Having It and Eating It Read online

  “That’s good though, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, they must have been really impressed by your Woody Allen jokes . . .”

  “No, it was awful. They never ran any of my pieces and I was having to travel all over the US all the time, doing proper stories, investigations, and it was all crap. I was crap. And I was in this relationship with this English bloke. And he was over here and I was over there, and I was beginning to think it was make or break time . . . and then luckily my grandmother died, no I don’t mean luckily of course, I mean unluckily, but coincidentally—she was old anyway—and the Times were on the phone and . . . I thought I’ve got to get out. And Granny’s flat was just sitting there. And I’d come into a bit of money from . . . oh, just from this little screenplay I’d sold . . .”

  “Screenplay?” I had to try very hard not to yell it.

  “It was nothing much. I was just lucky. I wrote this little thing about an English woman in New York and . . . I suppose I just tapped into something a bit zeitgeisty? Anyway, Disney wanted it and . . .”

  “DISNEY?” I cleared my throat and repeated the word more quietly. “Disney?”

  “Well, one of their offshoots. Anyway, look Maggie. None of that matters. It was just time to come home. I had a lot of issues. I saw a therapist for a bit out there—God, can of worms or what?” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Anyway, what with one thing and another . . . I thought it was time to stop running away? And maybe it was time to start healing things with my parents?”

  I was giving a little nod to coincide with each verbal rise, but at this I felt a little shake was required so I gave a little shake, opening my eyes wider a notch in an interested manner. “Your parents?” I said.

  She had lit another cigarette and had began puffing on it furiously as if pursuing a private line of inquiry. “Well, Rowena’s always had everything.” Rowena was her younger sister, who was, I’d noticed, the new face of Animal SOS, the latest early evening animal rescue program on ITV. “She was the actress. She was the one whose talent they respected. Forget the fact that I was the youngest person ever on the Sunday Times’s Style File. That at one point I was writing for Real Life and had a weekly column in Life . . .” Fergus had got down from her lap and was pretending to be a lion under the table. A lion with his mouth full of sugar. “Mind your head,” I said.

  “Anyway,” Claire was saying, “it’s time to shift priorities. It’s time to reassess what I want from the people around me . . .” Dan was stuffing her necklace into his mouth. She pulled it out of his grasp and tucked it into the top of her dress. He tried to grab it again. She jerked her chin away from him. “I’ve been running away from decisions, you know? And letting time run away from me. And as for men . . .” She stopped and passed Dan across to me. He was making irritated thrusting gestures with his legs and waving his arms about, which meant he was bored or hungry or needed changing, or all of those things. For a moment I was distracted, thinking how I didn’t have any wipes and that perhaps we ought to go before Fergus the Lion reared up and knocked my coffee over, so I missed what she said next. Something in a quiet voice about clocks ticking and a birthday coming up.

  Fergus the Lion reared up and knocked my coffee over. Only some of it splattered on Claire’s dress. “Don’t worry,” she said with a fixed smile, “it will dry clean.” By the time I’d mopped the greasy brown liquid off the table and the floor and the sides of my chair, apologized to the man at the next table whose paper was ruined, and paid, she’d changed the subject.

  “Anyway,” she said brightly as I kicked the stroller into life and strapped the children in. “I’m having a party on Saturday and I’d love it if you came. Catch up properly. And bring Jock. I’d love to see him too. Honestly.” She made a silly-me eyes-to-the-ceiling face and, producing a pen from her clutch purse, scrawled her address on the back of a napkin. “Bring the kids!”

  “That would not be a good idea,” I began to tell her, boring even myself with my sensible tone. “They’d be a nightmare . . .” I studied the napkin. I knew the road—elegant Georgian houses overlooking the common. “But I’m sure we’d love to come. I’ll ask Jake. See if we can get a baby-sitter. It’s quite short notice, but . . . And I don’t know whether Jake has anything planned. But . . . yes.”

  Claire had started smiling politely then, and I could see she wanted to get going. “See you then, then,” I said. She kissed me on both cheeks. “Great to see you, Maggie. You look . . . fulfilled. Really you do.” And she walked off down the road, young and tall and free and lovely. I watched her go.

  “Carry,” whined Fergus.

  “No. You’ve got to stay in the stroller,” I said.

  “CARRY!” he shouted. “I NEED A CARRY!!”

  I picked him up and sat him on my hip. It was only as I turned to go home, trying to steer the recalcitrant stroller with one hand and secure my eldest child with the other, that I realized cold coffee had seeped all the way down the inside of my thigh.

  “So what’s she doing now?” asked Jake that evening.

  “What isn’t she doing?” I said. “Film scripts, columns here, assignments there . . .”

  “And is she back in Morton for good?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she married? Does she have children?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. No, I think she would have said.”

  “You didn’t get much out of her then.”

  He put his tray down and went through to the kitchen. I heard the fridge door open, the clatter of unidentified objects falling onto the floor, and a muttered “oh fuck.”

  “Well, you know what it’s like. I had both children with me,” I called. “Fergus spilled some coffee . . .”

  Jake came back into the room holding two yogurts. He chucked one of them and a spoon onto the sofa next to me.

  “Is she still as selfish as ever?” he said.

  “She’s not selfish,” I said.

  “Oh go on, of course she is. I know she was good fun, but always on the lookout for herself, wasn’t she, Claire Masterson? Claire with an i. Don’t forget the i.”

  I felt a sudden dark twist of pleasure—fault found with perfection—which was immediately overwhelmed by irritation. It was unlike Jake to be like this. What right did he have to criticize my friend, my past? He always seemed to like her enough when we were teenagers. He had tried to get off with her, she’d said. “Well, she always thought you were . . .” I stopped.

  “Thought I was what?” he said.

  I tore the strip of lid off my yogurt and licked it. It was gooseberry and stung my tongue. Could I tell him he was dull?

  “Handsome,” I said, deflating. “She thought you were handsome.”

  During the period that these events took place, Jake and I and our two children were living in a terraced house in a nice street near a common on the outskirts of London. Morton, or Morton Park as our particular patch was called, was ideal for children—green spaces, fresh air, Pizza Express—and only ten minutes by train, if you wanted it, from the center of town. Not that I ever went there. I’d found family life to be a gradual process of zoning down, like old age: any trip involving more than a packet of breadsticks or one flight of steps or too many restroom unknowns was out of the question. So we tended to stick within a crutch’s length of home, plumb in the middle of what the property supplements called “Cape Cot”: it was said to have the highest concentration of under-fives in Europe. As Jake used to say, most of them seemed to live in our house. As the money had begun to float across the river, real estate agents had started referring to “Morton Village,” though there was no village hall, no village school, no village festival, no village pub (well there was, but it had been bought up by some huge chain) and the streets seeped very quickly into the bog-standard Edwardian sprawl of the suburb in which we’d both grown up.

  Jake and I had met at school. We’d do our homework together sometimes and on the nights when a gang of us would trawl south L
ondon in search of a party, it had always been Jake who’d lend me his jacket and find us a night bus home. But I had never thought I was his type back then. I was too mousy. Jake, stocky and dark like a walk-on in The Godfather, was famous for his gap-toothed blondes. They’d drape themselves over his shoulder in the pub on Fridays and stand shivering on the side of the field during his Saturday morning soccer commitment. (“Nothing,” he used to say, “comes between me and my soccer. Nothing.”) He went off to Oxford and had a wild old time, juggling work and women and his Saturday morning soccer commitment. “Wotcha Mags,” he’d say when we’d bump into each other during the holidays. “Wotcha Jake,” I’d say, mocking him back.

  I was far more sober. I didn’t juggle anything. I balanced. Through school and at Bristol, where I wandered aimlessly through college, and in my early working life, I was always “married” to someone. My friend Mel, who’s generally single or up to her neck in some disastrous romantic intrigue, used to say I was the queen of the long-term monogamous relationship. Two years here, four years there, five . . . Though I always got out before they did. I wasn’t going to follow the example of my mother: abandoned by my father when I was a baby and in personal turmoil ever since. Oh no. Not me. I always had an eye out for the signs.

  I was going out with David the summer Jake and I got together again; in fact we’d just got back from staying with his parents in France, fresh from celebrating his new job as a lawyer. We were at a wedding, a posh do with a tent on the lawn and strawberries bobbing in the Spumante, when Jake came up behind me in the line for coffee. “ ’Ello, ’ello,” he said in the mock Cockney he used to bring out when he was nervous. “Fancy a turn?”

  “A turn at what?” I said crisply.

  “A turn round the dance floor, you pillock,” he answered.

  David was talking to a woman farther up the line about the benefits of joining a central London dining club. He’d just got his coffee—I saw the glint of his Palm Pilot as he whipped it out of his top pocket. “So,” David was saying, “I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten in a panelled room before . . .”

  Jake was giving me a wolfish grin. “Okay,” I said.

  We danced and at midnight—by which time there were rings of wet on his white dress shirt and his bow tie was hanging loose around his neck and the dark hairs of his chest were just visible through the damp fabric, and my dress was torn at the hem and my face flushed, and after I’d given up searching for David who appeared to have left with his Palm Pilot in a huff—he walked me to the taxi stand outside Marks & Spencer, his jacket slung over one shoulder, and kissed me.

  That time, it felt grown up, as if now I was playing it for real, no more rehearsals or trial runs. David said I was a heartless hussy, or similarly unoriginal words to that effect—but I was too much in love to care. Jake, this newly discovered adult Jake, interested me. It wasn’t just sex, though there was a lot of that. It was more that he touched me in other places too. He was sexy and funny and kind, but he also had a different take on life than the men or boys I’d known before. Beneath the jokes and the fooling about were unmined seams of seriousness, self-confidence, and strength. He didn’t, when it came down to it, care very much what other people thought. Oh, I know he wasn’t perfect: he could be moody and distracted, and sometimes, when overpowered by the strength of somebody else’s self-obsession, he could be quite tactless, but he also had an ability to rise above the pettier aspects of life. He didn’t get cross, or insanely irritated, like most of the other men I’d known, with silly things, like parking tickets, or mistimed video recorders, or the time I spilled a ten-liter can of paint (eggshell) on the back seat of his car (new). He made me look at the world differently, from a higher perch, and when my mother was telling one of her long, condescending anecdotes involving the doubtful manners of a member of the working classes, I’d see his mouth twitch and I’d want to laugh not cry. Most of all, he made me feel really cared for. Not just in a mimsy, doing-the-bills, filling-out-the-census-form kind of way. But because I knew he wanted me. Though, I’d have to add for the sake of balance, he was good at the census forms too.

  So, we moved in together, and we moved back to Morton Park because it seemed like the natural thing to do. A homing instinct. And there we were, eight years and two children down the line: Mr. and Mrs. Convention. Minus the Mr. and Mrs., though. This, as they say in advertising circles, was the Nitty Gritty of the situation: Jake did not want to get married. He must be the only offspring known to man to have been put off not by his parents’ divorce but by the occasion of their silver wedding anniversary. This took place in the banquet suite of the Horse and Groom pub in Norwich, where they now live. Jake’s mother, Angela, wore her wedding dress. “Can you believe, it still bloody well fitted?” Jake said when he told me. “And all the bridesmaids were there. Twenty-five years in lace.” (Jake has a complicated relationship with his mother. She still keeps for him the picture cards you occasionally get in boxes of PG Tips Tea. It was only after we got together that he stopped putting them in a scrapbook.) That was his excuse. But of course it was more than that, and a lot less at the same time, more bound up with a resistance to doing what was expected, or an aversion to form, or, at the very least, just laziness. “Who needs a piece of paper?” he’d say, as people always do, but it wasn’t the piece of paper I cared about, it was the ringless left hand and the awkwardness I’d feel fifty-eight times a week, or maybe it wasn’t fifty-eight times, maybe it was five but even still, when I’d refer, pregnant, or small child in hand, to “my boyfriend.” Sometimes, I’d lie and say “my husband” and that would feel worse. Anyway, the long and the short of it (probably short: I always imagined I’d wear kneelength—a tight pearled bodice with a fifties puffball skirt, sort of classic with a sense of humor) was: no wedding. At first I had minded a lot—I liked things to be clear; I liked things to be black and white—but I had got used to it. Sometimes I even forgot I was still waiting for something to happen.

  Jake worked then for TMT&T (Titcher, Maloney, Titcher, and Titcher), a medium-sized advertising agency in the center of London. He was a planner, a board planning director to use his correct title, which was as far removed as you can get from your average red-glasses, sling-it-up-the-flagpole-see-if-anyone-salutes kind of advertising person. Planners are quieter, more cerebral, “the brains” of an agency, who think about strategies and consumer profiles and brand definition, and well, that sort of stuff. Whatever he did, it took up a lot of his time. He often worked late, usually missed bathtime. And if he wasn’t working, he was socializing. There was a lot of socializing in his line of work. He’d sigh and say he hated all that, the client lunches at Le Caprice, the agency bashes. He’d much rather, he’d say, be at home with us, kicking a ball about with Fergus in the garden, as he would on the summer evenings when he did get back before dark, elbows neatly at his side, head wobbling, just a subtle gentleness in the lower half of his body to indicate his opponent was only two, or in winter, sitting back on the sofa, his tie undone, a small child tucked under each arm, three heads in three shades of brown watching Scooby Doo with expressions of pure concentration on their faces.

  But that didn’t happen often. And his long day was one reason why I gave up my job. I had always wanted children, always wanted to create the perfect family life I had never quite had myself. And it was all right when we just had one child, but once we had two, both of us working didn’t seem fair anymore. And of course it was me who gave up. That’s the way things were in our circle. People talk about “having it all,” but you can’t. You can have some of one thing and some of the other, but you can’t have all of everything. You might be able to have the company car and the nativity play; you might be lucky and even get home in time, in your company car, to see your baby’s first step. But what you wouldn’t see is the six attempts that went before your baby’s first step, the six brave wobbling strikes at independence, and the six astonished expressions when their little legs give way. To some women t
hat might not matter. But I minded enough, when the day-care worker told me about the face Fergus had made at his first sip of water (horrified, all screwed up as if she’d plied him with gin—apparently) or, I don’t know, about this or that daily nothing and everything, that I decided, after Dan was born, that I was going to be around.

  Actually, I wasn’t very good at my job anyway. I was never going to have a company car. I was several escalators down from the glass ceiling. I wouldn’t have recognized one if it had shattered about my ears. I, like Claire, was a journalist, but I’d never made it like her. I just burbled around on the sidelines. I’d worked in newspapers for a bit and then in publishing, and before I gave up I was working for a literary journal, owned and edited from the basement of his flat in Bloomsbury by an eccentric elderly Czech called Gregor. I’d harry his contributors—mainly academics who took five months to get back to me—and sort through the piles of correspondence that provided the most comfortable of sleeping quarters for his copious cats and proofread, and get articles off to the typesetters (we weren’t exactly cutting edge on the technology front), and, sometimes long into the evening, listen to Gregor’s reminiscences of his life in Paris in the fifties, of drinking with Beckett and lunch with Cocteau. It was nothing. Dispensable, poorly paid, easily surrendered.

  I missed it like hell.

  But I had the children. And really I couldn’t complain. Oh I know there were days when I was subsumed by the task of it, by the things none of the manuals tell you: the mess and the noise and the chaos and the clobber and the palaver, and the squeezing of the person you used to be into this dull, one-tracked, loaded-down creature with opinions on the introduction of solids and an encyclopedic knowledge of diaper absorbency; the sense, in those early years at any rate, of being swallowed whole. But things would change. The children would get bigger. They’d go to school. I’d read a grown-up book again. And it seemed important not to become entirely a member of The Bleat Generation. Because there were moments even then, “trapped at home with the children,” when I would feel my soul soar with the freedom of it all. And it might just be hearing the theme tune to the two o’clock broadcast of The Archers that would do it. Or it might be the sense, waiting at the station on platform 2 for a train to take me to the seaside or the swimming pool or a distant park, when everyone else was on platform 1, briefcases at their ankles, irritated fingers tapping watches, pinched, impatient faces scanning the empty tracks behind, that I was going against the tide, that I was my own boss, the big cheese in a corporation of one—and two halves. Or it may simply have been that I felt in touch with my own life, with the diurnal nothings of it, aware of every change in the weather, each kaleidoscope shift in the day’s light. You may have no time to yourself when you have small children, but you also have all the time in the world.