by Jenny Eclair
‘Us,’ Freya reminds him.
‘Us,’ he repeats, putting his hands up in mock guilt and laughing. Then, speaking slowly and deliberately and putting great emphasis on any joint pronouns, he adds, ‘And now it’s ours . . . we can share it. We’re having a big party here in August. My fiftieth.’ He stresses my as if gallantly acknowledging that this milestone birthday is not joint, what with Freya being so much younger.
Lance continues, ‘This party is a chance for our friends and families to get together in beautiful surroundings, eat great food, have a few drinks . . . ’
‘My mother and my younger sister are coming over from Norway,’ gushes Freya, and Lance nods along enthusiastically.
‘And what about you, Lance?’ probes Mel, ‘Any of your family descending?’
‘Well yes,’ he answers, a twitch of annoyance visible in his cheek. ‘My mother and my, er, older sister Bel will definitely be invited.’
‘Ah, so your uncle believed in primogeniture too?’ Mel observes. ‘Only you mentioned you have an older sister and yet it was you who inherited Kittiwake?’
‘Oh, it’s a very complicated story,’ says Freya, leaning forward as if poised to explain everything.
‘That we don’t have time for now,’ warns Lance, his eyes turning cold. ‘The main thing is that this August we will all be celebrating together, one big happy Kittiwake family.’
And with that he reaches forward and very firmly switches Mel’s voice recorder off.
8
Blood Pressure
Clapham, London, April 2018, four months before the party
Bel is waiting to see the doctor. Her appointment is at 9.15, so she didn’t have time for breakfast. Her stomach rumbles and she eyes a baby gumming at a soggy croissant.
That would be nice – an almond croissant with lots of powdery icing sugar. For a second she visualises herself snatching the pastry from the child and cramming it into her own mouth.
Suddenly Bel craves the feel of a toddler on her lap far more than the germ-riddled pastry snack. A fat lump of a child, not yet able to walk. This one is all bundled up in what looks like a hand-knitted jumper and a fleecy hat. He or she is like a parcel, wrapped up and tucked into a buggy for safekeeping.
Until recently, Bel was very much a dog person, far more likely to coo over a dachshund than a tiny dribbling human, but lately she has found herself peering into prams at newborns and getting involved in long-winded games of peep-o with two-year-old strangers while drinking coffee in Pret.
Hormones, no doubt.
You’ve done all that, she reminds herself. Bel has two children and not just the stretch marks to prove it – her breasts sag and her pelvic floor is shot to pieces. It’s been a long time since she was able to tackle even a mini trampoline with any confidence.
Motherhood is all about sacrifice, she decides silently, picking up a tattered copy of OK! magazine and failing entirely to recognise the ‘celebrity’ on the cover.
The issue is a ‘Bridal Special’ and the unknown blonde seems to have an entire chorus line of bridesmaids behind her, all of whom seem to have identical smiling orange faces and matching bright white teeth.
Bel’s wedding over thirty years ago had been small. She hadn’t had a bridesmaid and Andrew didn’t have a best man; instead they’d had witnesses. There’d been four of them in the register office – Bel and Andrew and their two closest friends, Liz and Barry. So much cheaper, so much simpler, though she wishes now they’d been able to afford a photographer. Smartphones might be a curse but considering they weren’t around back then they have no actual record of the day. Bel has to think hard to recall what she was wearing. Late eighties, a navy velvet hairband to match her jacket and skirt, and a white pie-crust collar blouse from Laura Ashley. Andrew wore a suit from Next and a tie patterned with musical notes (which she’d hated, not that she’d said anything; he was smiling so much that as they said their vows she forgave him the tie and silently promised to choose all his accessories from that day forth).
She twists her wedding ring around her finger. They married young, she concedes. She’d been determined; once she’d found him, she couldn’t wait to ditch her maiden name and become Mrs Robatham.
The baby has been called in, his name is Felix – sweet. Bel is almost faint with hunger, hopefully she’ll be next. Impatiently she rifles through her voluminous handbag in case there’s a forgotten snack in there, a cereal bar, a throat lozenge, even a squashed banana, but the search is literally fruitless. What she has got, however, is the morning’s mail, which she’d picked up on her way out of the house. In an effort to distract herself from the increasingly embarrassing sounds emanating from her stomach, Bel picks through the small bundle. A couple of bills; a fashion catalogue aimed at women her age who look thrilled to be wearing a collarless silk shirt that comes in a variety of colours, including amethyst; a small package from ASOS for Ed’s girlfriend Maisie, and a stiff white envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs A. Robatham.
Bel bristles at the inclusion of the letter A – it’s old fashioned and unnecessary. Nonetheless, how novel these days to receive anything handwritten. Gleefully she rips it open to reveal a creamy gilt-edged card:
Lance Berrington has the pleasure of inviting
Annabel, Andrew, Edward, and James
to his fi ftieth birthday Bacchanalian bash/August bank holiday barn dance. Fancy dress encouraged. Accommodation and catering provided from Friday 24th–Sunday 26th inclusive At Kittiwake House, Monty’s Cove, Cornwall
Bel feels her chest squeeze. She can’t seem to catch her breath and she wonders if she might be about to pass out. She stuffs the post into her bag and concentrates on getting enough oxygen into her lungs. It’s all right, she reminds herself, it’s all right, you don’t even have to go if you don’t want to. But she knows that she will – after all, it’s Kittiwake.
‘Annabel Robatham, please.’ The nurse is short and fat. She better not say anything about losing weight and exercising, thinks Bel, following her vast bottom into what resembles a very untidy broom cupboard.
There is barely space for both of them to sit down. Bel takes off her coat and scarf. She can feel the heat rising from her, her body feels like a warm oven set to muffin temperature.
‘So, what’s the problem, Mrs Robatham?’
‘Anger,’ replies Bel. ‘I feel furious a great deal of the time and I think one day I could hurt someone, you know? Say someone is riding a bike on the pavement, I might just push them off.’
The nurse merely nods for her to continue.
‘And if I’m not angry, I’m upset. I feel so emotional a lot of the time – I have these fits of weepiness.’
Again that nod. ‘And you’re how old?’
‘Fifty-five,’ Bel responds, and she feels like adding, And I’m so middle-aged it hurts.
‘Would you say you were stressed?’ the nurse asks, looking surreptitiously at her watch.
Bel almost laughs, she would like to see the nurse’s face if she said, Damn right I’m stressed! I’m an overweight, heavy-drinking, middle-aged hysteric, with a massive mortgage and two supposedly adult sons, neither of whom can unload a dishwasher. And if that wasn’t bad enough, my eldest has moved his girlfriend in.
Bloody Maisie.
‘Ow, what the hell?’
Without Bel noticing, the nurse has pushed up her shirtsleeve and wired her up to a blood-pressure monitor.
The pressure around her upper arm grows incredibly intense. If the band doesn’t stop tightening, Bel’s afraid it will cut off her blood supply and she will lose the use of her arm.
‘Your blood pressure is very high,’ the nurse tells her, and she mentions numbers that mean nothing to Bel. Andrew does all the measuring in their house, Bel still hasn’t gone fully metric.
The nurse unleashes her arm and starts talking about the risks associated with high blood pressure, sudden strokes being the main concern. ‘And is there any history of high blood pressure or
heart problems in the family?’ she enquires.
Bel hasn’t a clue. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any knowledge of my blood family’s medical history,’ she replies breezily. ‘All I know for certain is that my birth mother was twenty when she died.’
The nurse raises an eyebrow. ‘Gosh, that is young.’
Yes, thinks Bel, twenty is nothing these days. In fact, both her sons are older than her mother was when she passed away. ‘I was adopted,’ she replies vaguely, and immediately she is transported back to the room.
When Bel was a little girl and she thought about where she came from, she imagined a huge room full of newborn babies in cots. She couldn’t actually hear the crying, but she could picture it. Some of the babies had their mouths wide open, all red inside like starling fledglings waiting for breakfast.
It couldn’t be an actual memory – Bel had been only a few months old when she was adopted – but ever since she was little, whenever she thought about being what her parents called ‘chosen’, she saw the same scenario. It was like that time she went to the cinema when she was six and something went wrong with the film and the same scene kept repeating and repeating, until a big scorch mark had burnt through the screen. Even now, though she knows the scenario was entirely rooted in her childish imagination, she can still picture the scene. That room full of babies, all lined up in cots ready for their prospective parents to come and see which one they liked the look of. ‘We picked you,’ she can remember her mother saying, ‘because you had the most beautiful blue eyes. We adored you on the spot.’
‘And what happened next?’ she would ask her mother when they were alone together, usually after her bath when she was on Mummy’s knee, all wrapped in the big warm towel.
‘We brought you home and put you in the yellow nursery that had been specially painted for you.’
Only it turned out Natasha had been lying. It had been years before Bel found out the truth. Years of assuming her real mother had died in childbirth – why else would she have been available for adoption? After all, mummies didn’t give their babies away.
Back in the broom cupboard, the nurse is still talking. Apparently she is going to fit Bel with a twenty-four-hour blood-pressure monitor to check whether her readings are consistently high or whether visiting the surgery has exacerbated her stress levels. ‘I’ll only be a tick,’ the nurse tells Bel, and exits the tiny space, presumably to fetch the blood-pressure device.
For the few minutes she is left alone, Bel wonders what it says on her medical records. She suspects they know she lies about her alcohol intake. She doesn’t think she’s got a problem, but she might be slightly what people call ‘dependent’. Let’s say it’s been a long time since Bel forgot to reach into the drinks fridge for a bottle of Chardonnay on the dot of 7 p.m. – and who can blame her? It’s a ritual: The Archers and a nice glass of chilled white wine. Andrew usually has a lager, which means there is more wine for Bel. Before she can reposition herself to peer at the screen and read her medical notes, the fat little nurse returns.
‘A few more questions, then we can set this up. So, alcohol?’
Bel allows a lie to slip out of her mouth. ‘The occasional glass of wine, that’s all.’
‘And what about exercise?’ prompts the nurse, not batting an eyelid despite the fact her cornflower blue uniform is straining at the seams.
Bel fights the temptation to step out of her nice middle-aged, middle-class lady persona and say, Probably as much as you, fatty. Let’s face it, neither of us could run for a bus without puking. Instead she replies, ‘I do a stretch class once a week.’
The nurse nods. ‘Maybe if you could add something a bit more cardiovascular?’
Maybe you could, replies Bel in her head while nodding in agreement.
9
In the Supermarket
Half an hour later, when Bel is in the supermarket, the cuff around her bicep buzzes into action. Immediately, she puts her basket on the floor and allows her arm to hang limply at her side, as the nurse had suggested. The cuff tightens, and she remembers how her children used to complain when she blew up their water wings until they were too tight: ‘Ow hurting, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.’
How many times has she been called ‘Mummy’ in her life? Over a million, surely. Once upon a time it was the only thing she ever wanted.
She has always been maternal, she supposes. As a little girl she had loved her dolls with a passion that bordered on the obsessive, smothering them with affection. Apart from . . .
Bel has a sudden flashback. She is a little girl in a cotton flower-sprig nightie, holding a doll. A proper Tiny Tears baby doll. She called her Tina, Tiny Tears Tina, a birthday gift from Uncle Benedict. But one night, playing schools with all her toys lined up in a row at the foot of her bed, she decided she was cross with Tina and shut her in a drawer.
Standing next to the cauliflowers in the vegetable aisle, as a fully grown fifty-five-year-old woman, Bel is once again awash with the guilt and horror of this memory, recalling how she had woken in the night convinced that Tina was dead, and the ensuing desperate scrabble to open the drawer and save her.
Fortunately, Tina’s mechanical eyelids had almost instantly clicked open. Relieved to find her alive, Bel climbed back into bed with the dolly tucked in beside her, apologising fervently into her little plastic ear, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
Blimey, talk about Freudian! She hasn’t thought about Tina for years. The double whammy of Lance’s party invitation combined with the chat at the surgery must have triggered this succession of uncomfortable childhood memories. Poor Tina, she’s probably in the attic somewhere, forever six months old and covered in cobwebs. Oh God, the attic – when is it ever going to get cleared out?
The monitor seems to pause before tightening again. It’s pinching her arm like a Chinese burn. There’s nowhere to sit down, so she stands in the aisle and waits until the tightening feeling passes, then continues filling her basket with all the things that everyone else in her house has demanded.
She has a list, a proper list written out on the back of an envelope in biro, old-school style. She cannot understand people who keep lists on their phones.
Gluten-free bagels, hummus, Cooper’s thick Oxford marmalade, face-wipes for sensitive skin (‘But not the anti-ageing ones, I don’t need those!’). Why is she buying her son’s girlfriend face-wipes and gluten-free nonsense? Since when has it become acceptable for Maisie to add things to the black chalkboard shopping list in the kitchen?
Even her handwriting annoys Bel. It’s unformed, childish. And as for her spelling . . .
Bel sighs. Now is not the time to ponder Maisie’s grasp of the English language. She has to think about supper. It’s infuriating, never knowing how many people will be sitting at the table, or if not exactly at the table, then hanging around expecting to be fed.
She’s got some neck of lamb in the freezer. If she remembers to get that out, they can have a casserole, or a tagine if she’s feeling adventurous – only that would mean buying dried apricots and they’re right down the other end of the supermarket. Sod it, she will do a bog-standard lamb stew. All she needs is carrots. Oh, God, she can’t remember if she’s got stock cubes, and they’re down the far end with the dried apricots. Decisions, decisions.
She should have gone home for breakfast before attempting this. The combination of lack of food, the prospect of a family get-together and the blood-pressure monitor is making her feel slightly sick and faint. Some plain croissants lie squashed at the bottom of her basket. Life can be terribly hard, thinks Bel, wondering how much more it would take to make her cry.
Wine, she’ll buy some wine. It’s not on the list, but they might need a couple of emergency bottles before the van delivery this Friday. (Bel belongs to the Sunday Times wine club, it makes the whole ‘heavy drinking’ thing seem so much more acceptable, almost professional.)
The wine makes the basket unbearably heavy. She should have got a tro
lley. She needs fizzy water and loo rolls too, but she’ll have to come back tomorrow for those. Damn and blast it, why can’t Maisie buy toilet rolls? No doubt she wipes her bum with hypo-allergenic face-wipes.
At the checkout, Bel searches in her purse for her Nectar card – throughout the year, she and Andrew save up their points so they can splash out on the big Christmas shop – but she can’t find the wretched thing. ‘No, I’m not collecting school vouchers,’ she snaps at the teenage boy behind the till, biting back the words ‘you idiot’, because he’s clearly not; he is a perfectly pleasant young man with a job.
There was a time when she couldn’t think of anything worse than her children working in a supermarket. Now she feels like stopping off at the information desk and asking if there are any vacancies. Ed, her eldest at twenty-six, has a part-time sort of job, but Jamie, her twenty-four-year-old, is yet to find employment of any kind.
Really, thinks Bel, I’d be happier with him sitting behind a till doing something constructive, rather than sitting around at home doing nothing.
What is it with her sons’ generation? By the time she was in her mid-twenties, she and Andrew were married and had set up home in Gypsy Hill. Bel was a PA working for a small publishing house, while Andrew had a job collecting data for a pharmaceutical company in West Croydon. They used to commute in different directions from their local train station, blowing each other kisses across the platforms. We were like little adults, she thinks, remembering how she would spend her lunch hour deciding what to cook her husband for his supper back at their cosy maisonette.
It’s not the Millennials’ fault there’s a housing crisis in London, she reminds herself, realising that the only twenty-somethings in the Robathams’ social circle that live entirely independently from their parents are those with mummies and daddies wealthy enough to have bought them a flat. Well, her lads can whistle for that. Neither she nor Andrew have enough savings of their own, and the likelihood of inheriting any life-changing amounts of money any time soon are non-existent. Andrew’s parents never had any, and hers . . . Bel swallows hard. All she knows is that her late father left his affairs in a terrible state and her mother now lives in what she refers to as ‘reduced circumstances’.