She takes a deep breath and rests her hand on the handle of the suitcase that’s sitting on the step beside her. “I didn’t want to see Dev, Bella. And I don’t want to go to the new house. Can I stay here, just for the night, with you?”
“Well, of course you can, but … Polly, what’s going on? Why don’t you want to see Dev? You’re marrying the guy in six weeks’ time!”
“No, I’m not.” Her voice is wobbly, but clear and determined. “The wedding isn’t going to happen, Bella. I’m calling it off. I’m not going to marry Dev in six weeks’ time. I’m not going to marry Dev at all.”
Grace
Wednesday, November 18
As usual, Charlie is up at six. I feel my side of the bed rise a couple of inches as he hauls himself out from under the duvet, and then I hear, through a fog of sleep, that he’s started his customary twenty minutes on the elliptical machine. But I must doze off again completely, because the next thing I know, it’s almost six thirty, and I can hear him calling to me from our bathroom, above the noise of the shower.
Which is a lot, by the way. The noise of the shower, I mean. Being American, Charlie can’t tolerate the weak and weedy water pressure of the average British shower. Or the cramped size. It’s just one of those things where they make our efforts look pitiful; that, and fridges. And steaks. Oh, and winning track and field medals at the Olympics.
Sometimes, to hear Charlie go on about all the things that are wrong with this country, you can’t help but wonder why he chooses to live and raise his children here at all.
Still, I suppose I can’t really complain, because Charlie’s hard line on the shower front at least means that I start each day with a truly terrific bathing experience. The plumber’s bill might have been frightening, but it’s hard to begrudge when you stand in our glorious new walk-in shower, perfectly pressurized jets of steaming water tumbling down onto you, and wonder whether today you might use the space to perform a few yoga stretches, or some slippery jumping jacks. It’s even more supersized than our American fridge. And that’s saying something.
“Grace? Honey? You hear me?”
I push open the bathroom door—it was only half shut—and pull my dressing gown down from the hook on the back of it. “Sorry?”
“I said, we’re almost out of shower gel!”
“Oh, right.” I pull the dressing gown on. It’s a skimpy kimono one that I wear as a direct challenge to the huge white toweling monstrosity that also hangs on the back of the door. This (the monstrosity) is the one Charlie’s mother gave me three birthdays ago, when I was very pregnant with Hector. It was far too big for me even then, and I think my mother-in-law was secretly disappointed that I didn’t balloon to the size of … well, the size of an American shower, I suppose. “It’s on the Ocado order for tomorrow.”
“Honey, I don’t think that’s going to cut it!” Charlie yells through the swirling steam. Ever since he started his new job he’s had a tendency to speak this way—as though he’s trying to off-load a million BP shares before the close of the Nikkei, rather than discussing the ins and outs of the weekly Ocado order. “Can’t you stop by the supermarket and pick some more up today? And get the yellow kind, OK? I think it’s lemon, something like that!”
“Yes. I’ll get the yellow kind.”
“The green one gives me a rash, remember?”
“I remember.”
“It’s still pretty sore, actually. It chafes every time I go for a run.”
Charlie’s new fitness campaign is another thing that’s roughly coincided with the start of his new job. Or maybe just with his turning forty-five before Christmas. It seems that practically everyone at MMA Capital, his new office, is either working out with an expensive personal trainer or puffing their way miserably toward the London Marathon, and Charlie Costello will not be left behind. Anyway, I suppose I can’t really blame Charlie for his desire to join the marathon-running herd. I know how good it is to feel you’re fitting in. And how miserable it can be when you don’t.
“Yeah, still pretty sore …” he carries on, scrubbing under his armpits with the last of the current bottle of shower gel. “Actually, hon, maybe you could stop by the pharmacy this morning, get me some of that soothing dermatological cream? The one in the white box?”
One time, just once, I’d like Charlie to be the one who trudges around—sorry, stops by—the supermarket and the drugstore and dry cleaner’s and the deli, identifying his prospective purchases solely on the basis of their color. “Cereal, yeah, we need cereal, I usually have the cereal in the purple box … Shirts, yeah, I’m here to pick up shirts, I think they were blue last time I looked at them … Cheese, yeah, I’d like some cheese, I think we usually have the yellow kind …”
“Could you pass me my towel, hon?” Charlie taps on the shower glass to get my attention. “No, sweetie, not the white one. The white one leaves lint all over my skin. Pass me the blue one next to it.”
Wordlessly, I pass him the correctly color-coded towel, and then I head back into the bedroom to start making the bed.
I don’t need to look over my shoulder to know what Charlie’s doing now: sucking in his stomach and then perusing his form in the mirror from various angles, as though he’s conducting some kind of alternative police lineup, with himself as both the officer in charge and the only suspect.
“Can you get me a shirt from the closet, hon?” he calls. “I’m running late.”
“But it’s barely six forty …”
“I have a breakfast meeting with Saad Amar at seven thirty. And I can hardly be late for the boss, Grace. Let’s wait until he at least makes me a partner before I start pissing him off, shall we?”
It’s the patronizing tone that really gets under my skin, but it’s not the time or the place to start up a quarrel about it. Not, let’s face it, that it would get me anywhere. Charlie can no more see that he’s being patronizing than a leopard can see he’s looking a bit spotty.
“I know you can’t be late for the boss, Charlie,” I say sunnily. “After all, I may not have a career, but I have responsibilities. I have things I can’t be late for, too!”
“Sure you do, hon.” His tone of voice is the exact same one he used on Hector the other morning at breakfast, when he announced that he thought he might like to be a chicken when he grew up. “Oh, hey, have you booked the babysitter for tomorrow evening? You haven’t forgotten it’s the drinks do at work?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” How could I possibly forget? He’s reminded me almost every day for the past week. MMA will be celebrating some big deal they’ve just negotiated (to buy a hedge fund, or take over a hedge fund, or maybe invade a hedge fund for all I know … I’m sketchy on the details because Charlie never really talks to me about his work). “I’ve booked Kitty-next-door to babysit.”
“Well done, honey.” He gets down on the floor to add on another few dozen sit-ups to his earlier abs routine. “Oh, by the way, when you make my packed lunch, can you put in some of that low-fat taramasalata for my vegetable sticks? The white kind, not the pink kind,” he calls after me as I head out of the bedroom. “Thanks, hon. You’re a star!”
On days like this, it’s a total mystery to me how I ended up here.
The next hour is filled with a blur of hummus, eggs Benedict (the only thing my newly gastronome older son Robbie will eat for breakfast at the moment), and an apparent explosion inside my younger son Hector’s nappy. Then, before we can leave for school and nursery, there’s a good fifteen minutes of chasing said younger son around the living room trying to get a fresh nappy on him, followed by a further ten minutes spent turning Robbie’s bedroom upside down to try and find his prized Chicago Bulls sticker book. As usual, as we hurtle out of the house at twenty past eight, I feel less like the boys’ mother and more like a well-meaning, but essentially clueless, au pair.
That said, at least I look the part. You won’t find a yummier mummy than me anywhere in West London. I am blond. I am slim. I relig
iously wear the designated uniform of designer jeans, Breton-striped tops, and smart-but-practical flat riding boots. I carry a Mulberry Bayswater. I could have stepped off the pages of the latest Boden catalogue—in fact, I can just picture it. Me in a Drapey Jersey Dress and Color Block Wedges, strolling jauntily along a sunny beach, with that little sidebox of cozy personal info printed a few inches above my head. Grace: favorite Halloween outfit—a sexy witch; best way to spend a Sunday morning—tea and toast in bed with the supplements; childhood ambition—artist.
Childhood ambition absolutely, categorically not “stay-at-home mother of such poor quality that she’s actually more like a well-meaning, but essentially clueless, au pair.”
Look—it’s not that I don’t realize how lucky I am. I know plenty of people who would kill for my life, at least the way it looks on the outside. Certainly I know people who’d kill for my two beautiful children. And obviously I adore my boys with every fiber and sinew of my being. I mean, look at them: a couple of blond angels (well, one angel and Hector) that somehow I’ve managed to bring into the world and keep breathing ever since. How I’ve achieved this miracle is a mystery to me, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I suppose. I do have two healthy, happy boys who aren’t (yet, at least) showing any signs of maternal neglect or deep-rooted dysfunction. Accidentally, it appears, I must be doing something right.
But when I take my eyes off Robbie and Hector, and just think for a moment about the rest of my life, it’s very, very far from the childhood ambitions I entertained.
And it’s starting to show, because I’m just plain wrong in the world I’m living in. I mean, I’m twenty-eight years old with a social circle entirely limited to over-forties. I’m a stay-at-home mother who still can’t make a proper shepherd’s pie. I’m not so much I Don’t Know How She Does It as Why Does She Even Bother?
It’s all very well doing the school run in my Breton-striped finest, but at the end of the day, I’m not really fooling anyone.
It’s a fifteen-minute brisk walk—very brisk, through the biting November wind—to Hector’s nursery, Tiny Tots, and then a further couple of minutes along the Fulham Road to St. Martin’s, Robbie’s school.
We’re among the last to arrive, as we are pretty much every morning, the on-duty teacher flapping frantic arms at us to get a move on, otherwise the main gates will be closed and we’ll have to ring the side bell and get the caretaker to let us in. Unlike me, the other stragglers tend to be the working mothers, who have my unending, uncomprehending admiration for the way they can get themselves and their children out the front door every morning at all. Especially since the St. Martin’s working mothers tend to have such impressively high-powered careers, the kind that require them to dress up in whip-smart suits and stalky-about heels, with neat, groomed hair and the kind of “minimal” makeup that takes a good twenty minutes, and a full set of shu uemura brushes, to apply.
There’s one working mother in particular who always catches my eye, though, and as usual she’s here this morning, depositing her daughter before jumping, at speed, into the nearest passing taxi. Louboutin Lexie, I call her—because I know her name is Lexie, and because she’s always, but always, wearing the most incredible Louboutin heels. Though she’s just as minutely groomed as the other working mothers, this is where the similarity ends. Because Louboutin Lexie doesn’t pair her Louboutins with a power suit, no matter how elegant. Louboutin Lexie is rock ’n’ roll. Louboutin Lexie wears skintight cigarette pants and fabulous cropped jackets, cool printed tees, and leather miniskirts. She spurns Mulberry’s entire handbag output in favor of absurdly impractical oversized clutches or animal-print totes. She works—and this is only my imaginings, you understand—in some chic little art gallery somewhere in Soho or Shoreditch, selling incomprehensible art installations by Young British Artists and pieces of graffiti by Banksy. And on the weekends, she hangs out with her equally fabulous friends—in hip little bars on Saturday nights, and in great big noisy family groups at the River Café on Sundays.
I know I sound just a little bit obsessed. But I want … I sort of want to be this woman. I actually think I should have been this woman. Louboutin Lexie is who I was supposed to be, I’m quite sure, from the art gallery career and the multitude of friends to the stunning wardrobe with the covetable accessories. I mean, I went to art school to do a fine art degree, and I was good at it, too, until I dropped out at the start of my third year to marry Charlie. I used to have a multitude of friends, until they all began to fall by the wayside when I skipped ahead an entire generation and got pregnant with Robbie only a month after my twenty-first birthday. As for the stunning wardrobe and the covetable accessories … well, OK, I’m not sure I was ever anywhere close to Louboutin Lexie’s exalted level.
But maybe I would have been if I hadn’t married a man who practically has a heart attack every time I attempt to deviate from middle-aged yummy-mummy style territory. Who made a fuss when I turned up to a colleague’s promotion dinner in a pair of bright red patent platforms. Who split his sides laughing the (admittedly ill-fated) day I attempted to rock a pair of harem pants. (I’d seen Jessica Biel looking fabulous in a pair in Grazia magazine, and as it happens, she’s three years older and a full dress size larger than me.)
I give Robbie his usual hug and kiss-on-the-tip-of-the-nose, and after he’s gone through the gates, I turn around and start heading back along Fulham Road.
I’m not quite brave enough to venture to a table-for-one at Café on the Green, where all the other (nonworking) mothers hang out, but I’m damned if I’m not going to at least get a takeaway coffee before stopping by the supermarket in search of Charlie’s yellow shower gel. Pathetic but true—a smile and a friendly word with the nice Croatian girl who makes the café’s delicious cappuccino is probably going to be the highlight of my week.
Actually, that’s a bit unfair. Though usually that would be true, this week I do have another, much better highlight. My best friend, Polly, is getting back from New York, where she’s been living for the last six years.
Actually, she’ll have got back last night—I wanted to go to the airport to meet her, but I couldn’t get a babysitter and Charlie had to work late. Anyway, she’s getting married on New Year’s Eve—Christ, that reminds me, I really have to speak to her scary sister, Bella, about picking out our bridesmaid dresses—and moving into a lovely house in leafy Wimbledon, with her even lovelier fiancé, Dev, so the next few weeks will hopefully be a happy blur of picking out her wedding dress and helping her with trips to John Lewis to choose carpets and curtains…. Though to be honest, I don’t even need to do those things with Polly. Just having her back home again, being able to meet for a coffee during her lunch hour, take a walk around Selfridges, or just hang out and do nothing together … well, it’s the thing that’s been keeping my head above water for the last few months.
I mean, even if I hadn’t missed Polly as much as I actually have, having her home again is going to be a massive improvement on my current lonely situation.
Two minutes from Café on the Green, I’m surprised by the sight of someone waving at me from a row of parked Range Rovers. I realize with a sinking heart that it’s a Miranda.
Miranda, by the way, is the catch-all name for the kind of professional mummy I’m impersonating. It was a (rare) joke of Charlie’s, to begin with; a year ago, when we first attended St. Martin’s open house, we were descended upon by, it seemed, no fewer than a dozen mothers called Miranda. They all had children called ridiculous things like Artemis and Ophelia, and they all wanted to know which other schools we were applying to, and whether or not our son was already reading chapter books, and were we thinking of having him join the after-school French club or was he more of a pottery and painting kind of boy …?
Even though it’s pretty obvious now that not all of them are called Miranda, Charlie’s joke has stuck.
Though actually, this one—the one climbing out of her Range Rover, overexcited Labradoo
dle in tow—really is called Miranda. Chief Miranda, I call her in my head, because she’s one of those queen-bee Alpha women, rather like Charlie’s ex-wife, Vanessa. In fact, she happens to be close friends with Charlie’s ex-wife, Vanessa, as they live next door to each other in one of the swankiest streets in this area.
It doesn’t make for the easiest of relations between us, that’s for certain. But still—and rather pathetically—I want her to approve of me. Chief Miranda is one of the lynchpins of society at St. Martin’s, whereas my role in said society is … well, I’m just not exactly the prom queen around here, that’s all. While being a leggy twenty-something blonde might stand me in pretty good stead if I had a fabulous job like Louboutin Lexie’s, or if I fancied hanging out at some kind of mechanics’ garage all day, like the woman in the Uptown Girl video, it’s a definite drawback in terms of getting “in” with the Mirandas. While they all look totally fabulous for women in their early forties, they are, unavoidably, women in their early forties. And even though it’s not like I’m stupid enough to come and stand at the school gates in a micro-mini with a sign painted on my unlined forehead saying And All This Without Botox!, I’m still practically a gym-slip mother around here. It’s not winning me too many allies.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m a lot more shy than anyone ever gives me credit for. Bad at small talk. Nervous with chat.
Oh, and then there’s the third thing, probably the most important thing, that’s working against me: I’m She Who Must Not Be Named. I’m a second, younger wife.
The thing is that even though everyone who matters knows that Charlie’s marriage to Vanessa was over before he made a move on me, I’m not stupid. I can see how it looks. I was their son’s babysitter, for God’s sake. It was a great way to make extra money when Polly and I first came to London together—me to art school, her to university—and even though I was scared witless of Vanessa, she and Charlie quickly became my most frequent clients. But—as I was forced to swear to my extremely old-fashioned, uptight parents before they’d even agree to meet Charlie—he and Vanessa had been sleeping in separate rooms for months before he tried to kiss me as he drove me home after babysitting one night. And he’d moved out and hired a divorce lawyer before I finally reciprocated.
There Goes the Bride Page 3