The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Diva

by Sarah May

  Her hands shaking again, Evie took three hundred pounds out of the yellow and brown Orla Kiely purse that matched her handbag and umbrella and poked it through the fence, her wrist sliding over something wet.

  After an unbearable pause the sandwich bag reappeared. She grabbed at it and thumped the panel back into place.

  As she stood up again she glanced up at the back of the housejust about visible through the bamboobut there was no sign of life there, apart from a light in Martina’s room.

  She made her way quickly towards the mossy hump of her ergonomic garden office, which had featured so prominently in Grand Designs. It took her a while to find the right key, but eventually she did, making her way precariously past the outline of desk and computer towards the tiny loo they’d had installedwith a view to the garden office doubling up as guest annexe. Once inside the loo, she finally turned the light on. There was barely room to stand between the loo and the door, and she just about managed to pull the loose tile off the wall behind the loo.

  Taking the sandwich bag out of her coat pocket, with water running off her, she shook a generous line of Jack’s cocaine out onto the tile and got quickly and efficiently down to business before putting the sandwich bag behind the tile and the tile back on the wall. Then she went into the office and slumped into the chair, jerking it absently from side to side and staring out at the rain-soaked night.

  She didn’t know how she’d got through tonight, having to sit there listening to how everybody had got into St Anthony’s: Toby Granger, Casper Burgess, Findlay Huntereven bloody Arthur Palmer.

  She had seriously thought about not going when the St Anthony’s rejection letter arrived that morning. At 7.52, an overriding despair resulted in her dialing 999. After informing emergency servicesin an incoherent, tear-stained babblethat Aggie hadn’t got her place at St Anthony’s and that they had to contact the school for herhad to…or she didn’t know what she’d do, she had hung up and collapsed on the kitchen floor where she’d lain banging her head repetitively against the reclaimed French limestone they’d finally managed to track down in southwest France that summer. It was only when Aggiewho’d been slowly making her way through a bowl of cocoa popscame over to tell her she couldn’t put her bowl in the dishwasher because it was full (had she forgotten to put it on the night before, again?) that she finally came to her senses. As a precaution, she’d phoned round everybody soon after thisapart from Jessica Palmer, but nobody ever phoned Jessica Palmerto tell them Aggie was in. Then she’d phoned Joel at workto tell him Aggie was in. Joel’s reaction made it clear that Aggie getting in was a foregone conclusion and that he had never for a moment doubted otherwise.

  After phoning Joel, she’d got in the car, dropped Aggie and Ingrid off at Village Montessori and driven round to St Anthony’s vicarage to plead with the Reverend Tessa Walker, begging her to intercede. All the Reverend Walker could say was that they’d had two sets of triplets applying that academic year. So whatAggie had suffered because of somebody else’s successful IVF treatment? It didn’t seem fairand with conception through IVF and resulting multiple births on the rise, if the local council and the Church of England didn’t do something to address the issue, soon St Anthony’s was going to have no more than five families being offered all fifty places between them.

  Restless, she got up from the chair, locked the office and headed back out into the rain. Once in the house, she hung up her dripping coat, aware that the TV had been switched off. She checked herself in the mirror in the downstairs loo then went upstairs.

  Joel was lying across the bed, A Guide to British Citizenship in his hand.

  ‘Shit, I could barely answer half of these questions myself. Listen to this…according to the 2001 Census, what percentage of the UK population reported that they had a religion?’

  ‘No idea.’ Evie went over to the bed and started to undress.

  ‘Okaywhat about this then…. Name three countries that Jewish people migrated to the UK from to escape persecution during Eighteen eighty to Nineteen ten?’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘When’s she sitting the test?’

  ‘Some time soon. She wants to do a travel and tourism course when she’s got her Cambridge English.’ Joel clearly approved of all this, Evie thought, watching him. Some men had hobbies…affairs…played football…drank too much. Joel had causes, and his latest cause was clearly Martina, their au pair.

  Their marriage waswhat was the word she came up with the other day?pockmarked with them. Up until the birth of Agnes five years ago. After Agnes, their marriage became a cause in itselfone that Joel was determined to champion. Which was a good thing because, if it hadn’t been for this, Evie was fairly certain they wouldn’t have made it as far as Ingrid. What lay ahead of them now, she had no idea.

  They met when they were well on the road to their respective peaks…when she was a fashion buyer, forever hopping on and off planes to Tokyo, and he was making twenty thousand a shoot as a photographer in advertising. That was pre-digital: things were much tougher now. They were the sort of people things went right for and this didn’t change when they became a couple. In fact, Agnes was the first wrong thing that ever happened to themand neither of them had anticipated it.

  The easy pregnancy was seen as yet another success in a long line of successes. Conception had been quickpossibly not passionate, but satisfying: no fertility clinics or IVF for them. The pregnancy was happy and healthy and baby Agnesdespite Joel’s recurrent nightmares during the pregnancyhad all her arms and legs, no deformities.

  The first disappointment was the unexpected Caesarean.

  The last trimester of pregnancy they’d had more of a nightlife than they’d had pre-pregnancy, going to every local antenatal support group for natural births. Joel had the whole thing planned to musichaving DJed in advance the entire birth. He had three discs with twelve hours’ worth of compilation music on them, starting with The Who to see them through those early contractions, followed by some Prodigy and eighties remixes for when things started to get fast and furious, then…the birth itself. He wanted the childhis childto emerge into the world to Handel’s Zadok the Priest.

  Only it had gone on and on and after the first twelve hours he’d had to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing photogenic about pain. During the following six hours Evie became some sort of pastiche of Linda from The Exorcist only to be delivered as Aggie herself was finally delivered…by Caesarean section. Something they quickly mumbled to everyone who came to visit them on the ward, to get it over and done with, lingering on the fact that Zadok the Priest had been playing as planned, and that the surgeon who delivered Aggie knew all the words and had sung along. In fact, in those early days, Joel spent a lot more time talking about the surgeon who sang along to Zadok the Priest than he did about Baby Aggie.

  He told visitors that the surgeon was Croatian and came to the UK during the Balkan conflict. Then he paused, trying to work out the meaning of what he had just saidbecause it had to mean something; had to be currency somewhere. ‘Our daughter was delivered by a war criminal,’ he said to the reflection in the mirror on the bathroom wall in the empty Clapham flat. Would it workat dinner parties and social gatherings? Was it currency in the marketplace of making yourself interestingnot just to others, but to yourself?

  Unconvincedby this and a lot of other, more general stuffhe invited an old assistant of his, Lucia, round to supper while Evie was in hospital, in order to gauge whether he was still the most sought-after man in the developed world. After only half an hour in Lucia’s companychecking to see that the twenty-six year old’s northern Italian pupils were dilating in the appropriate mannerhe was once more assured that all he had to do was click his fingers and Lucia would fuck an armadillo on his command.

  After the operation Evie couldn’t do anything for herself and found it difficult feeding Aggie. Joel told her not to give up because nobody they knew used bottles. Shiteven the Daily Mail was promoting breastfeeding.


  Joel had anticipated Evie being as successful at motherhood as she was doing business in Tokyo, and was therefore entirely unprepared for the Evie who sat sobbing in her hospital bed with a screaming, abandoned-looking baby sprawled in her lap.

  When he ran out of visitors to tell the Zadok the Priest story to, it got to the stage where he could no longer bear to visit her himself and so sent his parents instead.

  Following the birth of Aggie, neither Joel nor Evie ever really recovered from the depression and despair that came creeping, seeping into all that intact vitality both of them had thought so impregnable. The hardest part of all was losing the envy of their friends. For the first time ever, Joel had to deal with the fact that right then not only did nobody want to spend time with them, but people had stopped wanting to be them, and that was hard. Ever since he could remember, everybody he’d ever come into contact with had wanted to be him in some shape or form, and suddenly that stopped. The glowing, bouncing, enviable Evie he had known up to this point became nothing more than one of the variations on offer.

  So, after six months, Aggie was in full-time childcare and Evie was hopping on and off planes to Tokyo again. Joel was only able to take on assignments that didn’t conflict with the Tokyo trips. The Clapham flat was exchanged for a semi-detached house in SE22, bought cheap because the house they were semi-detached to was social housing and the young kid living thereJoel had lately become convincedwas dealing in drugs, because even younger kids on scooters were forever dropping off packages there.

  On one of the Tokyo trips, Evie had some sort of breakdown. Joel got a phone call from a frightened assistant who’d lost all plot of time differences and phoned at 3.00 a.m. to tell him Evie had locked herself in her hotel room with the chambermaid’s bucket of cleaning fluids and refused to leave until she’d cleaned it herself, it was so filthy.

  In the end he had to go to Tokyo to fetch her, telling everyoneincluding himselfthat she had acute glandular fever. Once they got back to London, Evie barely left the house. Joel turned down assignments and took over Aggie, who he was determined would be walking and talking before his brother’s daughterhis niece.

  Evie was prescribed Seniton to help herand Joelsleep at night. Often during this time, he would wake during the early hours of the morning and know, as he watched her sleeping, that the part of Evie he’d never known existedthe part that frightened him most; the part he was actively medicatingwas also the part, if he hadn’t been so afraid, he somehow knew he loved the most.

  Eventually Evie went back to work part-time, but no longer had the inclination or will to make things buzz around her. It came as no surprise to either of them when she was finally laid off.

  Joel didn’t know what to do. He liked things to work…function. Somehow he pulled himself back from the brink. Their marriage…children (Evie was pregnant with Ingrid)…were going to be a success; happiness didn’t have to come into it if it didn’t want to.

  He spent her redundancy on a lease and told everybody Evie was going into business, launching her own label, employing a team of young designers. So Boutique was born.

  Things slumped a bit around Ingrid’s birth, which was elected Caesarean, but now the shop was really taking off. He was even thinking of a franchiseopening another branch in maybe Barnes or Wandsworth and getting Evie to put in for Best Independent Retailer of the Year award. They had childcare sorted, and he was moving out of commercial photography and trying to cajole his agent onto getting together a studio retrospective of his work at Tate Modern. Then there was that stroke of genius: getting the house onto Grand Designs. The McRaes were happening again. Wherever he turned, he could see it in people’s faces…everybody wanted their lives to be as fulfilled as the McRaes. He was even thinking of contacting that toy manufacturer in Beijing that could make lifestyle dolls from photos. ‘Evie’ and ‘Joel’ dolls would make fantastic Christmas gifts.

  Evie’s energy levels were certainly back up, he thought approvingly, watching her pace aimlessly between bed and wall. Okay, she did look kind of fidgety, but there were no signs of exhaustion or, worse still, inertiai.e. depression. He’d gone downstairs that morning at 6.00 a.m. to find her unpacking a Sainsbury’s shop: that had to be a good sign.

  It occurred to him, watching her, that she was semi-naked. He leered pleasantly, meaningfully across the bed at her, thinking that really tonight they should…it had been ten days and it would be a good way for her to burn off some of that excess energy she seemed to have at the moment. Their marriage had to function on all levels. They were the couple who did everythingincluding sextogether. Still.

  Evie got into bed and he rolled up close, trying not to acknowledge the smell of drink on her.

  She smiled absently at him as he started to nibble at her neck.

  If not exactly forthcoming, she seemed amenable; but he took things slowly, cautiously. He never would get over those times they’d tried to have sex after Aggie was born when Evie would just burst into tears. It wasn’t that he’d never seen her cry beforewhen they first started dating they’d cried a lot together at European films; only these tears had been wild, without subtitles or explanation.

  Tonight his wife’s body felt warm, supple and familiar. He started to consider actually enjoying himself.

  Evie, watching him now, gave the same jerky, preoccupied smile she had done earlier, showing no objection but no outright consent either. Joel waited, unsure, until the next minute she rolled compliantly onto her back. Misjudging how close she already was to the edge of the bed, she fell onto the floor.

  The hysterical laughter started almost immediately.

  Joel peered over the side of the bed at her curled up naked, shaking with laughter.

  Laughter in bed needed to be complicit, but there was nothing complicit about this laughter.

  Suddenly scared, he said, ‘Get up.’

  Laughter.

  ‘Evieget up.’

  Continued laughter. Was she ever going to stop?

  ‘What are youdyspraxic or something?’ he yelled. Was that the right word? He didn’t know, but it had the right effect on her because she stopped laughing and rolled over to stare up at him.

  ‘You’re forever walking into things or falling over stuffyou’re worse than Aggie.’

  Now her whole face was gaping up at him. ‘My God, that’s it.’

  ‘What?’ Joel said from the bed.

  ‘That’s it,’ Evie said again, excited.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it earlier? St Anthony’s had a special needs unit specialising in dyspraxia and dyslexia. All she needed to do was get Aggie statemented…

  Chapter 24

  Ros stood inside the en-suite bathroom at No. 188 Prendergast Road, slowly taking out her earrings and inadvertently smiling at her reflection in the mirror.

  Martin was home.

  That hadn’t happened in a long time.

  ‘How were the kids?’ she called out.

  Martin’s voice, coming from the bedroom, sounded as though he was on the verge of sleep. ‘Toby was fineLola took a bit of settling.’

  She went and stood in the bedroom doorway as she rubbed in some face cream, aware that they hadn’t spoken face to facewithout the aid of a telephonefor weeks.

  Martin was sprawled across the bed, dressed in casual wear he’d last worn at Christmas, staring at the wall opposite.

  He started when she appeared in the doorway, as if he’d been caught outand this momentarily unnerved Ros, who stopped rubbing cream into her face and started to watch him more closely as he tried to smile at her.

  ‘Tired?’

  He nodded apologetically. ‘Boring, isn’t it?’

  She disappeared back into the bathroom without responding to this.

  A minute later he joined her, standing close behind her at the sink and stretching over her shoulder towards the medicine cabinet.

  They watched each other in the mirror until Ros leant suddenly forwards and washed her hands. Her back
was warm from where the length of him pressed against her as he reached for the Seniton.

  ‘Seniton?’

  Martin laughed cheerfully.

  ‘When did you start taking those again?’

  ‘Three weeks ago or something?’ he asked his own reflection in the mirror. Then, shrugging at himself, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But, Martinthose aren’t the herbal ones we agreed you could take.’

  ‘The herbal ones are shit useless,’ he said, still sounding cheerful. ‘Kind of like the difference between a cigarette and a Nicorette.’

  ‘You’re not smoking again as well?’

  ‘Course not.’

  Not entirely sure she believed this, she said, ‘But what about that article we read connecting Seniton to male infertility?’

  ‘Roswe’ve got two children.’

  ‘But what if we want more?’

  ‘Lola is only seven months old.’

  ‘Later…later we might want more.’

  ‘Well that’s something we can think about…later.’

  He turned away from her, taking the pack of Seniton into the bedroom.

  There was no point talking about it. Martin clearly didn’t want toshe wasn’t even sure she was all that interested herself. But she knewsuddenlythat she wasn’t going to sleep that night until they reached some sort of resolution as to whether or not a third child was a possibility at some stage.

  Martin was lying on the bed again and Martin lying on the bed was something she no longer took for granted, she realised. His presence tonight made the familiar landscape of the bedroom seem suddenly precipitous.

  ‘Later when?’ she said, pressing her point

  He stared at her for a moment, and gave his nose a quick scratch as a tiny feather poked its way through the pillowcase.

  ‘RosI don’t know.’

  She moved away from the doorway and sat on the edge of the bed, giving his chest a playful prod. ‘Laterwhen?’ she insisted, trying to get her voice to do provocative, but it just came out sounding irate.