by Fiona Neill
‘What are you thinking about?’ asks Tom, looking at me out of the corner of his eye while still fully engaged in the lines and piles process.
‘What do you think about Emma’s affair with this man?’ I ask. ‘I never thought she would get involved with someone who is married. She likes everything to be so defined, and, whatever the outcome, this is all going to be very complicated.’
‘I think that you have to let people live their lives, Lucy,’ he says, pulling a suit carrier out of the wardrobe and getting a towel to dust it. ‘Anyway, it all sounds quite compulsive, snatched sex in his office, in lifts, in the backs of cars. Clandestine encounters are a great aphrodisiac.’
‘How do you know all that?’ I ask.
‘She told me while you went to check on Fred. She can’t stop talking about it. God, I hope you never talk about me so explicitly.’
I ignore this and instead say, ‘But what about his wife?’
‘Well, she’s probably too knackered. You can only do that kind of stuff with a relative stranger,’ he says.
‘That’s not what I meant. It seems so unfair that she doesn’t even realise she’s engaged in a battle for hearts and minds. I mean, if she knew that there was a rival, she might try a bit harder,’ I say.
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know, wax her bikini line, go to the gym, cook nice dinners, consider new sexual positions, make a fuss of him when he comes home from work.’
‘Maybe you need a rival then,’ he jokes. ‘If those are the kinds of things that matter, then it’s not a very substantial marriage, is it? Perhaps she does all that and more and it’s still not enough. What I really can’t understand is why he wants to set up a flat with her. Domesticity is the death knell of that kind of passion.’
‘Not if you only get to be domestic in prescribed hours. I can’t see where it’s all going.’
‘I think all this has got more to do with you than her actually, Lucy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think you’re overempathising with other people’s situations and that unsettles you,’ he says.
Just as it gets interesting, Fred comes running into the bedroom, and in one impressive leap from the floor lands in the middle of his father’s arrangement and jumps up and down. A rabble of clothes bounces around, shirtsleeves embrace underpants, socks become separated, and the contents intended for his wash bag scatter over the floor. The razor never makes it to Milan and joins the splinter movement under the bed. Toddlers are natural-born anarchists.
‘Fred, you are meant to be asleep,’ shouts Tom, grabbing him and carrying him under his arm like a rugby ball back to the bedroom, his little legs pedalling wildly in the air.
Children always sense when you are abandoning the front line and leaving a duty officer in charge.
But Polly the babysitter, the youngest daughter of one of our neighbours, is now too busy writing an A-level philosophy essay to worry about what is going on upstairs. I go down into the kitchen to give her a list of numbers in case she needs to contact us, glancing at her computer screen; ‘Socrates believes that people do wrong, not because they are inherently evil, but because they are unclear about what is best for them.’ Discuss.
‘Would you like me to try and tackle the laundry once the children are asleep?’ Polly asks. The overflowing baskets are in the same corner of the kitchen as they were last time she came. The clean and dirty piles joined forces a couple of weeks ago and instead of twin peaks, there is a small mountain with a sort of plateau of pants and bras on top. She is clearing a small space on the kitchen table to spread out more books. She carries plastic mugs in garish colours half-filled with milk, plates with crusts of toast and eggshells that have been sitting on the table since tea, and starts efficiently sweeping food into the bin and then putting everything in the dishwasher.
‘Sorry, it’s always such a rush if you are going out,’ I say, companionably loading up the dishwasher beside her and hoping that Tom won’t come in, because Polly is randomly piling plates into the bottom compartment and mixing the knives and forks together in the cutlery rack.
‘I was going to clear up after I bathed the boys but then Fred cut his lip in the bath and Tom was making endless calls to Italy. If you have time for the laundry that would be great.’ I glance at her stomach as she stands up beside me. She is wearing a pair of Seven jeans that must have cost more than a hundred pounds and a multi-layered vest top that keeps riding up as she bends down to put things in the dishwasher, revealing an effortlessly flat stomach and belly-button ring. It is unimaginable that she might one day be pitched against rebellious piles of dirty laundry and multiple midriffs, befuddled by flat packs and school timetables, holding conversations with her husband about the best way to stack a dishwasher. And yet once I was like her. I wonder what she thinks of me. I see her looking at the ‘to do’ list on the fridge. Gym shoes Joe. Hairdresser. Christmas presents, underlined three times. Call plumber. Nit shampoo, because once again the children have lice.
I know that she won’t sort out the clothes now. Not because she is lazy or her offer is insincere. But because she will conclude that perhaps if she works a little harder for a little longer on her essay, she might get good enough grades to guarantee a future far removed from my own.
As we load the dishwasher I ask about her future plans.
‘I want to do a history degree,’ she says.
‘Oh, that’s what I did at Manchester,’ I reply enthusiastically. She looks slightly perturbed but has the good grace to blush.
‘So did you work then, before you had children?’ she asks tentatively, not really wanting to know the answer. And there is a part of me that wants to lie, to tell her that she will have different choices and that everything will be easier.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And then I tried part-time after Sam was born but because Tom was working unpredictable hours I had to find a nanny who was prepared to stay until midnight. Then I got pregnant with Joe.’
‘Were you doing shift work?’ she asks.
‘Something like that,’ I reply, picking bits of pasta out of the sink.
‘What exactly did it involve?’ she persists.
‘I was a producer on Newsnight,’ I say.
‘But that’s terrible, that you had to give all that up,’ she says.
‘When you have children, you are never truly free again,’ I say, ‘and that is both a terrible and a wonderful thing. At first, it felt as though the role I had prepared for my entire life had been taken from me, just as the curtain went up and I discovered that far from being the lead part, I was fourth spear bearer. But it was terrible never really seeing Sam. It’s funny, if the thought of time with your children fills you with dread, it is probably a sign that you are seeing too much of them, and if you wake up early on a Saturday morning and get up to pack in a trip to the zoo, a museum and make pancakes for breakfast, you undoubtedly aren’t getting enough time with them.’
‘But surely there must be a happy medium.’
‘Well, a really rich husband helps because then you can buy your way out of a lot of the more tedious tasks,’ I joke. ‘But then you never see him. And there are some jobs that are more compatible with motherhood. Or you could find yourself a house husband.’
‘I think that I will try and have children when I am young and then build a career after that,’ she says thoughtfully.
‘I think that sounds a great idea,’ I lie because there is no point in trying to explain the incompatibility of motherhood with all that has preceded it. ‘Anyway, you don’t need to worry about any of this at the moment, just enjoy yourself. What did your mother do?’
‘She’s a corporate lawyer,’ Polly says. ‘We joke that she’s a mole because we’ve never seen her in daylight hours. I know that I never want that.’
I hear shouting and run upstairs to investigate. Fred is out of bed again and the two elder boys are in the middle of a favourite new game, inspired by an episode of ER t
hat Sam watched with us a few months ago. It involves carrying out operations on each other, each more grotesque and bloody than the last. This time it is Fred’s turn to be pinned down on the floor. They have taken tomato ketchup from the kitchen to simulate blood and it is all over the duvet cover. It warrants a row, but the prospect is too exhausting, so I simply pick up the ketchup and give Sam, who as the eldest should show more responsibility, a look that I hope conveys a number of emotions including disappointment, rage and exasperation.
‘We’re doing a brain transplant, Mum,’ says Sam.
‘It’s so he remembers how to count to twenty,’ says Joe.
‘Do you want one too, Mum?’ asks Sam.
I go into our bedroom searching for Tom, catching sight of a lopsided curtain that Fred pulled down during hide-and-seek, to reveal a stain from where the gutter overflowed last year.
The whole house needs painting, I think to myself. But, like the dream of a toy cupboard filled with identical plastic boxes with names stuck on the side to indicate where things will be located, painting the house is not a first-division priority. Then I start to wonder just what is. Finding a new cleaning lady, perhaps? Sorting out Sam’s birthday party, for sure? Having sex with Tom, definitely? Resolving my ongoing crisis, absolutely?
One thing beyond question is that uncertainty is a breeding ground for more uncertainty. I attempt to chart the course of my recent loss of faith. Tom is right. The seeds were probably sown more than a year ago with a phone call from Cathy just after midnight asking in the kind of shrunken voice that comes after hours of crying whether she could come round and see us and stay the night. She said she would tell us everything when she arrived with Ben, who was then three years old, but we knew what had happened. The fissures had been obvious for some time. There had been the sessions with a Relate counsellor, when the bitterness was already so deep that even the air around them tasted sour, and the stand-up row at my brother’s fortieth birthday party when Cathy had forgotten to tell her ex-husband that she needed to work over the weekend which meant he had to look after Ben and cancel his shiatsu massage. ‘Look, if I don’t work, we don’t have enough money,’ she shouted.
‘My therapist says that I have to have space to think and find my inner child,’ he brayed back.
‘I think you need to find your outer adult first,’ she retorted.
‘What is so awful,’ said Cathy, over several bottles of wine, after we had settled Ben upstairs, ‘is the fact that he is so far ahead in the decision-making process that there is no hope of reconciliation. You think that you know what someone is thinking, and then they tell you that they’re not sure that they ever even loved you, and you start wondering about the truth of your own feelings and losing all faith in them.’
We nodded sagely. At that time I had never questioned the strength of our emotional fusion. Tom went upstairs and found her a handkerchief. When he handed it over she cried even more at his kindness.
‘You’re so reliable, Tom. If only I had married a man who arranged the spices alphabetically,’ she sobbed.
‘If only I had married a woman who appreciated that quality,’ he joked.
‘I thought that because we were married we would try to make it work even if it looked as though everything was stacked against us. I’m sure that he’s involved with someone else because he’s incapable of making a decision like this on his own.’
When we went to bed that night Tom said, ‘Well, that’s the end of those Wednesday evening sessions with him watching football at the pub.’ And then he fell asleep. And that really seemed to be the extent of his regret. ‘Things change, people don’t, life moves on, Lucy,’ he said the next morning. ‘And actually Cathy will probably be better off without him. He’s never going to evolve.’
‘Lucy, Lucy, come on, we’re going to be late,’ Tom says, sweeping into the bedroom and putting on his jacket and a scarf.
As we close the front door behind us, I get that feeling of lightness that comes with assuming the rearguard for a few hours and Tom, buoyed by similar thoughts, puts his hand out and I take it. Time alone is a precious commodity and the thought of simply being, rather than doing, is a sensation that we both relish. For a few paces we walk along in silent harmony and I feel a surge of optimism that my disturbed equilibrium could be restored if only we had more time alone together. For perhaps as long as a minute I reconnect with a time before children, when it was just Tom and me, when we could stay in bed at the weekends, read all the newspapers, and go on mini-breaks. Then I realise that the car has disappeared.
‘Oh, God. I left it outside school this afternoon, because the boys wanted to walk home. I’m really sorry,’ I tell him, trying to anticipate how long I might pay for this infringement, a rough calculation that involves judging to what extent his forthcoming trip compensates for his absence to make introductions at the restaurant, a detail that he would consider important, but not crucial. I decide on balance that the library in Milan favours me. And I am right. Time alone in harmony is a commodity he recognises has value.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll run and get it, you start walking towards school,’ he says, setting off at a sprint that I know he’ll find unsustainable after about a hundred metres.
I think about Polly doing her essay. Where has all the information gone that I retained during that intensive period from school to university, I wonder? Is it lost for ever? For sure the decline began in the childbearing years, when whole new areas of specialist interest opened up. Pushchairs, for example. A few years ago, I could have written a long essay on pushchairs. Securing our first took longer than buying a car. It required more viewings than buying our house.
I remember a conversation in my office with a couple of male colleagues who were having babies at the same time as I was pregnant with Sam. Fed up with weekends spent in baby shops, baffled and befuddled by the sheer variety of pushchairs, we sat down together in a meeting room with various catalogues, hoping that between us we had collated and analysed enough information to come to some conclusions. But after half an hour, we were still involved in hefty debate over issues such as weight, forward-folding designs versus collapsible options, sporty or rural. The statistical analysis required was beyond us.
Then, when Sam was born, medical expertise became the new priority. It became crucial to know exactly how to use a glass to distinguish between viral and meningococcal rashes; it was useful to know that digital thermometers gave readouts that were always slightly too high; and it was humbling to discover that the anti-inflammatory powers of Savoy cabbages and frozen peas made them much more than vegetables. Now the specialist subjects have widened further. Schools top the list. The depth of knowledge required to dominate that particular area is worthy of a PhD.
I look up and see Tom running towards me, waving his arms.
‘It’s not there,’ he shouts.
‘God, it must have been stolen again,’ I say. At least this time I know that I haven’t lost the spare key.
‘Are you sure that you left it at school? I’m going to go inside and ask Sam if he remembers,’ he says, immediately taking charge of the situation and running towards the house again. Within minutes he is running out again. There is something comical about all his rushing around, as though he is living life in fastforward, while I meander along on play and rewind, and I start to giggle.
‘I don’t know why you find this funny, we’re three-quarters of an hour behind schedule,’ he shouts, this time in anger, because his face is so close to mine that there is no reason to raise his voice. ‘Sam says that you left it outside Starbucks.’ But the angrier he gets, the more I giggle.
‘It’s strange because as I was running back I saw a blue Peugeot on the corner of that street but of course I didn’t realise you had parked it somewhere completely different.’
So we set off running together. Past the same trees and houses that I walk by every day on my way to school, waving to the nice man with the black Labrador walking in the
opposite direction, noting that one of the street lamps is broken, past the new Tesco Metro, hurdling the legs of the homeless man who always sits outside. Although our pace is evenly matched and we run in time – and to the people we pass on the pavement, there must be a satisfying physical symmetry in our movements – we could not really be further apart. We do however find the car.
‘Lucky this happened tonight and not on a school morning,’ I say.
‘It’s nothing to do with luck, Lucy, and everything to do with poor planning,’ says Tom.
I would like to continue the conversation we were having earlier, but I know that all my energies must now be invested in lifting the mood that has settled over the evening.
Tom drives silently, gripping the steering wheel in quiet fury, silence being the greatest punishment of them all. I am grateful that there is no moon tonight. I am grateful that we are going on ill-lit back roads through the underbelly of north London. Most of all, I am grateful for the fact that Tom is not in the passenger seat. All because the car is still in a state of unmade bed and I am aware that the seat and I are as one because the chocolate buttons down the back are slowly melting and sticking to my coat, and that when I move, even with the gentlest movement, old crisp packets and bits of paper from school crackle underneath. I pick out a couple of apple cores from under the handbrake when he turns right on to Marylebone Road and hide them in my handbag.
The traffic is at a standstill. So slow that no one even bothers to use their horn. So slow that some people have switched off their engine and are standing around the three-lane highway, discussing what might have happened. There is no way forward and no way back. And neither of us wants to be the first to break the silence.