Oh, heavens, it’s not often I wish this—Lord knows I’d hate to tempt Fate, she has a nasty habit of taking you a little too literally; I’m always afraid to wish I could lose weight in case I end up having my leg sliced off in a car crash: There, now you weigh less—but there are times I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be to be single and child-free at this time of year.
No hot, desperate searches for must-have toys that sold out last October. No three-trolley trips to Sainsbury’s for, amongst other things, nine pounds of spuds (which you don’t have time to peel until three A.M. on Christmas morning). No excruciating multifaith carol concerts in which you cannot even see your offspring because of the shadow cast by the tallest child in the school who is always placed right in the center of the front row.
And, oh dear, no irate publishers left sitting alone in expensive London restaurants because lunch clashed with a carol concert and you forgot to let them know.
That lovely young girl in the low-cut jeans and biscuit suede jacket by the luggage rack, for example. She can’t possibly be Christmas shopping for three under-tens; not in sexy boots four inches high. She’s probably going to be whisked away for Christmas to some glorious white-sugar beach in the Caribbean by a bedroom-eyed Adonis, far from sticky-fingered children high on E numbers and know-better husbands who throw out instructions and then can’t put Barbie’s Own Recording Studio together.
I cling on to the spring ceiling thingy as the train barrels round a tight corner. I must be mad. Heading into London to go shopping four days before Christmas is like rowing back to board the Titanic for an ice cube. My feet hurt already despite my sensible pumps, and we’re only five minutes out of Salisbury station. The train is packed—not a hope of a seat. As it is, I’m nose-to-gabardine-overcoat with the rather large businessman squashed next to me.
And my knickers itch. Well, scratch, really. Can’t be the label, I cut that out (it’s a bit embarrassing when your panties say “Age 8–10” and you’re more 36–38, but Sophie’s undies are so much more comfortable than mine) so—I knew it. Real Christmas trees are much nicer, Nicholas is absolutely right; but—
I don’t know why Gabardine Overcoat is looking at me so strangely. They’re only pine needles.
Christmas is about children, of course it is. But three of them does mean rather a lot of presents to buy, what with FC (mustn’t call him Santa, Nicholas gets so terribly cross) and then the aunts and grandparents and godmothers who ring up and say, “Oh, darling, you don’t mind getting them something from me, do you, you’ll know what they want.” And even though it’s very kind of them and you know they’ll pay you back, eventually, still now that’s something else you have to think of and find and buy and wrap. Though after last year—just what my mother thought three small children would do with a full-size potter’s kiln except try to bake the poor rabbit is beyond me.
I should have started shopping earlier, of course. I meant to; but then I got distracted with planning all sorts of yummy Christmas eats—I thought this year I’d try goose stuffed with persimmon foie gras and a 1985 Chateau d’Yquem sauternes reduction, though I’m rather dreading what Nicholas, such a champion of tradition, will say at the turkey’s nonappearance—and so now I’m rather desperately behind. About two months, to be precise. Very sweet of Liz to mind the girls for me, but heaven knows where I’ll find a Barbie ski suit for Chloe. Poor duck, she does rather take after Liz in the hips department, a size 16 at nine years old is a bit tricky. Luckily she’s stunningly lovely to look at—that delicious pre-Raphaelite hair—but born in totally the wrong century, of course. Seventeenth would have been perfect: Rubens would have loved her. Now if only Nicholas could have nipped into Snow+Rock for me; there’s one two minutes from him in Holborn, bound to have something, but of course he’s away in Manchester. And even if he weren’t, presents aren’t exactly his thing. Although why possession of two X chromosomes automatically makes them mine, as Nicholas seems to think, he doesn’t even—
The Christmas cards. I did put them in the post box, didn’t I? Or—oh, Lord, I didn’t leave them on the front seat of the Volvo? Heavens, I’m not normally this scatty. It’s Christmas, it does this to me every year. It’s like my brain’s on fast forward, scrolling through everything I’ve still got to do—
I sent them. I’m sure I did.
I wish I was brave enough to copy Louise. She has a three-year Christmas card cycle: She does A to H one year, then I to P the next, and Q to Z the third, so that everyone gets a card every three years. Just often enough that people don’t sulk and strike her off their lists.
I stare out the train window at the pelting rain. It’s ten already; I have to be back by four-thirty for Evie’s Bible class recital. And as well as scouring London for inspirational stocking fillers I must make time to go to Harrods Food Hall for some Spanish Roncal cheese (so tricky to find, that creamy, buttery Navarre) for the potato gratin. Pitt’s would have it, of course, quite certain to have it, but obviously that’s not possible; Trace might be there, and it’s bad enough that he’s moving back to Salisbury; even after all these years—
No, don’t think about that. Regrets are for sissies, as Kit loves to say.
Another surge of passengers piles onto the train, and suddenly it really is too crammed to breathe. I feel like I’m on one of those cattle trucks to Auschwitz—oh, Lord, I didn’t mean it, that’s a terrible thing to say, you can’t possibly compare—
“I’m not standing for this,” Gabardine Overcoat suddenly announces, levering himself out of the luggage rack whence the latest influx has pushed him. “The amount they ask for a ticket these days, the least I expect is a seat. If they don’t provide enough second-class carriages, I think we’re perfectly entitled to find seats elsewhere.”
His accent and pale gold silk cravat are true-blue Home Counties. When the much-put-upon silent majority finally finds its voice, you know there’s trouble ahead.
Murmured assent runs around the carriage. It really is stifling in here; we are all of us kitted out in our warmest winter coats, mittened and buttoned and scarfed and hatted, and the carriage is starting to smell somewhat unwashed. A conspiratorial I-will-if-you-will camaraderie seizes us; it reminds me of playing Knock Down Ginger as a child. (My sister Cleo was always much braver than me, she’d even dare to ring the doorbell of The Perv—I’m sure he wasn’t a pervert really, just a lonely old widower whose children lived too far away to visit much—and count to three before running away.)
Two girls in sleeveless Puffa jackets—I can only imagine what Nicholas would think of their silver nose piercings—push open the connecting door to the First Class corridor. Gabardine Overcoat helps a frighteningly young mother maneuver her double stroller across the swaying threshold. Within minutes, we’re all sinking into the posh seats with a delicious feeling of naughtiness.
A pin-striped businessman opposite me snaps his clever pink newspaper in front of his face with a disapproving tut. I giggle and think: I do miss Nicholas.
There are many things I have learned from my three daughters over the years. For example, a king-sized waterbed holds enough water to fill a three-bedroom Florida condo four inches deep. (Evie, last summer.)
A seven-year-old girl can start a fire with a flint rock, even though a forty-three-year-old lawyer insists it can only be done in the movies. (Evie again.)
Brake fluid from the garage mixed with bleach from the laundry room makes smoke; and lots of it. (Evie. Followed by Kit, and then Nicholas, when they heard about it.)
Always look in the oven before you turn it on—plastic Fisher Price toys do not like ovens. (Incidentally, the Salisbury Fire Department has a response time of a little under four minutes.)
And this morning, we all discovered that the spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy. It will, however, make rabbits dizzy.
Rabbits throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
Cleaning up animal vomit on your hands and knees before breakfast is not necessarily the most festive way to start Christmas Day, I think, scouring the flagstones with unnecessary vigor. So when Nicholas sneaks up behind me and slides his hands under my dressing gown to fondle my naked buttocks, I think I can be forgiven for not responding with quite his level of amour.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy sex with my husband. Per se. Whisked away to a water villa in the Maldives for two weeks while someone else minds the children, with no phones or cross publishers or school runs or laundry, I would like nothing better—well, perhaps not nothing better; I must admit to a terrible weakness for homemade bread-and-butter pudding and a fat Penny Vincenzi novel—but anyway, the idea of sex as recreation rather than chore certainly appeals. Whereas these days I seem to find myself thinking, as Nicholas rolls contentedly to his undamp side of the bed: Well, it’s Thursday today, so that gives me till at least—oh, the weekend after next before we have to do it again. Which is possibly not the most romantic way to approach lovemaking with your soulmate. But a hundred and fifty-two Christmas cards don’t write themselves.
I remember, with unexpected nostalgia, surprising Nicholas in his office one evening, not long after we’d met, wearing nothing but a suspender belt and seamed stockings under my raincoat. I’d persuaded the cleaning lady to let me in (it turned out she was a huge fan and had bought all my cookery books) and sat there in the darkness for two hours, waiting for Nicholas to come back from Court. He was terribly late; I nearly lost my nerve and went home, but I’d gone to so much trouble, I couldn’t bear to just leave. I’d painted my nipples with special edible chocolate paint—I’d trekked all the way out to a ladies-only erotic emporium called “Sh!” in north London to find it; it was the most embarrassing and exciting tube journey of my life—and even dusted my pubic hair with cocoa powder; I was terrified it’d somehow melt or something before Nicholas got that far, but it didn’t, it was perfect, it all went off exactly as I’d imagined, just like a late-night movie.
“Don’t put on the light,” I said in my most sultry voice, as he walked into his office and reached for the switch.
He jumped about six feet as I moved forward into the amber puddle of a streetlight and unbuttoned my coat. His mouth simply dropped open; I nearly ruined everything by laughing at the astonished look on his face.
“Close your eyes,” I said, trying not to giggle. “Now: Open your mouth.”
I fed him expensive Belgian chocolates I’d bought in Harrods as I unbuttoned his trousers; one bitter-orange truffle and a cognac-center later, he laid me across his desk and disappeared between my legs with the rapt expression of a cat that had just got the (chocolate) cream.
I sigh now and reach for the persimmon foie gras. It’s been a very long time since we made love anywhere but between John Lewis’s finest Egyptian cotton (two hundred threads per square inch). I just don’t have the energy.
The rabbit incident aside, Christmas morning passes off relatively well. There’s a slightly hairy moment after church when Louise presents Nicholas’s parents with a spiky-leafed cannabis seedling; but fortunately to the pure all things are pure, and Kit discreetly (if a little keenly) appropriates it before it can be put in the back of my in-laws’ car and innocently repotted in their garden.
“But Daisy says she’s in such pain from her arthritis,” Louise protests ingenuously, when Cleo and I corner her in the kitchen, “and Mary Jane is the best painkiller there is—”
“Mother, please,” Cleo hisses. “If you must dabble in drugs, at least refrain from this ridiculous hippie patois and call them by their proper names.”
Cleo professes not to remember playing Knock Down Ginger, or scrumping apples, or pinching lipstick from Woolies for a dare. She claims her crush on Donny Osmond is a figment of my imagination, and that she always thought Fame was rubbish. Cleo is now a very respectable chartered accountant (“Blood will out,” Louise sighed when she heard Cleo’s decision; “so much for rebirthing ceremonies”) and would probably have made the poor sweet Lyons a much more suitable daughter-in-law than the flaky sometime-chef they’re stuck with; but there it is.
At thirty-nine, Cleo is still defiantly single. “My choice,” she says tersely, when Daisy Lyon tentatively asks her over the sherry if she is stepping out with anyone. “If I wanted, I could have any man I pleased.”
“Yes,” Kit mutters, “but you never have pleased any man, have you?”
I adore Edward and Daisy Lyon, of course, impossible not to—she’s an absolute lamb, and he’s such a gentleman, so courtly and correct, with that wonderful ramrod military bearing even at eighty-two; but you can tell they’re a bit bewildered by the speed of the world these days. And Nicholas—well, Nicholas can sometimes be very much his parents’ son. Which just goes to show: It’s nurture, not just nature, that will out.
I drag Kit out of the sitting room just before the Queen’s speech; if he sees Nicholas and Edward stand to listen to Her Majesty—as they always do—restraining him will be beyond my capabilities.
Christmas dinner for ten is always a little testing, especially when one of the guests decides on the spur of the moment to become a vegan—“Marvelous idea, Sophs,” Kit enthuses, “let’s start tomorrow; I hate Boxing Day leftovers”—but the goose is thankfully well received and, miraculously, not in the least bit spoiled by the panicked forty-minute search for Metheny (finally discovered fast asleep under the potting bench in the boiler room in her new Pooh slippers) or Evie’s disturbingly skilled attempts at alchemy. Really, Kit is an ass. As if the baking-soda-and-vinegar incident last month wasn’t bad enough, he has to provide her with the means to cook up H2SO4 in her bedroom.
I feel dreadfully mean about my earlier dressing-gown briskness when I open Nicholas’s present after lunch—not that sexual favors should be in any way linked to a sumptuous nutmeg suede coat from Joseph (though there’s no denying that if they were, I’ve more than earned it this last month or so. I don’t know what’s got into my husband; I might have to borrow Evie’s chemistry set to cook up some bromide for his tea)—but he’s obviously spent a lot of money, an appallingly large sum of money. I mean, Joseph—whereas I—
“Perfect, darling, thank you,” Nicholas says as he opens my suddenly meager gift, a cashmere sweater the same moss gray as his eyes, “absolutely the right thing.”
“I know it’s not terribly exciting, but you did ask for—”
“It’s exciting to me,” he says quietly, “and it will be wonderfully warm for skiing next week. You are a very good wife to me, Malinche; a man simply couldn’t ask for better. And I wouldn’t ask, obviously. Obviously.”
“Such a very odd thing to say,” I muse to Kit later, “in fact, he’s been behaving rather oddly altogether these past few weeks. I know it’s driving him potty having Fisher looking over his shoulder all the time when he’s supposed to have retired—”
“Oddly?”
“Well, yes. Budge up, Kit, I can hardly move my elbows.”
“I don’t know why you don’t just tell him you smoke.” Kit sighs, gracefully exhaling a smoke ring. “He’s hardly going to divorce you and cite Marlboro Lights as corespondent. You’re as bad as Metheny, hiding out in the boiler room for a quick fag like this.”
“Don’t you mean with a quick fag?”
“Nothing quick about me, darling. Ask Paul. Or James. Or—”
I cut him off quickly before he recites his entire sexual history (which could take us to Easter). “I don’t smoke, Kit. Christmas Day and birthdays don’t count.”
“It wouldn’t if you just stuck to your birthday, poppet. Now, tell me about sweet Nick. In what way oddly?”
I inhale deeply, and spend the next five minutes coughing like a romantic heroine with advanced consumption. Lack of practice; entirely my own fault for not telling Nicholas I smoked when we first met. “Don’t call him Nick, Kit, he hates it. I don’t know quite how to put it—he just seems—well, odd.”
“So you keep saying.”
“He’s absolutely rampant, for one thing. I mean, he’s always been surprisingly keen in the bedroom, though perhaps not terribly imaginative—mind you, there was the time with the maple syrup. And of course the nurse’s outfit, very boarding school, that, some sort of Matron thing—”
“Malinche,” Kit says, “sweet of you to share, but not entirely necessary.”
Sometimes I forget Kit isn’t actually a girl.
“Sorry. And then he’s been terribly grumpy, says it’s work, of course, but—”
“He’s always grumpy to me.” Kit sulks.
“Yes, well, you don’t exactly go out of your way to play nicely with him, Kit.”
“I make every effort—”
“Kit, you gave him purple anal beads for Christmas.”
“Just trying to share the fun, darling.”
“It’s lucky for you he assumed they were part of Sophie’s jewelry kit; you must get them back before she turns them into a necklace for her teacher or something.” I stub out my cigarette. “I don’t mean Nicholas is grumpy, exactly; more moody, I suppose. A bit bearish, at times. And then suddenly terribly, terribly nice and attentive—”
Kit says nothing.
“Don’t even think it,” I warn. “Not after—”
“Yes,” says Kit, “point made.”
“Although,” I muse, “he did say this girl’s name the other morning in bed, it was actually rather funny—”
“Funny? Are you quite mad, Malinche?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Kit, he’s just having a naughty little fantasy about this girl at his office—Sara, I met her once, rather shy as I recall—but you know as well as I do he’d never do anything. He’s positively phobic about adultery; hardly surprising, given what happened to his parents. It was quite unconscious. I’m sure he had no idea what he’d said; he’d probably die of embarrassment if I ever told him.”
“Sadly, Pollyanna, I fear for once your optimism is well-placed,” Kit says regretfully. “I can’t quite see Nicholas doing the old inny-outy on his desk with the office floozy, much as the image delightfully boggles the mind. No, I think it probably is just work, sweets, or quite possibly a brain tumor—”
“Not funny, Kit.”
“Now, you, on the other hand, I can quite see getting up to all sorts of mischief.”
He’s lost me. “Mischief? Me? What sort of mischief?”
Kit unfurls his elegant frame from the potting bench and saunters toward the door. “I meant to tell you,” he says negligently, “Trace Pitt is opening his own restaurant in Salisbury, that’s why he’s back. And I hear”—he turns to me with a dark, amused smile—“I hear he’s hoping you will be his new head chef.”
“Oh, Nicholas, isn’t it breathtaking?”
I jam my ski poles into the snow, biting off my gloves finger by finger and unwinding my scarf as I drink in the spectacular view. Below us, the Briançon valley looks absurdly like a Christmas cake dotted with little green plastic pine trees. The vicious snowstorm of yesterday has cleared, leaving behind a foot of glorious fresh powder and acid blue skies.
“Fine,” Nicholas says shortly.
Oh dear. I thought the hard skiing this morning might have cheered him up a bit. Taken his mind off it, so to speak.
I do love him, and I do still fancy him—“Is it something I’m doing? Or not doing? Please, tell me,” he said this morning, desperately earnest—but I just don’t want sex as much as he does. Not these days. Not with three children, for heaven’s sake. And I’m sorry, but I’ve always hated it in the morning. I don’t feel quite fresh. There’s too much raw life going on, too much spinning in my head—gym outfits and lunch boxes and feed the rabbit and fix stuck window—and not enough sleep. Never enough sleep. It’s hard enough to get in the mood at night, when you can’t help but keep an eye on the clock: It’s midnight, six hours till I have to be up; if this takes another twenty minutes, then—
But in the morning, when you’d kill for just another five minutes’ sleep. And knowing the girls could come in at any minute. You would have thought, after ten years of marriage, you would have thought he’d know when I’m in the mood—
“Better get going,” Nicholas says now. “The others will be waiting.”
He shoots off down the piste before I even have my gloves back on. I’m still trying to tuck my scarf back into my ski jacket and close the zipper with clumsy fingers as he reaches a sharp left bend. I glance up, squinting slightly at the brightness of sun on snow, to see where he is, and watch it all unfold before me: the pack of snowboarders appearing over the crest of an adjoining run as if from nowhere, Nicholas stationary on the bend, adjusting his boot, waiting for me to catch up, the snowboarders suddenly bearing down on him, the edges of their boards glinting like knife-blades in the sunlight. And then Nicholas glancing up, astonished, as two of the snowboarders cut in front of him, giving him nowhere to go, and four more head straight toward him, so that he has no option but to throw himself bodily into the snowdrift at the side of the run if he wants to avoid being mown down.
And just as suddenly, it’s all over, and Nicholas is picking himself out of the snow, the boarders’ mocking jeers—“Get out of the way, Granddad!”—echoing down the mountain.
To my surprise, Nicholas tells the story against himself when we join Liz and her husband, Giles, at the piste-side mountain café twenty minutes later, his moodiness melting with the snow on his jacket.
“My own bloody fault,” he observes, “standing in the middle of the piste like that. Should’ve known better. Right on a bend, too. Bloody idiot.”
“They should have jolly well watched where they were going,” Liz protests.
“Ah. Not as easy to maneuver as skis, those snowboards,” Giles says.
Giles is the kind of man who sees the good in everyone, even homicidal Antipodean snowboarders. He has been heard to remark that Osama bin Laden, being one of approximately ninety-five brothers, is clearly very much a family man.
“But are you all right?” Liz presses anxiously. “I’ve ordered you an extra plate of frites, for the shock.”
Nicholas laughs ruefully.
“I’m going to have the devil of a bruise on my backside in the morning, and my sunglasses are wrapped round a pine tree, but apart from that, the only casualty is my pride. You ever tried snowboarding, Giles?”
“Young man’s game,” Giles harrumphs.
“Giles! You’re only thirty-five,” I say, laughing.
“Not wearing the years as well as you, Malinche,” he says gallantly. “And I’m certainly an old enough dog to know when new tricks are beyond me.”
“I rather think it’s trying new tricks that keeps you young,” Nicholas says thoughtfully, blowing on his vin chaud, and surprising me for the second time this morning.
In fact, Nicholas surprises me rather a lot during the second half of our holiday; and I surprise both of us by finding this unfamiliar Nicholas rather erotic. So erotic, in fact, that Nicholas has to brave the ordeal of purchasing condoms in French from the local pharmacy at ten past eleven one night; it (shamefully) never having occurred to me to pack any.
“Edepol nunc nos tempus et malas peioris fieri,” Nicholas says triumphantly as he throws the packet on the bedspread and his clothes on the floor. “Now’s the time for bad girls to become worse still.”
“Who said that?” I ask, pulling his beautiful naked body onto mine.
“Plautus.”
“I like Plautus,” I say firmly.
It all starts the morning after his near miss with the snowboarders. I come down to breakfast late after struggling for twenty minutes to get a demonic Metheny into her snowsuit for the village day care, only to find Nicholas has disappeared.
Evie lifts her face out of her breakfast bowl and displays a Cheshire cat hot-chocolate grin that reaches to her ears. “Daddy said he’d see your pussy in the van show at lunch-time,” she announces.
I look to Sophie for translation.
“He’ll see you at Le Poussin for a vin chaud at lunch.” Sophie sighs. “Evie, you’re useless. As if Daddy would ever drive a van.”
In the event, had Nicholas arrived at the piste-café at the wheel of a white Ford Transit demanding sexual satisfaction, I would have been less surprised.
“Snowboarding?” Kit exclaims, when I call on my mobile from the café lavatory to share the apocalyptic news. “Nicholas?”
“Snowboarding, Nicholas,” I confirm. “Not two words I ever expected to use in the same sentence.”
“Suddenly abduction by aliens is sounding perfectly reasonable,” Kit observes. “I’m looking at the whole business of Roswell and Area fifty-one in a whole new light. By the way,” he adds meaningfully, “I noticed, when I was feeding your cat, that you have rather a lot of messages on your answer machine.”
“Don’t, Kit.”
“I don’t understand you,” he says crossly. “How can you not be curious, after all these years?”
Trace always did have the power to tempt, I think, as his satanic smile fills my mind. But of course it’s out of the question. I mean, the hours, for a start. The girls would need to keep photos of me by their beds so they didn’t think we were being burgled if they ran into me in the hallway in the middle of the night.
But my own restaurant—
Impossible. No point even thinking about it: so I very carefully don’t.
No matter what hours Trace offered me, accepting would be unthinkable; far, far too dangerous on every level. I love Nicholas more than I thought possible; but I’m not going to risk it all by putting myself in the line of fire again.
It turns out he has rather a knack for snowboarding. After two days in which he acquires a collection of bruises that has Evie emerald with envy, it suddenly all comes together for him, and on the third morning, he and his snowboard join the rest of us ski-bound mortals on the piste.
He’s even found time to buy a new khaki jacket and gray cargo pants, I notice in astonishment. Thankful though I am to see the back of the vile navy all-in-one he’s had since we first met, this is all taking a bit of getting used to.
I’m also taken aback to see him sporting white earphones—earphones! And this a man who resolutely refused to switch from vinyl until 1994—and listening to a song by some girl I’ve never even heard of.
“I wouldn’t complain,” Liz mumbles through her pain au chocolat elevenses. “As midlife crises go, buying an iPod and taking up snowboarding is fairly harmless. And you have to admit it suits him.”
Liz is right: The changes in Nicholas do suit him. Watching my husband shooting past on his board, arms outstretched for balance, knees bent, the wind whipping back his hair—goodness, it needs cutting—I’m suddenly punched by the thought: This is the real Nicholas. There have been glimpses in the past—usually in bed—but in a dozen years together I have never seen him as clearly as I do now.
It’s always been the one sly disappointment of my marriage, that I’ve never managed to breach Nicholas’s fettered self-control. Edward and Daisy Lyon’s meticulous British upbringing, it turns out, was more thorough than I’d realized.
And yet—perhaps not thorough enough.
No. Trace Pitt can build the Taj Mahal in Salisbury town center and I’m still not going to return his calls.
“Sophie, will you hurry up!” I yell up the stairs, shifting Metheny to the other hip. “I told you, I’ve got things to do this morning, we’re going to be late!”
Sophie appears on the landing. “But Mummy, I can’t find any clean knickers! They’ve all just vanished! I can’t go to school without any knickers!”
Oops. “Darling, just grab any old pair from the clean laundry basket. We can sort it all out tomorrow. The first day back to school is always a bit of a rush, you know that.”
Minutes later, Sophie thunders down the stairs past me and piles into the backseat of the Volvo next to Evie. I move round to the other side to strap Metheny into her car seat. Scarcely have I secured the hold-all-five-points-and-click-together-while-your-baby-squirms-resentfully harness (I swear, it would defeat navy SEALS) than she sicks up porridge all over herself, the car seat, me, and—I don’t believe it—
“Evie! What on earth is Don Juan doing in the car?”
“But Mummy! It’s show and tell this morning—”
“Take him back to his cage in the scullery. Now! Sophie, help me get Metheny back inside so I can change her. Oh, Lord, the phone—”
It’s my gynecologist’s secretary, calling to reschedule because an elective Caesarean has suddenly “come up”—for which read an invitation to golf and a long lunch at the nineteenth hole. Can I please come in an hour earlier—earlier? oh, have pity—this morning for my well-woman check. The secretary sounds deeply apologetic, but we both know there is nothing to be done. The gynecologist is, after all, a man.
I could cancel my appointment altogether, but then the gynecologist will sulk and make me wait three days to see him next time I have an excruciating bout of cystitis (which, if Nicholas stays on present bedroom form, may not be too far away).
So instead I race to the girls’ school at breakneck speed—“Mummy, did you see that lady’s face at the traffic lights? She looked really funny, can we nearly hit someone again?”—deposit Metheny at Liz’s, and arrive back home with two minutes to spare before I have to leave again.
I usually like to make a little extra effort on the hygiene front when I’m going to the gynecologist (it’s like brushing your teeth before having them cleaned, or Hoovering under the bed before the cleaner comes) but clearly this time I’m not going to have time for more than a lick and a promise. I rush upstairs, throw off my kaftan—such a sartorial lifesaver, I can’t imagine why these ever went out of fashion—wet the washcloth sitting next to the sink, and give myself a quick wash down below to make sure all is at least presentable. Flinging the washcloth into the laundry basket, I throw the kaftan back on, hop back into the car, and race to my appointment.
And this headless-chicken chaos is just an ordinary morning, I reflect as I spend the next twenty minutes sitting behind a horse box and grinding my teeth in frustration.
I realize that Nicholas, like most husbands whose wives don’t actually go out to work, secretly believes that I lie around all day eating chocolate digestives and trying on shoes. And he is right, to a certain extent, since this is exactly what I would do—once I have taken the girls to school, swept the kitchen floor, stacked the dishwasher, hunted down dirty socks (my last sweep behind the Aga, under Don Juan’s cage, and, revoltingly, in the biscuit tin, yielded four), put the washing machine on, dropped off Nicholas’s dry cleaning, played with Metheny on the swings at the village green, put a casserole in the Aga, mopped up the mess from the leaky dishwasher, called a plumber, done all the washing-up by hand, pegged out the laundry, put Metheny to bed for her nap, brought in the laundry when it started to rain, arranged a service for the Mercedes, scribbled down a sudden idea for a new sort of soufflé, pegged the laundry back out again when it stopped raining, answered the phone four times to salesmen trying to sell me double glazing, collected the girls from school, glued cotton wool on a cardboard snowman, written five sentences using adverbs ending in ly, fed the girls, bathed them, dressed them, read them a story, put them to bed, discussed arrangements for his parents’ golden wedding anniversary party for forty minutes with his mother on the phone, checked under Evie’s bed for monsters with a flashlight, read them a story again, ironed Nicholas a shirt for the morning, cooked our dinner, washed up, tidied up, bathed myself, and gone to bed. Just line those shoes up for me to try on, I’m sure there’ll be time tomorrow.
Kit says I should stop trying so hard, let Nicholas see some of the frantic paddling below the surface instead of just the cool, calm swan above; but I can’t, he thinks I’m so capable, so organized, so unflappable. I couldn’t bear his disappointment.
Thanks to the snail’space horse box, I’m ten minutes late for the gynecologist. The secretary whisks me through to an empty examination room with a rather-you-than-me smile, and I whip off my clothes and pop up onto the table, sliding my ankles into the stirrups and trying to look suitably contrite. It doesn’t do to antagonize megalomaniacs armed with cold specula.
I stare up at the ceiling, letting my mind drift. If I were going to be Trace’s head chef—obviously I’m not—but if I were, there are some fascinating things happening in micro-gastronomy at the moment—oh, that sounds dreadfully dull and scientific, not at all to do with making strawberries taste of chocolate and potatoes taste like peas, which is what it really is—
(Relax, relax, he’s seen it all a thousand times.)
—and if anyone was going to take that sort of gastronomic plunge, it would be Trace; I’m amazed it’s taken him this long to open his own restaurant—
(Oh, cold hands.)
—though obviously I can quite see how sardine ice cream in Salisbury might not—
The gynecologist chuckles between my thighs. “My, my, Mrs. Lyon, we have made an extra effort this morning, haven’t we?”
I peer through my splayed legs at the top of his head. “I’m sorry?”
“Always a pleasure when someone goes the extra mile. All right now, try to relax, this’ll just take a jiffy—”
I puzzle briefly over his remark on the drive home, squirming damply in my seat—so much lubricant, necessary of course, unless one is turned on by the cold metal probing of strangers; not that there’s anything wrong with that, though it’s all a little Black Lace for me—but then as I walk in the back door, the phone is ringing, and by the time I’ve placated Ali, my increasingly tetchy agent, with reckless promises of a dozen new recipes and a complete synopsis (a dozen! By mid-February!) the entire incident has completely slipped my mind.
The penny, however, drops with a resounding echo when the girls get home.
“Mummy,” Sophie calls from the bathroom, “where’s my washcloth?”
“What washcloth?” I yell back, my head still in the Aga (from which I am extracting a slightly burned casserole, not contemplating anything Sylvia Plathish).
“The one that was here by the basin,” Sophie says with exaggerated patience. “It had all my glitter and sparkles in it.”
I’m naked and about to step in the shower—oh, the shame!—when Evie runs into the bathroom, her eyes wide in her bleached, shocked face. “Liz is here and she didn’t even see the shortbread you left out to cool she just came running through the kitchen she’s still got her slippers on and she says you have to come downstairs and watch the TV now.”
A cold drool of fear slides down my spine as I grab a towel. Instinctively, I know that something terrible has brushed my family.
Liz is hunched forward on the sofa in front of the television, her elbows on her knees. She leaps up and rushes over as if to throw her arms round me, then, at the last moment, seems to realize that this is inappropriate—for now, I think in terror—and stands there awkwardly fiddling with the hem of her bobbly old cardigan instead.
“What, Liz? What is it?”
“A bomb,” Liz says helplessly. “Actually, five of them. In London again, it seems they were timed to go off together in the middle of the rush hour—”
“Where?” I say thickly, as if talking through a mouthful of peanut butter.
“Trafalgar Square, Marble Arch—it’s terrible there, oh, God, Mal, the pictures—Victoria Station, Knightsbridge and—”
She pauses. I can’t bear the pity in her eyes.
“Holborn—oh, my God, Nicholas.”
How unoriginal, how desperate, the bargains we make with God. Please keep him safe and I’ll go to church every Sunday. Please keep him safe and I’ll give a hundred pounds to charity. Please keep him safe and I’ll never get cross when he leaves his clothes on the floor, I won’t mind that he never makes the bed, I’ll devote myself to being a perfect wife, a perfect mother, I’ll do anything, only please, please keep him safe.
Kit arrives ten minutes after Liz. He scoops up the children and whisks them home with him—“Who’s for a sleepover at Uncle Kit’s? No, Evie, you appalling child, you may not bring that revolting rabbit, not unless you bring carrots and onions to have with him”—and I sit riveted in front of the television, gripping my towel to my chest with white-knuckled fingers, unable to tear myself away from the horrific news footage, my mind blank with fear.
The terrorists have outdone themselves this time and blown up a power station too, it seems. So much of London is blacked out and of course the telephones are down, landlines and cell networks. There’s no way of communicating, of finding out, and all I want to do is leap in the car and drive up there and see; but of course I can’t, the roads into central London are closed, half the city is cordoned off, so I sit here, taut as a bow, not daring for one second to stop the silent mantra in my head—keep him safe keep him safe keep him safe—in case I snap the thin thin thread connecting my husband to life.
I watch the live images with an eerie detachment. The smoking ruins, the carnage—this is Tel Aviv, surely? Baghdad, or Kabul; not London. Not again.
None of it seems real. In a moment that old woman, covered in a blanket of gray dust, will open her eyes again, they’ll wipe all the tomato ketchup off that dead-eyed teenage boy, those people will stop shivering under the foil emergency blankets and get up for a cup of coffee, laughing and complaining about the canteen sandwiches as they stretch their legs and wait for the next take. Except, of course, that those crumpled mounds beneath blue sheets aren’t carefully arranged props, that isn’t red paint on the pavement there, that lost teddy bear—somehow there’s always a teddy bear, isn’t there?—belongs to a real child.
Even though I know the lines aren’t working, I press redial again and again until Liz finally takes the phone away from me. “He’ll call you,” she says brightly, “as soon as the networks are back up. He’ll be fine. You know Nicholas, fit as a fiddle. Look at him snowboarding.”
So what! I want to scream. A whole orchestra of fitness can’t protect you against nails and glass and bricks and concrete!
By midnight, the news networks have shifted into aftermath mode; their reporters, more composed now that the initial adrenaline rush of “Breaking News!” has eased, tell us little new information as they stand in front of arc-lit heaps of smoking, blackened rubble, grim-faced rescue workers slowly toiling in the background. In the studios, terrorism “experts” and politicians bicker. And still I have no idea if my husband is alive or dead, if he is already one of the two hundred people—dear God, two hundred!—blown into flesh-and-bone smithereens by the blasts; or if he will be a statistic added in later.
Eventually, I send Liz home, to cherish her own husband. I call Nicholas’s parents again and promise to let them know the minute I hear anything at all. “No news is good news,” Edward says bravely, but I can hear Daisy sobbing quietly in the background. And then I curl up on the sofa, still in my bath towel, dry-eyed, wide awake, waiting. Waiting.
Because we’ve all had to learn, haven’t we, that this is how you find out that your husband, your child, has been killed by a terrorist bomb on the way home from work; there’s no flight manifest, nothing to say clearly, in black and white, one way or another. You tell yourself there’s more chance of someone you love being hit by a bus than blown up on one, but fear washes through you as you wait anxiously for the phone to ring, and an hour later you’re still waiting, and the dread coagulates in your stomach; and yes, the lines are down, and yes, he’s probably stuck in grid-locked traffic somewhere, but the hours pass, and the next day breaks and he still hasn’t phoned, and somewhere out there, for two hundred families the worst has happened, even if they don’t yet know it. The fear blossoms like a mushroom cloud in your soul and you’re left clinging to a tiny shred of hope as if your sanity depended on it: which of course it does.
And at quarter to seven the next morning, my phone finally rings.
“Mal? It’s me,” Nicholas says.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank—
“Mal, are you there? Dammit, these lines—”
“I’m here,” I whisper dizzily.
“You saw the news, obviously. I’m fine, bit shaken up, as you’d expect, but we were lucky, office lost a few windows but the main damage was the other end of Holborn.” His tone is flat, leached of emotion. Shock, obviously. “It’s not as bad as it looks on television, but Christ, it’s bad enough.”
The words spill out of me with all the pent-up force of twelve nightmarish hours. “But are you sure you’re all right? Where were you when it happened? What did you do? Where have you been, I tried to call you but—”
“I’m fine,” he says again. “Look, I’m sorry you were worried but—hang on.”
There is a strange noise, like rushing water, and then a clatter as Nicholas picks up the phone again. His voice sounds muffled, as if he’s climbed into a wardrobe. “Mal, it’s been a hell of a night,” he says wearily. “I know you must have been going frantic, but it was out of my hands. I’ll do my best to get home as soon as I can, but you can imagine what it’s like trying to move anywhere at the moment. I don’t even know if the trains are running yet.”
“Waterloo’s open again, I heard on the news. Where are you now?”
“Oh. Yes. At the office, obviously. Spent the night here. Look, Mal, let me go now, OK? I’ll be home when I can. How are the girls?”
He sounds more shaken than I’ve ever heard him. He clearly isn’t telling me the half of it, and a fist twists my in-sides. Lord knows what he’s been through, what horrors he’s seen. How close I came to losing him.
“The girls are fine,” I say. “They’re with Kit—”
“Of course.”
“Nicholas, please. He was worried sick about you—we all were.”
“Sorry. Yes.”
“I love you,” I say, suddenly overwhelmed. “I do love you, Nicholas.”
He hesitates, and I smile through my tears. Embarrassed to say it in front of everyone at the office, even now. How very Nicholas. “You, too,” he mumbles finally.
It’s only after he’s rung off that I realize I haven’t asked if he’s spoken to his parents. I try to ring him back at the office, but get a disconnected tone—clearly the phone network is still very patchy, Nicholas must have been lucky. I telephone the Lyons myself with the news, and then drift slowly into the kitchen, suddenly rather light-headed.
It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for the past twelve hours. I feel sick, elated, tired, anticlimactic, angry, foolish, all at once. I never want to have to go through a night like that again. How dreadful that it takes something this appalling to remind you how very much you have to lose.
I suddenly feel very small and ashamed of myself. I spent most of yesterday mentally raging against Nicholas simply because he was out working while I was stuck slaving over a hot ironing board and picking up raisins of rabbit poo from the fruit bowl. But his job nearly cost him his life. What is a little boredom or the odd steam burn on your wrist compared to that?
A thrill of pure happiness sweeps over me. He’s safe, he’s alive. I do a little jig of relief and delight and pleasure by the Aga, I just can’t help it.
Which is why, when Trace Pitt pushes open the top half of the kitchen stable door and sees me for the first time since the day I lost our baby, I am standing there stark naked with sparkles and glitter in my pubic hair.