Separate Lives (14 page)

So, back in April 1984, merely setting foot outside the house not only needed to take into consideration the potential presence of The Marks, but also the mystery boy who had recently moved into the street diagonally across from our house and who often sat in his window staring into mine.

He wasn't a Mark (well he could have been; I didn't know his name, but he definitely didn't have a Fizzy or hang out with the other Marks) and even with the benefit of my 20/20 vision, he lived just a bit too far away to be checked out very closely from my bedroom vantage point. But he definitely had boyfriend potential, if only because he had noticed my existence, which was sometimes all it took. So I suddenly, conveniently, found a lot of letters that needed posting very urgently, which in turn meant walking down his road to double-back along the road that ran parallel to
his, where the (second-nearest) post box actually was. This was years before I'd heard the term “stalking,” obviously.

But beyond running the gauntlet of the local Marks, there were other hazards to be encountered en-route to shopping nirvana, notably the branch of Oxfam at the bottom of the road that was at the bottom of our road. Do you remember it? Next to the bookies? All the other local girls seemed to be unimpressed by the shop's stock of 1960s cocktail dresses and shoes, so I quickly learned how to mix high street purchases with charity shop finds (while borrowing whatever still fitted from you) creating an eclectic “style.” Or, alternatively, just a collision between garments in exciting drip-dry fabrics and challenging color combinations.

My successes included:

A pair of Miss Selfridge black PVC jeans teamed with a black sleeveless chiffon blouse.

A truly fabulous sleeveless cream jersey shift with broad horizontal bands of brown and orange and gold lurex—which, having racked up three snogs with three different boys (only one of whom was called Mark) on the only three occasions I'd ever worn it, I considered to be a “result” dress so potent it needed to be deployed carefully and only ever after dark, preferably alongside a Pernod-and-black.

So, here I was with the beaten-up shoebox labeled “Memory's” in cursive felt-tip, looking at the neatly folded copy of
The Face
magazine—the one I'd spotted in WH Smith and for which I'd ended up excitedly rejecting both
Cosmo
and
Honey
.
The Face
seemed suddenly to be my Proustian “madeleine”—I was right back there: hormonal,
fashion-and-boy-and-hair-obsessed, both scared by and optimistic about the future, but obviously not with the faintest idea of where I'd be now, twenty-five years later. Or with a clue as to the trajectory that would take me here, to this precise moment, when I was sitting on the floor of the “wardrobe” sobbing all over an old magazine and waiting for a date with a man who belonged to someone else.

What do you think of me, Mum? What do you really think of the woman I have become? . . .

And yes, if you're wondering, that is a melancholy ellipsis.

Eventually I pulled myself together. Sorted out the tangle of hangers, folded some sweaters and put them in bags, in drawers. Rediscovered some spring/summer pieces from last year that I thought I'd wear again and made a quick note about the gaps I felt needed plugging, for which I'd probably shop next week. And then I ran myself a big hot bath and started the auto-pilot process of middle-aged beautification/maintenance: depilate, body scrub, moisturize . . . and I thought, not for the first time, that none of these words sound as good as they feel, that in fact they're all so perversely and ironically ugly they might as well be “moist” or “gusset.”

By 6 p.m. I was done, scrubbed up, looking pretty good. Maybe even “hot,” and, dare I say it, possibly even MILF-y. Not that any of this made me love myself any more than I'd loved myself when I was twenty and properly, as opposed to peri-menopausally, fuckable.

The problem with being someone who was once “professionally” pretty is that it coincided with those years when I wasn't feeling remotely pretty on the inside. You know how reluctant a teenage model I was, Mum; how much I hated my four-year “career”; after all, you hated it too. You
particularly hated the fact that it contributed to me flunking my A-levels and stopped me “fulfilling my potential” and going to uni (my head teacher's words, not yours, to be fair). Instead I was living in a model flat in Tokyo and hating every minute. And it's not like it was a glittering career. Sixteen catalogs, five pop videos, two covers of
Just 17
and three campaigns for Laura Ashley do not a “Super” make.

I know you were relieved when I stopped at twenty-one, but disappointed that I didn't change direction. We had that huge row, I remember, when I told you I wanted to poach not game-keep and you accused me of “frittering” my life away. But even though I hated modeling I actually loved being an agent. Loved being able to help “my girls” (even though I was still pretty much a girl myself), enjoyed being able to give them the heads-up about the head-fuckery of the business—and then enjoy their successes much more than I ever did my own. And I really liked being a team player at the center of a fondly bickering “family.”

So, you know, no regrets. Not really. It wasn't a brain-dead job at all (stupid agents don't get covers and campaigns for their girls), even though I know it could seem frivolous from the outside. I suppose the only thing I do sort of regret is not grabbing that fleeting moment when I could've set up on my own, with a handful of the “big” girls, like Lisa. But instead I married David and if I hadn't done that I wouldn't have Hal, and of course life without Hal is unimaginable. So, you know . . .

Anyway, even though I suppose it didn't really matter, it ended up taking me nearly an hour to decide what to wear. And that was after I'd narrowed it down to the category of
“non-slutty dresses it's easy to get out of quickly.” So, a DVF wrap dress it was, then.

When I heard the doorbell, I was downstairs in the kitchen, checking on the progress of the white wine cooling process, then uncorking a bottle of red just in case, and seeing if I still had any tonic to go with the vodka I never drank at home and which, on closer inspection, appeared to be nearly gone, which was odd. And then I ran up the stairs three at a time, bare-footed, pausing to catch my breath before I opened the door.

“Hi,” said Alex. “You don't mind this, do you? Me turning up on your doorstep? It occurred to me after I'd sent the text that maybe you'd prefer to meet somewhere else.”

“No, it's fine, totally fine. Come in. Thanks.”

Alex was bearing flowers. One of those ready-made supermarket bouquets with the price tag half torn off—cheap but actually very pretty. And in his other hand he had a bottle of Barolo: not so cheap. I was touched. I was also, for a moment, slightly scared. Flowers and wine said “date.” “Date” said single. Only one of us was single. Or maybe not?

“I was just opening a bottle downstairs but that one looks much nicer than mine. Come down . . .” He followed me into the basement. I could see him checking out the room and tried to picture it from his perspective. I had a vision of his—or actually Susie's—kitchen and that vision wasn't this. Three months previously my newly revamped kitchen had been on the cover of
Elle Deco
. The shoot had been nothing to do with me, really—the architect had known the editor—but I had enjoyed the process.

“This is a beautiful room. Why do I feel like I recognize it?”

I hadn't really wanted to have the
Elle Deco
conversation but Alex had been a magazine publisher until about five minutes ago, so he probably did recognize it.

“February issue of
Elle Deco
?”

“Blimey, yes. Susie . . . uh . . . we . . . I subscribe.” I could tell he immediately regretted mentioning Susie so I pretended I hadn't heard.

“Yes, it scrubs up pretty well.” I didn't want to look flash.

“It's stunning.” He ran his hand along the seamless Corian work surface. “Really beautiful. It must have cost a—” He checked himself.

“It did. But it's a kitchen for life, really, so I figured it was money well spent. I came into some money a while back, so . . .”

And I didn't want to have this conversation, either, though I could see I was probably going to have to.

“The hedge-fund bastard, I presume, doing right by the mother of his child? Good for him.”

I took a deep breath.

“No. Not quite. Not really.”

“Ah, OK, scratch cards?”

“No. No . . .” Another breath. “No, my parents both died a few years ago. Together. On the same day.”

Alex immediately looked flustered—and flustered wasn't how I wanted Alex to look, but even though this was not a conversation I had wanted, or even anticipated having, I thought I'd better just go for it. So I told him, Mum. I told him about you and Dad.

“Thailand. Boxing Day 2004. The tsunami. They were on the beach and they drowned. My father died trying to save my mother. The irony is that they had been divorced for years—my father had moved to Thailand and married again in the late 1980s—but they'd recently sort of reconciled,
as friends anyway. And my father had invited my mother for Christmas to cheer her up after her second marriage had gone down the pan . . . and we'd all—that is, me and my brother and sister—we'd all encouraged her to go, even though she wasn't sure she wanted to. But she flew out on Christmas Day, and sent us a text saying
I'm SO glad I'm here! Thank you for making me do it! Lots of love, Mum XXX
. And she died the next morning and . . .” I paused, choking slightly. “Dad came home in a box three weeks later, but they never found Mum. Or maybe they did, but if so she couldn't be identified. So we never got her back. I still wake up in the night wondering where she is. If you've never been there, I can't tell you how incredibly difficult it is not to have a . . . a body. And a place to put that body.”

This was not the way I'd scripted the evening. Alex was ashen.

“Christ. I don't know what to say, Pippa. And anything I do say will sound shallow and meaningless, but, given that—my God, I'm so, so sorry.”

“Thank you. Thanks . . .” I wiped away a tear, poured two glasses of the Barolo and attempted a slightly cack-handed mood shift: “But apparently life goes on. So, anyway—you're right about one thing: the house was actually in the divorce settlement from The Bastard, but the kitchen was down to my parents. I have quite a lot of money. More than I need.”

“And . . . your brother and sister?”

So I told him about how Simon had flown to Thailand to identify the bodies—
body
—and that, apart from Dad's funeral, he never really came home; how he lives in Thailand now, trying to fight his demons, right the wrongs, do Good Works, and all while drinking too much. And I told him how Beth, who had been skiing in the Rockies that
Christmas with a couple of mates, had got engaged to a ski instructor within a month of Mum and Dad dying and now lived in Jackson Hole, managing chalets. How instead of bringing us closer, your deaths had the opposite effect; that the three of us—eaten up with the survivors' guilt (illogical guilt, but guilt nonetheless) of having encouraged you to go in the first place—dealt with it individually rather than collectively and now barely spoke, and that we all preferred it that way. At least for now.

And I suppose it was a conversation so suffused with tragedy that it speeded up the process of what was, surely, going to happen anyway, though possibly not as fast as it did. For it turned out that within twenty minutes of arriving nervously at my door with a smile and flowers and a bottle of wine, Alex suddenly kissed me passionately before untying the belt of my wrap dress, unfastening my bra, sucking on my nipples and then, after sinking to his knees, sliding his tongue hungrily between my legs. Then he turned me round, bent me over the kitchen island and fucked me so hard and fast from behind that I gasped with a combination of shock and pleasure.

“More,” I whispered. “More.”

“There's . . . plenty . . . more,” said Alex breathlessly. And there was.

It was only later—much, much later—that I started to wonder whether it had been me that Alex had found so irresistible, given he'd resisted me before, or whether it had been my story and my obvious fragility and vulnerability when telling it that had seduced him to seduce me? But as soon as that thought emerged, I buried it again, fast. I was very good at burying unexpected emotions.

Alex eventually left just after lunchtime on Sunday. Before that we had fucked a further four times (not
including assorted fore-and-after-play), eaten an Indian meal I'd phoned in, had a shower and a bath, watched a movie, and, somehow, even managed to talk.

Alex was relentlessly attentive and tender. Tender, that is, when he wasn't being a complete animal. And I was fine with animal. It had been ages, after all, and I fancied him wildly. And when we did, briefly, leave each other alone, one of us would soon seek out the other and then we'd be off again . . . God, it was the best sex I've ever had. I had no idea if I'd ever have more of it, but for now—for then—it was enough. And then our conversations, when we found time for them, were so easy, too. There was none of that awkward staccato rhythm that usually signifies two people trying to get to know each other, punctuated by retreating into silent, distracting sex. Everything flowed. Everything joined up. It all made sense.

When Alex finally left, I had just a couple of hours to acclimatize to his absence, to the delicious physical ache that comes of having been . . . there's no other way to put it:
completely fucked
 . . . and to rediscover my mum-head in time for Hal's return, and whatever emotions he was going to be bringing home with him.