The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

Then he grabs me and we fall on the bed, kissing recklessly. He pins me down with his hands and kisses me on the neck just below my ear. With his beard and ruff he looks so different from the man who left a week ago that I imagine I have suddenly found myself in the room with a stranger. And that is exciting. His hand is already inside my trousers and my shirt is completely undone. His fingers might be large and unwieldy, but when the same lightness of touch that makes him so good at drawing is applied to my body, I feel myself become liquid. Are all architects similarly skilled, I wonder? I must remember to ask Cathy. I shut my eyes and stop thinking about the Robert Bass dilemma.

  ‘I really missed you,’ he whispers breathlessly in my ear, before moving his attentions to my left breast.

  But just as it looks as though the sexual famine is ending, Joe comes in the room, rubbing his eyes sleepily. He is holding two bits of material clearly identifiable as shorts.

  ‘Daddy, what are you doing to Mummy?’ he asks suspiciously. Tom climbs off me and lies on the bed, breathing heavily.

  ‘We’re wrestling,’ he says.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re not being too rough,’ Joe says, sounding exactly like me. ‘Mummy, can I make a pair for Sam and Fred, too?’ he asks. ‘So that we look like the von Trapps.’ He is half-asleep and I lift him up and take him back to his room and he eventually goes to sleep clutching the two bits of material as though someone might steal them in the night. When I finally go back into our bedroom, Tom is in a deep sleep. Another missed opportunity. If parents were allowed to finish conversations, life might be so different.

  Then I notice that in an echo of his middle son, he is clutching a small cream box with a dark green ribbon in his hand. I prise open his fist, which is already stiff with sleep, and open the box. Inside is a small card. ‘To Lucy. From Tom. For services rendered.’ It is a silver necklace with stones and charms around the bottom. It is so beautiful that I bite my lip to stop myself from crying. I try to wake him up to say thank you, but he is somewhere unreachable. I put the necklace back inside, so that he can give it to me another time and I can feign surprise. But it doesn’t reappear for weeks.

  December starts inauspiciously. ‘Mrs Sweeney,’ says Joe’s teacher on Wednesday morning, when I take him into his classroom. ‘Can I have a quick word with you, please?’ When it comes to children, the language of fear is universal. And this is one of those sentences designed to strike dread into the hearts of parents around the globe. It crosses all cultural and religious barriers. A tightening of the throat, a quickening of the heart, mouth dry, muscles alert, I struggle to stroll rather than race over to her desk.

  There is much routine and repetition in the day of the average mother, but we all know that the thread that holds all this together is as fragile as a spider’s web. All around us are stories of random disaster: the child who climbed into a tumble dryer and suffocated, the boy who choked to death on a cherry tomato, the girl who drowned in a paddling pool filled with two inches of rainwater. Life and death in our own backyard. Every time I read one of these stories in the paper, I promise to be a more tolerant parent.

  Yesterday morning, I woke up and resolved to face the minefield of early-morning disasters with equanimity. When I realised there was no cheese for sandwiches for packed lunch, I improvised with jam. When I discovered that Fred had unravelled and stuffed an entire loo roll into the toilet, I put on rubber gloves and unblocked the U-bend. Even in the hours of mad intolerance before six o’clock in the morning, when I discovered that the boys had all woken early and dragged all the pillows and duvets from their beds to build a ship on the staircase, eight years’ worth of stuffed animals on board, and chocolate handprints from biscuits taken illicitly from the kitchen on the walls, I promised the children that I wouldn’t clear it up, so that they could play the same game when they came home from school.

  Then I forgot to tell Tom that the ship was still there. He came home after midnight, drunk and tired from work drinks, tripped on the oversize panda on the bottom step and fell so heavily that he cut open his lip. I found him lying there, face to face with the panda, blood pouring from his mouth, muttering something about booby traps. It is difficult to look out for everyone, every minute of the day.

  I see the teacher tidying her desk and open and shut my mouth, like a goldfish, in an effort to force my face to look relaxed, a trick I learnt from watching television presenters before they went on air. Then out of the corner of my eye I see Fred taking advantage of this unexpected diversion and heading for the corner of the room. In a matter of seconds, his trousers and Bob the Builder pants are round his ankles and he is peeing in a small dustbin in the corner. He looks over and smiles, secure in the knowledge that I can’t make a fuss. My tolerance levels start to dip dangerously. I change my route to sidle innocuously to the other side of the room and place the offending bin in my oversize handbag, then nonchalantly continue my trajectory, holding Fred’s arm a little too tightly. I can feel Robert Bass watching me and for once the attention is unwelcome.

  I go over to the teacher’s desk. She leans forward and I follow suit until our foreheads are almost touching. This must be bad. I run through a few scenarios in my head. Joe has hurt someone. Joe has been hurt by someone. They have made an official diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder. They blame me. It is my chaos that has caused his fixations. They have uncovered a paedophile scandal. They have noticed my flirtation with Robert Bass, who is now on the other side of the classroom, helping his son get books out of his school bag, and glancing over at me.

  ‘It is inappropriate for parents to engage in conversations of the flirty variety,’ I imagine her saying. ‘We deal with the fallout from this kind of short-term pleasure-seeking among parents on a daily basis. Four detentions, Mrs Sweeney.’

  I decide that I am becoming overly self-obsessed, placing myself at the centre of my world, when really I should accept periphery status. Of course, this has nothing to do with me. I also hold on to the fact that Joe’s teacher is probably ten years younger than me. Nevertheless, I find it impossible to avoid reverting to bolshy adolescent, and stand hand on hip, in the classic teenage posture of defiance.

  ‘Should I phone my husband?’ I ask worriedly.

  ‘There’s no need for that. It’s a minor matter, Mrs Sweeney. We found these in the side of Joe’s school bag,’ she says with a smile, handing over the half-smoked packet of cigarettes. I must have hidden them in there when I got home from Emma’s last Friday evening.

  ‘My husband must have left them there,’ I reply.

  ‘You are over sixteen. No need to hide behind the bike sheds any more,’ she jokes, and I smile weakly.

  I open my bag to put in the cigarettes and see her scrutinising the contents.

  ‘Is that my dustbin you’ve got in there?’ she asks warily.

  ‘No, it’s a portable potty,’ I hear myself say.

  ‘It looks very much like one of my dustbins,’ she says. I realise that she is not one of those people who are able to skate over something like this. She wants the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  ‘I found it in the playground on the way in,’ I say, forgetting Cathy’s advice about never dressing a lie with detail. ‘I think someone has urinated in it, judging by the colour and the aroma. A little person, I mean, not an adult. The volume of urine would suggest a little person.’ She looks really baffled. ‘So I was going to take it to the toilet and clean it out and then return it to the playground.’

  I look across the room to the gaping hole where her dustbin used to stand and see Robert Bass stroll across and undo his jacket to reveal an identical dustbin purloined from another classroom. He waves at me and puts the bin down.

  ‘Look, your bin is over there,’ I say.

  The teacher turns round and sees her bin in situ.

  ‘I am so sorry. I’ve never seen one of those, er, portable potties before, it looks very much like a dustbin,’ she says, in a classic volte-face. ‘That’s very public-spir
ited of you, Mrs Sweeney. We need parents like you at school.’

  I leave the classroom with Robert Bass, who follows me into the corridor, and fan myself with a packet of wet wipes.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, gripping Fred’s hand. ‘You got me out of a tight corner.’

  ‘No worries. I was wondering whether you would give me a lift to this meeting tonight,’ he says.

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ I hear myself say, all resolve to avoid him withering in the face of this overture. It is the first time that Robert Bass has initiated an arrangement with me. I justify my weakness by arguing that it would be churlish to turn him down and that, in any case, it involves nothing more dangerous than driving him to a meeting at Alpha Mum’s house to discuss school Christmas party arrangements. There is something irresponsibly teenage about the possibilities of forced proximity that cars afford. An image of clumsy manoeuvres, the handbrake digging into Robert Bass’s stomach as he leans over to kiss me and pull me across on to his lap, comes to mind in stunning clarity. Even with the chair on full tilt, my head would hit the roof. Then I think about the state of unmade car. The mouldy apples on the floor of the passenger seat, the sticky handle of the glove compartment and the chocolate compacted down the back of the seat. I resolve not to clean it up, because it will curb temptation.

  ‘That would be great, Lucy,’ he says. ‘Until then, watch out for the little people.’ Then he throws his head back and laughs so loudly that people start to stare.

  After dropping Fred at nursery, I set off for my lunch appointment with my mother-in-law. It is one of those cold winter days when the sky is brilliant blue and the sun all the more welcome for weeks of absence. I sit in a bus on my way to John Lewis in Oxford Street, lean my cheek against the cold window and shut my eyes against the glare of the sun, feeling something close to contentment, despite the difficult conversation that lies ahead. It is mid-morning, no one sits in the seat beside me and the driver takes corners gently so I don’t bang my head against the window. Being on my own is as luxurious to me as a session at Micheline Arcier is to Yummy Mummy No. 1.

  My mother-in-law believes in John Lewis like some people believe in God. She says that there is nothing worth having that cannot be bought within its stolid walls. When Selfridges reinvented itself, it merely served to reinforce her belief in John Lewis’s unalienable stability. Although vaguely contemptuous of attempts to modernise the furniture department and introduce new ranges of clothing, her long love affair with the department store has been generally faithful and uncomplicated, despite a brief liaison with Fenwicks shortly after Tom and I met.

  As I enter the shop, I walk through the haberdashery department. There is something strangely reassuring about the rows of different-coloured wools and threads. There are boxes of tapestry with kitsch designs of kittens and dogs hanging on the back wall. I imagine myself in the evening sitting beside Tom on the sofa, doing tapestry and drinking Horlicks, all thoughts of Robert Bass banished in favour of unerring devotion to family.

  Knitting and sewing have been rehabilitated as acceptable pastimes for fashionable mothers, so perhaps I can put tapestry back on the map as well. I could repent of my sins and do some kneelers for the local church. I sit on a chair opposite the sewing machines, shut my eyes, and breathe in and out deeply. I feel utterly relaxed.

  ‘Lucy, Lucy,’ I hear someone say. I look up and my mother-in-law is gently shaking my shoulder. ‘Were you asleep?’ Petra asks.

  ‘I was just meditating,’ I say. She is wearing what she would describe as her best coat, a navy blue wool affair with gold buttons and wide shoulders that has an eighties feel about it. There is a gold brooch on the collar, a long thin bar with a ribbon on each end. She smells of soap and Anaïs Anaïs perfume.

  We go up the escalator. I stand on the step behind her. She holds herself upright, her heels together and feet apart, like a grenadier guard. In the self-service restaurant we both order a prawn salad with slices of avocado on brown bread. It is the natural evolution of the prawn cocktail, I think to myself, as we head for a table by the window with views down towards Marble Arch. We look into the square below and stir our cappuccinos a little too vigorously. The introduction of what she calls ‘exotic coffee’ is one change that she has welcomed.

  ‘You have probably been wondering what all this is about,’ she starts off gamely. She is still wearing her coat, with the top button done up, and it reminds me so much of Tom that I have to resist the urge to laugh. There must be a buttoned-up gene.

  ‘I think I know,’ I say, hoping to wrong-foot her with my proactive approach. She looks at me a little surprised.

  ‘I’ve noticed you watching me,’ I say.

  ‘I know. I have been wanting to say something for ages,’ she says, eyeing me apprehensively. ‘But I’ve been putting it off, and now things have got to a point that if I don’t say something I think it will cause even more damage.’

  ‘It’s not always easy being married,’ I say, deciding to deal with the situation head on. There isn’t time to saunter through this, because in less than two hours I have to pick up Fred from nursery. ‘You go through different phases, complete compatibility doesn’t really exist.’

  ‘Indeed,’ she says. ‘Often, the very things that attract us to someone end up being the things that we find most difficult to live with. Compatibility is something to work towards.’ She has a mouthful of cappuccino and takes an unnervingly long time to swallow. When she looks up, there is a thin line of froth above her upper lip.

  ‘Very true,’ I nod in assent. ‘It’s not always easy to be tolerant.’

  ‘You are very intuitive, Lucy,’ she says. ‘And honest. Marriage is indeed a series of compromises and women are better chameleons than men. You might see it as the burden of being female but actually it is liberating rather than restricting because it allows the possibility of loving many different people.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it any easier,’ I say. Ten minutes earlier, it would have seemed inconceivable to have such a conversation with my mother-in-law, and I am struggling to absorb this unexpected change in the parameters of our relationship. She, on the other hand, has adjusted with apparent ease.

  ‘But I think that if you can compromise with one person you can do it with another,’ Petra says. ‘The idea that people roam the world in search of their perfect mate has always seemed absurd to me. I think we are capable of finding many different people attractive and that if we have that chance then we should exploit it.’

  She sits back in her chair, looking slightly relieved, as though she has been searching for these words for months, practising this conversation in her head late at night. I, on the other hand, am stunned by her directness and am at a loss to know what to say. This is not what I was expecting. I desperately try to recall moments over the past six months that I have allowed her such unqualified access to the inner workings of my mind. Although I know that she has disapproved of me, perhaps in some depth, over the previous decade, I am surprised that she wants to dispose of me so easily. It seems as though she is giving me carte blanche to have an affair. I actually feel a little hurt that she considers our marriage to have so little value.

  ‘I always thought you believed in monogamy, Petra?’ I say, astonished. The shock of the conversation has made me raise my voice and I look round to find dozens of pairs of eyes watching us. This is not the right backdrop for this kind of discussion. Nor the right audience. These are not reality TV fans. They are ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ Radio 4 types who want quiet chat about the best kind of lawnmower.

  It is as though she has swept the ground from beneath my feet. Any assumptions that I have made about my mother-in-law are now open to question. She must be familiar with the concept of key parties, but to learn that Tom’s parents might have had an open marriage is too much to contemplate.

  ‘Of course I believe in monogamy,’ she says, looking a little shocked at the turn in conversation.

  ‘But you are
talking about loving different people,’ I persist. ‘Do you mean in a platonic way, no sex involved?’

  ‘Well, I think that sex might be on the agenda,’ she says, looking very uncomfortable. ‘Although sex drive unwinds with age.’ She undoes the top button of her coat and starts using a menu to fan her flushed face.

  ‘I don’t think I am explaining myself very well,’ she says.

  ‘I think you are being unusually explicit,’ I say. People are purposefully staring at menus and spooning food into their mouths, but I know that all their efforts are concentrated on following our conversation, because they have stopped chewing and their cheeks are full, like hamsters.

  ‘Lucy. What I am trying to say, in a nutshell, is that I have met a man whom I once loved many years ago and I am moving to Marrakesh to live with him.’

  I try to work out whether the sudden realisation that this conversation has been all about her and not me is equal to the shock of my mother-in-law telling me that she has fallen in love with someone else and is moving abroad. I sit there, staring at her for an uncomfortably long time.

  ‘Is it the man who painted the portrait of you?’ I ask, in a moment of inspiration.

  ‘It is,’ she says, looking shamefaced. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to tell Tom. I’ve known this man for years. All the time I was married to Tom’s father we never saw each other. He sent the occasional letter, but I never wrote back. I was unerringly faithful. Then a couple of years ago, he came to London and called me and we went out to lunch. He’s about twelve years older than me. I was only twenty when we had our affair. It’s just I have been offered this chance of happiness that I turned down forty years ago and I don’t want to let it go again.’

  ‘But why didn’t you marry him then?’ I ask.

  ‘Because he was unreliable. He drank too much. He would have never been faithful and we would have lived in penury,’ she says. ‘We had a grand passion. I never told Tom’s father. It wouldn’t have been right then, but it is right now.’