The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (37 page)

“Dan, of course. What do you think?”

“He’s great,” I say. “I feel like I’ve known him ages.”

“I know, me too. I feel like I’ve known him forever.”

“He’s very different from your previous boyfriends, isn’t he?”

“Better, you mean.”

“Yes, that. And different looking.”

She grins. “He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?”

I can only smile back. “He is.” She seems genuinely unaware of having traded down on the looks front. Jemima has made the best sort of compromise, one that she isn’t even aware of. I wish again that I could delete all I now know and all my irritations and go back to a similar state of childlike innocence with my husband.

“I’m really happy,” she says.

“I can see that. I’m so glad for you.”

“I always felt envious of what you had and now I know that I was right to. I want it all with Dan.”

I am saved from speech by his return. They’d be sitting on the same kitchen chair if they could. I feel very old.

I am wearing makeup, I blow-dried my hair this morning and have kept my heels on inside the house. I can hear laughter coming from the bedroom but I can’t join in. It’s me and the kids or
Joel and the kids, not all of us together. We’ve broken off into two units and the circles of the Venn diagram have Joel and I separated, and only the boys in the overlap. I notice that some black slime has collected around the seal of the fridge door so I get to work on it. As I do so, I think about Kitty. This is Kitty, I say to myself, as I scour it away. I see her phantom everywhere, my own vision of what she might look like: in the mirror when I look at myself, with my children, with whom she could be Dad’s fun girlfriend, in the toilet bowl that I brush with violence. The slime comes away from the fridge. There—so easy, but of course fridge-seal slime and Kitty aren’t the same thing at all.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” I ask Joel when he comes down, at least fifteen minutes later than the boys’ appointed bedtime hour. He hasn’t shaved and looks as though he hasn’t been sleeping. Kitty’s sitting at my shoulder and I know that she would think he looks disheveled and handsome. I think I agree with her.

“No, I’d better be off.”

“Fine. I see. Yes, you get going.” He can’t wait to be out the door. “Send my regards to Ursula.” If that is indeed where you’re going.

“OK.”

“Does she know?”

“What?”

“About us.”

“What is there to know?”

“I don’t know.”

This from a couple whose relationship was built on non-stop conversation.

“Mary?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be off, then.”

“Yes, of course. Go.”

“I suppose so.”

We’re both standing up and I have no idea what the etiquette is for saying goodbye to one’s husband in this situation. “Well, bye then.” I want some sort of physical contact and so find myself sticking out my hand. He looks at it and shakes it. We glance at each other with shock and then laugh, very briefly. I’d forgotten what laughter sounded like. It sounds like hope.

I can’t go to sleep. The bedroom feels wrong. I look toward the laundry basket which has been stripped of its usual halo of socks and men’s underwear. I go to Joel’s chest of drawers and unball some socks and pull out a T-shirt, which I arrange around and on top of the basket. Now I can sleep.

At breakfast I am about to rinse out the nearly empty milk bottle to ready it for the recycling when I change my mind and put it back in the fridge, complete with its mere hint of liquid. I leave the toast crumbs around the toaster and place my used tea bag on the work surface.

I throw some towels down in the bathroom, but the sink remains free from the little iron filings of stubble that usually decorate it. I leave the soap bar to soak in some water for a few minutes so that it becomes furry enough to leave a residue of itself on the basin. I wet the blue washcloth and leave it dripping onto the tiles.

As I get ready to take the boys to school, I touch Joel’s winter coat. I’ve been asking him to take it to the spare room for months, but soon it will become cold again. I look down and see that he’s left some shoes behind in the hall. I can leave for the office now.

The week creaked by. Joel came around one other night while I sat in the kitchen pretending to read a magazine. I didn’t enjoy
dispensation from bedtime duties as much as I always thought I would. Instead, I could hear the sound of a party to which I had not been invited. I bet he’s getting bloody water all over the floor, I told myself, which didn’t make me feel any better.

Again we did a waltz of awkwardness when it was time to say goodbye. This time I even offered him something to eat, but this was no more tempting than the glass of wine. He was in a hurry, it seemed, to escape. Both times he has come over, I have started out with excitement and been left with dejection and rejection.

I found the weekdays hard, but this Saturday at home is even worse. It has been six days since Joel went to his mother’s. My hair stinks of chlorine from swimming with the boys and I’ve failed to get a chance to wash it in preparation for today’s bedtime visit from him. I look at myself in the mirror. I look thin, which is usually enough to brighten my mood, but it has aged me.

I hear his key in the door and it suddenly seems to be the world’s most beautiful music. My legs wobble and I realize then what I can deny no longer: I want him home. This is his home. I need to know that he has a key and that every night he will let himself in. He will throw his coat on the floor and hug the boys. He could even hug me, too. The house will be filled with his noise and his mess. I hate it but I need it. I need him. I can forgive him if I know that he can forgive me, too.

He is fumbling with the key, not realizing that I have taken to double-locking in fear of being in the house alone. He comes in and I smile at him, especially when for once he hangs his jacket up on the hook. Now I see even more clearly. I need him home, but I do also need him to hang his coat up. The List cannot have been in vain.

The smile he gives me in return emboldens me. He was the
one who put his pride on the line to get us together all those years ago and it is only fair that I should do the same to get us back there again.

He turns toward the street.

“Come on, Ursula, you can look at the neighbor’s clematis later.”

I am so disappointed that I want to cry. My plans to ask him or even tell him to get home where he belongs dissolve. He can’t want to make it work if he’s bringing his mother here as a human shield. How was I going to do it, anyway? We’re beyond the point where I could put on some sexy underwear and surprise him on the kitchen table. I imagine Joel and I doing exactly that and the thought of it leads to an unexpected warmth between my legs. I fancy my husband, I realize with surprise, just at the point when I can no longer have him. How could I have wasted all those opportunities when he slunk across the bed to me when now I may never have the chance again?

He looks apologetic. Ursula comes in and hugs me, clutching my arm too hard.

“Sorry,” he says when we go upstairs with the boys. “She said she needed to talk to us both.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not anything to do with, you know, us?”

“No, no. I’m sure it isn’t.”

“Good.”

“Mary, what is us?”

I shake my head and leave the room.

Ursula is a lot easier to read than some of her later books. She builds her confidence through the wearing of dangly earrings and brightly colored scarves. The television appearances have
long tailed off, but back in the days when she appeared on late-night discussion shows, she was fairly swaddled in vermilion and violet, while the little wooden parrots hanging from perches in her ears careered wildly as she swung her head to emphasize her points.

Despite the July heat, Ursula is mummified in purple velvet. Her earrings, jade fashioned into bunches of grapes, almost scrape her shoulders. She has something to say. I pour out three large glasses of wine now that the boys have gone to bed.

“I have a proposition,” she announces. She is giving us the sort of oratory that comes only with an expensive girls’ school and one of Oxford’s oldest women’s colleges. Many still speak of her barnstorming performance in support of the motion “This house believes that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Joel knows Ursula well and is beginning to look nervous. “A proposition?”

I think, entirely inappropriately, how this word is almost always sexual in its connotations. I’m sure Mitzi’s Michael makes propositions. I shudder at the thought of Ursula and Michael together, the least likely coupling in Christendom.

“Not that sort of proposition,” says Ursula, as if reading my mind. “The word ‘proposition’ does not always have that sort of suggestion.”

I think, again inappropriately, of the sort of proposition I have just been dreaming up for Joel.

“But in modern usage, it does tend to be employed in that context,” suggests Joel.

“Perhaps a less ambiguous word is ‘proposal,’ ” she agrees. “Though that’s a word always coupled with marriage, isn’t it?”

I think mournfully of Joel’s thwarted proposal to me.

“Is it merely a plan, then?” he asks.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, this could go on for hours. I used to
love the way that you couldn’t use a word without the pair of them querying its exact usage, with recourse to the vast dictionary kept permanently open on their kitchen table. “Why don’t you just tell us what’s on your mind and we can name it afterward?” Whatever it is that Ursula needs to say to us is of no importance in comparison to what Joel and I are not saying to one another.

“Yes, we’ll name it posthumously, shall we?” says Joel. “If it requires a moniker.”

Breathe in: one, two, three and out: two, three.

Ursula finally begins. “As you are aware, my house is in a state of some disrepair.”

I was aware of this, as are her neighbors, who have petitioned her to make improvements for fear of bringing down the street’s house prices, but I had no idea Ursula was.

“It’s perfect,” says Joel. “It’s lovely. Who says it isn’t?”

Joel loves Ursula’s strangely cramped kitchen and the dried slash dead flowers in the fireplaces. He’s scathing about what he calls “bashing out the back” to make outdoor rooms and a flow between spaces. Whenever we have fantasy conversations about what we’d do if we lived in Ursula’s vast house, he always looks bewildered as to why I’d want to move the kitchen from the dark back alley where servants used to lurk. He believes anyone moving in would be thrilled at such a period gem, while I can hear the well-clipped tones of a hedge-funder’s wife boasting to her friends of how it was “a
wreck
. Mad old woman hadn’t touched the place for 40 years. We had to gut it entirely.”

“Joel,” says Ursula, firmly, “it’s falling down.”

“But I thought you liked it like that,” he says. “I do.” Next he’s going to start whining about her threatening to throw away some of his childhood artwork or the chemistry set he got for his seventh birthday.

“Why would I like it? It’s a health hazard.” I feel a new respect for Ursula growing inside me. “The roof needs completely replacing, the plumbing is antediluvian, the electrics are dangerous.”

“You’ve never had any accidents.”

When I first met Joel he didn’t think it odd at all that his mother’s house was filled with the round-pin sockets that most people had moved away from at the end of the Second World War. In her over-flowing utility room were boxes labeled “round to square” and “square to round” filled with adaptors and plugs to snake around the house from an old electrical system to an even older one.

“Don’t be silly, Joel, I’ve electrocuted myself hundreds of times. It’s a mess and I know it. I try not to dwell on it—too, too depressing—but I don’t think we can deny it any longer. Mary knows it, don’t you? I can see the way you look at it and wipe the chair before you sit down.”

“No, not at all. But if it is structurally unsound, then you’re right, you do need to do something.”

“I’ve been worrying about it for years and burying my head in the sand,” she says. “I finally forced myself to get someone in to quote for how much all the repairs would cost. My eyes almost fell out so I got someone else in and they said even more money, so I got someone else after that and they were just as bad. So I buried my head a little longer.”

My mind runs through some options as to what her proposal will be. Is she suggesting that we move in with her and pay for the repairs? I’m not sure we could afford that financially or emotionally, especially since I don’t even know if there is a “we” anymore. I can’t see Ursula selling up and moving into sheltered accommodation. “So what’s the plan?” I ask, since Joel refuses to.

“Rebecca. That’s my plan. Your friend Rebecca.”

“Becky?”

“Yes. She’s got no home but lots of money, I’ve got a large house and no money. We’re a perfect match.”

“You’re living together?” I ask. Will Joel have to call Becky “Mother”?

“Not exactly. No, not like that,” she exclaims, having seen the stricken expression on Joel’s face, who now looks as though he will evaporate with relief at this reassurance. “We’ve got it all worked out. She’s very good with money, is Rebecca. I can see why she’s so good at sorting out other people’s. And at making it herself. She will pay for the repairs and for converting it into two dwellings—a flat for me on the ground floor with the garden, and the floor above and the attic for her.”

“My space,” says Joel mournfully.

A month ago that would have been an aggravating thing for him to have said, but now it might be the truth. “That sounds like it might be a sensible plan,” I say. “I don’t want to sound mercenary, but you do know it’s worth a lot of money?”

“I’m well aware of that, thank you, Mary. I do walk past the estate agent’s windows in the high street. That was one of my problems. I knew I should probably sell it, but I couldn’t bear to. My first idea was to move all of you in and you could pay for the work with the money from selling your house, but I fear we’d not have quite enough if those builders got it right. Becky’s a partner in her firm and got a lot of money from selling her flat, and she has no dependents. The house is too big for me on my own, but I fear it wouldn’t have been big enough for the four of you and me. You need your independence and I need mine. This way I’ll have more of an income to live off as I won’t have all the outgoings, as well as having Rebecca around to water the plants when I’m away.” This is a euphemism, I realize, for one of those old people’s eventualities like falling down the stairs and not being found until weeks later.