by Jenny Eclair
The contents of her basket come to almost forty pounds, and as Bel has left her bags for life in the car, an unnecessary extra fifteen pence is added to the bill.
Not that it matters; fifteen pence is neither here nor there in the scheme of things. It’s the amount left to pay on the mortgage that keeps her awake at night, wondering why and how they ever thought that an interest-only option was a good idea. We’re never going to pay that off, she frets, heading for the exit. Not now that she only works part-time. As for Andrew, his career stalled about ten years ago. Her mother’s voice echoes in her head: ‘Andrew hasn’t got much drive, has he?’ But she pushes the memory away.
It’s the uncertainty surrounding Brexit that has done for her salary, thinks Bel ruefully, wondering what would have happened had she stayed in publishing rather than jumping ship for a new venture some pals were setting up back in the mid-nineties.
Snow Nation was an agency created to recruit staff for European ski resorts, and Bel has been working at their office in Victoria since it first opened.
The owners, Jan and Marcus, have earned a fortune out of it, but the past few years have not been kind to the ski industry; rather than fight the downturn, the Leamings decided to scale down the business. As a result, Bel now works three days a week.
At first she was grateful, imagining herself spending more time in the gym and exploring new hobbies: dressmaking or maybe silver-smithing – she could have a little shed in the garden, all kitted out with whatever you need for silver-smithing . . . But with adult children to support and Andrew’s move over to the NHS meaning his wages are permanently frozen, there never seems to be enough money for anything exciting or extravagant. They haven’t even booked a holiday this year.
It’s been ages since I’ve actually been skiing, thinks Bel, jealously recalling Jan’s Austrian tan, with its giveaway goggle-lines, before recalling how useless her husband is on the slopes. Bless Andrew, she does love him, but he’s a complete waste of a lift pass. Bel thinks fondly back to how they first met; if Andrew hadn’t been such a rubbish skier, he’d never have broken his ankle and she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to play her Florence Nightingale number and her life might have taken a different path. I might have married someone with a bit more drive, she muses, someone with less dandruff and a bigger pension pot.
But money isn’t the only thing that keeps her awake at night. She made a list a few weeks ago of the things that worry her, and then she re-wrote the list in alphabetical order and awarded each problem a mark out of ten according to how much it upset her. Anything that causes her to hyperventilate scored a ten, while small background niggles such as needing a new mat for the hall were marked with a lowly one.
For a moment, seeing all her worries neatly written down in her lovely handwriting on the back of a handy piece of cardboard packaging that came free with a pair of tights made her feel more in control.
After a brief panic, Bel locates her car in the car park and opens the boot before realising that it’s full of bin liners of stuff intended for the charity shop. Slamming down the lid, she lobs her shopping onto the back seat instead. A jar of marmalade immediately falls out of the bag and rolls under the passenger seat. Dammit, she’ll dig it out later.
Bel proceeds to have her daily fight with the driver’s door. It keeps sticking and she has to yank at the handle until the door flies open and almost smacks her in the teeth. She squeezes behind the wheel. The car is alphabetically third on her list and rates a worry score of seven.
She reaches for her seat belt. No . . . croissant first, if she doesn’t eat right now she might black out on the way home.
As she twists her arm between the seats and reaches into her shopping, the blood-pressure monitor begins to buzz again. She holds still, thinking how ridiculous her life has become, and when the stupid thing has done its business she snatches at the bag of croissants, rips it open with her teeth and folds first one croissant, then a second and finally a third into her mouth. A blizzard of pastry flakes cascades down her coat.
Ideally, she would like to go back to bed; everything is such hard work. With one squashed croissant remaining in the packet, Bel turns the key in the ignition and for some reason, in that split second, she remembers it wasn’t only the doll that she was cruel to.
Once, when Jamie was a tiny baby and Ed was in nursery, she did the same to her six-month-old child as she had to Tina.
Bel would like to deny it, but the evidence plays out in a series of undeniably accurate pictures in her head.
She is sitting on an unmade bed, Andrew has gone to work, ugly purple wallpaper is peeling off the walls and a cup of tea has formed a milky skin on her bedside table. They had not long moved into the Clapham house, so Ed must have been nearly three. He is dressed and playing with Duplo on the floor, while she has the infant Jamie in her arms and is rocking backwards and forwards, slightly too fast to be comforting the baby.
Jamie was a colicky, ungrateful baby, impolite on the bosom, greedy and dismissive. At least when Ed was suckling, he looked adoringly into her eyes, as if grateful for the nourishment. Not Jamie: he bit and tugged and spat her nipple out, as if resentful that the stuff that kept him alive had to come from her. If he did settle to feed properly, he would close his eyes tightly shut. There was no intimacy between them, she was merely a machine that produced what he needed. But mostly he cried.
In the memory, she is thirty-one years old, she has one child playing nicely on the floor and this horrible goblin baby in her arms, turning his face away from her swollen breast. She is sweating. Glancing at the alarm clock on the bedside table, she rises from the bed and walks purposefully over to a chest of drawers, the baby tucked under her arm like a swimming towel. In one swift movement she opens a drawer and rolls the baby in. She doesn’t shut it completely, she closes it halfway. You can still hear him scream, so she closes the drawer a little more and the screaming is slightly muffled. Then she has a shower, gets dressed and takes Ed to nursery.
She is home within half an hour. The baby is asleep in the drawer.
He is fine.
10
Home
Bel carries her groceries into the house. The hallway is dark because of the yew tree that needs pruning in the front garden.
One day, she would like to live somewhere light, a simple wooden hut on the banks of a lake, with a private jetty. The sort of thing you regularly see in Elle Deco, featuring an elegant blonde in yoga pants with a cute baby on her hip. ‘Skye and her family live a simple yet sophisticated lifestyle here in this idyllic isolated lakeside beauty spot . . . ’
By contrast, Bel and her family live in a cramped four-bedroom house on the wrong side of Clapham Common.
It’s not that small, thinks Bel crossly; the problem is that nobody ever tidies anything up or puts anything away.
The wall to the left of the front door bulges under a mound of coats; coats are piled on top of coats on top of coats. She wouldn’t be surprised if, burrowing right down into the centre of all this wool, gabardine and leather, she found Ed’s first anorak or the totally inappropriate velvet-collared coat that Grandtash bought Jamie when he was five. Immediately she hears Natasha saying, ‘Really, darling, sometimes it’s nice for children to look smart.’
What for? It wasn’t as if the child was about to attend a society wedding. Her mother could be ridiculous at times. In her defence, Natasha’s upbringing had been ludicrously privileged, Bel acknowledges grudgingly. No wonder she had such daft priorities, hers was a world of nannies and ponies – for a while at least, until it all disappeared.
She desperately needs to have a cull of the coats and face up to the fact that she is never going to get into that baby-blue mohair number that she bought in the Jigsaw sale three years ago. The menopause plays havoc with a woman’s weight, she tells herself – though so does eating a family pack of croissants in the car, dammit.
Should get rid of that too, she reminds herself, spying Benji’s l
ead on the hall table. The dog’s been dead a good six months, but somehow she can’t yet bring herself to part with his lead.
What a dreadful day that was. The vet had come over and injected the old family pet in the sitting room, and then Bel sat with Benji on her knee until the weight of the animal became somehow heavier and she knew he was dead, or ‘gone to doggy heaven’ as Ed’s girlfriend insisted on saying in a baby voice.
No sign of Maisie, thank goodness. Mind you, the fact that her hideous fake-fur jacket wasn’t hanging up with the rest of the coats didn’t necessarily mean she was out. She might have draped it over a chair in the kitchen or chucked it on the living room floor. Wherever Maisie went, she seemed to leave a trail of evidence in her wake: a half-eaten bowl of cereal on the landing windowsill, a tangle of elastic hairbands around the kitchen doorknob, magenta hair dye on a beige towel in the bathroom. And it’s not just her things, it’s the smell of her, the sugary pong that permeates the whole house. God knows what it is, but it makes Bel’s eyes water.
Sadly, Maisie’s signature scent isn’t strong enough to mask the whiff of dope that is drifting down from Jamie’s bedroom.
Bel suppresses the urge to shout up a command to help unpack the shopping. She doesn’t want to face the fact that her second son may not be dressed. You can’t tell him what to do, he’s twenty-four, she reminds herself, as if she hadn’t been present at the birth. He’d been slow to emerge even then, eventually having to be sucked out of her using the ventouse method, a process which Andrew had described as a bit like watching someone unblock a sink. Her son’s head had been like a telegraph pole for months and consequently she’d always made sure he wore a hat. Ed, her eldest child, had been the more painful, awkwardly positioned and with the largest cranial circumference the midwife had ever recorded. He was all head for a long time and very slow to sit up, possibly because the weight of the thing unbalanced him. Or maybe because he simply couldn’t be bothered. Ed at twenty-six is so laid back he’s practically horizontal, but at least he manages to get up and dressed. At least he has a part-time job; at least he and Maisie are saving up (in principle) for a mortgage.
Although with the wages they are currently earning this will take them the best part of a hundred years, Bel speculates bitterly, setting the blood-pressure monitor a-buzzing. And you’ll be dead, she tells herself. So no point getting your knickers in a twist.
Bel leaves Maisie’s face-wipes on the stairs. As Ed’s live-in girlfriend, she is meant to contribute to household expenses, but she keeps forgetting and last week she left a note for the cleaner asking her to change the sheets she and Ed have soiled by taking snacks to bed with them.
Constancia had refused. ‘I do not have time, Mrs Robatham, to launder sheets. I will iron, yes, but I am not a washerwoman.’
Constancia has cleaned for the Robathams since the children were small. She has a daughter, Sybille, who used to accompany her mother during school holidays and sit reading on the stairs while the boys ran around making war noises.
Sybille is only a year older than Ed, but she is already married and living with her husband in a three-bedroom townhouse in Epsom. They have a dog and are expecting a baby. Constancia is always showing Bel blurred photographs of her swollen-bellied daughter on her phone. ‘She looks very happy,’ Bel says, when what she means is triumphant.
Sometimes life seems like a magic trick that only some people manage to pull off, while the rest of us are whipping away the tablecloth and smashing all the crockery.
The kettle is still warm, so someone’s been in the kitchen recently. Bel makes herself a cup of coffee, allowing her arm to hang limply when the machine on her arm buzzes, trying to ‘take herself to her calm space’ – only she can never decide if she is calmest sitting under a pine tree in Greece, or standing on a mountain filling her lungs with Alpine air. Today she conjures up a combination of both and pictures herself in a swimming costume on top of a mountain. She looks ridiculous, flabby and pink as a blancmange.
At last the cuff eases. Bel, sitting down with her cup of coffee, digs out the party invitation from her bag. So Lance is nearly fifty. Of course he is, he has always been and always will be five years younger than her. Now it’s his turn to hit the big five-O, so inevitably he will be celebrating at the family seat. Correction, her adoptive family seat. Instantly she feels a metallic taste in her mouth, a familiar surge of bitterness. Lance was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, hers was only borrowed. Lance is her brother, only he wasn’t adopted.
She remembers visiting her mother the day after she gave birth to him in a private room at the Portland Hospital. It was 1968. Natasha was propped up in her hospital bed with her hair freshly set and wearing a pretty floral nightie with a matching bed jacket. Her lipstick-coated smile was wider than Bel had ever seen before, it seemed to split her face in half. Daddy had brought flowers, carnations. ‘Darling they’re beautiful,’ Natasha had laughed with her wide orange mouth.
Then the nurses brought in the baby and her mother held out her arms, her face leaking water. ‘Oh, my darling baby, if you knew how long I had waited for you,’ she sobbed. Then her father had knelt down by the bed and buried his face in the bedding and he’d wept too. What with the flowers and the baby and Daddy, there didn’t seem to be any room for her, so she stood and waited for her mother to notice she was there.
I’m still waiting, she decides, feeling sorry for herself and reaching for the stem ginger and chocolate biscuits that had magically appeared in her shopping basket, despite not having been on any list.
August, she reminds herself. She’s got plenty of time to lose a stone or so before the party and the scrutiny of her mother’s exacting gaze. Natasha’s superpower is the ability to guess exactly how much a person weighs as soon as they walk into a room. And I have never been elegant or thin enough, decides Bel, defiantly tucking the biscuits under her arm and heading for the stairs.
These days she sometimes takes her treats up to the bedroom for safekeeping. It seems ridiculous, hiding food from the children, but they have no idea how boring and expensive it is to have to keep replacing things, and that sometimes it isn’t okay for Maisie to open a bottle of Chablis when she’s having cereal for her supper, because since when did anyone suggest serving Dorset extra-nutty muesli with a crisp chilled premier cru at nine pounds a bottle?
Bel sits on the edge of her bed thinking about her mother and comfort eating. Their relationship is so complicated; on the one hand, her parents should never have adopted her, on the other . . . Bel swallows her third biscuit. You had everything you could have asked for. You had a lovely home and an expensive education, you had your own bedroom, you were taken on foreign holidays and stayed in smart hotels . . . But, but, nags Bel’s subconscious.
Suddenly Bel is in Portugal. It is 1975, so she must have been twelve, and she’s the only one of the family who’s burnt. Her mother’s voice is both regretful and amused: ‘I always forget that Annabel doesn’t have the same skin as us, poor thing.’
Her back had bubbled with huge water-filled blisters and she had to spend two days indoors to be on the safe side. But she had had plenty of books to read, and in any case she was old enough and sensible enough to be left alone while the rest of the family went down to the beach. Of course she was.
She has always been religious about sunscreen with her own children, slathering them with factor thirty even on typically miserable summer bank holiday weekends in the UK. Naturally, as soon as the boys were old enough to go off to music festivals and get sunstroke, they did.
11
Dinner
Bel has forgotten to get the neck of lamb out of the freezer, and she can’t defrost the frozen lump of meat in the microwave because she chucked theirs out years ago when there was that scare about magnetrons frying children’s brains. What with Jamie’s GCSEs coming up, she hadn’t felt like taking the risk.
They can have pasta and pesto, they haven’t had that in years. When the children w
ere little it was all they would eat – pasta and pesto and pizza. In some respects, it’s a wonder they haven’t got rickets.
Really, tuts Bel, you’d think I’d be more organised now I’m only working part-time. Although, if she’s honest, these days she finds going to work easier than staying at home. At work she isn’t constantly faced with a mountain of domestic angst, at work she doesn’t need to worry about moths or the strange smell in the downstairs bathroom; all she has to do is match enthusiastic young people with available jobs in ski resorts across Europe.
Snow Nation had been a brainwave of Jan and Marcus’s, which is a bit galling considering Jan and Bel were chalet maids together back in the eighties. Thanks to its success Jan and Marcus mostly spend their weekends at their barn conversion in the Cotswolds, while their pre-Raphaelite daughter Minky is a published poet and competent flute player. Bel takes a deep breath. She has to stop doing this, she has to stop comparing herself and her family to everyone else.
Jan tells her she should take up meditation, but the last time Bel tried to sit cross-legged on the floor and empty her mind she got cramp in her left calf and found herself rolling around the carpet howling like a wolf.
Instead, she decides to spiralise some carrots and make an interesting salad to bring the dish up to twenty-first-century standards. Yotam Ottolenghi has a lot to answer for, thinks Bel, as she googles ‘interesting Moroccan carrot salad’.
She could make her own pasta – she has a machine, yet another household gift from Andrew. Come birthdays or Christmas, her husband never strays further than the kitchen department in Peter Jones’ basement, when he need only ride the escalator up a couple of floors to find himself in a world of luxury smellies.
