“I might be,” he said.
“And Clarice would love a pony,” Pea said, still directing her comments to Ed.
“Pea. She doesn’t even like dogs.”
“Well, I just think it’s madness. When you think what we could have . . .”
“Vegetables.” This was Jake’s first contribution. “You can never find fresh vegetables in the country. They pack them off to town as soon as they’ve dug them up.”
“You have to grow your own,” said Mark, warming to his theme.
“Or get a gardener to grow them for you,” I said. They all looked at me, puzzled for a moment.
Then Pea said, “Of course, there is a problem with the people. You wouldn’t have many friends. There’d be nobody to discuss Truffaut with . . . But you’d just have to ship your friends down at weekends.”
There was a lull as everyone registered what she had said.
Jake, who had been tearing his napkin into little strips, suddenly bunched it together again and chucked it into the middle of the table. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “Mark, Pea, you’re just imagining ideal lives in the country. Like other people’s photographs, when the light’s just right and everyone’s smiling. Real life isn’t like that. Real life in the country is just like life in the town only slightly different, more complicated in some ways, easier in others. It’s still school runs and trips to Woolworth’s and finding ways to keep the children quiet at weekends. I bet you’d find a multiplex and a play zone in the nearest town pretty damn quick. You make friends where you can. You try and make the most of anything wherever you are, don’t you? It’s all about muddling through.”
“Muddling through?” I said. “Is that what life is?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at me. “Isn’t it?”
“Shouldn’t one expect more than that?”
“I didn’t say muddling through didn’t make one happy.”
I felt confused for a moment. But Mark was still enjoying himself, winding Louisa up, or pandering to Pea, or whatever he was doing. “All I’m saying is,” he drawled, getting up and going over to one of the sofas, “I wouldn’t mind going to bed every night with those stars over my head.”
“Exactly,” said Pea. “That is so beautifully put.”
“I’ll give you stars over your head,” said Louisa, bashing him with a cushion.
It wasn’t long after this exchange that Louisa, clearly keen to emulate a weekend in the country with jollier companions, suggested we play a game. I said I was tired and that goodness knew what time Fergus would get up in the morning, but she told me to pull myself together. Pea, sitting stiff-backed on the edge of a hard chair with the bottle of wine on the sidetable next to her, wanted to know what kind of game.
“Mr. and Mrs,” Louisa said. “We played it in Cornwall at New Year. It was hilarious. One half of a couple leaves the room and you ask questions about them to the other. Then they come back in and answer the questions themselves. Their partner gets a point for each correct answer. I got everything wrong about Mark. I even got his high school grades wrong.”
“You know nothing about me,” her husband said, pretending to sob.
“Yeah well, I know more now than I did. It was quite an eye-opener. Stag weekend indeed . . .”
“All right,” said Pea. There were two bright spots on her cheeks. The bottle by her side seemed to be going down suspiciously fast.
The rest of us agreed too, largely, I suspect, through fear of being considered dull.
Louisa left the room first and Mark answered questions on 1) her favorite film (“Easy. The Silence of the Lambs”), 2) her favorite food (“Toad in the Hole. My mother taught me how to make it and she loves it”), and 3) her favorite flowers (“Tough one . . . er . . . carnations I think”), all of which he got wrong. Her answers, when she came back in, were 1) An American in Paris (“How can you say Silence of the Lambs?” “We saw it on our first date.” “Yes, well just because I remember it fondly doesn’t mean I liked it”), 2) Scallops with bacon (“But you love my Toad in the Hole!” “Oh sorry, of course, scrap scallops, put greasy sausage in artery-thickening batter. My mistake”), and 3) Night-scented stocks. When informed that Mark had guessed carnations, she sighed and shook her head pityingly. “All men think women like carnations. It’s one of the great tragedies of life.”
Their score, so far in the game, then was nil. “Which just goes to show,” Louisa said, snuggling up to her husband on the sofa, “that knowing things about each other, just like ‘having things in common,’ is a greatly overrated quality in a marriage.”
Pea was the next woman out, which meant that this time Mark and Louisa had a hand in the questions. Ed floundered as to whether Pea “scrunched or folded” her toilet paper. “Shit,” he said. “She’s quite anal so I’d say folded, but then if you are literally anal I suppose you scrunch. I’ll have to guess on this one. I’ll say scrunch.” Her desert island luxury caused him equal trouble. “If it hadn’t been for earlier I’d have said an Aga, ha ha, but apart from that . . .”
“Vibrator?” suggested Louisa.
“Phh.” He made a sound like a horse snorting through its mouth. “No. Perfume? No . . . There’s some face cream she’s always going on about, but . . . Um, I know: her contacts book. That’ll be it.” And, as for whether she had any recurring nightmares, he tapped his fingers on the side of his head, and went “nnnnnn” in thought, like an airplane coming in to land. Finally, he said, “I don’t think she likes heights much.”
Pea smiled brittlely when she came back in. She’d taken her drink with her, and I noticed she was swaying a little bit. “So,” she said. “What revelations?”
She looked a mite offended at the scrunch/fold question but admitted to scrunching, awarding her marriage one point. For her desert island luxury, she said quickly, “My photo album; I’d like to have my loved ones with me,” which made Ed pretend to slink under the table in shame. And for her recurring nightmare, she said, staring at me, “Discovering my husband has been unfaithful.” I felt myself go red. Did she think I’d been flirting with Ed? Or did she know about Jake and Claire and was being cruel? Or was I being paranoid? I opened my mouth to say something, but Louisa had gotten up and was bustling me out of the room so that Jake could be questioned. I stood in the corridor, taking deep breaths.
When I came back in, they were all staring at me. Jake was looking embarrassed. Louisa said, in the honeyed singsong tone of a travel show host, “from the table, to the bathroom, to the bedroom . . .” Then in her own voice, “Tough luck, Maggie. We’re braving sex now. The first question: with whom did you lose your virginity?”
“Easy,” I said, smiling but not looking at Jake. “Patrick Unwin. Lower Sixth. His bedroom. ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ on the stereo.”
Jake looked relieved. “Well done,” said Louisa. “One point to the Priton/Owens. Next question: have you ever had a one-night stand?”
“No,” I said. “Unless two nights count?”
“They don’t. Sorry.” Louisa marked a cross on her piece of paper.
“So who do you think I had a one-night stand with?” I asked Jake.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought you must have done.”
“Well, I haven’t.”
Louisa cleared her throat and then said in a rush, “And finally, not my question this, Mags, blame Pea . . . Have you ever been unfaithful?”
“Sorry?” I said. My heart was thudding in my rib cage. My mouth was dry, my face hot.
Pea said, “Have you ever been unfaithful?”
“What?” I tried to laugh.
Louisa and Mark had started horsing around on the sofa, busy with a private joke on their own. Ed was looking anxious. Jake was studying his fingernails as if he wasn’t even listening. But Pea was glaring at me. “Come on,” she said. “Answer the question.”
“No,” I said. I tried to breathe normally. “No. Never.”
Jake looked up. �
�Liar,” he said.
I stared at him. I felt the color drain from my face. My eyes felt like bones.
“What about with me?” he said.
“What about with you?” My voice sounded choked.
Everyone was looking at us now.
“And David.”
It was a moment before I understood what he was getting at, and then I felt relief flood through me. I took an enormous breath. “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’d forgotten. Of course. There was, shall we say, a slight matter of overlap between David the lawyer and Jake . . .” I put my hands up in an act of surrender.
“Thank you,” said Jake.
“Which,” said Louisa, back in official mode, “puts the Priton/Owens in the lead with two points.”
The next round passed without incident—until it was Jake’s turn to leave the room. I failed completely to come up with a figure for his golf handicap. I didn’t even know what kind of a figure to be playing with. Finally, wracking my memories of P. G. Wodehouse, I said, “Fourteen under five,” which made Mark fall off his chair laughing. I also didn’t know what the first account in his first job was. “Oh dear,” I said. “I should know, shouldn’t I? Can I have a clue?”
Mark said, “Who’s a pretty bird then?”
I said, “Something to do with animal feed, um . . .”
“Pretty Polly,” he hissed.
“Oh yes,” I said, “I knew that . . .”
But it was the next question, asked by Pea, that really got me. “Does Jake have any secrets from you?” she said. Did he have any secrets from me? Oddly, my first instinct was to laugh. I thought of saying yes—I mean everyone has some secrets, don’t they?—but her eyes were boring into me, and I suppose it was dignity or pride that made me say “no.”
When Jake came back in he didn’t seem particularly amused by my ignorance on questions one and two, but he smiled when he came to this one, or it might have been a grimace. Ed said, “Unfair question. Don’t make him answer it,” but Jake replied with remarkable cool. “Yes,” he said. “I do. Doesn’t everybody have some secret or other?”
Pea was looking triumphant. I couldn’t let her. I said, suddenly feeling sober, “No, you haven’t. You think you have. But you don’t.”
I got up and went to the door. “Anyway, we’re disqualified,” I said. “We’re not married.”
The following day, Jake and I had arranged to take the children to visit his parents, who lived just across the border into Norfolk, a short drive away.
“I’m not coming,” I told Jake when we woke up, after a short night (it had been past two by the time we finally made it to bed). My head throbbed with exhaustion and hangover and misery. It felt like a child’s toy, my brain clonking against my skull like the sound box in a mooing cow. “You can take Fergus and Dan on your own. They’re your parents after all.”
“But you’re the one they’ll want to see,” he said. “Please come.” He bent across Fergus, who had gotten into bed with us in the night, and said quietly, “Let’s be friends. It’s awful being like this.”
“I know,” I said. We looked at each other, but I was the first to look away. “I just don’t feel like coming, that’s all.”
“About last night, Maggie. The secret . . .”
“Look,” I said. My head pounded. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to know.”
I got up and went down the corridor to the bathroom where I could hear splashing and squeals of “get off” and then a sort of lapping sound. Mark and Louisa were clearly having sex in the bath. Depressed, I went back to the bedroom where Jake was mucking about on the bed with Fergus and Dan.
“Fine,” he said without rancor. “We’ll go without you then.”
The expression on his face made me want to kiss him. But I couldn’t. It had been too long.
They set off quite soon after that. Pea and Ed took Clarice off to a museum in a local market town so she could do some work on her Ancient Roman project. Penny and Joe made a camp in the garden. Louisa wanted to know if I was all right.
I told her everything was hunky-dory.
“So who’s this bloke?” she said, chucking the Sunday Times’ Style section on the floor. “Are you going to tell me about him?”
I told her he was nobody really and that it hadn’t been going on for long. That he was a gardener. That he had hands like sandpaper. That he had earth under his nails. That he was younger than me. That maybe it would be better if I didn’t talk about it.
“Whatever,” she said.
We went for a walk down the lane to a little bridge over a stream.
“Do you ever worry about missing out?” I asked her. “Do you ever for a minute doubt that Mark isn’t right for you?” She didn’t say anything, just looked sympathetic.
“Stupid question,” I said.
“You’re bound to have up and down patches,” she said. “We all do. You met him young. It’s so difficult with small children. Ninety percent of all divorces take place in the first year of the second child’s life. Or something.”
“Another two months to get through then,” I said.
We stood, looking down into the water, a trickle at this time of year, with a few snack wrappers entangled in the weeds.
Louisa bent to fiddle with her flip-flops. “I quite like Pea, actually,” she said.
“You like everybody,” I said. “It doesn’t count.”
When we got back to the house, Ed, Pea, and Clarice had been back, packed, and left. Mark was standing up, eating a sandwich in the kitchen.
“They said they wanted to beat the Sunday evening traffic,” he said. He took another bite, dropping lettuce onto the floor. “And Clarice had her Sanskrit homework to do. Or something.”
Penny and Joe trailed in, covered in mud. “We’re starving,” said Penny.
“Shoes!” yelled Louisa.
Mark started cutting more bread into big, big chunks with cheese spilling out of the edges. My stomach turned. I went upstairs and lay down on the bed. The noises of the house drifted up. Mark was playing some energetic game in the garden. “Da-ad. Da-ad. Over here.” Their voices got fainter and fainter. I felt a deep sense of unease. Something was nagging at the back of my mind. Something not right. Images came into my head. I could see box hedges, clipped into the shape of birds and animals, circles and spirals. I walked along a row of them toward a man in the distance. He had pruning shears in his hand and was bending over. His back was broad and he was wearing combats. When I got closer, he straightened up and turned toward me, and I saw then that it was Jake.
I must have slept for a long time because when I woke up the room was getting dark and the pillow beneath my cheek was wet.
September: Spiders
Chapter 21
It had been stormy in London that weekend too. When we got back there were leaves all over the common—green leaves, but harbingers of autumn nonetheless.
A change seemed to come over Jake and me, something less zingy and more subdued. When he said he was really sorry but he did have to go into the office on the Bank Holiday Monday to “tie up a few loose ends,” I didn’t tell him to “tie away” in reference to what I knew he was really off to do. I smiled and said, “Whatever.”
“As long as you don’t mind,” he said, looking sad.
Fran had left a couple of messages over the weekend. She was planning a trip to Babyworld for all her nursery essentials. “So I could really do with the ‘definitive Maggie list.’ I mean what do you think of the three-in-one carseat/ carry-seat/stroller option? Worth £500?” I could tell when I rang her back that she wanted me to go with her. Any item I mentioned, she made a sort of strangulated wheedling sound, as if it was all too much for her to cope with. “N’eghgh. What on earth are muslins anyway?” she said. “Don’t you use them for making jam?” I told her she should probably just ask an assistant.
“When are you going?” I asked.
“Wednesday?” she said in a small voice.
“Good luck then,” I said heartily. When I put the phone down, I felt lost for a moment, but I couldn’t have gone with her, played the jolly sister-in-law. Not under the circumstances.
I had a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach all day Tuesday, the day of my date with Pete. I didn’t know if it was excitement or anxiety or dread, but I felt breathless and jumpy. I had to go to the bathroom every five minutes too. I spent a long time getting ready. I’d waxed my legs and repolished my toenails when Fergus was napping. Scarlet Lady, the polish was called. And I used body lotion before getting dressed. I wore my Claire dress and my new taupe kitten heels. Jake was baby-sitting. I’d told him in the morning that I was having a girly night out with the “playground mums” and that I’d get Merika, but he’d frowned and said that he could do it, which felt a bit odd. I was surprised he could get away from work. “You look nice,” he said, standing in the hallway as I left.
I got the Tube. Pete and I had arranged to meet down the line, in a district composed of street upon street of identical thirties housing. Safe houses. A long way from anyone we knew. Pete’s van was waiting outside the station. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, with his elbow out the window, reading the Evening Standard. He closed it when he saw me and leaned across to open the door. I hadn’t seen him for more than a week. I’d expected him to look different. He was still in his work clothes. His hair was dull and unruly. He had more dirt than usual in his fingernails. He kissed me. “Look at you, all done up,” he said.
“Yes, and look at you!” I said. “You haven’t exactly made an effort!” I laughed, but I felt foolish suddenly in my new frock, my new heels at the bottom of my newly waxed legs, my cerise cardigan slung over my newly Clarins’ed shoulders.
Pete had taken his arm from my shoulder and had turned the ignition. “Where are we going then, Mags?” he said.
“I haven’t booked anywhere. Shall we just drive until we find somewhere?”
Having It and Eating It Page 24
