The Godmother (25 page)

Billy and Cora nodded. We pushed open the doors and walked into a wall of sound. I elbowed, jostled, rumbled and tussled our way back to the table. Everyone was delighted to see Cora and she was immediately passed around like the trophy she is, until she finally settled on Ben's knee. Ben is her favorite. He would be, she knows him best. We do the surrogate parenting thing quite a lot when Billy needs a break and Sasha is away.

“Where are the buns?” asked Cora.

“What?”

“The buns for the bun fight?”

Everyone laughed. Except me. I stared at Cora, playing with Ben's ear. And I wondered how long I had been borrowing someone else's child to play with someone else's husband and kidding myself it was normal.

“Where are Helen and Neil?” asked Francesca.

James Kent arrived with two bottles of champagne and seven glasses. I jumped up. “I'll go and find her,” I said. “And bring her over for a drink.”

I returned to the VIP bar and approached the emaciated woman. She averted her eyes, so I made my intentions very clear.

“I don't want to come in, I was just hoping my friend Helen Zhao could come out for a while and join us for a drink.”

“She isn't in there.”

I frowned.

“I know for a fact,” said the woman, “there was a bit of a scene.”

“A scene?” I was confused.

“She has drunk a bit too much. You'll probably find her in the loo.”

“Neil Williams's wife, are you sure?”

“Yes, his wife. Bit embarrassing for him, really.”

I was horrified by her over-familiarity, frightened for the reason why that might be, but, more than that, I was concerned for Helen. “She has just had twins,” I said, though I wasn't sure why.

The woman shrugged at me. It may have been in a noncommittal way, but to me it looked like “More fool her,” or, worse, “What do you expect, then?” I suddenly felt for Helen in a way I never had before. No wonder she'd drunk too much inside that insidious space; it was protection against the anorexic dementor standing in front of me, and the rest of her kind. There is little in this world less attractive to me than when the sisterhood breaks down.

I left her standing behind the rope and went up to the pods. There were eight of them. They were unisex, had no engaged sign and offered no queuing system. It was therefore impossible to know which of the pods Helen might be in. I started circling them, my head craning backwards and forwards at the slightest sign of any movement. I plotted them like battleships in my brain and crossed them off as I watched men and women spill out of them, usually in pairs.

After about ten minutes I located two that had shown no sign of life. I had once missed an entire wedding passed out in a Portaloo, so I knew it was possible. I approached the first. I knocked gently. There was no answer. I leaned closer and was about to call Helen's name when I heard a noise that sounded like retching.

“Helen? Are you all right?” I called out, loudly enough for some people near me to look over.

The retching stopped. In my experience retching doesn't stop to command.

“Sorry,” I said to the white plastic door and moved away as the retching started up again. I went and hovered out of sight until the people whose attention I'd attracted moved away. Five minutes later the retching pod door opened and a man and a woman stepped out, walked to the top of the stairs and, without exchanging a word, parted company. Was it just me, or was it getting harder out here?

I moved to the last pod that had shown no signs of activity. Luckily, it was the one that was furthest away from the stairwell, and the door faced the wall. I knocked again and again; there was no answer. I leaned closer. I couldn't hear retching, or grunting, but I could hear something. It sounded mechanical. A pulsating, mechanical sound, like something was malfunctioning inside. I looked for an out of order sign, but there wasn't one. Then I heard a human sound. A sob. Thinking back on it, it was more of a yelp, more animal than human, but it was female.

“Helen?” I said, more urgently. “It's me, Tessa. Let me in.”

There was no reply.

“Right,” I said loudly. “I'm going to get someone to open the door from the outside.”

“No!” came the immediate response.

“Then let me in now, there is no one about, no one can—” The door opened a fraction.

“See you.” I pulled it wider, gave a last furtive glance to check no one was watching, and stepped inside the pod.

Helen stared at me from the loo seat. Her black eye makeup was smeared over her face. She had snot hanging out of her left nostril. Her lower lip hung open like a boxer's after a fight. Her bare shoulders were hunched forward. Her dress was around her waist, leaving her top half naked. On each small breast was a clear plastic cone that tugged at the unyielding flesh. The mechanical noise I'd heard was the sound of suction. At the base of each cone were two clear pipes that joined a third, like a stethoscope, near her belly
button. The single pipe ran into a plastic bottle which Helen held in a white-knuckled grip. She appeared to be immune to the intermittent pull on her breasts. I prised the device out of her hand, found the switch, and turned it off. One cone fell off Helen's breast with a pop. The skin hung loose and empty over her ribcage. Her nipple was purple and swollen. I gently pulled the second cone away. It was then that I noticed the tiny specks of blood on the tip of Helen's nipple. I glanced at the bottle in my hand. Creeping down the tube into the few droplets of thin grey liquid at the bottom of the bottle were beads of blood.

There was no resistance from Helen as I pulled her dress back up and fed her skinny arms through the straps. She didn't attempt to help as I struggled to place the straps back in place on her bony shoulders but her eyes never left mine. I took her head and pulled her towards my stomach and held her there, silently, waiting for her to awaken from her trance. Finally she spoke.

“I'm going to ruin your beautiful dress,” said Helen.

“Sod the dress,” I replied. “What happened?”

“I just wanted to have fun, like it used to be.”

“How much did you drink?”

“I didn't drink,” insisted Helen.

“It doesn't matter that you had a drink, Helen, no one would blame you.”

“I can't drink, I'm still breastfeeding.”

“Why are you hiding in here then, with that?” I pointed at the contraption lying lifeless in the sink. Helen squinted at the electric breast pump, then back up at me.

“Tessa?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think he loves me?”

Coming from a professional blind-sider, I should have seen that coming. But I didn't. Instead, I panicked. “Come on, Helen, let's get you home.”

“I can't go out there.”

“It's all right, I have a plan.” I sent out the SOS call by quietly texting Billy while I held Helen to me. Next, I bent down and pulled Helen's hair away from her face. Nothing wet loo paper and some professional cover up couldn't cure, and after a lifetime of spots, I was the master of cover-up. Helen had darker skin tone to me, so she was a little pale by the time I'd finished, but at
least she no longer looked insane. There was a knock on the pod door. Helen jumped.

“Don't tell Neil,” she said.

“Tell him what?”

Helen didn't answer. I turned the lock. Billy held our coats in her hand. She fed mine through the slit in the door. As I got Helen into my coat, she watched me anxiously. “I've tried to be a good mother and wife, why is it so hard, why can't I do it? Why is it so hard?”

I could feel the hysteria inside her build. The hysteria that had forced her into a plastic cubicle to cry her makeup into paste. The hysteria that had left her wasted, spent and exhausted. I pulled her up.

“All you have to do is get out of here. We'll deal with everything else when we're home.” Who was I to make such sweeping statements? How telling it was that I really thought I could, with sheer will, make it all better for everyone. Even myself.

The party was well into its third stage by the time we left the pod. I gathered the breast pump into my hand and put my other arm around Helen. No one batted an eyelid to see two women emerging from the loo, fall into the arms of a third and stagger down the stairs. Taking one arm each, we bundled Helen out of the party like a celebrity. At the door Francesca was waiting with Cora. Cora simply slipped her hand into her mother's and the four of us moved to the exit.

“What about saying goodbye to James Kent?” whispered Fran into my ear.

I frowned at her. Not now. There were more important things to worry about.

It was a quarter to twelve when I got Helen into a cab. Since Helen and Billy lived in opposite directions, I gave Billy enough cash to get her and Cora home in another one.

A few minutes after pulling away, Helen remembered that she hadn't got her keys. I assumed that Rose would let us in, but Helen insisted we go back and I get her bag from the VIP bar. It made no sense to me, but Helen was in too fragile a state to argue with, so I asked the taxi driver to turn around and go back. If we hadn't, I wouldn't have seen Billy sitting at the bus stop, with Cora, curled like an oversized cat, already asleep on her lap. Billy didn't see us pass, and for that I was grateful.

I managed to find the handbag fairly easily, but I only just missed bumping into Neil by ducking onto the dance floor. There were Ben and Sasha doing pretty good dirty dancing for a couple of oldies. I stood stock-still among the moving mass of bodies and watched them gyrate, swing, smooch, laugh and laugh and laugh. For a brief moment Sasha looked straight at me, then Ben swung her upside-down again. She didn't look back. I had to get out of there.

By the time I'd wrestled my way back through the throng we'd ratcheted up another fiver on the clock and Billy and Cora had boarded their night bus and gone. I pulled Helen into my arms and held on to her tightly as we drove through the busy streets of London in the full swing of Saturday night. In her lap lay the dormant breast pump. She ran the empty plastic tube through her fingers like the beads on a rosary.

Having deposited Helen, fully clothed, in bed, I decided to go and check on the twins. As I reached the top floor Rose stepped out of the shadows onto the
landing and gave me such a fright, I nearly fell back down the stairwell. She eyed me suspiciously, which I thought was fair enough, given I was creeping around the house in the middle of the night, in the dark.

“Bloody hell, Rose, you gave me a fright. It's me, Tessa. I just brought Helen home,” I whispered.

“What happened?”

“I think she had a bit to drink, but she's obviously not used to it. She's in a real state.”

“How much?”

“I don't know. She's denying it.”

She nodded her head, which felt to me as if she were looking me up and down. I realized it was the middle of the night, and she'd probably been woken by the twins already, but she wasn't being very sympathetic. What I'd seen in that loo was a very distressed woman. Maybe Helen had got nervous, had too much to drink and then felt guilty about the twins and didn't want Neil to know, but then, maybe it was more serious than that.

“Are the twins all right? Are they hungry?” I asked.

“They're asleep. She shouldn't disturb them.”

“I agree. We should let her sleep as long as possible. You'll have to give the boys some formula if they wake up. Have you got any formula?”

Was it my imagination, or was Rose frowning at me? Was she a breast-is-best guru as well? Since when had formula become so vilified? Rose turned away from me and retreated into her room. I wasn't sure which room the boys slept in, since Helen always preferred to feed up there alone. It was also at the top of the house, and I had never felt sufficiently inclined to endorse the grotesquely expensive handmade cots in the perfectly decorated themed nursery from Dragons of Walton Street to brave the five storeys. Anyway, since the babies were always produced, powdered and clean in matching Moses baskets, it didn't seem necessary. Helen said running up and down to the nursery kept her fit. It tired me out just looking at them. Caspar spent the first six months of his life sleeping on a changing mat in the bath because Nick and Fran lived in a one-roomed flat. Cora was in hospital but when she moved into her room, I knew it like the back of my hand. I knew where everything was kept. The booties. The wipes. The muslins. I turned back down the stairs
feeling conscious that of the four doors in front of me, I did not know behind which my godsons slept, or if they even slept together.

I went over to Neil's drinks cabinet and poured a whisky into a cut-glass crystal tumbler that was too big to get my hand around. I raised the lid on the ice bucket expecting to find nothing, but was greeted by fresh ice. So that was what having full-time, live-in staff meant—fresh ice and, if Marguerite was right, only a passing knowledge of your children. I plopped a couple of pieces into the whisky and threw myself into one of their three huge cream sofas. Just you wait till crayon time, I thought, and melting ice-lollies, and Marmite soldiers, and Play-doh…but I dismissed the thought. All those images were from a happy home and something about this house didn't feel very happy. I curled my feet up under me. Had I really been so involved with what was going on at work not to pay Helen any attention, or was it something else? Something less palatable, though I was beginning to be able to taste its unappetizing flavor. I was jealous. That's why I hadn't listened to Helen's complaints of piles, of breathlessness, of stretch marks and rancid indigestion. In the absence of a decent role model, Helen worried about being a good mother. I dismissed those fears with a wave of my hand. When Neil looked at her and told her she was huge, I laughed because it wasn't true. She looked amazing right up to her delivery date. But it must have felt true to Helen. I had put up an invisible force field between Helen and myself. I had repelled her advances. Why? Because she had deserted me. My fellow fun-loving, girl-about-town, devil-may-care, throw-caution-to-the-wind playmate had deserted me. And I had made her suffer for it. It was worse than pure jealousy, because I was jealous of something that I didn't even want for myself.

I couldn't stand Neil. I knew that Helen had been subjected to a loveless childhood and that the money she inherited from her father would never make amends. I knew that she was insecure, unconfident, caged by her own looks, and could be inflicted with deep wounds by people who should have had no impact on her whatsoever. So beneath the jealousy lurked anger. I thought I was angry at her for selling herself so short, but really I was angry at myself because somewhere inside me the thought of selling myself short appealed. Trouble was, I couldn't even seem to manage that. I put the empty
glass down on the side table and peeled myself off the sofa. It was two in the morning. I groped my way upstairs and found a spare bedroom, stripped off, fell into the luxurious, squishy bed and fell asleep immediately.

I didn't know if I'd been woken by the smell of smoke, or the persistent thudding resonating through the floor into my ribcage. I reluctantly opened my eyes and took in my surroundings. Dawn outlined the thick curtains. I sat up, turned on the side light and squinted at my watch. I wrapped the waffle dressing gown I found hanging on the back of the en-suite bathroom around me and stepped into the hall. I heard a noise above me. Rose was leaning over the banister, glaring down the stairwell. When she saw me, she shook her head and moved back.

I started my descent. There were two girls sitting on the bottom step in deep conversation, waving cigarettes around.

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping between them. They barely paused. “You might want to get an ashtray,” I said, pointing at the long arc of ash that hung precariously off the cigarette. I may as well have asked them for a kidney. I followed the sound of the bass into the drawing room where I had wistfully sipped whisky a few hours earlier. Five people were huddled around the glass-topped coffee table. There were all sorts of bottles open on the table, every ashtray spilled over with fag butts, some still burning. They must have been in residence for a good couple of hours. Neil stood by the state-of-the-art stereo, controls in hand, dancing furiously on the spot, shaking his head from side to side, facing the wall.

“Do you mind turning that down?” I said to Neil. “You're going to wake the babies.”

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me!” exclaimed Neil turning around. “Oh God, I thought you were the nanny. Join us, have a drink, sit down. Did you enjoy the party?”

I was standing there in a robe, but Neil didn't seem to register that.

“Could you please turn the music down? Helen is knackered and I really don't want her to wake up.”

“Since when did you become such a bore, Sasha?” said Neil. He looked like a cow chewing cud. His jaw never stopped moving.

“Tessa,” I corrected him.

“Fuck, sorry, I always get you two mixed up. You're weirdly similar, don't you think? Have you ever thought that?” Neil didn't know what he was saying. He had verbal diarrhea. Talking shit. “Come and have a little livener. You've always been more adventurous than Helen. Always liked that spirit about you. At first I thought you were just a bit of a loser, but I admire you. You're so independent, wish my wife was more like you.” I just wanted him to shut up. I peeled his heavy, sweaty arm off me.

“She really needs some proper sleep. It's six in the morning. Isn't it time everyone went home?”

I looked over at the people around the coffee table. They were a grim-looking bunch. Cocaine is not good for the complexion. They stared back at me through vast, dilated pupils.

“We've only just got here,” said Neil.

The girls from the stairs came in. “Any more coke?” asked one.

Neil pulled a wrap from his pocket and threw it on to the table. Two men pounced. I knew I was fighting a losing battle; no one was going to listen to me, so I surreptitiously turned the volume down on the stereo and retreated, closing the doors behind me. I wondered, as I climbed the stairs back to my room, whether this was a one-off or not. I knew that Neil often went AWOL; I didn't realize that he'd started bringing the party home. I got back into bed. Half an hour or so later, I heard the music again. It thumped in and out of my consciousness until eight. Eventually I got up, had a bath, got dressed into my party dress and, after silently opening Helen's door just enough to check that she was still sleeping, I went upstairs to find the nursery.

Thankfully it was the first door I tried. The nursery was just as I had expected: a shrine to privileged parenting. It had everything. Hand-painted cots with rather girly canopies. Beatrix Potter character-shaped rugs on the floor. Machines that played Mozart. Machines that projected lights on the ceiling. Machines that read the temperature and humidity of the room. There was a matching feeding chair and stool in blue gingham, and two of everything else. Baby bouncers. Changing-tables. Play-nests. Potties. There were more Beatrix Potter characters stenciled above the skirting board, complete with the words of Miss Tiggywinkle. A struggling artist had painted a blue sky with fluffy white clouds on the ceiling, some of which hosted round-bottomed putti smiling down from on high. I wasn't sure the Renaissance and the Potter
combination worked, but hey, these weren't my offspring to confuse.

There were two built-in wardrobes. Behind one was a collection of designer labels to make a grown woman weep, except not even the thinnest of them could have squeezed into these minute ensembles. Behind the other I found a kitchenette with a microwave, a kettle, a fridge/freezer and every accessory I'd ever seen in the baby section of John Lewis, and others that I hadn't. Helen wasn't taking any chances. I opened the freezer and was confronted by row upon row of miniature colostomy bags—a stationary army of expressed milk, ready for the off. That was when I remembered the double-headed monster gnawing away at Helen's once remarkable cleavage last night. I looked around the light, airy room, amazed by the equipment that could be amassed if you had the money and the inclination, and recalled once again baby Caspar's nursery. A changing-mat in the bath. Cora's was the life-support unit at St. Mary's Hospital. In either case, I'd never seen their mothers as distressed, disorientated and disheveled as Helen was last night. I pulled the door behind me. The nursery boasted everything an expectant mother's heart desired. Except one thing. Where were the babies?

Behind another door I found a spare room that had once been occupied by the maternity nurse. Which left one more after the nautically themed bathroom. I knocked and heard Rose's voice. She came to the door and, rather suspiciously, I thought, opened it a crack. She looked me up and down and sneered with blatant disapproval. At first I was insulted but then I remembered the coke whores downstairs; I was still in my party dress and Rose had seen Helen and me after some of our own long nights. But that was all in the past. I hoped I looked better that morning than they did.

“I haven't been downstairs with Neil. I've been trying to sleep,” I said to appease her. I didn't get the thawing I was expecting. She stonewalled me.

“Are you all right?”

“What do you think?”

I was cross too, but I didn't understand Rose's hostility. She was a mild-mannered woman who had loved Helen unconditionally. Perhaps that was changing. Perhaps Helen's choice of husband had been one condition she couldn't work with.

“Do you have the twins?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Where are they, then?”

“With their father,” she said furiously.

“Their father!”

“He wanted to play with them.”

“Neil has them?”

“As I said, he wanted to play with them.”

“But he's…” Coked off his face. “Been up all night.”

“He is their father. I am just an ugly Filipino who is paid to do as she's told.”

I immediately knew the source of that gut-wrenching sentence.

“Oh, Rose, I'm sorry.” I wasn't going to make excuses for Neil, because there weren't any. I could have stood there all day and sympathized with Rose. I could have happily spent hours discussing how horrific Neil was, how racist, how puerile, how sexist, how stupid, but I was more concerned about my godsons. So I left her. I didn't operate within the same boundaries that Rose did and had no qualms about telling Neil exactly how disgusting he was.