How Was It For You?

by Carmen Reid

  The new couple, who had looked even more nervous during Magenta’s outpourings, seemed to be cheered by this, Pamela noticed, and reminded herself not to sound too pessimistic when it was her turn.

  Donna was talking now. She was in the same place as Pamela, recovering from another failed attempt.

  ‘I just wish my parents would get off my case,’ she told them.‘They know we’re coming here, getting medical treatment, but they can’t stop giving all sorts of stupid advice, you know the thing . . . my mum arriving with bizarre groceries,’ then in best Caribbean mama accent: ‘“Donna, girl, I’ve brought you Brazil nuts, because Gary should be eating them, you know, for his sperm. And prawns. They very good too . . . lots of zinc, I read it in Best magazine.” She keeps offering to pay for us to go on holiday to Jamaica because: “You need some sun, some heat in your bones and then it will happen.” It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell them my tubes are shot to pieces, it’s not physically possible for me to get pregnant unless I do IVF, they think I’m just a holiday, a bag of nuts . . . a mere prawn away from a baby!’

  ‘But face it, if you have a baby, your mother will still drive you mad,’ Magenta reminded her.

  ‘Oh God, I know: “Donna, girl, I have fresh papaya for de baby, you don’t want to be giving him that organic baby rubbish, it’s not healthy. I read it in heat magazine. Papaya juice is de best.” OK, I’m shutting up now. Pamela, your turn. Are you OK? Surviving?’ Donna turned her warm full beam smile on her.

  ‘Well . . . surviving is the word. Hanging on in there.’ Who was she telling? Many of these faces had been here with her since the beginning, knew it all, every twist and turn in the long, wretched disappointment.‘We’ve been tossing the decision about for weeks, and now we have, finally, decided to move out of London. We’d always thought we would . . . with . . .’ the word ‘baby’ wouldn’t come, neither would ‘child’, ‘children’, ‘family’ – every one of them suddenly too hard: ‘Later, when . . . you know,’ she managed. She cleared her throat a little.‘But now, we’ve decided to go. Just for us. Change of scene, fresh start. We’re buying a small farm in Norfolk.’ She gave something of a laugh at this, because here in her knee-length cashmere-blend black with pinchy, pointy shoes and a mobile she still didn’t like to turn off, even in this room, it sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous. They were going completely mad.

  ‘A farm?’ Donna asked in surprise.

  ‘Fifty acres of organic mixed-cropping farmland,’ she said, marvelling at her newly acquired technical language.

  ‘When?’ Donna again.

  ‘Well, the flat’s on the market, but the provisional purchase date on the farm is late September, October.’

  ‘Are you giving up your job?’ Magenta asked, in a tone that suggested Pamela must be at least slightly insane.

  ‘I’ve left WLI –’ slight gasps all around – ‘but I’ll still be in London on and off for freelance contracts. Dave is giving up totally. He’s going to run the farm.’ Said out loud in this room with women who knew her well looking stunned made it sound even more bonkers.

  ‘Wow, this is pretty mega,’ was Donna’s verdict.‘Was this always the plan?’

  ‘The farm? Our farm? No. Well, it wasn’t mine, I’d thought big garden in the Home Counties . . . roses, fruit trees. Dave was obviously thinking on a much bigger scale. But maybe it’ll make sense. God, who knows? Nothing is making a lot of sense at the moment at all.’ With a thought for the new couple, she chose her words as carefully as she could.‘The IVF has been really hard, really hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done – we’ve ever done,’ she corrected herself.‘Our relationship is pretty much in the toilet.’ Wasn’t just about everyone else’s in the room? ‘So, we have to take a break and try something new. Very new. I’ll have to buy wellies. Does Joseph do wellies?’ she joked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ROSIE PULLED THE Isuzu up outside the boys’ school. She looked at the clock on the dashboard again: only ten minutes early today, not too bad.

  ‘Where are the boys? Where are Willy and Pete?’ she asked Manda, strapped into her seat in the back, who giggled, kicked out her legs and pointed in reply.

  Waiting for the school door to open was like waiting for a date, she thought guiltily, always here early, willing the clock forward . . . Did she ever feel like this about Lachlan? Did she sit in the kitchen desperate for the back door to open and him to be home? Er . . . no.

  But the love affair with her children didn’t seem to have dimmed at all. Willy and Pete, only a year and a half between them, bang, bang two in a row, because she’d wanted to have children close together who could play together, get along, be inseparable.

  Then a long hiatus while the dust of mothering two small boys on a farm, where there was ample opportunity for them to break their arms, legs, even necks, every single day, had settled. Finally, she and Lachlan had decided, just one more. Although two was really enough, three would be wonderful.

  So along came baby Manda. A girl! A change from boy fights, action games, daring danger stunts, she’d thought. But now Rosie knew there wasn’t a hope that Manda was going to be pink, girlie, princessy and precious, the way she might secretly have liked her to be.

  Manda, only 19 months old, would shake her head every morning at her tights and dresses and point firmly to her denim dungarees, stating ‘Dungas.’ Dresses and tights were pointless anyway, she shredded and wrecked them within hours. She had to have short hair because she was so messy, would rub her food, honey oatcakes, whatever, into it, creating the most impossible, painfully knotted tangles.

  Her brothers had made her into the smallest, loudest, most stubborn tomboy in the word. If they were up a tree, Manda would be at the bottom, wailing, pointing to go up, always with a bit of chewed-up Digestive in her grubby hands, or tomatoes, pea pods, berries, things she had picked for herself from the garden, even morsels from Jessie the cat’s bowl.

  Rosie found her so impossibly pretty it was hard to say no to her, hard even to take her eyes from her chubby, peach-skinned, red-cheeked face framed with Lachlan’s thick, dark gold hair. Just gorgeous.

  Now that the summer was over, Pete had turned five and was at school all day like Willy and she missed them. Couldn’t stop herself from thinking about them all the time she wasn’t busy, and some of the time that she was. Teeth, she was worrying about at the moment. Willy had the jaggedy new teeth in, old teeth coming out mouth and Manda was cutting incisors, drooling all day long.

  She was giving them all gallons of milk and worrying about whether or not they should have fluoride tablets because the farmhouse wasn’t on the mains, but supplied by its own well.

  She was strict about crisps and sweets, rationing them to twice a week. But Lachlan would sneak them stuff every day if he got a chance. Driving her wild. As usual.

  But she was too busy to worry about anything for too long. Busy, busy, weren’t they always so busy? It was a recent thought that in a day, she only ever got about 40 per cent of what she’d hoped to achieve done. About 40 per cent of her house was 40 per cent clean most of the time, about 40 per cent of the clothes were washed, 40 per cent of toys put away, 40 per cent of mail answered, 40 per cent of guff chased from one room to another, from one pile to another. Chasing it all about the farmhouse. Wishing there was the time or, better still, money to have the kitchen redone, or the hallway, or the children’s room, or the downstairs bathroom, which had paper peeling off the back wall. And the kitchen floor beetles? Where were they coming from? How could she get rid of them? And all those other little things . . . She struggled every day to get the basics done: farm paperwork, food in the fridge, dinner made, house chaos at manageable level. How were other mothers able to polish shoes? Put on cuticle cream? Get the hand-washing done? Cleanse, tone and moisturize twice a day? How did they do this?

  No time, no time . . . As soon as Manda was down for a nap, Rosie was in the office making calls, doing the paperwork, filling in the
endless forms Lachlan relied on her to do.

  They had, unofficially, somewhat unspokenly, come to a working division of labour on the farm and in their home.

  Lachlan did the deals and oversaw the work in the fields, the staff, the summer student pickers. He was out for most of the day, dropping in every few hours for tea, food and a hunt round the fridge for things he could take back out with him.

  She was the form-filler, phoner, cheque-writer, mail-opener, tax-checker, VAT-keeper, not to mention the shopper, washer, cleaner, cook and main childminder. But the resentment didn’t spill out too often. When it did she would remind herself that he was almost always home for supper at 6.30 p.m. and then he would bath his children and help put them to bed. And he was a good dad, a devoted dad. Sometimes, just occasionally, she would also remember how handsome he was. How lucky, lucky she’d been to get a husband so good to look at, even if other women did notice it too. Yes, other women . . . Lachlan seemed to be one of Mother Nature’s natural attractions. Rosie knew this: wasn’t it what kept her glued to him? Despite the handful of incidents in their nine years of marriage which had made her wonder if he had done a little bit of straying. She’d never had any direct evidence, so she’d never confronted him. In fact, she’d always ignored the problem and it had gone away – not very grown-up, not very girl power, but there you go. It seemed to have worked.

  Sometimes she blamed herself. Lachlan would no doubt have liked some more of her attention, but really she was too tired. Her last thought most nights as she switched out the light was that she really must get some sexier pyjamas, really should lose the ten pounds or so still hanging about her from the last pregnancy, really must have sex with her husband some time, should definitely arrange for them both to go on a mini break . . . and then she would fall asleep. A deep, deep, dreamless sleep, broken at 6 a.m. by Manda.

  The offer stood from Lachlan to get up and give Manda her milk, but Rosie could never get back to sleep anyway, so she would always go. Always a bit tired, wondering when the nights got so short, why it seemed now that she’d barely got to sleep when it was time to get up and get another day on the road again.

  Today had been no different, with the added chore of cleaning out two trailers and the farm van so Harry and Ingrid could borrow them for the big move.

  The school bell cut through her thoughts.

  ‘Here they are!’ she said for Manda’s benefit and threw open the car door to go and get her boys from the schoolyard.

  With just the four of them together in the car, it never seemed to be the problem it was when Lachlan was there too. When the children had her undivided attention, they almost always behaved, and everyone had fun. Singing ridiculous variations on nursery rhymes was the current game, which they played at top volume all the way home.

  ‘Old Macdonald had a cold, ee-i-ee-i-o,

  With a cough, cough, here and a cough, cough there . . .’

  ‘Ring a ring of roses,

  A pocketful of bogies . . .’ Pete came out with today, and brought the house down.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘WELL, WHAT ABOUT this then?’ Alex was holding up a long black beaded skirt.‘It’s lovely, a take anywhere, go with everything classic, if ever I saw one.’ She rolled the waistband to see the label.‘Nice one.’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Pamela agreed sadly.‘But I haven’t been able to close the zip since the 1990s.’

  ‘No!’ was Alex’s response.‘Try it. Honestly, I think you see yourself through fat specs or something.’

  ‘Look, we’re supposed to be packing, sorting stuff out,’ Pamela protested.‘Not having a Trinny and Susannah moment.’

  ‘I am not putting this in my collection unless you try it on first,’ Alex insisted. She’d been brought in for flat clearout and packing day because she’d promised to sell or dispose of all the things that Pamela and Dave didn’t want any more.

  ‘All right, all right.’ Pamela unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘And you know what else I would like to know about?’ Alex asked now.

  ‘Uh huh?’ cautiously.

  ‘Ever since Barcelona, your trousers and loafers look has been ditched for skirts and heels and black is being phased out in favour of . . .’ Alex made a quick rifle through the clothes in the wardrobe in front of her, ‘toffee, rose . . . aqua blue . . . What is going on?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know . . . trying to get in touch with my inner Spaniard or something.’ Pamela, only breathing in a little, slid the zip all the way up to the top.‘That is unbelievable.’

  ‘See? You’re NOT FAT!’

  ‘It’s the move – I’m losing weight just thinking about it. The Pickfords Diet, maybe I could market it . . . make a million.’

  ‘Stop trying to put me off. I want to know about your Inner Spaniard. Does Dave know about your Inner Spaniard?’

  ‘You mean is it for his benefit?’ Pamela shook her head.‘No. I mean he’s noticed, but it’s for me. I’m 34, I really thought I would be a mum by now. And I’m not. So,’ the words stumbled out, ‘I feel like I’ve lost my bearings. I’m trying different things out. That’s the only way I can explain it. The boots . . . the skirts . . . the move . . . everything. Just trying different things out. I don’t know what’s going to work – but won’t know till I try.’

  ‘Different man?’ Alex dared to ask.

  Pamela let out a sigh and sat on the edge of her marital bed, her friend never flinched from the hard questions.‘Who knows?’ she said finally.‘That’s not what I’m thinking at the moment. This is a fresh start. But it’s also – no getting away from it – a last chance.’

  ‘I really like Dave,’ Alex threw in.

  ‘Yeah. Me too. But that may not be enough.’

  On cue, they heard the rattle of the front door.

  ‘Fresh supplies!’ Dave called from the hall.

  ‘You better have remembered my cigarettes or that’s it, I’m out of here,’ Alex answered.

  He put his head round the bedroom door: ‘Tea bags, milk, Hob-nobs and a packet of American Spirit cigarettes. Natural chemical-free tobacco. You don’t want to be smoking the other stuff.’

  Pamela groaned but Alex told him he was sweet.

  ‘How are you getting on, anyway?’ he asked.‘Hope you’ve thrown out all my suits.’

  ‘Not all of them!’ Pamela protested.

  ‘No, seriously.’ He opened his side of the wardrobe.‘I’m not planning to work anywhere ever again where I have to wear a suit, a suffocating shirt or even worse . . . a tie.’ He yanked out his tie rack, hung with the accumulated neck-wear of almost a decade in management, and handed it to Alex.‘Bye-bye,’ he said.‘Well no, I’ll save two ties and one suit for hatchings, matchings and dispatchings.’

  ‘Is there much call for suits at hatchings?’ Pamela couldn’t resist.

  ‘Probably not. I think men are required to wear full surgical scrubs these days and, you know, those little plastic hairnets. Right . . . tea.’

  Alex was impressed that this couple could occasionally crack birth gags. She also marvelled at the quantity of photos, framed and unframed, of Pamela’s nephew and niece all over the place.

  ‘Don’t they make you a bit sad?’ she had dared to ask her friend once, imagining Pamela scanning those faces for a glimpse of what her own child might have looked like.

  ‘The worst bit was when Liz was pregnant with Martha,’ Pamela had confided.‘We’d been trying for two years, our first IVF had failed, it was hell . . . I hated her. I couldn’t bear to see her. But when Martha arrived. Oh God . . .’ her eyes a little teary at the memory, ‘I thought she was wonderful. And she felt as if she was a little bit mine. Suddenly there’s a little person in the world who shares at least some of my genes. Both of them are just beautiful!’

  She’d held out her favourite snap, of her with Martha – perfect pink lips and iridescent blue eyes – snuggled in under one arm, and baby Jim, fat enough to fill his towelling babygro right to
the seams, asleep on her chest, lashes curling off a cheek so plump it rested on his shoulder.

  The three of them worked through the flat, digging out all sorts of marriage debris.

  ‘The pasta maker!’ Pamela brought it from the back of the kitchen cupboard.‘Wedding present, never been out of its box, never even been fully assembled, let alone used.’

  ‘Come to Mama.’ Alex held open her bag.

  ‘No, no.’ Dave got his hands on it.‘We’ll have time to make our own pasta in Norfolk.’

  Pamela rolled her eyes: ‘Well, I won’t.’

  ‘No, you’ll be too busy knitting,’ Alex reminded her. All three began to laugh. Although, Pamela thought, they wouldn’t if they knew all that was in the box of half-finished knits and balls of wool that Alex had brought out of the sitting room cupboards.

  ‘What is this?’ Alex had demanded, lifting the flaps and pulling out knitting needles, squares of knitting and the wool.

  ‘I always liked the idea of knitting things for Martha and Jim,’ Pamela had said, going over to close the flaps up again.‘But, you know, not a lot got finished. I’ll sort it out later.’

  Down in the body of the box were lots of little baby things, hats, booties, wooden rattles. Very special things she’d seen, loved and bought, telling herself they were for her brother’s babies, but somehow she hadn’t passed them all on. A little cache had remained with her, in the hope that one day, one day . . . she would need them.

  Further down in that box were the items she had started shredding in despair one afternoon, with tiny, pointed nail scissors, until Dave had found her, prised the things from her hands and told her to stop.

  At the very bottom of that box was also the wedding present book from Dave. The one she didn’t like to even think about now.

  ‘This is going to take for ever,’ Pamela had moaned as they finally entered the kitchen, the last room to be done.

  ‘As the great masters of Zen like to say: Begin . . . and then continue,’ were Alex’s words of encouragement.