by Claire Sandy
There could be no avoiding the plain truth that the ground was shifting in the teeny-tiny empire Marie had built. (And that’s how it felt; as if she’d laid every brick herself.) The clinic was tottering, the familiar landscape shuddering, as if a marauding giant was stomping nearer and nearer. One clumsy step and Smile! would collapse into rubble.
Having an empire, no matter how tiny and insignificant, was exhausting, and there were days when Marie would like to lie down and give it all up. These were the days when she almost – almost, mind – envied the lady of leisure across the Close.
Lucy didn’t have employees relying on her for their livelihoods, nor did she have a dozen red bills stapled together in her handbag. Another thing she doesn’t have, Marie reminded herself as she watched Robert’s intent profile, is him – this man right here. She couldn’t let Robert down, lose her business and plunge the family into financial dire straits, just when he needed her to be strong.
How was it all so delicately balanced? She and Robert had always worked hard, had never been wildly extravagant, saved when they could, spent when it felt right. It felt unjust that they should spend their forties worrying that the family bandwagon might career off the road.
But life is unjust, thought Marie. People you need die, others lose their marbles, and the babies you fussed over go off into the big bad world without their vests on.
Propelled out of bed by such maudlin navel-gazing, Marie escaped the reach of the laptop’s dazzle and crossed to the window. The Close was in a chocolate coma, all the gardens colourless and still.
A trundling noise at the side of the Grays’ focused Marie’s lazy sweep of the street. Tod emerged, with a wheelie bin of bottles that jostled and clanked. ‘Tod’s doing the recycling,’ said Marie.
‘Unh,’ said Robert, lost to her down a rabbit hole of statistics.
‘He gave Lucy an egg-shaped emerald pendant for Easter.’
That got Robert’s attention. ‘Is he crazy? Easter’s chocolate time – everybody knows that.’ The laptop closed with a faint snap. ‘Is he wearing his poncey dressing-gown-’n’-leather-slippers combo?’
‘Dunno. I’ll tell you when he comes back.’ Marie could hear bottles dropping and crashing into the recycling station at the end of the street, out of view. Tod’s feet of clay had been exposed, but she had to give him his due: not many men bought their wives emeralds and dressed like a 1940s movie star to take the rubbish out. ‘Come on, Toddy boy,’ she encouraged him as the Close regained its stillness without any sign of him coming back along the curve.
A base thought struck: did he buy Lucy jewellery because emeralds aren’t fattening? Marie recalled Lucy’s pleasure with her sparkling new ornament and hoped the same thought hadn’t struck her. ‘Where is he?’ Marie scanned the street. ‘Strange . . .’ she began, but was distracted by Robert’s hands around her waist and his lips on her neck.
‘Hello, you,’ she said.
‘Fancy a quick merger?’ said Robert.
The Easter leg of lamb, meltingly soft, delicate yet hearty, was fallen upon and devoured. ‘I hope you left room,’ said Marie, standing to clear their plates, ‘for my pièce de résistance.’
‘Yum-yum,’ said Lucy.
‘Eh?’ said Iris.
‘That’s French,’ said her father. ‘For Your mum took ages making this, so pretend you want some, even though you think your jeans are about to burst.’
‘I don’t really do dessert.’ Chloe nibbled a fingernail. She’d barely done lunch; the twins had noted this and pitied her.
‘Maybe if you did do dessert,’ suggested Iris, ‘you might grow boobs.’
‘Iris!’ Robert chastised her. ‘Sorry, Chloe.’
‘S’all right.’ Chloe sank a little lower in her chair, glancing at Angus, who was looking at the salt cellar as if it were the most fascinating salt cellar he’d ever come across in a long history of dealing with salt cellars: there was no way he could engage with a girl regarding a boobs-based comment in front of his parents.
‘Where’s Tod today?’ asked Robert.
‘Dad’s working.’ Chloe moved on to another fingernail with a hunger she didn’t bring to her food. ‘He works really hard.’
‘He does!’ agreed Lucy fondly, fingering the green egg at her throat.
‘My dad works hard too,’ said Rose.
‘He makes spoons,’ said Iris.
‘Well . . . kind of.’ Robert rather enjoyed his daughter’s slippery grasp of the adult world.
‘Ta-daa!’ Marie had never ta-daa-ed before, but felt that the clever, witty lemon meringue eggs deserved one.
‘They’re eggs,’ said Angus suspiciously. ‘For afters? You sure about this, Mum?’
Eggcups of differing sizes – some striped, some plain – sat on a bleached wooden tray, pilfered, of course, from Lucy’s stylish-homeware stockpile. Each eggcup held a white duck egg, its crown removed and replaced with a fluffy beret of meringue.
‘Take a spoon and dip in,’ said Marie.
They all chose an egg, and their cagey caution was replaced with glee as their spoons dived through a layer of warm, sweet meringue to reach buttery-smooth lemon curd beneath.
‘It’s like a real egg. But not really!’ shouted Iris. ‘In a real eggshell!’
‘Like I said,’ said Marie. ‘Ta-daa!’
Chloe ate two.
Last at the table, presiding over a wasteland of screwed-up napkins and stains on the good tablecloth, the women validated their decision to open yet another bottle of wine with Lucy’s It’s a bank-holiday weekend, after all and Marie’s I tidy up better when I’m sloshed.
Ruddy-cheeked and slapping the table to punctuate her rambling stories, Lucy was more tipsy than Marie. With the attention span of the inebriated, she skidded from topic to topic, her mood following suit. One moment they were giggling uncontrollably at Marie’s impression of the Gnomes having sex, and the next Marie was cackling alone as Lucy announced, stony-faced, ‘I don’t believe Tod’s at work, you know.’ She slapped the table, and an eggcup with legs fell over. ‘There. Call me an ungrateful bitch. But I’ve said it. I don’t believe my husband.’
Catching up, Marie stopped laughing. ‘I’d never call you any sort of bitch, Lu.’
‘I feel like one. Tod’s so good to me. He’s so generous and caring, and just lovely. Why can’t I get a grip on the stupid jealousy?’
The time to tell her about the fence-vaulting and the longest-recorded trip to the bottle bank was now. Marie hesitated, as if on the edge of a mine-laden field, and Lucy rushed to fill the pause.
‘I have to remind myself that our marriage isn’t like his first. He wouldn’t do that to me – we’re different.’
‘Hang on. She left him, I thought.’
‘No, no. Tod had . . .’ Lucy slowed down, but a sip of Dutch courage helped her push it out. ‘He had an affair.’ Perhaps in response to Marie’s look of shock, she rushed on, almost gabbling. ‘She pushed him into it – neglecting him, letting herself go.’
Beneath the table Marie sensed Lucy pull in her stomach. ‘Listen.’ Time to step onto the minefield.
Robert materialised behind Lucy, drawing his finger across his throat, mouthing No! No! at his wife.
Ignoring him, Marie said, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up now, but . . .’
‘Go on.’ Lucy was straight-backed, braced.
Robert put his hands to his head and left the room.
‘It just struck me as strange.’ Marie looked down into her wine. She might be about to upset Lucy for no good reason. And yet. And yet. ‘Last night – and this could be nothing, really it could, but – Tod went off up the road with your recycling bin and . . .’ Suddenly she lost faith in her tale. I’m drunker than I realised, she thought. ‘He didn’t come back.’ She groaned at how silly it sounded. ‘Oh, ignore me, please. Christ, what is the poor man supposed to have done? Jumped in a taxi in his dressing gown and gone to a hotel for some quick how’s-your-father while you w
armed the cocoa? Forget I spoke.’
Scowling with concentration, Lucy disobeyed this request. The cogs of the mind turn more slowly when lubricated with rioja, but at last she said, ‘The right-of-way!’
‘Oh, of course.’ There’d been a perfectly innocent explanation all along. ‘Tod got back to yours by going through the back gardens.’
‘No.’ Lucy leapt up. ‘He got back to Erika’s by going through the back gardens.’
‘No. Yours,’ insisted Marie, scrabbling to hang on to her cosier interpretation, unwilling to accept that Lucy’s explanation also neatly answered the question of Tod’s excursions into Erika’s front garden. Wincing at her unwitting double entendre, she had to accept that Lucy could be right.
‘He’s there now! The bastard isn’t working this late on a bank holiday!’ Lucy was zealous, bristling with the urge to right wrongs, a Boden Boadicea.
Feeling it was her duty to neutralise the tension a little, Marie said, ‘You don’t know that,’ even though she trusted her own wifely intuition utterly. She could usually tell from the way Robert said ‘Good morning’ whether he’d used the last of the milk or had yet another rude dream about Fern Britton. Some terrible mornings he’d done both.
‘I do know it.’ Lucy drained her glass, then slammed it down. ‘And so do you.’
Robert stood across the hall doorway, über-calm and very butch. ‘Now, Lucy, hang on. Think about—’
‘GET OUT OF MY WAY!’ she bayed, and Robert did exactly that.
Feeling responsible, Marie tailed her out into the twilight. Lights were on in half the houses, as their neighbours’ Easter dribbled on in a haze of television, chocolate and naps. Lucky them, she thought, suddenly caught up in a drama that couldn’t end well. ‘Lu, listen . . .’ she began, suddenly sober.
‘I’m done with listening.’ Lucy didn’t look drunk, either. She was wired, as if all the seething, simmering energy she’d bottled up, in order to play the perfect helpmate to her perfect partner, had suddenly popped its cork and was powering her across the Close.
At the top of the cul-de-sac they rounded the corner and confronted the high wooden door that led to the public right-of-way, a route that sliced eccentrically through the Close’s back gardens. Anybody could push this door open and walk through the gardens, but in reality the neighbours were far too polite and British to take advantage of this quirk in the design of their circular street. If they forged ahead, Marie and Lucy would have to cross the gardens of two families they knew only by sight, before reaching Erika’s garden, via Hattie’s.
Palms splayed on the rickety wood, Lucy said, ‘Right. OK. If he’s not there, then I owe him an apology. But if he is – well, there’ll be some changes.’ She looked at Marie and whispered, as if it was a terrible secret, ‘I love my husband, Marie.’
The first garden was modern, a Zen landscape of pebbles and bonsai and wind chimes. Creeping through it in Lucy’s wake, Marie felt like an intruder and hoped they weren’t freaking out the householders.
Garden two’s door stuck, before giving and introducing them to a Provençal dream of grey-green lavender and strict, knee-high hedging. Laughter, the jangle of cutlery and the theme from Mad Men floated out of the house as the trespassers made their furtive way through.
Cottagey and quaint, Hattie’s garden was familiar to them both. Marie breathed more easily. The conservatory was lit; Hattie was home.
Lucy slowed. ‘Maybe we should say hi – explain ourselves. It seems rude to tramp through Hattie’s flowerbeds without saying something.’
‘Good idea.’ Gregarious, lonely Hattie would probably invite them in for a coffee, and the situation would be defused organically. Lucy could regroup and plan a more civilised way to confront Tod. Marie intuited that, now they were in the last garden before Erika’s, Lucy secretly hoped this, too.
Following the brick path, they approached the glass extension bolted to the back of Hattie’s house. Dotted with rattan furniture, the room doubled as solarium and treatment space.
‘I’ve been kneaded and pummelled many a time in there,’ whispered Lucy over her shoulder, and Marie was relieved to hear something like her friend’s usual tone reassert itself.
The conservatory stood still and empty before them, like a stage before curtain up. Lucy raised a hand to knock on a pane, then the door from the kitchen slammed open and Hattie dashed out to the glass room in a pinkish all-in-one.
‘Nooo!’ hissed Lucy, ducking down.
Catching up and bobbing down, Marie saw what Lucy already knew: Hattie was naked.
Squawking, thighs a-wobble, belly flopping, Hattie easily outran Tod – also in his birthday suit – as he emerged to chase her on, around and over the rattan three-piece suite. Huffing, puffing, trying for a good shot at her dimply buttocks with a rolled-up yoga mat, he skidded to a halt at the sound of laughter.
Lucy was hooting. She straightened up, to point and guffaw, and then bent double again, still helpless with laughter.
With an animal sound, Hattie grabbed a fake-fur throw to cover her nakedness and shot back into the house, like a Bronze Age woman fleeing a woolly mammoth.
As for Tod, his handsome features sank into blankness, as if he couldn’t compute what was happening. When Lucy’s laughter subsided with a satisfied sigh, his face rearranged itself into an angry mask. ‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted out to her. ‘Are you spying on me?’
Lucy wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, shaking her head, the odd giggle still escaping. ‘Yes, darling,’ she said. ‘I am.’
Not the response he’d expected, perhaps, as Tod seemed lost for a reply. Self-doubt was not a good colour on him. He held the yoga mat carefully in front of him. ‘This isn’t . . .’ he began.
‘No, please, don’t!’ Lucy held up her hand, shoulders shaking again, trying to rein in her smile. ‘Don’t say This isn’t what it looks like, or you’ll start me off again.’
At her side Marie watched her friend closely, distrusting this mirth. Tense and ready, she awaited some kind of collapse, but it didn’t come.
‘Tod – to use a Chloe kind of phrase – you’re busted, darling.’ Lucy turned to Marie. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave them to it. I don’t know what my husband’s wearing, but it needs ironing.’
Robert’s advice – ‘Don’t give advice’ – was Marie’s motto through the rest of Sunday. So long suppressed, Lucy’s emotions held a fiesta, and Marie was on hand for mood swings, from self-righteous elation to naked fear and back again, via tears and silence. But Lucy was fastidious about holding back. This interlude would shape the Gray family’s future; such soul-searching was too important and too personal for Marie to barge in with her tuppence-worth.
The exquisite Gray house was the wrong setting for high drama. It sat, cool and patient, impossible to disorder, as if waiting for the rightful monarch to return and reclaim his rule over the tranquil acres of seagrass. Tod had left half an hour after the nudie show, holdall in hand and leaving a vapour trail of fury in his wake. Next door but one was dark and quiet; no Easter Monday power-walk for Hattie.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lucy for the umpteenth time. ‘About all this.’
‘Shuddup already.’ Marie refilled the cafetiere, and the rolling conversation moved with them to the mile-long sofa, then the marble-topped dining table, then the stools in the kitchen.
‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ admitted Lucy. Outside, clouds, as if they knew her mood, dimmed the kitchen. ‘If I’m honest, my marriage has always felt . . . flimsy. Not airtight, like you and Robert.’
‘No marriage,’ said Marie, ‘is airtight,’ hoping/believing that hers was. This close to the disintegration of a partnership she could see all the damage, the twisted body parts, the blood. ‘What if he said he’s willing to change?’
‘He’d be lying.’ Lucy was implacable. She saw no chink of light. It was over, she said: ‘And my only job now is to work out what to do next.’ She looked smaller than ever i
n the context of her all-mod-cons kitchen.
At noon Robert dropped in to deposit a marzipan and apricot twist, plus a report of strange goings-on back at the ranch. ‘The girls and Angus have been together all morning.’
‘Have they tied him up or something?’ Marie cut a large wodge of twist for herself and, as custom dictated, a more genteel portion for Lucy, who was living from coffee to coffee with few solids in between.
‘No. They seem to be collaborating on something on the computer. They’re really quiet. Then every so often there’s a shout of laughter.’
‘Well, obviously, Robert, those are not our children. Look into it.’
The twist had disappeared in moments. Witnessing Lucy’s sudden, unabashed appetite, Marie thought Perhaps Tod’s long reign is well and truly over.
The Gnomes pootled off in their camper van. Graham and Johann touched up their paintwork. The family at the end, whom nobody knew, had a loud row about an omelette. And Erika turned up, bearing a bottle of brandy and a long, contrite speech.
‘I knew,’ she said, leaving a scarlet lip-print on her glass and leaning back in an armchair. ‘I bloody knew, and I should have said something.’
Lucy absolved her. ‘Such as what?’ she laughed. ‘It can backfire horribly when you interfere. I don’t blame you for keeping schtum. Not one jot. I’m just sorry you were put in that position by my arrogant arsehole of a husband.’ Lucy noted Marie’s and Erika’s slight start; Erika’s bangles clinked. ‘Yes. Even I use bad language when I’m upset.’
‘About time you called Tod a few names,’ said Marie. ‘He deserves them.’