Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Charles. How weird to see you here.’

  ‘Not as weird as seeing yourself will be,’ he smirks, ‘look at this.’

  He takes my arm and steps to one side. And I am met, face to face, by myself. Experience shivering breathless-ness, as if iced water has been poured down my back. Cannot stop staring at the haunted, horrible version of myself. Me as I do not like to think of me, with bags under the eyes and a too-small shirt with buttons missing gaping pinkly over my stomach. Me with sadness in my eyes and a sunburnt nose. Me with lank strands of hair hanging around a tired, lonely face.

  ‘It’s a marvellous piece of veritas,’ says Helena, her beady eyes fixed on me, drinking in my horrified reaction.

  ‘God, it’s depressing,’ is all I can say. I grab a glass of wine from a passing tray and gulp it in one.

  ‘Darling, beautiful Venetia. I’m so glad you came.’ Warm hands are on my back replacing iced water sensation, and I am engulfed by Gawain hugging me, kissing my shoulder and grinning delightedly. ‘There’s a photographer here who wants to take a picture of you with your portrait for the Standard. Come and meet Vernon, the gallery owner, and the sponsors. In fact, come and meet everyone. You look gorgeous. It’s great to see you.’

  And Gawain sweeps me off, away from Charles and hateful Helena, and over to an important-looking table where there is champagne instead of the usual gallery white wine, and flashbulbs are popping like balloons at a children’s party. Immediately become overexcited. All this attention is astonishing, and compares favourably with an evening at home doing the ironing. I try this line on one or two people who look at me with mild distaste as though I have mentioned haemorrhoids or boils or some other defect. Decide to pretend from now on that I lead an exotic life and am usually sinning on tiger skins in the manner of Elinor Glyn and wearing silk camiknickers. Try out this version on a Young British Artist friend of Gawain’s; he scuttles away in terror. It is perhaps best not to admit to any form of existence beyond the here and now.

  Events speed up. People, compliments and glasses of champagne whirl like a carousel until it is late, the lights are low and I am dancing in a nightclub with Gawain. Don McLean is singing ‘American Pie’. Rose and Tristan are arguing by the bar. I have no husband to argue with and therefore not a care in the world. I lean on Gawain and close my eyes. Surely there can be no better sensation than that of having someone’s arms around you? Particularly someone as handsome as Gawain. Can’t believe that I’ve never noticed this before. Handsome and talented. Why did I never take him up on all those propositions he has put to me through the years? ‘Gawain Temple is a genius, and this is the picture which shows it’, was the headline in today’s newspaper preview. Lucky I didn’t see it before the show or I would never have come. Loved the party, though, after Charles and the poison dwarf had gone, and spent much of it nodding and trying to appear artistically worthy. All very intoxicating. Just as well I am catching the nine-thirty train tomorrow morning and can’t join Gawain and his friends for a party on a houseboat at lunchtime.

  Drift off to sleep in the indigo darkness of Rose’s super-minimalist study-cum-spare room, conjuring an image of myself as a Tess of the D’Urbervilles type, tending the fruitcakes and their piglet siblings with my rosy-cheeked children all wearing cheesecloth blouses and breeches. Gawain can be Angel. Can’t remember his role, so have to change the plot to Georgette Heyer. Fall asleep while deciding which Regency hero he could possibly resemble.

  September 28th

  Back in the school run rut, a million miles from my life as a glamorous artist’s model, I seem to be no closer to Tess or Georgette Heyer either. Terribly stormy weather means we are all wearing cagoules and wellingtons rather than cheesecloth, and the piglets have become malevolent; a pink bit me yesterday morning when I attempted to give it an apple. The Beauty and Felix are both festering with my vile cold and are now at the streaming-snot and raised-temperature stage. Giles has no symptoms, so he and I rise at dawn to prepare for school. Rather wish he was ill too so that I wouldn’t have to bother. I have the light-headed, carefree sense of not having been to bed, which I know will later turn into wrung-out-rag fatigue, caused by a night of pouring Calpol and cough mixture into alternate children, with a few minutes of sleep between each pharmaceutical call. The bathroom mirror confirms that all the benefits of two nights in London and the squandering of a fortune on my appearance are now as dust, and I have developed a tic in my left eye which I fear is permanent. Irritation rises while in the bathroom because David has still not mended the dripping cold tap and I know nothing of washers. Will ask Giles to find out how at school. In Home Economics. Bundle the ill people into the car in their pyjamas, and pass Giles a small surgical mask.

  ‘Here, put this on so you don’t inhale the germs from those two.’

  Giles stares at me in horror. ‘No way, Mum, I hate masks. I won’t catch their germs, I’m in the front. Why do you keep winking like that? It makes you look evil.’

  Cannot believe his intransigence. He should be deeply impressed at my foresight and top-class parenting. He should not mention my tic.

  ‘Please wear it, Giles. I’ve got one too, I’ll wear mine if you wear yours.’ I put it on and mumble, ‘See, it’s fine.’

  He is flattening himself against his door now, cringing away from me, only partly as a joke.

  ‘Mum, you’re crazy. You can’t drive around with a mask on. And your eye winking. You’ll be arrested.’

  Felix interrupts from the back seat.

  ‘Mum, Mum, you’ve got to wipe The Beauty’s nose. It’s like toffee, it’s really gross.’

  Turn around to look with the mask on and both The Beauty and Felix burst into tears.

  A day for the gas oven, but I do not have one. Instead put my head in the Aga to retrieve a baked potato at lunchtime, and manage to burn my forehead on the door. Leap away immediately but ghastly scrunching, singeing noise suggests that damage has been done. Back to the mirror, where worst fears are confirmed. I now have a sore like a streak of strawberry jam across my temple, too big to hide with hair. The baked potatoes are also burnt. No lunch. The ill ones choose this moment to trail into the kitchen in their pyjamas, both clutching teddies, both with white faces and purple smudges beneath their eyes. They range themselves in front of the Aga and deliver a monstrous array of coughs, one after the other. Sidney, perhaps in sympathy, goes into a paroxysm himself under the kitchen table and regurgitates a skinless shrew at my feet. I need help. I send an SOS message to my mother forthwith.

  September 29th

  She arrives, twenty-four hours later, in her wellingtons and appears to have become twice her usual size due to her costume of yellow rubber fisherman’s jacket. Felix and The Beauty are still coughing and corridor-creeping at night, and I am a zombie, beyond gas ovens.

  ‘I’ve been bailing out the pub,’ she announces. ‘They lent me this coat.’

  Scrutinise her closely, but can detect no signs of red wine or other beverages. Mystifying.

  ‘Why aren’t you drunk, then?’

  She draws herself up to express innocence outraged, and looks down her nose at me.

  ‘That is not my way,’ she says piously. ‘The pub was flooded and we had to form a human chain with buckets to empty it and then pile sandbags in the doorways. I’m worn out, and when I got home, I found that that fool Desmond had left the bath running while he went to answer the telephone, so the ceiling below has fallen in. I left him dealing with it, and I’ve come to stay until he has mended it.’

  Divested of her coat, she is back to her usual proportions except that she has a hot-water bottle tucked into her skirt. Decide not to mention it, as she may feel I am being critical.

  Felix is delighted to see her. ‘Hooray, Granny’s here,’ he shouts, and The Beauty runs and buries her face in her skirt, murmuring, ‘Granneee, Granneee.’

  Granny is astonished by the strength of their feeling. ‘Have you been torturing them or something?’ She lo
oks more closely at me. ‘Goodness, perhaps you’re the one being tortured. What happened to your head?’

  Depart to collect Giles, early for once to avoid explaining, and purchase two bottles of red wine as bribes to prevent her changing her mind and going home. Listen to Willie Nelson on the way to school and brood on my inability to lead a grown-up life without prop of mother to keep me going. Should I by now be standing on my own two feet, or does divorced status confer special privileges usually reserved for the sick?

  Catapulted into grown-up level of hysteria upon reaching home again. Charles has telephoned in my absence to say I am needed at a very urgent meeting of the directors and shareholders of Heavenly Petting on Thursday, and can he please cancel having the children next weekend as Helena is worn out so they’re going to Barcelona. My mother prowls back and forth in front of the Aga, and delivers this message with a snarl. We put the children in the playroom with a video of Some Like It Hot in order to have a therapeutic anti-Charles session in peace. Both bottles of red wine are consumed as we rant and fantasise. Charles will be humiliated, his constant dipping into capital for holidays, new golf clubs and cars will be revealed and he will be made to apologise. I wish.

  September 30th

  Have evicted three superwasps from Giles’s bedroom this evening and have painted my toenails water-lily-leaf green. Fire lit, hair washed, mother returned to her own home, Aga burn healing. Have borrowed Giles’s school briefcase for the meeting, but have not yet thought of anything proper to put in it. Giles suggested tuck, so it contains a Penguin biscuit and a carrot so far. Might put my book in as well, as I’m sure I won’t finish Frederica tonight, and am immersed. It is an especially fine example of Georgette Heyer’s ease with the mayhem of Regency family life. I am poised and businesslike and ready for Heavenly Petting tomorrow.

  October 1st

  Leave for Cambridge after dropping The Beauty at Jenny’s house and Felix and Giles at school. Had to shove breakfast into them all at arm’s length while keeping elegant but no longer fashionable suit unsullied, and found experience acutely stressful. This is the lot of working mothers. How do they do it? How do they stay clean? How do they put the children in the car without laddering their tights? Do they have special boiler suits for cross-over moments between kitchen and office?

  Offer prayers of guilt-ridden gratitude to Heavenly Petting for providing for my children and allowing me to pursue my so-called career from home, as I drive towards its offices through the fog-bound fens. Impossible not to be astonished at the scale of Charles’s business now. Pause at gate to be met by courteous, uniformed security.

  ‘Can I help you, madam? Are you attending a service, or do you need counselling in planning one?’

  Am unreasonably irritated that he does not know Who I Am.

  ‘Neither, I’m here for a meeting,’ I snap, and am further infuriated by the double take he is unable to disguise as he steps closer to my dented, muddy, litter-strewn car.

  ‘You’d better park with the contractors, I think.’ He waves me past the director’s car park where I can see Charles’s car hobnobbing with other sleek and expensive beasts, and sends me round to a space in between a Clean-Your-Crem van and a pick-up truck full of plastic dahlias on plinths. The front doors of Heavenly Petting open automatically as I step onto a doormat with a pair of hands clasped in prayer woven into it. In the foyer, a high desk dominates, and behind it a Dolly Parton type perches, her smile a well-balanced combination of welcome and sympathy. Am pleased to note that this changes to fear and deference when I tell her my name. I am ushered into the boardroom and away from the hideous loop of piped music, now metamorphosing from the Black Beauty theme tune to ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks.

  ‘Venetia, how good of you to come.’ Charles swoops over and shakes hands, which for some reason seems very odd to me and I have to bite my bottom lip hard to keep a wide grin at bay. Reflect that Charles’s manner has always been more boardroom than bedroom as he leads me around the table reintroducing me to the five directors. Knees become unreliable as we tour; have not seen any of them except Henry Loden, Charles’s business partner, for a year, and am convinced that they are all comparing me to Helena, who is junior embalmer here now. Wish I had brought The Beauty to protect me. As usual pay no attention to what Charles is saying as he opens the meeting. Am still mulling silently over my clever boardroom/bedroom pun and wondering whether Jenny will remember that Felix has trampolining this afternoon as the meeting begins.

  ‘… Trading has been extremely healthy, sales are up and the company is showing good margins on paper, increasingly good margins… although of course… still room for improvement.’

  Doodle on the paper provided and make mental note to ask Charles why I am not receiving a bigger dividend if figures are so rosy. Henry Loden is speaking now, running his palm across thinning, side-parted hair as he bulldozes through civilities and motors on to the point of the meeting. Heavenly Petting is extending into the gifts market and the company is starting production of plastic mourning rings to be sold at Pet City, Toys R Us and also at the chain’s own crematoria.

  Henry has stopped rubbing his pate and is greasing his hands, palm to palm, as his speech climaxes. He is so excited by what he is saying that little bubbles of spit have formed a pearly foam on his lower lip.

  ‘We hope also to reach the supermarkets to coincide with Valentine’s Day next year. We feel that a “Love and Loss” promotion would be a great start for us in this market.’ He pauses, slaps his calculator on the table and steps back, hands on hips, ready for admiration. ‘Any questions?’

  Am astonished to find that I have leapt to my feet, and am shaking my fist and heckling.

  ‘Have any of you stopped to think about what you are suggesting? I think it’s grotesque. A mourning ring indeed. Next you’ll be pretending that the hair in it – if you aren’t too cheapskate to put hair in it at all – belongs to a real animal. Maybe you’ll even say it belongs to their own pet. You could do a tailor-made range, a couture version for clients.’

  Am on full throttle now, and although furious at the slimy, seamy nature of Charles’s latest venture, am really enjoying the effect of my rage. Continue to list details for ever more tasteless rings until Charles hauls himself to his feet and raises a hand to quiet me.

  ‘Thank you, Venetia, shall we continue this conversation in my office? There are a couple of matters pertaining to the children that we need to go over.’ He shepherds me out, pushing me ahead, and then darts back in to say to Henry and the others, ‘Get to work on Venetia’s hair and couture ideas right away. I think she’s got something.’

  I sit down in his office with my shoulder abutting a shelf full of sample coffins for mice, budgerigars and other size A (which means tiny) pets. Charles leans against the door with his arms folded and looks at me levelly.

  ‘You may complain about the way I make money, but you seem to have no trouble spending it,’ he says coldly. I take a deep breath and maintain my cool.

  ‘And neither do you. Or is yet another holiday for you and Helena a research trip?’

  And then he drops his bombshell.

  ‘Helena is pregnant. She is expecting twins at Christmas and she needs a break. This is her last chance to fly. When we return, we are moving house, so I can’t have the boys until November.’

  Extraordinary that I didn’t notice at Gawain’s exhibition. It just illustrates the terrible truth: I am self-absorbed and unobservant to the point of stupidity. Come to think of it, she was wearing a smock, but I took that to be her interpretation of fashion, and thought nothing of it. Except that it was horrid.

  It is not until I am in the car, driving away from Cambridge with the sun like a blood orange streaming in through the back window, warmly caressing my head and my hair, that the shock thaws and I remember that Charles has had a vasectomy. Such was his fury when I announced that I was pregnant with The Beauty that he went to the BUPA hospital that week and made the ar
rangements, and by the time the bump that was to be The Beauty showed, Charles had done the deed.

  ‘He’s got no lead in his pencil now,’ was Henry Loden’s revolting, leering remark to me when we met in the hospital lift as I arrived to collect Charles and he was leaving, having visited him.

  October 3rd

  A freak hot autumn day. The Beauty and I spend the morning picking blackberries on the old railway line before driving to meet Vivienne for lunch in order to discuss Helena’s immaculate conception. Mist has draped fairy cobwebs in the shade beneath great oaks, and the hedgerows are busy with colour and bustling invisible creatures, all intent on gathering what they can before winter. The Beauty trundles ahead, her own choice of spotted handkerchief as headscarf and red woollen jersey giving her a timeless, story-book quality. Beyond the green seam of former railway, with its springing borders of hawthorn and elder, the newly ploughed fields are rich brown and herringbone-striped. A church tower drifts blue on the horizon, its backdrop the last square of golden stubble, shrinking every moment as a tiny toy tractor drags a gleam of plough along it.

  By lunchtime we have two baskets of blackberries, black crescents beneath our nails and deep purple lips. The stubble square behind the church is down to one shining stripe and the rest of the gilded world has turned over and taken on the rich chocolate hue of high autumn. Have been weeping and cursing into the blackberries intermittently, and am not sure why.

  If Helena chooses to have children, what business is it of mine? Can never get far with this thought before being sidetracked by how she managed it. Perhaps Charles had his operation reversed. Painful, but devoted. Cannot imagine inspiring such a gesture in anyone. Cannot imagine the poison dwarf inspiring it either.

  On the way to Vivienne’s, am immeasurably cheered and lifted by my first view of the sea, a crisp navy-blue triangle glimpsed through a cut in the headland. ‘Sea saw, sea saw,’ says The Beauty, thrilled with her ever broadening vocabulary.