May Contain Nuts (11 page)

‘What about a league table on who can remember the most things that their parents told them about
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
?' suggested William unhelpfully.

‘I
guided
her towards it …'

Sarah sensed that it might be time to change the subject. ‘What about Bronwyn – have you got any back-ups in mind for her?'

‘Well, we've got her down for a few other schools just in case. So she'll be sitting the exams for Alleyn's, JAG's, City of London, St Paul's, Streatham Hill and Clapham High, Godolphin and Latimer, Emanuel, Putney High, Francis Holland, oh and there's a boarding school in Massachusetts we're looking into …'

I was still seething inside, though part of me was wondering whether I should be writing all these names down to make sure I had twenty-seven reserve options for my own daughter.

‘But her personal tutors are all pretty sure she'll get into Chelsea, aren't they, darling?'

Philip nodded through the window, but I don't think he could hear her. It was raining quite heavily now. Tutors in the
plural. That was a slip. I thought Bronwyn was just having the one tutor that she shared with Molly.

That evening, David slumped on the sofa with a long cold glass of beer and I whisked it out of his hands and placed it in the fridge.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Come on, there's work to do. I am going to get Molly that place if it's the only thing I ever achieve in my life. I need you to explain multiplying fractions and long division again. Only the top 40 per cent of applicants get into Chelsea College, which out of nine hundred children is only … um … actually, could you go over percentages with me again as well?'

‘Do we have to do this now?'

‘This isn't for me, it's for our daughter,' I admonished. ‘So she can get the best possible education, so that she has the best start in life we can give her. And so we can see the expression on Ffion's face when she learns that Molly beat Bronwyn in the entrance exam …'

The level of David's grasp of modern mathematics proved problematic. He knew everything. Having my husband tutor me in something in which he was so unarguably superior precipitated an unacceptable shift in the fragile balance of power that allowed our marriage to function. I was forced to admit I had no idea how to calculate the volume of a cube or what happened when you multiplied negative numbers, so later I'd feel compelled to introduce a conversation on something I knew more about, such as Jane Austen novels or putting the salt in the dishwasher. My literary knowledge was superior to David's; the only fiction he ever read involved scenarios in which Hitler developed the atom bomb after his invasion of Cornwall.

‘What is minus nine times minus five?' David asked, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

I looked at him extra earnestly to show that I was listening. He had white hairs growing out of his nostrils.

‘Sorry, can you repeat the question?'

‘Minus nine multiplied by minus five?'

My husband really did have the hairiest nostrils I'd ever seen – which reminded me that I'd booked Jamie in for a haircut after school next day; I wondered if they could just give Alfie a quick trim as well. Except Alfie always made such a fuss, it might be better to do it myself when he was asleep, though last time I tried that I'd done it in the dark so as not to wake him up, which had the opposite effect when the scissors stabbed into his ear lobe.

‘Are you just thinking or don't you know?'

‘Don't know what?'

‘The sum I just asked you.'

‘No, I'm thinking. What was the sum again?'

I thought teachers were supposed to be positive and encouraging, not say things like, ‘Please, please, in God's name listen to what I'm saying before my brain explodes from frustration.' The truth was that this project was making me feel even more stupid than I felt already.

I'd never had the intellectual self-confidence of David or our friends. We were sitting round in our favourite Italian restaurant and Ffion said, ‘Of course, Granada is a wonderful mix of Islam and Old Spain,' and all I could think of was Granada services on the M4. But David could always summon up an appropriate response. ‘Yes, well it is only five hundred years since the Ottoman Empire was driven out of the Iberian peninsula …' and I sat there wondering if my holiday in
Malaga was worth mentioning here. My husband seemed better educated than me, my friends all seemed better educated than me, and sometimes I just felt like a stupid little girl.

‘So, er, why were you in Granada, Philip?' I called across to where Ffion's husband was sitting on his own in the smoking section of the restaurant.

‘Computing conference. We're still trying to develop these recreational software ideas but it's got a bit bogged down.'

‘What's recreational software?'

‘Well, you have a home computer, right? You might shop on it, look up your star signs on it and write letters on it, but you'd never play any games on it, would you?' he said, craning to make eye contact over the plants.

‘Maybe with the children. But that's because Jamie's not very good at computer games. The last time he played
Desert Storm
, the Americans actually lost.'

‘Well, there's no end of programs that ordinary adults can use during their leisure time: Family Tree Maker, 3-D Garden Designer or whatever, but none of these has been a runaway bestseller. That's the idea I'm determined to find …'

Philip worked on the creative side of software development. He claimed that his most lucrative idea had been sending random email addresses the following message: ‘Dear Pervert, your computer has been recorded accessing hardcore pornography sites. We have a complete record of all your email addresses; if you do not wish us to contact all your friends and work colleagues with details of the obscene websites you have visited, please send fifty pounds to the following bank account in the Cayman Islands …' He said he made nearly a million pounds from that one and I was never quite sure if he was joking or not.

‘What about a computer game in which the object is to get your children to stop playing computer games?' suggested William. Philip couldn't hear him. ‘Or, if everyone's doing internet shopping, then how about internet shoplifting? You order what you fancy on the website and they go round and nick it for you?'

‘I've got an idea for a computer program!' announced David excitedly. ‘A historical flow-chart challenge! Yes, yes, you start at, say, the Battle of Zama, right? And making various choices along the way you follow the course that history might have taken if the Carthaginians hadn't been defeated by Scipio in the Second Punic War so that Rome wasn't the dominant Mediterranean power! Now that would be massively popular!'

There was the sound of someone breaking a breadstick. ‘I think it may need a speedy hedgehog in there somewhere …' said William.

Obviously David could not spend all day as my maths tutor because, as the only breadwinner, he had more important things to concentrate on, namely our son's school history project on World War Two. I tried to picture the reaction we would get at drinks parties when people said, ‘And what do you do?' and he replied, ‘I'm writing my nine-year-old son's school project on World War Two.'

‘Oh right, does that pay well?'

‘Not huge amounts, but we're hoping for a gold star at the end of term …'

David's professional focus seemed to have blurred somewhat in the weeks since he'd volunteered to help Jamie with his project. There were still intricate diagrams and spreadsheets neatly pinned above his desk, but now instead of
referring to revenue forecasts versus capital outlay, they tracked the encirclement of Von Paulus's German Sixth Army to the west of Stalingrad.

‘Good day in the office, darling?'

‘Excellent … found some wonderful archive material on the Volga offensive for Jamie.'

I tentatively suggested that he might possibly be going into a little too much detail for a nine-year-old's school project. He was quite defensive about such an idea. ‘But the Battle of Rostov was vital to regaining the oilfields of the Caucasus; leave that out and all of Operation Uranus becomes illogical.'

‘Look, I know we want Jamie to get a good mark for his project and everything, but don't you think it rather defeats the object if you do it all for him?'

‘I'm just following his lead … and then sort of guiding him towards locating the stuff he's interested in …'

‘What, so our nine-year-old son chose to chronicle the German annexation of, of … Estonia, did he?'

‘The Germans didn't annex Estonia …' He laughed condescendingly. ‘The Baltic states were seized by Russia as part of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression treaty.'

‘I knew that. 1941 …'

‘1939.'

Secretly I rather resented the way this project seemed to have taken Jamie away from me. It felt as if I had lost two of the men in my home to the war. It seemed to drag on for ever: not knowing when my brave boys might be coming home on leave from the Imperial War Museum; keeping the home fires burning for the lads out there battling away on the school assignment front. David had declared martial law – this military commission became something exclusively for the boys; there were mines and barbed wire and signs all around it
saying, ‘
Achtung! Frau Verboten!
' If I dared to stray over into David's territory, I immediately came under intensive fire. Just because I happened to comment on the nice colours Jamie had chosen for colouring in his map of Hiroshima. ‘That's why there'll never be a female minister of defence,' laughed David. ‘“Which tank do you want to buy, minister?” “Well, I rather like the green one.”'

I wished I had known lots of stuff about World War Two so that I could have spent a bit of time with my son talking about war and armies and history. I had helped him a little when his class had had to write a piece imagining they were evacuees. Though by the time his mother had checked out which was the best village to evacuate him to, the war would have been over. Maybe I should find out a bit more about it, I thought; maybe the Waffen SS could bring me and my son closer together.

‘So this Nazi–Soviet non-aggression treaty? When did you say that was?' I asked David.

‘August 1939. Just before the war broke out.'

‘But Russia was on our side in the war?'

‘Yes?' said David patiently.

‘So what happened to stop them having a non-aggression treaty?'

David looked at me with almost pitiful disbelief. ‘Well, I think Adolf Hitler
invading Russia
may have been a technical breach of one of the sub-clauses in the
non-aggression
treaty.'

‘Oh, I see.'

‘Yes, I think sending in hundreds of panzer divisions, occupying thousands of square miles of Soviet territory and killing twenty million Russians was deemed by some eagle-eyed legal pedant in the Kremlin to be in technical breach of
sub-section three, paragraph two of a treaty based around the concept of
non-aggression
…'

‘All right, all right …' David's blitzkrieg sarcasm had all the subtlety of his favourite warlords.

‘I mean, maybe the Russians were being a bit oversensitive; maybe Stalin was a bit prickly that morning and just misread the signals. Maybe when Hitler set out to totally annihilate the Bolshevik
Untermenschen
, he didn't mean it in an
aggressive
way …'

‘You know your trouble,' I said to him. ‘You're too interested in the subject.'

‘What?'

‘You're unhealthily interested in the Nazis.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You! You're worse than the History Channel. I think there's something vaguely suspect about being that fascinated by the Third Reich … Next you'll be going to medal fairs and collecting Nazi insignia.'

‘Look, just because there's something I can teach the children that you can't …'

‘Well, that's the trouble, isn't it? You're just doing it all for him, not letting him find out for himself.'

‘I can't believe I'm hearing this! From the woman who's going to disguise herself as an eleven-year-old girl so that she can take her daughter's exam for her!'

‘Yeah, which leaves me stuck in the study trying to do nonverbal bloody reasoning while you have all the time with the kids! I thought men were supposed to balance work and home. But not you, oh no, it's just family, family, family the whole time! You never think once about coming home late because you were out drinking with some important clients, do you? Not one weekend where I'm abandoned with the children
because you've taken off on some vital work crisis that came up at the last minute. I mean, other husbands leave it to their wives to sit down with the children and go through all the homework, but you're so selfish you have to do it all, don't you?'

David never took criticism well. One bit of negative feedback on eBay and he was in a bad mood all weekend. But I did come home a couple of days after our row to notice Jamie sitting at the kitchen table enthusiastically drawing a big exploding battleship rather than taking dictation from his father on geopolitical fall-out from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, so perhaps the message had got through. Jamie was being allowed to finish his project on his own.

The more I heard about it, the more incredibly complicated World War Two sounded. World War Three, on the other hand, was far more straightforward. World War Three was simply ‘My Family versus Rest of The World'. Whereas the 1940s had been ‘all pull together', ‘everyone in the same boat', now it was me and my children pitted against everyone else: Alice, Molly, Jamie and Alfie versus Britain, France, United States, Germany, Japan, Russia and Ffion. (I hadn't decided which side David was on; he seemed to keep switching sides – he was Italy.) Of course, various superficial alliances were made along the way. If our embassy had to issue a sleepover invitation or present a birthday gift, then diplomatic channels could generally be found. But it was all part of the overriding objective: my children
über alles
, the permanent geopolitical battle for full-spectrum dominance for my precious offspring.