Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  “We’ve forgotten Cecily Alberge’s birthday party,” I said. The invitation was on the mantelpiece. I could just about visualize “3-5 p.m.” under a pink cavalcade of dancing dolls. It was just past 3 p.m. now. It was the last thing I felt like doing, face all those smug women. Fergus was looking at me, his features pinched with anxiety and suspended excitement.

  “But if we race it,” I said.

  We raced it. I nipped into the shop. Bought a Barbie hair salon—nothing like emergency for engendering generosity—wheedled a gift wrap, and ran, bent-double with the effort, straight across the common, past the pond, past the tennis courts, past the bowling green, past the flats, over the main road, down some side streets, to the Alberges’ double-fronted Victorian residence.

  It was twenty past three when we got there.

  “Oh, you’re early,” simpered Lucinda at the door, looking down at me in my dismal T-shirt with its sweat rings under the arms. She was the definition of cool in shades of gray. Her silky trousers skimmed the heels of her camel slingbacks. Her luscious dark hair was tamed back behind her head, only the crinkles at the side to indicate its natural curliness—she was wearing her office chignon, I noticed, a children’s party obviously being as close to real work as “home life” gets. My hair was a mess. I wasn’t wearing makeup. I was wearing shorts. And flip-flops. My bra itched damply. I’d cried a bit earlier and I was sure there were dirt streaks down my face. “Never mind,” she smiled, “everyone else will be here in ten minutes.”

  Cecily came to the door, in a froufrou party dress with smocking on the front. Her white socks had frills on the top of them like teenage tennis players’. “Is that my present?” she said. “Where’s your Barbie?”

  Fergus, who had strings of grape juice trailing from his faded blue T-shirt, across his shorts, which were a bit too big about the waist and hung, builder-like, across his hips, to his dusty sneakers, held on to the present tightly and said sweetly, “I hate Barbies. So does Mummy. And no, it’s mine. Where’s the party?”

  “Sweetheart!” said Lucinda. “Come . . . in.”

  We trooped in. I realized to my horror that Dan’s diaper needed changing. Lucinda, whose nostrils, permanently flared, had clearly already noticed the smell and was looking pointedly at Fergus’s shoes.

  “I’d better just use the bathroom . . .” I said.

  I fled upstairs, where I tried to pinion Dan to the fluffy white bath mat while I struggled with his snaps. He was wailing and banging his head against the marble floor. I got the diaper off, but not before I’d got poop on his clothes and poop on the bath mat and poop on his feet and poop on my hands. I’d torn off and wet some toilet paper but it wasn’t enough. I tried to grab some more paper with one hand, while keeping him still with the other. He wriggled and twisted, nodules of white tissue clinging to his bottom. I wrested the new diaper on, snapped him up wrongly, and released him while I set about mopping up the floor. All the towels were white. I had to make do with tissue. I dabbed frantically while trying to keep Dan from pulling the Floris soap off the shelf by the bath.

  “Maggie? Are you all right?” Lucinda was outside the door. “Fergus wants you. Can you let him in?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said in a panic, turning the bath mat upside down.

  I opened the door and there was Fergus with wet shorts. “Why didn’t you tell someone you needed the loo?” I said, despairing.

  “I don’t know,” he said in a small voice.

  I gave him a cuddle. It was too late to do anything else, and the three of us trooped back downstairs.

  The bad news was now we had pee and poop to add to our sweat and grape juice. The good news was at least the party was in medium swing.

  “Hi!” said a friendly voice. It was Rachel with a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches in her hand. “I haven’t seen you all week. You look as if you’ve been in the wars!”

  “No wipes!” I hissed.

  “I’ve got a spare packet in the back of the stroller you can have, pink packet for faces, green for bums,” she said over her shoulder as she proffered her plate to a passing mother. “Salmon anyone? It’s finest Scottish: Loch Fyne.”

  “Too late,” I said.

  Fergus ran off to join a group of party-frocked girls, who were playing messily with Lucinda’s twins, Ned and Sid, in a plastic sandbox on the patio. Lucinda seemed to be busy altercating with Mr. Twistletoes, a sinister fellow with a beard, about rearranging the furniture in the sitting room. With Dan on one hip, I followed Rachel’s raised plate into the kitchen where bottles of champagne and platters of food—sausage rolls and slices of cake and more sandwiches, corporate entertaining on an intimate scale—were laid out on the side (for the adults, it seemed, the children’s tea was in individual Barbie boxes on tiny trestle tables outside), and Lucinda’s husband, Gregory, was laid out on the sofa. He was wearing a suit, but his eyes were closed.

  “Dead?” I asked Rachel.

  “Ssssh,” she said. “I think the pressure has got to him. Hello, Jill.” She kissed an arriving mother. “Pâté? It’s wild boar.”

  Gregory came to as if on cue. “Party. Gosh. Cost a fortune,” he said to no one in particular. I was closest so I felt I had to respond.

  “I know, awful,” I said. “It really adds up.”

  “Ten pounds a head,” he said, searching under the sofa for his champagne flute. “Twenty kids. £200. Plus £180 for the entertainer. Little darling, though, Cecily. Worth it. Wants a pink tent next year. Said we’ll have to see. Anyway, better mingle.”

  He swayed off into the garden. I took Dan into the play-room where Cecily was fighting over the Brio with two small boys. A couple of women were leaning against the video shelf, deep in conversation. They stopped when I entered, paused while they registered the state of my clothes, and continued. I sat on the floor and built Dan a tower of bricks.

  “I’m so thrilled he’s got into Bolton Prep,” the one with gold-strapped loafers was saying. “It’s so much nicer than Howarth Hall. Of course I was disappointed that he failed his interview at Howarth—we’ve been training him to write his name for weeks. Apparently it was just the fridge question that did it. He said, ‘for keeping food in,’ which is right on the button, but the answer they wanted was ‘for keeping food cold.’ Well, I mean honestly. He’s only three. And a May birthday. He’s competing with Octobers and Januarys. It’s hardly surprising.”

  “Hm, hm,” said the other woman, tucking a stray bit of hair back into a baseball cap with a Chanel logo on the front.

  “And we just really, really liked the atmosphere at Bolton,” continued Gold Buckles. “Lovely children. Lovely garden. And I do think it’s fairer that they screen the parents and not the children. The headmistress couldn’t have been nicer at our interview. And the other parents seem so jolly. My husband John said the meet-and-greet was just like a city cocktail party. And I do like the fact that they curtsy in the morning. Or do the boys bow? I haven’t worked that out. But it just gives them a grounding in good manners. Mind you we’ve still got to worry about what we do when he’s seven. Maybe boarding . . . for the sport . . . John hated it himself but thinks it would do Gulliver a world of good . . . And boys do need so much . . . entertaining. Anyway, we’ll see. What about you? Where’s Dylan going?”

  “He got in to Howarth Hall actually.”

  “When’s his birthday?” said Gold Buckles quickly.

  “March.”

  “Ah.”

  I said, to help out as much as anything, “Are all the private schools not much of a muchness?” To which I got a withering look from both mothers. I fiddled with a Playmobil hospital set while the conversation continued above my head. Chanel Baseball Cap had launched into builders.

  “They say they’ll be out of the house before Christmas,” she was saying. “But I don’t believe a word they say. I wish we’d got an architect now. But this builder seemed to know what he was talking about. He’s done the basements up and down the street.”
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  “Oh,” said Gold Buckles, tapping her foot in excited sympathy, “if only you could have had our architects. Everyone who has seen it says our kitchen is quite breathtaking.”

  Maybe after we separated, I’d move.

  Luckily, games were starting up in the garden, so I gathered Dan and, passing Lucinda still in conference with Twistletoes (“I’m sorry. I am not going to move the baby grand”), went to find Fergus.

  Blind Man’s Bluff had just trailed off when I got there, and a game of Musical Chairs had just begun. Gwendolin, Lucinda’s eldest, was operating the tape recorder with an officiousness only a seven-year-old can muster, while a smart elderly couple whom I took—from the height of the man and the thickness of the woman’s hair—to be Lucinda’s parents, looked on. Harry, the first to lose his seat, refused to leave the game when the music restarted. Cecily, who was sitting under him at this stage, began to kick her legs and scream. Some of the other children, meanwhile, had begun lying on the ground, pretending to be crocodiles. “Come on children, back into a circle. Stop biting, Matilda. Maud, stand up. Charlie, leave her. Stop it. Come on. You—little boy, the little boy in shorts, what are you doing?” Lucinda’s mother appeared to be addressing Fergus. I turned away slightly. Perhaps she wouldn’t know he was mine.

  But then Gwendolin chipped in, giving the game away, “Fergus Priton. We’re not being lions now. Leave Matilda alone.” I felt a tide of panic in my throat. I could see Maria chatting with Gregory through the kitchen window. I could hear the dogs barking manically, locked up somewhere in the house. Mr. Twistletoes was standing in the doorway, idly folding a long, thin balloon into the shape of a dachshund. Rachel was at my elbow, circling like a bottle top with a tray of food.

  Her voice came in and out. “Wild boar, Loch Fyne, more tea.” I knew I should move forward to investigate Fergus, but my knees felt weak. The Wheels on the Bus was starting up. Musical Chairs had been abandoned for Simon Says. Lucinda’s father was holding Fergus’s hand. Children. Husbands. Grand-parents. Family life. All this. What was Jake doing now? Was he with her?

  “Excuse me,” I said, and I turned my back on the party and made for the bottom of the garden, for the bit around the corner, behind the climbing frame and the shrubbery, where I could have a quick cry in peace.

  And there was Pete.

  He looked up.

  I laughed, partly to disguise my embarrassment, partly to force the tears away. “We must stop meeting like this.”

  He squinted against the sun. “Hello,” he said. “Lucinda said to keep out of the way, but I thought you might be here. I was going to sneak over and have a look.”

  “My life,” I said. “It’s just one long party.”

  We looked at each other. In the silence between us, you could hear Mr. Twistletoes calling the children into the house for the puppet show. When we spoke, we spoke together. I said, “Did you get my note?” and he said, “You’ve got something in your hair.”

  I laughed. I said, “I’m a wreck. I thought we were late, which we weren’t in the end, so I ran all the way. I probably stink to high heaven.”

  He straightened up. He said, “I don’t think you do. I’ve got good nostrils and I can’t smell anything myself.” He leaned forward and pulled a twig from my hair. “But you look better without this.”

  I half-brushed, half-mussed my hair with my fingers as if to remove the print of his hand. I said, “I’d look better without a lot of things.”

  He laughed undecidedly, then wrinkled his nose. “I did get your note. Are you sure you don’t want me to come anymore? It seems a shame when I’ve only just got started.”

  I shifted my weight onto a different foot, which meant I moved away from him a fraction. “Look—”

  “If it’s a question of money?”

  “It’s not that.” There was a movement, a flash of red, on the other side of the azalea.

  Pete said, “Have you met Lloyd? My boss?”

  I turned quickly. “No. But it’s fine. I’d better get back to my baby.”

  I started moving off, when Pete put his hand on my arm to stop me. “You okay?” he said.

  “Yes. Of course. Just stuff at home.”

  “There always seems to be stuff at home for you.”

  I tried to say something, but just a sound came out, like a stifled cry. Pete had his head on one side. “Well, at least let me give you a lift home. If you’re under the weather.”

  For a moment, I thought I was going to cry. I didn’t answer. He said, “I can wait for you around the corner if you don’t want to be seen hanging out with the staff. It’s not a problem.”

  I said, still with a pain at the back of my throat, “Um . . .”

  He winked. “Go on. Live dangerously.”

  I didn’t hesitate then. “All right.”

  I returned to the party and stood with Dan at the back of Mr. Twistletoes, watching giant magic wands crumble. Then it was time for tea and I helped Fergus to the table to open his Barbie box, and then I helped pass round the Barbie cake and clear all the uneaten sandwiches and uneaten carrot sticks and empty chocolate wrappers and empty juice boxes into the garbage. And then I took my two grubby children to say goodbye nicely and collect their party bags (one model airplane, one bubble mixture, one packet of M&Ms, one pencil sharpener in the shape of a baboon: times twenty, about the value of the gross national product), and we left the house.

  Maria was on the doorstep, talking to a woman I didn’t recognize. She said, “Oh, Maggie, is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  “I mean last week.” She gave me a curious look. “The emergency—Merika coming over.”

  “Oh that,” I said, hurrying by. “Yes, thanks. Oh, it’s fine. It was nothing in the end.”

  Pete’s van was tucked out of sight around the corner behind Lucinda’s Mitsubishi Shogun. He was standing next to it, waiting. The van still had a battered front bumper and missing headlight. “Oops,” I said.

  “Ye-es,” he replied pointedly. He took the stroller from me and put it in the back. I clambered after Fergus, with Dan in my arms, into the front seat.

  It didn’t take long to round the common to our house. Fergus, strapped in between us, chattered about the gasoline gauge and windshield wipers the whole way. Pete and I didn’t say anything much. But when we got there, as I undid Fergus’s belt, Pete said, casually, “Maybe I could pop round in the next couple of days?”

  “Er,” I said. I looked up at him.

  “Just to check you’re okay.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t like to see a young lady so down.”

  I smiled. To gain some time, I wiped the dust off the clockface on the dashboard in front of me. “All right then,” I said finally.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” I brushed my finger and thumb together. “That would be nice. Come for a cup of tea or something.”

  “How’s tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s the weekend.”

  “Well, Monday then.” He grinned. “Before you change your mind.”

  Maybe it was the cheerfulness of his expression, or the carefree cockiness of his tone, or maybe it was just the inkling of sympathy, of concern, but I couldn’t help myself. I leaned across and kissed him quickly on the lips. Then I pulled away. “Okay,” I said.

  Chapter 15

  On Monday, I was up at dawn, to have a shower, shave my legs and armpits, wash and blow-dry my hair before the children woke. “What’s up with you?” said Jake when he stumbled down to breakfast. “Nits again?”

  “No,” I said. “Not nits. Not this time. I just couldn’t get back to sleep. Look,” I waved something in front of his eyes as a distraction. “I’ve found your PG Tips scrapbook. It was under the toy cupboard. Fergus must have . . .”

  “Thank God,” said Jake, putting down his coffee cup. “I’d looked everywhere for it. I was wondering where I might have left it.”

  “What were the options?�
�� I said. He didn’t pick up on it. He was slotting his dirty cereal bowl into the dishwasher. There wasn’t much room because it was still full of clean things. He didn’t notice. He said, snapping it shut. “I’ll be late again tonight. If I even make it home. I’m going to have to go to Amsterdam again this week. We’ve got to present our pitch to the Central European Office. And on top of that I’ve got to find time for the Zap-it brief.”

  “It’s amazing what you can find time for when you try,” I said. He didn’t pick up on that either.

  It was now eleven days since I had seen Jake with Claire. Sunday was the first day he was at home for any time during that period. It was surprising how normal things had seemed. There was no confrontation. There was tension but it made itself felt in such small things, such tiny absences—a missing kiss here, a door closed with no good-bye—that an untutored observer would have noticed nothing wrong.

  After Jake left for work on Monday, I took Dan and Fergus to my mother’s. “Long time no see,” she said when I dropped them off. I’d rung her to say I was going to the dentist. “Can you make sure you’re back by one? I’ve got aqua aerobics this afternoon,” she said. “And it’s absolute murder in the changing rooms if I’m late.”

  It wasn’t that I was excited at the prospect of Pete’s social visit. I was too emotionally exhausted for that. It was more that I felt I wanted to meet him looking my best, not tearful and sweaty but together and relaxed. I wanted to look a person who would recognize a Cambodian hand-woven ikat-dyed shot silk sarong, even if she didn’t own one. If only for an hour, not to be the woman whose husband was having an affair, but someone a man might flirt with. So when I got back from dropping off the kids, I put on my best accidental-chic linen trousers and a cotton camisole with my bra strap showing. I took a long time over shoes. In the absense of some duck-egg blue thong sandals, I painted my toenails and went barefoot. I sat in the kitchen and waited. I made myself some coffee, got the papers, and spread them around me. I flicked through them and got them tangled. Spilled the coffee. Mopped it up and made some more. Drank it. Remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth, ran upstairs. Dropped some toothpaste on my top. Attempted to lick it off. Finally, took it off and tried to hold just the toothpastey bit under the tap. Stain spread, got the whole lot wet. Panicked again. Up to the bedroom to find another vest, couldn’t find one. Tried to dry the first one under the hair dryer. Put it back on damp.