmly in the ascendant and Ursa Minor would be nestling beneath.
“You’re such an old hippie, Ali,” said Will from the back of the car as she joined the dots in the sky with her finger, muttering different names under her breath. Ali didn’t hear him. A familiar euphoria filled her. She felt diminished by the landscape but connected to something bigger than herself. It was a still night, and she could smell the sweet scent of marijuana emanating from the back of the car.
“If I smoke it all, you’ll have to drive home,” he said, remembering her hopelessness behind the wheel.
“Actually, I can get round central London now. The Skinners bought me a G-Wiz.”
She clambered into the trunk. He was right. They could almost lie down.
Will had made a makeshift pillow from a couple of coats. He leaned forward to pull the door shut, and Ali asked him to keep it open. She took a deep drag of his joint.
“I want to feel the air on my face,” she said.
“You didn’t mention the oldest child,” Will suddenly said. “I remember when I wrote your reference they mentioned a teenage boy.”
“Jake’s nineteen, he has a life of his own,” said Ali, handing back the joint because she didn’t want to be sleepy when she met up with her friends. “He’s just started at Oxford. Reading English lit. Not what his parents wanted, but he was adamant.”
“You must have a lot in common.”
“You and I love books but we don’t have a lot in common, do we?” Ali said, unthinkingly. For a moment, Will MacDonald, M.A., Ph.D., looked wounded. Ali quickly backtracked, because he was prone to overanalysis. “What I mean is that we don’t really know each other well enough to know where the common ground lies.” She was careful to use the present tense. “We meet each other. We talk about whether Moll Flanders was the first feminist literary heroine. We both like chocolate bourbons. We don’t like Tony Blair.”
“We have sexual compatibility,” said Will, turning toward her with a glint of intent in his pale blue eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that we can communicate without talking.”
“That’s something ephemeral. It’s not enduring.”
“But it should be exploited where it exists,” Will persisted, lying on his side and putting his arm across to touch her breast. “So what’s he like?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ali, as various images of Jake collided in her mind. Jake coming into the drawing room and finding her with Nick three months after she started working for the Skinners. Jake carrying Izzy down to the car after the party in Notting Hill. Jake confronting her in Corfu. There was nothing easy about their relationship. In fact, their interaction was so minimal that she didn’t even know if it qualified as a relationship.
“We didn’t get off to a very good start, and we’ve never made much headway,” Ali said dismissively.
“So what happened? All those boys sleep with their nannies, don’t they? Did he make a pass at you and you turned him down?”
Ali smiled at his archaic use of language but decided not to pick him up on it because he was the kind of middle-aged man who liked to share a joint with his students and download music by The Libertines to establish his youthful credentials.
“Just after I started the job, he found me sitting beside his dad on the sofa in their drawing room at five o’clock in the morning, and he jumped to all the wrong conclusions.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was wearing a T-shirt and Nick had been wanking and was in a state of dishevelment. Jake thought that we’d been fucking.”
“Your employer wanked in front of you?” said Will.
“Don’t be ridiculous. He was in that state when I came into the room. He was looking at a computer screen.”
“So is this man pursuing you?” Will sounded outraged at the prospect. He must be jealous, Ali decided. He couldn’t possibly be expressing any moral opprobrium, given the wild fluctuations of his own behavior.
“Is who pursuing me?” Ali tried not to sound exasperated.
“The father, of course,” said Will. “It’s a classic plotline, the young servant girl finding herself the object of her master’s desire.”
“You’re too immersed in awful Richardson,” said Ali, feeling a sudden urge to get away from him.
“Remember, Pamela ends up marrying the man she works for,” said Will.
“This is the twenty-first century, Will,” said Ali.
“So how are you going to tear yourself away from these people?”
“I’m not thinking about leaving, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s crazy to stay there much longer. Even if you don’t want to come back here, you should finish your degree somewhere else. I’ll help. You’ve got choices. Good choices. And I’ll feel guilty if you don’t.”
“I like living with them. It’s entertaining, and in a funny way, I feel free.”
“That’s what kidnap victims say. Be careful you don’t develop Stockholm syndrome. Someone told me a story about a nanny who stayed with their family even after the children went to university because she couldn’t bear to leave them.”
The penny dropped immediately.
“You’re sleeping with Rosa, aren’t you?”
He looked away guiltily. They had an uncomfortable conversation about whether The Lives of Others was the best film ever made, then got into the car and drove back to Norwich station in silence. Ali got the first train back to Cromer.
• • •
The next morning Ali went down to the beach to swim alone. The sea always had a purging effect on her soul. She could forget herself in its embrace, especially on a morning like this, when the tide was high and the waves were big enough for some of the local kids to surf. She got in the water as she always did, running at it fast, not giving herself time to think about the numbing cold as she thrashed through the early waves. These were all bluster, like angry show-offs, wanting to impress people with their personality, and then falling into a foamy soup of anger at their inability to sustain any momentum.
Close to the shore they b
roke strong and hard, and Ali knew that she would find peace only if she managed to reach the zone where the pier ended at the lifeboat station. She kept well away from the structure itself, wary of the children holding crab lines over the edge and the rip tides around the girders.
She could hear herself breathing, shocked throaty breaths. She pushed forward through the waves, walking and swimming until she could no longer stand. The water got colder, and she flipped onto her back and pounded farther in, doing the backstroke until she had reached her destination. Then she treaded water for a moment and stared back toward the beach. Sometimes, at this point, she would wait there, wondering how long it would take before she would be too cold and tired to get back in. It was a comforting thought knowing that if life didn’t work out for her, she could just end it all this way, and no one would ever know if she had drowned by accident or design.
On the beach, she could see the twins and Izzy standing there with her mother. They were waving at her. She lifted a hand in the air and waved back. Hector and Alfie jumped up and down. Her mother put a restraining hand on Alfie’s shoulder. Ali ducked underwater and opened her eyes. She could see nothing but the murky green of the sea beneath. She held her breath for as long as she could, and then burst to the surface feeling like one of the seals that swam up and down this route every day. Her eyes were watery with salt.
Beneath the surface, where her legs flailed, she could feel the strange pull of contradictory currents that indicated to her that the tide was now on the turn. She had no idea how long she had been in. She headed back to the beach doing the crawl to find Hector and Alfie sobbing with her mother and Izzy.
“They thought you had drowned,” her mother explained.