by A. M. Castle
But my sense of curiosity got the better of me. Yes, it was going to be intimidating, but rather than fretting myself silly, maybe I should just go in a spirit of enquiry, like an anthropologist journeying to a far country. My own upbringing had been an ordeal. But maybe it wasn’t always like that? Watching the interactions of a normal family would be a total novelty and I might end up learning a lot. After all, Pete’s reaction to my flat had been quite a wake-up call. I’d thought it was fine, and he’d nearly run off screaming. If anything went wrong at this lunch, I would analyse the problem and learn, as ever, from my mistakes.
Most daunting of all, the place turned out to be huge, the size of a small castle. We got out at a station on the edge of town, a place I’d never been before. Off we went, wending our way through roads that got posher and posher, while the houses got further and further apart. By the time we reached Pete’s family home, you couldn’t see anything of the houses at all, they were hidden behind huge walls with overhanging trees. It was making me feel a bit sick, and we hadn’t even got inside.
Once we were in, I relaxed a little bit. The place was pretty filthy, all the furniture looked old and dusty and, frankly, so did Pete’s family. There were dogs running everywhere and the place smelt odd.
But Pete’s mum was all set to love me already. He’d told me that and I’d taken it at face value. Well, she had ample reason to be grateful to me. She’d seen the miraculous change I’d wrought in her son, from dandruffy twit to a smartly turned-out and very attractive, almost-finished product. I sometimes wondered why she hadn’t done it herself – just a quiet ‘no, love’ when he turned up in preposterous clothes and a quick jaunt down the problem hair aisle at the supermarket. Not exactly onerous. An afternoon’s work. But once we got to their house, I realised exactly where all Pete’s problems had sprung from.
Don’t get me wrong; his mum was lovely. But dress sense? Nope. It wasn’t happening. All right, my own look had gone through a thorough re-tuning recently, but my original gear, though appalling, was better than the get-up Pete’s mum, Daphne, had on. Her cardigan was stretched out of shape, as though the dogs had got hold of it and worried it half to death, while the floral dress beneath it was as saggy as a fly-tipped mattress.
I felt the instinctive contempt that the young and beautiful have for less perfect specimens. Even now, knowing as I do that gravity is a force to be reckoned with and that keeping lithe in middle age is no mean feat, I still look back on Daphne and can’t help a little tut.
As usual, I was missing the point. Daphne just didn’t care about clothes. She considered herself above them, in a bluestocking way that I had never encountered until then. But she was a lovely, warm person, and she’d brought up a great son. The way that she welcomed me, literally with open arms, terrified and thrilled me. I wasn’t used to displays of affection from motherly types, to put it mildly. In fact, I wasn’t sure I knew any, aside from Jen, who was around my age and childless. My own mother had effortlessly body-swerved the role and considered female friends or relatives to be too much like competition for scarce resources. Her reaction to me as I grew and developed was poisonous enough. So I was unprepared to be dragged into the bosom of any family. But I knew from the moment that I stepped over the threshold into Pete’s friendly, crowded, busy home, that Daphne actually wanted me for a daughter-in-law.
It was a lot to take in. I just tried to absorb everything around me, and stack away the impressions to work through later, when I wasn’t quite so overloaded. There was a lot going on in Daphne’s house. First, even though it was as big as a barn, it seemed to be full to the brim with people. Maybe because they all had braying voices and talked over each other incessantly. Pete had two younger brothers who both had girlfriends, one already with a child in tow. Then there was Pete’s dad, a bit paunchy and vague – an older version of his son – who haw-hawed instead of speaking. Haw-haw, how d’ye do, young Louise? Haw-haw-haw. Was the haw-haw laughter or some sort of speech impediment? I had no idea. There were a couple of other relatives who’d been gathered just to meet me. Yes, me turning up was quite the occasion.
I could tell, immediately, that I didn’t fit in. I was too silent, too uptight, trying much too hard. I was completely overdressed in my simple column of a silk dress. I was also immaculately made up, my nails the perfect length and matching my outfit. Bang on, I’d thought. But no. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’d misjudged it, as usual. I looked absurd, as though I was going to the wedding of a minor Royal, or at least off to Ascot. And now I hated myself even more than usual.
The other women had bare faces, no jewellery unless it was massive clashing beads or a nasty brooch. Pete’s dad’s jumper had literal holes in the elbows. I didn’t get it. Everyone here was richer than generations of my family put together. Yet they dressed almost as badly as anyone on my old estate. I suddenly saw that Pete, in his down-at-heel ‘before’ version, would have slotted in just fine. Now, he looked bizarrely overdressed. I’d thought I was saving him. Turned out I’d done him no favours at all. I even saw some of the relatives having a bit of a snigger over his nice shirt with the Ralph Lauren logo – so new it still had the creases – but luckily then it was time to eat and he steered me quickly away from them.
I was shocked at the way they picked at the food. I always devoured my meals as though the four-minute warning had just sounded and this was my chance to stock up on calories to see me through the nuclear winter. This lot took a forkful, waved it around, then put it down, while talking, talking, talking. Everything was congealing on the chipped, mis-matched plates. I thought with a pang of regret of my own recently acquired set of china. I wasn’t at all sure this horrible old stuff was properly clean.
There were mountains of food on the table, all being ignored; roast potatoes, giant slabs of meat, oceans of gravy, despite the heat. But no ketchup. I wasn’t sure I could choke it all down without. I tried to use the gravy, but despite its fatty darkness it tasted of nothing.
While they ate slowly, they drank fast, sluicing away oceans of red wine. I was astonished. Where I had lived, having this many bottles meant an automatic party, which in turn meant me staying in my room for as long as humanly possible. I certainly didn’t trust myself to start matching any of this lot glass for glass, even Pete. When I drank a spritzer with Jen, we sipped away and I moved on to water as quickly as I could. I’d seen what abandoning control looked like. What if I turned into my mother, blotchy and itching for a fight? I knew I wouldn’t, but the prospect raised my anxiety levels. I fixed my eyes on the nasty plate.
The conversation was full of in-jokes, about an endless succession of people I’d never met. Fast, affectionate, baffling. When that finished, suddenly we were onto politics instead. I stayed quiet. Pete was sitting next to me. He kept trying to hold my hand under the table – adorable, I know – but then he’d get involved in some quasi-joshing shouting match with one or other of the brothers and would pull away. Plus, his hands were getting sweaty in the overheated kitchen of his mum’s house.
Though the house was huge, the kitchen was tiny. Whereas I would have knocked through, with my newfound competence at interior design, they’d kept everything as it had been in Pete’s great-grandmother’s day, when this matchbox had been plenty good enough for the servants. Despite all their modern political talk, I suspected there were a lot of things they’d never change.
The windows were running with condensation, as something bubbled away unattended on the hob and the table groaned with cooling vegetables. My forearm kept sticking to the oilcloth on the table, which was patterned with the same green willow boughs that twined around the curtains and even the wallpaper, a posh take on a jungle. After a while I sat back, tried to let the whole thing wash over me. Though things were so different here, the noise, mess and chaos were bringing back bad memories. I started zoning out.
Pete mouthed ‘You OK?’ to me, which was kind. It made me think that maybe I should come back to the present, make the effort.
Plunge in with the chat. I turned to the girlfriend next to me, who was attached to the older of Pete’s two younger brothers. She had long swathes of dark silky hair hanging around her face, and a consumptive pallor. ‘Where do you work?’ I asked her.
‘Oh! I’m at Oxford,’ she said, her tone seeming to imply that I really should have known this.
‘OK, right,’ I said, and that would have been that, if she hadn’t seemed to feel she needed to ask me something back.
‘And where are you?’ At my blank look, she clarified, stretching her eyes wide. ‘At uni?’
‘Oh, I’m working,’ I said, turning away. But she persisted.
‘Yes, but where did you go? Before working?’
‘What do you mean?’ Was she asking which pubs I’d frequented? Or wine bars? I didn’t get it.
‘Which uni?’ she said, as though to a simpleton. To be fair, I was giving a good impression of one.
‘I didn’t go to uni,’ I said. At that moment there was a hush around the table. Though I couldn’t swear I’d caused it, it felt as though I had. After a brief pause, both Pete’s mother and father started up conversations.
‘As I was saying to Peter …’
‘Have you noticed that damned buddleia is sprouting all over the …?’
Now I felt overdressed and stupid. I’d read about people like this, I’d devoured Nancy Mitford, I’d longed to be in the Hons cupboard with them all. But I’d missed the point. You couldn’t join this kind of gang. You had to be born into it. And I quite clearly hadn’t been.
Pete’s dad was next to give it a try. ‘So, Bridges, that’s your, ah, name, I gather? So, Louise, you’re bound to know the solicitor, Geoff Bridges, in the centre of town. Related?’
‘No, no, I don’t know him,’ I said. It wasn’t the moment to admit that my family usually tried to give all branches of the law a wide berth.
‘Or the Hertfordshire Bridges? Cousins of your lot, weren’t they?’ He swivelled, at this point, to look at the pallid girlfriend, who peered back at me with renewed interest, followed swiftly by polite scepticism. ‘Anything to do with your family, Louise?’
My scalp was prickling by now and my face was the colour of the absent ketchup. Though there was no way they could trace me back to the shame of my roots, I couldn’t sit there a moment longer.
I mumbled something, eyes on my plate, which was still lumpy with cold, dry potatoes. I risked a look at Pete. ‘The toilet?’ He looked at me blankly. I thought again. ‘The loo?’ I mouthed desperately.
It took me ages to find it in the maze of tattily decorated corridors, and when I did I couldn’t flush the ancient thing – it still had a chain you needed to yank. The soap was a half-moon that looked pre-war and I was sure the stiff sage green towel had never been washed. By the time I sidled back, having done my best to avoid the smelly dogs milling about the huge entrance hall, the conversation had moved on, thank God. I suspected Pete had warned his dad to lay off. Anyway, everyone was up in arms that somebody had done something heinous, politically speaking, and I still didn’t care who or what.
Pete’s older brother had a baby, who was being pretty much ignored while people argued about taxes they could obviously afford to pay without even thinking twice. The small creature was jammed in a highchair, her mother laminating the little face with gloop from a bowl. This gloop, the mum told us excitedly, was organic, locally sourced and sieved by her own fair hand. She looked prouder of this fact than of the little mite herself. The stuff looked like the sort of gruel Oliver Twist probably got in the workhouse. He’d wanted more, this baby definitely didn’t. Scarcely any made it past the tiny pink mouth, furled tighter than a rosebud. The mother didn’t seem to notice, gesticulating about the Liberals or the Tories or the who-knew-what and throwing gobs of the vile stuff around. After a while she moved on to mashed banana, with more success.
I edged away, mindful of the dress I’d thought was so suitable only hours before, and which was now just absurd. Still, I didn’t want to pay to have baby-gloop dry-cleaned off it. On my other side was the pale brainiac, lucky cow. What I would have given for her chances. Nothing to do but read books for three years, then a job where people would chuck money at her. She’d be promoted when she asked, unlike me, still trying to clamber up to the first floor.
I wracked my brains for possible intersections between her world and mine, and came up with nothing. She couldn’t have stuck my life for a moment. But I still had to start some sort of conversation. If I stayed mute, I might attract the attention of Pete’s dad again, and I didn’t want that. I cast around, looked at her closely for inspiration. Ah. An obvious topic sprang to my eye. ‘When’s it due, then?’ I asked, with a smile of hastily manufactured interest, flicking my eyes down to her spongy stomach. She looked at me in consternation, then seemed to choke on a spud. Suddenly she pushed up from the table and left the room. There was a babble of excited voices. Pete’s mum cut across them and said, down the table, ‘So, this job of yours, Louise? Tell us all about it.’
Thank God, something I was interested in talking about. I explained it all as briefly as I could, though by the end I did notice Pete’s younger brother jogging his elbow and whispering something. I shut up abruptly and the conversation moved on, an unstoppable juggernaut of noise and laughter.
In the moment of quiet, I felt something tapping my shoulder. I turned irritably, only to see the baby leaning perilously out of its highchair and patting me with its tiny paw, which was so liberally smeared with mashed banana that the browning substance oozed between its starfish fingers. For a second, I was incensed. My dress! But then the little creature smiled at me, and I felt myself falling into bottomless blue eyes, round and shiny with love. I couldn’t help smiling back and she gurgled with delight and patted me again. All of a sudden my chest felt tight and my eyes stung, and it wasn’t even because I was thinking about my silk georgette. Being the cause of such simple pleasure felt like winning first prize in a competition I hadn’t even known someone like me could enter.
I’d not thought about children until that moment. I had severe doubts over whether I was competent to look after Mephisto, and he was a cat who could probably open his own tins and change his litter himself if he had to. A baby, though. I’d never dreamed I’d have one – be allowed one, almost. But maybe I was looking at it all through my mother’s eyes.
There was the fear, too, that I’d be as bad at it all as she had been. But again, it would be actively hard for me, or anyone else, to be that dreadful. It was a huge responsibility, for sure. But it was something that, if I put my mind to it, I suddenly knew I could do well. And now I could see the joys to be reaped from it. A smile was enough to unblock something – either my ovaries or my heart, I wasn’t sure which.
My eyes filled. I had to turn away from the baby, babbling away at me, and stare at my empty plate.
‘Oh! Would you like some more, dear?’ Daphne asked, her forehead pleated.
I shook my head and was about to speak when Pete leapt to his feet and started to gather up plates, though no one else seemed to have finished. Then we were on to the next course. The wan girlfriend came back for this, though she ostentatiously dragged her chair as far away from mine as possible.
We were now onto what I’d grown up calling the ‘sweet’, if I was lucky enough to get it. I now thought of it as ‘dessert’, but I knew, thanks to Jen and Trish, not to mention Nancy Mitford, I should really be calling it pudding. All those who think that the English language is easy to pick up should just ponder this one little situation for a moment. What you say is as accurate as writing your income and your social class on your forehead. Most people don’t care. They’ve made peace with wherever they’ve ended up in the pack. But I suppose I still thought I had plenty of room to travel upwards. And that meant I hated giving away so many clues about where I’d started off, as soon as I picked up a spoon.
Pete’s family were definitely in the pudding camp. Anyway, whatever they want
ed to name it, I didn’t want any of it, particularly when I found out what it was – spotted dick. The very thing that had been steaming the place up throughout our main course, making me feel as though we were in a Chinese laundry. A dish that I thought had gone out with the ark – and probably sunk it, too. From the oohs and ahhs of the boys, you’d have thought that Pete’s mum had learned how to spin straw into gold. But no. Instead, she’d found the formula for translating white flour into concrete, as far as I was concerned.
I’d been trying very hard throughout this accursed meal, but I wasn’t going anywhere near this. As it was, I didn’t even get a chance to refuse it. No one was asked, great big heaped steaming bowls of the stuff were just passed around the table from hand to hand. It was like musical chairs. When one finally stopped in front of me, I gaped at the size of the thing. Bright yellow custard – straight out of a tin, though who was I to be snobby about such things – and another tin, a green one of golden syrup, getting stickier by the second, was now circulating like the port would here at dinnertime, which they probably called supper. Even the baby soon had syrup all over her chops, despite the fuss her mother had made over her ghastly organic gruel. I was the only one not making inroads into this mess.
At this point, Pete sent me what could only be described as an exasperated glance. He’d been such a love, sticking up for me through what had rapidly turned into quite an ordeal. I had expected him to gamely continue to fight my corner, or even be oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t melding with his family. But everyone has a certain length of tether available. And it appeared we’d come to the end of his.
In a way, it was the neatest possible way of ending things.
I could see, from the moment we clicked the heavy gothic front door shut on his family, where we were going. His brothers, their girlfriends, the sticky baby and Pete’s mum and dad were all still round the table, sloshing wine into their glasses and putting their very posh world to righter rights. They were still all talking at once and scoffing from a huge tin of biscuits. I was relieved to be out in the fresh air, away from the smell of dog and dinner. Pete, though, walked slowly down the road, hands hunched in his pockets. He was just far enough away from me that I couldn’t easily link arms or touch him in one of the ways he’d always loved, magic him back onside like one of the tiny nimble footballers he loved to watch on TV.