His inner voice was already hitting a teenage squeal. He had to stay calm and remember that, despite the way his mother spoke to him, he was an adult.
‘Cheers,’ he said, offering up his glass for a chink.
‘Cheers.’
‘So,’ he said, slumping back into the welcoming embrace of his armchair, the brand of which – La-Z-Boy – his mother could never be permitted to know. Ideally, she’d also never find out that the arms contained a hinged compartment for as many remote controls as a man could ever dream of. The nausea was still there. He couldn’t wait any longer. He had to know the worst. ‘What brings you here?’ he said, with a tentative smile. ‘Not that it isn’t great to see you. I mean, it’s lucky I was in. I’m usually not. But we’re both in luck. That’s what I mean. Just … to what do I owe this pleasure?’ He was taking it too far, now. He was beginning to sound implausible, or perhaps even sarcastic.
‘Well,’ she said, allowing her body the slightest of yields to the temptations of modern upholstery, ‘I’ve been having a long hard think, and you’re my only child, and …’
‘Is someone ill? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. I’m just trying to say that I feel as if our relationship has fizzled away to nothing. I don’t think I know you any more. And I’d like to rectify that.’
This was the scariest thing Matt had ever heard. The hairs on his neck prickled and his tongue went numb. Maori war dances were less frightening.
‘So I thought maybe I’d move in for a few days,’ continued Carol. ‘You’ve got a spare room. I won’t be any trouble. In fact, I’ll help out. This place could do with a tidy. Just a week or so. Until we know who one another is again. I thought if I said it on the phone you wouldn’t understand, and you’d think of some excuse, so I decided to just turn up.’
Carol downed the rest of her wine in a single gulp. ‘I’m dog-tired,’ she continued. ‘Mind if I turn in?’
And with that, she stood and made for the spare room, pausing on the way to pick up a capacious bag she had concealed under a draped raincoat. ‘I’m sure we won’t be bored,’ she said perkily, shutting the door behind her.
Matt was too shocked to respond, or even to move. He realised that his mouth was open, but no sound had emerged. Of all the apocalyptic scenarios that had been running through his mind since her arrival, this was one he had never even begun to imagine.
What on earth could have prompted this?
A week?
She came out of the spare room a minute or so later, wearing a nightie, clutching a faded purple sponge-bag Matt vaguely recognised, and gave him a quick, thin smile as she walked rapidly past. As she was closing the bathroom door, Matt heard himself stuttering, ‘But what about Dad?’
‘Seven frozen lasagnes.’
The door clicked shut and locked.
When she re-emerged, the sight of his mother’s legs rendered Matt speechless, and she disappeared into the bedroom before a word of protest passed his lips.
awkward breakfasts
Matt was already walking out of his bedroom, naked, yawning and tumescent, before he remembered he was not alone. He retreated and slammed the door, praying he hadn’t been glimpsed, and jumped on the spot a couple of times to encourage gravity’s help in redistributing his blood supply. When it could be done without excessive indecency, he wrapped a towel around himself and headed for the bathroom, stooping, with his eyes lowered, in the hope that he would not be forced into conversation while only one towel away from nudity.
‘Morning!’ came the chirp from the kitchen. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Mmm. Thanks. Just having a shower.’
‘Is there somewhere round here I can get a croissant?’
‘Er … yeah. There’s a supermarket on the corner down that way.’
‘Marvellous. I’ll be back in two ticks.’
As Matt showered, enjoying the feel of his gym-hardened muscles slicking up under the shower gel, he began rehearsing maternal ejection speeches. The great-idea-but-just-an-impossible-week-for-it angle seemed most tactful. He could even propose rescheduling the visit for another time, knowing that other excuses would arise when he needed them.
By the time he had shaved – a prolonged ritual involving the application of more unguents than his father had purchased in an entire lifetime – he was feeling confident of the exit strategy. As he gelled his hair, it occurred to him that his mother’s visit hadn’t been too painful after all. Perhaps he should invite her back for dinner some day.
He took his time selecting an outfit for the day, and arrived at the breakfast table thinking more about the day’s work that lay ahead of him than the task of dislodging his mother. He found that she had returned from the shop with a preposterous amount of food. An array of croissants, pains au chocolat, fresh bread, jams, yoghurts and fruit covered every square inch of the table, looking more like a buffet for ten than a meal for two. If he got started on a breakfast like this, he’d be late for work. A cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes eaten standing up in front of the TV was his usual morning routine.
He decided to let himself be late. One meal together wasn’t so much for his mother to ask of him, even if it was at an awkward time of day. And in the course of the meal, having demonstrated that he was hospitable, patient and kind, he’d ease the conversation towards the lovely-idea-but-not-this-week routine he’d perfected in the shower.
‘I’ve made a pot of Earl Grey,’ said Carol.
‘Where did you find that?’
‘I bought it.’
‘What, the teapot?’
‘No, the Earl Grey.’
‘Oh.’
‘The pot was under your oven, behind the pans.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Matt was by no means unaccustomed to having awkward breakfasts with women he hardly knew, but for the woman to be his mother was an unusual twist.
‘Sleep well?’ she said, again.
‘Yes, thanks.’
Matt reached for a croissant and picked up a fresh pot of Bonne Maman raspberry jam. He wasn’t sure if she’d bought this brand as a joke, but he didn’t like to ask. There was something in the homely shape of the pot and the gingham-patterned lid that took him back to his childhood. He had forgotten about this jam, about how much he used to love it, and was surprised that it had never occurred to him to buy it for himself.
He hadn’t eaten jam for years. As it melted on his tongue, along with the fresh, buttery croissant, he felt a surge of unidentifiable emotion spread through his body.
The taste of this croissant, with this jam, transported him. It was not that he had often eaten croissants as a child, or even that this jam held a unique, nostalgic flavour, but something in that precise sensation on his tongue popped him out of the moment. From where he was sitting, at the dining table with his mother, for a split second he felt like a child, looking up at where the adult Matt would be on a normal day, standing over the coffee table, joylessly shovelling in a heap of oversweet cereal, gazing at a shouty, uninteresting TV programme, alone.
Matt was not a lonely man. He was as far from lonely as it was possible to be. He had a desirable job, a beautiful flat, and a SIM card containing the numbers of many of the top people in the magazine industry, as well as a good-sized sample of the sexiest women in the country, many of whom he had bedded. If, aged sixteen, he’d been asked to write down a fantasy of everything he could have wanted from life, this would have been it. The idea that there could be any space for loneliness in his busy and frantically sociable life was preposterous.
But occasionally Matt looked around his flat – at the kitchen he never used, and the furniture he’d had chosen for him and his racks of this year’s clothes and his gadgets and his wall of DVDs – and he wondered if these things had anything to do with him. There were odd periods, once every few months, when he simply didn’t want to go out, or see anyone, or do anything.
This first mouthful of breakfast with his mother had
, for some reason, reminded him of this sensation, not because he felt the mood descending again, but because of some tangential connection he could only half grasp – perhaps because eating breakfast with his mother reminded him of his childhood, of a time before these anxieties meant anything; perhaps because he saw in his mother’s eyes a bleak prognosis of his life.
‘That nice?’ she said.
‘Mmm. Very.’
Then Carol began to talk, telling Matt the latest news of his father, and of things that had been happening in Pinner, before reeling off local gossip about the families he had grown up among, focusing on marriages, jobs and hospitalisations, with the greatest level of detail reserved for babies born to childhood friends, people he would have entirely forgotten about were it not for these periodic updates from his mother. Carol somehow remembered every name, and even the odd birth-weight.
Matt half-listened, neither bored nor interested, waiting for an opening to arrive for his shower speech, but, as gaps began to appear in her chatter, he found that the phrases he had planned now escaped him. The balloon of righteous outrage at her invasion of his life was mysteriously deflating. Sitting at his heavily laden dining table, eating breakfast opposite this ageing, infinitely familiar woman, he realised there was something intimate in all this, something companionable, something not entirely unpleasant.
Was there really any desperate rush to kick her out? He’d be at work all day, after all. What would it cost him to let her stay one more night? There was no way she really wanted to visit for a week. She must have just said that to scare him, or maybe as a joke. By this time tomorrow, she’d want to go home. She’d do it of her own accord, without him having to make any difficult speeches. However gently you put it, whatever excuses you’d prepared, there was something tricky about kicking your mother out of your home.
Some things, in a family, are never forgotten. If he turned her away now, it might be held against him for years to come. Taking the long view, he realised that perhaps it would be less hassle to let her have her way for just a short while longer.
When he left for work, he simply said, ‘See you later,’ heading for the front door without really understanding what had stopped him from even attempting to get rid of her.
‘I brought my spare keys with me,’ she said. ‘So I can let myself in and out.’
Matt was annoyed to find how unannoyed he was to hear this.
‘OK,’ he said, closing the door behind him.
As the lift carried him down to street level, he felt how he imagined a shoplifter must feel, sneaking out into the daylight with a guilty secret. The thought of what his colleagues would say if they knew what he had done made him flush with shame.
Helen and Paul
a little more oomph
As she lay in bed, listening to her husband crash around the kitchen, Helen knew she had to get up. She did not, on the whole, believe in pre-11 a.m. human interaction, but today she had no way out of facing Clive before he went to work. If she had been braver, it wouldn’t have come down to a breakfast confrontation, but she had lazily left it until the last possible moment.
Helen dragged herself upright and put on her dressing-gown: the old, cosy padded one that had been mothballed for the interregnum between her two marriages but had come out again not long after her second honeymoon.
‘Morning, darling,’ said Clive, as she shuffled into the kitchen. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Mmm.’
‘You’re up early.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Any special reason?’
‘Not really.’
‘You going somewhere?’
‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m going to see Paul today.’
‘What – for breakfast?’
‘No. Around lunchtime.’
‘OK,’ said Clive, his intonation making it clear that Helen wasn’t making any sense, but that he wouldn’t attempt to force an explanation out of her. One of the things Helen had found most attractive about Clive was this incurious streak in his character. In the course of their marriage, she had carefully nurtured it. The last thing you want in a second husband is someone inquisitive. On occasion, though, a little more oomph would have made him easier to talk to.
‘I’m staying for a while,’ she said.
‘Oh. OK.’
‘A few days, I mean.’
‘A few days?’
‘A week. Probably.’
‘A week? You’re going for lunch and staying a week.’
‘Lunch isn’t important. I’m just going at some point today, I don’t really know when, and I’m staying a week.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
‘I’m his mother.’
‘I know that. I just … well … OK. Is it his birthday?’
‘No. I’m just going because I want to.’
‘Well … have fun. Give me a ring and tell me how you’re getting on.’
Everything Helen had done in the course of their years together had taught Clive to behave like this. She had trained him to let her be. He had learnt (the hard way) that attempts to thwart her were futile. Yet part of her still yearned to be challenged and confronted, as she had been by her first husband.
Clive had accepted her explanation without even coaxing out of her that she was going uninvited, and could quite possibly arrive back home that same evening, spurned and humiliated. If he’d stopped to think about it for more than a second, he’d have realised that Paul would never invite her to stay for a whole week. He never even invited her for dinner. And having figured out that Paul was unaware his mother was about to descend on him, he would surely have tried to talk sense into her, tried to stop her attempting something so brazenly stupid.
You needed this in a husband. It was their job to help curb your crazier instincts and desires. Her friends had talked her into it, now she needed her husband to talk her out of it. But this was not Clive’s department. She had never allowed him that role. It was too much to ask of him that the one time she actually wanted someone to stand up to her, he should somehow sense it and step in.
With a kiss on the forehead and a jangle of car keys, Clive set off out of the house. Now she was committed. She’d hoped to spend most of the day mulling over whether or not to go through with her plan, but now she had told Clive, and he had so blithely accepted it, there was nothing more to think about. She couldn’t not go, or put it off for any longer.
the two best things that ever happened to her
Helen had no idea why she’d described her visit as lunch. There was no point arriving at Paul’s house until he got back from work. Lunch had somehow sounded more plausible. She was used to having lunch with people, so it was the first word that came out of her mouth.
Now she had said it, the day stretched emptily ahead of her. She felt restless, too excited and nervous to think about anything other than her visit to Paul, but with nothing useful she could do about it until evening, when he’d get home from work.
In the end, she decided to set off and explore Paul’s area of town before the visit. It would give her something vaguely relevant to do, and help screw up her courage. She hadn’t yet been to Paul’s new house, even though he’d been living there more than six months, and had never visited Hoxton before. It would be interesting, and the time she spent there would ease her into Paul’s world, before having to face him in person.
Hoxton, it turned out, was more stimulating than she expected. She had never seen anywhere quite so schizophrenic, so confused about whether to be rich or poor. The shop-fronts seemed to alternate between tiny supermarkets where nothing is fresh and everything is foreign, and the kind of restaurants where unnervingly good-looking waiters bring you teetering sculptures of shiny food on plates that aren’t round. Some roads looked like there had been a riot the week before, others reeked of money. The people on the streets all seemed to be dressed in either high fashion or asyl
um-seeker tracksuits, with each group apparently invisible to the other.
It was as if some magical space-saving superimposition had taken place, and a rich area had somehow landed inside a poor area without either set of people noticing that half of everything around them was for someone else.
As her feet and her brain grew tired, Helen decided to sit out the remainder of the afternoon in a café. She had the choice between two on opposite sides of the street, one serving PG Tips in a styrofoam cup for 30p, the other offering more-froth-than-coffee cappuccino for two quid. She opted for the latter, even though she felt equally out of place in both. If in doubt, go somewhere clean, was her general rule of thumb in these matters. When she was younger, she had worked in a hotel, which had left her with an abiding certainty that everywhere was at least twice as dirty as it looked. This didn’t worry her unduly, she just knew that the glass in your hotel bathroom had probably been dried on the dirty towel of the outgoing occupant, that your food was largely composed of the previous day’s leftovers, and that your bed cover had never been washed and contained every bodily fluid you could name and a few you couldn’t.
She had been working as a waitress when she met Larry. She’d served him lunch and, like most men in those days, he’d flirted with her, but to her surprise she found herself flirting back. Back then, she had been a head-turner, her every step a little easier and lighter than it was now, as if her life was cushioned and levitated by the thrilling potency of her youth and beauty. The exact thing that she felt slipping away from her faster than ever, these last few years, had at that point been at its peak.
Men wanted her, and she knew they wanted her, and they knew she knew, and it was almost impossible to talk to any man without being aware of her own magnetism. Her hair was straight and dark, with one neat curl at the end made fresh every morning with her beloved curling tongs, after which she’d carefully draw round her dark eyes with heavy black liner. Without the curl and her liner, she didn’t feel quite herself. Her legs, which as a teenager she’d always thought too long and skinny, also exerted a strange power over men, and as skirts got shorter, she found herself drawing more and more gazes. For a good ten years of her life, Helen forgot what it felt like to be ignored.
Whatever Makes You Happy Page 2