Separate Lives (27 page)

“It is another country, you moron. How pissed
are
you?”

“Stop it. Only a bit pissed. I love you. We love you.
We miss you
.”

“Spare me the sentimental-drunk stuff. So we all miss each other. And Alex and I are splitting up. And he's having an affair with a woman called Pippa who sold me a fabulous dress that I can't even look at anymore—may, in fact, have to destroy. And I think she knows about Will. God knows how. And I've just had Joan on the phone calling me ‘impossible and selfish.' And all this after a morning at Bridget's house—Bridget as in Phil and Bridget—and Phil's run off with Heinous Harvey and Bridge is now shagging her hot new au-pair. And the world's gone completely fucking mental.”

“Woooah! Hang on! Bridget's
gay
? And where the hell has Heinous Harvey sprung from? And you and Alex? Omigod. Are you all right, Soos? Are you OK, babe?”

“No, I'm not OK. I'm crap. And it's all falling apart. And I can see that if this was all written down it might look quite funny, on paper, but in real life it's not funny at all. None of it.”

“No, I can see that. Now, take a deep breath—” Bells sounded rather sober—“and just listen for a moment. I'm coming back, in a month, for good. And I'm bringing your mum for a visit. We were going to surprise you, me and Pauline, but we're not now, so . . . Hang on a mo, Soos.”

There was some muffled conversation in the background before Bells returned.

“Yes, anyway, so I'm jacking in the job.”

“I thought you loved it. Your emails, raving about the place?”

“I know. Positive spin. Had to give it a go. Some things are absolutely great here—this place, Byron, isn't bad for starters—but you learn things about yourself when you travel and to be honest I've learned that I'm a homebody. And without your mum I would've gone mad. Does that sound weird?”

“Yes, it sounds beyond weird, of course it does. The idea of my mother keeping you sane.”

“Well she has. And she's been a brilliant surrogate mum, and I think she feels shit about being so far away from you for so long. Actually I know she does, and she's used me as much as I've used her, but in a nice way. So anyway I'm coming home. I've been offered a job by a German publishing company who are expanding in Britain. So . . .”

There was such a lot to take in that it felt very much not the right time to ask if the German publishing company was called Guthenberg, though I had a hunch it might be.

“That's great. And no, Bridget is not gay. The hot au-pair is called Vladimir. And Harriet Harvey, of all people, sort of became my new best friend, mostly because my old best friend fucked off to Australia. And Heinous was instrumental in ‘inspiring' (Bells couldn't see my air-quotes, but I knew she could hear them), our move to Random-on-Sea, but I kind of went off her when I caught her giving Philip-from-marketing a blow-job in the loo at my house on my fortieth birthday.”

“She's entirely untrustworthy. She stole your Keith Haring Swatch, remember?”

“No, that was Hunchback. Whatever. Water under the—”

“Bridget?” said Bells. And I truly and deeply loved her for being able to finish my sentences far better than I could finish them myself.

“You're great. I'm so glad you're coming home.”

“I am great. And I'm so glad I'm coming home too. Me and Pauline will sort you out, won't we, Pauline?”

I could hear affirmative-sounding noises in the background, followed very clearly by my mother saying, “Actually would you be a darling and make that a double?” It was clearly time to go.

“Please tell me you and Mum aren't in some club being scary and Cougar-ish?”

“No, darling, boutique hotel bar. But we are having a highly inappropriate lesbian affair. You cool with that?”

I laughed so hard I got hiccups. Sometimes you have no idea quite how much you've missed somebody until they've come back.

I was very buoyed up by speaking to Bells. The effect lasted for days. It got me through Alex returning from his weekend wearing a thunderous expression and accompanied by our frankly frazzled-looking, discombobulated children, clearly unused to the traditional male hands-off approach to parenting, manifesting in little things—or indeed not-so-little, depending on your viewpoint—such as Lula wearing the same outfit she'd been wearing when she left, with unbrushed hair and too many stains, and Chuck, who is catnip to scrapes and bruises, returning with several more and telling me, half gleefully and half guiltily, that he'd “jumped out of a tree and landed wrong.”

“Where was Daddy?” I inquired as lightly as I could while applying the too-long-after-the-event arnica. And I tried to pretend that Chuck's shrug didn't matter, but
it did. I hadn't ever thought for very long about Alex's skills—or indeed lack of skills—as a father. Of course I knew he loved the children very much but, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how very little he'd had to do with them day-to-day, how much he'd managed to avoid the mundane stuff, the relentless clothes and school uniform organization, the homework, sorting their social lives, visiting doctors and dentists, solving the infinite variety of childcare crises. It was never Alex who had agonized about MMR when Lula was a baby or dropped everything in the office to race to school when she was sent home with a stomach bug at lunchtime. I worked full time too, of course, but realized I had made myself responsible for virtually all the tedious details of the domestic landscape, and (at least as far as Alex was concerned) that apparently included the children. It's your classic post-feminist fuck-up, mistaking the desire to have it all with the need to do it all. And, perhaps like most men of his age, Alex simply colluded. His contribution to our shared domestic life had, I worked out, extended to:

• • Bins, emptying and removal thereof.
  
• • Electronic meltdowns, of all kinds, across all media.
  
• • Drainage and plumbing issues, especially those involving S-Bends, which essentially amounted to a lot of sighing and swearing and, ultimately, phoning a Professional.
  
• • Anything to do with drills.
  
• • Anything to do with cars.
  
• • A few—maybe two?—years of taking the children to Queen's Park on Saturday mornings, for a maximum of two hours (in good weather), and a minimum thirty minutes (in average weather), so I could “relax.”
  

I genuinely believe that Alex thought the Saturday morning arrangement was my time for lying in a hot bath surrounded by Diptyque candles and indulging in elaborate exfoliation and depilation routines while flicking though
Easy Living
with a spare third hand, though the truth of it was that I usually ended up loading and unloading the dishwasher, putting on a clothes wash and deputizing on the bins. Anyway, I had never again even considered the possibility of “relaxing” after that time, late on a balmy early summer's morning, when Alex returned from the park, smiling and bearing newspapers and croissants, with Lula scootering behind him, and I'd said:

“Croissants! Lovely! Where the hell's Chuck?”

And Alex had turned white, spun on his heel and disappeared at a never-before-or-since-witnessed speed. Of course, our five-month-old son was just where he'd been left, asleep in his stroller next to a bench in the park under the kindly and watchful eye of a full time-mummy playground acquaintance who (when I subsequently ran into her and thanked her effusively, scarlet with embarrassment) had (she helpfully admitted) been mere moments from phoning the police.

“But Lula, what about Chuck? Didn't you notice Daddy had forgotten him?” I asked our five-year-old daughter.

“Yes, but every time I said ‘Daddy, Daddy!' he kept saying ‘Shush, I'm on the phone!'”

I had forgotten about this episode until I saw the children pile out of the car on Sunday afternoon, and when I did remember I felt a chill of something faintly resembling foreboding and wondered if this was the fabled maternal instinct—the thing that essentially separates Us from Them? I've never kidded myself I'm the most fabulous
mother in the world and certainly never made parenting my fetish, but I do think I'm probably good enough, and sometimes a great deal better than that. As for Alex—frankly, who knew? Despite having children aged nine and five, when it came to hands-on parenting, for Alex it was clearly early days.

“How was it? Did you have a lovely time?” I chirped as the kids disembarked, and before I'd discovered the bruises. Lula glanced briefly—nervously?—at her father, but smiled and breezed past me while choosing to keep her counsel, though Chuck raced straight into my arms. Meanwhile, Alex frowned.

“Bloody handful, your kids.”

My heart sank. Once we were no longer uneasily cohabiting and I was finally out of this bloody house—and Alex's daily life—my future almost certainly included never knowing exactly what was going on when he had access to the kids. We had, in advance, already tentatively negotiated a traditional every-other-weekend at Daddy's in the future, but a long one, starting on Friday afternoons and including Alex doing the Monday morning school run, though he had already indicated to me that this probably wasn't going to be often enough.

“I'm their father, for fuck's sake! Why would I automatically be relegated to the role of junior partner? I'm not happy about it at all.”

I'd bitten my lip. How could I get away with articulating the truth? Which was: “When it comes to the kids you've ALWAYS been the junior partner. Name all the contents of Lula's PE kitbag and then tell me what day she plays hockey. And while we're at it, give me the names of Chuck's latest ‘best friend' and his favorite teacher.”

But I didn't say any of this. Instead I said, soothingly, “I'm sure everything is negotiable . . .” Not rocking boats was a new discipline for me, and one at which I wasn't exactly gifted. I could, however, see that the future would include a lot of it.

And then just days after this, shortly after Nigel and Joan had decamped to “Golfditz,” Nigel Fox was preparing a putt at the eighteenth (the devil is in the details) when he had a heart attack. And then the following morning, surrounded by his wife and three of his children—Guy hadn't managed to get there fast enough from Bali—poor Nigel died, at which point the boat wasn't so much rocked as had hit a “berg and started sinking fast, with all hands.”

The funeral was held ten days later, in early July. Initially, Alex was adamant that he didn't want either me, or the children, to go. Then he changed his mind and said he wanted the children to attend, but not me. Then he changed his mind again, prompted, no doubt, by tears from Lula, who was particularly close to her grandpa (and he to her) and who had been hit very hard by the whole tragic business:

“I want to go and say good-bye to Grandpa. I love Grandpa. And I want Mummy there too. I won't go if Mummy doesn't come . . .” Accompanied by a stamped foot from my little chip-off-the-old-block.

As for me, in this—if only this—I was prepared to do as instructed: if it was considered “appropriate” by the Fox family (of which I had never felt less of a member) I'd go—if not, I wouldn't. Simple. And yet, not so simple at all. Alex didn't want me there.

“I don't need your fucking idea of ‘support,' though the children probably will,” he conceded.

In the end we reached a compromise. I'd come with the children to the actual funeral but then I'd take them home while Alex went on to the wake, at Careless, afterward. He made a point of telling me that the wake was “for family and close friends only.” And presumably I could read into that whatever I liked.

Either way I was dreading it. Alex and I hadn't spent any length of time together in a car since Guy and Lisa's wedding, and that had only been forty minutes. The prospect of driving to Suffolk filled me with even more gloom than was provided by the journey's already mega-gloomy context. In the short period since his father's death, Alex's mood had been at best unpredictable, at worst morose—and rarely more than monosyllabic.

Inside the Dream Home the tension was almost unbearable whenever I tried to do something to lift it—mostly for the sake of the children, who had been infected by Alex's distance and abrasiveness while struggling to understand its cause and who were now acting up. Chuck had started having bad dreams, coming into my bed at all hours of the night and asking, “Where's Daddy? Why isn't Daddy in bed too?” while Lula had just retreated into herself to the point where I became increasingly concerned.

One night, a few days before the funeral and just before I went to bed, I'd snuck into Lula's room at about 11 p.m. to kiss her sleeping forehead—as I had done every single night since she'd moved into her own bedroom when I'd stopped breastfeeding her, at five months old—and I found the light on and Lula staring fixedly at the wall at the end of her bed. On her bedside table was a small, framed photo of her sitting on her grandpa's knee, taken when she was about six or seven. I didn't even know she'd had it.

“It's very late, darling; why are you still awake?” I said gently.

“I can't sleep. I'm scared if I turn out the light, I'll die. But if I die I might see Grandpa again, so I don't know what to do.”

“Sweetheart. You're not going to die. You won't die until you're incredibly ancient—much, much older even than Grandpa. And even then he'll still be waiting to see you, sitting on his big cloud, because he's your grandpa and he loves you. So there's no hurry.”

“But I love him and I miss him.”

“I know you do, darling. I know you do. And he loves you too, he just can't tell you how much at the moment. He hasn't got a . . . a phone.”

Tears pricked my eyelids. I don't know why, but I hadn't cried for Nigel. Now, however, I was crying for Lula.