Calamity in Camberwell

by Alice Castle

  Beth sat and thought for a while, starting to brush the stray patisserie crumbs into a pile. ‘Well. I got some new boots last week.’

  She watched Katie take a cursory look at her feet, though she didn’t really need to. Beth had been wearing the same style of pixie boot for as long as they’d known each other. ‘You ordered those online in ten seconds, in between making supper and doing five freelance commissions, don’t tell me you didn’t. And if you hadn’t ordered them, they probably would have sent them automatically. You’ve been getting those exact same boots every two years for about a decade.’

  Beth withdrew a little, her fringe flopping forward. ‘So? I know what I like, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not criticising. I love those boots, too,’ said Katie, flashing an encouraging smile. ‘I’m just saying. Don’t neglect yourself. You deserve to have fun, to have a life, too. It can’t all be about Ben forever.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course it’s all about Ben. He’s my son, I’m all he has.’

  ‘That’s not true, Beth. He’s got a granny, and an uncle, and friends, and me, and a whole world, and one day he’s going to be off and making his own way.’

  ‘Well, I know that, but he’s still ten now, and he needs me.’

  ‘He absolutely does. I’m not disputing that for one second. But you both need more.’

  ‘More? What kind of more? This is all there is,’ said Beth, genuinely perplexed. She looked round the café, rammed now with enough mummies wearing jaunty Breton tops to crew the entire French navy, not to mention clutches of chattering au pairs, tangles of buggies, and several fully-loaded high chairs.

  ‘It so isn’t, Beth, and you know that. There’s a whole big world out there that you’ve been ignoring for too long.’

  ‘What are you saying, Katie?’

  ‘I’m saying that you need to start dating, Beth.’

  Chapter Three

  After Katie’s bombshell in the café, Beth had taken some time to regroup. She’d been stunned at first, her lower jaw flopping open unattractively. Once she remembered to close it, she’d been very tempted just to get up and walk out. But, however irresistible the urge, she knew that would be unfair to Katie. She might not want to hear what her friend was saying, but Katie had steeled herself to come out with it, too. Her hands had been clutched so tightly round her cappuccino that her knuckles had been white.

  A few days had passed since that very sticky moment in Jane’s. Days in which Beth had churned the idea of dating over in her mind. Eventually, she realised she was working through the five stages of grief all over again.

  First, denial – dating was a crazy idea, full stop. Then anger – how dare Katie suggest this? What right did she have to be telling Beth what to do and how to do it? Bargaining followed. If Katie would just shut up about this, they could carry on as before. And maybe Beth’d think about it all in a few months’ time, if that didn’t seem too upsetting. Depression then fell on her like a dark, dark grey blanket. She spent the weekend getting through the usual football practice even more on auto-pilot than usual, trudging through Court Lane and never even noticing the spectacular zing of the acer trees lining the pavements near Dulwich Park, their leaves showing every fiery red from chili pepper to pillar box in the weak September sunshine.

  She sat through a full Sunday lunch at her mother’s, insulated by the dreariness of her thoughts. And while that might have been a mercy, as they got through the long afternoon without a breath of discord, it wasn’t quite normal.

  Ben eventually punctured her self-absorption, but not until they were on the way back home. ‘I hope you’re not going to be like this all week, Mum. It’s boring answering all my own questions.’

  ‘Don’t call me Mum,’ she corrected absently – then his words registered. ‘I’m sorry, darling, haven’t I been answering? I’ve been listening, of course I have,’ she said, mentally crossing her fingers.

  ‘Ok, what have I been talking about for the last billion years?’

  Beth thought rapidly and hard but, though a billion years for Ben was five minutes for her, she couldn’t recall a single thing he’d said. Football? School? Computer games? Christmas? Nope, nothing. She could wing it, but she was quite likely to be wrong. And nobody liked to think they weren’t being heard.

  It gave her the check she needed. She had to snap out of this state, stop being so silly, and reach the final stage of grief – acceptance.

  ‘Ok then. I’m sorry, Ben. Race you home?’

  ***

  Later, once Ben was upstairs, his head on the pillow, his soft dark hair a little long but reminding her so much of James that she couldn’t bear to get it cut, Beth took stock on the sofa.

  Perhaps it really was time to move on.

  It had been seven years, no, eight, since James had died. A few headaches had, terrifyingly, meant a one-way ticket to the hospice for him and the lonely path of single motherhood for Beth. In all the time that had passed since, she felt as though she’d barely had a moment to consider meeting someone else.

  True, she’d accidentally met that policeman, DI York… Oh, who was she kidding? She knew full well his name was Harry. And she’d be lying if she pretended she hadn’t felt something. But, more often than not, the ‘something’ was boiling rage. Was that normal? Wasn’t attraction supposed to be pleasant?

  She couldn’t remember ever wanting to hit James over the head with a frying pan, even though he must have done all the usual annoying man things in the time they were together. He’d liked football, which had been a bit dull, but he’d been pretty good at DIY, which had seemed to make up for it. He hadn’t been a saint; he’d been flesh and blood and fun and love and everything to her. Had she airbrushed her own history, made him into too much of a paragon? That probably wasn’t terribly good for Ben. They did talk about his dad. Not in a hushed-voice sort of way, but when something he’d liked came up, Beth would always mention it, in what she hoped was an everyday sort of tone.

  Nowadays, it was a lot easier to talk about James without a tremor in her voice and without the over-bright sheen of tears in her eyes. She didn’t want Ben to feel he couldn’t ask anything about his dad or say his name for fear that she’d collapse. But had Beth gone too far the other way? Did she big him up too much, make it impossible for her son to live up to a perfect image? She really hoped not.

  Somehow, Beth realised with a jolt, she’d moved from the scary prospect of considering dating to chewing over problems with Ben, which was no novelty at all. She had to focus, to think really hard about this whole meeting-people business, and not let herself drift off into comforting patterns that were far removed from a potentially terrifying new world.

  She supposed the odd frisson – even the rage – she’d felt with Harry York, did prove she wasn’t emotionally dead, however handy that might have been. But did she and Ben really have time and space for another person in their lives? Their tiny house would struggle to accommodate anyone even slightly larger than Beth herself and little Ben. There was the fact that the dining table was so diddy, she decided, conveniently forgetting that they’d shared meals there with Harry before, and it had been fine. The sofa, well, that was perfect for two, not so great for three. And her bedroom… She didn’t really want to think of anything that might go on up there.

  Becoming a widow seemed to have catapulted her into a state of Victorian prudishness about matters of the flesh. Though she’d had the odd yearning, she never expected to feel the passion that she’d had with James. No, what she was worried about in the bedroom was the duvet covers. She only had hyper-floral, Cath Kidston-type bed linen, which she adored. But surely no man would consent to spend a minute under such a flowery bower? Again, Beth firmly shut her eyes to the fact that a bit of sex usually reconciled men to anything, even girly pink patterns.

  Maybe she just wasn’t ready to date. Maybe the fact that she was worrying more about her bedlinen than her underpinnings meant that it wasn’t the moment. Or maybe
, as usual, she was wriggling furiously when she knew she ought to be doing something but just couldn’t get her head around it.

  She flicked on the TV. Some of the mums at the gates today had been discussing a show called First Dates, where couples got matched up to have dinner together at a swanky central London restaurant with, the producers hoped, hysterical results. The format was slick, the French maitre d’ was full of gnomic pronouncements on love in an accent thicker than crème fraiche, and it certainly looked as though the diners were enjoying their meals, if not always each other. But the girls with their Tango tans, laminated eyebrows, and killer heels? The men with their tattoos and bulging muscles? Well, actually, now you came to mention it… Beth found herself enjoying the episode, though more as though she were David Attenborough peering in on the antics of an exotic species indulging in arcane mating rituals, than as a potential participant.

  What would she have to offer a partner? She had no banter; no piercings; quite normal eyebrows, which never saw the light of day anyway due to her fringe; her heels, despite her height, remained resolutely flat; and she firmly believed that black rubber was best used as a playground surface, not an excuse for an outfit. She was not First Dates material.

  But there were other means out there. Tinder? Match.com? Plenty of Fish? Were any of these any good? She was going to have to do some research. But that, in itself, was not easy in Dulwich, capital city of coupledom. She was literally the only singleton in the Village. One of the reasons she had been so close to Jen was that, for a time they had both been lone working mums. Then Jen had gone and ruined it all by finding Jeff. Well, that wasn’t quite what she meant… but the end result was that Beth had been left as all the more of an anomaly in her surroundings.

  Even Belinda MacKenzie had given up trying to match-make on her behalf. A couple of painful evenings, which had truly put the ‘awk!’ into awkward, had seen Beth sitting as the odd-one-out in a long line of perfectly-matched couples arranged around Belinda’s sweeping dining table. Most Dulwich residents had scrapped their separate diners and incorporated them into eat-in kitchens, or turned them into studies – usually infested with children trying to wrench screen time from each other. But Belinda’s Court Lane house was massive enough to have a kitchen the size of a church hall, a brace of studies, and this boardroom-style temple to fine dining as well, with its highly polished oak furniture and gloomy oils of ancestors that Beth rather suspected belonged neither to Belinda or her husband, Barty, but had been knocked down as a job lot at Roseberys, the West Norwood auction rooms.

  Beth, who’d felt as though she was attending a doomed job interview each time she’d caved in and accepted Belinda’s invites, had had to sit through lengthy evenings of showing off. She wasn’t sure if it was peculiar to the area, or the generation, or the sex, but all the men could talk about was how theirs was so much bigger than everyone else’s. Whether it was cars, salaries, or even lawnmowers they were discussing, Beth couldn’t care less. There was little hope of it being anything more visceral, and even if it had been, she still wouldn’t have been tempted. The women, meanwhile, seemed content to look nice and provide backing vocals when required, like the other two in Destiny’s Child, while a roomful of male Beyoncés dominated the stage. The ladies’ real views would come out only when they were swapping vicious stories over a latte or three while their men were safely at work.

  On both occasions, a recently divorced or newly-widowed chap was wheeled in, oh-so-not-casually, to sit next to her in the hope that, like giant pandas, they would overcome timidity and fastidiousness and get it on, while their audience gawped and fed them the posh equivalent of bamboo shoots – currently dishes involving lots of beetroot and leathery duck breasts.

  Needless to say, both the attempted matings had failed, and Beth had trailed back to Pickwick Road each time, abashed by the grandeur of Belinda’s dos and more convinced than ever that she was a total social failure doomed to go solo forever.

  But it was finally the moment to put such maundering thoughts to bed. She needed to get out there, not just because Belinda and her cohorts deemed that it was mandatory to be coupled-up, but because she had a sneaking feeling that it might actually be good for her. She was getting a mite set in her ways. She didn’t want to end up like her mother. Having to live with others was healthy, wasn’t it? Compromise, consultation, joint action. They all sounded good, but were things she hadn’t attempted for almost a decade.

  And, as usual, at the back of her mind, Ben was her motivation. Didn’t she need to show him what partnership was all about? If she ever wanted any grandchildren, she probably should model a relationship so that he wouldn’t be entirely at sea when he eventually got to that stage himself. It wouldn’t be long, unbelievable though the thought was. Puberty was lurking round the corner, like the bad fairy at the Christening. It would change her soft-skinned, gorgeous boy, with his luxuriant eyelashes and ready smile, into a gangling, bristly, spotty giant that she would scarcely recognise or want to acknowledge. And from being a cherished mama, she would no doubt become a massive embarrassment and liability, popping up at inopportune moments in front of his friends to mortify him by asking him to wipe his face or change his trousers.

  Ah, there was a lot to look forward to. And there was no doubt that it would be nice to have someone with her, to laugh about it all, if nothing else. Beth sighed. She was going to have to work on this dating business, and no mistake.

  ***

  Once Beth put her mind to something, she was nothing if not wholehearted. Over the next few days, while nominally sorting out materials for the Christmas exhibition, she sat in her beloved executive chair at work and peered at a strange new world on the Internet. When she’d first got to Wyatt’s, the school’s firewalls had confined her horizons strictly to her own job and the perusal of the term’s snooze-worthy rugby fixtures and extra-curricular clubs, but it hadn’t taken her long to vault over the IT safeguards, with a bit of help from Jen. Nowadays she spent quite a lot of time guiltily online, renewing her car insurance and comparing rates for holiday cover, like most employees. Today, however, she was looking at something rather different – a questionnaire that seemed to be never-ending, which she had to fill in completely before she could join the dating site eRelationships.

  Once upon a time – and still, as far as her mother’s generation was concerned – meeting a partner online was tantamount to declaring to the world that you were a weirdo. Now everyone – well, Katie – kept reassuring her that what she was doing was absolutely normal. But Katie then rather spoiled that by being transparently fascinated by the whole process. A lot more riveted than Beth herself was.

  eRelationships seemed to be asking her the same semi-intrusive questions a hundred different ways. Beth was instantly wary. Were they trying to trick her? Would they see that she was accidentally contradicting herself? Would this mean that they’d classify her as a liar, and only match her with men who had a similarly loose relationship with the truth?

  But Beth wasn’t a fibber. She just couldn’t remember whether she’d given ‘romantic meal for two’ as an answer for her perfect date three pages back, or whether she’d said ‘country walks’. And if so, whether she’d given walks a five out of five and meals a four, or the other way round. She wasn’t even sure if she really liked romantic meals, anyway. Did that mean the kind of cheesy Italian restaurant with flickering candles and an annoying violinist playing That’s Amore? And how could she go on a country walk round here, deep in the suburbs, anyway? There was the park, but she’d definitely be bound to bump into everyone she’d ever known in Dulwich there with their dogs, and her fledgling romance would be the talk of the village before they’d even got as far as the pond.

  There wasn’t a scrap of real country for miles. They’d have to go on an endless train journey through the rest of south London to reach any, clanking past the backs of tumbledown houses, car crushing yards, and warehouses. And that was once they were actually on the mo
ve. First, there’d be the endless announcements about delays, being vigilant about terrorism, and crackling tannoy excuses about ‘persons under trains’. God knew, there was nothing less romantic than a trip on South Eastern Railways, unless it was having your fingernails removed by a real live torturer.

  Beth looked up from her laptop with a sigh. Perhaps she wasn’t in the right frame of mind for all this. Just as she was staring into the middle distance, wondering what on earth she could do to galvanise herself for what she was starting to call the love hunt, there was a discreet tap on her door.

  She barely had time to say ‘come in’ before Janice popped her head round the door. Janice, who’d been school secretary when Beth had first started at Wyatt’s, was now uber-manager of everything and had not only shimmied into that enhanced role as though born to it, but had also pulled off the amazing feat of marrying Dr Grover into the bargain. It said a lot for Janice’s enormous likeability that she’d detached the head from his previous wife – quite a famous actress – and married him herself, while still remaining hugely popular both inside and outside Wyatt’s walls. Janice’s blonde prettiness was all about Thomas Hardy, her perfect English milkmaid looks set off by the faintest tinge of red in her blonde hair, hinting at an unscheduled Viking tumble an ancestor might have enjoyed behind a hedge about a thousand years ago.

  Now, as Janice edged into the room, the final seal on her glory announced itself in the shape of a pronounced baby bump which was proudly sheathed in her trademark pink cashmere. This baby was so cosy already that it was hard to imagine it would ever want to be born.

  ‘Sit down, Janice, how’re you feeling?’ Beth said, standing up and ushering Janice to a comfy chair.

  ‘I’m completely fine, slightly wishing everyone would stop treating me as though I’m made of spun glass,’ said Janice with a smug smile.

  ‘Oh, you love it. Anyway, make the most of it. When you really need the attention, once the baby’s born, everyone will be cooing over it instead of you and you’ll miss the fuss, believe me,’ said Beth.