by Fiona Neill
‘What do you think the Middle Ages are about?’ I ask Sam, as I reapply foundation.
He crosses his legs, considers the question for a moment, his finger on his lips, and then says thoughtfully, ‘Your new eyebrows, Daddy going bald, being tired all the time, forgetfulness. Oh, and disintegration.’ This is his favourite new word.
‘You’re thinking of being middle-aged,’ I explain to him. ‘The Middle Ages is something quite different.’ I mention wandering minstrels, jousting, bloodletting, and the arrival of olive oil in England. Sam looks suitably relieved.
‘That sounds like much more fun,’ he says, leaving the room to go downstairs, where the babysitter is making hot chocolate for them all.
‘Do you think we are disintegrating?’ I ask Tom. It is not an image that I favour.
‘In the sense that more of us is dying than growing, then I suppose we are,’ he shouts from the bathroom. ‘We are heading towards middle age, even if people no longer like to describe themselves that way.’
‘Well, I don’t really feel middle-aged,’ I say.
‘That’s because you’re having a midlife crisis,’ he says through a half-closed mouth. He must be shaving that area to the right of his chin. ‘Clinging on to the last vestiges of youth.’
‘Define midlife crisis,’ I say, a little disconcerted.
‘Discontent with the status quo, restlessness, questioning decisions that you made years ago, thinking you’ve grown apart from your husband, wondering whether happiness lies with another man, breaking into the house of a complete stranger,’ he says, peering round the door and waving his razor at me to emphasise the latter. ‘But you’ll get over it.’
‘Why haven’t you mentioned this before?’ I ask him.
‘I don’t want to indulge your crisis,’ he says. ‘And I’m worried it might be contagious.’
‘Mark says that we no longer communicate properly,’ I say.
‘That’s because we’re always interrupted by someone, mostly our children, but sometimes your friends, and more recently my work. Lucy, I don’t have time to access everything that is going on in your mind,’ he says. ‘But I have a good grasp of the overall picture and I don’t think that hours of analysis would ameliorate anything. In fact, it might make it worse. Right now, however, I am far more concerned that you remain sober enough to avoid revealing any further details of our sex life to complete strangers.’
‘They’re not complete strangers,’ I say. ‘What’s more, we will know these people for the next six years. In fact, sometimes you find that people you think you don’t know are more familiar than the people you thought you did know. If you know what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure that I do,’ he says, sighing. You will soon, I think to myself.
‘Also, we didn’t break into Guy’s house, we had the keys,’ I insist.
‘That’s like saying the man who stole the car because you dropped the key on the doorstep was borrowing it,’ he counters.
‘You promised that you would never mention that again,’ I say.
‘I’m still reeling from the fact that you went along with Emma’s plan,’ he says. ‘And that when you came home, you woke me up to show me a picture on your mobile phone of walk-in wardrobe as though it was the most notable part of the whole exercise.’
‘Well, in a way it was,’ I say.
Less than an hour later, we are standing on the doorstep of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s house. It is now light enough in the evening to see that the steps are covered in small mosaics in white, blue and brown. There is a wisteria growing up the side that hasn’t yet come into flower. The front garden has been planted with grasses, euphorbias and enormous wine-coloured phormium. It looks beguilingly careless but I know it was the product of meticulous planning, because it was one of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s Grand Projects. The others being the Double Height Glass Extension and the Flat to Rent, which is where Emma now lives.
Someone I don’t recognise answers the door. She must be the Filipina housekeeper, I think, trying to remember the exact dimensions of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s staff. I recall mention of a clutch of East European au pairs, a man and woman, ‘so that they don’t stray,’ and one English nanny. Then, for a long time, there was a night nanny, who was training the baby to sleep through the night using Ayuverdic techniques. And the Slovakian personal trainer. That’s globalisation for you.
We are directed to the sitting room where glasses of wine are being handed out. I know before I see the bottle that it is Puligny Montrachet. Emma is right. Guy doesn’t have much imagination.
I listen to a conversation behind me.
‘We might IPO the MBO we did last year and John is going to make a fortune on his LTIP,’ says one man in a suit to another. Tom raises an eyebrow at me. Could be a long evening, the look says.
Yummy Mummy No. 1 glides across the room. She looks even thinner than she did before half-term, wispy and papery. Even though it is a school party, she clearly sees her role as that of hostess. She is wearing skinny white jeans with thick cork wedge heels and a top from somewhere ethnic via Selfridges. She looks fantastic.
What a waste of all those hours invested in the gym and that careful application to her wardrobe. It’s like revising for exams that get cancelled at the last minute. If you can do all that and still your husband strays, then there doesn’t seem much point in embarking on those time-consuming, age-defying techniques in the first place. Better to have room for improvement than attain perfection. Looking at those long legs that Emma admired in the photo last week, encased in jeans cut so tight that they taper at the knee and then expand slightly to cocoon her calf, I decide that whatever fashion dictates, I will hang on to my extra pounds and wear boot-cut jeans for the rest of my life.
I look round the room at the other parents. The other yummy mummies are dressed in variations of the same theme and, not for the first time, I wonder how they know what each other will be wearing and what is the point in going to all this effort if everyone ends up looking the same anyway. But maybe that is the point. It’s a tribal thing. Is knowing exactly which brand of jeans from LA is in the ascent an art or a science, I wonder? For Yummy Mummy No. 1 it has definitely been raised to an art form.
The corporate mums have suits purloined from work wardrobes that look a little formal with their straight lines and sober colours. Then there are the mothers like me, the slummy mummies, the muddlers and befuddlers, the ones who don’t know what to do when a spare minute comes their way because it is so rare, wearing old dresses that have stretched with us over the years.
‘Lucy, how fantastic to see you,’ she says, leaning in to kiss me on both cheeks. The contact is unanticipated and we end up clumsily kissing on the lips. ‘And you must be Tom,’ she says, as though this is the first time that he has registered on her radar, although she must have seen him at school before.
I note that she is sporting that inverted Panda look favoured by spring skiers. White eyes set amidst a deep brown tan.
‘Did you have a good half-term?’ I ask her.
‘Les Arcs, with friends,’ she says. ‘Fantastic snow. How about you?’
‘Les Mendips,’ I say in a French accent. ‘With my parents. There was a fresh cover over Easter. Very unseasonal.’ Tom steps aside to look at me, baffled by the direction of this conversation, and shrugs his shoulders.
‘I haven’t heard of that resort. Is it in Bulgaria?’ she asks.
‘It’s a bit further west,’ I say vaguely.
‘Mark Warner? Powder Byrne? Off-piste? Tricky runs?’ she asks, using verbal shorthand to indicate the imminent closure of our discussion on the merits of ski resorts. Sure enough, I see a herd of yummy mummies with identical tans waving at her from the other side of the room.
I think of the tense hour spent roaming small villages in the Avon valley after I simultaneously forgot to tell Tom to turn off the M4 and then discovered that a key page covering said villages was missing from our British road map.
; ‘Dramatic,’ I say. ‘We covered a lot of ground.’ Including arguments about 1) why our clothes were packed in plastic bags instead of suitcases, 2) how despite the plethora of plastic bags in the boot, there were none available for episodes of car sickness, and 3) on what grounds we ever considered ourselves compatible enough for marriage.
‘Was the resort very high?’ she asks politely.
‘Sort of average. It was very cold though,’ I say. ‘Did your husband manage to take any time off work?’
‘He came out on the orange-eye both weekends,’ she says. Then, when she sees me looking bewildered, ‘The Easy Jet flight to Geneva that leaves early on Saturday morning.’
Yummy Mummy No. 1 shifts her attentions to Tom.
‘I’d love to show you around, Tom, and see what you think of the house,’ she says. ‘Although I know that you parted company with glass extensions many years ago.’
‘Well, it was my bread and butter for a long time,’ Tom says. Then she calls her husband over to come and meet us.
‘Guy, Guy,’ she peals, ‘come over and meet the Sweeneys. They’ve just got back from Les Mendips, it sounds fantastic.’
Guy walks over from the other side of the room. He is smiling in the manner of someone who is clearly used to being in control of situations. A man who is never short of a good anecdote over dinner, who knows how to make a woman feel as though she is the only person in the world that he is interested in, who can survey a room and spot the person most useful to his career and engage in conversation with that person without them realising that he is networking.
It is the same smile he uses when closing a Big Deal, or showing off in front of junior colleagues or meeting his mistress’s friends for the first time. He lifts a bottle of wine in greeting. I watch him closely, wanting to register the exact moment when he realises that he is no longer master of all he surveys.
It takes a few seconds longer than anticipated because along the way he stops to greet other guests and takes the opportunity to look round the room and bask in the attention. For a short man he has a large stride. When he is perhaps two metres from us, the smile disappears completely and for a moment he stands stock-still in shock, his eyes flitting from Tom to me. For a moment I imagine the room is falling silent, then Guy moves forward again, a little stiffly perhaps, but mustering a passable show of pleasure, although, as he gets closer and shakes my hand, I can see the muscles around his cheeks twitching with the strain of maintaining this friendly expression. His eyes, however, are not smiling. They are cold and angry.
‘I’m lucky he’s here, last time we were meant to meet friends for dinner he had to go to Paris for work,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1. ‘Work is his mistress. Isn’t it, darling?’ Tom tenses beside me and we hold hands a little too firmly to reassure one another.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Guy says, formally shaking our hands. Tom takes longer to recover and while he manages to shake Guy’s hand, he recoils slightly when he is released and slides it into his back pocket, where it darts restlessly in and out for the next five minutes.
‘Lucy is on the parents’ committee,’ Yummy Mummy No. 1 says warmly to Guy. ‘She helped organise tonight and managed to persuade the woman who heads it up that we didn’t need to come dressed as our favourite character from a book.’
‘The quid pro quo is that the summer fete will have a Roman theme,’ I say.
Tom and Guy remain still and silent.
‘She is one of my firm allies,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, looking anxiously at Guy as if willing him to say something appropriate. I try to resist being flattered, because I know she is going through the motions and that I will still be passed over in the playground if there are tastier morsels on offer.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Guy says finally, putting his arm round Yummy Mummy No. 1, to steady himself. He fills Tom’s glass with wine and I notice that his hand is trembling slightly.
‘Can I borrow him for a moment?’ she asks me, pointing at Tom. ‘I really want to show him the kitchen extension. We had the same architect as David Cameron. He lives round the corner. Very exciting to be living in the shadow of the next prime minister.’ She moves away, one hand in the back pocket of her jeans, showing off her bottom in all its tight-arsed glory, a gesture that I know is directed specifically at Tom. He whispers in my ear as he moves away, ‘Nothing middle-aged about that.’ I know that on the way home I will run into a wall of silent reproach, but I also know that I can rely on Tom to avoid a scene.
‘I’ll catch up with you later, Lucy, there is something I have to discuss with you,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1. This time I manage to contain the impulse to invent exciting scenarios. Still, if she wants advice about schools, then my transformation into Mother with Gravitas will be complete.
Guy and I are left standing together. I take the bottle of wine from his hand and pour myself a generous glass, then place it on the table where the answer machine sits. This time it is not blinking at me. I perch on the edge of the table and Guy turns around to face the window so that no one can see us talking.
‘Are you a Cameron fan?’ I ask politely. ‘Or do you think that inside every Tory lurks the spirit of Norman Tebbit?’
‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ he asks. His voice is quiet but laced with aggression and his face is so close to mine that I can feel the heat from his breath. ‘A return visit, within a week no less? I’m minded to call the police. Your fingerprints must be everywhere.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say. ‘What would you tell the police?’
‘Well, you tampered with my home, stole my wife’s underwear, and then left that . . . device in my pocket,’ he says furiously. ‘You know it was still running when we got home.’
‘We wore gloves,’ I say.
‘I know, because you left a pair in my wife’s dressing room,’ he says. ‘I had to take them to work with me to dispose of them.’
‘I was just an observer. The only thing I did was help to delete Emma’s message to you both and I think you will agree that I have done you a favour. Consider the alternative,’ I say, trying to calm him with logic.
He puts a hand on the back of his head and starts rubbing it irritably. I notice that he is losing his hair.
‘Look, sorry, I’m under a lot of stress at the moment, Emma is refusing to take my calls, my wife is watching my every move. I think you could have given me some heads up,’ he says. ‘Why didn’t Emma tell me that you know my wife and that our children are at school together?’ He groans.
‘I had to come because I helped organise this,’ I say, waving my hand around the room a little more forcefully than intended. ‘As for Emma, perhaps the question is better directed at her.’
My arm hits something hard and I turn round, just as the contents of the glass of wine spill on to the striped shirt of another father from school. I look up to see if I know the person that I am about to apologise to and feel that familiar quiver of excitement grip my body as I see Robert Bass trying to soak up the excess liquid with a dirty-looking handkerchief.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ I say, wondering how such a small glass of wine could cause such a large stain on his shirt. ‘Guy, this is Robert Bass, his son is in the same class as our children.’
‘So, you’re the writer,’ says Guy coldly, after an inappropriate silence, and I know that he is following this trail to its logical conclusion. ‘Lucy has told me about you.’
‘Oh,’ says Robert Bass, looking pleased.
‘We were talking about her ski holiday in Les Mendips,’ says Guy. ‘And the morality of skiing off-piste when you know it could cause an avalanche.’
Then he walks off without saying anything more.
‘I’ll go and find a towel or something,’ I say to Robert Bass, feeling uncharacteristically flustered by this situation.
‘What’s eating him up?’ he asks. ‘I’ll come with you.’ We walk out of the sitting room into the hall. There is no one there. Everyone is either in the
room that we have just left or downstairs in the kitchen. I go into a small room beside the front door that I remember from my visit last week. It looks like a cupboard but runs the breadth of the house and is used as a coat room and general dumping ground. At the end, overlooking the garden, is a small sink. I pick up a towel and hand it to him.
‘How did you know about this room?’ asks Robert Bass, soaking up wine with the towel. He picks up his glass and gulps down what is left without taking his eyes off me. He is looking at the outline of my wrap-dress, where it is set against the skin at the top of my shoulder, tracing it from the hard bone of my sternum to the soft contours above my cleavage. He chews his lower lip thoughtfully and stares at me with such intensity that I have to look away.
‘Instinct,’ I say.
‘You must have good instincts then,’ he says.
‘Sometimes,’ I say.
‘Well, we’re definitely off the beaten track here, Lucy,’ he says, closing the door behind him.
There is a point in a relationship where what is left unsaid becomes more important than what is said, and I have just reached this juncture with Robert Bass. But what I should have said to him at this moment, was that my intentions were noble when I offered to search for a towel, and that I didn’t intend to lure him into a glorified cupboard. Instead, I remain silent. The light is on, but it is still gloomy and we are swaddled from the outside world by layers of coats and jumpers which hang neatly on pegs on both sides of the room. It is the kind of moment that you look back on with the benefit of hindsight and wonder how things might have been had you gone down a different route. It is a time for decision-making.