Julia Gets a Life (18 page)

            I pick up my fork. ‘Don’t start.’

            ‘Why ever not?’

            ‘Because you’re married. Because you’re not in love with me at all. You’d just like to have sex with me.’

            ‘Oh, very strident. But it is true about the sex, yes. But sex in a strictly serial sense. Until my dick packs up, certainly - possibly longer, now that Viagra is a viable alternative to a stout rubber band. And Julia, I
am
in love with you. Just because I rub along with Mrs Colin does not mean I don’t have the most intense feelings for you.’

            ‘Oh shut up. If I said okay, leave your wife, come away with me and I’ll shag you senseless till your teeth drop out, you would run a mile.’

            ‘Ah, but come away where? I couldn’t possibly go to Cardiff. I can’t even read the bloody road signs, for one thing. Lets do Clapham. Clapham works for me. We could get a flat in one of those houses on the common and you could waft around in petticoats while I gaze dolefully out of the window agonising over whether my stanzas scan. Lets do it.’

            I shunt the flowers to the plate rim. (They are not nasturtiums.) ‘Can’t. I’m moving into a new phase of my life in which I am going to eschew traditional male/female couplings and live as a free and sensual being, taking sexual gratification from whatever attractive males hove into view.’ (Howard.)

            He plunges his spoon into the mauve well in front of him. ‘Well consider me hoved,’ he says brightly. And loudly. ‘We must do it on the table,
now!
But listen, Julia Potter, I detect a certain cutting edge in your usual array of soft and winsome charms. Life’s cruel blows?’

            ‘Not at all,’ I tell him, as heads drop again around us. ‘All healed. Consider it more a delightful and unexpected bonus. I must have buried it way back in a ‘non-marriageable attributes’ nook.’

            ‘Well, if it’s as robust a state of mind as you say, that is excellent news. You should never have married that dreary man in the first place. And it’s fortuitous also. Donna tells me that
Kite
have a fearful reputation, and a collective libido that could service Wyoming.’

            It is
so
nice to see Colin.

            The great thing about Colin is that apart from my family he is the only person I currently know that knew me before I knew Richard. Which gives him a special importance in my life. Not because he doesn’t like him much (though it helps), but because it means he sees me differently than most people do. He sees me as Julia the talented and would-be famous photographer as opposed to Julia as in wife of Richard as in mother to Emma and Max as in person for whom the domestic star shines most brightly in the firmament of life. Which matters. Of course it does. How many women are there in the world who have evolved into people who look after families and whose work has become just the thing that they do to fill in the time before the children get home? Too many.

            And then there’s the lust. Colin is not embarrassed about lusting after me because he didn’t meet me at a dinner party
as someone’s wife
. Every woman should have a Colin around.

            A lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely,
lovely
day.

            Almost.

            When I left to go to London I had;

            Locked house

            Left back gate open (access for painters, as per instructions)

            Put coloured wash on timer to coincide with return

            Hauled large plastic vat of bolognaise sauce from snowy depths of freezer          for        convenient (yet nutritious) supper for self and children

            Made arrangements for Max (at friend’s house - to return following       confirmatory phone call from self)

            Made arrangements for Emma (Do not have anyone in while I am out - especially boys. Do not use phone except in extremis. Do not microwave      tights.)

            When I returned, I had

            A police car outside my house

            A broken window

            Richard in my garden.

            All rather worrisome.

            Of course, drinking at lunchtime is the very best way to ensure that by seven pm you are anxious, nauseated, irritable and tired and that the front of your head will feel just like the bit in the roasting tin where the chicken has stuck. The bit you attack rigorously with a knife.

            It was with some sluggishness therefore that I closed the taxi door behind me, and walked back into the maelstrom that was, these days, my life.

            Richard had obviously heard the taxi because his head bobbed about above the garden gate like a skittish glove puppet.

            ‘Hmmph,’ he said, emerging. ‘There you are at last.’

            ‘Yes, here I am at last, ‘ I agreed, with an entirely unforced edge of exasperation in my voice. ‘And here are you. Where is Emma?’

            ‘How should I know?’ he snapped. ‘You make all those arrangements these days.’

            ‘But Emma should be home...’

            ‘Yes, indeed she should. Which is another thing. But in the meantime, would you please go in and deal with the alarm.’

            ‘The alarm?’

            ‘Yes, the alarm, if you wouldn’t mind, before it goes off again.’

            At which point, it did.

            I followed Richard into the house and switched it off.

            ‘But why is the alarm going off, and what exactly are you doing here?’

            ‘Because...’ He rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. He looked very tense. ‘Because Mr Evans accidentally broke a window and then set the alarm off.’

            ‘But breaking a window wouldn’t set the alarm off. It only...’

            ‘Yes I
know
that. God, you are becoming aggressive these days. He broke the window when he was moving his ladder, and when he ducked to avoid being speared by a shard of flying glass he then jolted the ladder and the top of it hit the alarm box, causing it to go off. O
kay
?’

            He turned and walked back into the kitchen, snubbing me. I let it go, in the interests of my chicken bit, and followed him, and then instantly regretted the slide into low-life that meant none of the breakfast had yet been cleared away. I could
feel
Richard noting it. Bastard.

            ‘But why…’

            ‘The police arrived following a telephone call from one of our,
your
community spirited neighbours, who obviously thought the house was being broken into, being uninformed,
naturally
, of the fact that the outside of the windows were being painted. So they came and wanted to know what Mr Evans and Mr Evans’s Youth Opportunities trainee were doing with a ladder up the side of our house, and so Mr Evans had no choice but to telephone me at work - seeing as you were gallivanting about in London -’

            ‘I was not
gallivanting
..’

            ‘Well, doing whatever it was that you were doing then. All I know is that I was in an important project meeting and that I have had to leave a small, frightened young engineer - who is already some thousands over budget, incidentally - in the hands of a property developer from Manchester, who will probably have eaten him between two slices of bread by the time I get back.’

            ‘So?’ I said. ‘That’s hardly my fault, is it?’

            Richard gave me a look that said that absolutely
everything
was my fault
since I ejected him from the premises. But he could not, of course, say this. So instead, he said,

            ‘I am just going to see off the constable, Mr Evans and any lingering sightseers. And then I want a word with you.’

            Richard wanting a word with me increased the scrapy chickeny scrubby bit to more of a cordless drill on hammer and caused the bilious small intestine full of banana flavoured blancmange (i.e. Chardonnay) to kick in and quiver as well.

            What word? What sort of word? What sort of kind of word? I can recall pretty much every occasion in my life when someone (usually a grown up, prior to this) has visited that particular brand of cruelty upon me. And here was another to add to my list. I stood, then sat, then stood again, while Richard dispensed apologies, platitudes and chummy waves in equal measure. Then I sat again, quaking. Though I knew not why. I had done nothing wrong.

            He stomped back in, pulled out a chair (yes,
that
one), and sat down on it heavily.

            ‘Right,’ he said, combing his hair with his fingers. ‘I don’t want any nonsense about this. I want to know exactly what is going on, Julia. No flannel.’

            ‘Flannel?’

            ‘Yes, flannel. You may consider me to be some sort of low life, but just remember one thing...’

            At which point he waggled a finger and threw me a look that said ‘skinny rib, tsk! Baggy jeans, Yeuch! Trainers,
trainers
? Dear, dear me.’

            ‘....remember that I have a role in this family, and that I take my responsibilities every bit as seriously as you. More so, to be honest, on recent evidence.’

            As expected. ‘Huh? I wouldn’t...’

            ‘Don’t start. Just give it me straight.’

            ‘Give you what?’

            ‘
All
the facts.’ He whipped out some paper. My pregnancy pamphlet. ‘About this.’

            Then he pointed, then looked at me pointedly, so I pointed back.

            ‘Just where d’you find that?’

            ‘Bah! You see? Flannel. For God’s sake, just tell me. How many weeks?’

            Ah! I see!

            ‘Richard, it’s not...’

            ‘She’s fifteen!’

            ‘Twenty six.’

            ‘But...’

            ‘It’s Lily. And if you tell a soul, a
soul
, I will personally kill you. And just what did you think you were doing snooping around my house?’

            ‘
Our
house. I still own it too, remember? And I wasn’t snooping. I was trying to find the instructions for the alarm. Only it seems any semblance of order left this place when I did. So what’s she going to do?’

            ‘She hasn’t decided yet. Well, she has, but I’m trying to decide her into being a bit less decided for a bit.’

            He frowned. ‘So she wants to get rid of it.’

            I nodded. ‘Which is all fine and...and, well, if it’s what she wants. But I’m not sure...you know.’

            ‘I know.’ He paused to let his expression catch up with events. ‘Look, I’m sorry about...jumping to conclusions and that. I…well, it couldn’t have been you, could it? So I...’