Love in a Warm Climate (9 page)

But never mind the peacocks, I think; I am doing a great impression of an ostrich – except that my thighs are much fatter.

I wonder how Nick’s feeling. Nick has that very male ability to move on extremely quickly. Just about the only time I ever saw him upset for more than an hour was when Chelsea lost the Champions League on goal difference to Manchester United. That was always what I thought was one of the great things about him: his optimism and
joie de vivre
, as they call it down my way.

He’s one of those people who always sees the silver lining as opposed to the cloud. I imagine he would have taken being dumped in France quite well. Onwards and upwards, he would have said, leaping out of bed to face the day. Whereas there is just no way I can even imagine moving on at all. I feel like a truck stuck in the mud (except there is no mud here): my wheels are spinning but I’m not getting anywhere.

I watch the children on the way home, playing tigers, crouching and pouncing and growling at each other. It’s the kind of thing I used to play, but I was always alone. My parents divorced when I was a toddler, and although my mother remarried more often than most people change their cars, she never had any more children. I always wanted to give my own kids the happy carefree childhood I didn’t have. And until the bra-in-the-bag incident, it never occurred to me that I would do anything else.

When she gets here, Sarah will tell me that this is a good opportunity to find another man, or even rekindle an old acquaintance, like Johnny Fray. But where will I begin? And who knows what murky secrets lurk in the depths of unknown men? A friend of mine ended up unwittingly dating a man who had murdered his wife. She only started to realise when she went to his cottage in the Wiltshire countryside, which was a total mess – in stark contrast to him, who was always well turned out.

“I’ve been away a long time,” he told her by way of explanation. Then he offered to show her his “special” place in the woods. Alarm bells started ringing and she rushed off, citing a somehow-forgotten appointment at the hairdresser’s at 9pm on a Friday evening.

When she got home she Googled him, and sure enough, he
had
been away for a long time: twelve years to be precise, for chopping up his missus in little bits and burying her in the woods. In a really “special” place.

I am thirty-six, so any man I meet is around that scary mid-life kind of age where strange things start to happen, even if they are not
wife-murderers
. Nick, for example, last year, started to listen to hard rock.

“It makes me feel alive,” he would say when I asked him about it.

It makes me feel like throwing the stereo out of the window, but he insisted it was good for your neural pathways, those things that keep your brain active and young – apparently the more you have, the less likely you are to get Alzheimer’s. In the interests of my neural pathways, I put up with it, but I still hated it.

So there’s one upside to Nick going off with another woman, I conclude as my three tigers run into the house: I will never have to listen to Led Zeppelin again.

They run past a robust-looking woman with a disapproving look on her face and a strange shade of red hair that I have noticed is extremely popular round these parts, waiting for me at my door.

“Madame Reed,” she says, pronouncing the Reed with a rolling r and endless e’s, so it sounds like weeeeeed, before launching into a diatribe in colloquial French. I think it has something to do with the fact that I didn’t buy the right cleaning products, but with my cleaning lady Agnès I am never too sure. The only surety is that she will grumble and sweat and huff and puff a lot.

“
Bonjour
Agnès,” I smile. “
Il fait beau, n’est-ce pas
?” I am trying a tactic that involves always being positive and happy when I see her, as an experiment to see if I can shake her dogged pessimism. And that includes being Miss Jolly even just after my husband has left me for another woman.

Agnès shakes her head and says, “It won’t last”, while wiping beads of sweat from her face.

“Are you well?” I try again, grinning inanely. My cheek muscles are beginning to hurt. I can hear the bell in the small chapel ringing. This is one of the children’s favourite pastimes; ringing the bell, calling the faithful (or more like unfaithful in our case) to prayer.

“Oh Madame, how can a person be well at my age and in this country?” she laments in her own rather strange mixture of French and English and possibly a third language as yet totally unknown to man. “I have arthritis, and a bad knee and a sore shoulder. You know Madame,” she leans closer to me conspiratorially: “I am over sixty. A person shouldn’t have to work at my age, but I need the money, Pierre’s pension is terrible even if his life was ruined by the war with Algeria. You give your life for your country and what do you get back?”

She says all this extremely slowly to be sure I understand, even the
English bits, then makes a zero shape with her hand and spits out: “
Rien, rien du tout
.”

I try to nod understandingly resisting the urgent desire to wipe what I am sure is a little of Agnès’s saliva from my cheek.

“And there’s no point in declaring what you earn,” she tells me. “You may as well not work; they just come and take it away.”

The French talk a lot about ‘them’, an omnipotent, malevolent force with the capacity to ruin your life within seconds, rather like the Germans during the war. There is a saying here,
Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés
: to be happy you need to be hidden. How anything can hide with her hair colour is beyond me, but maybe that’s why Agnès is always so miserable. Anyway, she can’t be more miserable than I am right now. Maybe I could shut her up by starting to cry again and explaining what’s happened. But of course I don’t. I behave in a very English way and apologise.

“
Je suis désolée
, Agnès,” I say, wishing she would go away. Then she starts to tell me about the cleaning products I should be buying. I explain with the help of a pen and a piece of paper upon which I write the words shopping list that it would be easier if she would write down what she needs and then I can be sure to get it next time I go to Carrefour, the nearest supermarket.

“
Non, non
, Madame Weeeeeed.” Agnès throws up her arms in despair, sending the broom flying (she refuses to use the Hoover). “
C’est trop cher. Intermarché à Bédarieux, c’est beaucoup mieux
.”

I nod and agree and wonder how I ended up with the world’s bossiest and grumpiest cleaning lady. Normally I am more sympathetic, but today I am all out of sympathy.

Eventually I get away and try to muster the energy to think of what to cook for the children for dinner. I still can’t face eating, I feel on the verge of either crying or throwing up all the time. My mind is buzzing with images of Nick and Cécile, although of course I’ve no idea what she looks like. I try to work out exactly when it began. What did they talk about? Are they together now? What are they doing? All these questions are burning holes in my brain.

Dinner is about as relaxing as sitting in a traffic jam knowing you’re going to miss your flight to the dream holiday you’ve been saving up for for ten years. The children behave as badly as is possible. They argue with each other about everything; from where to sit to who lays the table to who can stroke Daisy the cat. They are so busy trying to kill each other that they hardly eat my lovingly prepared macaroni cheese with ham.

I wonder if they’ve picked up on my mood and are unsettled in some way. But then I remember that they often behave this badly. Life in London for
Nick must be blissfully quiet in comparison.

“Mummy, Emily’s a nulatic.” Charlotte comes running into the kitchen from the bathroom where I have sent them all to get ready for bed while I wash up. “She’s put water everywhere.”

“A lunatic,” I correct her.

“Come on,” she says impatiently. I walk behind her, already dreading the mess I am going to be faced with as soon as I get into the bathroom. And now that Nick has gone there’s only me here to deal with it.

Emily is playing slides in the bath, which consists of standing up at one end and hurling herself towards the other. Edward is squealing with delight as she whizzes past him, but is wisely not trying it himself. Charlotte is right: the girl is a nulatic.

“Emily, stop,” I command. This has no effect whatsoever. Emily whizzes down again, splashing water everywhere. Edward giggles wildly and starts doing the same thing. Charlotte stands next to me commanding that they “listen to mummy.”

My mother’s child-rearing theory is this: as long as they’re not causing themselves or anyone else harm, let them be. I survey the situation. They are not causing anyone or anything harm (except maybe the bathroom), but frankly, if I’m going to cope with this single mother lark, I’m going to have to take control. My mother’s theory is all very well with only one daughter, but when you have three children, and a nulatic among them, you need to be stricter.

“Emily and Edward, STOP IT NOW,” I yell. Still no reaction. What the hell do I do, short of grabbing them and hurling them out of the bath? Drastic measures are required. I focus on the shower, the one static thing among the water and the flying children. I bend my right leg and place my foot on my left inside thigh, then lift my arms over my head and breathe. A perfect tree pose. Sarah would be proud of me. Emily immediately stops.

“What are you doing mummy? You look strange.”

“Not as strange as you will look with even less teeth when you do yourself in sliding around the bath,” I say, staring straight ahead of me. “Now both of you get out and let’s get into our pyjamas.”

Emily and Edward leave the bath slowly, watching me in total silence as they grab a towel each from the towel rail. Slowly I put my right leg down.

“That’s better,” I say, very pleased with my new Zen childcare method. I might even write a book about it – once I’ve mastered another yoga pose, that is. “Charlotte, you choose the book tonight.”

After the book, they start acting up again. “Go to bed,” I yell at them. Ms Zen yogi has retreated to her ashram. “Just go to bed, it’s enough now.” I tell
myself to breathe deeply, calmly, remind myself that I am going to have to get used to dealing with them on my own. But why do they have to be so infuriating about going to bed? It’s not like they’ve never done it before. They know it’s bedtime. They know they have school in the morning. But they come up with a hundred reasons to do anything but turning in, from not having the right teddy to needing a pee to not being tired.

“I don’t care if you’re not tired,” I tell Edward. “Just lie down and close your eyes.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Try,” I say.

“I tried,” he says.

“Count sheep,” I tell him.

“Where?” he asks, sitting up and looking around the room.

“No, in your head, pretend to count sheep in a field and then you’ll go to sleep,” I explain.

“That’s just silly,” he replies. He has a point.

Eventually I leave him with my ipod on listening to Take That, which seems to work better than the sheep. The girls finally promise to go to sleep if they can cycle to school in the morning. I listen at their door. Silence. That could just be a bluff, but by now I’m too exhausted to care.

I take the phone, go upstairs to our bedroom and sit on the bed. It has started to rain. I can hear it pelting down. When the wind catches it, it crashes against the French windows in my room.

The phone in my hand rings, making me drop it. What if it’s Nick? The way I’m feeling tonight, I might just ask him to come home. The thought of him coming home makes me cry again.

The phone rings on. I look at the caller display. It is Nick. I suppose to speak to the kids again to see how school went.

I leave it and collapse on the bed in a heap. I feel like I’m never going to be able to stop crying. My whole body convulses with pain and anger and desperation. If only something could make this go away. I just can’t stand it. My whole life is falling apart and I have no one to turn to.

Daisy joins me on the bed and starts to purr. She has a calming effect on me and I am finally able to breathe and control my sobbing. The phone rings again. But it isn’t Nick, this time – it’s my mother.

“Hello darling, how are you?” she asks.

I start crying as soon as I hear her voice. By the time I am able to tell her that Nick has left, she is almost hysterical, thinking one of the children has had a dreadful accident.

“Oh, thank God,” she says.

“Thank God?” I wail. “My husband is having an affair and that’s your reaction?”

“Well it’s not as if anyone has died,” she responds. “When did you last have sex?”

“Mother!” Her question shocks me so much I stop bawling.

“Oh don’t be such a prude, Sophie. When?”

I can’t remember. Reluctantly I tell her so.

“Well there’s your answer,” she says. “What man is going to hang around with a frigid wife? You girls are all the same nowadays, as soon as you’ve had your children you think that’s the end of it. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Why is everyone around me so obsessed with sex?

“So now it’s my fault the bastard has walked out on us?”

“Not entirely darling, but you have to understand that sex is crucial to men, they can’t live without it. And obviously this other woman is providing it a lot more often than ‘I can’t remember.’ I’ll come and see you soon darling, don’t worry, everything will be fine. He’ll come back, he loves the children. And the house. Are you going to stay? What are you going to do?”

“I will probably sell it, but don’t come out, I can cope, thanks anyway.” The last thing I need is my mother pitching up telling me I should have more sex and trying to cook. “I’ll be fine. Let’s talk over the weekend.”

“Are you sure you’re okay, darling? Shall I come out and help you?”

“No, I’m fine thanks, really.”

“Be brave, something will turn up.”

We say goodbye and I lie back on the bed.

I can’t stand it any longer. Why is it up to me to tell the children and deal with everything? I suppose he
has
tried to call, but still, he’s the bastard who caused all this trouble. I hate him for it, I hate him for turning my world upside down, for ruining my children’s happy childhood, for making me feel like a pile of worthless shit. I have to talk to him though. We need to make some decisions.