“And finally, our literature round,” said the geezer.
“Go, Ellie!” Alex hooted.
“Which Hans Christian Andersen story inspired the musical ‘Honk’?”
“The Ugly Duckling,” I muttered, and Alex had the grace to look a bit embarrassed.
“In which Shakespearean comedy,” there was a chorus of ‘awww’ from the philistines in the pub, but I went ‘yessss!’ and did a little air-punch. “In which Shakespearean comedy does the low-born Helena seduce the noble Bertram through trickery?”
“ Easy, peasy,” I said, “It’s All’s Well That Ends Well.”
“Nice one, Ellie!” Alex said, and we high-fived each other across the table. But it was a lost cause – we only scored seventeen out of a possible forty points.
“When I see Claire on Saturday for Pers’s birthday party, I really am going to have to talk to her properly,” I said, as we shuffled out into the night, past the triumphant table of eight that had emerged victorious thanks to their superior grasp of the finer points of British art.
“If Ben and Nina end up together, we’ll need to find more people for the team,” Alex said, adding forlornly, “I don’t suppose Rose would come?”
I said, “No chance.” Then I saw my bus coming, and made a run for it.
Four days later, I was toiling up the grimy, narrow stairwell that led to Claire’s flat, laden with carrier bags from Waitrose and a separate bag of presents. Before I could knock, Claire opened the door, and Pers came running towards me and threw herself against my legs. I picked her up and held her, and then, to my total surprise, I started to cry great splatty tears all over her perfect little head.
“Ellie!” Claire said, “Sweetie, you poor thing. Bloody Peter, the bastard! Shall we sew prawns into the hems of his curtains? Itching powder in his pants? Change the ringtone on his mobile to Pers screaming, and change the password so he can’t change it back? Here, come in and sit down.”
I carried Pers into the squalid flat and we all plonked down on the sofa, and for a bit I just kind of snivelled, then I managed to compose myself enough to start laughing, and say to Claire, “It’s not Peter, not really. It’s just that everything’s so complicated. And Pers is one year old today, and she’s so beautiful, and I love her so much, and I’ve missed you, and it’s all just too much.”
Claire said, “Sometimes I cry too, when I’ve put her to bed and I look at her asleep. Although often that’s just relief that she’s finally conked out and I can hit the gin.”
“So,” I said, once I’d more or less composed myself, “what’s the plan then?”
“We’ve got about seven mums and babies coming,” Claire said, “and I told them all that if it was a nice day we could meet in the park, and it is, thank God, because having them here would be social death for Pers, almost as bad as going to MacDonalds.”
“Really?” I said. “Social death? But she’s only one.”
Claire looked darkly at me. “You won’t believe it,” she said. “The pressure’s incredible. It’s all about opportunity, you see – you might not necessarily want your child to be part of a particular circle, but you’ve got to put the effort in, otherwise you end up with the unter-mums.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“It varies from place to place,” Claire said. “Here in Brixton, the Mummy elite are the attachment-parenting, baby-wearing, demand-feeding, lentil-knittery types, which is great for me because I kind of fit in with that style of doing things myself. A lot of us are single mums, or have partners who work in the media.”
“Right,” I said, not understanding a word.
“But in some other areas – in fact even a couple of streets down – there’s a group of mums who are all Gina Ford-reading, early-weaning types with husbands who work in the city, whose kids are already enrolled in private schools and Mandarin classes. Their children wouldn’t give Pers the time of day.”
“Little bastards!” I said, enraged on her behalf.
“Ellie, they’re only one,” Claire said gently. “Anyway, you sort of decide which lot you want to be in, and then you have to go through their initiation rites: afternoons at soft play, baby yoga, playdates in the park, that kind of thing. This is Brixton – it’s like wanting to join the Cherry Bloods or the Ghetto Crew, innit?”
“And what happens if you don’t get in?” I said, fearing for little Pers’s future.
“It doesn’t look good for you.” Claire sucked her teeth. “Not good at all. Your child doesn’t get invited to birthday parties, not even by the children you’ve invited to yours. Or you invite children to your child’s party and they RSVP no, even if it’s somewhere really cool like the Science Museum.”
“The Science Museum?” I said disbelievingly. “At one?”
“You bet,” Claire said. “Pers and I have been to at least one party there, and one at the Natural History Museum, and one on the London Eye. That got a bit messy. But anyway, you don’t need to worry about us. We’re in the inner circle of the Acre Lane Hippy Mums. You’ll meet the bedrin in a few minutes. Come on, let’s pack the picnic.”
Claire stood up and we went through to the kitchen together, carrying my Waitrose bags, Pers trotting behind us. I noticed that Claire was wearing a new dress, and it looked like it was properly new, not one of the charity shop finds she usually wears, and manages to look amazing in. This was a silk shift, printed in a cubist pattern in turquoise, coral and yellow, and it was gorgeous.
“Love the dress,” I said. “The Acre Lane Hippy Mums will have some serious competition come the next election for Alpha Blud.”
Claire grinned. “Fab, isn’t it? It’s only Topshop but it’s such ages since I’ve had anything new, I thought I’d treat myself.”
“Now,” she said. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Sticks of carrot and celery and cucumber, breadsticks and hummus,” she piled Tupperware boxes out of the fridge and into a cooler bag. “Cherry tomatoes and grapes.”
“No crisps?” I asked, horrified. “Not even Twiglets?”
“No crisps. Too high in salt, you see. Over on the dark side, at a Gina Ford, married-to-a-banker birthday party, you’d get crisps. Not here. Right. Hard-boiled quails’ eggs, little sandwiches with goat’s cheese, olives.”
“Aren’t those massively high in salt too?” I asked.
“Yes, but they’re okay. The mums like to say that little Aneurin has loved olives since he was nine months old. Don’t look at me like that, Ellie, I don’t make the rules.”
“I brought loads of champagne,” I said humbly, “for the mums, obviously. And some biscuits – they’re Duchy Originals, so they should be acceptable.”
“Hmmm, a bit of an unknown quantity,” Claire said. “We’ll risk it, I think. I made flapjack, which is absolutely loaded with sugar of course, but evidently it’s fine because oats are good for lactating mums.”
“And cake?” I said, “Are they allowed cake?”
“Like, durrr, obviously,” Claire said. “Check out the sugar and artificial colouring in this baby.” And she whisked the lid off a tin containing the most beautiful rocking horse cake I’ve ever seen. “And,” she whispered, “I’ve bought her a real rocking horse for her big present. It’s so cool, she’s going to unwrap it later. There isn’t really room for it but we’ll be moving soon so it doesn’t matter.”
Before I had the chance to ask for more details of this intriguing development – Claire’s been dying to get out of her horrible flat for absolutely ages, and thought she’d never be able to spare the cash to move – she said, “Right, we must go – it would never do for the birthday girl to be late for her homies.”
We packed everything up and Claire hoisted Pers into a new yellow sling that matched her dress, and put on a pair of absolutely beautiful sunglasses that looked new too, and they were either Prada or a seriously impressive knock-off. I picked up the heavy cooler bag in one hand and the picnic basket in the other and we left the flat, just as the d
ownstairs neighbour fired up his first joint of the day and started playing Simply Red at full volume.
I was as desperate for Claire to get out of there and improve her life and Pers’s as she was, and it looked as if things were finally turning around for them, with Claire’s new clothes and Pers’s rocking horse and the talk of moving. Was Ben funding this new lifestyle, I wondered? And if he was, what would happen now that Nina was back, trying to inveigle her way back into Ben’s life and his heart with the aid of a child who, although infinitely inferior to Pers, was Ben’s own flesh and blood? You’re going to have to talk to her, I told myself. You’re going to have to ask what’s going on, and tell her about Nina, no matter how hard it is.
But soon we’d arrived at the appointed spot in the park and Claire and I were too busy blowing up balloons (acceptable, in spite of their lack of eco credentials, apparently, as long as they were not the foil sort and blown up by the old-fashioned puffing method rather than using a helium canister) and spreading out picnic blankets and arranging food on plates (biodegradable ones made from sugar cane leaves) and trying to control a frantically overexcited Pers, to really chat. And then the friends started turning up – Ty with Olya; Abi and her daughter Calypso; Laura and her daughter Marina; Sally and her son Fabian; Cathy and her twins Harry and Hero; a little boy called Iskandar and his sister Zelide, accompanied by a gorgeous bloke called Ewan who was either their gay dad or their male nanny; Fran and her baby Zen, who was apparently being reared as gender neutral, and no one except Fran and her partner was allowed to know whether Zen was a boy or a girl. This pretty much silenced me for a while – I knew exactly what I wanted to say, of course, but knew it would result in Claire’s expulsion from the inner circle of the Acre Lane Hippy Mums and social death for Pers, so I sat down on the grass and sipped my champagne and nibbled on some bizarre crunchy snacks made of dehydrated carrot and looked at the babies and their mothers.
It was so strange, I thought, that just a year or so ago none of these women had even met the people they now knew best in all the world. That’s how it was with Claire and Pers, anyway. When she first brought Pers home Claire had literally taken to her bed for a week and cried and breastfed solidly, saying that she was never going to get her figure back or ever get a good night’s sleep again or have a social life, and in between wailing and lamenting about all that, she sobbed about how she loved Pers so much she just wanted to lick her, and how could she ever be a good enough mother to this most precious and remarkable child. But within about three weeks, Claire had been changing nappies with one hand and happily breastfeeding Pers everywhere, even on the Tube, and identifying whether her crying meant she was hungry, or bored, or tired, or just wanted a cuddle. I wondered whether, if I ever had a baby of my own, I’d take to motherhood with the same ease. Somehow I couldn’t see it happening, but it does seem to happen to most women, even those as patently underqualified for the job as I am.
I wondered what it was like for Ben, being presented with a child he hadn’t even known existed for five years, and suddenly being expected to love it with the same intensity with which Claire, and to a much lesser extent I, loved Pers. I remembered what Oliver had said about the little boy he used to take to feed the ducks, and wondered what had happened to make him so sad. And I wondered about Nina. What could possibly have possessed her to deprive Ben of the chance to get to know his son for all those precious years, and deprive little Benedict of his dad? And I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but I hated her even more than I had before.
By the time everyone had had some food and Pers had opened her presents – showing, of course, far more interest in the wrapping paper (recycled brown, tied with string) than she did in the presents, and the cake had been cut and some of it eaten, it was threatening to rain and most of the babies were threatening an afternoon meltdown, so everything got packed away again and we said goodbye to Claire and Pers’s friends, and carried everything back up to Claire’s flat and put it away. Then Claire got out Pers’s rocking horse and she simply crowed with joy, bouncing up and down and laughing like mad. Then after she’d had her bath, when she was all dopey and grumpy and plainly ready for bed, Claire read her her story and she curled up in a ball and put her thumb in her mouth and she said, although it was a bit muffled obviously, “Rocking horse.” Claire and I looked at each other, transfixed by her brilliance, and went, “Yes, darling, you have a rocking horse!” like a pair of hothousing loons, but Pers wasn’t anything like as impressed by her precocity as we were, and she squirmed around a bit, getting comfortable, and then took her thumb out with a popping sound and said, “Angeruck.” Claire said, “She wants her Camelduck!” and dashed off and got it for her, and we watched her fall asleep, clutching her silly knitted familiar, her long black eyelashes curled over her flawless cappuccino-coloured cheeks. Claire and I spent ages talking about her and her future, and then I told her a bit about what had happened with me and Peter, and by then it was half past eleven and Claire was yawning and looking discreetly at her watch, so I said I’d better go, even though we hadn’t said anything about Nina or Ben.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Ellie, have you updated the invite spreadsheet?”
“Ellie, have the caterers got back to you?”
“Ellie, have the Pimms people agreed to sponsor our welcome drinks?”
“Ellie, have you secured an interview in the Evening Standard with Diego Mendoza?”
“Ellie, have the Beckhams RSVPed?”
On and on and on Daisy went. It was relentless. I’ve always hated arranging events and this reminded me why. Until I came along Daisy had been the new girl, and she was clearly relishing the opportunity to throw her weight around a bit, which to be honest I could understand. Still, I was senior to her in every regard bar actual length of tenure, and her incessant demands for ‘help’, which actually meant me doing all the dull, impossible or generally shitty parts of the organisation of the hallowed Black & White polo day were really starting to piss me off. But without actually uttering the forbidden phrase “It’s not my job,” there was absolutely nothing I could do. And if I had downed tools and told her that I was supposed to be in charge of communications and not some glorified party planner, she would have been in Barri’s office complaining about me faster than you could say ‘bad attitude’, so I just had to suck it up.
Every night for two weeks I was stuck in the office until stupid o’clock, putting invitations into envelopes, proof-reading menus, comparing samples of black and white ribbon, rejecting florists’ designs on the basis that the flowers were insufficiently black and white. I wanted to scream, “There are no black flowers! And none of the ones that are white are truly white! What planet are you living on?” But I was stuck. Barri’s intervention over my press release had ensured that the only thing my job involved was turning down image requests from publications that Barri felt didn’t reflect our brand values, so I couldn’t even claim that I didn’t have time to play assistant to Daisy. And to add insult to injury, she kept me too busy even to comb the appointments section of the Guardian website and look for another job.
As the day of the polo tournament drew nearer, both Daisy and Barri became increasingly histrionic. Nothing was good enough. The guest list was insufficiently star-studded. The caterers were too expensive. The journalists who said they’d attend the ‘exclusive’ Black & White afterparty were too junior. The cocktails weren’t exotic enough (Pimms said no in the end and Sainsbury’s own-brand equivalent was deemed too downmarket, so we decided to offer a choice of White Russians and black coffee martinis, and I have to say that when I tried them at the official menu tasting, they were both absolutely disgusting). Fed up didn’t begin to describe my state of mind by the time the big day dawned. My social life had been shelved; I’d barely seen Rose, been too preoccupied to devote any thought to the Ben and Nina situation, and when Claire asked me on Facebook how Peter was doing, I replied, “Who?”
Daisy and I travelled out t
o Berkshire to The Venue the day before The Event. I’d tried to subtly suggest that I might spend the night down the road at Dad and Serena’s, now that she was home from hospital but still confined to bed, but this was met with a steely refusal from Barri and some more dark mutterings about Teamwork. So we ended up in a horrible corporate hotel, not that it mattered much, because we were too busy finalising the seating plan and assembling goodie bags (one box Black & White chocolate truffles, one little bottle Black & White signature scent, one rather tacky crystal-encrusted keyring from a jewellery supplier, one ‘limited edition’ half-bottle of Black & White house champagne… you get the idea). Except I ended up doing most of this myself, as Daisy announced at six thirty that she had an appointment at the hotel’s spa to have her nails and eyebrows done. “I am hosting the event, so it’s essential I look my best,” she said, in tones implying that as a mere flunky, it didn’t matter what I looked like, and in any case I was beyond help.
Despite what Daisy thought, I was aware that I’d be spending the day mingling with our glamorous guest list (a total of 150 journalists, minor celebrities and ‘socialites’, several of whose names I recognised from Rose’s dinner parties). I set my alarm clock for half past five so that I’d have time to do my own nails, straighten my hair and put on a face-full of slap before convening with her at seven as arranged. The early start meant I’d look like death by the end of the day, but I supposed everyone else would too, thanks to the free cocktails and the sun, which was already blazing down. I put on the pink dress I’d bought with Vanessa, and in a nod to corporatism, black and white spotty sling-back wedges with a bow. They were as high as hell, and I knew I’d regret the decision to wear them, but I didn’t want to let the side down.
When I saw Daisy, I realised that my choice of outfit was both stylish and relatively practical. I don’t know what had been going through her shallow, ambitious little mind underneath the cropped platinum hair, but she’d elected to wear an extremely short, extremely tight white dress and gold stilettos that would sink into the grass and leave her unable to move, which would be no bad thing for me. She was also wearing knickers with orange butterflies on them – I could see them quite clearly through the dress. Furthermore, there was a long, pale streak down the back of her right thigh where she’d missed a bit while applying her fake tan. I didn’t point this out to her though – call me a bitch, but I’d really had enough of her by that point.
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 19
