Summertime (8 page)

How can they all be such sheep? Even though I have been looking forward to this stolen day of indulgence with secret, guilty longing, I find my interest in making a purchase confounded, and decide that the National Portrait Gallery will raise the tone and put me in a more celestial frame of mind. However, I arrive in Trafalgar Square, to find a queue chicaning impenetrably towards a far distant ticket booth. Much of the queue is made up of elderly couples; women with crisply set grey hair, men restless, with the
Telegraph
folded under an arm and highly polished brown brogues.

‘It'll be another hour before we're even inside the building,' sighs a matron with a quilted jacket and a scarf emblazoned with Scottie dogs. ‘It's because the exhibition closes tomorrow. We'll have to stay, but I'm afraid we'll never make it to Peter Jones at this rate.'

Her husband sighs, thwacking his newspaper against his hand.

‘Well you did insist on coming, Marjorie. I said it was madness.'

Marjorie pulls her lips tightly in around her teeth in a disgruntled sigh, and adjusts her position so she is looking away from her husband. They are a picture of crossness.

I stand around for a few minutes, pretending to be in a welter of indecision and even put myself at the back of the queue to see what it feels like. It feels terrible: maddening and achingly boring. I have no intention of joining it. I never have had. Wander off, sideways like a crab, hardly able to admit to myself that my first attempt to see art for several years has been so easily thwarted. Once I reach a safe distance, I scuttle away, disliking to admit a degree of relief, even though I really wanted to see the exhibition, and wondering if many people are as shallow as I am.

However, simply cannot bear to have such a total absence of moral or cultural fibre, and turn back once more to hurl myself in through the main doors of the National Gallery, bypassing the special exhibitions, for an hour with Piero della Francesca and his contemporaries. The relief of being among these paintings is as powerful to me as a session in the
confessional would be to a Catholic, and I return to the street renewed, walking on air and determined to know more about art.

Reach Rose's flat at seven o'clock, and find her grinding carrots and beetroot into a health-giving drink. ‘Don't let's talk about it,' she shudders. ‘Tristan gave me a total detox programme as a birthday present. I think he must have a mistress who has put him up to it, or else he's developed a really vile and worrying streak of sadism. I'm on day three. I have to go and be colonically irrigated every afternoon for a week, and the irrigation man is really good-looking, which makes it double-embarrassing, and we can see the gunk as it comes out and we talk about it. The story of my life is being revealed through poo, it's just awful.'

Rose cannot come to the hen night because of the demands of the detox programme. ‘I'd love to,' she says longingly, looking at her timetable, ‘but I can't. I've got to have a shower at nine o'clock, followed by a body brush and another lot of disgusting powders at ten-fifteen. I've also got to drink two gallons of distilled water between now and bedtime and fill in my progress chart, and I haven't even taken the powders before the last ones yet.'

‘Well, you look fantastic, it must be worth it,' I say, admiring her glowing clear skin and shining eyes.

‘Do you think so? I hope you're right. I've had to
put Theo with a childminder and take a week's holiday from work to give myself time for all this. It's insanely stressful trying to keep up with it,' she says, rushing to turn off the kitchen timer she had set to remind herself to take her early-evening powders. ‘It just shows that all these treatments are aimed at fantastically rich women who do nothing all day but paint their nails. You can't possibly look after children or work, there just isn't time.'

Put on my make-up and get dressed, slightly crestfallen not to have Rose to giggle and swap things with, and half longing to have the detox treatment given to me as a present – such a luxury to think only of oneself and one's bodily functions for a whole week. Just like being a toddler again. On second thoughts, the implied criticism of a husband giving a wife an expensive and enslaving beauty treatment is grim. Better to buy it oneself, or, given that it costs a fortune, best just to sip a drop of camomile tea before bed and stay off the booze.

Minna's hen night has been organised by Incie Wincie Inglethorpe, who isn't a boy at all, and who does not live at White City Greyhound Stadium where I clearly remember sending the wedding invitation. In fact, the stadium turns out to be the venue for the hen night. Incie is a corruption of Celia, and Wincie is a reference
to her stature. Incie Wincie is about half my height and has a mop of black curls and dark eyes. She also has a girlfriend, Sophie, with a swanlike neck and for ever legs, with whom she is holding hands.

‘They're lesbians,' I whisper to Minna. ‘Look, they're holding hands.'

‘Yes, they're chefs, and they're making the wedding cake. It's going to be Elvis in his white trouser suit with sugar sequins and a guitar, but don't tell Desmond. It's a surprise.'

I have not seen Minna before in a crowd of her own friends. She has always either been at work at Heavenly Petting, where she is chief receptionist, or she has been with Desmond. Had quite forgotten the mesmerising effect she has, with her Dolly Parton proportions and coiffed, candyfloss hair. Manage to become paranoid and clumsy instantly, as cannot help noticing that
all
Minna's friends have the same pocket-Venus bodies. The only people at our table who are over five foot four and have a bra-cup size less than double-D, are me and Sophie the lesbian. We sit next to each other and we talk about one-day eventing (her pet subject) and children (mine). Realise as she begins to set up little jumps with matchbooks and cigarettes to illustrate what is fast becoming a lecture, that I have no passions whatsoever, and my social skills have diminished to two conversations: one about football
scores, and the other a debate on supermarkets versus delivery rounds for the best deals on organic foods.

I blame this restricted field of knowledge on the children. They are the only people I see, and I only know what they tell me these days, thus I know much more about
The Simpsons
than
EastEnders
. Stop listening at all to Sophie the lesbian, who is cantering a pony keyring around her plate, reminding me of Felix and his ‘life is a game of WarHammer' philosophy, and start trying to list my own interests and areas of expertise. After ten minutes, during which time I have bet and lost on the first dog race without being aware of it happening, I have established my areas of expertise as being:

1 Nit control.

2 Opening bottles of wine when I have lost the corkscrew.

3 Making and losing lists.

My interests are rather more limited. In fact, I can't think of any at all, which is disgraceful. I must get some immediately. What can they be, and where will I find them? Gambling is not likely to be among them. By the end of the evening I have bet on seven races and lost every time, except for the one when I was in the loo, so Sophie placed my bet for me.

April 18th

Leave Rose measuring powders and puréeing apples, grapefruit and lemons for a tart mid-morning drink, and catch the slow Sunday train home. Driving back from the station towards the house I open all the car windows and sing along to Don MacLean's ‘Bye Bye Miss American Pie'.

It is a beautiful wistful day, the air soft and mild and gentle when I get off the train, the quiet stillness save for a church bell contrasting with London's Sunday-morning busyness.

I follow the straggle of Norwich's suburbs out into the countryside, past grey pavements and streets pearled pink with blossom. Under gates, petals drift and shore up like soap flakes, and there is an almond scent of warm optimism on the air. I am perfectly, serenely happy, in a way that is only possible with the not-a-care-in-the-world sensation that comes with a slight hangover.

The sun is shining and as I park my car at home and turn the engine off, I hear my first cuckoo of the year in the silence that follows, and breathe deeply to inhale scented springtime. No one is in the house, but the trail of dolls, guns and odd shoes that follows Felix and The Beauty, and to a lesser extent Giles, wherever they go, leads to the garden. I head the same way,
anxious to be reunited with my loved ones and to thank my mother for coming to stay with them last night. Voices lead me to the flooded knot garden.

There, leaning over from the field, is Hedley Sale, smoking with my mother, who is on our side of the wall watching the children frolicking in the wet grass of Hedley Sale's field. The Beauty runs back towards the wall when she sees me, looking like a member of the Home Guard in an old army helmet with goose grass all over her face and hair.

‘Mummy, come and play hiding in the field,' she yells, and my mother and her companion turn to greet me, my mother beaming delightedly, ‘Venetia, do come and meet Hedley Sale. He's your new neighbour, and we've been talking about the field and the party and things.' Her expression tells me she has achieved whatever it may have been that she wanted, and I smile and shake hands with Hedley, trying to decide whether or not I shall admit to having met him before.

He decides for me and says, ‘Ah, yes,' before setting off in a rather showing-off fashion, gabbling away in Latin.

‘He does this a lot,' I whisper to my mother, and she gives me a sharp look.

‘Do you know what he's quoting?' she hisses back at me, and I shake my head. ‘Well I do, and it's
most unsuitable. He may imagine he's the only one around here who can recite Catullus. He'll have to think again.'

My hangover begins to buzz in my brain. The man stops talking Latin, lowers his monobrow to its customary position grazing his nose and says, in a special voice for simpletons, ‘I hear you were attending a hen night and visiting an art gallery.'

I nod. He continues, ‘I don't know if you had a chance to catch the Mantegna exhibition while it was in Europe? No, I thought not. I saw it in Amsterdam. Marvellous, quite breathtaking. What did you see yesterday? Oh, it must have been the Goya. What did you make of it?'

He is machine-gunning me against the wall, never drawing breath for me to answer, and suddenly the boys make an assault of their own from the right flank.

‘What did you bring from London? Did you get us anything? I don't want to wear stupid satin shorts for Desmond's wedding. He said combat trousers were cool, it's just stupid Minna—'

‘Minna is
not
stupid, and you are not to be rude.' Roused from my deadhead state, and as the haranguing words leave my mouth, I have a sudden clear picture of myself as a mother who ignores her children ninety per cent of the time and only connects with them to
tell them off. Hateful. Dole out the yo-yos and felt-tip pens I have come to view as the form of taxation I pay for going to London, and hear my mother inviting Hedley Sale to lunch. In my house. Today. How could she? She and the children must have had lunch hours ago. And there's no food. There hasn't been for days – we've been eating noodles, broccoli and stock for the past week. It is the only dish everyone likes, so I have not seen the point in trying to cook anything else.

To my relief, he refuses. ‘I would have loved to have come, but my stepdaughter is coming to stay and I need to get back for her.' He pauses, narrowing his eyes, or rather clamping down his eyebrow, intent on Giles, who is attempting to make his bicycle rear like a Lipizzaner on the lawn.

‘Would your son like to come over this afternoon? Tamsin and he must be the same age, and it would be good for her to get outside with someone her own age.'

Knowing Giles's views on girls, I open my mouth to refuse, but not quickly enough. My mother pounces on the opportunity to infiltrate the Sale headquarters.

‘Oh, what a kind offer. Giles would love that. We'll come and collect him later, shall we?'

Try to override her, but to no avail. ‘I think we should ask Giles himself if he wants to go,' I suggest feebly, convinced that he will refuse. Oddly, he says
yes. Am convinced that he has not heard properly, and repeat to him as we head for the house to gather a few belongings, ‘This is definitely a girl, you know.'

Giles looks at me patiently. ‘I know, Mum, stepdaughters usually are girls. Can you pass me my trainers, please.'

He drives off with Hedley Sale. Cannot rid myself of the conviction that he is an early Christian martyr being fed to the lions, but my mother says this is pathetic, and due to my hangover.

We retreat to the kitchen, noses tipped red with cold from too long in the shadows and weak sunshine of the afternoon.

‘I must say, that man may not throw Giles to the lions, but he certainly is very hard work,' sighs my mother from the armchair, where she has slumped with a warming cigarette. ‘I wouldn't want to be too neighbourly with him, Venetia, oh, no.' She shakes her head, brooding on the nastiness of Hedley Sale. Am incensed by this.

‘Well why did you force poor old Giles to go?' I snap.

‘I didn't force him, he wanted to go. And Sale is letting us use the field, so it would be churlish to refuse him a simple request of one small boy for a day.'

‘That makes him sound even more sacrificial,' I
point out, then change the subject. ‘So what did you all have for lunch today?'

My mother is defiant. ‘Oh, goodness! I'm afraid we haven't had time for lunch today, what with one thing and another. But I think there's some cheese somewhere. You'll manage. I must go. I have things to do.'

Her hair is flailing madly now it has escaped the confines of her hat, and three rings glow witchily on her right hand. She looks as if she may whip a crystal ball out from inside her cardigan at any minute and start seeing the future. Can't think where she gets the energy for all her plots and intrigues.