Juliet and Andy can’t afford private, and they’re not Catholics. Mention secondary-school options to Juliet and she gets these weird contortions in the muscles of her neck. Peter Littlewood mentions it now.
‘So where will you be sending your two when the time comes?’ He says it to Andy, but Juliet answers.
‘We haven’t even thought about it yet,’ she lies, with a laugh.
‘Really?’ Fiona and her husband say at the same time, both of them overdoing the horror, and you know damn well that there were tutors, music lessons and school-fees plans lined up for each of their gifted little darlings the minute they were conceived.
‘Well, anyway,’ Juliet says, stiff-jawed as her neck tightens up, ‘we’re thinking of moving.’ Which is of course the other option with regard to catchment areas, and gets us on to property. And how much it costs. And the right time to move. And blah, blah, blah.
I catch James looking at me with the faintest hint of a smirk on his face. He’s enjoying all this. Normally I would be too, in a way. In that I’ve-got-to-sneak-out-to-the-kitchen-and-down-myself-a-gin-before-I-kill-myself-laughing kind of way. But tonight I can’t find it funny. I mean, why do we do this? Why do we sit through such mind-numbing hell just so that we can laugh about it later?
It isn’t funny. It isn’t a game. This is our lives.
They start talking about the old people’s home in Chestnut Drive. It’s up for sale, apparently, as the old people can’t afford to live there any more. There’s a rumour going round that it’s going to be knocked down and replaced by affordable housing, for key-workers: teachers and nurses and other much-needed types.
‘We need our key-workers, of course we do,’ Fiona gushes. After all, she can hardly purport to say otherwise. ‘But the thing is, how can we be sure that the people the flats are meant for won’t sell on? And then who will we have living there?’
A shudder works its way around my table.
‘It’ll totally change the face of Ashton,’ announces Peter Littlewood with finality.
‘It comes down to parking in the end,’ Andy says, and Juliet nods vigorously in agreement, although we all know it isn’t really about parking at all. That’s just a cover. It’s really about the wrong sort of people, parking the wrong sort of cars. ‘Sixteen flats, let’s say two cars each. That’s thirty-two parking spaces needed.’ Andy pauses while we absorb the brilliance of his maths. ‘It’s hard enough already trying to park around here.’
‘Tell me about it,’ agrees Peter, who owns two cars himself, the BMW that he drives to work in and the little Mazda that he likes to run around in at weekends. This is, of course, in addition to the people-carrier that his wife ferries the children about in. ‘Sometimes I can’t even park outside my own house. The last thing we need around here is more cars.’
I drink my wine. I know I’ve had too much. Something pops inside my head.
‘It’s already been decided, hadn’t you heard?’ some mischief makes me say as I dole out the dessert into glass dishes. ‘It’s going to be used as a refuge for asylum seekers.’
The silence lasts for just seconds, but it is glorious.
Then, ‘Good God,’ gasps Andy Borrel, and turns an alarming shade of mauve.
‘That is the final straw,’ states Peter Littlewood, and flings down his napkin with a flourish.
The wives are staring at me, horrified. My husband is staring at me as if he wonders who on earth I am.
‘Well, they have to put them somewhere,’ I say sweetly, as I pass around the cream. ‘So why not here, in Ashton?’
Fiona Littlewood, who is spooning one of Nicola’s excellent profiteroles into her mouth, appears to accidentally swallow it whole and starts to choke. It soon becomes necessary for her husband to smack her on the back, which unfortunately causes her to slurp a little chocolate sauce down the front of her blouse, which even more unfortunately is made of silk chiffon. Instantly Juliet launches into a stream of advice on how to remove stains from delicates, and leans across the table to dab, dab, dab at Fiona’s breast with her napkin.
All around me faces are purple, faces are white. My husband is watching me with narrowed eyes.
‘Coffee, anyone?’ I ask.
‘What’s with the asylum seekers?’ James asks, later, as I am stacking the plates and bowls for collection in the morning.
‘Just a little joke,’ I say lightly, and I try a little laugh, but it comes out all wrong, like the brittle snapping of bones.
James is standing behind me. I can feel him watching me as I put bowls on top of small plates, small plates on top of large. I wonder if he will notice that they are not our plates and bowls. He doesn’t. I wonder if he is going to ask me what’s wrong, but he doesn’t. What I’d like is for him to put his arms around me and hold me, but he doesn’t do that, either.
He just stands there behind me as I create a perfect pyramid out of Nicola Blakely’s white china. I find myself unable to turn around. I put the last bowl into place slowly, in order to prolong the task. I wish he would touch me, I wish he would laugh, say something funny – anything – to break the isolation that is wrapping itself around me like a shroud.
Finally he moves. I hear him take a glass down from the cupboard. Still with my hands and all my concentration on the balance of that last bowl, I hear him pick up the whisky bottle, unscrew the cap and pour.
There is a silence while he drinks. I wait for the tap as he puts the glass back down on the side, but it doesn’t come. Instead I hear him opening the kitchen door.
‘You’re in a strange mood tonight,’ he says, and he leaves me alone.
I stare out of the kitchen window at the blackness outside and I am flooded with many, many unwanted feelings.
I still have one finger on that last bowl, keeping it balanced in place. Both the bowl and myself are perfectly still, but there is a veritable cocktail of emotions racing through my body.
James has gone up to bed; I heard his foot on the stairs, then the landing, followed by the quiet opening and shutting of doors. Now the house is silent, and here I am, attached by one finger to my china pyramid.
I cannot think what made me stack the plates and bowls so high, and I have the sudden urge to give that top bowl a little wobble. I twitch my finger; nothing much happens. I twitch it a tiny bit harder and the bowls creak in protest. I watch, fascinated, as six bowls, six small plates, six dinner plates and three serving dishes begin a slow gyration underneath my finger, leading from the top down. I hold my breath as they sway precariously and then resettle in a dangerous imitation of their former alignment. My heart is pounding, anticipation, excitement blocking out everything else. My whole self homes in on the thrill.
There is a voice in my head saying What if? What if? It is a voice I remember well.
I hold my finger still. All of me is so still I can barely breathe. There is just my heart, jumping.
Dare you, the voice says.
I crook my finger, then push it out.
The bowls slide from their tower like divers, synchronized, and smash onto the floor. I count them down. One, two, three, four . . . They explode into petals at my feet, hitting the tiles and dancing out to a fanfare of exhilarating sound. Each crash hits my ears like a whip.
Bowls five and six rock, hesitate, and stay where they are.
After the noise comes the silence, clean as ice. I am standing in a sea of confetti. I expect to hear my husband come charging down the stairs, but I hear nothing. He must be whiskied away, sound asleep. There is just me, and what I have done.
It’s like a blood-letting.
Now I move, and the broken china crunches under my shoes. I think of Thomas and Arianne coming down here in the morning, and the guilt floods in. I think of their bare feet, pink and soft and vulnerable. I know I must clear up every last broken piece. I take the dustpan and brush from the cupboard under the sink and feel the sharp slivers catching and splintering under my feet as I move. I sweep and I sweep, cleaning
away my shame. When I have finished sweeping, I go down on my knees and feel into the corners with my hands. The floor is cold under my skin as I spread my hands across the tiles, seeking out every last tiny shard. And I gather them all up, picking them up with my forefinger and my thumb.
I think I am done, when I find a small dagger of a piece, hidden under the dishwasher. I pick it up, and suddenly I wonder how it would feel, now, to cut its sharpest point across my skin. I am wearing a black lace shirt – I never go sleeveless if I can avoid it – and I bend my left elbow and tip up my hand so that the sleeve falls back. The skin on my inner arm is pale and the scars even paler, a cobweb of ghostly lines. I could trace over them, and draw them all back in. I prick a line in my skin and my fingers curl up in defence. I scratch it down and feel it sting. A tiny drop of blood creeps out and beads there; I tilt my arm and it runs, a mere trickle, over my skin. I watch it, mesmerized. My breath is in my throat, caught; needles prickle inside my chest, and flashing behind my eyes, one right after the other, are all the things, all the awful, wicked things, that I ever did to Heddy Partridge.
And stuck in my head there’s this phrase: What goes around comes around. What goes around comes around. A stupid old cliché, going round and round, on autoplay.
Where did it come from, this need to hurt? And where does it ever end? It lies too deep, too buried.
The cut is thin and sore and mean. There is no thrill. There is no escape. Already the blood is drying. I lick my finger, smear it over the red, wetting it up again, rubbing it away. My life crowds in on me and I am filled with shame.
I throw my dagger in the bin along with the rest of the swept-up, broken china. In the morning I’ll pay Nicola Blakely for the broken bowls. I’ll tell her that I dropped them, clearing up.
I’ll tell James the same, and that I cut my arm in the process, if he asks. But he won’t. Why should he? We are pinned to our lives, blind. He cannot see. I cannot let him see.
At first I sleep the thick, black sleep of too much wine, but then I wake up suddenly, with a jolt. I thought I heard someone crying. I lie still, listening, but all I can hear is my heart, and James’s heavy breathing.
My eyes feel bruised and prickly. I squeeze them tight, wishing myself asleep again, but my mind is racing, and there is a thin worm of anxiety crawling over the bumps in my spine.
I slip out of bed and cross the landing on leaden legs to my children’s rooms, at the front of the house. I look in on Thomas first. He is sleeping upside down with his feet on the pillow and his head and most of his body hidden down under the duvet. It used to scare me, him sleeping like this. Several times in a night I would turn him up the right way, only to have him wriggle back round again. Now I drop a kiss onto the sole of his left foot and watch his toes twitch in response.
Then I creep into Arianne’s room. She’s curled up on her side, thumb just fallen away from her mouth and her beanie doll tucked up in the crook of her arm. She is an angel with her white-gold curls and her pink rosebud mouth cupped around the ghost of her thumb. The curve of her cheek is so beautiful and so perfect that it makes me ache. Gently I bend and kiss her, and breathe in her warm honey scent. Her skin is like velvet under my lips.
Sometimes my love for my children feels so huge and all-consuming that I want them back inside me, unborn. Surely every mother must feel like that? Surely even Heddy Partridge, slashing up her arms and condemning herself and her son to this prolonged and painful separation, must feel like this?
And sometimes my fears for my children are too fast and too wild, spreading out roots like trees, too far, too tangled. How much are they really mine? My Arianne, so sweet, so eager to please. Blemish-free, waiting to be soiled. Could I ever have been like that, even just a little? And Thomas with his temper, quick in fists and kicks. You need to watch that temper, my mother will say to me, if ever she sees him shout, or throw a toy, or stomp off in a huff. Like she should know.
I had no temper. I kept it in, until the anger slithered out of me anyway, poisonous and slow.
FOURTEEN
André is a terrible gossip.
He’s like the village notice board. We all come into his salon with our little bits of information, and he gathers it all together, and passes it on. He is central to our lives and he knows it; he is hairdresser, flatterer, adviser and Ashton’s own jungle telegraph. All communication passes through André.
Naturally we use this to our advantage. If there is something you want known, you tell it to André. As you can imagine, there are times when this is very useful. For instance, Tasha told André how much Rupert got for his bonus last year, so now we all know how rich they are without Tasha having had to tell us herself and risk boasting. And we know that Samantha Brook’s husband bought her diamond earrings and a necklace for her birthday. And if someone’s having a party, André will know who’s going, and who isn’t.
Today he is commiserating with me over the hassle of finding a decent cleaner. Penny had told him I was looking for one, and now he has a whole list of recommendations from his other ladies. He’s even written down their phone numbers for me. André is far more useful than any agency – and a million times better than the one who sent me Delores, this morning, who arrived nearly half an hour late and with one arm in a sling.
‘You’re very late,’ I said when I let her in.
‘Is okay,’ she said, and shrugged.
‘And how will you clean with one arm?’
‘Is okay,’ she said again, though it very clearly wasn’t. But any cleaner is better than no cleaner, and I had my appointment at André’s to get to, so I left her to it. But I have to find someone else. Someone permanent. Soon.
‘Oh, you have to be so careful, don’t you, though?’ André sympathizes as he lifts up a section of my hair and wraps it up in tin foil. ‘One of my ladies had a cleaner once who robbed them of thousands, went through the drawers, found the husband’s bank details, and wham, cleared him out before doing a runner. And another had her house burgled by her cleaner’s son. He’d had her keys copied. She kept little labels on the keys, saying which one was for which house, you know? He took everything. All her jewellery, everything. Never got any of it back.’ He shakes his head at me in the mirror. ‘Sitting ducks,’ he says.
I listen to these horror stories with dread, and find myself a little anxious to get back and check on Delores.
‘Oh, and you’ll never believe this,’ André says with sudden mischief. In one hand he has a length of foil, in the other he’s holding up several strands of my hair, which he waggles now in excitement. I have no choice but to waggle my head along with his hand, attached as we are by my hair. ‘One of my ladies came home early one day and found her husband, and her cleaning lady, in bed.’
I round my eyes, waiting for André to tell me who this particularly unfortunate lady is, as I’m sure he will if prompted. But he suddenly changes tack entirely.
‘Oh, I know what I meant to say to you. A friend of yours was in yesterday . . . who was it now? The one with the awful children.’
‘Juliet?’ I suggest and feel instantly ashamed. Eloise and Jemima aren’t really awful. They’re gifted.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ André says as he starts painting on the bleach. ‘She had some shocking news. Said they’re turning the old people’s home in Chestnut Drive into a refuge for asylum seekers. She brought a petition in. I’ve got it up behind the desk. You can sign it on your way out.’
The next day I’m meeting Tasha and Penny for lunch. I walk into Chico’s at one and they’re there already, sitting side by side, coffee cups on the table in front of them. They must have arranged to meet up early, to talk without me first. I try not to feel annoyed. I try not to feel pushed out, but Tasha’s busy talking on her phone and doesn’t even look up at me, and Penny just gestures impatiently for me to stay quiet, then turns back to Tasha and listens in on her conversation with this ridiculous proprietorial look on her face. So I sit down and listen in too.
Penny tilts her head towards me and stage-whispers, ‘Tasha’s had some bad news.’
My stomach does a little half-turn. It must be something to do with the baby. ‘When I think what might happen . . .’ Tasha says into her phone, and her voice wobbles and she starts blinking back tears. Penny’s hand shoots out and squeezes Tasha’s arm, and I wonder if I could have shot my own hand across the table any quicker and beaten her to it.
‘I know, I know,’ Tasha says. ‘I’ll try, thank you . . .’ Then she puts her phone back in her bag, and sighs and dabs at her eyes.
I sit there, and prepare myself to say the right thing.
‘Poor Tasha,’ Penny says, still with her hand on Tasha’s arm. ‘You okay?’
Tasha manages a small, brave nod and looks at me at last. ‘Hi, Laura,’ she says sadly.
‘Tasha, what is it?’ I say.
But before Tasha can answer, Penny leans across the table at me and says, ‘You won’t believe this. You know the old people’s home opposite Tasha and Rupert’s new house? You know it was up for sale?’
This Perfect World Page 17
