My Life On a Plate

by India Knight

  ‘I don’t take an 18. Robert, do you think I’m butch? What’s with the lesbian stuff?’

  ‘Not normally, no. But like all tall women, you have to be careful.’

  ‘Do you think I’m obese?’ I often use exaggeration as a little signal to Robert to go easy on me. Am I obese? Am I hideous? Is my hair just like rats’ tails? Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t.

  ‘You are slightly overweight,’ Robert replies evenly, ‘but not actually a porker. You aren’t actually my little porker. You aren’t my Big Pig either.’ For a split second, he looks like malice incarnate. Then he starts giggling.

  This is a reference to a conversation we had a fortnight ago, before Naomi and Richard came to dinner. We were trying to think of the most horrible pet names to use out loud, with the specific intention of appalling our guests. We were only quite pleased with Tiny Stubby Man as a term of endearment for Robert, although we liked the way it implied a) midgethood and b) uncomplaining acceptance of a humiliating state. But we surpassed ourselves when it came to my special name. We came up with Big Pig. The idea of calling your well-upholstered wife Big Pig in public struck us as quite irresistibly horrible.

  ‘Pass the salad, BP,’ Robert could say.

  ‘Aaah, what does that stand for?’ Naomi would ask, all eagerly. ‘Bunny Pants? Booboo Pickle?’

  ‘Big Pig,’ I’d reply, matter-of-factly, dishing out the chicken (we toyed with the idea of my shouting it – ‘BIG PIG’ – added impact). ‘It’s Robert’s special name for me. I am Big Pig.’

  Merely imagining Naomi’s repulsed and bewildered face – ‘But it’s so cruel!’ – reduced us to tears of laughter. It still does, which is why we start laughing now. As I wipe my eyes, I realize with a start that I am feeling hysterical, in both senses. Like an insect with especially acute antennae, I can feel that something is up, somewhere. Is it him? Me? I can’t tell.

  Robert goes back to reading Vogue.

  I have to call bloody Sam Dunphy before we go and make amends. The idea is to persuade him to agree to a rematch. Jack has decided to position himself on my back, arms around my neck, and refuses to be shifted. I make the phone call half crouched, with his soft little head, the very centre of which still smells of baby, resting on my shoulder.

  The number – something beginning 07967 – obviously belongs to a mobile, but I still say, in my politest voice, ‘Please may I speak to Sam Dunphy?’ when he answers.

  ‘Speaking,’ he says.

  ‘Charlie!’ shouts Jack. ‘Charlie! Mummy’s calling Bloody Dunphy!’ It’s amazing what children pick up.

  ‘Dunphy the Smurfy!’ hollers Charlie from the other end of the room. It’s astounding, in fact.

  ‘Hello? Sorry about this,’ I say, reaching behind me furiously to detach Jack, who is humming a little song – ‘Dunphy, Dunphy/Is a Smurfy/He is blue/He smells of… POO’ – and giggling hysterically. ‘It’s Clara Hutt here, from Panache. I, er, I’m phoning to apologize about the other day.’

  ‘Really,’ says Dunphy. ‘That’s big of you.’

  ‘I am big,’ I say, still pulling at my limpet child. ‘I mean, not physically – although I suppose that’s open to argument – I mean… Oh look, anyway – I’m sorry. Get off, Jack. Sorry. Hello?’

  ‘I’m here,’ says hateful Dunphy.

  ‘You see, the hamsters needed new bedding and I used you – they peed on your face, actually, poor you – and then I had no time to read about you properly…’

  ‘Hamsters?’ says Dunphy, sounding nonplussed. Then: ‘Yeah, well, whatever. No big deal. Thanks for calling, anyway.’

  ‘No, no – hello?’

  ‘Yes?’ he says.

  ‘I need to interview you again. I won’t get drunk, I promise. I got drunk by mistake, you see, and it all went wrong. I will do days and days’ worth of research. I won’t ask you about your sexuality. Hello? Are you still there? I love modern dance,’ I add, lying. ‘I live for it.’

  ‘Clearly,’ he says. ‘I could tell. Anyway, no thanks. Once was enough. I’m going to Ireland tomorrow to rehearse. What’s that noise?’

  ‘Oh, just my kids. Sorry. Anyway, look – please. I could fly over. I’m really sorry…’

  ‘Your kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Six and three. Please let me interview you again. OUCH!’ Jack is doing some experimental biting of the top of my ear. ‘GO AWAY, Jack. Please. OW! Where’s bloody Robert? Go and find him. Jesus Christ, that hurt. Sam? Are you still there? Can I please come and talk to you?’

  There is a pause. ‘I’m here,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘I don’t think so,’ in a softer voice. ‘As I say, I’m going tomorrow. Back to Smurfland. You should explain to your kid that it’s little green folk in Ireland, by the way, not blue ones.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I will,’ I say absent-mindedly. ‘You won’t change your mind? Look, just take my number down. I work from home. And then if you have a spare hour in the next few days…’

  ‘Okay,’ says Dunphy. ‘What’s the number?’ I read it out. ‘Thanks for calling,’ he says again, sounding marginally friendlier. ‘Goodbye.’

  Buggering, buggering fuck. Araminta is going to go ballistic. I know Dunphy won’t call. I quickly ring her and, thankfully, get an answerphone (a languid passage from Chopin’s Nocturnes, followed by Araminta sounding like she needs a Strepsil. It’s the kind of message that’s supposed to call to mind glacial Hitchcock blondes and pared-down elegance – ‘I can’t come to the phone because I’m sipping a martini in a £300 négligé waiting for my demon lover.’ If you know Araminta, whose elocution lessons haven’t quite ironed out her flat Bolton vowels, this is a very funny thought). I suggest she might get a Dublin writer we sometimes use to call him; Dunphy might be more open to the idea of an interview with a sympathetic native.

  Meanwhile, we’re off to Stella’s. You know how sometimes you are incredibly attracted to the notion of a lifestyle that you know, in your heart of hearts, is a million miles away from what you really like? I get it all the time when I read the interiors magazines that Robert brings home. For instance, I know for fact that there’s nothing I despise more than the nauseatingly winsome Ye Olde Cottage look bang in the middle of town – no one’s ever needed an Aga in inner London (or a 2CV, for God’s sake). And yet I occasionally catch myself pining for wicker baskets, hand-painted mugs and blue-and-white gingham in the kitchen. I catch myself giving passionate looks to grotesque pottery cats in the windows of shops called things like Bramble Hedge Farm.

  Stella is, I suppose, my pottery cat. Stella is saintly. Stella, basically, is Motherhood. And although I don’t really want to be like her deep down, there is something potently, almost dizzyingly appealing about the way she lives her life. Stella really does ‘live for her children’; they are truly the centre of her universe. You get the feeling that she was only treading water before she had them – natural childbirth, natch – and that she never, ever resents the broken nights, the lack of sleep, the ridiculously early starts. Stella bakes cakes while Joy and Sadie, her daughters, are at school: wholemeal pound cake and banana bread, reflecting her own wholesome hippieness. After school, Stella ferries them to ballet or drama or French or swimming in her battered, ancient 2CV. She sits with them every night when they do their homework. She never reads the shortest bedtime story available because she’s longing to be by herself for two seconds, feet up with a glass of wine and a Ruth Rendell. What’s more, Stella is a single mother, which, if you ask me, elevates her virtues to those I more normally equate with holiness. She is, I suppose, entirely selfless. It is perpetually amazing to me that we are friends.

  When I first met Stella, which happened when I took Jack to the parent-run playgroup which she’s in charge of, I had her down as some kind of cow-like simpleton. She is beautiful, though in an unkempt bohemian way that owes more to jumble-sale finds than to shopping at Voyage. She wears no make-up. I had an innate suspicion of th
e bare-faced; until I met her, I’d never been friends with someone who didn’t own a lipstick. Like me, all my girlfriends are, and have always been, on intimate terms with London’s beauty counters, and I’e always thought there was something pretty suspicious about women who weren’t. Why, for a start, deny yourself the joy of looking better – unless, of course, you have yourself down as a total babe in the first place, which I suspect many of these artfully ‘natural’ types do. Still, who in their right mind wouldn’t swoon at little sable brushes, lovely eye colours in dinky little pots, scented creams, tingly astringents? Who would say ‘No thanks’ when given the option of making their eyes twice their actual size? And why is it that it’s always the plain ones that go about unadorned? Sometimes I see women in the street and I want to say, ‘Christ! Here, have my lippy, darling. God knows, you need it more than I do.’

  I have Kate to thank for my love of make-up. On my sixteenth birthday, she took me to Paris for the weekend. We went shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, where, to my surprise, she steered me straight towards the Clarins counter. ‘You have lovely skin,’ she said, ‘but unless you work at it, it’s downhill all the way from now on. I am going to buy you some products which you must use every day. I’ll buy some more when they run out. I know it’s boring, darling, but you’re too old for soap and water now. And you’ll thank me in the end.’

  After a long consultation with the Clarins lady – Kate, being Kate, helpfully told her that she herself used only infinitely superior Sisley products but that these would be too rich for me, and that Clarins was ‘good for teenagers’ Kate walked me to the Chanel counter. ‘If you have to wear make-up,’ she sighed, ‘you might as well wear decent stuff. I don’t want you to look like that slutty Tamsin. Of course, you’re far too young, but I’ll buy you some eyeliner, and some mascara, for parties.’

  She threw in some translucent powder and, to my astonishment, a scarlet lipstick (‘Red is classic. Anything else is common, apart from Vaseline – although do remember that Elizabeth Arden Eight-hour Cream makes the best lip salve ever’), and it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the de-luxe end of the cosmetics market. Apart from the fact that make-up makes you look better, I love the glamour of it, of the packaging, of the names (‘Rouge Coromandel’, ‘Vamp’, ‘Schiap’). Who wouldn’t? Well, Stella for a start.

  So I had her down as some kind of throwback, or at the very least a ghastly lentil-chewing tree-hugger who wove her own cloth out of recycled tights. I went through a stage of bracing myself for the lecture on conforming to stereotypical patriarchal notions of female beauty, actually, but it never came. Stella isn’t making any kind of point by wearing a bare face. Now that I know her, I doubt the idea of wearing rouge has ever occurred to her.

  Anyway, there she was, surrounded by children that weren’t her own, erecting some kind of wooden climbing frame. She said hello, and gave Jack a very sweet look, and then chatted to me about the playgroup while breastfeeding three-year-old Joy. I don’t hold with breastfeeding children once they have teeth, but I was fascinated by Stella, and I still am. She is my diametrical opposite – the kind of person for whom I normally reserve my deepest contempt. And a tiny, weeny part of me wishes I was like her.

  Her home, of course, is more Cotswolds than Crouch End. There are old quilts and bits of patchwork blanket draped over the back of her cat-scratched sofas, wild flowers in lumpen pottery jugs, vaguely Bloomsburyish paintings on the walls, which are painted sludgy colours from Farrow and Ball. Stella’s garden is a riot of hollyhocks and nasturtiums, and a sizeable chunk of it is devoted to vegetables. Her kitchen is Aga heaven. Her bathroom has a cast-iron bath and large, rose-patterned water jugs, suggesting she gets her water from a charming little well rather than from Thames Water plc.

  The whole thing ought to bring me out in a rash – it’s so fraudulent, this look, in the urban depths of north London – but, despite myself, I find it delightful. Less explicably, so do Jack and Charlie, who, mysteriously, are as quiet as mice when we’re here, and don’t ever whinge about there being only wooden toys and colouring books to play with – for Stella would no more entertain the idea of a PlayStation than she would tear raw battery chickens limb from limb with her bare hands for dinner. Besides, she doesn’t ‘believe’ in television. Joy and Sadie’s idea of a treat is a puzzle before bed, rather than a video of Toy Story.

  We sit in the kitchen, while Stella reheats the soup and home-made bread she’s made earlier. We have very odd conversations, Stella and I; I watch my step with her. I suppose she makes me feel protective. Certainly, she makes me edit myself. Whereas, for instance, Amber and I are always discussing whether we could ever have an affair – and concluding that no, we couldn’t, since apart from anything else it would mean showing our rubbery stomachs to someone new and strange – Stella and I have sweeter discussions: about schools, gardening, biscuits, E numbers. She is so maternal that I find myself treating her rather like I used to treat the impossibly charming mother of a school friend, aged thirteen. I cannot for the life of me understand why Stella’s husband – who’d left the scene by the time I first met her, when Sadie must have been about one year old – ever walked out on her.

  I have been in such an odd mood recently that I am not thinking straight and so, forsaking my naturally respectful line of dowager duchess-like conversation, I decide to ask her. ‘Why did Mark leave, Stella? I don’t understand. If I was married to you, I’d never leave.’

  ‘Oh, bless you,’ says Stella. ‘He left because I had an affair. Now, this is a green minestrone from the first River Café book. I do wish they wouldn’t give recipes for industrial quantities, don’t you? Well, I suppose it was because I had one affair too many. Can Jack manage with a big spoon? Can you, darling, or would you like a little one?’

  ‘A little one, please, thank you,’ says Jack, in the mysterious throes of impeccable-manners-itis. Stella hands him one and shoos the children away into the playroom.

  I can barely speak, I am so shocked. ‘An affair? What do you mean, an affair? You can’t have had an affair!’

  ‘I had lots,’ Stella says. ‘Sadie isn’t Mark’s, you see.’

  ‘Jesus! I never knew – I mean, I never guessed. I couldn’t guess. You – an affair! Jesus!’

  Stella laughs. ‘It happens all the time. Hasn’t it happened to you yet?’

  There is a strange feeling in my head, a hotness, and a weakness in my stomach.

  ‘NO!’ I shout. ‘Of course not. I couldn’t – I wouldn’t. I could never do that to Robert.’ My heart is beating and the shock I feel is out of all proportion to Stella’s revelation. ‘What happened?’ I ask, taking a sip of water. ‘I… Well, I’m sorry to sound so, er, bourgeois. But I thought you were so sussed, so together.’

  ‘What happened was I got bored,’ says Stella. ‘I woke up one morning and I had the feeling that my life wasn’t all it should be. Water, juice or elderflower cordial? It’s home-made.’

  Part of me wants to have an epi, of course – it’s not every day your most wholesome friend ’fesses up to being a serial slapper. The other part is, naturally, agog. And the third part is feeling very uneasy indeed about Stella taking the words right out of my mouth, as dear old Meatloaf might say. I mean, how often does someone quote your angst back at you verbatim? And – Christ – what kind of saddo am I, having Meatoaf’s æuvre popping into my head at times of crisis?

  Stella is laughing. She is, in fact, laughing at me. ‘You’re very old-fashioned, Clara,’ she says. ‘I’d never have thought it. You, of all people, being so shocked. Eat your soup. It’s going cold.’

  ‘Darling,’ I shout to Charlie in the other room, ‘take Jack and the girls into the garden. You can finish your lunch there. You can have a picnic.’

  The four of them shuffle off very slowly, holding their soup bowls with infinite care, trying hard not to spill. I suddenly can’t bear the look of their four fragile, retreating narrow little backs and have to blow my
nose.

  ‘Clara, get a grip,’ smiles Stella. ‘Is your period due? Echinacea drops are very effective. I’ll give you some. I’ve had affairs. I mean, so what? It’s not like I’m unique.’

  ‘But you’re married,’ I say lamely. ‘You were married. I mean, did you get married in church?’ I feel about twelve years old.

  ‘Yes, I got married in church. Please, Clara, don’t tell me you’re some kind of religious loon?’ She is really laughing now, shaking her head with disbelief, as if I were about to rip off my T-shirt and expose the foot-high Sacred Heart of Jesus tattoo underneath.

  ‘Well, no, of course not. I was thinking more about your vows. I mean, I sometimes say my prayers…’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Stella – I don’t mean I spend hours on my knees saying my decades. I mean if I really, really want something to happen, or really desperately want something not to, I, er, say a prayer. Well, I sort of have a friendly chat. You know. Please, please, please don’t let anything bad ever happen to the children. Please, please don’t make me have cancer and die and leave them. That kind of thing.’

  “ ‘Please, please don’t make me have cancer”?’ It is Stella’s turn to look agog, though, I notice with some irritation, also not unamused.

  ‘Well, yes, obviously.’ I shrug impatiently. ‘I don’t want to die of cancer and leave the boys with no mother.’

  ‘Well, no. But why should you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, getting quite exasperated. ‘Why should anyone? It happens, you know, for no apparent reason. And I’d really much rather it didn’t happen to me. So I sometimes say a prayer about it. And,’ I add triumphantly, ‘it’s clearly working. Because here I am, intact and lump-free. Which proves my point.’

  ‘If you say so, darling. Of course, you could always stop smoking,’ says Stella, who is now laughing out loud.