Poppy believed in karma. So even though Hannah’s attacks were humiliating, she meekly submitted to them knowing that, if anything, she was getting off lightly for her evil behaviour.
‘Oh Clara! Put that down!’
Clara continued rubbing Poppy’s favourite Shiseido lipstick all over her face.
‘Clara, that’s Mummy’s, give it to me.’
‘No-wagh.’
Poppy struggled to recall the techniques imparted from all the childcare programmes she watched when Luke was out entertaining contacts. ‘Then Mummy will have to take it from you,’ she threatened.
A sly look came over Clara’s pretty face, as she backed towards the wall.
‘No-wagh.’
Poppy looked round helplessly as if Supernanny might be hiding in the cupboard ready to jump out and help her subdue this ferocious toddler.
‘Please?’ she asked meekly.
Clara turned her back and started drawing on the wall.
‘Oh, sweetie, don’t do that. No!’ Luke would go mad. Poppy bounded across the room and snatched the lipstick. Immediately, Clara’s face creased and she began to scream a scream that could lead warriors into battle.
‘Noooo! Noooo! Noooo! Give me, Mummy. Give meeeee!’
Luke stuck his head around the door. ‘For God’s sake! What’s all the racket for?’
‘Nothing,’ said Poppy, positioning herself in front of the graffiti. She was sure the marks would come out with a bit of soap and water. ‘Clara’s just tired. Aren’t you, poppet?’
‘No, Mummeee. No tired.’
‘Did you have a good day?’ Poppy asked. It had been Luke’s day off and she had hoped he might spend it with them, but he’d lunched in town with a contact.
‘Yeah, not bad,’ he said absently. ‘Will Glenda be here soon? You should be getting ready.’
‘Half past seven, I told her.’
‘That’s now,’ Luke said, flopping on the bed. Poppy’s heart started to thud. If he discovered the Post under the duvet cover she’d be in big trouble. Happily, he was distracted by Clara trying to scramble on to his chest.
‘Clah-Clah, I just told Mummy, it’s time you got in your pyjamas.’
‘I don’t think she’s ready yet,’ Poppy said, rearranging the bedclothes to hide the paper better. ‘She had a really long nap this afternoon.’
‘You just said she was tired.’ Luke sighed. ‘You let her sleep too long in the afternoons. Hannah had some kind of routine for the children, where you only let them sleep a bit in the day at set times and then they always went to bed at seven and were always up at seven. That way you got the evenings to yourself.’
‘Mmm,’ Poppy said, trying surreptitiously to shift the cheval mirror, so it covered the red marks on the wall. It was what she always said when Luke praised his ex-wife. Bloody control freak. Why on earth would you want your child up at seven every day? She didn’t want Clara going to bed at seven sharp either. Well, sometimes it would be nice, but Luke was out so often in the evenings; Poppy relied on her daughter for company.
The doorbell rang. ‘Ah, that’ll be Glenda. I’ll let her in. The cab’s coming at quarter to. Think you can be ready by then?’
Poppy knew a dig when she heard one. She always did everything to delay these outings, in the vain hope Luke would suddenly decide he’d rather spend an evening in with her than go out schmoozing. She looked in the mirror on her dressing table. Not bad, she thought, looking at her floaty blue top from Portobello and the grey pinstripe trousers she’d found on a market stall in Dalston when she and Clara were on one of their adventures in the East End. Poppy had never been that into clothes and had quite happily slipped into the new-mum’s uniform of stained sweatpants and T-shirts, not worried if she ever wore a pair of heels again. But she knew she had to make some effort when she and Luke went out together. It had taken some time to shift the baby weight after Clara was born and she was still not quite as skinny as when she had been modelling, but she thought a healthy child was more important than getting to size zero.
‘Hello, darlin’!’
Glenda came bustling into the room. She was forty-five, with four children of her own in the Philippines whom she visited once a year for a fortnight. Compared to her, Poppy knew her problems were small. But the Alonto family’s loss had been Poppy’s gain. She hadn’t wanted a cleaner, but she hadn’t realized Glenda would end up being an unpaid shrink as well. Without her weekly visits, Poppy thought she would have gone a bit doolally for want of another mother to confide in.
‘Hey! How are you?’ She smiled.
‘Fine, my love. How are you?’ She swooped on Clara. ‘Hello, darling. How are you? Oh, I missed you, sweet angel.’
‘Gwenda!’
‘Why you no in your pyjamas? Come with Auntie Glenda, I make you all cosy.’
Obediently Clara toddled off with her. Poppy watched, stricken. How come Clara never did that with her? Was there anything she wasn’t rubbish at? The doorbell rang again.
‘Poppy, that’s the cab,’ Luke yelled from downstairs.
‘Just a second.’ She ran into Clara’s room, where her baby was looking angelic in her flowery pyjamas. She fell to her knees. ‘Goodnight, darling. Can Mummy have a cuddle?’
‘No-wagh.’
‘I’ll read you a story.’ Poppy always tried this one on the rare occasion Luke had friends over, even though she knew she should be making witty and erudite conversation downstairs. She could spend hours tucked up cosily with Poppy, avoiding the ‘grown-ups’ as she couldn’t help thinking of them by invoking the cast-iron excuse of introducing her daughter to the glory of the written word.
But as usual Clara was wise to her mummy’s ruse. ‘No wanna story.’
Luke stuck his head round the door. ‘Poppy! The taxi’s here.’
‘But Clara needs a story.’
‘No wanna story,’ Clara repeated, as Luke said. ‘Well, Glenda can read you one.’
Defeated, Poppy knelt down and kissed her. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then. Be a good girl for Glenda.’
‘She’s always a good girl for me,’ Glenda purred.
In the back of the taxi, Luke leant back against the burgundy upholstery and sighed.
‘At long last we’re going out together.’
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Poppy lied. ‘Tell me more about it. Dean Cutler’s your new editor.’
‘Yup, so be very, very nice to him because the rumour is that Dean has the knives out for everyone on the show over forty. Which means me.’
‘You mean you might lose your job?’
‘I might indeed.’ Luke stared out at the Marylebone Road. ‘How old is Clara now?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Nearly two?’
‘Twenty-three months.’ It never failed to amaze her that Luke couldn’t remember pieces of information that were tattooed on her heart.
‘So she’ll start nursery soon.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Poppy vaguely. Despite nagging from everyone from the man at the dry cleaners to the health visitor, from Louise to Meena, she had steadfastly refused to put Clara’s name down for nursery, so much did the prospect of sending her baby out into the big, bad world terrify her.
‘So you’ll soon be able to go back to work.’
‘Mmm.’
Luke reached out and took her hand. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, Poppy. It would be good for you. Get you out of the house. Earn your own money. Be able to talk to people about something more than nappies and Teletubbies.’
He’d been reading bloody Hannah. ‘Mmm,’ she said then, deciding it was worth another try, she squeezed his hand. ‘But I was thinking maybe soon we’d have another baby.’
As always when the subject came up, Luke sighed heavily. ‘You know what I think about that. I’ve got four children already. I can’t support another one.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Look, sweetheart, just think about the work thing. You can’t stay at home doing nothing for ever.’
; ‘I don’t do nothing,’ Poppy protested, but the cab was drawing up outside Dean Cutler’s terrace house in West Hampstead.
8
About an hour earlier Thea Mackharven was turning this way and that in front of the mirror of her one-bedroom flat in Stockwell to the strains of Bob Dylan singing about Black Diamond Bay on her favourite of all his albums Desire. Not bad, she thought of her dark green Joseph trouser suit and her hair piled in an unruly topknot, that she hoped was sexy rather than bag lady.
Thea knew she was not a natural beauty. As with everything in her life, she’d worked damn hard with her raw materials and – as with everything else – she’d succeeded. No one would ever say Thea was gorgeous but they would say she was ‘very attractive’, a tag which she’d managed, heroically, to retain even after passing the watershed of thirty-five. Only in the past few months had the mirror occasionally revealed a tired woman with a sunburst of lines round her eyes and mouth that thousands of pounds of rhinoceros’s innards and penta-peptides had been unable to keep at bay.
Tonight, however, her reflection was on her side. She smiled triumphantly, then glanced round the room. It had a rather corporate feel, she had to admit. Thea had owned it for nearly nine years but beyond a quick paint job when she bought it, she’d done little to make it feel like a real home. She had about as much interest in interior decoration as she did in the sex life of the aardvark. Her flat represented somewhere she slept for a few hours after rolling in after a long night in Soho House rather than any kind of nest. Its highlights were its proximity to the Tube and the twenty-four-hour shop below. All right, it did look a little bleak, but it would be better once she got round to unpacking her New York stuff, not that that amounted to more than a couple of boxes. Thea prided herself on travelling light, on being available to up sticks at a few hours’ notice. Possessions just slowed that process down.
It was unsettling to think that just a month ago, this space had been full of the clutter of Parveen; she worked for an accountant in the West End. Luckily, she’d been transferred to the Leeds office before Thea had been called back to London and before she’d found a new tenant, meaning she’d been able to move straight back in. Who had Parveen entertained in this bedroom? Thea wondered, then swallowed hard as she thought back to the last time she had been naked there with a man.
‘Come on,’ she snapped at herself, triple-locking the door and tapping down the stairs. She strode down her Victorian terraced street and on to the main road, inhaling the South London smell of fast food and petrol. Head in the air she walked even faster past a gaggle of hooded youths sitting on a wall, but they seemed more interested in their mobiles than in her. Thea felt a pang for the days when gangs of men had meant wolf whistles rather than potential stab wounds.
She had been staggered by how much London had changed in the short time she’d been away. Bits of it had got so much richer, with everyone floating round with blow-dried hair and threaded eyebrows (and that was just the men) as if they were on Rodeo Drive. Other bits, however, like Stockwell seemed to have got poorer and nastier, with an unsettling undercurrent of violence. She’d love to move to a smarter area, but with Gran’s care-home fees, she couldn’t afford it.
Still, she thought with a sudden swing in her heart, it was great to be back. Despite the dirt, the noise, the crowds, the grey, the rain, the incredible expense, Thea adored London, adored it – to everyone’s surprise – far more than New York, which she found a little bit too sanitized and populated by wannabe Gwyneth Paltrows with bleached blonde hair and perfect teeth who said ‘that’s funny’ to all Thea’s jokes as if she’d just told them they had terminal cancer. No, London was better. She adored the sense of possibility that existed here, the way anything was available: Portuguese custard tarts, dog yoga teachers, Swarovski-studded burkas. She loved how Poles lived next door to Brazilians, who lived next door to Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Canadians; how three hundred languages were spoken within the M25; the way the city was so big and noisy you could lead whatever life you chose without fear of a moment’s silence in which to question if that choice was the right one.
She’d yearned to live here ever since she’d come on a school trip to see Annie at the London Palladium when she was twelve. As a teenager, she had thought ‘sashimi in Soho’ was the most glamorous phrase known to man and now she could eat sashimi whenever she liked in whichever parish she chose. Sometimes Thea had to pinch herself when she realized this life was actually hers. All right, television didn’t pay like banking or law, but she lived comfortably and she got to travel the world and have adventures that someone from Dumberley could never have dreamed of.
Yes, all in all, Thea’s life was pretty perfect. Once she’d thought she needed one thing to complete it, but she was over that now.
She strode past the motley collection of drunks, drug-pushers and losers waiting for their dates at the Tube entrance and hurried over to the kiosk selling sweets and cigarettes. As embarrassed as if she was buying an ounce of crack, she picked up a bag of Skittles and handed over 55 pence.
Thea liked to see herself as the kind of woman who, in times of high anxiety, might sip a herbal tea or inhale some Rescue Remedy, but truth be told in times of trouble the thing that calmed her down best was a packet of brightly coloured sweeties stuffed with additives, which she would munch in strict colour order, first the yellows, then oranges, then greens, then reds and finally – having saved the best until last – the tangy purples.
Purchase achieved, she swiped her Oyster card on the barrier and hurried down the escalator. Thea was far too impatient to stand still and let the stairs carry her. As she waited for a Victoria line train – eight bloody minutes according to the electronic sign – she popped on her headphones and, to the strains of Bob telling her not to think twice, contemplated the evening ahead.
She was going to see Luke again. Not that it was that big a deal; she was long over him. But still, she couldn’t help being a bit nervous.
Like Poppy, Thea had always had a thing about older men and like Poppy, it wasn’t hard to see why. As a spotty, flat-chested teenager, the boys at school had had no interest in her whatsoever. Being proud, she pretended to have no interest in them either. Teenage boys were oafs, she had decided. She preferred older, cleverer men. Men who could drive. Men who read broadsheets and novels by dead Russian authors. Who ate frogs legs and played chess. Who listened to Bob Dylan rather than Wham! With those attributes in mind Thea conceived the first of her crushes on her history teacher, Mr Lyons, spending hours on her essays, sitting attentively at the front of the class, only to be rewarded by a ‘Thea is a very good student’ in her reports, before she discovered he was having an affair with Miss Jones, the French teacher.
The same pattern was repeated at college. Although by now her fellow students gave her plenty of attention, she couldn’t reciprocate it. She lost her virginity to one of the grey-bearded lecturers, who then told her his wife was pregnant with twins and it couldn’t go any further. Following that she had an affair with another lecturer; it lasted two years until he and his family moved to Bath.
She’d fallen in love with Luke before she’d even met him, watching his reports on the BBC. There couldn’t be much doubt that he was the perfect man: brave, clever and astonishingly good-looking with his dark, thick hair, Easter Island head and Roman nose. He was one of the reasons she applied for a job as a researcher at the organization, although she never met him in her time there. But when the Seven Thirty News was founded she jumped ship to become a junior producer. The first time she had to brief him on a story, she stuttered and her hands, clutching a sheaf of papers, shook uncontrollably.
At first, he took virtually no notice of her, just grabbing the briefing from her with a snappy, ‘Thanks’. But in the months and years to come, they travelled all over the world together. She produced his coverage of the Oscars, presidential inaugurations, elections in South America, disaster zones in the Far East. Inevitably, spending so much tim
e together they’d become friends. At the end of the day, in far-flung places, they’d talk about books and films and world affairs and how annoying everyone else in the office was. Once, in the Sudan, they’d even shared a scuzzy hotel room, where cockroaches crawled across the floor. Thea had suffered agonies of constipation rather than poo within Luke’s hearing and had slept in full make-up, so he’d always see her at her loveliest.
Inevitably they had sex. The first time was in Pakistan, when their car had been in an accident on a narrow mountain road and they had luckily escaped with only bumps and bruises. That night they got drunk on illegally imported alcohol and ended up in bed. The next morning, Thea’s heart was singing like a karaoke freak, but the expression on Luke’s face told her plainly he didn’t want to go there. So she left it, said nothing, acted as if the night had never happened and, because she played it cool, four months later they had a repeat in Malawi. So it went on for the next four years, the occasional night of carnal knowledge, followed by eye avoidance the next day, before they settled back into their familiar colleagues’ routines.
87
Thea was in love with Luke, wholeheartedly, passionately. They were intellectual equals and soulmates. In every conversation, Thea looked for points of contact. He loved Marmite – well, so did she! He loathed jazz. Ditto. His idol was the Polish war reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski. Same here! He hated sushi – oh well, it would be boring if they had everything in common. She was sure if they’d met at another time, they’d have been together. But she never let her love show. She’d seen his other girlfriends getting obsessed, texting him constantly, leaving lipsticks in his pocket in the hope Hannah would find them. They never lasted long. Luke loathed any form of pressure. To win him, Thea knew she needed to play the long game, to make no demands, simply to be there when the time was right.
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