Smile

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘I’m wet!’

  ‘Wanna Slush Puppy!’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  I wonder if you would have followed him.

  I didn’t. It was cold out there, and dark, and fumey as people revved up their cars. The warmth of the cinema, the dreams, they had vanished like that castle into the raw air of this South London road. Really, what was the good? Besides, the person I was seeking belonged to somebody who no longer existed.

  They both sat in the buggy, they were so sleepy. I gazed down at their two anorak hoods, lolling, brown in the sodium light. Some day, I thought, will your Prince come? If you get lost in the dark wood, as you will, and I can’t always be there to protect you … If you get lost, will somebody find you? Will you be happy?

  Twenty minutes later I was walking up our street. The cardboard eye of our bedroom looked at me blankly. It said: shouldn’t have gone, should you?

  Our car was outside and the house lights were on. Martin must be home. The rain had stopped but I wiped my face on my sleeve. Besides, he would just think my face was wet from the rain. If, that is, he ever noticed anything about me.

  I went into the house, with its naked lightbulb hanging down. The light shone on a lot of planks, propped against the wall; they made a forest of the hallway. He had been to the timber merchant.

  Adam stirred and started to whine. Tilly climbed out of the pushchair and they went into the living-room. A burst of canned laughter; they had switched on the TV.

  Martin didn’t come out of the kitchen. No buzzing drill. I hesitated. Could he feel my thoughts? In the sitting-room the advertisements came on; I heard the jingle for the Midland Bank. The children call it the Middling Bank.

  Then I thought: he’s made me a surprise.

  I stood still, the realization filling me, through my limbs, like warm liquid.

  You know how, just when the children are driving you insane, when you can’t stand another minute … You know how, suddenly, they do something terribly touching? Like drawing you a card with I LOVE MUM on it or trying, disastrously, to do the washing up?

  Martin had made the supper. Hopelessly, because he couldn’t cook. But he had cleared the table, and bought a bottle of wine and lots of pricey things from the deli. He had realized how I’d been feeling lately.

  I opened the door. But this wasn’t a story. Life is not that neat, is it? No fairy tale.

  There sat Martin, with a can of beer in front of him and the lunch plates still piled in the sink. Packets were heaped on the table: not exotic cheeses but three-point plugs and boxes of nails.

  ‘Hello.’ He looked up. ‘Didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Exhausted?’

  He nodded. Fiction is shapely. A story billows out like a sheet, then comes the final knot. The End. Reared up against the suffused, pink sky there stands a castle, lit from within. The end.

  A silence as he poured the lager into his glass. The froth filled up; we both watched it. He said: ‘The end is in sight. I think I can finally say I’ve finished this bloody kitchen.’

  Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide

  Pimlico, London

  I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.

  I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.

  And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.

  He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.

  I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.

  Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.

  See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.

  Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.

  Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.

  I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.

  Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.

  Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?

  This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.

  I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 9781473520776

  Version 1.0

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  William Heinemann, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1987

  Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in the
United Kingdom in 1987

  Published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Vintage

  ‘Smile’, ‘Stiff Competition’ and ‘Snake Girl’ first appeared in Cosmopolitan; ‘The Wrong Side’ first appeared in Company; ‘Making Hay’ was originally broadcast on BBC Radio; ‘Empire Building’ first appeared in Fiction Magazine; ‘Lost Boys’, ‘Monster’, ‘Vacant Posession’ and ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ first appeared in Woman’s Own.

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library