by Claire Sandy
‘To our wives!’ said Clive. ‘Jon,’ he remonstrated, ‘lift your glass, man!’
‘To our wives,’ said Jon, obediently.
‘Nice, very nice,’ said Paula.
‘Bill, s’il vous plaît.’ Clive summoned a waitress as he pulled out his wallet. ‘I wonder what’s going on back at the house? Always risky, leaving Zane at home. I may need to flex my cheque-writing fingers.’
‘Zane’s fine,’ said Evie. ‘Last I saw of him, he was chillaxing with his harem. There was music. And Scarlett was over-laughing. Everything’s tickety-boo.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ Clive discreetly handed his credit card to the waitress, thanking her for the meal with, ‘It makes a change from cooking.’
‘Listen to him,’ scoffed Shen, who’d overcome her wine-box prejudice, and then some. ‘Anybody would think he made dinner every night. He can order food and he can eat it, but introduce him to an egg and he’d have no idea what to do with it.’
‘Mike can do spaghetti,’ said Evie. ‘But only if I threaten him with a rifle.’ The basic skill of cooking had somehow become a mysterious feminine superpower. Mike was no sexist, but put him anywhere near a saucepan and his belief system crumbled to dust.
‘He’s gonna need to work up some skills soon,’ said Shen darkly.
‘It’s like we’ve walked onto the set of Mary Poppins.’ Evie could see no strewn toys, no discarded trail of dirty clothes, no half-eaten doughnuts lying on open books, none of her shoes lying on their side after illicit involvement in a dressing-up game.
The house was hushed as Mike and Evie made their way to the attic for tucking in; Mabel had been clear on this: she couldn’t be expected to fall asleep until they’d both tucked her in.
‘I’m still sulking,’ mumbled Mabel as Mike pulled the sheet over her. ‘But I love you.’
‘We know you do, silly knickers,’ said Mike, kissing the tip of her nose.
A small voice sounded from the other bed crammed into the manor’s eaves. ‘Please could you please send my mummy in, please, thank you very much.’
‘Of course, sweetie.’ Evie called Paula, beckoning her in. ‘Somebody needs a cuddle.’
‘Oh, my darling.’ Paula swooped on the bed as if visiting the dying. ‘I know, I know,’ she soothed the whimpering girl, sounding on the verge of tears herself. She was all emotion, a ball of empathy.
If the woman had a friend, thought Evie, a real confidante, perhaps she could be persuaded to override the empathy and downplay life’s everyday agonies, for her children’s sake. However would little Amber, so naturally fearful, learn to cope, if Paula agreed with her that every shadow held a monster and every separation from her mummy was a disaster?
Mike was peeling off his tee when Evie went to their room and shut their door. It creaked eloquently, as did the floorboards. As did Evie’s knees when she sat on the bed.
Yawning, Mike said, ‘I don’t know how the idle rich take the pace. I’m not half as tired as this after a day dealing with alcoholic tenants and burnt-out bedsits.’
‘Come outside with me.’ Evie stood up, impetuous, determined. She held out her hand across the plateau of the bed.
‘Naw.’ Mike was scratching under his armpits, a disinterested monkey.
‘Please.’
‘Too tired, love.’ He was under the duvet, then kicking it off. He punched the pillow, not hearing the pleading note in her second ‘Please, Mike!’ The click of his bedside lamp served as a full stop.
‘Mike.’ She said his name slowly, significantly – the approved method of opening a marital discussion of some importance.
He turned over, away from her, his voice muffled by the pillow. ‘I saw the price label on that tofu stuff Shen buys. Amazing. I mean, it’s not even meat.’
‘Mike,’ said Evie again, upping the implication. ‘Darling.’
‘And that champers we guzzle – I looked it up. Each bottle costs more than we ever spend on dinner.’ A thought struck him and he turned, looking at Evie but apparently not taking her in, as he seemed unaffected by her tense posture. ‘Fuck me, Evie, with a third of the cost of the house and the petrol down here, and all the extra bits and bobs I know you’ve bought, this isn’t exactly turning out to be a bargain break, is it? I mean, shouldn’t it be cheaper to stay in the UK than to go abroad?’
‘Down at the side of the terrace, almost hidden by a palm, is a little bench,’ said Evie. ‘It’s so pretty – just planks nailed together.’ She found his face in the gloaming. ‘We can talk there. Come on.’
‘We’ve got ten more days to talk, love.’
‘Pretty please? Please with knobs on?’
He smiled, a wide smile that was almost audible in the half-dark. ‘We can talk any time.’ He thrashed about, trying to find the perfect position. ‘Was electricity included in the rate for this house, d’you know? If not, I start turning off lights tomorrow evening. The place was lit up like a birthday cake when we got back.’ He exhaled, a long pre-dropping-off sigh, then said, ‘Aren’t you getting undressed?’
‘I need some air.’
‘No-o.’ Mike sounded bereft. ‘You’ve had loads of air. Too much air, if anything. I can’t get to sleep unless I’m spooning that big old bum of yours.’
‘Well, you silver-tongued charmer, you’ll have to do your best.’ Keep it light, Evie counselled herself, as she slipped out of the door. Sometimes she wondered if her husband saw pound signs above the children’s heads.
The blackout of rural night was nothing like the eternal twilight of the city. At this lonely hour the acoustics were odd, as if everything lay under a deep coating of snow.
People are fundamentally the same, no matter when or where they were born. Evie felt sure she wasn’t the first person to look up at the moon from Wellcome Manor and wonder and worry and – ow! – catch her ankle on a treacherously placed plant pot. Cursing softly, she limped down the steps, glad of the midnight drop in temperature. The springy support of the grass beneath her feet woke her senses, set them firing. It was time to wake up and kick some ass.
Except that she didn’t want to kick Mike’s ass. For one thing, it was such a nice ass. She wanted to include him, involve him. She wanted to reach past all the accumulated clutter of their marriage and speak plainly to him.
She reached the swing. How long was it since she’d swung – in the wholesome sense of the word, not the nipping upstairs with him-from-down-the-road sense of the word? She’d watched the kids kick off on endless swooping flights, but the swings in their local park were too narrow for Evie’s behind. This wooden seat was magnanimously wide. Assuming the right position, she grasped the ropes and planted her feet in the earth that had been churned up over the years and pushed off.
No other word but Wheee! would hit the spot. Her hair flew back, then covered her face, then flew back again, her face washed clean by the moon.
Wearing herself out, Evie puttered to a stop, almost falling off. She’d never perfected that move; as a child, she’d always landed like a damaged Spitfire.
In the dark it was easy to imagine Mike beside her. The sweet, woody smell of his hair, the heat he gave off, the feel of his uniform of jeans and rumpled linen shirt.
‘Darling,’ she began. ‘I need to flee. Don’t panic. I only need to flee a little way and then I’ll come back. But I’m suffocating for want of fresh air. Let me explain.’
She raised her voice, warming to her theme.
‘You’re the man I fell madly in lust with, the one I promised to love and honour (remember how we laughed at including “obey”?). I meant it. I also meant the sickness-and-in-health bit. As did you.
‘But nowhere in the marriage vows did we mention that I would consent to being bored to death in order to keep you happy.
‘You don’t bore me. You couldn’t. Not even when you’re telling me for the fourteenth time why I should get into Breaking Bad. What’s boring me is doing nothing.
‘Hang on, though. I’m not sayin
g that running a home and bringing up three children is nothing. No, sirree!
‘Being a housewife (which is what I am, and damned proud of it: don’t you dare call me a “homemaker” or – strewth – a “family engineer’) is tough. For a take-home pay of zero pence, it demands the practical skills of a carpenter/plumber/chef, the tact of a therapist, the steely attitude of a cop, the loving acceptance of a saint, the time-management prowess of a top executive, the story-telling talent of Sir Ian McKellen and, once the kids have been put to bed, the va-va-voom of Jessica Rabbit.
‘I get no holidays. I can’t call in sick; remember how I had to draw a manual on how to boil eggs from my flu sickbed? I’m the only one who knows everybody’s shoe sizes, allergies, greatest fears. Which are, for the record: Mabel/snakes; Dan/serial killers; Scarlett/blowing off near a boy; you/something – anything – happening to me or the kids.
‘Which is why I haven’t been able to share my feelings. You love us so much, Mike, that you keep us in aspic. Or cotton wool. Sorry, my metaphors are going ape-shit.
‘Staying at home isn’t enough for me any more. I need something that’s entirely mine, that I can point to and say: “See that not particularly important, yet quietly significant thing? I did that.”
‘When we met, my job impressed you and I liked the young woman reflected in your eyes. Apart, obviously, from the perm. You said, “I love telling people my girl-friend’s in advertising”, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m his girlfriend”, because I wasn’t sure if the curries and pizzas and kisses in your ancient car added up to anything yet.
‘By the time I left the agency, a teeny Scarlett firming up in my uterus, I was tipped for “great things” – whatever that means – but I hardly need to tell you that Scarlett had her issues, poor little thing, and it was a good three years before I felt able to leave her with my mum and get back to work.
‘There was a job waiting. Less money than I’d been on, more junior, but with potential. And I was gagging for it, d’you remember?
‘We never talk about this. It’s as if it un-happened. But, Mike my love, it did happen. The morning I was due to go in and formally sign my contract and be allocated a desk and shown the kettle, you took me to one side and you said: “We need you.”
‘Now, I know you very, very well. I know when you say you don’t want seconds of toad-in-the-hole that you’re just being pious. I know when you say that you’re squinting because the sun’s in your eyes that you have a humungous migraine.
‘So I knew what you were really saying was that you needed me.
‘The abandoned little care-home boy couldn’t watch the mummy of the house walk out of the door. Your past is always with us, Mike. I know you strive to feel “normal”, and I know the children are the icing on our “normal” cake. I sense the satisfaction you get just from being around them, doing the little things like kissing a grazed knee. It makes me well up, to have a man with massive reserves of feeling, who appreciates what we have.
‘D’you feel a “but” clearing its throat? Here it is.
‘But . . . sometimes you smother us.
‘Scarlett doesn’t need to be collected from the youth centre. Dan can cross our quiet road. And I can return to work.
‘I feel as guilty as if I have a lover. There’ve been assignations and secret texts and plans made behind your back. Remember Alex? She and I started at the agency on the same day. Now she runs the place. And she needs an assistant.
‘She needs me.
‘I could do it; I could do it well. It’s not producing; I missed that boat. But it’s a relatively senior admin post. The pay . . . it would make a difference. We might even be able to move. You could stop having nightmares about us all living in a cardboard box by the motorway.
‘But the main difference would be to our daily lives.
‘I’ve worked it all out, Mike, so the only change you have to make is your attitude. I’ll work four days a week at the office, with Wednesdays working from home. Scarlett’ll collect Dan and Mabel on Mondays and Tuesdays. I’ll fetch them on Wednesdays. On Thursdays and Fridays, when Scarlett has after-school clubs, Mum’ll take the little ones and feed them. Blimey, it sounds complicated, but we’ll get used to it.
‘There may be more convenience foods. I’ll leave the house before you, so I won’t wave you off, the way you like me to. And now and then I’ll have to travel, so you all will have to muddle along without me.
‘I can already smell your panic. You once said, during the other time I almost left you, the time we call “the bad time”, that you couldn’t imagine the house without me. That, without me all aproned and ready in the kitchen, it would simply fall down, brick by brick.
‘It won’t, Mike. I promise. Meet me halfway. Try. I’ve been hanging on by my fingertips for quite some time now, only half the woman I was when we met: I want to be me again. And I want our honesty back: I shouldn’t have kept this from you.
‘Can you try?
‘What do you say?’
Evie dropped into an exhausted bow. It felt good to get it all out. She jerked up at the sound of applause.
‘I say yes! What else could a man say to a speech like that?’
‘How long have you been standing there?’ she asked Clive, wanting to run.
‘I came out to our bench.’ Clive stopped, thought, smiled. ‘It is our bench, isn’t it? To see if you were there. I saw you on the swing, followed you down and, once you started talking, there seemed no easy way to pipe up.’ Clad in a brocade dressing gown, the ornate leisurewear of a bygone age, Clive held out his palms apologetically. ‘And then I was transfixed. Bravo, Evie!’
‘I feel . . . exposed.’
‘No need.’ Clive’s expression was hard to read. ‘Talk to Mike with half the sincerity you just showed, talking to thin air, and he’ll get on board. Nobody could resist such passion.’
‘Really?’ Evie felt her backbone rebuild itself, disc by disc. ‘Passion?’ Thanks to TV talent shows, it was an overused word. She liked it. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’ Clive struck a match to light his cigar and his face was bright for a second. ‘Believe me, Evie. You were on fire.’
DAY 5
Saturday, 15th August
dear miss Pritchett
our mummys made us rite this it is sunny we wish you cud be our teacher forrever
miles mabel amber
x xxxx xoxo
Tillie preferred the shade to the noon sunshine. Like she preferred black to pink, and Stephen King to Jilly Cooper.
When she’d suggested to Scarlett that they escape the relentless sun by climbing up to their treehouse (it was so theirs by now), she knew Zane would follow. At a distance, but there.
As usual.
‘Scar,’ said Tillie. ‘Bung us a ciggie.’
If Paula knew what went on up here, she’d faint. Evie would . . . Tillie wondered what Scarlett’s mother would do. Shout, definitely. But then hug. And shout again. She was one of those mums.
A cigarette flew like a torpedo from Scarlett’s hand.
‘Ta.’ Tillie didn’t really smoke, but Scarlett did; some stuff you just had to do to fit in, so . . . she braced herself as she lit a match. They tasted vile, these stupid fags. ‘Sorry to interrupt, lovebirds.’
Scarlett flashed her eyes at Tillie over Zane, stretched out at her feet like a pedigree pup, all health and gleam. ‘Go on,’ Scarlett nudged him with her foot. ‘You were saying. About your last girlfriend.’
‘She was mental.’ Zane lay flat on his back, fingers inter-locked beneath his head, not looking at Scarlett, but at the untreated wood that was the ceiling. ‘Bad reputation.’
‘Like what?’ Maybe, thought Scarlett, I’ll be an investigative journalist. Investigative journalism was especially easy when the subject was as fanciable as this one.
‘She was totally fit, but, man, she was crazy. Jealous. Always on my back. Bit of a slut too.’
A snort from Tillie.
�
�She was,’ said Zane, those unfeasibly straight brows creasing. ‘I’m only telling the truth.’
Scarlett knew she should tell the truth. She should tell Tillie she didn’t smoke. It was a pain having to puff her way through one or two cigarettes a day. She’d been hiding them for one of her mates, but Tillie saw them and asked for one, and somehow Scarlett was now a fake smoker. Jesus, she thought, life is complicated.
‘How many boys have you . . . you know?’ said Zane, nodding meaningfully.
‘He means,’ said Tillie loudly, ‘how many times have you had carnal knowledge of the opposite sex.’
‘Yeah,’ said Zane. ‘Thanks, Tills.’
‘You go first,’ said Scarlett. She saw how he quickened when she looked coy. She was both pleased with herself for pleasing him and irritated for allowing it to matter. It was hard being a girl.
‘Four.’ Zane let her gasp. ‘Actually, more like five. Yeah. Five – forgot that one on holiday.’
‘You started young,’ said Scarlett.
‘Very.’ Zane grinned. ‘I can’t resist the laydeez.’
‘What’s your type?’ Scarlett was super-duper casual about this; she had no idea why Tillie was groaning.
‘Kind,’ said Zane. ‘And hot, obviously. Good bod.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Sex is so amazing, isn’t it? I mean, there’s nothing like it, when you’re in the groove with some amazing girl. If you’re any good at it, I mean.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Scarlett. OK, this might put him off, but she had to say it. ‘I’ve never done it.’
‘You’ve never done it?’ Zane sat up. A languid boy, Scarlett had never seen him move so fast. ‘You told me you went out with some guy for five months.’
‘I did. But I didn’t love him.’
‘That poor guy.’
Was Zane referring to the fact that the poor guy had endured five sexless months or that he hadn’t been loved? Scarlett knew which translation she preferred.
‘Didn’t you ever feel . . . tempted?’