by India Knight
‘Queen,’ he says. ‘Bloody love ’em. And Bryan Adams, but he’s better for the slow stuff.’ Another swivel, this one pregnant with promise.
‘Digby,’ says Julian, ‘do you mind?’
‘Sorry, Pops. Just showing the girls how it’s done.’ He winks at me horribly. ‘Eh, Clara? Does the old eyes good, eh? Eh?’
‘Woof!’ I say. ‘Woof, Digby.’
‘Steady on,’ says Digby, delighted.
“ ‘Pops”,’ says Julian, taking my arm. ‘ “Pops”! I wish he’d desist.’ He shakes his head, but there’s a twinkle in his eye and his complaint is wrapped in palpable affection. ‘Pops!’ he says again, smiling to himself. ‘He is a card, isn’t he, Clara?’
‘Joker in every pack, Julian,’ I say.
14
Evie and Flo arrive shortly after Digby, and Anna and I race outside to greet them. After the hugs and a whispered, ‘Evie’s driving me mad,’ from Flo, I notice that the car’s back seat is covered in carrier bags and gift wrappings.
‘Been shopping?’ I ask, pointing through the window.
‘Yes!’ yells Flo, unlocking the boot. ‘Presents! We have gifts for you all.’ She is wearing the shortest skirt I have ever seen – it’s as wide as some of my pants, frankly accessorized with a T-shirt that says ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in glittery writing and a pair of giant fur-lined boots of the kind favoured by Eskimos.
‘Yes,’ says Evie guilelessly. ‘And Clara gets hers first because she’s the guest. We get ours last because we’re home. Home, home, lovely home,’ she half sings, doing a little dance.
‘Shush, Evie No-Tact,’ says Flo, throwing me a concerned glance. I smile manfully back. ‘Clara,’ Flo continues, ‘gets hers first because she’ll love it so much.’ And she produces a giant beribboned parcel from The Cross in London – my favourite shop, and hers. ‘Open it when we get inside,’ she says, and starts yanking at a giant wicker hamper that has Fortnum & Mason printed on its side.
‘Now, here is another gift, which is the gift of food.’ They really do talk like this, my sisters (half): part Nancy Mitford, part excitable, slightly solemn child.
‘Mm,’ says Evie, ‘I love food.’ She looks like a sweet little mushroom, her cat-eyed, heart-shaped face peering out from under the brim of a vast, lavender-coloured velvet hat, which matches the stripe in her 1970s Missoni knitted dress. This particular ensemble is tailed by a pair of sparkling silver Nikes. ‘Food’s yummy.’
‘You don’t think that when you sick it up,’ says Flo bluntly. ‘This present is for Anna. It’s a hamper. From Fortnum’s. For Christmas. Except it’s not Christmas, so they had to make it especially and there’s no plum pudding.’
‘I don’t sick it up any more,’ says Evie, looking hurt.
‘Thank you so much, girls,’ says Anna delightedly. ‘How lovely.’
‘I got them to put some marzipan pigs in it,’ says Flo. ‘They weren’t part of the original hamper. So when you bite into a marzipan pig, you can think of kind-hearted me. Kind-hearted us, actually – the pigs were Evie’s idea.’
‘There’s a lot of calories in marzipan,’ says Evie. ‘But I don’t care. And I like the pigs’ sweet faces, don’t you, Anna? Where’s Robert? And where are the boys, Clara?’
‘Robert’s in London. And the boys are playing hide-and-seek, I think. They’ll be out in a second.’
‘But we want them now,’ says Evie, who is an exceptionally devoted auntie. ‘Boys! BOYS!’ she shouts, like a nun who’s lost her vocation. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’
‘Here we are,’ Jack and Charlie shout back, galloping over the gravel and lobbing themselves into their aunts’ arms. ‘We saw a cock.’
‘Cool,’ says Evie, in her blithe twenty-three-year-old way. ‘Whose was it?’
‘A boy hen,’ says Jack. ‘Called a cock.’
‘Oh,’ says Evie. ‘That’s nice. Let’s go inside for the rest of the presents, Flo. I’m starving.’
Laden with elaborately wrapped gift boxes, we stagger into the roomy, stone-floored kitchen, where we deposit the girls’ presents on to the table. I open mine, the first layer of which contains an intricately embroidered pink cardigan, complete with sequinned flowers. The second layer hides a fabulous silver lace skirt (drawstring waist, oh joy), and the third – good grief, there’s more – a couple of dozen very thin, glittery, beaded bracelets.
‘Do you love our presents?’ says Evie.
‘Passionately,’ I reply truthfully. ‘You are angels of sweetness.’
The boys start racing around the kitchen, shooting each other with their brand-new pop guns while wearing a stegosaurus outfit (Jack, delirious with happiness) and an extravagantly mustachioed pirate’s (Charlie, ditto). Miss Johnson, whom Evie finds and wakes up from her nap, gets three bottles of flavoured vodkas with a silver flask to decant them into (‘Capital!’ she booms, causing me, not for the first time, to wonder whether I’ve stumbled into a 1930s play). Elvis, the Labrador, gets a red velvet collar with diamanté studs; Anna gets a vast bunch of lilies, to add to her hamper; Mrs Dunn, who does and is elderly, gets some cashmere slippers, ‘for your poor feet’; Mrs Hoppy (really), who cooks, gets candied fruit from Carluc-cio’s; and so on. Digby, who’s off somewhere walking with Julian, gets a pair of pants that say ‘CAUTION: HEAVY GOODS’.
We’re falling about laughing at these when Julian returns. ‘What a jolly scene,’ he says, divesting himself of his Barbour. ‘Hello, my darling girls. Is it Christmas?’
‘Daddy!’ They rush to embrace him. ‘No, but we might not be here for Christmas’ – Julian raises an eyebrow – ‘so we thought we’d bring the gifts now. And then if we are here we’ll bring more, so, you see, it’s a win-win situation,’ Flo explains. ‘Anyway – come and open yours.’
Julian seems delighted by his first edition of The Diary of a Nobody, a book he is able to quote from at considerable length. The first time I ever saw Julian laugh hysterically, with tears, was when quoting from it to Kate. The second parcel contains Three Men in a Boat, a tome which has an equally dramatic effect on Julian, reducing him to hyperventilation on many an occasion and even, once, to falling off a loo with a very loud thud.
‘But how brilliant!’ he exclaims. ‘My two favourite books, from my two favourite girls! Er,’ he adds, giving me a glance and looking around for Magdalen, who has taken the baby off for a feed. ‘Well. Er. Oh. Yes.’
‘I love that bookshop, Heywood Hill,’ says Evie. ‘They’re so professional. They know your credit card number off by heart.’
‘How odd,’ I say. ‘It’s hardly as if you live to read, Evie, darling. How often do you go in there?’ The notion of Evie as bookworm is, as it were, novel and not entirely convincing. I don’t think Evie’s read anything since being devastated by Charlotte’s Web, aged eleven, although she shows some familiarity with the more upmarket mail-order catalogues.
‘No, silly – I mean they knew Daddy’s credit card number.’
‘Oops,’ says Flo. ‘Oopsy doopsy doops. Do you want to play football, boys?’ And she scoops them up and whirls out of the kitchen.
‘And why would they need my credit card number?’ says Julian, for whom the penny is slowly dropping.
‘Well, to pay for the presents, of course, silly,’ says Evie. ‘Me and Flo can hardly be expected to buy things at Tiffany’s with our measly allowance. Miss J, show Julian the lovely flask.’
Miss Johnson does.
‘Very smart,’ says Julian. ‘So, darling, correct me, are all these lovely presents – very cosy-looking slippers, Mrs Dunn. Cashmere? Hmm – effectively, ah, from me?’
‘Well, effectively,’ says Evie. ‘I mean, obviously, they’re from us. From me and Flo. We chose them, you know. But you paid for them.’
‘I…’ starts Julian.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ says Evie, sidling up to him. ‘Don’t make a fuss. I mean, you get all the benefits. Especially of the hamper, which has marzipan pigs with the sweetest faces. Look.’ She thrusts a pig i
nto his face. ‘Really examine the sweetness.’
‘I suppose,’ Julian sighs, having conceded that, yes, the snouts are especially adorable, and that, yup, it is indeed a particularly gorgeous shade of pink. ‘I suppose it makes some kind of sense. But really, Evie, I’d have been just as happy with an old paperback.’
‘I wouldn’t have been just as happy with some rag from Oxfam,’ I say supportively. ‘Mrs Dunn wouldn’t have been just as happy with flip-flops, would you, Mrs D?’
‘No, Clara,’ says Mrs Dunn, gazing lovingly at her warm, snuggly toes.
‘The thing is,’ Julian says, ‘that you all have to stop buying lavish presents like this. You’re so like your mother. It’s completely over the top.’
‘Top, schmop,’ says Evie. ‘It’s lovely. Who doesn’t love lovely great big presents? Hands up.’
We all keep our hands down – Evie actually sits on hers – including Julian, who seems mollified.
‘Oh, all right,’ he says. ‘All right. Not that it’s exactly the first time this has happened. But all right. I suppose. Now, I’m going to do my paperwork.’ And he wanders off, Pooter under his arm.
The christening of Francis Cornelius Xavier, during which the baby beams sweetly and looks adorable in Digby’s own ancient christening gown, passes off without a hitch; it even makes me cry. Some braying friends of Digby and Magdalen’s are to be godparents. During the party that follows, I discover that none of the women works and that all the men work in the City. Francis is given lavish presents of the solid-silver variety and photographed, in his gown, in his proud parents’ and grandfather’s arms. I hug my boys close to me throughout.
We get the train home early the next morning.
15
Back from Somerset, I realize with a start that the sexy weekend away with Robert beckons, not, I must confess, especially alluringly. I’m not ready. When I imagined us romping through Paris – actually, bizarrely, I pictured me more doing a Toulouse-Lautrec kind of a louche cancan, red rose clenched between teeth, Robert watching, slick with brilliantine – I had the New Clara in mind: groomed, chic, sleek… and, much as it pains me to say it, slightly thinner.
Unless something very dramatic happens in the next six days, I’m going to hit Paris in full Jabba the Hutt mode, with two chins and nothing foxier to wear than a pair of tracky bottoms – except perhaps a lesbian-look Country Casuals outfit to change into for dinner, one that will stand me in depressingly poor stead when I whisper, ‘Coffee, tea… or me?’ at my dear husband. More (Roseanne) Barr than Bardot, and thus guaranteed to cause detumescence at twenty paces.
Clearly, I’m going to have to hit the shops. Equally clearly, a little dieting wouldn’t go amiss. There’s only one snag – a snag that’s as considerable as my waist size: I don’t believe in dieting. Me, I’m anti. I constitutionally disapprove of any slimming regime, on the heartfelt principle that Life Is Too Short (which principle also applies to aerobics, pooper-scooping and anal sex).
The kind of women who ogle a biscuit and then, guiltily, take a bite, squealing a winsome, ‘Ooh, it’ll go straight to my hips,’ are among the women I despise most in the world. The kind of women who, on being told that there’s a tablespoon full of oil on their salad, or a couple of glugs of cream in their pudding, pat their flat stomachs and say, ‘It’s awfully rich,’ with a panic-stricken face, make me want to slap them. The kind of women who eat sad fat-free dinners and sugarless cheesecake, not realizing – fools! – that they’re munching on the kind of carcinogenic sugar substitutes and creepy E numbers that’ll make them so sick in later life that skinniness will be theirs for ever make me incandescent with irritation.
Diets! Ha! I suppose one might consider them if one weighed twenty-two stone, and broke the paving stones as one walked along, and had to cope with the sound of cracking cement and pedestrians’ wails echoing forever in one’s shamed, burning ears as they slid down, down, down through the cracks to their doom. But otherwise, who’d turn themselves into a freaky giant rabbit, nibbling away at greenery?
Well, actually, um… perhaps I would. Nothing drastic. We’re talking a few pounds. Even though I’m not a pavement-pulverizer yet, I can’t help feeling that Paris – and the satin-sheeted, four-postered, ‘honeymoon’-type suite Robert has booked for us – deserves a little effort. A hint of cheekbone or a well- or at least better-defined jawline wouldn’t go amiss.
I might even buy some pants of the non-added-stretch, non-nice-and-cosy variety. It’s been ages since I owned a pair that didn’t come up to my waist, spurred in part by comfort but also by the hard-held belief that a woman in lacy, bum-bisecting knickers is a woman whose definition of ‘erotic’ is uncompromisingly suburban. Provincial, even. ‘I’ve got a treat for you tonight, Barry,’ followed by – tadaa! – the sateen, flame-retardant peignoir flung open to reveal a nylon set of suspenders and a tawdry half-cup bra, probably in burgundy, with matching ‘panties’. ‘Cor,’ says Barry. ‘Giggle,’ says the wife. ‘Fancy an early night?’ ‘Not half,’ says Bazza, who later wipes himself up with a sibilant ‘tiss-yoo’ or perhaps a stray serviette. It’s not a scenario that floats my boat. It’s a scenario that keeps me in Big Pants.
But hey – why not live a little? I think to myself, rootling through a pile of magazines to find the address for über-lingerie shop Agent Provocateur. These garments must exist in non-man-made fibres and non-acrylic lace, surely? I must call Evie for the Cabbage Soup Diet, too. And – why not? – book the facial Kate’s always banging on about. And a leg wax. Perhaps I’ll even try a bikini wax, for added sauce at bedtime.
The prospect of bedtime, underwear, waxing and sauce sends me spiralling into something that, if I didn’t know better, I would certainly describe as… well, worry. But it can’t be worry. We’ve been married eight years, remember? We have two children. We have sex. Sometimes, though not recently. Not since… Jesus. Still, I’m not worried. Worry? Me? Ha! What for?
Amber has finally been located and is dropping in this morning for coffee – ‘With my foul godson, do you mind? I said I’d look after him, but God, Clara, he’s simply the most unattractive child ever. I can hardly bear to look at him, poor thing.’ She shudders theatrically down the phone.
‘He’s not that bad,’ I say disingenuously, since, actually, he is. ‘Poor little boy, having a godmother that hates him.’
‘Oh, don’t, don’t make me feel worse than I already do. And anyway, I don’t hate him. He just makes me feel a bit sick.’
‘Amber, that’s terrible. Anyway, bring him round. Is he wearing his bag?’
‘What bag?’
‘The brown-paper number, with the holes for the eyes, that you force him into the second his mother leaves.’
‘Clara! Don’t be horrible,’ Amber says, her outrage tempered with the beginnings of a giggling fit. ‘He’s wearing a lovely Babar hat, aren’t you, Sammy?’
‘Yeah,’ says Sammy in the background. He has a disconcertingly deep voice for a two-year-old. ‘Babar.’
Amber sighs. ‘Can we come right away? I don’t know what to do with him. I’d take him to the park, but someone might think he was mine.’
‘Sure,’ I say sympathetically. ‘Come now.’
‘See you in a minute,’ says Amber, sounding wildly relieved.
You’re either reading this as a parent, in which case you’ll understand the above exchange perfectly, or you’re not, in which case I’d better explain.
It is always assumed that, if one loves one’s own children, one loves other people’s, or at the very least that one has boundless patience with them. ‘She’s very good with children,’ people say admiringly. This is simply not true. Some of us are, instead, very good at acting. Okay, lying.
Charlie has some friends I can hardly bear to have in the house (‘William was an angel! So sweet! Can he come again soon?’), and I’ve come across such a number of grossly unappealing babies (‘Oh! But he’s lovely! Makes me feel all broody!’) in my time that I ou
ght to be awarded an honorary PhD in Deception. Once, Robert and I went to see the new-born child of some very dear friends at Queen Mary’s in Paddington, a shockingly ugly infant, combining skeletal, very unbonny thinness with terrifyingly adult, big-nosed facial features, a tiny, amphibian-style slit for a mouth and a tufty gingerness around the (vast) head.
We nearly lost it, despite our years of practice, but composed ourselves at the last minute and managed to make the requisite cooing noises, and even to say reverently, ‘Can I hold her?’ After the ward door had shut behind us, we turned to each other and retched. No, I know it’s not very nice, but believe me – it happens. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. There are a lot of really grotesque children out there, either in looks or in temperament. And many of them, sadly for all concerned, belong to one’s friends.
Amber’s charge, Sammy, has neither looks nor an appealing nature. He is huge and jowly, which isn’t his fault, but rather that of his mother, who felt such pride at his robust infant’s appetite that she started padding out his bottles with baby rice and got him on to solids about three months too early. One of the many unhappy results of this maternal enthusiasm is that Sammy – who really looks much more like a Dave or a Terry, possibly because he shows a hefty slice of buttock cleavage at all times, or possibly because his favourite word is ‘Yeah’ – has weirdly adult tastes in food. I don’t mean he guzzles Aqua Vita and screams for pesto, but rather that he’s partial to… Well, you’ll get a demonstration later, no doubt.
Within ten minutes, Amber and Sammy are at the door. Sammy is, indeed, wearing a Babar hat, which fails to obscure his distinctly porcine features; you can see right up his nose.
‘Babar hat,’ he growls, pointing upwards and flashing extra, unpristine nostril.
‘That’s lovely,’ I say. ‘Come in, Sammy, and let’s get your coat off.’
