Sometimes they talked in the car and sometimes they talked a lot.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Am I allowed to say spermatozoa?’
‘I don’t see why not. Have you got your inhaler? And the cheque for the ski-trip?’
‘Mum.’
He was the only one in the world who listened to her, Ariadne reflected, and did what she said. Not like Patrick, her husband, who lay in the bath worrying about his pension contributions. Misery was like a tree, she thought: the topmost branches might hang far above you, but they still had the capacity to fall on your head.
‘I remember when I was at school,’ she said, wondering what had happened to the Coldplay CD. ‘My mind was full of girlish dreams, and the summer afternoons seemed to roll on for ever like the squares in a patchwork quilt. But now . . .’
‘You’re a loser, mum,’ her daughter Tallulah had told her the other day. ‘Xanthe’s mother’s got a shop in Bruton Street selling designer jewellery, and Araminta’s mum’s having an affair with Pete Doherty.’
Sometimes the terrible struggle of the school, this merciless crawl through foul air and the black talons of malevolent rain, gave her, Ariadne, pause. The journey took forty-five minutes, forty-two if you took a devious left-hand turn along Murgatroyd Avenue, forty-six if you stalled at the roundabout.
‘Mum,’ said Toby again, from the back seat. ‘Will you test me on my Hebrew?’
They turned right into the Finchley Road, past the shop that had those nice hanging baskets and the deli that did the goats’ milk cheese.
‘Mum,’ said Tallulah. ‘Can I have my nose pierced? Can I?’
It was so hard, Ariadne reflected, so nutritionless, this cramped bourgeois existence. Lying awake at night in your mid-terrace semi, negotiating the M25 in your BMW, pondering the landscape from the window of your gîte in the Dordogne, your mind ran away with you, constructed unappeasable phantoms for you to chase. And then you came awake to find the au pair had measles and the French windows were jammed shut. Stalled, stymied, silenced.
The school gates loomed, the 4X4s tussling before them like embattled dinosaurs. Silently the children disembarked. Deserted, she thought, abandoned, bereft. Suddenly Toby’s face appeared at the window.
‘Spermatozoa,’ he said. ‘Bye, mum.’
The brief, epiphanic moment hung above them in the dense and terrible sky.