A Surrey State of Affairs (29 page)

This I was not expecting. “What sort of plans?” I asked cautiously.

“Oh, I’m doing this TV thing in London.” I stared at her, my jaw ajar. “Will be great practice for sociology,” she added, sticking her tongue out between her teeth and narrowing her eyes as she applied a thick stroke of varnish to her last remaining nail.

“You mean a documentary? You’ll be working on a documentary?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. A documentary.”

“What’s it about?”

“Oh, lots of people and how they get along, like.”

“And this is an official work placement scheme that you’ve applied for?”

“Yup, gazillions of people applied. Didn’t want to tell you earlier because I didn’t know if I’d get in.”

I felt rather pleased. This was more initiative than I had expected. Clearly Sophie had not squandered all her time absconding to sun-drenched Spanish islands. She was also thinking of her future.

“Well, that’s wonderful news, well done, though you could have told me sooner. I was that close to calling Miss Hughes for
you! But where will you be staying? Shall I give Bridget a call and see if you can stay in her spare room? She’s got a lovely place, but mind that she doesn’t make you eat French éclairs for breakfast. Or we could go and see if we could rent you a nice little flat for a few months?”

“Nah, it’s all taken care of. The TV thing is…residential.”

“You mean you’ll have your own flat?”

“More like a sort of bunk bed.”

“That sounds like fun! It’ll be just like Guides.”

“Yeah.”

Only a well-structured internship would provide accommodations. After getting her to write down the name of the organizer and her telephone number, I left Sophie’s room with a smile on my face, and didn’t even nag her to pull her curtains and make the bed.

  
THURSDAY, JULY 3

Today I went out to buy the drinks for Sophie’s birthday—after all, she will have been legally entitled to enjoy a peach Bellini or two for exactly a year. Also, Mad Marvin the Magician, whom I’ve booked as the entertainment, insists that he can’t work without a two-liter bottle of Strongbow cider. Perhaps by some strange alchemy he turns it into something drinkable.

  
FRIDAY, JULY 4

I tried to coax Sophie out on a shopping trip with the offer of a pretty dress for tomorrow’s party, but to no avail. Perhaps she is worried about the effect the recession is having on our finances and wishes to save us the expense. In any case, she spent the day lying on the lawn plugged into her iPod, smearing her pale skin with tanning oil. Worried that she would burn, I decided to
execute what I think of as a “Reverse Ivan,” and subtly swapped her oil sprayer for SPF 50 while she was dozing.

After an hour of gentle weeding (Randolph does a good job, but it pays to keep one’s hand in), I could almost feel my freckles coming out, so I retreated indoors to check Facebook, which gave me something of a shock. There were thirty-six “comments” on the wall for Sophie’s party, all from people I didn’t know, all lacking in the basic rudiments of grammar and courtesy. The profile pictures did not inspire confidence either, ranging from Pamela Anderson to a hoodlum and a picture of a man’s Calvin Klein underpants. The last comment was “comin atchaaa.” I wonder if Jeffrey could reinforce the privet hedge with razor wire.

  
SATURDAY, JULY 5

The day has not begun well. Sophie is threatening to hide indoors because she has woken to find she has several big white hand prints against the dusky pink skin of her décolletage. She grabbed her bottle of tanning lotion from the kitchen table, stared at it in confusion, then threw it to the floor and stamped on it, leaving a greasy streak across the slate tiles, which I had only recently persuaded Natalia to scrub. Jeffrey gave me a funny look when I inquired about barricading the garden perimeter. The trifle has not yet set. I had better go.

10 P.M.

Where to begin?

As you will have gathered from my last posting, the start of the day was not promising. Things did not subsequently improve. Five minutes before the guests were due to arrive, Sophie was sitting at the kitchen table with her shoulders slumped, wearing a
hooded top, minuscule frayed denim shorts, and flip-flops. I asked her when she planned to change, wondering if she had spotted the pretty, plum-colored sundress—just the thing to offset her pale complexion—that I had sneaked out to buy from John Lewis yesterday and laid out on her bed along with a matching glittery hair clip. She had. She said she wouldn’t be seen dead in it and maybe I should give it to someone with no fashion sense, like Natalia. Natalia’s English may not be perfect, but she was still able to catch the gist of Sophie’s meaning, and as she was pouring a glass of juice at the time, she stumbled heavily to one side so that it poured, splashing, into Sophie’s lap. Sophie screeched and threw her own glass of juice over Natalia in retaliation, and the fracas was stopped only when Jeffrey put down his paper and thundered “Girls!” in a rare intervention. At last, Sophie went upstairs to change, but the results were not as I had hoped. As the doorbell rang for the first guest, she emerged wearing an “Ibiza Rocks” T-shirt and what appeared to be latex leggings.

Still, I tried to put her unfortunate outfit to the back of my mind, and the first hour or so was rather pleasant. Ruth and David arrived holding hands, Reginald and Miss Hughes sat in the marquee eating trifle together, Harriet helped me carry out jugs of Pimm’s and lemonade, and the pastel-colored balloons I had arranged earlier waved in the gentle breeze. Mad Marvin began his act by pulling a dove out of his hat (I was glad Darcy was safely shut indoors. I should not have liked to see him disappear again, if even for an instant), punctuating his performance with swigs of Strongbow. Though Sophie was pretending to fiddle with her nails, I heard her gasp and saw a smile spread across her face when the dove fluttered over to land on her shoulder.

And thus we may have continued, cheerful and relaxed, had I not spotted a familiar figure weaving haphazardly across the lawn toward us, followed by a bouncing black Labrador. Gerald, with Poppy. My heart flopped like a goldfish. He had come. Why had he come? I took Jeffrey’s hand. He jumped, and asked what was wrong with me.

At this precise moment, a silence had fallen over the lawn while Marvin asked for volunteers to be sawed in half. Understandably, perhaps, given the empty cider bottle, none were forthcoming.

Gerald approached. His breath reeked of sherry, his complexion was flushed, but his short-sleeved shirt was immaculately ironed. He looked at Marvin, still fruitlessly beckoning, then looked at the assembled guests, then looked at me. “Constance, I would do anything for you,” he bellowed, before pushing forward onto the makeshift stage, where the saw awaited.

Luckily, Jeffrey was preoccupied with chasing the lemon slice out of the bottom of his gin and tonic so that he could drink the last drop, but Sophie and Miss Hughes both gave me a quizzical look. “Bell-ringers’ loyalty,” I said, with what I hoped was a convincingly casual laugh, as Marvin packed a swaying Gerald into a purple sequined box. With a great flourish, he split Gerald in two, and I decided that this was a far safer state of affairs than having Gerald on the loose and intact. I had to prolong the moment. “A speech!” I declared, leading the magician off the stage by his elbow to the trestle table, where the glasses of champagne and peach Bellinis were laid out. Thinking on my feet, I waxed lyrical about my daughter and the joys of family life with her wonderful father, giving Gerald a meaningful look as he sweated in his bifurcated limbo.

When Gerald was subsequently reformed and released, he scuttled away across the lawn, leaving a little trail of sawdust
behind him. Poppy stayed behind eating some fairy cakes that had fallen onto the floor, which was just as well. No sooner had conversation started up again than I heard the
thud thud thud
of modern “music” and saw a crowd of youths tramping up the gravel. The Facebook interlopers. I felt a cold clamminess on the back of my neck. “Go, Poppy! See them off!” I shouted desperately. She looked up, a smear of cream on her damp nose, and must have suddenly realized that her owner had left, because she bolted down the drive barking. To anyone who knows her, Poppy is as menacing as a baby seal. However, she succeeded in alarming the youths and saving us all from further disaster, thus proving herself far more useful than her owner.

After that, the mood was rather flat, and it wasn’t long before everyone made their excuses and departed, leaving me to pick up the stray balloons that had blown into the flower beds and eat the last blob of trifle, which had already begun to congeal. When I asked Sophie if she had had a nice time, she said that it was “all right” and then asked me what I would do if I had to choose between, as she put it, “shagging Gerald, marrying him, or pushing him off a cliff.” What a thing to say. I told her not to be so cheeky. The Bellinis must have gone to her head.

I didn’t say anything to Sophie of course, but after long reflection, it would have to be either option one or option three.

  
MONDAY, JULY 7

Sophie has left. No matter how many times this happens—however many Christmas holidays or Easter holidays end with her wheeling her suitcase across the hall and swearing as it catches on the rug—it still ends with me sitting alone, blinking hard, in a house that feels heavy with silence. It was the same with Rupert. I think of Jeffrey busy at work in his open-plan office, poring over
his documents, staring at his computer screen, with phones ringing, colleagues bustling, perhaps a secretary bringing him a cup of tea, if they still stoop to such things these days. Is he oblivious, or does he feel it too?

I gave him a call to find out, but he said that he was on a conference call with the Netherlands and the CFO of Allianz Banque. I told him I was busy too and went to rearrange Sophie’s sock drawer. I hope she took enough pairs with her. I suppose it’s a normal sign of growing up, but she seems increasingly unwilling to accept my advice or help. I would happily have driven her into central London to her accommodations today, but she insisted that I drop her off at the station so she could get the train in. When I dropped her off and said, “See you soon,” she said, “You will, Mum, you will,” with a strange look in her eye. Perhaps she has already realized that she will miss me and is planning a trip home.