Love in a Warm Climate

by Helena Frith-Powell

  But how do I explain that their father has gone? I just can’t do it to them. This must be what it’s like when you have to tell people someone is dead. There they are, all innocent and unknowing, and you’re just about to shatter their world. I can’t shatter their world – not yet anyway, not before a cup of tea.

  So instead of telling Edward that his father is probably with a small-breasted woman called Cécile, I tell him he can’t go to school in Charlotte’s fairy dress. This probably has a more immediate effect on him than the other news would have had.

  “Why not? I love it,” he wails, keeling over on the bed, looking dangerously close to having a tantrum or at least bashing himself on the headboard.

  “Because your teacher might not like it.” I know they don’t go for school uniforms in France, but a fairy dress might be pushing it. “And you look a bit, well, a bit like a girl and you might get teased.”

  Edward sits up. “I look like a girl?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, stroking his hair again. “I’m sorry to say you do.”

  “Yuk. I hate girls,” he says looking disconsolately at his fairy dress.

  Charlotte looks around the room. “Is Daddy downstairs in the shower?”

  “No, Daddy has gone to London,” I say, making an effort not to betray anything in my voice. “He had to leave for work early.”

  “But he was supposed to be here for our first day at school,” wails Emily. “It’s not fair.”

  “I know, I know,” I say consolingly. “I’m afraid he had to go back to work urgently. But as a special treat you can have pain au chocolat for breakfast. A French breakfast for my French schoolchildren.”

  If anything can console Emily it is chocolate.

  “Yipppeee!” she yells. Didn’t take her long to get over the absence of her father. Maybe I should eat some chocolate too and hope for the best?

  “Last one to get dressed is a rotten banana,” yells Charlotte, running towards the door. I watch them. Charlotte is a smaller version of me, or at least the me I used to be before I became a mummy with a tummy; Emily is more like my mother: a total rebel. She’ll be reading books on nihilism before she’s ten. Or possibly even writing them.

  Half of me feels like lying down and going back to sleep. So what if I’m the rotten banana? I can’t muster the energy to do anything at all. I’m exhausted. My brain feels as messy as a ball of wool that’s been dragged around the house for several hours by an over-excited Daisy. The thought of getting dressed, even getting up, fills me with despair.

  I wonder where Nick is now. Probably already back with Cécile. She could be tying his tie for him as I lie here wondering how the hell my marriage ended. Hopefully she’ll accidentally strangle him.

  What am I supposed to do? I need to think about our future, about moving back home, packing everything up again (lucky I didn’t throw away those £8 collapsible boxes), finding a house, taking the children out of school, finding them another school. I wonder where I put Simon the removal man’s number. I didn’t think I’d ever need it again, let alone two weeks into our new life. The list of things to do is endless and horrible. I don’t want to dwell on any of it now; it makes me feel physically sick. But I can’t possibly stay here alone with no job and rely on Nick the faithless bastard for handouts.

  I think back to how excited we were when Mr Vorst called us to tell us our offer had been accepted. I had the feeling of a whole new world opening up. And now of course it is already closing.

  In the distance either Frank or Lampard screeches. Nick bought them from an aviary near Montpellier a few days after we moved here. They roam around the estate looking elegant and squawking occasionally. It feels like they have been here forever, like they belong to the house and land.

  I love the sound they make: it’s an aristocratic sound, the sort of sound you only ever hear in England when you’re on a visit to some stately home. Whenever I see our peacocks wandering around regally I’m reminded of the TV show Brideshead Revisited. But where is Jeremy Irons when I need him?

  I get up and walk out onto the terrace. It is a chilly January morning. There is no frost but a light mist hangs over the vineyards and the sun is just beginning to wake up. It seems inconceivable that Nick could risk his family and all this: Frank and Lampard, Sainte Claire, our new life, our vineyards, everything he’s dreamed about for so long, just for a good sex life. I need to understand why. I feel utterly confused and abandoned. How the hell did this happen?

  I turn to my rose. “Maybe this is just one of those moments of madness?” I ask it. “Maybe he will wake up today and realise the huge mistake he’s made.” Then I decide that talking to a flower may be considered a moment of madness in itself. You can only get away with that if you’re next in line to the throne.

  How long does a moment of madness normally last? Is it a kind of mid-life crisis? Maybe it had been building up for months. Did Nick think the move to France would answer all his problems, dispel his dissatisfaction, and then find it didn’t? Or did he realise that the only thing that could satisfy him was Cécile and her self-waxing legs?

  Of course I don’t know that they’re self-waxing, but I assume she didn’t get my husband to stick around for so long by wrapping hirsute pegs around him. I walk back inside and over to the mirror. I lift up my nightie and look down at my own legs. Yep, they’re predictably hairy.

  Is he right? Have I really let myself go? I need to call Sarah, I need to talk to someone. Last night I just couldn’t face anything, but today I need to work out what to do.

  A scream from the kitchen stops my rêverie. I run downstairs and find Edward trying to wrestle Emily’s precious Peter Rabbit bowl, a sixth birthday present from her best friend at school in England, from her.

  “Sit in your place, Edward,” I say, taking the bowl from him. If I’m going to be a single parent there’s going to have to be a policy of zero tolerance around here. “Girls, lay the table.”

  “Why does he get to do nothing?” moans Charlotte.

  “Because he’s only five and he doesn’t get to do nothing, he’s going to help me clear the table.”

  The twins think about rebelling but I give them one of my ‘don’t even think about it’ looks so they get out bowls, plates and cups. They put one in Nick’s place.

  “Not there, silly,” says Charlotte to Emily. “He’s gone to London to work.”

  “He didn’t say goodbye,” says Emily before putting her thumb back in her mouth.

  “He asked me to say goodbye and give you all a kiss,” I lie. Why am I protecting the bastard? Actually I’m not, I’m protecting them.

  I leave the room, partly to get dressed but partly so they can’t see that I am about to start crying again. Maybe I should hold off telling them. He was always going to be away during the week and even some weekends, so as far as they are concerned nothing has really changed. Right now I’m so unsure of what will happen. Maybe in a few weeks I will be able to forgive him? Or maybe he won’t want to come back at all after a few weeks of the full Cécile treatment.

  I pull my nightie over my head and resume my investigation of myself in the full-length mirror. How could he leave all this behind? The breasts that have seen better days, the nipples that never really recovered from breastfeeding, the knees with an inexplicably useless layer of skin just above them that seems to have arrived from nowhere, the unwaxed legs and bikini line, the out-of-shape arms, the buttocks that are at the other end of pert. And I haven’t even started on my face.

  Sophie Reed, née Cunningham, mother of three, thirty-six years old, saggy, sad and single. And a sex-free zone. What happened to my libido? Nick was right to complain about that. It’s not like I’m not aware of the issue myself. My sex drive is like one of those 80s pop stars that you used to be so familiar with but who then just vanished off the face of the earth. When I was trying to get pregnant I was keen on it, then while I was pregnant I liked it – my whole body was somehow on heightened alert.


  But after that my libido turned into Adam Ant and my husband had an affair. How long did it take? I suppose since Edward I have totally lost interest in Nick and any sex life with him. It’s almost as if the love I used to have for the father has been transferred to our son. Not in any sexual way of course, but all my affection and adoration. I could spend hours gazing at Edward, but I never really notice Nick any more. Or if I do notice him, it’s because he’s done something to annoy me like not putting his clothes in the laundry basket or nicked the bit of the paper I wanted to read. When did it all change?

  There was a time though when he was everything to me, when I adored him and he adored me. Is this all my fault? Should I have made more of an effort to be sexy and seductive and lost the baby weight and had my hair dyed blonder and done all those things high-maintenance yummy mummies do? I suppose it never occurred to me that he would go off me. I have always been pretty, and vaguely thin, and attractive. Boys always liked me. Up until now that is. I still look OK, but I am no longer thin. My weight gain has been insidious: it has happened without me noticing, each baby leaving its marks in the form a few kilos. I don’t look after myself like I used to. I never have facials, I hardly ever paint my nails, I have forgotten where to buy leg wax and don’t even think about matching underwear even though I now live in the land where it is practically obligatory. I have become the second lowest priority on my list, just above my husband.

  I drag a brush through my hair; it is still thick, blonde and long, so at least I have that going for me. Thankfully alopecia hasn’t set in. Yet. I did read somewhere that you can lose your hair from shock or go grey overnight. I guess if that were going to happen it would have done so already. But maybe the shock of Nick’s infidelity hasn’t reached my hair follicles yet.

  I still can’t believe it. Nick and infidelity. Those words just don’t fit together. My solid, dependable, Irish rock of a husband has slept with another woman. He has betrayed me, betrayed all of us. And the worst of it is that I only had two weeks to enjoy this French dream before it happened. I can’t believe my new life, that started with the New Year, is already over.

  “Mummy, quick, come here, quick, quick.” Thankfully I can drag myself away from assessing my own state of decay as all three children are shouting from the kitchen again. I run from the bedroom, throwing my nightie back on as I do so in case the postman decides to show up carrying a large package.

  “What is it?” I gasp, expecting to find an axe murderer in the house or at least some blood somewhere. But they are all staring at the television.

  “Your boyfriend’s on TV again,” says Emily, pointing at the screen.

  I look at the small television I have had since I owned my first flat in Fulham and that now sits on the counter in our French kitchen and is fully hooked up to Sky (obligatory for any Chelsea fan moving abroad). Classical music blares out from it. A familiar figure is in the middle of the screen, wearing black trousers and a white shirt. His hair is back-lit, making it look even more wild and curly than it normally is. He is staring intently at me with sparkling blue eyes. It is Johnny Fray, someone I met at work and who has since become a huge film star.

  Emily is wrong: he was never my boyfriend. But he might as well have been, I never forgot him. I knew him for almost two years and lusted after him for even longer.

  The first day I met him was the day he came for a job interview at Drake’s, the hotel I was working at. He looked me in the eyes and smiled. Two thoughts came into my head almost at the same time. The first one was “Oh my god, his eyes are the most incredible blue I have ever seen”. The second was “Why did I pick today to wear these trousers that make me look like a maiden aunt and forget my lip gloss?”

  He started telling me about drama school where he was studying at the time.

  “What sorts of things do you study at drama school?” I asked him.

  “Today we learnt all about how to kiss without really kissing,” he said. “What they call ‘on-screen kissing’.”

  “Oh? Any tips?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought as a hotel manager you would ever need to fake a kiss,” he laughed. “But I’d be happy to show you if you like.”

  “That’s not part of the job description,” I replied, ignoring his flirtatious tone, trying my best to sound professional and not give away that what I was really thinking was how I wanted to run my fingers through his thick black hair and try any kind of kiss with him at all.

  He started work the following night and fitted in right away. The clients loved him, especially the women: he was attractive, efficient and good-natured. Even Lady Butterdish, the hotel’s notoriously difficult and grumpy owner, was mesmerised. She was actually called Lady de Buerre, but Johnny Fray nicknamed her Butterdish because he knew it would annoy her if she ever found out and also because it made everyone else laugh.

  One time I overheard Lady Butterdish invite him to spend a weekend on her yacht in St Tropez. I was so relieved when I heard he had said no.

  I started to look forward to his shifts and hated it when he wasn’t there. Every time I saw him I liked him more. I think one of the major things that attracted me to him was his drive and ambition. I had never seen anyone work so hard, even if this was just his way of making some extra cash. And of course his looks: he reminded me of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights – dark and swarthy, with a mass of black curly hair.

  Johnny was tall, about six foot two, and well-built. But he had the most delicate hands, like a pianist’s – small with long elegant fingers. Sometimes I had to stop myself looking at them and wondering what they would feel like over my body.

  But it wasn’t just his looks that I liked. He was also an amazingly kind person. I remember once when I gave up smoking we went into a newsagent’s together so I could buy a packet of chewing-gum to take my mind off the cigarettes. Johnny took the whole box from its stand and bought it for me in a typically generous and flamboyant gesture. And he was more mature than other men of his age. His parents had both died when he was just six years old and that was probably partly why he was so determined to do well in life, he had no one to look after him.

  Looking back on it now it seems insane that nothing really happened between us. There was so much obvious attraction there and yet it was almost like every time we got close, something got in the way. One week we were out for a drink after work, alone for the first time in several weeks. We had just settled down for a drink when my phone rang. It was my mother, frantic because husband number four had been caught with his secretary in the boardroom doing more than going through the books.

  Another time it was Lucy on the phone in a state of despair because Perfect Patrick (her then crush at law school and now husband) had a girlfriend back home, and, what was worse, her mother was French. “How can I compete with a French woman?” she wailed. “Even Kate Moss couldn’t compete with a French woman – look what happened to Johnny Depp.”

  “Patrick is not Johnny Depp and she’s only half French,” I consoled her, wondering what, if anything, was ever going to happen with my own version of Johnny Depp.

  Then a third time (lucky for some but not for us) we finally kissed.

  It was about a year after he started at Drake’s. We were moving a table in the restaurant together. We had a hen party of twenty coming for dinner and needed to put two of our biggest tables together. At one stage we let go at the same time because it was so heavy. We stared at each other. I had such terrible butterflies I could hardly breathe. There was no one else in the restaurant.

  Johnny walked towards me. I kept looking at him, half in panic, half in joy. I was frozen to the spot. He stood opposite me, looking down at me. He smiled, cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. It was probably the most memorable kiss of my life. He gently leant down to touch my lips with his. Tentatively at first and then with more determination. I felt dizzy. My whole body seemed to float. I sometimes think about the significant things I will remember on my deathbed – walking d
own the aisle, the first moment I held the twins, my first (and only) pair of Manolo Blahniks (50% at the Selfridge’s sale), Nick proposing – and I still think that kiss would be right up there.

  After a minute or so he let me go.

  “I’m guessing that was a real kiss?” I asked, struggling to find my voice.

  Johnny laughed. “Yes. But as you said, it’s not in the job spec.”

  “Oh forget the job spec,” I said, lifting my face towards his, smiling. “Kiss me again.”

  “Hardly the kind of attitude I expect from one of my most promising and certainly my youngest managers.”

  Her voice cut through our intimacy like a knife through butter. Johnny and I sprang apart. It was Lady Butterdish herself, looking like the witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a cream white fur coat and black stiletto boots that almost certainly cost more than my annual salary each.

  “Both of you, to my office,” she commanded and stormed off.

  We obeyed orders and followed her. She started with me and made Johnny wait outside. I knew what was coming. I had the ‘I’m so disappointed in you’ speech and the ‘I trusted you despite your age and inexperience’ lecture.

  “If you are here to seduce the staff, Sophie, then I think we had better terminate our agreement,” she concluded. “Either you are serious about this job or you’re serious about him. You can’t have both.”

  I was a girl at the beginning of her career. Lady Butterdish could have made sure I never worked in London again. So what did I do? I lied to her, of course. I lied to save myself. I behaved like a coward.

  “Of course the job means more to me,” I said, practically choking on my words. “He’s only a waiter.”

  “Sensible girl,” smiled Lady Butterdish. “I am pleased to hear that. You’ll go far. Now send him in.”