by Anna Raverat
“At least you didn’t cut each other’s hair,” I said.
“Only a bit,” said Hester, turning her head to show a wide section missing at the back. “I want hair like Diego, but we thought you might get cross so we stopped and did the bears.”
I gathered Hester’s hair into a rather thin ponytail, which only partially hid the missing lump, and took her to the hairdresser with a picture of Diego.
“She’s going to look like a boy with this haircut,” the hairdresser warned.
“You mean I’m going to look like Diego!” Hester piped up.
And she did. Chubby as a cartoon character, she looked completely adorable with a crew cut and slicked-back fringe. The hairdresser gave us a lesson about how to recreate the look at home, and we bought some wax and gel and went home happy—or at least, Hester was 100 percent happy, Milla grumpy until I bought her a pirate comic, and I felt as though I’d dealt with the situation fairly well but that the situation itself was worrisome.
Their bears had had more than a haircut; the girls’ room was a soft-toy abattoir. Some had been decapitated, some were amputees, anything they’d been holding—pink hearts, velvet rainbows—cut off and cast aside. Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet looked the most beaten up: Piglet’s ears had been severed, Pooh had lost his jar of honey, his red jumper hacked to pieces.
We spent most of the rest of that weekend putting the bears back together: Milla and Hester restuffed bodies, heads, and limbs and I stitched, although not very well—you could see the joins and things were a bit wonky. On Sunday afternoon we lined them up to review our work: terrible. The bears had gone from being round and gleaming to a bunch of down-and-out misfits.
“They look older,” said Milla.
“They look ugly,” said Hester.
“They look like Peter and Ronnie,” I said. Hearing me mention men’s names, the girls growled, so I added, “People I know from work. Well, near work.”
Winnie-the-Pooh slipped over onto the floor. He was wearing a pink knitted cardigan belonging to another of their dolls, his cheeks were sunken, his famous and familiar potbelly visibly reduced. Almost a different bear. Hester picked him up.
“They’re still cute though,” she said, cuddling him.
For once, I wished my mother was there; she hated cooking but she’d have sewn the bears back together beautifully—I remember her darning the holes in the heels and toes of our socks and in the fingers of our gloves, something she’d learned from her mother. The world was different then; mending was an art. Nowadays, things are cheap. And not just that; women’s place was different too—my mother’s generation mended everything, saved everything, but I didn’t properly learn domesticity because it was expected that I would go out into the world and work alongside the men, and my mother pushed me hard in that direction. I’d resented that, but now I was beginning to understand why; it’s easier to be independent if you have your own money.
* * *
We decided to bake a cake. I looked up a recipe, we mixed the batter, and afterward the girls fought over who licked the bowl and who licked the spoon. While it was in the oven, they went upstairs to set up the teddy bears’ picnic. I followed the instructions faithfully; checked the cake after thirty minutes as the recipe said. It had risen beautifully and smelled heavenly, but when I turned it out of the tin, a circle about the size of a ten-pence piece dropped from the middle in a splodge. I maneuvered the hot cake back into the hot tin, swearing, and burned my fingers on the molten cake lava as I put it back in. When I took it out a second time the sponge was golden and springy to the touch, cooked all the way through, but there was this small, puckered hole in the middle.
I slumped down into a chair feeling deflated: the cake was ruined; the children needed psychiatric help; I was a failure.
I called the girls, expecting them to be cross about the cake, or upset, or both, but in fact they were delighted.
“It looks like a bum-hole!”
46
I began, slowly, to regain some weight, which everybody said was a good thing—except perhaps Jo. Consultation with Paul McKenna was vital. I went into the bookshop under cover of collecting another book and found him. His last Golden Rule: Stop When You’ve Had Enough.
Ben came over. I shoved Paul McKenna back on the shelf.
“Your book came in. We tried to call you, but the number didn’t work,” said Ben.
I checked the number; it was spectacularly wrong. I’d given that number in January when I ordered Raising Happy Children. I marveled at my state of mind back then and wrote down my real phone number. Ben said, “I was going to leave it one more day and come and knock on your door.” I wasn’t sure if this indicated compassion or attraction on his part, or neither, or both, but I wished fervently that I had waited one more day for that last Golden Rule.
* * *
One of the trashier self-help books stashed under my bed recommended the therapeutic value of revenge. Lady Sarah Graham-Moon’s iconic acts were described in gleeful detail. At 3:00 one morning she poured five liters of white gloss paint over her husband’s BMW, which was parked in the driveway of his mistress, cut off one sleeve of each of his thirty-two bespoke Savile Row suits, and distributed the contents of his wine cellar all around the village so that when they woke up in the morning, neighbors found £300 bottles of Chablis, Montrachet, and Château Latour next to their daily milk delivery. Lady Graham-Moon is often held up as an extreme example, but to my mind she simply did in one night what took me months and months; pinnacles of rage, depths of despair. Some nights I teetered and pulled back, other nights I reeled off and fell, flailing.
But at 6:00 a.m. I had to get ready for work and wake the children and get them dressed and breakfasted in time for school. My responsibilities meant that I couldn’t allow myself to lose it completely, but the situation was precarious—these duties held me, not the other way around.
There were other tales: one wife, discovering her husband’s affair while he was in Rome with the other woman, used his credit card to buy a new dress and heels and went to greet them at the airport. She looked so fantastically, glamorously expensive that the paparazzi mistook her for a celebrity and the whole thing ended up in News of the World. In another, more quotidian example, a woman said that she had made herself feel better by snipping off every single button from all her husband’s shirts and jackets and placing them in a Tupperware box for him to sew back on himself.
I’d already damaged Adam’s Ducati—not very badly, it turned out—and I didn’t want to do it again, but a lot of his things were still around. In a recent row, I’d asked him to take them, but he pointed out that he still owned half of the house. I went upstairs with a pair of scissors and opened the wardrobe where his suits and jackets were hanging. I started on his blue corduroy jacket. I used to like him in that jacket. I cut off the four buttons from each sleeve and realized I was bored. This was not going to make me feel better. I put the eight buttons inside the jacket pocket. I felt really tired. Stop when you’ve had enough.
* * *
I had several more books on dejunking by now: The Life Laundry, Dejunk Your Life, The Secrets to Decluttering. Dejunking, the books promised, would get it all out of my system, renew my energy and zest for life, and make our home a nicer place to be. I threw away everything that wasn’t useful or beautiful and many more things besides. In the evenings after I’d brought them home from Noreen’s, the girls practiced forward rolls across the carpet in the empty sitting room. The kitchen felt empty too without Charlie circling his basket, lowering down with a sigh. There began to be fewer places for the night terrors to hide in, but still they came, 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., night after night, the same three-hour slot; a relentless schedule. But I needed those dark windows. Sifting through my life, I gradually began to reshape it. Bit by bit I discovered that I hadn’t, in fact, shattered or dissolved, and I wasn’t going to.
47
June. Birthday season arrived in our household: Heste
r was turning five. At her party, she came away crying from the games to find me: “Daddy’s chasing everyone else more than me.” I could have said the same, I thought as I comforted her, and later told Adam exactly this.
“We’re not going to have an argument at the birthday party, are we?” he said.
“We don’t have to argue, you could just agree with me because it’s true—you did chase everyone else more than me.”
He sighed, weary. I walked away. But at the end of the party when the other five-year-olds had gone home and we’d disposed of all the dead balloons and wrapping paper, swept up the broken crisps and cake crumbs and half-eaten sticks of cucumber, wiped puddles of Ribena off the floor and put away the bunting, Adam stayed because Hester wanted him to put them to bed. He bathed them and read a bedtime story and kissed them good night and then he left, went back to his bedsit. The girls got up to wave him goodbye at the door. They were upset after he’d gone, so I read them another story and tucked them up again. Six months in, none of us had got used to the situation—every time he left the house it felt as though our fourth limb had been amputated.
“Did you have a nice birthday?” I asked Hester before she went to sleep.
“Kind of,” she said, but she looked sad.
“Will you and Daddy get back together?” asked Milla.
“I don’t know, sweetheart, I really don’t know.”
“I hope you do,” said Milla.
“I liked it better when our family was together,” said Hester.
* * *
I went into the bookshop to buy her another Jewel Fairies book to make up for the dismal party.
“Do you still have the Jewel Fairies series?” I asked Ben.
He took me to the children’s section, knelt down by the bottom shelf.
“Do you know which you want?”
“No, but this one looks fine,” I said, and pulled out a green book about the Emerald fairy.
“Hang on,” Ben said. “That cover’s bent.” He went through the line of thin, jewel-colored spines. His dark blue T-shirt was the same color as his Levi’s. I noticed his vintage watch and unwashed hair, which for some reason made him even more attractive.
“How about this one?” He held out India the Moonstone Fairy. On the cover was a fairy dressed in gauzy white fabric wearing sparkly sandals, and moonstone is one of the birthstones for June.
Perfect.
* * *
Milla was turning seven. Her birthday was also a disaster. Perhaps because of Hester’s party she decided not to have one; said she’d prefer a treat with each of her parents, separately. Adam took her to Madame Tussauds, where the waxworks freaked her out—“They look like dead people standing up.” I took her to the London Aquarium and I don’t know whether it was an optical illusion created by the incredibly thick, curved glass on the shark tank, or whether my coordination was addled from lack of sleep, or both, but when I swooped down to see what she was looking at I whacked my forehead really, really hard and swore.
“Don’t say ‘Fuck’ in the Aquarium, Mummy!” whispered Milla loudly. Other families turned to stare, and Milla was so mortified that she marched six feet ahead of me, bony shoulders hunched up high, for the rest of the way round, which had the one advantage that she then couldn’t see me trying not to cry.
Afterward I took her out for a gourmet burger, fries, and thick malted milkshake to make up for it. We arrived at the diner at the same time as a man with round spectacles and curly auburn hair who held the door open and came in behind us. The waitress picked up three menus and tried to seat us all at the same table.
“Oh, we’re not together!” I exclaimed.
The waitress apologized and the man smiled and said quietly, “Shame.” I felt myself blushing.
“Who was that, Mummy?” asked Milla, peering round.
48
By July, only three ideas had been submitted to the Ideas Derby. One was mine, one was for something the company was already doing, and the other was a toothless suggestion from someone on Don’s team. Trish hadn’t been keen on the project to begin with and at this point she lost interest entirely.
I paid a visit to the IT department, bearing gifts: a packet of ginger biscuits and some Yorkshire Gold tea bags—the stuff they provided in-house was so bland. Tea is supposed to help you to stand up, but if it’s going to do that it has to be strong.
“After all the hard work you guys have already put in, not to mention Sam’s hard work on the branding”—mentioning Sam was tactical; the IT guys love Sam—“I thought we could give it one more shot. I know it’s probably really hard and complicated, and I know you guys are snowed under with work, so I really appreciate this. I just want to see if it can work.”
“What do you want me to do?” said Tyler.
“Make it anonymous.”
Tyler laughed. “That is so ridiculously easy,” he said. “I could do it in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.”
“Deal,” I said, picking up his mug.
49
Every morning when I dropped off the girls, Noreen fed me compliments: “Doesn’t Mummy look lovely today?” Or: “Goodness me, you’re doing so well, Kate.” Or: “You’re very, very good at your job.” She was good for the girls—cuddly and uncritical, always soothing—and she was good for me in exactly the same ways. She gave me more smiles and hugs than I can remember from all of my childhood. Day after day, Noreen steadily provided encouragement and solace. I’d known it would be like this. Right from the moment I sat in her kitchen and told her everything that had happened, I had a sense that I would get from Noreen what my own mother had never been able to give—warmth and a hug and a “Well done, Kate.”
* * *
On the Tube one morning, my attention was caught by a passenger moving exceptionally slowly, a bunch of keys swinging from a blue lanyard round his neck. He emanated vulnerability. I couldn’t help thinking he shouldn’t have been out alone, and then I saw that the lanyard had King’s College Hospital written on it, and that he wasn’t in fact alone; there was a small group traveling together: two carers, three patients. One of the patients sat down next to me. She must have been in her fifties, very short, dressed in cherry red, and she had deep wrinkles running from her eyes. She too wore a blue hospital lanyard round her neck, also with keys, though not as many as the slow-moving man. She introduced herself as Angela, and asked my name, which I told her.
“You know my name, I know your name,” she said, and rested her head on my shoulder. The smell of hospital corridors came off her mouse-brown hair. Some of the other passengers in the carriage stared; Angela had contravened commuter law by invading my personal space, but she made herself comfortable so quickly that in fact I felt vaguely honored that she’d chosen me. We sat in perfect harmony for three stops before her carer gently roused her. Before she got off, Angela leaned over and kissed my cheek.
“Goodbye, Angela, it was lovely to meet you,” I said.
“I’d like to know you more, Kate,” she replied. We waved goodbye through the window. The train hadn’t even left the station when a man opposite leaned forward to speak to me.
“Looks like you made a new friend there,” he said. Little did I know that I was about to make another: Alastair, for that was his name, lived in a village an hour and a half away from London, which turned out to be a very good thing, though perhaps not for the village. He was what magazines call a “silver fox”; one of those guys who get better-looking as they age. Within two stops he was sitting next to me, and after another two he had told me he was married and that his wife didn’t understand him. Specifically what she didn’t understand, or like, were his affairs, the first of which was with his secretary thirty years ago. This, he confided, was a beautiful affair, lasted six years, and would have lasted longer if the boss of the company hadn’t found out and sacked him. His wife hadn’t discovered the secretary but she knew about the ones after, including his current lover, a German girl twenty-four years h
is junior whom he met at a conference and was considering leaving his wife for, though the wife didn’t know that.
Alastair asked if I would consider having lunch with him.
“So you want to make your life a bit more complicated by asking me out for lunch?” I said.
“Alastair’s got a big appetite,” said Alastair. “He loves women, absolutely adores them. But you’re right, he’s in a bit of a quandary about Heike and Marjorie…”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
“What?” said Alastair, gold implant winking in one corner of a well-practiced and self-consciously gorgeous smile. It was bad enough that he was married, worse that he seemed to think he could recruit me as another lover, and even worse that he spoke about himself in the third person.
“This is my stop,” I said, and fled.
I hailed a cab to the office. Never had the bland and sterile open-plan floor seemed safer. “Creep, creep, creep, creep, creep!” I muttered as I walked to my desk.
50
Peter set up a record player and two old speakers outside his shop and played an LP of Greek folk songs. He swayed and sashayed to the music, whiskey tumbler in hand. That day he was displaying an array of secondhand towels, basins, a couple of orthopedic shoes, and some crutches.
“Only used once, darling. NHS, they are. An old nurse gave them to me, the hospital doesn’t need them anymore.”
Beside them were some huge, rusty iron keys. I picked one up, just to feel the weight in my hand, and it was heavy.
“You want the keys to my castle, darling?” cackled Peter, rolling a cigarette.
“He’s only messing, sweetheart—take no notice,” said Ronnie.
“Take it! I give it to you!” said Peter, drunker than usual.
“WHISKEY,” cried Toto, from his cage.