Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  I was just checking the back of the card in case it had more clues on it, when the neat little frame of my friend Tim appeared at my desk.

  ‘I saw Smiler bringing the flowers over,’ he said, sinking his face into the deep pink roses. ‘Want me to do a rescue mission on them?’

  Tim and I had a system to save all the beautiful bouquets which Jeanette expected me to give away, outrageously in our opinion. He’d take them down to his – deliberately cultivated – pal in the delivery bay, on the pretence of having them sent on to a hospital, and then he’d take them home later. He lived quite near me in Westbourne Grove and we’d take turns who got to keep them.

  ‘These are really nice,’ he was saying. ‘Is that the card you’re holding?’

  He reached over to take it.

  ‘Oy,’ I said, snatching it away. ‘That was addressed to me.’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ said Tim, but still he didn’t offer me any privacy, getting comfortable on the edge of my desk, with his unusually short arms tightly folded, his face pink and perky with excitement. ‘Go on, then, Princess Aurora, tell me. Which luxury brand are these from?’

  I had to smile at him. Tim loved my world. It was one of the ironies of my life at the Journal; Tim had my job and I had his. This squitty little fellow – who adored luxury shopping with a fervour more normal in footballers’ wives and other B-list celebrities, whose every move he followed with glee in the weekly trash mags – was a real-life war correspondent. Award-winning.

  He was just back from his most recent stint in Iraq. And the first thing he had wanted to know when he got off the plane home were the latest plot twists in Desperate Housewives.

  ‘Actually, Tim,’ I said, ‘these are personal. They’re from a boy I met the other night.’

  ‘Cute?’ he said.

  ‘Seriously cute,’ I said.

  ‘So you clearly haven’t done him yet, if he’s sending you flowers.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘Mmmm, I’d like to hear more. Lunch?’ he said, making a gesture as though he was raising a glass of wine to his lips.

  ‘I can’t do lunch today,’ I said. ‘I have to finish this Jericho thing.’

  ‘Oh, my GOD,’ he said, his hands flying up to his face. ‘You went on that launch. I’d forgotten. What is she like? Nightmare? Fabulous? Did she hit anyone?’

  ‘Ubernightmare,’ I said. ‘Nearly hit me. Drink later? Email you at six?’

  He nodded enthusiastically and bustled off to his desk, where a bullet which had been gouged out of his thigh in a field hospital in Afghanistan was suspended in perspex and mounted on a silver plinth, alongside a small forest of award statuettes. For a little fella, who had been the mercilessly bullied school swot, he was quite a guy.

  Once Tim had gone, I made myself tear that card up into very tiny pieces and throw it back into the bin. It was the only way I knew I could prevent myself from dialling that number. But by five thirty that afternoon I was punching a mobile number into my phone. It wasn’t Jay’s. I was ringing Jack.

  Jack was my fallback guy. I didn’t have what you would call a boyfriend – I didn’t want one – but I did have men in my life. I had a little collection of them, to satisfy the various needs of a relatively young and healthy girl around town.

  I had several pleasant, amusing and well-dressed chaps who were my human handbags for work events; one or two more intense ones I liked seeing movies, or exhibitions, with; and Tim, who was my work bestie. Jack supplied the sex side of things. That was the deal and we both respected it. We met for sex, nothing more, nothing less. It was great sex, but that was all it was.

  I wasn’t particularly proud of the way I had met Jack, but I was happy with the way it had worked out. He’d stepped into my life one day, getting into my carriage when I was on the train going down to Ham’s country place, near Lewes.

  It had been a couple of years earlier, when they still hadn’t quite phased out all the old commuter trains and there were still some running which had the separate First Class compartments. Jack had stepped into mine at London Bridge.

  From the moment he got into that carriage I had felt like a tuning fork, there was such an instant sexual chemistry between us. He was a big, strong-looking guy. Broad shoulders, big hands, big legs and, I couldn’t help thinking, no doubt a great big… to match. And a very attractive face, in a slept-in kind of a way. But really, the most attractive thing about Jack, was his ease with himself.

  He sat right opposite me in the empty carriage, his feet firmly planted in their dusty working boots, his knees wide apart. He owned the space he occupied in a very complete way. He grinned at me. I smiled back, I couldn’t help it.

  ‘That’s one of mine,’ he said, suddenly, jerking his head towards the window. I looked out. I had no idea what he meant.

  ‘The church there,’ he said. ‘The steeple. I’m a steeplejack and I did that one.’

  ‘It’s very high,’ I said.

  He grinned at me. ‘I like a challenge,’ he said.

  And that was it, we’d picked each other up. Like I say, I’m not proud of it and it’s not something I would recommend doing, but sometimes life just seems to offer things up in such a way that you have to take them.

  Either way, that was the start of a very satisfactory arrangement between us, where I would ring him whenever I felt like what he had to offer and if we could meet we did. He never rang me.

  We always met at a hotel, the same one, near Victoria Station, not sleazy, not smart, just faceless and anonymous, and if the staff there ever recognized me as I checked in and connected me with the big bloke in dusty jeans who would arrive not long after, they never showed it.

  This was definitely a night to see Jack. It was the only thing that would stop me obsessing about Jay and possibly spending the evening trying to piece the jigsaw of that shredded card back together. He answered straightaway.

  ‘Jack?’ I said.

  ‘Allo, Posh Totty,’ he replied. That was his name for me. He didn’t know my real name and I didn’t know if Jack was really his. Considering his occupation, I strongly suspected it wasn’t.

  ‘Can you make it tonight?’

  ‘Sure can, Totty, darling. Six thirty suit ya?’

  At five forty-five I sent a cowardly intraoffice email to Tim cancelling our drink date and promising to catch up with him the next day, then I raced out to get over to Victoria.

  It was as good as always with Jack. Not much talking, down to business, great sex. And I fantasized about Jay all the way through it. By nine p.m., as I hailed a cab outside the hotel to take me home, I felt like I had the situation fully under control.

  I was very much my father’s daughter.

  *

  Physically weary – in the nicest possible way – and with my overactive brain blessedly calmed, it was wonderful to get back to the haven of my place. I had a tiny little mews house, which you entered down a cobbled side street in Notting Hill.

  It was actually the original stable that went with Ham’s very large house and I could get into his garden through a gate in the courtyard behind my place. It was the perfect arrangement. I was close to him, but there were three walls, a hedge and a stretch of lawn separating us.

  When I needed solitude – which was often – I could always retreat into my little house. Hardly anyone ever came there, not my friends, certainly no boyfriends, or lovers, and not even Ham. When he’d given it to me, he’d said it was mine alone and he would always respect that, while I was always welcome in the big house.

  So while I loved curling up in my own little world, happily reading in my big brass bed, or watching BBC World and the History Channel into the small hours, whenever I felt like a dose of family life, I would let myself through the gate, trot up the lawn and see what the latest generations of my half-siblings were up to.

  The morning after I saw Jack, I woke up early – after a pleasantly dreamless night’s sleep – had a quick shower, threw o
n jeans and a T-shirt, and ran up through the garden gate.

  I stood on the lawn outside the glass doors for a moment before any of them saw me, and took in the scene. It was a typical morning in my father’s house.

  His youngest daughter, Daisy, who had recently turned three, was sitting on the kitchen table eating cereal dry, from the packet, wearing her Snow White outfit. As I watched she jumped off and pranced around the room a bit, waving a sparkly plastic magic wand. I could just make out the pink shape of Angelina Ballerina on the plasma TV screen on the wall.

  Her mother, Chloe, Ham’s current wife, was standing at the steel counter in an old silk kimono, studying a book and yawning. Freddie and Marcus, the six- and seven-year-old boys from his previous marriage – born so close together due to a contraceptive miscalculation by their mother – were playing a video game, squashed together on one big armchair in a corner. And Venezia, the fourteen-year-old glamour queen from the marriage before that, was mixing up some potion in the blender.

  Daisy saw me first and came racing to the door.

  ‘Stella, Stella, Stella,’ she cried, jumping up and down. ‘Look, Mummy! Look! It’s Stella. Pick me up, Stella. I want you.’

  I picked her up, burying my face in her fluffy little blonde head and blowing raspberries. She giggled wildly.

  She looked up into my face. ‘I like you, Stella,’ she said, nodding earnestly. I kissed her little pink lips and set her down on the floor again.

  ‘Show me your latest ballet steps,’ I said to her.

  ‘OK,’ she said and set off round the room twirling on fat little bare feet, while I went to say hello to the others.

  I gave Chloe a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘I see your daughter is more gorgeous than ever,’ I said.

  Chloe smiled sweetly at me.

  ‘She is rather adorable, isn’t she? Would you like some food? I’m making pancakes.’

  I nodded enthusiastically. Chloe was a great cook – she wrote cookery books – but even apart from that obvious attraction, I really liked her. She was Ham’s best wife for ages, possibly ever, and I was always pleased to see her. OK, so it was a bit weird that she wasn’t much older than me – only about eight years – but we got on really well and I was long past the stage of resenting my stepmothers.

  Fourteen-year-old Venezia was more of a piece of work, which wasn’t a surprise, when you knew her mum, who was really the only one of Ham’s wives who had ever been actively unpleasant to me.

  Kristy, as her mother was called, was your actual full-on gold-digger. She’d been Ham’s mistress for years before she was his wife and Venezia had been born while Ham had still been married to the previous wife, Rose.

  When Kristy did eventually get him to marry her, she deeply resented any of Ham’s other children having any claim on his resources whatsoever, and she was always doing things like trying to make him take me out of the private girls’ day school where I was in my last crucial year and so happy.

  ‘If she’s so brainy,’ she used to say, ‘why can’t she just go to a normal school? It’s my children who might need to have serious money spent on their education…’

  Luckily for me, Ham had ignored her, but she used to take every opportunity to make me feel like I was only partly attached to the ‘real’ family. It was only Ham’s dogged loyalty to me which had got me through that difficult time.

  It was after the hideous Kristy finally ran off with a richer man – her cosmetic dentist – that Ham had given me the mews house.

  ‘I just want you to know that you are a permanent fixture in this family,’ he had said. ‘Whoever else comes in or out of it…’

  ‘What are you making, Venezia?’ I asked, peering over her shoulder; her failure to greet me a reminder of her mother’s poisonous manners.

  ‘An oat and fruit face pack,’ she said, glancing up at me. ‘Want some? You look like shit.’

  ‘No, thank you, dearest half-sister,’ I said, pulling a face at her, as she bent back down over the blender. It was the kind of behaviour she brought out in me.

  ‘How’s Archie?’ I asked her, sitting on one of the high stools by the counter.

  ‘Boring, ugly, stupid, whingeing, just the usual,’ she said, without looking up. ‘And why should you care, anyway? He’s not your brother.’

  She was right. Archie – or Archimedes, to give the poor bugger his full name – was Venezia’s sixteen-year-old half-brother by Kristy’s husband before Ham. So he wasn’t any kind of a relation to me, in actual fact, but I still really liked him.

  I liked him a lot more than I liked her – my half-blood sister – and there was a connection between us, even if it wasn’t blood. I was still very fond of Archie, and I worried about him, because I knew he didn’t get on with Kristy’s new husband at all. Or with Kristy.

  ‘He’s my ex-stepbrother,’ I said. ‘And I still care about him. Give him my love, will you?’

  She just snorted and walked out of the room with her blender of foul gloop. I rather hoped it would bring her out in a rash.

  Chloe was just dishing up the pancakes, when a loud thundering on the stairs indicated the imminent arrival of Ham. He was incapable of doing anything quietly. He could pretty much fill a room just with his personality, and his booming voice, heavy footfalls and frequent barks of laughter, would fill any little bits of space left over.

  A journalist had once written that you could stand in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall with just Ham and feel it was crowded.

  ‘Mmmmmm, vittles,’ he was booming, as he strode down the hall. ‘I can smell vittles. A man needs his foooooood.’

  I heard a loud thwack, followed by a squeal, which I strongly hoped was him whacking Venezia on her Dieseljeaned bottom, as she slouched past him.

  ‘Where are all my little ducklings?’ he said, as he entered the room, scooping up Daisy with one hand and throwing her over his shoulder, to her shrieks of delighted laughter. ‘Here’s one… Now let me see.’

  He padded round the corner to where the boys were engrossed in their ghastly game and, ignoring their protests, kicked the console out of their hands and on to the floor.

  ‘Gotcha!’ he said, scooping them up like piglets, one under each arm, and with Daisy still clinging on to his shoulders, he turned towards the kitchen. When he saw me he dropped them all on the floor and strode over with open arms.

  ‘Duckling number one,’ he said and folded me into his cavernous embrace. He pulled away and had a good look at me. ‘You look OK,’ he said nodding. ‘You’ll do. Caught any fierce handbags lately?’

  Before I could answer – he knew I’d rather be writing about terrorists than luxury brands – he had rounded the counter and was embracing Chloe from behind, with the lack of inhibition which I would never cease to find embarrassing, no matter how many wives he had.

  ‘Hmmmmmm,’ he was grunting, as he buried his face in her neck. I was glad I couldn’t see where his hands were. ‘Most excellent woman. And food as well, marvellous.’

  With much booming and clapping from Ham, everyone – including Venezia, who had been summarily summoned back – sat down at the round dining table for breakfast.

  Ham considered family meals the very bedrock of civilization and even Venezia knew she couldn’t challenge him on it, although her response to that was to sit through them silently and eat as little as possible.

  ‘So,’ said Ham, with his mouth full, ‘what’s the plan for this weekend? How many ducklings will be in residence with me at Willow Barn, Chloe darling?’

  It was Friday morning and Ham always left for the country straight after lunch, alone in his car – an ancient Morgan, which frequently broke down – so he could ‘think’. It was Chloe’s responsibility, as current wife, to marshal the various brigades of offspring, either returning them to their other parent, or collecting others who were due to be with Ham for the weekend.

  As there were different custody arrangements for them all, it kept life pretty interesting for Chl
oe, but with an excellent system of flow charts on the kitchen wall, she coped.

  It was these kind of expectations – and this was just one of many – which had eventually frightened most of Ham’s other wives away, as they grew to understand the full extent of his charismatic selfishness, but Chloe, who came from a big family with a tyrannical father of her own, seemed to thrive on it.

  Ham’s previous wife, Nicola, was a high-flying publishing executive, but after producing two boys in such quick succession, she just couldn’t cope with them, the job and Ham’s demands, and had fled.

  But apart from her cookery books and occasional contributions to magazines, Chloe devoted her entire life to Ham and his extended family, and it seemed to work for them both.

  It certainly kept her skinny – I had never seen her sit through a full meal without getting up since she had arrived in our lives – which was another important factor in the stability of the marriage. If a woman showed any signs of letting herself go in the figure department, Ham would immediately lose interest. He’s a total bastard, as he is the first to admit, just a very lovable one.

  As usual, that morning, after just a couple of mouthfuls of pancake, Chloe got up from the breakfast table to consult the chart she had made on a magnetic whiteboard, with coloured pieces representing each child. Ham immediately helped himself to what was left on her plate.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s quite an interesting one this weekend. Obviously Daisy is with us. The boys are going back to Nicola, who will send the au pair to pick them up from school. Venezia is coming with us and she wants to bring her friend, Chanel… and Kristy has asked if we could possibly have Archie as well, this weekend, as she’s just got to go to Paris…’

  ‘Selfish bitch,’ said Ham. ‘Of course, we’ll have him and ghastly Chanel. That it?’

  ‘No,’ continued Chloe. ‘Toby and Tabitha want to come down, even though it’s strictly a Rose weekend, because they missed out on their last visit because of her birthday, and Alex has offered to drive them. Is that OK?’