The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (20 page)

“I like your coat,” she says and touches its sleeve.

“Really? This old thing.” I laugh, though I’m not sure what the joke is or who it’s on.

“I must go,” she says. “I’ve got a brunch meeting.” I picture her in a fashionable restaurant with eggs Benedict and a glass of champagne that she sips, not glugs.

“Bye, then.” I walk away and then break into a trot. This is
pathetic. She is my best friend’s girlfriend. She is not prime minister or a top brain surgeon. I am a grown-up; a mother of two; I have a good degree and oversee budgets that run into the hundreds of thousands and I have never once made a major mistake in my professional career; I can order about “talent” without offending them; I can even manage Gabriel’s tantrums in public, for god’s sake. Pathetic, I repeat to myself.

I’m thinking about my day, half sublime half grime, as I lie in bed that evening with the computer, updating The List, which is hurtling toward a healthy total early in the month.

I check the code for the first of the day’s misdemeanors.
Subsection A [kitchen] number
16
)
Never clears out the sink gunk
. I hate that one, it reminds me of when James Herriot puts his hand up a cow’s vagina and pulls out a calf. I think maybe I ought to just add a point for that one every day, since it’s unlikely he’ll ever find his way to digging out the slime.

I cast my eyes around the room.
Subsection C [laundry]
Leaves dirty underwear mummified into duvet
. Oh, and also,
D [bedroom] number
4
)
Leaves balled-up tissues on the chest of drawers
. He always puts these germy rags on the side. Actually, that’s unfair, he doesn’t always leave them on the chest of drawers. Sometimes he leaves them in his trouser pocket so that they can go in the washing machine and leave little white ball-bearings to stick to everyone else’s clothes. Which, of course, is another point on The List.

“You’re spending a lot of time holed up with the laptop,” says Joel.

“Not really.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I give my best imitation of Rufus on being asked what he did at school today. “Stuff. The Internet sometimes.
We really should get that wireless connection sorted. I wish our whole lives could be wireless,” I say, feeling depressed by the spaghetti junction lying behind the TV. It’ll be me that sorts it out. As well as chief home executive, I am also home IT consultant. And head of accounts, personnel and internal communications.

“Are you having one of those virtual affairs?”

“What? Of course not.”

“I was joking, Mary. As if.”

“Why’s it so unlikely? Do you think no one would want to have an email liaison with me? I could be having an affair online.”

“You just said you weren’t.”

“I’m not.”

“Well then. So what is it, then? I’m trying to think what would be worse: you having an affair or you being addicted to one of those geeky Dungeons and Dragons type of sites, world of witchcraft.”

“Warcraft,” I correct him. “World of Warcraft, it’s called.”

“So that’s what you’re doing. You’re spending all your time pretending to be a scantily clad superhero wood sprite called Thorday.” He gives it a portentous, cinema trailer type voice-over.

“In your dreams. You’re the one who seems to know so much about it.”

I continue to look at my scribbled details of transgressions ready to transcribe to today’s date. If I were to do a pie chart of how I spend my time in bed, there would be more minutes actively engaged with The List than with my husband. Or with anybody else’s husband for that matter. Why was Joel quite so dismissive of the idea that I might be having a virtual affair? I could have an avatar of myself as a busty blonde in a leather bikini, happily cavorting with a hirsute cartoon muscleman, who is in real life a balding call-center operative who lives with his mother.

Although if I was going to have an affair, I think I’d probably make it a real one. It hardly seems worth going to the trouble of having one confined to cyberspace. “An affair”—I say the word in my head with a French accent. Lover, passion, érotique… Saying the words in French makes it sound a lot more classy a prospect, in the manner of a moisturizer that promises
luminescence pour la peau
.

I feel much the same way toward the prospect of an affair as I do about other people’s perfect homes—where on earth do they find the time? The only person with sufficient staff to squeeze in a lunchtime assignation is Mitzi. And what about all the body maintenance involved? When would one find time to do all the necessary beautification to sleep with someone for the first time? If you had them over to your house, you’d have to wash the sheets afterward. And before, probably.

Joel could have an affair, I suppose. I wonder what he’d like best about having to “stay late at the office”—the sex or the missing out on the fractious bath-and-bedtime routine?

I go into the bathroom to find Joel brushing his teeth with a bright yellow, aging toothbrush.

“Is that your toothbrush?” I ask.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I thought it was an old one. I just assumed it was.”

“Waste not want not. Do you know what it was doing by the kitchen sink? Next to Rufe’s shoes?”

“No, I don’t, sorry.”

I’m sure that this Sunday will be a day of multiple infringements of The List point code-named
Subsection F [invisible woman] number
7
)
previously known as number 33:
Takes his mother’s side over mine
.

Deep breath as we park the car and bundle the potty, favored
toys, spare clothes and, finally, children out of it and into the front garden of Ursula’s house. I need to breathe deeply a) to stay calm in the face of the Tennant family passive-aggression and b) because Ursula’s house, quite literally, smells. I drag my children through the overgrown garden to a front door emblazoned with “no junk mail” and peeling “No to Trident” stickers. I used to do mental makeovers of plain fellow students at university, imagining what they might look like with a proper haircut and some stylish clothes. Now I wonder what Mitzi would do to Ursula’s house, a solid double-fronted Edwardian villa. She’d rip out the tatty vinyl that half covers the original tiling in the hallway and replace the missing panes in the stained glass above the door. The vast quantities of orangey-brown varnished pine would be clothed in a dove-gray shade of paint made of china clay and hand mixed by Cornish fishermen.

First of all, though, she’d have to clean it. The corpses of flies litter every windowsill, the low-energy lightbulbs are coated with a layer of dead skin and the toilet bowl shows the result of a lifetime of not flushing “if it’s yellow,” as a thick crust of brown limescale clings to the sides, reminding me of Ursula’s nicotine-stained teeth. Piles of newspapers vie with towers of books and vast dust-covered rubber plants in big brass pots, while the furniture is a bizarre mix of priceless family heirlooms and tatty 70s junk shop—either Chippendale or merely chipped.

Ursula is the brightest thing in the dingy hall, dressed in purple velvet and a necklace made by a Guatemalan women’s collective. Rufus, well trained as he is, immediately sits on the bottom of the stairs to remove his shoes. The last time he did that, his socks were so permanently blackened by the experience that we had to throw them out.

“You don’t have to take your shoes off, darling.”

“Why not, Mommy?”

I ponder a tactful answer to that question when Ursula intervenes. “Because shoes are for wearing, of course.” She smiles at me. “And how is my favorite daughter-in-law?” It is just as well Joel is an only child.

“Fine, thanks.” In the novels I read, an untidy house is always shorthand for warmth and love. A tidy house means that the owner is clinical and cold, quite possibly sterile. I don’t believe that anymore. I walk into the kitchen, which has sticky brown cupboards, lined inside with graphic orange and white wallpaper. It’s a warm day. Ursula ushers us outside for what she calls a “gin and French,” closely related to another mysterious beverage called a “gin and It.” Standing on the moss-veined patio is Becky, holding a sweaty-looking glass of rosé. She gets up to hug me.

“Becky, how lovely. What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Ursula invited me.”

“Yes, but… anyway, it’s lovely to see you.” I lower my voice. “It’s great to have an ally.” She looks mystified.

“It’s great to be here.” She waves her glass, which could more accurately be described as a tumbler.

“Rebecca,” says Ursula, “has been working with my good friend Suzannah Westernberg on numerous cases.”

“Legendary family law barrister,” explains Becky.

“She thinks very highly of you, too,” says Ursula. I feel that Becky, sexual orientation notwithstanding, would make a far better daughter-in-law than me.

“What are you having, Ma?” Joel shouts from the kitchen. She is Ursula, Ma or Mater. Never “Mom” like anybody else’s mother. “And you, Mary?”

He is already knocking back the gin and something, thus fulfilling transgression
F
3:
Assumes that I will always be the one to drive us home when we go out
. “Something soft, I guess.” He
doesn’t even notice the sacrifice. “Actually, will you drive today? I’ll have some rosé.”

He swigs back the remains of his glass, rasping at the power of neat alcohol. “I think it may be too late. You don’t mind, it’s not like you ever want more than a couple anyway.”

He is quite the host in his mother’s house, busying himself with the supermarket-brand peanuts and making sure that everyone has a drink. He is much more helpful here than at home. And he won’t have a word said against the food served here, despite being a balsamic vinegar sort of man from a crusty wine vinegar childhood.

“I bumped into Cara the other day,” I say to Becky.

“Did you? She didn’t mention it.”

“It’s not like we talked for very long. A couple of minutes. It was near the office.”

“Have you seen Suzannah recently, Ursula?” Becky changes the subject abruptly. I wonder why and make a note to myself to ask her later. I don’t want to bury myself so deep in the dirty laundry of The List that I forget about Becky’s dilemma. “She’s got this case that’s going up to the Lords. Everyone reckons it’s going to set a precedent over reasonable needs.”

“Don’t have those crisps, Gabe. Joel, stop him, he’s ruining his appetite.”

“And other things that mothers say,” says Joel.

“I never did,” says Ursula.

“And don’t toss peanuts into your mouth. The boys will copy you and choke.”

Ursula snorts, “Peanut allergy.”

“They don’t have peanut allergies, but it’s very easy to choke on nuts. And uncut grapes.”

“And yet more things that mothers say,” adds Joel.

And that will be a
G
9:
Fails to back me up when I tell the children to do something entirely reasonable
.

“You’ve got to chill about their food.”

“He’s right,” says Ursula. “No child ever starves himself. Joel lived on nothing but cornflakes and orange juice until he was seven.”

“But I want my children to have a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals.”

Gabe and Rufus continue to mainline salty snacks, while the adults suck up the tepid rosé and faux martinis. The blossom is out and the beds are filled with tulips. The children are being unobtrusive thanks to the sedative properties of salt, while the adults bounce between the political and the personal. It is the sort of charming and bohemian scene that I used to fantasize about while growing up a bookish girl in what I considered to be a grim town. I would have imagined myself so happy here.

Lunch starts with what Ursula calls “tapas”: some aging olives, pickled onions mixed with salad cream and crackers topped with cheese out of a tube. Joel pronounces it all delicious. The roast meat is overdone while the roast potatoes are mysteriously rock solid and lacking a crunchy shell—instead they feel like they have been coated with an impenetrable rubber casing. The leeks are buttered, natch.

“Sorry,” says Ursula. “You know how I always forget about your dairy thing. Joel, you’ll never believe it, but the Moores have split up.”

“What, the grown-ups or the children?” asks Joel.

“The grown-ups. Well, as grown-up as you can be in your sixties. In their sixties.” She shakes her head. “I mean, what’s the point? What is the point?”

“If they were unhappy,” I say. “If she was unhappy.”

“Yes, but you’d have to be very unhappy indeed to go through all that bother. I mean, it’s not exactly as if either of them are going to find anyone else, are they?”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You’re not objecting to divorce on the grounds of morality, but of practicality?”

“Of course I don’t object to it on moral grounds. I’m hardly in a position to take a stance on the perfect nuclear family.” Joel’s father is somewhere in the States and played only an intermittent exotic gift-bringing part in his childhood. Even now, Joel is expected to get over-excited about the arrival of Oreos and Hershey bars, like a treat-starved World War II land girl welcoming the GIs. “I’m sure Rebecca can back me up here, but isn’t divorce a whole load of bother?”

“Not to mention expense,” Becky says. “Much of which gets wasted on people like me. And all the evidence suggests that one year on, the divorcees are unhappier than they were when they were married anyway. Especially the women, I think.” She looks at me as she says this.

“It’s all rather embarrassing,” says Ursula. “I really think the Moores believe that they’re not too old for love and happiness. How absurd. Oh dear, Mary.”

“What?”

“You won’t be able to have any cream with your crumble either, will you?”

“I’m not sure Mary would want to anyway,” says Joel, holding up the tub. “Mother, your commitment to ‘waste not want not’ is admirable, but I think you may have excelled yourself this time. This cream’s sell-by date is in February.”

“Nonsense,” she says, giving it a theatrical sniff. “Absolutely bloody fine. Hate all this hygiene namby-pambyism. Those sell-by dates are all a ruse by the supermarkets to make you buy more.”