I know, of course, that if I had bundled on to their train, the train for busy, serious commuters, with my slow, wobbling toddler and my knee-bumping hideous stroller and my wailing baby dripping a bottle from his pudgy fingers into the ridged floor, I would have seen pity or contempt in their faces. But I didn’t care. Or I tried not to. Because I thought what I was doing was what really counted. I thought I was doing the really big stuff. Even putting aside the genuine satisfactions of it, the physicality of children, the toughness of their hair, the softness of their skin, the bones in their back, the dough of flesh on their knees, there were things to take value from—just keeping them alive, keeping them off the road, out of reach of the kettle, getting nourishment into them, keeping illness out. So you could keep your spread sheets and your projected figures for 2005. I made life-and-death decisions every day.
Not that Jake’s sister Fran believed it. She called us “Them Indoors” because we were so boring, still to be living round the corner from where we grew up, squatting like over-fed Toms on the same patch of territory. But I found familiarity comforting. I liked the sense that I was continuing a life that had been lived before. I loved our garden for this reason too. The woman before us, who’d lived there for years until she was moved into a retirement home by her relatives, left us a forty-foot Eden, of hip-height lavender and mature viburnum, twisted honeysuckle and crooked apple. I used to spend every weekend out there, tending and cultivating (though with Fergus’s arrival this had dwindled down to the odd snatched moment, and then, after Dan, to almost no time at all).
And I liked hanging out, woozy with boredom, with my take-out polystyrene coffee in the same playgrounds (safer now of course with their flexi-firm floor coverings) that I used to hang out in, woozy with boredom, as a child. I liked knowing that The Drunken Stoat, the winebar on the corner, was once a hardware store, that Blockbuster’s used to be a shop called Cuff’s selling school labels, that the man I lived with, Mr. Advertising Exec with a bag of clubs in his trunk, used to bleach his hair and play drums for a band called The Snot Goblins. I was a creature of habit, I suppose. And I could have sworn, until the day I met Claire again, that Jake was the same.
“Did she really say I was handsome?” said Jake that evening.
“Were handsome,” I said, chucking a cushion at him. “She said you were handsome when you were sixteen. She hasn’t seen you now you’re old and gray and love-handled.” I grabbed him around the waist. “Get off, woman!” he yelled. “I’ll report you!”
“Come here,” I said. I pulled me to him and stroked the stubble on his face with my thumb. “Come here,” I said again, more softly. But Jake turned away, almost imperceptibly, bringing his own hand up to his chin as if we were both simply checking if he needed a shave. He hunched his arm across my shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, reaching for the remote control, “we don’t want to miss The Sopranos.”
Chapter 2
The next day was Thursday, the day when Fergus went to playgroup—Little Badgers (or Little Buggers, as Jake called it)—so I took the baby around to see my mother.
“Darling, how nice. Have a sherry,” she said.
“Mum, it’s eleven in the morning.”
“Is it? Just a little one then. Oh Daniel . . . why’s he crying? Does he want a little something?” For a moment I thought she was going to pour him a sherry. “How about a cookie? Oh Daniel, don’t you want to come to your grandmother? What’s this on his head?”
“Cradlecap,” I said. “And his name is Dan. Just Dan.”
“I just can’t understand it. I suppose I’ll get used to it. But all these short names. I’m sure he won’t like it when he grows up. Moira at Nadfest thinks it’s most odd. Are you sure there isn’t something you should be putting on it?”
She was very well meaning, my mother, and devoted to her grandchildren. She’d do anything for them, except on a Wednesday when she had tennis, or a Friday when there was art class, or Monday or Tuesday or Saturday or Sunday, when there were music groups and upholstery sessions and Nadfest, whatever that was, and trips to the National Theater, and she and her new husband had just a few friends around—the Thomases or the Bloxons, the Flotsams or the Jetsams—for a bite to eat. My mother, who was taller than me and hadn’t lost the figure I never had, was what she would call “with it.” On the day in question, she was wearing a canary yellow jogging suit which might have meant she was fresh from some sporting activity but was, more likely, a fashion statement.
I put Dan down on the floor, and he crawled gratefully out of the room.
“I met Claire Masterson yesterday,” I told her. “You know, from school.”
“Which one was she?” she said absentmindedly, riffling through her bag and pulling out a packet of photos. “Have I shown you our trip to Bruges? The one whose father was big at IBM?”
“Yes, you have,” I said, looking at them again anyway. “This one’s nice of you. I’m not sure if I like the hot pants though. No, Claire Masterson. You remember. Parents were actors. Henna’ed my hair that time. Ran away on the French exchange.”
“Oh, Claire Masterson,” said my mother, “Clive Masterson’s daughter.” She paused to remember something, while a small smile played about her lips, then she added sharply, “Claire with the painted finger nails. The girl you all wanted to be.”
There was a silence while I registered this uncharacteristic moment of insight. I picked up a carriage clock on the side table next to me and fiddled with its brass handle. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Still looking out for herself is she?” she said.
“Not you too,” I said, turning it upside down to see what happened.
“What do you mean, ‘not you too’?”
“Oh nothing,” I said. I put it back down with a clatter. There was a silence. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, dear. I know you all thought she was terrific fun, but I just remember that party she took you to and she got offered a lift home and you rang from Virginia Water on your own in tears.”
“That was a long time ago, Mum. Anyway, I just . . . you know . . . seeing her, it’s just made me feel a bit funny somehow. I love my life, of course I do, and I was feeling perfectly happy, I think, until I bumped into her and now I just keep thinking of all the things she’s done and all the things I haven’t.”
“She was certainly always very independent,” said my mother.
“Yes, that’s right—she’s been places, she’s done stuff. I mean, she never settled. In any meaning of the word. You know, she’s been living abroad. New York. She’s written a screenplay . . .”
My mother took a sip of her sherry. “But she’s back now, then?”
“Well . . .”
“Married?”
“Well . . .”
“Children?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well there you are, dear.” Problem solved. Anguish over. “I had the most terrible night,” she said, moving on to more important matters. “I didn’t sleep a wink. Frank”—that was her latest husband—“had to go and sleep in the other room. I had to take two of my pills in the end.” My mother was of a generation for whom ongoing supplies of prescription-only pills and lunchtime sherry were as normal as vitamin C supplements and bottled water to mine. She reached into her bag and brought out a matted sliver of tissue. For a moment I thought she was going to use it to clean my mouth—you never know with mothers—but she pulled it into a usable shape and blew her nose as if stifling some enormous grief. “I don’t know if you’ve been away,” she said when she’d finished, “or perhaps you don’t listen to your messages these days, but I did call on Tuesday to let you know about Ann and Rupert.”
There was a clatter and a clank from the kitchen as Dan began an onslaught on the cupboards. It sounded like saucepans. Then there was a wail—he’d probably reached the Le Creusets. I fetched him back into the sitting room. “What about Ann and Rupert?” I said, sitting back down again
with Dan on my knee, fondling his toes through his socks with my fingers.
“Well, didn’t you know? Their daughter’s got cancer.”
“Oh, how awful,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“Breast,” she hissed.
I held Dan tightly against my chest. Digging his feet into my thighs, he put his fingers in my mouth and tried to pry it open like an oyster. He was a sturdy little chap at that age, all pudge and muscle and thick dark hair, not a delicate rabbit like his brother. He started bouncing up and down, using my legs like a trampoline, chanting “ehda, ehda.” My mother was slipping her photos back into her bag.
“Well, they’re being most odd about it,” she said, reemerging. “We were so good to them when they found out. You know, she said to me, she said, ‘Sue, you really have said the right things.’ Because you do have to be careful, you know. People can be so terribly sensitive. Anyway, I rang last week and left a message asking them if they wanted to come to supper—just potluck in the kitchen—and they didn’t ring and they didn’t ring: more people who don’t seem to listen to their answering machines”—this pointed at me—“so on Monday I rang again and this time I got Rupert and you think they’d leap at the chance to get out, you can’t just sit in and mope, and he said, ‘Can we ring you back, we’ll see how the chemotherapy goes.’ Well, I mean don’t you think it’s odd? And it just puts me in an awkward position? Do I shop or not?”
“It depends how lucky your pot’s going to be, I suppose,” I said.
She looked momentarily floored. Then she said, “And yesterday, on top of everything, Margot rang. In floods. I thought, this is just what I need. Her Burmese had run out into the road and a horrible, horrible van driver ran over him and didn’t stop—I mean, people are awful—and poor Petrushka . . . Well, she rushed her round to the vet and that lovely Mr. Pelt did what he could. Cost her £240—well, I told her she should have had PetPlan but too late now, of course.”
She had begun to gulp with tragedy recollected in tranquillity. My mother’s response to misfortune never failed to astound me: she skirted over the horrors of life, but was thrown by small things. Take the time she was burglarized. The thieves threw her underwear all over the bedroom, smashed the glass in the family photographs she laid out like chess-pieces on the mantelpiece, and defecated in the bath. I found my mother with a bottle of spot remover on the stairs. “You’d think they could have wiped their feet,” she said. She also never talked about my father, the Gentleman Bolter, though she had plenty to say about the unscheduled departure of her last cleaner: “And did she bring the key back? No she didn’t. And it wasn’t for want of asking.”
I propped Dan into a nest of cushions on the sofa, where he sat fiddling with his fingers, bringing them up to his eyes and examining them as if he’d only just discovered them, and went through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. My mother still lived in the house I grew up in, and it never changed, just accrued. She only ever seemed to add things: utensils, ornaments, husbands. Frank, number four, was always tinkering about with his toolbox trying to make shelf space.
I filled the kettle, pulling a couple of thick Italian mugs (lugged back from their last holiday in Puglia) down from their place next to the decorated pasta bowls (free with 180 gasoline tokens from the local garage). The kettle, I noticed, was new, rounded white plastic: an ocean liner compared to the old aluminum tanker (still visible on a shelf above the fridge).
“New kettle?” I said when I went back into the sitting room with two cups of coffee.
“Ah, yes. I didn’t tell you, did I?” she said, fully recovered now. “I bought it in the store the other day when we went to buy the new dishwasher. Now, that was an adventure. In the end . . .” Her voice slowed down and hushed in preparation for some momentous news. She stretched out the fingers of both hands in a “wait for it” sort of way. “We went German. There was this lovely girl assistant. Black, but she couldn’t have been nicer. Lovely hair. And she just persuaded us it was worth the difference. And it really is a super machine. I couldn’t be more pleased with it. Very quiet.”
“That’s good,” I said, and I drank my coffee.
“Well, lovely to see you, darling,” she said into Dan’s face as I carried him to the door. “Give my love to ‘Jake.’ ” She always said his name in inverted commas, as if I’d made him up. “Is he still working so terribly hard? Is it so necessary? I only ask . . . How’s Angela?” This sudden casual reference to Jake’s mother may have seemed innocuous on the surface, but then so does sinking sand. A lot was going on here. When had we last seen Angela? How often exactly had we been in contact with her? How did that tally, exactly, in divvied up hours, minutes, with the amount of time we’d spent with her?
“Fine,” I said, giving nothing away.
“And do bring both the children round soon. I’d love to have them both for an afternoon. We could go for a lovely walk, couldn’t we, Daniel?” Dan didn’t respond.
“Well, actually,” I said. “You’re not free on Saturday are you? You couldn’t baby-sit if you are. We’ve been invited to a party and . . .”
She thought quickly. “Saturday? Saturday? This Saturday? What time? I know I’m free in the afternoon—we’ve got lunch at the club but nothing after that.”
“I meant the evening,” I said.
“Oh, what a bore,” she said. “It’s Morton Park Music Society at the church. They’re doing Flanders and Swann. I’d give it a miss but . . . I do love them, don’t you? In a wheelchair, poor man, but such a lovely sense of humor. ‘I’m a gnu’—do you remember?”
“No, I don’t,” I said, gnu-like. And left.
I was first in the line of parents at Little Badgers so Fergus was very cheerful when I picked him up. Second’s good, third’s fine, fourth was a disaster with tears all the way home. Today, though, he was chipper and really quite forthcoming. Apparently, a girl bumped her head on her chair and they put water on it. And the story was about a bear. It usually was. “And do you know?” he said, bounding into the back of the car, his arms full of sheets of paper still wet with paint. “I bumped my head too and I was very brave and I went to the moon in my helicopter.”
He was so busy telling me about his adventures in space he didn’t notice me take a detour from our usual route and drive slowly down the road where Claire lives. I stopped when we had just passed number thirty-eight. “What are you doing, Mummy?” he said then, jolted from his mental moonscape.
“Just checking something,” I said, craning over my shoulder. It had been bothering me, the house. Property envy can be a terrible thing. When anyone I knew bought a new house, I wanted to know three things: one, how much—exactly—did it cost?; two, how big was the garden?; and three, that, however big it was, was there a Tube line at the end? Claire’s writing said “38b,” b for basement or b for beautiful view? I couldn’t see any numbers, but there were steps up and steps down. Four floors of windows. Not a maisonette, surely? Please, I thought, don’t tell me two whole floors of beautiful view?
The door of the raised ground floor opened then and suddenly there she was on the doorstep. In some sort of robe. One o’clock in the afternoon—in middle of the week—and wrapped in something soft and textured. It was the color of pigeon—the more expensive an item, the more indistinct the color—and she was clasping it around herself in a caress though you could still see a slip of lace underneath. She was holding the door open while talking to someone back in the recesses of the hallway. As she turned to look into the street, a man came up behind her and pulled her around to face him. They kissed. Lingeringly. One of his hands slid down her back and clenched her behind through the fabric of her robe; the other was tangled in her hair. They wouldn’t have noticed me staring at them, but through some sort of modesty I turned and watched them in the mirror anyway.
“Baa baa black sheep, have you any tractors?” bellowed Fergus.
“Ssh,” I said. “Don’t wake Dan.” The man was coming down the steps. He turned
and said something. Claire laughed and shut the door. Quickly I grabbed a map from the glove compartment and studied it intently until he’d passed by the side of the car. Then I looked up again. He was wearing a suit and carried a pigskin briefcase. He was walking quickly, flicking shoulder-length hair away from his face. Just after he passed me, he paused for a moment, retrieved something from his pocket, brought it to his nose, and sniffed deeply. In the time it took him to walk to the end of the street, he did that twice more. He turned the corner.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little tractor. I want my lunch,” shouted Fergus.
“OK, OK,” I said, turning the key in the ignition and pulling out. There was a screech of brakes, the scrunch of metal, and a jolt. “Oh fuck,” I said, opening my door and getting out, braced, as you are in London, for aggression. The other car was a red transit van, with writing on the side, and was now at a funny angle to the road. There were hunks of colored plastic on the tarmac. I could see that the rear passenger side of my car was bashed in. The front of the red van was a bit of a mess.
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