by Tess Stimson
“Malinche, where in heaven’s name have you been? It’s eight-thirty; Will’s been asking for you for the last hour! What kept you?”
Fuck, this is Nick’s wife?
“Traffic,” she says, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the street.
“I told you to allow—oh, never mind. Now that you’re here, you’d better come and be sociable.”
“I was, darling, I was talking to this gorgeous girl here—such a lovely suit, I hate chartreuse itself, of course, the drink I mean, but that’s simply a delicious color, especially with that corn gold hair, how clever of you—what did you say your name was?”
“Sara Kaplan,” I supply faintly.
“Of course, Sara, well, Nicholas, I was being sociable—as you can see, I was talking to Sara, she very kindly got me a drink, I was just about to come and find you and Will, and then here you were—”
Does the woman never draw breath? I can’t believe the stuffy-but-cute Nick is with this hippie, style-free Alzheimer dingbat. He doesn’t look very comfortable either, as she latches onto him and grabs his arm, and suddenly I can see it all: the childhood sweetheart he married when he was too young to know any better, the kids that followed before he knew it, the albatross of a mortgage, the arid sex life, the whole nightmare. Poor sod. He looks like he needs some R&R big-time.
Hmmm. Now there’s an interesting thought.
All of a sudden, Monday can’t come quickly enough.
3
Malinche
Kit can be such a total wretch sometimes, really he can. I flick the end of a tea towel at him, but he ducks and instead I catch the saucepan chandelier hanging over the island in the center of the kitchen, setting pans and ladles clattering against each other. I cover the telephone mouthpiece so that Nicholas won’t hear the din, and stick out my tongue at Kit as he sits there shaking with laughter and doing absolutely nothing to stop my wilful baby daughter putting the rabbit down the waste disposal.
“Oh, God, Metheny, don’t do that,” I gasp, quickly rescuing the trembling creature and steadying the saucepans. “Poor rabbit. Sorry, Nicholas, I have to go. I’ll see you at the station. Usual time?”
Nicholas yelps in my ear. “For God’s sake, Malinche, it’s William’s retirement party this evening! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten! You’re supposed to be on the five twenty-eight from Salisbury to Waterloo, remember?”
Oh, Lord. I had completely forgotten. It’s three-forty already, Liz will be dropping the girls off from school at any moment, I haven’t made their tea yet—I thought ravioli di magro would be nice, I haven’t done that for a while; a little fresh ricotta seasoned with nutmeg, sea salt, and black pepper and blended with Swiss chard and pancetta stesa, and of course freshly grated Parmesan over the top. I haven’t sorted out a babysitter, I need to wash my hair, what to wear, how on earth am I going to get to the station in time for the five twenty-eight?
“So I am. I hadn’t really forgotten,” I fib, crossing my fingers behind my back, “it just slipped my mind for a moment. Hold on a second—”
I put the receiver down and thrust Don Juan de Marco back in his cage in the scullery with a couple of wilted leaves of bok choi as consolation, firmly securing the latch with a piece of twine so the baby can’t let him out again. Metheny instantly stops what she was doing—picking up spilled Cheerios from beneath her high chair and putting them one by one into Kit’s outstretched hand—to crouch by the rabbit cage, nappy in the air, fat gold curls clinging to the nape of her neck as her chubby little fingers poke and pull at the string. I cross my fingers that the twine holds for at least the next five minutes and throw myself theatrically onto my knees on the kitchen flagstones in front of Kit, hands clasped in supplication as I try my best to look pathetic.
He ignores my amateur dramatics, fastidiously heaping the Cheerios into a small pyramid on the counter before dipping an elegant pale finger into my cake mix to taste it. I’ve flavored it with vanilla and orange and lemon zest, darkened it with cocoa, and spiced it up with candied orange peel. The meld of tangy rich scents drifts around the warm kitchen like fog on the moors.
“What?” he says sternly.
I flap my hands at him to be quiet. Nicholas knows Kit is my best friend and comes over to visit, of course he does, but he doesn’t have to know quite how often.
“What?” Kit mouths.
I intensify my importunate expression, although I suspect, from the twitch at the corner of Kit’s mouth, that the net effect is one of constipation rather than entreaty. He rolls his eyes but nods, as I knew he would. I struggle up from the floor. Dramatic gestures are all very well, but then of course you have to live with the consequences; it’s rather like having sex on the beach, not nearly as romantic as you imagine, and of course the sand gets everywhere. I scoop up Metheny in the nick of time—my delicious yummy baby, she smells like warm fresh-baked bread—and retrieve the phone. “I really must go, Nicholas—”
“You did remember to arrange a babysitter?”
“Mmm. Yes, Kit very sweetly said he’d do it.”
Quickly I ring off so I don’t have to listen to the pained silence that invariably follows any mention of Kit. I’ve spent the past twelve years variously cajoling, begging, and banging heads together, but it’s no good, the current wary standoff between my husband and my dearest friend is clearly as good as it’s ever going to get. I have the deepest sympathy for everybody at the UN if the Palestinians and the Israelis are anywhere near this bad, though of course neither Nicholas nor Kit are anything at all like that difficult man Arafat—no, he’s dead now, there’s a new one, what’s his name, I really must read the paper a bit more often. It’s all a question of finding the time, of course: I get to Saturday evening and I still haven’t worked my way through last Sunday’s papers. I used to think Nicholas didn’t like Kit because he was gay, and perhaps in the beginning—though Nicholas isn’t like that, he’s not racist or sexist or homophobic or anything, well, except in a background wallpaper sort of way, you can’t help the way you’re raised. But of course it wasn’t about that, really, not at all—
“Mal, what an absolutely delicious smell,” Liz says, pushing open the top half of the kitchen stable door. A cold blast of December air carries the scent of bonfires and rotting leaves into the fuggy kitchen warmth. She reaches in to unbolt the bottom half and steps smartly out of the way as Sophie and Evie race past her into the kitchen, throwing coats, lobbing satchels, and dropping lunch boxes. “Hi, Kit. Ooooh, yummy, chocolate and orange, are you doing something Christmassy?”
I retrieve the mixing bowl from Kit’s grasp and scrape the lovely gooey chocolaty mixture into a greased baking tin. “It’s supposed to be a birthday cake for Nicholas and Metheny tomorrow, although at the current rate of progress it’s going to end up something Christmassy.”
“Oooh, save me a slice. No, no, on second thoughts, don’t, I’m supposed to be on another bloody diet for Christmas.” She drools over the photograph on the open page of my recipe book, looking for all the world like a starving Victorian orphan with her nose pressed to a pie shop window. “Does look scrummy, though. It is nearly Christmas now, and I’m going to do South Beach in January, it’s my New Year’s Resolution. So perhaps one slice.”
“One slice for Nicholas, and one for Metheny,” Kit purrs.
Liz looks flustered. Kit seems to have this effect on women even when they know which way the wind blows for him, bedroom-wise. I haven’t yet worked out if it’s because they find him so hopelessly attractive—hard not to, with those knife-edge cheekbones and Restoration curls—or because he’s just so wickedly louche you can’t help but think of s-e-x whenever he’s around.
“I don’t know how you stay so slim, Mal,” Liz complains. “It’s not fair, you cook such jolly wonderful food and you’re as thin as a rake.”
“Family life,” I say, not entirely joking.
“Never works that way for me,” Liz sighs.
Covetously she eye
s a platoon of gingerbread men, still warm, that I baked earlier for the school’s Christmas Fair and left out on racks to cool. Dearest Liz. She spends her life locked in an epic battle with temptation, for she adores food, all food, with unbridled passion, but is cruelly fated to wear every bite she eats. I love her dearly, but she’s built to last, as Kit mischievously puts it. She and I share the school run, with me dropping the children off—my older two, her lone poppy—in the morning, after I’ve taken Nicholas to the station, and Liz doing the afternoon shift so that I can get on with scribbling down a few of my recipes for the new book while Metheny has her nap. At least, that’s the theory.
“Gosh, must dash,” Liz exclaims, glancing at her hefty leather-strapped wristwatch. “Chloe’s got a riding lesson at four, it’s the gymkhana in a couple of weeks. Cheerio, Kit. See you tomorrow, girls.”
Sophie and Evie jump guiltily, their mouths full of gingerbread men whom they seem to have eaten bodily in one go, like little human boa constrictors. I whip the rest out of their reach as, unabashed, they yell an enthusiastic farewell to Liz, scattering a fine mist of crumbs and saliva across Kit’s burnt umber suede jacket and very close-fitting brown jeans. No wonder poor Liz doesn’t know where to look. You could divine his religion from the tightness of those trousers.
“Oh, God. You two infants are utterly vile,” Kit grimaces, brushing himself down.
“Serves you right for being such a peacock,” I retort.
The girls giggle. They adore Kit, who, for all his posturing, has been an extremely good godfather and will, I’m quite sure, introduce them to all sorts of delightful vices like smoking and baccarat as soon as they are old enough for him to take up to London without me.
“I found a cat today, but it was dead,” six-year-old Evie announces.
I suppress a shudder. “How do you know it was dead?”
“Because I pissed in its ear and it didn’t move,” Evie says.
“You did what?”
“You know,” she explains impatiently. “I leaned over and went ‘Pssst!’ and it didn’t move.”
Kit and I shriek with laughter. Evie looks crossly from one of us to the other, then stomps from the room in a fit of high dudgeon. At nine, Sophie may be the one with the knockout looks—thick chestnut hair, huge black sloe eyes, and tawny skin the color of caramel, a throwback to my Italian father’s roots—but I have the feeling it’s Evie’s zany interpretation of life that’s going to leave a trail of broken hearts when she’s older.
Last month, I overheard her doing her math homework at the kitchen table, muttering to herself, “Two plus five, that son of a bitch is seven. Four plus one, that son of a bitch is five …”
Aghast, I asked her what on earth she was doing.
“My math,” Evie said calmly.
“Is that how your teacher taught you to do it?” I gasped.
“Course. Three plus three …”
The next day I marched into the classroom and demanded to know what Mrs. Koehler thought she was teaching my child. When I explained what Evie had been saying, she laughed so much she had to sit down.
“What I taught them,” Mrs. Koehler explained, “was two plus two, the sum of which is four.”
Kit now unfolds his long, lean body from the kitchen counter as I pull an onion from the rope overhead to chop for the girls’ ravioli. “What is it exactly that I’ve agreed to ce soir?” he asks languidly.
“Only babysitting. Darling, you don’t mind, do you? Only it’s Will Fisher’s leaving do and I promised Nicholas I’d be there and then of course I forgot all about it—Metheny, no, take Uncle Kit’s lovely hat out of the rubbish—and now I have about an hour to get ready and find something to wear and catch the train—”
“Forget the crocheted pasta pillows or whatever it is you were planning,” Kit says firmly, taking the onion out of my hands, “and get your pert little derriere up the stairs and into the bathtub PDQ. I’ll sort out the girls’ tea. Sophie, Evie”—this as my middle daughter wanders back to the kitchen with Halibut the cat in her arms, tantrum forgotten already—“what would you like Uncle Kit to cook you for tea?”
“Pizza!” Sophie cries.
“Frozen! From a box!” Evie adds for good measure.
“Charming,” Kit huffs.
I have walked many a mile in these particular shoes. It’s one of those immutable facts of motherhood: The length of time taken and trouble spent preparing a meal is inversely proportional to the enthusiasm with which your children will greet it. Toil for hours in the kitchen producing something nourishing and delicious that hits all the primary food groups and they’ll push it around their plates until it gets cold and congeals and even the dog wouldn’t want it. Guiltily throw frozen chicken fingers and crinkle fries in the oven and they’ll rave about it for weeks.
I shoot upstairs to get ready. I haven’t time for the long relaxing bubble bath I crave—I haven’t had that kind of time since I got pregnant with Sophie—or indeed even to wait for the hot water to make its leisurely way through the ramble of furred pipes from the tank in the outhouse to the calcified shower head in the upstairs bathroom, a journey roughly comparable in terms of time and complexity to the Paris-Dakar rally. Instead, I whip off my clothes and brace myself for the ice-cold scourge that passes for a shower in this house. A six-hundred-year-old thatched farmhouse in two acres of breath-snatchingly beautiful Wiltshire countryside is romantic and gorgeous and just oozing with history and charm, and of course as soon as Nicholas and I saw it—house-hunting when I was newly pregnant with Evie—we just had to buy it, there was never any question about that. But it is not practical. Overflowing cesspits and lethally exposed live wires are neither romantic nor charming, and there have been times—never publicly admitted to; Nicholas would be mortified—when I have longed for something brand-spanking-new in vulgar red brick and equipped with the latest in efficient brushed-steel German appliances.
Gasping at the freezing water, I scrape a sliver of hard soap over my chicken skin, able to differentiate between my breasts and goose bumps only by the fact that two of them sport shriveled brown nipples. I try in vain to work up a decent lather until I realize that it is not in fact soap I am scrubbing over my scrawny pudenda but a piece of the ceiling plaster which has come down again.
By the time I finish washing my hair—with supermarket bubble bath, yuk and bugger, since wretched Sophie has once more pinched the wildly expensive shampoo that Kit gave me last birthday—my lips are blue and my fingers have frostbite. My dratted hair will frizz into a hideous Afro if I use the hair dryer, and since it’s already after five I don’t even have time to let it dry naturally by the Aga in the kitchen—the only warm room in the house—as I usually do. I’m going to have to venture out into the bitter November night with my head dripping wet; I will no doubt catch my death of cold, double pneumonia, pleurisy, and tuberculosis, but obviously this is entirely my own fault for forgetting about the party in the first place.
“Don’t say it,” I warn Kit, as I race downstairs in the safe but dull little black dress I’ve had since I was about fourteen. “No time to dither, it had to be this.”
“Quite sure?”
“Not a word, thank you.”
I dispense kisses liberally amongst the girls, fling keys and cash and lipstick into my bag, and scramble into Nicholas’s Mercedes, then scramble back out and go back for the monogrammed humidor I bought for him to give Will Fisher. I hate driving Nicholas’s car, I’m always so scared I’ll dent it or something, and although it’s so wonderful and safe and huge—I feel like I’m driving a luxury tank—I’m also very aware that even a tiny scrape on the bumper will set us back hundreds of pounds. I am really much happier in my old Volvo, so much more forgiving; and every little dent along its sides tells a story; it’s like a metal photograph album really, I know I’m going to hate it when I finally say goodbye. But the Volvo’s still with Ginger, so it’s got to be the Mercedes, and actually—I’d forgotten—it has heate
d seats, oh what bliss, at least now I’ll have a warm bottom when I get on the train.
When Nicholas and I first met, I didn’t even know how to drive. At twenty-four I was still gadding about London on the ancient sit-up-and-beg bicycle my mother, Louise, passed on to me when I followed in her shoes to Edinburgh; although Louise didn’t actually graduate, of course, she dropped out in her second year to go to California and “find herself” with her boyfriend (who naturally made sure he got his degree before decamping to join the flower children). The swine stayed around just long enough to get her pregnant with my sister before scuttling home to a lifetime of accountancy, his brief flirtation with the unconventional firmly over. Louise, not in the least put out by his desertion, joined a Californian lesbian commune and gave birth to Cleo in a pool as the sisters sang “Kumbaya” in a circle around her. She then promptly got pregnant again a few months later—“the lesbian thing never really took, you see; when we started having our periods together the amount of hormones swilling around was positively lethal”—by a newly arrived waiter from Florence, who this time did at least offer, in very broken English, to marry her. Louise thanked him very gently for being so kind, declined politely but firmly, and came back home to Salisbury so that she could have me at Stonehenge; not quite literally—much to her chagrin, even in hippie 1970 they wouldn’t let her do that—but in a little country hospital nearby.
Once, not long after I met Nicholas, I asked my mother why she had never married after she came back home, fully expecting some sort of Germaine Greer rant about marriage-as-patriarchal-ownership (before she recanted, of course; my mother has never quite forgiven her for that) but instead, “You think marriage is just about you and him,” Louise said, regarding me steadily, “but it’s not, it’s not a private romantic thing at all. You take on so many other people too, a whole network of them, all their problems and fears and difficulties. I never wanted any of that. I knew I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. I just wanted it to be us.”
