by India Knight
Anyway, Max has invited us all to his ‘cottage’ for the summer. Kate: ‘Tell Clara about your sweet little cottage.’ Just as Max is about to open his mouth, she decides – as she so often does – to speak for him.
‘Max has a charming cottage in the sweetest little fishing village,’ she tells me, smiling at the recollection of it. ‘A village full of simple fisherfolk. I was there three weeks ago. You’d love it, Clara. The pretty boats, the adorable people – poor as church mice, but always willing to share their lobsters with you.’
‘Lobsters?’ I say. ‘What do you mean, lobsters?’
‘It’s in America, darling, they have lobsters eveywhere,’ Kate explains dismissively, conjuring up a mental picture of poor Manhattanites fighting off the Pincer Menace on every street corner. ‘Max and I went for a walk and realized we’d no supper at home, so we knocked on the door of a little clapboard house in the village and the sweet old peasant lady that answered gave us two lobsters! So simple, those people, but my God – they know how to live.’ She shakes her head in admiration. ‘That’s style, Clara, don’t you think? The poorest of the poor, the dispossessed, almost, feasting on lobster.’
Max is grinning broadly at this stage, and so he should be, with his village full of generous, crustacea-loving rustics. ‘You must come over, Clara,’ he says. ‘Bring your boys.’
‘I’d love to,’ I say. ‘It sounds heavenly. Where is it, exactly, this coastal hamlet of yours?’
‘It’s in a place called Martha’s Vineyard, on the East Coast,’ says Kate. ‘Too sweet. Darling, it’d be such a break for you. We could ask the neighbours to baby-sit, couldn’t we, Max? They’d be glad of the cash, poor things. And then the rest of us could go and have dinner in one of those little fishermen’s cafés. Rough and ready, but such fun.’
I want to say, ‘What, Martha’s Vineyard, as in millionaires’ playground? Little café, as in $200 a head for homard à l’Américaine? Neighbours, as in Kennedys?’ Instead, I suppress a giggle. I am suddenly filled with intense love for Kate. I am, as Elvis might put it, temporarily turned into a hunka hunka burning love. It is an indisputable fact that she enhances my life. Max is smiling at me conspiratorially and throwing Kate fond glances. Yes, I think to myself, yes. He gets her. He’ll do.
11
I hadn’t realized the post from Eire was so swift. This morning’s batch, freshly landed, does indeed contain two posh-looking invitations to the Sadler’s Wells première of Contortions, Sam Dunphy’s ludicrously named show. I mean, really – you might as well call it I’m All Bendy, Me. The invites are printed in painfully hip type on top of a black-and-white shot of Dunphy leaping – there’s probably a more technical term for it, but I don’t know what it is. His skin is sheeny with sweat and he’s wearing a skin-tight white T-shirty affair, through which – Christ almighty – you can see his erect nipples. Beautiful legs, though. And arms, actually – sort of sinewy. I have to concede that, speaking as a purely detached observer, i.e. on aesthetic grounds alone, Dunphy is a bit of a fox. Sexy, even. Speaking, however, as the kind of observer who’s spent some time with him, he also, to me, looks exactly like what he is: a vain, tight-T-shirted, poofy-eyed creep.
Two smaller bits of card tumble out of the envelope. These are invitations to the after-show party, at some groovy bar in Hoxton, please bring this invitation with you, blah blah. Clocking the date – the show premières at the end of next week – I shove the whole bundle under the fruit bowl (where it joins last year’s tax bill, a party invitation for Jack, a reminder from BT, a card from Selfridges advising me of some special offer on my preferred brand of cleanser, a postcard from Amber which says, ‘Hello? Where are you? xxx’ and our family pass to London Zoo.
I can’t believe Kate said that about my ‘relationship’, if we’re going to be all textbook about it, with food, I think to myself as I hastily give the public parts of the house a vacuum. The bloody cheek. The total nerve. The, er, slight psychological insight. Or not. I mean, it is simply too absurd to contemplate the possibility that all overweight people are unhappy. Isn’t that what she said? ‘Not entirely happy.’ And is that what I am? I sit down on the middle step of the hall stairs, like a gigantic Christopher Robin (‘Hush, hush, whisper who dares/The tubbiest of all mummies/ is coming up the stairs’) and switch the Hoover off.
Okay. So maybe I am not ‘entirely happy’. Maybe this isn’t necessarily what I had planned for myself when I was a daydreaming teenager. Maybe this is… quotidian. But – and it’s a big but – it’s not a million miles from what I did have planned, because I only ever had very ploddy aspirations: to be happy, and secure, and not to have to move around all the time (Kate and I did a lot of that, around most of Europe, until she met Julian). I wanted to live in a house that would feel like home, for ever, with my children. And I am. I am. I’m sitting in it.
That’s that settled, then. But I am none the less finding it very hard to get up. My house, my kids… There’s something else I’m not focusing on: my husband. My husband, whom I love. Because I do love him, as I think he loves me. I just don’t love him. He doesn’t make me die. He doesn’t make me swoon every time I see him. I don’t have to lie down each time I think of him. And that wasn’t on my list. I wanted the swooning. Just a little swooning. The odd snatch of longing. I wanted to feel lonely in my bed when he wasn’t around.
‘Nobody has that,’ I tell myself crossly, remembering poor Naomi and her shit of a letch of a husband. I am talking out loud, raising my voice to myself. ‘The reason I wanted the swooning is because I was fifteen, for God’s sake. I had some swooning, at the beginning, at least. I should consider myself exceptionally lucky. How dare I even be thinking like this? What am I going to do – walk out because Robert doesn’t ravish me every night? Fuck’s sake, Clara. Get a fucking grip, will you?’
The oddest thing of all is I feel like phoning Kate. But I don’t dare. Once, three months or so ago, Kate and I had rather too much wine with our dinner, and I told her – because she was looking at me like she knew – that I was feeling a tiny bit… antsy, I think, is the way I put it. ‘Be adult, Clara,’ she said. ‘It’s what being grown-up is about. Get on with it. You’re luckier than most. You’re luckier than me.’ I felt embarrassed, and nodded. Kate, though, being Kate, hadn’t finished. ‘The thing I have absolutely always found,’ she said breezily, ‘is that provided you have very good sex, most of those problems just fall by the wayside.’ I said nothing to this – I may have gazed at her in disbelief, perhaps. ‘You do have good sex, don’t you, darling?’ Kate said. ‘Do realize it makes me feel quite ill even to have to ask – I’m your mother, for God’s sake, not your best friend. But it is important.’
I said, not entirely truthfully, ‘Yes. Yes. It’s fine.’ Kate looked like she was about to say something else, but lit a cigarette instead, and we changed the subject. I can’t call her now. I know one is supposed to be modern, but I simply will not entertain the idea of talking to my mother about my sex life. She was right: it’s what girlfriends are for.
But I can hardly ask Naomi, who’s due for lunch. Hi, Nomes, how’s your sex life? Oops, not so great, I guess, what with your hubby knobbing his PA. I dial Amber’s number instead, but just get her voice-mail. Stella? No, not Stella. I suspect I know what Stella’s advice would be and I don’t think I’d like it. Tamsin’s at work. Without thinking very hard about it, I find myself dialling Robert’s direct line instead.
‘Hi, Clara,’ he says. He always sounds so alert at work, so energetic. ‘You’ll have to be quick – I’m just about to have a meeting.’
‘I don’t have anything to say,’ I say, faintly pathetically. ‘We got asked to Sam Dunphy’s show, and to his party. Naomi is coming to lunch.’
‘Stop!’ says Robert. ‘Stop right now. It’s too exciting. Now I won’t be able to concentrate all day. Naomi coming to lunch! A ballet party! Anything else, baby?’
‘Yes,’ I say, smiling despite myself. ‘I’ve been ho
overing. And it seems to be quite sunny outside.’
‘You’re dazzling me,’ Robert says. ‘It’s go, go, go, isn’t it? It’s a social whirl. Anything planned for this afternoon?’ He drops his voice to a hyper-excited whisper. ‘Sainsbury’s?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘The fun.’ There are noises in the background, and Robert says, ‘I have to go now, Clara. I’ll call you later.’
‘Bye,’ I say. ‘From funny little me, in my funny little world.’
‘Bye,’ says Robert. ‘You forgot your funny little face.’
And I cheer up.
12
Naomi appears at 12.30 on the dot, and I am glad to note that infidelity does not affect her punctuality (‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings,’ she once informed me, with such a regal expression on her face that I nearly asked if she had thrillingly improbable ancestry). She looks better than she did yesterday morning: the taupe-coloured eyeshadow has made a comeback, as have the tinted moisturizer and subtly outlined and glossed ‘natural’-coloured lips. She throws my kitchen a mini-version of the look popularized by my mother – the ‘Oh, look, an unironed tea-towel. I do believe we’re in a hovel’ look that mixes sociological curiosity with faint disgust –and automatically reaches for the J-cloth. Naomi’s catchphrase, if she had one, would be ‘You missed a bit.’
But she’s a creature of contrasts, Naomi, because she says, ‘I love your kitchen,’ and sighs. I love my kitchen too. It may be shambolic, with its drying-rack hoicked up on the ceiling, festooned with unphotogenic garments, like my greying knickers, rather than, say, drying bunches of lavender or wispy, antiquey bits of lace, and its omnipresent bits of Lego, and I’m not entirely sure orange is the best colour for such a room – part of me keeps expecting bowler-hatted men to come marching through at any time, singing ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ and looking grouchy – but at least it’s big enough to have a (rather tatty) sofa in it. Okay, so the hamsters don’t exactly scream ‘Hygiene’, and the wall space is in danger of entirely being taken over by the children’s mad and not necessarily terribly aesthetically pleasing drawings – Chewbacca, in particular, looks like a poo on legs – but the kitchen is undeniably cosy.
I like to think it has other merits too, like the industrial cooking range and the lovely, though minute and entirely impractical red 1950s fridge. I see the boys have been practising their spelling, because the magnetic letters stuck to it say ‘BADGER’ and ‘HERKYOOLEES’. While impressed with Charlie’s phonetic fearlessness, I don’t think this looks particularly stylish. It’s not a look that would get World of Interiors drooling, I don’t think. And why ‘badger’?
Unlike me, Naomi is very interested in white goods. She reads Good Housekeeping and cuts out the comparative features on washing machines and dryers and ovens, in order to be fully equipped when she next needs one. ‘However do you cope without a chest freezer?’ she once asked, absurdly, as if I was the kind of person who, given a couple of hours to spare, would automatically think, ‘Hey, I know – I’ll make a week’s worth of casual but sophisticated dinners and freeze them.’ I never entirely believed such people existed until I met Nomes, who also makes her own Christmas wreaths and decorates any cake with hand-crafted, though faintly boggle-eyed, marzipan animals.
And World of Interiors loves it. It photographed her kitchen last year. As you would expect, Naomi’s kitchen, all pale bleached wood, Shaker units and colour-coordinated Le Creuset cookware, is the kitchen many of us long for. I am often puzzled by it, because it never looks like anyone actually uses it. It is permanently pristine, even though I know for a fact that Naomi bakes her own bread, produces three-course dinners every night and creates the kind of lunch-box extravaganzas for her children that have mine wailing about the injustice of ham and cheese rolls. (‘Linus has mushroom pâté and very special cheese from the country that looks like a boot,’ Charlie says, at least twice a week. ‘Today Linus had a thing called lemon tart. Linus has a napkin made of cloth. Linus has carrot juice. Linus loves olives, but not Greek ones. He says Ribena hurts your teeth.’ And so on.)
‘I don’t know about my kitchen,’ Naomi says. ‘It’s sterile-looking, don’t you think?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s lovely. It’s so clean. You could eat off the floor, if you were pretending to be a doggy. I’d love a kitchen like that.’
‘You know, don’t you?’ Naomi says, in a neutral tone of voice, rootling through her bag for her Canderel while I put a coffee in front of her. ‘You must know.’
And I am in a quandary. I know many things, as I am always telling the boys. I am omniscient and packed to the gills with information, which I impart to Father Christmas every December; I even have eyes in the back of my head. But I know too much, in this particular circumstance, and I’m not quite clear what part of my deep and profound knowledge Nomes is referring to. The difficulty of keeping a kitchen immaculate? The cost of said kitchen? The recipe for salmon baked in a salt and herb crust? Or the fact that her husband’s a philandering bastard?
I am wet, and Option A seems safest. ‘You must spend all day cleaning it,’ I say. ‘I mean, God knows I try – you wouldn’t believe the amount of Mr Muscle we get through in a week – and it still looks like this.’ I gesture at the pile of newspapers on the table and at the delicate towerlet of crumbs under Jack’s chair, a testimony to his love of Jammy Dodgers. ‘So yes, I do know. I don’t know how you do it, though. I wish we had cleaning ladies, don’t you? Robert says they’re a waste of money, but I don’t.’
‘I mean,’ says Nomes, briskly clicking her saccharine dispenser twice, ‘about Richard.’
Arse. Now what? Do I lie? Do I feign ignorance and mime shock and outrage when she tells me? Do I nod grimly, and deal with her asking me what kind of crappy friend I am for not telling her the moment I found out? Arse. Arse. Big, giant, outsize arse – Richard’s arse, in fact. Thinking on my feet, I decide to cling to the possibility that the Richard news is non-sexual. Perhaps he’s been promoted, or been given a bigger company car, or a huge bonus (to match the size of his behind). Perhaps he’s been sacked, I think maliciously, which would serve him right.
‘Know what?’ I say feebly, burying my face right inside the fridge. ‘I’m just looking for the pumpkin ravioli. Where can they be?’
They are, in fact, literally in front of my nose. But I am quite liking it in the fridge and feel a marked reluctance to come out. Especially when Naomi says, ‘Know that he’s having an affair.’ I feel a great love for the inside of the fridge at this moment. A passion, almost. A longing for more of its Arctic embrace. ‘Hmm?’ say spastically, panic rising. And then: ‘Where are the fucking ravioli of fuck?’
‘Language, Clara,’ says Naomi automatically.
I reluctantly close the fridge door. My heart is beating horribly fast and a part of Selfless Clara The Good Friend wonders whether I might be a candidate for a heart attack. I mean, I’m hardly the Exercise Queen.
God, what a thing to think at a time like this! I am going to punish myself by not lying.
‘Yes, I know,’ I say, as gently as I can, except it comes out as more of a shout. ‘With Parmesan, black pepper and cream, or with olive oil?’
‘Plain, please. Calories,’ Naomi explains. ‘How long have you known?’
‘About a week,’ I stammer nervously. ‘They’re disgusting by themselves. At least have oil. There’s some basil somewhere. I could shred that? Chiffonade de basilic, Nomes – that ought to float your boat. It sounds rather chic. No?’
‘No,’ Naomi says, brushing aside my helpful culinary suggestions.
‘Look, Nomes, I would have told you, but – well, you know, no one likes to deliver that kind of news. Think of the poor messenger, you know, being shot. Bang bang. Ow.’ I clutch my breast melodramatically and stagger a bit.
‘Clara…’ says Naomi. ‘For God’s sake.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, sobering up. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve known a few days. Robert told m
e. I’m sorry.’
‘What did he say?’
I must say, Naomi is looking very composed. In her shoes, I’d be red in the face and practically hyperventilating by now.
‘He said Richard was, er, having a really pathetic and utterly insignificant fling with Acne… with his PA.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ Nomes says, apparently satisfied. ‘A fling.’
‘How did you find out, Nomes?’
‘The usual way – credit card bills,’ she says. ‘We have a joint account and as you know I always go through the bills – which I’d strongly advise you to do, Clara, by the way. I noticed an entry from an Ann Summers shop.’
‘What?’
‘You know, those sex shops. I thought maybe Richard had bought me some kind of joke present –’
I interrupt, agog. ‘Does he often buy you joke presents from sex shops?’
‘It has been known. Anyway, I waited a week or so –’
‘Like what?’ I ask, cutting in again. ‘What kind of thing?’
‘Do let me finish, Clara. Oh, like padded handcuffs’ – she smiles at the recollection – ‘or see-through nighties. A maid’s uniform, once. Very cheap fabric, actually. Appalling seams.’
‘Right,’ I say feebly.
‘Anyway, the present didn’t appear, and I went back to the statement, and there were lots of restaurant bills, for amounts that were clearly for two people – seventy-odd quid here and there, and even Richard doesn’t eat that much. His work entertaining goes on his other card. So I asked him what he’d been doing in Ann Summers.’