Chapter 10: Nanny - The Golden Hours

Nanny liked the bath cubes. Usually bath time involved Pears soap and rough towels, a sprinkle of Matey and pirate noises. On Christmas night, though, Pen and Buttercup steamed gently like a pair of fragrant and contented little dumplings. The bath cubes (one each, for fairness) crumbled in their wet hands and dissolved like magic, the sweet smells of violet and carnation rising on the steam. Then a clattering erupted, heralding the arrival of the big boys, who burst in with their tape-measures, after which the tiles echoed to the squeaks of children trying to measure each other round the middle, and others resisting being measured.

‘Buttercup is thirty-nine inches long,’ announced Georgie, ‘and twelve inches from side to side.’ He made a note of it. ‘She can be my project,’ he said. ‘A human being is also an animal.’

Buttercup looked at him as severely as a naked person three years old with white-blonde curls, fat pink cheeks and a rosebud of a mouth could look. Everybody laughed. She gazed around at them, eyebrows drooping. Nanny swooped her up.

‘You’re not an animal,’ Nanny said softly.

‘Well, actually she is,’ said Andrew, ‘because she’s not vegetable or mineral, and there’s not anything else she can be – unless she’s a pony. There was a pony called Buttercup. I think it died. Or unless she’s a fungus,’ he went on. ‘She could be a fungus.’

‘She’s not a fungus, ‘said Georgie briskly.

‘No, she’s just a baby,’ Andrew said. The worst thing.

Even Buttercup knew she was not a baby. She turned towards Nanny and rested her ear on the soft cardigan.

‘I’m a small girl,’ she whispered.

‘Why are you pretending to be a grown-up, Andrew?’ said Bertie.

‘Shoo, the lot of you,’ said Nanny. ‘What are you all doing here anyway? Shoo or get into the bath. No, I didn’t think so.’

Nanny was technically Nanny to Clary and Archie’s children in London, where Mrs Lestrange always needed more time for her writing, but her duties expanded and contracted depending on where they were and who was about. It was fine by her. Buttercup lived up to her name, Bertie was a charmer all right and, no, she didn’t always mean that as a compliment. Harriet was a good quiet girl, a bit deep sometimes, needed a bit of love, with those busy parents. Georgie was just there, so of course included, but he was so involved with his animals he barely needed feeding and cleaning out himself. (Once she’d walked in on him reading aloud to the cockatiel. ‘He’s depressed,’ he’d said. And he’d been reading him Jude the Obscure! ‘Well, no wonder, listening to that,’ Nanny’d told him. ‘Try a little PG Wodehouse. Or James Joyce, but not the sentimental bits.’) And Mrs Cazalet got stuck in, even if she was a bit highly strung. At least she did the cooking, which was just as well. Apart from little Pen, who was basically in love with Buttercup, the Fakenham children were harder work, but then they weren’t hers, so they would be. Old Nanny had been old-fashioned, in her pomp, and, well, it wasn’t London. So of course the children were a bit bonkers.

London suited Nanny. She was a country girl by birth, and a bit of bright lights was welcome. And Nanny had been to Europe. Two years ago, Mr Cazalet and Mr Lestrange had packed the whole school up for the summer and transported it to what they called ‘The Home of Art’. Rome! That had been an eye-opener. (She’d thought London men were cheeky – the butcher’s lad in Mortlake had told her, over a packet of sausages in bloodstained white paper, that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Well, she did, a little, but goodness me, is there not a time and a place? Though of course he’d always be holding on to a package of something bloody when he saw her, it was his job.)

The men in Rome, though! Sometimes, on cold winter nights, or in summer when the sun fell at a certain angle and she felt the heat of it on her arm, she’d remember Rome, the great umbrella pines and the ruins, the sea at Fregene, the Holy Sites (and unholy sights!). Green shutters, tall windows, hot cobbled streets and ripe peaches and massive marble columns just lying about . . . While Mr Lestrange and Mr Cazalet were guiding the students around looking at paintings and ceilings and churches and piazzas, and Mrs Lestrange was staring out the window and back at her notebook and back out the window, Nanny had escorted Buttercup, Bertie and Harriet in the men’s wake, learning things. The men pretended to their little group of rich students that the family wasn’t there, while they followed them around, eavesdropping on talks about Caravaggio and Michelangelo, playing in fountains while they investigated modern galleries and came out eyes bright about Toti Scialoja, Jannis Kounellis and abstract concretism – well, Mr Lestrange did. Mr Cazalet preferred the Vatican galleries.

They’d had an apartment, borrowed from a friend of a friend: tall dim spacious rooms with dark furniture and hardly any of it, crucifixes over the beds and not a carpet in sight. Nanny had learnt how to cook spaghetti and prepare an artichoke, and how to sit at a cafe table in a piazza looking exactly like a film star, not showing too much leg, neckline always demure, her little gold crucifix hanging always between her collarbones. On the steps outside the many, many churches, young men lay in wait with scarves and shawls to drape over the shoulders of underdressed northern women for modesty before God – but Nanny never needed their services. ‘Che bella beata bambola!’ they cried – beautiful blessed doll! – and she hardly smiled at all. And there was such a choice of churches. Giovanna, the lady at the cafe on Piazza Navona, had taken her to mass at St Peter’s itself, nuns and pigeons swooping in the piazza outside, and everything in a strangely intoned Latin, and His actual Holiness the new pope, only crowned two years before, John the Twenty-Third, just there like a human being. It was too much for every day, she wrote to her mother. Instead, she chose an even more local church: St Agnes of Agony? Or St Mary of Peace? Easy choice, and Nanny grew accustomed to Latin mass.

The young man she saw every day was Donato, the son of Giovanna, who worked with his mother at the cafe. Donato called those chatty men ‘pappagalli’ – parrots – and soon knew how she took her coffee, which child liked which ice cream (limone fragola for Buttercup; frutti di bosco for Harriet, a different one every day for Bertie: stracciatella, torrone, melone, pistacchio). And when her day off was. He took her to the beach at Fregene on the back of his Vespa, to see the family’s other cafe, and the land, and the sea, and to meet his grandmother. He wore high-waisted trousers like Robert Mitchum, and very clean shirts; she sat side-saddle for propriety, in her neat court shoes. She watched the young girls in Capri pants and bikinis.

‘Nanny has a boyfriend,’ Bertie had announced one lunchtime, over a dish of anchovies on hot buttered toast.

‘Do be careful,’ Archie said, when he heard about the grandmother. ‘They believe in marriage here.’

‘Is he very handsome?’ Clary asked, and Bertie confirmed that he was an absolute dish.

Nanny hadn’t forgotten the moment under the umbrella pine on the via Aurelia, the dusty Vespa at the edge of a vineyard, the salt on the air. Nanny remembered that Italian cheese, white as milk, squishy. Big lush knobbly tomatoes, red all the way through. Wine. She remembered ripe figs, the sweet musty smell of their leaves, the way the trees were just there, by the road; you could eat a fig while it was still on the tree, just bite it, so red inside. Watch out for wasps, though. And peaches soft as silk. Donato washing the peach for her in seawater, brushing it with his hands. It’s like you, he’d said. You are a peach. Tu sei una pesca. Handing her the suntan oil, saying her skin was so white, like Bernini marble; you’re like a church, he’d said, laughing. His swimming shorts and his black hair. Never laid a finger on her but that one time, his finger on the little gold cross lying between her collarbones.

She had looked at Donato, and at his mother and father and his sisters and his grandmother, in the cafe, at mass, at their home by the sea; she had felt the eyes on her.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t tempted; that she didn’t think about it. She hadn’t talked to anybody about it, though, except, very tangentially, to Clary, one morning in the Campo dei Fiori, buying vegetables. ‘I could live here for ever,’ Clary had said, joyously loading zucchini flowers into her soft straw basket.

‘Could you?’ said Nanny.

‘God, no!’ cried Clary, laughing. ‘No, you’d have to be Italian, wouldn’t you? And I’m just not. And what about the children?’

When Nanny had told Donato no, and he’d asked her why, she’d said, ‘Capri pants.’

Well, she’d made her choice, and now she could remember it all, from the milder comforts of England. Anyway, she wasn’t interested in the butcher’s lad. She wasn’t interested in any lad. She’d had her reasons for leaving Galway in the first place, and she preferred running into the other nannies on the towpath or in Kew Gardens, and going to the pictures with them up on King’s Road or in Hammersmith.

The holidays in Norfolk, when all the children were together, were her great pleasure. At home in Galway she was the second of ten so it just seemed right. One of these years she’d get back home for Christmas itself; be with all her own nephews and nieces. The other girls said that you should never stay longer than two years with any family or you’d be theirs for life. They love you, and you would love them. She’d been four years with the Lestranges: well, she was done for.

While Old Nan was still alive, and active, Nanny had helped out, but since her death the Fakenhams hadn’t had the heart to get a new proper nanny in. Perhaps they felt they didn’t need to; well, that was their choice. Lady Fakenham was hands-on, and there was Miss Rachel, and Mr Simon was good with the boys, and Mrs Dodds coming in. Eileen, who Nanny recognised as a treasure, as the ladies called them, albeit a grumpy one, saw to Pen, who was a duck and soon to start at a day school locally. Andrew was away at prep school and the girls too would be off to boarding school this year. Nanny was glad they seemed not to be packing little Pen off at least. They say boarding school knocks the sweetness out of them. Personally, she couldn’t see the point. Why go to the trouble of having children at all if you’re only going to farm them out to strangers? She and her friend Peggy, who was a teacher in Edinburgh, and for whose opinions Nanny had every respect, had talked about this. Peggy, who was ferociously Scottish, said the custom had developed because they’d needed all the poor little boys to get accustomed to loneliness and obedience and routine for when they were packed off again, to serve the Empire.

‘All very well,’ Nanny muttered, ‘but old-fashioned.’ Nanny’s modern ideas included knowing she didn’t want to end up like Old Nan: beloved, living in a tower in the middle of nowhere, going gaga, and dying. Things are different to what they were, she thought. More options. And anyway, you’re a London girl now, with a London family, who took you to Europe and gave you choices.

She patted Buttercup’s tummy; gave Pen a scruff on the head. ‘Have you done your teeth?’ she said.

‘I have,’ said Pen. ‘Have you done yours?’

‘It’s not my bedtime,’ said Nanny.

‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,’ said Pen seriously.

‘Perhaps you’d like to make an appointment,’ she said.

‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll have my secretary give yours a ring.’

‘Very good, so,’ she said.

She was glad they hadn’t measured her. She herself felt a good couple of inches wider than she had before lunch: it had been delicious, and enormous. A good day all round! Lady Fakenham had given her a lilac cashmere scarf (very luxurious and chic, but not at all too much) and Mr and Mrs Lestrange had given her a sort of voucher which would let her go to the cinema for nothing.

As soon as the little ones were tucked up she would retire to her room off the nursery with a small sherry, to read. Peggy had sent her a novel for Christmas, called The Pumpkin Eater. The title wasn’t promising and there wasn’t even a picture on the cover, but Peggy said it was rather racy and would explain English women. ‘Peter Peter, Pumpkin Eater, had a wife but couldn’t keep her,’ Nanny sang softly, doing up Buttercup’s pyjamas.