by Daisy Waugh
Fucking Hell.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
Found a place to stay that wasn’t too far from the hospital, just in case I went into labour. I ordered room service. Watched telly in bed. It was wonderful. Or it would have been, if certain individuals hadn’t been hating me so much. In any case, the husband and I engaged in an extended telephonic row that night which rounded itself off, eventually, in a sort of faux peace, because neither of us could face repeating ourselves any longer. The fact is, so I shouted at him (approx. 63 times), if he can’t drive, and I can’t get the pram up the garden path without the help of a couple of weightlifters, we have no choice but to move. Whether we like it not. And since the children’s old school has kindly agreed to take them back again, we might just as well move home to London.
Spent the rest of the night drowning my marital sorrows with KitKats from the minibar, and watching Relocation, Relocation, which is always good for a belly laugh.
The small fat mother, who so kindly told my husband that his house was for sale, was standing on our wobbly terrace admiring our Wow Factor view when I arrived home the following morning. She was twenty minutes early for the viewing. It was pretty obvious, though, that she never had any intention of buying. Not just from the beady, furtive look in her eye, but also—how can I put this delicately? Never mind.
In any case, you can never be certain. And it would have been rude and very vulgar to ask. So the husband and I gave her the grand tour. She pointed out a small damp patch in the back bedroom, and wondered aloud if the lavatory in the children’s bathroom was leaking. Which of course it is. Then she opened the cupboard on the landing and said ‘Ooh,’ unapologetically, as the door came off its hinges in her hand. Finally, after chocolate biscuits and coffee, and a volley of questions about why we could possibly be wanting to move back to London, she waddled off, her pretext for hijacking our Saturday morning apparently not worth sustaining any longer.
She was half way down the path when I decided we’d been violated. She had opened the door into our shower cubicle and taken note of our toiletry choices, for Heaven’s sake. She had eaten our biscuits, examined our Wellington boots and commented on our leaking lavatory. For nothing. So I shouted after her,
‘I take it you’re not interested, then?’
She turned back, clearly confused.
‘In the house,’ she made me shout. The husband, annoyingly, was trying to pull me back inside. ‘We’ll put it on with the agent then,’ I called after her. ‘Price goes up 1.5 per cent as of this afternoon, ha ha ha! Can’t change your mind now!’
She looked at me as though I was slightly balmy, which I thought was a bit rich.
More importantly, perhaps, I had the baby. A ravishing nugget of pure perfection, we all agree, and magically good natured. Goes to show it’s a myth, all that stuff about mellow pregnancies leading to mellow babes. Nothing has been mellow these last forty-and-a-quarter weeks. Not even the final ten minutes. The husband and I were arguing about selling versus letting when I finally went into labour. We continued arguing, intermittently, all the way into hospital.
Turned out the midwife’s oldest sister used to be friends with Julie Burchill’s mother. Amazingly. And so unrushed was the vibe down on Paradise Maternity, and so generous were they with their painkillers, that the midwife and I were able to talk through every detail of Julie’s childhood right up until the moment my baby made its entrance into the world. So. A perfect birth.
And a difficult homecoming. We got the baby up the hill eventually. Question is, though, with the husband gone again, I don’t see how we’re ever going to get back down.
November 13th
Fin’s known about Darrell for months, it turns out. My excellent friend Clare told him—and I don’t honestly know when or how Clare found out. From what I can make out she knew about the fling between Darrell and me long before she’d even met Darrell. In any case Fin wasn’t being especially forthcoming about how he came by the knowledge he had; only that he had it, and that until he got the call from Clare, letting him—and Darrell—off the hook, he had suspected the worst. Or half suspected it, at any rate.
But the baby is his. It is his. So.
I asked him why he’d never confronted me. He said he had every intention of it, when the baby was born. When the ‘Clare problem’ had been resolved. And when he knew he’d be home for longer than a day and a half, to deal with the fall-out…
It’s the thing—aside from the fact he’s clever and good looking, and quite glamorous and funny and rich and very good at tennis—it’s the thing that made me fall in love with him in the first place. He may be a liar and a cheat—as am I. But he is fair I think; probably the most fair-minded man—person—I’ve ever met. Which is why he knows, as I do, really, that we are equally responsible for the mess we’re now in.
There is no such thing as perfection, and certainly not in a marriage. But I think we can forgive each other. Or something close to it. In fact—honestly—sometimes, secretly, I’m not even sure that there’s anything to forgive. I mean, Christ. It’s a long life. Isn’t it? What does it really matter, in the end? In any case I still love him. So. And he and I are going to go home to London with our three beautiful children, and one way or another we are going to stick our marriage back together again.
November 15th
Well, well well. So there I was, lying in bed with perfect Ferdinand, thinking about nothing, for once—not about money, or work, or Fin, or Clare Gower; just lying there being completely, peacefully, freakily contended—and who should call up but Smartypants.
My heart sank, to be honest, because even when she’s trying to be friendly she sounds horrible. Anyway, they ran the story. My beautiful, 73-year-old anarchist lesbian, who claims to dress up as a geisha to welcome her girlfriend home, didn’t just make the magazine, she made the cover! And the magazine is out now. And it’s everywhere!
Smartypants said, ‘Crikey. Didn’t I tell you we were running it? God. Sorree! Totally and utterly thought I had. Are you sure? Fact is, it’s just been so crazy round here. Anyway. Reason I’m calling…’ Turns out Smarty’s boss wants me to do more for the magazine. Smarty was ringing to make a date for lunch.
Funny. She sounded thoroughly irritated by the whole affair, even though—presumably—she must indirectly get some credit for having ‘discovered’ me. Or something. Actually I’ve been knocking around for years…Anyway. Who cares? I’m leaving my Ferdinand with Fin and going to London for the day.
Going to interview for an au pair, if I can find one willing to be interviewed.
Going to meet Smartypants at the Coffee Bean. Or equiv. She says she has loads of ideas for me.
Going to be brave and suggest a meeting with the Sunday Times people. They must be able to give me a bit more work, especially now that we’re moving back to—Oh. Ferdy’s awake.
November 20th
Column day. God. It always seems to be column day these days. And I have done nothing. I have thought nothing. I have seen no one but health visitors and letting agents. I have nothing, nothing, nothing to write. About anything. At all.
Health visitors…Health visitors…Can I get 700 words out of letting agents and health visitors? Guess I’m going to have to.
Right then. It’s going to be crap but I can’t help it. My brain isn’t working properly quite yet—Ooh, was that Ferdinand?
…Right then.
Right then.
Here goes.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
It’s like Piccadilly Circus up here in the Dream House. We have letting agents and their weird, whispering tenants filing through the place at least three times a day, and hot on their heels an apparently unending supply of kindly ladies from the National Health Service. They come puffing up that hill one after the other: the tenants with their annoying demands for power showers and fresh licks of paint; the NHS foot-soldiers with their bossy forms and their various
bits of measuring equipment, all of them insisting on calling me ‘Mummy’.
One of the NHS bods arrived with a machine to test my beautiful, mellow baby’s hearing. She asked if Mummy would sign a piece of paper allowing the test results to be released to other government departments. If I refused to sign it, she said sweetly, she wouldn’t be able to do the test. The mellow babe could be deaf as a post, and we’d have been none the wiser.
What with the pregnancy hormones and so much time spent in isolation, I’ve become faintly pathological about a few things: dog germs, for one; the girl in the newspaper shop who takes twenty minutes to serve each customer, for another; the mother at school, who makes her son wear a stupid hat with ear flaps whenever the sun comes out; shop sandwiches; sheep shit…but most of all about Big Brother (the state, not the show). I refused to sign.
Funnily enough, she did the test anyway. So there you have it. Mini protest meets with mini success. The End. I sincerely wish I had something of more interest to report, but I don’t. Truth is I’ve spent most of the last week in bed.
…I have a nasty feeling, mind you, that my mini protest may have landed me on a mini NHS blacklist, because those NHS ladies just keep on pouring through my door. Does everyone get as many as this? Hope not.
I’ve told them all that we’re moving back to London within the next few weeks, and they’re absolutely, embarrassingly determined to get a forwarding address out of me. Why? I’ve told them we don’t have one yet but I don’t think they believe me, and—intriguingly—in the last few days I’ve noticed a curious clicking noise every time I pick up the telephone.
NHS eavesdroppers will be disappointed, however, since any plots Mummy may secretly be hatching—to blow up the Home Office, for example—she takes care only ever to discuss over the mobile.
On the landline she and the husband talk about nothing but square footage, room layout and access to public transport. One way or another we are definitely going home.
I’m slightly incapacitated at the moment, what with having so many children, and living on a hill that a pram can’t get up or down. But the husband has been busy visiting grotesquely expensive rental properties in West London. The plan, inasmuch as we have one, is to get out of Paradise as soon as possible and to be back in London, in a house not too far from the children’s old school, in time for the beginning of next term.
What we’re looking for, in other words, is a house not entirely dissimilar to the one we sold in Shepherds Bush about eighteen months ago, and which—if we’re to believe our former neighbours (all of whom seem incapable of talking about anything else)—has almost doubled in value since.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’ll be just fine. Actually, if we wind up living in a small dustbin it will be all right with me. So long as the pram fits in too. I honestly couldn’t care less. Wholesome fantasies about bloody dream homes are a thing of the distant past for me. All I need is a tube station.
December 12th
End of term at last. School carol service.
We had to go, obviously. Clare Gower and her cuckolded Mega-Bux husband sat at the opposite end of the church to us and didn’t glance at us once. I wonder if he knows? Afterwards we lingered a little. We had to. I said goodbye to the other coffee mothers. They all dutifully admired little Ferdinand, said they were sorry things hadn’t worked out better for us in Paradise, and Fin and I dutifully agreed that, yes indeed, it was a great shame.
But the truth is I couldn’t wait to get away. I had no idea, any more, who knew what about either of us, and I felt exposed. I felt like we were the secret butt of everybody else’s joke. Or I was. Serves me right, obviously. I know that. But still.
I felt like such a fool.
And maybe Fin did too. I didn’t ask.
In any case, we’re leaving in less than a week now, and with everything that’s happened I’m not certain I can even bear to stick around that long. In fact, as I waved them all fondly goodbye, with that super-rictus Stepford grin chiselled hard into my face, I was praying that I would never set eyes on any of them ever again.
I do not feel proud. Of anything much, right now. Except the children, of course. But actually I feel much worse about the Sunday Times column than I do about any of my other long-running deceptions. And after this week, which will be the final instalment from Paradise, I’m going to say to my boss that the column’s got to finish. I’m jacking it in. It’s horrible. I wake up in the night sometimes, feeling sickened by my own spite. And maybe I can’t help my poisonous outlook, but I guess I could stop sharing it with however many millions of people it is read the Sunday Times. So I’ll find a more honourable way of earning my living in the future. I really haven’t the stomach for it any more.
Coming away from the carol service I felt a sort of camaraderie with Fin that I haven’t felt in ages. We all grow older and wiser, I suppose. And even the spoilt ones, like Fin and me, eventually come to understand that nothing in life is perfect. That there is no such thing as a storybook ending.
Frankly, I don’t really care what happened in the past, or who screwed who, or when, or why, or what may or may not have come of any of it. We are only human. Or most of us are, anyway. (Jury’s still out on Jennifer Bunny.) In the meantime Fin and I will muddle through. Because we have to. Because, in our own messed-up, selfish ways and in spite of everything, or even because of everything—we love each other. And one way or another, I think—I hope—we always will.
COUNTRY MOLE
Sunday Times
Our letting agents have found not one but two families wanting to move into the Dream House. They’ve been fighting it out, amazingly, upping each other’s offers; hand-delivering cheques hither and thither—and here’s the thing.
We’ve cashed one. We’ve signed on the line. So it’s official. As of Sunday December 17th—in fact as you read this—we’ll be double-locking that front door for the very last time. By lunch we’ll be gone for good.
What with the packing, and the baby and all, and the husband away again, I thought I could use a bit of help. So I trawled the internet for a temporary nanny, and found Rita. She sounded lovely: gave great text, had a CV with lots of references to her church group on it. More importantly, she could start at once. We arranged to meet for an interview at Paddington Station.
She was significantly older and fatter than I’d imagined. But when I asked her how old, exactly, she looked quite angry and refused to say. We brushed over that. I suppose she could have been anything between fifty and a hundred, say. She had jet-black hair and a totally unlined face.
In any case she had such a warm smile that the subject of mobility, for example, never really came up. I did warn her we lived on a steep hill but I don’t think she heard (incredibly noisy, Paddington Station) because she roared with laughter; said she loved nothing better than a hill. At least I thought that was what she said. Might have said she had a son called Bill. She had a strong accent and somebody was having an argument on their mobile at the table next door. The point is, it’s not that easy persuading someone to come and work for you when you’ve got a new baby, and you’re moving house, and the house you’re moving out of is on a hill and a long way from London, and the house you’re moving into hasn’t been found yet.
So I offered her the job the moment I suspected she might accept it, and arranged to pick her up from Paradise station the following afternoon. I left her munching happily on blueberry muffins. She looked a picture of health. I’m sure of it.
She made it to Paradise the following day and I greeted her at the platform like a long-lost lover. Dizzy, I was, with the ecstasy of having someone to help. It’s probably why I didn’t immediately register the limp, and the terrible, horrible panting.
We got her into the Dream House somehow, but it wasn’t easy. My son carried her rucksack (mysteriously heavy); my daughter and I (with the baby in a kangaroo pouch) sort of nudged her gently up the pathway. Every three or four steps we would all pause so she
could once again re-examine the view.
I think the walk to the house nearly killed her, poor woman. She sat down at the kitchen table and didn’t move again until it was time for her to roll upstairs to bed. The following morning she came to breakfast with the rucksack already on her back and without a word of explanation, really—or nothing explicit, and without any direct eye contact Rita, the children and I just clambered back down the hill, into the car and headed back to the station again. We’ve been sending each other loving text messages ever since.
So—the husband arrives from Budapest on the Friday before we leave. We’ll just have to do the packing then. In the meantime I’ve been rehearsing a Funny for the final moment. As we pull away from Paradise for that very last time, never, ever, ever to return, I’m going to turn to the group, and say: ‘Well! That was fun.’ See if it raises a laugh.
Unlikely.
I’m not that popular with the family at the moment. But I’ll make it up to them. Once we’re back in London. With or without poor Rita; with or without a home. It’s going to be a glorious Christmas.
Because from now on—and this is a promise—I am going to be a completely different human being.
January 25th
London
London! Thank God. Christmas long gone, and I’ve not written the diary for weeks. Haven’t needed to, that’s why. Just haven’t needed to.
The children were given an ecstatic welcome back to their old school and they are happy to be home again. Fin is in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. Doing whatever it is he does out there…We seem to be getting on OK. Much, much better.
