Separate Lives (13 page)

And I don't know if this was just my perception or if it was actually true, but there seemed to be very few other mothers at the kids' new school who worked. I'd drop off Lula and Chuck at 8:30 and watch the mums gathered in their chatty cliques in the car park while I wheel-spun out on to the main road in order to catch the 8:53 up to the Smoke. Occasionally I'd find myself making small talk with one of them in the corridors while trying to work out which child belonged to which parent, and which of those were the children's friends. And it turned out that quite a few of these women
did
work—sort of. There were a lot of those part time, recession-friendly mumtrepreneurs, doing interior design for their mates or cupcake-baking . . . not the kind of jobs I considered to be “proper” careers.

One day I fell into conversation with another mother while we were both attempting to locate our youngest children's PE kits. Her son, Liam, was also in Year One; I'd heard Chuck mention his name. It was she who suggested the boys had a playdate.

“That would be lovely,” I said, genuinely. “Obviously we haven't been here long and it would be really great for the kids to start making a few friends they can see after school occasionally.” And I gave her my mobile number. “Please call me. I'd take your number now too if I wasn't racing to catch a train. Sorry!”

“Ah, another busy working mum, then,” she said with an empathetic grin.

The following week, I picked up Chuck from his first playdate with Liam. Over the obligatory cuppa in the immaculate kitchen of a big modern house on a small estate near the park, I asked Liam's mum about her work.

“Oh, well, I'm really excited because it's starting to take off a bit,” she told me enthusiastically. “What I do, you see, is paint people's names—or just their initials—on to attractive stones I've found on the beach. I'm really pleased, actually, because one of the nicest gift shops in the Old Town have said they'll take a whole alphabet's-worth. And of course it costs me practically nothing to make them but they'll retail at £5.99, so that's £155 right there. And now I'm thinking of selling them on the internet.”

And of course I made very enthusiastic noises, while thinking to myself:
Fuck, it's like feminism never happened
.
That's not a job, that's a bloody hobby
.

So, forgive me my post-feminist workaholic sins but, y'know, I've always been a grafter, not to mention a bit old-school and Protestant-ethic about what constitutes work. And this obviously extended to Alex because, as far as I was concerned, sitting in front of a computer is really only work if you're getting paid for the end result, while sitting in front of the computer and having a quick look at Net-a-Porter/updating your Facebook status/emailing a mate is very obviously recreation. And while I was sure Alex was doing the digital-photography equivalent of hunting for the Higgs boson, I also didn't think it was remotely possible he could be doing it nonstop all day and quite a lot of the evening, five—sometimes even six—days a week. I got pretty tired of knocking on his door while bearing tea and being forced to talk to the back of his head.

“Hi. How's things? What are you up to?”

“‘Up to?' I'm working. What do you think I'm doing? Surfing porn?”

I had no idea; that's why I'd asked. And it was depressing to always be met by a talking back who answered a question with a question.

And then there was the time in early February when I came upstairs to the little attic room he'd co-opted as his office (mine was downstairs in the wonky “conservatory/dining room,” overlooking the gone-wonkily-to-seed “garden”) and I forgot to knock and just walked in with tea and something sweet made by Tunnock's and saw him speedily clicking the corner of a webpage, and as it whizzed into his toolbar he turned and with a face like, well, February, really—though a little bit more pink around the ears—said: “For fuck's sake, Soos. Knock, would you.”

And it was obviously a guilty face, but guilty of what? This was the point when the name
Pippa
started to haunt me a little bit and I lapsed into my old pattern. Previously it had been his phone; now it was his computer. Investigating the Mac was altogether trickier, though, because Alex had a password when his screen was asleep. Two days later, however, history had a chance to repeat itself and I had an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity when Alex came off the computer and rushed out, late for the school run he'd assured me he wanted to do and without having shut down the Mac.

I stood in his office doorway for a moment, torn by the prospect of trespassing, eaten by pre-guilt and the very likely prospect that if I did find something, I wouldn't necessarily like what I'd found.

I hovered over Entourage but then clicked on Safari, and then again on History. The first thing on the list was a website selling camera equipment, the second a Google search about lenses, the third . . . Facebook.

This didn't look great. As far as I knew Alex didn't even have a Facebook account. He'd always said he despised it (“I don't have enough time for my real friends, never mind people I was at school with. What's the point?”), so I went a bit hot-and-cold and was all set to click on it when I stopped, realizing that if I did so it would appear in his history. So, very slowly, while having an intense interior dialogue along the lines of “yes,” “no,” “yes,” “no,” “yes!” . . . I went back downstairs to my laptop and my own Facebook account, where I searched for “Alex Fox.”

And inevitably there were quite a lot of Alex Foxes. At first glance none of the headshot-type pictures were obviously Alex, though there were also lots using abstract kind of photos or who hadn't bothered to upload anything yet, so short of befriending them all I had no way of knowing if any of them were him.

This wasn't good news at all. If I'd found HotChixxx.com, for fuxxx sake, I'd've been ever so slightly less mortified, because I'm not a prude even if degrees of mortification are pretty much imperceptible. Our sex life was, after a couple of months of going at it like small mammals, very much in another quiet book-at-bedtime phase, and I know that men—most men, anyway—have an entirely different outlook on sex than we—most women, that is—do. I get that they can successfully separate their here-and-now relationships from the recreational pleasure of cruising HotChixxx.com. That it is in effect their Net-A-Porter. I
understand all of this intellectually, of course. Emotionally not so much.

But still,
Facebook
? These days I used it pretty infrequently (I'd befriended Heinous, for example), and in fact I was just starting to enjoy Twitter. Still, I also knew Facebook was a sneaky spouses' first port of call for extramarital shenanigans. Hadn't I recently read somewhere that it was cited in one in five divorces?

But just then Alex arrived home with the kids, so I shut down the Airbook and slipped effortlessly (oh, who am I kidding? effortfully) into mum-mode.

Charlie was sporting the head teacher's Good Work sticker on his blazer and had had his name read out in assembly, while Lula had earned ten points for her House by scoring a hat-trick during a hockey match. As a pupil at a London state primary she'd obviously never played hockey before we'd moved to Random—and entirely guilty of imposing my own baggage on my children, when she did I'd assumed she'd hate it with a deep and powerful loathing simply because I had spent several years loitering resentfully in goal with a copy of
Jackie
stuffed down my shin-pads. But it so happened that she absolutely loved it and, even more surprisingly, was good at it, too.

So I said: “Yay. Congratulations, Fox posse. Who fancies going out for pizza?”

And over the top of the deafening screams of assent, Alex winked at me and grinned and said: “Good idea, Boss.”

And I thought: Oh God. What am I doing prying the lid off the bloody can? This is good. This is what it's all about . . .

And of course sometimes this
was
what it was all about. But at other times—most of the time, if I'm really truthful—it wasn't.

Because the truth of the matter—proper capital-T “Truth” now—was that even if, when he wasn't online perving over state-of-the-art camera equipment, Alex was spending most of his “working” day befriending who-knew-who on Facebook, well . . . maybe that was just karma?

Or, rather, karma for me. Because I wasn't entirely un-guilty of creating the emotional climate in which that kind of thing might happen. And I don't just mean by leaving chippy little scribbled notes about phoning solicitors because I was too busy working, as opposed to “working.” And I don't even mean by being an unsupportive partner to a man who had recently been made redundant and was still, quite obviously, reeling. No, I don't mean that kind of stuff, I mean that on an almost daily basis I was still haunted by the fact that, well . . . OK . . . that Pippa had been right about her interpretation of the overheard phone conversation. That, yes, I had been arranging “an assignation.” And that this “assignation” had not been with Alex.

I
had
left Alex a message that Friday afternoon the previous June, but that wasn't what Pippa had overheard. I'd called Alex later, after I'd left the shop. And I hadn't left him a message attempting to book a spontaneous “date night” for that evening but, instead, a made-up excuse about why I would probably be late home. And the only reason I had been able to think on my feet fast enough to turn Pippa's overheard “conversation” into Alex's overheard “message”—and had got away with it—was because Alex had lost his
phone. Though that phone was not, in fact, quite as “lost” as it might be.

The reason I knew this is because on the day after I'd finally confronted him about “P,” the week after he'd lost his job, I'd gone in the afternoon to the hotel where the Germans were holding their think-tank—The Landmark—and I'd spoken to the concierge and asked if anybody had found an iPhone, lost during the Guthenberg & Partners Blue-Sky-Think-Tanking session a couple of weeks back? And the concierge asked me a few probing questions—who was I? for example. Which was fair enough. And then he said, “I'm very sorry, Mrs. Fox; it sounds like the same phone but we handed it over this morning to Mr. Fox's PA, so you might want to check with her, or your husband?”

“Um. So you gave it to a . . . her?”

“Oh yes, definitely. She said she was a temp and would return it to Mr. Fox later, so no problem. Crossed wires, I think.”

And I said something like, “Yes, a little bit crossed, but never mind. Thank you. I was just trying to be helpful to my, er, husband.”

“Of course. Have a lovely day, Mrs. Fox.”

So I left. And I was initially a bit confused because Alex's former PA was Gorgeous George, The Gay Geordie, and though deliciously camp, by no stretch of the imagination was George likely to be mistaken for a woman. So whoever she was, this woman was definitely not “Mr. Fox's PA”—or even a mysterious temp, because George had been away on holiday at Easter, but not since then. I couldn't be entirely certain who she was, though I had a hunch. And though
I didn't much like the hunch, over the next few days it provided me with an extraordinary sense of focus. And it was that focus, coupled with a compelling need to put this domestic hiccup behind us that resulted, albeit partly by accident—thanks to Heinous—in Operation Random-on-Sea. So here we were.

“Yay. Pizza. Bring it on.”

Dearest Mum,

After I sent that bloody text I won't bother pretending I didn't spend a few days regretting it. Of course I regretted it (particularly the :-) and the xxx's) but not necessarily for the reasons you may think. I didn't, for example, regret it because it was such an obvious come-on to a man who was as good as married—but because it wasn't as obvious a come-on as I think I really, deep down, intended it to be. It was actually slightly ambiguous. And sometimes men aren't good with ambiguous. Sometimes they just need to be told not only what you want, but what they want, too. Don't you agree?

“Start living a different kind of life?” Well, let's face it, that's the kind of advice you might easily offer a man who'd lost his job. A
carpe diem
, a bit of self-help-cum-therapy? What it didn't really say—at least when I woke up and read it the following morning, hungover—was “Come on, big boy, finish what you started in the back of that cab.” And that's
truthfully what I wanted to say, because even though I know men can be exceptionally lazy about the getting of sex—that if it's there on a plate they'll often just help themselves—it was precisely the fact that Alex had walked when he could have stayed which made it clear to me that far from it being merely an opportunistic drunken fumble in the back of a cab, it had messed with his head sufficiently to make him feel guilty. Which meant, by extension, that he cared. And not, weirdly enough, just about Susie, but very likely about me, too.

I became completely convinced of this over the next few days. I felt that Alex's silence, far from indicating a lack of interest, actually hinted at precisely the opposite. But I wasn't going to contact him—no way. Instead I would play the long game, because if Alex was about to start Living A Different Kind of Life, then I surprised myself by how much I wanted to find out what sort of life that could be.

Anyway, that weekend, the one after Alex had bolted, I felt the opposite of what you might expect—which would be embarrassed, flustered, guilty, that kind of thing—and instead felt an incredible sense of calm. This was pretty counter-intuitive: I'd just spent an evening with an insecure man who had confided in me and then stuck his tongue down my throat and his hands down my knickers with all the desperate abandon of a hormonal sixteen-year-old. A scenario from which any women's magazine advice column worth its salt would, quite obviously, advise me to “run, lady, run a million miles . . . and fast!” Instinctively, however, in the case of Alex, I felt this would be entirely wrong. I would effectively run to him; he just wouldn't know I was doing it.

The weekend was pretty normal. Hal had a few things to do—a rugby match on Saturday morning, which I planned to attend with a few homemade biscuits to keep up parental morale on the touchline, and in the afternoon he wanted to rifle through the Jack Wills rails in Selfridges with a couple of mates and his monthly allowance, which I was happy enough to let them do while I lost myself for a while in Womenswear. So, after a late lunch at Pizza Express, me and three large boy-men wandered down to a cinema in Leicester Square. While they were watching the third part of a shoot-'em-up trilogy of which I had cleverly avoided seeing parts 1&2, I slipped into the screen next door for one of those rom-coms in which Jennifer Aniston plays a weirdly winsome fortysomething who looks thirty-four and has a disastrous-art-imitates-love-life.

And then Sunday was . . . Sunday-ish. I made a roast because (as you well know, Mum) I have always been obsessed with family Sunday lunches, and nothing will change that, certainly nothing as straightforward as not having a family. And then afterward I dropped Hal round to Dom's in order, no doubt, that he might appreciate the farther reaches of YouTube without too much parental supervision, Dom being the youngest of four boys and therefore pretty much free-range. And Dom's mum, Patsy, said she'd drop Hal back, fed and watered, by 8 p.m., which meant I had four hours at home with the papers. And . . . whatever.

Between 4 and 8 p.m. I spent quite a bit of time staring at my phone. And with that came the feeling I always get when I'm waiting for an overground train at a busy station and a non-stopper roars past the platform and for a moment—a mere millisecond—I think I won't be able to
not
chuck myself in front of it. Which, incidentally, has nothing to do with
wanting to commit suicide and everything to do with . . . I dunno, seizing the madness of an adrenalized moment? In the case of the phone, it was of course text-related. I felt as though I may not be able to stop myself sending a text to Alex that I would actually end up seriously regretting. Something entirely unambiguous, like “Fuck Me Now! P.”

But of course I didn't. Partly because I knew that Alex was away for the weekend at his parents' house, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, surrounded by family and old friends, and I wasn't going to risk interrupting that. I didn't want to freak Alex out any more than I suspected he already was; I wanted to retreat while also moving forward. There's almost certainly some sort of military terminology for that kind of maneuver. Not that I know what it is, obviously, but Alex might.

Anyway, instead of doing the proverbial Something Silly, I decided to do Something Sensible. Even though this “Something Sensible” mostly just involved
not
doing Something Silly.

I didn't have that long to wait before I heard from Alex. Just over a week, in fact, because, the following Saturday, while I was rearranging my walk-in wardrobe with the slightly OCD efficiency you'd expect of a woman who anticipates a long, slow, child-free weekend (Hal was away with his dad and stepmother, being gently—or in reality probably brusquely and insensitively—introduced to the concept of a sibling, albeit one who was still only a scan), I received a text:

And I found myself doing that thing only women do, which is to read (and re-read and re-re-read) a couple of
handfuls of words searching for some deeper meaning. After about twenty minutes of this fairly pointless activity I drew the conclusion that there was no deeper meaning. The meaning was already as deep as it could be, which is to say all the information I could have required (at least for the moment) was right there in front of me.

Having almost ruled out the possibility that this text had been sent to the wrong person—the clue was in that “P”—just to be on the safe side I decided to rule it out a few more times. Although Alex probably knew several “P”s, eventually I had to assume this “P” was me. If only on the grounds that to not assume this would make me certifiable.

Wondered if you might be free this evening?
There was nothing terribly ambiguous about that. Though I suppose “evening” could be interpreted to mean “early” while if he'd said “tonight” it would have been even less unambiguous. So: “I am . . .” The most interesting bit of this sentence—apart from the statement of his availability, obviously—was the ellipsis. I actually Googled “ellipsis” and found the Wikipedia definition:

“A mark or series of marks that usually indicate an intentional omission of a word in the original text. An ellipsis can also be used to indicate a pause in speech, an unfinished thought, or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence (aposiopesis). When placed at the end of a sentence, the ellipsis can also inspire a feeling of melancholy longing . . .” (My ellipsis, not theirs.)

“A pause,” an “unfinished thought,” “a trailing off into silence” and “A FEELING OF MELANCHOLY LONGING” (my capitals, not theirs). So I finally replied. Or at least I started to reply because the response actually took me another five minutes to construct.

I started with:

But that seemed too exclamatory, too John Inman in
Are You Being Served
. So:

But that one seemed a bit too stand-offish, as though I was waiting for the best offer before I'd commit, which was foolish because you should start as you mean to go on in a relationship; this was my best offer and I wanted Alex to know that, though not in a needy way. So:

Which seemed to strike the right note (I'd rejected “nice” and “lovely” as, respectively, too banal and too needy) while the ellipsis introduced a similar note of “melancholy longing” to the original text. And then I agonized for another three minutes about adding an “x”:

Or:

Or:

Or even:

But in the end I rejected all the “x”s because an “x” was implicit.

So:

I hit Send. The reply came within a minute:

I was slightly thrown by this. I'd assumed we'd probably meet on neutral territory and take it from there. But on the upside, any ambiguity I might have been searching for had abruptly evaporated. So:

I looked at my watch. It was 4:28 p.m. I figured I'd better get my head—and my house—straight. Weirdly, I also wanted to cry. But there you are, unexpected emotions sometimes creep up on you.

The first thing I did was go straight back to finishing what I'd started in the wardrobe department, partly to be better organized and because the process of organizing helps clear my head and I hate things being half finished, and partly because it would give me some space to think about the evening that lay ahead. Instead, however, opening my
wardrobe doors was a bit like opening a portal to a shadowy, half-forgotten world. And that was even before I found—or rather, technically speaking, re-found (because I've carried it with me wherever I've lived for nearly thirty years now) the old brown shoebox labeled “Memory's” (sic). Which, in turn, took me straight back to Tuesday April 8, 1984, when I had been sixteen for a week and was getting ready to walk from our house in the northwest London 'burbs to the High Street for some “essential” purchases—magazines, magazines, magazines and if my stock of cherry-flavored lip-gloss was running dangerously low, possibly also a little light-fingered perusal of the Miss Selfridge Kiss 'n' makeup counter.

On that day—which I suddenly recalled as vividly as if it had been last week—I was wearing black liquid eyeliner and an asymmetric haircut (a coppery-tinted bobbed homage to the Vidal Sassoon oeuvre) accessorized by an equally asymmetrical attitude. Having rejected a black lacy mini-dress, secondhand black stilettos and your gorgeous white fox fur stole, Mum, as perhaps slightly too outré a look for an overcast weekday morning, I finally settled on a pair of black ski pants, black suede ankle boots with a white rubber Cuban heel (do you remember those? From—cue sharp intake of glamour-breath—Paris!), plus one of my favorite charity shop finds: that Chrissie Hynde-ish boxy jacket in butterscotch-colored suede which was so stylish it barely mattered that some of the seams were reinforced on the inside by double-sided Sellotape.

For any sixteen-year-old girl every morning is a fashion crisis in waiting, and it was no exception for me as I attempted to make a stylistic shift from early 1980s New Romantic toward something a bit more Edie Sedgwick. This wasn't simply a case of staring at hangers and working out
which items of clothing would work best together, there was the weighty nature versus nurture debate to be taken into account, for I was blessed with you, Mum—The Stylish Mother—which was only really a blessing until I suddenly become two inches taller, not to mention a shoe size bigger than you, having shared the same dress size for a clutch of months between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Then the blessing evolved into . . . if not a curse precisely, a gauntlet-chucking challenge. Which is why you can't take all the credit for creating a Frankens
teen's
little monster of a daughter who dreamed of appearing in
Vogue
, though preferably not while wearing Sellotape.

Anyway, I sat there on the floor of my “closet” staring at my “Memory's” from 1984 and recalled that even the apparently simple act of sauntering to the High Street to buy the new issues of
Honey
and
Cosmo
(
Honey
was cooler,
Cosmo
was fatter) called for a very carefully considered look because I would be seen by the boys who congregated on their Yamaha FS1 lawnmower-mopeds—“Fizzies”—at the end of the road. Most evenings they raced past my house executing squealing, rubber-burning wheelies while I sat nonchalantly on my bedroom windowsill with a cuppa, watching the potential drama unfolding like a suburban Capulet confronted by a bunch of boy-racing Montagues.

Do you remember how many of the moped boys were called Mark, Mum? And though the Mark (two parts Nick Heyward to one part Martin Kemp) for whom I carried a flaming torch of unrequited lust was entirely immune to my charms, another Mark—one who truly, deeply and properly loved me—was spurned as cruelly, casually and consistently as only a teenage girl can spurn a teenage boy who worships at her secondhand soles.

Despite being the only Mark allowed over the threshold and into my bedroom (though not my bed, oh no), despite being infinitely kind, funny, long-suffering and wearing his unrequited devotion as lightly as he did his PVC bomber and brushed pale denim parallels—not to mention being the only one of The Marks to have entirely charmed you, which was no mean feat—Mark One was, as far as I was concerned (and probably for all of these reasons), merely “friend” rather than boyfriend material. Something of which I would regularly remind him when the bedroom lights were dimmed (overhead bulb switched off, Anglepoise switched on), curtains drawn and the Eurythmics' “Sweet Dreams” was playing on your appropriated music center (wood veneer-effect dashboard, smoked plastic turntable lid), creating an atmosphere of almost unbearably—for Mark, anyway—sophisticated erotic suspense.