by India Knight
I am getting pretty annoyed, partly because she undeniably has a point. I shovel some soup in silence.
‘What happened?’ I ask, unable to resist.
Stella takes a raspberry tart out of the larder. ‘I told you,’ she says, looking oddly detached, as if she were talking about an acquaintance rather than herself. ‘I got bored. I met a man. We’d have very energetic sex in the afternoons – you know, when my sister was helping with Joy. It was very exciting for a while, being desired like that. We’d go on – what’s the word – illicit dates. I felt like a teenager.’
‘All the platitudes,’ I say unpleasantly.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ says Stella evenly. ‘Do you want cream with that? But I wouldn’t knock it. I like men. And of course I liked Mark. Loved him, actually. I have a much higher sex drive than he ever did. He wasn’t supposed to find out.’
‘But he did.’
‘Not at first, no. But the third time it happened, I got pregnant. And I didn’t want an abortion. I love children. So I told him. He asked if it was the first affair and I said no, the third. He tried staying for a bit, but he couldn’t hack it. Said Sadie was a constant reminder. As you say, all the platitudes. So he left, and here I am.’
‘What happened to Sadie’s father?’
‘Oh, he never knew. He was some student who was in London for the summer, doing odd jobs. He came to do the garden, which was how we met.’
‘Horny-handed Mellors to Milady’s chamber,’ I say, feeling depressed. ‘And you never told him?’
‘No. What was the point? He was twenty-one and doing a degree. Why ruin his life?’
‘I suppose. But what about Sadie?’
‘Sadie is two years old and blissfully happy. I’m a good mother, Clara, better than most. My children are everything. There’s no need to look so disapproving, and besides you asked. And I told you. It doesn’t matter. I am happy and so are the girls. Why should that be a problem? Open your eyes, Clara. I’m not the first ever bored housewife. And,’ she adds, giving me a sharp look, ‘I won’t be the last.’
‘Being bored,’ I say pompously, ‘doesn’t mean you have to go running about dropping your knickers.’
‘No,’ says Stella, laughing again. ‘There’s always macramé.’
*
Driving home, I am forced to consider the increasingly likely possibility that I am some kind of retro throwback. Am I really the only person around that took the ‘keep thee only unto him’ bit of my marriage ceremony seriously? And does this make me somehow comical? I feel like everything is happening in a code I can’t interpret. It’s all topsy-turvy, apart from anything else. It’s the wrong way round – I’m not supposed to be the one to whom people shout, ‘Get with it, Grandma.’ I mean, I’m a woman of the world. I know people have affairs. I know marriages break up. I have two stepfathers, three if Kate really does end up marrying Max. And I myself was hardly what you’d call a blushing flower before I married Robert. Whenever I read those sex surveys in women’s magazines, I’m always astonished by the frankly pitiful number of lovers most women seem to have had. I think the national average is something like four. Four! Four was my first term at university. Which I suppose makes me calling Stella a slapper deeply hypocritical. But I was an unattached slapper, which is, I remind myself, completely different. There’s a difference – isn’t there? – between going to bed with people because the sun is shining and it seems like a good idea to lie in the long grass, and betraying your husband of a rainy afternoon? Oh, it’s so grubby. Who’d be sexually incontinent?
I park the children in front of A Bug’s Life and march up to the living room. Robert is surrounded by the Saturday papers, nose deep into Hello!.
‘I want you to know,’ I say, ‘that I’d always leave you first. If I wanted to have an affair, I’d always leave you first.’
‘The plain one from Corrie’s got married. I don’t know who made the dress, but it’s not a good look. Hello. Did you have a nice lunch? Where are my boys?’ Robert peers at me as if I were hiding the fruit of his loins in my capacious, utilitarian pockets.
‘Downstairs. Robert, listen. I would not be sneaky and grubby. I would tell you. I would say, “Robert, I love another,” and I would leave first. Well, maybe I’d phrase if differently. But I absolutely would not sneak around.’
‘Would you not?’
‘No, Robert. I categorically would not sneak.’
‘Well, that’s a comfort.’ Robert is smiling at me, as if I’d said something deeply hilarious.
‘Why are you smiling like that? Christ, Robert. I come and tell you – very kindly, actually – that I wouldn’t betray you on some grotty single bed, with nylon sheets probably, and hundreds of people’s sweat sunk into the mattress, and a smell of sprout in the air…’
‘Clara, how squalid. Are you planning to run off with “a Homeless”?’ asks Robert, quoting Charlie. ‘I had you more as a suite-at-Claridge’s girl.’
‘Wherever I run to,’ I say, seemingly incapable of normal speech, ‘it will be with a clear conscience. Would be, I mean. Hypothetically. If I ran. Which I shan’t, because I, er. I, er. I love you.’
‘Do you?’ says Robert, still, apparently, in the throes of some side-splitting private joke. ‘How sweet. I love you too.’
‘Violently?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, how do you love me? Violently, or like a pet?’
Robert bursts out laughing. ‘You’re really the end, Clara.’ He composes his face. ‘I love you violently. I ache when you’re gone. I drag myself around, moaning like a wounded creature.’ He slides off the sofa and writhes on the floor, wailing. ‘Like this. It happened just now, when you were at Stella’s. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, beside myself. Now, I’ve got a couple of things to do. Will you be all right giving the boys their tea?’
I stare at him nonplussed. He has never helped me with the boys’ tea in his life.
‘Good,’ says Robert, for no apparent reason. ‘Good.’ He stands up and rubs my shoulders perfunctorily. ‘There are some messages on the machine, by the way.’
Which is really a very long and theatrical way of avoiding saying ‘like a pet’.
There’s a message from Araminta, saying Dunphy’s agreed to be interviewed by Niamh Malone in Dublin, thank God, which means I’m off the hook, guilt-wise. One in French, which I erase – a wrong number. Two from Kate: ‘For God’s sake, Clara, where can you possibly be? Call me back at once.’ One from Tamsin, wanting a chat, and one from my sister Flo. I suppose I’d better call Kate back.
Before that, though, I have an overwhelming urge to be supine for a while. I need to think. I mean, one can’t start despising one’s friends just because they have a private life which one disapproves of. Apart from anything else, what Stella does with herself is none of my business. Who am I to suddenly appoint myself moral arbiter? And she’s right: she’s a better mother than I could ever be. Why, then, has our conversation affected me so much? Because I wanted her to be perfect, I suppose. I wanted to believe that people like her existed, and compensated for people like me.
But she still exists, I tell myself crossly. She is still the same – still a pottery cat, although not necessarily one that’s been spayed. I don’t know. I don’t know what I think. Stella makes everything look so easy – even infidelity. Perhaps it is. Perhaps everyone’s at it except me. The phone rings.
‘There you are, Clara. It’s incredibly lazy of you not to answer your phone.’
‘Kate! I was out. I do occasionally leave the house, you know.’
‘Do you?’ Kate digests this astounding fact and then mutters, ‘God knows where you go.’
‘I was at Stella’s, having lunch.’
Kate harrumphs. ‘Is Stella that hippie one who doesn’t wash? And, darling, you really shouldn’t be having lunch. I’ve told you before – eating once a day works beautifully. I had a green apple for lunch. A beautiful fruit, the apple. So green. So fre
sh. It was a simple apple, but to me – a feast.’
My sense of weariness is growing by the second. I lie back on the pillows.
‘What did you want, Kate?’
‘On the other hand, I was talking to Lady Dalston the other day and she’s absolutely melted away on the Hay Diet. You should try it.’
‘Yes. Was that all? More diet stuff?’
‘You’re being very ungracious, Clara. I do hope you’re more charming to your husband than you are to me. No, I was calling to ask you to lunch on Tuesday, to meet Max.’
‘Sure. Whatever.’
‘The Ivy, 1 p.m. Do try to look nice, Clara. Wear a dress.’
‘Bye, Kate.’
‘Have you got women’s troubles?’ asks Kate.
‘No, I fucking have not. I’ll see you on Tuesday. Bye-bye.’
‘God, your foul temper,’ says Kate. ‘Bye.’
9
I must confess that I am ‘aweary, aweary’, like the chick from the Tennyson poem – not the one who says, ‘The curse has come upon me’, though she certainly cheered up O level English classes and provided one with the perfect, elegantly literary excuse to skive off swimming. Anyway: not her, the other one. The weary one. I don’t know why I should be taking other people’s lack of constancy as a personal affront, but I am. I mean, I’m making a bloody effort, rather than running around having scuzzy affairs, and if I can do it, so can anybody else, for God’s sake. Not that one wants to sound sour or anything…
Speaking of feeble pant-droppers, it’s about time I had lunch with Naomi, who, thanks to the literally dickheaded Richard, will now forever be known as Poor Nomes by her friends (as opposed to Rich Elves, presumably). I wonder if she knows yet about Richard’s fling with Acne Girl. I do hope not. The idea of Naomi throwing herself into the role of Betrayed Wife and Martyr is simply unbearable. I can see it now – the faun-like glances, the stiff (though slightly trembly) upper lip, the wholehearted abandon with which she would throw herself into the kind of no-nonsense, capable, full-on ‘coping’ that would have won her medals in the war; the faint suggestion of wimple about her head. I suppose it may work as an approach – all that stoicism and silent reproach – but I must say that if I were in her shoes (Ferragamo, flat heel, stiff grosgrain bow), I’d go for the slap-happy, full-on hysteria option every time.
None of these thoughts are good for my Doris Day streak, which has come skipping and ginghaming its way to the fore in recent days. I hate my streak, but I can’t help having it, nor it me, and I’ve given up on trying to shake it off. My Doris streak – hello, trees! hello, sky! hello, er, Rock! – is, I think, an inevitable by-product of my family situation. It’s what happens to you when your immediate family is a convoluted mass of divorce and fragmentation. At the end, deep down, you want to be the one to break the pattern (it doesn’t occur to you, in the throes of the loopiness brought on by the streak, that, mad, bad or sad as they are, not a single one of my relatives actively set out to be a serial divorcé/ée).
The Doris streak is responsible for my fixation with wanting to be mother to my children, and no one else’s; be married to my husband, till death us do part. The streak makes me want to be neat and nuclear; sometimes it even makes me think that I wouldn’t mind being suburban. And, obviously, the Doris streak is often at odds with the rest of me, or at least with the parts that smoke and drink and occasionally spend a happy half-hour drying the dishes absent-mindedly while wondering what it would be like to snog strange people who really, really fancied you and were groaning with desire at the idea of kissing you. If they existed. And one knew them. Hypothetically.
When Doris is coming on particularly strong, I sometimes tie my hair back with a ribbon and walk around the house wearing a pinafore (a very, very bad look for size 16 woman, obviously), wondering how hard it would be to rustle up a batch of muffins for tea and humming ‘Move Over, Darling’ to myself. It’s about to happen now. It’s time, clearly, to nip the streak in the bud sharpish.
The streak is nipped for me. The phone rings. The call is from my stepfather Julian – well, my ex-ex-stepfather, if we’re going to be technical about it.
‘Hello, Clara,’ he says. ‘How are you? Very good, very good,’ he continues, not waiting for a reply, which is actually quite reasonable of him, since all I ever say – Doris streak or no – is ‘Fine.’
‘Boys all right?’ he asks. ‘Robert?’
‘Fine.’
‘Goodo. Now, we need you down here.’
‘Do you?’
‘Absolutely,’ Julian says.
And I imagine. I imagine what it would be like if this were a simple statement of fact: we need you down here. As in, I miss you sometimes. As in, I like your children. We need you down here.
‘Gathering of the clan, as it were,’ Julian is saying.
‘Sorry? I missed that.’
‘Gathering of the clan. At the weekend. Small party.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say feebly. Gatherings of clans are gatherings I can do without. ‘What are you – we – celebrating?’
‘Francis is being baptized,’ says Julian. ‘Thought we’d have a do. First male grandchild and all that.’
I know he isn’t my biological father, but Julian did bring me up. I have two children, I want to remind him, and even though they’re not really his grandchildren, my boys love him as if they were. And every time Julian tells me that Francis is his first grandchild, my heart does a sort of lurch. Even though it’s true.
I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be reminded that I’m an also-ran. I don’t want my children not to understand why Francis is so much more special, so much more valued, than they will ever be in Julian’s eyes. And I don’t want to dislike Francis, who’s only a baby.
‘If you come down on Friday evening, Clara, I’ll come and get you all from the station. Let me know what train…’
‘Julian. Julian, I’m not sure we can make it. I need to talk to Robert…’
‘Of course you can make it,’ Julian says. ‘Call me and let me know what train you’ll be getting. Goodbye.’
I put the receiver back into its cradle and stare into space. It’s nice at Julian’s. He lives in a splendid Georgian pile in deepest Somerset. He has ‘gardens’, plural. Julian has staff, who take away your dirty clothes and wash and iron them, and make your bed and put fresh flowers in your room every day, like very helpful elves or mice. He has a big library and roaring fires in every room, as well as red lacquered bowls containing toffees on every table. He has a cook, which is arguably something of a waste, since his favourite food is boiled ham – ‘good English food,’ as he would put it, ‘not that faffed-about stuff’.
But I still don’t want to go.
My emotional well-being aside, there are other snags, like nature. Nature and I aren’t what you’d call immediately compatible. There’s so bloody much of it and it’s so pitifully low on shops. I would love vast fields of undulating wheat much more if there was a tiny shop in the middle of each one. Nothing too de luxe: we’re talking small, unobtrusive accessories boutique rather than, say, giant Harvey Nicks. A lipstick shack, that kind of thing, or a foundation hut that also stocked earrings.
And maybe fewer cows? Because while I am able to appreciate the lovable quadrupeds in an aesthetic sense – and they do look very pretty, standing there in their rather 1980s black-and-white prints, looking like backing singers for the Specials – I worry when I am actually standing too near them. Cows do that thing of completely ignoring you as you trudge through their field and then suddenly herding up, so that within seconds you have a dozen of them making a beeline for you, not looking aggressive as such but not actually exuding Christian kindness either. Cows – and they have this in common with the very dim – can turn their faces from blank sweetness to intense malevolence in a matter of nanoseconds in a way that (mercifully) eludes other mammals.
Plus I eat beef. And so, when in the company of cows – most days at Julian’s – I s
tart wondering whether the cows can smell the rare steaks I’ve eaten over the years. When the group action starts – when they start heading towards me like so many heavy-footed, lumbering psychos – I convince myself that they can, that they are super-sniffers bent on revenge, on making an example of the stinky carnivore in their midst. And then, obviously, I fill with panic and start running like the clappers, stepping in the cows’ vile pats as I run, leaping over fences and (the shame) emitting small squeaks of fear, until I get to the house and have to hose my shoes. It’s a sort of ritual at Julian’s and not one I especially look forward to.
Kate was married to Julian for fifteen years, and he is the father of Evie and Flo. He is also, through his previous marriage, the father of Hester and Digby – still with me? – and is currently the stepfather of Ollie and Jasmine.
I was six when Kate and Julian got together and twenty-one when they divorced. My own father, Felix, doesn’t really feature much – he took off for California in 1968, grew a beard, bought a bike and manifests himself, via postcard, only once or twice a year – and it would be fair to say that Julian brought me up. Hester and Digby were brought up by their own mother, so we didn’t see that much of them.
It’s a funny thing, divorce. One minute – well, one decade really – you’re someone’s stepchild, a virtual adoptee, Of The Family if not actually Of The Blood, and the next – well, the next you’re nothing. And it’s difficult to know how to react in the long term, once you’re stopped crying (because you do cry – you do the kind of unphotogenic waah-waah crying that involves snot and sobs and a swollen face).
Memories are the problem, I suppose. Memories of all of us together – me, Evie, Flo, Kate, Julian – laughing our way along a pony trek in the Lake District, say. Memories of me alone, drunk on cider aged fifteen, being collected from a party by a thunder-faced but kind-hearted Julian. Memories of missing him, sentimental as that sounds – not that Julian was any kind of paragon, but still. At least he was kind.
