by Fiona Neill
‘How unfortunate,’ I say. ‘How was your day?’
‘Busy, busy, busy,’ she says. Yummy Mummy No. 1, I notice, often repeats words three times, especially adjectives. It is a trait I have discussed with Tom. Although he conceded that such a tic could be an effective strategy to deflect questions he was unwilling to analyse further.
‘She’s got a great arse, that is all I need to know about that woman,’ Tom had said.
‘What exactly, exactly, exactly did you do?’ I persist. Sexy Domesticated Dad suppresses a smile.
‘I was rushing around all day, hitting deadlines, tying up loose ends, keeping all the balls in the air,’ she says, and then, when she sees that I am still dissatisfied, she continues. ‘I did a kick-boxing class with the gorgeous personal trainer, had lunch with a friend and then went to a flat that we have bought as a rental investment to check that the interior designer was on track.’
This was more like it. Of course this woman has an enviable existence. Perhaps what Yummy Mummy No. 1 represents is the logical evolution of the 1950s housewife, I think to myself in a moment of sudden lucidity. She embodies all those old symbols of homemaking: her house is immaculate; the sheets crisp and ironed; and rosy-cheeked children sit round the table eating home-baked meals. She simply pays other people to achieve the effect and watches it all happen around her. She is a spectator to her own life.
Delegation, that’s what it’s all about. And the small matter of sufficient income to support the lifestyle. Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you time and youth. Trips to the gym, forays to Selfridges, aromatherapy treatments. I would be good at that. Naturally, there would be some sacrifices. No more chocolate, for example. But it would be a small price to pay.
‘So did you call your friend back?’ asks Robert Bass, turning round to face me again. ‘That was quite a conversation you were having. You make a lot of assumptions about married men.’ I move my arm swiftly away from his, annoyed with him for sharing the details of my conversation in the toilet with Yummy Mummy No. 1. Partly because it underlines a depth of friendship with her that I haven’t really managed, but also because I know the vicarious pleasure she will get from accessing the grimy undercarriage of someone else’s life. Then I start to wonder whether her arrival was all part of a plan instigated by him to avoid spending time alone with me.
‘Actually, it’s a complicated situation,’ I say, trying to steer the conversation back on to safe territory, because surely there has to be a middle ground between the topics of three-way sex and a day in the life of Yummy Mummy No. 1. Somewhere safe between gritty and saccharin.
‘She’s having an affair with a married man,’ I say.
‘How married?’ asks Yummy Mummy No. 1.
‘Marriage is a black-and-white issue, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘There shouldn’t be degrees.’ But even as I’m saying it, I’m not sure that I agree with my own hypothesis. My moral compass is wildly unsynchronised.
‘But for the record, one wife, four children, more than a decade of marriage,’ I say.
‘Just like me,’ she says smiling. ‘And you. Albeit with one less child. Does his wife know?’
‘I don’t think she’s got any idea. Actually I feel sorry for her, she’s probably so wound up in her children that she has put her husband on the back burner to retrieve at a later date, when she is less tired,’ I say. ‘Don’t you sometimes feel like calling up one of those missing persons hotlines and reporting your disappearance? “Help, I don’t know where I’ve gone, I got married, had children, gave up my job, made everyone around me happy and then disappeared. Please send out a search party.” ’
She looks at me in astonishment. ‘Always a bad idea to neglect your husband. Men can’t stand being sidelined. They stray. That’s why we have two weeks alone in the Caribbean every year. Everyone should do it,’ she says emphatically.
‘Perhaps,’ says Robert Bass diplomatically, ‘not everyone has the financial capacity or the childcare to do something like that.’
‘When you’ve got children, husbands drop further and further down the pecking order,’ I say. ‘Even below pets. Even goldfish.’ Robert Bass has fallen silent. The circle is complete, we are back at the beginning talking about fish.
‘Of course, infidelity could be construed as an act of fidelity to oneself,’ says Robert Bass without looking up.
‘That’s a radical concept,’ I say, staring at the empty bottle of champagne.
‘Shall we call it a night? I can give you both a lift home if you want,’ says Yummy Mummy No. 1, looking at us suspiciously as though she realises there is a hidden undercurrent to the conversation that she is unable to access.
9
‘A guilty conscience needs no accuser’
THE SOUND OF MUSIC is playing on the video in the sitting room and the children are arguing because Joe wants to rewind to the scene where the Nazis try to capture the von Trapp family.
‘Joe, nothing is going to change,’ I hear Sam shout at him with frustration. ‘It’s always going to be the same, they always escape. Even if you watch it a hundred times, everything will happen exactly the same way.’
‘But the colour of their shorts has changed. They used to be dark green and now they are definitely light green,’ says Joe, defensively hugging the television screen so that Sam cannot turn it off.
‘That’s because Mummy sat on the television controls and changed the settings,’ shouts Sam.
‘So things do change. I want to watch one more time, just in case this time the Nazis get them,’ Joe insists, chewing the sleeve of his pyjama top. This is a recently acquired habit, but already the cuffs of all his school shirts and jumpers are in tatters.
‘If the Nazis got them, then the film wouldn’t be suitable for children and Mum wouldn’t let us watch it,’ says Sam, trying to soothe him with logic, rather than brute force. ‘No one will betray the von Trapps.’
Fred is hiding behind the sofa. He has been quietly engaged in a game with his tractors and trailers since I came into the sitting room. Although I know that a silent toddler is akin to an unexploded bomb, I decide that whatever he is doing, it is worth taking the risk so that I can deal with weeks of unopened post that has accumulated in the top drawer of my desk. I’ll deal with the consequences later.
To avoid unsettling Tom, every few days I pick up the envelopes that collect on the small table by the front door and stuff them into this drawer until it is full. Then I tackle the backlog. It is not a system that Tom would approve of, but its simplicity has some merit, especially since it allows me to censor anything that might prove contentious.
I wonder whether I should intervene in the dispute at the other end of the room. The issue is whether to indulge Joe’s neurosis and allow him to rewind, or force him to capitulate to Sam. I know that any involvement in peacekeeping will trigger further demands on my time. Pleas to play games, read books, wrestle, or do role play as Shane Warne. I am due for dinner at Emma’s new apartment in less than an hour, so I ignore them. If I could disappear for two hours a day, I would achieve so much.
I sit at my desk at the other end of the sitting room, trying to impose order on the chaos of unopened bills, bank statements and anonymous envelopes before Tom arrives back from Italy later tonight. It is an enterprise borne of contrition. Since the drink with Robert Bass earlier in the week, I am suffering from bouts of unresolved guilt. I haven’t lied to Tom. But I have economised with the truth. If he asks about what I did on Monday evening, what will I say? That I created a situation where I could sit close enough to a man I find so attractive that the hair on my arm stood on end when our flesh touched? That I am going to see this same man again later this week? That I have vivid dreams about these feelings being reciprocated? I have dismissed Robert Bass as a fantasy, a welcome distraction, as harmless as a plant that offers colour through the grey tones of winter in London. But I realise that to compare him to the witch hazel flowering in our garden is disingenuous. And then t
here are the children. My mind races, as it is prone to do when unpleasant emotions take hold, and I imagine them grown up, telling friends tales of their mother’s treachery and how it has affected their ability to form lasting relationships with the opposite sex, and how it will affect their children and their children’s children until it is carried through the generations in their genetic code.
Unable to resolve this dilemma, I force myself to concentrate on the task at hand, arranging three large piles of papers. The first has mail specifically for Tom, the second bills that need to be paid immediately, and the third is a non-specific pile to be dealt with at a much later date, possibly never. The latter goes back in the drawer. I smile to myself, anticipating Tom’s elation at discovering his post in a neat orderly pile. Then I immediately feel guilty again, knowing that such a simple act will give him such pleasure. In many respects, he is easily pleased. He could have had a very harmonious marriage with a different kind of woman. If he had married his mother, for example.
I am stuffing envelopes that I most definitely do not want Tom to see in a drawer at the bottom of the desk. They include a couple of forgotten congestion charges, parking tickets and credit card bills. I now have seven different kinds of credit card debt. This is not a source of pride. However, I have found myself surprisingly adept at juggling these bills and trawling the Internet to find the best deals. Nought per cent finance for the first twelve months. Small print to make your heart sing. When I walk home from school after a particularly busy period of debt exchange, I find myself giving Fred a status report. ‘Move Amex to Visa, move Visa to MasterCard, move MasterCard to Amex,’ I sing out loud, changing music according to my mood, ‘Jingle Bells’ being the tune of choice at the moment. I feel like a heavy hitter in the city, trading debt on the international market. Buy. Sell. Hold.
The traffic fines remain a blind spot. Last month, a bailiff arrived at the front door with a summons for a fine that I received about two years ago. Tom happened to be at home, working on architectural plans. The bailiff, a tall, well-built man, was wearing an ill-cut grey suit made of such cheap man-made fibre that, when he pulled a pen out of the top pocket for me to acknowledge receipt, small sparks flew.
He was not an unpleasant man. In fact, he was surprisingly placid, a characteristic reinforced by his eyelids, which turned down at the ends, like a friendly bloodhound. There was no evidence that he had absorbed any of the aggression and stress that must accompany his job. His face was almost serene. Mine, on the other hand, was furrowed with worry. It was not the fear of prosecution but the fear of Tom uncovering my trail of financial deception.
So when I heard Tom coming upstairs from the kitchen to see who was at the door, I persuaded the bailiff to pretend he was a Jehovah’s Witness, a bluff that he went along with surprisingly obligingly. He seemed completely at ease with this deviation from his job description.
‘Come Armageddon,’ he said loudly, peering across my shoulder at Tom, who was still dressed in a pair of pyjamas, ‘only the chosen will be saved. As a sinner you can repent, but only if you have resolved any outstanding parking issues.’
Tom looked vaguely bemused and scratched his head, making his dark hair stand on end.
‘Surely there are many worse sins,’ he said. ‘In any case, the statistical probability of one of the chosen being a traffic warden is infinitesimal, so no one would be any the wiser.’
‘It’s best not to engage, otherwise he’ll never leave,’ I whispered to Tom, pushing him back downstairs. ‘I’ll deal with this. You get on with your work.’ I went back to the front door and signed for the summons.
‘It is not for me to say,’ said the bailiff, ‘but I really think, Mrs Sweeney, that you should try and sort out all of this. It must be very stressful, having to hide this kind of thing from your husband.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I do it all the time,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘Women are very good at juggling deception. It’s part of multi-tasking.’ He shook his head, opened up a battered leather briefcase and stuffed my papers inside before snapping it shut and clasping my hand.
I know that one day I should consult someone practical like Emma, who never even runs an overdraft, for advice on how to resolve this. Or at least I should add all the credit card bills and parking fines together, to assess exactly how much I owe. But I simply can’t face up to the situation. It’s been so long since I actually accrued the debt that I can’t even remember what impulse purchases caused this catastrophic chain of events. They were probably thrown out years ago.
‘Mum, is it really true that the Nazis will never take Maria?’ Joe anxiously calls from the sofa.
‘It is, she smells far too sweet,’ I shout from the other side of the room, hoping this will seal the dispute.
‘Mum, do you think that one day I could make a pair of shorts from the curtains in my bedroom?’ he says.
‘Of course, darling,’ I say distractedly, hiding envelopes at the back of the drawer and then covering my tracks with a pile of catalogues.
‘Perhaps Joe shouldn’t watch this film any more,’ says my mother-in-law. I am unaware that she has come upstairs from the kitchen. I shut the drawer a little too firmly and note her looking at it suspiciously.
‘He has the same issues regardless of what he is watching. Even if it’s something totally benign,’ I say, standing up and moving away from the desk. ‘He’s just a very sensitive child.’
‘Who is this Major Tom that he keeps talking about? Is he a friend of your parents?’ she asks.
She is still staring at the bottom drawer, her hands stuck deeply in the pockets of Tom’s dressing gown. It has been washed and has changed colour from a sort of dirty orange to pale yellow. It is so big on her tiny frame that she has to tie it behind her back. Her feet and head, still red from the bath, poke out the ends like jam oozing from a fat Swiss roll.
Petra has been here all week, and there is no sign of her imminent departure. Each day she becomes more embedded. This is a familiar pattern. I will have to wait for Tom to come home to broach the subject of when she might leave. Whenever the situation threatens to become intolerable, for example when I open the wardrobe and discover that she has organised his pants into neat colour-coordinated piles, I resolve to ask her to go. She knows that she has overstepped the mark, and tries to rein herself in for the rest of the day, but her compulsion for organising overrides everything else. She tries to compensate by asking me exactly which area of the house would benefit from further precision tidying, and offers free babysitting, which she knows I will never turn down. For the most part, this bribery quells the waves of panic. The laundry mountain is now the size of a decent hill, still undulating but less imposing. Tom’s shirts are all ironed. Socks that lost their partners years ago have been reunited and those that missed out on a happy reunion condemned to the dustbin.
‘I was wondering, Lucy, whether we could have lunch together next week,’ she says, nervously fiddling with a string of pearls round her neck as I am trying to leave the house. Tom is due back later tonight but there is no sign of bags being packed.
‘But Petra, we’ve had lunch together almost every day this week,’ I say, feeling slightly panicked and reaching out for my coat to signal my imminent departure.
‘There is something important that I need to talk to you about. It has to be said somewhere neutral. Perhaps we could meet in John Lewis, and combine it with Christmas shopping? I need to get something for your parents.’ She pauses without looking up from her cup of coffee. ‘Please don’t mention to Tom that we are meeting. I’m sorry you lost your election the other day, by the way. Perhaps it’s for the best, given everything else you’ve got on your mind.’
Although I have already started towards the front door, I stop in my tracks. My assumption is that somehow over the past week my inner turmoil has reached the surface and has started to bubble through my pores, so that I now smell of self-doubt and uncertainty. My mother-in-law has many foibles, but
intrigue on a grand scale is not one of them. In the twelve years since I first met her, this is her most significant overture to me, and I know it must be serious because she has a natural aversion to emotional honesty. Still, at least I have a few days to prepare a plausible defence. Later that evening, installed in the cathedral-like space that is Emma’s new home in Clerkenwell, drinking expensive wine with her and Cathy, I start to relax. Obviously my mother-in-law has made the decision to intervene because she is fearful for her son. On the other hand, she never likes to hear the truth if it is too unpalatable or unsettling. I imagine layers of emotional deception compacted against each other like bands of sediment, in colours that start to run into each other over the years, so that it is impossible to examine any single part with clarity.
The walls of Emma’s loft are very white, almost clinical. Some slide into each other on invisible runners to create new rooms and spaces. These are the kinds of optical tricks that appeal to Tom. I, on the other hand, find it all quite disconcerting. I don’t want my home to be a movable feast. So when Emma shows Cathy and me how the sitting room can be turned into a spare bedroom and how the bedroom can double in size, it makes me feel slightly seasick.
I’m not sure for whom this flat was built. Certainly not for families or anyone suffering from depression. There are treacherous drops from the balconies that run round the edge and large flowerpots filled with fashionable grasses that cut your skin if you brush past them too closely. It is, however, a great place for parties.
I recognise a few belongings from Emma’s Notting Hill home, including a couple of Patrick Heron prints, and a kitsch white vase with big flowers stuck around the rim that I gave her on her thirtieth birthday. They are dwarfed by the space. The lift from the ground floor opens up impressively into the sitting room but it takes two of us to pull back the heavy iron grilles and I wonder how Emma manages to get in and out on her own.
We are unusually silent. Emma is struggling with a murky bucket of mussels. She is angrily scrubbing them.
