by Kerry Fisher
I wrapped myself in a towel and studied my face in the mirror. My skin looked all outdoor healthy. The dark smudges under my eyes had gone. Country mansions obviously agreed with me. I didn’t wear a lot of make-up but I imagined that turfing up at school without even a lick of lipstick was a bit like going out in just a bra. I did a quick flick of mascara and eyeliner then spent ages covering the yellowing bruises on my cheek with thick concealer. The swelling had gone down and I’d been telling anyone who asked that I’d cut my face on a Velux window when I was cleaning someone’s attic. I threw on my one pair of decent black trousers and a green jumper and ran out of the house, stepping over a pile of children playing Twister in the hallway.
I was expecting the meetings to take place in the classrooms but an assistant waved me towards the hall where the teachers sat behind desks. Confident couples stood around chatting with other confident couples. I hovered inside the door, trying to spot Harley’s teacher, the bald-headed Mr Rickson. Venetia of the ‘OMG, you didn’t go to university’ horror came in, looking like she was about to audition for Strictly Come Dancing. ‘It’s Amayra, isn’t it?’ I nodded. She was never going to be my friend. ‘If you’re looking for Mr Rickson, he’s not here. His wife’s gone into labour. Mr Peters has stepped in to do his meetings.’
A minute ago I’d been shy. Now I was shaking. I had two minutes to collect myself. ‘Thanks. Are you seeing him now?’
‘No, we’re after you on the list. You’d better go first. We might be a while because I’ve got some issues with Theo’s maths achievements. I need to find out if I can get a Kumon maths tutor to come into the school at lunchtime because he has tutors for other things after school.’
Christ. I might not be out by Easter. ‘I’ll go now then. I shouldn’t be too long.’ What the hell was Kumon maths?
I really wanted to nip to the loos and check for spinach, or rather Bourbon biscuit, in my teeth but I didn’t feel I could hold up the juggernaut of Venetia’s ambition shuddering along behind me. I walked over to Mr Peters’ desk, managed a hello, then sat down and blushed until it wasn’t possible to go any redder.
‘Ms Etxeleku, how are you?’ His eyes fixed on my bruises.
‘Fine, thank you,’ I said, conscious that Venetia and her husband were waiting a few yards behind us, no doubt equipped with special bugging devices to make sure Theo wasn’t lagging behind Harley in anything other than near-expulsions.
‘Your face is looking better,’ he said, in a whisper. Then more loudly, ‘So, let’s take a look at Harley’s marks. He’s doing extremely well.’
I was only a tiny bit tempted to look round and say, ‘See!’ to Venetia.
He opened a big book and started reading down the columns. Little images of those lovely hands stroking my face were distracting me from the results of Harley’s spelling tests. Considering the only reason I was at Stirling Hall at all was to get a better education for the kids, it seemed a bit off that I couldn’t concentrate on whether or not they had made any progress. I think the basic gist was that Harley had a natural gift for languages – ‘He’s a very good mimic’ – and was still struggling in maths but everything else was ‘going great guns with a tremendous aptitude for drama’.
I almost wished he was telling me that the whole experiment had been a royal balls-up because I still needed to broach the subject of Harley and Bronte leaving Stirling Hall. I’d decided that I couldn’t possibly send the letter without telling Mr Peters first. When he finished with, ‘I know Harley has had a few tricky times here, but what he’s achieved in such a short space of time is outstanding,’ I didn’t feel I could piss on his parade at that particular moment, especially as I was feeling under pressure to relinquish the hot seat to Venetia. Any minute now she was going to topple off her chair with the effort of trying to overhear. I was about to get up when he scribbled something on a piece of paper and pushed it towards me. I read, ‘I’ve thought about you an awful lot.’ I stared down to make sure it didn’t mean something different I was too thick to get. When I looked up, his eyes were teasing me.
‘I’m interested to hear that.’ I hadn’t flirted in a million years and my witty one-liners were a little rusty, along with my voice, which suddenly sounded as though I’d been working down the mines for thirty years.
I heard Venetia fidgeting behind me, tap, tap, tap on the arm of her chair. I’d probably had far more than the ten minutes allowed. I was trying to signal to Mr Peters with my eyes that she was listening to every word. Luckily, he was slightly more evolved than Colin who would have been going, ‘What? Why are you looking at me funny?’
‘Okay, I’ll just make a note of these marks, so you can read over them at your leisure.’ He quickly scribbled, ‘Leave now before I’m tempted to kiss you again.’ I picked up the piece of paper and pretended to look closely at it.
‘That’s wonderful. Thank you very much for your time.’ I had to concentrate on making my legs stand me up. When he shook my hand, every nerve in my body paid attention. There was a dangerous moment when it would have been easy to forget that there were other people in the room. Mr Peters let go.
‘Nice to see you, Ms Etxeleku.’ I think he meant it.
As I walked back past Venetia, she said, ‘Did you talk to him about Kumon maths?’
‘Yeah. He thinks the kids are better off watching The Simpsons.’
22
As soon as I got back, Clover swanned out the door, complete with the lace elbow-length gloves we’d discovered at the back of her wardrobe during one of our mammoth tidying sessions. She looked as though she was trying out for a part in Moulin Rouge. I got going on bedtime for five children, which was hard work in Clover’s household. Orion, Saffy and Sorrel didn’t really understand bedtime, which was having a knock-on effect for my two, especially Bronte who needed her sleep and was getting lippier by the day. At home I bundled them off to bed well before nine but Clover’s three were still paddling about at ten o’clock, roasting marshmallows in the Aga and making chocolate milkshakes, usually with Clover saying, ‘Well, you’ve only got RE and Art first thing tomorrow. No one ever died because they couldn’t draw a tree.’
Trying to force them up the stairs a bit earlier was not without the risk of being told to fuck off back to my own house. There was a lot to be said for one house, one staircase. Keeping an eye on where each child was, plus teeth cleaning and uniforms for the morning, was like trying to gather up a field of rabbits.
So it wasn’t until I plonked down into the leather armchair in the drawing room to watch the BBC News at Ten that I started to wonder where Clover was. She’d had the latest appointment at parents’ evening which was nine o’clock, but given that I regularly saw her shouting, ‘Tell Mrs Harper that the horses ate your homework’ or ‘Say that Daddy put your maths in the shredder by mistake’, I guessed she’d be in and out of there fairly sharpish.
I wasn’t used to being in big houses late at night. I didn’t miss my life with Colin at all but I missed the noises of it: the rumble of buses, the sound of people going home from the pub, the foxes rootling through the bins in the back alleyway and Denim and Gypsy clumping up and down the stairs next door. As for Colin himself, I hadn’t even spoken to him, simply passed the phone straight over to Bronte when I saw his name flash up. Even she pulled a face if he was interrupting her games with the twins.
I closed the curtains against the black and the silence, peering down the drive looking for headlights. Something was scratching against the window at the other end of the drawing room. I got my phone out of my pocket and switched all the lights off. As my eyes began to focus in the darkness, I prepared myself for some wild-eyed madman to have his nose pressed up against the window. I saw something moving about and forced myself closer. Just when I thought Clover might come back to find a SOCO team studying spurts of blood, I realised that my enemy was the wisteria, banging on the window pane in the wind.
I snapped the lights back on, furious with myself. I picked up T
he Guardian, which Clover insisted she needed to keep reading to stop herself becoming too right wing as she got older, turned the telly up and told myself to stop being such a wuss. I was still happy to hear the scratch of wheels on the gravel and the muffled sound of the kitchen door. Clover must have come in round the back. I stopped myself from scurrying out to her on the grounds that no one likes an ambush in their own home. When Mum was alive, I hated it when she used to greet me at the door, giving me every last detail of how she’d made me some special soup before I had time to take my coat off. Of course, now I’d love the chance to get pissed off about her exact method of sweating the garlic and onions.
So I sat there rustling the paper, flicking through the channels and trying to look to the manor born. I heard her go upstairs and smiled. Clover might appear laid back but she obviously couldn’t wait to tell Orion what his teachers had said about him. He was very popular despite the ‘rabbit scoffed my homework’ stories. He must still have been awake, as I could hear quite a lot of clodding about. Wooden floor-boards carried the noise, especially at night. My crappy 1970s carpets back home weren’t so bad after all. I couldn’t hear any talking. Maybe she’d gone straight to bed, but it seemed odd that she hadn’t bothered to come and speak to me. I immediately started stressing that she couldn’t wait to be shot of us all.
I crept out of the drawing room and listened at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was definitely moving about. I reassured myself that Weirdo would have barked if it wasn’t Clover. Then I had the very unreassuring thought that the stupid mutt would do anything for a custard cream. I was debating whether to go outside and check whether Clover’s Land Rover was back when I heard the familiar squeak of her bedroom door, then footsteps on the stairs. I pretended to be walking to the kitchen rather than have Clover catch me skulking about like a loony. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shape that wasn’t Clover, and when I snapped my head round, it was a man with a beard in a black Al Capone hat, black raincoat and a bin bag in his hand. The gangsters had come to town and the only thing I had to protect myself and five children was the wooden carving of a tall giraffe, which stood in the hallway. I’d always expected that I would shit myself and flee for the hills in that sort of situation but I surprised myself. I picked the giraffe up by its neck and jabbed the legs at him. In terms of a weapon, it was looking a little spindly but anger had made a Rottweiler out of me. The loudness of my voice surprised me. ‘Put the bag down. Put it down now. Get your hands on the banister before I call the police.’
‘For fuck’s sake, I bloody live here. Who the hell are you?’ I gasped. A Mancunian accent. ‘Lawrence! Oh my God. I am so sorry. You must think I am a complete madwoman. I thought you were a burglar. Shit. I didn’t recognise you. The beard’s new, isn’t it?’ I rallied slightly. ‘You might have come in and told me you were here.’ I turned away and lowered my giraffe battering ram back onto its hooves. He was more dishevelled than I remembered. His hair was curling out from under that bloody Mafia hat and he looked like he’d been sleeping in his clothes.
‘And you are?’
‘I’m Maia, we met once before, a while ago now. I’m looking after the children because Clover’s at parents’ evening.’ I didn’t think this was the moment to tell him that the kids and I had arrived with our suitcases the second his back was turned.
‘I know she’s at parents’ evening. That’s why I came now. Get a few things without any drama. Thought she might have got her mother in to babysit as a last resort, so I was trying to creep out without getting spotted. Wanted to sidestep a bit of earache.’ He shrugged in apology.
‘She’ll be back soon. I’m expecting her any minute.’ I tried to think of a way to keep him there but since I’d nearly taken his eye out with a wooden hoof, I wasn’t sure he’d want to party with me.
‘As I said, I don’t want any aggro, so I’ll be on my way. Just tell her I popped in. Give my love to the kids. I miss them.’ He looked quite watery-eyed for a moment. Then he nodded, looking round. ‘House looks amazing. Have the burglars been and tidied up?’ He indicated the bin bag.
‘Couldn’t find my clothes. Didn’t think to look in the drawer at first.’
With that, he walked off towards the kitchen. I heard him talking to Weirdo before the back door slammed. I slumped down onto the stairs. At least he’d noticed that the house was clean. It was a step in the right direction. I was still replaying the embarrassment of threatening Lawrence in his own home when Clover came bowling through the door.
‘What are you doing sitting on the stairs?’ she said.
‘Lawrence was here. I thought he was a burglar and I went for him with the giraffe.’
Clover looked around, puzzled. ‘Lawrence was here? What for? Had he come to see me?’
‘No, he knew you were at a parents’ evening. He came to get some clothes.’
Clover’s face crumpled. I could hear the sound of pedals whizzing backwards as I rethought my Diplomat of the Year approach. ‘He seemed a bit upset, sort of sad. He did say he missed you all.’ I was sure he meant to include Clover with the kids. If he didn’t miss her, we’d find out soon enough.
‘Did he? Did he look okay?’
‘No, he had a beard and looked like an East End hoodlum.’ I filled Clover in on my encounter.
God love her, she had the good grace to laugh. ‘Fucking Jennifer. If she hadn’t cornered me, I’d have been here. She came over to do her “I’m sorry to hear your bad news, do tell me all the gory details.” Sorry, my arse. I bet she’s loving it. I’ve no doubt she’ll be scouring the Surrey Mirror every week to see if the house is on the market. And then she’ll be trapping me in the playground with “It’s probably for the best. A new start in a more manageable house will do you good.” I couldn’t get away from her. She was doing that hand on the arm thing, you know, that “I feel your pain”, patting away like I had some terminal disease rather than a terminal divorce.’
‘You don’t know that he wants a divorce. Until you speak to him, you can’t know what he’s thinking. He didn’t look like a man with a mistress tending to his every need though.’
Clover chucked her coat on the end of the banister. ‘Doesn’t mean that he’s not shacked up with some bimbo with a nutcracker arse, does it? Maybe he’s gone for the great sex rather than the great cooking, cleaning or ironing?’
‘He did notice that the house was looking good, so that’s something.’
‘I need a drink,’ Clover said. ‘At least if he doesn’t come back, I’ll have had the satisfaction of emptying his wine cellar.’
Halfway through her second bottle of champagne and every Thorntons chocolate in the box except the nut brittle ‘too hard on my poor old teeth’, Clover saw the light. ‘Right. I am going to compete with any li’l nutcracker arse. I’m gonna get my own pair of perfeck buns. I’m gonna get down that gym of yours.’ Then she dug into the next layer for a butterscotch fudge, nodding wisely, while I wondered how soon I could creep off to bed to stand any chance of waking up for my 5 a.m. shift at the gym.
23
Clover didn’t turn up to the gym the day after she’d discovered the answers to life in a bottle of Dom Pérignon. I got home after my early morning shift expecting to find her slumped on the settee in her dressing gown eating fried egg butties but she met me at the door all triumphant. ‘Sorry, Maia. Thought I might vomit if I went near a running machine. I was so dehydrated I would have turned inside out like a slug sprinkled with salt, but I haven’t been totally useless.’ She pointed into the garden. ‘See that compost heap?’ I nodded, wondering what that had to do with transforming Clover into a lean, mean, fitness machine.
‘I’ve buried the key to the wine cellar in the bottom of it. So now if I want a drink, I’ll have to go excavating amongst the rotting bananas and rancid eggshells. Should be an incentive to keep off the pop. It’ll be smashing to wake up without a hangover.’
I didn’t share her enthusiasm for a champagne-free lifestyle. I w
as going to miss that ‘pop, glug, fizz’ thing that was quickly becoming part of my life.
‘I am very impressed,’ I said, secretly disappointed.
From then on, though, for a woman who said herself that she’d had it easy all her life, Clover showed a will to give Maggie Thatcher a run for her money. I’d expected her to come to the gym once, see all the teeny tiny girls with their sit-up-and-beg breasts and feel the immediate need for a jam doughnut and a siesta. I don’t know whether it was because she was desperate to lose weight or because she needed aching limbs to blot out her aching heart, but whenever I had a shift at the gym, she raced in, raring to go, shortly after I finished at 8 a.m. Life was so much easier for me now that Clover did the school drop-off in the mornings. When I finally went back to Colin, it would be a shock to my system to have to rally drive across Sandbury again to grab the kids and squeak up to Stirling Hall seconds before the bell went.
When they’d told me I could use the gym as a perk of the job, I’d thought I might have a ten-minute pedal on the bike every now and then, or a quick wave around of those kettle things when no one was looking. What I got, thanks to Clover, were regular hour-long sessions with a personal trainer. ‘I’ll never keep it up if I’m messing about by myself. I need someone to make me suffer but I’d feel ridiculous on my own,’ she said.
I came to see it as a rent payment, a straight swap – short-term agony for what was looking like long-term lodgings – the week time limit I’d set myself for staying at Clover’s had already stretched to ten days but no one seemed to care. Whenever I mentioned leaving, she threw her hands up theatrically and said, ‘Stay forever!’
In the meantime, she’d dug up a blond monster of a man, who introduced himself as ‘Tristram, but everyone calls me Ram’. Clover laughed out loud but got the joke about ‘Is that in or out of bed?’ out of the way. Ram looked like he should have been shouting, ‘About turn’ on a parade ground except that he spent more time flexing his muscles in the mirror than the army would have allowed.
