by Isabel Wolff
“Oh yes,” she said, “but not like this. I’m afraid it’s gone down like a cup of cold sick at home.”
“But you’re thirty-eight.”
“I know. But I’m still their little girl,” she explained. “And I’m their only daughter. So naturally they’re disappointed that I’m not going to have the white wedding of their dreams to their fantasy son-in-law. Anyway,” she continued, “they’re pretty unhappy about it, and for the time being they don’t want to know. And that’s why I’m telling you, Tiffany.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to confide in me,” I said as I got out the double-chocolate ice cream. “I promise I won’t breathe a word.”
“No, no, it’s more than that. I didn’t just want to tell you to get it off my chest. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“A favor.”
“Yes. If I can.”
“It’s a big favor.”
“Ask away,” I said as I shut the freezer door.
“It’s a very big favor.”
“Sally, I really don’t mind. You know I’d do anything to help.”
“OK then. Will you be my birth partner?”
“WHAT?”
“I’d like you to be there with me when I have the baby.”
“Er. Well. I’m terribly squeamish, you know.”
“. . . and I was wondering if you could come to some of the ante-natal classes with me.”
“I’m not sure I’d be much use, really.”
“You see, I need someone to give me moral support . . .”
“. . . just doesn’t sound like my kind of scene at all, Sally.”
“. . . as I don’t have a man.”
“Oh God, oh God.”
“. . . and you’re the only person I know well enough to ask. I can hardly ask my younger brother,” she continued, “my mother’s absolutely anti, and I don’t have any other women friends to whom I feel sufficiently close.”
Gosh. Well. Flattery does work wonders, doesn’t it? But to be honest, I was a bit surprised, because although I like Sally a lot, I really do, I would never have said we were best friends. But it’s me she wants. Me! How amazing. “Well, of course I will,” I said.
“Thanks, Tiffany. You’re a brick.”
And so this morning, it really got me thinking about the whole subject. Babies. I suppose if Fate handed me a card like that I’d probably play it too. But some women—they set out to be single mothers. Deliberately. They have a one-night stand, or they ask a friend to oblige, or they pop down to the sperm bank. But that’s always struck me as highly risky because you don’t know what you’re getting, do you? I mean, it would be OK if you could go down there and say, “I’d like some Pierce Brosnan please, or if you’re out of him, I’ll have some Kevin Costner or possibly a little Bill Gates.” But it isn’t like that, is it? It could be any ugly, scrofulous student with criminal tendencies and a genetic predisposition to athlete’s foot. No. No way. I’m not doing that. At least Sally knows what she’s got. And by May she’ll be a mum. Gosh.
Anyway, I arrived back home after my walk in the fields to find the answer phone flashing at me in a cheerful fashion. Ooh goody. A message. Not from Seriously Successful, who appears to have given up on me completely, but from Mungo Brown.
“Hello, Tiffany,” he said in his slightly affected drawl. Or maybe he was drunk. “It’s Mungo here. I hope you’re well. I really enjoyed meeting you at the Oscar Reeds gallery last week and, um . . . I wondered whether you’d like to come to a little dinner party I’m having at my house in Shepherd’s Bush on Friday. Just a small do. Just six of us. Hope you can make it. Around eight? Give me a ring will you, to let me know.”
On Friday I put on my long Nicole Farhi sweater which conveniently covers my bum, and a woollen miniskirt which really flatters my legs, popped on my leopard-skin coat and a fur-trimmed hat, and set off for Shepherd’s Bush. Bit of a schlepp frankly, and the Central Line’s so slow! Please Mind the Gap, said that annoying woman over the Tannoy again. Well yes, I will mind the gap, I thought to myself. I really do mind the gap. That fifteen-minute gap between trains. God, it was eight o’clock already and I was still stuck at Oxford Circus. I hate being late for dinner parties. And I hate it when people are late for mine—turning up at half past nine by which time the first course is curdling and the main course is practically carobonized. So I always try to arrive on time for other people’s. But this time I knew I was going to be late. Damn. And I’d forgotten to bring my mobile phone. Well, I hoped they’d all have started without me. Much better.
“Oh I’m so sorry I’m late,” I said to Mungo when he opened the door to me in Stanlake Road. “I do hope you’ve all started . . .” I stopped. All? What all? Where were the other people? He had said it was a dinner party for six.
“Oh, are the others all later than I am?” I asked, handing him a bottle of rather good Sauvignon. “It’s eight forty-five already.”
“Well . . .” He gave a little laugh. “I’m afraid there aren’t any other people, actually I . . .”
“What, you mean they all canceled? Oh bad luck!” I said. “It’s terribly annoying when that happens. That happened to me on my last birthday. I had forty-four cancellations. Perhaps you should have rescheduled for another day. I wouldn’t have minded.”
Mungo didn’t say anything, he just took my coat with a rather lingering look which swept up from ankles to throat. “What a fabulous fur,” he said. “I love leopard-skin.”
“Oh it’s not real of course,” I said swiftly. “Budget won’t stretch to it, ha ha ha ha! Just joking. I wouldn’t wear real fur. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean I’m vegetarian. I’m not.” And then I noticed something. Or rather an absence of something. Cooking smells. No aroma of roasting lamb, or grilling fish, or baking quiche. Nothing. Just a dusty, fusty smell. And what a bare, tiny place. Like a studio flat. Just a sofa and a telly in the living room, and a few badly upholstered chairs. He’d said “house.” His “house” in Shepherd’s Bush. That was funny.
“Nasty little place you’ve got here,” I said. Actually, I didn’t really say that. I said. “Well, the December air has made me quite peckish!”
“I’m a hopeless cook,” he said, “so I thought I’d order in take-away.” A take-away? Astonishing. “Do you like Indian?” he inquired.
“Er. Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“Or perhaps you prefer Chinese?”
“No. No. Indian would be fine,” I said. “Fine.”
“Would you like a drink?” he said.
“Yes please.”
“Sauvignon OK?” he said with a laugh. My Sauvignon, evidently.
“Yup. Sauvignon would be just fine. How long have you lived here?” I asked as he poured me a glass of wine and then opened a tiny packet of peanuts, like the sort you get given on planes.
“About six months. Of course it’s a bit cramped. But my wife got the house in Hammersmith, the law being the ass that it is.”
“Well, I suppose she needs it with five kids.”
“Yes, maybe, although I would have preferred it to be sold. But there you go,” he added with a sardonic little smile. “Divorced men get a bum deal.”
“Why are you getting divorced?” I asked boldly.
“I don’t know. She just kicked me out. She became a religious nut actually, started going to this weird church in Notting Hill . . .”
“Gosh—I’m surprised she had the time to go to church with five kids.”
“—and they indoctrinated her. They convinced her that I was this mean, uptight, drunk, lascivious, domestically useless chap who she should never have married in the first place,” he said. “That’s bloody sects for you.”
“Oh dear. Is your wife very impressionable, then?”
“No I wouldn’t say so. Anyway, it’s all a drag,” he said. “Let’s order some food. They usually take about forty-five minutes to deliver.” He handed me a leaflet from the Tip Top Tandoori House in t
he Uxbridge Road.
“I’m going to have a number seven, a number forty-three and a number fifty-six,” he said.
“Oh, I’d like the prawn garam masala and the chicken tikka, and some pilau rice, please—that’s number six, number twenty-nine and number forty-one.” Gosh—it was just like doing the lottery! Mungo phoned the restaurant while I stared at the walls. The Anaglypta wallpaper was lifting off at the sides, like a scab.
“Could I just use your bathroom?” I asked. He showed me where it was, and I went in. It was disgusting. Unwashed bath. Scabrous toilet. Taps that were encrusted with lime. An old toothbrush holder and some tiny soap, clearly from a hotel or airline. I had a quick peek in his cabinet—always fascinating, isn’t it, the contents of other people’s bathroom cabinets? My God! Women’s makeup, and deodorant. A small bottle of Oil of Olay, and a can of hairspray. Whose was that? I was happy to see that it was Head Start—the one that Kit had worked on. Then I sat on the sofa again while Mungo fiddled with a rather ancient, portable cassette player. He put on some Ella Fitzgerald. This was undoubtedly the worst dinner party I’d been to since college. How long would it be before I could get away? Still, he was, at least, attractive. Extremely attractive, in fact. And I was starving. That’s the trouble with drinking—one glass of good white wine and I’m ravenous. I’d eat and then plead an early night.
The bell rang. He went to the door and took delivery of the food, in four paper carrier bags. Then I heard him say, “Tiffany, I’m a bit short. Have you got any cash?”
“Er, yes, hang on a minute,” I said, mentally renaming him Mungo McBrown whilst I reached for my bag.
“I need another fifteen pounds.” Fifteen pounds! “Thanks.”
He went into the tiny kitchen with the food, and reappeared with plates and plastic forks, and little sachets of salt and pepper which bore the legend, “Dan Air.” At least the food was good, I thought to myself as he poured me another glass of wine. And then, I don’t know what it was, perhaps it was just the fact that I felt replete and comfortable and slightly tipsy, I just sat back into the sofa. Which is why I didn’t really care as he sat there and talked about his wife and his divorce.
“—outrageous really, she got an ouster order . . . kicked out of my own home . . . and most of the money that went into that house was mine you know . . . she didn’t really work . . . just a bit of teaching . . . her parents never liked me . . . big problems with her father . . . he’s a lawyer, so of course they’re going to shaft me . . . should never have married her . . . mind you the kids are great . . . though she’s trying to turn them against me . . . those people at her church should be strung up.”
“Why don’t you ask me something about myself?” I said indignantly. Actually, I didn’t say that at all. Because the fact is that I couldn’t have cared less. I knew I was never going to see him again, even though he was, really, very, very attractive. I just nodded and made polite noises as his monologue reached fever pitch.
“. . . and no sex, you know. She wouldn’t.”
“Well, she did five times at least,” I said.
“Yes,” he said morosely, “if they’re all mine.”
“Oh dear.”
“Do you like my suit?” he said suddenly, fingering his viscose jacket.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very nice.” Nice and shiny.
“It was only thirty-five pounds,” he said happily. “In a warehouse sale.”
“That’s good,” I said with a discreet glance at my watch. Ten past ten. Good, I could leave soon.
And then something odd happened. Mungo stood up, went to the light switch, and dimmed the overhead light to an amber glow. Then he went to the TV and put in a video. And then he came and sat next to me—right next to me, so that our thighs were touching—on the sofa. What, I wondered, was going on? The TV flickered into life. Then he turned and gave me a lecherous smile. Oh God, not a dirty video, I hoped. Pur-leeze. I found myself staring at his collar, the ends of which were curling up as if in disgust. And the collar was getting closer and closer and then I realized he was going to snog me. Definitely. Yup. This was about to become a snogging situation. His face approached mine, his lips pulled back from this wall of even white teeth. Oh well. A snog’s a snog.
“Dawn over Aberystwyth . . .” said the voice on the video, which I instantly recognized as his. I looked over at the television. There was Mungo, standing on a Welsh beach, the collar of his trenchcoat turned up against the wind. “This is home to the Welsh clam,” he said as he walked along the sand. “A cottage industry which provides employment for hundreds of local people. And now . . .” he said, turning and looking dramatically out to sea, “. . . the clams are drying up.”
I glanced at Mungo, sitting next to me on the sofa. He was no longer looking at me. He was gazing with an expression of intense but happy concentration at his own projected image. “This bit’s really good,” he whispered confidentially, as the picture cut to an interior scene in a local restaurant. And there was Mungo again, napkin tucked into shirt, spoon poised over a bowl of soup. He dipped it in, took a sip, and gave the camera a thoughtful sort of smile. “The clam chowder you can eat in Aberystwyth is as good as any you’ll find in New England,” he said. Suddenly, Mungo stopped the video, and rewound it.
The clam chowder you can eat in Aberystwyth is as good as any you’ll find in New England . . .
“You see, what’s so good about that,” he explained, “is that I had never before attempted to record a link with my mouth full.”
“Well, it was marvelous,” I said in a bored kind of way.
“Yes, I really was pleased with that. The camera crew were very impressed.” He started the tape again, and I sat through the feature to the end, complete with interviews with Welsh clam workers, indignant local people and poignant shots of young children whose future as packers in the local clam factory hung perilously in the balance. Then Trevor McDonald came into view. “That was Mungo Bwown weporting from W-Wales,” he said. The item had taken over ten minutes.
I turned to Mungo to ask for another glass of wine, but he was fiddling with the remote control. The screen scrambled, then cleared, and suddenly there was Mungo Brown again, sitting on a rock, in a windswept field, the collar of his trenchcoat turned up. “Here in the Outer Hebrides,” he began, shouting over the gusting wind, “life has continued in much the same way for decades. Centuries even. But now the late twentieth century is impinging on the peaceful life of these crofters, and a new threat . . .” Suddenly a farmer in a Range Rover drove by shaking his fist at the camera. “Oops, we had to cut that bit out—we were on his land,” Mungo explained. “Hang on.” He wound it forward. “. . . a new threat is looming to the traditional way of life here in the form of a virus on the island’s computers . . .”
Half an hour later, after I had sat through Mungo Brown in Nottinghamshire talking to ex-miners, Mungo Brown in Staffordshire with pottery workers, Mungo Brown in Lincolnshire with bulb planters, I had had enough of Mungo Brown.
“Look, this is fascinating,” I said, standing up. “But I’ve really got to make a move.”
“No—I’m the one who’s got to make a move,” he said with a drunken giggle as he grabbed me by the waist and attempted to wrestle me to the ground.
“For God’s sake—get off! I don’t even know you,” I hissed as he started to loosen his tie.
“Oh come on, Tiffany, I know you want to.”
“Bloody outrageous. How dare you! Who do you think I am?”
“You came here on your own,” he said indignantly.
“I did not. I came here expecting to be one of six people,” I retorted. “I had no idea it was going to be tête-à-tête .”
“Well.” He stood up, reddening. He straightened his polyester tie. “I seem to have made a mistake.”
“Yes,” I said. “You have.”
“But I thought you might just want to—you know—”
“What?”
“Go with th
e flow.”
“I do want to go with the flow,” I said. “With the flow of traffic. I’m leaving now. Could you get me my coat? Thanks. Goodbye and . . .”—what should I say? A thank you was hardly in order—“. . . good luck with your divorce.”
December Continued
Being single isn’t so bad really. In fact, there are lots of good things to be said for it, and every time I have a bad date I cheer myself up by enumerating the many advantages of living on one’s own. On my way back from Shepherd’s Bush I passed a pleasant half hour listing them in the little notebook I keep in my bag for this purpose.
TEN GOOD THINGS ABOUT BEING SINGLE:
1. You can spend a lot of quality time with yourself.
2. You can eat potato chips in bed.
3. Your Janet Reger is secure.
4. You are not married to a bastard, or even to Mr. Not-Quite-Right.
5. You do not have to be totally meticulous about cleaning the bath after use.
6. You do not have to look and smell alluring twenty-four hours a day.
7. You can put on weight if you wish.
8. You can watch Xena: Warrior Princess without being sneered at for your plebeian taste.
9. You can watch Blind Date, ditto.
10. You can put that buttery knife in the marmalade jar.
11. You can, in a no-panties situation, retrieve yesterday’s pair from the linen basket.
12. You can converse uninhibitedly with your domestic appliances.
13. You can sleep diagonally.
14. You can fall in love.
15. Being single is an important fashion statement.
“You’re right—being single and female is very chic,” said Frances on the phone the following morning. “It’s cool. I’m glad you’ve come round to my way of thinking, Tiffany. Marriage is passé—we’re Lone Rangers. We’re hip.”
“I thought we were SINKs,” I said, “Single Income No Kids. Or what’s the other one? SINMOSSs: Single Income Never Married Owner-Occupiers. Or aren’t we SINBADs? Still No Boyfriend, Absolutely Desperates?”