by Anna Maxted
‘It’s like someone dying after a long illness,’ I said. ‘You think, because you know what’s going to happen, it won’t affect you. Then it does and you’re knocked flat.’ I glared at him. ‘You better not put this in one of your books. I tell you, if I’m flipping through The Totally Fabulous Guide to Financial Dispute Resolution this time next year, and I see a reference to the Rupert Fitzherbert Case, you are for it!’
He giggled. It was very attractive. ‘What are you doing now?’
I glanced down at the bump. ‘I thought I’d finish this brownie, then go on to a club.’ I smiled. ‘On the whole, I’m extraordinarily demanding, but right now, all I want is a jacket potato with lots of butter, a hot bath – not too hot, and just three inches of water – and then, I want to fall into a bed with clean sheets, and sleep for twelve hours without being kicked.’
‘I don’t kick in bed,’ said Barnaby. I looked at him, and he blushed, and said, ‘But of course! You were referring to bébé Clyde! The little scamp! I knew that!’ He paused. ‘Any update on George?’
I kept looking at him, and I said, ‘George backed off. His parents heard and went loopy. Now he’s offering to buy me breast pads and such. So, I think it might turn out ok with him. A good divorce.’
Barnaby said, ‘That’s terrific news. Terrific. I’m delighted. Not that we wouldn’t have crushed him to a fine chalk in the witness box, but we can always do without getting our knickers in a twist – terrific!’
I smiled. I liked the way he talked, as if he was a part of my divorce. ‘Thank you. So what are you doing now?’
I found I couldn’t wait to hear his answer. I was intrigued to hear how the great Barnaby Alcock celebrated victory. Did he fire off a few cannonballs in his extensive back yard?
Barnaby opened his rucksack, and got out his ankle clips. ‘Ideally,’ he said. ‘I’d like to run you a bath, bake you a potato, wash your sheets, and tuck you under them. What do you say?’
I said, ‘You want to what me under the sheets?’
‘Tuck you,’ said Barnaby. Then he blushed.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t like to have sex with me?’
‘Cassie,’ said Barnaby, ‘I dream of having sex with you. In fact, I think about it so often that I’ve probably ruined it for myself. If, theoretically, of course, it were to happen. Ever. Or tomorrow morning, after you’ve had the twelve-hour sleep.’
I tried to keep my face stern. ‘Barnaby, look at me.’
Barnaby looked. ‘I think you’re God’s earth beautiful.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Look at my situation.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I should find a woman with a less . . . complex situation. But, she wouldn’t be you. And I do like babies. They’re like little animals. I might make a hash of it at first, giving it a water bowl instead of a bottle, but I—’
‘Barnaby,’ I said, ‘for the love of God, will you stop talking for a minute, and kiss me.’
Lizbet
Chapter 39
I’ve always been bad at arguing. Cassie was always good. I preferred it that way. She was always convincing me to do things I didn’t want to do. I convinced her of nothing. I didn’t mind – I didn’t want the responsibility. I knew – from my experience of being convinced – that while it is possible to win people over to your opinion, this is only a good outcome superficially. Because after a while, some tiny thing will go wrong, at which point they will revert to their original viewpoint, and resent you for bullying them out of it (and for exposing their weak will – so you won’t have won after all.)
If Tim didn’t want my children then I wasn’t going to argue. I just wouldn’t have children.
I informed him that I’d return the following day to collect my thesaurus, my thermal vest, and other essentials. It occurred to me that I now had the rest of my life to correct the nation’s grammar. I should feel grateful that – at least, within my head and possibly a notebook, in which I’d detail each mistake and my amendments – the world would now be orderly, regulated and error-free. I also had to think about keeping myself warm, as there was no one else to do it. The next afternoon, I found my belongings in a plastic bag on the doorstep.
I was walking away from the house with a face like a barracuda, when Tabitha emerged from next door. She was dragging an enormous black bin bag along the ground, and muttering.
‘Not a woman’s job, but no, I have to do bloody everything – Lizbet! Darling! Come in for a coffee.’ She heaved the bag into the wheelie bin like Atlas dropping off the planet. ‘We’ve got a new coffee maker – it grinds the beans from scratch – I said to John Lewis –’ Tabitha often spoke of John Lewis as if the store were a personal friend – ‘“I need a machine that wrings the beans for every last drop of caffeine,” and the woman recommended this beast! It cost over a thousand pounds – which Jeremy wasn’t too happy about – but it’s worth it. I see it as a serious investment in staying awake. Darling, you seem quiet.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. I was about to say, ‘Except Tim doesn’t want to have a baby with me – so no babies for me – a bit of a spoke in the wheel of my life,’ when I decided against. I was thirty-three now, not three. In fact, I was about to be thirty-four. I had to make the choice to live my life as it was, not as it might have been.
‘It’s my birthday on Sunday week,’ I said, instead.
Tabitha washed her hands at her porcelain sink, dried them on kitchen roll, and stared at a thick instruction manual. After a minute, she looked up. ‘Your birthday!’ she cried. ‘Ooh, I love birthdays! What have you got planned?’
Tabitha set a lot of store by birthdays, her own in particular. Jeremy was always required to lay out the red carpet – dinner reservations, bunting, fireworks over the Thames – or else. Whereas I felt she was at the age where you started scaling down the celebrations.
I said, ‘Last year we went to the seaside.’
It was one of our rules. You don’t work on your birthday. Ever! I’d taken the day off, and Tim had driven us to Botany Bay, near Margate. It was a lovely sandy beach, not crowded, everyone eating hot dogs behind windbreaks. All the men had tattoos, and most of the women. Everyone was brown, except me, and I wondered if I was the only person who spent most of every summer indoors. Tim asked if I wanted a coffee – there was a little blue hut in the corner selling food and drink – and I’d said, ‘Only if it’s filter.’
Tim had laughed and said, ‘Lizbet. Look around you.’
I’d looked, and felt my middle-class primness like a boil on my neck. That was the thing about Tim – he teased but there was no malice. That was my trouble. I appeared easygoing, but I took a lot of patience.
‘The seaside!’ cried Tabitha, tossing aside the instruction manual and reaching for the cafetière. ‘What a super idea! We’ll all go! A family day out! I’ll make a cake – well –’ she sighed and didn’t quite meet my eye – ‘I’ll probably buy it, if the truth be known. I don’t have a minute these days. Well, that’s not strictly true. I have a minute, at least four times a day. But I need more. I need, say, four lots of twenty minutes.’
I felt that Tabitha wasn’t content. Or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe she just required backup. I saw that she loved her children more than anything, but that she couldn’t always cope. It made me think of Vivica, and re-evaluate. As a little girl, I was renowned for my compliments, mainly to our mother.
‘Vivica, I like your dress.’
‘Vivica, I love you.’
‘Vivica, I like your shoes.’
‘Vivica, I really like you, Vivica.’
And Vivica would reply, tersely, and with a tense look on her face, ‘Thank you, darling. I like you too.’
If I didn’t initiate the conversation, I never got a compliment from my mother. When I did, I could eke one out of her, but the jagged look on her face was never absent for long. Maybe she just wanted everything to be perfect for us, and was forever disappointed that we, as children, made perfection impossible.
Tabitha seemed to need a day at the beach – her relationship with Jeremy functioned better in a group – so I didn’t resist. I had nothing else planned, and I had no wish to be alone on my birthday with the Morrissey album of my own mind for company. I decided to invite Cassie. She’d left an ecstatic message on my phone the day before, announcing that Ivan and Sheila had forced George to call off the dogs. I was piqued that his parents had omitted to mention my part in his downfall, but tried not to be. I wasn’t naturally selfless – I thrived on being told what a delightful person I was.
I took after our mother in so many ways it was embarrassing.
I decided to invite Vivica and our father too. They could be incorporated into Tabitha’s Could You Hold The Baby For A Sec rota (leaving Tabitha free to scour Homes & Gardens, Foxtons’ brochure of Unique & Exclusive Properties, and a thousand overpriced catalogues peddling children’s clothes, toys, and various unnecessary hand-made wooden accessories). Some people invite parents and siblings to their birthday events without even thinking, but for me it was a bold move, as my natural assumption was, they all had better things to do.
‘Darling, we’d love to come! Will I, as the matriarch, be required to bake a cake? Thank God! I’ll send your father to Tesco. What’s that, Geoffrey? He says we’ll have to set off at nine sharp to avoid the traffic. He’s looking it up on the computer now. He says it shouldn’t take longer than an hour and a half.’
As I recalled, the journey took two and a half hours, but I didn’t comment. Our father was a mild-mannered and peaceable man, but he drove like a devil with his bum on fire. Tim and I followed him once to a wedding out of town and, in our efforts to keep up, found ourselves airborne for most of the journey. ‘I doubt,’ Tim had said, ‘if there was any wear and tear on his tyres at all.’
Cassie’s response also surprised me.
‘Of course I’ll come.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I’d prefer to sit at home and listen to the roof contractors across the road cutting metal.’
I smiled. ‘It wouldn’t be a strain on Baby Cleetus?’
‘Baby Cleetus would like it known that he’d be much amused by a day at the beach.’
‘The toilets are a bit Third World. I’ll bring packs of tissues and antiseptic wipes.’
‘Oh God, Lizbet,’ said Cassie, suddenly. ‘You’re far more suited to this mother thing than I am.’
‘What!’ I said, my voice shrill. ‘Don’t be silly. What are you talking about?’ All of a sudden, my ugly inner thoughts came pouring out – a great writhing brain-like mass of black worms – thunk! – landing on the carpet. ‘Please, Cassie, I know you mean it in the kindest way, but the fact is, I’m never going to be a mother, so don’t say it again. It’s too painful, and I can’t think about it. I saw Tim on Friday, and he . . . ended everything. He said he doesn’t want children with me. So that’s final. Because I don’t want children with anyone else.’
Cassie was silent. Then she said, ‘If that is really true and you’re not exaggerating—’
‘I’m not,’ I said sharply.
‘Then,’ said my sister, a woman of absolutes, ‘you strike him off and begin again. You want children more than anything. Don’t make a decision that goes against your heart’s desire’ – what! Pregnancy was turning her soft – ‘because you’re afraid to hope. You can still hope. You can still wish. There’s no point in living if you don’t wish for anything. You might meet Someone Else.’
I was touched, not convinced. What spurned woman wants Someone Else? Someone Else was a man who folded his socks, had a select cache of racist jokes (a man’s home is his castle, say what you like there!) disliked badgers, couldn’t spell anagram, or tell you what one was. I wanted a Tim! Someone Else wouldn’t get me. I was too weird, too special-interest for Someone Else.
I’d been going out with Tim for three months, when I walked into the lounge with an open pack of pancetta.
‘Tim,’ I’d said, ‘is pancetta mainly fat?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Oh, ok then, I’ll put it back.’
‘Why? What have you done with it?’
‘I ate a strip, just the red bit.’
‘Babe, it’s raw. It’s raw bacon.’
‘Oh! Is it? I thought it was like parma ham.’
I studied the pack, accusingly – smoked, blah, unique flavour, blah, and in tiny (capital) letters, MUST BE COOKED. Tim was smiling up at me from the sofa, but I was feeling like a woman (never mind a Jew) who ate raw bacon. You are what you eat. I was a pig. I’d literally spelled it out for him! He’d called me Babe. That was the name of a pig, right?
‘Lizbet,’ Tim had said, ‘it’s . . . similar.’
I dragged myself back to the unappetising present, and said to Cassie, ‘I don’t want kids with someone else. So . . . it looks like I won’t be having them.’
‘You are so like Mummy I could scream. Plate, bowl, coffin, remember? See things for what they are. Know the difference between a challenging situation and a tragedy.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And yet,’ she added, her voice gentle, ‘there are so many differences between you and Mummy. You always consider how everyone else might feel, or what they might need. I’m going to be a crap mother. I’m only good at thinking of myself.’
‘That’s not true,’ I told her. ‘And how can anyone know how they’ll be as a mother, until the baby’s right there?’ I paused, relieved of a chance to change the subject. ‘Are you worried about doing this without George?’
‘No. And George will be around. I realise I want him to have a part in this. Despite everything. It wouldn’t be right otherwise. But he’ll have to fit in with my plans. Do you remember Barnaby?’
‘The blond six-foot super-barrister with the beauteous face, fabulous physique, and charming conversation? No, I don’t recall.’
‘He seems to think he’ll be sticking around.’
‘Cassie!’
She was trying not to sound too happy, I could tell.
‘We’ll see.’
‘My God!’ It was good to feel another person’s joy – it made me feel human. I realised also that it didn’t matter if she was unaware that I’d helped tame George. All that mattered was, I’d helped to make my sister happy. I was like a celebrity backing a worthy cause without boasting about it. I liked myself.
‘That’s wonderful! So what happened?’
‘Oh, the usual. So may I drag him along on Sunday week?’
Oh, the usual! Was she even female? ‘You may. I don’t think he’ll spoil the view. Lovely. Ok then.’
I was edging towards ‘Goodbye’, but Cassie interrupted. She never had cared for hints. ‘So when you spoke to Tim, what did he say exactly?’
I considered saying, ‘Oh, the usual;’ told her the whole saga.
‘Hello?’ I said, when I finally stopped talking, and there was no response.
‘Elizabeth,’ said my sister, ‘you have high expectations of the people who love you. You think they should know everything about you – and when they don’t, because no one’s that smart – you take it to mean that they don’t love you. Well, you’re a big girl now, and it’s time to apply some rational thought. Tim made you a study because he thought that was what you wanted. You flipped out because the sight of it scared you to death. It was a shock. The nursery, gone! There was your fear of never having kids, in 3-D, right in front of you.
‘Listen, girl,’ her voice softened, ‘he wants you. He wants your children. But I am instructing you to do something proper – write to him and explain the scariness of Friday, for God’s sake. Then give him time to get over it, and it will all be fine – on one condition. There is one crucial error that you could make, and you have to promise me that you will avoid it at all costs. So I am telling you,’ She paused.
I held my breath and pressed my ear to the phone, eager to catch this bright jewel of wisdom as it fell.
‘Just don’t w
ig out.’
‘Sorry? What? Is that a legal term?’
‘Yeah, it’s what I tell the judge.’
‘All right,’ I said, and I felt the beginnings of a smile. ‘I promise, I won’t wig out.’
Cassie
Chapter 40
Barnaby was sitting on the floor, a vision in boxer shorts, trying to put the cot together.
Quick, somebody, make a poster!
‘So, do your parents know that you’re shacked up with a . . . me?’
I found I couldn’t say it.
At Cambridge University, my friends were – apparently – some of the most intelligent people in the country. Their confidence was inbred, they’d been packed off in short trousers, from their Queen Anne houses to the finest public schools in the land, and their ascent to Oxbridge was not an amazing achievement – as it was for the likes of me – it was an expectation, a tradition. Generations of their families were, for instance, Magdalene men. And yet, despite this wealth of education, once or twice, they showed their ignorance.
‘Did you get a taxi from the station, Matthew?’
‘No, I walked. I’m a bit of a Jew.’
It wasn’t malicious. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, whatever – they liked me, I was cute. But they’d never met anyone Jewish before – or so they thought – and so, I was always the little Jew to them, it was how they defined me. Here, I was exotic – a shock to me, having grown up in the city, gone to a good state school with white kids, black kids, middle class, working class, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Japanese kids, Romanian kids, Pakistani kids . . . blond, ginger, curly-haired, and oh, I don’t know! No one cared – perhaps because if they did, they’d have no friends – as there was no uniformity, we were all different.
I’d never been self-conscious about my religion before. But at Cambridge, I was. And while there were other differentiating factors between me and the Lukes and Johns – after all, the entire point of private school education is to leave its distinguishing mark on the forehead of each subject – for the first time in my life, I felt like an outsider.