Having It and Eating It Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  June: Ants

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  July: Wasps

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  August: Dead Flies

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  September: Spiders

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  More praise for

  Having It & Eating It

  “The personal dramas are only as tragic as Maggie’s sharp humor will allow them to be—that is, not very—which makes British journalist Durrant’s debut a fine mix of adroit plotting and page-turning comedic suspense.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This novel is made by the well-observed details, the conversational prose, and the sharp humor. . . . Good fun.”

  —The Observer (UK)

  “Durrant pulls off the Austen-like trick of bringing us nose to nose with a micro-class of society . . . appealingly understated wit.”

  —The Guardian (UK)

  “[A] standout for its rich detail and deceptively weightless prose . . . Durrant’s wry and precise observation of Maggie’s middle-class milieu—from the sub rosa playground status wars . . . and on to the nature of long-term relationships—makes it all seem like unexplored territory. . . . Giving a sly nod to genre conventions, Durrant ends with a marriage proposal, but this is no fairy tale, and Maggie’s response, along with all that’s come before, puts this one head and shoulders above most of the ‘chick-lit’ that will flank it on the shelves.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Entertaining twist on the usual betrayed wife story, written with great pace and humor.”

  —Sunday Mirror (UK)

  “An amusing cast of characters . . . A cute and entertaining story [that] reads like a Julia Roberts movie.”

  —Library Journal

  “Astute and well-written, with a marvelous twist towards the end, this is a must for all women in the throes of, or about to embark on, motherhood.”

  —Marie Claire (UK)

  Riverhead Books

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Sabine Durrant

  All rights reserved.This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Durrant, Sabine.

  Having it and eating it / Sabine Durrant.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16665-9

  1. Unmarried couples—Fiction. 2. Mother and child—Fiction. 3. Motherhood—Fiction.

  I.Title.

  PS3604.U77 H

  813’.6—dc21

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  June: Ants

  Chapter 1

  It is not often you really want someone else’s life. You might say you do: wouldn’t mind being her or him with her or his looks, or wealth, or fame. But you don’t really mean it. It would involve far too much upheaval for one thing.

  But Claire Masterson. I’d have given anything to be her. I’d have sacrificed friends and relations, not to mention my guinea pigs and my Donny Osmond posters, for one week in her shoes—the patent leather pumps with shiny buckles, for example, or the pink ballet slippers with real blocks in the toes or those big red clogs she wore when clogs were it.

  There were lots of Clares in my class, a whole register full of them, but only one of them had an i. Claire Masterson had other extras too. She had long, tawny legs under her gymslip and marble blue eyes, flecked with green, and hair the same color and texture as the straw in our regulation summer boaters. And her parents were actors: God, that was exciting. Her mother spent long nights in the West End, whole days in bed. Her father, handsome, famous from some ad—Schweppes was it?—pulled our cheeks and pretended to pull our mothers at the school gates and gave us all rides in his car with the roof down. Her parents were untidier than you generally found along the green streets of our London suburb, where even the trees were pollarded as if to avoid any verdant vulgarity, but they were trendier too: they didn’t wear A-line skirts or Prince of Wales check, but kaftans and cheesecloth. And their house was messier, but bigger, grander. There were piles of dirty dishes in the sink and food left out and furniture that didn’t match like ours. “Family money,” said my mother coolly, dropping me at the mossy stone lions at their gates.

  And Claire was amazing. Claire lunched with “Olivier” and holidayed in New York (“NY” she called it). On Wear-Your-Own-Clothes-Day she wore glamorous scarves and real faded jeans, and later just black. Black with a tan. She brought Pepsi to school when the rest of us brought clanking Thermoses of tomato soup. She was the first at everything too: the first to know the facts of life, the first to hitch the waist of her gray serge skirt up under her money belt, the first to Sun-In her hair, the first, easily the first, to go all the way. She was certainly the first, and probably the last, to go all the way behind Pizza Hut in Morton High Street.

  And then she left. She was the first to do that too. At sixteen, sweet ’n’ sour sixteen, she went. For another thirty-five years, or so it felt, we padded about our all-girls sixth-form common room, thwumping down into beanbags with our mugs of Nescafé from the calcified kettle in the corner. We dreamed of the life she was leading, off, away, in her progressive mixed boarding school, experimenting with hard liquor and soft drugs and English teachers, small acts of rebellion adding up to some blissful alternative program, far from our secure, stultifying teenage existence. She said she’d write, but she never did. Instead, you’d hear the odd piece of news over the breaktime snack, picked up from someone who’d met her mother’s secretary in a line at the bank: the parties, the dorm fire, the time she “got caught.” Later, there was other news too: the Vogue talent competition, the shiny, glossy job at the shiny, glossy magazine, the newspaper column (“Girl, Uninterrupted: the nights of a party animal”), the journalistic assignments abroad. She was everything we, I, wanted to be. And wasn’t. She was our Sylvia Pankhurst, our Isadora Duncan. She was our free one, our wild one. The one that got away.

  So it was quite a surprise to bump into her in Morton High Street that day. I’d got the double stroller caught on a slightly raised curb—you have to angle it right, get your foot on the back supports and really yank it up; mistime it, as I had, and you’re lost—so, what with reassembling Fergus’s electric Thomas the Tank Engine, which had lost a battery in the maneuver, and repositioning Dan’s Winnie the Pooh pacifier, which had fallen out, I didn’t see her until she was standing right in front of me.
r />   “Maggie?” she said. “Maggie Owen?”

  The moment I heard her voice, creamy with catches in it, like chocolate chip ice cream, I knew it was her. She looked the same too. She hardly seemed to have aged at all. It’s funny how close friends can suddenly put on ten years in a week, how the whole texture of their face can shift in an evening, so that you can hardly bear to look in their eyes for pity and fear of what you might see back, and yet people you haven’t seen for eons quite often confound you by looking just how you remember them always looking. Teachers who looked fifty then still look fifty years later. And Claire Masterson, sixteen plus twenty, was a sophisticated version of her younger self, not a line out of place.

  “Maggie?” she said again. She was smiling at me, slightly quizzically. Her hair was longer than when I’d seen her last and the once thick black eyeliner around those bright Aegean eyes had gone the way of all black liner (though perhaps, on reflection, not the way of mine, stubbed and cracked, to the bottom of Fergus’s crayon box). She was thinner than she had been too, her body brown and lean in a dazzlingly orange cotton dress with velvet straps and purple ribbon around the neckline. On her feet were a pair of embroidered slingbacks with kitten heels and in her hand a hard candy-pink handbag, clashing with everything else in a manner that only models in a magazine, or Barbie, or Claire, could carry off with style. I felt suddenly sick. I wished I hadn’t seen her. More to the point, I wished she hadn’t seen me. My unwashed hair. My sleep-deprived makeup-free face. The oatmeal on the sleeves of my left-over-from-pregnancy white/beige/whatever T-shirt. The mud Fergus’s shoes had left on the thighs of my jeans the last time he’d demanded to be carried halfway through a stomp in the park. I thought fuck, fuck, fuck. And then I pulled myself together. Never mind, I thought, never mind: quick, a wave, a smile, a waft of contented motherhood and into Woolworth’s. Come on, get wafting.

  “Juice. I WANT MY JUICE!” Claire was still smiling at me, peering now. Fergus wasn’t. Fergus was scowling. He’d twisted his lean, wiry body around in his seat and was pushing against the foot rests to stand up, straining against the straps. His arms were flailing in the direction of Dan’s dark head. He was beginning to tip the stroller backwards. Dan, struck, spat out Winnie the Pooh and started screeching. A motorbike screamed past. I lunged. The stroller tipped. The Safeway’s bag dangling on the back of the stroller split. There were jars of Organix baby food in the gutter, fish fingers underfoot. And Winnie the Pooh was in a puddle, eviscerated, tire marks across his silicone neck. Claire was still standing there, patience on a monument, smiling at my grief. I burst into tears.

  There was a hand on my shoulder. “How about a coffee?” Claire said.

  “So was she nice?” Jake asked over supper that evening.

  “Yes,” I said. “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  We’d made our way, me wiping my eyes, saying sorry I’m stupid, blaming the humidity, to Pollyanna’s, Morton High Street’s contribution to the coffee revolution. My arms were full of broken plastic bag, so Claire took control of the stroller, pushing it gingerly at arm’s length so that she looked like someone walking barefoot on pebbles, pausing only to produce half a Snickers from her matchbox bag to appease Fergus (bit close to lunch but never mind; and how does she stay so thin?) and to coo charmingly to Dan until, astounded by the attention, he stopped crying. When we got there, we ordered two cappuccinos; I was busy sorting the children at the table while she was getting them from the counter so I didn’t hear what she said, but it was enough to make “Pollyanna,” a burly, grumpy Spaniard whose mouth had been set at four-forty for the last five years, his brows forever furrowed with cross thoughts of tax returns and sugar wastage on table ten, look across and laugh and squirt an extra dose of St. Ivel’s spray cream onto our hot brown drinks.

  Claire turned and came toward me, bearing two cups. But just before she reached me, she turned sideways to negotiate the stroller which was blocking the way and as she did so, she became somehow entangled with someone else who had just gotten up from his seat, someone in a polyester beige raincoat, shoulders heaving with annoyance, elbows jerking at cross angles at the inconvenience. Someone whose tutting followed me like the ticking clock in Captain Hook’s crocodile. It was, I realized before she even turned, my neighbor Mrs. Allardyce, who had, I had long learned, very little time for “ridiculous modern contraptions” or “today’s mothers.”

  “Mrs. Allardyce,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Sorry . . . Won’t be a . . . Just let me . . .”

  Mrs. Allardyce glared at me, her lips pursed, her chin folded down onto her neck like a cross toad. “Sorry,” I said, holding Dan up so I could yank my ridiculous modern contraption out of her way with my knees. She shook her head and said, “Tt’ahhh,” which I didn’t take as a form of thanks. “Sorry,” I said again weakly to her departing back.

  “Who was that?” said Claire after she’d gone.

  “Mrs. Allardyce,” I said. “She’s a neighbor. She hates me.”

  “Ooh, that’s grown up.”

  “What, being hated?”

  “No, having neighbors. Having neighbors that have an opinion about you at least.”

  “It goes with the territory,” I said, gesturing at Fergus and Dan. “People do have opinions about you when you have children. You become sort of public property somehow.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, putting the cups down on the table.

  The vinyl tablecloth was damp from a recent mopping, and she sat at an angle to it so as not to get her knees wet. This wasn’t an option for me: Dan was making powerful splashing movements on my lap, and Fergus was trying to get the salt and pepper, squirming in his chair, every inch of him twitching with the shock of constraint like a salmon on the end of a line. “Ants in your pants?” said Claire, which made him laugh.

  “Pants!” he giggled. “Pants!”

  She reached across to take Dan on her knee. “Can I?” she said.

  I had forgotten how charming she was. In fact, for the first five minutes, as we conducted that “catch-up dance,” in which you move from subject to subject, leaping great chasms of time, plunging into giant life-altering moments, while so rigid with the social trauma of unexpected encounter that you don’t actually listen or follow up a word the other person says, she did such a good job of blowing raspberries for Fergus and kisses for Dan, I tried not to mind when she pulled an ashtray over from the next table and started to blow cigarette smoke over them.

  “So, hey,” she said, exhaling. “So, hey, God. Who do you still see from the old days? Do you ever see Serena? Serena La-Di-Da Mills?”

  I told her I thought Serena Mills was in hairdressing, which made Claire hoot. “Natch,” she said, grinning. “Patricia Wells?”

  “Someone told me she was an airline pilot.”

  She laughed even more. She said, “That figures.” And I laughed too. That was the thing about Claire. She made you feel in collusion with her against the rest of the world, blissfully superior until in a quiet moment you would wonder what she might say about you.

  “And what about the boys’ school? Do you ever see any of the old gang from there?”

  “Well actually,” I began.

  “You know, what about whatsisname? That hunk with the floppy dark hair we all pretended to be in love with. God, what was his name? Jock. . . ?”

  “Oh—well . . .”

  She was laughing. “What did we see in him? He was in that crap band wasn’t he? What were they called? The Nasal Passage, was it? I almost got off with him once, glad I didn’t. Handsome, but dull.” She opened her eyes wide to make a face for Dan and then said with exaggerated mouth movements, as if to entertain him more than me. “Dullsville.”

  “No. Yes,” I said. “I do. See him I mean. Actually, um.” I tried to laugh. I took a mouthful of muffin to pretend to be relaxed. “Actually, I did get off with him. These I’m afraid”—I shrugged hopelessly through the crumbs to show no hard feelings—“are his kids. Er, and . .
. The Snot Goblins. The band was called The Snot Goblins.”

  “Oh shit. I’m sorry.” Claire flushed. She put her hand out to touch mine. There was a moment of silence. Then she gave a loud exaggerated gulp, which sounded like a coin landing in the bottom of an empty charity tin, and raised her eyes to the ceiling. She could always self-dramatize herself out of trouble, could Claire. “My big mouth,” she said, opening her eyes wide and clasping her hand to her forehead over Fergus. “It has a life of its own. I don’t know why I said it. I never really even knew him. And twenty years is a long time. He’s probably changed. I mean, not that there was anything wrong with him before. Oh God, I’m digging myself deeper into a hole, aren’t I?”

  I laughed. Claire’s eyes were darting over the café for assistance. She made a goofy face at Pollyanna who appeared to blush. I said, “It’s all right. Dull’s good. Dull’s fine.” I watched Dan, who was trying to wriggle out of her arms, grab the sugar bowl and begin to chew on the end of a pink saccharine sachet. “Anyway, what about you? Last I heard you were with Vanity Fair in New York.” I pulled the sugar bowl back to the other side of the table. “NY,” I added.

  “Yes I was,” she said. “But I was running away . . . you can be away too long, do you know what I mean?” I didn’t, but I nodded. Her voice had shifted gears now that America had been mentioned, her sentences beginning to go up at the end as if turning into questions despite themselves, statements of fact in search of approval. “It was fine when I was working for the Sunday Times. You know, they pay for your flat and your expenses and . . . you know me, Maggie, I was never very diligent, not like you, and all I had to do was write a weekly diary column, make a few jokes about Woody Allen or satirize Starbucks’ bid for global domination, and then interview the odd film star for the mag. And it was great. It suited me fine. But then Vanity Fair offered me a contract and I was flattered so I took it.”