“What yogurts?” Fergus said.
I went to the fridge. I said, “Thomas the Tank Engine, though there’s only one left of those, Bob the Builder, or Pokémon fromage frais.”
He said, “Bob the Builder.”
“Please,” I said.
“Please,” he said.
I brought Bob the Builder to the table, and peeled the lid off.
“Nooooooooo,” panicked Fergus. “I want the lid ON.”
I tried quickly to stick it back, using the yogurt around the edge as glue. It just about stuck. Fergus took it and eyed it suspiciously. He was momentarily thrown. I thought I’d won. Then inspiration struck: “I said I wanted Thomas. I don’t want Bob.” He threw his spoon on the floor. His face crumpled.
It’s quite clear in the manuals that at moments like this you should not give in. If you give in, a cycle of bad behavior is established. You do not want the lunatics taking over the asylum. You are the boss. It is important to stand firm.
What the manuals never say is, anything for an easy life. I went to the fridge and found one last remaining steam-engine flavored kids dessert. I brought it back to him, my emperor in his booster chair.
“That’s not Thomas. That’s Gordon,” he yelled, his voice rising.
I snapped. “No it’s not. It’s Percy.” And I took it off him and threw it in the sink where its sides dented and splattered against the aluminum.
Fergus started crying, and because he was crying Dan started crying, and I would have cried too if I hadn’t been so busy comforting them. And my life suddenly seemed so small and so hopeless and a solution, temporary, but did it matter? seemed so quickly and easily come by, that I couldn’t help myself. I rang Pete.
He came straight around that afternoon. Fergus and I were playing sea monsters in the garden when he knocked. “As I was passing,” he said at the door.
“Well, if you’re passing . . .” I laughed back.
I said, “You can come in, but we’re playing sea monsters.”
He said “Er-aghhhh,” which made Fergus, who had wandered up behind me, scream and run back into the garden.
Pete came out with me and I said, “You probably can’t stay. It’s probably not a good time.” But I could feel my mouth stretching into a smile.
He said, “I left my shears. I’ve only come to pick them up.”
“When?” I said.
“Monday,” he said. “Must have been Monday.”
“And you’ve done without them ever since?”
“I’ve got a spare,” he said, looking into my face and laughing.
“Er-aghhhh,” he said again to Fergus who had come up behind him with a stick. He turned and chased him. Fergus squealed in delight. They fell on the ground and Pete pin-ioned Fergus between his feet and held him high, horizontal, in the air.
“Again, again!” my son shouted.
I felt uncomfortable. It seemed important to keep the children away from Pete, to keep them pure and untainted even if I wasn’t. I said, “Stop now, Fergus, you’re overexcited. Come here and find some worms.” Pete made a face at him, which made him giggle some more. “Come on,” I said. “Calm down.” I didn’t want him charming my children too. This was nothing to do with them.
“Where do you think you left your shears?” I said to Pete.
He gave me a hot look. “In one of the beds?”
“Well, let’s search for them then,” I said, looking back. “Fergus, Pete the Gardener has lost his shears in the flower beds. Are you going to help us find them?”
“What’s shears?”
“Like big scissors. So get looking.”
Dan was having his nap upstairs. Fergus was head down in the bushes. Pete said, “They might be in the shed. Come see.” And he pulled me by the arm, with him, to the back of the garden. The door, which was half off its hinges, was kept shut with a big stone. He kicked it out of the way with his foot and pushed me into the shed in front of him. I grabbed him, roughly, after me, and he pushed me back against an old chest of drawers. We kissed hungrily, almost violently. There were old cobwebs in our hair, dead spiders down our neck. I pulled him around so I was pressing into him. We were pulling each other down, dented cans of antifreeze were toppling over on the wobbly shelf above us, there was some clattering as a box of radiator caps tumbled over. A rake slid to one side, scattering rust. Pete was tugging at my clothes. I had my hands in his thick hair, yanking it, my nails in his scalp.
“We’ve got to stop,” I said, not stopping.
“Quickly,” he said. “No. Quickly, come on.”
It was then I caught a glimpse of Fergus through the dusty window, through the cobwebs, past the tendrils of bindweed that had forced their way under the glass. He was pottering happily across the lawn. He had a stick in one hand and in the other . . . the kitchen scissors. Open. Facing up. I said, “No, no, stop.” And I pulled away, disentangled myself and ran out into the light, toward my son.
Pete came out, after a short while, looking amused. He said, “Is that it then?”
I looked at him carefully. “No,” I said, sealing my fate. “It’s not.”
Later that day, Mel dropped around between appointments. “A house call!” I said with unnatural brightness. “How nice!” She frowned. She was worried about me. She wanted to know if I was really all right. I almost told her how things were, but something—guilt? a sense of irresponsibility? fear that she’d stop me doing what I wanted to do?—held me back. Instead, I hugged her and asked if we could leave it for now. I said I didn’t feel up to talking about it. And, even though she gave me a funny look, she took me at my word. Big mistake.
August: Dead Flies
Chapter 16
And so it began. In the week in which Jake was away, and when the children were safely asleep, Pete came to the house on three separate occasions. He’d leave the van around the corner. We’d have sex against the radiator in the hall or on the stairs, quick and urgent, half our clothes still on. I wouldn’t let him upstairs, in case the children woke up, or in case our reflection was branded forever in the bedroom mirror. And he didn’t hang around afterward—just left me with a carpet burn or a radiator ridge and went. Maybe he took a beer from the fridge. Or a slice of cake. And again I would wonder what the hell I was up to.
“What do you see in me?” I asked him once.
“You’re wild,” he said, through the crumbs. “You seem all English and prissy but inside you’re wild.”
“Wild?” I said, checking the lights on the baby monitor.
“Okay then,” he grinned, “sex.”
If he saw sex in me, I don’t exactly know what I saw in him. I saw a handsome man, certainly, with the kind of looks I would once have considered way out of my league; a handsome man who was, of all things, attracted to me. So handsome, and so apparently attracted (or possibly so intrigued), it would have seemed churlish to turn the opportunity down. This sounds flippant, I know, and I have no ready defense for it now. In fact, quite the opposite. My flippancy was a guard, I used it to hide behind, to protect myself from thinking about my actions too deeply, or too carefully. Infidelity brought out the worst in me. I may, in my moments of more pious self-justification, have told myself that I was equalizing things with Jake, that he had started it, that I had been forced into an impossible position by his own digressions, by his absence, by the late nights that continued after his return from Amsterdam . . . But it was much more than that. Something in me, I confess, liked the way Pete was proof that I hadn’t completely hunkered down into a cocoon, populated by children and playground mums, that there was a side of me that nobody else had seen—including me up to that point. Some small part of me would have loved Rachel to have caught me in the act, to have seen all her tidy preconceptions about me drain from her shocked and appalled face. And yet, of course, that would have been terrible. The whole situation was ridiculous. Impossible. Miserable. I was full of guilt. But I can’t pretend it didn’t thrill me.
; One day, a couple of weeks in, Pete rang just as I’d got the children into the stroller. He said, “I’m on my way to a garden center down in Surrey: are you free?”
I said, “But we’re off to the common.”
He made a noise, half whine, half groan, down the phone. And then, wheedling, after a silence, he said, “There’s a disused dunny on the path to the fishing lake.”
“A dunny?”
“You know, a public lavvy. Be there in half an hour.”
“Pete, this is impossible.”
He had already hung up.
When I got to the playground, Maria’s au pair, Merika, was there with Maria’s children, Flossie and Patrick. There were a couple of other mothers I recognized from playgroup too—except I only knew them as “Milo’s Mummy” and “Jemima’s Mummy.” I put Dan in the sandbox, let Fergus loose, and then sat, watching them idly. Every now and then I’d nod and smile as a child of one of the other mothers did something nod- or smile-worthy. And I tried to ignore the adrenaline that had started to run inside me along with some feelings of fear and anticipation. After a while I said, somewhat to my own surprise and in a faintly nervous voice, “Shall I go and get us some coffees?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m fine,” Merika said.
“Go on. Cappuccino?” I urged. “Latte? Frappuccino? Mocha frappuccino with whipped cream? Caramel macchiato? You know you want to.”
“No really, I’m fine.”
“What about a tea then? Iced tea? Mango and papaya juice shake?”
She was shaking her head insistently.
“Cool you down!”
“I’m dieting,” she said, tapping a nonexistent belly.
Desperately, I racked my brain for a name for one of the other women. “Laura!” I said suddenly, “Can I get you a coffee? Or an iced tea or a frappuccino?”
“It’s Lauren,” she said. “Gosh, a coffee. That’s a nice idea. I’d love a Caffe Mocha if you’re going anyway.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m on my way. . . . If you could just keep an eye on Fergus and Dan, while I’m gone.”
The café was the same side of the common as the boarded-up restrooms. Eventually I puffed up with a corrugated card tray in my hand and hot bubbles of coffee on my shoes. Pete was leaning against the wall, under the trees.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m mad,” I replied.
At weekends and in the summer holidays there were strange clusters of teenage boys by the lake. From a distance they looked as if they were dealing drugs or torturing small animals. Or having sex. It was only when you got close that you realized they were sharing a fishing rod, eyes intent on a straggling line that floated motionless on the stagnant water.
I was grateful for their concentration that day. I wondered afterward, as I pulled a leaf from my hair, zipped up my shorts, if they had heard anything, if they saw the undergrowth stir or shake. Maybe they thought someone was dealing drugs or torturing small animals. Or having sex. Uncomfortable sex. Vertical uncomfortable sex. Addictive vertical uncomfortable sex.
When I got back to the playground, Dan was still playing happily in the sandbox, but Fergus was crying. “He wanted his mummy,” said Lauren, as I handed her her cup of deflated milk and chocolate powder. “He wondered what had happened to you.”
Of course I was always meaning to stop it. We had two close shaves. There was one time, when the children were with my mother and Jake was “busy with Kyushi,” that Pete and I “went for a drive.” That was one of his euphemisms. Pete seemed to prefer making love in his van to anywhere else. The risk, maybe even the grubbiness of it, gave him an extra thrill. We had driven to a road just off the common and parked. On the way back, he needed some gas so he drove into the nearest Shell station. He went into the kiosk to pay and I was just sitting there in the passenger seat, feeling stunned at myself, when I turned and right next to me, so close I could reach down and stroke his hair, was Jake. He was bending over, negotiating the gas cap on our car. He had his back to me, but I dove onto the floor of the car nonetheless.
“What have you dropped?” said Pete when he climbed back in.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just drive. Now.”
And after that, I did feel awful, though, disconcertingly, the experience seemed to have turned Pete on.
And then there was the day that Pete came round at 7:00 p.m. That summer my children went to bed earlier and earlier. I’d pull their curtains tight shut to block out the sun, which still hit its head on the window like it was midday. Jake had rung to say he had the results of a focus group to go through, and was it all right if he and Ed went for a drink afterward? I said that was fine. It would give me at least two safe hours.
I was wearing my old yard sale tea dress when Pete got there. We took a couple of beers into the garden, which was looking blowsy now that it was August, seedy and unkempt, to drink on the bench under the tree. Pete put his bottle down on the lawn where it wobbled and fell over, glugging into the grass. I bent and made as if to pick it up, but he pulled me onto his lap and, slipping the dress over my head, started kissing me instead.
The bench was concealed from the neighboring gardens by the jasmine on one side and the overgrown honeysuckle on the other, the branches of the tree hiding the upstairs windows. I closed my eyes for a moment as Pete threw off his shirt, breathing in the slightly contradictory scents of midsummer flowers and Australian male. Pete made a humming sound at the back of his throat. He was kissing me and taking off his shorts at the same time. I was drifting. I was almost lost. And then suddenly the atmosphere was split open like a coconut by a voice, not that close yet, not that loud, but inquiring, echoing through an empty house. “Where are you?”
“FUCK!” I yelped. “It’s Jake. Quick into the shed!”
I jumped up and, yanking my dress back on, herded Pete, still confused, behind the tree and the beginning-to-run-wild shrubs, into the safety of the shed. I ran back out to the bench, gathered up his clothes, threw them into a bush, called in a high, artificial voice, “I’m here! Coming!” and charged back into the house, where I found Jake bent down, peering into the fridge.
“Oh there you are,” he said coolly. “I could have sworn there were a couple of beers left. Ed and I thought we’d head out of the office and go through our stuff here. We both feel like we’ve been living there recently. Are Fergus and Dan in bed? I thought I’d catch them.”
“Oh, I think, we . . . Yes they are . . . I thought you . . .”
“Did we drink them?”
“Yes, we must have.”
Ed was in the sitting room, standing with his back to the door, looking out the window. He seemed subdued. “Hi, Maggie,” he said. “Sorry to er . . .”
I was curling and uncurling my fists. But my voice managed to be casual. “Hello. I’m surprised you could get away. It’s only . . .” I looked at the clock on the video. “Half past seven. Gosh, that is early. You’ve both been working such long hours.” I was studying him carefully.
He said, rather too quickly, “Yes we have, we have.”
“No beers.” Jake came in behind me. “So how about wine? Or coffee?”
“. . . or the pub,” I said quickly. “You could go to the pub.” I was looking from one to the other. Please say yes. Please say yes. Jake raised his eyebrows. Ed raised his to match. “Go on,” I said. “I’m all right here. I’ve got some things to . . . finish off in the garden.”
After they’d gone, I ran back to the shed, my toes fizzy with leftover panic. Pete was sitting on the old chest of drawers, his feet balanced on two of the knobs, looking sullen. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
The sight of him, disconsolate and naked, caused me to open my mouth and roar with laughter. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “I’m sorry,” and I’d straighten my face in line with his but then I’d think about it again, and the crosser he looked the funnier it seemed, and I’d start all over again. “Look, look please,” I burbled finally, “you’d better
go, but don’t be angry. I’m sorry. It’s just seeing you . . . it’s just tension, that’s all it is.”
“Has he gone then?” he said irritably. “Is the coast clear?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, calming. “It is. And you’d better go.”
I smoothed him down and got him to the door. He seemed appeased, though he said one more thing before he left. “Don’t laugh at me, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t like being laughed at.”
And then there were other, more localized, difficulties. Fran and Rain came around one evening in the middle of the month to sort through some baby things and collect the Tens machine. It was a Saturday and I’d slipped off for an hour earlier in the day, under the pretense of buying lightbulbs (as good an excuse as I could think of: sometimes the more mundane, the more convincing), and had met Pete in the parking lot of the hardware store.
We’d had a sticky time. I had been feeling a bit cornered. I hadn’t really wanted to meet—Dan was fretful that day and Fergus clingy and Pete, for an instant, seemed one more demand on my time. But he’d rung several times and in the end I’d gone because it seemed easier to do so than not. When I’d gotten there, hot and my back sweaty from the plastic seats of the car, I hadn’t even wanted to make love, though Pete had been insistent. “Be a sport, Mags,” he’d said. He was fed up—Lloyd was away and he was kicking his heels, a bored single man stuck on his own on a fuggy weekend.
“Oh all right,” I’d said.
“I’m hoping to do without medical intervention altogether,” Fran was saying. She was sitting on the bed in the spare room. I was standing on a chair, searching the top of the closet. She took a pillow and squashed it on her lap. “And I’m not sure if it works in the birthing pool.” Jake, who had wandered in with a bottle of beer in his hand, said she’d probably get electrocuted. I told her I’d found it a waste of time.
“It just set my nerve ends on edge,” I said, finally finding its box tucked behind Jake’s Hornby railway set, which he’d put away until the boys were older (until they’d left home, I suspected, and he could play with it without them getting in the way). I reached for it and handed it down to her. “But take it because it works for some people, and you won’t know until you need it.”
Having It and Eating It Page 19