The Adultery Club (6 page)

I shoot upstairs to get ready. I haven’t time for the long relaxing bubble bath I crave—I haven’t had that kind of time since I got pregnant with Sophie—or indeed even to wait for the hot water to make its leisurely way through the ramble of furred pipes from the tank in the outhouse to the calcified shower head in the upstairs bathroom, a journey roughly comparable in terms of time and complexity to the Paris-Dakar rally. Instead, I whip off my clothes and brace myself for the ice-cold scourge that passes for a shower in this house. A six-hundred-year-old thatched farmhouse in two acres of breath-snatchingly beautiful Wiltshire countryside is romantic and gorgeous and just oozing with history and charm, and of course as soon as Nicholas and I saw it—house-hunting when I was newly pregnant with Evie—we just had to buy it, there was never any question about
that
. But it is
not
practical. Overflowing cesspits and lethally exposed live wires are neither romantic nor charming, and there have been times—never publicly admitted to; Nicholas would be mortified
—
when I have longed for something brand-spanking-new in vulgar red brick and equipped with the latest in efficient brushed-steel German appliances.

Gasping at the freezing water, I scrape a sliver of hard soap over my chicken skin, able to differentiate between my breasts and goose bumps only by the fact that two of them sport shriveled brown nipples. I try in vain to work up a decent lather until I realize that it is not in fact soap I am
scrubbing over my scrawny pudenda but a piece of the ceiling plaster which has come down
again
.

By the time I finish washing my hair—with supermarket bubble bath, yuk and bugger, since wretched Sophie has once more pinched the wildly expensive shampoo that Kit gave me last birthday—my lips are blue and my fingers have frostbite. My dratted hair will frizz into a hideous Afro if I use the hair dryer, and since it’s already after five I don’t even have time to let it dry naturally by the Aga in the kitchen—the only warm room in the house—as I usually do. I’m going to have to venture out into the bitter November night with my head dripping wet; I will no doubt catch my death of cold, double pneumonia, pleurisy, and tuberculosis, but obviously this is entirely my own fault for forgetting about the party in the first place.

“Don’t say it,” I warn Kit, as I race downstairs in the safe but dull little black dress I’ve had since I was about fourteen. “No time to dither, it had to be this.”

“Quite sure?”

“Not a word, thank you.”

I dispense kisses liberally amongst the girls, fling keys and cash and lipstick into my bag, and scramble into Nicholas’s Mercedes, then scramble back out and go back for the monogrammed humidor I bought for him to give Will Fisher. I hate driving Nicholas’s car, I’m always so scared I’ll dent it or something, and although it’s so wonderful and safe and huge—I feel like I’m driving a luxury tank—I’m also very aware that even a
tiny
scrape on the bumper will set us back hundreds of pounds. I am really much happier in my old Volvo, so much more forgiving; and every little dent along its sides tells a story; it’s like a metal photograph album really, I know I’m going to hate it when I finally say goodbye.
But the Volvo’s still with Ginger, so it’s got to be the Mercedes, and actually—I’d forgotten—it has heated seats, oh what bliss, at least now I’ll have a warm bottom when I get on the train.

When Nicholas and I first met, I didn’t even know how to drive. At twenty-four I was still gadding about London on the ancient sit-up-and-beg bicycle my mother, Louise, passed on to me when I followed in her shoes to Edinburgh; although Louise didn’t actually graduate, of course, she dropped out in her second year to go to California and “find herself” with her boyfriend (who naturally made sure he got
his
degree before decamping to join the flower children). The swine stayed around just long enough to get her pregnant with my sister before scuttling home to a lifetime of accountancy, his brief flirtation with the unconventional firmly over. Louise, not in the least put out by his desertion, joined a Californian lesbian commune and gave birth to Cleo in a pool as the sisters sang “Kumbaya” in a circle around her. She then promptly got pregnant again a few months later—“the lesbian thing never really
took
, you see; when we started having our periods together the amount of hormones swilling around was positively
lethal”
—by a newly arrived waiter from Florence, who this time did at least offer, in very broken English, to marry her. Louise thanked him very gently for being so kind, declined politely but firmly, and came back home to Salisbury so that she could have me at Stonehenge; not quite literally—much to her chagrin, even in hippie 1970 they wouldn’t let her do
that—
but in a little country hospital nearby.

Once, not long after I met Nicholas, I asked my mother why she had never married after she came back home, fully expecting some sort of Germaine Greer rant about
marriage-as-patriarchal-ownership (before she recanted, of course; my mother has never quite forgiven her for that) but instead, “You think marriage is just about you and him,” Louise said, regarding me steadily, “but it’s
not
, it’s not a private romantic thing at all. You take on so many other people too, a whole network of them, all their problems and fears and difficulties. I never wanted any of that. I knew I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. I just wanted it to be
us.”

I realized then that I didn’t actually know my mother at all.

Nor, in a very literal sense, did I ever know my father. But it’s from Roberto—Louise never did catch his last name—that I got the impossible hair and an overwhelming desire to cook almost from the moment I could pick up a spoon; it’s certainly not from my mother. It’s no wonder I’m so skinny, I was practically malnourished as a child; learning to throw a meal together was probably as much survival instinct as genetic heritage. If I’d had my way I’d have run off at the age of seven to become the culinary equivalent of the little drummer boy, working my way up through the kitchen ranks from pot-scrubber to
saucier
to, if I was
very
lucky and worked longer hours than a junior doctor, executive chef. And at least I’d have had enough to eat. But with typical parental hypocrisy—don’t do as I do, do as I tell you—Louise refused to hear of me leaving school early; she filled in the application to Edinburgh herself. Feeling it would be deeply churlish if a second generation of Sandal women turned down the chance of a university education, I did actually complete my degree; though even as my pen dutifully churned out analyses of Chaucer and Byron and Nathaniel Hawthorne, my mind dreamed of the perfect soufflé and a hollandaise that, even in the steamiest kitchen, never broke.

After three very dull years I finally marched into my mother’s womb-red healing room at the top of our house in Islington, brandishing my examination results and crying, “I’ve done it, I’ve got my First, now can I go to culinary school?”

Louise lowered herself gracefully from full plank into cobra, assumed the child’s pose, and said, her face pressed into her yoga mat, “I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to find the courage to ask.”

However, I discovered at culinary school that I was more my mother’s daughter than I had thought; thankfully not in the actual cooking,
that
came easily—perhaps I was a chef in a former life: Napoleon’s, maybe, or some Eastern potentate’s, I’ve often wondered—but in my response to the wretched rules and regulations that hemmed you in and pushed you down and, it seemed to me, got in the way of doing anything novel or creative. I chafed unbearably against the restrictive syllabus whose principal purpose seemed to be to show plump, unimaginative young women in Alice bands and pearls how to find their way to a suitable young man’s heart through his stomach. After two terms I quit and moved in with Kit and his latest boyfriend, a sharklike bond trader with dead eyes.

“For pity’s sake, what do you really want to do?” Kit demanded one night when the shark was working late and I was driving him potty by whining—yet again—about the curdled mess I seemed to be making of my life.

“You
know
what I want to do,” I said tetchily, “I’ve been telling you since nursery school. Open my own restaurant, of course.”

“You were three. I thought you’d grow up and put away childish things.”

“So were you.
You
didn’t.”

“Acting is different—”

“I don’t see why.”

“Put that bottom lip away and stop being such a spoiled brat. Acting is different, as you well know, because you can still have a life while you do it. Have you any idea what opening your own restaurant would really be like?” Kit demanded. “Three quarters of new restaurants fail within the first year. You’d be working at least eighty hours a week with no evenings off, no holidays, not a minute to call your own, in an industry which has the highest percentage of drug addicts next to dentists—”

“Dentists?”

He waved his hand. “Never mind that now. The other kitchen staff would hate you just for being there. Half the men in the restaurant business still think a woman’s presence in the kitchen curdles the sauce. You’d be eating sexual harassment for breakfast, lunch, and tea—”

“All right, all right,” I interrupted. “I do
know
, Kit. But you did ask—”

“You have a First in English and you cook like an angel. What you should be doing, my love—” Kit said, his eyes alight with an evangelical zeal I knew well enough to fear, “I can’t imagine how we haven’t thought of it before—what you should be doing, Mal darling, is writing cookery books, of course.”

When Kit gets hold of an idea, he’s like a dog with a particularly juicy marrowbone. At his insistence, and more to get him to leave me alone than anything else, I put together a slim folder of my best recipes, illustrated with glossy photographs—shot by the freelancer who succeeded the bond shark in Kit’s revolving-door bedroom—and submitted
them to an agent plucked at random from the
Writer’s Handbook
by Kit, fully expecting rejection with a generous side helping of derision by return of post. But, unbeknownst to either of us, the agent Kit selected just happened to open my submission ten minutes after returning from lunch with a panicked publisher who had been bending her ear for two hours on the subject of the gaping hole in her upcoming list, thanks to their star cookery writer—a household name with his own TV show and flatware line—eloping to Guatemala with his sous-chef and huge advance, and without delivering his much-delayed, and increasingly urgently needed, manuscript.

Serendipity really is very much underrated. My mother always said it was better to be born lucky than clever, “although,” she’d add serenely, “it does help to be both.”

At twenty-two, I had a three-book contract, and then a small guest spot on a brand-new satellite channel followed, and when my first book reached number one on the
Times
best-seller list there was even talk of my own TV show. I was the Hot New Thing and everything was going absolutely swimmingly and then I met Trace and for a while nothing else mattered, it was wonderful, it was beyond imagining; and then of course it all collapsed into the darkest, most dreadful mess. It was Kit who pulled me out and told me I would get over it and forced me to get back to work when I just wanted to crawl into bed and never come out again, my heart shriveling with misery against my ribs.

And then, of course, I found Nicholas.

I hover on the restaurant threshold, shifting my bag to the other shoulder as I look for him, anticipating that familiar lurch when I spot his clean, chiseled features—even now, after twelve years—that same strange jolt of knowing I experienced
the first moment I saw him, in Covent Garden: that absolutely electric certainty, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was The One. Dear Nicholas, so tall and fine and honorable; so sexy and carnal and unaware.

It’s such a relief to be inside, out of the cold. Where
is
Nicholas? The train from Salisbury was freezing, and the cab from Paddington Station wasn’t much better. I can’t imagine why Louise ever left California—

A waitress thrusts a glass of white wine at me, mumbling something about my shoes. Where
can
Nicholas have got to? The train was a bit delayed, thankfully, or I’d never have caught it; but it wasn’t
that
late, he can’t have left yet. He must be here somewhere. Unless I’ve got the name of the restaurant wrong, of course. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I scrabble in my bag for the envelope I wrote the restaurant down on, scattering half the contents across the floor. The waitress is still pressing her glass of wine at me so I have no choice but to take it; still fumbling through my bag, I end up spilling most of the wine on myself. Thank God nothing shows on this dress and after three babies it’s seen far worse. For heaven’s sake, where is Nicholas? Oh, Lord, that wasn’t a clean tissue—

“Your
shoes,”
the girl hisses again.

I finally look down and discover that Kit has, quite deliberately, let me walk out of the house in my pink slippers. He is an absolute swine. I will hang him by the neck until he is dead and then cut him down and eviscerate him while he is still conscious before burning his intestines in front of him … or no, I will allow him to babysit Metheny
at his house
.

I can’t
bear
to let this stunning girl—clearly
not
a waitress after all; her shoes are far too expensive and far too high—see how mortified I am. She is so pretty and smart and
clean
,
and I’m already well aware that she’s written me off as barely a fingertip away from senile dementia.

I summon an insouciant smile. “Oh, yes. Well, at least the rain hasn’t ruined them.”

I shove the slippers nonchalantly into my bag as if I do this all the time. Which, of course, I do: not wear pink slippers to retirement parties in London—this is a landmark snafu even for me—but get caught in the crush as my two worlds, nurturing earth mother and career wife, collide.