Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  “I haven’t got either,” said Mel, laughing.

  “I know but . . .”

  “Maggie. It’ll be fine. You’re just stuck in a rut. My sister Siobhan felt just the same when her children were this little. You just need something to get you out of it. What about this party tonight? Why don’t you dress up? Make yourself feel like a proper woman again.”

  “I do feel like a proper woman.”

  “Exactly,” she said darkly. “Too proper.”

  I got up to set the table. I wanted to ask her more, seek more reassurance, but I felt I’d probably had my quota so instead I handed her the cutlery. “I wonder what you’d think of Claire,” I said.

  “Would I like her?” she asked, as she mimed cutting a piece of meat before placing the knives and forks around the table.

  I reached up to get the plates from the cupboard. “I don’t know.” I put them down and then leaned for a moment against a chair. “She’s quite high maintenance and she doesn’t let you get a word in edgeways. But she’s . . . remarkable really. She has this glamorous life and she’s funny and successful and she’s got nice clothes.”

  “Oh well, if she’s got nice clothes.”

  “She’s definitely got nice clothes.”

  “Are you a teensy bit jealous?”

  The microwave beeped. “LUNCH!” I yelled up the stairs. “Of course not,” I said. “With a life as glamorous as mine? Of course not.”

  After we’d eaten, Mel and I and the children went over to the common to laugh at the weekend dads. It was one of our regular pleasures. There was a whole different scene in the park at weekends. There were two types of weekend dad. Type one: the lawyers and city men, shiny black shoes poking under their razor-sharp jeans, crisp work collars folded like envelope flaps over “fun” weekend jackets, white-lipped and dazed by the limitless potential for wildness and disagreeableness of children they had only seen flush-cheeked against their pillows all week. There was one there then, desperately trying to get his daughter off the monkey bars. Mel ducked because she thought she recognized him from the clinic (“Athlete’s foot,” she mouthed, “or was it warts? Can’t remember now”). He wouldn’t have spotted her anyway. He was half in, half out the bars himself. “Cressida, out of the jungle web now, time to go. I mean it, Cressy. I’m counting to three, Cressida. One. Two. Three. Where are you going now, Cressida?”

  And then there was type two. Maybe they worked in the music business or film; either way, they were at home in their weekend Timberlands (laces undone), their plaid shirts and Ralph Laurens. They were so busy showing you how they could squeeze a week’s worth of “quality time” into forty-eight hours, chasing their children around the playground—crazy people, crazy guys—they almost forgot to keep an eye on their microscooters or their expensively kiddy-seated mountain bikes. There were a couple at it today, playing crocodile tag for, oh, at least five minutes before two of their children clonked their heads and another crashed into a brown Labrador and everybody left in tears. “It’s enough to put you off family life for good,” said Mel, as we sat together on the metal fence around the swings, legs dangling, knees warmed by the bars, rough girls against the world.

  I didn’t answer. I was too busy watching two people farther away under the trees. They were lying on their stomachs on a blanket, with the papers spread out around them and a bottle of wine beside them on the grass. Their ankles were entwined.

  “All right?” said Mel.

  “Yup, fine,” I said, “Let’s go.”

  When we got home we had tea and cake. Homemade cake. Banana and walnut to be accurate. I could hardly be trusted with a stew, but I was fine with a sponge. You have to be if you don’t work, otherwise people don’t understand what you do all day. When working mothers talk about their guilt, it’s always bringing store-bought treats to school events they mention first. The humiliation of that or the misery of being up at midnight creaming eggs. As if it really mattered. It must be a conspiracy between the PTA and husbands whose mothers were always baking. You could write a thesis on the subject. Cake: Its Role in Family Politics.

  “Hm,” said Mel. “Very moist.”

  “I want a chocolate cake,” said Fergus. “One of those shiny purple ones.” You see, children prefer Cadbury’s minirolls anyway.

  I had just cut a slice for myself when Jake came in, yawning, leaned over me and picked it up clumsily for himself. Half of it fell on the floor before he got it to his mouth.

  “Jake,” I admonished. “That was mine. Anyway, what happened to the packet of chocolate chip cookies? They’ve all gone.”

  “Funny you should say that,” said Jake, putting his hand to his forehead and waving his head around woozily. “I was just making myself a cup of coffee earlier and suddenly—brwwwwww—I woke up and I was on the floor and there were crumbs all over my face.”

  Mel laughed. She hadn’t heard it as many times as I had. She picked the slice off the floor, put it on a plate, and handed it to him. “Bit of dust won’t hurt anyone,” she said.

  Chapter 5

  Jake became quiet after Mel and Milly left. It was as if they had taken all his energy with them, as if they’d switched the light off when they went. He had to answer some phone calls and then he got cross with Fergus for trying to disturb him, and Fergus, who was tired, continued banging on the door of the room Jake was in until he came out and said, “Maggie?” in a pointed voice. By the children’s supper time, something with edges was flying around in the air, catching in our hair and jangling our nerves. “Do we have to go?” said Jake behind me, as I pushed eggs around in the frying pan. “We won’t know anyone. And anyway, what about our curry?” Saturday was, traditionally, take-out night in our house.

  “Okay.” I turned abruptly, fish slice dripping fat onto the floor tiles. “Let’s stay in like we always do and wallow in biryani instead.”

  Jake held out his hands and turned. “Fine, fine, fine. We’re going. Forget I said anything.”

  Which is how it was left until there we were at 9:15 p.m., scrubbed and stilettoed (well, I was stilettoed, having found the second one at the back of my closet), on the steps of Claire’s house. “Let’s not go,” I said suddenly. “Let’s go and have a meal instead.”

  “WHAT?” mouthed Jake in a silent-shout.

  “I’m nervous,” I said. “We won’t know anyone.”

  “Oh behave,” he said. “We’re here now and we’re going in.”

  The buzzer rang, Jake pushed the door open, and we went through to another open door. And there was Claire. She was dressed in a curve-clinging aquamarine frock, with a thick band of darker green velvet around the hem and tiny sequinned straps over her shoulders. “Beautiful dress, Claire,” I gasped. She wrinkled up her nose. “I bought it in America,” she said. On her feet were deep-water blue silk Aladdin slippers, and her blonde hair was piled up high, tendrils tumbling around her ears. She was either wearing a very clever bra or her breasts had magical floating properties. Most of them were bobbing above her dress. They looked new to me. I wondered if she’d bought them in America too.

  “Gosh hello,” mumbled Jake. “Long time no see.”

  “Jake!” she said. “How lovely that you’ve come. Maggie too. And how nice that some of my married friends have made it. All the others have cancelled.”

  “Children?” I said.

  “No, wives,” she said, winking at me over her shoulder as she threaded her arm through Jake’s. “Now, come in you handsome man and meet some people.”

  She took us, or him, me tripping along behind, feeling clumsy in my heels, into a wide drawing room where a waiter handed me a glass of champagne. You could see the sun floating low over the common through the floor-to-ceiling windows (definitely b for beautiful view), throwing pinkish gold light across the bare floor and up faded green walls. There was no furniture. It appeared to have been moved out of the way to make room for the candles. There were candles everywhere: thick ivory church candles flickering in gi
lt-framed mirrors; small round candles bobbing like lost ships in silver bowls of water. It certainly didn’t seem to have been moved out of the way to make room for the people. There weren’t any.

  “Everyone’s in the garden,” said Claire, and led us through some French doors to the top of a wrought-iron spiral staircase below which, in a dusky grotto of urns and figurines and sculpted box trees, a small throng milled and swayed, cigarette ends glowing. “I hope you’re not going to find it all horribly media,” she said, waving to a chap with a bald head behind a bay. “Political editor of the Independent,” she said, “married to Sue Batsby on the Mail. Darling.” She broke off to kiss a young man with sideburns the shape and size of New Zealand. “How’s life on Culture? Oh I know, they’re all absolute Philistines. Except for Gav who’s a poppet, and of course he’s gone to Harper’s . . .” She was still gripping Jake tightly by the arm. He was smiling inanely. She said, “Remind me what you do again, Jake.”

  “I’m in advertising,” he said patiently.

  “Ah, well you must meet Omar,” she said. “Or have you already met? He writes ‘Back in five’ in the Guardian.”

  She pulled Jake away behind a mossy angel but, before I’d quite finished sinking to the ground in horror, was back. “Now, Maggers,” she said. “Who shall I get for you? Now . . . there’s Pool-ey who edits my copy at the Times but looks a bit tied up at the moment talking to Caggers from the Speccy . . . Ah—” She put out her hand and grabbed a woman with plastic pansies in her hair. “Katya, Katters, quick, meet my oldest, oldest friend in the world. Katya does ‘Talk of the Town’ for The New Yorker, and writes a column in the Sunday Telegraph on American politics. She’s also studying at Columbia for her doctorate in comparative literature. And Maggie . . .” She broke off and then resumed an octave higher, “isamum!”

  Katya, who seemed about twenty-five, looked at me wonderingly, and then reproachfully at the departing back of Claire. “Hi,” she said kindly.

  “Hello,” I said. And then, “Sorry, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to,” which was the worst thing I could have said because of course it meant after that she did. She was very nice. She made a good show of it. She asked me lots of questions about my children’s ages (one probably would have sufficed) and was sweetly generous in the information she was happy to impart about life in the Big Apple (I must remember to try Cello at 53 East Seventy-seventh Street next time I’m there). But I knew she was desperate to escape. Not because she looked over my shoulder the whole time—only the socially gauche do that—but by the way her eyes bored into mine, unflinching in their determination to do so, her whole body rigid with the effort of staying upright. After a while, once she’d explained, nodding earnestly, why she didn’t think she could ever give up work herself (“I value my own identity too much and I think, if I ever have children, they’d respect that”), I said, “Oh your glass is empty,” and she caved in with relief and disappeared.

  After she’d gone, I scanned the crowd for Jake and could just about make out his top half through a crush of bodies. He appeared to have taken off his jacket. He was bending down to hear someone over the hubbub and was laughing. I was just about to go over to him when someone next to me said, “Any chance of another drink?”

  “Sorry?”

  “A DRINK,” the man said, as if I was deaf or mad. “Are you serving or not?”

  “Not,” I said.

  “Oo, I’m sorry.” He turned and giggled to the woman next to him. “Oops,” he said to her.

  I sat down on the step. My toes had begun to hurt. I was wearing a short-sleeved white linen shirt that looked like the kind of jacket worn by milkmen and that I only ever wore because it had been expensive, a short black chiffon skirt that I’d thought made me look sexy but that I now realized was an inch too short, and black tights because I hadn’t had a chance in the end to shave. None of the other women here had sullied their brown legs with anything as tacky as nylon. Or as dull as black. Nobody else had dressed like a waitress. Not even the waitresses.

  “Maggie. What are you doing? Not on your own already!” Claire was back again.

  I said, “I’m dressed all wrong. All your friends look like they’ve stepped out of Vogue. I look like I’ve stepped out of Bon Appétit.”

  She said, “Maggie, you look great. You always do. You just have a problem with your self-image.” She broke off. “I know. Aha. I’ve just got the person for you to meet. Wait here.” She scurried off into the party to return a few minutes later, dragging an attractive red-headed woman in bright orange trousers and striking turquoise shoes with blunt toes like a dolphin’s nose. “Meet Yonka,” said Claire. “She’s a personal shopper. Oops, better go, the band’s here,” and she disappeared again.

  Yonka smiled. “Hi.”

  “Nice to meet someone else who’s not in the media,” I said. “How do you know Claire?”

  “She’s doing a piece on me for Harper’s Bazaar,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I like your shoes.”

  “Mew, mew,” she said.

  I said, “I’m not being sarcastic, I mean it. They’re nice.”

  “It’s the designer,” she said. “Mew mew. M.I.U. M.I.U.”

  “Oh right.”

  Silence. Someone had to fill it. “So what exactly does a personal shopper do?” I said.

  Yonka raised an elegantly plucked eyebrow. “I’m involved in realigning the individual look. I’ll create an image for someone, or I’ll work with the client to discover what they themselves would like their personal presentation to say about them.”

  “What, clothes-wise, you mean?”

  “Clothes-wise and, um . . . yup basically clothes-wise. A lot of it is about undoing the damage created by years of laziness or bad habits.”

  “Oh. I could do with a bit of that.” I looked down at my legs. “I bet black tights are pretty damaging.”

  She smiled politely.

  “No, I mean it. Are they pretty damaging?”

  She made an amused hm!, half-laugh, change-the-subject sort of noise.

  “No, are they?” I almost shouted.

  She stopped smiling. “Yes,” she said. “In June certainly. Have you considered a St. Tropez Tan?”

  “It would be lovely, but we’re not planning on a holiday this year.”

  “No, from a bottle. You need to have it applied at a beauty salon. And you have to be careful which one. Some of them smear.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’d definitely lose the stilettos,” she added.

  “I thought heels were in.”

  “Yes, but tubular.”

  I groaned. “I wish I’d never come.”

  Yonka leaned forward and pressed her card in my hand. Before she turned away, an expression flitted over her face, not unlike that of a priest about to administer Communion.

  “Call me,” she said.

  Alone again, I returned to my perch on the steps. I didn’t have a pocket so I screwed Yonka’s card into a twist and poked it into a hole in the wrought-iron banister. Jake was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Claire. I looked idly for Rowena, her actress sister, but I didn’t see her either. I felt beached. It had been so long I’d forgotten how parties could make you feel like that—sometimes they pick you up and roar and crash about your ears and carry you along with them, but most often they just leave you stranded.

  “Angel on horseback?” said a voice above me. It was a waitress, a waitress in hot-pink chiffon, bearing a tray.

  “No thanks.”

  “What about a devil then?”

  “Do you have something in between?” I said, but she didn’t smile.

  I stood up. I wanted to find Jake to check that he wasn’t having too awful a time. I should never have made him come. He recoiled like an anemone from this sort of thing. It was wrong of me to have insisted. We should leave, find some quiet restaurant, our local Indian maybe, in which to sit and be ourselves, to sort things out between us. I manipulated
my way through the crowd, thicker now, louder now since the band—a salsa band—had struck up in the sitting room, until I reached the place where I thought I’d spotted him before. He wasn’t there. I grabbed a glass of Perrier from a passing tray and navigated a path through some more jostling bodies (“Soho House,” they were all saying. “Oh yes, The Ivy, Babington”) until I got to the bottom of the garden. He wasn’t there either. I sat on a wall, took off my shoes, and fiddled with the feet of my tights, unpicking the net at the toes. After a while, I thought I might as well go to the bathroom, the last resort of the socially desperate.

  I had made my way halfway back when I realized there were a few people in the drawing room now. It was dark and the room stood out like a magic lantern. Two or three couples were dancing to the music, holding hands and coming together and apart again, rubbing hips and rocking shoulders. Up close they probably looked self-conscious, but from a distance, up there in the candlelight in that big empty room, they looked enchanted, like inhabitants of some suburban Grand Meaulnes. I was almost at the steps before I realized that one of the men, the one holding his partner’s hand above his head and spinning her round in an enclosed circle of his own making, his mouth open, laughing, was Jake. And then I realized that the girl was Claire.

  My first thought was surprised pleasure. Jake danced so rarely in those days, so rarely let himself go. And he looked young and free and handsome, twirling Claire and her green dress around. He was bending over to reach her, his shoulders rounded, his hair pushed back from his face, at ease with himself, not cuddly, but, yes, commanding. For a moment I reflected on how cool, how together he looked. He had always been a good dancer. And then I felt dizzy with something less charitable, with the sense that I was lost and alone, and socially inept, and he was up there, part of it all, part of the party. And even though I recognized it as self-pity it didn’t make it any easier when I thought: when was the last time he danced with me?