by Fiona Gibson
Constance’s unusually small feet are tucked into ochre lace-up shoes. She wears a dark brown cardigan done up to the neck and a pleated skirt that she picks at. She wants to help, and tries to break into the kitchen, but Jonathan guides her back outside. “Relax, Mum,” he insists. “Chat to Nina.”
Constance squints in the sharp October sunlight. She is trapped in the yard with her pretend daughter-in-law and Ben on her lap. He regards her as if she has stepped from a space rocket. Jonathan brings out two glasses of wine. Constance shakes her head at her glass and motions for him to place hers on the flagstones. She’s in nonconversational mode. We stare at the brick wall bordering our backyard as if poised for the latest movie to be projected upon it.
My parents are late. Or perhaps they’ve forgotten. When I called to invite them, my mother appeared to have difficulty in remembering who I was. “We thought you should meet Constance,” I said, “seeing as you’ll be sitting together in the registry office.”
“Constance?” came the distant voice, as if she were holding the receiver at arm’s length.
“Jonathan’s mother,” I said, expecting her to say, “Jonathan? Who is this calling?” But just in time she said, “Oh! Of course we’ll come. We’d love to see…the baby.” Perhaps she had forgotten his name, too.
They arrive when the chicken should be sizzling nicely, filling the yard with tempting smells, but the embers aren’t hot enough. Jonathan prods the coals with a long-handled fork; barbecue behavior, useful for enabling males to duck out of family situations. Constance rubs her shoes together and stares ahead. She holds Ben, but he could be a teapot for all the interaction that’s going on.
Jonathan douses the coals with lighter fluid in an attempt to rev up the heat. Mum sniffs loudly. She wants to smoke, of course. It’s allowed, as we’re outside. And she’s weighing it up: would anyone mind? Where should she sit so her smoke doesn’t waft into Constance’s face? She dips into her bag, pulls out a soft packet and lights up. Constance flicks her watery eyes at my mother, then looks back at the wall.
Dad hovers over Jonathan at the barbecue. “It never cooks through to the middle, does it?” he says. “You think—it must be ready by now. And you bite it and it’s bloody inside.”
At the word bloody, Constance glares at my dad. “Don’t say that, Jack,” says my mother. “Jonathan’s doing his best.” She turns to Constance. “Isn’t he good, doing the cooking? Nina says it’s his area. All she does is grab a few bits from the deli and slap them on a plate.” She finishes with a little laugh. Constance scowls, deciding—if further proof were needed—that I am not about to cut it as a superwife. “What sort of wedding food are you having, Nina?” asks my mother loudly.
“Just a buffet. Salmon, seafood, salady bits and pieces.”
“We eat very simply in France, don’t we, Jack? We have a place there,” she tells Constance.
Now Constance views my parents as swanky folk, even minor aristocracy, with unnecessary homes dotted around Europe. Not that my mother looks grand—she’s wearing a faded ivy-patterned dress, which looks like one more wash might finish it off—but she could just be slumming it.
“Looking forward to the wedding?” she asks, running out of steam with her Befriending Constance enterprise.
Constance stares at Mum’s rumpled collar and says, “What?”
“The wedding. Are you—”
“I’ve never been to a wedding,” Constance growls.
“Except your own,” says my mother.
Constance’s eyes, though insignificantly gray, beam powerfully. “I have never been to a wedding. Jonathan’s father and I were never married. Jonathan,” she says, louder now, “will you take me home before it’s too late? I don’t like you driving in the dark.”
“This is London, Mum,” he says, examining a smoldering chicken thigh. “It’s never properly dark.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” my mother tells Constance.
Jonathan slaps chicken onto plates, forgets to pass round the salad which sits in a glass bowl in the kitchen, and tips wine into his throat, as if gargling.
Mum examines her plate. “This looks wonderful,” she says, “but I might eat later at home. Ashley’s concerned about the antibiotics in chicken.”
“It’s organic,” says Jonathan.
“It’s getting late,” murmurs Constance. “Jonathan?”
Mon: springwater shoot. Bring white babygro & selection of toys.
Tue: My Secret due in. Who to interview????
Wed: Order wedding wine, order cake, check to Fox, chase up RSVPs. Transport from registry to Fox? Able Towing ad. 3:00 p.m. start? Eliza’s to try on dress.
Thur: Xmas audition. 2:00 p.m.? Check with Lovely. Fri: Jonathan’s birthday. Beth baby-sit?
“They coped,” says Beth, “but things are never done exactly how you’d do them yourself.” She’s back from the country, plumper and less greasy around the T-zone. “I missed him, you know,” she adds. “Maybe that’s what we needed. A little holiday from each other.” She has brought back painted wooden letters spelling Maudie and two goldfish she won at a fete. They will go in the playroom. Rosie will clean out the tank because, according to Beth, fish count as playthings, and the cleansing of playthings is Rosie’s domain.
“Take it you’re not buying that country house?” says Beth, placing a miniature shipwreck in the tank.
“I’m fending him off, though it’ll probably come up on Friday night. It’s his birthday. Could you baby-sit?”
“No problem,” she says, sounding nervous. Ben’s a boy, after all, and he’s already smashed the lid of her teddy biscuit barrel.
“Around seven?”
“Fine,” she says, then adds giddily, “You know the best thing, when I got back? He’d cut that blasted grass.”
The week passes in a flurry of scribbled reminders and the fear of being one second late. The springwater ad is shot against a stark-white background with droplets sprinkling from above. The director is a sorrowful man with a serious chin. He moves awkwardly, as if chipped out of stone. Ben sits squatly on the floor on mounds of what looks like bubble wrap. As the water starts falling, I expect him to storm off the set—or at least crawl like blazes toward me—but he laughs, batting sparkling droplets with his fingers. The other baby, the reserve baby, doesn’t need to be used. “Never mind, it’s just been a nice morning out,” says his mother, her face flat with disappointment.
I spend the next morning scouring the papers for a My Secret idea, but find nothing. I ask Eliza if she’d consider telling her story—“My Toy Boy Lover”—but she just honks down the phone. Promise isn’t her sort of magazine. It’s fit only to line her cat litter tray. I wonder what Chase thinks of the lapdancing story. There was no time to let Rosie read it first. She might have found it, plonked in the kitchen, but it hasn’t been mentioned. I am keeping contact with Beth and Rosie to a minimum. I fear that my forehead, corrugated with worry, will blab: I saw them, doing it. They left Maud in the playpen in a dirty vest, smelling off.
Jess calls from Promise to ask if I could work in a little more detail this week? They’ll run with the lapdancing piece as it is, no time for a rewrite. But they could have done with a twist. She talks squeakily, as if asking the school nurse for a sanitary towel. “Have you done the pictures?” I ask.
“Yesterday. Very natural, the photographer said. Lovely girl. You can’t imagine her getting up to something so tawdry.”
“She’s a dark horse,” I say.
“Will I have this week’s piece from you today?” Jess wants to know.
“It’s nearly finished,” I mumble.
After Ben’s lunch, I march him round the park until he drops off in the buggy. Back home, I bang out a fictitious My Secret, about a woman who knows her husband’s having an affair, but lets it go on because at least he doesn’t bother her for sex. By the time I’ve finished, coinciding with Ben’s wake-up call, I almost believe it’s a real story.
I e-mail it to Jess at Promise, explaining that the woman refuses to have her photo taken. They can use a stock picture out of the drawer. Or take a picture of Jess. Like I care what they do.
The Able Towing ad is shot on the hard shoulder of the M1. All Ben has to do is simmer with photogenicness while being lifted from his car seat by an Irish actor well-practiced at the caring dad act. He’s a Ranald type, looks like he could erect a tent in under a minute. The only time he smiles is when he hands Ben back to me.
Jonathan comes home from work complaining that his team aren’t bonding, despite the three days spent digging a pond. “Everyone spins off, doing their own thing,” he says. “I’m going to have a word.” I wonder what kind of word that might be. Can’t imagine Jonathan shouting, laying down the law. He says, “How did it go with the car people?” Was he spying, watching Ben being held by a surrogate dad? “You said you’d book a minibus,” he says tersely. “To take everyone from the registry office to the Fox.”
“Can’t we use taxis?” I suggest. “There’s only twelve people. They can—”
“I’ll sort it out,” he snaps. He plays an answerphone message from Eliza, reminding me to be round at hers at 8:00 p.m. sharp.
She looks like she’s recently enjoyed too much sex for one person. Her flat has caved in on itself. It could be a jumble sale after the first surge has nabbed the best stuff.
The dress droops at the window in Eliza’s spare room, midway between blue and gray. A label hangs from the shoulder reading Sample: Must Be Returned. I try it on without removing the label. “Turn round,” Eliza commands. My body feels saggy. I need some kind of support, like scaffolding.
“It looks all right from the back,” she says.
The audition suite for the Christmas audition is decked out in clumsy green tinsel, presumably to get the babies in the festive spirit. The ad is for a catalog of toys and household goods: straight from the page to your door. How will I feel if Jonathan buys me a set of three glass-lidded saucepans? That’s what happens. Beth was incensed last birthday when Matthew presented her with a dustbin. She was heavily pregnant, told me about it at the antenatal class. The bin was eye-pleasing as bins go—a sleek design in searing yellow—and contained three bottles of Moët. Well, she didn’t want a bin. And, being with child, she couldn’t drink champagne.
Jonathan and I haven’t thought about Christmas. It’s his birthday tomorrow; I’ve had enough trouble with that. Under our bed lurk two parcels: a briefcase with sharp corners and a hefty-looking combination lock (though his current one is perfectly good) and a three-step men’s skincare kit in a charcoal corduroy pouch. The shop girl might have assumed they were gifts for my dad.
“Nervous?” pipes up a woman whose child refuses to be placated, even by the tinsel and frosted stars dangling from the ceiling.
“No, we’ve done this before.”
She looks at Ben, then at me. “You’re with Little Lovelies aren’t you? And this is the famous Ben.”
Famous Ben looks up at me with a fistful of stars and an expression that asks: do we have to audition? Don’t they know who I am?
It’s not Beth who shows up on Friday evening, but Rosie. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asks, scooping up Ben in his zip-up sleepsuit. “Beth said she wanted some time alone with Matthew. I love your dress.”
Apart from a couple of try-ons, the black dress has spent too long wrapped in tissue, in a dark place, like Beth’s mother’s glass animals. It smells musty and doesn’t look as black as it should. The shoes are searingly uncomfortable. I’m not up to such brazen footwear.
Jonathan wears a light blue shirt and nondescript black trousers; it’s as far as he is able to stray from the office look. He stares at my dress, wants to say something, but not in front of Rosie. We leave detailed instructions: what to do should Ben be reluctant to go down in his cot. Babycare recommends a trial run, having a baby-sitter round without going out, which seems pointless and embarrassing. What are the parents supposed to do? Hover in the kitchen, sipping wine, pretending it’s a bar? Jonathan shows Rosie where nappies, wipes and Calpol are kept, although Ben’s been changed and doesn’t appear to be running a fever. I’ve laid out his entire collection of toys, except the rusting bike Mum brought for him, so he doesn’t feel abandoned.
“Here’s my pager and mobile and Nina’s mobile and the restaurant number,” says Jonathan, handing her a note with everything written in capitals: BRAZIL UNTIL NINE THEN ODEON. FILM FINISHES 11:15 SHOULD BE HOME 11:45.
“That’s our cab,” I say, eager to escape before Ben clocks his mother’s virtually nude feet and surmises that I’m off to a mysterious place where alcohol is served.
Jonathan climbs into the taxi, brushing invisible dust from his thighs. I turn back to remind Rosie that Ben tends to wallop back his evening bottle and demand a refill; she should take it slowly, give him breaks, make sure he’s properly burped. She knows all this. She knows more about babies than I do.
“I liked the interview,” she says, holding Ben in the doorway. “You wrote it just as I said it.”
“Well, I tried.”
“I just want to thank you,” she says.
Jonathan doesn’t like to eat out but Brazil is not a real restaurant: just a tapas bar, too hectic to pay much attention to what’s on your plate. We stand near the door where it’s less smoky, clutching glasses of wine. Jonathan smiles tensely each time someone buffets past him to reach the cigarette machine. A couple get up from one of the pavement tables, leaving an explosion of oily dishes, torn serviettes and an ashtray brimming with butts and beer bottle tops.
The table wobbles. Jonathan takes a business card from his wallet, folds it and wedges it under a silvery leg. But the table still teeters precariously when we lean on it. The waiter takes our order without looking at us. A gang of five, deeply tanned women at the next table applauds the arrival of an outsize jug of burgundy liquid, festooned with chopped fruit.
We’re unused to being together without the distraction of Ben. I wonder if the tanned girls assume we’re on a first date. We’re still feeling our way. Our sentences start with “so.” And of course the tanned girls don’t notice us; why would they? One receives a text message and shows the others, who yelp like puppies. Jonathan takes my hand under the table and squeezes it.
And I will tell him, in a minute. I’ll wait until the food’s arrived; don’t want a waiter delving about, arranging dishes, when I’m informing Jonathan that his son is soon to appear on national television, being wheeled about in a supermarket trolley with the voice of a forty-five-year-old man. You need a quiet moment to explain that the reason you’re so wrecked is the springwater shoot and the Able Towing ad and the Christmas audition, not to mention the mounting pressure to concoct another My Secret.
I pick at baby squid and some kind of fish with a slimy tomato sauce and bones where you wouldn’t expect them. I line up the bones on my plate. The tanned girls shout at a startlingly attractive blond boy with a portfolio tucked under his arm. He kisses each girl, smothered by cleavage.
Jonathan, I have something to tell you.
A fragment of squid, something like a tentacle, is wedged in my throat. It won’t budge. It’s jammed halfway down with the aid of its suckers. Jonathan looks at me, gripping his fork. The blond boy is playfully massaging the loudest girl’s shoulders. Their jug is already empty. Three of them light cigarettes, taking quick, shallow puffs.
“I don’t know how to start,” I say.
Jonathan blinks rapidly, puts down his fork. “It’s the house. You’re not happy about it. You don’t want to move.”
The waiter appears at our table. “Finished?” he says, regarding the barely touched dishes.
“Yes, thank you,” says Jonathan.
“Would you like anything else?” He watches the tanned girls while loading our plates onto a stainless-steel tray.
“No, thanks,” I say. The loud girl beckons the waiter over, waving the empty jug.
“The house is sold anyway. At least they’ve accepted an offer. I called Garie to check. He’s keeping an eye out for something closer to town.”
How close exactly? You’re either in town or you’re not. I’d rather be stranded in Marmalade Land than in pretend country just off the North Circular. “It’s not the house,” I say, wondering if the tentacle will come back up or work its way down or have to be removed by that nine-year-old doctor at the hospital.
“You don’t want another baby. That’s okay. It’s probably too soon. We have the wedding to think about.”
He looks crushed. His neck is pink against the light blue shirt. There’s a nick on his jaw from shaving. He twists the stem of his wineglass. There’s a splash of meat-ball sauce on his wrist.
Someone heading into Brazil spots me and thunders toward us in an enormous, sapphire-colored dress. It hangs from her neck to her ankles with no discernable seams or structure. Felt Lady’s face is in mine, the voice booming, “Nina, sorry I haven’t been in touch. He’s had a chest infection. I’m worried it’s the damp. I’ve started papermaking and there are buckets of pulp all over the flat.” She looks expectantly at Jonathan.
“This is Jonathan, my fiancé,” I croak. And I cannot remember her name. Does it begin with an F or an H or could that be her kid?
She extends a hand. Jonathan shakes it. “I’m Charlotte,” she says, giving my dress a confused look before biffing her way into Brazil.
We pay and drink the rest of the wine. Jonathan holds my hand as we walk. I feel too old for hand-holding. We stop at the window of a home accessories shop selling globular lamps and delicate tables designed for baby-free homes. “Is it the wedding?” he says. “We don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to.” Rosie flashes into my mind. She’s curled up prettily on our leather sofa, channel hopping, every so often padding through to the bedroom to check that Ben is okay.
“It feels strange,” I say, “being out like this. It’s our first time, isn’t it? Since we’ve had Ben?”
His hand touches the bare bit of my back. I pull my thin jacket around myself. “As long as that’s all it is,” he says.