by Tess Stimson
“Yes,” Kit mutters, “but you never have pleased any man, have you?”
I adore Edward and Daisy Lyon, of course, impossible not to—she’s an absolute lamb, and he’s such a gentleman, so courtly and correct, with that wonderful ramrod military bearing even at eighty-two; but you can tell they’re a bit bewildered by the speed of the world these days. And Nicholas—well, Nicholas can sometimes be very much his parents’ son. Which just goes to show: It’s nurture, not just nature, that will out.
I drag Kit out of the sitting room just before the Queen’s speech; if he sees Nicholas and Edward stand to listen to Her Majesty—as they always do—restraining him will be beyond my capabilities.
Christmas dinner for ten is always a little testing, especially when one of the guests decides on the spur of the moment to become a vegan—“Marvelous idea, Sophs,” Kit enthuses, “let’s start tomorrow; I hate Boxing Day leftovers”—but the goose is thankfully well received and, miraculously, not in the least bit spoiled by the panicked forty-minute search for Metheny (finally discovered fast asleep under the potting bench in the boiler room in her new Pooh slippers) or Evie’s disturbingly skilled attempts at alchemy. Really, Kit is an ass. As if the baking-soda-and-vinegar incident last month wasn’t bad enough, he has to provide her with the means to cook up H2SO4 in her bedroom.
I feel dreadfully mean about my earlier dressing-gown briskness when I open Nicholas’s present after lunch—not that sexual favors should be in any way linked to a sumptuous nutmeg suede coat from Joseph (though there’s no denying that if they were, I’ve more than earned it this last month or so. I don’t know what’s got into my husband; I might have to borrow Evie’s chemistry set to cook up some bromide for his tea)—but he’s obviously spent a lot of money, an appallingly large sum of money. I mean, Joseph—whereas I—
“Perfect, darling, thank you,” Nicholas says as he opens my suddenly meager gift, a cashmere sweater the same moss gray as his eyes, “absolutely the right thing.”
“I know it’s not terribly exciting, but you did ask for—”
“It’s exciting to me,” he says quietly, “and it will be wonderfully warm for skiing next week. You are a very good wife to me, Malinche; a man simply couldn’t ask for better. And I wouldn’t ask, obviously. Obviously.”
“Such a very odd thing to say,” I muse to Kit later, “in fact, he’s been behaving rather oddly altogether these past few weeks. I know it’s driving him potty having Fisher looking over his shoulder all the time when he’s supposed to have retired—”
“Oddly?”
“Well, yes. Budge up, Kit, I can hardly move my elbows.”
“I don’t know why you don’t just tell him you smoke.” Kit sighs, gracefully exhaling a smoke ring. “He’s hardly going to divorce you and cite Marlboro Lights as corespondent. You’re as bad as Metheny, hiding out in the boiler room for a quick fag like this.”
“Don’t you mean with a quick fag?”
“Nothing quick about me, darling. Ask Paul. Or James. Or—”
I cut him off quickly before he recites his entire sexual history (which could take us to Easter). “I don’t smoke, Kit. Christmas Day and birthdays don’t count.”
“It wouldn’t if you just stuck to your birthday, poppet. Now, tell me about sweet Nick. In what way oddly?”
I inhale deeply, and spend the next five minutes coughing like a romantic heroine with advanced consumption. Lack of practice; entirely my own fault for not telling Nicholas I smoked when we first met. “Don’t call him Nick, Kit, he hates it. I don’t know quite how to put it—he just seems—well, odd.”
“So you keep saying.”
“He’s absolutely rampant, for one thing. I mean, he’s always been surprisingly keen in the bedroom, though perhaps not terribly imaginative—mind you, there was the time with the maple syrup. And of course the nurse’s outfit, very boarding school, that, some sort of Matron thing—”
“Malinche,” Kit says, “sweet of you to share, but not entirely necessary.”
Sometimes I forget Kit isn’t actually a girl.
“Sorry. And then he’s been terribly grumpy, says it’s work, of course, but—”
“He’s always grumpy to me.” Kit sulks.
“Yes, well, you don’t exactly go out of your way to play nicely with him, Kit.”
“I make every effort—”
“Kit, you gave him purple anal beads for Christmas.”
“Just trying to share the fun, darling.”
“It’s lucky for you he assumed they were part of Sophie’s jewelry kit; you must get them back before she turns them into a necklace for her teacher or something.” I stub out my cigarette. “I don’t mean Nicholas is grumpy, exactly; more moody, I suppose. A bit bearish, at times. And then suddenly terribly, terribly nice and attentive—”
Kit says nothing.
“Don’t even think it,” I warn. “Not after—”
“Yes,” says Kit, “point made.”
“Although,” I muse, “he did say this girl’s name the other morning in bed, it was actually rather funny—”
“Funny? Are you quite mad, Malinche?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Kit, he’s just having a naughty little fantasy about this girl at his office—Sara, I met her once, rather shy as I recall—but you know as well as I do he’d never do anything. He’s positively phobic about adultery; hardly surprising, given what happened to his parents. It was quite unconscious. I’m sure he had no idea what he’d said; he’d probably die of embarrassment if I ever told him.”
“Sadly, Pollyanna, I fear for once your optimism is well-placed,” Kit says regretfully. “I can’t quite see Nicholas doing the old inny-outy on his desk with the office floozy, much as the image delightfully boggles the mind. No, I think it probably is just work, sweets, or quite possibly a brain tumor—”
“Not funny, Kit.”
“Now, you, on the other hand, I can quite see getting up to all sorts of mischief.”
He’s lost me. “Mischief? Me? What sort of mischief?”
Kit unfurls his elegant frame from the potting bench and saunters toward the door. “I meant to tell you,” he says negligently, “Trace Pitt is opening his own restaurant in Salisbury, that’s why he’s back. And I hear”—he turns to me with a dark, amused smile—“I hear he’s hoping you will be his new head chef.”
“Oh, Nicholas, isn’t it breathtaking?”
I jam my ski poles into the snow, biting off my gloves finger by finger and unwinding my scarf as I drink in the spectacular view. Below us, the Briançon valley looks absurdly like a Christmas cake dotted with little green plastic pine trees. The vicious snowstorm of yesterday has cleared, leaving behind a foot of glorious fresh powder and acid blue skies.
“Fine,” Nicholas says shortly.
Oh dear. I thought the hard skiing this morning might have cheered him up a bit. Taken his mind off it, so to speak.
I do love him, and I do still fancy him—“Is it something I’m doing? Or not doing? Please, tell me,” he said this morning, desperately earnest—but I just don’t want sex as much as he does. Not these days. Not with three children, for heaven’s sake. And I’m sorry, but I’ve always hated it in the morning. I don’t feel quite fresh. There’s too much raw life going on, too much spinning in my head—gym outfits and lunch boxes and feed the rabbit and fix stuck window—and not enough sleep. Never enough sleep. It’s hard enough to get in the mood at night, when you can’t help but keep an eye on the clock: It’s midnight, six hours till I have to be up; if this takes another twenty minutes, then—
But in the morning, when you’d kill for just another five minutes’ sleep. And knowing the girls could come in at any minute. You would have thought, after ten years of marriage, you would have thought he’d know when I’m in the mood—
“Better get going,” Nicholas says now. “The others will be waiting.”
He shoots off down the piste before I even have my gloves back on. I
’m still trying to tuck my scarf back into my ski jacket and close the zipper with clumsy fingers as he reaches a sharp left bend. I glance up, squinting slightly at the brightness of sun on snow, to see where he is, and watch it all unfold before me: the pack of snowboarders appearing over the crest of an adjoining run as if from nowhere, Nicholas stationary on the bend, adjusting his boot, waiting for me to catch up, the snowboarders suddenly bearing down on him, the edges of their boards glinting like knife-blades in the sunlight. And then Nicholas glancing up, astonished, as two of the snowboarders cut in front of him, giving him nowhere to go, and four more head straight toward him, so that he has no option but to throw himself bodily into the snowdrift at the side of the run if he wants to avoid being mown down.
And just as suddenly, it’s all over, and Nicholas is picking himself out of the snow, the boarders’ mocking jeers—“Get out of the way, Granddad!”—echoing down the mountain.
To my surprise, Nicholas tells the story against himself when we join Liz and her husband, Giles, at the piste-side mountain café twenty minutes later, his moodiness melting with the snow on his jacket.
“My own bloody fault,” he observes, “standing in the middle of the piste like that. Should’ve known better. Right on a bend, too. Bloody idiot.”
“They should have jolly well watched where they were going,” Liz protests.
“Ah. Not as easy to maneuver as skis, those snowboards,” Giles says.
Giles is the kind of man who sees the good in everyone, even homicidal Antipodean snowboarders. He has been heard to remark that Osama bin Laden, being one of approximately ninety-five brothers, is clearly very much a family man.
“But are you all right?” Liz presses anxiously. “I’ve ordered you an extra plate of frites, for the shock.”
Nicholas laughs ruefully.
“I’m going to have the devil of a bruise on my backside in the morning, and my sunglasses are wrapped round a pine tree, but apart from that, the only casualty is my pride. You ever tried snowboarding, Giles?”
“Young man’s game,” Giles harrumphs.
“Giles! You’re only thirty-five,” I say, laughing.
“Not wearing the years as well as you, Malinche,” he says gallantly. “And I’m certainly an old enough dog to know when new tricks are beyond me.”
“I rather think it’s trying new tricks that keeps you young,” Nicholas says thoughtfully, blowing on his vin chaud, and surprising me for the second time this morning.
In fact, Nicholas surprises me rather a lot during the second half of our holiday; and I surprise both of us by finding this unfamiliar Nicholas rather erotic. So erotic, in fact, that Nicholas has to brave the ordeal of purchasing condoms in French from the local pharmacy at ten past eleven one night; it (shamefully) never having occurred to me to pack any.
“Edepol nunc nos tempus et malas peioris fieri,” Nicholas says triumphantly as he throws the packet on the bedspread and his clothes on the floor. “Now’s the time for bad girls to become worse still.”
“Who said that?” I ask, pulling his beautiful naked body onto mine.
“Plautus.”
“I like Plautus,” I say firmly.
It all starts the morning after his near miss with the snowboarders. I come down to breakfast late after struggling for twenty minutes to get a demonic Metheny into her snowsuit for the village day care, only to find Nicholas has disappeared.
Evie lifts her face out of her breakfast bowl and displays a Cheshire cat hot-chocolate grin that reaches to her ears. “Daddy said he’d see your pussy in the van show at lunch-time,” she announces.
I look to Sophie for translation.
“He’ll see you at Le Poussin for a vin chaud at lunch.” Sophie sighs. “Evie, you’re useless. As if Daddy would ever drive a van.”
In the event, had Nicholas arrived at the piste-café at the wheel of a white Ford Transit demanding sexual satisfaction, I would have been less surprised.
“Snowboarding?” Kit exclaims, when I call on my mobile from the café lavatory to share the apocalyptic news. “Nicholas?”
“Snowboarding, Nicholas,” I confirm. “Not two words I ever expected to use in the same sentence.”
“Suddenly abduction by aliens is sounding perfectly reasonable,” Kit observes. “I’m looking at the whole business of Roswell and Area fifty-one in a whole new light. By the way,” he adds meaningfully, “I noticed, when I was feeding your cat, that you have rather a lot of messages on your answer machine.”
“Don’t, Kit.”
“I don’t understand you,” he says crossly. “How can you not be curious, after all these years?”
Trace always did have the power to tempt, I think, as his satanic smile fills my mind. But of course it’s out of the question. I mean, the hours, for a start. The girls would need to keep photos of me by their beds so they didn’t think we were being burgled if they ran into me in the hallway in the middle of the night.
But my own restaurant—
Impossible. No point even thinking about it: so I very carefully don’t.
No matter what hours Trace offered me, accepting would be unthinkable; far, far too dangerous on every level. I love Nicholas more than I thought possible; but I’m not going to risk it all by putting myself in the line of fire again.
It turns out he has rather a knack for snowboarding. After two days in which he acquires a collection of bruises that has Evie emerald with envy, it suddenly all comes together for him, and on the third morning, he and his snowboard join the rest of us ski-bound mortals on the piste.
He’s even found time to buy a new khaki jacket and gray cargo pants, I notice in astonishment. Thankful though I am to see the back of the vile navy all-in-one he’s had since we first met, this is all taking a bit of getting used to.
I’m also taken aback to see him sporting white earphones—earphones! And this a man who resolutely refused to switch from vinyl until 1994—and listening to a song by some girl I’ve never even heard of.
“I wouldn’t complain,” Liz mumbles through her pain au chocolat elevenses. “As midlife crises go, buying an iPod and taking up snowboarding is fairly harmless. And you have to admit it suits him.”
Liz is right: The changes in Nicholas do suit him. Watching my husband shooting past on his board, arms outstretched for balance, knees bent, the wind whipping back his hair—goodness, it needs cutting—I’m suddenly punched by the thought: This is the real Nicholas. There have been glimpses in the past—usually in bed—but in a dozen years together I have never seen him as clearly as I do now.
It’s always been the one sly disappointment of my marriage, that I’ve never managed to breach Nicholas’s fettered self-control. Edward and Daisy Lyon’s meticulous British upbringing, it turns out, was more thorough than I’d realized.
And yet—perhaps not thorough enough.
No. Trace Pitt can build the Taj Mahal in Salisbury town center and I’m still not going to return his calls.
“Sophie, will you hurry up!” I yell up the stairs, shifting Metheny to the other hip. “I told you, I’ve got things to do this morning, we’re going to be late!”
Sophie appears on the landing. “But Mummy, I can’t find any clean knickers! They’ve all just vanished! I can’t go to school without any knickers!”
Oops. “Darling, just grab any old pair from the clean laundry basket. We can sort it all out tomorrow. The first day back to school is always a bit of a rush, you know that.”
Minutes later, Sophie thunders down the stairs past me and piles into the backseat of the Volvo next to Evie. I move round to the other side to strap Metheny into her car seat. Scarcely have I secured the hold-all-five-points-and-click-together-while-your-baby-squirms-resentfully harness (I swear, it would defeat navy SEALS) than she sicks up porridge all over herself, the car seat, me, and—I don’t believe it—
“Evie! What on earth is Don Juan doing in the car?”
“But Mummy! It’s show and tell this mo
rning—”
“Take him back to his cage in the scullery. Now! Sophie, help me get Metheny back inside so I can change her. Oh, Lord, the phone—”
It’s my gynecologist’s secretary, calling to reschedule because an elective Caesarean has suddenly “come up”—for which read an invitation to golf and a long lunch at the nineteenth hole. Can I please come in an hour earlier—earlier? oh, have pity—this morning for my well-woman check. The secretary sounds deeply apologetic, but we both know there is nothing to be done. The gynecologist is, after all, a man.
I could cancel my appointment altogether, but then the gynecologist will sulk and make me wait three days to see him next time I have an excruciating bout of cystitis (which, if Nicholas stays on present bedroom form, may not be too far away).
So instead I race to the girls’ school at breakneck speed—“Mummy, did you see that lady’s face at the traffic lights? She looked really funny, can we nearly hit someone again?”—deposit Metheny at Liz’s, and arrive back home with two minutes to spare before I have to leave again.
I usually like to make a little extra effort on the hygiene front when I’m going to the gynecologist (it’s like brushing your teeth before having them cleaned, or Hoovering under the bed before the cleaner comes) but clearly this time I’m not going to have time for more than a lick and a promise. I rush upstairs, throw off my kaftan—such a sartorial lifesaver, I can’t imagine why these ever went out of fashion—wet the washcloth sitting next to the sink, and give myself a quick wash down below to make sure all is at least presentable. Flinging the washcloth into the laundry basket, I throw the kaftan back on, hop back into the car, and race to my appointment.
And this headless-chicken chaos is just an ordinary morning, I reflect as I spend the next twenty minutes sitting behind a horse box and grinding my teeth in frustration.
I realize that Nicholas, like most husbands whose wives don’t actually go out to work, secretly believes that I lie around all day eating chocolate digestives and trying on shoes. And he is right, to a certain extent, since this is exactly what I would do—once I have taken the girls to school, swept the kitchen floor, stacked the dishwasher, hunted down dirty socks (my last sweep behind the Aga, under Don Juan’s cage, and, revoltingly, in the biscuit tin, yielded four), put the washing machine on, dropped off Nicholas’s dry cleaning, played with Metheny on the swings at the village green, put a casserole in the Aga, mopped up the mess from the leaky dishwasher, called a plumber, done all the washing-up by hand, pegged out the laundry, put Metheny to bed for her nap, brought in the laundry when it started to rain, arranged a service for the Mercedes, scribbled down a sudden idea for a new sort of soufflé, pegged the laundry back out again when it stopped raining, answered the phone four times to salesmen trying to sell me double glazing, collected the girls from school, glued cotton wool on a cardboard snowman, written five sentences using adverbs ending in ly, fed the girls, bathed them, dressed them, read them a story, put them to bed, discussed arrangements for his parents’ golden wedding anniversary party for forty minutes with his mother on the phone, checked under Evie’s bed for monsters with a flashlight, read them a story again, ironed Nicholas a shirt for the morning, cooked our dinner, washed up, tidied up, bathed myself, and gone to bed. Just line those shoes up for me to try on, I’m sure there’ll be time tomorrow.
