by India Knight
‘Just leave it, Frank,’ I tell him, trying to be cool and stern while still hot and floppy with shame. I wish I hadn’t told him. I feel like I’ve got a family of wriggly hedgehogs under my armpits, flexing their spikes.
‘Stella?’
‘Don’t start. Please. I shouldn’t have said anything. And anyway,’ I retort, gathering strength, ‘you can talk. You may not make inhuman noises …’
‘Snorrrrrt,’ interrupts Frank rudely. ‘Snoort.’
‘But you’ve come on a woman’s face at least once in the last three months. So I think we’re quits.’
‘I bloody have not,’ Frank starts saying, but I don’t let him, since as a matter of fact he has.
‘I have the incontrovertible evidence of my own ears,’ I say. ‘So let’s just know these unattractive things about each other and place them at the backs of our minds, like adults.’
Frank has been peeling an apple for Honey. He now, rather absent-mindedly, starts feeding her small pieces of it. His mind, understandably, is elsewhere.
‘But Stell,’ he says. ‘How do you know? Did you hear yourself?’
‘No, of course not. There’s a sort of mini passing-out, isn’t there, at the point of orgasm? One is hardly listening out for unusual sounds.’
‘Well, then, how can you be sure?’
‘Someone told me.’
‘Who? They might have been joking.’
‘They have no sense of humour. Besides, it’s not funny. And anyway, I said, let’s leave it. Let’s talk about something else. What shall I wear tomorrow night, for instance?’
‘The grandpa,’ Frank murmurs, as if this were a particularly devastating insight. ‘The doctor gramps from the other night.’
‘Well, hey, Sherlock. Bravo. Now can we leave it?’
‘Quite a menagerie that night chez Gramps, it must have been, with the tiger lying down with the lamb’s little piggy pal,’ irritating Frank persists biblically.
‘Frank!’ I yell, echoed by Honey: ‘Fwank!’
Frank stops talking, but carries on feeding my daughter bits of apple with a strange expression of barely repressed hysteria on his face. This makes his eyes bulge.
I stomp over to the counter and clear away our plates. I can feel Frank’s eyes burning into the back of my neck. He just can’t help himself – he just can’t leave it alone.
He says, ‘Has anyone else ever mentioned it, like Dom?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘No. No one’s ever said, Stella, you snort like a fucking pig when you come, darling. Odd, that.’
‘Don’t get cross, babe. It was probably a one-off.’
‘I doubt it. And don’t call me “babe” – you sound like Frank Butcher.’ I unclip Honey’s bib and lift her, and half a ton of squishy apple, out of the high chair, just as Frank bursts out laughing.
‘I didn’t mean it in the Frank Butcher sense,’ he honks. ‘I meant it …’
‘As in the film,’ I suddenly twig. ‘Babe. Very fucking hilarious, Frankie. Honey and I are going to make up the guest beds now,’ I tell him with as much dignity as I can muster. ‘And that, by the way, was a really mean joke.’
As we make our way up, I can hear Frank at first shouting and then screaming with laughter. I hear his big hands slap against his thighs. He drops something, at one point. He is practically delirious.
‘Oink,’ Honey snorts quietly against my neck as we head for the second landing. ‘Oi piggy.’
‘No, darling. Oi piggy,’ I tell her sadly. ‘Oi Piggy of Shame.’
9
Friday morning, and chaos. There’s no food in the house except rusks, bananas and a scraping of cold curry, so I’m just about to rush off to Waitrose to stock up when the phone rings. It’s Rupert, who informs me that he’s decided to drive down from Scotland rather than train or plane it, which means he doesn’t quite know when he’ll be arriving. ‘So,’ he tells me, ‘I’ve asked Cressida – that’s my date, Cressida Lennox – to come straight to yours at half past six. I’ll either be there myself by then, or I’ll be just around the corner. Is that OK?’
I suppose it is; he’s booked dinner at a restaurant called Odette’s, ten minutes’ walk from my house. ‘That’s fine,’ I tell Rupert, ‘but do please try and be here on time – my dad’s arriving, plus I’m going out myself and I need to get ready, so if you’re not here, I’m not going to stand in the living room for hours making small talk to your fancy woman when I should be in the bath and generally beautifying.’
‘You’ll love Cressida,’ Rupert says breezily. ‘You can talk about babies and things.’
‘Why? Because we both have wombs?’
Rupert chortles fruitily; one of the sweet things about him is that he never takes offence at my snappier jokes. ‘That too. But she works in childcare so, you know, you’ll have lots in common. I expect. Anyway, I’ll be there. Don’t worry about it. Cheerio.’
So then I’m trying to rush out to Waitrose for the second time, and just scribbling a note for Mary asking her if she wouldn’t mind giving the living room a quick once-over while Honey has her nap, when the doorbell goes.
‘Bon-jewer,’ says Tim, my next-door neighbour. He is standing with his hands in the pockets of his trousers – they’re more slacks, really – stretching them out.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I’m actually just on my way out – house guests. No food. Need to get to Waitrose and back before the child-minder finishes her shift.’
Tim just stands there, fiddling with his pockets, staring. He mowed my lawn this time last week, come to think of it: obviously doesn’t go to work on Fridays.
‘Hello?’ I say, keys in hand. ‘I’m sorry, Tim, but I’m late as it is – I really need to get going.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ Tim finally says, selecting a weird, burbly voice, as if speaking from the bottom of a bog, from his panoply.
‘No, really, it’s OK,’ I tell him, stepping out and slamming the front door shut behind me. He doesn’t move back, so for a second or two we are both perched awkwardly on the top step. Why is he so peculiar and off-putting?
‘I’ll drive myself,’ I say.
‘I’d like to drive you,’ he replies.
‘Sweet of you, but …’
‘I’m at a bit of a loose end, what with Janice and the kids away,’ he explains, now sounding perfectly normal and looking entirely plausible, in a beslacked, suburban husband twenty-years-married kind of way. ‘I need a few things from Waitrose too. Go on,’ he adds, seeing my confused expression. ‘It’ll be fun.’ He points his key ring at the street and the lights on a black MPV (natch) flash as the door catches – click – are released.
‘Come on,’ he calls out, striding ahead purposefully now. I don’t quite see how I can’t get into his car without seeming unnecessarily rude. He is odd, and he is marsupial, but if he wants to drive me to Waitrose because he’s bored, or lonely, and if supermarkets are his idea of ‘fun’, then really I don’t see why not.
‘Belt up,’ Tim says as I park my behind in the front seat. His seat belt is already fastened, and as I glance over it seems unusually taut and neat, sitting across his proud chest like a sash. Tim was probably the kind of boy whose school uniform trousers were slightly too short, and too tight over the copious expanse of his buttocks (because he was a fat-arsed child, I can just tell). He probably tucked his regulation V-neck in tightly too, and had horrible sandwiches that stank of unrefrigerated egg, and ignored his contemporaries’ mean comments by applying himself to elaborate fantasies about trolls or Tolkien. I suddenly feel sorry for him.
‘So,’ I say cheerily. ‘You don’t work on Fridays, then?’
‘Not at the moment, no,’ he says, not elaborating.
‘That must be nice. Longer sort of weekend, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘More time with the kids.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Tim says.
‘They look nice boys.’
‘That they
are, mam’zelle, that they are.’
We drive in silence for a while, up to Swiss Cottage. The Swiss cottage itself, an Alpine wooden chalet in the middle of a busy junction, has always struck me as especially incongruous, but the minute we catch sight of it Tim grabs my knee and says, ‘Yodel-ei-hee-ho,’ very, very loudly, causing me to jump.
‘Gosh,’ I say.
Tim is holding the steering wheel with one hand and rotating the other encouragingly at me.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Come on, then.’
I smile at him blankly. What is it he wants me to do?
Tim sighs deeply. ‘Yodel-ei-hee-ho,’ he repeats. And then, helpfully, he whispers, ‘You reply, “Yodel-ei-hee-hee.” ’ He raises his eyebrows expectantly.
‘Oh, haha, yes,’ I stammer. ‘The Swiss cottage. I get it. Yodelling. Yes. Ha ha.’
‘Yodel-ei-HEE-HO,’ Tim bellows, po-faced. ‘Join in, for God’s sake. Join in, woman.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Yodel-ei-hee, yodel-ei-hee,’ he sings furiously, his voice rising all the while. ‘Yodel-ei-heehee, yodel-ei-hee-ho, yodel-edle-yodle-edle-yodel-E I.’
Bloody hell. I don’t know what to do, so I stare out of the window.
Tim doesn’t speak again until we’re halfway down the Finchley Road.
‘Look,’ he then says. ‘I’ll be straight with you.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Straight about what?’
‘My needs,’ Tim says simply. ‘I have needs.’
‘Oh,’ I say, flummoxed. ‘What kinds of needs?’
‘Very real needs,’ he says. ‘And you strike me as a woman of the world.’
‘Oh,’ I repeat. I wish I could remember the bit in the Worst Case Scenario handbook about jumping out of moving cars.
‘Being foreign and all that,’ he continues.
‘Quite. Though possibly you attribute too much exoticism to me, Tim. I’m half English, you know.’
‘Weren’t raised here though, were you? I can tell.’
I concede that no, I was in the main raised Abroad. Tim nods knowingly and parks the car. We jump out and head for the trolley rank.
‘What’s your point, Tim?’
‘My point is this,’ Tim says. He takes me by the hand and leads me to a little concrete bench, usually frequented by drunks. ‘Sit yourself down,’ he says magnificently. ‘My point,’ he repeats – he is standing, and doing the thing with his pockets again – ‘is this. I know about you single women.’
‘Right,’ I say, glancing at my watch. ‘I don’t really have that much time, Tim, so …’
‘Precisely. You’re, what, thirty-five?’
‘Thirty-eight, actually.’
‘And time is running out,’ Tim says, looking very pleased at the idea.
‘What for? Time is running out for what?’
‘For the likes of you. I mean, look at you. You’re divorced, single, not getting any younger …’
‘That’s right,’ I say pleasantly. He is annoying me now. The ’Allo ’Allo French stuff is bad enough, but this really takes the biscuit.
‘And you’re gagging for a man. You all are.’
‘There’s only one of me. Actually.’
‘I mean all of you … you women. You types.’
‘Gagging for a man?’
‘Of course,’ says Tim. ‘Let’s go in, shall we? They always run out of rhubarb yoghurt.’
Tim’s idea, in a nutshell (because it takes him three aisles – pasta, crisps and snacks, dairy – to articulate it), is as follows: he and I have an affair. Nothing heavy. Janice, it seems, is going through some kind of early menopause thing which is affecting her sex drive. Only temporary, probably. But meanwhile Tim has very real needs and I – well, I am old and single and gagging for it. True, there isn’t much in it for me in the long run, but in the short run I get all the sex I want. With Tim. In the afternoons. I’ll love this, because a) I am French and thus gagging for it even more than my English sisters and b) it would give me a chance to air my mother tongue, which Tim says he would find very erotic when used ‘in a bedroom situation’.
‘So,’ he says, standing by the cheese counter and actually rubbing his hands together. ‘What do you say?’
I say nothing. I stare at a Stilton with blueberries and wonder why the English, with so many fabulous and underrated native cheeses at their disposal, insist on buggering about with them. Blueberries in Stilton. Imagine. What next? Sultanas in Brie? Jelly Tots in Chèvre?
‘That’s a disgrace,’ I tell Tim, gesturing in the direction of the counter. ‘A disgrace to cheesehood.’
‘I like a bit of Jarlsberg myself,’ he says.
‘I can’t have an affair with you, Tim,’ I snap. ‘But thanks for asking.’
‘Why ever not?’ he asks, looking genuinely astonished. ‘Why not, woman?’ He isn’t in the least sorry for himself at being turned down: he is indignant, just as he was when I wouldn’t yodel.
‘Your taste in cheese offends me,’ I tell him truthfully.
‘I suppose you like those stinky French numbers that taste like old socks,’ he sniffs, not remotely conciliatory.
‘I do, as a matter of fact. Though I am also devoted to Laughing Cow.’
‘Very unattractive in a woman,’ Tim continues, flinching away from me as though I were about to lick his face with Chaumes-scented breath.
‘Well, then,’ I say.
‘Well, then, what?’
‘Well, then, we couldn’t possibly have an affair, because I eat stinky cheese all day long. For breakfast. For elevenses. Lunch and dinner. Snacks in the night.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Yes. That’s how French I am. Cheese all day, walking around in basques all night.’
‘Basques, eh? Basques. Braun do an excellent electric toothbrush. The Plaque 3-D. Most efficient. Janice has got one.’
‘No doubt.’
‘You could use that, before coming over. And Listerine.’
I’ve had enough of this by now. Oddly, though, I can’t get quite as cross with Tim, or feel as amply insulted, as the occasion warrants. There’s something about him that makes me feel protective: he’s so pitiful and weird and throwbackishly English. He is beyond gauche. He is a social cripple. He thinks you ask your next-door neighbour for sex because she’s foreign and so, in some weird way, it doesn’t count. He yodels. He wears slacks and puts on funny voices; he probably goes to pubs, ‘takes a pew’ and addresses the landlord as ‘mine host’. He also hates women, I suspect, and has overly macho, robust relationships with his male friends, give or take a little bare-bottomed towel-flicking after the weekly game of squash.
‘I won’t be coming over,’ I tell him, stuffing basmati rice and two jars of chutney into my already bulging trolley, ‘because we won’t be having an affair.’
‘I don’t mind about the cheese. Not with modern mouthwash.’
‘I don’t fancy you,’ I tell him bluntly, loading up on claret.
‘House guests alcoholics, are they?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I fancy you, even though you’re quite old.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Tim, now standing in line at the till, stretching out his pockets again. ‘Oh, Lord. What will I do instead?’
‘You could always just wait until Janice gets HRT. Or masturbate,’ I tell him loudly as I unload my trolley on to the conveyor belt. The latter suggestion seems to thrill him, because he squirms slightly and goes red and smiley before throwing me a disgusted look.
We drive home in silence, avoiding Swiss Cottage. So you see, the thing about single women over the age of twenty-five never getting any offers is a complete crock, and so’s the thing about desperation. Some of us may be desperate, but there’s desperation and there’s Weedy Neighbour Sex, and never the twain shall meet.
Tim helps me unload my shopping bags and then goes home, throwing a cross-sounding, ‘When you change your mind …’ in my
direction. I spend the next couple of hours cooking and cleaning – we do actually have a cleaning lady, but I can never tell whether she’s been or not, a state of affairs I must remedy at some point – and generally making things attractive.
My father arrives just before four, while Honey, clearly exhausted from a morning spent at her weekly Music and Movement session, is still napping.
‘Estelle!’ he bellows from the front doorstep, not bothering to use the knocker. ‘I have arrived. Help me.’ I am fiddling about with the fire in the living room and can hear him through two sets of walls.
‘Hello,’ I say, opening the door and embracing him. ‘It’s so nice to see you. Did you have a good journey?’
‘Passable,’ Papa says, thrusting luggage at me. ‘Although one feels most oppressed by the ocean when actually under its mighty weight.’
‘Yes, it’s an odd idea, isn’t it? Come in, come in. Coffee? Something to eat?’
Oddly, counter-intuitively, this conversation is not conducted in French: my father loves speaking English.
‘A glass of wine, I think. And perhaps one of your exquisite British sandwiches. Aaah,’ he says, looking happily around the living room. ‘It’s much prettier than when I was last here. More aesthetic. Less hideous.’
‘I redid it after Dom. White or red?’ I call from the kitchen.
‘Red, darling. Red like the corpuscle.’
I walk back through. ‘Here you go,’ I say. ‘And here are some cucumber sandwiches I made especially for you. Chin-chin.’
My father taught me to say ‘chin-chin’ when I was a child, believing this to be charmingly and authentically English. I’ve never met another person under sixty who actually says it, unless they’re French.
‘Santé!’ he smiles, taking a huge gulp. ‘Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,’ he continues, waving his arms about like a third-rate actor – I’m sparing you the phonetic spelling: suffice it to say that his accent is cartoonishly, comically French and that he speaks very fast. ‘Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.’ That’s another thing he taught me. Until I was about sixteen, I believed the done thing was to quote this particular bit of Keats whenever presented with a glass of wine: according to my father, it was what le tout Londres always did. My mother just smiled vaguely (smiling vaguely is my mother’s forte), and never disabused either of us.
