He looked over at her and saw the black circles gouged under her eyes, her hair awry on her head, her pale and gaunt face, her bedraggled clothes. She made him feel momentarily worried. She was starting to look like she had at the end of that first year with Betty. Ruth was so complicated, she made his head spin. Part of her wonderfulness, he knew, lay in that complexity, but it interfered so constantly with everyday life, he also hated her for it. He wondered how she could be bothered with all the worry and anxiety which seemed to accompany her every waking moment.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’ll do you good. We can just go to Lemonas.’
She sat on the side of the bed and he saw she was going to cry. There was no doubting where Betty got her trembling bottom lip. ‘I think I’ve fucked everything up.’
Christian sat next to her. ‘What do you mean “everything”?’ Although he knew.
Now the tears came. ‘The kids, mainly. How do we have a child who doesn’t eat? We’re like some terrible BBC Three documentary.’
‘Don’t be silly. We’ll look back on all of this in a few years and wonder why we got so worked up.’
‘But do you think it’s all my fault?’ Ruth looked up at him and the desperation in her eyes made him want to protect her for ever, to stop the bad thoughts and take the pain away. He considered telling her that he feared it was his fault, but he didn’t want to bring Sarah into her head.
‘Of course it isn’t. Why would it be?’
‘Because I work.’
‘Because you work? What are you talking about? Where did that come from? Millions of women work.’
Ruth ran her hands through her hair. ‘God, I don’t know. The bloody nutritionist, for a start.’
Christian stood up. ‘Come on. Let’s go to the restaurant and talk about it there. I’m hungry.’
He was amazed that Ruth stood up and opened her closet door.
The restaurant didn’t look anything special from the outside and Ruth and Christian had nearly walked past it when they’d first moved in. Now they went there as often as they could and it felt like a little home from home. There was so much comfort to be found in the wonky wooden tables, the tea lights in old jam jars, the standard issue metal knives and forks, even the strings of plastic lemons criss-crossing the ceiling. The food was like the best sort of picnic: warm pittas, freshly made hummus and taramasalata, feta that was neither too sharp nor too salty, olives so juicy that you couldn’t stop the oil running down your chin.
On the way there Ruth told him that Aggie had suggested taking Betty into bed with them to try to make her sleep. He heard the desperation in his wife’s voice and felt surprised with himself for not thinking of this solution himself, it was so obvious. But it had always been such a contentious subject; it had taken him so long to persuade Ruth to move Betty out of their bed in the first place. A whole year without sex, it sounded like something you might read in an advice column. Now, though, it seemed less important and, as Ruth pointed out, Betty didn’t usually wake until midnight. It’s a good idea, he heard himself saying, let’s try it tonight. Anything to break this misery which seemed to enshroud their lives.
With a glass of red wine in her and another one waiting, Christian saw his wife relax. Her shoulders dropped and her mouth turned up into a half smile. She looked pretty if wan in the flickering light of the candles.
‘So tell me about this nutritionist,’ he said, wanting to take her hand across the table, but as the thought flittered into his brain like a starling in a church roof, she used her hands to wrap her shawl closer to her slight body.
‘I guess he was just old school. I don’t know why I let him get to me so much. It was a shit day. Betty dropped her fucking Brat onto the track on the tube and then had hysterics all the way there. I think the people in the carriage would have preferred me to have a bomb rather than Betty, you should have seen the looks I got.’ Christian laughed. Ruth smiled back at him. ‘Then I was expecting some nice Alan Rickman type of doctor and I got fucking Dr Crippen.’ Christian laughed again. ‘Seriously, he was like a parody of a posh doctor. And all he could ask was when had I gone back to work and then he said that five months was a critical time and had I heard of separation anxiety. I wanted to ask him why he wasn’t asking when you went back to work or anything like that, but instead I kept apologising. And then Betty started freaking out and so we had to go before our hour was up and as I left he said some snide remark like, Why don’t you leave her at home with your fabulous nanny next time?’
‘We should complain.’
‘Don’t be silly. He didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, he was probably right.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ruth tucked her hair behind her ears. She couldn’t force any more of the food down, even though it was delicious and she’d hardly eaten anything. ‘Well, I waited a year before I went back with Betty, and she eats. And I looked up everything he said on the Internet this afternoon and there is research on it.’
‘There’s research on everything.’
‘Yes, but did I go back to work for me or for Hal?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course it does. That year after Betty I nearly went mad, and so I rushed back to work after Hal, saying that we needed the money and everything, but we could have stayed in our old house.’
‘It was tiny.’
‘Yeah, but we could have, and then I wouldn’t have had to work.’
Christian was becoming confused by the turns in the conversation. He felt as if he’d been led too far into a maze. ‘But you wanted to go back.’
‘I know, that’s what I’m saying. Why did I want to go back? Why can’t I look after my kids? Am I a bad mother?’
And there was the exit. Of course, this was what it was all about. ‘Why does working make you a bad mother and not the millions of other women who do it?’
‘Maybe they are too.’
‘Yes, and maybe so are all the women who stay at home and go silently mad or build up a head of resentment. I think you’ll find there are bad mothers everywhere, as well as good mothers.’
‘But . . . ’ Ruth was drawing a pattern on the table with a drop of red wine.
‘Staying at home and baking cookies doesn’t make you a good mother, Ruth.’
She looked up at him, her eyes glistening. ‘Well, what does then? Because I’m all out of ideas.’
Agatha did not want Ruth’s life. Let’s just get that straight, she said to herself as she looked up cake recipes the next day. But it did give her a warm feeling of superiority to see Ruth falling apart while she coped so well. The woman was nothing more than a mess. Sometimes when she was breezing through the house tidying and sorting, she would have conversations in her head with Ruth’s mother, a woman she had never met and someone whom Ruth rarely spoke about. All of which was fine by Agatha because it was one less person to interfere in her new life. But surely you couldn’t have a daughter like Ruth and not worry about her, and surely, if the errant grandmother met Agatha, she would be reassured that life was as it should be. Yes, it is quite worrying, Agatha would say to the woman as she mended another broken toy or plumped cushions which were fatally sagged, but I’m coping fine, you stay where you are. Don’t be silly, it’s nothing, I want to help.
She had decided on a menu of egg or ham sandwiches, biscuits, little sausages on sticks, chocolate crispy cakes and, of course, the all-important birthday cake. Everything was going to be home made. She couldn’t decide if she should put a bit of orange into the biscuits or make one of those lemon drizzle cakes that Betty liked. But, it was Hal’s birthday and shouldn’t you always make children a chocolate cake? She was trying to find the perfect icing because everything like butter or vanilla seemed too boring.
The food was only a small part of the whole thing. She wanted a theme, but it was difficult with Hal because he was only interested in his plastic house and Thomas the Tank Engine. And every boy of his age liked Thomas, so what would be the
big wow about theming a party along those lines? In her mind she was going to amaze all the guests, make Ruth never want to let her go and the children love her forever. The idea must be there in her mind, but for now it was still out of focus and she couldn’t make out all the details.
She had been trying to get a guest list out of Ruth for days now, but she was always too busy and there were only twelve days to go and you had to give people some notice. Don’t worry about invitations, Ruth had said, I’ll just telephone everyone. Which annoyed Agatha, who had spent three whole nights in her room making twenty invitations which shimmered and sparkled like proper works of art. But how many people do you think will come? Agatha had tried. Ruth had frowned in that way she had when she was trying to remember something: wrinkling up her forehead and contracting her eyebrows so she almost looked ugly. Agatha had once had a job in the bowels of some massive medical school in central London in which she’d had to spend eight hours a day filing endless pieces of paper in the dark. There were whole rows for each letter, and whole trolleys of papers for each row. Agatha had started diligently, but by the end she had begun haphazardly stuffing the paper anywhere she fancied, revelling in the mess that would probably never be undone. As she stood talking to Ruth now she was reminded of that room.
‘God,’ said Ruth, which, Agatha had noticed, was how she began most sentences, as if appealing to a saviour for help. ‘Well . . . Toby, as he’s Hal’s godfather, and I guess I’ll invite Sally . . . and it’s a good excuse to get some friends round who’ve got kids because we never have parties and then we can kill about five birds with one stone. And of course I’ll ring my parents. Christian’s are away, so don’t worry about them. I’ll write you a list, but I guess it’ll end up about twenty grown-ups and twenty kids. Is that all right? Can you manage that many, Aggie?’
It was no surprise that a list had never been forthcoming, but Agatha had worked on the assumption that there would be more rather than fewer guests and had added smoked salmon to her list of sandwiches. She’d been woken in the middle of the night by the thought that maybe she should get some wine, but when she’d mentioned this to Ruth she’d been told that Christian would deal with that. There was just one other thing, something she’d had to steel herself to ask Ruth: could she invite the little boy from the toddler group she’d been taking Hal to, as they seemed to get along so well. Of course, Ruth had chimed as she’d been rushing out the door, the more the merrier.
The toddler group was on a Tuesday in a draughty church hall across the park from where Agatha dropped Betty at school. Children’s activities were often stuck underground, out of sight, Agatha had noticed. Often in rooms with no natural light and no heating and occasionally ominous smells. They were invariably run by harassed-looking women who were always begging things off the people who came in the form of money or favours. Someone had to lead the art activity, and so far Agatha had done this three times. She still felt her first art group had been the most successful. She had saved egg boxes for weeks, cutting them in two so they looked like caterpillars before the group began. Then she’d bought some pipe cleaners and made tiny pom-poms out of left-over wool and used the glue and paint at the hall. Everyone had congratulated her. One woman had even written down her number in case she ever wanted to change jobs.
It was the same woman whom Agatha had overheard talking to a friend as they sat in a circle waiting to sing songs before the group ended.
‘These songs give me an out-of-body experience,’ she had said. ‘It’s like I’m floating above myself and I look down and I think, What am I doing, jumping around a room pretending to be marching up a hill? I used to save people’s lives on the operating table and now I’m singing about sick bunnies.’
Her friend had laughed and said, ‘You can’t think about it too much or it’ll drive you mad. You just have to remember that it’ll be over soon.’
‘Not if you have another one.’
‘Yes, but then you really are mad.’
‘But do you want Barney to be an only child?’
‘Basically it’s a choice between Barney being an only child or a motherless child, because if I had another I would end up hospitalised.’
And then they had both laughed as if they got the joke, but Agatha couldn’t see for one second what was funny about what they had said. She hugged Hal’s chubby body more tightly to her and smoothed his blond hair against his head, sucking in his sweet scent. She could not understand how anyone didn’t marvel at this, didn’t want to consume their child with love. It made Agatha want to cry when she looked around and saw all these amazing children with such unworthy mothers. Images reared up before her of Barney and his friends stuck in front of whirring televisions, being fed cheap pizzas and going to bed without kisses whilst their mothers sat in kitchens drinking wine and bitching about how much they hated it all. Ruth, she realised, was one of those women and it made her wonder if perhaps working was the kinder choice.
It is very odd how sometimes the phone can ring and you know with absolute certainty who it is before you pick up. People whom Christian generally hated would claim to be psychic because of this. Christian wasn’t psychic but he still knew that his vibrating mobile would deliver Sarah to him as soon as it started to buzz face-down on his desk. Ignoring it was still an option at that moment. She wouldn’t leave a message and probably would never call back. But his hand twitched and he answered.
‘Christian.’
He tried to sound surprised. ‘Sarah. Hello.’
‘I’m sorry to call again. It’s just that . . . ’ she hesitated and in the hesitation Christian felt time loosen. Choices and decisions whirred around him as if he was on a brightly lit fairground ride. He shouldn’t have picked up, but now he had, he felt sunk, as if free will had been taken away. ‘I didn’t say what I wanted to when we met up. I wondered if I could see you again.’
‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’
‘Probably not. But . . . look, to tell you the truth I’ve been having therapy, and my counsellor thinks it would be good for me.’
‘Okay.’ The floor felt like sand under his feet.
‘It’s not as scary as it sounds.’
There was no way he could refuse now. This, he realised, was it. ‘Right. When’s good for you?’
‘Anytime.’
‘Okay.’ Christian flicked through his diary, looking for an evening he could tell Ruth he was working late. And so it started again. ‘I could do Friday after work. About seven.’
‘Fine. How about The Ram?’
It was where they used to meet. ‘Great. See you then.’
What if he lost his family without meaning to? Without even wanting to?
Ruth was looking out of her window at work watching a shadow float across the building opposite her. The shape was mesmerising and totally inexplicable. Her office was high up in the sky and yet something fluid was dancing like a feather across the concrete mass opposite her. Ruth’s mind couldn’t find an explanation for it and she wondered if life as she knew it was about to dissolve and a new order take its place. She willed this to be true. She would have liked to shed her skin like a snake and start again. But then a plastic bag floated into view and she realised that a gust of wind had simply caught a piece of rubbish and thrown it into her eyeline to tip her slightly off balance.
Ruth dialled her mother’s number. It was lunchtime, the office was only half full and her plastic box of limp salad was inedible. As the rings sounded into her ear she imagined her mother’s neat and ordered house in Gloucestershire. She imagined her immaculate mother hearing the sound from her well-manicured garden and starting the walk up the path so she could hear who wanted something from her now. Ruth liked to make it a rule never to want anything from her mother.
‘Hello.’ Her mother sounded out of breath.
‘Sorry, Mum, it’s just me. Did I get you in from the garden?’
‘Yes, I always forget to take the phone out with me. It drives Dad mad.
’
‘How is he?’
‘Fine. At golf.’
‘And how are you?’
‘Splendid, darling. In fact, you’re lucky to catch me, this week has been hectic. It’s the fête on Saturday.’
‘God, is it that time of year already?’
‘We were hoping you might come down for it. I did tell you about it last time we spoke.’
‘Oh shit, yes you did. I’m sorry, I forgot. I’ll talk to Christian, let you know.’
Ruth wondered when her real life would start. When she would become like her mother and remember things, have time for things, make things, grow things, have a bit of fun. The idea tugged on her arms.
‘Anyway, are you okay, Ruth?’
No, Ruth wanted to say, I’m slowly turning to jelly and I’m frightened that I might soon dissolve. I’m losing my grip on life but I’ve got a great nanny who’ll take over if I do slip away. Do you think that’s enough? Do you think my kids would even notice if I wasn’t there any more? I’m not sure Christian would.
‘I’m all right, apart from terminal tiredness.’
‘You work too hard.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘And you expect too much.’
Ruth found her mother so direct and clipped she never knew if she was making a generalised comment or telling her something useful.
‘Don’t we all?’
‘No. In fact, I think the secret of life is to expect as little as possible.’
Ruth laughed. Only her mother could claim to know the secret of life.
‘Anyway, I was ringing to ask you to Hal’s birthday party. It’s going to be the Saturday after next at our house. Stay the night, if you like.’
‘How lovely. Do you want a hand? I could come early, bake something.’
‘Aggie’s got everything under control.’
‘Aggie?’
Ruth heard the disapproval in her mother’s voice but tried to shut her mind to it because it chimed too deeply with her own feelings. ‘She’s amazing, Mum. I don’t know what I did without her.’
Everything and Nothing Page 7
