I was halfway to the front door to put the garbage out after this, when the phone rang. I ran back in, snagging the trash bag on the children’s pegs in the hall, dripping burst teabag and eggshell on the carpet, assuming it was Mel to say she couldn’t make it after all. It wasn’t.
“Maggie!” gushed the voice on the other end. “I’m so glad I’ve caught you. I was sure you’d be out somehow. I just wanted to say how glad I was that you both managed to come on Saturday. But I’ve been feeling dreadful that I didn’t get a chance to talk to you. Did you have an awful time? Was it the worst, worst party you’ve ever been to?”
“Hello, Claire,” I said, taken aback. “Not at all. It was very nice. I should have rung you to thank you. I had a great time. And Jake did too. In fact, I haven’t seen him enjoy himself so much in . . . well, for years.” I was clearing up the eggshell and thinking, why is she ringing me? It was so out of character. The old Claire never rung me. I was always the one who rang her. And then when I went around, I’d often find someone else already there, and they’d have already played with her makeup, and be in the middle of trying on her mum’s old clothes, and I’d feel plain and wan standing in the doorway. Now she wanted me. The thought pleased me, flattered me.
“God, you are an angel to say so,” she was saying. “Listen, when are we going to meet? I’m longing to see you properly and really, really catch up. It was fantastically frustrating not to talk to you properly at the bash. I wanted to just wrench everybody else aside to find you, but you know what it’s like . . .”
“Of course,” I said.
“And . . .” Her voice shifted a gear. “I wanted to ask if you were all right. You were looking quite tired and . . .”
“Children,” I said.
“. . . and run down.”
Oh great. “Probably goes with the territory,” I said.
“. . . and . . .” “. . . and . . .”
“What?”
“. . . and what’s happened to your hair? Didn’t it use to be curly?” Her voice was over-burdened with sympathy.
“Yes,” I said. “No, it has changed. I think that’s pregnancy. Tragedy really.” I meant it facetiously. I didn’t really care if my hair was straight or wavy. Those days all that mattered was that it was out of my eyes.
“Oh Maggie,” she said. “We do need to sort you out, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I laughed jollily, hollowly.
“So listen, get your date book, girl. Right now.”
I went and got my date book. I used to be rather fussy about date books. I’d had a Filofax stage, in both big and small format. I’d had a classy buttoned-up Coach stage and, when I was at the journal, a big cloth-bound desk-job stage which had also kept me abreast of the birthdays of various dead literary figures. But, since the children, and since giving up work, there wasn’t much call for any form of date book, really. I could keep most of my appointments (a dental appointment here, a swimming pool meet there) in my head. At that stage in my life, I was scrawling the odd thing in a freebie off the front of Cosmo the woman at the newsagent had given Fergus (she was always saving things from magazines to give Fergus—sometimes he hit pay dirt with a Sesame Street fridge magnet from Tots TV; other times he’d leave the shop with a baffled expression and a plastic artists modelling scalpel from the front of Craft-Works).
Open in front of me then was my Cosmo Girl freebie. Blank.
“You must be busy, busy, busy,” said Claire. “What with the children and everything. And I’m quite tight this week. Tomorrow, let’s think. . . . I’ve got a meeting with my agent in the morning. I’m seeing a publisher to discuss turning my Times column into a book in the afternoon . . . And then on Thursday . . .”
“Busy, busy, busy,” I interrupted.
“No, actually, Thursday is quite clear. I’ve got to write my col some time, but . . . I don’t know. Thursday morning? Coffee?”
I was staring at my blank date book. I panicked. I grabbed the nearest other thing to hand. The Yellow Pages (South London) was underneath a pile of unpaid bills on the kitchen counter. I opened it at random.
“No good, er, electrolysis,” I said.
She didn’t miss a beat. “Lunchtime?”
“Engine tuning.”
“What?”
“The engine, the car engine, got to take it to be tuned.”
“Thursday evening?”
Escort agencies. No. Frantically I turned the page. “Exercise equipment. I mean exercise class.”
“Okay then. Friday morning?”
I’d reached explosive engineers. “That’s great,” I said, closing the book. “I can make that. Here?”
“Fantastic. Can’t wait.”
I was about to put the phone down when she added, “Oh and just one other thing. Jake said . . . he was being very interested about ‘pester power’ the other night, about how advertisers target purchasers through their children, and it struck me it would make a very good piece and I just wondered . . . Could you ask him to give me a ring some time?”
“He’s working very hard at the moment,” I said. “You might be better off trying him at the office.”
“Actually, I have. I just thought if I left a message here too . . .”
“Of course,” I said. “Right. Bye then. See you.”
And then Claire said, “Ciao.”
When I put the phone down I said “ciao” crisply to myself in the mirror. And then I said it again, with a provocative curl to my lip, “ciao.” And then I twisted my body away, so I was looking at myself over my shoulder, and I pushed my nose up with my finger and, with my top teeth digging into my tongue, I said, with comic exaggeration, “Ci-ao. Ci-ao. Ci-ao.” And then I felt much better.
Jake hadn’t gotten back before midnight all week, creeping into bed long after I’d gone to sleep, but that night he’d promised to be home in time to see Fran and Rain, who were coming around for supper.
Fran had left her birth plan behind on Saturday. In the meantime Jake had defaced it. He’d replaced “Mozart, Elder-flower, Birthing Pool” with “Pethidine, Epidural, Emergency Caesarean.”
“You. Are. Such. A. Child,” she said, chasing him around the kitchen with the birth plan curled up in her hand like a rolling pin.
“Help me. Help me,” he squawked, trying to hide behind me while I was cooking. “Mad pregnant hippy on the loose.”
Later, when they were setting the table, he pretended to be intensely interested in something above her waistband. “What? What?” she said, craning her neck and panicking.
He peered closer and closer. “Fran,” he whispered. “Maggie, Rain, quickly come and see. It’s . . . a . . . yes . . . it’s . . . a . . . STRETCHMARK!!!!!”
She screamed and hit him on the head with the paper.
I said, “Fran. Ignore him. He wouldn’t know a stretchmark if it bounced off and twanged him in the eye.”
I suppose I was asking for it because Jake just laughed and said, “Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah?” I repeated.
“Well . . .”
“Charming.” I said it jokingly, and normally it wouldn’t have bothered me, but a bit later, after we’d eaten our cannelloni with spinach and ricotta (Fran was a vegetarian) and when the others were settled in the sitting room listening to Rain’s CD of whale sounds set to a garage band back track, I went upstairs to the bathroom. I undid the top button of my jeans and pushed them down over my hips so I could inspect the marks left behind by my pregnancies: white ridges across the outer reaches of my stomach like bad embroidery. Then, just for good measure, I yanked my T-shirt up and round to look at my breasts. There were thin white traces here too. I pulled my T-shirt back and rummaged around in the bathroom cabinet until I found the “maternity lotion” that I’d once bought and never used and went back downstairs.
“Here,” I said to Fran, handing her the lotion. “This might have worked if I’d bothered to use it.”
“Maggie, you’re an angel,” she said.
She closed her eyes and rolled her shoulders around. “Did you manage to buy some peppermint tea yet?”
After they’d gone, I said to Jake, “You have to be nicer to Fran. It’s very difficult being pregnant, you know. You can be very sensitive about your body.”
He was standing up but still flicking through the channels. He wasn’t looking at me. He said, “Don’t be silly. She can take it. Tough as old boots, my sister. One thing you don’t have to be is touchy on her behalf.” He stopped flicking, seemed suddenly engrossed in a man swinging a club on a piece of green sward somewhere where the sun was out. “She can look after herself,” he added.
I said, “Well, maybe I’m being touchy on my behalf.”
But he wasn’t listening. He said, “Oh yesss.” And I don’t think it was directed at me.
I was halfway out of the room when I remembered the message. I said, “Oh, can you ring Claire? She rang for you earlier. About some conversation you’d had . . .”
That certainly got his attention. “She rang here?” he said.
“Yup. The number’s in the kitchen.”
He looked uneasy. “I’ll ring her tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sure it’s not urgent.”
When I went to bed I thought about the old man in the raincoat and his absent companion in her Sunday best. And I wondered how long they’d been together and whether they’d had children and whether she had had stretch marks to bear witness. And I wondered how much he missed her.
Chapter 7
The next day, Jake got up early, packed a suitcase, and left. Bound for Amsterdam. A taxi arrived, containing Ed Brady: colleague, best friend, and chief leader-astrayer. Ed Brady was an account director at TMT&T. His job involved dealing with the clients and, as far as I could gather, a lot of slipping things up the flagpole. He was charming and smooth and whenever I overheard him talking about work to Jake, he’d be saying things like, “We had a very, very positive meeting with the client yesterday; they thought the presentation from the creatives was fantastic . . . Absolutely terrific. They just have a teensy-weensy concern with the central concept . . . If they could just have a couple more options, to put it in context.”
Jake: “So you mean they think it’s shit?”
Ed: “Er . . . yeah, well . . . maybe . . . yes.”
That day, I heard the taxi purr throatily outside the window first and then I heard the door knocker clatter and then I heard Ed calling, “Get your sorry arse out here, my son” through the letter box.
“Bye, sweetie,” Jake said, bending down with his elbows buried in the pillow on either side of my head. He kissed me. “Will you miss me?”
“You’ll only be gone one night,” I said.
“It might be two—or three.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll ring.” He kissed me again. There was more banging from downstairs. “I’m coming. I’m coming.” He jumped up, grabbed his bag, and charged from the room. I never quite knew what to think about work trips. Jake said he hated them, but it was hard not to detect, when he was poised for departure, a lightness in his step. The father of young children leaving on a business trip: the definition of the Great Escape. He slammed the front door behind him. The baby upstairs started crying.
But it was another beautiful morning, and I couldn’t feel put out for long. There was a hazy softness in the air, light slanting already through the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. Fat gray wood pigeons were waddling across the lawn like elderly women whose thighs were rubbing. There were motes dancing in the bathroom. I changed Dan’s diaper and took him downstairs to give him his bottle. It was peaceful with just the one child for a bit. There were moments when I thought we made a mistake having two. When we had Fergus, we still felt like a couple who just happened to have a child. Now we were a family, and you can get lost in families. Or if you don’t get lost, you get sat on. Or bitten. Or shouted at and sent up to your room. And that’s just the parents.
The phone kept going that morning. Fergus had come down eventually in just his pajama top. “Where are the bottoms?” I said.
“Oh!” He looked down at his willy, surprised, as if he’d just noticed. “I don’t know!”
Then the phone rang. It was Rachel. She wanted to know if I’d have Harry while she “whizzed round” Safeway. “Of course,” I said, “Fergus would love it. He gets bored playing with himself.” Fergus was sitting dreamily on the stairs proving me wrong. “The more the merrier,” I added.
I still hadn’t got dressed when Lucinda, in super-efficient, hair-in-chignon mode, rang from her city office—a sleek modern high-rise, I imagined, with windows on two sides and a view of St. Paul’s and the Thames—to inform me that, due to complications arising from nanny Hilda’s appendicitis (peritonitis), who was supposed to have masterminded the operation (so to speak) from her hospital bed, invitations to Cecily’s third birthday party had been late getting in the mail. She told me the party was “Bring a Barbie.” I told her, in rather dubious tones, that we didn’t have one, and she said, “Well improvise,” which panicked me a bit. How could one improvise a Barbie? Do something imaginative with an egg box and a teddy? I rang Mel at her clinic to ask her. She had a line of patients, but took my call anyway.
She said crisply, “Oh God, just buy one. They’re quite cheap.”
“I know,” I said, “but I hate them.”
She asked me how one could feel anything such as strong as “hate” for a Barbie, and I told her it was something to do with the bosoms and the hair. “So it’s competition?” she said. “Get a life.”
I know some people—people like Lucinda, say—think nonworking mothers spend the whole day sitting around chatting on the phone with their friends, drinking coffee while the children pleasantly amuse themselves, but it really isn’t true. Not the whole day, anyway. I was trying to fill the washing machine while holding a struggling Dan with one arm and preventing Fergus from opening all the remaining detergent packets with all the patience I could muster when there was a banging on the door. She was earlier than she said, but it had to be Rachel.
“Coming,” I called. “Now Fergus, put that one in the drawstring bag. Ye-es. And the other. No. No. That’s enough. Fergus put that one down. Coming.”
She had started banging again, more insistently. “COMING,” I shouted. I thrust the machine shut with my knee, yanked Fergus’s fingers away from the controls, and made for the front door.
“All right,” I said opening it. “I’m here. I’m here. You don’t have to break the door down.”
I looked out. It wasn’t Rachel. It was Pete. What the hell was he doing here? He was due that afternoon. To coincide with Mel. This was a disaster. My beautiful plan. “What are you doing?” I said. “You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you until this afternoon.”
“I can see that,” he said. He was wearing big dusty boots and a faded T-shirt with a button missing on the shoulder, and he had a wide grin on his face, that tightened his dimples. He made a big play of looking me up and down. “Just got up, have you?” There was a slit in his combats at the knee.
I was still in my robe.
“I’ve been up since six,” I said. “I haven’t had a minute to get dressed yet.”
It was not a glamorous robe—not like Claire’s. I think it might once have belonged to Jake’s father. It was tartan and too big and rather holey. I pulled it round myself.
Pete said: “It’s just that one of my jobs was canceled. So I thought I’d see if I could come now instead of later? I can come back if . . .”
For a moment, I wavered. “Well, actually . . .” I began. I was staring at his knee. There were light golden hairs on it. I gave up. “Now’s fine,” I said. I steered Fergus, who had come to stand meekly beside me, back against the hall wall. “Come in. The garden’s this way. Out the back.”
“It usually is,” he said.
We went through to the kitchen. I was still holding Dan and I had to reach up to turn the keys at the top of the back door. P
ete was right behind me. I could feel his breath on my neck. “You have to give it a shove,” I said.
He put his arm past me and shoved. “There you go,” he said. I moved to one side so he could get by, but the cupboard was in the way and there was a moment of awkwardness as he squeezed past me. “You’re going to have to lose some weight there,” he said grinning once he’d gotten through. I laughed and pulled the belt of my robe tighter around my waist. Fergus, awed by his presence, had followed him out. The two of them, the big man and the small boy, wandered around the garden for a bit, in and out of the sunshine like pieces on a chessboard. Occasionally Pete would bend down to study a plant, explaining something to Fergus as he pushed the fronds aside authoritatively. At one point, he bent to coax something onto the palm of his hand with his finger to show Fergus, and the two of them studied it for a while before Pete gently placed whatever it was back on a leaf. Finally Pete came back to the house, followed by Fergus. “It’s a nice little garden,” he said. “You’ve done well. Was there anything major you had in mind?”
Fergus said, “Mummy. Come and look. We found a caterpillar.”
“Um . . . I’m not sure.” Fergus was pulling me out to the garden. “Maybe. Not really. Just a few things here and there really.” I pointed to a gnarled stump by the side wall. “It would be great, for example, if you had something which could get that out.” Pete pried at it with his fingers. “I could probably get it out with my hands,” he said. “What else?”
“Maybe some new trellis?”
Having It and Eating It Page 9
