Free What the Nanny Saw by Fiona Neill Page B

taken aback to hear Nick mutter under his breath. He tried to focus on the bottles of wine. Malea, who obviously wasn’t privy to the fish embargo, told Foy proudly that she was cooking salmon en croute in his honor. Foy didn’t flinch.
    “Hope it’s wild salmon. The farmed stuff is full of crap,” he said virulently.
    Nick looked up at him in surprise. Foy normally talked about the salmon business in terms of revolution. Of how he had introduced salmon to the masses, how he had brought democracy to the dining table by selling it in supermarkets, how he had improved the nation’s health long before fish oils had become fashionable. But the Che Guevara diatribe was gone. This was a new angle.
    “Those fish are no better off than battery hens,” he said. “Covered in fleas, pumped with more chemicals than an East German weightlifter. God knows what they do to a man’s libido.”
    “Damn,” said Nick suddenly. “The bloody cork has broken.” He held up the bottle to the window and saw tiny pieces of cork floating on the surface.
    “I thought it was an infallible bottle opener,” said Foy wryly. Nick picked up the bottle of Puligny-Montrachet and started pouring it down the sink. He assumed a pose of utter nonchalance that he knew would irritate his more frugal father-in-law.
    “Why don’t we put it through a sieve?” suggested Foy.
    “There’s plenty more where that came from,” said Nick, pointing at the floor beneath him, where his wine cellar was located. “We’ll just have the Meursault instead. Salmon needs something a bit stronger than a Montrachet, don’t you think, Foy?”
    Foy wasn’t listening. He had just noticed Ali standing awkwardly by the window.
    “And who are you?” Foy boomed. Ali stared at him vacantly. She pointed at herself with one hand and tried to say “Me?” but no sound came out. In the week since she had moved into Holland Park Crescent, Ali was growing accustomed to the idea of being invisible. In Cromer she was always coming across people she knew, whether it was queuing in the butcher’s or walking along the beach. Even in Norwich she often ran into fellow students or friends who had moved to the city in search of work.
    In London, there were no familiar faces. She was neither a parent nor part of the group of Eastern European nannies who stood together, laughing and chatting in guttural strange languages in the park. It made Ali realize how much of her identity was formed from her relationship with the familiar. She regretted not taking up her father’s recent offer to go out to sea with him. She hadn’t been for years. She might have seen which parts of her were exposed in heavy seas when everything nonessential was stripped away, and this would surely have helped her now. Foy turned away from her.
    •   •   •
    There had been times this week when she went the entire day without speaking to anyone apart from the children and Malea, who was clearly more interested in the soaps she followed daily on the TV in the kitchen than in talking to Ali. The first two evenings she had dutifully waited downstairs at the kitchen table until eleven o’clock at night for Bryony to come home from work. She had compiled a careful list of the day’s highlights, hoping for reassurance that she was doing things right. But she never appeared. On the third night, Ali gave up and took herself off to bed at ten o’clock. She walked past Izzy’s door and could see her on the computer.
    Above her, she could hear Jake padding about in his bedroom on the top floor, occasionally singing to a song on his iPod. She longed for company and scrolled down her contacts in the new BlackBerry that Bryony had given her. It was a spartan list. There were three numbers for Jo, but they were probably all defunct because her sister would have either lost her phone or run out of credit. And even if she managed to get hold of her, at this time of night, the chances of her being off her face were too