Foursome

by Jane Fallon

She smiles. ‘Good.’ That’s it. Good. I wait for her to say thank you, after all she doesn’t yet know that I didn’t carry out her request. But no. No ‘thank you’. Just ‘good’. I hear her shuffling papers around on her desk as I leave and I have to stop myself from laughing. It’s either that or kill her.

  When I get back exactly an hour later (I’m not stupid, I know she’s timing me, desperate to catch me out) she’s sitting there waiting for me with a face like thunder.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, smiling.

  She launches straight into it. ‘I thought you said you had typed that CV up for me.’

  I feign confusion. ‘No, I said that I saw the piece of paper you left on my desk…’

  ‘Which clearly said “please type” across the top…’

  I take a deep breath. ‘Lorna,’ I say. ‘At no point has anyone told me that I was now to be your assistant as well as having to look after Joshua and Melanie on my own and deal with all the general office stuff. If you’re really snowed under and you want to ask me to do something for you, as a favour, then that’s one thing. And, if I have time, then I’ll be glad to help. But if you’re going to start treating me like I’m here to do your admin then that’s another matter entirely. It’s not happening. I’ve just had my workload doubled as it is.’

  She’s turned a funny shade of purple. ‘Of course you have to do things for me,’ she says, almost hissing. ‘You’re the assistant.’

  ‘I’m Joshua and Melanie’s assistant. I’m the general assistant. I’m not your assistant.’ I can’t say it any clearer than that.

  ‘I’m going to speak to Josh about this,’ she says, and I say, ‘Good. You do that. I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say.’

  12

  It’s the twins’ ninth birthday and, in an effort to fool them into thinking that everything is just fine, Isabel has organized a party to which she has invited not only me and Dan and the kids but also Alex and Lorna. We have all been told to be on our best behaviour, to keep any simmering resentments to ourselves, to save any arguments we may be fermenting for another occasion. Isabel knows how I feel about being in the same space as Lorna any more often than I have to be, but, the way I see it, the night is going to be infinitely harder for her, with her children trying to come to terms with their father’s vile new girlfriend, not to mention the loose cannon that is Alex, so I resolve just to keep quiet and to be there for my friend.

  The party is to take place on a Sunday afternoon in the house formerly known as Alex and Isabel’s. In order to try to minimize the trauma caused by meeting their scary new surrogate mother figure at the event, and thereby ensuring that they will never be able to celebrate a birthday again without serious therapy, Alex has arranged to take both the girls and Lorna out to lunch the weekend before. Lorna, who now seems able to switch, in a worryingly accomplished bipolar fashion, between Nazi boss and best girly friend, has been quizzing me for days about what she should wear and what, exactly, eight-, about to be nine-, year-old girls like to talk about. I’m tempted to lead her down the wrong path (‘They hate animals, loathe them. Tell them about the time you ran over that puppy,’ or, ‘They’re obsessed with serial killers, the more gruesome details the better’), but I decide it would be unfair on the twins, who I adore. I tell her – truthfully – that they’re into Barbie and Miley Cirus and clothes and dogs and gymnastics. It’s hardly rocket science, they’re eight-year-old girls after all, but she looks gratefully at me as if I just gave her my last twenty-pence piece. The fact that I’ve made her happy irritates me so, to unsettle her a little, I tell her that the girls are identical and that the worst faux pas she could commit would be to mix them up. She blanches, nervous again. Actually the truth is that once you’ve known Natalie and Nicola for more than five minutes it’s almost impossible not to know which is which. Nicola is lively and confident; Natalie is quiet and introverted. That and the fact that Natalie’s hair barely reaches her shoulders while Nicola’s cascades down her back. They are very much their own people and along with that, very early on, came the announcement that they would never dress the same or have the same haircut. I don’t share this piece of vital information with Lorna, though. Let her sweat for a few days.

  Isabel, who has been hearing stories about Lorna for years, will also be meeting her for the first time when she drops the twins off at the Pizza Express in Islington.

  ‘Just don’t think about the bean,’ I say when she calls me to say she’s on her way.

  ‘Honestly,’ she says, ‘I thought I was taking the moral high ground inviting her to the party, but I’m not actually sure I’m ready to see him with somebody else.’

  It’s so like Isabel to be trying to do the grown-up thing. I knew that she had been agonizing over whether or not to invite Lorna, but I also knew that Isabel being Isabel she would decide to try to be gracious. The way she sees it Alex is the one who has behaved badly, but there is no reason why she shouldn’t be civil towards Lorna. If it had been me, I would have told Alex that he could bring his new girlfriend over my dead body or, even better, over hers. And probably once I’d said that Isabel would have taken me aside and calmed me down and told me to remember that the only thing I had control over, the thing to hang on to at all costs, was my dignity. Isabel has always been the person I’ve turned to when I know I’m working myself up into an irrational frenzy about something. She’s my voice of reason.

  I don’t really know what to say to her. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to see your not-quite-ex husband with another woman. Knowing it is one thing, being forced to witness it is something else altogether.

  ‘Of course it’s going to be hard,’ I say. ‘But you’re doing the right thing.’

  I’m not at all sure I believe what I’m saying, but it sounds like the appropriate response. ‘Plus, it’s Lorna,’ I add. ‘So at least you’re not going to feel inadequate next to her.’

  ‘Rebecca,’ Isabel says disapprovingly, but I can tell she’s smiling.

  *

  ‘She looks like she needs to eat something,’ is the first thing Isabel says to me afterwards.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I say. ‘So… what else?’

  ‘She seemed nice enough. A bit territorial with Alex.’

  ‘She’s insecure,’ I say. ‘It’s the root of all her neuroses.’

  ‘Maybe we should feel sorry for her?’ Isabel asks, and I snort.

  ‘We’re all insecure,’ I say, which makes her laugh.

  Isabel says that Lorna seemed to be making a big effort with the girls for which she is grateful although when quizzed later Nicola said that she was ‘nosy’ and Natalie had complained that Lorna ‘talked too much’.

  ‘Do you think Alex is happy with her?’ she asks.

  I brush off the question. ‘They deserve each other.’

  On Monday Lorna is all ‘Nicola this’ and ‘Natalie that’ like all three were in the same class at school and have just declared themselves best friends forever. I let her ramble on, though, because it beats her telling me what to do. After a while I tune out and it feels quite comfortable, like the good old days when she talked about herself incessantly and I ignored her but that was the extent of our interaction.

  William is beyond excitement about the party and by Wednesday he has already picked out an outfit: his page-boy suit from his uncle’s wedding last year, along with a rather foppy ruffled shirt, which he blackmailed us into buying for him on holiday once. He has decided to accompany this with a blue tie.

  ‘Don’t you want to wear something a bit more casual?’ I ask, although I know what the answer will be. ‘You might be running around. How about your tracksuit?’

  ‘It’s a party,’ he says very deliberately, as if I’m a little slow. I know that he has visions of himself, cocktail glass in one hand, cigar in the other, wooing either Nicola or Natalie, whoever is his current favourite, with his sophistication.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you. I’m just saying.’

 
He has been agonizing over what to buy them for a gift. He has a budget of two pounds fifty each and for this he means to get each of them something that will demonstrate how much he understands and values their individuality. He finally settles on a hairbrush for Nicola and a book on identifying beetles for Natalie.

  ‘Does she like beetles?’ I ask. I find it hard to imagine.

  ‘Of course she does, that’s why I’m getting it for her,’ he says, sighing at my stupidity. From his choices I deduce that Natalie is the current twin number one in his eyes.

  Zoe is being allowed to bring a friend from school to the party because the girls would be devastated if she wasn’t there, but I know that it’s very damaging to her self-image for her to have to spend too much time in the company of eight- and nine-year-olds. I have bribed her by saying that she and her friend Kerrie can retire to Isabel’s spare room and play on the Wii once the cake has been cut and ‘Happy Birthday’ sung. She tells me I owe her big time because she has agreed to make an appearance at all.

  As far as grown-ups go there will just be me and Daniel, Alex and Isabel. And Lorna. All the other parents will drop and run, making the most of an afternoon where they’ve managed to fob off their children on someone else. I always look forward to the twins’ birthdays. I love kids’ parties. Well, those where I know most of the kids involved anyway. But, this time, there’s a dark cloud hanging over the event. A skinny, seed-eating, talkative black cloud. OK, I never said I was good at similes.

  We somehow pass the week leading up to the big day fairly uneventfully. I manage to bite my tongue and she manages to do her own job without trying to palm the bits she can’t be bothered with on to me. Her new office is nearly ready so I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. When I am on my own with Melanie one day I get up the courage to ask what is going to happen in the future. I figure that things do need to change and maybe I should start acclimatizing myself to that now. Who knows, if they bring in someone to do Lorna’s old job, then maybe we could divide up the work completely. I could work for Joshua and Melanie, they could work for Lorna. I’d never have to deal with her again. And it’s even possible that they might employ someone I’d like, an ally. Maybe I won’t have to try to find something else to do with my life after all.

  ‘Yes, we must talk about that,’ Melanie says when I collar her, and then she gets straight back on the phone, leaving me thinking, Isn’t that what we could be doing now?

  So I come up with a plan of sorts. My job is untenable as it is. We need a replacement old Lorna. If they don’t replace her, I can’t stay because I have too much to do and spending my days trying to find ways not to take orders from new Lorna is definitely not good for my health. If they do replace her and they take on someone I don’t get on with, I can still leave. I might as well see how it pans out. My new year’s resolution – if I believed in new year’s resolutions, which I don’t – this year was going to be to try to embrace change. Mind you, I decide this pretty much every December and come January 1st I have usually forgotten all about it. Maybe that could be the first change I embrace, remembering that I have made a resolution. Anyway, I have decided, why wait until January. I’m determined to start now. No one seems to be listening to me so I go direct to the person I think they might listen to.

  ‘You need to get an assistant,’ I say to Lorna when she’s grudgingly making herself a cup of tea. ‘I mean, I’d help you out if I could (yeah, right), but I’m snowed under looking after Joshua and Melanie on my own. I just don’t have the time.’

  She looks at me suspiciously, but she can’t see the catch in what I’ve said so she relaxes.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘They told me they’d take someone else on but they seem to have forgotten all about it.’

  ‘Well, you need to talk to them again,’ I say. ‘After all, you’re an agent now; you need to be spending time on your clients, not doing your own filing.’ All six of her clients, without a paying job between them. I have no idea what there is to file. Still, she takes the bait as I knew she would.

  ‘You’re right,’ she says.

  ‘I mean, it’s not fair,’ I say, winding her up a little more. ‘I don’t know how they expect you to really make a go of it with no support.’

  ‘Plus, it looks bad,’ she says. ‘If people ask who my assistant is and they get told I don’t have one.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say.

  So the next thing I know there’s an advert going in the Evening Standard. General assistant wanted for Theatrical and Literary Agency. I think about adding ‘ability to listen to drivel for eight and a half hours a day an asset,’ but then I want there to be lots of applicants. In these days of unemployment I figure we’ll be inundated with responses despite the fact that there’s no mention of the salary, which is, to say the least, basic. Melanie and Joshua will be looking for somebody to fall in love with the idea of the job in the way that me and Lorna did. In a way they see it as a vocation. I feel better now I’ve set things in motion. One way or another this will sort itself out. It will be my task to sort through the applicants and to prepare a short list for interview so I am confident that I can eliminate a lot of the potential nightmares. Questions I resolve to ask them on the phone before I decide whether they are suitable:

  – Do you talk all the time regardless of whether or not you have anything to say?

  – Do you have a power complex?

  – Are you so desperate for a relationship that you will consider any man, however unsuitable for you?

  – Do you eat iceberg lettuce/celery/sunflower seeds?

  – Do you eat at all?

  I’m actually looking forward to it.

  On Sunday I get to the house early. Alex is taking the girls off to Gap Kids to buy them birthday outfits, his gift to them, and while they’re out Isabel and I are going to decorate and make pizzas and fairy cakes. It’s like old times except that Isabel’s heart is broken and her husband is going to be coming to the party with his new girlfriend.

  It’s the first time I have seen Alex and Isabel together since the split although, of course, they have seen each other regularly for child-handing-over duties. Isabel seems nervous, wanting to give off the impression that she’s over him but unable to do so convincingly. Alex actually seems unruffled by her presence. He’s looking good. Relaxed. I suddenly wonder what he’s living on. Is Isabel still paying the mortgage on the house and giving him pocket money? Is she paying the rent on his flat? Or is Lorna keeping him? Maybe that’s the attraction. He certainly isn’t bringing in any money himself. I’m glad when he leaves with the girls. I don’t really enjoy being around him these days. There’s a growing list of things I want to start a fight with him about.

  ‘You two seem to be getting on OK,’ I say to Isabel once he’s gone.

  ‘We are,’ she says. ‘He’s stopped trying to pick arguments with me at least.’

  ‘Maybe he can move on from his transitional woman soon,’ I say, forcing a laugh.

  ‘You know what? I’m glad he seems happy; it’s far better for the girls. I don’t have to like her.’ I’m not sure if I believe her or not.

  ‘It’d just be nice if he could pick someone I didn’t work with. And who wasn’t a complete bitch.’

  Isabel tells me that she is going to start looking for a smaller place soon and sell the house so they can share the profits. I look around sadly, so much of our shared history is in this house. Isabel went into labour with the twins in this very kitchen. The four of us were having dinner at the time, curry to try and speed her along. I sat on the kitchen floor with her and timed contractions while Alex ran around like a headless chicken and Dan hid in the living room.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ I say, knowing she’ll know what I mean.

  ‘It is,’ she says, concentrating far too hard on putting the finishing touches on one tiny cake. ‘But we have to be practical. It’s only a house.’

  ‘How is Alex managing,’ I ask tentatively. ‘For money?’

>   ‘Don’t ask,’ she says, and I know that that means she is still paying his way.

  *

  All too quickly Alex and the girls arrive back with Lorna in tow. Then Dan turns up with our two and Kerrie and, before I know it, there are eighteen eight- and nine-year-olds causing havoc all over the house. Usually at these parties the grown-ups take it in turns to sit in the little downstairs TV room drinking spritzers and weak lager while the kids take over the living room and do whatever kids do, with hands off supervision from one adult. This time the dynamics are all over the shop so Isabel and I stay with the children the whole time, while Alex and Dan pop in and out every now and then to see what’s going on. I am dreading the part when the visiting kids go home and ours all crash out in the bedroom when, traditionally, we all get pissed together. Somehow that doesn’t seem like such a good idea this year.

  At one point Lorna leaves Alex and Dan to it and comes to join the party. It’s such an inappropriate gesture, even if well intentioned, that I don’t know what to do. I want to tell her to go away and leave us alone, but I don’t want the kids to pick up on a bad atmosphere so I at least sacrifice myself to keep her away from Isabel and I listen to her drivelling on about how Natalie reminds her of herself when she was little and hasn’t Nicola got lovely hair and isn’t William the spitting image of Dan for about an hour without strangling her, which is, I feel, quite an achievement.

  William is the only boy and, as such, is alternately adopted by the screaming masses as some kind of pet and then spurned by them as a pariah. It’s like watching a microcosm of a rioting mob. It’s impossible to see from the outside why the mood changes, it just suddenly does, and every one of the group picks up the cue at the same time just as if they had been given an order. My poor boy is utterly bemused by the shifting tides, but he valiantly battles through, somehow knowing the good times will come again as they always seem to. I have to stop myself from steaming in to rescue him. By seven thirty, when the first of the parents comes to collect their offspring, he has been a servant, a dog, a horse, a pampered baby and the groom at several play weddings.