Copycat (22 page)

It was hard to remember that I’d once been normal like the rest of these middle-aged mothers, inhabiting a world of pot plants and potpourri, worried about sterile surfaces and whether the mint sauce would go round, or if Mr Muscle would live up to his promises. But you needed such concentration to enter the world of Windows and Quark, not a head bulging with passions and anxieties of a fantastic kind.

It was so incredibly boring.

I had no capacity for learning, not one spare patch of my brain was free; it was dangerously overloaded. Anyway, Graham could teach me all this on his emerald iMac at home. My daughter had already begun to learn.

Fantasy gripped me. Any quiet moment – time given for reading, note-taking, attending lectures – and my eyes glazed over. I was back with Martha again, planning what to say and how to say it during the next blissful telephone call or the next agonizing journey to town.

In many ways I’d been kept busier and had more to distract me at home.

And what the hell was I doing here learning to be a dogsbody again?

They must have thought me dull-witted. I spent my time alone, not mixing, rushing off to the pub at lunchtime to be sure not to be late for Martha, hanging around after four o’clock to catch her for a lift home.

‘Are you having an affair?’ asked one middle-aged stop-at-home who had clearly been watching too much TV. ‘You’ve got that look about you.’

The others smiled awkwardly. I froze, telling myself,
it’s a joke, it’s her sense of humour,
before I bit back my guilty fury. ‘How did you know?’ I asked archly. ‘The only trouble is there’s too many offers to know which to choose.’

‘You can always dump one on me,’ joked the group jester behind pebble glasses. I nailed a monkey grin to my face.

I found their mindless world nauseating.

There were times when I longed to strip, dance on a desk, shriek depravities, just to bring these deathly classes to life.

I reminded myself I was here for Martha and there was satisfaction in that. I was here for Martha and so must endure, not miss one seminar, attend every lecture, hand in my homework on time, and make her believe I was improving. I couldn’t get over how lucky I’d been landing on my feet again, after exhausting everyone’s patience. For the time being, I controlled my feelings and all was going to plan.

There was something about me my group distrusted, and I learned to deal with some sudden attacks. ‘And you leave your baby with some minder – at his age. The poor little mite won’t know who you are.’

I used Martha’s arguments to shoot down my old opinions. ‘Better a contented mother than a vegetable.’

‘Well,’ said my self-righteous friend. ‘I managed to wait until mine were in school before I enrolled.’

I wouldn’t be undermined by her censorial comments. I turned the other cheek like Jesus, the victim, and sat at the back until lunchtime.

One hour to go until I saw Martha.

I was proud of how well Poppy had settled at the Humpty Dumpty Nursery. ‘She’s a very popular little girl and certainly one of my brightest,’ Mrs Tree told me. ‘Of course, she and Scarlett won’t be separated so it’s rather like dealing with twins, confusing to know what’s coming from who. Rather too much huddling and whispering for my liking.’ If Scarlett hadn’t been so dark and Poppy so contrastingly fair, it would have been hard to tell them apart because their build was the same, their clothes were the same and so were their hairstyles. They rang each other up every morning to discuss what to wear; it was so sweet to hear them. I went along with the dungarees and the bicycle shorts, but I stopped short at the teeny skirts and glitter sandals so beloved of Scarlett. Clarks Start-Rite for Poppy: I did insist on those and refused to listen to her furious cries. Care of growing feet is important and Scarlett did lean towards the tarty – navy nail polish and vulgar tattoos, at her age,
ridiculous.
But one of the blessings of my hospital stay was the new independence my daughter was showing.

It looked as if my shy little girl wouldn’t suffer as I had done. She’d manage to avoid my frantic desire to please. Next term she’d be in the infants’ school along with Scarlett.

And Josh was a more settled, happier baby. I put his earlier problems down to colic and teething difficulties which, luckily, he had now grown out of. Mrs Cruikshank was a gift, Martha was right, and even Graham accepted the fact that children can be happy when loved and cared for by more than two people.

Howard and Ruth, Graham’s mum and dad, were put off from visiting quite so often because there was no-one at home to wait on them. Their stays were limited to weekends which, between us, we could just endure. And with me away and busy all week, their mean criticisms over the lack of home-made cakes and puddings, and my new dependence on fast food, fell on deaf ears.

‘Have you made your blackberry and apples yet, Jennie?’

‘No, Ruth, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to get round to it this year.’

‘Oh, what a pity,’ she’d say. ‘My freezer is already full, what with the plums and Howard’s string beans.’

I was immune. She could no longer touch me.

Martha and I laughed about this. ‘You’re a different person already, you’re free of all that old crap.’

Martha would never understand why so many women weaker than her used this trivia as stabilizers to stop them wobbling. Because who is brave enough to confront that vast, unfulfilled void in their heads? And if I let go of my obsession with Martha, neither plums nor blackberries – nor cleaning the windows – would fill the empty universe that would be left inside me.
Where would I put my passion?

That day, confident, strong and beautiful, she presided over chaos: slicing tomatoes, searching for glue, answering the phone, bawling instructions about clean socks. I knew I could never tell her that only last night I had seen Sam almost eating a woman alive in the jeep, down a side street, outside the China Garden. When I got home with my takeaway I wasn’t hungry, I couldn’t touch it. Why had I gone myself? Why hadn’t I let Graham collect it?

Pity and sorrow did not suit Martha’s image – those descriptions were mine, not hers. I couldn’t abide the idea of a Martha made weak. And, quite apart from keeping quiet from a selfish point of view, I knew I was on shaky ground; I had no illusions – Sam’s betrayal of Martha was no worse than mine of Graham. And going on past experience, Sam’s flings were normally brief.

But I did confide in Mr Singh on my next monthly visit to the clinic.

‘And does this discovery make you feel powerful? You are obviously more in control of your life than your idol, Martha, is.’

I said, ‘I don’t see it like that. If Sam left her she would recover – she runs the house single-handed, shops, cleans and pays the bills. Sam doesn’t lift a finger. She moans about him but he gets away with it.’ I was curious to note that I found it threatening to diminish Martha in the doctor’s eyes. ‘She’d find someone else, she’s fun, she’s lovely. With Sam she asks to be taken for granted, she fusses over him, cooks his favourite meals, drives when he’s pissed, and you should see the trouble she goes to to find him exactly the right present. It takes her hours and he’s never grateful.’

‘Jennie, are you jealous of Sam?’

‘It’s the kids, even the cats,’ I blurted out without thinking, and in Mr Singh’s pause I had the time to realize how silly this sounded.

‘Could this be because they belong to Martha in a way that Sam does not?’

How could I know? I was annoyed. All I had demonstrated were my unhealthy feelings: suspicious and abnormal. I hated this intimacy with a virtual stranger. Talking about Martha was fine; I loved to talk about Martha and I did half hope he could cure me, but I wasn’t even certain that I did envy the cats and the kids, and now he would labour the point, wasting time on me.

‘Let me rephrase my original question. Are you saying you’re not jealous of Sam, but you are jealous of the cats and the children?’

I felt my eye begin to twitch; there was no way I could control it. The man would be bound to interpret this as some deep, subconscious response.

Leave me alone, let’s talk about Martha.

But I thought of the times I had kicked the cats when Martha wasn’t looking. Surely this was mere annoyance because they would jump on my shoulders or sharpen their claws on my knee? Cats frightened me and they sensed that. Hers were assertive, menacing cats, and the only time Martha ever smacked Poppy – well, more of a tap, but even so – was when she was tormenting Honey. I couldn’t share Martha’s blind devotion to these stealthy, flea-ridden creatures, and it irked me. No big deal. That’s all.

I told Mr Singh, ‘I love Martha’s children like my own, more sometimes, and that’s awful. They’re so like Martha, you see, perfect little carbon copies.’

This could be because her kids loved me back, unlike the cats who verged on the hostile. And, of course, Martha’s children and mine were one way of keeping us together.

And I wondered how I would feel if they ever gave us cause to part.

Mr Singh glanced at his watch to signal five minutes left. Presumably he gave this warning so his patients could pull themselves together and not start diving too deeply before the end of the session. He used this time as a summing-up period during which he withdrew some of his sympathy. It slipped like a shadow under his door. ‘So you’ve decided to say nothing to Martha about Sam’s little infidelity? Although she’s your friend? Although she might rather be told about her husband’s latest fling?’

‘Yes, I’ve decided. Whoever told her something like that, she’d resent them for telling her. And knowing Sam it’ll soon blow over.’

‘Mummy!’ Poppy was jumping through the puddles, the water lapping over her boots. She clung on to my hand and in her other she held a small, useless umbrella.

‘Yes?’ She ought to stop messing around, the blasted shop closed at five thirty.

She gabbled on. ‘D’you like Scarlett better than me?’

‘What on earth gave you that silly idea?’

She kept on jumping, jarring my arm. My sleeve was pulled over my wrist. The rain sheeted down in full force now and the buses, brilliantly lit, sloshed past us as we struggled and huddled, and Poppy’s umbrella kept nudging my face. ‘Mummy?’

‘What is it?’ Sometimes her chatterings provoked me to tears. I needed to think – I’d forgotten my list but I knew what I wanted was important.

‘D’you like the way I have my hair?’

‘Of course I do. It suits you.’

‘When Josh grows up, will he look like Lawrence?’

‘I dunno, Poppy.’

‘Mummy?’ My patience was exhausted. I didn’t bother to answer. Rain was dripping down my neck and my right hand, in Poppy’s, was going numb. I would call in and see Martha when I got back, but only if Sam’s jeep wasn’t there. If we didn’t hurry, we might not make it.

‘Scarlett says that when we go to big school next term, we can sit at the same table together.’

‘Well, that’s nice, you’ll like that.’

At last we were out of the shop and hurrying homewards. My strides were too long for Poppy, so she skipped along by my side.

Damn and blast! Damn.
The jeep.

I couldn’t pop in to Martha’s now. Sam was on his way home. I blamed Poppy for dawdling, for keeping me at the counter while she took so long to choose her sweets, and now there was the jeep – it pulled out of the line of traffic and stopped at the bus stop.

We kept walking, but I watched as a woman in a mac got out. It took them a while to release hands, it took time to finish what she was saying – something urgent. They smiled, then laughed; she slammed the door and hurried towards the shelter.

So Sam’s indiscretion was still going strong and I felt a sickly blob of terror as a new threat presented itself –
a disturbance in the status quo.
What if the Frazers’ marriage broke up? What if they got divorced and had to sell the house? What if Martha, ambitious and capable, moved to another part of the country?

And what would become of poor Poppy, having to cope without Scarlett? Parting would break their hearts.

Sam’s behaviour could prove lethal, and he wasn’t too bothered about being discreet. I had seen him twice now, so it was quite likely that somebody else, some meddler like Tina Gallagher, would be the next one to catch him at it and hurry to Martha with the news.

These possibilities were terrifying. I couldn’t allow this affair to drag on until Martha somehow found out. Time and again, she had promised she wouldn’t have him back if he cheated once more. ‘And it’s different now,’ she told me the last time we discussed it. ‘I’m stronger, I’m working, the kids are older. Once, I couldn’t have done without him, stuck at home with a baby. But not now. Oh no. There’s no way I would take any more of that.’

Had she meant it?

I fretted, but what could I do?

Damn Sam and his lecherous urges.

It might be that Sam was in love this time and would demand a divorce. In that case, confrontation would only bring matters to a head. But whatever the circumstances, Sam wouldn’t take kindly to me interfering in his life.

I would have to be subtle. I would not criticize. I would issue a friendly warning.

It’s only when women are normal that plums and blackberries have a place in their lives.

I
T’S ONLY WHEN WOMEN
are normal that plums and blackberries have a place in their lives.

If plums and blackberries had a place in my life, I might be one of those enviable people whose lives cruise along on an even keel, no storms to confound them, no waves to unseat them and no half-hidden icebergs lying in wait. People like my mum and dad, theirs was a blueprint for marriage, and as a child I used to dream that one day I’d be as contented as them.

I should have married a less dangerous man whose love for me was greater than mine for him.

Like Graham, for example. But like most women so blessed, Jennie failed to appreciate her luck.

Was this another of Sam’s flings, one that just lasted rather longer, or was this the time it would turn serious? As years flew by – Poppy and Scarlett off to school and Josh and Lawrence to playgroup – pride and terror stopped me from asking. I had no-one to share my misery with since I’d stopped confiding in Jennie. Although she’d improved over these last few years and taken several jobs as a temp, I was still nervous around her, of her troublemaking abilities, which weren’t deliberate – I understood that – just part of her uncanny fixation. She didn’t deny this was true; poor thing, she couldn’t even trust herself any more.