by Claire Sandy
‘A cinema room!’ Evie clapped. ‘You’ll be telling me there’s a mezzanine next.’
‘There’s TWO!’ shrieked Shen, her teardrop black eyes creasing to nothing with the sheer joy of such la-di-da trappings. She took Evie by the arm, peremptory and despotic despite Evie’s eight-inch/eleven-year head-start. ‘You’ll die when you see the bedrooms.’
As the women rushed up the stairs, skittish at the prospect of Fired Earth tiling and distressed floorboards, Mike turned to offer a full and manly hello to Clive, complete with mandatory talk of route taken and traffic encountered, but was silenced by Clive’s hand, held imperiously up in the air.
‘Clive Little,’ Clive was saying into his phone, cigar still clenched between his teeth. ‘How did the meeting go?’ He made a comically apologetic face at Mike who mouthed, ‘S’OK.’
Sauntering off, Mike put his head around the kitchen door. Not particularly interested in kitchens, he could see that it was easily splendid enough to hospitalize his wife.
‘Dad, there’s a trampoline!’ Dan skidded in, his Converses squeaking on the black-and-white chequered floor, flushed cheeks competing with his hair’s glorious Titian (Evie’s adjective; Mike knew his son was a ginge). ‘And one of those big outside bath-things that Mum likes!’
‘A hot tub?’ said Mike to his son’s receding back. Mabel ran in, hand-in-hand with the little boy who’d greeted them at the door; Miles and Mabel had been born a day apart in the same hospital, and it was this happy accident that had first bonded their mothers. The two children were great friends; she was so good at climbing trees and farting to order that Miles overlooked her being a girl.
‘Dad Dad Dad, can we get in the pool, can we – yes?’
‘Yes. Hang on. NO!’ Mike looked to Clive for backup as the pair sped out again. ‘Don’t get in on your own!’
‘Bollocks!’ Clive was saying into his phone. ‘We turn that place into flats and whack ’em out by the end of the year.’ He made a winding-up motion to Mike.
Take as long as you like, thought Mike. Listening to Clive was a crash course in the immoral nuts and bolts of big business. Fat cats like Clive had driven the last house-price crash, creating heartache for millions and unpaid overtime for Mike.
Last year Mike’s housing trust had been able to fund two assistants. Now that they were down to one, taking work home was inevitable for the Senior Neighbourhood Services Manager. Mike agreed with Evie when she said that he took on too much, that it wasn’t good for him (by which she also meant, he knew, for them), but what could he do? Leave vulnerable people out in the cold? Literally.
He recalled the family who’d kept him late in the office. With one eye on the clock, he’d listened to the familiar story of job loss, mortgage arrears, foreclosure and sleeping on friends’ floors until they ran out of friends. With Evie and the kids waiting, he’d had to pass them over to his assistant, but Mike couldn’t shake the memory of their faces.
The private sector was better-paid; Mike could make much more money working for the likes of Clive. But he wouldn’t make a difference. He wouldn’t be able to help the bewildered people thrown about like flotsam after a shipwreck.
Two weeks, thought Mike. Two long weeks with a man whose conscience had been neatly excised before Mike was even born.
He tuned out the braying phone call and felt the mile-long velvet sofas calling to him. Thank God, he thought, my wife digs up such amazing bargains.
A floor above, taking in the four-poster’s linen hangings and the cream curtains that pooled on the floor and the soaring cross-timbered ceiling, Evie thought, Thank God my husband is so amazingly gullible. How could a grown man with a Master’s degree believe that the amount they’d spent could rent a house of this calibre? ‘A bath in the room!’ she squealed at Fang, as Shen Riverdanced in the dressing room, all the better to demonstrate its size. ‘In the room!’
When Evie had told Mike the cost, he’d paled, as if somebody had walked over his grave. After some How much?-ing, he’d caved in, little knowing that Clive was contributing three times that amount. They owed their holiday to Clive.
A snuffling noise came from the arctic-white duvet that trembled on the bed like a displaced cloud. ‘Prunella?’ queried Evie and moved nearer, to see Shen’s diminutive dog.
‘Fnnfh,’ said Prunella by way of hello, as if she had a head-cold. Evie wondered about the sadists who’d first bred pugs: Hey, guys! There’s a gap in the market for a dog with a crumpled face that breathes like an asthmatic sex pest!
‘Down, Prunella,’ said Evie. ‘Off my bed. Bad dog!’
Prunella, resembling a cashmere pig dipped in soot, looked disgruntled as she righted herself from her slutty, legs-akimbo pose.
‘Stay, Prunella!’ Shen was out of the dressing room in a flash; her high heels never impeded her speed. She could run, jump and kick ass in platforms that would break Evie’s ankles if she stood up in them. ‘Good dog!’ Shen pulled herself up to her full height, slender shoulders back, breasts (a Christmas present from Clive) jutting out. ‘That’s my bed, and Pru’s welcome on it.’
Prunella lay back among the bedclothes, emanating doggy whatevs.
‘And there was me, assuming we’d toss a coin for the best room in the house.’
‘Finders, keepers.’ With a deft movement, Shen twisted her fall of razor-edged black hair into a chignon and secured it with a clip magicked from thin air. It took Evie an age to produce even a wobbly topknot with her own streaked-to-buggery haystack; she’d never be envious of her friend’s wealth, but Shen’s hair left her green from head to toe. ‘I’d better bagsy the second-best room, before Lady Muck arrives with her brood.’ Evie dreaded the third family’s arrival so much she couldn’t use their real names.
‘Oh, yeah, about that . . .’ Shen had grown super-offhand. ‘Françoise isn’t coming.’
Evie gawped. ‘When did this happen?’ She was delighted, but confused. And then she was suspicious. ‘Sh-en?’ she encouraged. ‘Is there something you want to share with the class?’
‘She just couldn’t come, for some reason.’ Shen was nuzzling Prunella in a frankly unhygienic manner.
‘For some reason like you had a massive row with her?’
‘A small disagreement.’
‘Knew it!’
Like Shen, Françoise was a key member of the Ubermums, a school-gate clique identifiable by ‘done’ hair and handbags that cost the same as Evie’s parents’ first house. These massive accessories were brandished like shields, and their size served to accentuate the sparrow dimensions of the Ubers’ starved bodies.
Uber-kiddiwinks were ferried to St Agatha’s Primary and their infinite tutors in enormous four-wheel drives, as if traversing a hostile Outback rather than terraced streets; Uber-husbands, both current and ex, were ‘big in the City’.
Françoise had a lover, a timeshare and a face so packed with Botox that she needed forty-eight hours’ written notice to simper. Like all the Ubers, she was openly baffled by Shen’s friendship with Evie: the stylish ex-model and the tousled middle-aged mum. When Shen smuggled Evie into Uber coffee mornings, where the catty gossip was devoured but the Danish pastries shunned, Evie felt Françoise look her up and down, stirring her skinny latte, wondering, How did that civilian get in?
‘What was the row about this time?’ Evie sat on the bed, eager to hear.
‘She had this crazy idea that I’d poached her daughter’s French tutor.’
‘Et,’ said Evie, faltering as she dredged up her GCSE French, ‘il est vrai?’
‘A little vrai,’ conceded Shen. ‘But you know Miles is gifted at languages. All’s fair in love and tutors.’
All Ubers believed their perfectly ordinary and nice children to be gifted. The vain, domineering Françoise’s row with the argumentative Shen was inevitable; sooner or later everybody fell out with Shen.
Except Evie.
Despite Shen and Evie’s many differences – their ages (twenty-nine/forty), their
attitudes to grooming (non-stop/ annual leg wax prior to wedding-anniversary sex), their child-rearing styles (Tiger Mother/Meh Mother) – theirs was a natural, fluid friendship, fuelled by jokes and jibes, but underpinned by intimacy and the certainty that they had each other’s backs.
Prunella rolled off the bed and click-clacked after them, as Shen led the way to the second-best bedroom. In Evie’s arms, Fang regarded her in that serious way some babies have. ‘Are you the prettiest little thing? Are you? Are you?’ A thought struck her. An unwelcome thought. ‘What are we doing about Françoise’s share, Shen? I can’t pay the extra – Mike will flip, we just don’t have it.’
‘I know, I know.’ Shen waved her hands. ‘Don’t panic. I invited another family. It’ll be great.’
Something about the way she said it made Evie wilt. ‘Oh God, Shen, who’s coming?’
Instead of replying, Shen pushed at a door. ‘Ta-da!’ she said.
‘Ta-da indeed.’ Evie stepped into the second-best bedroom, a tone-poem of greys and faint pinks and knocked-back blues. A chandelier dangled above the vast bed, stacked with more pillows than Evie had ever owned. ‘Me like.’ She tried not to drool. ‘Me want.’
‘Then move your stuff in pronto and stake your claim, before the Browns arrive.’
‘The Browns? What, Paula and what’s-his-name?’
‘Jon, yes.’ Shen was brisk, all the better to get it over with. ‘And lovely Tillie, who we’ve never met, but who’s Scarlett’s age apparently; and little Amber, who’s in Miles’s and Mabel’s class. Yes, them.’ She opened the door to the en-suite, but Evie was wise to her and refused to be distracted . . . Hang on. Ooh, A free-standing bath! Evie shook herself. ‘Shen, the Browns are . . .’ She didn’t like the word that sprang to her lips, and was instantly ashamed of it.
‘Weird?’ Shen was more forthright. ‘Yup. But the Browns were the only ones available at the last minute. Probably because they’re weird,’ she ended, with a shrug.
‘I wouldn’t say they’re weird, exactly—’ began Evie.
‘Although they are weird,’ Shen cut in.
‘Yes, all right, can we stop saying “weird”? Paula makes me feel bad. She’s so nervous and . . .’
‘She jumps if you say hello.’
‘Yeah, and she tries to escape if you chat.’
‘And her clothes . . .’ Shen was unable to understand women who stepped out of their front doors less than catwalk-ready.
‘She makes me feel guilty,’ said Evie, realizing it properly for the first time. ‘As if I should make more of an effort with her.’
‘Then I’m giving you a chance to do just that!’
‘If you fell off a tower block,’ said Evie, jiggling Fang, ‘you’d land in a vat of champagne jelly. I’m not letting you off the hook just like that.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Shen smiled.
‘Yes, I suppose I am. As usual. Come on.’ She reluctantly tore herself away from the second-best bedroom. ‘Let’s get stuck into paradise.’
The kitchen ticked boxes Evie didn’t know existed. It was high, it was wide, and the back wall was a bank of folding glass, which opened up, concertina-style, to the Portland stone of the terrace, and the emerald-neon of the lawns beyond.
Rows of copper pans hung in strict size order above the range. The handmade cupboards, slightly oversized, so as to make even a full-figured (ahem) woman like Evie feel dainty, were painted an elusive colour somewhere between grey and green and blue. Evie stroked the ice-white worktops the way she’d stroked parts of Mike, back in their early days.
The vacuum-packed hot dogs and frozen chips that came out of Evie’s plastic bags sullied the style of the room a little. Shamefacedly she opened the pantry door and jumped, to find a young woman in there. ‘Elizabetta! Hi, or . . . um . . . ciao.’
‘Ciao.’ Shen’s Italian nanny had the body of a chorus girl and the demeanour of a nun. ‘May I?’ She took the hot dogs reverently and put them on a shelf.
‘I didn’t realize you were coming.’ Evidently Shen and Clive’s notion of quality family time was a little different from Evie and Mike’s.
Not quite dusk, the blues and purples and whites of the flower beds had begun to melt. With the candles in the outsize lanterns lit unobtrusively by Elizabetta, the terrace felt like the place to be.
‘The view,’ said Mike simply, settling himself into a metal-and-mesh garden chair that bore little relation to the white plastic monstrosities that squatted in their own yard. ‘When,’ he turned to Evie, ‘did people start naming their kids after Victorian servants? We’ve got a Mabel, and a Tillie arrives tomorrow. Sounds like the cast list of Downton.’
‘We almost called Dan “Edward”, remember? Just as Downton-esque, in its way.’ Edward was Evie’s favourite uncle; she recalled how they couldn’t name any of the kids after Mike’s family, and felt a sudden jab of compassion.
‘Right,’ said Clive, emerging from the French windows and rubbing his hands together. ‘Din-dins?’
An excited babble broke out. It seemed that all of them, from the oldest to the teeniest, was starving.
‘Seriously,’ said Mabel seriously, ‘I might die if I don’t eat right now.’
‘As it’s the first night, I vote for . . .’ Evie anticipated the acclaim that her inspiration would receive, ‘. . . a takeaway!’
Jubilation broke out. Mabel and Miles hugged each other. Scarlett broke off from texting to cheer. Clive said, ‘Bravo!’
Shen clapped her hands and said, ‘No need! Elizabetta will prepare dinner.’
Elizabetta looked as if this was news to her. Not particularly good news.
‘It’ll be,’ Shen promised, aglow, ‘highly nutritious, organic, balanced and vegetarian!’
Mike groaned as each adjective hammered a nail into the coffin of his KFC.
Evie smothered the children’s complaints. She’d let Shen win this round; there was plenty of time to stray from the path of righteousness. She ruffled Mike’s hair as she stood and followed Elizabetta into the kitchen.
‘Can I help?’
‘Of course not.’ The voice was that of Shen, who crossed to the wine rack in the fridge and tugged out a bottle of champagne as if birthing a glass baby. ‘She doesn’t need any help.’
‘Elizabetta?’ Evie double-checked.
‘You go sit.’ Elizabetta moved about purposefully. The sundress she wore, its nautical stripes clean on her strong, brown limbs, was one Evie recognized from Shen’s wardrobe. Regal with her employee, Shen was also generous. Perhaps, thought Evie, it makes up for moments such as these.
She looked closer at the girl’s closed, mutinous face.
And perhaps it didn’t.
The embers of the day.
Out on the terrace, as the others lazily discussed the weather – ‘Amazing summer we’re having’, ‘Apparently the hottest this century’, and so on – Evie watched her daughter amble around and remembered the days when she herself would happily have worn shorts that short.
Scarlett, bent over her phone, surfed from trend to trend, cherry-picking styles and details, but was always, irrepressibly, herself. Her hair, naturally lively (a term Evie preferred to the more truthful ‘messy’), was usually growing out of some terrible experiment; at present, Easter’s fringe was in her eyes. She seemed to be in a lipgloss phase; her mouth was jammy as she smiled to herself over some txtspk message from ‘home’.
The teenager had been mourning ‘home’ all evening. ‘I wonder what they’re doing at home now,’ she’d mused at intervals.
‘Who cares?’ had been Dan’s take on it, easily won over by the treehouse and the ping-pong table.
‘I wish my mates were here.’ When Scarlett said this for the fifth time, Evie pointed out that a possible mate would arrive tomorrow. ‘Tillie’s your age.’
‘I’m not a toddler,’ Scarlett groused. ‘You can’t put us together and say, Play nicely.’
‘Make her feel welcome. The Browns are new to the ar
ea, remember.’
‘Why’re you always on my case?’
‘Because I went through a forty-three-hour labour and ruined my boobs for you. That, madam, is why. Give Tillie a chance.’
‘Like you gave her mum a chance? You think she’s a nutter.’
Evie hoped that she hadn’t used that word. She sat up, remembered something. ‘Hang on,’ she said to Mike. ‘Don’t we have two other children?’
‘They’re in bed,’ said Shen. ‘Elizabetta took them up half an hour ago.’
‘But,’ said Evie, confused, ‘I didn’t hear any screaming or death-threats.’
‘Elizabetta knows her stuff,’ said Shen. She was smug, as if she’d made Elizabetta, rather than just hired her.
‘Oh.’ Evie felt strangely redundant. No cooking. No putting children to bed. She could learn to like feeling redundant.
‘Poker, anyone?’ Clive slapped down a pack of cards, the diamond on his pinkie glinting.
Reaching out to deal, Evie said, ‘But not for money, obviously.’
‘Of course we play for money.’ Clive seemed shocked. ‘Or what’s the point?’
‘Oh, I don’t think . . .’ began Evie, knowing how Mike felt about wasting cash.
‘I’m in,’ said Mike, taking out his wallet.
The men and Shen were evenly matched, whereas Evie played poker like an escaped chimp. She was soon out, and a whole three pounds down, so she sat back and watched, as the champagne bubbles worked their glorious dark magic on her.
Clive’s poker face was a jolly one, whether he had a good hand or a dreadful one.
Despite being a few glasses ahead of the others, Shen played to win, her wits as sharp as her cheekbones as she held Prunella on her lap, kissing her extravagantly.
‘I make it a rule,’ said Mike, fanning out his cards, ‘never to kiss anything that licks its own bottom.’
‘When’d you get so picky?’ Evie leaned back, noting his ace.
He swatted her leg. Mike didn’t know his own strength; that was a sexy thought. He winked at Evie.