Having It and Eating It Page 5

  “Nigella?” I said. I wasn’t really listening. Rachel was a good cook—it’s where she put the energy she used to expend as a conference organizer—and always assumed I was too. She didn’t hear me. “It does seem to take an awful lot of eggs,” she was saying. “Do you think it might be a bit rich after the cotechino?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Really? Even with the loganberry and mascarpone coulis?”

  “Maybe not then,” I said. She darted me a look but then luckily noticed the situation building on the slide.

  “Fergus!” she yelled. “Harry! Get off the little girl! We go down slides, not up them.” She pursed the corners of her mouth and held her hands out apologetically in the direction of the pink girl’s mother who inclined her head stiffly. “Now go and play on the monkey bars you two. And Fergus, stop pushing Harry please.” Rachel, who approached motherhood like a military exercise, was convinced that my son was out to get hers. It was a sort of persecution complex by proxy. Child-on-child violence: a greater source of tension among adults than the threat of nuclear action. Personally, I thought Harry should learn to fight back. Little whiner.

  Rachel came and sat down next to me again. She had fresh, young skin, Rachel, but there were firm lines edging their way down from her mouth and across her forehead. Her hair was always pulled back tightly as if defiant of the new threads of iron in her temples. She was one of my new friends, one of the “playground mums” as Jake called them. The personal criteria for friendship changes when you have kids. You don’t need to get along too well or to have that much in common—in some respects, that can get in the way. Better to withstand the constant interruptions that children bring to a conversation about recipes than one that really interests you about, oh I don’t know, what did interest me those days? Playground friends take the same role as work friends: someone to gossip with at the photocopier, when half your mind’s on something else (only, of course, it’s not a photocopier any more, it’s a slide in the shape of a moose). Someone, anyway, to gang up with against the strain.

  I said, “Oh look, it’s Maria.”

  Rachel said, “Oh yes, so it is.”

  That’s the kind of conversation our sleep-deprived brains stretched to. It wouldn’t, now I come to think of it, have lasted two minutes at the photocopier.

  “Maria!” I called her over.

  “Oh, hiya!” she said. Maria, slim and toned and usually in Lycra from hours in the gym, was several years younger than us and married to a banker. She had two small children, a house the size of a hotel, and an irritating habit of always pretending to be more humble than she was, a pretense which only served to draw attention to her position of wealth and privilege. “Ohmigod,” she said, wiping the seat with a muslin that had been hanging off the back of her three-wheel all terrain mountain stroller and sitting herself down next to us. “Another riotous night at Casa Jennings. I’m so hung over. I couldn’t tell you how much I drank. God knows what the neighbors think of us. It was supposed to be just a quiet kitchen supper—we had Flossie’s godfather and his new girl-friend over. But it ended up with Patrick out in the middle of the road at midnight on Flossie’s Microscooter. It was hilarious. I was laughing so much I’m sure I woke the whole street. Down our way, they’re not used to that sort of behavior.”

  “Thursday night,” remarked Rachel. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  We both knew how she did it. I said, “You don’t think Merika might be free on Saturday night do you?” Merika was her au pair, a devastatingly attractive and capable twenty-five-year-old, whom Maria called “My Slovakian.” Merika was a pediatrician before she came to England, one of many Slovaks putting their qualifications at the mercy of the British middle class. Having made the grade as brain surgeons in their own land, they then submitted themselves to the ultimate challenge of nannying in south London.

  “Oh,” said Maria, sounding dubious. “The thing is, I’ve got people coming over, just a small party, and I was rather hoping that once the children were in bed she might help out. I thought she might enjoy that—she could throw on a black frock and pass around the nibbles.”

  “What sort of nibbles?” asked Rachel, with genuine interest.

  “Oh, I haven’t asked . . . we’ve got this sweet girl coming in to cook—she’s just a friend of a friend; I’m just having Merika to help her out really . . .”

  Rachel turned to me. “I served this delicious hors d’oeuvre last week,” she said. “Crostini di fegatini di pollo e acciughe. River Café 2—I do think it’s better than River Café 1, don’t you?”

  “Artemis! Octavia! Heel.” A loud voice pealed across the green swade. “Shit,” I said, under my breath. Rachel elbowed me in the ribs. It was Lucinda, an investment banker who, on the rare occasion that she was spotted in the week, did her utmost to undermine the rest of us. More polished, more efficient, more organized than us, morally, intellectually, and financially superior in every way (or so she believed), she was Public Enemy No. 1 in the battle between mothers-who-work and mothers-who-don’t. She towered over us physically too: with the body of a tennis player and the thick, long, springy hair of Medusa. Only, Lucinda’s hair was never wild—she was not a woman you ever imagined letting her hair down—so if Medusa she was, she was Medusa after a visit to Vidal Sassoon.

  “Hiya,” we chorused as she tied her leash of Highland terriers to the railings and bustled her brood through the child-friendly, finger-grabbing swing-back gate. Lucinda’s children were called Cecily, Gwendolen, Ned, and Sid in accordance with a peculiar Morton Park fashion for naming girls after Noel Coward characters and boys after New York pickle salesmen. All four (she bettered us in child-bearing too) were delivered by elective Caesarean because she was, as they say, too posh to push. “Off you go, children—swings. WHAT A DAY!” she said, marching over to the bench. She adjusted the grip of her padded hairband, which, on “family days,” replaced the tight chignon she wore to work. “The Audi wouldn’t start. And Cecily was late for ballet and Miss Trisha gets so cross if they’re not there for their barre exercises. And Ned and Sid had Toddler Massage on the other side of Morton and I’ve been lugging Gwendolen around with me when really she should be at home practicing for her violin grade five. Her teacher suggested she skip two to four as she is really very advanced,” she added as an aside. “And I should be at work. This is a very important week for me. But Hilda, our nanny bless her, is in the hospital. Can’t be helped I know, but it is typical. Honestly, you lot don’t know how lucky you are. It’s not the work that’s so backbreaking, or the child care, but the juggling.”

  “Nothing serious I hope,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Hilda.”

  “Only a perforated appendix, but the fuss she’s making . . . Two months off? Quite absurd. And guess who’s paying? Well anyway, enough of that. I expect she needs the rest. Who doesn’t?” She fixed Maria in her sights. “I haven’t got nearly enough help. Your Croatian is super, isn’t she?”

  Maria began to look helpful and then frowned.

  “No poaching,” said Rachel.

  “Slovakian,” I added.

  “And the house is still a state after the builders,” said Lucinda, bending down and rubbing a chink of mud from the buckle of one of her little velvet shoes. “I don’t know what Matty, my cleaner, does all day. Well, that’s an out-of-work actress for you. Maybe I should go back to the agency and get someone a bit more committed.”

  “To a long-term future in lavatory bowls,” I said.

  A mobile phone started ringing. An eerie silence fell as mothers and nannies throughout the playground stopped dead for a moment, listened, and then scattered from the play area and charged back to their stroller baskets or handbags to rummage for hand-held salvation, leaving children hanging from the top of monkey bars, dangling from swings, thumping to the ground on suddenly vacated seesaws. Only Lucinda emerged triumphant. Apparently, her country needed her, or the city did at least.

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nbsp; “Oh no,” she screamed into her Nokia, red blotches of anger beneath her foundation. “Gregory, I told you . . . All right, I’ll deal with it. Okay, okay. Yes, I know. Okay, okay.” Pause. “Okay, okay. See you later. Okay.” She slipped the phone back into her stiff olive-green Mulberry shoulder bag. “Ach,” she said. “I said to Gregory it’s all very well this new house with all its acres of space and huge garden, but I can’t be the one who has to take responsibility for it on top of everything else. This sort of thing never happened when we were in Fulham.”

  “What has happened?” asked Rachel.

  Lucinda closed her eyes, as if the light was hurting, but kept on talking. “Flower Power were due to come today,” she explained with exaggerated calm, “to prune the cherry and mow the lawn and plant out a few pots for the terrace so that it looks halfway decent for Sunday when Gregory’s boss is coming for lunch. And the main woman has rung Gregory to say she can’t come today, will Monday do? Well, no, it won’t do.” She stopped as if even she was pulled short by her own bossiness.

  “What’s her excuse?” asked Rachel. “Stung by a nettle?”

  Lucinda ignored her.

  “I know a gardener.” Everyone looked taken aback including me.

  Lucinda looked at me directly for the first time.

  I pulled out of my wallet the card that the man from the crash had given me. “Here,” I said. She looked at it.

  “Peat and Dug,” she read. “Any good?”

  “Someone I bumped into. Seemed very nice. Ask for Pete.”

  “Should I mention you?”

  “You could. But he probably wouldn’t remember.”

  Lucinda jotted down the number, and I went off to find Fergus.

  It took me a while. He’d broken out of the playground through a vandalized gap in the fence and was poking about in the roots of a tree with a long stick. There was earth in his pale brown hair, and his face, flushed with exertion, was screwed up into an expression of intense concentration, his tongue resting on his lower lip.

  “Bang,” he said when he saw me. “You’re dead.”

  ”I know,” I said. “But it’s also time to go home.”

  “NO,” he shouted. “I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME.” He went rigid and dug his heels in.

  “Yes,” I said patiently, trying to undig them with my fingers. Rachel, Maria, and Lucinda were looking over at me with pained sympathy. “Pleeze,” I whispered. He slackened. Sometimes even under-threes respond to desperation. We set off for home and, in gratitude, I let him walk all the way.

  When we finally got there, Fran, Jake’s sister, was sitting on the doorstep.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had to take the car to be repaired and then we walked back by the playground and I completely forgot you were coming.”

  She heaved herself up. She was twenty-two weeks pregnant and already into the self-righteous, martyred stage.

  “It’s all right,” she said in the tone of one for whom it wasn’t. “You’re here now.” She fondled her tiny bump, which was on proud display between a crop top purple vest and a pair of shocking pink draw-string trousers. “As soon as I’ve had a drink, I’ll feel better.” She sighed and rubbed both hands up and down her lower back.

  Fran, who was an interactive artist, had never been one for strict time-keeping, for such conventions as appointments and routines—unless you were the one keeping her waiting, in which case punctuality suddenly seemed to rise on her list of priorities. She was twenty-nine, seven years younger than Jake, a much longed for second child, a girl at that, and had the kind of looks—a large, vulnerable mouth, deer-like brown eyes, tumbling curls, and pale white skin that bruised easily—that made you want to look after her. I loved her and was infuriated by her in equal measure. Her parents just gazed at her most of the time with open mouths. There was Italian blood somewhere in their veins, but it was as if Fran had gathered up every unconventional gene the Pritons had ever had, and run off with them, carefree in the knowledge that she could do her own thing and no one could stop her. Her own thing had included psychotherapy, aromatherapy, that spiritual movement when you only eat air—one of her more short-lived fads—and finally moving in with a fellow artist called Rain. He may not always have been called Rain—his parents lived in the very conventional suburb of Croydon—but Fran accused us of being bourgeois when we asked. They lived in West Kensington—“in town” she called it—in the mansion flat the Pritons once bought for her and Jake to share, but which appeared since to have become wholly hers. She made virtual art on the Internet. Rain . . . well I’m not quite sure what Rain did. Something to do with Thames debris. Rain, who was so handsome you wanted to weep, didn’t say much.

  “How are you feeling, sweetie?” I said. “And how’s Rain?”

  “Rain, rain, go away,” said Fergus.

  Fran ignored him. “Just so, so well,” she said, slipping out of her Birkenstocks at the door. “I feel as if the world has just begun to make sense you know? As if it’s been black and white, and now it’s in color.”

  “Jolly good,” I said, steering her through the house and into the garden. “I like your toe nails. What color do you call that?”

  “Daylily.” She plonked herself down into a deck chair. Fergus ran off to find his fire engine. I put Dan on a blanket on the grass. He immediately made for the borders. I had a few minutes before he found a snail and started eating it.

  “Tea or coffee?” I said. “Or fizzy water?”

  “Have you any raspberry leaf?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Dandelion?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ginger? Blackcurrant? Red Zinger?”

  “No, no, and no.”

  “What about chamomile? Surely you’ve got chamomile.”

  “I think we’re out.”

  “Sod it, I’ll have coffee,” she said and lit a cigarette. “Low tar,” she said defensively. “Nothing in them. Anyway, they’re organic.” She took a few deep drags and then twisted it out on the grass and chucked the dead end into the impatiens.

  “Fran!” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said and rubbed her eyes.

  I grabbed Dan by the legs and pulled him away from a daffodil bulb that he was on the verge of sinking his two rabbity teeth into. I could tell Fergus was all right because I could hear him shout “Emergency, emergency, fire on the sofa, fire on the sofa” in the sitting room. I put my arm around her shoulder. “Are you okay Fran? You seem a bit down.”

  “Sorry,” she said a bit tearfully. “I’ve just convinced myself I’ve had a missed abortion. You wouldn’t know, would you? It’s been a while since I felt the baby move. And I was reading last night about detached placentas. And I’m sure I felt a sharp pain when I was waiting on your step. So it could be that. I just don’t feel that things are right.”

  I laughed. That may sound like an unsympathetic response, but one of Fran’s more touching characteristics was incorrigible hypochondria. I had had four months of this, of early pre-eclampsia, of threatened toxoplasmosis, of blighted ovums. She looked at me through watery eyes. “Why are you laughing?” she said in a little voice.

  “Fran, there’s nothing wrong with you. Or the baby. You’ve had your scan. When did you last feel a movement?”

  “At breakfast?”

  “Well then, the little mite’s obviously having a nap. I’ll get you some orange juice, and we’ll wake him or her up. How about that?”

  I put my finger under her chin, but her eyes had filled again. “Fran?”

  “Oh God, I know you don’t get any sleep either, but I’m just so tired you know? And I’ve got these funny little veins on my legs. I’m sure they’re new. And . . . and . . .”

  “What?” I said.

  “I’ve got piles,” she whispered.

  “Poor you,” I said with genuine sympathy. “I know. It’s all awful. It’s an awful business. But it’s worth it in the end.”

  “Is it?” She looked at me keenly
. “Oh God, I don’t know. I suddenly feel really scared. I feel like I’ve been invaded. And I feel so fat. And I’m desperate to smoke all the time. Typical, the one time when you really need a cigarette it’s the worst thing for you. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cope. And . . . I mean Maggie, do you ever look around yourself and think how have I gotten here? How has all this accumulated? Where has my life gone?”

  “Oh God,” I said, straightening up. “Don’t go down there.” Luckily Fergus came into the garden then, clutching a packet of frozen dinosaurs nuggets. I could hear the deep-freeze alarm beeping. Fergus said, “There’s a fire in the freezer, but I got the animals out.”

  “Well done, you,” I said, taking them back off him. Dan had crawled off to the steps and was about to plunge down headfirst. “Actually,” I said, going after him and then returning the ice-age pterodactyls to the kitchen, “it’s not the big things I miss so much, the freedom and the independence, as being able to finish a sentence without interruption, have a proper conversation now and again.”

  “Sorry?” said Fran, trying to wrest her packet of cigarettes from Fergus.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Now, guess who I saw yesterday? Claire Masterson. Do you remember, my year at school?”

  “God, yes,” she said. “Wasn’t she always going off with everyone’s boyfriends?”

  “Ye-es,” I said doubtfully. “Anyway, she’s invited us to a party. Tomorrow night . . .” I paused.

  “And?” she said.

  “And I don’t suppose you could baby-sit? All my regulars have gone AWOL. Good practice . . .”

  She cast her eyes at Fergus and Dan. Fergus was on top of Dan, trying to chew his ear off. “All right,” she said.

  I almost fainted. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said doubtfully.

  “Good,” I said. “Good, good, good, good, good. As Dr. Seuss would say.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat. A lot of repetition.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “But anyway. Good,” I said again, before she could change her mind. “Thanks.”