Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  Jake said, sitting on the bed, “Actually, it did really help you. It really helped her, in stage one.”

  “No it didn’t,” I said. “I hated it.”

  “You liked it,” he said. “She liked it. She said it helped. It was only after transition that she didn’t want it.”

  “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here. Don’t talk about my labor as if you know more about it than me,” I said.

  “Oooooh. Sorry,” he said, getting up and backing away.

  “And don’t say ‘ooooh sorry’ like that,” I said.

  “Oooooh. Sorry.”

  Fran flicked at him with a muslin, which he grabbed from her and put on his head, folding his hands together and bowing his head like a mullah. Then he went downstairs to the kitchen. I continued folding baby clothes—so tiny, vole-like—thinking with one half of my brain, how quickly my children had grown, and with the other, how quickly my relationship with their father had changed. It was like playing the piano or reciting a poem you know off by heart: everything goes well until you let your concentration lapse, or think too hard about it, and then the words and the notes tumble about your ears unformed and chaotic. When Jake was the unfaithful one, at least I could still take refuge in hating him. Now I just hated myself. I put the baby clothes in a plastic bag and closed the closet door. There were dead flies in the bottom of it—there are dead flies everywhere in August—but I didn’t sweep them up. I’d do it later. I’d do everything later.

  Fran said, “We’ve been thinking Lakshmi for a girl. She’s the Hindu goddess of wealth. Bede for a boy. What do you think?”

  “Heavenly,” I said.

  Downstairs, Jake and Rain had gotten the menu out and were about to get take-out. Jake ordered chicken biryani.

  “Why don’t you order something different for once?” I said.

  “Like what?” he said, in mock outrage.

  I picked up the menu. “What about fish tandoori? Or egg khorma or . . . go on have egg khorma. I’ve never seen anyone have egg khorma.”

  Jake looked as if I’d suggested he fry up some diapers. “Give over,” he said. “I want chicken biryani. I always have chicken biriyani.”

  “So you do,” I said.

  Fran was looking from one of us to the other. She said, “All right, you two?”

  I said, “Jake always has the same thing. He’s never adventurous. I have something different every time. Jake never takes risks.”

  “I take risks all the time,” he said quietly. “But when it comes to ordering Indian take-out, I like chicken biryani. It is not a crime as far as I know. Unless I’m suddenly living under a new political administration.”

  “Oh yes, risks. I forgot about the risks,” I said.

  “Just order!” said Fran.

  They went soon after we’d eaten. Fran hugged me. I hugged her back. “Take care,” I said. “Ring me if you need anything else.”

  “I will,” she said. “And Maggie? Have you ever thought about Pilates? There’s a very good course at the House of Eternal Peace, though it’s quite booked up. Or how about You Too Can Heal at the Innerpotential Center. You look as if you need something to take you out of yourself.”

  “I think, at the moment, I’ve got enough things with which to take myself out of myself,” I said, closing the door.

  A few minutes later, I was in the bathroom washing my face when Jake came in. “Are you all right?” he said, reaching past me for the toothpaste.

  “Fine,” I said as he started brushing. “Absolutely fine.”

  He spat. I moved my hand. “Are you sure?” He sounded solicitous. He was looking at me carefully in the mirror. He said, “This thing with Kyushi, it’s almost over. I know it’s been almost three months, but it’s not going to go on forever.”

  I nodded. I turned to go, but he grabbed me by the hand and, still looking at me in the mirror, buried his mouth in my neck. Then he let me go. “How about coming to bed?” he said.

  My heart sank. I said, “You go ahead. I’ll be a few minutes.” And I went downstairs and tidied up the kitchen until I knew he’d be asleep.

  Chapter 17

  I had managed to avoid Mel since the beginning of my affair with Pete. She had a course in Bournemouth (Complementary Medicine in General Practice) which took her away for one week (including two return trips to Manchester where her parents looked after Milly). And she left several messages on the answering machine, which I didn’t return. You can tell you’re in trouble if you start steering clear of your closest friends. I didn’t want to see Mel because I knew how shocked she would be, and, in witnessing her shock, I’d have to confront all the stuff I’d been so busy burying. But I couldn’t hide from her forever.

  “So what’s going on?” she asked. “I can understand the eyebrows, but why the bikini wax? I thought you never had your bikini done?”

  It was Saturday afternoon, a week after the hardware store, and we were lying on our backs, on green cushioned lounger chairs, naked but for towels discreetly arranged, droplets of sweat between our breasts, large mango and banana smoothies at our sides, gazing up at a magnolia network of exposed heating pipes.

  “This is the life,” she said, as a dab of condensation dropped from above onto her forehead. “Ugh,” she added, shaking her head like a dog.

  It was an annual event. Every year, before our holidays (although this year, only Mel was going away—two weeks in Tuscany with her brother and his family), we’d get day passes to Paddle, an all-women’s health club in the center of London. So far, we’d had a steam and a sauna and a plunge, and we’d frolicked for a while in the pool, where you could dangle above the water on a rope-swing and, with your shoulders against your ears to block out the impossibly thin Sloanes discussing the new Autumn range of Nicole Farhi knits, pretend you were Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. And now we were relaxing from the business of relaxing.

  “I’m just bucking my self-image,” I said. “After all, a bit of pampering never went amiss.” And then I turned my face away to take a sip from my fruit shake as I remembered how amiss my pampering was probably going to go.

  She said, “Maggie. What is going on? You’ve been unreachable recently. I know you’re avoiding me. I haven’t seen you on your own for weeks. I know you don’t want to talk, but I think you should. What is happening with Jake?”

  I closed my eyes. “Ummmm . . .” I began.

  She said, sitting up, “I’m putting my clothes on and walking straight out unless you talk to me. I know something’s up. You’re not yourself. Please, Maggie. I hate it when you shut down like this. What’s going on? Is he or isn’t he?”

  I said, deadpan, “Yes, he is.”

  She lay back down, banging her head against her cushion. She said, “Bastard.” She sat up again. “You talked to him then? What did he say?”

  A woman with a navel ring on the next lounger who had been reading Marie Claire had looked up during this. I glared at her until she looked back down. I said, “If I tell you something, do you promise you won’t hate me?”

  “Of course not.”

  I put my hands over my eyes. “I’m seeing someone too.”

  Mel swung her legs over her lounger and bent over me. “What?”

  I took my hands away. “I’m seeing someone. I’m having an affair too. Now do you hate me?”

  “Of course I don’t.” She was frowning.

  “So only I hate me then.”

  She said, “Who? Who? How? When?” and I told her about Pete coming on to me and how eventually, after finding out about Claire, I’d given in and she said, “What, my Pete?” and I said yes, even though she’d never actually met him. I told her how at first it had bucked me up and given me something else to think about and made me feel better about myself, more on a par with Jake, physically better as much as anything, but that now I felt awful and angry all the time. And she said gently, shaking her head, “What were you thinking?”

  And I said, “I didn’t think. I
just did.”

  And she said, “Maybe it wasn’t an affair you needed, but an exercise class.” And I saw the girl with the navel ring smile.

  I was called for my stack of treatments then—much to the disappointment of Navel Ring. I had ordered an eyelash tint, and an underarm, a half-leg, a bikini and an eyebrow shape—the full nicknack Paddle wax. As I lay there, the beautician said, “Any particular occasion?” and I wanted to say “Yes, I’m sleeping with someone I’m not married to; actually I’m sleeping with two people I’m not married to, but that’s another story.” Instead, I simpered and said, “Oh just August.”

  She said, plucking, “One does tend to have more flesh on display then, doesn’t one?”

  When she’d finished tidying me up, the beautician studied my face, rather like Mel had done earlier. “There,” she said, rubbing an excess streak of blue-black dye off my cheek-bone. “You’ll feel more human now.”

  Mel was already dressed when I came out. She had to pick Milly up from her next-door neighbor and then she had to rush home to cook Piers a good-bye dinner. She hugged me and said she’d ring and not to worry, but that we needed to talk some more soon. “There was some statistic in the paper the other day,” she said. “In forty percent of all marriages . . .”

  “Someone is sleeping with someone else,” I finished off. “Yes, I saw that too. But we’re both sleeping with someone else. And we’re not married, so where does that leave us?”

  “It’ll all come out in the wash,” she said, and there was something comforting in the triteness of that, as if none of it was any more important than a good spin cycle.

  I left Paddle on my own and wandered around Covent Garden for a while looking for salvation of a more transient nature, putting off going home. In one of the shops in the plaza I found a dress that reminded me of the frock Claire was wearing the day I’d bumped into her on Morton High Street, the dress she wore to dinner that night. This one had tiny straps and ribbon along the hem, and was, according to the assistant, cut on the bias, which she concluded was flattering “to the curvier figure.” It did look nice, even with my sneakers, even with my post-wax rash, but the assistant said it would look even better with some kitten heels. “Maybe in pink or taupe,” she said. “Have you tried our shop next door? And what about a little cardigan,” she added. “Cerise would look nice. Or this one in bilberry? For evening.”

  I was laden down with bags when I finally got home. I’d bought everything guiltily on the joint account, so it was a relief to find an empty house. I stashed the bags into the back of the closet, poured myself a drink, and went into the garden to read the papers. There was a small ribbon of sun left at the bottom of the lawn and I sat my deck chair on it, with the shade creeping up my legs. I hadn’t got much further than the travel section and was imagining myself digging for turtle eggs in hot bleached white sand—when Jake arrived back with the children.

  “Hello,” he said, as Fergus hurled himself on top of me. “Nice day?”

  “Lovely. Thanks,” I said politely. The deck chair lurched to one side under the force of Fergus’s hug. I put my spare arm onto the grass to steady us. “You?”

  “We’ve had a great time, haven’t we boys?” said Jake, straining to keep hold of Dan, who was reaching his arms out to me. “Such nice weather.”

  “Isn’t it just?” I said, taking Dan from him. How nice we were. How civilized. What surfaces we could maintain. I said, “Thank you for looking after the kids,” thinking “why do mothers always thank fathers? Good thing they don’t thank us or there would be no room for any other conversation.” I was about to repeat this thought, make a joke about it, a joke with an edge, but it seemed too intimate, too engaged with the daily ebb and flow of our relationship. So I didn’t say anything.

  Jake peered around the children. “Let’s see,” he said. “You look different.”

  “I know,” I said. I stood up and put Fergus and Dan down on the grass. The spot of sun had gone altogether now. I started folding up the deck chair. “Fergus, mind your fingers. I am different. It’s a whole new me.”

  Rachel was on to me too. On the following Monday, in the changing rooms at the swimming pool, she wanted to know what the new undies were for. “Classy,” she said, as I slipped off my new “second skin” underwear from Lycra’N’Lace, a lingerie shop in the Southgate Mall that thinks it’s in Beverly Hills, and stuffed them in a Safeway’s bag. “Matching bra, hmm. Very nice. Very underrated, purple.”

  I was a bit too busy trying to prevent Fergus from scattering his clothes all over the damp floor while squirming into my Speedo to answer immediately. I grunted as I finally got the straps over my shoulders. “Crushed grape,” I said noncommittally, adjusting the Lycra under my arms, and whirling Dan round to sit on one hip, “Yup. Just got myself remeasured—after all that breastfeeding, you know. It’s amazing how your shape changes.”

  “Isn’t it?” she agreed, still eying me up.

  The swimming pool, Splashdown!, as they’d recently renamed it, had changed since my day. Less of “a rec” (or wreck), more of a whole wraparound swimming experience. We used to come on Wednesday afternoons with school. In those days, the most exciting thing on offer was the illustrated notice banning “heavy petting.” Wasted on me: I didn’t know what heavy petting was then, but suspected it was something to do with gerbils. Now it was all elephant slides and wave machines and huge inflatable monsters. You used to get snacks and a can of drink from the machines in the foyer—you’d need the right change, then you’d tense as you waited for the clunk or the rustle that meant your money had worked—and you’d devour your booty on the steps with your ears still humming and an itchy wetness under your clothes. Now there was a whole café space, specializing in whale-shaped fish morsels and crocodile-mouthed chicken pieces.

  I jammed the plastic bag into a locker, which was as crappy as they always had been, and slipped the rubber band around my wrist. Fergus and Harry, miniature Michelin men in their orange Floaties, with Fergus’s skinny arms sticking out like matchsticks, ran ahead of us to splash in the ankle-deep beach-style shallow end. Rachel’s pregnant friend Martha was waiting for us there already, sitting on her bum in the water, legs splayed like a Beanie Baby plonked on a nursery shelf. Her two-year-old daughter Phoebe frolicked with a piece of yellow foam at her ankles. Martha smiled weakly when she saw us. We shivered down next to her. It was not the water that was the problem, heated as it was to Caribbean germ-breeding balmitude, it was the air above it.

  “How are you?” asked Rachel.

  Martha sighed. “Exhausted,” she said. “I’m just . . .”

  I missed what she said next because the attendant blew his whistle loudly and started gesticulating crossly just to the right of us. I turned to see what the nasty big boys were doing, which small child they were dive-bombing, but all I could see was Fergus and Harry climbing on one of the crocodiles, and then hurling themselves off with enviable fearlessness.

  “Tooooooooooooot,” the whistle went again, shrill above the echoing cries of swimmers. The attendant was coming over, waving his tracksuited arms. He was heading for Fergus and Harry.

  “No jumping off the animals,” he said to them. “Or you’re out.”

  I busied myself with Dan—“Whoosh,” I said, twirling him around, “Whooosh”—to show they weren’t mine, but Rachel stood up and, water flapping at her ankles, strode over.

  “Can’t you two behave for one minute?” she said. For once she didn’t seem to be blaming Fergus. “Fergus,” she added, “off!”

  After that, Martha said she’d watch Dan, while Rachel and I waded the boys over to the deeper end. It was still only about three feet deep, but we slouched across, alternating between our bottoms and knees, keeping as much of our upper torsos as we could in the warmth.

  When we reached the ropes separating kiddy chaos from the lengths lane, Rachel said, “God, Martha doesn’t know how lucky she is. For one thing, Phoebe is very well behaved, and for anot
her she has so much help it’s untrue. She’s got an au pair and Phoebe goes to nursery one morning a week, and her mother comes up from Guildford and helps out all the time, and her inlaws come down from Chester every other weekend and practically fight to have the children . . . ”

  “Gosh,” I said, trying to stop Fergus from putting both his feet on the rope. “That is a lot.” Nonworking mothers are all obsessed with other people’s help, as if our children’s preoccupation with fairness had rubbed off on us. Fergus was swinging on the rope now, his hands in mine, his feet pushing it back and forth. Rachel was saying, “And her husband’s an angel. He gives her a lie-in every Saturday and is home two nights a week for bathtime. And,” she lowered her voice, “she’s getting a maternity nurse when the baby’s born. So really, I don’t know how she can say she’s exhausted.”

  “Not like we’re exhausted,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “ERRRR. Excuse me!” There was a cross, spluttering voice suddenly in my ear. I’d let my attention lapse and Fergus had swung a little too forcefully and pushed the rope, complete with his feet, right into the smooth path of an oncoming swimmer. A wet face was staring at me, her hair dark and wet, two-ringed fingers flicking droplets of water from under her eyes. She was wearing a black halter-neck bikini, her slim, tanned body flickering brown and white under the water.

  “Oh,” I said, speechless. Oh. God. Her. Here. Together in the same water as me. Almost naked in the same element. How unspeakably awful. “Claire,” I said.

  “OH. Oh. Maggie!” Her annoyance dropped immediately, plunged into embarrassment instead. She started rabbiting inanely. “Fancy meeting you here. Actually, do you know, I was just thinking about you. I had this funny feeling I might see you. There were all these small children in the changing room and I thought, ‘oh I wonder if Maggie brings her boys here’!”