“There’s plenty of space,” she’d said excitedly, dragging me down to the orchard one day, “and if I scooped the poop to keep the pong at bay, Sebastian would be none the wiser. He never comes down here, anyway.”
“He might see it from the bedroom window,” I said doubtfully. “I’ll tell him it’s a big dog.”
“What, the Hound of Putney Common?”
“Why not?”
I smiled to myself now as I gathered up my son’s belongings—book bag, lunch box, PE kit—and attempted to prise him away from the joys of Orlando’s toy box with its mountains of Lego and remote-control cars, and back to his own, less exciting quarters with no sisters, bantams or ponies. But as I told him the other day as he’d dragged his heels from this very same kitchen, other people’s houses were always more attractive, and Orlando probably felt the same about Rufus’s house. Rufus had turned contemptuous eyes on me.
“Come on, Rufus.” I beamed down at him now.
“We’re going?” The eyes he turned on me now were anguished. “Aren’t we staying for tea?”
My son had yet to enter polite society.
“No, darling,” I said quickly before Kate could offer, “because Daddy’s coming home early tonight so we can all have supper together. That’s nice, isn’t it?”
Not as nice, clearly, as stopping here with Orlando and Laura and Tabitha and sitting around the huge tea table whilst Sandra, the nanny, produced tiny sandwiches with crusts off and meringues in the shape of white mice and melon balls—melon balls!—for pudding; whilst at home, Mummy hacked a doorstep off a loaf and frizbee’d a Jaffa cake at him. But he was an obedient child and I could do a lot with my eyes.
“Alex is coming home early for a change?” Kate got up to show us out. “That’s nice.”
“Well, relatively,” I said nervously, following her down the black-and-white-tiled hallway. “I mean, relatively early, not relatively nice. Nine o’clock rather than ten o’clock, probably.”
She grimaced. “Tell him from me to break the habit of a lifetime and make it back for bath time for once. Really bust a gut.”
I laughed, but was aware of a whiff of disapproval in Kate’s tone. A suggestion that Alex’s after-work socialising—even though it was client-oriented and he loathed it—was excessive and at odds with family life. But then as Alex had pointed out as he’d flopped down exhausted on the sofa the other night, his handsome face racked with tiredness, tie askew, fresh from yet another city cocktail party, it was all very well for Sebastian. His clients were all horizontal and anaesthetised by the end of his working day; there was no chance of one of them sitting up and saying brightly, “Mine’s a pint.”
“And anyway,” he’d observed sourly, rubbing the side of his face and yawning widely, “we can’t all save lives for a living.”
I think Alex was fond of our new best friends, but found them a little worthy for his tastes. An “homme sérieux” was how he described Sebastian, adding, “That man’s never dropped a bollock in his life.”
“Meaning?”
“He can’t let go. Never has a drink and lets his hair down. What’s he afraid of? That he’ll make a prat of himself? So what?”
“Well, he may be an homme sérieux, but he’s also a fairly grand fromage,” I’d replied archly, thinking personally, I wouldn’t mind a little less bollock-dropping around here. Always the last to leave a party, always the life and soul, Alex was the ultimate bon viveur; but then, he would argue, it went with the territory. As a mergers and acquisitions specialist at Weinberg and Parsons, his job was to drum up new business and schmooze clients, and you couldn’t do that on a glass of tomato juice and a face like a wet weekend, now could you?
Rufus and I said our good-byes to Kate and walked across the road. As I let us into the little semi with the Queen Anne door and the pretty stained-glass fanlight, the mess hit me. The house had originally sported a long thin entrance hall but it was dark and gloomy, so Alex and I had knocked the wall through into the adjacent sitting room. The net effect was that you walked straight into one largish, slightly less gloomy room, but straight into clutter. My response—which should have been to stoop and scoop the toys and clothes as I went, like a cotton picker—was to step gingerly over it all, whilst Rufus’s was to run straight through to the only other downstairs room, the kitchen. As I neatly sidestepped a basket of laundry, I thought wistfully of Sandra across the road, but at the moment I couldn’t even justify a cleaner, let alone a nanny. I followed Rufus to the kitchen, where he’d hopped up on to the counter and had got the bread out of the bin. He was hacking away fairly adeptly with a knife.
“Hey, what about having supper with Daddy?”
“Oh.” He paused, mid-slice. “I thought you were just making that up to be like the Barringtons. I didn’t know we really were.”
I laughed and dumped his book bag on the table. “You’re too shrewd for your own good, Rufus Cameron. Come here, I’ll do it.” I took the knife from him.
“What’s shrewd?”
“Um…knowing, I suppose.”
I cut the bread, spread it with peanut butter and folded it into a sandwich for him. He took it and bit into it, still none the wiser. But it was true, I thought, as I watched him sitting on the counter, munching away, swinging his legs in his shorts and grey socks and drumming his heels against the cupboard door, this was a very knowing child. One who tuned into my moods very acutely: who knew when his mother was happy or sad, pensive or nervous. My beautiful boy, with his auburn curls and deep chocolate-brown eyes: edible, clever. One of the things that had astonished me about having a child was that feeling of him being an extension of oneself, another organ pumping away. I wondered if other mothers felt that way. Since I had only one child, I had nothing to compare him with. Sometimes I wondered if our bond was too strong; if I should step back a bit, let out the umbilical cord. Alex said I mollycoddled him, but then Rufus and his father…I licked some peanut butter from my finger and turned to put the bread back in the bin. I shut it with a brisk snap. And to be fair, Rufus wasn’t altogether the son Alex had expected.
“Throw a ball at him and he ducks!” Alex had complained after a disastrous trip to the park when the pair of them had returned looking mutinous. “He needs to toughen up a bit, be more of a lad.” He tossed the rugby ball on to the sofa and flopped down crossly beside it, still in his coat, whilst Rufus ran upstairs.
“He’s nine, Alex. You want him sinking pints and singing rugby songs?”
“No, but I don’t think he should be doing this, either. I mean what’s this all about?” He’d plucked a piece of tapestry Mum had given Rufus from behind a sofa cushion and waved it at me.
“It’s just a bit of sewing,” I’d said, snatching it angrily. “What’s wrong with that?” Though I myself had wondered guiltily about Rufus taking it into school.
“Are you sure you want to take that, darling?” I’d said, eyeing him nervously one morning as he packed the sewing in his bag. “I mean, when will you have time to do it?”
“Oh, I do it at break,” he’d said calmly. “When the other boys are playing football.”
“Right,” I’d breathed. “But don’t they think that’s…you know…odd?”
He’d shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“No! No, of course not.”
I’m ashamed to say, though, that the following morning, when he went to look for it and couldn’t find it, it was at the bottom of my underwear drawer. And I was relieved, when I went to pick him up later, to find him in the thick of a card game with his great mates Arthur and Torquil, a couple of embryonic professors from recorder group.
“A sensitive, musical child,” his teacher had smiled at Alex and me one parents’ evening as we’d sat facing her like giants on tiny Lilliputian chairs; “but not a shrinking violet by any means. Oh, no, he can hold his own in class discussions. He’s
got it up here.” She’d tapped her head and I’d glowed proudly. “Why, only the other day on our nature walk he was telling us the difference between a buttercup and a celandine, and then went on to identify a cowslip for us. He’s definitely our wild flower expert!”
I couldn’t look at Alex.
Now, though, Rufus was settling down with his peanut butter sandwich and his yo-yo in front of The Simpsons, which surely was what any other nine-year-old boy who’d already spent an hour in after-school club and another at a friend’s house would be doing? Aside from sitting down to a proper cooked tea with vegetables, of course.
I hovered in the doorway. “No homework, Rufus?”
“Only reading, and I’ve already done it.” He kept his eyes on Bart and Marge.
“Right.” Probably finished the book, if I knew Rufus.
“I’ve finished the book.”
I smiled. “Well done, darling.”
He turned. “Mum, go. We don’t need quality time every night and I’ve had a play with friends so I’ve done the interactive bit, and there’s protein in the peanuts and fibre in the bread, and I promise I’ll have an apple for pudding, so go.”
Spooky, this child.
“Well, I might just pop up for half an hour, if you’re sure.”
“Course.” He turned back to the television. “And if the phone goes I won’t say you’re painting, I’ll say you’re in the middle of turning out the treacle tart, OK?”
I grinned and picked my way through the debris to the stairs. This was a reference to being accosted at the school gates one morning by Ursula Moncrief, class rep and all-round terrifying professional mother, who, flanked by a couple of flunkeys, had said accusingly, “I rang last night about your contribution to the Harvest Festival, and Rufus said you were upstairs painting!”
From her tone Rufus might just as well have said I was upstairs flaying a couple of naked rent boys, tied up with satsumas in their mouths.
“Um, well, yes, I do occasionally,” I’d stammered, as a wave of disapproval rippled around the Ursula camp. “Most nights, actually,” I added bravely.
“So where’s Rufus?”
“Well, he’s…downstairs. Doing his homework,” I added quickly.
More teeth sucking at this, because of course I should be down there with him, strapped into my pinny, frying fishcakes, and ready to spin round and help him spell “alligator,” if need be.
“Tell them to fuck off!” Alex had roared helpfully when I’d reported back.
I didn’t, but was grateful for his support. Alex had little truck with the mummy mafia, having seen it all before with Lucy and Miranda, his daughters from his first marriage, now sixteen and fourteen respectively. His views on school-gate mothers—“a load of frustrated, overqualified women channelling their thwarted careers into overstimulated children”—were trenchant, and possibly true. Nevertheless, I was easily cowed, and these days Rufus and I were more circumspect about my whereabouts. The treacle tart ruse seemed to work.
Yes, the girls. It was probably time they came to visit again, I thought nervously as I mounted the stairs. My heart began to pound at the thought and I clutched the banister.
Lucy and Miranda lived with their mother, a stunningly beautiful woman called Tilly, who, after the divorce, had gone to America. When we were first married and the girls were younger, I’d hardly seen them at all because Alex often had business in the States and visited them when he was there. Last year, however, now that they were teenagers, they’d crossed the pond alone, to stay with us in London. It hadn’t been the most auspicious visit. They were possibly the most beautiful, long-limbed, self-possessed, scary creatures I’d ever encountered, with their low-slung Miss Sixty jeans and Ugg boots and yards of silky dark hair. I remember coming back from Tesco one afternoon, laden with shopping, to find both of them draped across Alex on the sofa, two pairs of long legs over his knees, the room in darkness, curtains drawn as they watched a movie. Instinctively, I’d said, “Oh—sorry.”
Lucy had mocked me with her eyes. “Why are you sorry?”
I blushed. “Well, I just meant…” I laughed gaily. “I felt like I’d intruded!”
“Bit late for that, isn’t it?”
I remember my face burning as I went through to the kitchen to unpack my shopping. It wasn’t even a justified remark. Their parents’ marriage had been over long before I came along. Alex had come up behind me and put his arms around me as I unpacked.
“She doesn’t mean it,” he whispered in my ear. “She’s just a kid.”
I turned round in his arms. “I know, but…Alex, doesn’t she know about Eleanor?” I searched his face.
He shrugged and looked away. “I guess not. Eleanor’s her godmother, Imo. She adores her. I can’t tell her that.”
“But surely Tilly’s told her? Told her what happened?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. Tilly’s far too proud.”
Right. So I took the rap. I was The Other Woman who’d broken up the happy home. And he was right, why dig up the past? But it just seemed so unfair, and sometimes I wanted to say to them, “It wasn’t me, you know! Ask your precious godmother all about it!” But that would hurt them even more, and Alex was right: they’d been through enough.
And I’d try harder with them next time, I thought, going on up the next flight of stairs and opening the studio door. Make more of an effort. Take them both shopping on the King’s Road perhaps, although the very idea brought me out in a muck sweat. What, hold up belts and scarves as potential purchases as their eyes ridiculed my choices? I scuttled across to my paints in panic. My paints. In this tiny, north-facing, and therefore perfect, room, which was my sanctuary, my retreat. Here I could unwind. Be me.
Under the slanting dormer window that looked on to the street, an old pine table was covered in paint tubes, rags, drawing pads, books, pencils and my palette, almost an art form in itself it was so stiff with paint. The heady, oily aroma hit me as I stood over it, making me beautifully woozy for a second. I turned. The room was chaotic, but only to the uninitiated: I knew where everything was. Stacked on the floor around the walls were my canvases, or, more recently, boards, painted in my swirling, free style, lots of them—I was nothing if not prolific—and in the middle of the room, my easel, with a half-finished painting in it. I pretended to ignore it as I went past to get my smock from the back of the door, a common trick, snubbing it, as if I wasn’t terribly interested, but even before I’d thrown on my old lab technician’s coat and squeezed some paint on the palette, my eye was drawn. It was a stubble field in winter: a grey, chilly scene, and since Putney didn’t throw up many stubble fields, I had a photo of one propped up behind it.
“Isn’t that cheating?” Kate had asked in astonishment on a rare visit to my sanctum. This was not an uncommon reaction, but still one that surprised me.
“Why? I’m painting from a photograph, not another work of art. How is that cheating?”
She’d made a “suppose so” face, but I was aware people still felt it wasn’t quite right. A bit rum. I wasn’t actually in that field, feeling that light, those shadows. But then again, punters liked country landscapes on their Fulham walls and the odd one or two I’d sold so far had all been executed thus. Needs must.
As I took a brush from a jar of turps and wiped it on a rag, I spotted Kate emerging from her house opposite. She came down the path, looking supremely elegant in a little black jacket, short pink skirt, and kitten heels, and slid into a waiting taxi at the kerb. It purred off, bound for Sheekey’s, where Sebastian was meeting her for a little pre-opera supper, whilst meanwhile Sandra bathed the children and read them bedtime stories. I smiled. Other people’s lives. I turned back to the easel. Now. That beech tree in the corner—surely the sun shouldn’t be filtering through the branches quite so fiercely?
I was just getting to grips with the sky, fussin
g about its greyness and adding a touch of Prussian Blue amongst the swirling clouds to darken it, when a head came round the door.
“Oh! Rufus. You startled me.”
“There’s nothing on, so I’m going to bed.”
“Already? But you haven’t had a bath or anything yet.”
“It’s ten o’clock, Mum. When are we going to get Sky?”
“Is it?” I glanced at my watch, horrified. “God, so it is. You should have been in bed ages ago. Come on, chop chop.”
Guilt making me brisk, I put my brush down and hustled him off to his room and into his pyjamas, muttering darkly as if it was his fault, for heaven’s sake. How would this child turn out with such a distracted mother? I quickly made his bed and plumped up his pillow. No need to draw the curtains as they hadn’t been opened. As I kissed him good night and turned out his light, I remembered Kate telling me about a house she’d picked Tabitha up from, where upstairs she’d found unmade beds, loos that hadn’t been flushed, closed curtains, and knickers with skid marks on the floor. I went hot as I nipped to the bathroom to flush the loo and pick up yesterday’s pants. Not for the first time, I decided, my painting had got out of hand. Instead of heading back to my studio where I knew I could stay until midnight, I went determinedly downstairs, did the washing up, tidied the sitting room, turned off all the lights, then headed on up to bed. An early night for once, I decided. And then when Alex came home, well, maybe…
I had a quick shower and got into bed, loving the feeling of my warm, tingling body under the cool duvet. The street outside was quiet now with only a distant roar of traffic in the background. I tried to stay awake for Alex but was aware of my eyelids growing heavier. At some point I stirred as a taxi drew up and rumbled outside. I listened for Alex’s tread, but it was Kate and Sebastian, paying the driver, and then Kate’s voice as Sandra came to the door, asking her how the children had been, what time they’d gone to bed; then silence.
A Crowded Marriage Page 3