Hens Dancing (25 page)

In despair, I make cheerful Blue Peter suggestion: ‘I know, why don't you make a few things instead?' Giles is horizontal under the table, throwing tiny blobs of Blu-Tack at the underside of the tabletop above him. He drips sarcasm.

‘Like what? I suppose you think it's easy to make a remote-control aeroplane which flies, or a size four rugby ball? You're on totally the wrong wicket, Mum.'

Pleased to know roughly what his slang means, and to note that ‘wicket', popular when I was a child and in P. G. Wodehouse books, is making a comeback.

‘No, I mean things like lavender bags and furry purses like we saw at that craft fair.' Felix takes the bait.

‘Yes,' he says, already getting overexcited, ‘we can do giraffe-skin frames, too. Mum's got some giraffe skin, haven't you?'

I nod, scanning my memory hastily to see if I can remember where I put the large fake-fur slices I bought last Christmas to make cuddly toys and did nothing with.

Felix continues, his tone now one of serious responsibility, ‘But I don't think we should use the zebra skin because it's whole.'

Giles continues to kick furniture and look cross. We ignore him and assemble excellent items including glitter
glue, fake fur, sequins, dyed feathers, gold spray and bubble wrap. These are irresistible. Before Felix has finished cutting his first strip of giraffe, Giles is at the table, expression now friendly and interested, demanding to be shown how to spray bubble wrap. Am able to enjoy fully the smug sense of being a Blue Peter kind of mother with Blue Peter children until I remember The Beauty. She has been occupied in silence, in the playroom, for some twenty minutes. Disaster. I have wronged her. She is in her tent with a Superman cape flung over her shoulders and a Red Indian headdress round her neck. On her head she has a suede cap with a foil hoe sticking out of the top, a relic from Felix's school play. Her tiny feet are wedged into the long toes of a pair of red velvet stilettos with one stiletto missing. When I look in, she is leaning towards a hand mirror dabbing at her face with a paintbrush.

‘She's getting ready to go out and she's dressed up, just like you do, Mum,' laughs Felix.

The Beauty glances round at us and bats her eyelashes before turning back to her toilette.

December 1st

Postcard from Rose arrives with picture of a dolphin on it. ‘Darling Venetia, you must have one of these new massages. It will make you feel like a dolphin. This is your late birthday token. Ring me to activate it and a pint-sized masseuse will arrive bearing table and swaddling gear. Prepare for meltdown.'

December 2nd

Do I want to feel like a dolphin?

December 4th

Am now an astral body and live on an astral plane where nothing matters and calm is deep and blue like the sea. Have been pummelled, kneaded, unravelled, unwound, stroked and filleted. Am more like an ear than a whole
skeleton, being boneless now, and lacking any tension anywhere, so I could just slide through a wedding ring if anyone wanted me to. Thankfully, my mother is collecting the children and has The Beauty, for I am fit for nothing but silken sleep. Mmmmmm.

December 6th

Silken sleep was short-lived, but state of blue calm lasted forty-eight hours. It has now evaporated and been replaced by hysteria and also dogged determination. I have a puncture and I don't know how to fix it. More importantly, I do not want to find out how to fix it. I want someone else to do it. Am keen to master a variety of physical skills, including how to get rid of garden moles and how to syphon petrol, but not punctures. Have reached the age of thirty-five and had three children and, briefly, a husband, all without knowing how to change the tyre on a car. Anyway, I would be bound to do it wrong and the wheel would come off round a bend and cause a terrible accident.

Stand idiotically on the side of the road, next to a very smart triangle I found in the car boot. The triangle has an exclamation mark in the middle. Am sure that it makes me look efficient and in control. A silver car with
blacked-in windows and throbbing music radiating from it stops. A greasy-haired creep gets out.

‘'Allo, sweetheart. Need rescuing, do ya?'

His neck is wider than his head, giving him the appearance of a gorilla. But not a friendly one. He leers and chews gum aggressively. Wish I had a big dog or a gun. The Beauty has taken charge inside the car, and stands on the driver's seat twiddling knobs and wiggling the steering wheel. Her lip trembles when the creep approaches, and tears well. I lean against the door, shielding her from him, and make a feeble excuse.

‘I think I'll just wait a minute. Someone's coming to pick me up soon, anyway. I can manage. Thank you for stopping, but there's no need for you to wait, my friend will be here any minute.'

This is a big lie, but as I utter it, it becomes true. A throaty chugging sound heralds David's ambulance. It pulls up, menacingly close to the creep's car, the brakes squealing a protest like the fruitcake pigs.

David leans out, his face hard, angry, with his jaw clenched, and says to my would-be rescuer, ‘OK, mate, thanks for your help but I'll sort this one out.'

Am most impressed by his aggressive stance as he swings out of his vehicle and moves over to stand protectively next to me and my puncture. Have to fight impulse to giggle weakly and hide head in his manly biceps. The creep narrows his eyes, rolls his jaw as if
moving marbles in his mouth and evidently cannot think of anything cutting to say. He curses under his breath and spits his gum into the road before slamming himself back into his car and roaring off. Look to David to make fun of this interlude, but find he is grinding his teeth and wearing thunderous expression, not unlike that of thwarted creep, in fact.

‘How can you be so stupid, Venetia? What if I hadn't come along? You are here on your own, in the middle of nowhere, with a baby. It's getting dark. Christ only knows what you've done with Giles and Felix, but presumably they're waiting for you somewhere. And don't even pretend that you know how to change that tyre. I know you don't and I'm going to show you now, so this cannot happen again.'

Mouth gapes, arms hang slack in astonishment and I keep quiet until he has finished and is scrabbling about in the boot looking for something. He doesn't find it, and slams the boot but starts rummaging in the Land Rover instead. Have an urge to vent my own spleen, and do so.

‘I don't want to learn how to change a bloody tyre. That's what men are for. I would have easily got someone to do it by now if you weren't standing here giving sanctimonious lectures. And actually the boys are with Vivienne and we're on our way to meet them and have tea.'

He misses most of this, as his head is in the bowels of the Land Rover.

‘You need a jack first. Your car hasn't got one, which is peculiar. You must buy one.'

‘I don't want one.'

‘You will when you know what to do with it.'

‘I don't want to know what to do with it.'

‘Grow up.' The crisp delivery of these words leaves me smarting. David looks round to see why I am not answering back, and continues smoothly, passing me a weird-shaped bit of metal.

‘Now I want you to do this yourself. This is the jack. Put the jack here behind the wheel and twist the handle clockwise.
I said clockwise…'

On and on he goes, bossing me about as if I am five. The Beauty waves occasionally from her snug disco scene within the lopsided car, but is mainly oblivious to any humiliation and David's smug and patronising manner.

‘… And you just check for one last time that each nut is tight before you put the hubcap back on.'

It is almost dark now, and my fingers are blunt and without feeling. I am cold, tired and depressed. David, on the other hand, appears overjoyed, and his former flintlike expression has given way to a wide grin.

‘Well done. It wasn't so bad, was it? I'm really glad you made the effort, and I know you will be too. Next time it'll be so easy for you.'

His good cheer radiates through the dark and it is impossible to go on being cross. Instead I have a go at being graceful.

‘It was very considerate of you to teach me how to change a puncture, and I really appreciate it.'

He laughs and climbs into his car, switching on the engine and letting it idle a little.

‘I'm sure you don't. But you will. A single woman needs to be practical. I'll teach you now to split logs with an axe next.' He chugs away, missing a selection of filthy language which The Beauty copies.

‘Oh, bugger off. Oh, bugger off. Bugger, bugger, bugger, HA HA!' she trills all the way to Vivienne's. There, just for good measure, she tries her new word on Simon. Finding him watching television, she homes in on him, patting his arm, smiling angelically and announcing, ‘Oh, bugger,' in her breathiest voice. Simon's response is pleasing.

‘That's really splendid, isn't it? Such a shame about the fog. Come and watch the local news, my dear.' He pats the seat next to him and The Beauty, sensing a kindred spirit, climbs on and becomes absorbed in the teatime news and weather.

December 8th

Sidney is ill. His coat stares and his eyes are dull. Dare say he has swallowed a fishbone or half a pheasant, but take him to the vet anyway, as work-avoidance exercise. It backfires. The journey is ghastly. We have no box, so he flits about the car miaowing and shedding hair. Finally subsides, emitting a menacing whine and flurrying hair, under my foot. Have to kick him to avoid crashing into a sugar-beet lorry. Vet gives him a pill, says, ‘He's got worms,' and charges me £28. Wish I had Pet Plan, as recommended by Charles.

December 10th

Hurtling towards Christmas now, and am in deepest disgrace with Felix for not having the skill to make his costume for the nativity play. He is Joseph, and he has to sing a solo.

‘All the other mothers are making costumes. They come to the school and sit in the library and sew and have coffee and stuff.' This outburst accompanies a session in the charity shop where I attempt to put together an Galilean carpenter's outfit scaled down to seven-year-old size; Felix refuses to have anything to do with me.

‘I am not wearing that,' he hisses, when I hold up a matted purple knitted tunic.

I am reluctant to let so charming an item go without a fight: ‘But it would look great over something long. Like a tabard.'

‘I hate tabards. And I hate all this sort of thing.' He flings an expansive arm wide to include everything in the shop. Realise that I am not sure I know what a tabard is. Never mind. The big thing is to get out of the charity shop without either of us having a tantrum.

December 11th

Am at the sewing circle. Sewing. Badly. Try to rise above the frightfulness as Felix is very pleased with me, and skipped into school today making sure all his friends and their mums noticed his own immaculately behaved parent.

‘Mummy's doing sewing today. She's making costumes,' he told Peregrine. Peregrine has a Roundhead haircut and is the most pampered boy in the school due to his mother having been forty-two and very rich when she had him, and because he is her only child after twenty years of trying.

‘Tho what?' lisps poisonous Peregrine, ‘my mum hath
been thewing ev'wy day and my coth-thume hath got sequinzth on it.'

Peregrine has been wildly miscast as the Angel Gabriel. His mother, Trisha, is a hell-cat, and is only attending the sewing circle to interfere in other people's work. Of course, she finished hers days ago, and it hangs on a rail at the end of the room, an example to us all, twinkling like something Gary Glitter might have worn in the seventies. She lords it over us for a while, then seizes my cloth and needle.

‘That is not blanket stitch, Venetia. This is how you do it.'

As she hems the brown nylon, fashioning it, I hope, into a tabard, she sighs and glances at me contemptuously from beneath long, blue-mascaraed lashes. But what care I? She is my salvation, and makes the whole Joseph outfit for me. Hooray. Am now confident that Felix will be pleased with his costume for the play.

December 14th

Am sure that Christmas party invitations should be flooding in by now, and also seasonal cards to display on the mantelpiece, and if very popular, to hang on strings around the room. Today's post yields only the telephone
bill and a children's gift catalogue. Resolve to do all my Christmas shopping right now from this catalogue. How splendid it will be in a minute, when I have chosen everything and dispatched the order. Getting along famously, and have just selected a Truth Machine for Charles, when I turn the page and recoil in horror. Utterly trashy, gaudy trembly letters announce Charles's clockwork coffin, updated since the one Felix had, but no less loathsome. A whole page is devoted to parading its virtues.

HEAVENLY PETTING ENTERPRISES
brings you memories to treasure when Poochy
passes on or Cheepy tweets his last. No pet will ever
leave you with our clockwork mini coffins. Pop a pinch of
your pet's ashes in through the plastic opening lid and you
have a personalised memento. It's as easy as that!
Wind the key and listen to evocative music,
chosen to bring your pet back to life.