A Perfect Life (2 page)

‘I need the US documents faxed home, I've got calls to make tonight. I did ask you to get the stuff to me earlier.' He doesn't say please, and Janet's hurt is like a bell clanging persistently in his conscience. He has enough awareness to know that he does this often when he is irritated by Angel, and in the pause when
Janet doesn't speak, he wonders if it comes out of a smarting and unresolved frustration that he works for his wife's family's business, and although he is good at his job, it feels to him and looks to the world that he got where he is by marrying the boss's daughter. Uncomfortable with this thought, he coughs into Janet's silence.

‘Oh, sorry. Yes, I'll do that, Nick. Did you want me to post it to you as well?'

‘No, I don't need a hard copy at home, I just need to get on top of it before I come in tomorrow. I keep forgetting Angel's on sabbatical.'

Nick is not sure why this is relevant, it just popped out, but it seems that it was the right thing to say.

Janet is being won round; he can hear the motherly smile in her voice when she says, ‘Well, it has only been a week so no one would expect you to remember.'

Nick cannot allow himself to be let off the hook so easily. ‘Very kind of you, Janet, to be so loyal.'

Janet sighs, papers rustling as if she is folding them while talking.

‘You don't have to worry, Nick. Have a nice evening, and we'll finish everything off before your meeting tomorrow afternoon. Bye, Nick.'

‘Bye, Janet. Thanks.' Before he has spoken, the line is dead – she did not hear his thanks. Honestly. Why be nasty to poor Janet? It's not her fault. Nick castigates himself, flicking off the cruise control as he turns out of the Fens and into the plush arable farmland of Norfolk. Neat high hedges run along both sides of the road, punctuated by gates painted robin's-egg blue.
Getting back here, sliding under the rural canopy, always has one of two effects on Nick – he either feels safe or he feels trapped. Today's feeling is trapped. There are so many parts of life that are full of possibility; it's just that sometimes the possibility comes with a dead end.

The driveway to his house is a dead end. It was actually one of the things that made Nick want to buy it, odd though it seems this evening. The wall in the yard where cars turn, looms large and solid in Nick's mind and from long ago the plummy tone of the estate agent rolls into his thoughts. They first saw the Mill House eighteen years ago, and the Locksley & Parks representative deserved full marks for digging himself into a hole and then climbing out again with only a small whiff of mortification about his person. ‘The original carriage drive was obliterated by the erection of the conservatory, but that is in itself a massive bonus, and of course you are saved from the danger of drive-through burglars,' Martin Chistleton had droned. His habitual cravat-smoothing with one hand and hair-rumpling with the other speeded up when Angel climbed out of Nick's car wearing a pink fluffy jumper she insisted was a dress but which Nick knew was just too short. Angel didn't care. She told him so on the way, when he looked across at her, ran his hands up from her knees and said, ‘You can't go around like that, you look much too provocative. Where's your coat?'

Angel smiled and bit her lip, parting her legs a little so his hand could move between her thighs.

‘I forgot it,' she said, wriggling in her seat, looking sideways at him, adorable and adoring. Nick had a rush of excitement and joy so mood-altering he could have sworn it was medicated. She was lovely, she was sexy, and she wanted him, too. It was extraordinary, but it appeared to be true. There was no need for him to find reasons or excuses; he could just enjoy the pleasure of being with Angel.

But that was then. Now he is almost home. He skirts the village centre, noticing with a small part of his mind that the scaffolding is off the church and the bench has been dragged out of its usual position overlooking the duck pond. And although thinking about that time plunges Nick back into nostalgia for the heady feelings of love and lust and lost youth, he only affords himself a moment to rub a hand up over his forehead and into his hair. That phase of limerance, so intoxicating and consuming, is the beginning, the foundations: it is not meant to last. Or is it? Ever since then he and Angel have been getting on with building the rest. Or so Nick believes. Of course, he loves her, she knows that. They have a life together.

The crumbling of tyres on the gravel, echoing hollow as the car passes in through the gates, is one of the sounds Nick knows best, and it brings texture to his memories of first seeing the house, Actually it is a miracle he can remember anything about that time. His life ten years ago is mostly lost in a fog of confused fragments, memories torn apart by being drunk, or
rows over drink, or attempts to stop drinking, or lies about having stopped drinking. Most of his sober moments were spent juggling two questions: would Angel have married him if she hadn't been pregnant, and where will the next drink be coming from?

There is no possibility that they would ever have bought a house like this if it hadn't been for Angel's family. There is no way he, Nick, ever thought a rambling idyll in a picture-book village was an achievable dream.

Frankly, it often looks to him more like a nightmare. A giant money-guzzling monster parked in the middle of his life, demanding everything he can ever muster and more. If they hadn't bought this house, things might have turned out differently. He might have been able to do something other than work for Fourply, rival to Angel for her father Lionel Mayden's affections, as Angel used to joke, but the joke was thin because Angel knew the business had won long ago.

The Mill Stone House, as Nick secretly called it to himself, was their wedding present from Lionel. Nick's pay-off, or rather Nick's high-interest loan. Lionel has been dead for ten years now, but still Nick feels he is paying with his life.

And it is true; every day Nick goes to work in Cambridge at the head office, as sales director of the company, doing a job that is vital in a small British manufacturing business, but which he still believes no one needs him to do. It's enough to turn anyone to drink. If they haven't already been turned off it.

Nick has stopped the car at the front door and the engine cooler buzzes in the silence.

In the house, music throbs in the kitchen, and Coral, teetering in high-heeled shoes with a cigarette in her mouth, eyes narrowed to the smoke, is breaking ice in the blender.

‘Hi,' says Nick, pointlessly he feels, as there is no way she can hear him.

Coral turns round from the dresser and moves towards the sink. Her eyes widen seeing him. ‘God! Nick. I didn't know you were back,' she says.

‘Evidently,' Nick replies, grinding his teeth to curb anger he has no reason to feel. Coral brushes her hands down her thighs, automatically smoothing her clothes, even though they are not crumpled. She twists her hair into a loose plait and smiles, flashing on and off automatically, calculating the effect on Nick of a strange youth in his kitchen.

‘This is Matt. Matt, this is Nick. Nick is my, my –' Coral laughs angrily. ‘Oh well, you've met my mum, this is the other half.'

Matt doesn't stand up, though he smiles and nods his head at Nick and carries on rolling his cigarette. Nick wants to make a cup of tea, to sit down at the table and read his post and catch up with the cricket score on the radio. He stands in the doorway for a moment. Coral and Matt ignore him. Coral shovels the crushed ice into two glasses then throws the blender into the sink. There is no suggestion that she might pour a third glass. The music is impenetrable, loud and feverish. Matt says something Nick cannot
even hear. Coral runs her fingers through her long hair and laughs. Smarting slightly, and at the same time knowing it is absurd to be hurt by any teenage behaviour, Nick leaves the room. Coral lowers the music to shout after him.

‘Oh, by the way, could you tell Mum I won't be home for supper? We're going to the cinema.'

On the sofa in the snug, Nick flicks on the television, and thanks God for the invention of cricket.

The children have gone into a trance of tiredness now that Angel has got them back in the car after a day playing with school friends. Ruby and Foss are bundled on the back seat in an array of play implements which should have been stashed in the boot. Angel is regretting her own feebleness in not insisting on this with every corner, as plastic spades clatter and fall on the floor, or a rush of beach pebbles spills from a bucket down between the seats. Driving with dark glasses on through the lustrous pink and gold evening cornfields, Angel wonders how many conversations and thoughts it is possible for one person to have at one moment and not implode. Radio Two is playing a song from her past, getting lost in rock and roll, drifting away.

Part of her mind is transported back to a summer when she was seventeen, and had too much time to lie around feeling sorry for herself. It was hot, like today, and every day Angel lay naked on the flat roof
of the woodshed at home in the suburbs of Cambridge, soaking up the sun. She breathed in the sticky earth smell of bitumen tar, inhaled one cigarette after another and deliberately closed her mind to revision. Her mind hummed and buzzed through all of that summer, with the rush of nicotine from the stolen cigarettes she sneaked from her father's pocket.

Angel turns the car off the main road and slows down for a tractor dragging a trailer piled high with a gold glacier of corn. She shivers involuntarily. The first field is harvested, the path cut to make way for the end of summer; this moment always makes her sad, even though it is still only July.

Her thoughts return again to the wilful destructiveness in her teenage self that took her tiptoeing into the bedroom where her father lay gasping for breath, only half conscious. His prone state, incapacitated from smoking, drowning in his own lungs from emphysema, enabled her, unnoticed, to slide her hand into the cool silk of the inside pocket of his jacket for his always-present packet of cigarettes. The hot, ironed smell of his shirts, the whiff of lemon aftershave and tobacco curled like smoke through her memory. She could take the cigarettes and no one knew. No one cared what she was doing or wondered where she was. Her father was dying, a process which would take ten years. Her mother Dawn was distant. Fourply, the family business set up by Lionel and his brother Terry, was run by the board. In its heyday the company had flourished, supplying school uniform manufacturers and swimming-costume makers with stretch nylon,
but at the time Lionel became ill it slumped, and Angel remembered Terry's glee when Fourply won a shell-suit contract with a removals firm.

‘I don't think this is what Lionel built the company for,' her mother had sighed. ‘Anyway, I'm going upstairs to see him. You'll find some lunch for yourself later, won't you?'

It was late morning. Dawn was in her dressing gown and had just put the telephone down. She went through to the kitchen, opened the fridge and took a glass from the cupboard next to it. As she poured vermouth, then tipped her head back to drink it in a gulp, Angel realised with vague unease that she had seen her mother do this every day for as long as she could remember. And until she left home, she measured time by this small deliberate routine of her mother's, though she never told a single person. Now, more than twenty years have passed, and Angel still remembers the ache of feeling unwanted that opened like a chasm when she heard her mother telling her father, ‘And we don't have to worry about getting her up for school for a while. She's revising and she can get the bus. And then she'll be gone. She'll look after herself, Lionel.'

The present intrudes sharply, a voice in Angel's ear commanding her attention, bringing a focus.

‘Mummy, how much pocket money would it cost for me to buy hair straighteners? Will it be more than twenty-one?'

Angel is never sure what currency or denomination seven-year-old Ruby works in.

‘Um, I think that will be plenty. I reckon about seventeen would be enough.'

Ruby leans forward from the back seat, much further than she would have been able to if she was wearing her seat belt, and waves a magazine picture. ‘I want to get this one. Can we go to Marshall's on the way home?'

‘It's shut now. Please will you put your seat belt on? And Foss, you put yours on too, please.'

Coral, Jem, Ruby, Foss. Girl, boy, girl, boy. Eighteen, sixteen, seven and four. It is so neat it belongs in a nursery rhyme. Angel can never quite get used to adding them all together and finding that she is a mother of four. Sometimes she is convinced that Ruby and Foss, separated from the other two by almost ten years and brought up by her with a different awareness, are her second chance. She is supposed to get it right this time. Even so, it has taken her until now to break the mould and leave her job at Fourply. And of course it isn't really
leaving
to take a sabbatical, but maybe it will give her time to work out why her life has become overwhelming. She cranes to look in the rear-view mirror at Foss, but he is invisible behind her seat. He doesn't often speak, so when he is with Ruby who is never silent, it is easy to forget about him.

His voice rises from the back. ‘I've done my seat belt up already. I want some water.'

‘Well, there's some in that bottle.'

‘No, not for drinking, it's to wash the snails. They're muddy and hot.'

‘Oh. Good. I mean bad.' Angel has no idea what the right response is.

‘What exactly do you mean?' comes Foss's voice politely from behind her.

‘Err. I don't know,' replies Angel, feeling mad.

Ruby whacks something with her magazine. ‘Oooh, Mummy! He's got insects too. I really hate woodlice. Why do we have to have them in the car?'

Foss's small voice is utterly reasonable. ‘I like them. I found them in the flower bed. Mummy, why is it called a flower bed not a flower table or a flower carpet?'