What the Nanny Saw Read Free Page B

beauty. Anxiety had taken away Bryony’s appetite, and she had lost weight. Her green eyes overwhelmed her face. Her jeans and cashmere sweater hung off her frame. Without makeup she looked even more fragile. It was difficult to believe she was forty-six years old.
    Bryony was no longer wearing work clothes, although she still got up earlier than anyone else to check her e-mails and pound the treadmill before sitting down to breakfast with her children. She stressed to Ali the importance of sticking to routines, pointing out that throughout World War II, Winston Churchill rose at exactly the same time every morning, had the same breakfast, and read the newspapers in the same order before disappearing into his bunker.
    “I’m concerning myself with Ali’s welfare in case she gets lost between the cracks,” said Foy. Ali immediately removed the bracelet and placed it carefully beside the earrings. “Why don’t you sell this table?”
    Bryony didn’t answer.
    “You should sell this table,” said Foy more insistently. “It’s a Jupe, isn’t it? It must be worth something.”
    “Nick bought it for our tenth wedding anniversary,” said Bryony, protectively patting its shiny surface. “There’s only a couple this size in Europe.”
    “I don’t think you’ll be a popular dinner party destination for the next couple of years,” said Foy. “If you sold this table you could free up enough cash to pay the mortgage for the next six months, and then you’d have one less thing to worry about.”
    “Stop interfering, Dad,” said Bryony
    “I’m just trying to be practical,” said Foy, turning round to calculate the distance that now stood between him and the armchair.
    “The table stays,” said Bryony firmly. “I want to keep it for when Nick comes home.”
    “What about the mirrors?” He pointed to a pair of eighteenth-century Italian silver gilt mirrors that hung on either side of the fireplace. “You’d get a good price for those.”
    There had been heated debate the previous evening about the table, although it was its location, not its value, that was up for discussion. Bryony had suggested that it was essential the antiques dealer view the objects under natural daylight, and it should therefore be shifted to the other side of the room, parallel to the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto Holland Park Crescent.
    Her sister Hester vehemently argued against moving it closer to the prying lenses of the photographers who periodically congregated with their stepladders on the other side of the crescent. Even such a minor change could provide them with a useful new angle for their story, especially if their telephoto lenses could pick out exactly what was on the table. They had all waited for her to finish. Hester’s point of view might have sounded more coherent, but it wasn’t necessarily completely objective. In the following breath she told everyone that the problem with owning the biggest house on one of the most expensive streets in London, apart from the obvious public relations problem that it now presented, was that its location at the center of the arc of the crescent provided fantastic breadth of vision for photographers.
    “Of course, if you were a teacher and lived in my street in Stoke Newington, it would all be much easier,” Hester had said, venting one of her longer-term resentments.
    “If I was a teacher in Stoke Newington, there wouldn’t be photographers outside the house,” said Bryony dryly. Foy had laughed, signaling victory to Bryony.
    “What do you think, Ali?” Foy had asked. One of the few merits of the current crisis was that people sought Ali’s opinion. At the outset she assumed this was a tactic to ensure that she didn’t run out on them like Malea, the Philippine housekeeper who read the runes and defected on day three to a family from the twins’ school. Then she thought it was because she was an impartial observer to the crisis being played out before her