Having It All (11 page)

David’s face was disapproving. He didn’t like Mel. He thought her raucous and insensitive. He was right of course, but that was what made her Mel.

Britt was sitting slightly apart, a maddening been there, done it, got the T-shirt expression on her face. She probably thinks her Swedish origins make her an authority on sex, Liz thought
bitchily.

For a moment Liz’s eyes were drawn to Britt’s legs. They protruded long, golden, and wildly annoying from her designer shorts. Not a hair disfigured their tanned smoothness. How
often does she have them waxed, Liz wondered, carefully tucking her own, which suddenly reminded her of a plucked chicken’s, under her sundress and hoping no one noticed the gesture,
especially Britt. And how does she get that tan? Sunbed or break-between-bed on dirty weekends in Acapulco?

Britt was always rushing off to some sunspot or other with a man they never heard of again. She liked her men powerful, older and preferably married. That way the presents were better. They
bought her Janet Reger underwear and expensive watches and asked her to luxury hotels, the type where they
gave
you a fluffy white bathrobe. And not even, presumably, to stop you nicking
it. One of her lovers, Liz recalled with a grin, gave her a flat with its own conservatory. Liz, crammed with two others into an Earls Court bedsit, had wondered why it was that she got daffs and
Black Magic when Britt got three rooms and a walk-through closet.

Liz looked at Britt’s legs again. Little luxuries like sunbeds and bikini-waxing seemed to be the first to go when you had small children and a job. Why do we feel more confident when
hairless, she wondered. At the press conference the other day she’d been convinced someone would guess she had fuzzy armpits under her expensive new suit. And not by choice, you understand,
not
feminist
armpits that make a statement, simply inefficient, overworked, uncared-for armpits.

The worst sort.

Mel was becoming unbearably smug. ‘It was wonderful,’ she sighed, her eyes soft with sentiment, ‘about nine inches long at least.’ She waited for gasps of admiration.
None were forthcoming. ‘Ten then.’ She extended her hands miming what could have been a dachshund-shaped balloon or an unusually large French stick.

Everyone laughed. They knew Mel.

‘I was looking through a Sex Aids catalogue once’ – Britt crossed and uncrossed her brown legs provocatively – ‘and the condoms came in three sizes: jumbo, colossal
and super colossal.’

Mel giggled at the vanity of the male ego. ‘Well, Garth’s super colossal,’ she announced proudly.

‘I thought size was no object.’ David tried not to sound pompous and failed.

‘Don’t you believe it!’ squealed Mel. ‘That’s a myth put about by men with small willies.’

David looked curiously at Britt and wondered, as he was intended to, what she’d been doing reading a Sex Aids catalogue. Disconcertingly, an image of Britt, corny and stereotyped yet oddly
powerful, dressed in a black rubber basque with five-inch stilettos, a Nazi cap on her short blonde hair, holding a whip, jumped fully formed into his consciousness. He looked away, embarrassed at
how much it stirred him.

Ginny got up to get the lunch and Liz joined her, eager to get away from the curious tension in the atmosphere. All this talk of sex was unsettling. Three times in one night! She couldn’t
even remember when she and David had done it more than once in years.

What did other people do about keeping the passion in their marriages? She’d heard about a couple who made an appointment with each other once a week, no doubt writing it in their
Filofaxes, and retired to bed with a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of wine.

Did they get in a babysitter? Liz wondered idly.

Following Ginny into the kitchen she was struck again by what a delightful room it was. The heart of the house, so welcoming that whenever you stepped into it, you wanted to stay there, for ever
blanketed in its aromatic warmth.

It was a real dream kitchen. Not one of those adman’s fantasies you saw in the colour supplements where the stylist’s idea of homeliness was to add a Labrador and five dozen dried
roses suspended from the ceiling. Ginny’s was a real kitchen with delicious smells drifting from the blue Rayburn, blue-and-white china on the dresser, a dog basket next to a pile of
newspapers for the fire, a tattered sofa with a patchwork quilt thrown over it.

Mementoes of holidays, outings, fossil hunts, romantic trysts from their past and anyone else’s Ginny liked the look of hung from every spare nook and cranny. It was like a great tapestry
of experience, guaranteed to drive anyone who liked their kitchens neat and clinical into a nervous decline. Liz adored it.

She stopped wandering round the room and looked at one of the samplers lining the walls. Collecting samplers was one of Ginny’s hobbies. Ginny loved the idea of someone sitting there
– maybe even in this part of Sussex – sewing homilies which would seem, a hundred years later, as trite and true as they ever did.

Liz hadn’t seen this one before, and like a horoscope you only believe if it tells you what you want to hear, it suddenly seemed touchingly true.

She thought of her own kitchen with its wall-to-wall units, its vast fridge-freezer imported from America where they really know how to bulk-buy, its microwave, every labour-saving device on the
market, the noticeboard with its rotas and lists and instructions. But there was one thing missing. And with a sharp pang of envy she hadn’t felt for Mel with her sex or Britt with her money,
she realized what it was.

What Ginny whipped up among the souffés was love.

My house feels like a hotel, Liz thought with a shock. An elegant, orderly, smart hotel. It comes of neither of us being there.
My house has no heart.

For a moment she saw herself waiting at home for Jamie to get back from school, like Ginny did. She heard him shout ‘Hello, Mum!’ as he ran into her arms, his cheeks cold from the
winter air.

And what would it be like to be waiting for David, a meal in the oven instead of microwaved M & S? Would he welcome it or be stifled by the love she baked into the home-made steak-and-kidney
pudding?

Picking up one of Ginny’s paintings and examining the intricate beauty of the thing, Liz wondered how she could ever have felt sorry for her. She’d always thought Ginny was wasting
her talent on piffling flower paintings; stencilling every bit of furniture because she hadn’t got anything worthwhile to do with her talent. Now she wasn’t so sure. Everything might be
small-scale and trivial but Ginny had so much in her life: this lovely house, her flower paintings, Gavin, her kids. Ginny was the lynchpin of her family.

Liz looked at Ginny stirring a sauce for lemon pudding, the smell of the fruit sharp and tangy.

‘You know, Ginny, I envy you.’

Ginny nearly dropped her wooden spoon in surprise. ‘
You
envy me?’ Her voice rang with astonishment. ‘But you’re the high-flyer. You’re the one with the
brilliant degree, the job in TV, the handsome husband. I’m just a housewife, but you –’

‘I know, I know,’ Liz interrupted, ‘I’m bloody Superwoman, the one who’s got it all. So people keep telling me.’

Ginny looked concerned. She’d never heard bitterness like that in Liz’s voice before.

‘Is everything OK?’ She hadn’t had a real chat with Liz in months. ‘Why don’t I come up to town next week and we can go out for a meal and really talk?’

Suddenly Liz realized how much she longed to talk to someone who would understand, who wouldn’t think she was a freak or a madwoman like Mel and Britt did. And even David.

‘That’d be terrific.’ Liz dipped a finger in the delicious sauce. ‘OK. I’ll pull myself together and go and see how Confessions of a Sex-Starved Magazine Editor is
getting on.’

‘Tell them lunch is ready, would you?’

Liz walked through the French windows into the garden. There were shrieks of ecstasy from the paddling pool at the far end of the garden as Gavin splashed the children. Mel sat smiling dreamily
into her glass, obviously wondering what her toy boy would have in store tonight. Britt, lounging on a rug, was laughing up at David in a wicker chair.

‘Right, you lot, out. Lunch is ready,’ she called to Gavin and the children.

‘Come on, David.’ Britt began to pull him up. ‘Let’s go and see what Mrs Tiggy-Winkle’s got out of the store cupboard.’ They both collapsed with laughter.

Comparing Ginny with Beatrix Potter’s houseproud hedgehog was so blisteringly accurate and yet so utterly cruel that Liz found herself glancing round to see if Ginny could hear. She was
standing on the back step. She couldn’t have missed it.

Furious with the two of them, Liz ran down the garden and scooped Jamie out of the paddling pool.

So she missed seeing how, just for a fraction of a second, Britt brushed against David as he got up. And she didn’t notice the look of excitement that crossed David’s face as he
wondered if the come-on was deliberate.

But Ginny did.

Damn! There were no parking spaces within half a mile of Waterloo Station and Liz was already late. She was supposed to meet Ginny from her train at eight-thirty. Their table
at Mon Plaisir was booked for half an hour’s time and they’d be pushed to make it. She’d just have to park down by the river and walk.

‘Could you spare a pound for a cup o’ tea, missus?’

Just as she turned into the underpass leading to the station Liz was accosted by an Irishman who looked like tea was low on his list of favourite beverages. Since when had a cup of tea cost a
pound, Liz wondered, delving in her bag for some coins, unless you bought it across the river at the Savoy?

She hadn’t gone another ten yards before a second man approached her, then another. Beginning to feel annoyed as Ginny would be starting to worry, she walked faster. But as she hurried
down into the underpass she realized there was something unusual about these last two. They weren’t the old dossers familiar in every city. They were young. Not so different from any other
teenagers.

Turning the corner, into the wide open space under the roundabout, she stopped in amazement. She’d seen Cardboard City on television, but ludicrously enough, though she ran a TV company,
she’d never encountered it before in reality.

She saw at once how it earned its title. Even though it was so early hundreds of homeless people, young and old, were bedding down for the night, building makeshift homes out of cardboard boxes.
The old hands had fashioned elaborate shelters like small houses, draping blankets over the top to serve as roofs.

A small group of old men and teenagers searched through a pile of worn overcoats, just delivered by a charity to serve as blankets for those who had none. Someone had lit a fire next to one of
the concrete pillars holding up the roundabout and it glowed incongruously, as though it belonged not here in this soulless wasteland but in the cosy grate of some Edwardian villa.

For a moment Liz couldn’t believe she was in England. Brazil maybe, or some poor banana republic but not London, less than a mile from the House of Commons and Buckingham Palace.

And as she hurried past, eager to reach the reassuring bright lights and piped music of the station, Liz was stopped in her tracks by the most pathetic sight she’d ever seen. It was a bed
made out of two old mattresses stacked on top of each other. But unlike all the other makeshift beds covered with tatty sleeping bags and filthy old coats, this one was perfectly made up with
threadbare sheets and blankets neatly tucked in and a pillowcase stuffed with newspaper. Next to it was an upturned cardboard box, a rough and ready bedside table.

Out of all this hopelessness and devastation someone had tried to create a little home, a haven of their own against all the odds.

As she stumbled up the steps to the station, Liz felt her eyes stinging with tears and she knew one thing for certain. Metro TV would have to do something to help these people.

‘So, Lizzie, what’s up?’ Ginny smiled across the restaurant table at her friend encouragingly. ‘That didn’t sound like you the other day at
all.’

‘I know.’ Liz smiled wistfully. ‘It’s just that everybody thinks I’m perfect and the truth is it’s such a struggle holding my life together. I’ve always
wanted to be a success and now that I am I’m not really happy. It’s crazy really but I just don’t seem to be able to fit everything into my life and have any corners left for me.
What with work and children and trying to run the house and see my friends occasionally I’m always exhausted! I just feel there ought to be more to life somehow.’

‘Doesn’t David help out now that you’re so busy?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course he does a bit but he’s a
man
, Ginny, and you know what they’re like! One visit to the supermarket lasts five years in the male memory, and they
start saying “But I always do the shopping”!’

Ginny giggled. ‘I know what you mean. But can’t you cut back on anything?’

‘I don’t know. I keep trying to, but there’s so much to do. And somehow you feel you’ve got to be not only as good as a man would be in the job, but better!’

‘I don’t know where you get the energy.’

‘Neither do I. Sometimes I have this fantasy that I disappear to the cottage and let the lot of them sort everything out without me.’

‘But you’d never do it. You’re used to being at the hub of things. You’d be bored to tears.’

‘Would I? Would I really?’ Liz looked serious for a moment. ‘I suppose you’re probably right.’

Mel rewound her answering machine and listened to the tape again. She knew that it was useless, that there was no message from Garth on it, but somehow she had to put herself
through another two minutes of fruitless hoping. Maybe it was hiding right at the end and she’d missed it last time.

Nothing. Zilch. And it had been a whole week since they’d spent that glorious night together. A week of jumping every time the phone went, of washing her hair every morning in case he
turned up at the office, and not once going to bed in her make-up but putting it on fresh every day. Instead the phone didn’t ring and she had the curious feeling that if he had come into
Femina
’s offices, he’d chosen the moment deliberately to avoid her.