Don't You Want Me? (3 page)

I was never entirely comfortable with the boho notion of Not Married: it seemed a bit of a swizz from the female standpoint, and once Honey came along the feeling just got exacerbated. It’s all very well to lie about how ‘It’s only a piece of paper’ and to make jokes about balls and chains, but really – who, given the choice, wouldn’t swish around Mayfair with a twenty-foot train? But having done it once, I told myself that wanting to do it again was just greedy. I told myself a lot of things in those days.

The real problems started occurring shortly after Honey’s birth, when I finally pointed out to Dominic what had become painfully obvious to me over the past year: namely that the social circles we moved in may have been glittering, but the people in them were fantastically dull. Most of his artists were what Dom, in his nastier moments, freely described as ‘barely literate oiks’ (secretly despised) who believed their own publicity so much that they found their own unintelligent boorishness potently, dizzyingly charming. They all drank like fishes and would end many an evening vomiting and exposing their cocks, like unattractive adolescents with an interest in being ‘outrageous’. The problem was that some of these Bright Young People were by now in their forties, and you just
died
of embarrassment on their behalf, or at least I did. Dominic pretended to look amused, and then rang the gossip columns.

I never got on especially well with them once I knew them properly (which took seconds: there often wasn’t anything
to
know). Sometimes I’d wish someone would
point out that this particular Emperor or that had no clothes. Hard to do, though, when you’re the agent’s wife: instead, you had to smile and say things like, ‘I adored
ShitMan
. So clever of you to create beauty out of your own, er, waste,’ and then look enthralled as Artist A or B haltingly, as if translating simultaneously from Xhosa, explained the (literal) ins and outs of the creative/lavatorial process. That was when I started developing internal Tourette’s: the words that came out of my mouth were perfectly reasonable; but the words galloping around my head were dementedly not.

There wasn’t much more luck elsewhere. Dominic’s handful of old school friends, now MPs and journalists, seemed oddly ingratiating: I think it’s fair to say that, residual fondness aside, they only really liked Dominic and me because of our so-called friends. ‘One meets the most extraordinary people at your house,’ the Member for Acton’s wife once told me, with the kind of sniff, familiar from my mother, that meant, ‘It may very well be fun, but it isn’t quite cricket.’ My own school friends were now married women running large households in the Home Counties: sweet, but hardly soul-mates, banging on about Pony Club, pressing jam recipes on one and moaning about their lack of sex lives. They, too, considered me a curiosity: having thought of me for years as bad French Claudine from
Mallory Towers
, they were interested enough in the superficial gloss of my life to remain in touch, but the gloss, such as it was, was so alien to them that any conversation would end with them faux-shuddering and saying, ‘Oh, Stella. What a funny life! I don’t know how you do it.’ I wanted them to envy me; it was clear they didn’t.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that I was lonely. Not pitiably lonely, certainly, and the old thing about making your bed and lying in it certainly applied. But once my darling little Honey came along, I started asking myself what kind of a household she was being brought up in. Our five-bedroomed Primrose Hill house was a sort of upmarket dossing place for Dominic’s clients, friends and assorted hangers-on, even when Dom wasn’t there (he still spent half his time in Paris): I’d come down with her for the early-morning feed, nightied and leaky-breasted, and find strangers lying across the brutal and frankly ugly designer furniture. I was too old for this, I kept telling myself, and besides had never had any kind of yearning for this rock ’n’ roll lifestyle: I wanted hardcore domestic, in the way that you always want the opposite of your own childhood. Something, it became clear, had to give, and since Dom was either unwilling or unable to abandon – well, his life, it made sense to remove myself from it. We separated a year ago, when Honey was eight months old. I wasn’t sorry: disliking Dominic’s life was one thing, but I’d also begun to dislike him.

Dominic, who is so freakily controlling professionally, was pretty much exemplary about the split, which is more than I can say about our friends. Not Marriage notwithstanding, he gave me the house, a decent amount of alimony – which I supplement with the odd translating job – and moved, conveniently, to Tokyo, where gallery number four was about to open (number three’s in Los Angeles), his Japanese girlfriend in tow. Dom surfaces for a few days once a month. It’s not ideal as far as Honey is concerned – her main contact with her father is via Hello Kitty parcels
from Japan, faxed drawings and little notes – but he claims to be devoted to her and I see no reason to disbelieve him. On the other hand, the house is now a haven of blessed peace and calm, there are no horrible surprises in human form when we come down to breakfast, there is no dirt, and Honey is the cheeriest, chirpiest eighteen-month-old imaginable, so we must be doing something right.

I’ve completely redecorated the house, funding myself from the sale of a couple of the more hideous art works which Dominic had given me during our marriage: a giant sculpture of a seven-foot-tall man that looks just like Morph’s spastic brother, excreting the world while screaming with bottom-ache (
This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You
, plaster and cigarette ash, 1996, sold on by me for – seriously – £20,000); and a drawing by Kevin Autan, who may or may not have limbs – I’d guess he held the pen in his mouth – of a woman with the face of a mosquito (
Stung
, crayon and biro, 1998, £8,000).

So where there were concrete floors and stainless steel, there’s now reclaimed oak flooring and cherry-red cupboards (the kitchen); where there were hideous Seventies love-seats, hard lines and pale grey walls, there’s fresh yellow paint, squishy sofas, flowers and faded patchwork throws (the living room); and our bedroom, formerly an angular minimalist nightmare, is a softly lit, hot-pink den of sin: I took my inspiration from the New Orleans bordello look. Except, of course, that I have no one to sin with.

I didn’t like many of the people Dominic and I hung out with, but I never let them know it: I fed them, watered them, gave them beds to sleep in and cooked them eggs
in the morning. I went to their boring dinners and spent weekends in their country houses, I talked to them. I was as gracious as I am capable of being. I bought their children presents, even though most of their children behaved like monsters and were so plain that really the best present would have been a brown paper bag. I even went on holiday with a few of them, an experience reminiscent of finding oneself in a Victorian freak show, sandwiched between the Pinhead and the Bearded Lady, with their child the Torso, writhing about on the floor, making subhuman noises: it would always take me weeks to recover.

Now, I’m not saying these friends of Dominic’s should have sworn eternal allegiance to me when Dom and I split up. But they vanished, proving that some clichés only endure because they are so true. Sure, a few of the men took me out to dinner, were affronted when I wouldn’t weep prettily, bemoaning my fate, let alone bitch about Dominic, and lunged just before pudding, with varying degrees of crudity. And yes, a couple of the women rang me to see whether I was ‘all right’, and seemed disappointed to hear that I was (just as a few women became oddly watchful of their husbands when I was around, as though their portly, balding partners were all Brad Pitt, and as such irresistible to me). But that was all.

I can’t say I miss them, exactly, but you’d think that in 2001 people would understand that an amicable separation doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole world has to take sides. But take sides they have: Dominic is rich, successful, knows everyone and throws great parties. I’m a non-working housewife of sorts, left in my big house, barely knowing anyone really – not properly – and although the
invitations haven’t quite dried up, I sometimes feel like a horrible kept thing, rattling about my cage, beholden.

Frank, bless him, was the only one who really stuck by me. I met him a couple of years ago in Paris: Dominic had meetings all day and Frank, already a star client, needed to be entertained (he paints giant, twelve-foot-plus canvases of cows: not quite my thing, but at least he can draw – the cows do look like they’re about to come up to you and moo). I took him to lunch at L’Ami Louis, where we ate perfect roast chicken and drank perfect white Burgundy well into the afternoon, and then we went shopping for candles at Diptyque on the Boulevard St-Germain, and then we went to look at Marie Antoinette’s sad cell at the Conciergerie. ‘Don’t start,’ I said as we ascended the dark, narrow stairs. ‘What?’ asked Frank. ‘I know the revolution was a good thing et cetera et cetera,’ I said, ‘but I won’t have you making jokes about nobs all deserving to have been dragged to the guillotine. Not while we’re actually looking at her things.’

He didn’t, and later he said he’d like to see Versailles, and this seemed so unlikely, so improbable – Francis Keane, artist as pop star, wearing his working-class credentials like a badge of honour, wanting to see the prettiest, richest, most glittering thing he could see in Paris – that I was enchanted.

We became firm friends, and when Frank needed somewhere to live upon coming back from Berlin, where he’d been working for the past six months as a consultant to some German museum of modern arse, I offered him a room in my house. He’s been here three months and is, in many respects, a marvel: he’s a domestic god, and not only on the cooking front – within two weeks of arriving, he
secured the services of Mary O’Connor, an old friend of his mother, to look after Honey. There’s clearly something not quite right with Frank in the commitment department – the number of women who have been up my stairs are testament to that. Still, so what, really? Each to his own: I don’t see that it’s actually any of my business. I just wish that I could view his slapperiness with the amused detachment I would probably muster up if I were with someone myself. But I’m single, and the amount of sex Frank gets is getting me down, and if I’m not careful it’ll make me bitter. I must find some of my own.

I know I bang on about the English being strange, but clearly a little part of me isn’t quite convinced, since I’ve sort of married two of them. I must make more of an effort, I resolve, and be less condemning, and here, in this morning’s post, is my chance: a postcard from Isabella Howard, one of the former friends, not sighted for months, asking me to dinner on Friday. Which is tomorrow – rather impolitely short notice, but I am not in a position to mind. Surely Frank or Mary could baby-sit.

Human company! New people! I practically skip upstairs to get dressed – little vest, green cardigan with brown fur collar, violet tweed skirt and my favourite shoes, pea-green slingbacks. It’s October, but I can never quite manage tights. I stuff my hair into a rubber band, slick some Vaseline on to my lips
et voilà
: hardly glamorama, but ready to face the day.

Frank must have gone to his studio; there’s no sign of him. I scoop Honey out of Mary’s lap, because today we’re off to playgroup. Felicity, one of our neighbours, recently noticed I had a child roughly the same age as hers and asked me along to Happy Bunnies, a parent-run playgroup a couple of streets away. It’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays and two of you take it in turn to do shifts, reading the children stories and changing their nappies and so on. The other mothers are there too, keeping an eye on things, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Today is our first time, and I’ll
be tailing Felicity as Helper Number 2 and sort of learning the ropes.

I’m really rather looking forward to it. I know hardly anyone locally, let alone anyone with small children, and I sometimes feel leprously alone as I wheel Honey along Primrose Hill or up Hampstead Heath, wishing desperately that I had someone to chat to, and then to go for coffee with afterwards. After today, God willing, I may have. I let out an absurd little squeak of excitement, which Honey copies all the way to the front door.

‘We are mice,’ I tell her happily. ‘We are squeaky mice.’

‘Mama,’ says Honey, who doesn’t say much.

It’s going to be a good day, I feel, as I push the buggy on to the damp pavement.

The church hall that Happy Bunnies is in is incredibly dirty. The lino is smeared and dusty, the equipment covered in smudges and fingermarks and sticky patches. Why haven’t the Happy Bunny parents got busy with the Domestos Wipes? And why are certain kinds of middle-class people so weirdly keen on dirt? I think it’s because they think it’s bohemian and anti-bourgeois, but really, my God. A tousled beauty with a perfect complexion and faint traces of mud under her fingernails is one thing, but this is quite another; and anyway, the dirt thing is a dead giveaway that you’re in a place where every woman has been privately educated, has a name that ends in ‘a’ and sees herself as not a run of the mill member of the bourgeoisie but as something gayer, less predictable, freer: a bohemian. And Primrose Hill, where we live, is boho central. Sometimes I really yearn for the scrubbed surfaces
and disinfected floors of somewhere less apologetically middle class, like Balham.

God, the dirt. Why, for instance, do all of these children have runny noses which no one is wiping? And there’s a powerful smell of nappy. Still, best to pretend there is nothing peculiar about this (though clearly there is: if your child has a dirty nappy, change it, for God’s sake – there’s nothing bohemian about shit).

I beam hopefully at the assorted mothers – half a dozen or so of them – sitting on child-sized chairs watching their offsprings’ nasal dribble with pride, and my heart sinks. They’re a dull-looking lot, and then there’s the person directly to my left. She is an elephantine woman wearing – can this be possible in 2001? – a tightly belted pastel-blue jump suit. Her toenails are gnarled and filthy. One enormous, veiny breast is out, being suckled voraciously by a malevolent-looking child with little avian eyes. He must be at least four years old. Christ. It makes my nipples hurt just to look at her. I turn away, but not, I think, quickly enough. The woman, the creature – she reminds me of a cow: perhaps Frank could paint her – shoots me a dark look, having presumably registered the sheer horror on my face. She has the same eyes as her son: they rather suggest their owner would like nothing better than to peck at your corpse.