A Perfect Life (24 page)

We are driving up the hill and away from the sea, and turning down the winding lanes that lead home
from the station. I suddenly desperately want Dad to be at home when we get there and for it all to be normal. I wouldn't even mind Jake hanging around if Mum and Dad could just live together and be like they have always been. It isn't easy lighting a cigarette in the back of a TVR with Phil Collins breathing away and wailing about ‘something in the air', but it is worth it. Inhaling is a big fix of defiance and my gaze holds Mum's in the mirror. She doesn't say anything. I can't believe it when I see Jake is singing along. It isn't that anything is wrong at home, it's just different in an empty way. Even the fact that Gosha the au pair has left is different, though I don't know why, because au pairs always leave.

Jake drops us off and I leave Mum to say goodbye to him. I don't want to see if he kisses her, or rather how he kisses her. In the TV room, Foss and Ruby are sitting on a pile of magazines each and the sofa is upside down.

‘We're looking for the keys to the tractor. Daddy wants them and he says he will give me five pounds if I find them. Mum doesn't know where they are either.'

This is Ruby's greeting. Foss waves a bread stick at me.

‘This is nice,' he says, dipping it into a pot of yoghurt. Basically, they have gone feral. I am so relieved none of my friends came home with me this weekend.

‘Where's Coral?'

‘They're having sex,' says Ruby without looking up from the TV.

‘What? Did Coral tell you that?'

She giggles. ‘No, not Coral, silly, the people on this deserted island who are camping. Look, they're both in the same sleeping bag.'

‘Oh yeah.' I watch for a moment. It is some pornographic crap. Finally it sinks in. It really IS some pornographic crap, and I react. ‘What the hell are you watching?' I grab the remote control. They have got on to one of the Sky adult channels.

Ruby pouts. ‘I've seen it before. One of the babysitters Mummy got for us last week was watching one about a plumber.'

Oh my God. We need a new au pair.

Agreeing to Coral having a party was the easy bit. In fact, Angel wished she had offered it first.

‘You deserve to have a good time,' she says when Coral comes in waving the invitations which are in the shape of pouting red lips.

‘Do you think so?' Coral looks disbelieving and, pinning one of the invitations on to the kitchen noticeboard, she leaves the room. Angel's hopes that the party might mend broken lines of communication with her daughter dwindle again. Coral is unreachable, distant. She is either on the phone, or waving a hand as she disappears out of the door and into Matt's car, arriving home at the heart of a group of girlfriends, all jangling identical earrings and smiling secret smiles. Matt goes back to university a couple of weeks earlier than the others to do a course, and Coral finds a whole lot of new interchangeable friends. Angel is not sure where they have come from.

Talking to Jenny, whose daughter Ally is the same age, is a relief.

‘The girls look twice the age of the boys, and the boys look like they could have half-fares on the train. I can't believe they are old enough to drive,' says Jenny, and Angel laughs.

‘The ones Coral brings home are either like that or they look about thirty. I don't know which is worse.'

Angel and Jenny are walking through the village to collect Foss and Ruby from school. Angel goes on, ‘None of Coral's friends seem to have anything to do. Having a job doesn't feature, and when I suggested to Coral that she might go to the village pub and earn some cash waitressing, she glared at me and said, “That is not what I worked my butt off for at school, Mum. I am having a break, just a few months, not even a gap year like lots of people, and I start university in October. Is that OK with you?” I was pole-axed. So I didn't even react.'

Angel laughs it off now with Jenny, who has a similar story about her own daughter, but at the time, she was confounded by Coral's fury. Coral's hands were on her hips, her jaw was thrust forward, and Angel retreated, shaking, not sure how she could have done it differently, but quite certain that there were ways to handle children so much better.

Coral had been at boarding school for the past five years, so Angel was quite unused to the daily presence of a grown-up member of her family in the house. Her privacy was gone at the moment she was convinced she needed it most. And as Jenny suggested,
Coral probably knew it and resented her mother for needing space.

Right now, though, is lunchtime on Saturday, the party is tonight, and Angel has had enough privacy this morning to send her into a decline. Jem is still asleep, Ruby and Foss are waiting, with a packed rucksack between them, at the bottom of the drive for Alice West to pick them up and take them to a play date.

‘We would rather wait down there,' says Ruby, ‘because then you won't waste time talking to her like mums always do, and she can't have coffee.'

Waving them off, Angel ponders their unpredictability. Until now, through all the years when Angel was working and unavailable, Ruby swung on her arm every time a friend came to play, pronouncing orders she wanted carried out from the moment of the friend's arrival.

‘What you have to do, Mummy, is say to Mrs Killross, “Would you like to come in for coffee?” And you have to make sure you have some cake on a tray and get one of those white pots for coffee which has cups and saucers.'

‘Oh yes, and then what?' Angel is always fascinated by Ruby's visualisations, or indeed hallucinations.

‘Then you talk to her, like she's your friend.'

This also clearly has an agenda, and Angel wants to know more. ‘What might we talk about?'

Ruby considers for a moment. ‘Well, probably it would be things like your daughter's ballet exams and things like that,' she says. Ruby's vision is so solemn,
consuming and important to her; Angel is uncomfortably aware that she has never had a conversation about a ballet exam with any other mother, nor has it occurred to her to do so. All this must change.

Today, though, there is not a moment to practise ballet conversations as the need to get all the sleeping teenagers to get up and do something presents itself. They clearly had a practice run for the party, after the pub last night, if the stack of bottles and cigarette packets in the fireplace in the sitting room is anything to go by.

Throwing them into a bin bag, Angel wonders if she has got this wrong too. Is it a mistake to let your teenage children drink and smoke in your house? Oh probably, but who is making the rules anyway?

Wandering into the hall, Angel shouts hopefully up the stairs, ‘Is anyone getting up?' Returning to the kitchen she begins to pace between the fridge and the table, thinking of all the things that need to be done for Coral's party.

Clear the barn, find a lot of candles, set up the trestle tables, get the music out there, and then someone has to go and buy some more drink. And it would look so nice if they put lanterns along the top of the wall. Writing a list in bigger and bigger writing, as if the size of it will make things happen, Angel quickly becomes carried away.

A quick coat of lime wash over the barn would give it a real lift and the whole thing could look like the Buddha Bar if they got that sea grass matting up from the cellar and put it down with a few beanbags and
candles floating in a bowl or something. The familiar reflex of managing and perfecting kicks is like a buzz of adrenaline. Angel is hooked immediately; all that needs to be done is for someone to make a start, and who better than she? Coral and her friends can take over when they get up.

Angel makes her way out into the yard. It is a softly beautiful day; the damson tree droops with purple fruit, their dusty lustre like cabochon garnets, Angel's favourite stone. She pauses to look across the fields and the smell of autumn in the air fills her with a sense of aching loss. Blue smoke drifts from a bonfire, and otherwise everything is still, basking in gentle autumn sunlight. Reaching to unbolt the barn door Angel forces herself to remain focused on her plan. Doing something always makes her feel better. She just needs to get on with it. So it is surprising to hear a clear voice inside her shout ‘STOP!'

‘Why?' Angel wonders, ready to dismiss the voice. Being busy, and making things perfect, is so reassuring, so familiar, so soothing. It's like staying in a bath that is no longer hot enough – if she keeps all of herself submerged and tries not to create any movement on the surface, it is fine, but any unusual action which might bring her into contact with the world above the water will be uncomfortable and dreadfully cold. This is how she feels about being organised. Suddenly she is just too tired. None of it matters. Coral can do what she likes for her party, or she can do nothing, it is all the same to Angel. The thought of spending the afternoon scrubbing a barn
for a bunch of teenagers is absurd, a mind-blowingly unnecessary and unrewarding project. But what can she do instead? How about nothing? There are a thousand things that need doing. Angel finds herself walking past them all, past the kitchen where Coral, Mel and another tangle-haired girl are coughing and shuffling food from the fridge to the table, their faces pasty with mascara rubbed beneath their eyes. Angel glances in, but backs out again. Her sympathy is roused by the skimpy neediness of their bodies in T-shirts and baggy pyjama bottoms, but it is subdued again by her own tiredness. And suddenly she is in bed, with the curtains drawn, sinking in, but so empty she can imagine evaporating and not being there in the bed when she wakes up and looks for herself. An out-of-body experience is how Jem would see it if she told him.

‘Hey, Mum, I've got you a cup of tea.' Jem wakes her, a bit like a ministering angel, but only because he is wearing a white gown. It turns out to be a boxer's satin dressing gown Angel has never seen before. Switching the bedside light on creates a well of warmth in the lilac shadows. It is late.

‘Are Foss and Ruby back?'

‘Yes. Foss is green.'

Angel sips her tea. Jem sits down on the bed. His face has changed since the end of the summer, and features that were too big then, like his jaw and his ears, are now in proportion again. He is balanced
between childhood and being a man. Not realising she is smiling fondly, Angel stares at him over her cup.

‘Why is he green?' she asks.

‘Oh, he wanted to be an alien or a frog or something at the party they went to. He says he's not going to bed, by the way, and he's gone to help light the bonfire. Coral's friends are all coming in about half an hour. Can you stop looking at me like that, Mum.'

‘Sorry, I was just thinking.' Angel rubs her eyes, then jumps. ‘Oh my God. What time is it? We haven't done anything! I can't believe you let me sleep so long.'

Angel slops her tea on the bedside table and throws off her duvet. Jem throws it back on.

‘Mum, chill out. It's all done. Matt's here. He got back an hour ago, and Mel has brought the drink and they're setting up a tequila bar. Ruby's dressed up as a belly dancer, and I wanted to know if you thought I should wear this?'

Angel looks at him again. He stands up and turns around. She gets out of bed and switches the overhead light on. Jem fills a lot of the space in her room.

She hugs him. ‘You look great,' she says.

Jem hugs her back. ‘Thanks, Mum,' he says, and digging into his pocket, he takes a cigarette out and flips it from his hand up into his mouth. He grins at her, a measuring expression on his face, and says, ‘By the way, your boyfriend Jake called.'

Angel raises her eyebrows. Jem raises his back.

‘Yes, Mum?' he says politely.

‘He is not my boyfriend,' says Angel, throwing a pillow at him. ‘We are friends. That's all.'

‘Whatever,' says Jem and, grinning, walks out of the room.

So now she knows what he has been thinking. Angel sits down on the bed again. Jem has presented her with the memory of an encounter she had not thought of for years. It must be the dressing gown, or maybe the heart-breaking hope that is youth. Or maybe it was the mention of Jake and the possibility attached to him. Twenty years ago, when Angel was at art school, about to finish her degree, and she went to an election-night party. It was the only time in the whole of her adult life that Angel had shown an interest in politics, and even then her interest was purely a reaction against her father, who had six months earlier given a large amount of money to the Conservative Party to coincide with his inclusion on the New Year's Honours List. She could not even remember who was standing for Prime Minister. Anyway, it didn't matter. What mattered was the boy. A beautiful boy.

Now, lying back down on her bed and closing her eyes to focus her mind, she cannot remember his name. But he had sexy, sleepy eyes and he was wearing a white dressing gown over his clothes. At the party they leant on a window sill together and looked out at swans floating past on the river beneath the derelict shoe factory next to the art school, and they talked about belief. Angel must have been drunk, because she often was then, but despite this she could remember what happened. She could see him by her
side as they walked along the river towards the house she shared, and his dressing gown gleamed in the street like the swans had gleamed in the water half an hour before.

At the door of her bedroom, a chance remark by Angel brought them to the election, and by the time they were inside the door, he was defending the Conservatives and sounding just like her father when he said, ‘And there will come a time when you will change.'

But he was beautiful, tall and lean and she wanted him. Inside her room, he asked her what she had voted.

‘I didn't get round to it,' she replied, reaching up to take off his dressing gown.

‘You didn't? Think of the suffragettes who died so that you could have the vote.' He took off her shirt and pulled down her bra so it fell like a lace belt around her waist and he licked her right across both nipples then picked her up in his arms. She kissed him back, wanting him and pushing him away at once. He put her down close to the bed.