This Perfect World (11 page)

I have a sudden memory of something Liz said to me once,
after some report had come out about the health divide
between the well-off and the poor, and about how much of
it came down to the food we eat. Liz has quite strong opinions
on things; it makes the rest of us a little uncomfortable
at times. ‘It all comes down to education,’ she said, and
nobody liked to disagree. ‘A packet of crisps costs the same
amount of money as an apple. You need to be educated to
choose the apple.’

Or an organic apple, in my case.

The last of my things are on the conveyor belt now, and
the woman behind the till picks up item after item, scans each
thing and packs it into a bag. Organic strawberries, organic
mangoes, free-range chicken breasts, wild rice and Italian
bread. She is positively flinching at the noise that child behind
me is making, and her mouth is puckered, in badly suppressed
disapproval. Handling my expensive goods seems to add weight
to her umbrage, as if she assumes that just because I can
afford high-quality foods, I will join in her silent condemnation
of the poor woman behind me who can’t.

‘Thank you, madam,’ she says to me with a strained,
supercilious smile when I key in my PIN. Then she turns po-faced
to the next load of haphazardly piled-up goods coming
her way and shoves the stuff through quickly, as if too much
contact might make her hands dirty. She is like those estate
agents who act as if every big house on their books is theirs.

I push my trolley out to my car, disturbed. It’s only food.
We all need it. We all shove it in our shopping trolleys, shove
it in our mouths. Our need for food should make us equal,
that and the mind-numbing trek around the supermarket.
You’d think we’d all be the same behind our trolleys, we
women, we wives, we mothers. You certainly feel like every
other woman, when you struggle with the wonky wheels and
the monotony. What we stick in our trolleys shouldn’t paint
a picture of our lives, it shouldn’t divide us.

But it does.

We’re soul-bared in the supermarket. Soul-bared, purse
open.

Everything is disturbing me today.

I can’t even enjoy Tumbletots any more, since the other week
on the evening news when there was some feature on early
childhood development, and they showed a clip of some
Tumble centre, just like the one Arianne and I go to. The
clip showed the wind-down session, after the main tumbling
time, when the women and the children join together in a
circle to sing songs – songs that have movements to go with
them. You know, ‘The wheels on the bus’ and that sort of
thing. I’m sure there isn’t a mother alive who hasn’t ‘Row,
row, rowed the boat’ down the godforsaken stream at some
time or another, and perhaps we do feel a little bit self-conscious,
silly even, at first. But it’s just what you do, what
we all do. We’re all in it together, women and children in
the bizarre, self-imposed world of women and children.

But the other night, when they showed that clip on the
news, James was eating a peanut-butter sandwich and he
nearly choked on it.

‘Look!’ he exclaimed, spluttering peanut butter everywhere,
and pointing at the television where a group of women and
toddlers were clapping together as they smiled and sang.
‘Look!’ He turned from the television to me and back to the
television again, almost bouncing up and down on the sofa
in his disbelief, as if it was the funniest thing he’d seen for
a long time.

‘That’s what it’s like, James,’ I said. ‘That’s what we do.’

And he laughed even more, as if I’d said it just to amuse
him. There is so much of amusement here, in the little world.

I take refuge from my thoughts at Tasha’s house.

Tasha lives in a vast extended 1930s house built on a
corner plot at the end of Chestnut Drive. Her husband works
for an American bank. Tasha likes the idea of interior design
and did a little course on it recently, not at the local college,
but up in town somewhere – it cost a fortune, apparently –
while Carole looked after Phoebe for her. When she was
halfway through the course Tasha decided that she liked the
planning more than the actual doing, that her forte was more
in steering other people to carry out her ideas than doing it
herself, and now she has a whole house to play with.

Wood samples are laid out along the huge, open expanse
of the living-room floor, for me to look at.

‘What do you think?’ Tasha asks me, and both her voice
and the heels of her shoes echo slightly against the wood
flooring. The existing floor is parquet, dark little oblongs, all
packed in, just like we had on the hall floor at junior school.
Suddenly I picture us sitting on it – not Tasha, of course,
but me and all those other girls and boys of thirty years
ago, squashed up in rows, legs crossed and pink, fingers
picking at the dried-on sticky bits and bogies, and at the
unrecognizable remains of school dinners that gave the
school hall its awful, unforgettable smell.

Tasha paces up and down, looking at the options, then
she stops up beside me, one arm folded across her middle,
hand supporting the elbow of the other arm that is bent, that
hand up by her face, one finger extended and tapping against
her chin. She is willowy elegant, Tasha. Always clad in black
and grey, with just a flash of pink or red to lift things, and
her nails always newly done, to match.

I switch my glance from the S-like curve of her figure
standing next to me to the mirror opposite us, hanging above
the great open fireplace. It’s an enormous mirror; from this
little distance it reflects us both, right down to the start of
our thighs in our matching dark jeans. Looking in this mirror,
I am struck by how alike we are. Oh, she is a good inch or
so taller than me and I’m sure I don’t have her incredible
grace, and her hair is cut a little shorter and choppy now
with those red streaks underneath the blonde, but still there
are things, so many things. I realize that my stance is the
same as hers, one hip lifting, one hand raised to the face in
contemplation. I see our pale, serious faces with our pale,
serious eyes and I think how similar we look, even though
Tasha’s changed her hair. She used to wear her hair like mine,
like Penny’s: highlighted blonde and falling straight to the
shoulders. In fact, if you put Tasha and Penny and me in a
row, you could pass us off as sisters. Liz too, though she
fights against the grain a little by going about in her gym
clothes half the time and letting her fair hair go wavy.

I stare at our reflections and I am unnerved. I wonder why
it is that all my life I have chosen friends that look like me.

Tasha glances up, catching my eye in the mirror, oblivious
to the way my mind is working. ‘What do you think?’ she
says, frowning slightly. ‘I’m torn between the natural and the
honeyed oak. And should we take it upstairs? Rupert says
not; he thinks carpet for upstairs, but I don’t know.’ She
stares at me, serious, and I can be serious too.

I can lose myself in this.

We carry on considering Tasha’s floor over lunch, which we
eat at the dining table; through the double doors we can still
see the samples on the living-room floor. Arianne and Phoebe
chatter away at one end of the table while Tasha and I talk
floors at the other. We won’t make our minds up today. This
is part of the pleasure – wallowing in choice.

It’s like floating away on nothingness, and I want to float
away.

Shortly after five on Monday my mum phones, from Devon.
She asks after James, briefly, and the children of course, then
she tells me about the trellis my dad is going to build over
the patio, and about the vines they’re planning to grow on
it. You can get quite decent grapes down there, apparently,
if the summer’s kind. They have a very active garden society
down there, in the village, she says; she’s put my father up
as treasurer. She’d do it herself, but she’s busy with the
church-renovation project fund-raiser and the Keep Our
Village Green campaign. I listen as she talks breezily on, and
wickedly I feel a little sorry for Lower Eddington. I picture
the place: sleepy, time-warped and barely on the map. And
I picture my mum and my dad descending upon it, with all
the good that they no doubt will do.

I do not tell my mother about Heddy. I do not tell her,
but I feel guilty just the same.

I cannot think what to wear.

I am up early as usual, and straight in the shower the
minute James comes out. We get ready for our days around
each other. He is standing in front of the mirror, looking at
himself as he puts the cufflinks into his shirt and combs back
his hair. I watch him; I can see both the back of his head
and his reflection, an all-round view if you like, of James
Hamley the lawyer, as he lawyers himself up. He tilts his
head, from side to side and then down slightly at the front,
peering up at himself, dark-blue eyes sharp under that dark,
sharp brow. It used to amuse me, watching him practise like
this. He runs through all his expressions: we have the considering
look, the
I understand what you’re saying, but
. . . look,
the
Please, have utter faith in me
look, even the
This really
hurts me to have to do this
look. We have it all. His whole
self is exercised across his face as he primes up for the day.

It used to amuse me. I used to find this routine endearing
until I realized he uses the same expressions on me.

James rounds off his routine with a smile – at himself, at
his clients, I can’t tell. It is a confident smile, a winning smile,
worked to perfection. He is a winner, my husband. He knows
it, I know it. The whole world must know it by now, surely.

Finally he pats a little cologne onto his cheeks and turns
to me. I am standing, still in my underwear, with the doors
of my wardrobe flung open, but I’m not even looking at
what’s inside. I’m looking at him.

‘Not going to yoga?’ he asks as he shrugs himself into his
suit jacket. He gives me his cheerfully curious smile, the one
that says he’d love to hear my reply, if only he had the time
to hang around and listen.

‘Not today,’ I reply, and I wonder if I would have told
him more, but he kisses me on the cheek and is gone, out
of the house, before his children are even awake.

I cannot think what to wear because I have never been to
visit someone in a mental hospital before. Hospitals of the
ordinary kind are bad enough. You feel the dirt jumping onto
you, the germs, the promise of death. Especially on the floor.
The floor is always the worst.

The year before last my father was in hospital for a week
after a knee operation. I visited him twice. I wore the same
clothes each time, kept them in a sealed bag between visits,
then sent them to the dry-cleaner’s when he came out. I wore
the same pair of shoes too, and then I threw them away.

I do not want to waste a pair of shoes on Heddy Partridge.

In the end I decide on a pair of last year’s trousers and a
top I don’t often wear because the colour isn’t exactly right
on me. I know I’ll never wear them again. And I’ll wear the
suede mules that I bought last week in town, and tomorrow
I’ll go and buy myself another pair to replace them.

Mrs Partridge is standing on her doorstep, waiting for me
to arrive.

I am late, for the obvious reason that I do not want to be
here at all. I chatted to Penny in the playground, long after
the children had gone in. Chatted while Arianne pulled at
my clothes, saying, ‘Mummy, Mummy, come
on
.’

Chatted until Penny said, ‘What are
you
doing today?’ She
skimmed her eyes over my clothes, curious.

‘Oh, boring stuff,’ I said, grabbing Arianne by the hand.
‘Dentist. That sort of thing. Must dash.’

On my way out of Carole’s I bumped into Tasha.

‘Fancy a coffee after yoga?’ she called, unloading Phoebe
from the back of her car. Then in seconds – milliseconds –
she’d clocked me head to toe and said, ‘Oh. Not going to
yoga?’

Curiosity is a big, big thing around here. Lives are built
and ruined on it. The slightest little thing out of the ordinary
will not go unnoticed. Today it will be my life under
scrutiny; I do not fool myself otherwise. It will not be Tasha
and me having coffee, it’ll be Tasha and Penny and Liz
instead, and I’ll be the subject of discussion for today. And
for many days to come if I’m not careful, if I don’t nip this
thing in the bud, so to speak. They’re probably on their
phones already, speculating.

And so it is that I am late arriving at Mrs Partridge’s. Late
according to her plan, that is. As far as I’m concerned, she’s
lucky I’m here at all.

She’s looking out for me, twittering and fussing on her
doorstep like an agitated penguin. It’s a warm day, but she’s
buttoned into a thick, quilted jacket that makes her head
look tiny poking out the top, and her legs even thinner. She
watches me as I park up the car, and I think, as she is clearly
ready to go, she will close the door behind her and come
and get straight in the car, but she doesn’t. She darts back
into the house, swallowed up by the darkness, and I wait
where I am. I am not going to be hurried. I am not going
to be blustered into some false sense of urgency. It is essential
that I remain detached, for both of us.

I think I might check my phone for messages, perhaps
make a call, just to make my point, but before I do Mrs
Partridge reappears, anxiously gesturing for me to come inside.
I don’t like being beckoned like a child, and I get out of the
car slowly, irritated.

Once again I am walking up that pathway, and into that
house.

She disappears inside the house once I’m halfway up the
path, and so I have to follow. I feel as though I’ve been
tricked.

She’s got a bunch of papers in her hand, seemingly pulled
from the big plastic shopping bag at her feet.