by Anna Raverat
So this is an angel. I’ve never seen a real one before, only those winged cherubs; fat little jokes that annoy me to hell. There’s not much light in the room, but nevertheless the painting seems to shine. I hover in his limpid gaze, drinking in this feeling of somehow being touched by grace, and oh, but it’s a deep, sad feeling and troubling.
29
“I don’t have a job description anymore,” I told Gérard.
“We’re past job descriptions, Kate,” he said. “Not quite in the danger zone, but definitely past job descriptions.”
“What do you mean, danger zone?”
“Trish and Don, they’re in the danger zone. At their level it’s about behaving in a certain way, speaking in a certain way. It gets into how you think. It can take you over completely—unless you’re strong, like Richard was. At a certain level, you’re paid to drink the company Kool-Aid.”
* * *
Nevertheless, the pay rise came just at the right time. Adam found a job, which helped, but we were running two households now. I told Adam that I needed to know that I could stand on my own two feet before deciding whether or not I could get over his affairs.
“Affair,” he corrected.
“Whatever,” I said. “The point is, I need to be properly independent. If we do get back together we both have to be sure it’s because we want to.”
* * *
Workmen came and took away Richard’s huge oak desk and replaced it with Don’s lighter, smaller one. The paintings arrived and got divvied up. Everyone expected the Hockney swimming pool to go in Don’s office since he enjoyed its glamour, but instead the workmen carried in Raphael’s angel. “He’ll need more than an angel,” muttered Valerie.
* * *
Don embarked on a trip to all PHC regions around the globe, a territory-marking exercise that turned out to be wildly expensive, not just because of the first-class air tickets but because in order to curry favor, the regional heads had Valerie freight out his favorite beer from the Black Isle Brewery in Munlochy, a small village in northern Scotland. Crates were flown to the four corners of the world, the ale chilled and ready for his arrival in the penthouse suite and also in the limousine that picked him up from the airport.
“This is just money out of the till,” said Valerie. “Richard would never have indulged in such behavior.”
* * *
Valerie didn’t come in the next day, or the one after that. People started to ask her whereabouts. “I have sent Valerie on compassionate leave,” said Trish. “She’s infecting the whole office. It’s time we moved on.”
“Do you mean ‘affecting’?” I said, but it wasn’t the only time Trish muddled her words. She wrote an all-staff email and sent it with “War Regards,” and another signed “Beset Wishes.”
* * *
Trish became obsessed with the Guest Experience even though this was now supposed to be my job. What she really seemed fixated on was breaking it down into small, replicable pieces. She commissioned an agency to design a sleep kit: lavender pillow spray, a roll-on blend of the essential oils of juniper, mallow, and mugwort to be applied to pulse points, a sachet of valerian-and-rose bath salts and some chamomile tea, all zipped into a small silk pouch branded with the company logo. In a development of the old chocolate-on-pillow tradition, PHC hotels started to give a Good Night’s Sleep kit instead of confectionery. The cost was astronomical, so Trish added a toothbrush and a tiny tube of toothpaste and got Colgate to sponsor the whole thing.
Project teams went to speak to guests all over the world; I took France, Denmark, Spain, and Portugal. Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but on those truncated trips I wasn’t visiting with wide eyes and an open soul; I was focused entirely on the documents I needed to see and the people I needed to talk to—thirty guests of varied ages and nationalities—my mind directed on what I should be saying or taking away from meetings and getting home as fast as possible to see the girls. My itinerary went: airport, taxi, hotel, taxi, airport, out. I didn’t set foot on the soil of the country I was in, didn’t use their currency, didn’t attempt one word of their language, because MasterCard and Visa and basic English are accepted everywhere. Travel like this is as impersonal as surgery. I was continually snubbing my host. The worst was the visit to Copenhagen; the hotel overlooked the Tivoli Gardens but I didn’t cross the street to even stick my nose through the gate and smell the air.
30
The girls started creeping upstairs to my bed, which meant my nightly walkabout had to be very quiet. I limped around the house with shame and self-pity, the most unwelcome guests of all. At times I couldn’t bear it. And so I started to throw things away.
I began in the kitchen, tackled the pile on top of the fridge: old vouchers from Sainsbury’s, a reminder from the dentist, last year’s family planner, the phone directory, coloring books three-quarters done. Next, the cupboards: Tupperware with lost lids, my favorite blue cup with the broken handle, an expired packet of dumpling mix, a jar of molasses, a shiny flan dish never used. Out, out, out, out, out.
Another night I sorted through my clothes, discovering my criteria as I went along: stained—out; frayed—out; misshapen—out. Out if it was stiff and uncomfortable. Out if I’d never liked it anyway. Out if it was too baggy, too tight, too dark, or too light. I deliberated over a cashmere jumper bought in last year’s January sales; the fact of it being cashmere had trumped the fact of it being prawn pink. Seldom worn, I’d been keeping it because of the money spent, but that money was gone and now the jumper needed to go too. The relief was palpable! Old, gray knickers went, baggy bras, socks that fell down. The “out” pile was much, much bigger than the “in” pile.
At the back of the wardrobe was my wedding dress. I wouldn’t wear it again and I couldn’t imagine wanting, now, to pass it on to either of my daughters. It was probably sentimentality that made me go downstairs to fetch a brand-new bag from the roll of bin liners. I shook it open—wide, black, as deep and dark as a hole in the ground—and carefully placed inside my white wedding shoes and the white silk dress, which rustled and whispered as I tied the bag closed.
I stood for a moment wondering, what am I supposed to do now? I felt as though I’d just drowned a kitten. Abruptly, I decided I didn’t like the clothes I’d worn yesterday so I bagged those, and then I noticed the pajamas I was wearing; I hated these pajamas! I stripped off, stuffed them into the bag, and tied it. I had spent three hours going through all my clothes and there I stood at the end of it, naked.
31
Hotel therapy. That’s the kind I wanted. I thought I’d like to bring my girls and move into a hotel, where we would be looked after and kept warm. We could have a suite, or one big room with three beds. The girls would make friends of the staff, the whole hotel would be their playground—the lifts, the trollies, the free mints in the lobby, back of house with the staff room and the huge kitchens, where the chefs would give them special treats. We would have room service and clean towels every day, chocolates on our pillows every night, badminton lessons in the car park.
* * *
“But who puts them there?” asked Hester, about the pillow-chocolates.
“Maybe it’s the tooth fairy’s wicked sister,” I said.
“Or maybe the tooth fairy puts them there herself so that people’s teeth fall out quicker and she gets more,” said Milla.
* * *
In real life, there were no chocolates on our pillows. The girls were staying up later and later, and when I put myself to bed it was like covering a car with a blanket, the engine still running. It didn’t make any difference what time I turned off the light, how much or how little wine I drank—hot milk, hot toddies, herbal tinctures, aromatherapeutic bath suds—none of it made any difference. Even with the pills I would go to sleep with difficulty; you couldn’t call it falling, more like a slow descent hanging on by fingertips. Eventually the drugs would kick in; the mechanics would stop whirring, the grip would loosen, I would sleep. And four
hours later I would wake, as if some switch had been thrown. These night shifts left me frazzled, with the certain knowledge that I might drop or break things both literally and metaphorically, and so I operated with extreme caution, hazard lights flashing in the corner of my vision at all times, as if my life was a vehicle I had no license to drive.
Every day at 3:00 a.m. I’d sit up like a bolt drawn on a door, as if keeping an internal appointment—which I was, because every morning at 3:00 the same crowd of worries showed up; I spent hours each night walking around the house with them, listening to them, feeding them, clearing up after them.
My thoughts made rooms. There were rooms to suit each particular anxiety: huge chambers of fear for how this would affect Milla and Hester and for how I was going to get us through this, whether I even could. Long corridors of rage against Adam, worry for him too. Lower down, there was anger and pity for Louise, envy and spite for Judy Garland, and thoughts about my parents, especially my mother. I needed a hotel to accommodate them all. Trish often made an appearance. Money worries took up a lot of space. It was like having another job; by day an executive at PHC, by night running the Hotel Insomnia.
* * *
“How are you doing?” Yvette asked the girls.
“The kids are all right—the adults aren’t,” Milla said. She was right about the adults. For the first few weeks, I operated on autopilot: minimal functioning with erratic outbursts. I tried to uphold established routines, but sometimes the old bedtime stories would make me cry or I’d slip out of a trance and realize that I’d been stirring the soup for twenty minutes. Adam was a mess as well—unshaven, he looked drawn and shadowy, as though he were being hunted down by faceless horsemen with swirling cloaks. His friends were worried about him getting into some kind of trouble. He had a reputation for volatility.
One day Hester asked, “Mummy, what’s a cunk?”
“I don’t know—where did you hear it?”
“Daddy said it. We were crossing the road with him and a bike went in front of us really fast and Daddy shouted, ‘You cunk!’”
* * *
But I didn’t think the kids were all right. Milla started to leave notes. I’d be hovering in the middle distance and come round to find small folded pieces of paper strewn like white petals around my feet. Inside were little drawings—a unicorn, a fairy, a rainbow, a smiling sun—and little writings: You are pretty; You are kind; You care for others; I love you; Best mummy ever.
We were lost at sea on separate boats. Milla’s notes were like messages in bottles thrown out in hope of finding land and being rescued, invocations to summon her mother back from the deep: I knew because I’d done more or less the same thing when my father’s affair came to light and my own mother set sail without saying goodbye. In a way I lost her then; after the initial crisis passed, she started teaching. She never really came back.
As well as her little notes, Milla started to eavesdrop, another activity I was familiar with from childhood. With this inside knowledge I tried to stay one step ahead: I’d make absolutely sure she was asleep or watching television behind a closed door before making any personal calls, but often I’d be mid-outpour with Yvette or with Jo, and I’d look up and see her standing side-on in the shadows, pressed against a wall. I knew Milla was only trying to piece it all together, but I understood now a comment my mother had made when she caught me folded under the stairs, listening to one of her phone calls. “It’s like living with the Gestapo,” she said.
Hester stepped up her campaign to change her name and when I was steadfast in my refusal she retaliated by withdrawing the title “Mummy”—but only when she remembered, which wasn’t very often. She followed her elder sister’s example of message writing, only hers were the opposite of love letters. I would find notes propped against the kettle in cronky four-year-old handwriting: To Kate. You are going to hav a chopt off hed and it is not a jok. Hat from Diego. I understood that jok meant “joke” but sometimes her spelling foxed me. “Hat from Diego?” I asked, because Diego the cartoon character did in fact wear a sombrero. “Do you mean you want a hat like Diego’s? Because that we can do.”
“HATE, Mummy, it says HATE!”
A few days later she lost a tooth and when I looked under her pillow at 3:00 a.m. to retrieve the tooth and replace it with a coin there was more hate mail, this time for the tooth fairy: If you don’t giv my mune I will smash you. I took the envelope down to the kitchen and wrote a reply using my left hand. Maybe you could ask nicely? I am sure we can be friendly, xoxo. I slid the envelope back under her pillow with the tooth still inside, no coin; I didn’t need to consult Raising Happy Children or any of the other child-rearing manuals under my bed to know that the tooth fairy doesn’t respond to threats.
32
On my way home from work one day I found Peter and Ronnie in conference, Toto looking on.
“You missed it, darling!” said Peter. “The police came to arrest us all—they took names and addresses, but in the end they didn’t take us.”
“The royal servant?” I asked.
“DVDs,” said Ronnie. “They were pirate.”
“We had some good ones—some children ones,” said Peter.
“Disney, he means. Not wrong’uns, sweetheart,” corrected Ronnie.
“No!” said Peter.
Ronnie picked up my shopping bags and carried them all the way to the Tube. “You know we all love you, darling, don’t you?” he said. “Peter loves you. He’d never say it, but he does. If there’s ever anything we can do for you, you just let us know, all right? We can come round. We’ll carry your bags, paint the walls, dig the garden, beat someone up for you—we’ll make sure he doesn’t come back, you just give us the nod.” He was probably exaggerating. Nevertheless I was quite glad they didn’t know where we lived.
* * *
That Peter and Ronnie had worked out my situation wasn’t surprising; I had been bringing them remnants of my household for weeks. But I must have been giving off some kind of vibe because one lunchtime while I was shopping in Sainsbury’s a man approached me in the grocery section, where I was busy wondering if the girls would eat spinach if I disguised it in an omelette.
“Excuse me,” he said. I didn’t realize he was talking to me.
“Excuse me, miss,” he repeated politely. I looked up from the green leafy vegetables to see who was calling me “miss.” He was good-looking, with round, high cheeks and wavy black hair and he spoke with a posh accent.
“Excuse me, but I have to ask—are you single?”
“What?” I said, though I’d heard him.
“I’m really sorry to accost you like this in a supermarket of all places, but I saw you and I just had to ask whether you’re single?”
“Ah … not really,” I answered. I still had my wedding ring, but wasn’t wearing it.
“Not really,” he repeated, mulling it over. “Well, let me put it like this—are you single enough for me to ask you out for a drink sometime, or a coffee?”
“Oh!” I said. “Um…”
“My name’s Abs,” he said hurriedly. “What’s yours?”
“Abs?” I said. “As in stomach muscles?”
“As in Absolem.”
“Oh, right, of course—sorry. My name’s Kate.”
“No problem, Kate,” said Abs. “So, how about a coffee?”
Still embarrassed about my mistake over his name, I found myself giving Abs my number. But I worried about it afterward. I couldn’t stop thinking about Adam and whether I should tell him. I called Jo.
“It is a bit odd, being asked out in Sainsbury’s,” she said. “But it could be quite good for you. It’s just a coffee, and you’re entitled to have coffee with whoever you want—you and Adam are separated, remember?”
Abs texted me the same afternoon to suggest we speak on the phone before meeting up. He referred to this as a pre-date, which I’d never heard of. We arranged to speak at 9:00 p.m. but he didn’t call, so at 9:30 I started gett
ing ready for bed. When I checked the phone later I saw that he had tried calling at 9:27 and sent a text at 9:31.
“I tried to reach you just after nine,” he said when we did speak. Half past does not qualify as “just after,” I thought but didn’t say.
Abs said he’d planned a virtual date, as a surprise. It would take place on this phone call. I’d never heard of one of those either. He asked me what color dress I’d wear—the only question he did ask—and then proceeded to pick me up in an unspecified fancy car and drive me round “his” London, showing me the places he grew up and went to school, then on to the London Eye, where he had booked a private capsule with musicians, hors d’oeuvres, and prosecco.
“Prosecco?” I said. “If it’s a virtual date couldn’t we have champagne?”
After the London Eye, the fancy car took us to a one-room restaurant at the top of Battersea Power Station, which I could only imagine derelict, and then on to a flat overlooking the river, where there would be dancing.
“And now I’m going to do something really spontaneous,” said Abs, after the first dance.
“Oh,” I said.
“Can you guess what it is?”
“Not really,” I said, though I had that sinking feeling.
“It’s just a really spontaneous thing that I’m going to do, can’t you think of it?”
“No!”
“Well, I’m going to kiss you.”
“Oh.”
“Is that it—‘Oh’? Is that all you can say? You’ve been saying ‘oh’ for the whole date, apart from complaining about the drinks. Maybe you’re stressed—or are you just tired?”
I had no idea what to say. I was of course deeply stressed and completely exhausted, but this was not the problem.
“Can’t you say something to help the situation?” he said. “I was just trying to be spontaneous. I really don’t know what to say now. Can’t you say anything at all?”
“Do you do this all the time?” I said. “Pick people up in Sainsbury’s?”