by Anna Maxted
I grimaced but Simon looked through me as if I was wearing orange tie-dye trousers. Within seconds I was feeling like a goat again. This time I went home immediately.
That was five months ago, and now this! I look down on Babs in her frothy white dress and can barely believe it. I should have realized there was mischief afoot when she went missing for three days.
“Don’t worry, though,” she purred when she finally bothered to call: “I’ll do your share of the washing up next week!”
To which I retorted, “Thank you, Barbara, and now if you’ll excuse me I have to call the police to inform them the search for your body is now off.”
I wanted contrition but got instead: “Good idea, because Si’s been conducting his own investigation! Pah ha ha! It’s been very in-depth!”
“It’s very English, isn’t it?” says a voice, making me jump.
Andy leans his arms on the balcony railing, and turns to me, smiling.
“It’s lovely,” I reply, torn between loyalty to Babs and wanting to snub Andy.
“Mum didn’t want to have hymns—Italian weddings don’t have hymns—but Simon’s parents wouldn’t budge.”
“Your parents are very easygoing,” I say. I hope this doesn’t sound friendly.
“Unlike Simon’s. I think Mum and Dad feel like Germany at the Treaty of Versailles.”
“That’s a shame,” I reply. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“So Nat,” he says, “how about a dance later? To ‘Rule Britannia,’ probably.”
“Well, I—”
“We should, we’re practically brother and sister!”
“Thank you, but I already have one brother,” I say. “And believe me, he’s more than enough.”
I return to our table.
Tony is chatting to a Keith over Frannie’s abandoned chair. My brother and Frances Crump do not get on. She calls him an “unreconstructed Neanderthal” while he refers to her as Fork-head (meaning, he’d like to stick a fork in her head). I glance at the top table and see Frannie crouching before Babs like a eunuch in front of Cleopatra. I swallow hard. I don’t get on with Frannie either. Frannie is the Third Friend. She follows Babs around like a pimple on a bottom.
I smile helplessly at Chris, who grins in a way that squeezes the air from my lungs.
“I can’t be doing with weddings,” he drawls. His voice is soft and scratchy, honey on gravel. Its faint northern twang goes straight to my knees. He holds my gaze and adds, “Normally.”
I smile and say, “Me neither.”
Chris tips back in his chair. He seems to have ants in his pants. Meanwhile, Babs and Simon are smooching up for the first dance.
Chris murmurs, “I’d ditch all this and go to Vegas.”
I giggle and say, “Me too.”
Then we fall silent as Kenny and the Drum Kit Krew start up a terrible racket that is faintly recognizable as “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” This is a hard-line wedding, I think, as everyone claps. My mother, I notice, applauds so furiously she looks like a Venus flycatcher on speed.
“I’d go to Vegas,” says Chris again. He and I sit out “Lady in Red” and “Come on, Eileen.” I ask Chris why he’s not wearing a tux like all the other men. His answer is to sniff twice, and cast a withering look at all the other men. Andy, I note, is dancing with Frannie.
“Vegas,” mutters Chris.
“As you said,” I say politely. He grinds his teeth and I’m not sure if he has Alzheimer’s. He then asks why I’m wearing a brown hat. My answer is that my mother over there making a spectacle of herself to “Agadoo” said I should, except I don’t get that far because Chris grabs the hat from my head, drops it onto the violently patterned carpet, and—as I sit there frozen and speechless—unpins my butterfly clasp and rakes his hands through my hair, shaking it out so that it tumbles over my shoulders.
Then he leans closer and closer until we are nearly touching and I can almost taste his bittersweet breath.
“Natalie,” he murmurs, twirling a yellow curl around his finger, “you should let your hair down more often.”
I am dazed and drooling at the delicious raw nerve of the man when a huge white moon face appears between us, forcing us apart, and Frannie sings, “Nataleeee! Where’s your boyfriend, Saul Bowcock?”
2
I’VE KNOWN BABS FOR A LONG TIME. I KNOW WHAT makes Babs laugh—place names like Piddlehinton and Brown Willy. I know what makes her cry—anything, from news reports on starving children to the end of Turner & Hooch when Hooch dies but leaves behind a legacy of puppies. (She bawled, “It’s not the same!”) I know she hates small teeth and the texture of apricots. I know she gets a rash from underwire bras. I know she can beat Tony in an arm-wrestle. I know she has a tiny black spot above her left knee, from a childhood accident with a sharp pencil. I know her favorite words are “hullaballoo” and “pumpkin.” I know what Babs sounds like when she’s having sex.
So you can imagine my pique when Babs reintroduced me to Simon a week after the seventies night fiasco and he said, “So, ah, how do you know Barbara?” I could barely believe he’d made such a blunder. Like asking God, “So, ah, how do you know Adam?”
“How do I know her!” I squeaked before lowering my pitch, as bats were falling out of trees clutching their ears. “I’ve known her for ages,” I choked eventually. “We’re very close friends.”
I was too stricken to say more, but the question stormed round my head like a bully in a playground. How obsessed must Babs and Simon have been that in seven solid days of crash-course intimacy, she hadn’t mentioned me? I soon found out. Their enthrallment was mutual and total. There was endless fondling in front of me. I wanted to roar, “Stop it at once!” But they literally had eyes and ears for no one else. When I spoke, or smiled, they barely saw or heard. I was excluded. It was offensive. It was like a thief shutting you out of your own home. I couldn’t believe it. My boyfriend could have written a thesis on Babs within a fortnight of knowing me. But then maybe Saul Bowcock is less in love than Simon.
Maybe Saul is too sensible to be in love. We are driving—at a sensible speed—to my mother’s solitary white house in Hendon to attend a celebratory dinner for Tony’s latest promotion. (From executive marketing manager to vice president of marketing at Black Moon Records. Although, as my boss Matt observed, “I’ll bet there’s a vice president of teabags at Black Moon Records.”)
Saul likes seeing my mother, as she clucks and fusses after him in the vain hope that he’ll propose to me. “Should we stop off and get Sheila some flowers?” he says, slowing as the traffic lights turn amber instead of speeding up like a normal person.
I nod. “Good idea.”
That’s the trouble with Saul. He’s considerate but he’s also so screamingly proper. He is allergic to straying from his schedule. He thinks an impulse is a deodorant. I glance sideways at his face, and try to think kind thoughts. Saul is a nice man. Honest. Predictable. Safe. Affectionate. The only man I know who taps his girlfriend on the back and says, “I need a cuddle.” “A willy cuddle?” said Babs suspiciously, when I told her. No! A fully clothed frisk-free cuddle. Saul isn’t like other men. We met nine months ago at the chiropodist’s and his chat-up line, I’m sorry to say, was “You have such an intelligent face. What do you do for a living?” As he was never going to get anywhere with any woman ever with hopeless patter like that—surely even the pope has a sharper spiel—I didn’t have the heart to snub him.
“I’m senior press officer for the Greater London Ballet Company,” I replied kindly. “And you?”
“I’m an accountant,” he told me solemnly. “But I do have a nice car.”
I wait in the green Lotus Elise while Saul hurries into Texaco to purchase a bunch of fiercely colored blooms, and bite my nails. Or rather, bite the skin on my fingertips, as I finished my nails last week. I am looking forward to dinner as I look forward to a cervical smear test. It’s nearly a fortnight since Babs’s wedding and
I know my mother will want to dissect it and I don’t have the energy to fight her off.
“I wonder what Sheila’s cooking for supper,” says Saul as he bounces into the driver’s seat. “I’m famished!”
Barry Manilow singing “Copacabana” is audible from the driveway. In a powerful puff of Dune and fried onions, my mother appears, straightens my jumper, and crushes the air out of Saul in a pincer hug. “Don’t you look well. A crying shame you missed the wedding!” she exclaims—shaking her head so fiercely I’m surprised it doesn’t come loose. “But you managed to get all your work done?”
Saul gratefully breathes in upon his release and says, “Yes, thank you, Sheila.” My mother scuttles off to fetch him a glass of milk. Yes, a glass of milk. Saul is a strapping twenty-nine-year-old, but he drinks more milk than a parched baby elephant. Call me lactose intolerant, but it’s a trait I can’t get along with. It’s almost as odd as his habit of sleeping with a black jumper sleeve over his eyes. Which is like The Mask of Zorro without Antonio.
I follow my mother into the steamy kitchen while Saul collapses on the sofa and starts shelling pistachios. I can hear the crack-crack-cracking sound. I chew my fingers and look around. The shelf above the stove is jammed with books. On the left is the F Plan Diet, The Hollywood Pineapple Diet, Beverly Hills Diet, Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, Dr. Tooshis High Fiber Diet, The Grapefruit Diet, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, Reader’s Digest Mind and Mood Foods, Rosemary Conley’s Complete Hip and Thigh Diet, Carbohydrate Addicts Diet: The Lifelong Solution to Yo-Yo Dieting, The Food Combining Diet, Dieting with the Duchess, A Flat Stomach in 15 Days, and (the altogether less efficient) 32 Days to a 32-Inch Waist.
On the right is The House & Garden Cookbook, Step-by-Step Cooking with Chocolate, Delia Smith’s Winter Collection, Leith’s Book of Desserts, Good Housekeeping Cookery Club, Evelyn Rose—Complete International Jewish Cookery, At Home with the Roux Brothers, The Dairy Book of Family Cooking, Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book, The Crank’s Recipe Book, A Wok for All Seasons, A Table in Tuscany, A Little Book of Viennese Pastries, Amish Cooking, 365 Great Chocolate Desserts, The Naked Chef, and The Artful Chicken.
“What can I get you? When did you last comb your hair?” demands my mother as she tips a brick of butter into a casserole dish. “Orange juice? You look like something out of Black Sabbath.”
I reply, “Water’s fine. I’ll brush it in a sec.” I watch as she pours a slick of sunflower oil onto the spitting butter. She’s an expert on heavy metal but thinks cholesterol is a vitamin.
“Are you sure you need all that, Mum?”
My mother wipes her hands on her apron. “And what do you know about cooking herby orange poussin?”
Fair point. “Well, would you like me to make a salad?”
My mother hands me a glass of water, flaps at me with a Beefeater dishcloth, and says, “You’d only chop your finger off. You be a good girl and go and chat to Saul.”
As I trudge toward the living room, the cloying stench of alpine breeze air freshener intensifies with every step (it’s never occurred to my mother to open a window). Then someone presses his entire bodyweight on the poor little doorbell and keeps pressing.
Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggg gggggggggggggggggggggggg!
Tony. My mother zooms past me in a blur and wrenches open the front door.
“Hello, my love,” she says in a sympathetic tone, in honor of the exhausting trek he’s made from Camden Town in his black BMW 5 series 2.0 520i four-door sedan. “How are you? Here, let me take your coat. Hard day? What can I get you? Something to drink? I’ve got that champagne you like in the fridge and I’m doing your favorite desserts, lemon syllabub and chocolate cheesecake. I know it’s naughty but we deserve a treat. I went to Weight Watchers yesterday so tonight I’m free!”
Tony kisses Mum and grins. “Mother,” he says, sighing, “you’re a saint. I can hardly believe we’re related.”
I smile with my mouth shut. Since the divorce Tony and I are hostage to my mother’s needs. Except Tony plays the game better than I do. (In fact, he plays it so well you might suspect him of cheating.) Mum dyes her hair black, tends to wear yellow, and carries a handbag tucked under her arm like a machine gun. You don’t want to upset her in the way that you don’t want to upset a wasp. She lost her capacity for fun fourteen years ago when my father scribbled her a letter on his surgery notepaper that began, “Dear Sheila, Sorry about this but I’d like to jump ship on our marriage…”
You’d think that such an event would dissuade her from chasing her offspring up the aisle. No, indeed. She read Bridget Jones’s Diary and cried. I kiss Tony hello, and brace myself. Our bottoms brush our chairs and she’s off, like a greyhound after a rabbit:
“So Barbara got her happy ending. I spoke to Jackie last week, and this morning, and yesterday—oof. Such a plush do. Altogether she felt it went very well. The groom, Simon, nice-looking boy. You’d never think it, what with his mother’s jaw and teeth. What a fright. And her dress. Cream. And with a figure like that. You just can’t. It did nothing for her, nothing. I said to Jackie, you looked at least twenty years younger than her, at least. You were the belle of the ball, apart from Barbara, of course. She looked a picture, she really—”
“Mum,” says Tony, with a sly glance at me, “she looked like what she is. A fireman in a skirt.”
Saul coughs into his watercress soup. I place my spoon at the side of my plate. Tony has not forgiven Babs for making him victim of her party trick (in front of an audience, she flipped him over her shoulder and ran down the road with him, as if he were as light and inconsequential as a blow-up doll). I say, “Babs is a firefighter, Tony. That’s the correct term. And she did look nice. Tanned, tall—”
“Why aren’t you eating?” interrupts my mother. (She’s justly proud of her cooking and takes offense if you slow down during a meal to, for instance, breathe.)
“I am eating,” I cry, hoping to ward off an explosion. “It’s delicious.”
I wave my spoon in the air as evidence, as my mother says, “I go to all this trouble and you sit there huffing at your soup like it’s bilge water! I don’t—”
“Sheila, you must be very proud of Tony,” suggests Saul. “I forget. How many times have you been promoted in the last year, Tony?”
My brother shrugs and replies, “Three.” Saul and my mother and I wobble our heads in unison.
“Amazing,” murmurs Saul. He coughs, curling his fingers into a tube to, I presume, catch the cough. “You must be marvelous at what you do.”
My mother exclaims, eyes glazed, “Oh he is, Saul, he’s such a credit to me, he’s so talented!”
Saul smiles at her and says, “And so are you, Sheila, this watercress soup is sensational. I don’t suppose there’s any mo—”
“Of course there is!” booms my mother. “My pleasure.”
“Are you sure?” replies Saul, ever the gentleman. “I mean, Sheila, have you had enou—”
“Me?” she exclaims. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll heat it up for you.” She speeds to the kitchen at the pace of a cheetah in a rush, and I slump in relief.
“Nice one, Saul mate,” murmurs Tony. “Don’t know when to stop, do I?”
Saul beams with pleasure and gratitude. I suspect it’s the first time in his life he’s been called “mate.” Then again, there’s something about my brother that bewitches people. He is without doubt an alpha male. You want to please him. A smile from him is like a kiss bestowed by a film star.
I look at Saul, who grins back. “I didn’t realize you were so fond of watercress soup,” he says. “I can make it for you if you like.” I suppress a whimper. Saul is to cooking what whirlwinds are to Kansas.
“That’s sweet of you,” I reply, “but I thought you were going on a health kick.” Saul’s face drops.
“You what!” hoots Tony. “You’re not dieting, are you? You big girl! You want to play a bit of sport, mate. FIFA 2002, some
thing like that!”
Saul blushes. “I’m, er, actually I’m not all that good on the football field—”
“It’s a video game, Saulie,” I murmur as my mother bustles in. She deposits a bowl of soup in front of my boyfriend with the reverence of a courtier presenting the crown jewels to the king, and instructs him: “Eat!” We sit in brief silence while Saul eats.
“Didn’t think much of the food at the wedding,” exclaims my mother, who has been itching to reintroduce her specialist subject for the last three minutes.
“Now if I were organizing a wedding, not that I ever”—here, in deference to Saul, she catches herself—“Well, if I were to organize a wedding I’d spend a lot less on the drink, it’s not necessary for people to get so away with themselves, and a great deal more on ensuring the food was restaurant quality because, and naturally I didn’t say anything to Jackie, but that asparagus was”—here my mother’s voice drops to a low hiss—“tinned!”
We digest the import of this grave news in silence. “And the shame of it is,” continues my mother, “that Jackie wanted to have food from the deli. But Simon’s parents were paying and they insisted on using their caterers,” she adds, in the tone of one personally affronted by this slight.
I catch the scent of an approaching tailspin.
“But you liked the dancing, didn’t you, Mum?” I say in an encouraging tone. “You’re a bit of a Ginger Rogers when you get going.”
“Well, I hope not! She’s so old she’s dead!” retorts my mother.
“I reckon Mum had been at the Special Brew—you’re a bit partial to a can of Special, aren’t you, Mother?” Tony grins.
“Anthony, stop it!” My mother’s mouth is a stern line, but she is trying not to laugh. “That was once and a long time ago, and you gave it to me in a wineglass and said it was Château de Sleepeengruff. I wasn’t to realize it was so potent! Anyway, as if they’d serve lager at a smart wedding like Jackie’s. I mean, Barbara’s!”
