The initial excitement I felt at this new discovery about my father begins to darken as the question of how he funded the purchase of this property rises in my mind like a specter. What additional work did he undertake to secure this massive asset, and how could he have compartmentalized his life to such a degree that I, his only living relative, could know nothing about it?
I tentatively question a few of his friends: men and women in their late seventies, snowy eyebrows raised in youthful surprise that John had any connection out there. He never spoke of a second home. How wonderful for him. What’s it like?
I do not tell them the extent of what I imagine it will be like, this generous property. To tell them that would be to lead them in the direction of my own thoughts—that a man like my father, a man with a career like my father’s, should not have had that much money. Should not have had a secret house.
One of his long-term co-workers, Maeve Rittman, a force of nature now in her late sixties and still lecturing at the university, told me something that lodged in my mind.
When I asked her if she could spare an hour or so to talk about Dad, she invited me to tea at Brown’s in Mayfair. I don’t doubt she must have thought the meeting purely about my need for comfort post-bereavement, but regardless, she was happy to oblige. That was the kind of man my father was, you see, the kind you care about to the extent your goodwill bleeds to anyone else they might know or like.
At least, that was how others saw him. As the child of a great man, things are often more complicated: he loved me, but I was never not aware that he feared finding his own faults in me. Though what his faults might have been I could not tell you. But I knew enough to know they haunted him. He could not abide thoughtlessness, carelessness, letting standards slip.
In the years we had together, in all the puzzles we solved and games we played, and in all the life we lived, I found myself fearing both losing to and winning over him.
If I lost, I risked his disappointment; if I won, I feared destroying the foundations of our relationship. Though of course he gave no such indication that this would ever be the case if I did win.
But that is academic. I never really won against him. I did not have that extra spark that seemed embedded in him from birth. I could never win without his encouragement, his direction, his nudging, his sometimes cold pulling away. And when I won, I would burst with pride and he would say he had always known it was there—and we were both happy enough with that, I believe. I was a trier, and that was enough.
I don’t doubt Maeve likes me because I’m John’s daughter. An undeniable pedigree before I ever even uttered a word. He loved me, so I am lovable.
I have always felt at home with Maeve. But no doubt everyone feels that with Maeve, funny, beautiful, and as close to genius as it might be possible to be, though with the good grace to keep it to herself most of the time.
She smiled at me over the rim of her teacup, her garnet lipstick expertly applied, her eyes still twinkling as they always had.
“I’m glad you asked me to do this,” she said after a sip. “You’re a long way off this yet but there comes a time in your life when people start to go. Die. And of course you attend the events, but it’s never enough, there is still so much left unsaid. Memories to be turned over, inspected. If you can find someone willing to listen to your memories, so much the better. And trust me, dear Nina, you lovely girl, I have a lot of memories of your father.”
And she did. Mostly stories about the pranks they played on each other as PhD students at Cambridge. They had been researching in different departments: she clinical neuroscience and he applied mathematics and theoretical physics, and they might never have met had it not been for their mutual love of bog-standard pub quizzing. Their ragtag quiz team going on to rinse every pub in Cambridge and the surrounding areas out of their accumulated jackpots to hilarious effect.
I found myself childishly hoping as Maeve spoke that this mysterious house on the other side of the world might be entirely funded by pub quiz winnings. That spry, edgy young man she spoke of was so different from the calm, staid man I spent my life with. The stories made me laugh and then they made me sad. I cried a bit. She responded in kind and I was at least spared the embarrassment of being the only one in the piano-tinkling tearoom with damp eyes and a blotchy face.
The questions around the existence of this house introduced a more existential concern, I told her: That if I discovered more, I might lose the old idea of who my father was. That I might find out something out there that destroyed my memory of him and I might, in a sense, lose him again with even more permanence.
With the arrival of a fresh pot of tea and more scones, her tone shifted.
“I know you want me to give you something, some reassurance or even perhaps a seismic disclosure about who your father was. But he was a private man, Nina. We shared so much but I never got in, if you understand my meaning. He was a closed circuit. He never remarried after your mother. There was a lot of sadness there. He battled it, I think, but one would never know. As far as I can tell he never even tried to find someone else. He was married to his work and his diversions and, in a way, to you.”
Maeve broke off, seeming to suddenly see my predicament for what it was and adding, “He was a good man, though. Perhaps he cut off a side of his life to preserve the rest; we do what we must. But don’t ever doubt that he was a good man. Secrets or no. No one is perfect, you just need to know that he loved you immensely—he made a life out of it.”
Then Maeve reached a delicately boned hand across the table and squeezed my forearm with surprising strength.
“Whatever you find out there: he will have had his reasons. If there is one thing I do know about your father, it’s that he never did anything without at least one very good reason. If he left you the house, he wanted you to go there.”
CHAPTER 3
MARIA
T he door slid open with a hydraulic smoothness. So weird, Maria thought, after three days of trying, nothing and then this. The woman had told her the rules when she arrived at the house. There were always rules for clients like this. The bigger the property, the shinier the surfaces, the quieter the rooms: the stranger the clients—it was a truth universally acknowledged, though Maria hadn’t gotten the measure of this client at all as she hadn’t even met him, or his children, yet.
She had been hired for two weeks to cover the client’s usual nanny’s annual leave. She had done enough of these now to know what that entailed, and these short jobs were always the easiest. Be quiet, cheerful, fun, but incredibly reliable, yes to everything, no to nothing, in a nutshell: the dream. Well, everyone else’s dream. But the money was always, always good. The best.
The rules of this particular job were simple: Wear the clothes provided, impeccably made soft white polo shirts and chic linen shorts; be amenable; and when not immediately required, make yourself comfortable in the house. Make yourself comfortable. What a joke, Maria thought. No one wants to see the hired help comfortable.
Of course, Maria hadn’t dreamt as a child of being the hired help. She started doing short contracts between her first-year terms at Cornell Medical School, each contract easily paying off her course fees. She had no particular ambition to become a nanny, but she was savvy as well as intelligent, and it turned out she was good with kids, or at least they listened to her, and the astronomical amount she could make as a live-in nanny to the super-rich had made it a simple choice.
Then as the course’s study schedule began to leak into her “free time,” it got harder to do both. Holidays between terms had ceased to exist. So she had to make a clear-minded decision: an unsentimental, rational decision. Training to be a doctor required money, money required a job, a job required time. She had needed to quickly reassess her career trajectory. The truth was that Maria could make more as an attractive, highly educated, polite young child-minder to the super-rich than she could as an overworked junior doctor back in New York City.
And with the hefty nannying wage packets she had been hoarding over the last few years, rent-free, overhead-free, she’d be able to pick up her med course again in, say, five years and be able to pay for it all outright—hell, she’d even be able to buy her own apartment in Manhattan near the hospital in order to study there comfortably if she wanted.
And this new contract, her largest and most life-altering paycheck yet, would push her closer than ever to the figure she knew she needed to be safe, to be comfortable. After a lifetime of hustle, she would soon be secure.
