Which was what he did. And it was just as we were almost home and swinging into my drive that Leo, obviously beside himself with glee, decided to pipe up.
‘Oh, Stefan,’ he said brightly, ‘did Mum tell you about—’
‘Leo!’ I hissed at him. ‘Belt up, will you!’
‘Tell me about what?’
‘Um …’
We got out of the car.
There is a point in any potentially confrontational situation where one has to take stock and weigh up the odds. In my case, in this case, it was a question of dignity. Dignity versus what I knew would be a deeply satisfying and cathartic encounter.
We’re back with Patrick, of course. Boy, had I done dignity with him. On the day I discovered I was pregnant with Leo, I spent a lot of time rehearsing. I’m going to have a baby. I’m going to have your baby. I’m going to have our baby. I have something important to tell you and I need you to be completely honest about how you feel about it. That kind of thing. It had been a sunny day. A day not unlike this one. A day that had fallen exactly eighteen days after the day when I found out about him and her. It had been a long and thoughtful eighteen days. There had been indications of his infidelity for some time, of course, but the twenty-five-year-old me had elected to ignore them. The twenty-five-year-old me had been anxious to ascribe them to work-stress, or misinformation, or crap. The twenty-five-year-old me had been such an optimistic, hopeful soul.
But also someone with dignity. He was due to come round for supper that evening. We generally ate at either his place or mine. On this day I hadn’t bothered to get anything in. Instead I had zipped down to Boots in my lunchbreak and bought a Clear Blue pregnancy test. Being over a week late I had used it at tea-time, straight after I had returned home from work. I’m having a baby. We’re having a baby. What’s all this about - and tell me the truth, now - what’s all this about between you and her? I could have said something sooner, of course. Had I said something sooner it would have been easier. Eighteen days. Any of which might have played host to the ending of our relationship. As it was, I still had a relationship with him and now I had two bits of data to impart. That I was having his baby. And that I knew he was cheating on me.
He arrived. I said, ‘We need to talk, I think, Patrick.’
He said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Oh? Right. OK. What about?’
I said, ‘Us, Patrick. Us. About how things have been going. About the fact that I think we’ve reached the end of the road.’
He said, ‘You do?’
I said, ‘Oh. Don’t you think so? I’m sorry but, you see, I don’t love you. I don’t love you and I don’t want to see you any more.’
Or something like that. I was brief, at any rate. Because I can clearly recall sitting on my little sofa in front of EastEnders soon after, twenty-seven unmarked French tests beside me, while someone on screen - Michelle? - shouted the odds.
I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t about dignity at all. Maybe it was actually about fear. Sometimes I wonder how the conversation - had I let it happen as it might have - would have panned out. But not for long, because however it might have (and there were countless permutations and possibilities), all the options had me cast in a role I hadn’t planned on playing, and the child in a bit-part it didn’t deserve. So, in acting as I did, I never had to be the victim. Didn’t have to own up that I knew he’d been unfaithful to me. And never had to see the horror on his face when I told him I was going to have a baby that I knew he wouldn’t want. Didn’t have to deal with any of it. And I got to keep my dignity.
So here we are in the kitchen. As life events go this is small fry, of course. Just some jerk. Just some minor relationship. Nothing to get worked up about. Thus the dignified thing would be to engage autopilot, tell him sorry, but no, he couldn’t have the pictures, and then send him, politely, on his way. But something in me has decided to have none of it. Thing is, where’s dignity ever got me anyway?
‘Did you tell me about what?’ he asks again.
Leo, whom I have denied the pleasure of enlightening him, has gone upstairs, at my instruction, to get on with his homework. I fill the kettle with water and plug it in. About your paintings,’ I answer levelly.
‘What about them?’ he asks.
I fold my arms. ‘Your paintings are gone,’ I say gravely.
‘What?’
‘Del couldn’t stand the sight of them, you see, so she gave them back to me.’
The words feel nice. He winces slightly.
‘And?’ He has now adopted a slightly gladiatorial stance: arms across chest, legs apart.
‘Cup of tea?’ I suggest, crossing the kitchen and pulling mugs from the cupboard. ‘Or perhaps you’d like something stronger. I think I have a couple of Kingfishers rolling around at the back of the fridge. Yes, indeed I do. Those ones I got in specially for you last week. Beer?’
‘No. No, thanks, actually. Look, Lu, what do you mean “gone”?’
‘Well, not gone, as such. More sort of evolved. Or would that be devolved? Hmm. Yes. Devolved. Tell you what,’ I say, and beginning to tire of his increasingly irritating presence, ‘I’ve got an awful lot on tonight, actually. Come along.’ I take him by the hand and lead him out through the back door and into the garage. His palm is clammy. And I have, I note, moved now from schoolgirl to matron. I pick up the bin-bag and hold it out to him. It’s not too heavy, but slightly unwieldy. There are some shards of board - hues various - poking out from the sides. He doesn’t take it. Just stares at it. ‘Here you are,’ I say. ‘I think that’s all of them.’
‘All of what?’ He is looking mightily confused.
‘All of the bits, of course.’ I jiggle the contents to illustrate.
‘Bits? Bits of what?’
‘The bits of your Abstract Expressionist paintings.’
‘My paintings? Why are my paintings in bits?’
‘Because I broke them into bits.’ I say this very slowly, enunciating every word.
‘Broke them?’ He gapes. ‘Why on earth did you break them?’
‘I had to.’
‘Had to?’
I nod at him. ‘No choice.’
‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘I just couldn’t stop myself, Stefan. Because,’ I explain, smiling, ‘they were absolute crap.’
There is no scene. Because he is mute with distress. Thus, ten minutes, some muttering and a few flounces later, he has pedalled off down the street and out of my life.
And, gosh, I feel so much better.
16
Saturday 2 June
Doesn’t last, of course. A euphoric, watershed, satisfying moment to be sure, but nevertheless a transient one. If I look at things life-wise, tot up the points on the Fisher Happiness Index, I’m not doing so great. What I really feel is bloody lousy. And you can’t persuade yourself out of feeling bloody lousy any more than you can persuade yourself out of a cold. Which new delight is what I now seem to have contracted, quite possibly as a result of a low white-cell count, quite possibly as a result of a depleted immune system, quite possibly as a result of feeling so very bloody lousy. In any event, it’s with less than unbridled enthusiasm that I contemplate the prospect of trailing round the zoo all day.
Aren’t we going to have fun, boys?’ I gush anyway, because that’s what you have to do. Young boys, I’ve learnt, are a bit like lawnmowers. Get them up and running and they’re generally away. Leave them to their natural propensity for scowling lethargy and dissent for any length of time and their flywheels tend to get stuck.
‘Yes,’ agrees Del, whose base levels of enthusiasm know no bounds at the best of times, and who today, of course, is almost effervescent with it. Dinner-dance, hotel, the prospect of unassisted vision on the horizon. Why wouldn’t she be, bless her?
I give her a hug. ‘Have a fab time,’ I tell her, ‘and don’t hurry back on Monday. I can hang on to Sim for as long as you like.’
‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘Might take you
up on that, darling.’ Ben toots the horn and points to his watch. ‘Anyhow, must off. Have a fab time yourselves, guys. And you make sure you behave yourself, Sim. I don’t want to hear you’ve been playing Auntie Lu up, especially with her being poorly.’ She reels him in for a cuddle and blows me a kiss.
‘I’m fine, Del. Go on.’
I’m just waving them off when I hear the phone ringing.
‘Aha! Caught you!’ trills the voice at the other end.
I finish blowing my nose. ‘Joe?’
‘The very same. I was calling to ask you a favour.’
Except when I’ve been driving him to work, I’ve seen little of Joe for around ten days now, as he has been on site overseeing a new installation. As my French is of little use in the bowels of North Pentwyn Community Centre, he has been driven around by one of his engineers. I reach out to shut the front door and switch the phone to my other hand. ‘Oh,’ I snuffle, ‘what kind of favour?’
‘I wondered if you had any plans for today, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘We-ell, it’s just that I have Angharad for the weekend and it’s a lovely day. And I only have the one arm, of course. And no car. And I really don’t think I can face Claire’s Accessories. And, well, I wondered if you might do me a tiny favour and drive us somewhere. The beach or something.’
Oh, he did, did he? ‘I can’t Joe. I’m busy,’ I tell him.
‘Oh. Oh, right.’
He sounds like it never occurred to him I might be. ‘Sorry,’ I add.
‘No matter,’ he answers. ‘Doing anything nice?’
‘Depends on your definition of “nice”, I suppose. I’m taking the boys to Bristol Zoo. I’ve got Simeon for the weekend and Leo’s got a project to get done and—’
‘Perfect!’ he replies. ‘Can we come with you?’
Just like that. ‘With us?’
‘To the zoo. Yes. Can we? Come on. Take pity on me. Take us to the zoo.’
‘But—’
‘But what, Lu?’
The problem is that there isn’t really a ‘but’ with which I can address the situation. No space in the car ‘but’, no time ‘but’, no logistics ‘but’, no inconvenience ‘but’. There is the small but important ‘but’ of not particularly wanting to, of course, but it’s a sorry little ‘but’, with no basis in logic, and therefore completely useless as artillery. But then again, as ‘buts’ go, it is valid. Do I really want to spend all day having to make polite conversation with Joe? No, I do not. I already have a plan for our outing to the zoo. A plan that will involve the boys frolicking gaily in the sunshine, while I trail around all day on my own, staring bleakly into cages and feeling sorry for myself.
‘Come on,’ he coaxes. ‘Take us with you. After all, you don’t want to trail around all day on your own feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘Who said anything about feeling sorry for myself?’ I snap.
‘Well, you’re certainly not living up to your name right now.’
‘What?’
‘Light of the Morning, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, how very droll. I have a cold.’ I cough, to illustrate. ‘And who said I was going on my own anyway?’
‘No one,’ he says brightly. ‘You are, though, aren’t you? Just you and the kids and your runny nose. Which seems a shame when I could come along as well and cheer you up. Come on. Be nice to me. Take us to the zoo.’
I’m not entirely sure that I want to be cheered up, and even if I do, I’m far from sure that Joe Delaney is the person to do it. But there is something so childlike and hopeful in his manner that for a moment I almost forget that I don’t much like him.
‘All right,’ I decide, sniffing. ‘You can come to the zoo.’
Leo, however, was deeply unimpressed. ‘That’s so totally skank, Mum,’ he moaned, while I packed up the sandwiches. ‘And I suppose it means I have to sit in the back now, do I?’
‘Yes, Leo, you have to sit in the back.’
‘Well, I’m not going in the middle. I’m not sitting next to her.’
‘Nor am I!’ chipped in Simeon.
I zipped up the backpack. ‘Well, one of you will have to,’ I told them both. ‘Unless you’d prefer to travel in the boot.’
‘Yeah! Wicked! We’ll do that, Mum! Yes!’
‘Now you’re just being silly. You will sit in the back and you will be nice to Angharad - got it? Or we don’t go at all. OK?’
Leo’s face brightened perceptibly. ‘We don’t care. We don’t want to go anyway, do we, Sim? Why do we have to go to the stupid zoo? The zoo’s pants. Why can’t we go bowling? You said last week that we could go bowling this weekend. We want to go bowling, don’t we. Sim? Can’t we go bowling instead, Mum?’
I took the picnic into the hall and put it on the floor by the front door. They skittered around behind me hopefully. ‘No,’ I told them sternly. ‘We cannot go bowling instead. It’s a lovely warm day and we should be out in the sunshine. And you have a project to finish, young man. Remember?’
Leo rolled his eyes. ‘Mum, we do not need to go to the zoo to do my project. We can just get a book from the library and do it.’
‘No, we can’t do that, Leo, actually, because every book in the library that is anything remotely connected to anything south of the equator is already on loan. To parents of children who were sensible enough to have told them they were doing a project on Antarctica when they were told about it by their teachers three weeks back. Now, go and get your sweatshirts, please.’
He spread his hands. ‘So why don’t we just buy one, then?’
‘Because I am not going to waste good money on a book you will never so much as glance at again.’
‘It’ll cost just as much to go to Bristol Zoo. If we didn’t go to Bristol Zoo we would have enough money to buy a book and go bowling.’
‘Leo, we are not going bowling, OK? We are going to Bristol Zoo. Now. Who needs the toilet?’
‘Well, I’m not sitting next to her.’
‘Her name is Angharad, Leo. And, Leo, you will sit - atchoo! - where you’re told.’
So lovely to be out on a family outing. Such lovely, enriching quality time. God, what is it with children, these days? When I was ten I would be beside myself with excitement at the thought of being taken on a trip to the zoo. Beside myself. I blame Steven Spielberg.
When we arrive at Joe’s house they are already waiting outside for us. Angharad is skipping along the pavement (so at least one child in this trio is exhibiting some signs of enthusiasm) and Joe is perched on his front wall with a pair of sunglasses on his head and a candy-striped cool-bag parked between his legs. He stands up and waves cheerily at us.
And that’s another thing, Mum,’ Leo starts, as Joe advances with it. ‘Why do we always have to take a picnic? Why can’t we eat in the restaurant like everyone else does? I hate sitting in that picnic bit. You get bird poo on your head. Everyone else eats in the restaurant. Why do we have to have smelly sandwiches all the time?’
I swivel in my seat and fix him on the end of a particularly virulent species of glare. ‘Get in the back,’ I growl.
‘Well,’ says Joe, once everyone is in and belted up and we are off, once more, on our jolly travels, ‘isn’t this nice? Must be years since I last went to Bristol Zoo. Do they still have Wendy the Elephant?’
They do indeed still have Wendy the Elephant, but she rarely does the walkabouts she used to, being rather elderly these days. Having managed to find a parking space on the top of Clifton Down and only a twenty-minute precipitous trail back down to the entrance, we obtain our family ticket (oh, irony), gather up our maps and bags and head on out into the gardens. At least Joe has managed to break the ice somewhat, by recounting to the boys with much graphic detail how, as children, he and his brother used to follow Wendy around on her twice daily excursions, in the hopes of being witness to her frequent emissions of grapefruit-sized nuggets of steaming brown dung. There was a keeper who used to follow along b
ehind with a wheelbarrow and shovel and collect it all up,’ he tells them chattily. ‘They used to save it, you see, for manuring the roses. I expect they still do.’
‘Wicked!’ says Simeon, much enthused by the subject matter and skipping along brightly at his side. ‘We went to the zoo in Jersey last year, and the gorillas there used to poo in people’s faces if they annoyed them.’
‘That’s stupid,’ mutters Leo, marching along on Joe’s other flank and obviously anxious to reclaim the conversational impetus. ‘They can’t poo at people. You can’t poo at things.’
Simeon rolls his eyes. ‘They didn’t actually poo in people’s faces, stupid. They would do a poo in the grass then pick it up and throw it at them. We saw it.’
‘Liar.’
‘We did. They would—’
‘Thank you, Simeon! I don’t think we want to hear any more about gorilla toilet habits, if you don’t mind. Now, what shall we go and look at first?’
Angharad, who is a girl - and can therefore be relied upon not to take part in such infantile displays of toilet humour - is doing what girls do best: walking sensibly beside me with her Groovy Chick mini-rucksack on her back and carefully studying the complimentary map and animal-encounter itinerary in order to plan our day. ‘Ah!’ she exclaims. ‘Look! They have gorillas here as well now. Shall we go and see the gorillas?’
Which turns out to be a shrewd move, as the hippo enclosure, which we are now passing, seems to be the place of the moment. It is six deep in spectators. There is an animal encounter scheduled here any time now, and the animals themselves seem anxious to oblige: they seem to be having an encounter of their own.
‘Ah, the spring,’ says Joe, as we skirt around the excitable throng. ‘When a young hippo’s fancy …’ He points towards the water. ‘Don’t fancy yours much, Leo.’
Fortunately, the mammals we’re after are housed on an island, the moat for which, comfortingly, looks more than wide enough to put paid to any shot-putting activities. But the gorillas are all holed up inside so we carry on round to the indoor part of the enclosure, which fetid environs they share with Wendy herself. She, though, is outside being scrubbed down in the sunshine, but the evidence of her recent passing hangs like a miasma in the still warm air. The boys, somewhat deflated by the general lack of primate activity, and the keeper’s insistence that beating one’s chest is an absolute no-no when there are silverback males in the vicinity, console themselves with the fact that one of the females has her bottom in the air.
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