The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (17 page)

The traffic fines remain a blind spot. Last month, a bailiff arrived at the front door with a summons for a fine that I received about two years ago. Tom happened to be at home, working on architectural plans. The bailiff, a tall, well-built man, was wearing an ill-cut grey suit made of such cheap man-made fibre that, when he pulled a pen out of the top pocket for me to acknowledge receipt, small sparks flew.

He was not an unpleasant man. In fact, he was surprisingly placid, a characteristic reinforced by his eyelids, which turned down at the ends, like a friendly bloodhound. There was no evidence that he had absorbed any of the aggression and stress that must accompany his job. His face was almost serene. Mine, on the other hand, was furrowed with worry. It was not the fear of prosecution but the fear of Tom uncovering my trail of financial deception.

So when I heard Tom coming upstairs from the kitchen to see who was at the door, I persuaded the bailiff to pretend he was a Jehovah’s Witness, a bluff that he went along with surprisingly obligingly. He seemed completely at ease with this deviation from his job description.

‘Come Armageddon,’ he said loudly, peering across my shoulder at Tom, who was still dressed in a pair of pyjamas, ‘only the chosen will be saved. As a sinner you can repent, but only if you have resolved any outstanding parking issues.’

Tom looked vaguely bemused and scratched his head, making his dark hair stand on end.

‘Surely there are many worse sins,’ he said. ‘In any case, the statistical probability of one of the chosen being a traffic warden is infinitesimal, so no one would be any the wiser.’

‘It’s best not to engage, otherwise he’ll never leave,’ I whispered to Tom, pushing him back downstairs. ‘I’ll deal with this. You get on with your work.’ I went back to the front door and signed for the summons.

‘It is not for me to say,’ said the bailiff, ‘but I really think, Mrs Sweeney, that you should try and sort out all of this. It must be very stressful, having to hide this kind of thing from your husband.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I do it all the time,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘Women are very good at juggling deception. It’s part of multi-tasking.’ He shook his head, opened up a battered leather briefcase and stuffed my papers inside before snapping it shut and clasping my hand.

I know that one day I should consult someone practical like Emma, who never even runs an overdraft, for advice on how to resolve this. Or at least I should add all the credit card bills and parking fines together, to assess exactly how much I owe. But I simply can’t face up to the situation. It’s been so long since I actually accrued the debt that I can’t even remember what impulse purchases caused this catastrophic chain of events. They were probably thrown out years ago.

‘Mum, is it really true that the Nazis will never take Maria?’ Joe anxiously calls from the sofa.

‘It is, she smells far too sweet,’ I shout from the other side of the room, hoping this will seal the dispute.

‘Mum, do you think that one day I could make a pair of shorts from the curtains in my bedroom?’ he says.

‘Of course, darling,’ I say distractedly, hiding envelopes at the back of the drawer and then covering my tracks with a pile of catalogues.

‘Perhaps Joe shouldn’t watch this film any more,’ says my mother-in-law. I am unaware that she has come upstairs from the kitchen. I shut the drawer a little too firmly and note her looking at it suspiciously.

‘He has the same issues regardless of what he is watching. Even if it’s something totally benign,’ I say, standing up and moving away from the desk. ‘He’s just a very sensitive child.’

‘Who is this Major Tom that he keeps talking about? Is he a friend of your parents?’ she asks.

She is still staring at the bottom drawer, her hands stuck deeply in the pockets of Tom’s dressing gown. It has been washed and has changed colour from a sort of dirty orange to pale yellow. It is so big on her tiny frame that she has to tie it behind her back. Her feet and head, still red from the bath, poke out the ends like jam oozing from a fat Swiss roll.

Petra has been here all week, and there is no sign of her imminent departure. Each day she becomes more embedded. This is a familiar pattern. I will have to wait for Tom to come home to broach the subject of when she might leave. Whenever the situation threatens to become intolerable, for example when I open the wardrobe and discover that she has organised his pants into neat colour-coordinated piles, I resolve to ask her to go. She knows that she has overstepped the mark, and tries to rein herself in for the rest of the day, but her compulsion for organising overrides everything else. She tries to compensate by asking me exactly which area of the house would benefit
from further precision tidying, and offers free babysitting, which she knows I will never turn down. For the most part, this bribery quells the waves of panic. The laundry mountain is now the size of a decent hill, still undulating but less imposing. Tom’s shirts are all ironed. Socks that lost their partners years ago have been reunited and those that missed out on a happy reunion condemned to the dustbin.

‘I was wondering, Lucy, whether we could have lunch together next week,’ she says, nervously fiddling with a string of pearls round her neck as I am trying to leave the house. Tom is due back later tonight but there is no sign of bags being packed.

‘But Petra, we’ve had lunch together almost every day this week,’ I say, feeling slightly panicked and reaching out for my coat to signal my imminent departure.

‘There is something important that I need to talk to you about. It has to be said somewhere neutral. Perhaps we could meet in John Lewis, and combine it with Christmas shopping? I need to get something for your parents.’ She pauses without looking up from her cup of coffee. ‘Please don’t mention to Tom that we are meeting. I’m sorry you lost your election the other day, by the way. Perhaps it’s for the best, given everything else you’ve got on your mind.’

Although I have already started towards the front door, I stop in my tracks. My assumption is that somehow over the past week my inner turmoil has reached the surface and has started to bubble through my pores, so that I now smell of self-doubt and uncertainty. My mother-in-law has many foibles, but intrigue on a grand scale is not one of them. In the twelve years since I first met her, this is her most significant overture to me, and I know it must be serious because she has a natural
aversion to emotional honesty. Still, at least I have a few days to prepare a plausible defence. Later that evening, installed in the cathedral-like space that is Emma’s new home in Clerkenwell, drinking expensive wine with her and Cathy, I start to relax. Obviously my mother-in-law has made the decision to intervene because she is fearful for her son. On the other hand, she never likes to hear the truth if it is too unpalatable or unsettling. I imagine layers of emotional deception compacted against each other like bands of sediment, in colours that start to run into each other over the years, so that it is impossible to examine any single part with clarity.

The walls of Emma’s loft are very white, almost clinical. Some slide into each other on invisible runners to create new rooms and spaces. These are the kinds of optical tricks that appeal to Tom. I, on the other hand, find it all quite disconcerting. I don’t want my home to be a movable feast. So when Emma shows Cathy and me how the sitting room can be turned into a spare bedroom and how the bedroom can double in size, it makes me feel slightly seasick.

I’m not sure for whom this flat was built. Certainly not for families or anyone suffering from depression. There are treacherous drops from the balconies that run round the edge and large flowerpots filled with fashionable grasses that cut your skin if you brush past them too closely. It is, however, a great place for parties.

I recognise a few belongings from Emma’s Notting Hill home, including a couple of Patrick Heron prints, and a kitsch white vase with big flowers stuck around the rim that I gave her on her thirtieth birthday. They are dwarfed by the space. The lift from the ground floor opens up impressively into the sitting room but it takes two of us to pull back the heavy iron grilles
and I wonder how Emma manages to get in and out on her own.

We are unusually silent. Emma is struggling with a murky bucket of mussels. She is angrily scrubbing them.

‘I’ve had a bad day,’ she says finally. ‘I had to phone the parents of one of our correspondents in Iraq and tell them that their son was killed in an ambush. I don’t want to talk about it. These mussels are a bitch to clean, they are so beardy.’

‘Maybe something bigger than a toothbrush would make it easier,’ Cathy says gently.

Emma’s bad days are always on a grand scale compared to my own, involving, as they often do, significant events on the world stage. Anything from tsunamis to civil war. Impressive problems. Discovering that my mother-in-law has organised my husband’s pants into a colour-coordinated scheme without asking whether she can go in our bedroom hardly competes.

I look round the kitchen, taking in the Gaggia coffee machine, Kitchen Aid mixer and twin dishwashers. Only one of the dishwashers has been used. It is all conceived on such an enormous scale that Emma looks as though she is in Brobdingnag, standing on steps to open cupboards beyond the reach of mere mortals, peering into a huge American-style fridge that is empty apart from lots of bottles of white wine, Puligny Montrachet, it says on the labels, and a packet of shrivelled rocket. She looks even tinier than usual and quaintly domestic in an apron, gripping a wooden spoon in her fist like a toddler holding a fork for the first time. I can’t remember ever eating a meal cooked by her before.

‘What are we having?’ I ask.

‘Mussels followed by pan-fried scallops with pancetta,’ she says, frowning at a Jamie Oliver cook book and lining up brand
new Le Creuset saucepans on the granite worktop. What is it about people who never cook, choosing recipes that even a professional chef would find challenging? She puts everything in the oven and shuts the door a little too hard.

‘Let’s sit down and have a drink. It’s hard work being a domestic goddess. I don’t know how you manage to hold it all together, Lucy,’ says Emma, walking to the other end of the room and slumping in an oversize sofa. Her kitten-heel boots make a disproportionally loud noise on the poured cement floor.

I have wasted many hours explaining to Emma the grounds on which I fail to qualify for domestic goddess status, and finally realised about a year ago that maintaining this illusion is important to her. As she scrolls through news stories on her screen in her glass bubble, I know she imagines me in a floral Cath Kidston pinny, removing buns that I have made with the children from the oven, and drawing up plans of how they should be decorated, a complicated endeavour involving different-coloured icing, little silver balls and sprinkles.

Emma likes to invest her friends with traits that bear little resemblance to reality, but they’re always positive, which is what makes the habit tolerable. So in her mind, I am a glamorous, thin mother of three, with a healthy bank balance, tidy home and cooperative children. It is a picture painted in primary colours because the idea that any of us might lead an anaemic existence is anathema to her. It is also a way for her to avoid confrontation with the underbelly of life. And sometimes it is easier to believe the myth, because it makes me feel good.

‘So how is living apart together?’ I ask her, anticipating a rosy account filled with witty observation and funny anecdotes.

‘Well, the bed finally arrived, which is bliss. Sometimes I
wake in the night and Guy is lying beside me and I’m so excited that I can’t get back to sleep. I don’t want to disturb him because I don’t want him to go, and yet I’m terrified that if I don’t send him home, his wife will find out. Other times I feel a bit like a songbird trapped in a cage,’ she says, kicking off her boots and undoing the top button of her jeans.

‘And we’re still going to hotels at lunch-time, because it’s an addiction that’s hard to break. I spend too many evenings waiting for Guy to call, because I hardly know anyone who lives in this area. I avoid making other plans in case there is a chance that he can escape work and make an excuse to his wife. And then as soon as he arrives I forget how I felt and cook elaborate recipes from one of these books, drink lots of wine, and have fantastic sex.’

‘That all sounds amazing,’ I say, because largely it does and that is what Emma wants to hear. She won’t want us to dwell on the songbird image. But there is a touch of uncertainty in her voice. She sounds vulnerable.

‘But I can’t help thinking it’s a relationship that’s stunted from the start. A runt relationship, that’s never going to grow into something else,’ she continues. ‘We only exist within the confines of this flat. The rare moments when we are together outside of this space, we can’t even touch each other. Although that makes it more charged when you can. Let’s eat. It must be ready. I can’t bear the sound of my own voice any more.’

We move to the kitchen table to eat the meal that Emma has prepared. She has laid each place with a complex arrangement of knives, forks and spoons, and two glasses, one for water and one for wine. A basket of bread cut into delicate slices sits in the middle, already going stale. There is something poignant in this effort, as though she is trying to mark out new territory
that doesn’t really belong to her. Everything is borrowed from someone else’s life.

The mussels still have sand and bits of beard in them, and the scallops are dry and rubbery because Emma put them in the oven instead of frying them over a hot heat for a short time. So for a few minutes we sit there in companionable silence. I chew a scallop in my right cheek until the muscles beg for mercy and then swap sides. When we discover that they are resistant to all attempts to break them down into a more manageable consistency, we swallow them with gulps of red wine as though we are taking a vitamin supplement. Still, we compliment Emma on her nascent culinary achievements.

‘You don’t have to pretend, I know I’m a crap cook,’ she says, laughing, as though she is relieved that one of her most long-standing attributes hasn’t changed. ‘Actually, Guy does most of the cooking. At home his wife doesn’t let him near the kitchen.’