It's Got to Be Perfect: the memoirs of a modern-day matchmaker (20 page)

As for the bar itself, the faces behind it had changed more frequently than the flowers displayed upon it, yet Steve and Marie remained as permanent as the blood-red carpet, soaking up the years with only a slight tread to mark their endurance. Despite endless rebuffs, it seemed Marie hadn’t quite given up hope that the initial bout of casual sex with Steve would someday lead to something more.

She wiggled down the staircase, holding hands with a little boy whose head was about the same height as the bottom of her miniskirt.

‘
Il est très mignon
,’ she said, with a convincing smile.

Behind her was Harriet. ‘
Il est très épuisant
,’ she said, her expression more befitting someone who had trekked across a desert and just stumbled upon the first watering hole. ‘Henry.
Attend!
’

The disjointed stagger with which Harriet descended the staircase was barely comparable to the elegant slink that I’d witnessed the first time we met. She sat down in front of me, her hair dishevelled and her eyes disorientated. Behind us, Marie swung Henry around in her arms with a contrived giggle and intermittent glances in Steve’s direction, as though she hoped it might provoke a desire for fatherhood. That was until Henry presented her with a snotty tissue from his pocket, at which point she dropped him to the ground as though he were brandishing a venomous spider.

It had been almost two years since I’d last seen Harriet at Henry’s christening. Essentially, nothing had changed. She still had the bone structure of a porcelain figurine, the wide eyes of a fawn, hair to rival an Arabian racehorse, and still, despite several biscuit smudges, the intrinsic chic of a French woman. But something was missing and it was more than the exhaustion that accompanies the voracious demands of a two year-old.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ she sighed, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘It’s just not how I imagined it would be.’

I poured her a coffee. She looked at it, picked it up and then put it back down. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for motherhood.’

I looked down to see Henry trying to post his snotty tissue into my bag and I wondered if any of us were.

‘I love Henry to bits but being with him all the time, it’s so … well, at first it was the lack of sleep, the endless rotation of feeding, burping, changing. I thought when that was over it would be okay. Then it was the food-throwing, the kamikaze toddling and adamant refusal to nap. Now, it’s the blatant disobedience.’ She turned around. ‘Henry, come back with that!’

He toddled off with a wad of papers from my bag.

She sighed. ‘Whenever I have a chance to do something, and, you know, have one minute to myself. Then I’m needed. For something. My time is not my own anymore. He takes all of it. I don’t have time for anything.’

‘Time for what?’

‘Time to do anything. Time to write an email, time to make a phone call, time to read a book, time to watch the news, time to eat, time to sleep, time to have a conversation.’

‘Mummy!’ Henry shouted.

She pulled the hair tightly away from her face. ‘Time to think. Time to breathe.’

‘Mummy! Ephenant!’

Henry ran towards us, waving a piece of paper. Steve was closing in on him, looking alarmed. I swung around, saw what it was and then snatched it from his grasp.

Henry’s face turned a deep purple, his eyes filled with rage. ‘Ephenant! Ephenant!’

Without breaking eye contact with me, Harriet reached into her bag and handed him a custard cream. Henry’s expression of inconsolable despair instantly morphed into one of sheer delight.

‘Is that an elephant?’ Harriet asked. ‘He loves elephants.’

‘Not really,’ I said, stuffing the penis sketch back into my bag. ‘More of an impressionist’s interpretation of one.’

She shrugged her shoulders and then lifted her coffee cup.

‘So do you have anyone to help you look after Henry?’

‘“Help? You need help? You have one child. My mother brought up six of us by herself. And she baked her own bread.” That’s what he says.’

‘Jeremy?’

She nodded. ‘He thinks I’m a useless mother.’

‘He said that?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Life’s too short to bake bread.’

‘That’s what I said,’ she swirled the coffee in her cup, ‘but whatever I do is never enough. I just feel like a massive failure.’

I looked at Henry who was now hanging upside down from the bar, seemingly finding the experience hilarious. ‘But he looks so happy.’

‘Yes when he’s not screaming the house down.’

‘Isn’t that normal though, the terrible twos?’

Finally, she took a sip of coffee but then pulled a face, as though the bitterness were overpowering. ‘I hid in the cupboard the other day.’

I frowned.

‘Jeremy found me there when he came home early. He was furious.’

‘He was home early?’

‘Yes, I know, that’s more of a shock than me hiding from my child. He left a board meeting to take Rusty to the vets. Again. That bloody dog is a liability.’

I tried not to laugh.

‘In the space of six months he’s eaten four pairs of Henry’s shoes, one pair of Wellington boots, a plastic bunch of grapes, and a rubber giraffe called Sophie.’

‘But he’s okay, though?’

She nodded. ‘He’s just fine. Everyone’s just fine.’

‘And you?’

‘Me, well, every day is the same. And with every day, I get further away from who I was, and closer towards who I am becoming. My fate, my destiny, which apparently involves baking bread.’

‘Or hiding in cupboards?’

She smiled.

‘And Jeremy?’

‘He’s never there. Unless Rusty needs him, of course. And even when he is home, his mind isn’t. It’s “the fund this”, “the fund that”.’

She looked at me, her eyes dull as though there were a mist clouding the lens and suffocating the light that once burned so brightly.

‘We haven’t had sex in eight months.’

I sat back, assuming she would quickly correct the units to weeks. She didn’t.

‘Oh.’ I said, gesturing for Steve to clear the coffee cups and bring over some wine.

‘I think he’s bored of me,’ she went on. ‘Well even if he isn’t, I’m bored of me.’ Henry clambered onto her lap, smearing more biscuit on her trousers. ‘And,’ she said, peeling him off, ‘I just don’t feel sexy anymore. The whole giving birth thing …’ She wrinkled her nose and nodded downwards ‘… it’s like blowing up a balloon, it never goes back to how it was.’

Steve hovered by the table holding two glasses of wine.

Harriet’s face flushed. ‘Sorry,’ she said looking up at him. ‘Not the sort of conversation you want to overhear.’

He smiled and placed the glasses on the table. ‘That’s nothing. At least she’s not asking you to draw it.’

I waved him away and turned back to Harriet. ‘Have you spoken to Jeremy about this?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s got enough to deal with. You know his fund lost millions, don’t you?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘It’s on the verge of going bankrupt.’

‘That’s terrible.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

Henry, now standing on her lap was tugging on her hair clip. ‘
A
rrête ça,’ she said ripping it from his sticky grasp.

‘I hate the fund. I hate his job.’ She gulped down her wine and then stared into the glass. ‘I lost my family when I married him. And now it feels like I’ve lost him too.’

‘Henry’s your family now.’

‘And he needs his daddy.’

Henry’s face lit up. ‘Daddy!’ he shouted. ‘Daddy!’

‘No darling. We’ll be seeing Daddy later. Not now.’

His face crumpled. Harriet handed him another biscuit and then looked up at me.

‘What should I do?’ she asked.

I scrunched up my mouth and considered what to say. ‘You have to talk to him.’

‘When? Henry never sleeps. He’s like a little Margaret Thatcher, fully functioning on five hours. And even when he does sleep, Jeremy’s working.’

‘I’ll look after the little chap for an evening if that would help?’

Henry scowled, but the light in Harriet’s eyes temporarily re-ignited.

‘Would you? Really? It’s just Jeremy doesn’t trust babysitters and we don’t have any family here. And I know he’d trust you. Wouldn’t you like that Henry? Stay with the lovely lady?’

He poked his tongue out.

‘I’ll drop him over on Friday,’ she said.

After I’d led Harriet and, following a misunderstanding regarding ownership of the elephant sketch, a now wailing Henry to the door, she turned to me. It was as if she were trying to think of a way to stall, a way to stay longer.

‘What are your plans for the rest of the day?’

I laughed, but it came out as more of a snort. ‘My car’s been impounded, so I have to collect it from a place called Perivale.’

‘Impounded?’

‘Driving without insurance.’

She stepped back. ‘You?’

I nodded. ‘Technically, though, it was Nick’s fault.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Nick, oh my God, how rude of me. I didn’t ask how things were going with you two. Any news?’

I laughed. ‘It takes him six-months’ of research to buy a TV, so I’m not holding my breath for a proposal anytime soon.’

‘It’s best not to rush into things,’ she said, scooping up Henry in her arms. ‘I wish Jeremy and I had waited and, well, you know, got to know each other a bit better first.’

The door to the club swung closed behind them. As I pulled on my coat and prepared to follow her out into the lukewarm drizzle, I wondered if the pendulum of love, initially swinging from high to low, was always destined to settle somewhere in the middle.

‘Perivale? I don’t know, check Google maps. I really don’t have time to talk. I’ve got an important meeting.’ Nick’s irritation seemed to amplify down the phone line.

‘Where, at the gym?’ I replied, marching along the pavement.

‘No, with the CEO from New York, actually.’

‘Oh, you’re going to Gaucho with Frank then?’

He huffed down the line.

‘Anyway, I can’t Google it because I can’t access the internet since you interfered with my phone.’

‘Interfered? I’m not a sex offender. I was trying to help.’

‘Well, now it doesn’t work.’

‘So, sort it out yourself.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is that you said you would do it.’

‘Since when did your phone become my responsibility?’

‘Since you started fiddling with it.’

‘Look, I have to go.’

‘Yeah, me too. I have to trek across London to collect our car from the pound because you forgot to get it insured.’

‘Me? I forgot?’

‘Yes. You.’

‘It’s your car too. You’re the one who drives it.’

‘But you promised you would get it insured.’

‘I offered. There’s a difference between offering and promising.’

‘So you don’t mean what you say?’

‘No, that’s not what I said.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you say if you don’t mean it.’

‘Look, I really have to go.’

‘Yeah, whatever. Enjoy your steak.’

Two hours later, the train pulled into a station called Perivale. Still unsure as to whether this was a real place or just an elaborate set directed by Nick from the comfort of his steakhouse to prove a point about how irresponsible I was, I climbed onto the platform and looked around
.
Google maps, now resurrected thanks to a lengthy phone call to the network helpdesk, inked out the thirty-minute slog through semi-detached suburbia. Instructed by a random app that Nick had installed, a pop-up immediately informed me the concrete cul-de-sacs I was walking past were once a vast expanse of fields that used to grow hay for the working horses of Victorian London. It was, I mused, ironic that the fields had harvested the fuel that would lead to their own burial under a blanket of tarmac.

‘The queue ends here love,’ a man with a tattoo on his forehead informed me.

Stood behind twenty others lined up outside a depressing port-a-cabin, I impatiently tapped my foot as I timed each “customer”: one in and, twenty-five minutes later, one out. I huffed and puffed like a sulky teenager and then looked around in disbelief when it started to rain.

Huddled against the railings, I shielded my phone from the drizzle and read my emails, hoping, like Harriet, for a way to escape the greyness of reality.

One immediately caught my attention, and not only because at first glance it appeared to be from a late suffragette. Emily Pankhurst was so sorry to be bothering me and was hoping that I might remember her. Well her mum, Susan, that was, who drinks Lady Grey tea. I met her a little while ago Emily’s email prompted me.
Yes, Emily
, I thought,
that was four years ago and, if I remember correctly, our first and last conversation ended with you instructing me to shoot you if you ever got that desperate
.

Another email, from my virtual office, informed me that I’d received a fax. As it was such an unusual occurrence, it seemed they weren’t entirely sure how to deal with it. Following several frustrating phone conversations, a scanned four-page legal document eventually appeared in my inbox. It appeared Sharon, the canapé quibbler from the Masquerade Ball, who had recently signed up, had now instructed solicitors.

‘We’re being sued? For what?’ Mia asked after I had read it and called her in a panic.

‘From what I can gather, for failing to find her a husband.’

She laughed. ‘Can’t we just refund her?’

‘I did, but now she’s seeking damages.’

‘Damages for what?’

‘Time wasted using our service, diminished fertility, something from a specialist about anal follicle count.’

‘I think you mean antral.’

‘She’s saying it’s our fault she may never have children.’

‘She’s insane.’

‘She’s got a good lawyer though.’

Mia let out a long deep sigh, which conjured an image in my mind of a dragon breathing fire. Then it morphed into Mia wearing a white coat and using a blowtorch to perform some kind of makeshift sterilisation.

It was after 9pm when I finally arrived home, damp from the rain. My muscles ached and my stomach rumbled as though it were contemplating eating its very own parietal cells. I almost wished I were still Henry’s age so I could have a tantrum until someone made it all better. Or at least gave me a custard cream and a cuddle.