The Yummy Mummy (31 page)

Around the edge of the hall, in a horseshoe shape, is a row of padded maroon chairs, like the ones you might find at a cheaper private dentist. Sitting on them are huddled women talking intently. A lot of the women are fat, possibly because they’re all eating chocolate biscuits. The women chat over the remaining empty seats, leaving no option but to intrude on the conversation. I settle on a seat between two benign-looking women in their late twenties.

“Sorry.” I sit down. They ignore me, dunk their biscuits. A pretty little blond girl, about two, comes up to the knee of the fattest lady on my left. She doesn’t look like her. And she is whining. She wants another biscuit.

“Mummy says no more than one biscuit in the morning,” the woman mutters halfheartedly. Australian accent. “Oh well, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” She gives the girl a biscuit and exchanges glances with the woman to my right, their eyes meeting somewhere near my forehead.

“Are you a nanny?” I ask shyly.

“Oh yes, we’re all nannies here.” She smiles, slightly surprised I’ve addressed her.

“Where are all the mothers?”

“Good question.” She rolls her eyes like I’ve hit on a topic she could talk about for hours but won’t because she’s not like that. Then she engages her friend back into loud nanny talk—pay, holidays, the husband’s habit of pissing all over the loo seat. I want to ask them if they know anyone who could look after Evie when I go back to work but can’t find a window in which to interrupt. Instead, I bend back into the chair, out of the way of their conversational traffic, and feel rather superfluous, considering that Evie is by far the youngest at the playgroup and displays an almost autistic disinterest in all the other children.

A swell of loneliness threatens like an overdue sneeze. I feel—how pathetic is this?—like the new girl no one wants to talk to on the playground. Where are all my comrades? I was sold the line that becoming a mother meant immediate membership to some kind of club. But it doesn’t, not now. Mum says she spent years popping from neighborly house to house in the seventies, with sultana rock cakes in her stripy shopper and children hanging from her Laura Ashley skirt: “Such easy, sociable years.” But it’s not the seventies. In London it’s not really the done thing to pop round to someone’s house unannounced. Chances are that only the nanny will be at home anyway.

Suddenly, there is a large cold gust of wind and the door screeches open. The sea of children parts.

“Kate!” A more astonishing sight than the second coming.

Kate smiles her overbite smile and surveys the room curiously. “Your mum said you were coming here, been trying to find you.” A seat is liberated from an impressive bottom two seats down and the nannies budge up reluctantly. Kate puts her hand on my knee. “How come you haven’t got back to me?” she says softly.

“Sorry, been really crap at returning calls. It’s been difficult. . . .” My fears of Kate’s being too involved or too Joe-sided suddenly seem unfounded and silly. A pause.

“So Joe’s not back, then?” Kate asks.

“In Barcelona. A design conference.” Kate looks surprised. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No, Joe’s been almost as bad as you, holding everything in, not filling me in.” Kate gazes out at the toddler carnage and looks doleful. “He always retreats into himself when something goes wrong, doesn’t he?”

I nod. It is good to talk to someone who knows Joe almost as well as me. She has the Joe shorthand.

“Or do you think he’s pissed off with me?” she asks.

“You? Why?”

“He hasn’t confided in me at all.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No, really. Joe adores you, Kate.”

Kate smiles and sits straighter on her maroon chair. She looks different. Slightly plumper, but not in a bad way. And radiant. Her skin gleams with health, her eyes and hair shine. “This is bedlam.”

“Meant to be baby massage. Got the wrong day.”

Kate laughs and puts a hand on my knee. “Oh well, easily done in your state, I’m sure. Now are you going to tell me what the hell went on? One minute you’re getting married . . .”

“Joe hasn’t told you?”

Kate shakes her head. Joe, loyal to the end. He wouldn’t humiliate me, not even when I deserved it.

“Well, er. . . . it’s complicated. . . .”

“Go on.”

“I . . . I . . . Joe caught . . .” I can’t do it. She’ll take Joe’s side. Who wouldn’t? And I can’t cope with Kate’s turning against me, too. “Irreconcilable differences.”

“Amy? You can tell
me
, you know.” She waits for my response, doesn’t get it. “But I understand if you don’t really want to talk, not right now.” Sweet Kate, trying so hard to be accommodating when she’s dying for the gory details. “I’m so sorry. It shouldn’t be like this.”

I shake my head and think back to all those happy times, me and Joe lounging around her Notting Hill flat, the lazy brunches, the boozy child-free nights. No, it shouldn’t be like this. Kate slips her hand into mine and squeezes it and I feel a strong, very real flow of love from her flesh to mine, like a kind of broadband Reiki transfer. Dear Kate, dependable contrary Kate. I squeeze her hand back.

“Let’s go.”

Back home, she picks a photo off the fire surround: Joe on a Goan beach against a shrieking red sunset, smiling, stoned. I found it in the office, put it up yesterday for company. Solitariness is doing funny things to my head. “You’re still surrounding yourself with him? I’m not sure this is healthy. I don’t want you to get more hurt, Amy. And by pretending it’s all fine and he’s coming home . . .”

“You don’t think he will?” I interrupt. Does she know something I don’t? Is this her soft way of letting me down?

“Maybe. But probably best to accept he isn’t and move on.”

“Move on? Where the hell to?”

Kate perches neatly on the sofa arm, crossing her legs and cocking her head to the side, warming to the counseling role. “A life, for starters. Amy, I can see you’ve been moping around . . . living in this . . . this pit.”

“It could probably do with a clean.”

“This isn’t
you
! Last time we met you looked like the sexiest mother on God’s earth, groomed, glamorous. And now, well, look at you.” She pulls something out of my hair. “Egg! Eew!” She shakes the yellow crust off her finger. Evie, who is sitting on my knee, stretches out to catch it with a delighted shriek.

“But . . .”

“Moping isn’t going to win him back.” She slaps her hand on the mantelpiece, tossing a blanket of dust into the air.

“Suppose you’d know.” I’m not being sarcastic. Kate understands men. She’s read hundreds of self-help books about them and has always navigated the harsh Darwinian dating jungle like a native bushman.

“Moping makes a woman less attractive. It gives too much away.” Kate leans forward on the sofa and holds my hands in an evangelical clasp. “You need some fire back! Don’t feel sorry, get angry! Ask yourself, why
hasn’t
he phoned from Barcelona? Why isn’t he back here with you now? Stop making excuses for him and get on with your life!”

Evie raises an eyebrow. I slump onto the sofa, surprised and winded by the force of her conviction. “I was rather hoping he’d come back.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Kate’s cocked empathetic head is now almost at right angles to the rest of her body. “You know what I think? I think you should pack up his stuff, show you’re no doormat. It will help wash him out of your hair!”

Wash him out of my hair? Do people without children have any idea of the impossibility of doing that to the father of your child? “This isn’t a teenage dating situation, Kate. It isn’t that easy.”

“No, no, of course not, I don’t mean to trivialize it. I’m just suggesting a fresh start, that’s all. I care about you.” I’m touched, feel bad for doubting her mixed loyalties.

“I suppose it may give him a jolt. Show him this isn’t a game.”

“Exactly! Come on, this place needs a tidy at the very least. I’ll help you.”

After putting a protesting Evie down to sleep—she hates to miss the action—Kate and I get to work. Kate stacks his books in an old cardboard box, dusty books dancing with yellow mites. I start on his clothes. Socks, with their familiar residue of trainers. Joe’s winter sweaters. The cashmere navy one I got him two years ago to match his eyes. There’s a little hole in the left sleeve where Evie likes to wiggle her pinky finger. Unworn sweaters from Christmases past. One from my mother that he’d never dare give to Oxfam, certain that she’d find it. I press them down into a holdall, fold tissue paper over the top like a shop assistant, and imagine him opening it, touched by the care that had gone into its packing. His bathroom cabinet. Shaving foam. Aftershave, the smell of Joe’s chin. Joe’s comb. Bits of his hair. Bits of DNA. Bits of Evie.

Kate comes upstairs and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay? Is this difficult for you?”

“Nah. Weirdly, I kind of feel like I’m packing to go on holiday.” There is a curious elation to this process, a kind of release, as if I were venting my feelings in a bit of therapeutic amateur dramatics.

“That’s the spirit!” She sits down on our bed, bounces on it a little as if testing the springs. “Afraid I’m going to have to go soon, to feed the dogs.”

“Oh. Don’t go. It’s nice having you here.”

She gives me a hug. “I can’t leave the old hounds starving, can I? They’ll attack an organic lamb or something and I’ll be cattle-prodded from the village.” In the ferocity of the hug Kate’s hair gets caught in my mouth. It tastes how shampoo smells. “I’ll get my stuff together. Is there anything else I can do for you before I go? Make Evie’s tea, ready for when she wakes up?”

“No, bless you. Thanks.” Trust Kate to offer proper practical help, rather than an inappropriate bottle of Moet like Alice. (This said, I once caught Kate spooning Evie foie gras.) She pads downstairs. The sound of another human being on the stairs is reassuring. I stand on the stool and pull down boxes from the top of the wardrobe. Oh, my old clothes. My third-date dress lies crumpled at the top of a box, dappled from my tears all those weeks ago. I throw it onto the washing pile. Another box? Maternity stuff; bras with cups as big as hats; wraparound dresses; bump tights. Another box. Joe’s stuff. Pictures, postcards, bank statements, solar calculators, keys to unknown locks. Some stuff I want to keep, like Evie’s hospital identity bracelet, so I empty it onto the floor and start sorting through. I stack the postcards; an unsent one from Nice, written on a train by me, almost illegible; another one featuring a Bournemouth beach scene, 1977, but sent 2004 from Joe’s late grandmother, who always believed, rather confusingly, in using up old postcards in her dresser drawer first before buying new ones; New York cityscape, blank; Regent’s Park . . .

“Amy, I’m off.” Kate stands in the doorway, lush hair coiled over one shoulder, hand on hip.

“I’ll see you out. Thanks a million, Kate. I needed a boot up the bum. . . .”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to be too . . .”

“No, seriously, thank you.”

Kate’s bullish Range Rover accelerates loudly. I feel like I should be waving a white handkerchief at an ocean liner. My throat is dry and my heart hollows as Kate, dear Kate, source of much-needed advice and shampoo-smelling hugs, is dehumanized into a noisy green dot on the horizon.

People leaving. Sometimes that’s all I can remember.

Forty-five

THE POSTCARD: REGENT,S PARK, WILLOWS SLUMPED LIKE
drunks, framed by Nash’s architectural confectionary and a black frill with
MAGICAL LONDON VIEWS
swirled across the bottom. I flip it over. Sent last September, from Sussex. Oh? Kate’s confident round writing.

“That special September day. You take the sting out of life, thank you. K.”

I sit in shock, jigsaw bits raining down and slotting neatly. Oh God. Not Kate. Please not Kate. But it is her handwriting, her initial. A new fear somersaults in my stomach, tangible and fluttery as a young fetus. I shiver, pick up my mobile.

“Hiya!” she booms cheerfully.

“I’ve just found evidence that Joe had an affair.” My voice is slow, doesn’t betray the acrobatics inside.

“What? An affair? You are joking!”

“No, I’m deadly serious.”

“What evidence? Who with?” Her voice is high, reedy.

“It’s a postcard. . . .”

“You sure sure?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Shit. Christ. I can’t believe it. The
bastard
. The absolute bastard!” She sounds almost teary. “I’m coming back over. Be with you in ten.”

Kate’s back in five, screeching to a stop outside. I let her in solemnly, holding back. She follows me into the kitchen, begging, “What? What? Show me. Who is this girl?” She grabs the postcard out of my hand hungrily. Ah, Kate is jealous of herself.

“This . . . can you explain it?”

Kate studies the postcard, face egg-pale.

“Bitch,” I say, mouth hardly moving.

Kate flicks back as if I’ve slapped her. “What? What did you say?” I glare. “It’s from me. What the hell has this postcard got to do with an affair? Don’t be bonkers.”

“Kate, I was there. I saw you and Joe, except I didn’t know it was you. He . . . he . . . kissed your arm. . . .”

Kate’s eyes open wide, the whites pinking with the pressure in her head. “You were
there
in Regent’s Park?” She holds her Tod’s bag tight as if preparing to be mugged.

“Yes, I was fucking there! I saw you!” All control gone, I am shaking and grip the back of a kitchen chair so hard its legs rattle. “It was you! I don’t fucking believe it.” The betrayal of Kate, my friend! My confidante! Joe’s mouth on her inner arm. The arm I know so well. That shrugs around my shoulders. That hugs Evie. I feel sick.

“I’ve got nothing to apologize for, Amy.” The kitchen knives glint seductively in the knife rack. For a brief millisecond I imagine digging one into her head, splitting it like a coconut. “You’re totally . . . like . . . overreacting.”

I step forward confrontationally. “Bitch . . .”

“Listen,
nothing
happened.” Kate backs into the fridge nervously, knocking off pieces of Joe’s fridge poetry. The word “SUCK” falls onto my left big toe. “We were in the park. We used to go to the park together a lot. Don’t you remember?” Like it’s my fault if I don’t. “You were always too tired. . . .”