by Tamar Cohen
SELINA
All this fuss about presents. As if any of it matters.
It’s funny to think how much effort I used to put into them—giving each person a theme and scouring the shops for months beforehand for gifts, large and small, that fitted in with what I’d chosen. Who was that woman? The year Felix went traveling in South America, his presents were all based on a Latin theme; the year Flora moved out she had her “Survival Kit” with everything a newly independent girl could possibly need.
But this year, I looked at shop windows heaped with consumer goods—electronic devices, clothes, cushions, things to cook with, things to fish with, things to sit on, things to slather on your skin or run in your bath, scarves, jewelry, makeup that comes in heavy glass pots or tiny glossy black cardboard boxes embossed with gold writing—and I felt disgusted, in the same way one feels disgusted at the sight of rich food after a heavy meal. It’s not even about not having money. Well, it’s not just about not having money. Why didn’t I ever notice before how much waste there is, how much gluttonous excess, how it leaves one feeling queasy and flabby around the edges? All that glitter! All that oozing, slimy velvet and silk! Too much.
Now I wipe my hands on a tea towel and fetch a stack of identical envelopes from the everything drawer.
“Are these Marks & Spencer vouchers?” queries Felix, tearing his envelope open. “Push the boat out, Madre!”
I turn my back to him. I’m tired of it all. Everyone wanting so much from me, pulling me this way and that, stretching me between them like fine pizza dough.
Now there’s someone behind my back, strong arms clasping me tight, a chin resting on my shoulder.
“Poor Madre,” coos Felix’s voice in my ear, all trace of the barbed tone of a few seconds ago completely disappeared. “Poor, poor Madre.”
LOTTIE
Oh, but look. How would that feel, I wonder, to have that young, handsome version of Simon putting his arms around you, loving you?
But isn’t there something just a little creepy about it? Standing so close together, almost swaying, the mother with her eyes closed, the son with his face in her neck?
Now Selina has pulled away.
“The cabbage won’t prepare itself!”
Chop, chop, chop.
SELINA
That hug from Felix, such a sharp reminder of the human touch I miss. Not Greg, not him, not that. What I mean is the physical intimacy of being with someone you know so well (thought you knew so well), the million little gestures you don’t even notice. Simon’s hand resting like a warm compress on my thigh when I sit in the passenger seat as he drives, his arm around my shoulders when we emerge from the theater on brisk winter evenings, his fingers stroking my toes through my tights as we watch television, my feet on his lap. The warmth of skin upon skin.
I glance at Lottie’s arm where it rests on the table. So small, like a child’s arm, really.
When I thought he was in meetings, on building sites, sweltering under the desert sun, he was with her, their skin touching. Skin upon skin.
Ah, there it is! The now-familiar lurch of betrayal. I wait for the nausea to come... No, nothing. The feeling subsides just as quickly as it arose. Emotions are too wearing, I realize now. I am emptied out like a rusty can. So he loved that other woman, with her silly hair and her soap-opera melodramas. Does it really matter? Do any of us really, in the end, have a monopoly on each other? I’m so sick of it all suddenly. Simon, Lottie, Greg. The sordidness of my life. My grief-damaged children.
My family resembles the cheap baubles on the token Christmas tree Josh dragged home at the last minute a couple of days ago—garish and overcolored on the outside and hollow and empty on the inside, liable to shatter into a thousand pieces under the slightest pressure, each one sharp enough to draw blood.
How I wish they would all just go away.
LOTTIE
Finally, lunch is ready. ’Though what kind of lunch gets served at nearly 5:00 p.m. I don’t know. I’ve been sent to summon Sadie and Josh. The Royal Summons. Flora offered to find them, but I was already on my feet. Any excuse to get out of that kitchen for a few minutes. To be honest, I didn’t even notice them leaving, Josh and Sadie; they just melted away while I was making small talk with Hettie about whether it’s worth paying extra for supermarket mince pies with a picture of a celebrity chef on the box.
I can hear voices coming from a room I haven’t been in before, on the opposite side of the hallway from that hideous mausoleum of a living room we went in the first time we were here. Josh’s low bass tones are difficult to make out behind the closed door, but just as I’m about to go in, I hear Sadie.
“Great Christmas this is—broke and soon to be homeless.”
Josh murmurs something, to which Sadie replies, “You wait. We’ll go first, then you. It’ll be like a house of cards. The house that Simon built.”
I freeze. When did my daughter get so cynical? My own stupid fault for not talking to her more about what’s been going on. I thought I was protecting her, but now I see she’s been gathering choice snippets of information here and there like a magpie—piecing it all together in a patchwork approximation of the truth.
There’s a lull now, but still I hover outside the door with my hand poised in the act of reaching for the handle.
Now Sadie resumes speaking. “Did you like him? Dad, I mean?”
The word Dad feels like a stone in my stomach. For all these years it has belonged to Sadie exclusively—only she had the right to say Dad and for it to mean Simon. Now she tosses it out for Josh to share as carelessly as an old tennis ball. I’m astonished how much I mind.
The question clearly embarrasses Josh—even through the solid door I sense his discomfort as he replies, “Yeah, he was all right, I s’pose.”
Sadie murmurs in what sounds like agreement.
“Yeah, he was better than my mum anyway,” she says. The hurt is instant, vicious. Stupidly, my eyes blur with tears. “But sometimes,” she continues, “I used to feel as if I had to, I dunno, entertain him or something.”
To my surprise, Josh laughs.
“I thought that was just me!” he says. “Sometimes I used to rehearse what I was going to say to him in my head, d’you know what I mean, to make sure it was interesting enough?”
I’m shocked to hear Simon’s youngest son voicing what I never admitted even to myself, that I’d occasionally run through a story in my mind before telling it to Simon, polishing it up to make it more worth listening to.
From the dining room down the hall comes the sound of someone shouting, “Going cold!” Hettie perhaps, or maybe Petra.
Josh and Sadie instantly fall silent, and I grab the handle and push open the door.
SELINA
When I look down the table at all the half-eaten food—a clot of mashed swede in an earthenware container, overcooked Brussels sprouts with chestnuts that leave a slimy trail of greeny-brown across the plates, the desiccated carcass of the turkey, one uneaten leg pointing grotesquely at the ceiling—I feel sickened by it all. All this excess. All this waste.
Lottie has hardly touched her food, just pushed it around her plate with her fork. She probably has an eating disorder. She seems like the type. Anything to make herself seem more interesting. She thinks I don’t know what she was doing when she disappeared earlier. She said she went to get Josh and Sadie—as if it really takes that long to walk down the hall! Had a good poke about, did you? I want to say it, but I don’t. I’m supposed to be nice because of the thing she did with the sleeping pills, because she’s pregnant, because I’m older. But I’m sick of being the bigger person. I’m sick of holding it together. I want to scoop up the uneaten food from her plate and smash it right into her face. I want to curl up in the middle of the table, amid the leftover roast potatoes in their puddle of congealing fat and the g
ravy with its thick wrinkled skin, and scream until I can’t scream anymore.
Instead, I purse my lips together, so the bad thoughts can’t come out.
“It’s amazing about your mortgage being paid,” I say through my tightly pressed lips, the words emerging thin and flattened. “You must be sitting pretty now.”
I don’t mention the secret account, but she knows that’s what I’m thinking of. No mortgage on her flat, a nice little nest egg in an offshore bank. No wonder she’s looking so smug—rubbing her neat little bump under the table with a smirk on her face.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” she says.
“Oh, come on.” I keep my voice light, sifting the hard lumps of bile from it before letting it out. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself out of all this, surely? Ironic, really, that your mortgage has been paid off thanks to this ‘anonymous benefactor—’” I make exaggerated quote marks in the air when I say this “—while I’m still saddled with the one Simon took out to pay for your flat!”
“Mum!” Josh’s voice is raw with embarrassment.
“It’s okay, Josh. I’m not criticizing, merely stating fact. And you’ve got no idea who this ‘anonymous benefactor’ is?”
I’ve turned back to Lottie to ask the question, and I say it with a slight smile. It occurs to me suddenly that there’s only one possibility, as far as I can see—Lottie has another lover somewhere in the wings. She’s waiting until all the fuss over Simon’s death dies down to introduce him. Probably the baby isn’t even Simon’s.
I allow myself to be carried away by this fantasy until she speaks.
“Actually, we’re not ‘sitting pretty’ as you call it at all.” She does an ugly thing with her mouth when she says sitting pretty, pulling her lips back like a snarling dog. “I had a phone call from Greg Ronaldson yesterday morning.”
The heat rushes to my face. Am I blushing? Does she know?
“He’s been talking to Simon’s solicitor. Apparently, because I wasn’t legally married to Simon, I’m not exempt from inheritance tax. If I can’t come up with thirty-six thousand pounds, I’ll lose my home.
“And if I lose mine. You’ll lose yours.”
SELINA
After they’ve gone, Hettie and I sit in the den nursing brandies in Simon’s pretentious bulbous glasses. Ian is driving my mother back to the nursing home and from the kitchen we can hear the sound of Petra and Flora and Josh clearing up. Felix and Ryan are both too drunk to help. They were both sprawled across the table the last time I saw them.
“That went off well, I thought,” says Hettie brightly.
I tip my head to one side and stare at her until she backtracks. “As well as can be expected anyway...” I hold my pose and finally she capitulates. “Oh, okay. It was a bit of an ordeal. But really, Sel, what did you expect?”
For a moment I think about explaining about Flora and the cardboard sister and Josh and how he’d been waiting for me to do the right thing, the appropriate thing. I imagine telling Hettie how I’m not me anymore, but I’m not really a new person, either, so I must be taking my cues from other people, modeling my behavior on theirs, matching my expectations to their own.
“You’re right,” I say in the end, taking a big gulp of brandy. “It was a truly crap idea. I’m scared, Hets.” Only now do I recognize this to be the case. “All that money owing. Thirty-six thousand pounds she needs now. Taxes, mortgages, debts. It’s like I went to sleep in my own home and woke up somewhere totally foreign where everyone talks a different language.
“And I don’t know how I’m ever going to get back.”
21
SELINA
When Hettie first rang and told me the junior department of Josh’s school needed a new teaching assistant, I dismissed it out of hand. Whenever I’ve thought about my triumphant return to the world of work, I’ve always envisaged something in PR or journalism, maybe—not teaching, and certainly not a teacher’s assistant. But Hettie didn’t waste any time in setting me right. She didn’t actually use the phrase “beggars can’t be choosers”—she didn’t have to.
Much as I love Hettie, there was something vaguely unseemly about her zeal as she urged me to apply. I’ve noticed there are few things that make a woman more impassioned than advocating on behalf of someone else for something she’d rather die than do herself.
But lying awake the night before the start of the new school term, fretting about money, or the lack of it, moving it around in my head from current account to unpaid bill to credit card in a ghastly choreographed dance, I realized I didn’t have much choice. A job at the school would give me an income and a sizable discount on Josh’s fees. The funny thing is I always meant to have a career somewhere down the line. I remember, very early on, going to a party where a woman with bright pink lipstick and statement earrings asked me what I did and laughed out loud when I said “I’m a homemaker.” When Simon and I got home, I was livid. Felix was still very small.
“Of course I’ll get a job once he’s old enough,” I said. But then came Flora, followed by Josh. We’d bought the house in Barnes, which needed a total overhaul, and then the place in Tuscany, and there never seemed like a right time.
“Do you miss it?” Simon asked, just once. “Having something outside of the family, something that’s just yours?”
At the time I was defensive, feeling judged by him. “My family and my home are what’s mine,” I bristled. “I’ll come into my own when the children are grown, don’t worry.” But of course, I didn’t. There was always another project...and then another... And now here I am at fifty-one, without any marketable skills and potentially broke.
The truth is I’m not really doing poverty very well.
It’s the humiliation of it that affects me most, the way everyone has to know about it. Like Josh’s head teacher when I went to see her before Christmas. We share (used to share) a hairstylist, so we’ve always had a sort of bond, and I suppose she was as understanding as she could be in the circumstances, agreeing that I could pay this term’s fees at the end of the term rather than the beginning. But she made it crystal-clear she could do no more.
“We’re in the midst of a recession,” she said solemnly, gazing at me through the vase of calla lilies on her desk. “Many of our parents work in the City and have been greatly damaged by what’s happened there. I’d love to make an exception for you, Mrs. Busfield. I do sympathize immensely with your...predicament.” She looked away when she said that word, predicament, as if it were something indelicate. “But the fact is that if I made an exception for you, I’d be setting a precedent for all those other parents in similar positions of financial stress and, much as I’d like to, we simply cannot afford to let the school run at a loss, or standards would suffer. You can appreciate that, I’m sure.”
I could indeed appreciate it. Just as I appreciate that my Chelsea gym can’t allow me to go into arrears in membership fees and that my private health-care insurance has lapsed now that Simon is no longer paying his premiums. I appreciate, too, that I can no longer nip into the little boutique in the village to preorder a few key pieces from the forthcoming season’s catalog. “Hello, stranger,” Maria, the boutique manager, said the last time I gave in to temptation and popped my head inside. Immediately, I knew it to be a mistake. The clothes with those monstrous price tags. Another world, another era. “Sorry,” I told her, backing out the door. “I’m just so busy these days.”
The fact is that the chasm that opened up in my life when Simon died has sucked everything into it—marriage, status, my lavish lifestyle, all the trappings that define who I am.
It’s funny how I never used to think of myself as well-off, just comfortable. Only now can I see how much I took for granted. Did I really buy those overpriced packets of freshly ground coffee from the deli every week? Did I book flights to Florence without bothe
ring to shop around for cheap deals, often changing them at the last minute at vast expense when other things got in the way? Now it seems absurd that I used to go to bed night after night with nothing more to worry about than whether I should, after all, have splurged for the stalls rather than the circle seats at the theater, or bought the mocha coat as well as the ivory.
Where is that other profligate Selina now? She isn’t here. She isn’t me.
The real Selina, the current, impecunious Selina, is sitting in the office of Briony North, the head of the lower school, who, even though I’ve never met her before today, clearly regards the saving of Selina Busfield as her new mission in life.
“How have you been coping?” she whispers, laying a hand on my shoulder and standing so close behind my chair I can feel her breath on my neck.
This is what I hate—the way perfect strangers feel they have the right to come into my personal space because they know things about my life. What Simon did has turned me into public property.
I fidget with the clear plastic folder in my hand, which contains the bullet-pointed list I made of my skills set (I’ve been searching Google—the jargon of the job market) and excerpts from scientific studies, which purport to show how running a household equates to experience in the workplace. I came prepared for everything. Except pity.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Bearing up.”
Oh, dear God. I have turned into the kind of woman who says bearing up.
Briony North nods violently above my head, and her grip on my shoulder tightens.
“Of course you are,” she murmurs.
“I’ve brought along a CV,” I say, desperate to change the subject.
“Why don’t we just have a little chat to start with,” she says, pulling up a chair so close to mine she’s practically sitting on my lap. “I just want you to know how much I—well, all of us, really—have been feeling for you and what you’ve been going through.”