Jake frowned. “Errr . . .” he said.
I said, “That would be lovely, Claire.”
“Fantastic. Right then, I’m off.” She was halfway to the door when she turned suddenly and said, “How was Kyushi?”
“Tricky,” said Jake.
I was thinking, “Kyushi? Did I tell her that too?”
Later, after supper, Jake said, “Odd to find Claire here when I got back. Why is she inviting us to supper?”
I edged past him to put the plates in the dishwasher. “What do you mean ‘odd’?”
“Nothing,” he said, picking up the newspaper and studying the headlines as if he hadn’t already had a two-hour flight in which to do so. “I just mean I’m surprised you’ve seen her again. I can’t imagine you’ve got much in common anymore. She doesn’t seem like your usual chums.”
“My usual chums?” I said.
“The other playground mums you hang out with.”
“The other playground mums?” I repeated acidly. “In what way is she not like them? You mean she’s more glamorous?” I scraped some mashed potato remains into the sink and clattered the cutlery into the cutlery holder.
“No, not glamorous. You know . . .”
“What?”
He flicked the paper back onto the table. He sifted through his mail, which he’d sifted through half an hour before. “She’s just different. You know . . .”
“No, I don’t,” I said, clicking the dishwasher shut and turning to face him. “You’re just saying you fancy her.”
“I do not fancy Claire Masterson. She’s not my type.”
“Why not?”
He sagged his head toward the table as if it had suddenly gotten too heavy. “All I said was I was surprised to see her here.”
“It’s just that one minute you don’t like her and the next she’s the most interesting person in the world. What’s that about? The fact that she’s got great legs and enormous bosoms and lovely hair? And a job?” I went to stuff an empty milk carton into the bin. It was too full; I had to force it down with the flat of my hand.
He put the mail down and looked at me directly for the first time. And then he sighed and said, “It’s not what I was going to say at all. But now that you mention it, I suppose it is unusual, not pleasant, just unusual, to meet someone here who hasn’t heard of the Teletubbies.”
If the children hadn’t been upstairs, I would have slammed the door then. As it was I closed it very quietly and went through into the sitting room. I knew I was overreacting but that knowledge never makes you feel better, it makes you feel worse: more impotent somehow. I felt twisted inside as if someone was pulling and tugging me in different directions. I stood in the middle of the floor for a bit. Everything around me was mine. The faded green sofa I’d picked up at a local junk shop, the rugs I’d lugged back from holiday in Morocco, the battered old mirrors I’d restored with chewing gum and gilt paint, the cushions I’d sewn. Then on the table by the television, I spotted the scrapbook Jake kept his PG Tips cards in, still there from a few days before when he’d shown them to Fergus. For a moment I considered taking it outside and stuffing it into the garbage can. Then I relented. Instead, I dropped it behind the toy cupboard. And then I felt a little bit better.
Chapter 10
That weekend, we had a brunch date. Who has brunch in England? Well, Ed Brady, Jake’s much maligned (by me) colleague, that’s who. The first time he invited us, Jake had called up to double-check what time we were due. “One or one-thirty,” Ed had said.
Most people would call this lunchtime. “Yeah, all right,” Jake said, when I pointed this out. “Don’t blame me.”
Of course, I blamed him. The fact is, not only do one’s friends’ loved ones often leave one cold, so often do one’s loved ones’ friends. So I did blame Jake. I blamed him for being Ed’s friend in the first place.
Ed Brady was everything I dreaded Jake being. He was Jake on a bad day. He was Jake played by Jim Carrey, only he was much thinner under his loose designer suits, etiolated like a daffodil bulb that has been kept too long in the closet under the stairs. He had so much nervous energy you kept expecting him to fizz across the room like a released balloon. He was married to Pea, or Pee, (short for Penelope), who was “in film,” which is to say she worked for the BBC. They had one of those baffling marriages in which one side of the equation had so much more power than the other, that you couldn’t see how they stayed upright, why they didn’t topple over. Jake and I were always convinced Pea was on the verge of leaving Ed. She seemed perpetually irritated by him, wincing when he spoke as if he set her teeth on edge, and so obviously contemptuous of his job (trashy, empty, ephemeral compared to the real nitty-gritty work of addressing the world’s injustices on . . . er, television), you wondered what they had ever had in common. Jake thought—he may have had inside information on this—that it boiled down to oral sex. She was constantly down on him. He was constantly going down on her. Whatever, I always felt uncomfortable in their presence, ignoring as far as I could the public front of their relationship while trying desperately hard not to imagine the private.
“Come in, come in, come in,” Ed said at the door that brunch time. “Maggie: You. Look. Fantastic. Give us a kiss. And another. And is this the baby? Gosh, isn’t she big now.”
“He,” I said.
“And Fergus, my man!” He gave him a clap on the shoulder that sent him sprawling across the parquet. “Oopla,” said Ed, bending to pick him up. (Fergus looked too stunned to complain). “Jaaaaaaake.” They shared an ironic high five. This was part of the charade played out by Ed, with Jake’s assistance, that they were, contrary to appearances, in fact eighteen. And black. Ed then went straight into some office in-joke. “Kyushi, Kyushi, Kyushi” he chanted, in the tone of one patting a baby. Finally, in his own voice, he said, “What a fucking week, eh?” Jake raised his eyes to the ceiling and pretended to mop his brow.
Ed turned to me again, “Come in, come in, Maggie. Pea is longing to see you. She’s just been saying it’s been tooo long.”
“Hi,” said Pea, coming out of the sitting room, switching a smile on and off, and then disappearing upstairs.
Ed cleared his throat and widened his mouth into a mouth-organ grimace. “PMT,” he joked to Jake, then tipped his head back. “Dah-ling,” he yodeled. “Can I bring you something? Teensy-weensy glass of bubbly?” There was no answer. “Terrible headache,” he said to me. “Poor love.”
We went through to the sitting room, where their five-year-old daughter, Clarice, was kicking some small carved figures about on the hardwood floor. Clarice had been squeezed into a miniature version of her mother. She took the world very seriously. Or rather, she took her ballet lessons seriously. And her tennis lessons seriously. And her school, where she wore a boater and green and white stripes, very seriously. She took so many things so seriously she seemed to have lost the ability to do what children do better than anyone else, which is play with nothing—or at the very most a piece of electric cord and a bare plug—very happily, and very unseriously, for hours on end.
“Clari, Clari darling, mind the coffee table,” trilled Ed. “And not against the French doors please. And be careful of the walls.” Sometimes, one suspected Clari needed more fresh air. Or her parents did. Ed hurried over and returned the small carved figures to the decorative Chinese checkers board on the coffee table. “Clari, darling, take Fergus upstairs and show him your new lap dancing.” Nudge to Jake . . . “I mean Caribbean Holiday Barbie.”
Fergus looked as though he was up for it, but Clarice rearranged her hair in its sparkly heart-shaped clips and said in a clear bell-like voice, “No. I don’t want to. I don’t like Fergus. I want him to go home.”
Fergus looked nonplussed. Ed mouthed, “Sorry she’s over-tired. Poor love.”
“Perhaps she’s got a headache,” I said. Dan was wriggling to get out of my arms, so I put him down on the floor, as far away as I could from the jagged-edged glass and steel cof
fee table. Not far enough. He shuffled over to it and, before I got there too, had scattered neatly stacked copies of Interiors and Wallpaper in all directions. I grabbed him before he reached the Chinese Checkers. Fergus, delighted, scampered over and started yanking at his hair and shouting, “No, Dan. Naughty.” Fergus was reprimanded. Dan cried. Jake hid in an armchair. Ed wheeled his arms around suggesting other activities Clarice might enjoy sharing with Fergus. Clarice went to find her mother. Fergus started crying. Welcome to the Brady brunch.
I had just managed to distract Fergus with a page in Wallpaper about kitchen appliances—one of those subjects that strangely fascinates small male minds—when another couple arrived, he with pewter hair and thick leather-clad thighs; she with eyebrows plucked to an inch of their life and a pale suede skirt-top combo that merged imperceptibly into the cream sofa on which she perched. He, it was explained to me, was Ed’s equivalent at Blue Fish, another agency. She was “in corporate entertaining.” Pea must have approved of them because she launched herself down the stairs to greet them, the image of the hostess with the mostest, a blonde pinklipsticked weathergirl, bubbling over with effusive greetings that reached almost hysteria at the speedy realization that they were all going to be on holiday in Majorca for the same two weeks of August.
“What bit? What bit?” squawked the eyebrowless one.
“The north,” squealed Pea. “You?”
“Oh, the same. We always go to the north. The rest is rubbish.”
“Absolutely! We must meet up. Jake, Maggie, what about you? What are your holiday plans this year?”
Jake said, “Er. Well actually . . .” His eyes darted across to Ed who was looking nervous. “Well, because of this Kyushi stuff . . . Well, I doubt I’ll be able to get away . . .”
Ed’s neck was disappearing into his shoulders. He looked as if he was about to sink behind the sofa. Pea said, “But Ed’s working on the same account. Surely this . . . Ed?”
Ed said, “Er, yeah.” And then he said again, “Er, yeah,” and he gave a little laugh and wrinkled up his nose. “Let’s . . . er . . . let’s talk about it later.”
Hefty Thighs said, “Oh yeah, I heard about this Kyushi pitch. What’s happening?”
Pea, her blue eyes like drills, ignored him. She said, still looking at Ed, “But . . .”
I said quickly, “So we’re just going to enjoy Morton Park this summer.”
Ed said soothingly, “It’ll all be over by September. And that’s a much better time to go away.”
Pea said, “But we always go to Pollensa in August.”
Ed said, his voice a pointed reminder of social obligation, “Darling . . . shall I go and get the blinis?”
He escaped into the kitchen, leaving the conversation to flounder a bit before Hefty Thighs threw it a lifeline in the form of “house prices.” It had moved via “commuting complaints” on to “kitchen extensions” by the time Ed came back in with a plate of smoked salmon morsels. (“Umm,” I said. “Ugh,” Fergus said, spitting his out on the cream sofa, and from there it was just a hop and a skip to “child care,” to the impossibility of finding a good nanny, about the superiority of “Polish girls” to Czechs, of Kiwis to “The French.”) In the course of this conversation, I noticed Pea refer to the intervals she herself spent with Clarice as “child care,” as in, “I was late getting to the shoot because of child care.” Jake had started doing that too recently—“Sorry, can’t make it: child care”—like it was a double math lesson or an evening class.
“What do you mean by ‘child care’?” I said. “Didn’t that used to be called being a family?” I knew I was being twitchy, but I couldn’t let it lie somehow. Pea looked daggers at me and then, while Ed passed round plates of lasagne, gave me a long lecture about the difficulties faced by working mothers in contemporary society, about the lack of adequate provision, about how squeezed you felt, how torn, how you never have any time for yourself. She would probably describe me afterward as being part of an army of nonworking mothers determined to undermine her at every turn. I didn’t care. I just smiled weakly.
The others meanwhile had moved on and were busy talking about something else. Jake was telling them about a sticky meeting he’d had with the men from Wheato, about how they’d invented a loaf that tasted like toast and how they wanted to target kids and he’d told them that it was pointless, that it was mums who bought bread. And in the course of this anecdote, he mentioned the name of the MD at TMT&T and Hefty Thighs suddenly said, “Oh Philip . . . Oh, we all know about Philip.” He opened his eyes wide and pushed his chin into his neck, suggestively.
“What?” asked his wife.
“Yes, what?” said Pea, frowning.
“Philip’s women,” he said. He was slapping his knees open and closed with excitement.
Ed was looking embarrassed.
Pea said, “What women?”
Hefty Thighs said, “He’s a terrible womanizer. He’s always got someone on the go.”
“Oh he has, has he?” said Pea, glaring at Ed. “He and his wife, Lucy, were here to dinner last week.”
Hefty Thighs still hadn’t gotten the measure of her frostiness. He said, “Can’t keep it zipped up if you know what I mean.”
Pea said, “Yes, I know quite what you mean.”
Ed said, “Anyone been watching Wimbledon?”
Hefty Thighs was nudging his wife, chortling to himself. “At the moment he’s seeing a chartered accountant in Barnes. He even slips out for a shag in the middle of the evening sometimes. He says he’s nipping out to buy some beer. Once he even said he had to move the car!”
“She must know then,” said the cream combo. “She must have guessed.”
“Knows which side her bread is buttered,” said HT. “Nice five-bedroom house in Holland Park, communal gardens, worth—I’d say at least two mil in the current market. Place in Wiltshire. Harvey Nichols charge account. Why rock the boat?”
“Ab-so-bloody-lutely,” joshed Ed.
“Excuse me?” said Pea.
There was an awkward silence as Ed registered that he had said the wrong thing. I concentrated on Delaney, their Burmese, who had come and sat next to me on the sofa. I stroked his wet-look papery fur. He yawned, a startled expression hitting his face. The inside of his mouth looked like a fillet of Dover sole.
Pea said, “It’s not a joke, Ed.”
“No, no, no, I know,” he said.
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “It really isn’t funny. I know you blokes think it’s all a laugh and good for Philip and I’m not interested in that. But it’s beyond the pale to think it’s funny that his wife turns a blind eye. Maybe she does. But I don’t think we should find that acceptable. It’s a fundamental betrayal of women’s rights. Don’t you think? Don’t you think Maggie? Polly?” She was waving her hands around, her face was in mine. I murmured something, desperately tried to drag up an opinion. Where did people find opinions like this? Were they just born with them? “I mean, we each have a responsibility to other women, not to put up with things like that,” she continued. “There may be women who are too scared to leave their husbands and . . . well, I just don’t think we should laugh, that’s all.”
Polly was nodding in agreement. Pea went on, “God, advertising! Sometimes it just makes me so . . .”
Ed looked green. “Ab-so-bloody-lutely,” he said weakly.
I looked at Jake. He was staring out of the window with an odd expression on his face.
We left shortly after this. Ed said good-bye to us at the door. “Catch ya later,” he said, in an irritating fake voice to Jake. I must have given him a look because I heard him say, “Oops, hope you’re not in the doghouse too,” which irritated me even more, particularly as I knew that Jake would have had a better time if I hadn’t been there, radiating ungraciousness.
While we were walking home, I said, “Why on earth do you like Ed? He’s so false.”
And Jake said, “He’s different when he’s on his own.”
“Aren’t we all,” I said. I kicked an empty aluminum can out of the front wheels of the stroller only for it to become enmeshed in the wheels at the back.
Chapter 11
On Sunday morning, Jake went to the office, going straight on in the afternoon to the managing director’s “country” (if Hemel Hempstead counts as country) club for a round of golf. He didn’t get back until late. And on Monday Pete came to the house. I hadn’t expected him to come that soon. I thought he’d come on Wednesday. Maybe even Thursday or Friday. I’d have washed my hair if I’d known. I’d certainly have washed my hair if I’d known this time he’d be wearing shorts.
It was just after one when he arrived. Dan was building a tower out of bricks on the kitchen floor. Fergus and I were making chocolate cornflake cakes, as a distractionary measure. “Okay, that’s enough stirring,” I was shouting. “It’s hot, Fergus. HOT.”
At the door, Pete said, “Thought I’d crack on with the job now I’ve started. That bindweed gets into everything. You only need to leave a tiny piece of root in the earth and it spreads.”
“Is it the worst thing you can have?” I said, wiping Fergus’s chocolatey fingers with the corner of my apron.
“No, Japanese knotweed’s worse. Get that in your foundations and you can start getting cracks. Japanese knotweed can bring your house down. Japanese knotweed’s a killer.”
“I’d better be thankful for small mercies, then.” I smiled, trying not to look down at his ginger brown muscular calves. The shorts looked ancient, tatty, army surplus; one of the pockets, combat-style, was half hanging off. There was a scab on one of his knees but an old one, an etching of New South Wales.
“Yes, you had,” he said, his eyes crinkling up as he smiled back. “Yes, you had.”
He worked in the garden all afternoon, mowing the lawn and digging sharp trenches between the grass and the flower beds, banging in some netting for the vines along the fence, tangling himself up in some of the shrubs with his pruning shears. Fergus was out there most of the time watching him, jumping up and down with excitement every time Pete brought through a new implement from his van. I watched most of the time, too, but from the upstairs window. I watched him bend and hoick and stretch. I watched his T-shirt wrinkle up across his back. I watched the circles of sweat widen under his arms. Occasionally, he’d stand and squint in my direction. But I don’t think he could see me through the sun on the glass.
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