The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (41 page)

‘I think it’s only fair if we take a vote on something like this,’ says Robert Bass moodily, leaning forward. The right sleeve of his T-shirt creeps down to cover the top of his arm.

‘In vita priore ego imperator romanus fui,’
says Alpha Mum. ‘Besides, there was no democracy in ancient Rome. We agreed last term that all school events should have an educational component.’

‘But we’re not in ancient Rome, we’re in north London,’ insists Robert Bass. ‘Not all of us are studying GCSE Latin to help with our children’s homework.’

He looks even more attractive when he is angry, I think, gazing at him dreamily. It certainly beats his monologues on the importance of composting and directing children’s play.

‘Perhaps I can use the costume that I wore in
Troy
,’ suggests Celebrity Dad, trying to repair the frayed edges of the discussion. Robert Bass glares at him.

‘Wrong era, but what a marvellous idea,’ says Alpha Mum, clapping her hands excitedly and opening up her laptop.

‘I hope you’ve brought those ladies with you again,’ says Celebrity Dad, leaning forward towards her. Alpha Mum squirms in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her smile is taut. But she is clearly enjoying the attention.

‘Your costume, does it involve lorica and greaves?’ she asks demurely.

‘The whole shebang, including an Aquincum helmet with a red crest,’ says Celebrity Dad.

‘Are you proposing that we all make our own costumes?’ I ask.

‘You can just run something up on your sewing machine, can’t you?’ says Alpha Mum impatiently.

‘I don’t have a sewing machine and it took me a week to make the Barney Bear costume for the school play,’ I plead.

‘And what are the men meant to wear?’ asks Robert Bass. ‘Not all of us have costumes from Hollywood films.’

‘Something short, pleated, with strappy sandals,’ fires back Alpha Mum, knowing that she is in the driving seat. ‘I’m sure Lucy will help you. I am proposing that you run the Roman cake stall together.’

‘I’m not sure that is such a good idea,’ I say. Everyone stares at me. ‘Can’t I do Pin the Tail on the Trojan Horse instead?’

‘Wrong era,’ says Alpha Mum dismissively. ‘Why don’t you want to do the cake stall with Robert?’ She looks at me and then at Robert Bass, who shrugs his shoulders dismissively.

‘Are you worried about his levels of enthusiasm?’ she asks. I splutter on my orange juice.

‘I’ll help you as well, Lucy,’ says Celebrity Dad. ‘I am Spartacus.’ He is doing his best Kirk Douglas impression.

‘No, I am Spartacus,’ replies Robert Bass. Then Isobel joins in.

‘No, I am Spartacus,’ she says. We all start laughing.

Then suddenly Isobel stands up beside me, her arm outstretched, and her hand pointing in the air. We all look at her in awed silence.

‘I’ve got it,’ she says. ‘Think Pleats Please, think gorgeous Miu Miu gladiator sandals with turquoise stones, think Vestal Virgin.’

‘We’re meant to raise money, not spend it,’ says Robert Bass sternly.

‘I’m glad that some of you can muster a little enthusiasm,’ says Alpha Mum. ‘We’ll meet in the playground early Saturday morning with our contributions, all themed of course, and in full costume.’ We all nod meekly.

‘Why have you made so many cakes?’ asks Tom late Friday night. ‘Is it one for every glass of wine you have drunk this evening?’

‘I just need one to be perfect,’ I say, slumping in the chair and wrapping Tom’s dressing gown around me. ‘My entire status as a mother depends on producing a perfect cake.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lucy,’ says Tom. ‘How can baking have any bearing on your parenting skills? It’s completely illogical. You’re behaving like your mother at Christmas.’

‘It’s a genetic condition, the inability to bake a cake,’ I say.

‘Couldn’t you have got Deep Shallows to do them instead?’ he asks. ‘You are sharing the cake stall, after all.’

‘You must stop calling him that,’ I say.

‘Well, I can hardly call him Sexy Domesticated Dad, can I,’ he says teasingly. ‘Isobel told me that is how the mums refer to him. I thought baking was his speciality?’

‘It is, that is the point,’ I say getting flustered.

‘Why are they so flat?’ he says, pressing one, which immediately deflates further.

‘They look like Frisbees.’ Then he pauses. ‘Why don’t you pretend they are Roman discuses?’

I look at him in awe. ‘What a brilliant idea,’ I say, almost weeping with relief. I go over to hug him.

‘That dressing gown is revolting,’ he says, putting his arms around me. We lean against each other in silence.

‘Are you all right?’ asks Tom. ‘You seem very distracted of late, even by your standards. Are you worrying about Emma? Or Cathy? Or Isobel?’

‘I’m fine. I’m looking forward to the summer and going to Italy,’ I say.

‘The library will be well under way by then, and I’ll take a proper break,’ he says. ‘We can find each other again, we just need to get through the next month. I’m going to bed. Did I tell you I have to spend next week in Milan again?’

He hadn’t, but to be honest, I was getting used to Tom being away. The problem is not being apart but learning to be together again. The drift set in months ago and now it is actually easier to be on my own. I just need to get to the end of the school year. The summer holidays loom on the horizon like dry land after a rocky spell at sea. If I can get through the school fete then I am safe. The holidays will put a proper distance between Robert Bass and myself and, besides, after that he will be away promoting his book.

At five o’clock in the morning, I stumble down into the kitchen ready to renew hostilities. Even before I reach the basement, the acrid smell of burnt cake fills my nose. By the end of the previous evening, a combination of sleep deprivation and too much wine meant I had fallen asleep on the job, condemning my last experiment, a Victoria sponge, to an uncertain future that didn’t involve the Roman Empire.

I sip from a glass of wine left over from the night before to soothe my nerves, hoping that I won’t get breathalysed on my way to school. An overwhelming sight awaits me, more
battleground than domestic idyll. Every bowl commandeered into action during this late-night exercise is filled with cake mix now set unforgivingly hard. On the sideboard there is a no-man’s-land of unidentifiable gunk and a couple of empty wine bottles. Dirty saucepans are stranded in pools of icing. The Magimix is partially encased in chocolate. I assess the situation with admirable sangfroid and decide dispassionately that the carefully sculpted chocolate dormice complete with string tails can be salvaged, along with one slightly overcooked chocolate sponge and three discuses.

Then I put on the radio and listen to a programme aimed at people who get up early to milk cows and those caught in cake peonage. More swallows are returning to Britain after years in decline; there is a shortage of shepherds and rural vicars. This pastoral image has soothing qualities and I start another cake with renewed vigour. As I crack eggs into a bowl I look out of the window into the garden and see a sheet flapping gently on the washing line. Then I realise that, in my compulsion to bake cakes, I have forgotten the most crucial ingredient of the day, the hand-made Roman costume. I stride decisively into the garden, buoyed by the early-morning glass of wine, and snatch the sheet from the washing line. A wood pigeon eyes the Victoria sponge that I leave on the lawn and warbles appreciatively from the end of the garden.

Nil desperandum, to every problem there is a solution, and mine is staring me in the face. A beautifully clean, if unironed, fitted single sheet waiting for its moment of glory. Using the kitchen scissors I cut a rough circle where the head should be. Beside the shorts that Joe manufactured, it looks like the work of an amateur, but with a rope round my middle I will pass for a slave girl or some other ancient minion. Our neighbours’
curtains are firmly shut. I take off the dressing gown and shake the sheet.

I hear a noise at the window and look up to see Tom peering out of our bedroom, looking confused. He opens the window and sleepily leans out.

‘Why are you standing naked in the garden at five o’clock in the morning?’ he asks wearily, as though fearing the answer. He spots the cake in the middle of the lawn. ‘Don’t tell me, you’re practising the chocolate discus competition. I’m beginning to wonder about the sanity of parents at this school, particularly your own.’

‘Sshh, you’ll wake everyone up,’ I say, cutting a slightly larger hole around the neck.

‘Why have you ruined that sheet?’ he asks.

‘There, isn’t it obvious now?’ I ask.

‘Not to the idle bystander,’ he says.

‘It’s my Roman costume,’ I tell him.

‘Funny that, because it looks as though you are wearing a sheet with a hole cut in the middle,’ he says, slamming the window shut and muttering under his breath.

A few minutes later he rumbles into the kitchen. Glancing up at the spots of chocolate on the ceiling he says, with a hint of desperation, ‘God, Lucy, just tell me again how you make so much mess? Why don’t you tidy up as you go along? It’s a system tried and tested over the centuries. Even during Roman times. Look at the picture of my mother, it looks as though she has a dermatological condition.’ He uses his finger to wipe the spots from Petra’s portrait and carefully licks them clean.

I explain that at a key moment in the cake-making process I was unable to find the lid of the blender and so, with Heath
Robinson-like ingenuity, I improvised by using a piece of cardboard with a hole cut in the middle for the handheld electric whisk.

‘Is that something you saw on
Blue Peter
?’ he asks. ‘You realise that you could have just put it all in a smaller bowl.’

I remove my final effort from the oven and tip it from the cake tin. It has conspired to be at once overcooked on the outside and undercooked in the middle.

‘How can that be?’ I ask him despairingly. ‘It’s like being fat and thin at the same time.’ He goes to the tool box and brings out a hacksaw.

‘That worked for Joe’s birthday cake last year,’ he says reassuringly. ‘Then you can cut a hole in the middle and fill it with chocolate eggs.’

‘But chocolate eggs aren’t authentically Roman,’ I tell him.

‘Nor is a cake stall. I don’t understand why you volunteer to do something that will inevitably end in disaster. It’s so masochistic.’ Then he stops. ‘It’s difficult to have a serious conversation with an adult dressed in a sheet.’

He goes upstairs and brings down his old tweed coat.

‘I know it’s hot, but you cannot walk to school wearing that. You look absurd. I’m going back to bed. I’ll get the boys up and bring them along later.’

In rebellious mood, I leave the house a couple of hours later, carrying my sponge discuses and chocolate dormice in a basket. I walk towards school feeling hot and itchy in Tom’s coat. Just outside the school gate, I spot Robert Bass locking up his bicycle, with a Cath Kidston cake tin under his arm. It is too late to avoid him.

‘Carrot cake. All organic,’ he smiles nonchalantly. ‘My speciality.’

I resolve to recall this sentence every time I think of him, because if ever there were six words designed to suppress desire, then these are them.

He is also wearing a long overcoat. I stare at his calves and notice that they are entwined in leather, in the manner of an ancient Roman.

‘What have you got on under there?’ I ask.

‘As instructed, I am wearing a short off-the-shoulder toga and leather belt,’ he smiles, gritting his teeth.

‘How short?’ I ask.

‘Well, put it this way, we could only find a child-sized sheet,’ he says, opening up the coat to show me the full, glorious effect. Robert Bass is wearing a mini-skirt to the school fete. I indulgently gaze at his legs, a little too hairy for my taste, but finely honed. In the spirit of shared humiliation, I show him my own fitted sheet with the hastily hacked hole in the middle. He visibly blanches.

‘It’s Casper the Ghost,’ he says, retreating towards the hedge to get a better view.

I am saved from further excoriation by the arrival of Isobel. She draws up beside us and her electric window winds down.

‘Comparing notes?’ she asks rhetorically. She disembarks, wearing a full-length cream number with perfectly ironed pleats and little spaghetti straps.

‘How on earth did you manage that?’ I say, genuinely impressed.

‘Issey Miyake,’ she replies.

‘I didn’t know you had a Japanese cleaner,’ says Robert Bass.

‘I got it especially,’ she informs me. It is then I realise that my priorities are wrong. Chocolate cakes are anonymous, but the dress code is highly visible.

Robert Bass and I walk in silence towards our cake stall.

‘About the party, Lucy,’ he says. ‘We need to talk.’

‘There’s nothing to say,’ I say, looking around in case someone is listening.

‘You can’t avoid me for ever,’ he says, standing behind the trestle table with his arms folded.

It is difficult to imagine a circumstance that could be more engaging than the conversation that Robert Bass is trying to engineer. But the playground falls silent as a very authentic-looking centurion guard, wearing a short white skirt, full body armour and helmet complete with visor and crest, walks towards us.

‘Hail Caesar,’ he shouts to us, waving his sword in the air. Celebrity Dad has arrived.

‘I’m here to defend your honour, Lucy,’ he whispers, as Robert Bass walks to the front of the stall and starts unpacking cakes. ‘Unless I pass out first. It’s all a bit tight. I think I have gained a little weight since I made that film. It must be the beer.’

‘Not the whisky?’ I ask.

‘Well, that too,’ he says.

‘Can everyone assume their positions,’ shouts Alpha Mum, clapping her hands.

As we stand behind the cake stall, the clouds break open and Robert Bass and I discover that, with the sun upon our backs, our sheets are rendered completely transparent.

‘Those don’t leave a lot to the imagination,’ says Celebrity Dad, looking us up and down from under his visor, his layers of skirt bobbing up and down pleasingly.