About Last Night . . .

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘I’ve got Tia.’

  ‘Because she’s the bailiff.’

  ‘And Anna.’

  ‘Except she’s even busier than you, so you never see her.’

  ‘My book group.’

  ‘Which you never go to.’

  I hesitated. Raised my chin. ‘Granny and Grandpa.’

  ‘Who hustled down there when Dad died so you wouldn’t be lonely.’

  I gazed around at them. Had a feeling they’d had a long chat before I made it to the pub.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘What we’re saying, Mum,’ said Lucy, clearly the official spokesperson, ‘is that there’s no real reason for you to be buried deep in the country now.’

  ‘You could sell the whole balls-aching affair,’ agreed Nico.

  The thought had occurred to me, of course. But I didn’t let on.

  ‘And live where?’

  ‘Here, in London, where you used to live. Where all your friends are.’

  ‘But I’ve made a life for myself down there, a rural idyll – it was our dream!’

  ‘It was Dad’s dream,’ said Lucy firmly. ‘You never wanted to go, you told us that years ago, although you’d never say it now. And Dad’s dead.’

  My eyes filled. ‘But I have to finish what he started,’ I said fiercely. ‘Have to—’

  ‘You don’t. You don’t have to do anything. Dad wouldn’t have wanted that.’

  ‘And we know why you wanted to stay, because he loved it so much, because it made you feel closer to him, but you have stayed. For five years. More. Now it’s time to move on,’ Nico insisted.

  ‘I have moved on,’ I said stubbornly, aware I was being subjected to a pincer movement.

  ‘You haven’t, you’ve hidden. Behind your busy higgledy-piggledy life – which you’ve done brilliantly,’ Lucy added quickly, ‘behind never sitting still. But you haven’t been out with anyone or anything like that, and you’re gorgeous, Mum. Everyone says so. Sophia thinks you look like Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s such a waste. Dad would agree.’

  This caused me to breathe in sharply. It was said urgently, but gently and sensitively too.

  ‘I have been out with people. You made me.’

  ‘Two suppers. Precisely two. One with Peter Cox, who, OK, is a bit dull, but one with Paddy Campbell, who is seriously hot and was seriously into you, and you’re so rude to him, Mum.’

  ‘Me? Rude to him? He’s always so cross and disagreeable!’

  ‘Because the one and only time you let him take you out you talked non-stop about Dad, and the next time, you stood him up.’

  ‘I forgot, that’s all.’

  ‘So he was left in the pub with all his clients around, all the people whose animals he looks after, at a table for two in the window. Bummer. I’d be cross,’ said Nico.

  ‘Oh, I apologized, you’re making a big deal of it. And anyway, it was ages ago,’ I said airily but I remembered it well. And I hadn’t forgotten at all. I had been in the car park. Unable to get out of the car. Sitting in the dark, physically unable to go in. Had driven home in tears. Pathetic. Obviously I couldn’t tell the children that. Or him. Not when I’d drivelled on about my deceased husband the first time.

  ‘He’s too bad-tempered,’ I said, sticking to what was indisputable.

  ‘You’d be bad-tempered if you’d been dumped and had to carry on seeing your dumper,’ put in Minna heatedly. ‘I’m always bumping into Ted and I just want to knee him in the balls.’

  ‘I thought you dumped him?’ objected Nico. ‘You said—’

  ‘It’s beside the point, Nico,’ she said furiously. ‘We’re talking about Mum here and how she should move on, not me.’

  ‘You brought him up.’

  ‘And that includes being open to different suggestions,’ agreed Lucy. ‘Like possibly moving back here. We’re not dyed-in-the-wool country dwellers, Mum. We weren’t born in barns, we were born in Wandsworth.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I said, almost gripping the table.

  ‘No, we know,’ the girls said quickly, in unison. ‘Not there.’

  I simply could not go back to Wandsworth, which I’d loved so much. Had never wanted to leave. Could not go back to my gorgeous Victorian villa, or something similar, in that lovely grid of leafy, wide roads near the common, with the wine bars and bookshops and boutiques, where I’d pushed prams, done school runs, where my best friends still lived, the ones I’d met at the school gates: Caroline, Rosie, Silvia, all with their children no doubt at clever universities now, Durham, Bristol, Cambridge, and with their lives, their husbands. How could I go back, so bereft? I would be even more bereft all these years on. At least in Herefordshire I didn’t have the comparison – right next door in the case of Silvia. And my lovely job in PR: in the old days full-time, then four days a week with small children, and at the end, when we could afford it, just three, Monday to Wednesday, which had been heaven. Leaving me two whole days to play tennis, a bit of bridge, catch up with the house, the children fully immersed in long school days, occupied. It had been an enviable life. How could I go back? I looked at them, aghast. Hurt they’d even suggested it.

  ‘Obviously not home – I mean, in Wandsworth. But London’s huge,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Where, then? I don’t know anywhere else.’

  ‘Well, why not where you actually already own a house?’ Lucy jerked her head meaningfully. ‘Why not number thirty-two?’

  ‘In South Ken?’ I really did gasp now. ‘So smart!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘God … I don’t know anyone—’

  ‘Which is what you want, isn’t it? Not to go backwards. A fresh start. But you wouldn’t be quite so grief-stricken. Quite so …’

  ‘Complicated,’ said Minna softly.

  Since when had my children become so wise? A minute ago they were arguing about who got what when it was sold; now they wanted me to live in it?

  I tried to imagine it. Found I could. Found I could see myself coming out of the shiny white front door, tripping down the cobbled street to the little expensive shops with their shiny regular vegetables in pristine straw baskets outside, buying groceries. Maybe buying strange organic things, too: the one I couldn’t say – keen-oh-ah? Studying the Ottolenghi cookbook. Becoming frightfully grown up and civilized. And no one would know me. It was far enough away, as they said, from Wandsworth. Surely I’d done my time in the country? I began to feel excited. Though I was determined not to show it. But I saw myself going back down the street with my lentils and my – what was it? Keen-ou-wiee? Greeting my neighbours as they emerged from their pretty ice-cream-coloured houses, other, civilized Kensington women, off to Sloane Square no doubt, promising to pop in for a G&T later, not for soul-searching chats like I would in Bolingbroke Road, really getting to the bottom of things, roaring with laughter over a bottle of Chardonnay; those days were gone. But popping in for light chit-chat, bridge – just enough. I’d had dear friends. Bosom buddies. Didn’t want them again. I’d had a dear husband. Didn’t ever want one again, or a partner, or even a boyfriend, whatever the children thought.

  I could feel their eyes on me now as I turned it all around in my head. Digested it. Could feel the far-off thrill of a distinct possibility, something I hadn’t felt for a very long time. For precisely five years and ten months. But a thrill of a different nature. One I was entitled to, not someone else’s.

  ‘Bound to have three bedrooms,’ observed Nico.

  I turned to him. ‘D’you think?’

  ‘Maybe even four.’

  ‘No. It looked smaller.’ I cast my mind back, remembering the ground-floor layout.

  ‘So one for you, one for me, and one for the girls, when Lucy’s home.’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked around. ‘So we’d all be together.’

  Something we clearly weren’t going to be at the farm any more, not with Lucy in London having opted out of university, Minna following exactly the same path, albeit squeezing in a foundation
course at the local college, and Nico in his final year at school.

  ‘I’d see so much more of you,’ I said excitedly.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Lucy. ‘I’d keep this flat on, it’s too much of a find not to, but Sunday lunches, midweek suppers—’

  ‘Yes!’ I breathed.

  ‘And I could live with you, till I found somewhere,’ said Minna. ‘Maybe even for a year or two.’

  ‘I’d love that.’

  ‘Cool. And I’ll be in London next year, Jake wants to come too. Maybe go to art college.’ Nico’s blue eyes shone.

  ‘There’s a garden,’ I said eagerly, ‘for Moppet and Flo. Or d’you think they’d be happier … maybe with Anna?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said Lucy. ‘People have dogs in London! Do not re-house them. God, they’re only little terriers, albeit a bit feral.’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed, no object too big suddenly, although Moppet and Flo’s rampant sexuality might be. They were both loose women.

  ‘Have them spayed,’ said Minna, reading my mind. ‘And don’t forget we had Coco in London.’

  Coco was our spaniel. A well-trained elderly dog who hadn’t lasted long in Herefordshire.

  ‘And you can walk in the park, with friends, like you used to,’ enthused Nico before the girls shot him a look.

  ‘Kensington Gardens,’ said Lucy quickly. ‘Not Battersea.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed equally quickly, getting up, gathering empty plates. Not Battersea. Not bumping into anyone I knew. Or used to know. With their dogs. Who we used to walk regularly there. Or on Wandsworth Common. And then drop them back at home in their baskets and race on to Pilates, or tennis, then lunch with a friend. Our lives. Our lovely lives. Until I’d wrecked it. And so we’d moved. David had decided we’d move. And then – well, then I’d really finished it off completely. Although of course, the children had no idea. They just knew I couldn’t go back. As I put the plates in the sink I watched them from the kitchen, leaning across the coffee table where we’d perched to have our scratch supper, heads close, resuming their excited chatter. They had absolutely no idea what I’d done.

  6

  David and I were married for fifteen years. Fifteen happy years, give or take the usual marital tiffs and disagreements, the occasional peaks and troughs which go with the contract, and as I say, we enjoyed an increasingly covetable life. David had made something of a success of being a City solicitor, and I’d pottered about in PR. We’d met at Bristol University, but not until the third year, which was perfect. By then I’d almost forgotten about the dashing London boyfriend I’d beetled down most weekends to see in the first year, but not the second, when someone else had appeared on his scene, and I was ready for someone new to appear on mine. Even though David and I were on the same course, I hadn’t noticed him until then, but then History was a huge intake. One morning, though, I’d arrived late for a lecture, as usual, but instead of being able to slip quietly in at the back as I normally did, I’d found the door at the top of the lecture theatre locked. It meant I had to emerge at the very bottom, in front of everyone, causing Professor Henderson to pause at his lectern. In my confusion I’d dropped all my files, sending papers flying everywhere. When I’d finally picked them all up and taken a seat, crimson and mortified, the blond boy beside me had scrawled on his pad – Smooth.

  After exchanging some banter on the way out, me defending my position on the grounds that it offended no one if I was simply allowed to creep in as usual at the back, him asking why I couldn’t just get up two minutes earlier and save myself the hassle, we found ourselves going for a coffee and I remember, as I looked at his kind, intelligent face, his slightly sleepy grey eyes, wishing my tights weren’t so laddered and that I’d bothered to wash my hair. How long was it before we were going out? I don’t remember. Not long. A few weeks? A month? Close proximity meant everything happened so quickly in those days. What I do remember, though, is that the fun and frivolity of the first two years dissipated somewhat: finals loomed and we studied hard. Rather sweetly we sat side by side in the library, usually writing the same essay, and because of that proximity I also knew – although I kept it to myself because he wasn’t good at being teased – that I was a bit cleverer than him. My marks were always higher, which I remember surprised him. When we left, however, he was the one who headed to a law conversion course and thence to the City and a proper job, and I was the one who dithered between advertising or publishing, or at least something fun, preferably with reasonable hours, finally joining a fashion PR agency in the West End.

  Is it still like this? Lucy tells me it’s better. More of her girlfriends plan to head for the money in the City after university, and Sophia’s elder sister said the bank she’d applied to was bending over backwards to appear women-friendly, religiously employing two girls and two boys from its hundred and fifty applicants, even though only twenty of the applicants were girls. No doubt the sisterhood would call this progress, but I wanted to tell Lucy I thought it smacked of something else. I didn’t. Lucy’s her father’s daughter and not that good at being teased, either.

  Anyway, back then, I simply adored being in Covent Garden. I loved the fact that my girlfriends were nearby in similar PR or ad agencies, that the job itself was terrific fun – albeit badly paid – the shops were on my doorstep and the bars and restaurants a hop and a skip away. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the City if you’d … well, you know. On fine mornings I’d even cycle across the river to my office in Henrietta Street, leaving first Lucy, then Minna and then Nico with a series of jolly Australian au pairs, although in the beginning I often had tears streaming down my face when I arrived, which was easier to explain if I cycled, but not if I got the tube. Gradually it got easier, and when they were at school, it was sheer bliss. I’d have hated to be at home all day and David, I think, was rather proud, as most of the wives in Wandsworth had given up by then: had stayed at home when more than one baby – certainly more than two – had arrived.

  ‘God, I envy you now,’ Caroline would wail when I bumped into her, wheeling my bike out of the front garden in a smart little suit when she was coming back from walking her youngest to school in her leggings. ‘What am I supposed to do now? My lot don’t come out till six by the time they’ve done clubs. Polish the teacups?’

  ‘You could always have an affair,’ I’d quipped as I hoisted myself on to my saddle. I cringe as I remember, and I do remember: I have a particularly vivid piece of footage in my mind, of her throwing back her blonde head and roaring with laughter as I’d peddled off down the street under the cherry blossom. Because of course, I’d been the one to do that, some years later. With her husband.

  Not an affair in the sense that we snuck off week after week to a hotel – that only happened once, when we were very definitely at the end of our ropes – but an affair in the sense that we lost our hearts completely to one another. Fell hopelessly in love. And Caroline was a good friend, not just a neighbour. Our children had grown up together. Lucy and Alice were close. I can barely tell you. Barely admit it to myself. But I will.

  They were not immediate neighbours, in the sense that they didn’t live in our street, but around a couple of corners and up the hill, where the bigger houses were. Theirs was a particularly beautiful wisteria-clad affair at the top: detached, almost in splendid isolation, with a glorious magnolia tree in the front garden. Henri was ruggedly handsome in the dark, tousled, twinkly-eyed, craggy-face vein. Not my type at all, in that I’ve never really gone for the bleeding obvious, and he was also very flirty – he even smouldered when he bought his cigarettes, for heaven’s sake. Flirting was a way of life to him. He said it oiled the wheels, that everyday life would be dull without it and he couldn’t understand why Englishmen didn’t do it. ‘Surely it’s like breathing?’ he’d say. ‘Walking the dog? Don’t you girls like it?’

  ‘We love it!’ we’d assured him at one particular dinner party.

  ‘So why your husbands so tight-arsed about it, h
m? Why so, David? All that boarding school at seven, you think? Too emotionally crippled, peut-être?’ He had an outrageous French accent – not his fault, obviously – but sometimes, we thought he hammed it up. He certainly knew the English for ‘perhaps’.

  ‘Yes, we’re too much the product of our upbringing to posture away like you, Henri, but frankly if it keeps the girls smiling, we’re all for it, eh Jamie?’ David turned to another husband.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said Rosie’s husband, who was quite pissed by then. ‘Henri,’ he raised his glass, ‘you have my unqualified permission to service my wife, in the nicest possible way, as frequently, and as passionately, as you like. More power to your elbow.’ He threw back the contents of his glass.

  Henri roared, pulling me and Rosie close to him at the table, landing huge kisses on our cheeks. He was very tactile like that: lots of bear hugs and squeezing of shoulders – and if two of your fingers are moving mouth- and throat-wards, I can only tell you that he could also be terribly amusing and that all the husbands liked him. He was a terrific mimic and would have us in stitches, naughtily aping the idiosyncrasies of some of our more stuffy neighbours who felt they should be living in Chelsea and weekending in Gloucestershire, strutting around in yellow cords and Barbours at the weekends. He released Rosie and me and leaped up to give a particularly accurate impersonation of Tristan, down the road, shoulders back, tummy proud, sweeping back a few wisps of hair and looking out of the corner of his eye to see who was watching. Henri, of course, wouldn’t be seen dead in cords, yellow or otherwise, and wore crumpled shirts over skinny jeans. He always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, where he’d smoked a couple of Gauloises and read another chapter of Christopher Hitchens – he probably had – before shuffling off for the paper, giving Tristan’s wife, should he pass her in the street, a devastating smile, causing her to palpitate all day.

  Although Rosie and Silvia and I laughed about this over coffee on my days off, we all privately agreed it probably wasn’t a charade: that he was probably the most tremendous Lothario, particularly in Paris, where he frequently popped to and fro on business.