The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  ‘I’ve had a bad day,’ she says finally. ‘I had to phone the parents of one of our correspondents in Iraq and tell them that their son was killed in an ambush. I don’t want to talk about it. These mussels are a bitch to clean, they are so beardy.’

  ‘Maybe something bigger than a toothbrush would make it easier,’ Cathy says gently.

  Emma’s bad days are always on a grand scale compared to my own, involving, as they often do, significant events on the world stage. Anything from tsunamis to civil war. Impressive problems. Discovering that my mother-in-law has organised my husband’s pants into a colour-coordinated scheme without asking whether she can go in our bedroom hardly competes.

  I look round the kitchen, taking in the Gaggia coffee machine, Kitchen Aid mixer and twin dishwashers. Only one of the dishwashers has been used. It is all conceived on such an enormous scale that Emma looks as though she is in Brobdingnag, standing on steps to open cupboards beyond the reach of mere mortals, peering into a huge American-style fridge that is empty apart from lots of bottles of white wine, Puligny Montrachet, it says on the labels, and a packet of shrivelled rocket. She looks even tinier than usual and quaintly domestic in an apron, gripping a wooden spoon in her fist like a toddler holding a fork for the first time. I can’t remember ever eating a meal cooked by her before.

  ‘What are we having?’ I ask.

  ‘Mussels followed by pan-fried scallops with pancetta,’ she says, frowning at a Jamie Oliver cook book and lining up brand new Le Creuset saucepans on the granite worktop. What is it about people who never cook, choosing recipes that even a professional chef would find challenging? She puts everything in the oven and shuts the door a little too hard.

  ‘Let’s sit down and have a drink. It’s hard work being a domestic goddess. I don’t know how you manage to hold it all together, Lucy,’ says Emma, walking to the other end of the room and slumping in an oversize sofa. Her kitten-heel boots make a disproportionally loud noise on the poured cement floor.

  I have wasted many hours explaining to Emma the grounds on which I fail to qualify for domestic goddess status, and finally realised about a year ago that maintaining this illusion is important to her. As she scrolls through news stories on her screen in her glass bubble, I know she imagines me in a floral Cath Kidston pinny, removing buns that I have made with the children from the oven, and drawing up plans of how they should be decorated, a complicated endeavour involving different-coloured icing, little silver balls and sprinkles.

  Emma likes to invest her friends with traits that bear little resemblance to reality, but they’re always positive, which is what makes the habit tolerable. So in her mind, I am a glamorous, thin mother of three, with a healthy bank balance, tidy home and cooperative children. It is a picture painted in primary colours because the idea that any of us might lead an anaemic existence is anathema to her. It is also a way for her to avoid confrontation with the underbelly of life. And sometimes it is easier to believe the myth, because it makes me feel good.

  ‘So how is living apart together?’ I ask her, anticipating a rosy account filled with witty observation and funny anecdotes.

  ‘Well, the bed finally arrived, which is bliss. Sometimes I wake in the night and Guy is lying beside me and I’m so excited that I can’t get back to sleep. I don’t want to disturb him because I don’t want him to go, and yet I’m terrified that if I don’t send him home, his wife will find out. Other times I feel a bit like a songbird trapped in a cage,’ she says, kicking off her boots and undoing the top button of her jeans.

  ‘And we’re still going to hotels at lunch-time, because it’s an addiction that’s hard to break. I spend too many evenings waiting for Guy to call, because I hardly know anyone who lives in this area. I avoid making other plans in case there is a chance that he can escape work and make an excuse to his wife. And then as soon as he arrives I forget how I felt and cook elaborate recipes from one of these books, drink lots of wine, and have fantastic sex.’

  ‘That all sounds amazing,’ I say, because largely it does and that is what Emma wants to hear. She won’t want us to dwell on the songbird image. But there is a touch of uncertainty in her voice. She sounds vulnerable.

  ‘But I can’t help thinking it’s a relationship that’s stunted from the start. A runt relationship, that’s never going to grow into something else,’ she continues. ‘We only exist within the confines of this flat. The rare moments when we are together outside of this space, we can’t even touch each other. Although that makes it more charged when you can. Let’s eat. It must be ready. I can’t bear the sound of my own voice any more.’

  We move to the kitchen table to eat the meal that Emma has prepared. She has laid each place with a complex arrangement of knives, forks and spoons, and two glasses, one for water and one for wine. A basket of bread cut into delicate slices sits in the middle, already going stale. There is something poignant in this effort, as though she is trying to mark out new territory that doesn’t really belong to her. Everything is borrowed from someone else’s life.

  The mussels still have sand and bits of beard in them, and the scallops are dry and rubbery because Emma put them in the oven instead of frying them over a hot heat for a short time. So for a few minutes we sit there in companionable silence. I chew a scallop in my right cheek until the muscles beg for mercy and then swap sides. When we discover that they are resistant to all attempts to break them down into a more manageable consistency, we swallow them with gulps of red wine as though we are taking a vitamin supplement. Still, we compliment Emma on her nascent culinary achievements.

  ‘You don’t have to pretend, I know I’m a crap cook,’ she says, laughing, as though she is relieved that one of her most long-standing attributes hasn’t changed. ‘Actually, Guy does most of the cooking. At home his wife doesn’t let him near the kitchen.’

  The kitchen table can sit fourteen, possibly sixteen. It is so new that I find myself yearning for the pockmarked imperfections of our own table with its paint stains and tiny trenches made by the children with small spoons and forks. It might be grubby, but at least it has history.

  We are huddled at one corner and it feels a little lonely. I can’t imagine Emma eating on her own, although she must have breakfast here every morning. There are views out across London if you happen to be sitting on the side that backs on to the cooker. Perhaps that is some compensation.

  ‘What a great place to have a party,’ says Cathy.

  ‘That’s what it is designed for, but we’ll never have one together,’ says Emma, putting down her knife and fork. ‘We won’t even have mutual friends round for dinner or slob around in our pyjamas on a Saturday morning, although I’m hoping that during the Christmas holidays, when his wife goes to their country home with the children, we might manage a weekend together. Second homes are a great thing. We had such a good summer when his wife was in Dorset.’

  I bite my tongue and remember Tom’s advice about allowing people to live their own lives.

  ‘You could have people round for dinner. You could have us, and I can invite my new boyfriend,’ says Cathy enthusiastically. ‘I’m desperate for you to meet him.’

  ‘That would be nice. Perhaps I can try and persuade Guy,’ says Emma. ‘The thing is that his life is so compartmentalised. He likes to keep me for himself. He doesn’t want to share me. Going out with friends is something he associates with his wife, not me. I am not most of his life. I’m just a fraction.’

  ‘But you can’t measure the depth of fractions, only the breadth,’ I say, trying to be reassuring. She sounds uncharacteristically dispirited.

  ‘Maybe he’ll leave his wife,’ I continue, wanting to offer a morsel of hope.

  ‘He won’t, because ultimately he is someone who plays safe. A woman with a career is the last thing that he wants. He was the one who persuaded his wife to give up work as soon as she got pregnant. I merely give a little diversity to his portfolio,’ she says, periodically running her nails up and down t
he back of her head and scratching furiously.

  ‘Well, he is having his cake and eating it,’ I say, viewing this conversation as progress of a sort. It is the first time, since Emma began this relationship more than a year ago, that she has shown any sign of self-doubt. Her certainty has been unnatural and a little disturbing.

  ‘I suppose what I really want is some evidence that he wants emotional evolution. He seems so satisfied with the status quo and that feels like a betrayal,’ she says.

  Betrayal takes on many forms, I think to myself. It can creep up on you slowly, an accumulation of self-deception and small white lies, or descend suddenly like a mist. The treachery of Emma’s banker is not in what he says. He has promised nothing more than he can deliver. It is in what he doesn’t say. It is in the empty gestures, the way he gets his secretary to send flowers on his wife’s birthday, the way he punctiliously deletes his text messages from Emma each evening on the doorstep of his home and then kisses his children with the scent of his mistress still fresh on his breath.

  Then I hold myself up for comparison. My drink with Robert Bass might seem small beer compared to the situation between Emma and Guy, but it is betrayal all the same. The time I have spent thinking about him, engineering fantasies in my mind, has already diluted my relationship with Tom. Like a ship approaching shore after a long period at sea, I find myself feeling happier the closer I come to our next meeting. Of course, unlike Emma and Guy, my flirtation with Robert Bass will never be consummated. But what started as a harmless distraction from my other preoccupations has now hijacked a space in my head that would be much better occupied with pastimes appropriate to a millennial mother. Like, for example, putting together the Ikea shoe-shelf kit that has sat beside the front door alongside a jumble of shoes for the past two years, or mastering the espresso machine given to us for Christmas last year by Petra, or engaging in depilation befitting a woman in her late thirties.

  ‘Lucy, Lucy, are you listening?’ says Emma. ‘What do you think?’ I realise I have missed crucial sections of Emma’s moment of self-doubt and start feeling remorseful for that.

  ‘I wonder whether you ever feel guilty for his wife?’ I blurt out, and Cathy stares at me, looking slightly shocked, although whether it is because the question is inappropriate to what has preceded it or just plain inappropriate is unclear. If I was more sure of my own feelings, then I would tell Emma that it is less judgement and more self-absorption. The question hangs in the air for a while, and Emma scratches her head thoughtfully.

  ‘Last month, he was with me one Friday evening and forgot that he was meant to be going out to dinner with his wife and some friends, because he had switched off his mobile phone. She couldn’t get hold of him until about one in the morning, when we finally crawled out of bed, and then he turned his phone back on to discover there were all these messages from her. She had gone to dinner on her own, lying to their friends that he had had to go abroad suddenly. He felt awful and I felt bad because of that. But I think, because I don’t have children and my own family life was fucked, my ability to feel guilt is limited,’ says Emma, in a rare moment of brutal self-honesty. ‘He tells me that he stays with her because he has me, but I know that isn’t true. However deep my self-delusion, I know that I’m not saving their marriage. Quite a lot of the time I feel contemptuous of her for failing to realise what is going on.’

  She looks up as she says this, knowing that it won’t rest easily with us.

  ‘Nothing is going to change. This is it,’ she continues, waving her hand around the room. ‘He’s never going to leave his wife and children, and I’m not sure I want him to. Relationships that start like this are unlikely to end well. There are too many fault lines from the outset. His wife would invest all her energy into making sure it would never work and his children would always hate me. Anyway, I would never want the responsibility for ending his marriage.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a good divorce, that’s for sure,’ says Cathy, who is still swimming in the wake of her own, wrangling over money matters, access to Ben and how to divide furniture. A universal formula for mutual unhappiness. The armoury of failed marriage might not have very sophisticated weapons, but that doesn’t make the battles any less bloody.

  ‘Two weekends a month without any children sounds quite good to me,’ I say glibly, hoping to lift the mood that has settled.

  ‘That’s because you don’t go out to work,’ says Cathy. ‘Handing over Ben every other weekend, when I don’t see him enough during the week, makes me feel physically sick. His father’s new girlfriend is trying so hard with him to curry favour that it makes me want to scream. I don’t want her to even touch Ben.’

  ‘And how is Tom’s architect?’ Emma asks Cathy, signalling an end to any further self-analysis.

  ‘He is fabulous,’ she says. ‘The light at the end of the tunnel. In every way. Almost. He’s clever, funny, we have great sex, amazing sex. I owe Tom big time for this one. The only downside is the man he shares the house with, who also happens to be his best friend,’ she says.

  ‘Do you want to move in already? Don’t you think that’s a little rash?’

  ‘Lucy, I’m never going to live with someone again,’ she says. ‘I’m never going to expose myself like that. I’ve got my life organised now, I’m earning good money, Ben is settled at school. I never want to rely on a man again financially.’

  ‘Well, that’s a little extreme,’ I say. ‘Although it’s true that most architects live in a constant state of economic uncertainty.’

  ‘What I mean is that this man he lives with seems to be jealous of me in some way,’ she says.

  ‘Is there an underlying sexual current between them, do you think?’ shouts Emma in a muffled voice from inside the fridge, where she is getting another bottle of white wine. I count the bottles on the kitchen table and realise that we have already drunk close to one each.

  ‘I haven’t talked to him about it, because although it seems really obvious to me, he seems oblivious, but there is nothing so far to suggest any latent homosexuality,’ Cathy says. ‘Except perhaps a penchant for anal sex.’

  ‘So how do you know he is jealous?’ I ask, intrigued.

  ‘Well, at first it was small things. If I call him at home, for example, he never passes on the messages and a couple of times he has said that Pete isn’t there when I’m sure that he is. I was happy to overlook that, but then the few times that I have actually met his flatmate he has behaved really strangely. The first time I had dinner there with both of them, which is a little odd in itself, Pete was cooking in the kitchen and he sat in the sitting room, telling me that Pete was a classic commitment-phobe who would never be able to connect permanently to anyone. He said he was like a magpie, always coveting his friends’ girlfriends, constantly dissatisfied with his own, leaving a trail of misery in his wake.’

  ‘Maybe that’s true, and he was trying to warn you not to get in too deep, because he knows you have already had a bad experience,’ says Emma.

  ‘I was happy to give him the benefit of the doubt over that too,’ says Cathy. ‘Then, the other night, I thought I was having text sex with Pete and discovered it was someone else.’

  ‘But how can you possibly know that?’ I ask.

  ‘I laid a trap,’ she says, smiling wickedly. ‘I replayed something that Pete and I had never done together as though it was something that had actually happened and he took the bait.’

  ‘So what was it about?’ I ask.

  ‘I pretended that Pete and I had been to a party, where we had sex with another woman in the bathroom. Took him right through it all as though we had actually done this together and then at the end he said it was the best erotic experience of his life and that he really wanted to do the same thing again. I’m sure it was his flatmate. Who else would have access to Pete’s phone at night?’

  ‘What is it about men and threesomes?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s not really threesomes, is it,’ says Cathy. �
��It’s about having sex with two other women and it’s not about the women having sex with each other, it’s about the man having two women all over him. There’s nothing democratic about it.’

  ‘What did you do about Guy’s plan?’ I ask Emma.

  ‘I took your advice about saying I had a rash from a Brazilian, got a Brazilian, to make it authentic, which was about the most painful experience of my life so far, and got a rash. He’s now switched fantasies and it’s all about having sex in his office, which is far less complicated to indulge and actually very exciting because there is such a risk of us being caught. I blame you for that one, Lucy, it was after those texts you sent him.’

  ‘So what else has the saucy flatmate been up to?’ I ask, turning to Cathy again.

  ‘Well, the other night, I got there before Pete and he started flirting with me in a really obvious way,’ she says.

  ‘What did he do?’ I ask, because since my drink with Robert Bass, learning to read these kinds of signals suddenly seems very important. But there is nothing subtle about what she says next.

  ‘He came up behind me when I was opening a bottle of wine in the kitchen, and ran his finger down my spine,’ she says. ‘It was almost imperceptible; he started at the top and slowly meandered down the back of my T-shirt and stopped when he reached the skin below and then took his finger away.’

  Emma and I gasp.

  ‘What’s awful is that although I should have found it creepy and put an immediate stop to it, I let him go on because actually I was really tempted. He’s very attractive too, in a smooth metro-sexual kind of way,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe they like to share girlfriends,’ I proffer.

  ‘Who knows,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to say anything to Pete, because it might conflict their friendship, and we’ll probably implode anyway before Christmas. I’ll just see where it all takes me. The other thing is that Pete always wants to bring him out with us. It’s as though they are married. They’ve lived together for eight years.’