Her (17 page)

When he comes down an hour later, fresh-shaven, I’m whipping mascarpone into the eggs while singing to Cecily, who is propped up in the highchair, chewing on a wooden spoon. It’s sometimes easier to sing to her than to think of things to say.

‘Looks good,’ Ben says, coming up behind me and putting his arms around my shoulders. I flinch a little at it –
someone else pawing at me, wanting something –
but I make myself smile, and then I ask him to fetch down the big glass dish for the tiramisu. I won’t say anything about the mess he left for me, I won’t. I’m better than that. And anyway, I don’t have the energy for a row. Sometimes it’s less trouble just to let things go.

During that Saturday there are many moments when I wish I’d never done this, never had the idea and set it in motion. But at a quarter to eight – once the children are safely in bed and I’ve found a clean top – I go around the house putting tea lights into glass holders, and I feel a queer burst of hope: the house doesn’t look so bad, the food should be fine, we’ve got plenty of booze. Perhaps people will enjoy themselves.

I stand in the doorway, and the sitting room looks fairly attractive and orderly: the little lamps casting cosy pools of amber light over the polished table and the smooth pelt of the vacuumed carpet, the vases of ranunculus and white roses set out beside the dishes of nuts and olives. Does it look as if we’ve made an effort? Does it look as if we’re trying too hard? I take a match from the box and strike it, and the little flame bobs and dips as I put it to the wicks, creeping up the match, shrivelling and blackening it. ‘Harvest Moon’ shuffles into ‘The Goodbye Look’.

As I blow out the flame, I sense movement behind me. A small pale face pressed between the banisters. ‘Bed,’ I say, in a cool and steady voice, turning away, moving the flowers an inch to the left. When I glance back a moment later, he has gone.

In the kitchen, Ben is stationed in front of the fridge, gazing uncertainly into its recesses; I can tell he has forgotten what he was looking for. He shuts the fridge door and together we inspect the table, extended to fill the bay, laid with the jaunty pink-striped tablecloth, and crowded round with an assortment of mismatching chairs and stools culled from bedrooms and bathroom. I adjust the jam jars with posies in them, wondering whether they look stupid. ‘What do you think?’ I ask, hoping he’ll reassure me, but he just says it’s fine, leave it. Before I can stop him, he’s pouring the dressing on the salad and picking up the servers, starting to toss the leaves around in the bowl. ‘Just getting ahead of ourselves,’ he says, giving me a wink.

By the time we sit down to eat, the salad will be darkly sodden, limp. Too late now.

‘You look nice,’ he says, and I remember I’ve forgotten to put on any makeup. I’m upstairs with my little pots and brushes, trying to find a mascara that hasn’t completely dried out, when Fran and Luke arrive, knocking (the parents’ courtesy) rather than ringing the bell. Patience and Rob are just behind them on the step.

We stand in the hall, exchanging jackets and bottles and bunches of flowers, and then everyone’s pressing through to the sitting room, marvelling at how pretty it’s looking, introducing themselves, while Ben picks up one of the bottles.

I’m in the kitchen dealing with Fran’s freesias when the Bremners arrive. Of course, I haven’t met Charles before. He’s much older than I was expecting, late fifties, or even early sixties: tall, patrician-looking, in a dark blue shirt and large black-framed spectacles, receding hair swept back in two wings at his temple. I think of him taking a seat on the ugly sofa, making conversation with Rob, who is in marketing strategy, and my courage fails me a little.

‘Go through!’ I say, ushering them into the sitting room, conscious that I am glad to have an excuse to abandon them there, and not only because Fran’s freesias have left a wet patch on my top. Ben, who doesn’t know either of them, is so busy gassing away – something about
Breaking Bad
– that he hasn’t got around to opening the bottle yet. ‘Ben!’ I say, sharply, hating the sound I’m making. ‘Do you need some help with that? Nina and Charles, this is Ben . . .’

I hear the cork pop as I stir the cream into the soup.

Over supper, I remember why I haven’t seen Patience much recently. She is missing in action, subsumed by the quicksand of motherhood. As the evening goes on, I have an image of her, stuck in it up to her chin, like a character in a Beckett play. Only her mouth is mobile. ‘Oh, they’re vermin,’ she says. ‘There’s a woman on our street who puts food out for them last thing at night. I’d report her, only I’m not sure who to call.’ She keeps seeing the same fox hanging out by the bins. She thinks it must have mange or something, it’s covered in bald patches. She turns to me. ‘I hope you’re not leaving your back door open? You know they’ve been known to take babies?’

She refers to Audrey and Alfred as if they’re famous wits and sages, the key players in her social landscape. Often they are produced as trump cards, hijacking conversations, taking us off in unexpected directions, towards the things she really feels impassioned about: Ofsted reports, a column in the
Guardian
’s family section, the celebrated rudeness of the local butcher. ‘Audrey was only just telling me,’ she’ll say, laughing hilariously at the memory, or, ‘Last week I said to Alfred . . .’

‘Alfred?’ Fran asks, at the second mention.

‘Oh, our seven-year-old,’ Patience explains, pinking slightly. Does she assume everyone knows? Or perhaps she wishes she hadn’t been called on this particular point.

As we clear the soup and bring out the beef, I can hear Charles is making quite an effort with her, asking questions, listening to the answers, and finally being asked one himself. ‘No, Nina and I don’t have children together, but we both have daughters from our first marriages,’ he says. ‘My Jessica is in her thirties, but Sophie, Nina’s daughter, lives with us. She’s seventeen.’

‘Ah, the babysitter,’ says Fran, half-remembering the story.

Patience helps herself to salad, which is every bit as limp as I’d known it would be. ‘Goodness, a teenager,’ she says, with an ornithologist’s curiosity about a rarely seen species. ‘What’s that like? Hard work?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Charles says easily. ‘OK, there’s the usual stuff. Picking her up from parties at 2 a.m. The lost phones. The falling in and out with friends . . .’

‘Teenage girls, they’re worse than the Borgias,’ says Nina, shrugging.

‘And I must confess,’ says Charles, ‘that I make a very bad driving instructor. I think she must have mounted every kerb in north London.’

‘Charles has always been very good with Sophie,’ says Nina, lifting her glass, not putting it to her lips. The candlelight winks though the wine. She’s wearing the black necklace, a large green cocktail ring, one of her narrow dark dresses, a little cardigan slung over her shoulders. If I wore that, I’d look hopelessly dowdy. Part of it must be expensive tailoring, of course, but that’s not the whole story.

‘Well, there’s one key rule,’ Charles says. ‘I learned it from Jess.
It’ll all be fine, as long as you don’t ask too many questions
. Isn’t that so, darling?’

Nina smiles. ‘She’s a good girl,’ she says. ‘As seventeen-year-old girls go. She could be a lot worse.’

Having ascertained where Sophie is at school, Patience (concerned eyes) says she heard from a neighbour that some sixth-formers were recently expelled for drugs.

‘That’s true,’ says Nina. ‘The school came down on it like a tonne of bricks. And somehow, they always find out. Zero tolerance, I’m glad to say.’

A moment of silence. I glance around the table. We are all thinking about this: thinking, of course, of our own children, tucked up in darkened rooms decorated with spaceships and fairy castles, faithful constellations of glow-stars fading on the ceiling; sleepers watched over by tender vigilant squadrons of bears and monkeys. We are contemplating the effort involved in keeping these children safe and healthy and happy. Sensing how little we understand what’s coming next; sensing, if only in the vaguest, most theoretical of ways, our approaching powerlessness.

Patience will not linger here, of course. She embarks on another monologue about Audrey’s secondary transfer, the choices they have made for her. Listening to Patience, I remember how her febrile nervous energy – her bloody-mindedness, her tenacity, her twitchy inability to let things go – was once usefully deployed in making hard-hitting current-affairs documentaries. Is this where it has all gone? On securing the services of the famous Mr Cowper, a gnome-like maths tutor who ‘only takes the brightest’ and charges £55 per hour? On driving Audrey to cello practice, to swim team and street dance? How can Audrey survive a mother like this, a mother with so much to prove?

I met Audrey once, as she and Patience came out of the stationers. A flat-faced child in orange earmuffs, who surreptitiously picked her nose while I joggled the buggy and discussed the weather with her mother. I didn’t warm to her then, but now I feel a wave of sympathy.
You’ll take it with you forever
, I think.
Your mother needs you to be exceptional. She has staked everything on your exceptionality.
But perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps Patience will settle, when it comes down to it, for less than this.

I wonder if Nina is judging me, holding Patience against me, slyly identifying our shared characteristics. I imagine she is. The thought fills me with gloom. I finish my wine and Charles refills my glass. ‘The beef’s delicious,’ he says, so I say it’s all Ben’s work, I can’t take the credit. He asks me how long we’ve lived here, and we talk a little about the strange way I came to know his wife. How she has saved me on several occasions: returning the wallet; finding Christopher on the street (an episode I’m now able to discuss quite calmly); the babysitting, of course. He hadn’t heard about the wallet.

He’s genial, attentive, pleasant company, but I’m aware of the chasm between us: I’m probably closer to his daughter’s age than to his. As, I imagine, is Nina. Nina and I must be in the same demographic, though in important ways she seems so much older: more sophisticated, more polished. The way she moves through a room in her dark clothes, somehow catching the light without seeming to court attention.

I hear Rob telling her about the marketing strategy he’s working on for a digital radio station. Suddenly I feel rash, not really caring very much, and I ask Charles how long he and Nina have been together.

Nearly ten years, he says. ‘I did some work for her father, his house in the south of France. She was recently divorced, as I was . . . It wasn’t a happy time for either of us. But then things started to look up.’ Nina’s father isn’t French, he explains, but he’s married to a Frenchwoman. This is just a holiday place by the sea. Although, he implies, it’s hardly basic.

I’m conscious of Nina suddenly turning away from Rob, easing herself into our conversation. ‘Oh, the house,’ she says. ‘It’s one of the best things Charles has done.’ She describes it: the position on the coast, the light. The scent of pine and lavender.

Fran says, ‘Butlin’s Minehead again for us this year,’ and we all laugh, partly at the Bremners and our own resentment, and then the conversation moves on, to Crossrail and the redevelopment of King’s Cross, and on again, to the crazy facial hair – the biblical or Romanov beards – that all the Soho kids are cultivating, and at some point Nina catches my gaze and mouths, ‘Back in a sec,’ and slips away from the table. When she comes back a few moments later, she pauses by my chair, drops a hand on my shoulder, and says in a low voice, ‘Cecily’s crying . . . I didn’t know what to do . . .’

But before I rise, I run my spoon over my plate, greedily and hurriedly scraping up the last smears of sweet cream, conscious that the party’s over.

I can hear her bellowing when I step out of the kitchen. When I push open her door, she’s sitting up in her cot, fists clamped to the bars, her face wet with tears. Somehow she has wriggled out of her sleeping bag. Her feet are icy cold. I zip her in and pick her up and lay her over my shoulder as she quietens, patting her small firm back, murmuring reassurances, and gradually I feel the fury draining away as she softens and relaxes against me, the little hiccups fading, her breathing slowing down. I let her have a sip of water from the beaker on the mantelpiece, and then we stay still for another few moments. But when I try to lower her back in to the cot, she stiffens again, and I feel her inhale, preparing another wail, so I give in and sit down on the chair, letting her curl against me.
Sod’s law
, I think, pushing back the curtain, looking out over the back gardens, incidentally lit by kitchens and landings: the spectral washing hung on the Callaghans’ line, the movement of a cat on a wall. The sky is the colour of a bruise.

There’s a burst of conversation from downstairs as someone comes out of the kitchen, and then the noise shuts off again.

Footsteps on the stairs; Fran pops her head around the door. ‘Oh, Cecily,’ she whispers. ‘Give your mother a break.’

‘That’ll teach me,’ I say. ‘I thought we had the nights sorted. She hasn’t done this for weeks. I’ll have to sit with her until she goes back to sleep.’

‘We were too noisy,’ Fran says. ‘Maybe she could hear how much fun we were having.’

Fran’s awfully sorry, but she and Luke won’t stay for coffee, they promised the sitter they wouldn’t be back too late. ‘It’s been a lovely evening,’ she says. ‘Such a treat!’ But I have a feeling that she and Luke will have a few laughs on the way home: about Patience, of course, but also probably Charles, so much older than the rest of us, and a little ponderous; and his wife, the noncommittal Nina, intimidating in the way that only chic slight women can be, perched on the pine stool in her neat dark dress and her thick teal-coloured tights, her crazy shoes, the shoes of an architect’s wife.
Where did Emma find that couple?
they might say to each other.
And why are they bothering with her?

I find I’m unable to answer that question. I have no idea. The party, now that I’ve stepped away from it, seems ludicrous, a doomed exercise: a ragbag of ill-assorted strangers with ironed linen on their knees, cranking through the usual topics of conversation. As embarrassing as my ambition.