The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

by Fiona Neill

  ‘Nothing disastrous,’ I say. It is utterly baffling to me that I used to be able to put together the lead package on Newsnight in less than an hour but am so singularly unable to meet the challenge of getting my children ready for school every morning.

  It seems unbelievable that I could persuade cabinet ministers to come to the studio late at night to be grilled by Jeremy Paxman, but cannot convince my toddler to keep on his clothes.

  ‘Is God bigger than a pencil?’ asks Joe, who worries far too much for a five-year-old. ‘If he isn’t, could he be eaten by a dog?’

  ‘Not the kind of dogs that wander these streets,’ I tell him reassuringly. ‘They are too polite.’

  And it is true. We are roaming through upper-tax-bracket territory in north-west London. There are no pasty-faced chisel-headed boys walking pit bulls here. No William Hill. No turkey twizzlers. No teenage pregnancies. We are in the heart of dinner-party land.

  It is the first day of term and already standards have slipped. As they walk along the pavement the children are supplementing bits of toast with fistfuls of cereal from a couple of those variety packs.

  My vision is reduced by myopia to the most impressionistic strokes, and I recall a moment two weeks ago on a beach in Norfolk, when I stood before the North Sea with a woolly hat pulled down over my eyebrows and a scarf wrapped around my neck just below my eyes. An easterly wind, uncharacteristic for the time of year, blew into my face, making my eyes water. I had to keep blinking to stop the view from blurring. It was like looking through a prism. No sooner had I focussed on a seagull or a particularly lovely stone than the scene fractured into a spectrum of different shapes and colours. It struck me then that this was exactly how I felt about myself. Somehow over the years I had atomised. Now, faced with the prospect of my youngest child starting nursery three mornings a week, it is time to rebuild myself, but I can no longer remember how all the pieces fit together. There is Tom, the children, my family, friends, school, all these different elements but no coherent whole. No thread connecting everything together. Somewhere in the domestic maelstrom I have lost myself. I can see where I came from, but I’m uncertain where I am going. I try to cling on to the bigger picture but can no longer remember what it is meant to be. I gave up the job I loved as a television news producer eight years ago, when I discovered that thirteen-hour days and motherhood were an unstable partnership. Whoever suggested that working full time and having children equated to having it all wasn’t very good at maths. There was always something in deficit. Including our bank balance, because there wasn’t much change from what we paid the nanny. And besides, I missed Sam too much.

  What I should do in the here and now, with the playground looming in the distance, is think up a few stock replies to those friendly inanities that mark the beginning of the new school year. Something sketchy, because most people aren’t really interested in the detail. ‘The summer was hard graft, culminating in a disastrous holiday on a Norfolk campsite, because we are short of cash, during which I slid into my current introspective mood, reappraising key areas of my life, including – in no particular order, because my husband is right, I can’t prioritise – my decision to give up work after we had children, the state of my marriage, and our lack of money,’ I imagine saying, miming the words and using my right hand to illustrate my depth of feeling. ‘Oh, and did I mention that my husband wants us to rent out our house and move in with my mother-in-law for a year until our financial situation is more secure?’ The holiday was a watershed, we both knew that. But its repercussions were less immediately obvious.

  ‘Mum, Mum, can you hear me?’ demands Sam.

  ‘Sorry, just dreaming,’ I tell him, and he asks me if he is like a guide dog.

  ‘Something like that,’ I say, squinting down the road.

  I spot the blurry outline of one of the fathers from school walking down the road towards us. He is talking on his mobile phone and running his fingers through his thick dark hair in a gesture familiar to me from the previous school year. It’s Sexy Domesticated Dad, with his disarming opinions about what constitutes a nutritional lunch box and a penchant for mothers’ coffee mornings. But it’s not those characteristics which fix him in my mind. It is the way he looks and the way he moves. Something much more primeval. In fact, the less he says, the greater his appeal.

  Even from a distance I can recognise his shape. In that strange juxtaposition of random thoughts, it suddenly occurs to me that in appearing at this moment, he has inadvertently become part of the bigger picture I was just thinking about. I curse my hastily thrown together second choice of outfit: tartan pyjama bottoms under a long, grungy coat in what I’d hoped would pass for casual chic in underwear-as-outerwear fashion. But it’s too late to hide in the hedge with my pint-sized sons, so I surreptitiously check for yesterday’s unremoved eye make-up in the wing mirror of a stationary 4 × 4.

  I jump as the automatic window slides down and someone looks over the passenger seat to ask what I am doing. ‘My God, you look like a panda,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, my sartorial nemesis. She opens her glove compartment to reveal spa-like contents including a half-bottle of Moët, Jo Malone candle, and eye make-up remover pads.

  ‘How do you do this?’ I ask her, wiping my eyes gratefully. ‘Do you have systems?’ She looks puzzled. ‘No, just staff,’ she says.

  ‘Good summer?’ I ask her.

  ‘Wonderful, Tuscany, Cornwall. How about you?’

  ‘Great,’ I reply, but she is already glancing down the road and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘Must go or I’ll be late for my astanga class. By the way, are you wearing tartan? How directional.’

  Sexy Domesticated Dad ambles down the street towards me. I can see him waving one arm in the air and have no choice but to speak to him. Then I notice the other arm is in plaster. Oh happy fate, an obvious subject for conversation.

  ‘You’ve broken your arm,’ I say, a little too enthusiastically.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I fell off a ladder at a friend’s house in Croatia.’

  He looks at me expectantly. Then he smiles and I hear myself say in an unnaturally slow voice, ‘That must be really . . . relaxing.’ Except I say it in a slow throaty way that makes me sound like Mariella Frostrup.

  His smile fades slightly. This doesn’t conform to the predictable pattern of social niceties among parents that he was expecting.

  ‘What could possibly be relaxing about breaking your arm? Especially in Croatia.’

  Sam looks at me, equally perplexed. ‘He’s right, mum.’

  ‘Actually, Lucy, it’s really . . . painful.’ Sexy Domesticated Dad is mimicking my intonation. ‘And I don’t think that my wife would agree that it’s relaxing. I’m not much use at the moment. Can’t get any work done, it hurts too much to type.’ He smiles. I suddenly think about the chance encounters of premarital existence and their infinite possibilities, and images of a previous life gatecrash my thoughts. Striped knee-high socks with individual toes, Sony Walkmans, winkle-pickers. I remember buying a copy of an album by The Cure in Bristol from a boy who wore really tight black drainpipe jeans and a mohair jumper and smelt of patchouli oil. I can even remember the words of most of those songs. I remember a flight to Berlin when a man asked me if I wanted to go back to his hotel with him and I agreed and then his wife turned round from the seat in front and smiled. I remember being in love with someone at university who never unpacked his bag and had three pairs of identical Levi’s jeans and three white shirts, which he rotated each day. Tom would have approved of him. Why have these memories stayed with me while others are lost for ever? If this is what I remember now, will that be what I remember in twenty years’ time?

  Mention of Sexy Domesticated Dad’s powerhouse wife brings me up short, because I have never considered him in the plural, and I arrange my features into friendly but businesslike mode. ‘How is she, did she manage to unwind?’

  ‘She’s never very good at doing that, she’
s got too much energy. Look, do you want to grab a coffee after you’ve dropped off the kids?’

  ‘Great,’ I say, trying to appear composed in the face of this unexpected incursion into my daydreams. Then I notice him looking suspiciously at my feet.

  ‘Are you wearing tartan pyjamas under that coat?’ he asks. ‘Maybe we should do coffee another time.’

  2

  ‘Coming events cast their shadows before’

  DESPITE THE MIXED messages and tiny humiliations of that encounter it causes some geological shift inside me. Plates stirring after a long dormant spell. How else can I account for the renewed feelings of excitement that I experience over subsequent days? This is how natural disasters happen, I think. A series of imperceptible movements at the core, culminating in a catastrophe way down the line. I feel the way I do when I smoke a cadged cigarette while the children aren’t looking, reconnecting momentarily with feelings of liberation associated with a different period in my life, when pleasure was there for the taking.

  Over the next few days, I set off in the morning in the hopeful anticipation of chancing upon Sexy Domesticated Dad, and then berate myself for feeling unreasonably disappointed when he doesn’t emerge. Perhaps he is working again and his wife is doing the school run, although I know she has a Big City Job that means she has to be at her desk by eight o’clock. Maybe they have an au pair who is taking their two children to school.

  I allow myself to indulge in a harmless flight of fancy and imagine him in the British Library doing research for a book he’s writing. He could do that with one arm in a plaster cast but he almost certainly couldn’t type. He could dictate to me and I could type it up. Him sitting in an old comfortable chair, his forearms resting on the arms, fingers pulling out bits of stuffing during silences while he contemplates me. We could spend long days shut up in his office (the children are out of the picture here), with me offering pithy advice and shaping the structure of his biography. Then I become indispensable, he can’t work without me. Not that I know what he is writing until I Google him one evening after the children have gone to bed and find that he is late delivering a manuscript on Latin America’s contribution to the international film world. Very niche. And a subject about which I know nothing. So there the fantasy ends. Benignly.

  ‘Excuse me, madam, would you like a drink, would you like to order something?’ I am aware suddenly of a waiter gently tapping me on the shoulder. He is wearing an impeccably clean and wrinkle-free long white apron tied round the waist several times, with a neat bow at the front just above his stomach. I think of the war of attrition being waged back home in the washroom, where the piles of unironed sheets and shirts are threatening to besiege the kitchen. Our Polish cleaning lady, who is meant to come one morning a week, is now too arthritic to manage more than a cursory dust and abandoned the laundry pile to its fate months ago.

  I consider asking him where he gets his laundry done or even whether he would do it for me. Would sleeping on sheets as smooth and cool as ready-made icing restore my equilibrium? I resist an urge to rest my head on his apron and shut my eyes. These are the kinds of domestic issues that used to send my mother’s friends reaching for the Valium. They are not important anymore, I tell myself. In any case, there are new weapons in the household armoury: easy-iron shirts, disposable nappies, and quick-cook pasta. Starch has long been banished, along with Soda-Streams and carpet beating.

  Besides, domestic chaos is a genetic condition. My mother cleverly turned it into an intellectual statement and I grew up being told that a tidy home was anti-feminist. Women should spend more time fine-tuning their brains and less time ordering the linen cupboard if they wanted to break the domestic shackles that prevented them from achieving their intellectual potential, she used to say to me as a child.

  The waiter urges me to look at a long and confusing list of cocktails. They all promise a better tomorrow and have names like ‘Sunny Dreams’ or ‘Rainbow of Optimism’. There are none called ‘Uneasy Truce’ or ‘Gathering Storm’. I feel like a stranger in a foreign land and ask for a ginger beer, partly because it feels familiar but mostly because the writing is so small that I can’t read the list of cocktail ingredients.

  Another year and I will need bifocals.

  I am waiting in a private members’ club in Soho for a rare evening out with my last remaining single girlfriends. Inside the old Georgian dining rooms, the walls are painted a deep crimson and even in the dim light they cast a warm glow, inviting intimacy and whispered indiscretions. People flutter around like moths, looking for familiar faces. Buoyed by alcohol they seem to have no doubts about the quality of their happiness.

  I sit alone in the middle of a large faux regency sofa with wooden arms and faded velvet covers. Periodically people come over and ask me to move up so that they can sit down, but my urge to be alone transcends any desire to be affable and I tell them that I am waiting for friends. I know it will be a while before anyone turns up but I wanted to escape the chaos of bath time and bedtime and told Tom that I had to be here by seven-thirty, just to catch up with myself. Sometimes I play so many roles in a day that I think I am suffering from a form of maternal schizophrenia. Cook, chauffeur, cleaner, lover, friend, mediator. It’s like being in a pantomime, unsure whether you are meant to be the back part of the donkey or playing the leading role.

  Looking at my watch and calmly sipping my Luscombe organic ginger beer, I consider the major systems failure likely to be taking place at home. I imagine Fred refusing to get out of the bath and wriggling out of Tom’s grasp like a slippery eel. His brothers will hold on to Fred’s legs and shriek like banshees. Tom will swear under his breath and then the oldest two will repeatedly taunt ‘Daddy said the F-word’ until Tom loses his temper. Tomorrow he will no doubt hold me responsible for the anarchy. But there is a whole night between now and then. Even though this is the first time that I have been out for almost a month, I still reproach myself. Guilt is the bindweed of motherhood, the two so inexorably entwined that it is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins.

  My brother, Mark, who is a psychologist, says contemporary mothers are the innocent victims of the nature-versus-nurture debate. According to Mark, we are burdened by recent trends in psychotherapeutic thought, which reject the idea that children are born with a unique set of traits and instead place full responsibility for every aspect of development fairly and squarely on our shoulders. ‘So mothers blame themselves for any shortfall in their children’s personality,’ he says. ‘Flash cards, Baby Einstein, pencil grip, it’s all part of the belief that you can model your children like clay, when the truth is as long as you avoid extremes, the outcome for the child will be pretty much the same.’ I want to believe him, but when I consider the chaos of his own personal life, I always look back to our childhood for answers.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ asks a tired-looking man carrying a pile of loose papers under his arm. ‘I’m only going to be half an hour.’ When I look doubtful, he says exasperatedly, ‘I just want to be here long enough to avoid putting my children to bed.’ And then I know he is telling the truth. A fellow deserter from the domestic front line. I get out a newspaper from my bag to give him the illusion of privacy and a chance to rest with his own thoughts.

  I decide, almost on impulse, to take up smoking again properly and ask the man whether he would keep my seat for a moment. He nods wearily without saying anything. It is so long since I bought a packet of cigarettes that I am left fumbling in my coat pockets for change, when I see how much they cost. Then I can’t remember how to use the machine. Do you put in the money first or choose the brand? In the end I press the wrong button and end up with a packet of John Player.

  I light up the first one, and even though it tastes vile and I feel so light-headed that I think I am going to pass out, I doggedly continue as if to prove a point to myself. It should be like riding a bicycle, but it isn’t. I really need to get out more. Like a schoolgirl trying to finish a cigare
tte before the teacher spots me, I find myself smoking it so fast that the end becomes unpleasantly hot and the smoke billows thickly around my head. I start to cough and splutter. Through the fog I can see Friend with Improbably Successful Career circling the adjacent room looking for me. Instead of waving or calling her name, I watch in wonder as she drifts from table to table, peering at faces and occasionally stopping to greet someone. Emma’s ease amazes me. She is wearing a pair of black low-slung Sass & Bide drainpipes, knee-high leather boots, and a fantastic silver top with tassels that are so long they form a kind of slipstream behind her. But it is not just about what she is wearing, although certainly the general effect demands attention. It is more the way that she occupies the space around her with such authority. The same way that it is not simply the smoke that makes me invisible. Nor the fact that I am wearing a velvet jacket the same colour as the sofa so that I merge with the furniture.

  ‘Lucy,’ she beams, sitting down beside me. ‘I’ve found you at last.’ The tassels finally calm down as she looks at the empty glasses in front of me. ‘What are you drinking?’ she asks.

  ‘Ginger beer,’ I tell her.

  ‘Lashings, I can see. Very Famous Five.’ The waiter comes over immediately and effusively greets her, in a way that is gratifying to them both, and she orders a bottle of champagne. It is fair to say that Emma is now so high up in her news organisation that most parts of her life qualify as expenses, so I do not wince.

  As I sip champagne from a tall thin glass with a long elegant stem, Sexy Single Mum appears and makes me, as the guest of honour, move into the middle of the sofa.

  ‘Lucy, it’s so great to see you. I can’t even remember the last time we all went out together,’ enthuses Cathy, hugging me tightly.

  ‘How’s my lovely godson?’ I ask her.