I said, “What do you mean?”
“None of us is perfect.”
“I know, but what do you mean?”
Ed began to take in a deep breath, as if he was about to say something, but then stopped it and didn’t. He dropped the stones he was holding, dusted his hands on his trousers, and shook his head as if he’d changed his mind. He stood up abruptly, pulling himself physically together. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Forget it.”
“Go on,” I said. “What do you mean? Who’s not perfect?”
“I was just making conversation,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.” He’d started moving away and down the beach. He began to run, careening downhill into his usual self. He put his arms out like an airplane. “Ngwooooow,” he said, charging into Penny and Joe. “Okay, campers!” he hollered. “How about a bite of lunch?” Even from where I was sitting I could see him pretending to take a chunk out of Louisa’s shoulder.
We should, in retrospect, have gone back to the cottage for warmed-up stew. As it was, we went to one of those cozy-looking seafood cafés, which pretends it’s cheap and cheerful but is full of people eating seriously, and expensively, off gingham tablecloths, heads ducked so as not to bang against the plastic lobsters hanging from the ceiling.
Ed darted off when we got to the main square and returned with Pea and Clarice. Clarice had been bought a jigsaw puzzle from a souvenir shop and she started unwrapping it while we were still waiting for a table, dropping pieces left, right, and center, and squealing whenever somebody trod on a piece of the Little Mermaid. We were all squashed against the door, with our arms full of coats, because it was steamy in there out of the wind, and Fergus had his hands in the air, wanting to be picked up, and Dan was writhing in my arms, trying to poke his fingers through the fishing net that was slung across the window, and everyone else was milling and tripping over chair legs. People at the tables kept looking round to see what the commotion was, which, on the one hand, made me want to bow my head in apology and embarrassment, and on the other, I wanted to curl up under the table and cry.
I said to Jake, “Do you think you could take something? I’ve got my arms full here.”
He said, “What do you want me to take exactly?”
“I don’t know. Anything,” I snapped. “Take Dan.”
I was about to suggest we beat a retreat when Pea said from the floor where she was picking up pieces of puzzle, “I don’t know why we’re doing this. There’s lots of delicious bourguignonne left back at the house.” Suddenly, I was eating out’s biggest fan. “Yes but no hot crab ramekin. I can’t wait for my hot crab ramekin.”
When we finally squeezed into a table, negotiating the high chair round the legs, settling each child in proximity to at least one parent, confiscating the menus before they were waved too wildly, and the napkin-wrapped cutlery before it was scattered, matters disintegrated even further. Fergus was overexcited. He was bouncing up and down in his chair. He was banging the table, chanting, “Er, er, er” in a moment of regression. The older children joined in too, turning it into a game. Joe got hold of the salt and pepper shakers and started banging those too, and he made Clarice cry by spilling her Coke. “Grow up all of you,” shrieked Pea. “Enough, I say. Enough.” We all turn into our parents in the end.
I was at the opposite end of the table from Jake with a small mountain range of children’s heads between us. Ed was next to me on my right. Ignoring the chaos, he had his face in the wine menu. “White all right for everyone?” he said, as if he was offering us a choice, then, without pausing, to the waiter, “Pouilly Fumé, please.” He sniffed it when it came, swirled it in his glass, and brought it to his nose. He nodded at the waiter without looking up.
“Aren’t you supposed to taste it?” I said.
“Actually, no. A sniff’s all that’s needed. All you’re looking for is whether it’s corked or not and you can tell that from the slightest of signs.”
“Like many things in life,” I said, taking a large glug from mine. “The smallest of clues . . .”
He looked at me and then looked away very quickly.
I waited until the food arrived to ask him what he had meant on the beach. I was sure he had been about to say something about Jake’s affair. Could he be an unexpected ally? But, before I did, I had trouble getting his attention away from Clarice, who wanted him to hear her count her scallops in French.
“Un. Deux. Trois . . .”
“So what’s the name of your French teacher?” I interrupted.
“Madame Charbonnel,” she said, still busy with her Coquilles St. Jacques.
Unfortunately, this caught Pea’s attention across the table. She looked up from her pan-fried squid. “Not for long. Madame Charbonnel has announced she’s leaving next half term, to have a baby. So she’s in no one’s good books at the moment.”
Ed had caught Jake’s eye. “Madame Charbonnel,” he said, with his hand on his heart, pretending to swoon.
Pea said, “Except clearly in Ed’s. Madame Charbonnel can’t do a thing wrong as far as you’re concerned, can she? Including,” this to the rest of us, “leaving in the middle of a school year. It couldn’t be more disruptive for the children.”
A flinch of irritation contracted Ed’s forehead. “I’m only messing about,” he said.
“Yes, well, not in front of . . .” Pea inclined her head toward Clarice.
Ed’s jaw stiffened almost imperceptibly. I waited until it got noisy again, until there was a rising tumult around us, blurred voices and children’s cries, like the sea heard through a shell. I concentrated firmly on my glass. I could hear Fergus demanding ketchup for his goujons. Jake admonished, “Fergus!”
“Ketchup PLEASE,” returned Fergus. I saw the contents of Dan’s spoon, catapulted by an errant elbow in a 180-degree radius. I reached across for the Pouilly Fumé and poured myself another drink.
Ed was picking at his Easter bonnet garnish of twirled carrot and parsley next to me. When no one was listening, I said softly, “What did you mean, ‘no one’s perfect’? What were you referring to? I wish you’d tell me.”
He looked frightened. You could almost see the cogs in his brain trying to think of a joke to get him out of it; urgently needed: an ejector seat of wit.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Look, this is a mad house. Let’s eat up and go. Waiter? Check please.”
He did some frantic invisible writing, which caught the eye only of his wife.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Aren’t we going to have coffee?”
“I thought . . .”
She looked irritated with him and turned to the others as if she had decided no longer to register his presence. “Who wants coffee?” she said.
I had been busying myself with Dan. I said, “Ed and I thought we’d take the children for a runaround. You lot have coffee. Jake, will you take Dan? We’ll take the others.”
Jake said, “Er, sure.” He looked a bit nonplussed, though not as nonplussed as Ed who looked as if he wanted to curl up like the carrot on his plate. But I felt defiant. I wanted Ed on my own. I wanted to know what he knew.
We bundled up the children and went outside into the gusty grayness. We walked back to the beach without talking. I hadn’t brought my jacket. I wanted to feel the cold wind again after the hotness of the café. I felt headachey around the eyes as well as pink in the cheeks.
The children had run off back down to the sand. I stopped to take off my shoes and perched on the edge of a breakwater, pulling my dress around my knees. “Listen, you started to say something earlier and then you bottled out.”
“What?”
“Come on, you know you did.”
He looked flustered. “Did I?”
“Yup. I know we don’t really get on, but I liked you for it. I appreciated the fact you wanted to talk to me about it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It made me realize you are my friend as well as Jake’s.”
“Did
it?” He flushed. He started picking at some dried-up seaweed, which had stuck to the breakwater. “I don’t know what to say, really.”
“Well, you don’t have to say anything else, because I know about her. About Claire, I mean.”
“Do you?” He sat down on the stump next to me. It was wet, but he didn’t seem to notice. The red had drained away, leaving his face white. “Did Jake tell you?”
“I worked it out. I’m not stupid.”
“Oh.” He picked at a bobbly string of seaweed attached to the breakwater next to him.
The children were huddled together farther across the beach. Penny was kneeling on the sand and was poking at something with a piece of driftwood. The others had their heads together watching her.
“So?” I tried to make my voice sound light. “How serious do you think it is?”
Ed rubbed his eyes with his seaweedy hands, pushed them back through his hair. “I think it’s very serious. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it wasn’t . . .”
I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I don’t think, until this moment, that it was this. Part of me had assumed that Jake’s relationship with Claire was just about sex. The fabric of my dress suddenly seemed very thin. I said, shivering, “Oh fuck.”
Ed was looking paler than usual. “It’s a terrible mess,” he said in a tight voice.
“You can say that again.”
He had turned his head to stare at the olive sea. There were some sail boats out there now, white envelopes cutting through the waves. I pulled on his shoulder. “So what are you saying, Ed? Time to leave?”
There was a pause before he turned his head back to me. “Maybe. I know Pea wouldn’t stand for things if she knew. I don’t know. What do you think, Maggie? It’s a hard thing to ask, but maybe you could talk to Claire. See what’s going through her mind. That’s one thing I don’t know.”
“The last thing I want to do is talk to Claire,” I said. Then I said, “Fuck.” I didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.
The children had moved apart from each other now. Penny was taking something on the end of her wood down to the water. The smaller ones were following her, but Clarice had started back up the beach toward her father, her face screwed up. I said quickly, before she got to us, “So is it just about sex, Ed? Or is it love?”
He paused before answering. “Are they different?”
Clarice, sobbing, was a few steps from us. “Fergus . . .” she began.
“I wish I knew,” I said.
Chapter 20
That evening, after I’d put the children to bed, I told everyone I needed some air and walked down to the pub in the village. It was your typical country affair: video games built into low tables, wide-screen TV, and local guys discussing crack cocaine in a gaggle in the corner. I ordered a gin and tonic and sat on a stool listening to the landlord talking with a rather dapper middle-aged man in a velvet jacket about the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now: “The original version was much more intense, but the new one’s much longer.” There was a chunky plastic pay phone on the bar. I pushed coins into it and called Pete. But the line was engaged.
I sat on the stool nursing my drink. I didn’t know how long I could be away from the house without drawing attention, but I had to speak to Pete. Ever since my conversation on the beach with Ed, I’d been feeling desperate. It would do me good to hear Pete’s voice, to hear him be nice to me, to check that he was still all right for Tuesday. All this would quell my confusion. Jake didn’t want me anymore, but Pete did. Didn’t he? And, naturally, I wanted to be with him. Why wouldn’t I? Why would I feel anything for Jake anymore? Not after how he’d behaved. Not if things were serious with Claire. There was no point thinking about that. Obviously Pete and I didn’t know each other very well, but that was soon to change. We were proceeding in the right direction. Or were we? Oh, hell.
If the landlord had known what was going through my head, he would no doubt have told me to pull myself together. Worse things, worse things by far (especially in the uncut version) had happened in Vietnam. But he didn’t.
I tried the phone again. This time Pete picked up straight away and said, “What happened there?” as if he was in the middle of a call with someone else.
I said, “What do you mean? Nothing. It’s Maggie. You were engaged.”
He said, “Oh, Maggie. Hi. Right. Sorry. I was talking to someone else and . . . er, they were cut off.”
I said, “Do you want me to ring back?”
And he said, “No, it’s all right,” but after that I felt wrong-footed, as if I had to talk fast and get off.
“I just needed to hear your voice,” I said. “It’s awful here. I’m longing to see you. It feels like ages.”
“I’m sorry, Mags. I’ve been busy as shit.”
“It’s all right, I understand. But you’re still on for Tuesday?”
“You bet. Can’t wait. A whole evening of . . .”
“Yes, but we’re going to go out, aren’t we? Do something? You’re still happy to do that?”
“Oh yeah. Of course. How are you?”
“Oh God. You wouldn’t believe . . .” I began to tell him about the weekend, but he cut me off. “Look, my little pumpkin”—he said this ironically—“I’m sorry. But I’d better go. There’re some people waiting for me upstairs . . .”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Do you miss me?”
“Of course. Mmmmmm.” He paused. “See ya, all right?”
“See you.”
I didn’t feel much better after this conversation, but I could at least take comfort in having spoken to him.
There was an uneasy atmosphere when I got back to the house. Pea was clattering about in the kitchen, making a meal out of cooking a chicken. Louisa and I had wanted to get take-out from the Thai restaurant in the village, but Pea had insisted. When I asked if there was anything I could do to help, she told me it was all under control now, thanks. She had been cool with me ever since Ed and I had taken the children for a walk. “Can I get you a drink?” I asked, pouring myself a glass from the bottle of wine by the sink.
She flinched. “Oh. I’d set that aside for the gravy. Never mind.” A clipped, martyrish smile. Then, eyebrows raised, “Maybe I’ll wait until Mark and Louisa have got their children to bed. If they ever do.”
It was 9:30 p.m. before they did and 10:00 p.m. before we sat down for supper.
Pea was visibly steaming with irritation—Clarice had been in bed since 7:00 p.m., and the chicken had been in the oven for hours.
“It’ll be fine,” said Ed.
“It won’t,” she said under her breath. “It’ll have completely dried out. Anyway, I don’t know what I’m doing with this oven. I don’t know where I am with gas.”
“Do you have electricity at home?” asked Louisa with calming interest.
“No. I have an Aga.”
“Natch,” said Ed, looking at Jake.
Pea had been halfway out to the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway. “Sorry?”
“Nothing,” he said. She was still looking at him, a glare that turned the rest of us to stone. I expected Ed to whimper apologies. That’s what the old Ed would have done. Instead, he said, “It’s just having an Aga over in Morton. It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s the sort of stove you expect to find in a country farmhouse. But we never wear wellies, we never go out in the rain—Clarice doesn’t even own a proper mack—we don’t have a cat. We never cook cakes or bread or . . . I don’t know whatever else an Aga is supposed to be good for. We’re out at work all day, and yet sitting at home, cold and empty, except for the au pair doing her fingernails, is this complete replica of a country kitchen. In the suburbs of London. It just seems a bit . . .”
“A bit what?” Pea’s teeth were gritted.
“A bit pretentious.”
Everyone else started talking very quickly then.
“Raeburn . . .” said Louisa.
“Wet socks . . .” said Mark.
Ja
ke told a story about his college room and a hot plate. I began to recount the time I’d left a burner on all night. But Ed went very quiet, and Pea left the room.
The meal passed awkwardly. Mark and Louisa tried as hard as they could to rally spirits—heaping compliments onto Pea, insisting she not lift another finger, tearing into each other’s table-clearing techniques (“Don’t scrape, Mark—that’s so common. That’s the worst thing you can do apparently. Straight to the bottom of the social order.” “You’re one to talk; you’re spilling!”), knocking each other around the head in mock fury, as if it was totally normal for one half of a couple to be at the other half’s throat. Unfortunately, this display only served to point up the solidarity between them. Jake and I were polite, while Ed and Pea were like opposite ends of a magnet. Ed turned to me a few times and asked the odd gentle question about my daily life, out of sympathy for my plight, I supposed. Pea glared from the other end of the table.
We were having coffee when the subject of the country came up again. Mark had gone outside for a cigarette, and when he came back in he said something about how wonderful the stars were when there weren’t street lights in the way and that he’d thought he’d heard an owl. “I don’t know,” he said, “but maybe I could get used to this.”
Pea, who hadn’t said much up until then, said suddenly, “Well exactly. It’s no wonder that some of us want to live in the country. It’s not ‘pretension.’ The quality of life is much better here.”
“You mean we could afford a bigger house,” Ed said. “That’s why the quality of life would be better.”
“Maybe. But there are other things. Fresher, cleaner air. The great outdoors.”
“Remind me to buy you your very own waxed Barbour country jacket.”
Mark jumped in quickly. “You’re right, Pea. No traffic. No trucks. No airplanes taking off and landing at all hours. No Tube strikes. No speed bumps. No multiplexes and play zones. Fresh air and country walks, and pissing about in the garden. That’s what I did when I was growing up.”
Louisa’s nose was wrinkled up on one side. “Mark,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re serious. I’d hate it. Stuck with the children in the middle of nowhere. Roads full of mud.”
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