Her duplicitousness was quite dizzying. How could she even think about mentioning my children? “Sorry Fergus kicked you,” I said, wishing he’d done it a bit harder.
“Oh, don’t worry. High spirits, etc. It just gave me a shock that’s all. Small foot in the ribs. Doesn’t matter at all. But Maggie, I haven’t seen you for ages.” She was burbling, launched into hyperspace with the awkwardness of seeing me. It was quite gratifying to watch. She was skewered on a pin. Most of us, under such circumstances, might nod wanly and swim away. Not Claire. Claire gushed. “You must think I’m terrible. I’ve just been so—well, it’s been eventful, let me tell you. Just—oh God,” she was shaking her head. “But we must get together again soon.”
Rachel was smiling hopefully, with her head on one side, looking from one to the other of us, waiting for an introduction. I was silent. Claire gave a wide smile and said, “I’m Claire. Maggie and I are old, old friends. We were at school together, weren’t we?”
“Er, yes,” I said, pulling myself together. I’d have to do introductions, but I didn’t want to. “This is Rachel.” She’d probably steal her too.
Fergus and Harry were whooping and splashing. Claire gave a gay laugh and said, “Oops, there goes my waterproof mascara!” as quite a lot of water ricocheted off their bodies into her face. “Where’s your other little one?” she added.
I waited, hoping she’d lose interest. I didn’t want her even to look at my baby. Finally, I said, “Dan’s over there,” pointing vaguely in the direction of Martha. Claire gave a dainty wave, one hand flapping invisible castanets open and shut parallel to her eyes, in his direction. Dan had pulled himself up on to the elephant’s trunk. He didn’t wave back.
Rachel was looking at Claire with fascination, clearly intrigued as to how someone as dull as me could have such a glamorous friend. “It is brilliant,” she said. “It hasn’t run at all. Is it Dior?”
“No, Clinique,” said Claire bending conspiratorially. “It’s worth its weight in gold.”
“I must get some,” said Rachel. “Now. I want some now. This minute.”
They both laughed.
“And how do you two know each other?” said Claire.
Rachel told her about the post-natal support group run by the hospital, what a lifeline it had been when all those hormones were just swimming and you just felt so isolated . . . I could see Claire’s interest wander, but I wasn’t going to interrupt. I wanted to slouch away, low down, so she wouldn’t see my body out of the water, but I also couldn’t stop looking at her. I wanted to see what Jake saw. Suddenly, I was imagining them and . . . I said, “Oh Rachel, Claire’s not interested in all that.”
Rachel said, “Oh sorry. You forget how boring children are to people who haven’t got them.”
Claire smiled. She darted me a look. She said, “No, it’s not true at all. I’d love to have children, only the man I’m seeing . . .”
I interrupted. I said, “Claire’s boyfriend’s married.”
I tugged on Fergus’s fingers until finally they came loose. I grabbed his toes under the water and made him squeal. I pulled him onto one hip and Harry onto the other and, with a child in each arm, splashed up and down in the water until they screamed with delight.
I still couldn’t drown out the answer, couldn’t hide from the nervous look Claire threw in my direction.
“They always are,” she said.
I started asking Pete what he did when he wasn’t seeing me. He said, “Hang out.” But I wanted to know where. “Just about,” he said. “Bars, you know.”
“Which bars?”
“I dunno. Fiction. Oblivion. Anonymous. Meltdown. The usual.”
“The usual,” I said. “Sounds like my life.”
He shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Who with?”
“Mates.”
“But who are your mates?”
“Lloyd. Some blokes I used to live with when I lived in Catford. People from about.”
“Women?”
“There are girls there, Maggie, yes.”
We were lying in the back of his van by the river at Putney, down the end, under the trees. It was midweek and quiet, though you could still hear muffled squeals and shouts from the playground across the road. Fergus was having lunch at Lucinda’s. I’d left Dan with Fran on the pretext of a “Safeway’s shop.” I could tell she was feeling neglected. As I left, she said, “I wanted to ask you about toxoplasmosis . . .”
“FRAN!”
“Only joking.” But she gave me a reproachful look nonetheless.
The week before we’d been in Richmond Park, but I’d felt exposed there, naked in the back of a white van in the middle of an empty parking lot. It was less conspicuous on the embankment. It was lurkers’ paradise. There were several people apart from us in locked cars, mainly old couples sharing a Thermos and the view. Unlike us, they tended to sit in the front.
Pete was pulling on his clothes. He had looked at his watch and said he’d better be getting on. I lay there, with my arms crossed behind my head.
I said, watching him burrow into his T-shirt, “I know, let’s do something different for once.”
“Different from what?” His head emerged.
“From this.” I sat up, pulled my knees into my chest. “We could go on a date. Go somewhere normal. Maybe not Oblivion. But we could find somewhere. Do something.”
He winced, turned away from me toward the door. “Bit tricky . . .”
“I could manage it. I could work it. It would be good. It’s important.”
“Whatever,” said Pete sunnily. He chucked my clothes at me. “Get your kit on. I haven’t got all day.”
I wriggled into my clothes, and Pete crouched down to undo the back doors. He clambered out and then bent to fiddle with the number plate on the back of the van. It was held on with string and was hanging on by one side. I followed him out and went to stand against the railings, looking down into the sludge below. It was low tide. There was a Dulux paint can among the driftwood, sticking out of the mud. A dog went by, nose down, tail up, followed by an owner, trudging in shorts and boots. Jake and I had talked about getting a dog, though we’d decided it wouldn’t be fair. Not in London.
I said, “I should bring Fergus here. He’d love it down there.”
Pete, still with his head under the bumper, said, in a half-grunt, “Huh?”
“He could dig around with sticks,” I said. “In the mud.”
I turned, but Pete wasn’t listening.
The relationship, once the initial charge had left, wasn’t following the kind of pattern I was used to. I was not, in these hot August days, at my most clearheaded, but I thought I knew two things. One, that I didn’t want it to carry on the way it was, and two, that I didn’t want it to end. Or did I? Did I want to try to make something more of it? Did I want to think about a future with this man?
I stood and stared at the strip of river, sparkling in the sun like the Mediterranean. “What now?” I said, turning again. “Where do we go from here?”
“Well.” Pete was jangling his car keys. “I’ve got to pick up some bedding plants at the nursery. And I’ve got an appointment at Lucinda’s at 3:00 p.m.”
I think we both knew that wasn’t what I meant.
Then he said he wasn’t going my way, so could he drop me at the station? “Be a sport,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “It’s only one transfer.”
Chapter 18
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said. “We must be mad. Out of our heads. Criminally insane. How did I let this happen?”
“It’s too late,” he said. “We’ve gone too far.”
“I can’t bear it,” I said. “I’m leaving behind my house, my garden, my life.”
“Tough,” he said. “There’s no turning back now.”
We were in the car, Jake and I, on our way to Suffolk, the guests of Ed and Pea, who had invited us, along with Mark, another of E
d and Jake’s colleagues at TMT&T, and his wife Louisa, to a cottage booked through Barn D’Or. Barn D’Or was the crème de la crème of holiday cottage companies: exposed beams and properly lagged hot water tanks, yours for two nights, for the cost of a small Learjet. “The house is ‘price code B,’ ” Ed had said on the phone, before I passed him to Jake. “I’ve told Pea we’d bloody well better get a thatched roof for that.”
The weekend had been in the Cosmo date-book for ages, but I’d filed it away in the region of my mind labeled “Get Out of That Nearer the Time.” What with one thing and another—small children, unfaithful husbands, rampant sex with near strangers in bushes—I hadn’t got around to it and suddenly there we were, on our way, hardly speaking, Mr. and Mrs. Dysfunctional, having to put on a brave face for a Bank Holiday weekend with other people.
I was in a terrible mood. I hadn’t managed to see Pete all week, but I’d managed to pin him down for our date, which was to take place the following Tuesday. In the meantime, if I’d had my choice, I would have spent the weekend on my own with my kids, thinking about things if I was feeling brave, burying them if I wasn’t, but at any rate not forced into artificial merriment.
“I don’t even understand why they’ve invited us,” I said to Jake crossly. We had endured the Friday night traffic on Tower Bridge and were now heading haltingly up the White-chapel Road. “She hates me as much as I hate her.”
“No, she doesn’t,” he said back, calmly, infuriatingly. “She’s probably just a bit confused by your attitude. She’s probably just waiting to like you, if you’d let her.”
“What about Ed?” I said.
He was staring ahead at the bumpers in front of him. “You may not like him, but he is my friend and my colleague. And I don’t see why we shouldn’t socialize with them once in a while.” He darted me a look and then glanced away again. “It’s embarrassing not to. Particularly as Clarice and Fergus aren’t so far apart in age.”
“Fergus hates Clarice.”
“No, he doesn’t. And she’s perfectly sweet really. She might even be a bit of a calming influence.”
“She’s a monster,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, quite harshly for him. “She’s only a child.”
We lapsed into silence. Fergus and Dan had been asleep since we crossed the river. Two months ago—was it only that recently?—a traffic jam with comatose children could have been classified as “quality time,” a chance to catch up, listen to music together, chat idly. As it was, it felt like purgatory. Over the last month, things had, if it were possible, become even more strained. Jake had become withdrawn to the point where even the routine politeness between us, the going-through-the-motions, had seized up.
I said, after a while, “Well at least I like Mark and Louisa.”
Jake grunted. It’s true, I did. They lived in north London, and in the way in which friendship as you get older is increasingly dictated by geography, we never saw as much of them as we’d have liked. They were a bit unconventional, or as unconventional as anyone we ever knew was, which wasn’t saying much. Mark, a copywriter at Jake’s agency, was one of those energetic people who is always said to be “brilliant” with children. He was the one who’d run the barbecue and organize the kites and untangle the lines for tickling the crabs. He was the one his children, or anyone’s children for that matter, ran to when they scraped their knees. Louisa, on the other hand, would emerge death-white at 10:00 a.m., grope for a cigarette and a mug of black coffee, and wail what a terrible mother she was, while wishing she was somewhere else. We always had a nice time with them. Or we used to.
I looked across at Jake and noticed how gray around the gills he was looking. There were bags under his eyes and a nick on his chin, with a scab on it, where he must have cut himself shaving. Probably using the razor I borrowed to deal with the regrowth from my Paddle wax. I said, suddenly disarmed by his vulnerability, “Are you exhausted? Would you like me to drive?”
“I’m fine,” he said coolly.
We had reached the fast bit of the highway. When the traffic had cleared after a roundabout, Jake had put his foot down sharply on the accelerator and we had swerved to the left so aggressively I had gripped both sides of my seat. I continued to grip, chin jutting into my chest, right foot stretched out on an imaginary brake, just a little bit longer than was necessary—to make a point.
After a while, when the point wasn’t picked up, I said, “So what’s happening with Kyushi?”
There was a pause. Then he said, as if it didn’t matter, “They liked our pitch best. So, er, yup, they’re sticking with us.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Jake? When? When did you find out?”
“Yesterday. It’s what I was celebrating last night. I thought you realized.”
“But I didn’t . . . When you said you were having a few beers, I thought . . . You might have said.”
“I didn’t think you were interested,” he said. “As long as I bring in the money . . .”
“I cannot believe you said that,” I said. “It’s unfair.”
“Is it?” he said, turning to look at me. “Is it?”
“Yes, of course. Anyway, I wish I’d known.”
“Too late now,” he said briskly. “And Maggie, do me a favor. At least pretend to enjoy yourself, okay?”
Five things I swore I’d never do when I had children.1. Add the baby’s name to the list of people unable to get to the phone right now, on the answering machine.
2. Send Christmas cards of specially mounted family scenes.
3. Carry any sort of padded bag, with nursery animals on it, even for “changing” purposes.
4. Wear pastels.
5. Go away with other people.
So far I had managed to abide by the first four of these promises. But nobody’s perfect.
It was dark when we arrived at the Old School House, Cotley. Ed and Pea’s Kyushi Adventurer (4-wheel drive; profile: would-be urban warrior or adman keen to make impression with client) had already rammed a path up to the front door. A Renault Espace was squeezed in behind it.
“Last here, then,” I said, as we parked on the lane outside.
I got out and breathed in the sharp fresh country air, a cocktail of leaves and salt, mown grass and manure. Jake heaved our bags out of the trunk in silence and together we eased our way up the drive, past the kangaroo bars to the front door.
“Hello, everyone!” hailed Ed, coming to greet us at the door with a dishcloth in his hand. “Find it okay? Great. Come in. Welcome. Welcome. Lovely to see you, Maggie. How are you?” He put on his teensy-weensy little girl’s voice for this last question, as if addressing a flower fairy.
“I’m fine,” I said heartily, but he had already turned to Jake and was gripping his forearm.
“Kyushi, Kyushi, Kyushi,” he said in his ear. “Fucking brilliant,” he said loudly.
Jake said, “Yup. Isn’t it?”
“What an evening,” Ed continued. “I hear you were in the office today. I didn’t make it in. I was going to come in for lunch, but . . .” He flicked his finger across his brow.
Jake suddenly felt the pocket of his jacket. “Shit. I left it at home. I forgot to cancel something next week.” He looked at his watch. “Is there a phone here? I might just catch Judy in the office.”
Ed was steering us into the house. “There isn’t,” he said. “But you can use mine. It’s in my jacket. In there—” He moved his head to indicate a door behind him, then turned to me. “Maggie. I’ll show you round.”
The house was charming. There was a series of interconnecting rooms on the ground floor, all so tastefully decorated you fully expected to find a film crew at work on some elegant English drama. The woodwork was painted powder blue, the floorboards were sanded, and the sofas loosely covered in various neutral shades of linen. It was warm, despite the chill in the air outside. A fire was lit in the main sitting room. And above it there
was a collection of beautifully chosen objects. What else could you want? Central heating and a candle sconce in the shape of an antelope. A tumble dryer and the stars at night.
“Where are the others?” I said.
“Oh, right.” Ed’s voice lowered. “Pea, I’m afraid, has gone to bed. Migraine, poor love. She’s had a terribly stressful week at work. She had a very important film to finish. It was about battered women, phw.” He shook his head in admiration. “It really took it out of her. And the others—Mark and Louisa—have gone for a quick drink at the pub. I’m holding the fort. I didn’t want to leave Pea on her own in case any of the children woke up. Clarice is out like a light, but the other two . . .” He gave a small shudder. “Bit wild I think.”
It occurred to me that Mark and Louisa’s children, who seemed no wilder on the few times I had met them than any other six- and eight-year-olds, attended a state school. It may perhaps have disconcerted Ed, whose daughter was at Bolton Prep, to meet children who didn’t speak more poshly than their parents.
“We’d better get ours in,” I said.
“Yes, come up, come up,” said Ed. He bounded ahead of me up the stairs. “I’ll show you where you are first . . . We’re in here—” He lowered his voice to a whisper and waved to the room at the top of the stairs. “Clarice is in—here. Mark and Louisa have got this room so they can be next to the room with the bunk beds, and you’re in . . . um . . . in here.” He opened the door to a perfectly adequate room at the end of the corridor, its only immediate drawbacks being the extra mattress on the floor and the crib in the corner. “Thought you’d want to have the children close to you,” he said.
“Can Fergus not share with Clarice?” I said at the doorway, not even going in.
“Do you mind terribly if he doesn’t? She’s such a light sleeper . . .”
I stomped out to the car, muttering under my breath. Jake came up behind me and, when I told him about the sleeping arrangements, pulled me by the arm.
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