A Catered Affair

by Sue Margolis

After about a week, she realized law wasn’t for her, and she changed to modern history. Even though she wasn’t in my lectures and tutorials anymore, we would meet up for coffee or lunch with the other girls who had joined our gang. The other great thing about Rosie was that she could cook and she used to have us over to her student house and fill us up with homemade spag bol and chili. Even now she loved to cook, although she hadn’t entertained much since having Ben. She still kept piles of cookery books on her nightstand, though, and there was rarely a night when she didn’t share her bed with Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay.

  The gang stayed friends and were still in touch, but Rosie and I were particularly close. Rosie was the first of the group to get married and have kids. She was also the first to split from her husband. Last year, when she and Dan came for Christmas lunch, I could see they weren’t getting along, but I had no idea—and nor did Rosie, who was pregnant with their second child—that he was having an affair.

  Eventually she found out and Dan left her for his new love. Her name was Becca, but Rosie only ever referred to her as “the Tart.”

  These days Rosie was a single mother of two. Ben was four now and—as Nana Ida would say—a total nosh. Two weeks ago she had given birth to nosh number two: a nine-pound, one-ounce, black-haired, blue-eyed baby girl named Isobel.

  Even now I missed those times at uni when we would sit up until all hours—in her room or mine—gossiping, discussing politics or planning our futures. We both had great ambitions. Back then I wanted to be a judge. Rosie, who spent hours wandering around secondhand bookshops and reading James Joyce for pleasure, wanted to write a great literary novel and win the Booker Prize.

  “I really need to get started, though,” she would say. “Cod has written six chapters of his.”

  Tobias Fish, known universally as Cod, was an English lit student in our year. Somehow he became part of our gang, but nobody really liked him, mainly because he had an ego the size of a Goodyear blimp and was always going on about his latest literary masterpiece. Apparently he’d been penning plays and novels since he was sixteen. The university drama society produced one of his plays. I can’t remember what it was called, but I’m pretty sure that it had the words genocide and jelly bean in the title. It involved three blokes standing in dustbins for two hours, waiting for the end of the world. I also remember that the student newspaper called it pretentious and artless and a brazen imitation of Samuel Beckett. That would have put off most budding writers, but Cod scoffed at his critics and called them ignorant yokels and barbarians.

  What he really wanted to do was write literary fiction. He even had an agent. I only found out last year, through some old uni friends I reconnected with through Facebook, that Tobias’s agent was his mum and that she’d run her so-called literary agency from her kitchen table in Wembley.

  “Of course, once you’ve read shitloads of literary fiction, like I have,” Cod said one night when a gang of us were hanging out smoking weed in the kitchen, “you realize that it’s all pretty formulaic.” Nobody could believe the arrogance of the guy after his slaying in the student press. “First there needs to be an absence of external plot. All that matters is what’s going on inside the head of the main character. In the unlikely event of there being an external plot-slash-plots, these should leap from time zone to time zone and become so interwoven that the reader has no idea what’s going on. The weather and countryside have to be described in minute detail, taking up pages at a time. Finally you need a protagonist who’s lonely, miserable and on the brink and, ta-da, Bob’s your father’s brother. Oh, plus, of course, you must have one of those obviously literary-sounding titles. Actually, with my latest novel, I started with the title.”

  “Really?” somebody said, feigning wonder and admiration.

  “Yep,” Cod said, failing to pick up on the feigned part of the wonder and admiration. “Get that right and it almost doesn’t matter about the novel itself.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Absolutely. I whittled it down to three before I made a decision: Oranges Through Other Eyes … The Redundancy of Orris and Tansy … and Kumquats and Other Deaths. I mean, are those in the zone or what?”

  It goes without saying that Cod never got anything published. The last I heard, he was living in the wilds of Scotland and editing Wind Turbine magazine.

  Months turned to years, but Rosie had never found quite the right time to make a start on her novel. First she wasn’t in the right headspace. Then she was too busy getting a job, getting married, getting pregnant and having Dan cheat on her.

  Tesco was just down the road. I parked on double yellow lines and dashed in. I would get the cabbage and a couple of ready meals. It occurred to me that Rosie might not have anything in for dinner—and I was suddenly feeling peckish. I couldn’t find a whole cabbage, only a pack of spring greens. For a moment or two I hemmed and hawed about buying it on the grounds that loose leaves might have less medicinal value, but in the end I decided cabbage leaves were cabbage leaves, whether they came loose or as an entire beast. I picked up a mushroom risotto for two and a couple of pots of tiramisu.

  By the time I was stuck in the queue behind a woman paying her bill with coupons, half of which were out of date, I’d been away from the car for fifteen minutes. When I got back, a traffic warden was writing me a ticket.

  “But I only parked on yellow lines because I had to buy a cabbage for my best friend. It’s an emergency. She really needs it. She’s a nursing mother and it’s for her breasts. So if you could see your way clear to letting me off a ticket, just this once, I would be enormously grateful.”

  “Sorry, miss. No can do.”

  He handed me the ticket and ambled off.

  “Miserable sod,” I muttered. I rammed the ticket into my coat pocket, got in the car and switched on the radio. William Shatner was singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which cheered me up in a weird kind of way.

  I hadn’t seen Rosie since just after Isobel was born. I’d arrived at the hospital with a gorgeous hand-smocked dress for the new arrival, which I hadn’t been able to resist even though I knew it wouldn’t fit her until she was at least three. I’d bought Ben picture books wrapped in Bob the Builder paper so that he wouldn’t feel left out.

  I’d promised Rosie that once she and Isobel got home, I would pop in every day, but two days after she was born, I went down with a cold. It wasn’t serious, but Rosie refused to let me visit in case the baby caught it.

  I couldn’t wait to hold her again. I’d spent ages marveling at this tiny newborn, counting her fingers and toes, watching her squirm and do that sucky thing babies do in their sleep. To say I’d felt the broodiness kick in was an understatement. That day at the hospital I’d been positively clucking with maternal desire. I still was. I couldn’t wait to see how she’d changed in two weeks.

  Rosie opened the door in her dressing gown. Her hair was hanging limp about her face, looking like it hadn’t seen an Herbal Essences bottle in days. There was also a faint whiff of baby puke about her. I could hear Isobel bawling in the background.

  There was no hug, no greeting, just a weary: “You sure you’re over your cold?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “OK, you can come in.”

  No sooner had I set foot in the hallway than Rosie burst into tears.

  “Sweetie, what is it?”

  “Everything,” she wailed.

  I put my arm round her shoulders and guided her into the living room. I couldn’t help noticing the sacks full of dirty nappies on the floor, the used breast pads on the coffee table. Isobel’s screams grew louder. I peeked into her crib. Her little arms and legs were thrashing. Her face was contorted and red. Was she in pain? Hungry? Wet? Or just pissed off? I had no idea.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Rosie sobbed. “Izzy hasn’t slept for three nights. My episiotomy is infected, and I’ve got a hemorrhoid the size of the Home Counties sticking out of my bum.” She pointed to a rubber ring on the so
fa. “That’s what I have to sit on. And now my breasts have gotten infected and turned to bloody concrete.”

  “Oh, hon. You must be in agony.” I went to hug her.

  “Mind my boobs!”

  “I’m sorry. Come on, sit down.”

  She eased herself onto the rubber ring and I handed her the pack of greens. “Thanks for doing that. I really appreciate it. So welcome to my postpartum party. I’d ask you to dance, but I’m not sure my undercarriage would take the stress. I’d probably end up peeing all over the floor.”

  I told her she had to go to the doctor.

  “I will. I tried to get an appointment today, but there was nothing until Monday.”

  “OK. Now, what about food? Have you had dinner?”

  She shook her head.

  “I picked up some mushroom risotto. Why don’t I go and stick it in the oven?”

  “That sounds nice,” Rosie said, managing a smile.

  I headed into the kitchen.

  The strains of being a recently delivered mum were new to me, partly because I wasn’t a mother, but also because I hadn’t been around when Ben was born. Rosie and Dan had been living in Australia, after Dan accepted a two-year contract to lecture in philosophy at Melbourne University. When that was over, they came back to London and got pregnant with Izzy a year or so later. Rosie was in her final trimester when Dan left her for one of his Ph.D. students.

  When I got back, Izzy was still screaming. “Would you like me to take her?” I said.

  Rosie nodded. “That would be great. If you don’t mind.” She took a disposable breast pad out of the box on the coffee table and blew her nose into it.

  “Of course not.” I pulled back Izzy’s rosebud quilt and picked up this nine-pound squawking raspberry. “Hey, Noodle. Let’s see if we can stop those tears.”

  “Put her over your shoulder,” Rosie said. “She likes that.”

  I did as she said, at the same time offering Izzy soothing therethere s. As I began rubbing her back, she let out a loud burp, followed by another. The crying stopped.

  “Typical. The moment somebody else picks her up, she obliges. I’ve been trying to get her to stop crying for hours.”

  “So, what’s happening with you and Dan?”

  “He’s been taking Ben off my hands, which is great, and he’s picking up all the bills—for now, but I’ll have to get back to work pretty soon. Bottom line is, there’s no question of him moving back. The marriage is over. We’re both agreed on that.”

  “I still can’t believe he did this to you. I just want to know how he lives with himself.”

  Rosie shrugged. “He seems to manage. And if he’s feeling any guilt, I’m sure that the Tart is suitably soothing. Fran, my next-door neighbor, bumped into them the other day in the supermarket. Apparently she’s gorgeous.”

  “Rosie, you have to stop tormenting yourself.”

  “Why? She’s young and pretty, and here I am, a fat bathrobe smelling of baby sick.”

  “Rosie, you’ve just given birth. Give yourself a chance. Two or three months from now, everything will seem very different.”

  “Only if I manage to get more than two hours’ sleep in a row. And if she carries on like this—and plenty of babies do—how will I cope being back at work?” Rosie taught six-year-olds at the primary school around the corner.

  I sat down on the sofa next to Rosie and carried on rubbing Izzy’s back. There was some gurgling in her nappy area.

  “Probably just a fart,” Rosie said. “Unless of course it isn’t. Then it’ll start leaking out from the tops of her legs. Don’t worry, at this age it’s not as offensive as real poo.”

  “Oh. Good.” I decided to change the subject. “So, how’s Ben’s taking to his new sister?”

  “So far, I’ve caught him trying to poke out her eyes, pull her off the changing table and smother her with a cushion.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Oh, and when Izzy’s not feeding, he tries to suck my tits. It’s all normal stuff, but it’s just so wearing.”

  By now my maternal clucking was little more than a faint chirrup.

  “Can’t your mum and dad help?” I knew Rosie’s parents lived in Edinburgh, so it wasn’t easy.

  “They’re coming down next week for a few weeks. Actually, it’s worked out well. Their house is being renovated, and they can’t stay there while the work’s being done. I can’t wait for them to get here.” She paused. “God, here’s me going on about all my stuff and I haven’t congratulated you on your news.

  “You know, there was a time when I thought you’d never get Josh down the aisle. I’m so glad the two of you got there in the end.”

  “Me, too,” I said. Josh had a long history of walking away from relationships once they got serious, and there had been a time when it looked pretty touch and go with us.

  She reached out and took my hand. “Be happy, hon.”

  “I intend to do my very best.”

  “Of course,” Rosie said, “everybody was convinced that you’d end up marrying Hugh. Do you ever find yourself thinking about him? … Oh God, I don’t know why I said that. Here you are about to get married and I’m bringing up your old boyfriends.”

  “No, it’s OK. Actually, I do think about him from time to time.”

  I’d met Hugh Marshall at a party when I was twenty-five. He was two years older. I fell for the floppy blond hair, the wonky smile and boyish blue eyes. I also had the hots for his brains—he’d studied PPE at Oxford—and the fact that his main ambition was to do some good in the world. He had spent a couple of years working as an intern for a Labour Party Member of Parliament, and now worked for Oxfam as a campaigns coordinator.

  He said I reminded him of a Jewish princess. I took offense until he explained that he was referring to the biblical kind.

  We were together three years, and although we never discussed it, I’m pretty sure we would have gotten married. (Of course, Mum didn’t particularly approve. She thought Hugh was serious and rather stuffy.)

  Then Hugh’s mother got ill with what turned out to be terminal breast cancer. She lived in Melbourne with Hugh’s father, brother and two sisters. Hugh left his job to be with her. We e-mailed several times a day, talked on the phone a couple of times a week. He was so miserable and clearly needed to be with his family. After his mother died, he said he was staying on for a month or so, but he never hinted that he was thinking of staying in Australia for good. Then he called and told me that he’d got a job with an NGO based in Perth, overseeing the development of aboriginal housing projects. He begged me to come to Australia and marry him. For the next few weeks, I could think about nothing else. I hardly ate or slept. I adored Hugh, but I also loved my job. I was at the beginning of a career with one of the top human rights law firms in the country—if not the world. I was passionate about what I did. I couldn’t walk away. Telling him broke my heart—and his.

  “I still get news through friends,” I said. “Last I heard he was planning to move back to the UK. Apparently, he’s been offered a job advising the government on third world poverty.” I found myself getting wistful for moment or two. “Funny how you always carry a bit of a torch for your first real love.”

  “What about that Frank O’Rourke—the one your mum wanted you to marry?”

  “I loved him, but I’m not sure he counts. We were just kids.”

  “Dan was my first real love,” Rosie said. “If I carry a torch for him, it’s only because I want to set light to his sorry arse.”

  “Now, there’s an image,” I said, laughing.

  By now, Rosie had opened the bag of cabbage leaves and selected two large ones that looked like they might do. With a lack of self-consciousness that I’d been told affects many women who had given birth and had had armies of medics rooting around their vaginas, she opened her robe, unhooked the cups of her nursing bra and clamped the cabbage leaves to her enormous mammaries. I went to check on the risotto.

  “You know,
” Rosie said, while I sat drinking her Sauvignon and she made do with tap water because she didn’t want to get Izzy tipsy, “if I can catch up on some sleep, I might even get back to my novel.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. “Hang on. ‘Back to’ implies that you’ve started it.”

  She grinned. “Correct. Not that I’ve done much so far. I finally got going after Dan left. Then—get this—you remember Cod from uni? Well, I found out he got published. I thought, if that jerk can do it …”

  “Cod? No. You’re wrong. He works for Wind Turbine magazine.”

  “He did. He just published Kumquats and Other Deaths and there’s another book due out next year.”

  “You’re kidding. Cod got published? I don’t believe it. But his stuff was such pretentious rubbish.”

  “I know, but his writing’s probably matured a bit by now. Anyway, it’s doing quite well, apparently.”

  “So Cod was the clincher. He was the one who got you writing. How weird is that?”

  “I even started a writing course. Mary, my tutor, has read a few of my short stories and poems, and she thinks I’ve got real talent. Can you believe it? I always thought I could write, but this is the first time I’ve had it confirmed. I’m just so excited.”

  “Rosie, this is fantastic,” I said. “This is just the kind of boost you need right now. So what’s the book called?”

  “The Sand Collector’s Daughter. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman whose father walked out on her family when she was a child. The only thing she has that belonged to him is his collection of sand from all over the world. Using the samples of sand as clues, she pieces together details of his life and starts to understand who he really was.”

  “So what is he, this guy? A builder? And he’s got these leftover piles of sand in his garage? God, the daughter could find a mutilated corpse in the sand and then there could be a massive police hunt and she could fall in love with the detective leading the case.”

  Rosie rolled her eyes. “No dead bodies. No police hunt. No sexy detective. Tally, don’t you read anything apart from trashy thrillers?”