by Daisy Waugh
Quite a pitch, I remarked. And one short enough to text.
It was meant to be a joke, but he took the comment literally; made me text ‘LIKE DA VINCI ONLY BETTER’ to the Primary Breadwinner there and then. Which I did, partly because, at that stage I would have done anything to get the tap fixed; partly because my husband was in Los Angeles at the time, where it was three in the morning, and texting him with useless information at three in the morning is generally the closest I dare go to checking up on him.
He didn’t reply. It tells me nothing, of course. Tells me either he was busy snuffling lines of charlie and shagging some plastic-boobed slapper who wants a part in his next film. Or, erm, he was asleep.
So anyway, less than two months now until the baby’s born, and I don’t get any more beautiful, or any more fun to be with. It’s just over a year since we moved from urban hell to rural Paradise, and let’s face it, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. Twelve months ago we were so full of enthusiasm. So full of hope. In retrospect, it all feels faintly embarrassing.
I remember one sunny afternoon in particular, almost exactly a year ago. I took the children into the fields behind the house to pick blackberries, of all ridiculous playing-at-country-life activities. (As if the mangoes at Waitrose wouldn’t always taste better.) I remember watching the children shovelling blackberries into their mouths, assuming that this innocent, healthy scenario would be typical of our life to come, and feeling a wave of enormous happiness and pride. My son and daughter had been rescued from a childhood of bomb scares, consumerism and Ken Livingstone-approved street festivals. We were in a field picking blackberries on a weekday. We were doing the right thing.—But then the dog went missing, or my son fell into the stinging nettles. Somehow the spell was broken. And that was it. It’s never really been restored.
Which brings me, very nearly, to the point. My husband’s last whistle-stop tour in Paradise, before he went off to LA, had been made extra nettlesome not just by my sour face, which I imagine he’s growing used to by now, but because I insisted that before he left, all the paintings, plus the twenty-odd packing cases filled with paperback novels I never intend to read again, should finally be brought up from the cellar, where they’ve been growing mould all winter long.
I’m not sure I ever had much intention of doing anything useful with any of it. But things are so bad-tempered between us now, it’s possible I devise fresh new ways to exhaust and infuriate him without my conscious mind even noticing it. In any case the boxes stink of damp. They’ve taken over the entire sitting room and I can no longer reach the telly. He’s been away a week now and I’ve not gone anywhere near them.
Except yesterday. I bravely put my head round the door. And I looked at the mountain of crap in the middle of our sitting room…Realised I didn’t want any of it…And then I looked at the pristine, newly painted walls…And then I did a tour, actually, of the entire house. I wandered from room to unlived-in room. What a palace, I thought. What a Dream Home. I realised, suddenly, that there wasn’t much point in unpacking.
The children don’t know it yet. The husband certainly doesn’t know it yet.
But between you and me, I’ve called the estate agents in.
September 25th
Read somewhere that estate agents have an acronym for people like me, and all the other lonely, house-proud lady-mums with not enough to do and too few adults to talk to: FWOTs, I think they call us. Fucking Wastes of Time. And how right they are…I sometimes think estate agents may have been invented specifically for us.
Anyway, who knows? Maybe I’m not a FWOT. Maybe, maybe I’m doing this for real.
October 4th
Hot. Wretchedly hot. Wish everyone would stop going around in jerseys. Had the windows slightly ajar this morning. So Ripley insisted on eating his Cheerios in bloody mittens. Dora thought it was hilarious and decided to copy him. They giggled and spilt things all the way through breakfast. Very annoying.
October 5th
Darrell came round. The children were at school. The sun was shining. The front door was open, and I was standing on a chair in the kitchen with my skirt tucked into my pants, cooling one of my hot, swollen feet in a sink full of lovely cold water. I don’t even want to imagine what I looked like.
I am truly enormous now. Insortable enormous, as my posh grandmother used to say. Too bloody monstrously enormous to be seen in public, I think is what she meant. I look like the Michelin man, only hotter. So. Darrell shouted out a hello from the hall before he came in, but the door from hall to kitchen was wide open as well, so he saw me long before I had time to recover myself.
He paused at the awful sight of me, and laughed, and then strolled over to offer me a hand. I leant on his arm as I clambered back down to the ground, and I wish I could say I felt nothing when I touched him. Felt an electric jolt of pure, unrequited pleasure. Like a dirty old man tucking his tenner into a lap-dancer’s knickers, I suppose. Christ. What a dismal thought. Anyway. Anyway—never mind all that. Things have moved on since then. Darrell came to see me. And I’ve often felt that we never really settled things between us properly. I think I felt that in some way I had let him down. So—in spite of my generally monstrous insortable-ness I was happy to see him. Very happy.
He made us both some coffee; said he knew his way round the kitchen, which I guess he did. He suggested, with eyes tactfully averted from my horrible swollen feet, that I would probably like to sit down. We took our coffee out onto the terrace, just as we had the last time, all those months ago. And we sat there on the balustrade, just as we had the last time, looking out at the view but not saying much, because I think neither of us really knew quite where to begin. And then of course—inevitably—we both started talking at the same time. He said:
‘The old man’s in London again.’
It wasn’t a question. I wondered vaguely how he knew—except that the old man is always in London, I suppose.
I broke off from whatever I was saying—something facetious but safe about the neighbours’ poplar trees, I remember. I nodded. ‘The old man’s in London,’ I said. ‘As ever.’ I smiled. But I suppose he heard a hint of the bitterness. Or sadness. Or whatever it is. There are times when I can’t really hide it.
Darrell nodded. ‘Away more and more, is he?’ He said it quietly.
‘Pretty much.’ I stared very hard at the trees; could feel his gaze on my profile; could feel my own eyes burning and willed the tears not to spill over. But then the silence dragged on, and I could sense his—I don’t know what: his interest? Concern? Pity? More silence. I looked straight ahead. He looked straight at me. I think I tried to kid myself that he couldn’t see that I was crying. He was kind enough not to comment on it, anyway. The silence stretched on and on, and for once in my life I couldn’t think of a single upbeat, brittle, smart-arse remark to fill it with. All my energy was focused on trying to suck back those awful tears. Finally he said,
‘Well, Martha…Are you going to tell me?’ It was the first time, I think, that he had ever called me by my real name. Not ‘love’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’: Martha. It sounded shockingly intimate. ‘Are you going to tell me or are you going to leave me guessing?’
I—opened my mouth to answer. Hadn’t expected the question. Not at all. I smiled, actually, and shook my head. ‘No need to guess,’ I said. ‘It’s not yours, Darrell,’ And I laughed when I saw the look on his face. He so wanted to believe me, but I could tell that he didn’t. ‘I promise you,’ I said. ‘I thought it was yours for a while. I was terrified, actually…Anyway it’s not. The maths was out. My maths was out. Thank God.’
He made me promise him again. So I did. Why not? He said he didn’t want any nasty surprises. Well, neither do I. The baby’s not his. There’s no question. In my mind. It never was his, and it never will be, not in my mind. The baby is Fin’s—if he wants it. I wish I could believe he did.
After that Darrell put his arms around me and for some reason the electri
city I’d always felt before seemed to have ebbed away just a little bit. He might—almost—have been my brother. He was my friend. My only friend, I think, in the whole of Paradise.
I told him we were selling up and moving back to London; or, rather, that it was what I was planning, but that Fin didn’t know about it yet. He didn’t seem particularly surprised. He said it was obvious from the start that I wasn’t cut out for country life. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘what d’you go so mad with your friend Hatty for?’ He laughed. ‘You were so jealous of her you couldn’t hardly see straight.’
Annoying, that. I wasn’t, anyway. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t jealousy. I was disappointed because for a while she’d turned out to be such a fair-weather friend. But he wasn’t interested. He just laughed at me. Anyway. He stayed for about an hour, I think; until it was time for me to pick up the children. He told me about his little boy Daniel, who started at school this term. He told me about the babysitter’s outrage at my suggestion she’d appeared on reality TV. He told me Potato Head had absconded with £4,000 of Darrell’s money, and that nobody had heard from him for months. He told me numerous bits of gossip—about people I hadn’t even realised he knew. He told me Rachel Healthy-Snax had put her house up for sale. And then, as he stood up to leave, he said:
‘I suppose the old man knows, does he?’
‘The old man knows nothing,’ I said. Didn’t really want to talk about the Old Man. Not to Darrell.
Darrell looked unusually awkward. ‘Only because…there’s a lot of gossip around here. Nasty stories. People round here tend to know each other’s business…They can be crueller than you probably think…He’s staying away all this time—and you as big as lorry, with the baby due any time now. He may have got the wrong idea. He may be thinking all sorts of funny things…That’s all I’m saying.’
I wanted him to be clearer. I think. But he said he had to go. He wished me luck with the baby, and with my secret plans to move us all back to London. It was the warmest of goodbyes. Maybe I hugged him a little tighter than he hugged me. Maybe. But we parted friends.
I watched him saunter back down the hill, out of my life. I’m not sure if I will ever see him again.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
The estate agent who showed us the house just over a year ago was utterly wretched when I told him things hadn’t worked out for us, and that we were thinking of selling it again. Somehow, though, through the veil of tears, he communicated his willingness to drop by for a valuation. He wanted to come round immediately, even as he was wiping his eyes, but I put him off for a week. It gives me time to smarten the place up a bit; to minimise our inevitable losses. I need to get rid of the mountain of musty packing cases still squatting in the sitting room, for example, and buy some lampshades, and put up the roman blinds we had made-to-measure for every room in the house, which have been stacked in the drying cupboard since the week before Christmas, still wrapped in their cellophane…
We spent a lot of money on the back garden, too, when we first arrived. Chopped down a couple of trees, knocked down a wall, built up another. There was a brief moment some time in the early spring, around the time the Dream House stank of chemicals and we all had to evacuate, when our garden in Paradise looked truly stunning. These days, though, it’s a bit of a no-go zone: part junk heap, part dog’s lavatory. In fact it’s probably the most beautifully landscaped dog’s lavatory in the world.
We found a giant polystyrene board in the cellar at some point, months ago now, and in an early sign of the slipshoddiness which was soon to take over completely, we used it as part of a complicated barricade, designed to keep the dog from escaping into the village. The system didn’t work. Nothing does. Within a week she had gnawed the polystyrene board into a thousand tiny pieces and strewn them all over the garden. Which is where they remain, annoyingly light and bouncy, however hard it rains. What with the dog shit lurking beneath the surface, and all the rest of the junk, we can none of us face the effort of removing them.
But things change. Suddenly clearing up the back garden has become a top priority. As I write, the musical sound of my two children, hard at work in their little rubber gloves, filters reassuringly through my office window. From what I can understand, between their merry screams of disgust, they’ve so far filled half a dustbin bag with old dog turds and bits of bouncy polystyrene. I’m paying them a fortune, needless to say, though not enough according to my daughter. She claims there’s an unwritten rule never to ask an employee to do something you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself. Seems pretty illogical to me. In any case—frankly—it’s not the only rule I’m breaking this week.
Unless, that is, you’re allowed to put a person’s Dream House up for sale without quite getting around to telling them about it. Actually the Dream House ownership is split: half the rooms are in my name, half in his. It was a measure advised by our accountants, to minimise the tax bill for our children, should the husband and I simultaneously decide to kill each other. Which we easily might. Or at any rate he might kill me if he knew what I was planning. Happily, at least, there are no tax ramifications in that.
He’s away, anyway. As ever. It occurs to me that if I fake his signature on the sale contracts, bribe the children from telling him when he calls, and then somehow arrange to keep our telephone number the same, it could be ages before he even notices we’ve moved.
Oh, I’m exaggerating, of course. Actually, he’s been speeding up and down the motorway to see us often enough recently that he’s about to have his licence suspended. But that’s not the point. I have to justify my awful behaviour somehow, and since I’m the one doing the writing here, it would be madness not to lay at least most of the blame for this potentially bankrupting experiment on him.
October 14th
Bumped into Rachel Healthy-Snax at the school gate. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since she came round in such a state the other day. Jennifer-Mummy, of stool colour fame, told me Rachel had taken the children to stay with her mother for a while. Anyway, she seemed a lot more composed today. Came over and apologised, in fact.
She said she and Jeremy were getting divorced and that she’d decided, after ‘a lot of soul searching’, that it was time for her to go back to work. I said congratulations. Don’t know why. It slipped out. Rachel looked slightly startled, and Jennifer-Mummy, standing beside her as always, pursed her little lips with the utmost disapproval.
‘Not congratulations about the divorce,’ I said quickly.
Rachel laughed. ‘I didn’t think so.’ She said she was divorcing Jeremy even though it turned out he hadn’t rekindled his affair with Clare at all. In fact he had shown her ‘documentary evidence’ that the person he ate lunch with at the Ivy was in fact a business associate, and not only that, but a man. Rachel seemed oddly unphased by her mistake. She said the fact that she had ever been so suspicious simply confirmed what she had been trying not to accept for a long time: there was no trust between them any longer. ‘It’s not only that, anyway,’ she said. ‘The truth is, Jeremy and I have drifted apart. We don’t have anything to say to each other any more.’
Afterwards, over more coffee down at the Coffee Bean, Rachel told Jennifer and me how, at the peak of her misery and rage, she had driven over to Clare’s house. ‘Don’t know quite what I was planning to do when I got there,’ Rachel said. ‘The way I felt, it was lucky I didn’t have a gun.’
‘Mmm,’ nodded Jennifer-Bunny. ‘Thank goodness for that!’
Clare had answered the front door, according to Rachel, ‘looking like the little slut she really is’; dressed in a black silky dressing gown and obviously, from the look of shock on her face, expecting to see someone else entirely.
The confrontation between them didn’t last long. Clare had laughed, apparently, and told Rachel not to be silly, which must have been a little crushing; possibly the final nail in poor, silly Jeremy’s marital coffin. After that, almost immediately, Clare had
threatened to call the police. So Rachel left. ‘And you know what?’ Rachel muttered. Jennifer-Mummy-Bunny and I both leaned forward to find out. ‘As I was getting into my car I spotted a young man—very nice looking, early thirties—lurking round the side of the house. He was watching me. Waiting for me to leave. I presume she must have told him to park round the back so people couldn’t see…’
‘There’s no stopping her, is there?’ muttered Jennifer-Mummy, shaking her fluffy ears. ‘It’s one man after another with that woman. And I don’t suppose that young man was the one she was dining with at the Ivy. Knowing the rate she goes…’
‘I wouldn’t think so, no,’ Rachel said heavily.
‘That woman is a Walking Health Risk.’
Maybe. I have to say, the evidence against Clare is slightly stacking up. She’s a Goer. No doubt about that. It’s no wonder I’ve seen so little of her. Funnily enough, I was beginning to feel quite offended at the way she seemed to be avoiding me, but clearly she’s been rather better occupied elsewhere. Lucky thing.
October 17th
Fin came home this weekend behaving like a different man. He looked happy to be home for the first time in months, I think, as if some dreadful weight had been lifted from his shoulders. I didn’t ask what or why—unwilling to rock the boat. It was just lovely to see him like that again.
Also—he turned up with a whole sack of stuff for the new baby: beautiful, ridiculous, tiny little cashmere jerseys, and enormous teddy bears, and a disco-ball mobile to hang above the cot, and booties made of rabbit fur, and a matching rabbit fur hat, and a whole lot of extravagant, glorious nonsense the baby most definitely doesn’t need. He said he’d been thinking a lot about names, and what did I think about Ferdinand? Or Hector? Or Rosie? Or Alison?
