by Fiona Neill
“Why do we have to be on the move all the time?” Hector began to cry.
They were interesting questions. Ali came up with a few hypotheses in her head. Because unhappy people are restless. Because if you earn shitloads of money you have to find a way to spend it. Because if you measure success by what you earn, then the only way to impress other people is to show off what you can buy. Because you are never satisfied with what you’ve got because someone else always has more than you.
“Because you are lucky,” she said. “Imagine yourselves as the wildebeest that we saw in the David Attenborough program, migrating from one place to the other across the African plains. You lead a really exciting life compared to most children.”
They sensed the lack of conviction in her voice.
“Think how many of the wildebeest die during the journey,” whispered Hector.
Ali started to recite from their favorite Dr. Seuss book. “‘Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more . . . oh, ever so much more . . . oh, muchly much-much more unlucky than you!’”
“We could be like the Crumple-horn, Web-footed, Green-bearded Schlottz,” said Hector, “with a tail that’s tied in knots that can’t ever be undone.”
“Or the man who mows the lawn but the faster he mows the faster it grows,” said Alfie. Their eyes finally started to close.
Above her, Ali could hear the dull thud of music coming from the Long Room. Razorlight, Black Eyed Peas, Kaiser Chiefs. All the same music that she used to listen to with Rosa, Maia, and Tom. She felt lonely. Jake and Izzy were dancing with their friends. She would have liked to be there with her own friends, or maybe even to join them. After all, they were only four years younger than her. But it wouldn’t be appropriate, or at least it wouldn’t feel appropriate.
Instead she decided to head upstairs to her own bedroom to collect her belongings. Outside her room, she noticed that the trapdoor that led to the roof was completely open. She craned her neck and saw a perfect square canvas of stars and moon in the sky above. The collapsible ladder was half folded but just within reach. She stretched up to pull it down and climbed up the rungs until she found herself on the lead-tiled roof. It was surprisingly flat. She stood up slowly, tried to get her bearings, and tentatively walked forward a couple of paces, worried about the irresistible pull toward the edge. She guessed she was close to the front of the house on the south side, behind the tip of the gabled window of the twins’ room beneath.
“What are you doing here?” a languid voice inquired. As her eyes grew used to the dark, Ali could make out Jake nestled in a narrow lead gap between the window and a chimney pot, where he had the best view of the party. Ali stopped abruptly, unsure whether to retreat or go forward, scanning the area for Lucy.
“She’s not here.” Ali could detect the sweet smell of grass hanging in the still night air. There was an open bottle of champagne beside him.
“Smoke?” Jake offered. He held out a small, carved clay object to her. “Pipe of peace.”
“No. Thanks.”
“Come and sit down, at least,” said Jake. “We’ve got the bird’s-eye view.”
Jake removed his dinner jacket and created a makeshift cushion in the space beside him. He motioned her toward it. Music coiled up from the room below to fill the silence between them. She stared at the jacket.
“Come on, Ali,” he said. “I could do with the benefit of your wisdom. The four years of experience that you have on me. Tell me, what is the kindest way that a man can dump a girl?”
“You’re stoned,” said Ali. It was less recrimination than statement of fact.
She thought for a moment. Jake looked down at the party, as though disinterested in whether she stayed or went. His ambivalence gave her confidence, and she carefully made her way forward, removing her shoes because it was easier to grip the lead roof with bare feet. She sat down beside him and peered over the edge.
The ground was farther away than she expected. There was a small, decorative balustrade that ran across the front of the roof. It was only a couple of feet high. Ali pressed her feet against it, wondering what would happen if a piece gave way.
She might not fall, but she could kill someone standing below. She told herself that she should tell Jake to come down now. But Jake was no longer her responsibility. And besides, she could see the appeal of watching the party from this vantage point. So instead she found herself taking a deep slug from the bottle of champagne he was pushing toward her, and overlooking the pipe.
“I think you need to be completely honest and tell her it’s over. Don’t give her any hope. It’s kinder in the long term. Don’t be personal about the things that bother you about her. Keep it simple and say that it was a fantastic relationship while it lasted but it’s time for both of you to move on, that you’re both too young to be involved in something so serious.”
Jake put his hand in the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a chewed pencil and his train ticket. He started writing on the back of the ticket.
“What are you doing?” Ali asked.
“Taking notes,” he said. “What you said was word perfect.”
“If you learn it by rote, it won’t sound sincere.” Ali laughed.
They fell silent for a moment. But it was a comfortable silence. They both leaned forward toward the balustrade to gaze once more at the crowd down below. Their shoulders were touching. She could feel the warmth of the top of Jake’s arm through his shirt.
The lighting around the garden highlighted the area below like a stage. Everyone on the terrace was visible. Even the darker shapes that had graduated to the Sundial Garden could be seen in the flicker of candles that lit the pathways. They saw Izzy draped over one of Jake’s university friends. She was wearing a black dress that she had found in Camden Market. She had taken up the hem, removed the sleeves, and created an off-the-shoulder look that made her look much older than seventeen.
“Don’t worry. He’s gay,” said Jake, as Izzy and the boy disappeared together.
“Did I tell you that the last time Lucy came to Oxford to stay the weekend, she brought a vacuum cleaner with her?” Jake said. “Can you imagine the relentless piss-taking?”
“You got too domestic too quick,” said Ali. “It’s a good lesson to learn.”
“Not something you’ve experienced?” asked Jake.
“No, my relationships have been a little less conventional,” Ali said, deliberately vague.
“I like the sound of ‘unconventional,’” said Jake. He pondered for a moment. “Don’t tell me, you slept with your tutor? That’s the oldest one in the book. Up there with sleeping with your nanny.”
“Maybe it’s good to get a few clichés out of your system early on in life,” said Ali. “Then you avoid them later.”
“So if Ned Wilbraham had shagged his nanny when he was younger, then he wouldn’t have done it later on in life?” Jake asked.
There was an awkward silence as they considered the content of their banter.
“What do you think of the view?” asked Jake.
“Fantastic,” said Ali, “although a long horizon without any sea always makes me feel landlocked and homesick.”
“I feel like that at home in London,” said Jake. “Not homesick. More claustrophobic. As if I can’t breathe because everyone is watching everything I do all the time. Every cricket score, every Latin test, every friendship, every detail of my life held up to scrutiny and found wanting. I don’t know how you can tolerate living with my family. Ambitious perfectionists aren’t a bundle of laughs.”
“Because it’s not my family.” They both laughed.
“Did you have a happy childhood?” asked Jake.
“You sound like a therapist.”
“Don’t be evasive. You know so much about me and I know not
hing about you. It’s a lopsided arrangement.”
“I had a childhood of two extremes,” conceded Ali. “The first half was all buckets and spades and picnics on the beach. Sometimes, if the weather was good and it wasn’t blowing up rough, I went out with my Dad in his boat to work the crab pots.”
“He’s a fisherman?”
“Seventh generation,” Ali confirmed. “There are tombstones with carvings of fishing boats belonging to my ancestors in the churchyard in Cromer. I’d get up with him early in the morning, get in his truck, head for the prom, and load up boxes of bait onto the boat. You go out after high water and come back on the ebb tide. We’d leave Cromer in the dark, with the lights twinkling behind us, and head toward the horizon as dawn was breaking. It’s really beautiful. You should do it someday.”
“Did you ever get seasick?”
“Never. We’d spend hours at sea, winching up pots, taking out crabs, rebaiting them, and chucking them back overboard. The boat has GPS, but Dad knows where all the potting grounds are just by lining up landmarks.”
“Sounds idyllic,” Jake agreed. “So when did the skies darken?”
“When I was twelve my sister began smoking lots of dope. She got really heavily into drugs. Heroin, mostly. A couple of years later she moved to a squat in Norwich and stopped going to school. My parents imploded. My mother became someone who struggled to get through each day. My father escaped by spending more and more time on his boat. Sometimes my sister would come home and try to clean up. Then she’d disappear for months. Bad times. Last year I paid for her to go into rehab. She’s still there, so we might get a happy ending yet.”
“That’s a lot to deal with,” said Jake.
“All families are frayed round the edges. Most don’t completely unravel. We’re all stronger than we think.”
“Sounds like a good life philosophy,” said Jake.
Lucy came out of the house, pale and floaty in her cream dress, and steered a steady course toward the tent, where she stopped at the entrance by an arch draped in pale pink roses and peonies and turned toward the terrace, scanning the crowd for Jake.
“Like a bride abandoned at church on her wedding day,” Ali observed, as Lucy nervously flicked her hair back from her face.
“Don’t,” Jake said with a groan.
“You need to confront the situation head-on,” said Ali, this time taking a toke from the pipe. Most definitely a sackable offense, she thought to herself. It occurred to Ali that perhaps she wanted to be sacked. She could feel herself starting to distance herself from her job with the Skinners. Disturbed by these thoughts, she drank some more champagne, a little too quickly, as though, having decided that she wanted to lose herself, she needed to apply herself to the job in hand.
Down below on the terrace in front of the house, small groups were milling about. A stream of waiters and waitresses carrying trays of drinks flowed between them. Bryony was talking to Felix. Their heads were bowed as though neither wanted to catch the other’s eye. Foy was talking to Eleanor Peterson, looking hopefully over her shoulder for some diversion. Occasionally someone stopped to shake his hand or kiss him on the cheek, but Eleanor’s possessive body language was easily interpreted, and they quickly peeled away.
Eleanor was wearing a floor-length gold taffeta dress that suggested her style was irreversibly forged in the 1980s. She was tanned from an early-summer trip to Corfu and her hair was dyed an odd shade of honey blond.
“She looks like an Oscar,” Ali said, and giggled.
“Talking to a Toby Jug,” said Jake. They saw Leicester, head tilted toward them, barking furiously, and slid back into the shadows in case he gave them away. “My grandfather had a relationship with her. Years ago. I discovered it . . .”
“I know,” Ali interrupted him.
“There isn’t a lot that you don’t know about my family, is there?” Jake asked.
They watched as Eleanor leaned toward Foy and spoke into his left ear.
“His good ear,” observed Jake, passing her the bottle again.
The bubbles burned her throat, and she choked. Jake thumped her on the back, and the third time she felt the tip of his finger linger somewhere in the middle of her spine. She edged forward away from him. Imperceptibly, so that he didn’t think it was an accusatory gesture, but enough that she couldn’t feel the heat from his hand burning through her dress. Something in their relationship had shifted, but Ali wasn’t sure that this new ground was any less treacherous than the old.
“I should go,” said Ali.
She looked back over her shoulder at Jake, and he leaned toward her. This time Ali didn’t move away. There was a noise from the terrace below. The cord was broken, and they leaned over the edge of the balustrade to see Eleanor shouting at Foy. They watched in riveted silence. Jake put his arm around her. Sublime, thought Ali, exquisitely aware of the current between them through the fog of dope and champagne. Foy stared at the ground, nodding vigorously so that his chins wobbled. He fiddled with the knot in his bow tie and undid the button beneath. His mouth looked odd, as though the lower lip was trying to get as far away from the upper lip as possible. There was a moment when Foy and Eleanor stared at each other with the hot flash of former lovers, and then she lifted the glass of champagne in her hand, threw it in his face, and smashed the glass on the terrace.
“I’m going to tell Tita everything,” she shouted, as Tita came over to see what was going on. One look at Foy’s face told Tita everything she needed to know. She stood openmouthed as Foy lurched toward Eleanor, hand in the air, as though about to embark on a complicated Scottish dance. Was he going to strike her? wondered Ali. Instead he toppled over and lay at her feet in a crumpled heap. Eleanor knelt down beside him and began screaming.
“I’ve killed the man I loved,” she cried, pulling Foy to her chest. The sleeve of her dress had slipped down so that her well-engineered bra was visible. Her words hung in the warm evening air, and anyone who was outside could hear them. Tita stood immobile, so dizzy she couldn’t bend down to touch her husband. Julian Peterson came over and managed to peel his wife off Foy.
It was difficult to work out the exact order of events, because apart from Tita and Foy everyone was in motion. It was as though everything was happening in fast-forward, thought Ali. Bryony raced into the house to phone for an ambulance. Hester ran over to Tita and put an arm around her. Rick laid Foy on his side in the recovery position. Felix Naylor found himself propping up Eleanor, pulling up her bra strap, and trying to get the sleeve of her dress to stay in place while Julian ran to fetch a chair.
“Shit,” said Jake. “We’d better go down.”
They stood up, and from the terrace below Ali saw Lucy looking back up at them on the roof.
20
Foy moved in with Bryony and Nick to convalesce after he was discharged from hospital in Oxford at the end of June, two weeks after the party. Nick reluctantly conceded that it was impossible for him to go home, principally because Tita refused to have him. Tita argued that Foy couldn’t climb the stairs of their house unaided, that he needed help to wash and get dressed, and that he shouldn’t be left alone. Having told Bryony and Hester she had been captive to her marriage for more than forty-five years, she calmly explained that she didn’t want to become a prisoner in her own home.
In the days after the party, Ali heard Bryony and Hester speak together more than she could ever remember as they tried to broker peace between their parents.
“It’s difficult enough to forgive an affair in the middle of a marriage but impossible when you uncover it at the end,” Ali heard Hester say to Bryony. “I wish I’d told her before.”
“You knew about this?” Bryony had asked.
“Of course I did,” Hester had impatiently replied. “You knew, too. You just couldn’t admit it to yourself. Don’t you remember how Da
d and Eleanor always used to go on those evening walks together in Corfu when we were children? You chose to ignore the evidence because you didn’t want to knock Dad off his pedestal. The eyes of the favorite child were blinkered.”
When Bryony offered to pay someone to come six hours each day to help, Tita gently but firmly told her she was leaving for Corfu midweek, as planned, to prepare the house for the summer, and no one could persuade her to change her mind. A new air-conditioning system was being installed, and it was “imperative” she be there to oversee the work. Nothing was discussed. Eleanor wasn’t mentioned. And as far as Ali could remember, her name was never spoken again in front of Tita.
“I’m not having a fucking stranger wipe my arse,” Foy protested when Bryony proposed finding live-in help for him while Tita was away. Hester was adamant that her father should stay at home. It was less conviction than negotiating position, because Rick refused to have Foy living with them. So Malea was summoned to the drawing room and doubled her salary overnight by accepting a job as Foy’s part-time carer until he was fully recovered and Tita had come home.
It was meant to be a temporary solution to the problem of Foy’s limited mobility and Tita’s impending absence. Foy approved of the arrangement. So Ali was dispatched to his house to retrieve clothes and essential possessions from a list headed “Foy’s Paraphernalia” that he had dictated to Izzy because his hand was still too shaky to write. Its length and precision suggested Foy didn’t expect to be going home very soon. The list included tomato plants that wouldn’t ripen until the end of July, golf clubs, his favorite jacket, and the wedding photograph from the mantelpiece in the sitting room. Tita offered to drive everything to Holland Park Crescent later that day. She explained that she would also be delivering three unopened boxes containing copies of Foy’s self-published autobiography that should have been given to guests at the end of the party.
“They’ll make good kindling,” she suggested archly. She then kissed Ali good-bye in a way that had a certain finality.