What the Nanny Saw

by Fiona Neill

  “So you definitely didn’t give Nick this information about your companies?” asked Foy. “Not even inadvertently?”

  “Of course not,” Bryony said impatiently. “Why would I do that? It would destroy the business that I have spent years building and ruin my reputation. As it is, I’ve already lost five clients, and everyone agrees it’s best if I don’t show my face in the office.”

  “So why would Dad do it?” asked Jake. “It’s not as though he needed the money.”

  Bryony pointed at the television screen. The CNBC reporter was pointing at a graph showing the decline of Lehman’s shares, explaining that they had lost ninety-three percent of their value since January 31.

  “I don’t know, because I can’t get hold of him,” said Bryony, staring at Jake and Izzy as though she wasn’t sure how much truth they could endure. “But I think it might have something to do with the crisis at Lehman’s.”

  “Go on, Mum,” said Jake. “If you don’t tell us, we’ll just read it in a newspaper.”

  “Lehman’s always paid out most of its bonuses in stock,” said Bryony. “Two years ago your father’s share of the company was worth fifteen million pounds, now it’s worth less than one million. I think he saw the storm clouds gathering and thought that doing a bit of insider dealing was a good insurance policy against losses at the bank.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, he’s a fucking fool!” Foy exploded with some of his old bravado. “And even more of a fucking fool to get caught. This kind of thing goes on all the time, but it’s only the amateurs who show up on the radar.” He was warming to his theme, rubbing his hands up and down his trousers, sending a confetti of crumbs onto Leicester’s head.

  “You’re not being helpful,” Jake warned his grandfather.

  “I’m paying for his bloody lawyer,” said Foy, “so I can say what I like. I built my business brick by brick, from the foundations up. Nick always had it too easy. He’s never had to really work for a living. Selling bundles of debt isn’t a real living. Bloody snake-oil salesman.” He slumped back in his armchair.

  “Actually, Dad has always worked really hard,” protested Izzy. “That’s why he was never around.”

  “His great risk-minimizing formulas don’t look very clever now, do they?” Foy continued.

  Hector and Alfie were downstairs in the kitchen, fiddling with the music system. The sound of Cat Stevens singing “Wild World” at full volume suddenly filled the house. Everyone jumped. Then it switched to “Two Little Boys,” the original version that Foy had bought for them. No one moved, momentarily shocked into silence by the noise, and relieved that it drowned out Foy.

  “Turn that racket off,” rasped Foy, leaning forward as if he was going to try to get up out of his armchair. His sandwich fell from his hand, and Leicester greedily gobbled it up.

  “I need to find a good lawyer who specializes in corporate crime, Dad,” said Bryony. She didn’t have the strength to argue with her father. “Otherwise I’m going to go down for something I didn’t do.”

  “Won’t Daddy tell them that you’re innocent?” asked Izzy.

  “I’m sure he will, but that doesn’t mean they’ll believe him,” said Bryony flatly.

  “We should phone Julian,” said Foy emphatically. It was a line he had obviously used in the past when stuck in a tight corner.

  “Why?” asked Jake incredulously.

  “He might be able to help us,” said Foy.

  “How can he possibly help?” asked Izzy. “And why would he?”

  “Eleanor has just sold a story about her fifty-year relationship with you to a tabloid newspaper,” said Bryony bitterly. “That’s not the sort of help we need right now.”

  “Eleanor has lost the plot.” Foy sighed. “She’s not in her right mind.”

  “So how did Nick find out about which of your clients were buying or merging with other companies if you didn’t tell him, Bryony?” asked Ali. It was the first time she had spoken. Bryony looked at Ali as if surprised to find her in the room with them.

  “I don’t know. The police asked me the same question, and I couldn’t give them an answer. Do you have any ideas?”

  • • •

  On Sunday night, after she had read the twins four chapters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an appropriate choice in the current circumstances, Ali went to her bedroom and began tidying it. She started with the wardrobe, haphazardly pulling out everything until she was left holding a handful of clothes that belonged to her when she first moved in with the Skinners.

  She put together on the bed an outfit that she once wore at university, trying to imagine herself wearing it for a lecture on eighteenth-century writers. She smoothed down the wrinkled purple T-shirt and the jeans. “John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne.” Ali did a roll call of authors she had studied, pleased with the way she could remember not just their names but the order in which the lectures had taken place.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and saw herself dressed in this pair of jeans and this T-shirt, lying on her back in the grass, dreaming about Will MacDonald as he quoted, “‘Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words.’” She tried to remember the subject of her last essay: Was it the exploration of solitude in the fiction of Richardson, Defoe, and Sterne, or the relations between castration, clocks, midwives, and the military in Tristram Shandy?

  Then she remembered a rucksack of books that she had stuffed at the back of a cupboard at the top of the wardrobe, and impulsively dragged over a chair so that she could pull it down. There was one on the rise of the City of London as the financial and commercial capital of the world in the eighteenth century; another on the dominance of political power by mercantile interests; a book by Carole Pateman about patriarchal society and the sexual subordination of women; and The Birth of a Consumer Society by John Brewer.

  She carefully took each one out of the rucksack, cleaned off the dust with the purple T-shirt, and put them in an orderly pile on her bedside table, resolving that she would take advantage of her incarceration to do some background reading to prepare for her return to university. Whatever Nick had done and whatever Bryony’s role in his crime, it was obvious to Ali that she was living in a house of cards. “We’re nearing the end game,” she had told Jake. It was one of her few certainties.

  For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine studying at Oxford with Jake. When he was with her it seemed almost possible. When they were apart it became a prospect as absurd as the Mad Hatter’s tea party. She turned her attention back to the pile of clothes. Most of them had been given to her by Bryony: some were castoffs that she no longer wore, others ill-advised purchases made during one of Bryony’s snatched forays with a personal shopper to Selfridges or Harvey Nichols. Ali remembered a conversation with Mira and the other nannies about the inverse relationship between wealth and generosity. “She makes me pay for my own milk . . .” “They buy children’s portions for me in restaurants . . .” “I have to show receipts even if I’ve only bought a packet of M&M’s after school.” None of their complaints resonated with her.

  Ali counted at least ten pairs of shoes that Bryony had given her. She put on a pair of jeans that Bryony had bought for her in New York, some Belstaff boots that Bryony had never used, and a Sass & Bide top. She looked at herself critically in the mirror.

  Many of the clothes were too formal. These she put in a bag for her friends. Her old clothes from Norfolk went in the Oxfam pile. Then Ali turned her attention to the chest of drawers. She removed all four drawers and tipped everything onto the floor: knickers, socks, scarves, belts, notebooks, booklists sent in the early days by her tutor, hoping to lure her back to university, letters from her mother, toys that belonged to the twins.

  Then she pulled out the Francis Bacon poster from the
back of the wardrobe and decided she would hang it in the drawing room where the original used to be, in the hope of raising a laugh from Foy. She attributed this flurry of energy to a desire to impose order on the creeping chaos that had enveloped the Skinners. It was the same mentality that took hold among civilian populations in war zones or among aid organizations delivering relief in the aftermath of natural disasters. Bryony was right. Routine and order were the best antidote to anxiety and uncertainty.

  In the midst of this disarray, at the point where everything looked much worse than it had before she began, she heard her phone beep. She glanced down and saw a message from Jake.

  “Can’t sleep, want company?” it read. She frowned at Jake’s punctuation. Was he trying to say that he couldn’t sleep or was he asking her whether she couldn’t sleep? Ali tapped in “yes and yes” into her BlackBerry. Even before she had sent the message, the door handle started turning and Jake poked his head around the bedroom door, holding a couple of bottles of beer.

  “They’re warm,” he apologized, “and I don’t have an opener.”

  Ali saw him glance around the room, checking past her shoulder to the wardrobe, taking in the plastic bags of clothes lined up by the dressing table and the piles on the floor. He came over to the bedside table and picked up one of the books that Ali had piled up.

  “I read this last term,” he said, leafing through the pages of John Brewer’s Consumer Society, trying to decipher the tiny notes that Ali had made in the margin.

  “What conclusions did you draw?” Ali asked.

  “That everything that is happening now is the logical end to what began in the eighteenth century,” Jake said. He put down the book and glanced at Ali’s phone with her unsent message to him. “We’d make a great essay-writing team.”

  “I should check on Hector and Alfie,” said Ali, busily stuffing clothes back into the wardrobe.

  “They’re asleep in Alfie’s bed with Leicester,” said Jake.

  “It makes them feel secure,” said Ali. “Were they underneath their duvets?”

  Jake put his arms around Ali from behind. His hand strayed beneath her T-shirt, and she leaned back into him.

  “How come you are so responsible?” asked Jake.

  “I was forced to grow up quickly,” said Ali simply. “And I’m paid to be.” The last was inaccurate. Despite the money hidden in the piano, she hadn’t been paid for weeks and she didn’t feel very responsible anymore.

  “Why don’t you sit down for a moment?” Jake suggested, gently pushing her toward the bed.

  “I feel too agitated,” said Ali, allowing him to nuzzle her neck. “I keep thinking about things I’ve seen, to do with your dad, wondering whether they’re relevant or whether I’ve misinterpreted them.” She paused for a moment. “I’ve heard him talking to Ned Wilbraham on the phone. I’ve seen him with papers belonging to your mum. Sorry I’m not being very articulate.”

  “You think that Dad is guilty?”

  “There are things that don’t add up.”

  “Dad has always kept his cards close to his chest.” Jake had stopped in the middle of the room. He leaned against her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you know his parents are still alive and live somewhere up north? I found out when I was looking through some papers unearthed by the FSA during the search.”

  “Do you think your mum knew?”

  “No,” said Jake flatly.

  “Why don’t we go out?” Jake suddenly suggested. He went over to the window and looked outside. There was no one there. Bryony’s arrest and Eleanor’s exposé had the benefit of satisfying the insatiable media hunger for a new angle about the Skinners at least for today.

  “Your Mum doesn’t want you to go out at night.”

  “If you’re with me, that’s different.” He pulled Ali toward him.

  “It would make me complicit.”

  “I know a bar on Ken High Street which might be open.”

  “It will be full of your friends.”

  “We could just walk? When was the last time you left this house?”

  Ali tried to remember. It was when she went to see Felix Naylor, two weeks earlier.

  “What about money?”

  Jake pulled out a wodge of cash from his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?” asked Ali.

  “From the piano,” he said, and laughed.

  • • •

  Years later, when she was coming to the end of her first tenure as a university lecturer, Ali wondered whether the way that Jake and she happened upon the Whispers club that night was by accident or design. She had retraced their steps a thousand times, searching for new clues, and reviewing old evidence. Sometimes she tripped over double negatives trying to imagine what would have not happened if she hadn’t gone there.

  The facts were these: They had left the house, wandered around the dark sidewalks that hugged the edges of Holland Park, listening to peacocks shriek through the night air. They had crossed Kensington High Street and headed south through Warwick Gardens. A radio was on in the basement of one of the houses.

  “Russian oligarch,” said Jake, as strange guttural voices drifted through the window.

  “Ukrainian nanny,” Ali corrected him. Over the past couple of years she had developed a good ear for the different nuances of the languages spoken around her. “I know the nanny who works there. She’s from a village outside Kiev.”

  They continued toward Earls Court. They walked with a sense of purpose, enjoying the freedom. Neither questioned the other’s decision to take a left turn or cross a busy road and head for a side street. They held hands in public for the first time. There were no photographers to worry about. Hector and Alfie weren’t there to slow them down. And Jake’s presence made her feel more secure than she should, wandering the streets of London at one o’clock in the morning.

  “Aren’t you cold?” she asked Jake, suddenly noticing that he was wearing only a black T-shirt and jeans.

  “Stop trying to look after me, Ali,” he said, but she could hear the smile in his tone. “If you look after people too much, you undermine their capacity for looking after themselves. That’s what you said about your sister.”

  Ali wrapped the jacket she had grabbed from the Izzy pile tightly around her. It was black velvet with silver studs around the wrists and collar. It made her feel feminine and strong all at once. It was beautiful but totally inappropriate.

  “Great jacket.”

  “Your mum gave it to me.”

  “My parents were always good at presents.”

  “Very generous,” agreed Ali, careful not to endorse his use of the past tense.

  They continued to walk in comfortable silence for a while. A group of teenage kids riding BMX bikes cycled by on the sidewalk, and Jake bumped into Ali’s shoulder as he jumped out of their way.

  “London at night is something I’ve almost always experienced from the back of an Addison Lee cab,” said Jake.

  “You used to take the Tube to school,” Ali reminded him.

  “I mostly hitched a lift with Dad’s driver,” Jake confessed. “I wonder what’s happened to him.”

  Ali recalled the driver who used to arrive at the house at seven forty-five every morning. He was so short that all you could see of him was a tweed cap hovering above the steering wheel. The cap looked out of place in central London, but he told Ali that it reminded him of the village where he was born in Armenia. Ali said that it reminded her of home, too, and he smiled and she saw that he had at least three gold teeth. Nick used to tease him that he looked like an extra from a Merchant Ivory film, possibly The Remains of the Day, but Mr. Artouche had never been to the cinema in England and the joke was lost on him.

  “Did you know that his wife cleaned of
fices all night so that they could pay for their eldest son to go to private school?” Ali asked.

  “I didn’t,” said Jake. “And now I’ll never have the chance to ask him because he’s gone, too. I wonder when all this is over what will actually be left? I mean, how many of Mum and Dad’s friends have stuck around? Dad’s gone. Malea’s gone. And my grandfather is slowly drowning at the bottom of a wine bottle, vengefully supplied by my grandmother.”

  “It’s best not to think about the future too much,” said Ali gently. “Take each day as it comes.”

  “Or each meal as it comes, like Izzy,” said Jake. “You know, sometimes I wish that I had a borderline eating disorder, just to have something to focus on that didn’t have anything to do with all this. I wish I had the luxury of spending two hours deliberating whether to eat a plate of smoked mackerel and half a Ryvita.”

  They were in a side street, just off the Earls Court Road. They stopped as a small group of disheveled-looking men poured out of an imposing double door in the narrow pedestrian walkway. They were wearing crumpled suits, their shirts flapped around their hips in the breeze, and their ties, the kind with tiny elephant motifs, were askew.

  “Where next? Might as well party while Rome burns,” slurred one of the men.

  “Have you calculated your net worth recently?” asked another. “Because our stock’s worth fuck—in fact, it’s worth less than fuck.”

  “Closed off seven percent today, and Monday’s going to be a bloodbath,” said the drunker one of the group.

  “What I really don’t get, I really don’t fucking get, is why Fuld said the bank had plenty of capital and then reported a two-point-eight-billion-pound loss. It makes us look as though we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

  “Skinner’s fucked us all up the arse. Made us look like a bunch of fucking criminals as well as a bunch of fucking incompetents.”

  “He was right, though. He saw this one coming. Can’t take that away from him. He was just trying to hedge.” The others laughed uproariously.