Nip 'N' Tuck (10 page)

‘Of course, she gets all her most brilliant ideas during sex,’ Sven preened, ‘because she’s plugged into a genius!’ Sven laughed uproariously at his own joke, then looked lasciviously at Marrakech, obviously hoping she’d also like a stroke of genius.

‘Oh, well, I’ll always be a dumb brunette, then, ’cause I’m celibate,’ Marrakech announced. ‘I mean, what’s the point in having a relationship, yeah, when statistically, in one out of every
three
couples, one partner is cheating?’

The air was suddenly polluted with guilt. An uneasy smog of silence settled on the table.

Feeling me tense up beside him, Cal gallantly attempted to rescue my party from the social minefield into which it had strayed. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of statistics are made up, you know … just like that one,’ he drawled.

Hugo gave a fake laugh. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about with affairs. I’m sure I’d be very understanding.’ He fired off a meaningful look in my direction. ‘If it ever happened to
me
, that is …’

‘Really?’ Victoria retorted loyally on my behalf. ‘I’d shoot my spouse in the head with a small handgun. Or maybe just the woman he was cheating on me
with
.’ She glowered at Britney.

Britney’s gaze remained impassive, her smile serene.

Sven’s yellow wolfish eyes glinted at me. ‘What would you do, Lizzie, if Hugo was unfaithful?’ He fired up a cigar.

‘I … I …’ I wanted to respond, but Hugo was pulling that passing-a-kidney-stone expression.

‘She’d divorce him,’ Victoria answered, looking daggers at her brother-in-law. ‘No. She’d kill him and
then
divorce him.’

‘Really, hon?’ Britney asked, amused, ostentatiously waving away Victoria’s cigarette smoke. ‘You’d divorce him?’

‘And why are
you
so concerned, Princess?’ Sven probed suspiciously.

Hugo and Britney were overtaken by a sudden simultaneous desire to count the pinenuts in their salads.

‘It’s all hypothetical anyway because Lizzie and I are faithful,’ Hugo assured the guests. Now it was my turn to be riveted by pinenuts. ‘Because I know the secret of how to keep a woman happy.’

‘And, by God, does he know how to keep a secret!’ Victoria let loose a husky guffaw.

By now I’d chewed my lip into paté. Oh, well, at least I finally had something interesting to serve up to the guests.

Cal’s breath was hot in my ear. ‘How can you just sit there and listen to this crap?’

‘I’m under sedation,’ I told him, braving a smile.

‘I am blessed with a very happy marriage,’ elaborated Hugo, arms spread expansively along the backs of the chairs on either side of him.

‘We’ll have a real happy marriage too,’ cooed the actress, seductively snuggling up to Sven. Victoria started bayoneting more food off my plate. Her fork prongs were literally flying back and forth in front of my face. ‘I’ll like nothin’ more than havin’ sex with the Hubby.’ Britney playfully pinched Sven’s cheek.

Victoria’s fork froze in mid-air. ‘The fact that it’s not, strictly speaking,
your
hubby is by the by, I suppose,’ she said, with all the subtlety of a Scud missile.

My husband looked at me with such intensity that I felt like a new strain of bacteria beneath a microscope. Now he knew that I’d told Victoria about the illicit nude kiss.

‘Meaning?’ demanded Sven, extinguishing his cigar in his wineglass with a hiss.

Hugo was so rigid he might have been mistaken for a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘That’s Victoria’s idea of a little joke.’ The waxwork spoke, nerves and anger jockeying for dominance in his voice. ‘But women can never remember the punchline of jokes.’

‘No,’ spat my sister, ‘because we marry them.’

Hugo was up on his feet in one swift movement and looming down upon her. My sister was up too, the wine in her glass already arcing towards Hugo, who dodged sideways, ensuring that most of the Chianti
classico
splattered down Milano’s designer suit. Sven manacled Britney’s upper arm, demanding to know what all this fuss was
really
about. Hugo was shaking Victoria vigorously by the shoulders.

While male disdain is the traditional response to sisters-in-law, throttling them is a whole other matter. ‘Hugo, stop it! Cal, stop him!’ Cal sprang at my husband. The piratical way he was dressed – torn T-shirt, threadbare denims and down-at-heel leather boots, made him look quite threatening – prompting ‘Knuckles’ and Sven to roll up their sleeves and lurch to standing positions, fists flying. It’d be so much easier if men just had antlers, really.

With so much smoke coming out of people’s ears it took me a while to notice that it was also coming out of the kitchen. Shit! The oil! For the chicken! I’d left it on the stove. Somehow I doubt that Martha Stewart uses her smoke alarm as a
timer
.
Today’s recipe – take one Domestic Goddess then skewer on sacrificial altar
. Where was some cleaning fluid to inhale, when I needed it?

As the smoke alarm wailed and Hugo accidentally ejaculated the fire-extinguisher foam over the guests, there was an abrupt scooting back of chairs and a mass exodus for the door. Our visitors were as flustered in their departure as they’d been calm and collected in their arrival. Bags, coats, car keys, mobile phones – there was a mad scramble for paraphernalia, then a dash for the door, led by the Rolexed Knuckles. I got the vague impression that London’s latest ‘Power Couple’ had just blown a fuse, big time.

First my husband’s infidelity, then getting the flick at work and now burning down my own kitchen to publicly launch a new taste sensation – Cordon Noir … I think it is fair to say that I had turned into one of the unluckiest girls in the world. Hell, if I fell into a bag of dicks,
I
’d come out sucking my
thumb
.

9

It
Is
As Bad as It Gets and They
Are
Out to Get You

‘
WHEN EXACTLY WERE
you planning on letting me know that you’d chosen to redirect your precious medical expertise into stuffing plastic whoopee cushions into women’s chests?’ I asked Hugo, as soon as he got back from driving Victoria home. (She was only being loyal: I’d
insisted
they make it up. After all, blood is thicker than Beaujolais.)

‘I wanted to meet the people involved first,’ he said, throwing off his jacket. ‘I was going to talk to you about it after that. How thoughtful of you to set aside this specific time to humiliate me in public, Elisabeth, before our sole investor.’

‘His nickname is Knuckles. What does that tell you? That he’s wearing a monitoring device around his ankle –
that
’s what. Hugo, cosmetic surgery is the most wasteful use of human potential outside of, well, outside of
modelling
.’

‘For God’s sake, Lizzie, I’m going to be a cosmetic surgeon, not a Nazi medical researcher! It’s an exciting field. Great strides are being made as the medical community becomes increasingly aware of the benefits of—’

‘Getting rich? Come off it, Hugo. You’re a brilliant doctor.’ I took his hand in mine. ‘You should be saving the lives of some indigent people somewhere remote and tsetse-flied. When we met you were principled. You were …’ My husband wavered in the heat of my scrutiny. For a moment I flashed back to how he was then, striding those hospital corridors like a conquistador, his mission to liberate people from their pain. I felt a pang of nostalgia for those pre-Montrachet days when we spent the rare nights he wasn’t on call with unpublished poets who leant towards philosophers of triple nomenclature and struggling musicians who just leant.
Now
I had to put up with his gynaecologist golfing buddies who boasted so wittily about ‘doing eighteen holes’ before lunch.

‘We don’t need more money. We’ve paid off the house. I mean. What’s the difference between a million pounds and twenty million pounds?’

‘Um … a Lear jet, an island, a couple of helipads. Look, I’m sick of the ugliness and poverty of the NHS. I’ve spent half my life working with patients who are suffering from some disease I can’t quite put my finger on – and would much rather not, come to think of it.’ He winced.

‘No. You’d rather go into business with a man who watches videos entitled
Shaved Frankenhookers
. God, he’s even engaged to one.’

‘This is all to do with Britney, isn’t it? Because it was her idea. I keep telling you, I am not remotely interested in her.’

‘Oh, that was an escaped python writhing in your trousers all night, then, was it?’

‘Lizzie, Sven’s offering me a chance to grow, professionally, intellectually …’

‘Hugo, this is
me
. Your wife. The only interest
you
have in “personal growth” is your morning erection.’

The door squeaked. Jamie, all bleary-eyed, stumbled in wearing his luminous Bart Simpson pyjamas. ‘Why are you and Daddy fighting?’

‘We’re not fighting, love,’ I comforted, scooping him up in my arms. ‘We’re just having a slightly raucous conflict resolution, that’s all,’ I said, for Hugo’s benefit.

A few seconds later, there was a muted thump of bare feet padding down the stairs. Julia appeared, her eyes wide with dismay. ‘You’re not going to divorce, are you? I’m the only kid in my class whose parents are still married.’

Hugo snatched up his BMW keys from the bowl on the hall table. ‘It’s up to your mother. If you don’t trust me, Lizzie, what’s the point?’

‘Where are you going?’ I felt panic gripping my throat.

‘Out.’

‘At one a.m.? Going out to Her,’ I said, impulsively.

‘With your usual impeccable judgement, you seem to think this is an appropriate conversation to be having in front of the children.’

Hugo strode down the hall. With the kids clinging to my knees as though they were drowning, I trailed after him. Why are men so like mascara – running at the first sign of tears? When I spoke, I felt as if I was dubbing a film. ‘Don’t go.’

But his high horse had galloped in, and he simply swung up into the saddle and rode off on it.

I sat there, amid the dinner party detritus, cradling my seven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter. Despair flooded into me like the sea into a scuttled vessel.

After a while, I settled the kids back into their beds. I sloshed the alcoholic leftovers into a glass and slugged it down in one gulp. With rain pecking at the windows, I sat weeping in the gloom. At two a.m., with still no sign of Hugo, I resorted to dunking the kids’ teddy-bear biscuits into a glass of whisky and chewing off their soggy ears. He couldn’t leave me. I’d go mad with grief, like Ophelia … God, I’d been one of the castaways from the wreckage of my own mother’s life, and now I was about to make emotional driftwood of my own dear babies. By three a.m. it was a case of ‘Can I Trade My Life For What’s Behind Door Two’? How I longed to cuddle up inside my
old
life, and go to sleep. At four o’clock I dragged myself fully clothed into bed. I rolled over and over for the next two hours, until the sheets were twisted tighter than a French plait. How had this happened to me? When? Where? What had I done wrong? Obviously, there
is
a God and he’d just found out that
I
was an atheist. My husband, who spent his life patching up bodies blasted by anti-personnel munitions, had placed a sexual incendiary device right in my path. Britney Amore had blown up my known world. I was maimed. And things would never be the same again.

When he still wasn’t back by dawn, I knew that Victoria was right. The reason men have that tiny hole in the end of their cocks is so that they can think with an open mind.

10

Husband Uncertainty Syndrome

AND SO IT
was that I found myself being tutored by Dr Love –
but on a Doctor Crippen fellowship
.

Hugo returned the next day without a word of explanation. For the rest of July and way into August it was a case of take heart, put in trash compactor, turn on. Was he seeing her? Or wasn’t he seeing her? I became obsessed. Life lost its humour. The six o’clock news was getting more laughs than I was. I was so absent-minded I drove to a job interview with my briefcase on the roof of my smashed-in people-mover; I’d searched for an hour for my sunglasses before finding them perched on the top of my befuddled head. I took to wearing those sunglasses even after dusk, to hide eyes that were as pink-rimmed and watery as a lab rabbit’s. I forgot my children’s names and then, when I remembered their names, I couldn’t remember why I’d summoned them.

I took to calling myself ‘the Patient’.
The Patient has a philandering doctor-husband, but no other abnormalities
.

I tried to keep myself busy. I catalogued my shoes in alphabetical order. I checked the crisper and threw away anything that moved without being touched. I picked my
Desert Island Discs
list. I looked up synonyms for ‘depression’. But despite not wanting to turn into a walking, talking wronged-wife cliché, I finally succumbed to the urge to nitpick Hugo’s bank statements and wore off a valuable fingerprint pressing redial. I told myself I was only interested in Hugo’s happiness – so interested that I went through his diary to see who was the reason for it. Soon I was spending all my waking hours wallet-snooping and underpant-sniffing. Not to mention the constant nagging – ‘You’re still seeing her, aren’t you? Well, go on, then! Contract the antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain of your choice and pass it on to your wife. Why not?’

He would return a few barbed comments about paranoia and pathetic behaviour. In the space of a few weeks, we’d turned into the sort of couple who indicate the happiness of their marital union by giving each other head injuries with the nearest household implement. I secretly envied the patients he touched so tenderly. I began to wish I could tread on a bloody landmine. But in effect I had: my mind was flying apart in all directions.

By September our marriage took on the weighty, soft-boned weariness of anaesthetic. My husband’s feelings for me seemed to fade in and out like a wartime broadcast. And I sat huddled, twiddling dials, desperately trying to pick up a signal: ‘Receiving, over and out.’