Out of My Depth (21 page)

She washed her hands and rinsed her mouth, wishing she’d had the foresight to use the bathroom where her toothbrush was. When she rejoined the group, nobody gave her a funny look. They had barely noticed that she had gone.

‘My main memory of the Slackers meetings,’ Izzy said, with a glint in her eye, ‘was hearing about the progress of Amanda’s grand passion.’

‘SHUT UP!’ Amanda was halfway into her chair, and stood up again, furious. She noticed the way Susie caught Tamsin’s eye and giggled. She could see Tamsin trying to bite back her laughter.

‘Oh yes,’ said Susie, smiling serenely at Amanda. ‘I think we all remember young Dai.’

Amanda frowned. ‘Jesus!’ she hissed. ‘Don’t tell Patrick! Don’t even hint to him, OK?’

Tamsin was puzzled. ‘About Dai? Why ever not? You didn’t meet Patrick for a few years after that, did you? He cannot possibly object to you .. .’ She began giggling, and the harder she tried to stop, the less she was able to control herself. Izzy joined in. Susie’s mouth began to wobble. ‘. . . to you humping the school builder, in the back of his van, once a week for the entire sixth form!’

They collapsed.

Izzy managed to add, ‘The best part of all my time at Lodwell’s was you telling us all about it, in that godawful café, in graphic detail, every sports lesson.’

Susie was clearly trying to stop laughing. Amanda stared at her, stony faced, until she got it down to a spluttering giggle-

‘Amanda, there’s really nothing wrong with what you did,’ Susie managed. ‘We were wildly jealous. You were brilliant.’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Amanda didn’t dare shout, because she knew that Patrick was upstairs, that he could, even now, be on his way down with the children. She hissed instead. ‘For Christ’s sake! Stop it!’ She felt compelled to break into monster mummy mode. ‘If you don’t stop laughing right now . . .’ she whispered, terrifyingly, with no idea as to what the threat was going to be. It worked; she was good at that. When she had her friends’ attention, she stared hard at each of them in turn. ‘When I met Patrick,’ she whispered, ‘I told him I was a virgin. It seemed easier that way. It went with my image. He liked it. And I hadn’t slept with any of my boyfriends, I mean there was Piers, there was Julian. Mark. None of them up to the job in hand. So I gave Patrick the official version. A couple of boyfriends, but never gone all the way.’ Amanda spread her hands out. And so it’s not the fact of Dai that matters. I mean, you can see what Patrick’s like. He’s not exactly a jealous monster, and he certainly wouldn’t have cared about my past. It’s more the fact that I’ve lied to him for about thirteen years.’

The others nodded. They were still trying not to laugh.

‘Do you mean,’ asked Tamsin, quietly, ‘that the biggest problem in your marriage is Dai the labourer? That seems completely insane.’

Amanda concentrated her energies on being angry with Tamsin, because it was easier than guilt.

‘No,’ she snapped. ‘No, I don’t mean that at all. There are no problems in my marriage — it’s fine. There’s a difference between having a bad marriage and wanting to keep a little white lie hidden away. God, I never give blasted Dai a moment’s thought. But I was nineteen when I met Patrick, not that long after Dai, really, and I would hate for him to look back and know I’d lied to him. And faking a first time is quite a big lie. There was never really an opportune moment for setting the record straight. I mean, what do you say? By the way, I wasn’t a virgin? At what point do you say that? Before the wedding? After? Then he starts to wonder what else I’ve been lying about.’ She paused. ‘Which, incidentally, is nothing.’

Everyone promised that their lips were sealed. Susie was the first to recover her equilibrium. She got to her feet and announced that she would top up everybody’s coffee. As she was halfway to the kitchen, Patrick, Jake and Freya came into the room. There were stifled giggles from Tamsin and Isabelle. Amanda glared around the room. Then she looked at her husband. Patrick was a quintessential Englishman abroad today. He was ready for an outing, wearing a pair of cream shorts that were still creased down the front, a white T-shirt through which his wiry chest hair was visible, and a cotton sun hat. Round his neck was a large camera. He was wearing sandals.

‘Patrick!’ she said, sharply. ‘You’re wearing sandals with socks! Jesus. Take your socks off, for pity’s sake.’ She rolled her eyes and managed to stare threateningly, briefly, at Izzy and Tamsin in turn as she did it.

He sat down obediently and took off his shoes and socks.

‘Told you, Dad,’ said Freya, sadly.

‘You did, you did. I had no idea how stylistically unacceptable this practice was. Sorry, love.’

‘Do you mean me, Dad, or do you mean Mum?’

‘Both of you, I suppose. Sorry to the ladies in my life for embarrassing you both with my attire.’

Susie emerged from the kitchen with a plate of homemade biscuits and a full cafetière. She offered the plate to the children.

‘You two haven’t even had breakfast, have you?’ she said, pleasantly. ‘Why don’t you start off with one of Roman’s double chocolate cookies? They really are . . .’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘To Dai for.’

There was a pause, in which Amanda wondered whether Patrick could really be oblivious to Tamsin and Isabelle’s stifled laughter, or whether he was pretending. Was he that obtuse? Could she really have the good fortune to be married to an utter dimwit? Freya and Jake exchanged a puzzled glance.

‘There,’ said Patrick, balling his socks up and putting them in his pocket. ‘Rid of the offending footwear.’

‘But Susie,’ said Tamsin, innocently. ‘You must have laboured for hours over these biscuits.’

‘Right,’ said Patrick. ‘Who’s coming to town, then? All of us?’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t get one of the neighbours to help,’ added Isabelle.

‘Hmm?’ asked Patrick. ‘What neighbours?’

‘Nothing,’ Amanda said, so firmly that nobody dared carry on. ‘I’m not going to market. I’m going to soak up some rays by the pool. Read a book. You lot can all go. Patrick, you can take the kids. Maybe see if there’s a playground or something you can go to on the way back. Don’t rush it.’

Patrick nodded equably.

‘If there’s a playground expedition,’ Izzy said brightly, ‘could Sam and I tag along? Sam would be in heaven, and even more so if Jake wouldn’t mind letting him trail around worshipping him?’ She said it as a question, addressed to Jake.

‘Course,’ Jake said, gruffly. ‘S’fine.’

Amanda smiled at him, pleased that somebody was being nice. She stood in the doorway and let them all leave. Tamsin was unable to resist one parting shot, once she was safely halfway into the passenger seat of Patrick’s car.

‘Bye, Amanda!’ she called. ‘Remember, you’re on holi-Dai!'

Amanda stamped around the ground floor, fuming. They had no respect. She would like to know which of the girls could hold a candle to her. Which of them had what she had. She had money, like Susie, and she had children, like Izzy, but twice as many. Susie had no children, although she was clearly broody, and Izzy had no money. And none of them had a husband. She was a bit miffed that nobody had mentioned the fact that only one of them was married and that it was her. Still, she had the house to herself. Amanda stretched, yawned, and began to luxuriate in the knowledge that she was alone in this huge, beautiful home and that for a few hours she could pretend it was hers. She would use it as a trial run for the day she and Patrick bought a second home. It was ten o’clock. They wouldn’t be back before one, at the earliest.

She walked, barefoot, to the kitchen. She poured herself a large black coffee, and added three spoonfuls of sugar to it. Briefly, she considered not replacing the breakfast she had flushed away. It might do her some good to be bulimic again. She would lose weight and it would probably be kind to her liver, too.

She tore six inches off the nearest baguette, pulled it apart longways, and slathered it in unsalted butter. She found some Bonne Maman raspberry jam in the fridge, and spread it liberally on top. Carrying the two pieces of jammy bread, or bready jammy butter, in an open palm, and her coffee in the other hand, she went out to the terrace and sat at the mosaic table to savour her solitude. She could always send this breakfast the way of the first.

She unbuttoned her shorts, put her legs up on a chair, pulled her shades down over her eyes, and looked at the garden. She particularly liked the trees, here. There were so many of them, beyond the lawn. It was like a little wood. A copse. The trees must have been there for ever. One of them was so tall that it was probably a hundred years old. Amanda tried to feel insignificant in the face of this longevity, but she failed. Jakey had told her the other day that the stones in their front garden in Clapham were thousands of years old — ‘Even older than you, Mum!’ — but she had failed to find this fact interesting. Perhaps she lacked imagination. Maybe she was jaded. She took the wonders of the natural world for granted. The way the world was going, they wouldn’t be there for long. There was no point in getting too attached to them.

She bit her bread and savoured the combination of flavours. There was the deliciously gooey baguette, and the way the crust cracked and went squidgy in her mouth. Then there was the slick creaminess of the butter, and over the top of all of that, the perfect sweetness of the jam. It was heaven. Bulimia was definitely better than anorexia.

She closed her eyes, felt the sun on her face, and took a deep breath. She needed to stop thinking about Tamsin and her mother. This solitude might be exactly the tonic she needed.

‘Enjoying yourself?’

Roman was mocking her. She opened her eyes and craned her head in all directions until she spotted him, looking down at her from the tiny attic window. She glared at him and he chuckled at her.

‘Why are you there?’ It sounded strange to Amanda as she said it, but that was the way it came out. Why was he there? She had assumed he was out, doing something, earning a living, perhaps. ‘I thought you were out doing something, or earning a living,’ she added, shouting so that her words would travel to the top window.

‘And I thought you were out in town. Where are your children?’

‘With their father.’

‘Isn’t that what divorced mothers say?’

‘Oh yes, because you know so much about parenthood.’

‘What?’

‘I said, you know so much about parenthood.’

‘Can’t hear you. I’m coming down.’

Roman disappeared. Then Amanda watched in astonishment as he came back to the window and eased himself out of it, backwards.

‘What the bloody hell . . . ?’ she shouted up to him, but stopped, abruptly, in case she startled him into falling. She watched, horrified, as he stood up on the narrow window sill, two storeys up, at the very top of the solid old house. If he fell, he would land on the terrace. It was concrete, paved with slabs that, Roman himself had told her, had been sourced from some particularly exclusive Pyrennean quarry. She pictured him, vividly, crashing out backwards and breaking his back. She imagined his body, dark blood in his dark hair, limbs splayed at impossible angles. She didn’t even know the 999 number for France.

He leapt, backwards, off the window sill. Almost immediately, Amanda saw that he was suspended by a rope, that he was wearing a harness. Nonetheless, she gasped, and her stomach went into knots as he flew out from the house and traced an arc downwards. As his feet came back in to touch the wall, he sprang back out again. He landed on his feet, a couple of metres away from the house, next to her chair, laughing.

‘You stupid tosser,’ she said, but she was laughing too. She screwed up her eyes at the glare of the sun reflected off the house and the terrace. ‘Are you always this much of a show-off?’

Roman unclipped his harness. ‘Pretty much. I bet you’ve never abseiled.’

‘What, because I’m such a dull, smug, Clapham mother?’ She remembered her shorts, and buttoned them up.

‘Have you?’

‘Once, actually. Patrick and I went on an Outward Bound weekend when we were at uni. It was organised by the Climbing Club. I abseiled then. So there.’

‘Liked it?’

‘Terrified. Pretended to be less scared than I was to impress the boyfriend.’

‘Would you do it again?’ He had a mischievous glint in his eye that Amanda distrusted.

‘Jesus, Roman,’ she said, quickly. ‘When am I going to abseil? I live in London. I have children. Not,’ she added hastily, ‘that having children makes you put your life on hold.’

‘Yeah, right. Your turn.’

‘My turn for what?’

‘For jumping out, of the attic window. You don’t have any children right at this moment, do you? You’d be much better off doing something brave than sitting there eating.’

Amanda glowered. ‘I’m on holiday. I was savouring the peace.’

She screwed her eyes tight shut, and forced herself to pay the rope out through her fingers. Her breath was coming in sharp gasps. It was only the morning and she’d already had enough of the day.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said, angrily, through gritted teeth. ‘I hate you!’

She didn’t look at Roman. She kept her eyes closed, but she knew he was smiling. She knew he was finding her amusing. He was slightly contemptuous, very patronising, and he was torturing her so he could tell Susie about it later. She couldn’t believe what she was doing. She could feel the sun on the top of her head. She was mortified that Roman had had to loosen his harness quite as much as he had to make it fit her.