by Judy Astley
Sally commented, ‘It’s the “were” that gets me. It sounds like a shop that’s closing down. You can just imagine old greying Babygros, curled-up bibs and grotty potties and third-hand high chairs.’
‘With food stains. And worse,’ Nina laughed, and then was struck by a sobering idea. ‘Perhaps that’s how Joe sees me, since Catherine came along, someone with the final sale signs up: “Last few days, everything must go”, all moth-eaten carpet and dingy paintwork. Everything about her is so taut and shining, when he looks at me I must remind him of an unmade bed.’
Sally gave a disbelieving snort. ‘Huh, if anything, since he moved out, I’d say you’d gone in for pretty thorough refurbishment. I mean look at your hair – having it cut all short and feathery took five years off, at least – not to mention you lost a few pounds.’
‘I could pretend that was trauma and misery,’ Nina confessed. ‘But it’s just that there’s only me running round the house doing the laundry, taking the rubbish out, striding round the Common with the dog. I should probably make the girls do more, but I quite like being able to fit into my snuggest Levis again.’
Sally and Nina’s gallery, Art and Soul (Joe’s idea), was quiet. It always was on Friday mornings. It wasn’t a good time for browsing lazily around, choosing between paintings that consisted of more square inches of frame than of art, silver jewellery that resembled paperclips twisted in frustration and contorted steel cutlery with hand-whittled sustainable-teak handles. Everyone who was shopping in the area was across the road in the delicatessen or the organic butcher’s or in Scissorhands next door having their hair perked up for the weekend. A few bored young nannies and au pairs sat on benches on the green near the pond huddled into their collective resentment that ‘SW London’ could extend so very far from the vibrant centre of the capital. They smoked sullenly and watched their charges throwing bread to ducks that were growing plump on focaccio and sun-dried tomato ciabatta.
Through the gallery window, from between two post-modern interpretations of terrazzo statuary, Nina could see a queue at the florist opposite, and the wine bar on the corner was filling up early with those who would have to pretend not to be dozing at their desks after lunch. Until the afternoon, when there’d be the usual rush of people looking for just the right little one-off, so cleverly original present to take for the weekend/dinner hosts, there was no need for the two of them to be sitting there waiting for customers and getting through endless coffee.
Friday morning was Sally’s turn but Nina had been almost choking with the need to talk to someone about the lunch with Joe.
‘I mean why did he want to tell me about it? Why does he think I want to know if Catherine’s getting broody?’ she asked.
‘You’ve already said that twice,’ Sally pointed out, getting up and rearranging a display of silver-painted octagonal cups. I’m not sure whether you want me to give you several possible interpretations or whether you’d rather keep it rhetorical and think about it on your own.’
Nina looked at her doubtfully. ‘I don’t want to think about it at all. That was the point of the parting. When we lived together, Joe made me think about him all the bloody time, what he was up to, where he really was, who with, all that. He was worse than a naughty toddler for needing attention. I keep telling myself I’ve got my own life to get on with now. I’d been doing fine till yesterday. Joe was, not is.’
‘Too soon for that,’ Sally, veteran of two divorces, told her. ‘You’ll need at least a year. Or another man, of course, though I bet you’re the sort who thinks they don’t need one. It’s women like me who rush out for a new puppy the minute the old dog dies. That’s probably why, metaphorically speaking, I always end up with a stray so utterly cute I just don’t notice it simply isn’t capable of being house-trained till it’s too late.’
‘Well even if I was on the look-out, there’s hardly a vast choice of available men around here. Anything on the loose would get snapped up faster than a half-price Armani number at Harvey Nichols,’ Nina said, peering through the window again. ‘Look there’s one – just coming out of the deli, not bad actually, but he’s got that “I’m just going to run home and marinade the free-range chicken before picking up the kids from the Montessori” look. For every “Not Bad” out there, there’s some gorgeous, brainy, creative, young Mrs Not Bad, you can bet a heap of folding money on it.’
‘Well you know what I think: you should do what I do and simply shop for men in the Sunday Times Encounters column. That way, you just go out with them as and when you feel the need for an ego-boosting date. No hassles, promises, breakfasts or blame.’
Nina laughed, ‘Yes, but more often than not you come home complaining that they were a total waste of time and make-up.’
Sally wagged a finger at her. ‘Learn by my mistakes. Never go for one that describes himself as “bored” – that means married. Or one that specifies a Good Sense of Humour. You should be able to take that for granted. They can use the line space to list more important attractions, like the Ferrari or the VIP.’
‘When you say VIP . . .’ Nina sensed a rather ruder interpretation than the usual one.
‘Very Impressive Penis, of course,’ Sally said. ‘Anyway, what about your dependable old Henry-up-the-road,’ she suggested. ‘You wheel him out for supper sometimes and he’s quite presentable. Haven’t you ever—’
‘No. Absolutely never. Henry is a brilliant neighbour and friend and has been for years and that’s all. We don’t fancy each other in the slightest,’ Nina stated, adding to make sure Sally got the idea, ‘Not even the teeniest slightest bit.’
‘OK, OK, though some, less worthy folk than I, would suggest that perhaps you doth protest too much.’ Sally smiled slyly at her.
‘No, really. I’m afraid I always think Henry’s most attractive asset is his set of drain rods. Forget finding me a replacement man,’ Nina insisted, ‘I’d rather take up tap dancing or archery.’
‘So do,’ Sally suggested, looking at her sideways. ‘You haven’t actually done anything very different since you two separated, have you? I mean you just plod on. Well we all do, I suppose,’ she conceded, worrying that she was being hurtful.
Nina said nothing, just went on looking out of the window. ‘Look at those nannies out on the green. They have all the world’s chances to change what they’re doing, where they are. They’ve got qualifications, youth, energy and still they sit there smoking and sulking by the pond, watching someone else’s kid getting muddy. They don’t have to sit there in the damp air wishing this was Knightsbridge or Beverly Hills; they could be there. I’ve got Lucy and Emily and the house, hamster, cat and dog, an ageing mother plus the creeping wistaria and this gallery to deal with. You can only change small bits at a time.’
‘Emily Malone!’ The shout pierced straight through the collective clamour of fifty sixth-formers chatting their idle way down the stairs towards the school lunch hall. Emily looked round quickly, not for the voice, but for an escape route. She hadn’t done the French essay, hadn’t even finished reading La Peste, didn’t at all care about rats, plagues, allegory or Algeria. If pushed she would admit that the only French words of interest to her were Marie Claire, pain au chocolat and Renault.
‘Shit. Bollocks,’ she murmured to Chloe next to her.
‘Emily!’ came the voice again, ‘Tomorrow at the latest!’
‘Lucky you. She’s given up. She wouldn’t do that for me,’ Chloe said, turning to see where the voice was going.
Emily didn’t look, didn’t want to risk catching sight of Mrs Hutchins and her so-sympathetic spaniel eyes. Emily had been offered counselling by the school welfare officer, as soon as her parents’ separation had become known. Now that had been a day of Embarrassments to be Remembered, when both parents, all smart prim suits like nervous Speech Day guests, had turned up together to do what they called the right thing. ‘If you get stressed, or whatever, they need to be aware of the pressure you’re under,’ her dad had explained
while she cringed and argued. They were such bloody Guardian-reader parents – all emotion-sharing and fervent reassurance. Couldn’t just sodding well do the other right thing and stay together though, no chance. Whatever they said about putting her and Luce first, there was no stopping Dad from going to find his own path through the woods, as he put it. No stopping Mum from helping him pack.
Emily had refused the counselling – there was nothing to talk about. Nothing she’d let the school know about anyway. What could she tell them? The awful truth? A couple of Dad’s advertising jingles (ice-cream and a cheap car) turned into mega-hits, he decided he was Andrew sodding Lloyd Webber and went all irresponsible and big-time, and Mum was being such a stroppy feminist she did everyone’s laundry except his, and kept telling him his kind of success was only a fluke, like the lottery. It would be all round the staff room. Instead she kept an enigmatic silence, gaining a hefty amount of sympathetic leeway where homework was concerned, and a convenient assumption that the only reason for flagging concentration must be unhealthily repressed emotional angst. Emily was quite happy to take advantage.
‘S’OK, she’s gone. I thought we were in for one of her “I do understand, I was young once” rantings,’ Chloe mocked.
Emily laughed. ‘Do you think she was one, though? Really? Do you think if I asked her if she’d tripped or done speed or shagged someone whose name she didn’t even know that she’d actually say “Oh yes, yes, happy days”?’
Chloe thought for a moment, pausing outside the hall to give the menu a quick glance. She didn’t really need to, it was Friday, so lunch was therefore something fish-shaped with chips. ‘She might. She might like the chance to “share”. Perhaps she did the Paris riots back in 1968 and met some Gauloisey piece of French rough.’
Emily shrugged. ‘I haven’t shagged anyone whose name I don’t know either so it would be just a pose,’ she laughed. ‘How disgustingly, typically teenage of me.’
‘Well you are from a broken home, you’re sure to be kicking at the barriers a bit. Doesn’t your poor despairing mother find you moody and uncontrollable and your father not know what to say to you? Don’t you put your little sister through secret mental torture?’
Emily joined the end of the queue and stared past a crowd of jostling boys at the food. It all looked orange. Bread-crumbed fish, lurid chips, glistening beans. Her father had told her, that weekend when he’d asked her to help choose paint for her and Lucy’s room in his wondrous loft/flat, he’d told her about when he was fifteen and painted his bedroom ceiling orange. He’d told her about the paint blobbing onto the carpet, his bed, his head, and how his mother had said, “Oh that’s lovely, darling,” because she’d thought everything he did was God-perfect. No wonder he’d gone off and slaked his ego on every little slapper who laughed at his jokes. Mum should have known he’d do that, Gran had warned her often enough that men need careful cherishing, like delicate plants. It even said all that in Man-Date, Emily’s new guide to getting and keeping the man of any woman’s dreams.
‘No,’ she eventually replied to Chloe, who had lost interest and was using both her inky hands to sort her way through the contents of the hotplate for a decent fish. ‘No. I’m a perfect child. I’d say a model child, but that’s my beautiful little sister’s role.’ Emily picked up a tray and then laughed, ‘Lucy doesn’t get out of bed for less than two Snickers bars a day.’
‘There are girls in our year,’ Chloe murmured, looking surreptitiously around, ‘who will get into bed for less than that.’
‘I would too,’ Emily said, absentmindedly scooping chips on to her plate. ‘I met a man.’
‘Man? Not boy? And what about the faithful Nick? You’ll break his scummy heart. If he’s got one,’ Chloe said as they made their way to a table strewn with abandoned salty crisp packets, spilt yoghurt and cold, dead chips. Across the dining room, Nick, the school’s most desired male, was sprawled across a table with friends, talking about football and pretending not to care that Emily wasn’t about to come over and sit with him. Around the room, girls flicked their long clean hair alluringly, hoping he’d notice them.
‘Nick’s irrelevant, don’t mention him. He’s just a boy, just someone I learned to do sex with. But last weekend,’ Emily confided, ‘when Luce and I went to see Dad . . .’
She hesitated, both scared to tell and at the same time keeping Chloe hanging onto her words. ‘Well?’ Chloe reached across and shook her plate.
‘Sorry. It’s just in here, with all these children and the squally schoolkid racket.’ Emily sighed, chewed a chip and continued, ‘OK. Well, this Catherine woman he lives with now, her brother was there to see her. And he’s younger than her. Only about twenty-three or so.’
‘But you’re seventeen,’ Chloe pointed out, looking disappointed. ‘It’s not much of an age difference. Where’s the big deal? I mean, come back and tell me when you’ve pulled a bald sixty-year-old with grandchildren and a pension and prostate trouble.’
Emily shrugged and flicked her hair back. Her hair was long and thick and red-blond. He’d said it was the colour of sunset, but he’d said it as if he was laughing at her, like a joke so she wouldn’t think he was sadly drippy. He’d also said it in front of her father and Catherine, picking up a hank of hair like it was a sleeve of something in a shop to be felt before it was tried on. His fingernail had trailed across the back of her neck, very slowly. The other two hadn’t seen that.
Nick didn’t trail his fingers anywhere. His hands made a mad straight-there dash up her skirt, no loitering, no hanging about and tantalizing. It had seemed all right at the time, exciting enough when she was in the same amount of hurry and didn’t really know any better. She looked at the girls who were gazing at him so adoringly: suppose she went up to one of these romantic little innocents and told her that his dick tasted of old sock?
‘Seventeen but a pathetic schoolgirl,’ she said and then looked down in disgust at her moss green pleated skirt. ‘And this place must be the only school left in the world where the sixth form still have a uniform. It’s like living in a piece of fiction from grandmother days. Even the boys here are pathetic, sad things.’
Chloe nodded sympathetically and munched a handful of chips, waiting for Emily to go on: having kept it bottled up all week there was going to be no stopping her now. Emily pulled a bone from her fish and waved it at Chloe. ‘Look, it must have been a real fish, unless they slide a few bones into this stuff just to make us think they are. Anyway, about Simon, I mean I’m only just thinking about my gap year, if I pass my As, and he’s had his and university. Six years when you’re both working is nothing, but these particular six years, loads happens. Plus, and it’s a big plus, he’s my dad’s girlfriend’s brother. I have a suspicion, but don’t quote me, that with Mum that could be an insey-winsey problem.’
Chloe giggled. ‘If you all married each other, you’d be your stepmother’s sister-in-law. If you all had children, your dad would be his grandson’s er . . . uncle?’
‘I can’t say anything to Mum. Not that there’s anything to say.’
‘No you can’t,’ Chloe agreed. ’But that’s mostly because secrets are sexy. Is he?’
Emily put down the bone she was holding and pushed her plate away, all hunger, at least for food, gone. ‘Yes. Oh God Chloe, yes.’
Nina sat in the Polo outside Lucy’s school and watched the stream of children emerging. Mostly they were running, hurtling towards the freedom of the weekend like puppies let off their leads in a park, their mothers trailing behind, weighed down with their children’s bags and coats and buggy-loads of baby siblings and shouting to mind the road. It all seemed such a time of burden, that phase when the children were so little, always constantly hung round with paraphernalia and worry. Even in the park there was the running in front of swings, bad dogs, evil men who just wanted your back to be turned for a second. Sally’s boys were grown up now and she still worried that they might get run over by a bus or electrocuted in a launderett
e – so obviously it never ended.
‘Don’t be late out, please don’t be late,’ Nina murmured to herself, feeling anxious. They had to drive to Kensington, no fun on a busy Friday afternoon, for what Lucy’s agent Angela, at Little Cherubs, had described as the ‘go-see of the season’. This, when she’d got Angela to dispense with the persuasive hype and come across with genuine information, turned out to be an audition for a chain-store’s new clothes catalogue. ‘They’re talking Caribbean, darling,’ Angela had persuaded breathily. ‘And terrific money, of course. Don’t forget Lucy’s book.’
Nina flicked through the ‘book’, a photographic CV of the best of Lucy’s modelling work. Some of the earlier ones should be removed now – a few were a couple of years old and Lucy was now changing fast, losing her podgy baby-tummy and gaining cheekbones and pre-pubescent angles that would later become curves. She was a tall girl, and had probably inherited her mother’s tendency to early maturity. Nina herself still recalled the humiliation of being the first one in her class (age eleven) to start her periods. Her mother had told her it was a perfectly natural thing, that she should be proud to have reached womanhood and not to be ashamed of it. ‘It’s not a curse, you ignorant girls, but a blessing and don’t ever forget it,’ Monica had boomed at them when Nina and her friend Paula had been sniggering over Nina’s off-swimming letter.
‘Can I go to Sasha’s?’ Lucy opened the car door, flung her bag on the floor but didn’t get in. She looked expectantly at her mother, large cat-like blue eyes eager for an instant ‘yes’. Sasha, stumpy and stolid, hovered in the background, kicking at stones on the pavement.
‘Oh Lucy, I’m sorry but not today. You know you’ve got an audition at 4.30.’ She smiled past her daughter to the stone-kicker: ‘Sorry Sasha, another time?’
