This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  *

  James is up early in the morning, and out, before the children are up. He is completely unaware that we have had Nathan to stay.

  Now that we are taking him home and therefore it is certain that he is not a permanent fixture, Thomas finds it in his power to be a little nicer to Nathan. He especially can’t wait to see the big black car with no wheels.

  ‘Look, there it is!’ squeals Arianne, frantically pointing as we pull up outside numbers One and Two Fairview Lane.

  ‘Wow!’ Thomas gasps in total awe, and tries desperately to whistle through his lips.

  ‘Wait,’ I say as I let them out of the car. ‘Nathan lives next door.’ But they line up in a row, all three of them, staring at that hideous old banger as if it was a spaceship down from the sky.

  They are still there when the door of number One opens, and Ian Partridge comes out and walks down the path.

  Would I have known it was him, if I hadn’t seen him here, now? I don’t know. He’s tall and wide and carries his weight with a confident swagger. His black hair is thinning at the front and brushed back, and he’s dressed in aged jeans that do up tight below his belly and a check shirt. He thinks he’s gorgeous. I can tell that just by the way he moves.

  ‘Laura,’ he says. ‘Good to see you again.’

  He puts his hands on my shoulders and makes the bold move of kissing me on the cheek. I hang between his hands like a wooden doll. I do not know if he’s learned a few cosmopolitan manners since he grew up or if he’s just taking advantage.

  ‘You’re looking good, Laura,’ he says as if his opinion should matter to me, and his smile is just as leery as it ever was. Then he calls over to Nathan, ‘All right, mate?’

  Nathan looks at him and grins; it is the first time I’ve seen him smile. I’ve the feeling he would run over to his uncle, but he’s enjoying the success of being with the others, looking at that car.

  To me, Ian says, ‘Those yours? Kids are great, aren’t they? Got three myself, and another one on the way. They’re hard work, but worth it.’

  I agree wholeheartedly and watch the children, which is infinitely better than making eye contact with Ian Partridge.

  ‘It’s hard for Mum, looking after Nathan on her own,’ he says. ‘Wish I could do more. He’s a great kid. Needs his family, though.’

  ‘He needs his mother,’ I can’t help saying.

  I sense, rather than see, Ian shrug his shoulders beside me, but I hear him sigh clearly enough. ‘It’s a sad old business with poor Heddy. Can’t see an end to it, somehow. And you’re right, the boy does need his mother.’ He clicks together his teeth, then sighs again. ‘But it’s Mum I worry about most. She’s not as young as she used to be and it’s too much for her, looking after Nathan and going back and forth to the hospital every day. Took her back over this morning, I did. Worn out, she is, worn out.’

  ‘And what about Heddy?’ I ask. ‘How’s she?’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ he says. ‘Well, as all right as she can be, stuck in that place. Drugged up.’ He pauses. ‘She cut her arms with a Coke ring. Didn’t do too much damage. It’s the fallout that’s worse, you know. The upset.’

  ‘I can’t understand why she’d want to make things worse,’ I say.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ Ian says. ‘She doesn’t see it like that. She’s caught in a vicious circle. Can’t see how to get out.’

  ‘Well, she’s not going to get out if she keeps cutting herself,’ I say, perhaps a little sharply.

  When I leave he gives me his business card. Ian Partridge, it says, Painter and decorator. No job too small.

  ‘You can call this number any time. Always got my mobile on.’

  I put the card in my bag, quite sure I’ll never need it.

  He leans against the car door as I get in, then stays standing there right by the kerb so that I feel obliged to open the window as I start up the engine.

  ‘Thanks, Laura, for all your help,’ he says, bending down and sticking his face in the open window, uncomfortably close. ‘Be in touch.’ Then he pats the roof of the car in farewell, much as I’m sure he’d like to pat my bottom, given the chance.

  As I drive away, with Thomas and Arianne giggling in the back, I think of poor Nathan crying in the dark for his mother, and I feel an anger towards Heddy Partridge far greater than anything I ever felt in the past.

  TWELVE

  Later that same day Tasha, Liz, Penny and I are sitting on Tasha’s new wrought-iron chairs on her newly laid patio. This patio is bigger than most people’s gardens; it is semicircular in design and staggered in three tiers, each tier being wider than the last, with the widest one opening out onto the huge lawn. From here we can observe and contemplate the vast expanse of grass bordered in the distance by an eclectic assortment of interwoven and overlapping hedgerow; honeysuckle, hydrangeas, you name it and it’s out there, all strung together like loosely and fulsomely braided hair. The lawn is interspersed here and there with trees: apple and pear, and something else we can’t quite make up our minds over.

  It is a fine day, and in and out and around these trees our children play like wingless fairies. Distractedly, we watch them. We are busy with the dilemma of Tasha’s proposed swimming pool. She has the plans, laid out on the table, and lifting slightly in the gentle breeze. She’d called us all up in a panic, and round we all came. The thing is, should the pool be at the end of the garden as planned, or would it be better situated on a raised area to the left and midway down, thus breaking things up a little, without intruding on the space?

  ‘It could be a real feature, then. You know, with steps leading up to it and maybe decking around the edges.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ Penny says, ‘to have a garden like this, so close to London.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Tasha hums, in that tone that only the truly fortunate dare adopt – that tone that lets you think that, to them, it’s all something and nothing. ‘It’ll be a pain to maintain, though,’ she says, meaning either the pool or the garden, or both.

  We all nod and sympathize, making it quite clear that we’re not jealous – no, not at all.

  ‘That’s the trouble with big gardens. And big houses, too,’ says Liz, who’s still living in the house that she and Tim bought when they first got married, now with three kids and one bathroom between them. ‘They’re a lot of work.’

  ‘I just wouldn’t have the time,’ agrees Penny a little too eagerly.

  ‘I was thinking of getting some sort of marquee,’ Tasha says, ‘for our house-warming party. What do you think? And I’ll need a couple of decent-sized patio heaters. Some of those really big industrial-sized ones.’

  ‘You know, they’re really bad for the environment,’ I say, and it comes out too sharply, not because I’m a perfect saint about such things, but because I’m feeling prickly. It’s been creeping up on me all afternoon, all through this fawning session. Penny and Liz look at me aghast. Tasha looks out across the beautiful garden towards her beautiful daughter with a slightly hurt expression on her face.

  ‘Well, they are,’ I say, in defence.

  ‘Rupert and I actually take a lot of care to offset our carbon emissions,’ Tasha says a little huffily, still without meeting my eye.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Penny jumps in, then she says to me, ‘And anyway, it’s only once, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, Laura,’ Liz says, so they’re all rounding on me now. ‘It’s not like she’s going to be using them all year.’

  And who am I to dare criticize Tasha? I stick a sweet smile on my face and back-pedal fast. ‘Of course not. Now and again can’t hurt. And anyway we don’t want to freeze, do we?’ I laugh, remembering too well how it felt to be in exile, and knowing how easily I could end up there again. ‘Didn’t Fiona Littlewood have one of those at her garden party last year? I’ll ask her where she got it from, if you like. I’m seeing her on Saturday.’

  They all look at me curiously now, Tasha included. They know that I can’t
stand Fiona Littlewood.

  ‘Dinner,’ I say, flatly. ‘The Littlewoods, with Juliet and Andy. Our turn.’

  ‘Poor you,’ Penny says, and the others murmur sympathetically.

  You know how it is, you get into these rounds and rounds of dinner parties and the whole thing becomes like a roulette game: who did you have last time, who the time before, who have you been to, and who with whom? And then when you’ve sorted out the right guests so that you don’t offend anyone, and fixed a date when everyone’s free, you have to get the food.

  I loathe cooking, the hours spent ploughing through recipe books, then trawling round Sainsbury’s in search of obscure ingredients upon which your whole ensemble depends. I hate it, whenever; but more than anything I hate it when I’m cooking for Fiona Littlewood.

  The girls know this, and they understand why. Not for Fiona Littlewood some impromptu pasta dish washed down with copious amounts of Sauvignon. Oh no. Fiona Littlewood is the benchmark of domestic perfection by which we all measure ourselves. Fiona Littlewood is the perfect cook. Dinner at Fiona’s is an invitation to be received with honour and returned with dread. She is the sort of woman who can stuff a live lobster as if it were a pepper. There is a section in her wardrobe devoted to pinnies, in a variety of fabrics and colours, to go with every outfit, including evening wear, and I have never, ever seen her get one dirty. Even afternoon tea with the children at Fiona’s house is a full-blown Aga affair with pinwheel sandwiches (home-made bread of course), scones and three-foot-high cakes, effortlessly produced. Never did a fish finger cross the lips of a junior Littlewood.

  ‘That woman is a marvel,’ Tasha drawls. ‘Do you know, she did the catering for the Christmas fair almost entirely single-handedly. Six hundred mince pies.’

  ‘Sickening,’ Liz says. ‘I don’t know how she has the time. And with all those children, too. What’s the latest one called?’

  ‘Minka,’ I say.

  ‘Minka!’ Liz screeches. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  ‘So what are you cooking?’ Penny asks.

  ‘I’m not,’ I reply. ‘I’m having it catered.’ My voice drops like a stone into water. They stare at me, wide-eyed, as the ripples roll out. ‘Well, I haven’t even got time to go shopping. I’m going to my parents’ tomorrow and I won’t be back till Friday.’

  Penny’s mouth has dropped open. Tasha’s perfectly pale face is looking a little flushed. There is something dangerous in the brightness of Liz’s eyes. I observe them, strangely detached.

  ‘Who’s doing it?’ asks Liz, and there’s a slight disapproval in her voice. Mostly I think it’s just jealousy that she didn’t think of doing it, or wouldn’t dare, but there is also the slight sense that you’re not a real woman unless you do your own hostessing.

  ‘Nicola Blakely,’ I say. ‘Lives on Barlow Road. You’ve probably never heard of her. I hadn’t till I looked her up.’

  ‘I have heard of her!’ Liz exclaims, and Tasha and Penny are both leaning towards me now, nodding their heads in frantic agreement.

  ‘She had a child that went to Carole’s for a while – don’t you remember?’

  ‘Weird child, wasn’t it? Funny eyes.’

  ‘Weird mother.’

  ‘Fiona can’t stand her. Didn’t they both do the same cookery course once?’

  ‘It was college, wasn’t it? Weren’t they at college together?’

  ‘Don’t you remember them at the nursery Christmas party, bitching about each other’s vol-au-vents?’

  I don’t, but I can’t think anyway. Can’t think of anything but Nathan, seated on my lap in the dark and crying for his mother.

  ‘Oh, this is so hilarious!’ Penny squeals. ‘You mustn’t tell Fiona. She has to think you did it all.’

  ‘I can just see it now. This chicken supreme is wonderful,’ Liz mocks. ‘You must give me the recipe. Oh, Laura you mustn’t tell her.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I say and my voice is so cold it would freeze lesser beings. Not these women, though; they are too knocked out by the joke to notice the chill. ‘The food will arrive half an hour beforehand. Back door, of course. And the plates will be collected in the morning. No one will know.’

  They are staring at me like schoolgirls, hiding their thrill behind their hands. Yes, Tasha’s hand is actually up there, against her mouth, perfect nails coyly displayed. You’d think I was doing this for their entertainment. You’d think I’d found the cure for ageing, or for the boredom of married sex; for something important, you know, in our little world. I look at their faces and I see that I have. I see my kudos rising up and shooting through the metaphorical roof.

  ‘Oh, this is brilliant,’ Tasha says through her fingers. ‘Fiona mustn’t know.’

  ‘Just imagine,’ Penny says, ‘if Fiona Littlewood thinks there’s a better cook in Ashton than her!’

  ‘How will she cope?’ laughs Liz, and so they go on, thrilled with my wit and daring.

  I find myself looking away. I cannot be bothered to laugh, or not to laugh. There is a commodity much like cement settling itself in the space between my stomach and my heart. I watch the children play and I think how they run around on Tasha’s huge lawn as if they owned the world. I try to picture Nathan running around with them, in and out of those trees, and I can’t. I can only picture him seated on my lap, crying.

  There was a boy at infant school called Michael Napps. We called him Nappy-pants.

  He was a small boy, with rather a large head and lots of thick, curly hair that sprang upwards in gravity-defying rolls, making his head seem even bigger. His mum made him wear white socks, like a girl, and elasticated-waist shorts that he pulled up too high, so that they came almost up to his chest. And he talked to himself; we’d seen him.

  Sometimes, when we were bored, we’d look out for him. We’d spy him wandering around the playground on his own, muttering to himself and making strange noises, and we’d creep up behind him and shadow him. He seemed to imagine he was driving some kind of car, and when he realized we were following him, he’d make weird little peep-peep noises out of the corner of his mouth, shunt up an invisible gear and try to run away.

  And we’d run after him, chasing him into the trees that ran along the far side of the playground.

  He’d try to hide behind a tree, but we’d find him.

  ‘Nappy-pants! Nappy-pants!’ we’d taunt, rounding on him. His trying to hide worked to our advantage, for it meant that the dinner ladies couldn’t see him if they looked over from the playground; they could only see us, a bunch of sweet little girls playing nicely by the trees.

  He was like a scared animal when trapped. Once caught, he didn’t even try to escape. He’d just stand there pinned against the tree, quivering, and staring at us with watery-bright eyes.

  ‘Nappy-pants!’ we’d hiss at him, putting our faces up close to his. ‘Nappy-pants!’

  If we did this for long enough – and that was the aim, of course, to do it for long enough – he’d start to fart, out of nerves, I suppose. We’d have our faces up close to his and suddenly we’d notice it, the stink, coming up.

  ‘Urgh!’ we’d shriek, wrinkling our noses in horror. ‘How disgusting! Nappy has pooped in his pants again!’

  This was just a little something we did for a change now and again, when we got tired of picking on Heddy.

  What fun there is to be had when you are young, and fortunately perfect. It seemed to me back then that some people are born to be picked on, and others to do the picking.

  *

  Thomas, Arianne and I arrive at my parents’ house just a little bit late for lunch on Tuesday, with what I hope will be enough clothes stuffed haphazardly into the back of the car. I didn’t have time to pack properly; I’m sure it will be noted. My parents live all the way out past Exeter, way further from Ashton than the couple of hours or so that my mum likes to think it. I’m sure that when they moved she envisioned all our holidays and weekends spent hacking down for visits, but in fact this is only the
second time I’ve been. Somehow that’s all I can manage, however much they mind and expected it to be otherwise. They want me to go down for a full week in the summer, with the children, and I’ve said I will because I can hardly say no. And I want to, of course I do. As my mother tells me, it’s good for the children.

  The children, the children.

  They are tired and fractious and hungry when we finally get there. Thomas is feeling sick and Arianne has wet herself because there was absolutely nowhere to stop for the loo for the last hour. Hardly the arrival my parents were expecting. They are standing by the road looking out for us. So are one or two of the neighbours.

  ‘You’re late,’ my mother says through her china smile as we stagger out of the car. ‘I’ve had lunch waiting for over an hour.’

  And lunch has to wait even longer while I sort out the children, who don’t want to eat at all, by which time my mother is almost as stressed as I am.

  ‘I expect they had too many sweets in the car,’ she says as the children pick at their food.

  ‘They didn’t have any,’ I say.

  ‘You used to get travel-sick. You’d grown out of it, mind you, by the time you were Thomas’s age. It’s in the mind, mostly.’

  Thomas glares at her, and then at me. ‘It’s a long journey,’ I say, as nicely as I can.

  My mother crumbles a bit of dried-up bread between her agitated fingers. ‘Isn’t Arianne toilet-trained by now?’ she says, and poor little Arianne, who is mortified, starts to cry.

  But still.

  They’ve a whole schedule lined up for us. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble. There’s no time to be aimless, or bored, or introspective. Walks, picnics, trips to the beach, where every move the children make, every nuance in their behaviour and every phase in their development – forwards or backwards – is observed. It’s all Do you think it’s a good idea for Arianne to be sucking her thumb? Have you noticed any improvement in her coordination yet? Do the ballet lessons help? And You really should encourage Thomas to learn a musical instrument, Laura. It will help him to focus. He does have a bit of a temper, doesn’t he, dear?