A Surrey State of Affairs

by Ceri Radford

  As soon as Sophie was better, I booked our flights and here we are. Fortunately, she had to remove her tongue stud to pass through the metal detectors in the airport.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 27

  Sophie kept to her room today. I do hope she will perk up in time for her nineteenth birthday, which is next Friday. I’m going to organize a last-minute party: it will do her good to have something to look forward to. I’m thinking a marquee, ice cream, trifle, fairy cakes—all her old favorites. I might even book a magician. His first trick could be to make the tongue piercing vanish.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 28

  You’ll be pleased to hear that the planning is well under way for Sophie’s party. As it’s such short notice (I had presumed she would still be in France), I decided—for once—to stint on formal etiquette and phone the guests rather than sending out invitations. The family will all be there, as will Reginald, David, and Ruth, and several of Sophie’s old primary school friends with whom she has lost touch, and their mothers, with whom I have not. Rupert asked me several times what Sophie thought of the plan before agreeing to come. I don’t know why he’s being so stubborn. What’s not to like about a party?

  After some deliberation, I decided to invite Gerald along with all the other bell ringers. While not wanting to give him any inappropriate encouragement, I’m also anxious to get things back to a normal footing as quickly as possible, to avoid rumors of any description. Miss Hughes has almost a supernatural insight into other people’s affairs, especially when her hearing aid is turned to maximum.

  After making my phone calls, I dipped into Facebook for the first time in some weeks. I found that, once the initial excitement had worn off, it is a little like using e-mail, except with more advertisements and baffling invitations to turn all my friends into zombies. This time, however, I noticed the section for “events.” After two hours of studious concentration, I was able to set up a page for Sophie’s birthday party, complete with a lovely picture of a smiling clown. My Internet skills have certainly progressed since I first joined—Rupert would be proud. I invited Sophie, of course, and managed to remember a few of the names of her sixth form friends and invited them too.

  I filled in the “event description” as An afternoon of fun, fairy cakes, and magic to celebrate my daughter turning 19. Dress code: Ladies’ Day at Ascot before it went downhill.

  8:30 P.M.

  I am just testing my LapTop to make sure it still works. After dinner, Sophie swept out of the room and knocked a glass of wine all over it. I hope she grows out of her clumsiness soon.

  SUNDAY, JUNE 29

  A rather strained Sunday lunch today with Mother, who I picked up from The Copse, and Rupert, who drove down from Milton Keynes. Since Sophie had to hide her swollen tongue from her grandmother, and the only line of conversation that this same grandmother would take with Rupert was to ask him if he was playing cricket this summer, which he wasn’t, and whether he was seeing a young lady yet, which he also, alas, wasn’t, there was little in the way of lively conversation. At one point Mother said to Sophie, “Cat got your tongue?” and I found my-self replying “If only” before I could stop myself. All in all I was relieved, for once, when Jeffrey opened up the paper before the pudding was finished, giving me an excuse to start clearing away.

  MONDAY, JUNE 30

  Today I attempted to have a heart-to-heart with my daughter. She has been at home now for nearly five days but has done little more than mope, watch television, and eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream directly from the carton. The summer stretches out ahead of her. She doesn’t feel up to going back to the eco lodge for the final week of the project, and there are more than three months to fill before her first term at Bristol starts. At her current rate of activity, that would equate to twenty-four tubs of ice cream and ninety-six episodes of Ricki Lake. I fear for the effect on her mind, and her figure. Something had to be done.

  I knocked on her door at eleven A.M. and was greeted with an apathetic “Yeah?” She was sitting up in bed, wearing a Little Miss Naughty vest top and painting her nails bluish black. I started off on a sympathetic note, examining her tongue and asking if it still hurt. From there I shifted to the soothing qualities of ice cream, the quantities of which she could look forward to at her party on Saturday, and beyond that to how many days lay ahead of her before the term began. Just as I was persuasively setting out how these days might constructively be filled by helping Miss Hughes with Cats in Need or signing up to be a Tawny Owl at the local Brownies group, she interrupted me. “Don’t be such a mentalist,” she said, yawning. “I’ve got plans, yeah?”

  This I was not expecting. “What sort of plans?” I asked cautiously.

  “Oh, I’m doing this TV thing in London.” I stared at her, my jaw ajar. “Will be great practice for sociology,” she added, sticking her tongue out between her teeth and narrowing her eyes as she applied a thick stroke of varnish to her last remaining nail.

  “You mean a documentary? You’ll be working on a documentary?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. A documentary.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, lots of people and how they get along, like.”

  “And this is an official work placement scheme that you’ve applied for?”

  “Yup, gazillions of people applied. Didn’t want to tell you earlier because I didn’t know if I’d get in.”

  I felt rather pleased. This was more initiative than I had expected. Clearly Sophie had not squandered all her time absconding to sun-drenched Spanish islands. She was also thinking of her future.

  “Well, that’s wonderful news, well done, though you could have told me sooner. I was that close to calling Miss Hughes for you! But where will you be staying? Shall I give Bridget a call and see if you can stay in her spare room? She’s got a lovely place, but mind that she doesn’t make you eat French éclairs for breakfast. Or we could go and see if we could rent you a nice little flat for a few months?”

  “Nah, it’s all taken care of. The TV thing is…residential.”

  “You mean you’ll have your own flat?”

  “More like a sort of bunk bed.”

  “That sounds like fun! It’ll be just like Guides.”

  “Yeah.”

  Only a well-structured internship would provide accommodations. After getting her to write down the name of the organizer and her telephone number, I left Sophie’s room with a smile on my face, and didn’t even nag her to pull her curtains and make the bed.

  THURSDAY, JULY 3

  Today I went out to buy the drinks for Sophie’s birthday—after all, she will have been legally entitled to enjoy a peach Bellini or two for exactly a year. Also, Mad Marvin the Magician, whom I’ve booked as the entertainment, insists that he can’t work without a two-liter bottle of Strongbow cider. Perhaps by some strange alchemy he turns it into something drinkable.

  FRIDAY, JULY 4

  I tried to coax Sophie out on a shopping trip with the offer of a pretty dress for tomorrow’s party, but to no avail. Perhaps she is worried about the effect the recession is having on our finances and wishes to save us the expense. In any case, she spent the day lying on the lawn plugged into her iPod, smearing her pale skin with tanning oil. Worried that she would burn, I decided to execute what I think of as a “Reverse Ivan,” and subtly swapped her oil sprayer for SPF 50 while she was dozing.

  After an hour of gentle weeding (Randolph does a good job, but it pays to keep one’s hand in), I could almost feel my freckles coming out, so I retreated indoors to check Facebook, which gave me something of a shock. There were thirty-six “comments” on the wall for Sophie’s party, all from people I didn’t know, all lacking in the basic rudiments of grammar and courtesy. The profile pictures did not inspire confidence either, ranging from Pamela Anderson to a hoodlum and a picture of a man’s Calvin Klein underpants. The last comment was “comin atchaaa.” I wonder if Jeffrey could reinforce the privet hedge with razor wire.

  SATURDAY, JULY
5

  The day has not begun well. Sophie is threatening to hide indoors because she has woken to find she has several big white hand prints against the dusky pink skin of her décolletage. She grabbed her bottle of tanning lotion from the kitchen table, stared at it in confusion, then threw it to the floor and stamped on it, leaving a greasy streak across the slate tiles, which I had only recently persuaded Natalia to scrub. Jeffrey gave me a funny look when I inquired about barricading the garden perimeter. The trifle has not yet set. I had better go.

  10 P.M.

  Where to begin?

  As you will have gathered from my last posting, the start of the day was not promising. Things did not subsequently improve. Five minutes before the guests were due to arrive, Sophie was sitting at the kitchen table with her shoulders slumped, wearing a hooded top, minuscule frayed denim shorts, and flip-flops. I asked her when she planned to change, wondering if she had spotted the pretty, plum-colored sundress—just the thing to offset her pale complexion—that I had sneaked out to buy from John Lewis yesterday and laid out on her bed along with a matching glittery hair clip. She had. She said she wouldn’t be seen dead in it and maybe I should give it to someone with no fashion sense, like Natalia. Natalia’s English may not be perfect, but she was still able to catch the gist of Sophie’s meaning, and as she was pouring a glass of juice at the time, she stumbled heavily to one side so that it poured, splashing, into Sophie’s lap. Sophie screeched and threw her own glass of juice over Natalia in retaliation, and the fracas was stopped only when Jeffrey put down his paper and thundered “Girls!” in a rare intervention. At last, Sophie went upstairs to change, but the results were not as I had hoped. As the doorbell rang for the first guest, she emerged wearing an “Ibiza Rocks” T-shirt and what appeared to be latex leggings.

  Still, I tried to put her unfortunate outfit to the back of my mind, and the first hour or so was rather pleasant. Ruth and David arrived holding hands, Reginald and Miss Hughes sat in the marquee eating trifle together, Harriet helped me carry out jugs of Pimm’s and lemonade, and the pastel-colored balloons I had arranged earlier waved in the gentle breeze. Mad Marvin began his act by pulling a dove out of his hat (I was glad Darcy was safely shut indoors. I should not have liked to see him disappear again, if even for an instant), punctuating his performance with swigs of Strongbow. Though Sophie was pretending to fiddle with her nails, I heard her gasp and saw a smile spread across her face when the dove fluttered over to land on her shoulder.

  And thus we may have continued, cheerful and relaxed, had I not spotted a familiar figure weaving haphazardly across the lawn toward us, followed by a bouncing black Labrador. Gerald, with Poppy. My heart flopped like a goldfish. He had come. Why had he come? I took Jeffrey’s hand. He jumped, and asked what was wrong with me.

  At this precise moment, a silence had fallen over the lawn while Marvin asked for volunteers to be sawed in half. Understandably, perhaps, given the empty cider bottle, none were forthcoming.

  Gerald approached. His breath reeked of sherry, his complexion was flushed, but his short-sleeved shirt was immaculately ironed. He looked at Marvin, still fruitlessly beckoning, then looked at the assembled guests, then looked at me. “Constance, I would do anything for you,” he bellowed, before pushing forward onto the makeshift stage, where the saw awaited.

  Luckily, Jeffrey was preoccupied with chasing the lemon slice out of the bottom of his gin and tonic so that he could drink the last drop, but Sophie and Miss Hughes both gave me a quizzical look. “Bell-ringers’ loyalty,” I said, with what I hoped was a convincingly casual laugh, as Marvin packed a swaying Gerald into a purple sequined box. With a great flourish, he split Gerald in two, and I decided that this was a far safer state of affairs than having Gerald on the loose and intact. I had to prolong the moment. “A speech!” I declared, leading the magician off the stage by his elbow to the trestle table, where the glasses of champagne and peach Bellinis were laid out. Thinking on my feet, I waxed lyrical about my daughter and the joys of family life with her wonderful father, giving Gerald a meaningful look as he sweated in his bifurcated limbo.

  When Gerald was subsequently reformed and released, he scuttled away across the lawn, leaving a little trail of sawdust behind him. Poppy stayed behind eating some fairy cakes that had fallen onto the floor, which was just as well. No sooner had conversation started up again than I heard the thud thud thud of modern “music” and saw a crowd of youths tramping up the gravel. The Facebook interlopers. I felt a cold clamminess on the back of my neck. “Go, Poppy! See them off!” I shouted desperately. She looked up, a smear of cream on her damp nose, and must have suddenly realized that her owner had left, because she bolted down the drive barking. To anyone who knows her, Poppy is as menacing as a baby seal. However, she succeeded in alarming the youths and saving us all from further disaster, thus proving herself far more useful than her owner.

  After that, the mood was rather flat, and it wasn’t long before everyone made their excuses and departed, leaving me to pick up the stray balloons that had blown into the flower beds and eat the last blob of trifle, which had already begun to congeal. When I asked Sophie if she had had a nice time, she said that it was “all right” and then asked me what I would do if I had to choose between, as she put it, “shagging Gerald, marrying him, or pushing him off a cliff.” What a thing to say. I told her not to be so cheeky. The Bellinis must have gone to her head.

  I didn’t say anything to Sophie of course, but after long reflection, it would have to be either option one or option three.

  MONDAY, JULY 7

  Sophie has left. No matter how many times this happens—however many Christmas holidays or Easter holidays end with her wheeling her suitcase across the hall and swearing as it catches on the rug—it still ends with me sitting alone, blinking hard, in a house that feels heavy with silence. It was the same with Rupert. I think of Jeffrey busy at work in his open-plan office, poring over his documents, staring at his computer screen, with phones ringing, colleagues bustling, perhaps a secretary bringing him a cup of tea, if they still stoop to such things these days. Is he oblivious, or does he feel it too?

  I gave him a call to find out, but he said that he was on a conference call with the Netherlands and the CFO of Allianz Banque. I told him I was busy too and went to rearrange Sophie’s sock drawer. I hope she took enough pairs with her. I suppose it’s a normal sign of growing up, but she seems increasingly unwilling to accept my advice or help. I would happily have driven her into central London to her accommodations today, but she insisted that I drop her off at the station so she could get the train in. When I dropped her off and said, “See you soon,” she said, “You will, Mum, you will,” with a strange look in her eye. Perhaps she has already realized that she will miss me and is planning a trip home.

  TUESDAY, JULY 8

  It is exactly one month until my fifty-fourth birthday. I wonder whether I should start dropping mild hints as to what sorts of presents would be appropriate, or whether such things are beneath me.

  The problem is that, left to his own devices, Jeffrey once lurched from forgetting one year to giving me a necklace made from pink diamonds and jet the next. I can only hope it was his secretary’s choice. I stored it away in my underwear drawer, where it keeps snagging my 30 Derniers. After that it was an oven glove; then a miniature foot spa. Sophie can be equally misguided. Last year she bought me a disgusting book called Belle du Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl. Rupert, at least, can be relied upon to buy my favorite perfume or a smart neck scarf. He always seems to find just the thing to compliment my complexion. If only the rest of the family would follow his lead.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 9

  No sign of Gerald at bell ringing last night. I hope the combined forces of Jeffrey and Mad Marvin have not frightened him off indefinitely. There are only six weeks left before the championships and we can’t afford to lose any of our ringers, no matter how rhythmically challenged. Miss Hughes seemed to blame me, and trod
on my toe twice while executing a Plain Bob Major. She must weigh at least 14 stone. I have a livid bruise showing through my cream espadrilles. I suppose one must suffer for one’s art.

  10:30 P.M.

  I am shaking. What have I done to deserve this? What? I taught Sophie right from wrong, I read her Ladybird Classics from the age of three, I gave her an apple a day, I taught her that she could achieve whatever she wanted if she worked hard. How can this have happened?

  At nine P.M. this evening, just as I was watching David Attenborough’s The Life of Mammals and Jeffrey was snoozing in his armchair, the telephone rang. It was Tanya. “Turn on your TV,” she said in an odd voice.

  “I have,” I replied. “I’m watching a baby bat learn to fly.”

  “Wrong channel,” she said urgently. “Put it on channel four.”

  By this point Jeffrey had woken up and was looking at me with a bemused expression. I needed his help to locate channel 4. Then we found it. We both stared. I thought for a moment that it was some kind of practical joke. We looked again. “Connie? Are you there?” echoed Tanya’s voice, small and remote, from where the receiver lay. Jeffrey hung it up. We stared at the screen again. The last piece of a monstrous jigsaw clicked into place. Sophie was not working on a documentary. Sophie was in an experimental new reality television program—mentioned only yesterday in a disapproving editorial in the newspaper—called Dungeon. Thanks to this said editorial, I am aware that the program involves twelve people being held in a ghoulish medieval-style dungeon who will be given challenges to win the right to daylight or food other than gruel. The “dunce of the day” will be put in replica plastic stocks. I am aware that it is only the latest in a long line of such programs, which are essentially cruel cynical freak shows allowing nonentities to build careers out of playing strip poker and weeping copiously at the mistreatment that they enthusiastically signed up for.