Having It and Eating It Page 6

  Before she went, Fran came upstairs with me to find me something to wear. I left Fergus in front of Thomas the Tank Engine, lined up for his favorite crashes, with a big pile of floppy Marmite sandwiches and strict orders not to wipe his fingers on the sofa. Fran held Dan while I flicked self-consciously along the hangers in my rickety pine wardrobe. She said: “You can’t wear that!” and “What the hell is that?” and “Doubt you’ll get into that” and “Hm. Thought not.”

  “It’s all too black and middle-aged in here,” she said. “You need something with color. Haven’t you got an old nighty and a little cardy?”

  “I’ve got an old nighty,” I said, producing it.

  “Not that old,” she said, grimacing.

  “This is hopeless.” She put Dan onto the floor and picked up my dog-eared Fcuk Buy Mail catalogue. “Oh, what about this?” She held up the page with the white sprinkle sequin dress. I loved that dress. It had tiny straps beneath the model’s tumbling auburn locks and was about four inches long. It probably would have fitted me—three years earlier. I wrinkled up my nose. “Dry clean only,” I said.

  Fran looked bored. “Oh right.”

  I turned back to my closet. Dan had started pulling out the shoes from the shoe rack: one of Jake’s old loafers, now dusty and slope-heeled; some Docksides, cracked and sand-encrusted; several pairs of gray-white sneakers, a red suede stiletto!

  “What about this?” I said, holding it aloft like Cinderella’s prince, spinning it round on the top of my finger. “Would this jazz something up?”

  Fran laughed. “‘Jazz’?” she said. “Oh, Maggie, you are funny. You sound like my mother.” She started to talk as if she had a plum in her mouth. “How about a nice silk scarf with horse stirrups on it. That can jazz up any outfit. Oh God, Maggie. This is what I’m worried about. Am I going to start talking about ‘jazzing things up’? Am I going to have a closet full of yesterday’s clothes? It’s fine for you, you’re Maggie. But does motherhood automatically mean letting yourself go?”

  I was smiling at her, but I could feel the blood draining from my face and then flooding back into all the wrong places. It was throbbing under my eyes. My throat suddenly felt tight. I had to keep smiling or I would cry.

  “I don’t know,” I said, still smiling. “I suppose it, well I mean it . . . It depends on . . .” I couldn’t seem to get the words out.

  “Oh, God. Have I upset you?” She got up and put her hands on my shoulders. “Oh sorry. I didn’t mean to. Was that very tactless? I didn’t think you minded about things like that. Not like old frivolous me. I’m such a body fascist. It’s the inside that counts. And you’re so relaxed with things and people love you for it. Jake I know, I’m sure, loves you for it.”

  I turned away and picked up Dan who had emptied the shoe rack now and had started on Jake’s ties. When I stood up, I was standing by the mirror and I turned to give myself a long look. It was like catching my face in a Tube window. I knew I was going through a dowdy phase—it’s a time thing as much as anything—but I saw my face properly for the first time in ages. There it was: distorted and flattened, with hard angles for cheeks and dark rings where the eyes should be, as if all the old bad points were accentuated, all the good ones dissolved. This wasn’t a phase. This was how I was. I looked hollowed out. I looked middle-aged. I said, quietly, “Yes, well, I wouldn’t know, because he’s hardly ever here . . .”

  Fran had diverted her attention back to the clothes on the bed. She was holding a pair of black leggings against her bump. She said, “Oh, that reminds me. Tell him I saw him last night. I yelled at him from the car window, but he didn’t see me. He was too busy yakking. Can I borrow these? They look blissfully comfy.”

  I turned. “Who was he yakking with?”

  “Oh just some girl.” She chucked the leggings back on the bed, stretched, and whirled her hands around above her head—a pregnant ballerina. “So can I have them?” She looked at her watch. “Oh shit. Better go. I’ve got prenatal yoga. Bugger, I meant to buy some almond oil to massage my perineum.”

  “The little touch that means so much,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Of course you can borrow them. They’re probably too tight for me anyway.”

  At the door, she said, “Sorry if . . .”

  And I said, “Doesn’t matter. Thanks for baby-sitting tomorrow.”

  And she said, “Give my love to Jake.”

  And I said, “I will if I see him.” And we both laughed. So everything was all right then.

  I was bathing the children when Jake got home. He came straight upstairs hollering, “Where’s my family!” like a hungry monster and made Fergus laugh so much he went under the water. While I was fishing him out, Jake came up behind me and kissed me on the head. “You’re early,” I said, putting my arms back to keep him there.

  “I bunked off,” he said. For a moment, he buried his nose in my hair, but then he was tickling Fergus and hauling him out of the bath, and chasing him, squawking and shrieking and wet, up the stairs and around our bedroom and over our bed and got him so overexcited I couldn’t get him to sleep for hours.

  Chapter 4

  Saturday started early. It was 5:30 a.m. when Fergus began hollering for his breakfast in the other room and then, a few minutes later, in my ear.

  “Whose turn is it?” Jake muttered.

  “Yours,” I said, but he didn’t move. I got up with big exaggerated getting-up noises and, on the way out, left the door open which was code for “I’m happy for you to carry on sleeping if you can bear to do so through the guilt.” Nobody ever warns you about the guilt quota in family relationships. “Shut the door!” yelled Jake after me, which was code for

  “shut the door.”

  I took Fergus down to the kitchen where he played on the floor, driving his Matchbox cars along the ridges between the tiles while I emptied the dishwasher. I loved my house in the early morning. It felt cool and clean and monastic without the toys out and papers everywhere. The kitchen was small—I’d never wanted to waste garden space by expanding out like all the other newcomers on our street—so it had windows on two sides and on June mornings like this the sun slipped in, past the pots on the sill, still sleepy, not bright enough yet to glare accusingly at the egg stains on the table or the crayon on the woodwork, but strong enough to throw the creamy whiteness of the walls into relief and send geranium shadows dancing up the cabinets. The cabinets were painted an off-white called “Casablanca.” “White with a hint of Bogey,” said Jake.

  It was almost nine when he stumbled down the stairs with Dan in his arms. Fergus and I were watching Saturday morning television by then, curled up around each other on the sofa, and while half my mind had been actively following Buzz Lightyear’s conflict with Evil Zurg, the other half had been mulling over “things,” worrying at them like a tongue at a sore tooth. The previous evening Jake and I had had what we used to call, in the days when nights could be anything but, a QNI (a Quiet Night In), but this one had been even quieter than usual. Jake had been preoccupied once the children were asleep, and we had eaten and cleared in silence. He’d gone to bed early, leaving me in front of Frasier, so I hadn’t told him about Fran seeing him with “a girl.” I hadn’t asked him who she was. I hadn’t made a joke of it, got to the bottom of it, as I would have done a few months before. A few months before, I would never have believed it for an instant. But now? I didn’t know what I thought. I just felt uneasy and distant. I hadn’t, now that I came to think of it, even told him that Fran had agreed to baby-sit tonight, though if I had he would probably just have groaned and moaned about going. I was thinking about this when he came in. I said, idly, “Oh, hello. By the way, I meant to say, the good news is Fran says she’ll baby-sit tonight.”

  He looked bemused. He frowned. He handed me Dan who snuggled into my neck. “Why?” he said, waving his hands in front of Fergus’s eyes to distract him from the television.

  “So we can go
to Claire’s party.”

  He groaned. Here we go. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “We’re not really going, are we?”

  “We have to,” I said firmly. Then more weakly, “I said we would.”

  Jake was walking around the room with Fergus standing on his feet, using them like human stilts. He sighed heavily and put Fergus back on the sofa. “I’d better go and have a shower now then.”

  It was only an excuse of course. Like “Just popping out to get the paper” or “I’ve just got to get this off in the post,” “having to have” a shower is one of the few times you ever get to have any time to yourself when you have small children.

  So Jake had his shower—a long shower, you could have cleaned the Statue of Liberty with a toothbrush in the time it took him to wash—and Fergus and Dan and I sat on the kitchen floor and studied the ants. Children are the gods of small things. When I was little, I was always finding dying fledglings in the garden. I’d make a bed for them in an old plastic breadbin and bring them milk and worms. And then I’d rush home from school and up the stairs and into my bedroom to see them . . . and, well, usually my mother had discreetly cleared them away by then. Or I’d find money on the pavement and stag beetles in the gutter or powder blue black-birds’ eggs cracked open on the grass: objects you never find when you’re grown up. You have to be a mother for your nose to be brought back to the ground, for little things to matter more than the large.

  The ants in our kitchen knew they were on to a winner. No pesticides in this house. Far too toxic. Over the previous days, Fergus and I had studied their advance on the kitchen cupboard, one, two, three, up the cabinet, into the jam. At the moment, they were marching in a line from the back door across the tiles to a hole in the baseboard.

  “Is that their house?” Fergus asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe they live in the garden and they just come here to shop.”

  “They’re busy,” said Fergus. “Aren’t they?”

  “Busy doing nothing,” I said. “They are amazing things, ants. The industry, the organization. They live in finely developed communities. Did you know that when . . .”

  “OH MUMMY!” Fergus cried. “Dan’s eating them!”

  The phone rang just then—in time to divert a crisis. It was Angela, Jake’s mother. I told her Jake was in the shower, but she was quite happy to talk to me—as long as the subject was Jake. Like many women I knew, I had taken on the role of mediator between my cohabitee and his parents, a domestic hostage negotiator. I was the one who remembered birthdays and anniversaries, who made interested inquiries about the garden and the Nile cruise. I was the one who cooked Sunday lunch and made sure we had the right sherry and kept them up to date with their son’s career advancements. Angela always complained that Jake never told her anything, whereas I’d say, “Oh yes, I know, he’s dreadful about keys” or “Yes, I’ve told him he should get that mole seen to.” She babied her only son, and we all colluded in it. Only sometimes did I let it irritate me. After I’d put the phone down, promising he’d ring her when he was dry (and resisting the temptation to add “between the toes and behind the ears”), I rang Mel. I said,

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you bring Milly round to play?”

  She said, “I would, but I’ve got a half leg, an underarm, and a bikini at 11.”

  “Well, come after. Isn’t the bikini agony?”

  “Absolute agony but not as agony as the underarm, which is major agony. I’ll ask Milly. MILLY! Do you want to go and play with Fergus?”

  Fergus was jumping up and down next to me trying to grab the receiver. “What do you want?” I said. He muttered something. “What?” He pulled my head down so that my mouth was on a level with his ear. He hadn’t really gotten the hang of whispering.

  “Can she bring her guns?” he begged.

  Mel came back on the line. She said they’d come for lunch. I told her to come armed.

  Jake clumped down the stairs then, looking spruce. “Hello, gorgeous,” he said, happy about something, and unstringing the belt of my robe.

  “Hey,” I said. We kissed—a brief moment of happy family: parents united, baby frolicking on the carpet, toddler busy with a box of matches—before Fergus jumped on Dan and the usual mayhem broke out, everybody shouting and yelling and trying to kill each other. Jake didn’t look so happy again after that. I was still feeling disgruntled.

  “Ring your mother,” I said. “You never ring your mother.”

  Mel and Milly arrived at midday. Milly and Fergus threw themselves into each other’s arms and ran upstairs giggling. Mel said, patting Jake’s stomach through his shirt, “What’s this?”

  “Oh no,” he said, anguished.

  “It’s all right,” she teased. “It’s nice. Makes you look cuddly.”

  “I don’t want to look cuddly,” he said.

  “All right then: commanding.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “How’s Piers?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Poor Piers,” I called from the kitchen where I was making coffee.

  “Poor Piers nothing,” called out Jake. “He can always get out if he wants to. He doesn’t have to stay with her.”

  “I know,” I said, coming back in with the coffee pot and a packet of chocolate chip cookies. “It’s just . . .”

  “Excuse me,” said Mel from the sofa where she had put her legs up. “It’s my love life you’re discussing if you don’t mind. I am in the room.”

  “Well?” said Jake. “How is it?”

  Mel sighed. “Uninspiring. He’s sweet, but . . . there’s no spark.”

  I handed her her coffee. “Sex?”

  “Yes please, but no sugar.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  She lay back down. “Darling,” she camped. “He’s an anesthetist. It passes in a blur. I count to ten, and when I wake up, it’s all over. Completely painless.”

  Jake said, anguished, “Oh no, I can’t bear it. The thought of anyone talking about me like this . . .” He got up from his chair. “I’ve got to go and do some work anyway.” He mussed Mel’s hair. “Staying for lunch?” She nodded. “Good. See you in a bit.”

  After he’d gone, Mel and I went into the kitchen. She took Dan on her knee while I defrosted a quiche and told me about this man in his fifties who’d come into the clinic the day before, particularly requesting her, and how he’d stood shyly in the doorway, slightly stuttery, hands in his pockets, a bit greasy looking but otherwise harmless, and told her how he had a problem “down there.” “So I said, all serious, not wanting to jump to conclusions: ‘down where?’ and he kept saying ‘down there,’ so finally I said I’d do an examination and a funny look came over his face and he dropped his trousers and shrieked, ‘it goes all hard, it goes all hard’ and started cackling with laughter. I had to push him out of my room. Apparently, he’s done it to all the women doctors, just no one had warned me!” I laughed with her at this, but maybe I stopped too soon, because she said, “Are you all right?”

  I said, turning away from her and looking out of the window, “What would you say if someone told you they’d seen Jake with a girl?”

  Mel said “What?”

  I turned back. “A girl.”

  “When?”

  “Late at night.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. Yakking.”

  “Who told you this?” She was looking at me as if I was mad.

  “Fran. She said she saw him. He told me he was with Ed.”

  “Well, I’d say you, or Fran, need your head examined. Why would Jake see a girl? He’s got you. Or if he did, it was probably someone from work. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I can’t bear to.” I sat down next to her. “In case it’s true.”

  “Oh Maggie. How could it be? He loves you. You’re the best couple I know.” She looked into my face. “He adores you. You’ve got no reason to . . .”

  “I don’t know, Mel.” I cleared the papers on the
table into a pile, sorted Jake’s mail from mine.

  “Things aren’t great at the moment. He’s distant, disengaged. I thought relationships were supposed to get easier. But they don’t. Everything speeds up and intensifies. Things that used to take weeks to happen take place in a day. One minute we love each other and the next, we seem to hate each other. Honestly, I really do. I hate him sometimes. It’s frightening. And then I love him again and it happens so fast. It’s so changeable.” I stood up. “Like the English weather.”

  Mel said, “Well, in my experience, these sorts of feelings are easily solved.”

  “How?” I’d opened the fridge and began spooning puréed carrots into a bowl of left-over rice for Dan.

  “A good shag’s what you need. Clears the air like a thunderstorm.”

  I gave her a rueful look over my shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Yes well, easier said than done.”

  “Oh dear.” She grimaced.

  I took Dan off her knee and, plonking him in his high chair, began coaxing purée into his mouth. I looked at the door and back again and mouthed, “And it’s not like him.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “So something’s up,” I whispered.

  She ran through a few suggestions. She advised adding a new spark to the relationship. She mentioned that Cosmo staple of coming to the door in a negligee. I told her that, as in most grown-up relationships, my cohabitee had his own key. She brought up candlelit dinners.

  I said, “Puleese.”

  She said, “Well, why not do something different for once. Experiment.”

  “You mean anal sex?” I said and winced.

  Then she said, “Oh fuck, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a phase?”

  “Yes, or maybe it’s me,” I said. I gave up on Dan, who didn’t seem hungry or certainly not hungry for puréed carrots and chucked his bowl behind me into the sink. “Maybe he just doesn’t fancy me any more.” I wiped Dan’s mouth and hands with his bib. “Or maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe this is always what happens after a bit. Maybe it takes two years or five or ten, but finally you can’t summon it up anymore. I mean”—I got up to find Dan a hunk of bread—“do you think you can ever go back to the days when every pore seems to tingle and you can’t wait to tear off his clothes? When sex really is preferable to a good book? Do you think it’s a choice between that and settling down? Can you ever have both?”