The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (25 page)

Joel helps me to dress up the children in their country-appropriate gear, mostly borrowed, and Mitzi prepares Molyneux and Mahalia, who, I am glad to say, are moaning about wanting to use the Wii just as much as Rufus. Right as we are about to leave, Merle, the girl twin, trips over the foot of Michael’s lounger and scrapes her knee. He does nothing. It’s almost as if he
can’t hear her cries, as if they’re pitched like a dog whistle so that only the rest of us can hear. Eventually, the au pair comes out and envelops Merle in sturdy Bulgarian arms, while Michael continues to read all the sections of the newspaper that I ignore.

“Does Michael do much with the children?” I ask Mitzi as we walk out across the flatness toward the sea and the seals, and she begins to toss seaweed into a flat basket. “Why are you weeding the great outdoors?”

“It’s samphire. It’s the asparagus of the sea. Not really the season for it yet, but it’s simply delicious with melted butter and, best of all, completely natural and free. I’m very down with foraging at the moment.”

“Yes, I’ve read about that. The only thing I could forage in our neck of the woods would be supermarket trolleys, flattened chewing gum and lager cans. What does wild garlic look like, anyway? And how do you tell the difference between a mushroom and a toadstool?”

“You just know,” says Mitzi. “Like choosing a lover.”

“So, Michael. He seems quite hands off.”

“In a domestic, diaper-changing way, I suppose he is,” she says. “He works so hard and is so successful that I feel it would be very unfair of me to burden him with anything to do with the house. And he’s very involved in the children’s education.”

“He pays for it.”

“No, more than that. He was adamant that I made sure Molyneux and Mahalia could read before they went to school, and knew some French. It’s really important to him.”

Now I think about it, Mitzi can’t walk down steps with her children without having to count them out loud, and the twins, aged two, are constantly drilled on their colors and shapes. “But other stuff?” I ask.

“Well, he doesn’t do all that baby in a sling, throw the toddler
in the air type of fatherhood, if that’s what you mean. We can’t all be married to the perfect father, you know. You’re the one married to Joel.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“We all know you’re the one who got Joel. I do wish you didn’t feel like you constantly have to remind me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know I did. Let me help you with your seaweed.”

“We could have a completely foraged supper.” Mitzi now speaks with the excitement she used to reserve for pills and booze. “We could catch crabs.”

“Just like the good old days.”

She giggles and, standing here, well away from Michael and the staff, she’s like the girl I first met thirteen years ago. “You mustn’t say such things in front of Michael.”

“Does he think you were a virgin when you two met?”

“Obviously not, but he doesn’t know quite the extent of my twenties. It was all so chaotic.”

“It wasn’t, though,” I say, thinking back. “Mine were less exciting but somehow more chaotic than yours. Your adventures seemed quite deliberate, well planned. I think you even said so at the time. That you were going to have as much fun as possible and then settle down with a rich man. And you’ve done exactly that.”

“I never said that. It’s a coincidence that Michael happens to be successful. I fell in love with him, not his money. The sort of man I was going to fall in love with, powerful and intelligent, was probably the sort of man who’d be successful in his chosen profession.”

“Maybe, but what career advice will you give Mahalia and Merle?”

“Are you implying that me marrying Michael was a career move?”

“No, no, of course not.” Of course I am. Not since Trotsky was erased from photos of revolutionary Russia has history been so blatantly revised. Mitzi banked copious reserves of sex and fun in order to pay for a good marriage to a man as stiff as Michael.

“I wanted security,” she admits. “Not financial, necessarily. You know about my mother. I didn’t want that for my own family.”

The children are now covering themselves in mud and whooping with delight. They throw themselves across the flats, skidding and colliding as they do, not caring that embedded shells occasionally scrape their palely perfect skin. I want to hold on to this moment, which makes me feel, for a day at least, as if I’m giving my children the childhood they deserve. I occasionally have these moments when we’re all singing along to the radio and making up silly lyrics, my contribution inserting their names into the songs, theirs reliant on repetition of the words “poo” and “bum.” These are the times when I know, rather than just tell myself, how much I love them and love being with them. I revel in these brief interludes of familial perfection, as I do now, watching their hair clog with Norfolk mud and their skinny limbs become camouflaged into an indistinguishable mass. I almost want to weep with the utter loveliness of it and I wonder whether this is what it’s always like for Mitzi, to always have the idyll, the life that the article about Mitzi’s second home will tell us we are so blessed to be living.

The morning after my first night with Joel, I didn’t so much wake up in the attic at Ursula’s house as not go to sleep at all. We screwed and laughed and drank, before dozing for only a few minutes at a time, then starting off all over again. We zipped ourselves to one another, creating a film of sticky sweat between
us, and I found myself cursing the fact that I had two arms, for the way one of them always created a barrier between us. Our first sleepover was as giggle-infested as any eight-year-old girl’s. “You go to sleep first.” “No, you.” “Are you asleep yet?”

“I fancied you from the moment I walked into the office,” Joel said as the light poured in and we debated what to have for breakfast. “There you were, a gorgeous redhead standing on a desk, and when you stretched up to do those shelves, there was a little band of bare skin showing around your waist… this one.” He leaned down to kiss the flesh above my stomach and I felt myself get wet once again. It was like when you have a terrible cold and you wonder where on earth all this liquid can come from.

I blushed. I hadn’t expected this conversation so soon in. Joel didn’t bother playing hard to get because he didn’t need to. “But…”

“But what?”

“I thought you were gay.”

“Some of my best friends, et cetera, et cetera, but what on earth made you think that?”

“Mitzi told me.”

His eyes narrowed. “But she knows I fancy you.”

I blushed with the joy of it, not stopping to question how I had been kept ignorant of that fact. “Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. Or maybe Mitzi did.”

“Easy mistake to make, Mary being a well-known boy’s name.” His head moved back down and he licked me. He emerged to speak. “I’m so glad Mary’s not a boy.” He delved in once more.

“And I’m so glad that you are one,” I said, pulling him up and inside me yet again.

This could have gone on all day. I wondered whether I ought to pretend that I had some pressing and wildly glamorous engagement on that Saturday morning. Joel suddenly leaped up.

“I’m an idiot,” he shouted, doing an exaggerated dance of panic that segued into a dance of trying to get his underwear and trousers on.

“What?” I asked. This is too good to be true, I thought; he’s remembered he’s got a wife and child to meet up with.

“I’ve got to be in Brussels for lunch. I’m meeting Ursula there. Where are the train tickets?” The room, which had been jumbled when we came in, was now in a comedic state of dishevelment. I started to hyperventilate. I have a morbid fear of missing planes and trains. As Joel flung possessions around in a wild search for socks, passport and ticket, I tried to calm myself by methodically searching through his desk. He had to make that train. If he didn’t, everything would be ruined. I’d be forever the girl who made him miss the train—not just any train, the Eurostar. How impossibly fabulous, I thought in my panic, here is a man who can forget he’s got a trip away, abroad and everything. Here is a man who, instead of spending the night before laying out clothes and uttering the passport-tickets-money mantra, could go out drinking and seduce a girl.

“Found them,” I shouted. “Your tickets and your passport.”

“I love you,” he said and kissed me. It wasn’t a proper “I love you,” it was just the one you’d say to anyone who found your tickets and your passport. Nevertheless, it made me realize how I’d feel if he said it for real.

I love you too, I said to myself. I love that you are so damn good in bed, that you raise my game with your confidence, that you lose things and I can help you find them, that you can treat cross-channel trains like others treat buses.

Joel is always talking of those “and that’s the moment I knew I loved you” moments; he seems to have had hundreds of them. But when he texted me his thanks and love from the train bound for Brussels, I knew too.

At work we had a blissful week where we kept our relationship quiet and got off with each other in the disabled toilets on the second floor. We emailed and texted when we weren’t with each other, though we met up as much as we could. I didn’t play hard to get. I was soft to get.

Then someone caught us in a café around the corner and I knew I’d have to tell Mitzi.

“Great,” she said on hearing the news. “How sweet.”

I was so relieved I didn’t analyze her reaction much. “He’s not gay, you know.”

“No,” she said. “Well, you’ve got to hope not, anyway.”

And that was that. Mitzi’s and my friendship lost its intensity and I became just one of her many disciples, as I remain to this day. Joel and Mitzi developed their own special prickly, barb-throwing relationship, a love-hate thing where nobody is sure of the proportions on each side. Sometimes he’d insist that we avoid her, which would make me insist the opposite. I didn’t want him protesting too much. Then a year or so later she met Michael, and embarked on a love story more epic than anybody else’s ever, with holidays to private islands in the Maldives and a wedding that made the Oscars ceremony seem under-produced.

“Could you make it a bit less evident how little you want to be here?” I snap at Joel as we sluice the boys in the recycled brake-pad bath, picking the Norfolk mud off their limbs.

“Gooey goo for chewy chewing,” he says to Rufus and Gabe and pretends to put some of the glutinous soil into his mouth, much to their amusement. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. You’re always telling me how irritating you find it that I want people to like me. As if I should be wanting everyone to hate me.”

“I just can’t understand why you, who must make everybody
love you, seem so intent on being so boorish and uncharming with Michael and Mitzi. Is there not some middle way?”

“I can’t win, can I? Either it annoys you that I want people to like me or I don’t want certain people to like me enough.”

“Don’t worry—they still think you’re
so
wonderful and I’m
so
lucky to have you. Everybody loves Joel.”

“Except my wife, who apparently hates me.”

“I don’t hate you.” I look nervously at the boys who are busy sudsing themselves up with expensive facial cleanser. Joel looks skeptical. “I just sometimes hate the things you do.”

“Becky, it is a joy to see you.” A freshly shaved and laundered Joel swoops upon her. They are both tall and broad-shouldered, with the capacity to run to fat and arms built for enveloping others. She whispers something into his ear and I see him relax for the first time since we arrived the day before.

“How’s your hotel?” I ask when they’ve finished.

“It’s nice.”

“It’s gorgeous,” adds Cara, who gives me a kiss smelling of lemongrass. “Mitzi, you are clever to have found it for us.”

“It’s divine, isn’t it?” says Mitzi. “Its utter fabulousness was the only thing that got us through all those boring planning meetings and arguments with the builders that we had to come up for when this place was being done.”

Mitzi’s holiday finds are always beyond fabulous. We are invited to admire not Michael’s ability to pay for such luxury, but her cleverness in truffling out these darling boutique hotels and fully staffed villas. That she and Michael go away for the odd child-free week in the chicest of Caribbean hotels is not a sign that they’ve more money than the rest of us, but that they have more discernment, as well as being more in love. Good taste is a sort of morality for her. Even in our scuzzy twenties,
she had a natural predilection for Egyptian cotton sheets, 85-percent-cocoa chocolate and very dry wine. She is someone who actually likes doing yoga.

“Why aren’t you staying here?” I ask Becky. “There’s masses of room.”

“God, there’s no way Cara was going to share a house with half a dozen under-eights waking up at the crack of dawn. She sleeps with an eye mask and everything.” I picture Cara with a pale green silk eye mask and matching slip. I think of the cut-off tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt that make up my nightwear.

“I don’t blame her. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to go on holiday with my family. In fact, if I were me, I wouldn’t want to either.”

We’re interrupted by the arrival of lazy Daisy and her silent husband.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I say. “Though I’m very pleased to see you.”

“My in-laws have a place down the road. Have done forever. Holiday home like this one. Though I say like this one, but a house less like this one it’s hard to imagine. It’s way more shabby than chic.”

“It’s very beautiful around here. I’m getting terrible house envy,” I say. “Mitzi, I want your house.”

“Oh, god, I don’t,” says Daisy. “Such a hassle having a place in the country, even a dump like Robert’s parents’.”

“A country estate is something I’d hate,” sings Joel, showcasing the knowledge of musicals that may have contributed to the rumor that he was gay.

“No, really,” says Daisy. “Boilers going wrong and burst pipes and all that. Such a shag. I can’t be doing with one house most of the time.”

“That’s true,” I say. “I feel that about mine.”

“Although I have discovered the secret to feeling happy at home,” she says.