by Fiona Neill
Bryony glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it was seven o’clock in the morning. She checked her new pay-as-you-go mobile phone to see if there were any messages from Nick. There were none. She went up into the drawing room and peeked through the curtains to find a crowd of photographers waiting outside. She needed to get everyone downstairs to face this day together.
Ablaze with nervous energy and pent-up anxiety, Bryony ran upstairs, two at a time, until she reached Jake’s room. She didn’t bother to knock on his door. Instead she clumsily turned the handle, immediately waking up Ali, the lighter sleeper of the two. Ali watched as Bryony stood in the doorway, squinting to adjust to the poor light in the room. She calculated that she had a couple of seconds until Bryony absorbed the scene before her.
Ali forced herself to take shallow breaths. She remained completely still, lying on her side, naked, on top of the duvet, beside Jake. They were facing each other and holding hands. Ali tried to disentangle her fingers, but Jake resisted and instead gripped hers tighter in his sleep, pulling Ali toward him, nuzzling her neck. Bryony took a half-step back toward the door, as though she had been winded.
For a moment Ali wondered whether Bryony had seen them and decided that this was a problem she was going to confront later, when she had dealt with other more pressing issues. Or perhaps she didn’t mind that her son and her nanny were sleeping with each other, as long as they didn’t advertise their relationship in public. The truth was, for a couple of seconds, Bryony was frozen.
Ali closed her eyes, remembering how Hector and Alfie used to think that no one could see them if their eyes were shut, and wishing it were true. There were a couple of seconds of respite, and then the sound of Bryony screaming pierced the silence. Ali couldn’t remember what she did first. Did she try to pull the duvet around her? Or was the weight of Jake’s body too heavy to gain any purchase? Maybe she grabbed Jake’s arm to wake him up? Probably the latter, she decided, because the noise Bryony made was so animal that she could hear the twins stir in her bedroom below. Ali saw the look of revulsion on Bryony’s face and knew her relationship with Jake was over.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked sleepily as he sat up, rubbing his eyes.
Bryony wasn’t looking at him. In a storm of anger, she rushed to Ali’s side of the bed and began picking up clothes randomly from the floor and throwing them at her. Knickers, bras, trousers, T-shirts. Many of them belonged to Ali. Some of them had even once belonged to Bryony, a fact that seemed to enflame her further. She noticed Ali’s things on the chest of drawers and swept them all onto the floor with her arm. Her eyes were flashing, and her hair was wild. Ali imagined she might physically attack her.
“Get out, get out,” Bryony screamed over and over, her body quivering with anger. “We’ve done everything we could for you, and this is how you repay us.”
Ali had always envisaged that one day she might be able to have a rational conversation with Bryony about her relationship with Jake. Imbued with the optimism of those in love, she had even allowed herself to dare to think that Bryony might share their happiness.
She imagined telling Bryony that it had begun only recently, that nothing had happened before Jake went to university, and that they were properly in love. She would have agreed that it was unorthodox, and imagined Bryony telling her the best relationships always were. She would have explained to Bryony that she could understand if she didn’t want anyone to know in the current circumstances. She would have told her that her feelings for Jake were genuine and that she was planning to move to Oxford so that they could be at university together. In the event, it was all a hideous muddle of ugly words and accusations.
“You’ve let me down, just like the rest of them,” Bryony howled. Ali curled into Jake’s arms, and he wrapped himself around her, trying to protect her from the flying clothes and the occasional book. Apart from Nick, who else had let her down? Ali wondered. Was she talking about Foy? Or Izzy? Or nannies gone by?
Bryony accused her of everything from selling stories about their family to the newspapers to stealing the photographs missing from the drawing room. She even suggested that Ali had slept with Nick. She called her lots of names that Ali later tried to forget. Slut, tart, whore were the ones she remembered. “I really thought I could count on you. I want you out of here before the end of the day.”
It was like poisoning a beautiful garden, Ali had told her friends later.
“You can’t do this, Mum,” Jake had shouted. “It’s as much my fault as Ali’s.”
Ali felt hurt by his reaction. He should have been defending their relationship rather than conceding culpability. Later, she understood it was an attempt to be emollient to someone who was out of her mind with stress. At the time, however, it had seemed more like surrender.
25
December 2009
Ali saw the Skinners one last time. Just before Christmas the following year, she happened to pick up a crumpled newspaper from the table in a café where she had gone to crack the introduction of her final essay of the term. She was completing the final year of her degree in London, and the café was a haven away from the noisy flat she shared with other students in Mile End Road. She turned to the favorite destination of procrastinating students, the obituaries section, and beside the two main pieces, found a short sidebar dedicated to Foy Chesterton, “entrepreneur who introduced smoked salmon to the masses.”
It was exactly twelve paragraphs long. Ali searched beneath the facts, to see if there was any hint of the scandal that had enveloped the family seventeen months earlier, and was pleased to find none, unless you included a passing reference to Foy being a bon viveur. Otherwise it was a straightforward chronology of his life.
Ali remembered how often he had threatened to regale her with the history of Freithshire Fisheries, and how everyone had always shouted him down. Now, as she read, she felt regretful that she had never bothered to hear him out, because it was a predictably colorful story.
It described how he had left school at sixteen, spent a year in Greece, and started a business importing olive oil to the UK, at a time when it could be bought only in pharmacies that recommended it to soften earwax. “Like using Meursault on carpet stains,” Foy had apparently said. When he was twenty, he took a three-month sabbatical from his business to walk around the British coast. But he never got beyond Sutherland in northern Scotland, because he was distracted by a small smoked-salmon farm that he found there, and by Tita Marshall, the daughter of its owner. They were married the same year, 1959, and their first child, Bryony, was born three years later.
It went on to detail other key moments in his life: how Foy was among the first to talk about the health benefits of eating fish, and made it his personal crusade to introduce smoked salmon to every household in Britain; how he had a walk-on part in the 1963 film Tom Jones, because he was friendly with Susannah York, who played the main female part. Did he sleep with her, too? Ali marveled. How he was the centerpiece of a BBC documentary about the Hebridean islands, directed by his oldest friend, Julian Peterson.
In his later years it said he had returned to his roots, producing olive oil from his small holding in Corfu. The penultimate paragraph described how he stunned guests at his seventieth-birthday party by singing all six verses of “American Pie.” Finally, it mentioned that he lived in Holland Park and was survived by his wife, Tita, and their two daughters, Bryony and Hester. Both names were of Greek origin, reflecting the family’s long love affair with Corfu.
Foy Peterson, entrepreneur, was born on June 9, 1938. He died on December 5, 2009, aged 71.
It didn’t mention how he died. Ali imagined it was another stroke. What was the point of sucking all the fun out of life just to live a couple of years longer? he used to say to Ali. Carpe diem was the motto he wanted written on his gravestone. So Foy continued to smoke cigars and drink red wine smuggled into t
he drawing room at Holland Park Crescent by complicit visitors, including his wife and sometimes his two eldest grandchildren. “A life well lived,” the obituary writer concluded, and Ali couldn’t argue with that. The problem with people who live life to the fullest is that they don’t recognize their capacity to cause pain to those around them. They’re too busy having a good time to notice that others might not be.
She tore the page out of the newspaper and put it in her bag, not sure exactly why she was keeping it. Perhaps she would send it to her parents. They would be interested in Foy’s story, and since she had left her job and gone back to university, they could talk about the Skinners without the resentment that existed in the past.
She flicked through to the death notices and saw that his funeral would take place the following weekend in a local church, close to the village where he was born. It was a few miles from where the Skinners used to have their second home. Thornberry Manor had been sold. Katya had shown her the page advertising its sale in a copy of Country Life left at her flat by Ned.
• • •
Ali stood at the back of the church, just in front of the vestry. It provided the best vantage point to watch mourners arrive, and meant that she could hide behind the font when the family came in. The church was packed, and there were people standing outside. Four loudspeakers had been erected in the graveyard to broadcast the service. It was a windswept, rainy day, and through the open door Ali could see a brightly colored landscape of open umbrellas. She looked down at her watch and noted that it was already five minutes behind schedule. Timing never had been Foy’s good point. She smiled to herself and turned to the order of service.
There were two readings. Jake would recite a passage from The Tempest (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”), a decision, Ali liked to think, that might have been inspired by her pointing out the play’s connection with Corfu. Bryony’s reading was a poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” An inspired choice, thought Ali, muttering the second line to herself: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day.” That’s what they should inscribe on Foy’s gravestone.
She felt suddenly sorry that she hadn’t seen him before he died. He was one of the few adults during her two years at Holland Park Crescent who never treated her as though she were invisible. It might have been because his need for approval meant he required affirmation from everyone around him, but nevertheless his attention had mostly felt like a blessing. And the very traits that made him impossible to his family were also those that made him so entertaining to others. He had also leapt in at the very end to defend her from Bryony’s accusations.
She felt tears well up and turned to the rest of the order of service. She was crying for herself, not for him. There were no surprises with the hymns. “All Things Bright and Beautiful” was, perhaps, a little feminine for Foy’s taste. “Jerusalem” and “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” were more robust choices.
It would be an event characterized more by what wouldn’t happen rather than what would happen, Ali decided. Nick Skinner wouldn’t be making an appearance; Julian Peterson wouldn’t be giving the address; Hester wouldn’t be reading the lesson, because she had argued with her mother about biodegradable coffins.
Ali craned her neck over the people standing in front of her to see who she could recognize. Desmond Darke and his wife were in a pew toward the back of the church. Ali could see the profile of his angular face. He gazed into the distance, his features set hard, probably engaged in an internal debate about whether Foy really deserved his presence here. He was studiously avoiding the small, dark figure beside him, who Ali immediately recognized as Malea. The church was full, and she was pressed uncomfortably close to his left flank, her face impassive as always.
She could see Sophia Wilbraham’s parents a few pews in front. Neither Sophia nor Ned was present. It had caused a huge row, but inevitably Sophia had prevailed. Ali knew this because after seeing the notice about Foy’s death she had immediately gone round to Katya’s flat. Ned had sheepishly emerged from the bedroom and asked Ali’s advice on whether he should ignore his wife and just turn up at the funeral. He was still promising to leave Sophia and have a baby with Katya. He had even brought Thomas to Whispers during the day a couple of times to see her. But it was an act of desperation, because he could sense Katya was in retreat.
Toward the front of the left-hand row of pews, Ali recognized Julian and Eleanor Peterson. She was clutching a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes every few minutes. She stood out from the crowd because she was wearing a 1950s-style lemon-colored dress. It was the one Foy had described her wearing in his dream. Ali had recently learned from Katya that Eleanor had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor that made her behavior unpredictable and sometimes aggressive. It explained her extraordinary outburst at Foy’s birthday party but didn’t soften Tita’s attitude to Foy, who was never allowed back home. Fi Seldon-Kent sat in a chair at the back, looking down at her notebook. After a few minutes Ali realized that she must be organizing the funeral.
Nick was probably footing the bill. Ali knew from Ned that Nick was very busy with his “fantastic new job” at another investment bank. He had been guaranteed a first-year bonus, double his last one at Lehman’s. Those who played a part in creating the crisis would be the last ones to pay for it, thought Ali.
At quarter past twelve the church fell silent as the coffin was brought in. The family walked slowly behind in pairs. Tita came in first, holding Izzy’s arm. She looked straight ahead, tall enough to see over the single wreath on the oak lid to the end of the nave. She was wearing a tailored gray jacket and skirt that matched her eyes. Izzy was wearing a black minidress and short coat that showed off her long legs to best effect. Ali thought she saw a purple streak in her dark hair, but the heavy makeup and black nail varnish had been replaced by a softer, more feminine look. She sat down beside a boy waiting in the pew for her. He put his arm around her, and Izzy leaned in to him. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Izzy was closer to her grandfather than any of the other children. Tita sat erectly beside her. She didn’t look round once. Both hands rested on the front of the pew, holding the order of service.
Jake came in with Bryony. Ali forced herself to look at Bryony to avoid staring at him, although she could feel his presence in her stomach. Bryony’s hair was longer than Ali remembered. The contrast with her black suit was dazzling—like looking into the sun, thought Ali. Behind her were Hester and Rick and the other grandchildren.
The twins wore identical black suits.
• • •
Ali hadn’t seen Hector and Alfie since the day Bryony had discovered her and Jake in bed. She had said good-bye to them in the drawing room a couple of hours later. She could still remember every detail of that terrible scene. For the first time since she moved into Holland Park Crescent, she had worn shoes in the room. Her hastily packed bags were stacked in the hall. There was the old rucksack that she had brought with her the day she moved in, and another bag that Jake had found for her. Jake pleaded with her not to leave, but it was impossible for her to stay.
“How can I?” Ali told him. Finally he acquiesced. He never offered to go with her.
Ali remembered how the twins had clung on to her bare arms and legs until they were stuck together with sweat and tears. Bryony had tried to peel them off, but each time she managed to get one of them to detach, the other clung back on with ever more determination. The next day, Ali’s legs and arms were black and blue with bruises and there were so many scratches from their fingernails that she had to wear long sleeves for the next couple of weeks. They had screamed so loudly that Desmond Darke had rung on the doorbell to make sure everything was all right. Alfie and Hector had fought harder for her than Jake, thought Ali. Perhaps he realized that a relationship forged in the shadows would shrivel in the glare of daylight.
“Just wanted to check everyth
ing was in order,” Desmond said gruffly when Izzy answered the door. “You’ve put the people in this street through enough shame.” He craned his neck to try and see what was going on.
“You’re a pompous old fart,” said Izzy, slamming the door in his face.
Bryony had pleaded with Foy, Jake, and Izzy to help her with Hector and Alfie, but they had all refused.
“I don’t disapprove of their relationship,” Foy had shouted over the twins’ screams. “You’re being completely irrational.”
“That’s because your moral compass is so wildly out of synch,” Bryony had screamed back at him. “You’re no example of how to behave.”
“Your mother and I have managed to stay together for almost fifty years—that’s a kind of achievement,” Foy said with some of his old bluster.
“At what cost?” Bryony shouted at him. “You’re not even living together.”
“Don’t take out your frustrations over my behavior on Ali and Jake,” said Foy. “It’s not fair.”
“She’s the nanny,” Bryony had yelled. “She’s meant to be looking after his interests. God knows when it started.”
“She’s four years older than him,” Foy pointed out. “Hardly makes her a kiddie fiddler. And I told you when she moved in that it was asking for trouble employing an attractive girl with a hormonal teenager in the house.”
“She’s one of our employees,” shouted Bryony. “We pay her to be loyal.”
“Right now, she’s our only employee,” said Izzy. “And when was the last time you paid her? It might be a good idea to keep her. What does it matter if Ali and Jake are in love? She’s a big improvement on Lucy.”
“Imagine if those tabloid journalists find out,” said Bryony. “I can see the headlines now. Don’t you think they’ve raked over our lives enough?”