by Alex Marwood
‘All well in the house?’ asks Robert.
‘Teatime,’ he says, and waggles his head.
‘Ah,’ says Maria. ‘Are they okay? Is Joaquin up there?’
‘Yes, he’s up there. He’s discovered the bongos in the corner of the living room.’
Linda shifts from one elbow to the other. ‘Those are real zebra skin,’ she says, proudly. ‘They marry the disconnect between the white floor tiles and the black marble in the fireplace.’
Five pairs of eyes flick over to look at her, then back to Charlie. ‘Maybe I should go and help,’ says Maria, reluctantly. She looks happy where she is, lounging against a kilim-covered bolster.
‘I’ll go,’ offers Simone in her little-girl voice.
‘Ah, there’s a good girl,’ says Sean. She beams as if someone’s turned a super trouper on to her face. God, it’s almost pathetic, thinks Charlie. She’s like a spaniel puppy, begging for attention.
Simone gets slowly to her feet, pulls her tummy in hard as she stands up. Stretches and sticks out her tiny bosom. The adults all watch her and say nothing as she sashays away across the lawn.
‘She’s growing up,’ he says, once she’s inside the door.
‘Don’t,’ says Maria. ‘I’m going to have to lock her in a darkened room or something.’
‘Heh,’ says Charlie, ‘I wouldn’t worry too much. She’s only got eyes for one man.’
‘Watch it,’ says Sean. ‘She’ll grow out of it.’
‘I bloody hope so,’ says Robert. ‘If you think I’m going to give her away at your wedding, you can think again, matey.’
Maria shudders melodramatically. Linda shifts again, pulls in her own stomach and pushes her breasts forward. No sign that she intends to join the feeding frenzy; an admirable belief that other people will take over if she just leaves it. The breasts are disproportionately large on her slender frame. Enhanced, thinks Charlie. They’re going to have to change standard sizing to deal with it, the way all these ambitious girls are hurling themselves in to get double Ds clamped on to their size eight bodies. He’s not much of a one for fake tits himself. He likes his women to fly under the radar. But then, you don’t want your wife to look like a hooker if you’re aiming for Cabinet.
‘What’s all this about the nanny?’ he asks.
Sean takes a long suck on his cigar and exhales a long stream of smoke into the evening air. On the other side of the coffee table, Jimmy lights his joint and holds his breath like a deep-sea diver. ‘Yes, sorry,’ says Sean. ‘Polly Paranoia got it into her head to sack her, this weekend of all weekends.’
‘Why?’
Sean reaches for the champagne bottle. There are three empties sitting on the side table already. It’s quite clear no one’s planning to do anything by halves. ‘Frankly, if I were fucking as many women as she thinks I’m fucking I’d have had a coronary by now.’
‘God,’ says Charlie, ‘women,’ as though every woman’s suspicions were naturally the product of mental health issues. Imogen has never once complained about the high turnover of parliamentary researchers that pass through his office.
‘I suppose it’s inevitable, to a degree,’ says Robert, ‘given the way your own relationship got started.’
Charlie lets out a thunderclap of laughter. ‘On the nail, Robbo! On the nail!’
‘Oh, you bugger,’ says Sean, but he doesn’t show much sign of being offended. Jimmy holds the joint out to Linda, who takes a short toke and passes it to Sean. Their fingers brush as they pass it, too slowly for it to be an accident. Oy oy, thinks Charlie. Doesn’t look like the competition was coming from the nanny.
‘So that’s it?’ he asks. ‘No childcare all weekend? Couldn’t you find a temp or something?’
Sean shakes his head. ‘God,’ he says, ‘you can tell you never had children.’
‘Thought I’d bequeath my quota to you, old boy,’ says Charlie. ‘Looks like you need it.’
Sean sucks down a lungful of smoke and looks, for a moment, as though he’s going to cough it straight back up again. It smells vile to Charlie. Not the way dope smelled when they were at university. He remembers it as fragrant, back then, not this acrid, chemical-scented stuff that hangs around London’s bus stops like melted tar for millennia after the user has departed.
‘Have you ever tried getting staff at no notice on August bank holiday weekend? No go, my brother. We’re on our own.’
‘Well, at least we’ve got the girls,’ says Maria. ‘They can help out.’
‘I wouldn’t rely on mine,’ says Sean. ‘They’re already in a snit because I forgot they were coming. Apparently they’ve taken off into the fleshpots of Purbeck already.’
‘You forgot they were coming?’
‘Well, or Heather wanted to spoil my birthday. Which I think is probably more likely, don’t you?’
‘Nice way to talk about your offspring,’ says Robert.
‘Hell hath no fury,’ says Jimmy, and Charlie notes that he has one of those cracked drawls, slightly higher than it should be, slightly slurred, slightly Cockneyfied. A junkie voice. I need to make sure we never get photographed together, he thinks. I bet there’s going to be a licence-loss scandal attached to him before the decade’s out. Still. At least he knows now that the strangers in the group won’t be rushing off to tell tales to the tabloids.
He feels in the breast pocket of his polo shirt for his wrap. Linda has thoughtfully picked a coffee table topped with glass for the middle of the gazebo.
‘Well,’ he says, bending forward, ‘no point in letting it ruin the weekend, is there?’ and starts chopping.
Chapter Fifteen
2004 | Thursday | Claire
‘I can’t sleep.’
Joaquin stands at the top of the stairs, rubbing his eyes.
Claire glances at the clock. It’s gone ten. The men look up for a moment and go back to shouting at each other. Linda doesn’t shift on her perch on the kitchen island in among them, like a little pixie statue, smoking a Vogue and flicking the ash into the sink.
Maria clicks across the marble floor. ‘Hello, darling,’ she says. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’
‘You’re making such a racket,’ he says, ‘I can’t sleep.’
Maria trots up the stairs. Scoops him up and carries him out of sight. The third downstairs visit tonight. Joaquin’s been once already and the twins, together, hand-holding on the brink of disaster at the top of the stairs until she swooped up there and grabbed them. Claire doesn’t doubt for a second that they’ll be back soon enough.
‘Maybe we should move through,’ she says, vaguely. ‘We are making a lot of noise.’
‘Through to where?’ asks Charlie, crushingly. He’s always been crushing to her, Charlie Clutterbuck. No man so short of stature should have been able to master looking down his nose at women the way he does. She doesn’t know if his dislike is related to some residual loyalty to Heather, whether he simply despises her on a personal level or if it’s a simple gender thing, but she has no desire to find out. His pupils are like pencil tips and the smile is frozen back from his teeth, no humour in it, though he probably thinks he looks as if he’s having a great time. Maybe I should do a line, she thinks. That’s the trouble with cocaine. It’s really unbearable being around people who are doing it when you’re not. It’s like being a dog surrounded by wolves.
He gestures expansively at the open-plan room. No doors to cut off noise, nothing soft to soak it up. It looks like hell. Scattered with discarded glasses and ashtrays, shoes on their sides, empty bottles under furniture. The kitchen table, that great slab of polished cherry wood, is a mess of half-empty plates and half-drained wine glasses. I’ll be clearing this lot up tomorrow, she thinks. What a weekend. He complains about no nanny, but I knew when he said he didn’t want a housekeeper because we wanted our privacy that it would end up like this.
‘We wouldn’t have dared to get out of bed when we’d been put in it when I was little,’ says Imogen. She has a lot
of opinions about child-raising for someone who’s never actually done it.
‘That explains a lot,’ Claire says sarkily. She just can’t stop herself. Really: Imogen’s either forgotten everything about being a child or she’s been abused into this rigid set of rules that had her threatening to take away a three-year-old’s nuggets if it didn’t eat its peas this afternoon.
Imogen doesn’t respond. Perhaps she hasn’t heard her. Her husband is, after all, making as much noise as a fire engine. ‘I see Jimmy and Linda’s children understand the rules, at least,’ she says.
‘Ah, we’ve got a technique,’ says Jimmy, and waves his joint in the air like a conductor’s baton.
‘What about the garden?’ ventures Claire. The French doors are all open, in an attempt to air the place, get some sea breeze through the muggy atmosphere. She’d like to be out there. In the cool, on one of those sofas under the gazebo. Maybe I’ll just go anyway, she thinks. It’s not as though anyone’s acknowledged I’m here for the past hour. Even Maria doesn’t really bother talking to me any more. I’m yesterday’s woman. No longer interesting now I’m not Sean’s princess.
‘Is there somewhere to plug the alarms in, in the garden?’ asks Imogen, looking up for a sharp moment from the lines of cocaine lined up on the island countertop. Such things you find out. She looks like such a matron on the ten o’clock news, following sternly along behind her boastful husband, but she’s hoovering up the drugs like a Frankfurt whore.
Claire sighs. The alarms are lined up side by side next to the stove: one for Gavila, one for Jackson. There is no Orizio alarm. ‘We don’t need one,’ said Linda, smugly, as they were plugging them in. ‘They won’t wake up. We’ve got them trained.’ Claire puts an ear to her own alarm, hears her children snuffling in the dark above her. They’ll be up at dawn, whatever time the adults get to bed. She feels weary to the bones just at the thought of it.
‘No,’ she says, and resigns herself to a long night under the glare of the halogen spots. Linda is one of those designers who think that the point of lighting is to show up every flaw in the paintwork, every speck of dust. It’s not a restful room.
The fish pie so carefully thought about and transported from London in a cool-box has gone largely uneaten because Charlie Clutterbuck has brought cocaine enough that the dealers of north Kennington must have been able to take the weekend off on the profits.
Claire hates Charlie Clutterbuck. If she’d met him before she had been in too deep to back out, she might have thought twice about Sean purely on the basis of the company he kept. There are lots of Sean’s friends she doesn’t like much, but Charlie is the worst of all: a walking stereotype of Tory manhood. High red in the face, the teeth whitened till they look like dentures, a lock of oily hair detached from the slicked-back whole and flopping over the forehead, the booming voice drowning out everything around him, the spiky wife laughing that boys-will-be-boys laugh whenever he sweeps another group of people into a heap and dismisses them. We’ve had Lefties and Suburbanites and Poofs and Oiks already: words he would never use in his many handrubbing vox pops on Newsnight but ones he’s happy to scatter about when he thinks the doors are closed. It’s only a matter of time before we’re on to the Coons and the Towelheads, she thinks. Only a matter of time.
The lads are discussing business. More specifically, planning law, and how it impedes Sean’s march towards global domination. ‘Well, I can tell you this for nothing,’ says Charlie, ‘English Heritage will be having its wings clipped pronto when the election’s over. Bloody lefty busybodies.’
‘Tell you another thing,’ says Sean. ‘This Special Scientific Interest malarkey. I’ve lost literally years across my portfolio. Bloody bat-breeding sites and special sand lizards.’
Robert Gavila, partner at the law firm of Kendall, Wright and Macy, school governor, stalwart of the Wandsworth Conservatives, leans over the kitchen island and fills his nose. Stands upright at the speed of sound, licks his finger and scoops what’s left on to his gums. ‘Ahhhhh!’ he declares.
‘I just think it’s an outrage,’ says Sean, ‘that Tesco seem to get superstores waved through on a daily basis and I can’t stick a garage on to a house just because it’s Elizabethan.’
‘Here,’ says Jimmy. ‘Have any of you lot ever tried sniffing vodka?’
Claire stopped drinking at eight p.m., when she realised that she and Simone were the only sober people in the house. Someone’s got to be responsible, she thinks. Simone has retreated to the annexe with the laptop and a DVD of Love, Actually, so it’s basically me. I wouldn’t trust any of these people not to drop one of the babies down the stairs.
She studies her guests, one by one. The four men, three of them pudgy from their love of chateaubriand, the doctor thin in that way that suggests that forgetting-to-eat nights are a familiar concept. Jimmy’s skin is pinky-grey and he has a mop of black curls in which tufts of white show his age. He laughs at everything, but the laughter has a mirthless edge. He’s not really taking in anything anyone’s saying, she thinks. Just laughing because he needs to show the world he’s having a good time. That Linda will be moving on at some point, she thinks. She’s ambitious, the way I was, back when I was a fool. Keeping her figure despite the children because she wants to keep her options open, and practising her flirtation with everybody else’s husbands.
And what husbands! Kings of the world, full to the brim with self-congratulation. Hair that was once fair and is now mostly gone, tufts of wire in their ears. They come from the sort of background that insulates them from ever thinking that their good fortune might have an element of luck in it. ‘I’ve worked hard to get where I am,’ they would say, to a man, if anyone suggested it, and indeed, they have all worked hard. They’ve all put in their late nights and their early mornings, done the kow-towing and the ruthless defeat of their enemies. And yet, and yet. Privilege rarely knows it’s privileged. Sean is constantly bemoaning his tax bills and never seems to remember that you only pay tax on money you’ve received.
Charlie has suddenly got interested in the fish pie, and is eating it from the dish with a spoon, going back in for more without a thought for hygiene. He’d probably be eating it with his fingers if the spoon weren’t there, she thinks. I’ll have to think twice about giving the leftovers to the kids tomorrow. I bet he drinks milk straight from the carton and puts it back in the fridge, too.
Claire is used to being the sober one in the room among people who are wasted. Back in the day, it was because of the calorie content, and men never notice if you’re drunk or sober, once they’re gone themselves; they just assume that you’re whatever they are. Sean was quite drunk when she met him at the Gavilas’ Christmas party five years ago. She’s wished for some time that she’d left him there.
She goes out to the gazebo with a glass of Montrachet. Kicks off her shoes and curls up on a sofa and tries to tune out the sounds of singing from indoors. The men have moved on to whisky and rugby songs have followed. This wasn’t what I had in mind, she thinks. When I met him he couldn’t do enough to impress me with his sophistication. It was all Paris Ritz and private dining rooms, though those were mostly about Heather’s friends not spotting us, I suppose. And now I’m married to a fifty-year-old yob who eats with his mouth open. Be careful what you wish for, she thinks, and lets out a small sarcastic laugh, because it might well come true. I wanted money and I wanted position, and, when I saw that Sean had both, I wanted him. It serves me right, really, because he wasn’t mine to have. And suddenly I’m just another woman who stole someone’s husband, and nobody ever really forgives you for that, whatever they say.
She sips her wine. It’s quite exquisite on the tongue. There are good things, she thinks. I must remember the good things. The cars and the houses and the guilt diamonds, and the never having to poison my liver with cheap wine again. And my girls will never want for anything. God knows, the amount of money he pours into Milly and India, the alimony that goes on and on, the school fees, the
skiing trips, the bloody riding lessons, my own will never go short even if he trades me in. Maybe it would be better if he did trade me in. Then I could sit in the quiet and drink my wine and never have to listen to him moan about his haemorrhoids again.
She hears her name being bellowed through the open door. ‘What?’ she calls.
An upstairs window at Seagulls, the genteelly dilapidated pebbledashed semi on the other side of the fence, is slammed pointedly shut. They must love us, she thinks. Six months of contractors and now this.
‘Twins are awake!’ shouts Sean.
For a second she considers telling him to go and sort them out, and then she sighs. The state he’s in, he’ll probably drop Ruby on her head on that hard tiled floor. She puts her glass regretfully down on the table and uncurls from her comfortable nest.
‘Coming!’ she calls.
‘God almighty,’ says Charlie. ‘Do they never fucking sleep?’
‘That’s our godchildren you’re talking about, Charlie,’ slurs Imogen.
‘Yes, but they’re meant to go to sleep! It’s grown-up time now!’
‘Grown-up time?’ enquires Claire. Charlie is splayed out on a dining chair like a scarecrow, legs straight as broom handles, shirt stained with wine and whisky and fish pie and cigar ash, wiry grey curls creeping out around his open buttons. Robert and Maria are snogging like teenagers on a sofa. Jimmy is lying face-up on the sheepskin rug, yet another joint scattering burny flakes on to the ruined hairs beneath him. Linda is doing a dance – some cross between Bollywood and stripper – and her husband is staring at the narrow waist and bulging buttocks in her bandage dress like a Bedouin staring at a water hole. Imogen bounces Coco on her chest. She’s fallen back asleep, worn out by the constant up-and-down the night has entailed, and her head flops loosely on her shoulder. Imogen flashes Claire the sort of you-see? look that makes her want to start laying about her with the fire tongs. You see? She goes to sleep for me. You see? I never have trouble getting them to eat their peas. I don’t know what the fuss is about. Childcare is easy.