Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

  She went through to the kitchen. Her favourite part of the house: buttercup-yellow walls, William Morris curtains – lemon, lime and pomegranate – lots of pale oak, French windows leading into the garden, a sofa to one side, in what had once been a play area but was now clear of baby toys.

  Still no Hannah.

  She would have gone out to take Lottie to Stagecoach and Clemmie to her party, but she should have been back by now. Or had she popped out and neglected to double-lock the front door?

  As Lucy started upstairs she heard an animal howl, like a cat doing battle.

  She flung open the bedroom door. The smell of sex – visceral, dank, imperative, the opposite of sweet – assaulted her. If it hadn’t been for that, she would scarcely have known what she was looking at was real: it was like a scene from the sort of dream that left her feeling vaguely ashamed.

  The scene was shocking, yes, but also had the dreamlike quality of inevitable revelation.

  Adam was fucking Hannah. Doggy-style, on the floor in front of the mirror.

  ‘You stop that right now!’ Lucy shouted.

  Hannah yelped, and Adam saw Lucy standing behind them in the mirror. His face, which had been flushed and exultant, contorted painfully under the influence of two powerful and precisely opposed forces: the desire to stay exactly where he was and the desire to be a million miles away. He delivered one final, regretful thrust and then, as if with a wrenching effort, pulled out.

  Hannah made a dash for the en suite. Lucy noted how smooth her little sister’s body was – no stretch marks and no saggy belly. No pubic hair, either, a look that Adam had hinted he might appreciate, but Lucy had been reluctant to provide.

  As if surveying a crime scene Lucy took in the steam in the air, the damp towel on the floor, the discarded clothes and the faint scent of her expensive shower gel, the one Adam had given her.

  Hannah shut the bathroom door behind her, and Adam grabbed the towel and wound it round his waist, sarong-style. The effect was incongruously camp.

  ‘You absolute fucking prick,’ Lucy said.

  It was a surprise to hear her own voice – it was a surprise that she was capable of something as everyday as speaking – though it didn’t sound like hers: it was harsh and vicious.

  He held out one hand to her, maybe to ward her off, or maybe in supplication.

  ‘I’d ask you how long this has been going on . . . but I don’t think I’d be able to believe you,’ she said.

  ‘It hasn’t . . . it hasn’t been going on.’

  ‘What – are you going to tell me this isn’t what it looks like?’

  He stared at her in horror and in shame: it struck her that he would have looked at her in much the same way if he had accidentally killed her. But this had been no accident.

  ‘How could you?’ she said.

  His face twisted with a spasm of remorse. ‘I don’t know. She was just there! All the bloody time! Why do you think I was so keen to go to Buenos Aires?’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘No. No! No, I’m not – Lucy, you have to believe this, it’s you I—’

  ‘Of course. It was just sex. Right?’

  ‘It was . . . it was confusing, that’s all, I was confused . . .’

  He sat down on the bed, and his back and shoulders slumped.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, and he looked so pathetic now that a small part of her almost pitied him, ‘I know I’m a shit and I’ve just done a terrible thing, but if you can’t forgive me, if there isn’t even the faintest possibility, I don’t think I could bear it. Don’t leave me. Please.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said, ‘you are. Under the circumstances, I think it’s the least you can do. I’m going down to the garden now. When I come back in, I want both of you gone.’

  He struggled for a moment, then managed to get it out: ‘What are you going to tell the girls?’

  Lucy paused at the door. ‘If you really cared about them,’ she said, ‘you might have tried to be a little less confused.’

  And then she made her exit.

  Moments later she was outside in the garden, in the weak spring sunshine. She had a sudden urge to lie down – to feel the earth underneath her, holding her up. And then she was on her back on the damp, cool grass, looking up at the thin clouds and the sky – toile de Jouy blue – and trying not to think about the scene inside the house, the recriminations, the panic, the packing. What would they take? What would be left?

  If only Tina hadn’t mouthed off in that silly column, if she’d just written about something else . . . But that was a ridiculous thing to think. It had happened, it couldn’t be undone.

  Somewhere in the house she heard a phone ringing. Oh God – what time was it? Was she late picking Clemmie up?

  She checked her watch; it was midday. Clemmie’s friend’s birthday party didn’t finish till one, so most likely it was Natalie, trying to smooth things over. Tina wouldn’t – she’d leave it for a bit. Maybe indefinitely.

  She would have to pull herself together. She couldn’t go under. She had children to collect, washing to do, supper to sort out. She couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces. She didn’t have time.

  What was she going to say to the girls?

  2

  Invitation to lunch

  JUST OVER A week later it was Natalie’s turn to pick up a copy of the Post and see herself unflatteringly reflected in it.

  She was on the tube, running late, and worried about how Richard would bear up if the antenatal class started without her. He had gamely signed up to accompany her to ten two-hour sessions, but she knew he was finding the experience intermittently excruciating.

  Still, he’d manage. She took an abandoned copy of the Post from the seat next to her and leafed past the snaps of celebrity post-baby bodies in search of Tina’s column.

  The Vixen Letters

  Outcast and outclassed

  Friends, families, complete strangers, all tend to assume that I must want a ring on my finger and a reason to go to Mothercare, and are disinclined to believe me when I assure them that I don’t. It’s a struggle for me to understand that others may yearn for what I so profoundly fear and mistrust, but I have forced myself to accept that other women are much more willing than I am to give up their freedom.

  When friends tell me they’re expecting – and we’re all in our mid-thirties, so this happens a lot – I’m pleased for them, but I’m sad for myself. I can go on safari, loiter at a party or sign up for an improving evening class without a second thought, and if my friends were also still able to do all these things I’d be perfectly content. But once a woman has a baby on the way, the only courses she’s interested in are antenatal.

  Middle-class women, having got good grades and impressive degrees and professional qualifications their mothers could only dream of – having, in short, out-performed every previous generation of females going back to the dawn of time – tend to have faith in the power of swotting, and approach childbirth as if it were a particularly gruelling practical exam. They go to lessons, they read the books, they watch the videos and do the yoga – they put the work in, and hope it’ll pay off. How disconcerting it must be when the gymslip mum down the corridor, whose CV is a desert of underachievement, pops out her offspring in half the time it takes for the ageing graduate to start begging for an epidural.

  At this point Natalie folded the paper and put it back where she’d found it.

  She didn’t want to be annoyed with Tina . . . and she had a feeling that if she read any more, she would be. She knew she should be a good sport, take it with a pinch of salt and remember that Tina didn’t mean any harm. But still, she felt somewhat ridiculed. Exploited. Reduced. It wasn’t nice to be boiled down to a couple of throwaway lines; to be not so much written about as written off.

  No wonder Lucy had been so upset. Obviously Tina had touched a nerve; Lucy must have minded more about giving up work than she had let on. But was it really possible for a
ny friendship to recover from the harsh words that Lucy had flung at Tina in response? You’re on your own, you haven’t got a man, and you’re running out of time . . . Of course Lucy didn’t know, and probably never would, that Tina had not really been single all these years. If Tina had told her what she was up to, would it have made any difference? If friendships thrived on closeness, not sharing the secret of a long-running love affair counted as a pretty major omission.

  Anyway, Natalie was determined not to take sides. She’d always regarded her relationships with both women as perfectly balanced and even-handed, and she couldn’t imagine her life without them both in it.

  Tina was a passport to a world of members’ clubs and gossip and people Natalie vaguely recognized off the telly, a hierarchical, restless, hive-like society in which she was content to watch Tina hold court, and play the mousy foil. Lucy’s home territory was also alien, but softer; it was all about sewing costumes for the school play, icing fairy cakes for fêtes, and laying on white wine and nibbles for the Parent–Teacher Association.

  Natalie had never felt she could cut it in either environment herself. Sampling someone else’s life was all very well, and a change was as good as a rest; but she was much more comfortable pottering round at home with Richard, and trundling into work to compare cute mongoose screen savers with the junior press officer at the next desk.

  It was unusual for Natalie to invite Tina and Lucy on to her patch? and look what had happened when she had. At least she’d had a sort of olive branch from Lucy: the little handmade lavender cushion that had turned up, without note or explanation enclosed, in the post a couple of days ago, even though Lucy hadn’t returned any of her calls.

  The cushion gave off a soft, gentle scent reminiscent of sunshine and bumble bees, and it was hard to reconcile it with the scary harpy who’d laid into Tina. The lack of other communication was definitely odd, and how things stood between Lucy and Tina Natalie didn’t know.

  She emerged from Clapham Common Underground Station into one of the first nice light evenings of spring. There was a queue spilling out of the posh organic butcher’s on the corner, and as she lumbered round the tail end of it she barged straight into a tall blonde hurrying in the opposite direction.

  Of all the people . . . It was Tina.

  They both apologized and righted themselves. There was a brief mutual hesitation before Tina stepped forward to plant a respectful air kiss as close to Natalie’s cheek as the bulge of Natalie’s belly would permit, and Natalie let one arm rest lightly across Tina’s back before withdrawing it.

  Up close, Natalie noticed Tina’s perfume, which was sharp, sweet and spicy all at once, grapefruit with a hint of pepper. Natalie wondered if her own smell would give her away. It was probably a combination of fetid Underground, and the raisin Danish and vanilla bean smoothie she’d scoffed on the way: hot and bothered, a little sickly and suggestive of comfort eating.

  Tina was as slim and chic as ever, of course. She had on a tightly belted raincoat – designer, probably – whereas Natalie’s tunic top and stretchy dress were long, large, and amorphously funereal. Clothes to hide in. Who was she trying to kid? Sure, black was slimming, but even black couldn’t make you disappear.

  Still . . . OK, she’d put on far too much weight and she was going to have a right battle to lose it all – just that morning she’d tipped the scales at 16 stone – but was there something rather brittle about Tina’s thinness that she hadn’t really registered before?

  Obviously Tina had always been attractive – enough, once upon a time, to pique Natalie’s interest in a way that had been confusing and ultimately not terribly helpful, though thankfully all that was well and truly in the past. But what had really appealed about Tina was her confidence, and right now she didn’t look particularly at ease with herself. She looked tense, and even though she was smiling, the effect was not one of warmth.

  Natalie was reminded of the sharp, rather predatory expression of the byline photo that went with the new column, and a quotation from one of the textbooks they had both studied more than a decade ago came to mind: If a journalist offers to take you out for lunch, make no mistake, you’re on the menu. Become a source, and sooner or later you’ll be paying.

  ‘So how are you?’ Tina asked. ‘Have you finished work yet?’

  ‘This is my last week.’

  ‘And you’re going to be off for how long, six months?’

  ‘I’m planning on taking the full year. Actually, I’m not sure I’m going to go back to work at all, at least not while Matilda’s little.’

  As soon as this was out Natalie wished she hadn’t said it. She hadn’t actually discussed it with Richard yet, not as such, and she shouldn’t discuss something so important with a friend before she’d been through it with him. Particularly not a friend she was feeling a bit annoyed with, thanks (but no thanks) to that snarky column.

  She knew that if she made a halfway decent case for staying at home with Matilda, if she stressed the benefits of one-to-one care and the ludicrous cost of nursery fees and so on, Richard would listen, and ultimately he would agree. What made him uncomfortable was prevarication; she needed to know her own mind first, otherwise it would all end up with her getting worked up about nothing that either of them could explain, and him staring at her in anxious bafflement.

  And she didn’t really know what she wanted, not yet. She liked her job, more or less – she did, overall, believe in what the Department for Children, Schools and Families was trying to do, and if she was occasionally required to manipulate the facts for the sake of an effective press release, at least it wasn’t in the interests of entertainment. There was no real reason why she should have this niggling feeling of having sold out – of being someone other than the person she’d become.

  ‘Oh God, don’t tell me you’re going to go down the Lucy route,’ Tina said. ‘You can’t. I’ll kidnap you and make you come for cocktails.’

  ‘Actually, I’m beginning to appreciate what Lucy’s been doing all these years,’ Natalie said. ‘She put her family first, and now she’s got it all: the beautiful home, the doting husband, the two lovely daughters. I think that’s quite an achievement.’

  ‘If that’s what you want, I suppose it is,’ Tina said.

  ‘Have you been in touch with her?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Tina pulled a face. ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to me either. Anyway, I should head off. Got an antenatal class to go to. You know what us middle-class mothers are like. Obsessed with swotting up for that all-important practical birth exam.’

  She noted with some satisfaction that Tina was at a loss for words. The silence lasted long enough to convey the possibility of a distance opening up between them that neither would find easy to cross. Then, because she could never bear to let hostility hang in the air for long, Natalie came to the rescue by asking, ‘So what are you up to tonight?’

  Tina lifted up the carrier bag she’d been twisting round, and Natalie saw that it was from Freddlestone’s Old-Fashioned Butchershop and contained a small package wrapped in paper, presumably an expensive cut of meat.

  ‘Dinner date,’ Tina said.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Natalie, ‘the Grandee, I presume?’

  Tina had never disclosed her married lover’s real name. They had continued to refer to him by the silly nickname Tina had first given him in Cornwall all those years ago, when she had explained that he had a certain stature in public life, and his identity would have to remain a secret.

  Recently she’d talked about him less and less. The last time she’d mentioned him had been to complain that she never got to see him at Christmas. Natalie, who found that pregnancy made her increasingly inclined to sympathize with all other mothers, including Mrs Grandee, had pointed out that it was only to be expected that he would want to spend it with his family.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve kind of wound that down,’ Tina said, with a forced, gh
astly smile that belied her attempt at bravado. ‘I’m looking to replace him with a younger model. If it works out, I might even be able to introduce you to this one.’

  ‘Oh God! You broke up with the Grandee? Really? But, Tina, are you OK? I thought you looked a bit . . .’

  ‘A bit what? Down in the mouth? Not me. Us single ladies have plenty more fish in the sea, you know.’

  ‘But – how come? What happened? Did he—’

  ‘Nothing to tell – just fizzled!’ Tina said. ‘Anyway, I’d better dash. I’m not parked terribly legally.’

  She moved in for the farewell kiss.

  ‘Give my love to Richard, won’t you? Great to see you! Call me! Good luck with it all, if I don’t see you before!’

  As Tina moved away she looked back over one shoulder and waved: an airy, undulating little gesture that was simultaneously acknowledgement and dismissal, part salute, part wafting away.

  Natalie checked her watch, and realized she was going to have to jog the rest of the way to the leafy side street where Bella Madden, the antenatal class teacher, lived in a large Victorian pile, testament to the success of her private midwifery practice.

  Still, she’d never have to rush to the class again. By next week she would have finished work, she’d have nothing to do all day other than lounge round at home, and it would be easy to get there on time. Bliss!

  Let Tina slave away at her career! She didn’t look as if it was making her particularly happy, but then, she’d wasted ten years of her life on someone who was already taken. Whereas Natalie had worked at things with Richard, and now she was about to reap her reward: the chance to do something genuinely fulfilling with her life.

  Motherhood. It was a fresh start, and with it would come new friends: friends who would know only the new, purposeful, capable, maternal, satisfied Natalie.

  The end was in sight. Just a few more days to go, and just like Lucy before her, she would be free.