by Fiona Neill
I couldn’t be more astonished if he had asked me to lick his forearm.
‘Well, of course I’m considering it, my youngest one has just started nursery and it would be a good time to do something like that. But I don’t want to look too pushy.’ It sounds so credible I almost believe myself.
‘I’ll vote for you,’ he says good-naturedly. ‘So will Isobel. She was saying that it would be really entertaining if you won.’
‘Oh, did she?’ I say, entirely mistrustful of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s motives.
‘I told my wife what happened yesterday. You know, the, er, imbroglio with the underwear. She thought it was very funny. Simpatico. So did I.’
I wonder in what context it was discussed, what adjectives he used, whether he told her that we were sitting so close together I could feel the heat from his thigh. After he had cooked dinner, or when they were in bed? What were they wearing in bed?
‘Pyjamas,’ he says. ‘I told her about the pyjamas too.’ I know that I should feel gratified that he has shared this with his wife, because it hints at the promise of friendship. I imagine cosy foursomes sharing dinner, family picnics on Hampstead Heath, even holidays abroad. But I realise that I don’t want anyone extraneous intruding on my fantasy because they could dilute its escapist potential.
In the evening I lie at one end of the sofa, watching Tom at the other end reading last week’s copy of the Architects’ Journal. After almost a year’s delay, building work is finally to begin on his library in Milan, and his mood is buoyant. Our feet are touching. The witching hour is over. The children are in bed and a bottle of wine has been consumed in lieu of dinner.
He will be travelling to Milan in the next couple of weeks. He tells me this apologetically, at pains to demonstrate awareness of the burden this will place on me. But I know he is excited because tonight there have been no searches in the fridge for food that has exceeded its sell-by date. No forensic examination of bank statements, looking for evidence of parking fines and other misdemeanours. No questions about new scratches on the side of the car.
‘I’ll leave an alarm clock, so that you aren’t late in the morning. I’ll put one hundred pounds in cash in the chest of drawers, in case you lose your credit card. I’ll babysit for you when I come back. I’ll buy my own socks at the airport.’
The less I say, the more extravagant his offers, so I keep quiet.
‘We won’t ever go camping again. Next time, we’ll rent a house. We’ll never have such an awful holiday again. And we might even be able to afford to have a cleaning lady twice a week.’
I make all sorts of rash promises in return. ‘I won’t lie about little things. I’ll put out the school uniforms the night before. I’ll look in the fridge before I go shopping.’
Then the phone starts to ring. After swift negotiations Tom answers on the fifth ring, as a quid pro quo for my opening another bottle of wine.
‘It’s for you,’ he says. ‘One of the dads from school.’ He raises an eyebrow and holds the phone just out of reach.
‘Tell him I’m busy,’ I whisper, but Tom pushes the phone into my hand.
‘Hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘Are you in the middle of eating?’
I slap my cheeks in a desperate attempt to sober up. ‘No, no, we’ve just finished dinner actually,’ I slur. ‘Some vegetable stew my husband rustled up. Delicious.’
Tom looks at me in astonishment. ‘Why are you lying? Tell him you put the wrong month on the Ocado order and there’s only an onion and a jar of marmalade in the fridge,’ he mutters bemusedly, starting to lurch towards me with lust in his eye. ‘I love it when you try to dissimulate, you are so bad at it.’
Not now, not now, I think, pondering the complex dilemma unravelling before me: to end the sexual fast of the past two months or to risk alienating Sexy Domesticated Dad at the outset of our friendship. I start to push Tom away with my foot.
‘The thing is,’ Sexy Domesticated Dad continues obliviously, ‘I put your name forward to be class rep.’ All thoughts of sex with either man fade rapidly. ‘But a competitor has already emerged, and she is phoning around other parents to warn them off you. Sort of a smear campaign.’ I struggle to digest this information. ‘In essence, she is saying that you don’t have any experience of running anything and that your exotic domestic habits are no recommendation.’
‘It’s Yummy Mummy No. 1, isn’t it? I knew she was untrustworthy,’ I say in full slur. ‘What does she know about my domestic habits?’
Tom is taking off his shirt and pointing to the sofa.
‘Look, we could talk about this another time,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad, obviously disturbed by my tone. ‘And, actually, it’s not Isobel. It’s the one whose children are learning Mandarin.’
I hear my voice rise into a wail. ‘Alpha Mum. That’s it, the truce is over,’ I yell into the phone.
‘Look, don’t shoot the messenger,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad shirtily. ‘I was calling to offer to be your campaign manager.’
The phone goes dead and I reconsider my options. Then the doorbell rings. It’s the Internet shopping man, looking a little worried.
‘Where do you want us to leave all these onions?’ he asks Tom. ‘We thought we were delivering to an Italian restaurant.’ He brings three large sacks into the kitchen.
Tom starts rifling through the bags. ‘Explain how this is possible,’ he asks, baffled.
‘I thought I was ordering by unit, not by kilo.’
‘But why did you want to order thirty red onions? I’m off to bed.’
5
‘The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge’s wing’
WINTER IS DRAWING in, this much I know, because the annual war of attrition over the heating has begun. I turn up the thermostat when Tom leaves the house, and then occasionally remember to turn it down before he comes home. But even on the good days, he uncovers any subterfuge by putting a hand on the radiator that runs along the passageway from the front door.
‘We had an agreement. And the warmth of the radiator is exactly proportionate to the scale of deception,’ he says one Friday evening in late October. Downstairs in the kitchen, Emma has opened a second bottle of wine and is reluctantly nibbling Little Bear crisps for want of anything else. The children are upstairs asleep in bed.
‘I know we said November, but the weather is not subject to your will. This is going to be the coldest winter ever recorded, colder even than the great freeze of 1963, and I think we will have to suspend hostilities until spring,’ I tell him, speaking a language I know he will understand.
There is a knock at the door. As he walks along the passage to open it, I quickly turn the thermostat up a couple of notches. He turns round, I stand motionless, hand in the air a little north of the dial. We are playing an adult variation of grandmother’s footsteps.
‘All right, Lucy, you’re in charge of heating until spring,’ he acquiesces. I think he is relieved to have the responsibility taken away from him, although he would never admit this.
There are secrets in every marriage. There are large-scale acts of deception. Then there are the smaller, more innocuous kind. Despite being married for almost ten years, Tom still hasn’t uncovered the following: 1) I have five sources of credit card debt, 2) the car got stolen shortly after I lost the spare key, 3) I have an unconfessed infidelity dating from the second year of our relationship. The last one might qualify as a big one, except that I know he has one of similar magnitude.
He opens the door and is genuinely pleased to see Cathy standing there.
‘Cathy, what a lovely surprise,’ he says with unaffected feeling, as though her arrival is completely unexpected.
While some men might resent their wife’s friends, Tom has always relished mine and consequently they reciprocate with ill-thought-out adulation. Cathy kisses him enthusiastically and sweeps through the narrow passage to go downstairs, hugging me on the way down. Cathy is perpetually in mot
ion. She is one of those people who take up a lot of space even though she is quite small, like a centrifugal force sucking people into her wake. She comes with baggage: handbags, shopping and a laptop computer. Tom is immediately pulled into the slipstream and follows her downstairs.
‘God, it’s hot in here,’ she shouts up to me.
When I get down, she has already opened the computer, removed our phone from the socket, and sits down, tapping away without even taking off her coat. ‘Have you got a work crisis?’ Tom asks.
‘No, no, no,’ Cathy says excitedly. ‘I have to show you all a photo of my next Internet date.’
Emma is lying languidly on the sofa.
‘Will you bring him over here, Cathy, so I don’t have to get up?’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘That’s the beauty of the Internet, men delivered to the comfort and privacy of your very own sofa.’
‘I really can’t imagine why you need to look for men on the Internet. Can’t you meet enough through the normal channels?’ Tom says, opening the door of the fridge.
‘The men you meet through the normal channels are fatally flawed,’ she says.
‘Well, there are several single men in my office. They seem normal enough.’
‘Why don’t you introduce me to them, then?’ Cathy demands. ‘I am doing multiple dating at the moment.’
Scores of tiny faces the size of postage stamps appear on the screen. She points to one.
‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘It was a tough decision. There’s so much choice.’
‘Difficult to tell. I mean, he has all the key features in the right places, which is always a good starting point,’ I say, squinting at the screen.
So she starts to enlarge him, until frame by frame his face takes shape and we observe a well-calibrated if slightly large nose, short, almost spiky, brown hair, and challenging brown eyes.
When he is life-size, we sit in a row and silently stare at the stranger before us. There are a few wrinkles on the forehead and around the eyes.
‘Absolutely your type,’ says Emma.
‘Well, he’s definitely walked on the wild side,’ I say, after a long silence.
‘How can you tell that?’ shouts Tom from inside the fridge.
‘Just something about those wrinkles on his forehead. They’re not from laughing too much or being too anxious, they are the kind that appear when you wake up too many mornings and you can’t remember where you are or who you are with.’
Tom snorts and continues his tour of the fridge.
‘Actually, Lucy’s generally right about these things, Tom,’ says Cathy. ‘She was right about my husband long before the fault lines appeared. Anyway, isn’t he gorgeous? He’s a solicitor, thirty-seven years old, lives in Earl’s Court, what could be more perfect? The only sticking point so far is that he thinks I should cut my hair into a “neat little bob”.’
‘That’s so disappointing,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t look the type.’
‘What does a man who likes women with neat little bobs look like?’ asks Tom with genuine curiosity.
‘Well, sartorially speaking he’s never left the eighties. He probably wears trousers in primary colours and brogues, even on a beach holiday,’ says Emma. ‘In the winter, he puts on those thick Norwegian jumpers with loud prints. He has a sensible job with a reliable salary and enjoys a round of golf at the weekend. He’s never done a line of coke. He reads the Telegraph. And he doesn’t like to talk dirty in bed, at least not to women.’
‘But that’s such a massive generalisation,’ says Tom.
‘No it’s not, it’s a truism,’ says Emma. ‘Does he want you to accessorise with a Labrador?’
Tom strolls over and takes a look.
‘More likely a Reservoir Dog,’ he says enigmatically. ‘Write to him and ask if the name Mr Orange means anything to him, because the other sticking point is that’s not what he looks like. That’s not a west London solicitor, it’s the actor Tim Roth, and he lives in LA. The man who wants to date you is an impostor.’
Cathy pauses, looks again at the photo, then says, ‘I’m dating a film star. I’m prepared to move to Hollywood if it all works out.’
‘What about schools?’ I ask.
‘We’ll live in Palo Alto, I’ll give up work and do home schooling.’
‘But that would be a nightmare,’ I say. ‘Especially if you decide to have another child.’
‘I think we need to rewind a little,’ says Tom. ‘For a start, Tim Roth is married.’
‘Don’t let that hold you back,’ says Emma. ‘Those forty-something men are like wild animals when released from the purdah of marriage. They want to do everything they haven’t done for the past ten years in less than a week.’
Tom looks interested.
‘I thought we were off-bounds. Fellowship of women and all that. And what about this?’ he asks, patting his stomach so that it makes a hollow sound.
‘There are other compensations,’ says Emma knowingly. ‘You are generally at the peak of your professional success, and money and power are a powerful aphrodisiac. Also, you are more emotionally coherent than twenty-year-old men. And actually, as soon as you rediscover your old sex drive, the weight just peels off.’
‘Then I shall look at those attractive young single women in my office in a whole new light,’ says Tom.
‘Which attractive young single women?’ I ask.
‘You haven’t met them,’ he says. ‘But none of them could compete with you for excitement, unpredictability and all-round gorgeousness,’ and he comes over and puts his arm around my stomach. ‘Especially round gorgeousness.’
‘If he’s advertising on the Internet, then I think it’s fair to say he is up for grabs,’ says Cathy.
‘The point is that Tim Roth doesn’t need to do Internet dating. He probably has women throwing themselves at him the whole time,’ says Tom, losing patience, although I am the only one to pick up on the subtle change in tone.
‘But that’s like saying Hugh Grant didn’t need to pay for a blow-job on Sunset Boulevard,’ says Cathy.
‘Look, this man might be a west London solicitor but this is not what he looks like. At best you’ll be dating a five-foot-tall liar,’ says Tom. ‘At worst . . . well, you should definitely take someone with you in case it turns nasty. I’ll come if you like.’
Cathy shrugs and says, ‘Back to the drawing board,’ in the kind of way that indicates the subject is closed for further discussion. Tim Roth shrinks, click by click, until he is just another face in the crowd.
‘Look, there’s another one,’ I say, pointing to another stamp in the top left-hand corner. ‘Snap.’
Cathy enlarges the image and, sure enough, it is another man masquerading as Tim Roth, albeit using a later photograph that even I recognise is him playing a robber in Pulp Fiction. This time it says he is a civil engineer based in northern England. Then Emma finds David Cameron.
‘How can this man be so stupid to think that women won’t recognise the leader of the Tory party?’ says Tom. ‘Besides, I can’t imagine that many women find him attractive.’ Silence.
‘I can’t believe that you all fancy David Cameron,’ says Tom incredulously. ‘Sometimes I find women completely incomprehensible. I think you should ask for a refund, Cathy. Or some free dates. Or at least a couple of discount dates, if they stretch to that. I can’t believe that any man would go to those lengths to get a date. What can be wrong with them?’
‘Actually, they do very well out of it. My last date was sleeping with five different women,’ explains Cathy. ‘What do you think, Lucy?’
‘I think you should investigate the men in Tom’s office first. And avoid married men, if possible. Although sometimes I know it’s difficult to tell or resist.’
‘I wish you could come out with me, Lucy, and use your radar to sort out the wheat from the chaff,’ she says.
‘Well, I owe her a couple of nights’ babysitting, so why don’t you take her with you?’ says
Tom.
‘Isn’t he so lovely,’ they chorus. ‘What a great husband.’
I don’t mention the fact that men rarely pay back the babysitting debt and that with the Milan project back on track, he will be travelling backwards and forwards to Italy for much of the foreseeable future. Tom basks in the adulation. In fact, I think he panders to their expectations. There is no level playing field in the domestic point-scoring game. Women always start in the foothills, with higher to climb and further to fall. A man who changes a nappy bounds ahead, while a woman who performs the same task in half the time, using three economic movements and a quarter of the wipes, barely registers progress. Consider the phenomenon of men glory cooking for dinner parties, with guests falling over each other to find adjectives that adequately sum up the sumptuousness of the spread and the inventiveness of the cook. But the reality is that they learnt two recipes from the River Café ten years ago and recycle them shamelessly when there is a chance for plaudits, while children’s meals are considered beneath their dignity.
No one bothers to score the blushing spaghetti bolognese, the diffident baked potatoes, or the humble shepherd’s pies that mothers peddle to the table twice a day every day. They don’t find their own way from fridge to table. And there is a fluency in their repetition that is as ancient as those leaf-cutter ants carrying bits back to their nest, doggedly fulfilling their genetic job description without any fuss.
I look at Tom talking to my friends and try and see him as they do: a man at ease with himself, confidently negotiating his way around the shared intimacies of this group of women, in a manner that is neither too intrusive nor dominating. A man who enjoys his mid-week football with friends and manages to live off the pleasures of a hat trick for at least a couple of months. A man who goes to the pub for a few beers and then consumes only that. Reflected back to me through my friends, I know that I should consider myself a lucky woman. But no one can dissect a marriage except for the two people involved, and even then it is difficult to see round the corners. And there are always lots of angles and points of view. For example, the lightness of heart after three children have successfully been bedded for the evening has to be measured against the bone-aching tiredness that comes with the end of the day. Is it a good moment to mention that you have lost the house keys again? Does the relief of silence compensate for the irritation of nine o’clock feeling like a late night out?
