The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (45 page)

‘Imagine my hand where my leg is,’ he says. ‘And then imagine my head where my hand is.’

‘You are bad,’ I tell him.

‘No, I’m not, I just know what I want,’ he says. ‘It’s a
beautiful coincidence that we are both here tonight, let’s take advantage of it. We can spend a couple of hours together and then forget that anything ever happened. Suspend reality for a while and then go back to our rather dull, routine lives. Come on, Lucy, live a little.’

It is always tempting to read too much into coincidence. But the truth is that we attribute meaning to some events but not others. For example, it is enticing given the fact that Robert Bass is here tonight, when I have only been here twice in the past year, to invest meaning into this serendipity. To say that fate dealt its hand and absolve myself from responsibility for my actions. But, actually, the chances of bumping into my brother are statistically less likely yet I have barely considered that coincidence. And what about the fact that we have exactly the same waiter? We like to find symmetry in the world around us to find meaning in its arbitrariness.

Robert Bass’s hand moves on to my upper thigh and his fingers lightly circle an area ranging from the upper knee to somewhere on my inner thigh. Of course I could get up and walk away but it is just so pleasurable.

I note that we are both staring into our glasses. It is impossible to speak, as though everything has been reduced to the simple movement of his hand on my thigh.

‘So how do you two know each other?’ my brother asks suddenly from the other end of the table. The question makes me jump. I had almost forgotten that there was anyone else here. ‘You haven’t got a lot to say to each other for people who haven’t seen each other for years.’

I shoot him what I hope is a look malevolent enough to deter him from this line of questioning. Robert Bass doesn’t move his hand.

‘We’ve covered all the ground,’ he says. ‘I’d better get home.’ He gets out a piece of paper, writes something on it and passes it to me. ‘My address, in case you want to get in touch.’

When he removes his hand from my leg, I feel an immediate sense of loss. I get up to say goodbye to him. He kisses me again on the cheek, this time it is a swift and perfunctory gesture.

‘See you around,’ he says to Cathy and my brother.

‘I hope I didn’t frighten him off,’ says Mark. I ignore him and instead unfold the piece of paper.

Me at Aberdeen Hotel in Bloomsbury waiting for you
, it says. I scrunch it up quickly and put it in my pocket. Emma comes back to the table.

‘Has he gone already?’ she asks. ‘I thought the party was just beginning.’

I plead tiredness, and fifteen minutes later, find myself catching a cab to the hotel.

‘The journey is the destination’

WHEN I ARRIVE
at the Hotel Aberdeen, I walk with straight shoulders and head held high towards the man behind reception and tell him that I have a reservation. At first I am affronted that he doesn’t get up from his stool to speak to me. Then I realise that the small man in the large suit is so short that, even at full height, his elbows barely reach the reception desk. It doesn’t lend the occasion the gravitas that it deserves. I look round for someone else but the lobby is empty. Hotels that rent rooms by the hour are unlikely to have the kind of service associated with the Sanderson, but I am surprised to see that he is sharpening pencils.

‘Are you attending the anxiety convention?’ he asks slowly in a strong Spanish accent, stroking his chin wisely.

‘Do I look nervous?’ I reply, intrigued that a complete stranger can read my emotions so accurately. He points to a board sitting on the floor beside the lifts. It welcomes guests to the third annual anxiety conference. Guest speakers will address a variety of subjects including 1) the role of deep breathing in controlling nervousness, 2) making anxiety your friend and, 3) breaking the cycle of tension. There will then be a break for anxious delegates to have coffee and tea together.

‘Sometimes talking about it just doesn’t help,’ I tell him.
‘And the caffeine will only exacerbate the problem.’ He looks at me suspiciously and puts down the pencil sharpener.

‘I can find an anxiety expert for you to speak to if you are having any doubts,’ he says. ‘It happens every time. The anxious people are often anxious about attending the anxiety conference.’

For a moment I wonder whether this hotel, notorious for its role in hosting illicit affairs, has become like those television channels that show harrowing dramas and then give numbers for people to call if the programme proves too disturbing. Perhaps it would be a good thing to speak to an anxiety expert about my reasons for being here.

‘I have an appointment with Mr Robert Bass,’ I say decisively. ‘At one o’clock in the morning.’

‘Is he one of the conference leaders?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s, er, a friend. Bass, like the fish.’

‘A friendly fish?’ he enquires. Then he says slowly, ‘A nocturnal, friendly fish.’

He starts to check through his reservation list, moving his hand slowly down a large leather-bound book, stopping at each name for a moment, pointing at it with his newly sharpened pencil before muttering a surname under his breath.

‘Smith . . . Klein . . . Robinson . . . McMannus . . . Smith . . . Villeroy . . . Raphael . . . Smith,’ he says, sounding out every syllable as though he is in an English lesson, and impressively rolling his Rs, so that they resound like volleys of machine-gun fire.

‘Roderick Riley,’ he says with satisfaction, smiling up at me. There are two pages of names. It could take four or five minutes to get from the beginning to the end. Even reading
upside down I can already see that there is no one with the surname Bass on the first page. I look nervously around the foyer of the hotel, wondering how I will explain myself if I see someone I know, then reassuring myself that their presence is unlikely to have an innocent explanation either, unless they are attending the anxiety convention.

I look at the name on the lapel of his jacket, turning my head slightly to one side because it is not pinned on straight. He is called Diego.

When I look up his head is facing mine, tilted at a similar angle. He smiles reassuringly.

‘Do you think he is using his real name?’ he asks. ‘We have a lot of Smiths every day.’

‘I’m sure he has booked the room under the name Bass,’ I say. ‘I think it’s
trucha
in Spanish.’

‘A
trucha
is a trout,’ he says. ‘Maybe you mean a
merluza
?’

‘Isn’t that a red snapper?’ I say. ‘Or a groper or something? He’s more of a cold-water fish. An English fish.’

‘We have so many wonderful fish in Costa Rica,’ he says wistfully. ‘Have you ever been there?’ I shake my head, willing him to turn to the next page of the reservation list because I can see that someone else has arrived and is waiting behind me at a polite distance, shifting from foot to foot and trying not to listen to our conversation.

‘Is he here for the adultery or the anxiety?’ I joke nervously to Diego. He smiles benignly, revealing nothing.

‘And manatees,’ he says. He senses my impatience. ‘Trout, trout, trout,’ he mutters under his breath.

‘No, Bass, B-A-S-S,’ I repeat. ‘Do you want me to have a look?’

He hands me the book with a flourish and turns to the
second page. I scroll down and then, when I find the name Robert Bass, I feel a sort of nauseous excitement.

‘Ah,’ says Diego, winking at me. ‘He only called about twenty minutes ago. I’ll show you up to your room. It’s booked for three hours, but if you overrun I won’t charge you.’

He starts walking towards the lift. I can’t believe that Robert Bass has booked the room for so long. Won’t his wife be suspicious if he goes out until four in the morning? It is strange but it doesn’t occur to me to ask the same question about Tom.

I try to calculate how many times we might have sex in three hours and then feel shaky. The man who was queuing behind me at reception looks bemused as I obediently follow Diego into the lift.

‘You have no luggage I see,’ he says, shutting the lift doors behind us and pressing a button to take us to the fifth floor.

‘I’m not here for very long,’ I say. He is looking at my wedding ring. I put my hands behind my back and look up at the ceiling.

The lift shudders to a halt on the fifth floor. We walk down a long corridor and he opens the door of room 507 with pride.

‘This is one of our best rooms,’ he says. He goes towards the bed, lifts the covers and pulls back the top quarter of the sheets so that they lie on the bedspread in a perfect sandwich-shaped triangle. I imagine Robert Bass and myself lying in this bed and put out a hand to steady myself.

Diego wants to show me the bathroom.

‘The bath is enormous. Big enough for two. Or three,’ he says. ‘Not big enough for a manatee though.’ No matter what he says, his voice is still sorrowful.

He goes back into the bedroom and asks whether I want room service to send anything up.

‘We have Tension Tamer tea for the anxiety delegates,’ he says kindly.

‘That would be great,’ I reply.

Anticipation does not necessarily heighten desire. For the professionally unfaithful, those who habitually wait for their lovers in functional hotel rooms in Bloomsbury, it might allow time to get into the mood, to make the switch between work and play, to have a shower and consider the pleasures that lie ahead. Perhaps they lie back on the carefully made bed with its cover that matches the curtains and watch the Playboy channel or read a book and order a bottle of cheap wine.

I, on the other hand, sit gingerly on the edge of the bed and wonder about how clean the mattress is, given its workload. My mood of languid desire has passed and I am starting to become all too aware of my surroundings. When I look at the door key lying on the bed beside me, I start to invest the numbers with ridiculous emotional significance. Five hundred and seven. If you subtract seven from fifty, it is forty-three, Tom’s age. We were married on 5 July. The London underground was bombed on 7 July. I wonder what time in the morning the anxiety conference is programmed to start. I conclude that it will be an early kick-off, because it wouldn’t be good to allow a group of tense people to wait for too long for redemption.

There is a television but I prefer the quiet. If the silence is overwhelming I can always put on the radio and listen to the World Service. I wonder if Robert Bass listens to the World Service and whether I could suggest to him as a preliminary exercise that we just lie beside each other in companionable silence and listen to the radio for fifteen minutes and then go home. And then I wonder what he watches on television, what
books he reads, whether he leaves a decent tip for waiters, whether his cup is half-full or half-empty, what was the last film he saw. It strikes me that I know very little about him apart from the kind of routine information that parents share. I know his children had single measles jabs, that there is no television allowed during the school week, and that they each play two musical instruments.

Would he be able to light a fire during a damp camping trip? Does he patrol the fridge for inexplicable changes in the way food is organised? Would he notice, for example, if the yogurts were on the same shelf as the chicken, if the lettuce had formed a close relationship with a half-eaten jelly or if the milk was not stored according to its sell-by date? Does he talk in his sleep? Does he have a mother complex? Are his parents alive? Does he have siblings?

Of course, I might discover that we concur on everything. More likely, I would determine that his imperfections are different from Tom’s but not necessarily any the less irritating in the long term. The first time someone sleeps diagonally across the bed, their legs straying over to the other side, the desire for communion through the lonely hours of the night seems a sweet gesture. Within a week it becomes mildly irritating and painful. Ahead lies a future of single beds.

Then I consider the fact that all too often when Robert Bass has spoken, I have found what he says irritating. This is something that I have tried to suppress over the previous months, but now all his most annoying comments and habits crowd up behind each other, jostling for consideration.

The vanity of removing his cycling helmet and combing his hair before he goes into school seems ridiculous; the way he expounds his parenting techniques – no television during the
week; the importance of playing with children without directing play; of never using processed food not even a can of baked beans – becomes thoroughly irritating. Even the way he walks, like a cowboy, suddenly seems ridiculous. Everything is so mannered. The scars on his face, far from being manly, are a hangover from adolescent acne.

It reminds me of something that had happened during a summer holiday when, out of the blue, Simon Miller had called at my parents’ house and asked whether he could come and see me. It had been at least two years since we last met up and I was studying at Manchester. My parents were on holiday and I was fully prepared that he might stay the night and we might relive the passion of our teenage years. When he arrived I noticed that he was wearing a pair of white towelling socks, and for some inexplicable reason, this detonated a series of negative feelings towards him, culminating in him spending the night in the spare bedroom with me counting the hours before he left. When I met Tom, and he committed far worse sartorial hara-kiri, I was relieved to find that it had no effect. Even the shag-pile dressing gown was endearing. Thinking of Tom makes me feel nostalgic.

There is a soft knock at the door. I’m unsure what to do. I decide that it looks a little forward to be lying on the bed but then, opening the door might prove even more awkward, because it isn’t obvious where we would both sit down. There is a small table with one chair beside the window. All routes lead to the bed. I could swear that there is a worn path between the door and the bed, like a track cut with a lawnmower through a field of long grass, trampled by people for whom time is of the essence.