The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  ‘Emma endeavours to get me to look the part,’ he smiles. I am struggling to break the small piece of plastic that holds the label to the shirt. When finally it breaks in half, my hand shoots away from him so fast that I knock my glass of wine over him. He tries to push himself away from the table, but it is too late, his shirt is soaked.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ I say. I can see Tom staring at me in wonder from the other end of the table.

  ‘Is this some kind of test?’ Guy asks, but he is smiling benevolently. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got another shirt in my briefcase. My secretary always keeps one in there for me. I don’t know what I’ll do when she retires.’

  ‘But isn’t she too young to retire?’ I ask unthinkingly. I consider whether I have developed a form of Tourette’s that involves imbuing all conversation with sexual innuendo derived from my knowledge of their relationship.

  ‘How would you know how old my secretary is?’ he asks suspiciously, mopping himself with a dishcloth that Emma has handed to him. She listens to his question and frowns at me.

  While he changes his shirt, I give myself five minutes to settle on a benign subject, but it isn’t easy. I take deep breaths to steady myself. It is a difficult call. Talk of wives, children, schools and anything domestic is strictly off bounds. I try to remember the last film that I saw.

  The Squid and the Whale. All about the break-up of a marriage. What else have I seen? Syriana. But I can’t possibly talk about that because I couldn’t follow the plot even when I was in the cinema. Was it set in Dubai or Qatar? Then it comes to me: Iraq. We must talk about Iraq, so many opinions that can be canvassed. No room for talk of affairs, threesomes, or secretaries.

  Besides, it says a lot about someone to know where they stood on Iraq before the war, although obviously people now deny that they supported it. I establish that he was in favour of intervention but only with UN approval. I ask him whether there is any political context to his job and he says that there isn’t. And then I ask him exactly what he does.

  ‘I create mechanisms for exchanging foreign debt on the international market, basically,’ he says. I look blank. ‘Don’t worry. Even people at my bank don’t understand what I do. Emma does, though.’ He looks proudly down the table at Emma, who smiles back at him.

  Then he tells me about a recent dinner held between prominent members of the business community and Gordon Brown, and how Gordon Brown couldn’t tell jokes and this made people suspicious of him.

  ‘Do you miss being at the heart of all this?’ he asks. ‘I know all about your past.’ This is said in a way that indicates he is not merely referring to my job.

  ‘Sometimes I miss the adrenalin rush, because that kind of job is all-consuming and I really miss my colleagues,’ I say, wanting to bring the conversation back to conventional territory. ‘But I’m glad that when disasters happen I no longer have to suppress that surge of excitement and can relate to them with unadulterated sympathy. Revealing you are a stay-at-home mum just doesn’t do it for people in the same way as saying you work on Newsnight, although mostly people wanted to know what Jeremy Paxman was like.’

  ‘So what was he like?’ he asks. I stop myself from sighing.

  This is always the first question that people ask me when they discover that I worked on Newsnight for seven years. Some amble around the subject with well-chosen questions that they hope will impress upon me their serious interest in the subject of the process of making a news feature and therefore elicit some never-before revealed insight into Jeremy Paxman. But I know that before long they will want to ask about him.

  ‘He is a really great guy. Very brilliant. Everyone adores him,’ I say, hoping that is enough to satisfy him. ‘Mostly, though, I struggle to recall what life was like before children.’ He laughs.

  ‘Well, we all struggle with that,’ he says.

  ‘Do you enjoy your job?’ I ask.

  ‘I used to,’ he says. ‘In my twenties, I had things to prove to people and I worked like a dog. In my thirties, I became a managing director of my bank and I still worked like a dog. I made more money than even my wife could spend. When I hit forty I began to lose interest. I don’t mean to sound arrogant but there was no longer any challenge, I can do it with my eyes shut, and making money is no longer a strong enough incentive.’

  ‘Only someone who has no financial worries can say something like that,’ I say. A few days earlier I had sat down at the desk, removed my credit card bills from their hiding place, calculated the total of my unpaid parking fines and came up with a figure that left me gasping. Twelve thousand seven hundred and sixty pounds and twenty-two pence. The initial debt was probably half this amount, the rest had accumulated as the bills were left unpaid and the interest payments soared.

  ‘Also, I began worrying about my own mortality. I wonder, when I step off this treadmill, whether I will be able to look back and consider my life well spent,’ he says. ‘Your husband is a lucky man.’

  ‘To be married to me?’ I say, delighted at the compliment.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he says. ‘What I mean is that he is doing something he feels passionate about. The only thing I feel really passionate about is Emma, she has filled a void, breathed new life into me. I have been unhappy in my marriage for a long time now.’

  ‘But don’t you think that’s just an argument to justify your deception? Perhaps you should just learn to live alongside your mid-life crisis,’ I say, leaning towards him. ‘You can’t just use Emma as a short-term antidote.’

  ‘She might be a long-term antidote,’ he says, leaning back towards me.

  ‘People having affairs always like to think their situation is unique, as though their feelings are somehow more powerful than anyone else who has lived through a similar experience. But actually it’s a cliché. You are just one of thousands of middle-aged men going through this,’ I say, knowing before I have finished my diatribe that I should have stopped after the first sentence. ‘My brother, who is a psychologist, says that men are driven by sex, that they are not designed to be monogamous, they are designed to spread their seed, and that those who avoid this kind of situation are higher up the evolutionary scale. And what about your wife? Does she have any idea about what’s going on? Doesn’t she deserve to have a chance at understanding what is going on in your head? And if she doesn’t, then don’t you owe it to your children to try?’

  Guy looks completely shocked. For a moment he is silent. I remember Emma telling me how he doesn’t like to be reminded of his wife and realise that he is angry with me. He puts down his wineglass a little too heavily and circles the rim with his finger so that it makes a quiet hum.

  ‘I don’t have to justify my behaviour to you in any way, but in the interests of friendship, I want you to know that I have tried to talk to my wife about the way I feel but she dismisses my crisis as an indulgence. I have told her that I want to downscale and change the way we live. I have told her that I am fed up with dinner parties with other bankers and their wives, where the conversation revolves around schools, children and jobs, with an explicit undercurrent of competition underlying the chat. She says that we can’t afford for me to earn less money, but what she really means is that she doesn’t want to compromise on her lifestyle. Sometimes I think this is what money has bought me, a wife, four beautiful children, a home in Notting Hill and a great girlfriend who nurtures my ego and those other places that no one else can reach any more.’

  ‘But what about Emma? Doesn’t she deserve more than mistress status?’ I say. ‘What about children?’

  ‘Emma doesn’t want children,’ he says. ‘And if she did, I don’t see why this would preclude having a child.’

  I’m shocked.

  ‘And what about you, Lucy, does your husband know what’s going on in your head?’ he says, still stroking the wineglass. ‘Do any couples know exactly what is going on inside each other’s heads? Do you know what’s going on in your own head?’

  ‘But sur
ely it would have been better to deal with your existential crisis before embarking on an affair,’ I say. ‘Lust is very distracting.’

  ‘So I have heard,’ he says, raising an eyebrow. ‘Is that what you are doing?’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say, wondering whether I have misunderstood him.

  ‘Emma tells me that you have been grappling with a crisis of your own,’ he says. ‘We’re no different really. The thing is, Lucy, that we are compatible with many different people and that is both a wonderful and terrible thing.’

  I drop my knife on the ground and everyone turns round to look at us. Then my phone rings. It is the babysitter.

  ‘Fred has thrown up everywhere, Lucy, he’s inconsolable, I’m really sorry, but would you mind coming home? He says that he’s eaten a packet of tablets that he found in your bedroom,’ Polly says, her voice wobbling with fear and tension.

  ‘What sort of tablets?’ I ask, my stomach gripped with anxiety.

  ‘It says Omega 3 on the side,’ she says.

  ‘Fish oils,’ I say, with a certain amount of relief. ‘We’ll come right away.’

  The evening ends in the Accident and Emergency department of the hospital where Mark works.

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask the doctor.

  ‘He looks a bit green around the gills,’ he says, smiling. ‘Sorry, bad joke. I’ve been on duty since nine o’clock this morning.’

  ‘Will there be any lasting side effects?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Well, if he starts growing fins bring him back, and we’ll check him over,’ says the doctor.

  I carry Fred in my arms, like a baby, whispering songs in his ear, and he quickly falls asleep, exhausted with the effort of so much crying and retching. These are the same rhymes that mothers have sung to children for centuries, a thread carried through the generations.

  Almost exactly three years ago, we carried Fred home from this same hospital. I feel time passing like sand slipping through my fingers. Perhaps it is good that we remember only fragments of their childhood as we grow older. Otherwise the loss would be too great to bear.

  We go home, but it is impossible to sleep. Fear is a difficult thing to control, once it has seeped into the bloodstream. Tom, who usually falls asleep as soon as he is placed in any horizontal position, lies awake, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘So what did you think?’ he asks.

  ‘I think I should have put the tablets in the medicine cabinet,’ I say.

  ‘Not that,’ he says. ‘I mean what did you think of Guy?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think he’s reliable, but there was a certain vulnerability about him that I wasn’t expecting,’ I say.

  Tom snorts.

  ‘Availability, I think you mean,’ he says. ‘He’s just a type.’

  ‘What type?’ I ask.

  ‘The kind of man who fucks around and tries to justify it by making people feel sorry for him for being misunderstood,’ he says. ‘It’s a great strategy to adopt in your forties. Might even get you through them. The only surprising thing about him was that he seemed familiar. I think I’ve met him somewhere before.’

  15

  ‘It is better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep’

  WHEN LIFE LOSES its sense of alignment, vital clues get missed, while others become the object of excessive scrutiny. And so it was that I quickly forgot about Tom’s sense of déjà vu surrounding Guy. Instead, I became preoccupied with an issue that affected me more directly because at the beginning of February, a time of year when every woman deserves a daily dose of sublimity, Robert Bass went to ground without any explanation for his absence.

  Every Monday I began walking to school with a small spring in my step, hoping that this would be the day that he would re-emerge from hiding. By the end of the week, my pace had dipped and my shoulders started to droop, as another weekend loomed with expectations dashed. I looked at missed calls on my mobile phone more than was reasonable and wrote emails to him that I never sent, because I couldn’t find the right tone and was scared I might inadvertently dispatch them to the wrong person. Instead his wife and au pair appeared at school with the children. I tried to ignore them, because I didn’t want them trampling over my daydreams.

  The weeks dragged by without even a sighting. Celebrity Dad disappeared to LA for a month to promote his latest film. Tom was in Milan for long stretches during the week. Cathy was busy being kept happy by two men. And Emma was still trying to turn her loft into a home with both furniture and husband on loan from someone else.

  Actually, she had stopped calling so much and when she did there was less talk of Guy. There was mention of a trip to Paris, a new promotion at work, and once she referred to a new car, but only to underline the fact that I had forgotten her birthday. I put this down to a combination of my transgression at dinner and the fact that she had entered a more settled phase in her relationship. Then I laid this to rest. Friendships, like gardens, sometimes come into bloom again when left unattended for a while, I thought. It proved another stone left unturned.

  Even Yummy Mummy No. 1 had disappeared, dispatching her housekeeper to drop the children at school. My own escape route having suddenly closed down, I envied all of them for having somewhere else to go, without considering that where you go is not necessarily as satisfying as where you have come from.

  I was left with Alpha Mum, who had started GCSE Latin so that she could help her eldest son with his homework. ‘Errare humanum est. Ego te absolvo,’ she said one morning. ‘You can retain your position.’

  I replied, using the only Latin phrase that I could remember. ‘Non sum pisces,’ I said, which means, ‘I am not a fish.’ She looked surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a Latin speaker, Lucy.’

  I stopped worrying about what to wear in the morning and put Tom’s oversize coat on top of hastily thrown-together outfits, so that no one noticed I was disappearing into myself. I began to think that I might never see Robert Bass again and then felt annoyed for allowing him to impact on my mood in this way, especially at a moment when I was in the ascendant. On the other hand, since he had vanished, there was no longer any imperative to tell Tom about him. He had become a historical figure. My certainty wilted and I became convinced that he was trying to avoid me, because the focus of his affections had reverted elsewhere.

  There were days when I struggled to recall exactly what Robert Bass looked like, although I couldn’t forget how he made me feel. I could picture each feature individually but struggled to amalgamate them into a cohesive whole. I could remember his green eyes, but then his nose lost focus; or recall the exact tilt of his chin, but then became unsure of the shape of his lips. He became a jumble of almost-remembered features that didn’t fuse together properly. I looked at school photos of his daughter to try and find his face, but swiftly concluded she looked much more like her mother, whose perky walk and gamine features had by this time become more familiar to me than those of her husband.

  The February weather underlined what was impossible, rather than what was possible.

  There was little rain, just endless days of damp and drizzle. Despite all indications, it wasn’t the coldest winter since 1963, just the greyest. My victory over the heating lost significance. There was some comfort to be drawn from the repetition of daily ritual: wrapping cheese sandwiches in cling film; pushing Fred on the swing in empty parks; stopping to stare at street cleaners using machines like giant hairdryers to blow the leaves into piles, and then watching the wind dance them over the road before they had a chance to pick them up. The children asked the same questions every morning, and because the answers were well-rehearsed, I could speak and think at the same time.

  ‘Is that taking two steps forward and one step backwards?’ asked Sam, pointing at the men blowing leaves.

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘Never mind, spring is round the corner.’

  ‘And then what’s round the next corner, Mummy, is it summer?’ asked Joe. Children propel you
forward, and at this time of year, that is a good thing.

  In the background, Fred was running through his daily inventory of road markings. ‘Single yellow,’ he said, leaning out of his pushchair to examine the pavement. Then a few minutes later, ‘Double yellow.’ Every mark on the road was deserving of commentary.

  ‘Dotted line,’ he yelled in triumph, because they are less common.

  Sam collected red rubber bands that the postmen leave on the ground. I thought of all the things that I didn’t notice before I had children: that people are kinder to children and mothers in most other European countries; that going to the toilet is not a solitary experience; that you can’t have it all.

  ‘I don’t understand why the leaves get picked up and the rubber bands dropped,’ said Sam.

  Then one Wednesday morning at the beginning of March I find myself listlessly shaking a tambourine at the Munchkin Music Group, urging Fred to wield his maracas less savagely because he is upsetting the small girl beside him. I am pondering how in twenty years, my children will be more likely to work alongside people called Tiger and Calypso, than Peter and Jane.

  Although there are tatty chairs covered in faux leather around the edge of the church hall, for reasons that I have never understood, we are all required to sit on the floor on foam mats, our children perched between our legs in deference to the woman who runs the group and is entitled to look down at us from her chair. It is cold and uncomfortable, and by the end of the hour my thighs and buttocks have gone to sleep, making standing up a painful experience. But the sense of self-sacrifice and suffering for the sake of Fred imbues me with feelings of piety that generally last the rest of the day, although perhaps the headiness has more to do with breathing in a combination of bleach and disinfectant for an hour. Because as well as a meeting place for mothers, the church hall also doubles as a centre for the homeless, both groups forming part of the disenfranchised.

  Today, I am doubly unfortunate because I am sitting next to the woman that those of us with boys refer to as Smug Mother of Girls, or SMOG for short. On a good week she restricts herself to deep sighs and self-satisfied comments.