The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

“You just said you weren’t.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well then. So what is it, then? I’m trying to think what would be worse: you having an affair or you being addicted to one of those geeky Dungeons and Dragons type of sites, world of witchcraft.”

  “Warcraft,” I correct him. “World of Warcraft, it’s called.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing. You’re spending all your time pretending to be a scantily clad superhero wood sprite called Thorday.” He gives it a portentous, cinema trailer type voice-over.

  “In your dreams. You’re the one who seems to know so much about it.”

  I continue to look at my scribbled details of transgressions ready to transcribe to today’s date. If I were to do a pie chart of how I spend my time in bed, there would be more minutes actively engaged with The List than with my husband. Or with anybody else’s husband for that matter. Why was Joel quite so dismissive of the idea that I might be having a virtual affair? I could have an avatar of myself as a busty blonde in a leather bikini, happily cavorting with a hirsute cartoon muscleman, who is in real life a balding call-center operative who lives with his mother.

  Although if I was going to have an affair, I think I’d probably make it a real one. It hardly seems worth going to the trouble of having one confined to cyberspace. “An affair”—I say the word in my head with a French accent. Lover, passion, érotique… Saying the words in French makes it sound a lot more classy a prospect, in the manner of a moisturizer that promises luminescence pour la peau.

  I feel much the same way toward the prospect of an affair as I do about other people’s perfect homes—where on earth do they find the time? The only person with sufficient staff to squeeze in a lunchtime assignation is Mitzi. And what about all the body maintenance involved? When would one find time to do all the necessary beautification to sleep with someone for the first time? If you had them over to your house, you’d have to wash the sheets afterward. And before, probably.

  Joel could have an affair, I suppose. I wonder what he’d like best about having to “stay late at the office”—the sex or the missing out on the fractious bath-and-bedtime routine?

  I go into the bathroom to find Joel brushing his teeth with a bright yellow, aging toothbrush.

  “Is that your toothbrush?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I thought it was an old one. I just assumed it was.”

  “Waste not want not. Do you know what it was doing by the kitchen sink? Next to Rufe’s shoes?”

  “No, I don’t, sorry.”

  I’m sure that this Sunday will be a day of multiple infringements of The List point code-named Subsection F [invisible woman] number 7) previously known as number 33: Takes his mother’s side over mine.

  Deep breath as we park the car and bundle the potty, favored toys, spare clothes and, finally, children out of it and into the front garden of Ursula’s house. I need to breathe deeply a) to stay calm in the face of the Tennant family passive-aggression and b) because Ursula’s house, quite literally, smells. I drag my children through the overgrown garden to a front door emblazoned with “no junk mail” and peeling “No to Trident” stickers. I used to do mental makeovers of plain fellow students at university, imagining what they might look like with a proper haircut and some stylish clothes. Now I wonder what Mitzi would do to Ursula’s house, a solid double-fronted Edwardian villa. She’d rip out the tatty vinyl that half covers the original tiling in the hallway and replace the missing panes in the stained glass above the door. The vast quantities of orangey-brown varnished pine would be clothed in a dove-gray shade of paint made of china clay and hand mixed by Cornish fishermen.

  First of all, though, she’d have to clean it. The corpses of flies litter every windowsill, the low-energy lightbulbs are coated with a layer of dead skin and the toilet bowl shows the result of a lifetime of not flushing “if it’s yellow,” as a thick crust of brown limescale clings to the sides, reminding me of Ursula’s nicotine-stained teeth. Piles of newspapers vie with towers of books and vast dust-covered rubber plants in big brass pots, while the furniture is a bizarre mix of priceless family heirlooms and tatty 70s junk shop—either Chippendale or merely chipped.

  Ursula is the brightest thing in the dingy hall, dressed in purple velvet and a necklace made by a Guatemalan women’s collective. Rufus, well trained as he is, immediately sits on the bottom of the stairs to remove his shoes. The last time he did that, his socks were so permanently blackened by the experience that we had to throw them out.

  “You don’t have to take your shoes off, darling.”

  “Why not, Mommy?”

  I ponder a tactful answer to that question when Ursula intervenes. “Because shoes are for wearing, of course.” She smiles at me. “And how is my favorite daughter-in-law?” It is just as well Joel is an only child.

  “Fine, thanks.” In the novels I read, an untidy house is always shorthand for warmth and love. A tidy house means that the owner is clinical and cold, quite possibly sterile. I don’t believe that anymore. I walk into the kitchen, which has sticky brown cupboards, lined inside with graphic orange and white wallpaper. It’s a warm day. Ursula ushers us outside for what she calls a “gin and French,” closely related to another mysterious beverage called a “gin and It.” Standing on the moss-veined patio is Becky, holding a sweaty-looking glass of rosé. She gets up to hug me.

  “Becky, how lovely. What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “Ursula invited me.”

  “Yes, but… anyway, it’s lovely to see you.” I lower my voice. “It’s great to have an ally.” She looks mystified.

  “It’s great to be here.” She waves her glass, which could more accurately be described as a tumbler.

  “Rebecca,” says Ursula, “has been working with my good friend Suzannah Westernberg on numerous cases.”

  “Legendary family law barrister,” explains Becky.

  “She thinks very highly of you, too,” says Ursula. I feel that Becky, sexual orientation notwithstanding, would make a far better daughter-in-law than me.

  “What are you having, Ma?” Joel shouts from the kitchen. She is Ursula, Ma or Mater. Never “Mom” like anybody else’s mother. “And you, Mary?”

  He is already knocking back the gin and something, thus fulfilling transgression F3: Assumes that I will always be the one to drive us home when we go out. “Something soft, I guess.” He doesn’t even notice the sacrifice. “Actually, will you drive today? I’ll have some rosé.”

  He swigs back the remains of his glass, rasping at the power of neat alcohol. “I think it may be too late. You don’t mind, it’s not like you ever want more than a couple anyway.”

  He is quite the host in his mother’s house, busying himself with the supermarket-brand peanuts and making sure that everyone has a drink. He is much more helpful here than at home. And he won’t have a word said against the food served here, despite being a balsamic vinegar sort of man from a crusty wine vinegar childhood.

  “I bumped into Cara the other day,” I say to Becky.

  “Did you? She didn’t mention it.”

  “It’s not like we talked for very long. A couple of minutes. It was near the office.”

  “Have you seen Suzannah recently, Ursula?” Becky changes the subject abruptly. I wonder why and make a note to myself to ask her later. I don’t want to bury myself so deep in the dirty laundry of The List that I forget about Becky’s dilemma. “She’s got this case that’s going up to the Lords. Everyone reckons it’s going to set a precedent over reasonable needs.”

  “Don’t have those crisps, Gabe. Joel, stop him, he’s ruining his appetite.”

  “And other things that mothers say,” says Joel.

  “I never did,” says Ursula.

  “And don’t toss peanuts into your mouth. The boys will copy you and choke.”

  Ursula snorts, “Peanut allergy.”

  “They don’t have peanut allergies, but it’s very easy to choke on nu
ts. And uncut grapes.”

  “And yet more things that mothers say,” adds Joel.

  And that will be a G9: Fails to back me up when I tell the children to do something entirely reasonable.

  “You’ve got to chill about their food.”

  “He’s right,” says Ursula. “No child ever starves himself. Joel lived on nothing but cornflakes and orange juice until he was seven.”

  “But I want my children to have a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals.”

  Gabe and Rufus continue to mainline salty snacks, while the adults suck up the tepid rosé and faux martinis. The blossom is out and the beds are filled with tulips. The children are being unobtrusive thanks to the sedative properties of salt, while the adults bounce between the political and the personal. It is the sort of charming and bohemian scene that I used to fantasize about while growing up a bookish girl in what I considered to be a grim town. I would have imagined myself so happy here.

  Lunch starts with what Ursula calls “tapas”: some aging olives, pickled onions mixed with salad cream and crackers topped with cheese out of a tube. Joel pronounces it all delicious. The roast meat is overdone while the roast potatoes are mysteriously rock solid and lacking a crunchy shell—instead they feel like they have been coated with an impenetrable rubber casing. The leeks are buttered, natch.

  “Sorry,” says Ursula. “You know how I always forget about your dairy thing. Joel, you’ll never believe it, but the Moores have split up.”

  “What, the grown-ups or the children?” asks Joel.

  “The grown-ups. Well, as grown-up as you can be in your sixties. In their sixties.” She shakes her head. “I mean, what’s the point? What is the point?”

  “If they were unhappy,” I say. “If she was unhappy.”

  “Yes, but you’d have to be very unhappy indeed to go through all that bother. I mean, it’s not exactly as if either of them are going to find anyone else, are they?”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You’re not objecting to divorce on the grounds of morality, but of practicality?”

  “Of course I don’t object to it on moral grounds. I’m hardly in a position to take a stance on the perfect nuclear family.” Joel’s father is somewhere in the States and played only an intermittent exotic gift-bringing part in his childhood. Even now, Joel is expected to get over-excited about the arrival of Oreos and Hershey bars, like a treat-starved World War II land girl welcoming the GIs. “I’m sure Rebecca can back me up here, but isn’t divorce a whole load of bother?”

  “Not to mention expense,” Becky says. “Much of which gets wasted on people like me. And all the evidence suggests that one year on, the divorcees are unhappier than they were when they were married anyway. Especially the women, I think.” She looks at me as she says this.

  “It’s all rather embarrassing,” says Ursula. “I really think the Moores believe that they’re not too old for love and happiness. How absurd. Oh dear, Mary.”

  “What?”

  “You won’t be able to have any cream with your crumble either, will you?”

  “I’m not sure Mary would want to anyway,” says Joel, holding up the tub. “Mother, your commitment to ‘waste not want not’ is admirable, but I think you may have excelled yourself this time. This cream’s sell-by date is in February.”

  “Nonsense,” she says, giving it a theatrical sniff. “Absolutely bloody fine. Hate all this hygiene namby-pambyism. Those sell-by dates are all a ruse by the supermarkets to make you buy more.”

  “You’re quite right,” says Becky. “That’s what I’m always telling Cara.” She pulls a face. “Especially yogurt. It’s supposed to be a bit moldy.”

  “You are a woman after my own heart,” says Ursula. “Ham is supposed to have that green shine to it. Sign that it’s mature.”

  “Exactly,” says Becky, with rosé-fueled emphasis. “The waste not want not mentality is authentic environmentalism. Not like your friend Mitzi.” She hisses her name.

  “That’s what I’m always saying to Mary,” adds Joel. “It’s about buying less, not more.”

  “I agree,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me all this. I find all that hybrid-car-driving, fancy compost heap stuff sticks in my throat too, you know.” Though not quite as much as Ursula’s two-month-old cream would.

  I clear the plates and take them into the kitchen. I decant leftovers into little bowls so as not to be accused of wastage and look in vain for some plastic wrap. The fridge is already crammed with saucepans holding useless remnants of previous meals and strange bowls of unidentifiable fat. I’m desperate for the toilet, but find the lack of bathroom locks inhibiting. Joel finds my attitude bewildering and tells me just to shout “I’m in here,” if I hear someone coming.

  Becky joins me. “It’s bliss here, isn’t it? You’re so lucky, Ursula is so wonderful. This house, it’s my idea of heaven.”

  “How so?”

  “Everything shouts out a life lived. The sofas dip where bums have sat and you feel like just sitting there means you join a great pantheon of others and the good times they’ve had. I love that all the walls have been drawn on and that door frame has the heights etched on of not just your children, but Joel, too. I mean, how fantastic that it hasn’t been painted in 30 years. You know that you could pick up anything and there would be a story behind it. A mug bought on holiday, books signed by the author, ancient cookery books with food-encrusted pages.”

  “Ursula doesn’t really do much cooking,” I reply.

  “If these walls could talk…”

  “They’d be pontificating about something or other in a judgmental, intellectually entitled way.”

  “Well, I think it’s brilliant. I hate the way people these days get rid of perfectly usable kitchens because they’re not in this year’s colors, or think that there’s no place for something that looks ugly but may have a beautiful story behind it.”

  “This isn’t about Ursula’s house, is it? Are you still feeling uncomfortable at Cara’s?”

  “I suppose.” Becky picks up an ancient place mat with an engraving of a Cambridge college. Or at least, St. John’s College in a mud storm, splattered as it is with vintage congealed gravy.

  “But it’s so perfect,” I say, thinking of Cara’s galvanized-steel worktops.

  “Exactly. Perfection’s not really me. When I look at the place that I’m living in—see, I can’t even call it ‘my place,’ it’s ‘the place where I’m living’—I just wonder where all the ephemera is.”

  “Ephemera?”

  “The stuff, the souvenirs, the gifts, the old chairs that don’t match.”

  “Oh, the crap, you mean.”

  “It’s not normal, the way these people expunge anything that isn’t aesthetically pleasing from their lives. And then I think I’m the only piece of ephemera, or crap as you’d call it, in the whole flat. I’m the only thing that isn’t shiny and new. I’m the only thing that doesn’t match, that doesn’t match some scheme or other.”

  “Becks, this isn’t about the way that Cara has decorated her house, is it? We identify ourselves with our surroundings, don’t we? If my house isn’t tidy, I feel untidy, unhinged. The state of my house dictates my state of mind. Is something like that going on with you?”

  “You’re right.”

  “I thought so.”

  “No, I mean you’re right about confusing your feelings about where you live with how you feel about yourself, but I think it’s probably the other way around. It’s not that the state of your house reflects the state of your mind. More that the state of your mind dictates to you how you feel about your house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Take you and Joel. It’s not your untidy house that’s the problem, it’s you. Just like it’s not actually the fact that I don’t wear white and match the painted floorboards at Cara’s that’s the issue, it’s the fact that I don’t match her. We don’t match each other.”

 
; Joel walks in, carrying a tray piled with plates stacked precariously on top of one another. It really annoys me the way he doesn’t put all the food scrapings and the cutlery onto the top plate when he clears the table. Not that he ever clears the table at home; this sort of helpful behavior is reserved for his mother.

  Becky looks at me and at Joel, then squeezes my arm. “Think about it.”

  I did think about it. I am still thinking about it three days later when I should be sorting out some yet more revised budgets, or at the very least electronically skiving like a normal person working in TV.

  “Done,” says Lily, staring at her Facebook page. “Status updated. I’m so through with Zak.”

  I hadn’t been aware that she had been so with Zak in the first place. “I’m sorry to hear that. What is your current status? No, don’t tell me, why not just tweet me since I’m sitting all of five meters away from you.”

  “You’re not subscribed, remember? Do you want me to sort it out for you, Grandma?”

  And to think how dismissive I used to be of my parents when I had to program the video recorder for them. “I was joking. Single and happy? Single and looking? Joining holy orders?”

  “Single and thinking.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “What, the single bit or the thinking bit?”

  “Either?”

  “Very funny.” She twists her dangling scarf with the Op Art pattern. See, Lily can wear a scarf and it looks hip, edgy and nonchalant. If I wore one, I’d look like a middle-aged Labor MP. Or, worse, Ursula. “Nah, seriously, I’m bored with all these boys. I want a man. Someone like your sex-on-a-stick husband. He is fierce.”

  “Oh, please.” Someone less fierce in any sense of the word I cannot imagine. Talking about anybody’s husband, even or especially my own, as sexually attractive makes my stomach turn. When we were all on the dating scene, it was perfectly acceptable, even mandatory, to drone on about how gorgeous and stud-like your latest man was and how well endowed he was, but I now find any reference to the allure of a married man distasteful. Such language about sex and men has been replaced with a new vocabulary of tragicomic celibacy and casual disparagement.