by India Knight
Kate is tapping the side of her glass with her knife. ‘I’d like to say a few words,’ she says, ‘on this happy occasion.’ She beams at Robert, who is deep in conversation with Flo. ‘Florence!’ she shouts. ‘Stop talking to Robert. You can’t possibly be saying anything interesting and he is bored of looking polite.’
Flo, who is used to this brand of motherly chat, raises her eyes to heaven. Robert smiles at her reassuringly. Kate clears her throat.
‘The marvellous thing,’ she begins, fixing the horizon and smiling beatifically, ‘the marvellous thing is that we’re all here. And that we all love each other. Despite the fact that most of your fathers are frankly unspeakable human beings with terrible emotional problems…’
‘Not to mention physical,’ sniggers Flo, remembering Maurice, husband number three, whom Kate refused to sleep with on the grounds that she hadn’t been able to see what he looked like throughout their courtship – she was too vain to wear her glasses and suffers from myopia. The poor man was eventually driven into the comforting arms of his therapist. Kate has, ever since, insisted on the fact that the therapist is blind. ‘The poor blind thing,’ Kate says at parties. ‘So brave, without her stick. Of course, at home it’s tippety-tap, all day long.’
Kate is continuing. ‘We are all here and we all love each other. We support each other. And it is in the spirit of supportiveness that I would urge you all to keep the bread rolls away from Clara, who is in serious danger of turning into… well, a sort of pudding on legs, really.’ Kate looks pensive. ‘Or perhaps a hippopotamus. Which, I think we all agree, would be a terrible shame for such a pretty girl.’ She turns to me, radiating motherly love. ‘You’re so beautiful, darling. Don’t become obese. For all our sakes.’
You’re probably thinking this is quite mean – and, indeed, it is – but I am used to Kate and her funny little ways, so I mutter, ‘Go away,’ at her, not unaffectionately, and grab a roll off a passing waiter. Robert winks at me across the table. Tom says, ‘You look great, Clara.’ Tarka, helpfully, says, ‘Yeah, big is beautiful.’ Still, Kate is nothing if not democratic. We are asked to raise our glasses to celebrate the fact that Evie hasn’t gone off to the loo to be sick yet; as well as to toast Robert.
After a few minutes, we all begin to settle into what seems to be developing into a relatively peaceful occasion. We’ve barely tucked into our starters – my bruschetta look particularly appetizing – when Kate taps her glass again, awkwardly, with her right hand. Unusually for her, she is looking disconcerted.
We put our forks down again, but Kate does not immediately fill the expectant silence. She clears her throat. Amazed by this less than gung-ho display – Kate is giving every impression of looking nervous and nerves are not normally part of her repertoire – Robert and I catch each other’s eye.
Tom’s eyebrow is lifted quizzically. ‘Spit it out, Kate. Dinner’s getting cold,’ he says, for which he would usually be rebuked (Kate wouldn’t care for being linked with saliva). But there is no rebuke forthcoming, and suddenly the whole table is silent.
‘There’s something else,’ Kate says, and then pauses again. The moment is filmic. The seconds turn into a good minute and a half, during which there is a pin-drop silence. Kate seems to be struggling.
‘Oh no,’ Tarka suddenly yells. ‘It’s like the bit in Who Will Love My Children?, when the matey – the matrey – the mom gets real sick. She’s, like, gonna die. So she gets all her kids round and she’s, like, crying. Because, you know, who will love them?’
This impertinence seems to snap Kate out of her reverie. And how: ‘Oh really,’ she says, eyeing Tarka with a basilisk stare that has the immediate effect of reducing the latter to a serious bout of lip-wobbling. ‘For God’s sake, you cretinous young woman. It is nothing of the sort.’ She sighs to herself. ‘I can’t believe that my stepson has a girlfriend named after a variety of lentil. I mean,’ she adds, raising her voice, ‘my daughter may be fat’ – and here she points at me languidly, so that half the restaurant cranes around for a good look – ‘but at least she has a brain. Of course, she wastes it terribly…’ There is a pause here, then: ‘Christ! Anyway. I, um. I, er. I… Well, darlings, I’ve met someone. Someone very special. A soulmate, you might say. An exceptional human being. And…’
‘Please,’ I say, meaning it. ‘Please don’t marry him. Please say you’re not going to marry him.’
But it’s too late. Kate, flushed and beaming, has slowly lifted her left hand for us all to see, and there, sparkling quietly, is a giant, square-cut emerald. ‘He’s a wonderful, wonderful man,’ she is saying, as though in slow motion. ‘He’s a seer.’
‘Is a seer, like, a lord?’ asks Evie, who, though lovely, is not necessarily the brightest little pixie in the forest.
‘No, Evie, that’s a peer,’ I explain kindly.
‘One who pees,’ says Flo, purely to confuse her.
‘A lord who pees?’ blinks Evie, thoroughly muddled. ‘Gross. So what’s a seer, Kate?’
‘One who sees, darling,’ Kate replies. ‘One who sees. He is a mystic. He has an ancient soul. As do I, apparently… He has looked deep within my soul and chosen me.’
Fancying this seer-ing lark myself, I look around the table. I may not be able to look deep within the assorted souls – and I may not want to – but I notice that Tom’s just ordered a double whisky and Evie has hit the bread rolls, always a sign that she’s in the mood for a spot of inter-course regurgitation. Flo is staring at Kate, her mouth hanging slightly open, blinking fast. I’m smoking, wishing my mouth were wider so that I could fit in more fags. Even Robert has his head in his hands.
‘Isn’t it heaven?’ Kate is asking, somewhat rhetorically. ‘He is the most special man.’ And she proceeds to tell Robert all about this paragon – his name, apparently, is Max and he is American – for the rest of dinner.
6
I can’t sit and think about my family all day. It’s all very well mournfully considering the nightmare at hand, but some of us have work to do (although of course some of us have trust funds instead, as I am reminded every time one of my stepsisters goes shopping and returns trip-trapping like a Billy Goat Gruff on new Patrick Cox heels, swinging Gucci carriers). Which is why Thursday morning finds me in the kitchen, gulping down vile Nescafé – I always think coffee tastes faintly of halitosis, though not as much as lager does – in full panic mode.
Still, we’re hardly talking anoother deh slaving down t’ pit. The kitchen’s scrubbed refectory table is strewn with newspaper and magazine cuttings. A tape machine and a six-pack of Duracell AAs squat patiently by the side, mingling with this morning’s leftover bowls of Sugar Puffs, a dog-eared copy of Toddlers Love Learning! (synonyms of ‘poo’, yes, rudimentary division, no, in my experience), a forsaken-looking Jar Jar Binks toy (deemed very last season by fickle Charlie) and some pink and blue Elvis knickers sent to me by Amber in this morning’s post. I love Amber. She makes me feel like I still have fun. And she cares about my underwear. In fact, since we make sporadic attempts at going swimming together (whenever I manage to overcome the distressing impression that I look like an egg in my cozzie), she’s the only other person who ever sees it, apart from me.
Cuttings, batteries, panic: yup, it’s interview time. And what with Robert’s birthday and Kate’s news, I’d forgotten all about it until the phone call from Araminta, editrix of Panache, the glossy weekly for which I write, came last night. Hence the somewhat rushed ‘research’. Normally I’d give myself more than half an hour to get the measure of my interviewee.
Mug in one hand, exceptionally delicious (ergo third) croissant in the other, I can’t help but notice from the magazines littering the table that today’s candidate is pretty easy on the eye. He is a dancer, one of a new breed that, according to a clipping by Ismene Brown of the Daily Telegraph, is revolutionizing the contemporary dance scene. I haven’t time to find out quite how this is achieved (apart from the fact that my interviewee clearly doesn’t
shave his chest – is this modern, I wonder?). Unfortunately my knowledge of ballet comes, in its entirety, from a slim tome entitled Angelina Ballerina, a book about a gifted young mouse that was most popular with Jack until he recently decided that ballet was ‘for girls’ and abandoned it in favour of Know Your Stegosaurus.
Still, our Mr Dunphy here – Christ, he’s Irish! I do hope he isn’t another clippy-cloppy Lord of the Dance, ‘I Am Celtic Culture’ type – looks pleasant enough. He looks very pleasant indeed, actually, if you like that dark ’n’ brooding kind of thing. I’m sure we’ll have a nice chat about… oh, I don’t know, tutus or U2 or something.
More pressingly, there’s a distinctly high whiffemanating from the hamsters’ cage, and I reluctantly tear myself away from Sam Dunphy’s suspiciously blue eyes (contact lenses, doubtless, but I must say that black-haired, blue-eyed combo is not uneffective). I scrumple him up, in fact, and shred him in the Magimix, razor-blade cheekbones and all. Nobody nice is that cartoonishly good-looking and he’ll make lovely fresh bedding for Binky and George Roid (the Hammy Roids, named, I’m afraid, by mature me). After which there’s just time for a quick application of powder – I must change the light bulb by the sink; it’s almost impossible to see in there – and blusher, and away we go. No point in lipstick, since he’s clearly a Ballet Poof, besides which I’ve only got until 3 p.m., since I need to get to school. Dunphy had better not have too much to say.
Well, that was fun. Not. I thought the Irish were supposed to be friendly. Turned out that our Mr Dunphy is something of a serious young man – more James Joyce than Yootha unfortunately, given my distinctly lowbrow approach. Granted, I should have remembered his faxed biography, and going straight in with the chest-hair question – ‘Did you stop shaving because it was all sort of itchy?’ – was perhaps not as intellectually challenging as an opener should have been, but I thought it would at least break the ice. And then that look he shot me – ‘Me Man, You Infant’ – when I said, isn’t it too funny about your compatriot, The Edge from U2. ‘What about him?’ said Dunphy icily. Well, I said, isn’t it too funny that he exists? The man’s 42 and has a spastic name, and as jokes go it’s surely a very good one? Dunphy fixed me with his gimlet, azure stare (definitely lenses, and eyeliner too, I would hazard), not saying anything, unsmiling.
No wonder I needed a drink. And then another, and then a third, quite forgetting that drink accentuates my irritating trait of unconsciously mimicking people’s accents. I’ve noticed that some people don’t suffer from this affliction. They can talk to an American from the Deep South without sounding like the love-child of Tennessee Williams and Dolly Parton – if such a thing were imaginable – or to an Antipodean without turning into Dame Kiri. Alas, I am not of their number. And after the second Black Velvet – I thought Guinness and champagne would be, you know, sympathetic, but he seemed to prefer mineral water – I suddenly found myself coming over all Andrea Corr. Which is when Sam Dunphy leaned over and said, ‘Are you taking the piss?’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘The mick, surely?’ and it all went downhill from there.
Back at the kitchen table – my mouth is dry and I have the beginnings of a headache coming on, brought on, I think, by shame – I dejectedly flick on the tape machine. We’re talking cringe-o-rama. I go scarlet, then puce, breaking into one pre-menopausal hot flush after another as I listen again to the last bit of our brief ‘conversation’.
Me (sounding, frankly, pissed): ‘So, I’ve heard ballet dancers all sleep with each other, all day long.’
Him (terse): ‘I’m not a ballet dancer.’
Me (inexplicably aggressive, facetious): ‘Really? How odd. What kind of dancing then? Ballroom? Morris?’
Him (terser): ‘Contemporary. I choreograph too. Did my agent not send you my biography? I trained at ballet school, of course…’
Me (interrupting, giggling): ‘Did you wear those girlie tights? And do tippy-toes?’
He (gobsmacked): ‘Tippy-toes? Do you, ah, mean points? Christ. I’m not a woman.’
Me: ‘And tight tights?’
He: ‘I’m ignoring you. Anyway, I was at the Dublin Academy of Dance from 1987 to…’
Me: ‘Go on, you can tell me. Girlie tights?’
Him: ‘Jesus. Why don’t we take a break? Have a coffee. Have some water…’
Me: ‘No thanks, I’m not thirsty. So then, dancing. Are we talking shag-frenzy or are we not? Because the reader demands the truth.’
Him: ‘I’m not even going to answer that.’
Me (gently, like Claire Rayner talking to someone handicapped): ‘Because it must be a comfort, a great comfort – I mean, so many of you, all ostracized for years and suddenly it’s quite normal…’
It’s his turn to interrupt me. ‘How do you mean exactly, “ostracized”?’
This is when I pointed out that it can’t have been easy being a gay Catholic, er, ballerina boy. It is also where he stopped the interview and walked out. Idiotically, because I was drunk and embarrassed, I put on my best mincy voice and shouted, ‘Oooooh! Temper!’ after him. That was some mean look he gave me as he walked out. Some mean comment too: ‘Do your homework, little girl.’ Rude bastard, in his tatty white T-shirt that was at least two sizes too small. And grubby-looking too, frankly. Slept-in-looking.
I suppose I’d better call Araminta at the magazine and explain. She said last night that she was relying on the interview for a cover – not possible now, of course, although there should just be time to shoot a new one. But Araminta, when I get through, is pretty annoyed. Araminta is, not to put too fine a point on it, raging. Words like ‘unprofessional’, ‘lax’ and ‘fuck-up’ fall from her impeccably glossed lips. I try to explain – about my mother’s engagement and how it’s disengaged me, about my mix-up over dates, about getting pissed by mistake, about the hamsters eating into my research time – but Araminta’s having none of it. The cover’s been shot, apparently. Not only this, but every magazine in the country’s after an interview with Dunphy, who is, she says, ‘about to go mega’. We were, it seems, amazingly lucky to get him. And I blew it. There’s nothing for it, she says. I am going to have to ring him up and apologize. Personally. It’s an order. She dictates the phone number and makes me swear (‘on your life, Clara’) to call him forthwith.
Yes, well. It’s all going to have to wait, because it’s time for the boys’ tea, and then Robert and I are going to dinner at Tamsin’s. Tamsin is my oldest friend, along with Amber – we’ve all known each other since school. One of my missions in life is to pair her up with someone, if only to stop her whingeing. Her mission in life is a) to marry and b) to mate, though, increasingly, not necessarily in that order. Tamsin is, according to herself, the ne plus ultra of Old Maidhood: an unloved, shrivelled shelf-dweller whose genitalia are cobwebbed through lack of use. She has panic attacks when she gets drunk, during which she witters on about how she’ll never have a baby, and if, by a miracle, she does, how said baby is bound to have ‘at least a harelip. I mean, I’m thirty-four – it’s geriatric, Clara, for a first child. And I don’t think I could cope with Down’s.’ And then she cries. And I feel much better.
To my shame – well, my slight shame – I like hearing her talk like this. It makes me feel superior. (I told you I wasn’t very nice.) It makes me think that I am very, very lucky to have Robert and the boys. (The luck of having the boys is never in any doubt I’m not that bad – although I must confess to a certain sneaking longing for spontaneous weekends away, say, or a quick two days’ shopping in Paris with a girlfriend on the spur of the moment… Pastimes which are as dead to me as the rah-rah skirt or the stripy legwarmer.) Listening to Tamsin drone on about being lonely, and all men being bastards, is superlatively good news for morale: the oral equivalent of a family-sized pack of jam doughnuts with a side dish of vanilla custard (to dunk).
I tell Robert about Dunphy in the car on the way over to Belsize Park. Single girls, I reflect, can afford to live in London’s green oases (in a box,
in Tamsin’s case, but a very pretty one). When you’re reasonably well paid and fending only for yourself, a hefty mortgage is not the albatross it becomes for women like me, with families to feed and clothe, school fees to pay, cars to run – which is why London’s most unfashionable reaches are slowly being colonized by young families. We live in the East End, among an odd mixture of crack dens, the dispossessed and People like Us. I love it, actually. But there’s no denying I also love Belsize Park, with its trees and wide streets and pavement cafés. Our nearest café is inside Tesco’s, and they do Sunday lunch for £2.99; Tamsin’s is by her front door and does lattes and frappuccinos and all-day breakfast with organic bacon.
‘Araminta does have a point,’ Robert says, manoeuvring our ancient Volvo through the streets of London with his cool effortlessness. He is the most composed man I have ever met. ‘It isn’t exactly professional to get pissed and insult the star.’
‘I didn’t say it was, Robert. I didn’t suggest I should adopt it as a modus operandi for all future interviews. It was an accident. I have no time… And now I’m going to have to grovel to him. Oh, God, admit – it’s a bleak prospect. Besides, when am I going to do it?… Darling?’
I never call Robert darling unless I want something, which is why it has the unfortunate effect, as now, of making him clench his jaw and raise one eyebrow, expressing both resignation and unbearable weariness. His face is rather like that of a Scripture teacher asked for the nth time about circumcision by a gaggle of sniggering schoolgirls.
‘Yes?’
‘Where does the little bit of skin come from? Sorry – I mean, I mean, couldn’t we have an au pair? It would make life so much simpler. It’s not that expensive and think of the things we could do. I could work properly and have the time to make the house nice. I could cook. We could go away for the weekend…’