by Sue Margolis
When she arrived at Zilli’s, Stan was already there, sitting at a table by the window. The first thing that struck her was his hair. Usually the first thing she noticed about him was the lacy bra or knickers sample sticking out of his jacket pocket (she’d lost count of the times he’d had to explain to people—waiters, her teachers on school open nights, rabbis—that he worked in ladies’ underwear). Today there was no lingerie, just the hair. A week ago it had been gray, now it was a dark, bottled reddish brown. He’d also brushed it forward so that there was a strange kind of early Beatles fringe thing going on. The effect was made particularly hideous by the yarmulke-shaped bald patch he had, right in the middle of his head. The upshot was he didn’t look so much John Lennon as Little John.
The moment he saw her he stood up and held out his arms to greet her.
“Wow, Dad,” she said, giving him a kiss and a hug, “great hair.”
“You mean that? I just thought it was time for a new look. You don’t think it’s too much for a man of my age?”
“No, I love it. It really suits you.”
The waiter came over to take their drink order. Stan ordered a bottle of champagne “because this is a celebration,” but it was as much as she could do to stop herself from saying, “Oh, and innkeeper, my father will also have a tankard of your best mead.”
“And what do you think of the slacks?” he said, half standing again. She hadn’t noticed until now. He was wearing cargo pants. With a tweed sports jacket. And shoes with Velcro fasteners. “Personally I prefer something with an elasticized waist, but I thought I’d give them a go. Apparently they’re very with-it.”
“Yeah, they’re great. Very now.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a paper bag. “Before I forget, I found this in the secondhand bookshop at the end of my road. Thought you might like it.”
Stan collected bizarre books with equally bizarre titles. He had over fifty. Her favorites were A Study of Hospital Waiting Lists in Cardiff, 1953–1954; Who’s Who in Barbed Wire and one from the 1930s called Games You Can Play with Your Pussy. Whenever she saw something she thought he would like, she bought it. This one was a Western from the fifties.
“Tosser Hitches His Wagon,” he guffawed. “Brilliant. I love it. But you shouldn’t.”
“Yes, I should,” she said, smiling. “So, Dad, come on, you’ve got me all excited. What’s the big surprise?”
He reached across the table, took her hand in his and squeezed it. “You know I love you, don’t you, sweetie?”
“Of course I do. And I love you, too.”
“And you know that nobody could ever replace your mother.”
Could this possibly be going where she hoped it was going?
“You’ve met somebody, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “Her name’s Bernadette,” he said, beaming. “We’re getting married.”
“Omigod!” she squealed, getting up to hug him. “I can’t believe it. After all these years, you’ve finally gone and done it. But you never said anything.”
“I—that is, Bernadette and me—we wanted to be certain.”
“Yeah, it’s a big step. I can understand that.” She went back to her seat. “So c’mon, dish,” she said, taking his hand again, “tell me everything about her. How did you meet? Where does she live? Does she work?”
Stan said they met at his book club, that she lived in Muswell Hill, just a few streets from Rebecca, and that she owned her own beauty salon.
“And what, she’s about your age?” Rebecca said, imagining a slim, beautifully preserved woman of about sixty.
“A bit younger.”
“What, fifties?”
He gave a little shrug.
“Forties?”
He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat.
“Dad,” she said, beginning to feel anxious now. “Exactly how old is Bernadette?”
He cleared his throat. “Thirty-two.”
“Ah.”
She leaned back in her chair and sat processing this information. “Omigod. I’m going to have a stepmother the same age as me.”
This could take some getting used to, she thought. But at least now she had an explanation for Stan’s new look.
“I know this has come as a bit of a shock,” he said, “but Bernadette and I just don’t think about the age thing. When you’re in love, a few years is neither here nor there.”
The waiter arrived with the champagne and began filling their glasses.
“But, Dad, it’s not just a few years,” she said when he’d gone. “It’s over thirty years. What do you have in common? What are you going to talk about? You remember rationing and Glenn Miller. Her idea of rationing is probably a Miller Lite.”
“I know, I know, but we just think stuff like that’s funny. We are just so happy. She makes me feel like a teenager again.”
She took a long, slow breath and looked into his watery brown eyes with their droopy lids. His face always reminded her of a King Charles spaniel. She could see how desperate he was for her approval. Despite her reservations, she at least had to pretend it was fine with her.
“Well, Dad,” she said, her face breaking into a smile, “if it’s what you really want and this Bernadette makes you happy, then I’m happy, too.”
Stan patted the back of her hand. “You don’t know how much I was hoping you’d say that. By the way, don’t say anything to your grandmother. I haven’t mentioned any of this to her yet. Apart from the age thing, Bernadette’s not Jewish. She’s Catholic.”
“No kidding.”
“Might take your gran a while to come round.”
Rebecca nodded. Then they clinked glasses and toasted the future.
“And guess what,” he said afterward, lowering his voice, “I had my vasectomy reversed just after Christmas—during those two weeks you were away.”
Rebecca almost choked on her champagne.
“We don’t know if it’s worked, but I’ve got my checkup this afternoon. I can make a start on your book in the waiting room.”
He began flicking through the first few pages of Tosser Hitches His Wagon.
3
I’ll have you know, young man,” Lady Axminster was bellowing down the phone, “that I have spent the last half hour shoveling three feet of ‘dry and partly cloudy’ off my daughter’s front path.”
Rebecca, who had been shown into the kitchen by Jess’s elderly maid, Dolly, shot her friend an amused, quizzical look.
“Oh, Mum’s just having one of her rants. Apparently the BBC got the weather wrong again and forgot to mention the snow.”
Rebecca nodded. She’d known Marjorie Axminster almost as long as she’d known Jess. Over the years she’d grown accustomed to her rants. Once, when she’d been staying with the two of them at the Axminster pile in Slapton Gusset, her ladyship had spent several hours each day on the phone to the emergency help-line at the rural district council demanding something be done immediately to halt the dawn chorus. It had been starting an utterly unacceptable two hours before sunrise and disturbing her sleep.
“It’s all these agrochemicals the birds come into contact with,” she’d railed at some poor minion. “They’re making the poor creatures hyperactive.”
Jess swiveled back round on her chair to face Diggory, who was sitting in his little bouncy cradle, looking exceedingly cute in the Gap tracksuit Rebecca had bought him just after he was born. In her hand Jess had a stack of what appeared to be printed postcards.
“OK, darling,” she cooed, holding a card about two inches from Diggory’s nose. “Now come on, concentrate for Mummy. Spitsbergen, Arctic country. Edvard Grieg, Norwegian composer, 1843 to 1907. Wrote Peer Gynt. Kemal Atatürk, reforming Turkish president. À la Florentine, a dish with spinach.”
“Jess, what on earth are you doing?” Rebecca asked.
“Showing him flash cards. According to this book I’ve been reading on the development of human intelligence, you can’t start exercising babies�
�� brains too soon.” She chucked her son under the chin. “And we don’t want you turning out to be an ickle Dignoramus, do we?”
“But with all due respect to my godson here,” Rebecca said, bending down to give Diggory a kiss on his scurfy head, “babies this age aren’t much more than glorified plants, are they?”
“Well, that’s just where you’re wrong. Apparently they start absorbing information virtually from the moment they’re born. Look, I know it seems harsh, but you have to remember he’s got his preprep entrance exam in less than three years. The competition’s horrendous.”
“But I thought you disapproved of private education.”
Jess had rebelled against her privileged background as a teenager. Ever since Rebecca had known her she’d been a card-carrying member of the Labour Party. Two years ago she married Ed, a reporter on a left-wing tabloid, and moved to oh-so-egalitarian Archway.
“Oh, I do. I do,” Jess shot back, her eyes gleaming with sincerity. “Ideologically. The problem is the state schools round here are just so dire. You know the kind of thing—they reach sixteen and can’t even write a business letter. Best they can manage is a formal collage.”
Rebecca smiled and supposed she couldn’t blame Jess for wanting the best for Diggory—although she still had grave doubts about the flash cards. If Jess wasn’t careful, the poor mite would be burned out before she had him on solids.
She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down at the long, grease-smeared farmhouse table that was littered with dirty dishes and cups, baby clothes and a couple of sodden Pampers that were starting to smell. At the far end, the cat—a lardy ginger tom—was sprawled out over a plate of dried-up egg, sniffing and licking Diggory’s pacifier.
One aspect of her background Jess hadn’t been able to shake off was the traditional upper-class penchant for domestic disorder and chaos. Although scrupulous about her personal hygiene (unlike her mother, who always had a niff of damp Labrador about her and who would arrive home after an afternoon out with the Slapton Gusset hunt and get changed for a ball without showering first), she shunned household cleanliness with an energy most people reserved for depleted uranium. To her, a skid mark-free lavatory bowl was just one step away from a home gym and a cocktail cabinet that played Greensleeves.
Jess’s lack of hygiene about the home was nothing compared to her grandfather’s. In the twenties the then Lord Axminster (virtually the only member of the upper house who believed Mrs. Simpson would have made an excellent queen) had ordered a urinal to be plumbed into the dining room at the house in Slapton Gusset so that he could break off for a pee during dinner and still carry on a conversation.
It was Ed, who had been brought up by a lorry driver and a school dinner lady in a thirties terraced house in Chingford, who insisted on getting a housecleaner. But as far as Rebecca could make out, all Dolly seemed to do for eight hours a week was rearrange the dirt.
“And you with knobs on,” Lady Axminster boomed, slamming down the phone.
Looking every inch the queen at Balmoral (green padded jacket, tweed skirt, pearls), she strode over to Rebecca and greeted her with a perfunctory, rather distracted double kiss. Yep, definite doggy smell, Rebecca decided.
“Hi, Lady A. How are you?”
“Well, if you must know, Rebecca …” Her accent couldn’t have been more cut glass if it had been made by Waterford. “I am fed up to the back teeth with being patronized and whined at by ignorant nincompoops with degrees in Estuary English from the University of Haringey.”
“And I’m not so bad either, thanks,” Rebecca said, and at the same time happened to notice Lady Axminster’s earrings.
“Gosh,” she said peering at the clusters of diamonds and pearls, “those are exquisite.”
“Yes, they are rather stunning,” Lady Axminster said, allowing her face to break into a smile. “They were given to my mother when she came out.”
At this point, Dolly the cleaner, who until now had been supposedly vacuuming upstairs, walked back into the room, carrying a pile of Diggory’s dirty clothes.
“Ooh,” she said, opening the washing machine door, “we ’ad a coming out party for my mum once. She went down for soliciting on the Whitechapel Road. Same wi’ yours, was it?”
But Lady Axminster wasn’t listening. She’d noticed Jess’s computer, which was sitting at the far end of the table next to the ginger tom, and had begun reading from the screen.
“Good Lord, Jessica,” she said, “this is revolting, utterly revolting. I cannot believe you get paid to write filth like this.”
(Since having Diggory, Jess was writing her magazine advice column at home. She was in the middle of replying to a chap desperate to find a cure for his premature ejaculation.)
“What filth?” Jess came back, feigning offense and nudging Rebecca.
“You know—words like that,” she tapped the screen.
“Like what?” Jess insisted, teasing.
“Stop it, Jessica. I will not be bullied. You know precisely what I mean.” Rebecca smiled to herself. Although they weren’t even remotely alike in any other way, Lady A reminded her of Lucretia.
“What? Words like penis, erection, come?”
“Oh, please, no, not that last one.” Lady Axminster looked as if she’d just been offered a plate of whelks.
Jess turned to Rebecca and grinned. “What you have to understand,” she said, “is that the sexual revolution never quite made it to Slapton Gusset. People there don’t say ‘come.’ They prefer to announce that ‘one has arrived.’”
Jess and Rebecca collapsed.
“Now you’re just being silly,” her ladyship said huffily. “It’s just that when I was growing up, sex was a personal affair. Men and women never talked openly about their private parts. In my day, one’s husband kept his scrotum firmly under his hat.”
More snorts from Rebecca and Jess.
“Quite right, yer ladyship,” Dolly said, heading back upstairs, a duster in one hand, a can of Pledge in the other. “When I was a girl we had no time for sex. We were too busy having babies.”
Lady Axminster merely arched her eyebrows in disdain. Then she bent down and dabbed at some fresh sick that had begun trickling down Diggory’s chin.
“That’s a dear little outfit he has on,” she said, regarding Diggory’s Gap tracksuit, “but do you mind telling me why everything people wear these days has to have a brand name emblazoned across it? And it’s not just clothes. TV programs, public buildings, sports stadiums—everything has to have a sponsor. I swear it’s only the royals who have any dignity left.”
“Not for long, Mum,” Jess said. “You know they’re always pleading poverty. Pretty soon we’ll have the All Bran Queen proceeding down the Andrex Mall with her son the Tampax Prince of Wales to see the Changing of the Durex Featherlite Guard.”
Lady Axminster gave a theatrical shiver. A moment later she was picking up her gloves and Burberry handbag and announcing she had to get home (to the Chelsea pied-à-terre) to change for a charity do.
Jess always said it was her mother’s good works that had kept her sane since Lord Axminster left her ten years ago for a high-class Spanish call girl half his age. The day after he was famously caught by the paparazzi drinking champagne from the woman’s evening shoe, Lady Axminster was quoted in Dempster, saying, “I hope the swine catches athlete’s tongue.” From that moment she rarely mentioned or spoke of him again. Arranging charity fund-raisers became her therapy. As far as the do-gooding members of the upper classes were concerned, her organizational skills were second to none. Within twenty-four hours of any earthquake, hurricane or interesting new disease being announced, Lady Axminster would be putting on a ball.
The moment Lady Axminster left, Diggory started to squawk. Before Rebecca could stop her, Jess had leaned across the table, picked up Diggory’s pacifier from beside the cat and shoved it into his mouth.
“OK, do I have news,” Rebecca said as the baby sucked quietly on the cat-lick-smeared
teat.
“Oh, God, you’re not.”
“What?”
“Up the spout.”
“No. I am not up the spout,” Rebecca shot back indignantly. “What I am, is about to acquire a stepmother.”
“What? Stan’s finally getting married? That’s great.”
“Yes. Except she’s thirty-two.”
“Oh, my God,” Jess cried, “he’s done exactly what my father did. Except Dad and Bienvenida aren’t actually married. And she was a prostitute, of course.”
“And I bet your dad didn’t start dyeing his hair and wearing cargo pants. He’s even had his vasectomy reversed.”
“His vasectomy reversed? Jeez, him and the kids’ll be in nappies together.” Jess paused and took a deep breath. “I dunno, when does maturity finally set in for a man?”
“About six months after death, I reckon,” Rebecca replied, making her friend laugh.
“So, come on, joking aside,” Jess said, getting up, “how do you really feel about your dad and this woman?” She flicked the switch on the kettle.
Rebecca said she’d only tell if Jess promised not to make fun or say she was stupid.
“Hey, c’mon, I’m your best mate. As if.”
“OK. I know it’s daft, but I feel jealous of her. I mean Bernadette’s my age. What if she’s really gorgeous?”
“You mean you see her as some kind of rival?”
Rebecca nodded. “Plus she’s taking my dad away. I never thought I’d feel like this. I mean, I’ve been praying for him to get married again, for years. But now I’m starting to realize how much I’ve enjoyed having him to myself. And what if she takes the whole stepmother thing to heart and starts trying to boss me about? Then if they have kids …” Her voice trailed off.
“Your dad may not want you anymore.”
“God,” Rebecca said, “I sound like an insecure eight-year-old, don’t I?”
“Yeah, but it’s perfectly normal. I loathed Bienvenida until I discovered she couldn’t have children and had a face full of moles.”
She began pouring boiling water over tea bags. “Look, Stan worships you. That won’t change. And the chances are this Bernadette’ll turn out to be dead ordinary-looking and really nice.”
