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Authors: Kate Saunders

BOOK: Bachelor Boys
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“Well, of course you must go.”
“Oh, Matthew, you are nice. I hate standing you up. Can you come round tomorrow instead?”
“I've got a better offer for tomorrow,” Matthew said cheerfully. “You're going to love this. I've managed to blag a box at the Coliseum—that new production of
The Flying Dutchman
.”
“Oh, how amazing!”
He chuckled down the phone. “I knew you'd be thrilled. The tickets are like gold dust.”
“God, yes!”
“I'll meet you in the foyer at six forty-five tomorrow, and we'll have a bottle of champagne. As it's a box, we can take it in with us.”
“Heavenly!”
You will have noticed, as Matthew did not, the slightly forced quality of my interjections. Yes, I was interested in the hot new production of
The Flying Dutchman
at the English National Opera. But my overwhelming reaction was disappointment. Matthew and I hadn't had an evening at home together for nearly three weeks. He preferred going out to staying in. He was forever getting tickets to operas and concerts, saying his job made him hungry for the higher culture. I was tough enough to take any amount of culture on the chin, but I did absolutely love it when Matthew just came round to my place for dinner. On these occasions, I would cook one of the elegant little dishes taught to me by Phoebe. Matthew would arrive with his briefcase, a bottle of wine and a clean shirt for the next day. This last item was an unofficial guarantee that we would have sex and sleep together afterward.
I thought of the four lamb chops sitting in my fridge. I had bought
them for Matthew. Now that I was seeing Phoebe, he would not come round to dinner and there would be no sex. And now that we were going to the opera I wouldn't get any sex tomorrow, either. After the opera, Matthew preferred to go home alone, because he always seemed to have meetings at the crack of dawn. I was a little hurt that he had not thought of this while congratulating himself over the tickets. When would we have sex again? Never, at this rate.
“He's got tickets for
The Flying Dutchman
tomorrow,” I told Betsy, testing the sound of it.
“Hmmm. That's nice.” Betsy guessed how I felt, but was too kind to challenge me.
“It's had stunning reviews—Annabel's been, and she said it was mind-blowing.”
“Wonderful,” Betsy said, exuding benevolent skepticism.
I was talking myself into the right frame of mind. “I'm so lucky to have a man who actually likes going out and seeing something worthwhile. I can't stand too many evenings in.”
“All the same,” Betsy said, “it wouldn't do young Matthew any harm to slow down a bit. Is this his idea of fun, or is he trying to prove something?”
“Some people actually enjoy opera, Betsy, strange as it may seem.”
“But how do you know he's enjoying himself? I mean, a night at the opera isn't exactly letting your hair down.”
“He says it relaxes him,” I said.
“Funny notion of relaxation. He'll never unwind properly until he stops thinking about work all the time.”
It was never any use trying to make Betsy understand the inner workings of the ambitious male. “He can't stop thinking about work till he's a partner.”
Betsy drained the last of her soup and began a new row of knitting. “Has he said any more about getting engaged?”
No. He had not. I was not going to admit this to Betsy, when I could hardly admit it to myself. “We talk about it from time to time,” I said. “The time's not right at the moment. We both have too much to do first.”
She looked at me solemnly over her glasses. “You know, by the time I was your age, I'd been married for six years and I had three children.”
“Yes, I know. But a little thing called feminism came along, just in time to save women like me from the same ghastly fate.”
“Cassie, one of the few advantages of being an old bag is that you know what's really important. I don't like to see you throwing so much of your energy into your career. What's the point of being the most successful person in the world if you don't have a life outside the office?”
She didn't expect an answer to this question, but it hung in the air like the aftertaste of cheese. The embarrassing fact was that I longed, longed, longed to marry Matthew. Somewhere inside this single-minded career woman there apparently lurked a frilly creature with no ambition beyond being loved. When my work became too stressful, I often escaped into a furtive little fantasy about jacking it all in, moving to a leafy suburb and raising a family.
 
I didn't feel I'd ever had a real family of my own. My childhood had left me with a permanent ache of outrage. On paper, I was fortunate. My parents were both psychiatrists (my father wrote fashionable books, my mother had a reputation for treating the criminally insane) and we lived in a handsome Georgian house in Hampstead.
But it was a house without warmth. My parents—mainly my father, I think—liked white walls and blond wood, and modernist sculptures that bristled with barbed wire. Nothing in the place acknowledged the existence of a child. My tasteful educational toys were confined to my bare and drafty playroom. My parents worked all hours: my father in a rented office and my mother in her locked wards. The business of bringing me up was left to a series of foreign au pairs.
My parents were chilly people. I have no memory of caresses or playfulness. I was trained to keep quiet and not bump into the expensive, scary furniture. My father is a dry, unexpressive, critical man. My mother was, at that time, silent and impossibly distant. I grew up under the distinct impression that my father was in charge, and my mother was his resentful prisoner. Her baffling relationship with him surrounded her like a fog, leaving little room for me. They divorced when I was in my teens, and I felt nothing except a mild relief. I was glad to leave our petrified house, and move to a less pretentious but more comfortable flat near the railway in Gospel Oak. Without my father, I could draw a proper breath.
I found I could live quite easily with my mother's gloom. You can ignore gloom.
Later, I came to a better understanding of the sadness that lay between my parents, without coming near to guessing what caused it. As I grew up, Phoebe urged me to keep in touch with my mother. Mainly to please Phoebe, I called her about once a week. It was hard work. Ruth, my mother, had absolutely no gift for light conversation. We were distantly courteous, and I couldn't help thinking of Winnie-the-Pooh trying to cheer up Eeyore.
I couldn't mention Winnie-the-Pooh to my father. He banned the book during my childhood, on the grounds that it was “elitist and anthropomorphic.” Yes, he was a barrel of laughs. We met then as we do now. He takes me out to lunch at Simpson's in the Strand, twice a year, Christmas and birthday. He used to express a tepid interest in my career. I used to enjoy listing my various academic and professional triumphs, until I realized he was only showing the interest he would have shown to one of his patients. I'd spent my whole life trying to impress him, but it was a waste of time. I don't think he ever wanted children. What freakish spasm of heat warmed me into being? I have no memory of a single sexual frisson between him and my mother.
All the warmth and love in my childhood (and my access to the unsuitable works of A. A. Milne, E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis) came from the house next door. My parents were insular and never fraternized with the neighbors, but as soon as I was aware of a longing for anything, I longed for the next-door garden like the banished Peri at the gates of Paradise.
The home of the Darling family vibrated with noise and heaved with chaos. I used to sit in our bay window in the mornings, hungrily watching the drama of Jimmy Darling leaving for work. Jimmy was a handsome, rosy, boisterous man, with a loud and tuneful voice (we often heard him singing through the wall) and a jubilant laugh. He was a venereologist at the Royal Free Hospital. He would come bursting out of his front door scattering papers, shouting over his shoulder to his wife and their two little sons. Sometimes he would swear because he had forgotten something, and dash back inside. Sometimes he would run back to give his wife and the boys one more bear hug. Although he was very busy, and although my parents had only spoken to him to complain about a tree
house he had built, Jimmy never forgot to wave to the solitary little girl in the window. He was the kindest man I have ever known.
And I adored his wife, who used to give me the sweetest smiles and hellos when we met in the street. What can I say about Phoebe Darling? The greatest writers have a hard time describing real goodness, so I have to fall back on lukewarm clichés—“sweet,” “warm”—which can never convey the pure essence of Phoebe. I can't write about the scent of a rose.
In those days, she must have been at the height of her special brand of loveliness. She was slight and dark and softly spoken, and her brown velvet eyes brimmed with watchful humor. I was interested to see how often Jimmy kissed her lips and swept her into his arms. Both parents practically worshipped their two dark-eyed sons. The fortunate Darling boys were hugged and squeezed and kissed and thrown into the air. Slight as she was, Phoebe carried Ben on her hip until he was at least four.
The day the barrier between the gardens came down is seared into my memory. I was four years old. A photograph of the time shows the little girl I was: tiny and defensive, with anxious brown eyes under a fringe of wispy brown curls. This is the child who pulled a kitchen chair into her paved back garden, one glorious summer afternoon.
I stood on the chair, gazing into the leafy well of the garden next door. That garden was my theater, and the show that day was particularly good. They had a paddling pool. Four-year-old Frederick and three-year-old Benedict were stark naked, splashing and fighting like a pair of noisy puppies. Both had Phoebe's beautiful dark eyes. Little Ben had ringlets, and behaved (his brother would claim later) in an offensively ringletty manner—he sucked his thumb and was given to weeping big, photogenic tears.
Frederick (equally pretty, but an unmistakable little devil) looked up at the top of the fence, and saw my earnest face through the clematis. He stared. I stared back, in a vacant way, as if watching television.
Then he startled me by asking, “What's your name?”
He had noticed me, as so few people did. I was not invisible. “Cassie,” I whispered.
“My name's Frederick. That's Ben. That's our mummy.”
Phoebe, coming out of the back door with a tray of orange squash, walked across the lawn toward me. She wore a striped Breton shirt, and
denim shorts that showed endless bare brown legs. Her long, glossy black plait lay over one shoulder.
“Her name's Cassie,” Frederick informed her.
“Hello, Cassie. I'm Phoebe.”
Feebee. I turned the funny name over in my mind, liking it.
Phoebe put her tray down on the grass. She poured orange squash from a glass jug into a plastic beaker. She handed this libation through the clematis like Hebe dispensing nectar. I was not allowed orange squash at my house, and I sipped it reverently, amazed by the violent golden sweetness that flooded my tongue.
“Thank you,” I whispered, daring to hand back the drained beaker.
“Would you like to play in our pool?”
Of course I wanted to, but I shook my head. I didn't have the language to explain that I wasn't strong enough to break through the screen into Paradise. I couldn't imagine what would happen to me if I did. I was beyond shy. Suddenly feeling exposed, I jumped off the chair and dragged it back to the house. I was partly sorry and partly glad that I had ended the conversation.
I was reckoning without Phoebe. A short time later she appeared at the front door, clutching a German phrasebook. Haltingly, she told Gudrun (the au pair of the moment and a nice girl, if dim) that I would be next door until six. She held out her hand to me. I slipped my sharp little paw into her soft, cool palm. We walked next door and I became part of the beautiful picture. Dazzled, I sank down on the tattered lawn—still watching, but from a better seat.
Phoebe gently persuaded me out of my dress and into the cool silver water. I felt the delight of it like an internal explosion, and Phoebe giggled at the look on my face. The two boys soon forgot I was a novelty, and threw open their game to include me. Frederick appeared to be loud and rough, and I was a little wary of him. But he was also kind, and he let me sit in the deep end of the pool where the lawn sloped. The game was that Benedict and I were daffodil bulbs and Frederick was growing us. He watered our heads with his red plastic watering can. We all thought this was hilarious.
Time sprouted wings. The sunlight danced on the leaves, beads of water dried on my warm skin. Phoebe sat cross-legged on the grass, watching
us. Every so often she darted into the kitchen and emerged with more squash, or slices of apple. The grand finale, as I still remember, was a chocolate biscuit of astounding deliciousness.
Jimmy came home. The boys flung their wet bodies at him, soaking his shirt. I wondered if he would be cross. He laughed and tickled Ben's tummy. He hurled Frederick back into the pool with a tremendous splash. He landed a hard kiss on Phoebe's mouth.

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