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Authors: Kate Saunders

BOOK: Bachelor Boys
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But I couldn't face any more destruction. I couldn't face losing my last refuge, that blissful dream of secure married life. “Oh no, it's only a row. Everyone has them. I wondered what it would be like to row with Matthew.”
Phoebe raised her eyebrows. “Don't tell me that was your first.”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it was.” I racked my brains, but really couldn't remember anything worse than a little sarkiness on my side, a little tetchiness on his. These highly controlled exchanges could not be called rows. Until today, we had existed in a state of calm and temperate reason.
Phoebe reached across the table to squeeze my hand. “Don't worry, my lamb. I think it'll all blow over. As soon he's washed the dust out of his creases, Matthew will see the funny side.”
“What's so funny anyway?” I was despondent. Matthew wasn't big on humor.
“It's the nudity, I'm afraid,” Phoebe said apologetically. “Have another brioche. More important, he'll realize he owes you an apology.”
“He does, doesn't he?”
My uncertainty made Phoebe roll her eyes. “Listen to yourself. Of course he does. It wasn't your fault that the ceiling came down on his briefcase.”
I laughed, beginning to feel positively cheerful. “I'm the one who's going to suffer most. I have to pay for a new ceiling, and my flat looks like downtown Pompeii. I'll have to cancel that dinner party.”
“Not necessarily,” Phoebe said. She smiled mysteriously, and I saw that she had had one of her brilliant ideas.
“Well, where else can I hold it? Matthew lives in a loft, and it's so incredibly clean that I'd be too nervous to cook properly. And before you say anything,” I added firmly, “I'd rather not hold my dinner party here. An eligible bachelor never lives with his mum.”
“No, not here.” Phoebe was delighted by her own cunning. “Downstairs.”
“The basement?” This was a good one. “Phoebe, have you gone mad?”
“Don't be silly, darling—it's a perfectly lovely flat. And it's their territory. Fritz and Ben would be the hosts.” Phoebe's dark eyes were full of vitality in her worn face. She was excited. “That's far more romantic—two elegant young bachelors, entertaining in their Hampstead pad!” Bless her, she was more than half serious. “What? What's so funny?”
For the second time that day I was helpless with laughter. “Which one's James Bond?”
“Actually, I've always thought Fritz would make a marvelous James Bond. Yes, you can laugh, Miss Cassie, but stranger things have happened. Sean Connery was plucked from obscurity.”
“Oh, Phoebe, I do love you!”
She stopped being dignified and started giggling. “I've had another idea—I'll pretend I'm not their mother and dress up as a foreign cook. I'd so love to be a fly on the wall.”
I sighed. I could see that the idea had taken hold. She wouldn't be talked out of it, so I might as well give in gracefully. “I suppose it could be done,” I said reluctantly. “But you'd have to find an industrial cleaner. The place is in such a state.”
“I'll tell the boys they're doing it for you,” Phoebe said. “I'll say you had nowhere to hold your party. They'll agree because they're so kindhearted.”
And so fond of you, I thought; they'd do anything to please you.
I spent the rest of that Sunday morning with Phoebe. I went out for a heap of papers, and we read them in the garden. Fritz and Ben returned just as I was putting the finishing touches (under Phoebe's instructions) to a summery salad of tomato and basil. They were hot and tired, and clouds of brown dust puffed out of their clothes whenever they moved. I provided them with cold beers, almost incoherent with gratitude.
“We filled loads of black bags,” Ben said. “You'd never think one ceiling had so much plaster in it.”
“I'm afraid your vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost,” Fritz said. “The place is far from perfect—but you can probably sleep there tonight.”
I was waiting for the right moment to introduce Phoebe's mad idea, but she told them immediately.
“Poor Cassie can't hold her dinner party there now. We thought we'd move it to your basement.”
I half expected them to be annoyed, but Fritz only laughed. “Good grief, did you hear that, Ben? Our very first dinner party.”
“I'd be really grateful,” I said humbly. “I'll do the cooking, obviously. I'll also help with the cleaning and fumigating—it's the least I can do, after you've spent a Sunday morning bagging up my ceiling.”
Ben was solemn. “She can't hold it at her place, Fritz—her sitting room looks terrible. She'll never get it fixed in a week.”
I was still addressing Fritz. “We'll find a time next week to really clean the hell out of your place.”
“It's all settled then,” Phoebe said contentedly.
“Not quite,” Fritz said. “If we're putting up with this monumental intrusion, it has to be our show.”
“Your show?” I couldn't help sounding doubtful—Fritz and Ben hadn't done any kind of entertaining in their lives, unless you counted certain rowdy gatherings after the pubs had shut. “What about the cooking? Elspeth and Hazel will expect more than pizza.”
“You can help, obviously,” Fritz said. “But we're in charge. We choose the food, we choose the wine, we decide what we wear. The evening will have our stamp upon it—the dinner party reinvented.”
 
It was late in the afternoon by the time I got up the courage to go home. Outside my house I found a large, dusty heap of black binbags and the mangled corpse of my vacuum cleaner. I also found Matthew's Saab, with Matthew sitting in it. He leaped out as soon as he saw me. He had rehearsed his speech.
“Cassie, I'm so sorry about this morning. I don't know what possessed me. I've been under incredible stress at work, but I know that's not an excuse. I behaved like a shit.”
He hugged me hard, squeezing my rib cage. The relief of being held by him made my eyes sting. I wiped the scattering of hot tears discreetly on his shoulder.
“I was really nasty to you,” Matthew said. “As soon as I cooled off, I hated myself. I've been sitting in the car for more than an hour, wondering what I'd do if you didn't come back. Ignore the million messages I left on your phone.”
“We were both in shock.” I was eager to make excuses for him.
To give him his due, Matthew wasn't having any of this. He shook his head solemnly. “No, my response was totally self-centered. I ought to have seen how much worse it was for you. I've been doing some hard thinking, and—we need to talk.”
I was a little wary, as I always am when people say “we need to talk.” It invariably means “I need to mention things you don't want to hear.” But Matthew was being gentle and kind, and wrapping me in the affection I longed for. This blast of warmth reminded me how cold he had been lately. I had a blind eagerness to be part of a cozy couple again.
“Come on in,” I said. “Let's take a look at the damage.”
Matthew nodded toward the cairn of black bags beside the gate. “You didn't do all this on your own?”
“Oh, no—Fritz and Ben handled everything.”
“That was nice of them.” Matthew winced slightly as he said this—it must have been galling to acknowledge the Darlings' unexpected moral superiority. Clearly, Matthew's self-image had suffered a blow. His fit of temper appeared to have shocked him more than it had shocked me. He held my hand all the way up the stairs, and insisted on going into my flat first, presumably to protect me from any more collapsing ceilings.
The sitting room was bad. I stepped through the door and let out a moan. The fallen ceiling resembled a plowed field of raw soil, lowering over my furniture in a way that made it look particularly shabby and defeated. The air was still a fine haze of dust. Every surface had a transparent film of the stuff.
But the lumps and boulders had gone. No wonder the vacuum cleaner had died—Fritz and Ben had worked like furies, sweeping every inch of my dreadful, treacherous flat. They had dusted and polished the television. There was a note stuck to the screen—“This works.” They had driven the dust from the shelves, the tops of the books, the lamp-shades and the sofa. I let out a shaky sigh, suddenly calm because the day's crisis was over.
“You poor darling,” Matthew said. From the pocket of his immaculate chinos he pulled a piece of paper. “This is a list of local plasterers, by the way.”
“Really?” I was genuinely impressed. “How on earth did you get that? Are you a Freemason or something?”
He put his arms around me again. “I called Talking Pages while I was waiting in the car.”
“You're so efficient.”
He was very serious. “Cassie, I've been asking myself a lot of questions. I've been looking at what we've built together. I've been quite distant with you recently, haven't I?”
“Yes.”
“What we've made is too good to throw away. I realized this morning that I don't want to lose you.”
I put my arms round his neck and buried my face in his shoulder. “I don't want to be lost. Please don't lose me.” I had never begged for his love so blatantly.
He kissed me, and we made love on the sofa with something like the old passion, raising clouds around us.
T
he following Wednesday was set aside for Hampstead's biggest cleanup since they renovated the town hall. This was the only day I could carve out of a schedule packed with Matthew, the magazine and a volatile Polish plasterer. Somehow, by burning midnight oil (and surreptitiously catching up on sleep during a Palestrina concert at St. John's, Smith Square), I managed to take the afternoon off. I arrived in a taxi, laden with every cleaning product in existence, down to a fierce foam that claimed to act like napalm on carpet stains.
I found a scene of seething chaos. Ben and Fritz had been hard at work since early morning. The French windows stood open, and various shabby articles of furniture had been turned out into the sunny garden. Cupboards were open, spewing out the boxes and bags of ancient junk stored there since the boys moved in. Ben was outside, his long hair bundled into a ponytail, scrubbing the big table. Fritz was washing down the walls with sugar soap. A bulky, sweating stranger with red hair was kneeling in front of the oven, chipping at the crusted gunk with a knife.
Ben leaped in and flung a friendly arm around the stranger. “Cassie, this is Neil Evans—my tenor.” As if he kept a tenor as a pet.
Neil had a ruddy complexion. His permanent blush deepened when he stood up to shake my hand. He was a shy man, with a soft Welsh voice. “Hi. Ben's told me loads about you.”
I looked round forlornly. “I don't know where to start. How on earth are we going to be ready for Saturday?”
Neil said, “It's not as bad as it looks.”
“Has anyone tackled the bathroom?”
“We saved it for you, darling.” Fritz pointed to one of the black bags silting up the narrow hall. “I've cleared out Ben's stash of useless folk remedies. Now it's ready for a good scrubber.”
“The penalty for being late,” I said. “Neil, it's tremendously nice of you to help—but how on earth did you get roped in?”
Puffing slightly, Neil dropped back to his knees. “I don't know. Ben was going on about it, and the next thing I knew, I was buying Brillo.”
I could have told him that I understood. The Darlings had an extraordinary talent for drawing people into their orbit, and mesmerizing them into doing menial things (those of a literary bent might like to remember Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence).
“It happened yesterday evening,” Ben told me. “We were rehearsing for Neil's
Pagliacci
at the Harrogate Festival, and the subject of housework just came up.”
“So it was off with the motley, and on with the apron,” Fritz said. “I must say, for a rising young tenor, you know a hell of a lot about cleaning.”
The rising young tenor shrugged. “You can thank my mum for that. Her kitchen's like an operating theater.”
I gathered up my carrier bag of products and put my head round the bathroom door. “Oh, dear God!” No, I won't describe it. I rolled up my sleeves, removed my jewelry and began with a large can of foaming Harpic.
Neil, once he had finished the oven, joined me. “The foam won't take all that off, you know. It needs some old-fashioned elbow grease.”
“The Camden Sainsbury's was out of elbow grease, unfortunately.”
He smiled shyly, not at all annoyed by my sarcasm. “Here, I'll give you a hand. You do the bath and the sink. I'm bigger than you, and a gentleman, so I'll take on the toilet.”
It was impossible not to get friendly—even intimate—with Neil while we were bumping against each other in that awful bathroom. I found him a gentle and genial character, disarmingly modest about his burgeoning career. In between answering my nosy questions about recitals and recordings, he stuck his red head out of the bathroom door to shout suggestions to Fritz and Ben: “Fritz, you want to mop those tiles with the stuff in the red bottle, man. It brings them up lovely.”
I couldn't help getting caught up in his enthusiasm. In a surprisingly short time, the bathroom was white again, the medicine cabinet polished, the scarred cork tiles spotless. Neil then helped Fritz to rehang the sitting room curtains, while I wiped down shelves. Ben ferried bags and boxes of rubbish out the front gate—a rubbish-collecting firm was to remove them tomorrow morning. As the three of us got dirtier, the flat got cleaner. Little by little, the lineaments of civilization were restored. Holding the dinner party here no longer seemed foolhardy.
Fritz found his CD of the twenty best garage anthems and put it on. We danced as we worked—yes, including the rising young classical tenor, who wasn't as groove-proof as one might think.
By about six o'clock, after extensive work with two vacuum cleaners, damp cloths and dusters, Fritz decided it was time to bring in the furniture. While Ben and Neil finished waxing the floorboards, Fritz and I went into the garden armed with a squash racquet and a large spatula, to beat out the dust. This was invigorating, filthy work. We pounded the clouds of centuries out of the sofa and rugs. Then we flopped down on the sofa to rest. I was sweating and gasping. Unlike Fritz, I was woefully out of condition.
“I've invited Neil to the dinner,” Fritz said.
“Oh.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, of course not. He's lovely, and he's done all this work.” I paused, to stop myself being the kind of prat who whines about having her table “put out.” I wouldn't be petty. Neil was more than presentable. “Is he bringing someone? You know, does he have a girlfriend?”
“No. He's apparently rather diffident with girls. I thought you could find another girl for him.”
I let out a laugh that was half a groan. “Oh yes, just like that. As if I had a stash of them in my airing cupboard.”
“I'd like to make it worth his while,” Fritz said. “The fact is, Neil's offered to do the cooking. He's marvelous at it, apparently.”
“Oh, I see—that's why you're suddenly so desperate to accommodate him. I might have known.”
Fritz nudged me with his bare tanned arm. “He fancies you.”
“Who—Neil? Get off.”
“No, really. Perhaps you don't know how foxy you look in those jeans. He's been brick red ever since you arrived.”
“Isn't he always that color?”
He was laughing softly. “You could do a lot worse. Neil will be famous one day.”
“I don't go for fat blokes with red hair.”
“Sorry—I assumed you weren't fussy.”
“What?”
“You manage to endure moose-faced blokes with eighties hair.”
“Fritz, I'm aware that you don't like Matthew—all right?”
He sighed. I felt his warm body stretching on the cushions beside me. “Only because he's wrong for you.”
“How do you know? I think he's perfect for me.”
“I don't know what you're trying to do to yourself,” Fritz said. “Why do you want to be somebody else?”
I looked at him, not sure I'd heard him properly. I was surprised that my strivings to be somebody else were obvious enough for him to notice. He was smiling, but I felt he was serious.
I said, “What do you mean?” Knowing exactly what he meant.
“I get the sense that you're acting out a role,” Fritz said. “You're like a transvestite, buying stuff for his female persona.”
“Thank you. Please don't overwhelm me with compliments.”
“Darling, I'm trying to be nice.”
“Really? You said I was like a transvestite.”
He smiled, and said, “Okay, I put that really badly. What I mean is, the natural Cassie is perfectly sweet and lovely, and I don't understand why you work so hard to hide her.”
“I don't think I'm trying to hide anything. Isn't it natural to try to improve on nature?” I suddenly wanted Fritz to understand that I was only doing it because I had lost the genuine me. I wasn't even sure of my own tastes any more.
Phoebe tapped on the kitchen window upstairs, and the moment vanished like a bubble bursting. Fritz and I waved.
“I said we'd have tea with her when she woke up,” Fritz said. He glanced at his watch. “She slept for a long time.”
I hoped this was good. I hadn't the heart to ask. We dragged the sofa back indoors, and the four of us climbed to the sunlit uplands of Phoebe's domain. It was obvious that Phoebe felt well rested. She had set out the tea service, put several sorts of chocolate biscuits on plates and made tomato sandwiches. She laughed over our dirtiness, and made Ben sit on the
Guardian.
We were all parched and ravenous, and we fell on the tea as if we had just come off the Raft of the Medusa. Phoebe replenished the biscuits and kept the tea flowing. She was in her element—so transparently delighted to be entertaining that Fritz did not tell her off for overdoing it.
Phoebe already adored Neil, and not only because he had provided paid work for her less-effective son. They fell to discussing food. I noticed that his face did not turn magenta when she spoke to him. People were never shy with her for long.
Incredibly, it seemed that the eligible young bachelors really were going to throw their first posh dinner party. I was relieved, but also a little anxious that so much of the business had been taken out of my hands. I was still the senior consultant, however, and there were still details that needed attention.
I looked at Fritz and Ben, trying to picture them in sharp suits instead of sweats and T-shirts.
“Forgive me if this is a silly question,” I said, “but the two of you are going to shave before this dinner, aren't you?” Both handsome faces were pebbledashed with stubble. I felt it gave out totally the wrong message.
Ben sighed, his mouth crammed with biscuit. “You don't trust us at all, do you? You think we're going to whip out our knobs between courses and show you up.”
“And are you planning to get haircuts?” I took it for granted that Ben would be cutting his long hair.
“What's wrong with my hair?” He was wounded.
I placed a soothing hand on his arm. “Ben, you'd look so fantastic with shorter hair. Only wizened old rock stars have long hair these days.”
“That's not true, actually.”
“All right, and motorcycle messengers—but nobody else.”
You'd think I was Delilah, telling Samson he'd look great with a Number One. Ben's eyes widened with horror (twenty years ago, they
would have brimmed with tears). “I like it, actually. If you want to cut it off, you'll have to chloroform me first.”
Fritz said, “Good idea. A whiff of chloroform might stop you talking bollocks.”
“I mean it, Cass,” Ben said. “I'm not cutting my hair.”
“Oh, darling, I'm so glad!” Phoebe had caught the end of this. “I love your hair. Every mother secretly dreams of having a son who looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
She meant it—the irony had never entered Phoebe's soul.
Ben did not have the grace to look embarrassed. He only smirked at me, knowing he had won the hair argument.
“You keep forgetting, dear Grimble,” Fritz said, “that you have surrendered control to us. This is our gig. If Ben wants to look like a big wendy, that's his business.”
Ben would not rise. “You're eaten up with jealousy. You can't bear to admit that I've got better hair than you.”
“No you haven't.”
“Yes I have. Yours is coarse.”
“Coarse!”
“Stop it, boys,” Phoebe cut in, mild but firm. “Neil and Cassie don't want to witness one of your silly arguments.”
“I appeal to you,” Fritz said. “Is my hair coarse?”
“Stop it, both of you.” Phoebe gave Ben a biscuit, momentarily forgetting that he was no longer six years old (when we were children, Ben would do anything for a biscuit). “Go and play the piano. Neil says he'll sing for me.”
Ben and Neil went to the grand piano, their dirt and dishevelment making incongruous reflections in the depths of its polished lid. Then Ben began to play, and I forgot everything else—as people generally did when Ben played, if they had even the smallest liking for music. Neil sang the old Scottish songs that Phoebe loved, and he was a revelation. His stout body swelled and firmed before us, and out poured a glorious voice. If you have ever heard a trained singer in a small room, you'll know how the sound flattens you like a gale.
Phoebe's eyes were stars of bliss. The beautiful tenor voice sang “Bonnie Mary of Argyll,” “Auld Robin Grey” and the “The Land of the
Leal.” These were the songs Phoebe had warbled around the house when we were little. I had ordered myself not to come over sentimental, but by the last verse of “The Land of the Leal” I had a lump in my throat the size of a cricket ball.

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