A Surrey State of Affairs

by Ceri Radford

  I must go back and help Jeffrey pack; we leave in an hour. You may not hear from me for some time.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7

  A tropical beetle has eaten right through the leather of my sandals! I’ve had to replace them with flip-flops, the sort of rubber things that Sophie would wear, in bright turquoise. Jeffrey says I look “cool.” We’re at the Iguazu falls, in the steamy northeast. Yesterday we took a boat trip that wove so close to the waterfall we could feel the spray in our faces. Jeffrey rocked the boat on purpose and made me shriek, then grabbed me and gave me one of his bear hugs. It may be twenty-three years since he played club rugby, but he still has a powerful grasp.

  Anyway, I can’t write anymore because I need to e-mail Rupert and Sophie, check Facebook for new photos of Shariah, and use the phone booth next door to check in with Harriet and Mother, who thinks that Jeffrey and I are on an extended watercolor course in Andalucia. There is no free Internet where we are staying (although there is, thank heavens, a flush lavatory). This cybercafé connection is expensive, and the keys, as ever in such haunts, are grubby.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15

  We’re in Rio de Janeiro. We’ve rented a moped. Earlier this evening, I clutched Jeffrey’s waist as we zoomed along the seafront at a full seventeen miles per hour, with music from a teenager’s ghetto blaster pounding in the background, skyscrapers rising up behind us and the setting sun turning the sea the color of sherbet. As Jeffrey valiantly steered the bike around some teenage girls dancing in the street, I thought that he reminded me of Che Guevera, except without the head scarf or the extrajudiciary killings.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23

  We’re in Lima. I have walked the Inca trail, and encountered French-style lavatories, and survived both challenges. The lowest point of the trip came when Jeffrey and I had our first proper argument since beginning our adventure: studying the map, he was convinced that we had to follow a path leading up the left, but I was sure I could discern a bumbag hovering above a pair of broad American buttocks through the mist on a trail leading off to the right. Neither of us would give in, and our difference of opinion segued inexplicably into an argument about Natalia and Carlos. Eventually, the mist cleared, and we were distracted by the majestic crags of rock rising up ahead of us, and by another American, who appeared from behind a bend wearing a yellow waterproof poncho, tapped Jeffrey on the shoulder, and said, “The housekeeper? Man, that’s low.” I took this as a moral victory and the argument was soon forgotten.

  Did you know they eat guinea pigs here? From the window of a bus (the quality of which has sadly deteriorated since Argentina) I saw a lady with a makeshift barbecue and a whole row of the hairless, roasted creatures, their expressions still bearing the indelible cheeriness of a family pet. I should tell Sophie. Perhaps it would stem the frequent complaints she puts in her e-mails about the quality of food in her hall of residence.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5

  News, real news! Late last night my mobile—which I had just managed to recharge—rang. It was Rupert. After I had picked up with a sleepy hello, he said that he was sorry, he’d lost track of which time zone we were in. Then, with an uncharacteristic peeved tone in his voice, he asked, “Where are you, Mum? How long are you going to go on like this? Whenever I go home to check on the house, it freaks me out. It’s spotlessly clean but so empty; the pile of mail in the hall is as tall as the hat stand. And I think Boris is starting to go nuts all by himself—he’s buying second-hand vacuum cleaners on eBay and hand-washing the carpet.”

  I gave a small, sad laugh, and sighed. I do miss home. Today is the fifth of December, the fifth day of Advent, and here I am sitting in an Internet café in Bogotá, sweating in a Hello Kitty vest top that I bought in a market stall near the bus stop after the jungle moths got to my blouses. I had a sudden vision of cold, crisp mornings, of sitting down to write my Christmas cards, studying my list from last year with all the people who failed to send me a card neatly crossed out in red, and I sighed again. Every time I mention going home, Jeffrey gets the same pale, twitchy expression he acquires whenever he checks his bank account online, and he changes the subject. Our daily budget has been getting ever smaller, and I have started to yearn for life’s little daily luxuries, the clean, warm towel on the towel rack, the cold apple juice in the fridge.

  But I digress. Rupert had not finished. After I had told him that of course I missed home and that I was sure we would be coming back at some point in the not too distant future, and Jeffrey had woken up beside me with a jolt, Rupert said again: “But when? Will you be home by Christmas? By New Year? Oh, Mum, please say you’ll be back by the New Year.”

  And it turned out that the reason he was so keen for us to be home by then was that he had something planned: a civil partnership ceremony with Alex.

  Oh, readers, I had a mixed surge of emotion: sadness, I suppose at the finality, at the fact that Rupert’s gayness wasn’t a passing phase, like the time he got into “grunge” as a teenager, but most of all happiness, that he had found someone he wanted to be with for the rest of his life and whom he wanted to commit to in the eye of the law. As he told me of the plans—just a small, low-key gathering, family and a few close friends, perhaps dinner afterward—I could hear the contentedness in his voice, and I shared it. After all, a gay wedding is just as valid an excuse for the purchase of a new hat as a heterosexual one. Jeffrey agreed, but it took him a long time to get back to sleep.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6

  My head hurts. The whir of the electric fan in this cybercafé is making it worse. My own hands are as clammy as the keys. Do not be alarmed: I am not suffering from some virulent South American disease, but from the aftereffects of too much aguardiente, a spirit that is quite the thing over here and that Jeffrey tells me is a little like Sambuca.

  Last night we talked about our future. Jeffrey took me to a little bar with dark alcoves and coffee-scented candles and ordered a bottle of the spirit, which came with two squat little glasses. After he’d drunk three in quick succession, he admitted that he’d been desperate to avoid thinking about how things were going to work out when we got back home. Up until Rupert’s call, he said he’d had his head in the sand. And now he was going to try to pull it out.

  “I’m scared, Connie,” he said. “I think I’ve lost my job. You don’t just go AWOL for three months and expect to get away with it. God knows what kind of messages are sitting on my BlackBerry back home. I told them I was having a personal crisis and that was that. But you can’t have a personal crisis when you’re a senior partner. You can’t have any kind of personal life at all,” he said, as he poured himself another glass of the clear, fragrant liquid.

  I squeezed his hand. “But darling, I thought you didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. I thought that was what this was all about.”

  “I didn’t!” he replied. “Back home, I was sick of it, sick of the alarm in the morning, the train, the meetings, the routine. I was sick of watching my nearest colleague wipe his keyboard clean with a disinfectant wipe every day. He used to do his mouse too, and his phone. All I wanted was a bit of adventure. But now…” His voice trailed off.

  “Aren’t you a bit fed up of this too?” he picked up again. “Fed up of being able to go anywhere and do anything?”

  I admitted that I was. I have started to have dreams—clear, vivid dreams—in which I am walking along the green to the church to bell ringing, but then suddenly I’m lost, and the familiar path has twisted and turned into something I don’t recognize, and I’m walking faster and faster but getting nowhere. Either that or I dream I’m in the kitchen, cooking a big roast for Rupert and Sophie—I can hear them laughing and chatting in the dining room, but just as I walk through the adjoining door with a tray of Yorkshire puddings in my hands they’re gone, the room is empty, even the familiar oak table has vanished. On one occasion I found myself in the Lima bus station instead; on another, in the haberdashery department of John Lewis.

  I told Jeffr
ey all this as I swallowed a few glasses of aguardiente, which tasted more like sherry the more I drank it. Jeffrey squeezed my hand back, and as I looked at him I realized that there were tears in his eyes, and in mine.

  “I miss the kids too,” he said. “I expected that. But the oddest thing is, I even miss work. I miss putting on my tie and cuff links in the morning and coming home at the end of the day feeling like I’ve accomplished something, like I’ve earned the right to relax. Whereas with all this drifting, it’s fun, but.…”

  I told him I knew exactly what he meant. Adventures, I have decided, are like shortbread biscuits. When you can’t have any, you crave them, but given a whole tin and no restraints, you soon start to sicken of them.

  “So we’re agreed,” I said. “We’re going back.”

  “We’re going back,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be the same.”

  Then he explained why he was so worried about money. While I have largely remained blissfully ignorant of whatever has been going on in the news, Jeffrey has kept a weather eye on the Reuters Web site. All our investments have been clobbered.

  “I’m not sure what we’re going to live on, or how we’re going to live,” he said, swallowing his sixth, or seventh, glass of liquor.

  Perhaps it was the insulating effect of the aguardiente, perhaps the fact that a month ago I thought I was going to lose Jeffrey and end my days a lone, embittered divorcée, but these words did not have the devastating effect that they once would have.

  “We’ll manage,” I said. “Don’t you worry, we’ll find a way, even if I have to start buying cheap cuts of meat and doing the Christmas shopping at Woolworths.”

  “Woolworths has gone, remember?” he said. “It’ll have to be TK Maxx.”

  I looked at him, and I realized that he was right: everything had changed.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13

  I am home, and it feels like I’m in a different world. No more sweaty cybercafés and sticky heat: I am wearing a woolen jumper, sitting in Jeffrey’s study in a leather-clad swivel chair, LapTop balanced on a solid oak desk, shelves of old legal textbooks and tennis trophies stretching up on either side. Out the window it is winter, and I realize just how long I’ve been away. When I left the garden was still lush with the final throes of summer; now it is bare, trimmed back, bleak. Randolph did a good job before returning to America.

  My own reflection in the bathroom mirror gave me a shock. I was accustomed to seeing a pale, neat image of myself looking out against the backdrop of cream marble tiles. Now I am a toasty, golden brown, with freckles crowding all over my forearms, and my hair grown long and wavy, streaked through with white and gold. I wonder what the children will say when they come around tomorrow.

  Jeffrey and I got back last night, worn out after the first economy flight we were able to book home. I had no idea that one was expected to eat with plastic cutlery and watch the same film as all the other passengers at the same time. I think Jeffrey struggled to adjust. He looked irritable and distracted throughout the whole of Mamma Mia!

  Now that we’re back, he has been pacing the house, opening the doors to the rooms, closing them again. He has given Boris, who kept the house in an immaculate state, two weeks’ notice. The poor man is a luxury we can no longer afford, even if he did bake us a welcome-home cake and buff every piece of furniture with beeswax while we were away. He took the news with his usual unflinching courtesy, but afterward I heard the mournful sound of one of Rupert’s old Radiohead albums drifting from his room.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14

  Bliss. Rupert and Sophie together under my roof, for Sunday lunch, and it was just like my dream, except when I walked through the door to the dining room they were both still there, Rupert with a navy turtleneck pullover and a touch of stubble, Sophie grinning despite her “monster” hangover. She took the train home this morning for the Christmas holidays, and apparently she’s already missing university. All those stabs of guilt I felt for abandoning her as I woke up in a strange bed in Brazil or Bogotá were unfounded. Left to her own devices, she has flourished. She has filled out a touch—whether this is the result of a wholesome lifestyle or too much white wine I cannot tell, but it suits her; and there is something changed, more confident, in her general behavior. The tongue stud has gone (“the only other girl with a tongue stud was a goth, so it had to go,” she explained). Not only did she refrain from hiding her peas under her knife, but she declared that she was no longer a vegetarian, and that I should feed the nut roast to Darcy because she would much rather tuck into some lamb—all the veggie options at halls were “minging,” she said, so she’d given that up too. I met Rupert’s eye, and we both smiled.

  Rupert asked a lot of questions about our trip, and there was a gleam of pride in Jeffrey’s eye as he got out his atlas after dessert and showed them both where we had been, the many borders we had crossed. I took out my camera and showed them some of our shots, from the hundreds of penguins huddled against the wind in Argentina to Jeffrey standing on Copacabana beach with a piña colada in his hand and a cocktail umbrella tucked behind his ear. Sophie said it looked awesome, just like a trip her other best mate, Liam, took in his gap year.

  Rupert admired all the pictures, and then asked, in a tentative voice, “But are you glad to be back?”

  Jeffrey and I held hands, looked into the young, smiling faces of our children, looked out at the cold December drizzle, and said that, yes, all things considered, yes, we were. I tried to hold that thought in my mind as I visited Mother, who told me that I was as brown as a farmhand.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 15

  10 A.M.

  I can’t sit still. I am too nervous. Jeffrey has gone in to see Andrew, the senior par1tner at Alpha & Omega. I had to tie his tie for him this morning; he had forgotten how. This does not bode well for a seamless return to corporate life.

  3 P.M.

  He is home. He is no longer a partner, I am no longer a partner’s partner, as it were. And yet, as I shall explain, all is not entirely lost.

  When his car crunched up the gravel on the drive and he got out, I struggled to read his expression. He had loosened his tie; he wasn’t dejected and hangdog, he wasn’t ecstatic with relief. It wasn’t until I had made him a cup of tea and we had both sat down at the kitchen table that he told me what had happened.

  “Well, my career as I knew it is over,” he said, nonchalantly. He then told me how he had met up with Andrew and a severe woman from HR with a blond ponytail and metallic glasses. I did not like the sound of her. My instincts were correct. While Andrew asked him what had happened and whether he was okay, HR woman asked him if he realized how much disruption his disappearance had caused the company and its clients. Jeffrey said that he had explained as best he could that he had had some sort of personal crisis, but HR woman coldly asked him if he could supply a doctor’s note to back that up. Jeffrey asked if she would accept the receipt for a leather cowboy hat in lieu, but she would not. And on it went in circles, until Andrew said that it was time to cut to the chase: sadly, Jeffrey could never have his old job back. It had already gone to Amanda (Andrew had at least had the good grace to look ashamed of himself, Jeffrey told me), and besides, in these tough economic times the company had to have 110 percent confidence in its partners. However, there was another role being offered: training the junior lawyers, on a part-time basis, and sharing the job with a woman who was just back from maternity leave. The salary would be half what he was previously on (or really a quarter, given the reduction in hours), but Jeffrey was not in a position to say no.

  “Law is a small world,” he said. “And most of the big firms are laying people off. Who else would take me on now? And do I even want to go back to the way I was before?”

  So they had shaken hands, and he had signed the contract, and he will start work in his new, reduced capacity in the New Year. As soon as HR woman had retreated with the paperwork, Andrew took Jeffrey to lunch at The Cheddar Cheese, a musty old
pub off Fleet Street—apparently the budget no longer stretches to the likes of Nobu, at least not for Jeffrey. There, he admired Jeffrey’s tan, and Jeffrey told me that he caught a wistful look in Andrew’s eye as he was telling him all about his prowess with the lasso and the moped.

  All in all, as we finished our tea, we both agreed that things could have been a lot worse. I asked Jeffrey how we would get by with the money, and he said we would have to see. He’s meeting with his financial adviser tomorrow; he said he was pretty sure we could no longer afford a financial adviser but that, just at the moment, we couldn’t afford not to have one either.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16

  We’re going to have to sell the house. I can’t write anymore because I’m crying and because I need to go into Boris’s room to get Radiohead back.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17

  For the first time in many months, I once again turned to bell ringing for comfort last night. I lay down with a slice of cucumber over each eye for half an hour first, so nobody would know that I had been crying. For a moment, I thought of recycling them for a salad, but decided we were not, yet, that desperate.

  As soon as I walked across the churchyard I began to put the house to the back of my mind, savoring the anticipation of seeing my old friends. I was not disappointed. Reginald started and stared at me as if I were some sort of heavenly vision, then clasped me in a bear hug. Gerald looked a bit awkward, but gave me a small, quick hug and told me I looked very well. Rosemary was by his side, wearing a tweed skirt and a V-necked pullover looking for all the world as if she had never once fleetingly joined a traveling circus. During the coffee break, she came over and whispered, “Don’t worry, he told me everything. I know that you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. It was just as well he tried his luck with you, and not Miss Hughes. She’d have snapped him up, make no mistake. I know her sort: there was a bearded lady in Vilnius who had just the same glint in her eye.”