The Making of Us (3 page)

He glanced up at her as she walked in and smiled wanly. ‘Hello, love.’ He’d pulled the mask from his mouth.

‘Hello.’

‘Nice walk?’

‘Yeah, bit hot.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, his gaze drifting towards the window, ‘yeah.’ He’d been indoors for thirteen days now, on that sofa for most of them. If he wanted, he could sit on the balcony, sit in the sun, but Lydia’s dad had locked the door on to the balcony fifteen years ago, locked it and never opened it again. She made him a cup of tea and brought it to him. He held out two big hands, thin-fleshed and cold as a reptile’s. Lydia asked him if he needed anything else, and when he said he didn’t she took her mug of tea and her dog into her own small bedroom and sat on her single bed and tried not to feel guilty about leaving her dad like that, out there on his own, dying for all she knew. She battled the guilt for a moment or two but then she remembered the man he’d been before his lungs had caved in and his body had started to collapse. Not a bad man, but not a good father. But he was nice to her now, nice now that she was all he had.

Lydia stared around her room, at the grubby magnolia walls with the hint of cyclamen pink skulking beneath. Her father had painted Lydia’s room only a few days after her mother died. She’d watched in despair as the dun-coloured paint had been slopped over the bright pink. It was as if he was painting away her happiness. Nowadays the magnolia suited her. She found it hard to imagine she’d ever been the kind of little girl who would have wanted her bedroom to be pink.

Lydia was almost four when her mother died. She could remember very little about her. Dark hair. The little silver swans she would make for her daughter out of the lining of her cigarette packets. A skirt with blue roses on it. Long fingernails up the back of Lydia’s top, scratch-scratch-scratching away an itch for her: ‘Harder? Softer? There? There? Ooh, let me scratch that away for you.’ Her name was Glenys. Lydia remembered music, Terry Wogan on the radio, a sink full of washing up, a cigarette left burning in an ashtray, the smell of chips in a fryer, the bars of a playpen, a cardboard box big enough to hide in, the
TV Times
on the coffee table, shows circled in blue biro, and a little yellow bird in a cage that pirouetted with joy every time Lydia’s mother looked at it. After her mother died these things disappeared, one by one, like stars going out in the night sky. The yellow bird, the
TV Times
, Terry Wogan, the chips, the back scratches, the delicate silver swans, the pink paint in the bedroom. All that remained was the ashtray.

Lydia heard her father coughing next door. She tensed. Every cough sounded like it could be his last. The thought left her feeling torn between joy and panic. If he died she’d be all on her own.
All on her own
. She wanted to be alone. But she didn’t want to be all on her own. She glanced at her dog, at his big strong skull, his soft ears. She wasn’t all on her own. She had her dog. She closed her eyes against the sound of her father’s rasping, the thoughts of her future, and let herself fall into a deep, vodka-induced slumber.

Bendiks hoisted Lydia’s leg over her shoulder and ran his hands up and down her calf muscles, squeezing as he went. A fine thread of sweat trickled from Lydia’s hairline, down her temple and into her ear. She stuck a fingertip into her ear and rubbed away the itch.

‘How does that feel?’ said Bendiks.

Lydia clenched her teeth together and smiled. ‘That feels great,’ she said, ‘absolutely great.’

‘Not too much?’ asked Bendiks, his oddly beautiful face softening with concern.

‘No,’ she said, ‘just right.’

He smiled and lifted her leg a little higher. Lydia felt the latticework of muscles behind her knee pulling against the movement and winced slightly. Bendiks had one knee at her crotch and his thick black hair was almost brushing her lips. Gently he lowered Lydia’s leg and rested it on the floor.

‘There,’ he said, ‘finished.’

Lydia smiled and sighed. Bendiks stood above her, his hands on his hips, smiling down fondly. ‘You did good today,’ he said, helping her to her feet. ‘Really good. You want we do it in the park on Thursday. Yes?’

‘The park?’ said Lydia. ‘Yes, why not?’

‘Great.’ He smiled at her again. Lydia smiled back. She tried to think of something witty or conversational to say but, finding nothing inside the cavernous cathedral of her head that seemed to fit the job, just said, ‘See you on Thursday,’ then turned and walked away.

She saw Bendiks’ next client, loitering in her field of vision. It was the Jewish woman, the one with the overstretched Juicy Couture trousers and the fake tan. Lydia knew she was Jewish because her name was Debbie Levy. From behind she looked like a cheap sofa and Lydia despised her, not for her resemblance to a cheap sofa but because of her slinky way with Bendiks.

‘Morning, gorgeous,’ she heard the woman growling behind her, ‘are you ready for me?’

She heard Bendiks laugh, slightly nervously, and then Lydia pushed through the swing doors towards the changing rooms, her personal training session over for another day.

Lydia Pike lived not far from the exclusive health and fitness club where she was trained every other day by a beautiful Latvian man called Bendiks Vitols. The club was so exclusive that it was almost impossible to guess it was there, tucked away up a small St John’s Wood mews, looking for all the world like someone’s rather pretty house. Lydia only knew it was there because it was where Bendiks worked. She’d read about him in a glossy magazine that had been slopped through her letterbox three months ago. ‘Want to get fit for spring?’ said the by-line. ‘We talk to three local fitness experts.’ And there was Bendiks, a head-and-shoulders shot, thick dark hair in a side parting, a black fitted t-shirt, smiling at a third party out of view as though disturbed by a cheeky comment. At the time Lydia had dearly wanted to get fit for spring. She’d wanted to get fit not just for spring, but for summer, autumn and winter too, and the moment she saw Bendiks’ face she knew that she’d found the person to do it. It wasn’t just that he was beautiful, which he was, but there was a softness to his features, a sort of humour about him. She knew he’d put her at her ease. And he had.

From her external appearance you might not imagine that Lydia was in much need of fitness training. She was lean and spare, there was no extra meat on her, except perhaps for a little softness around her belly button. But Lydia knew the truth about her body. She knew that it was a shell behind which ticked a time bomb of unnurtured organs and neglected arteries.

Lydia dropped her gym bag in the hallway and said hello to Juliette, her housekeeper, who was halfway up the stairs with an armful of freshly laundered clothes. She stopped when she saw an Ocado delivery man approaching the front door. ‘You want me to take care of this?’ asked Juliette.

‘No, no, it’s fine. I’ve got it.’

Juliette smiled and continued up the stairs. The man from Ocado unpacked Lydia’s shopping on to her kitchen table while Lydia fingered the contents of her purse for a couple of pound coins with which to show the Ocado man her appreciation for sparing her the inconvenience of doing her own shopping. After the man had left, Lydia began to sort the goods into her kitchen cupboards. Lydia rarely dealt with her kitchen cupboards. She had a vague idea what each cupboard contained, had herself allocated each unit a function during the unpacking process, but really, some of them were slightly mysterious. Where, for example, she wondered to herself, do I put rice vinegar?

Juliette came upon her, a moment later, wafting vaguely around the kitchen with a packet of rice noodles in her hand. ‘Here.’ She took them from Lydia and placed them deftly in a pull-out cupboard next to the fridge. ‘Let me finish.’

Lydia acquiesced and pulled a bottle of sugar-free Sprite from the fridge. ‘I’ll be in my office,’ she said in the strange new tone of voice she’d developed for talking to the woman she paid to deal with her domestic affairs; it said, ‘I am not your friend, no, but neither am I the kind of heartless, overpaid St John’s Wood resident who sees you as nothing more than a paid-for slave. I know that you are a human being and I am aware that you have a meaningful and real life outside my home, but I still do not really wish to discuss your children with you, or to find out what brought you from the palm-lined shores of a Philippine island to our dirty old city. I am a nice person, and I too have travelled a long way to get where I am today, but I would like to keep our relationship purely professional. If that’s OK with you? Thank you.’

Lydia had only had a housekeeper for a few months. It hadn’t been her idea. It was her friend Dixie’s idea. She’d been happy with having a cleaner once a week, but Dixie had taken one look at Lydia’s over-sized new St John’s Wood palace and said: ‘Housekeeper. You’ll have to.’

Lydia’s office was at the top of her house. It was painted white with an eaved ceiling and a small Velux window from which, if she stood on her tiptoes, Lydia could see the cemetery and the otherworldly white bulges of the Lord’s Pavilion. It also looked out across a playground, and sometimes when the wind was blowing in her direction Lydia could hear the shouts and calls of small children playing down below, and for a moment would be transported back to another time and another place, far, far away from here.

She twisted open the bottle of Sprite and drank it fast from the neck, thirsty after her workout. The sky seen through her window was densely coloured and strangely mottled, almost like a framed piece of marbled Venetian paper. On her desk was her mail, left in a neat pile by Juliette while she was out. Also in her office was a green plant of some description, and two abstract paintings that rested on their frames against the walls, waiting for nails and pieces of string. She’d been to an ‘affordable’ art fair just after she moved into the house and spent £5,000 on art. In fact, the whole experience of moving into her first home had involved alarming amounts of expenditure. A lamp at a price of £280, which in the context of Lydia’s life pre-house might have seemed offensively expensive, in the context of having spent nearly £4 million on a house seemed something of a bargain: that little? Wow! I’ll have two! Spending £5,000 at an art fair had felt a little like grocery shopping, throwing things into a metaphorical trolley, barely glancing at the price tags.

Lydia had taken a giant leap up the property ladder, from a flatshare in Camden with Dixie, to a St John’s Wood semi, almost overnight. The flatshare in Camden could have gone on indefinitely; neither woman could see any point to mortgages and space and rooms they didn’t use. But then Dixie had met Clem and very quickly she had got pregnant and clearly neither of them had any interest in sharing the joys of parenthood with a flatmate. And Lydia did have a stupid amount of money sitting in her bank account. Most millionaire entrepreneurs did not share flats in slightly scuzzy Camden back streets. She was nearly thirty. It was a sign. It was time. She would have liked to have stayed in Camden, oddly comforted as she was by the proximity of kebab shops and drug dealers and places to get drunk in at three in the morning. But St John’s Wood seemed a sounder investment, a surer place to lump her money, a place that had never been fashionable so could never be unfashionable, just a big, clean, comfy place for rich people to live.

It wasn’t Lydia’s fault that she was rich. She had not intended to be rich. It had happened to her purely by accident.

The kitchen smelled like a Shanghai back alley. Juliette was making rice noodles with seafood and a chicken and cashew nut stir fry. Not for herself, for Lydia. And Clem. And Dixie. And Viola. Not that Viola would be eating noodles and chicken, she was only five days old. Lydia had offered to come and visit them and their new baby in their own home but Dixie had said: ‘I’ve seen enough of my own home these past five days to last me a lifetime. And I’m sick of eating frozen lasagne. Please can we come to you?’

Lydia could not cook. She had tried. She could make a fairly decent breakfast, particularly scrambled eggs, but after 11 a.m. she floundered. She hadn’t even had to ask Juliette if she would prepare occasional meals for her; Juliette had taken one look at Lydia and said, ‘I cook for you, too, yes?’

‘Smells great,’ Lydia said now appreciatively.

‘It is great.’ Juliette smiled. ‘Delicious. Taste.’ She waved a fork in Lydia’s direction.

Lydia speared some flaccid noodles on to the fork and popped them into her mouth. ‘Mm,’ she said, ‘mmm, mmm, mmm. Amazing.’

‘And, please don’t mind me asking,’ said Juliette, patting her hands against her apron, ‘but have you bought a gift for the baby?’

Lydia puckered her lips and her brow. ‘Er, no, actually.’

‘No,’ Juliette insisted, ‘you must have gift for the baby.’

Lydia shook her head. ‘I, er … God.’ She ran her hand across the crown of her head. ‘I didn’t think.’

‘It’s fine,’ Juliette smiled at her, reassuringly. ‘BabyGap is just here,’ she indicated the back of the house, ‘one-minute walk. Pink.’

‘Pink?’ repeated Lydia.

‘Yes. Pink. Or even white. But not blue.’

She turned her back on her employer then and faced the sink to wash her hands. Lydia shuffled from foot to foot for a moment, hoping for further instructions, but none came so she found her shoulder bag and then headed from the house towards the High Street.

Luckily, Lydia felt, she had some basic statistics to work with. The baby was female, so yes, as Juliette had suggested, blue was to be avoided; also the baby was five days old which fell, it transpired, into a size range referred to as nb, or ‘newborn’. So at least Lydia knew which ones she should be looking at. It was also the middle of January, so warm clothing seemed the order of the day. Finally, after a long and rather discombobulating traverse of the shop, Lydia arrived at the cash desk holding a small pink cardigan and a pair of pink fleecy trousers decorated all over with tiny teddy bears.

‘Is this a gift?’ said the sales assistant.

‘Er, yes,’ said Lydia, resisting the temptation to say: No, they’re for me, don’t bother wrapping them, I’ll wear them out. It then occurred to her that the asking of the question signified that the sales assistant thought that perhaps the garments were intended for Lydia’s own child. The thought stunned her momentarily. Did she actually look like the sort of woman who might recently have brought forth her own child into the world? Did she actually look like a mother? It seemed unlikely. She was so far from the reality of motherhood – the concept sat on the horizon, strange and unattainable – that the idea that someone could look at her and imagine for a moment she was that type of person made her feel disturbed and oddly flattered all at the same time.