Separate Lives (2 page)

“Susie. HURRY UP.”

I glanced at my watch—the Cartier Tank that had been an eighteenth birthday present from my father and which was in permanent need of a service, having run six minutes slow since the late twentieth century. I'd been in the bathroom for four minutes.

“Coming.” I made it sound bright and efficient and I'm-on-top-of-all-this-Saturday-stuff. This was a lie.

I slicked on some tinted moisturizer, slightly cloggy mascara and the muted Mac Viva Glam gloss that I felt was appropriately “Saturday morning”; the kind of non-color on which I had relied since motherhood had somehow mysteriously dictated I leave the hot pinks and vampy reds behind.

And while I'd assumed that having babies was responsible for the muted lips, here, now, in front of this mirror a zingy lightbulb moment of clarity indicated that this might not in fact be the case. Perhaps it had been the moment I'd swapped my trademark bright red lips for tastefully
grown-up gloss that indicated the passing of the Susie I had been and announced the arrival of the Susie I had become: a woman who asked her partner of ten years—her apparently straying, semi-stranger of a partner, the recipient of smiley-face texts from a red-lipsticked mystery woman (P almost certainly hadn't left vampy reds behind) if he'd had “a nice shower?” For fuck's sake.

A last glance in the mirror and a comb through the dirty-blond bird's-nest. Noises were now coming up the stairs. Specifically the noises of a recalcitrant four-year-old male child—Charlie, aka Chuck—being reluctantly persuaded into a pair of shoes which, maternal multi-tasking brain effortlessly clicking into gear, I recognized were almost certainly the ones he had just outgrown.

“Alex. Those SHOES,” I shouted down the stairs. “They don't fit him anymore. I meant to tell you.”

At the bottom of the stairs Alex was kneeling on the floor pushing a small foot into a smaller shoe, while Chuck was wearing an expression like a freshly smacked bottom—puffy, red, with a hint of grizzle. I sighed, pushed—almost elbowed, but not quite—Alex out of the way, removed the shoes and found an emergency replacement pair of
Bob the Builder
trainers that had been gifted by a friend with no taste and no children.

“There,” I said soothingly. “Lula, where are you?”

Lula is my—our—eight-year-old daughter. What with the postnatal hormones, she was very nearly Tallulah, after Jodie Foster in
Bugsy Malone
, but when I finally got around to registering her birth relative sanity had thankfully prevailed.

“Your daughter,” said Alex—she was always “my” daughter when he couldn't relate to her—“is watching
Hannah Montana
. As per.”

I went into the living room where she was indeed curled like an apostrophe on the sofa, sucking her thumb and staring at Miley Cyrus with a kind of crush-fostering girl-longing I entirely understood—I'd felt pretty much exactly the same way about Jodie in
Bugsy Malone
. Just for a moment I was disarmed by her loveliness. My straight light-brown hair had, when combined with Alex's conker-colored curls, given Lula a genetic leg-up. Those long thick honey-colored strands (one of which was being chewed and which may or may not have been harboring a nit), the delicately olive skin (Alex's), Bambi legs (Alex's) and green eyes (mine) made Lula the kind of child people first stared at and then smiled at in supermarkets, their days apparently brightened. Anyway, until recently Lula would have sneered at
Hannah Montana
as being “yuck! For girly-girls” but something had shifted recently and a newly emerging Lula had started saying unnerving things like “when I grow up I want to be Cheryl Cole.” So much for the vet-cum-part time-firewoman.

“Lula, let's go. Like, now.”

The drive from northwest London to Suffolk was long and leavened only by Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, the occasional lingering shoe-related grizzle from Chuck before he decided to conk out and the bleep of Lula's Nintendogs. Alex seemed to be lost in his thoughts—red lipsticked, thong-wearing thoughts?—so I was left with mine. Which, with autistic-spectrum variety, ranged from the banal to the hyperventilatory.

“You're quiet,” said Alex at one point, just as we pulled into our preferred motorway services pit-stop for the traditional mid-morning caffeine-and-wee.

“I am. You're not wrong. I'm very quiet. On the outside.”

Alex glanced at me quizzically.

“And what does that mean, precisely?”

“I think it means just that. Not talkative. On the inside, however, I'm practically Jonathan Ross.”

He left me to it.

My outlaws, Mr. and Mrs. Fox—to whom we were heading for a family gathering in honor of (brace yourself for the irony) their golden wedding anniversary—live in a rambling, low-slung house painted Suffolk Pink, which is about two shades the bearable side of Barbie but still very much on the Disney Princess spectrum. It is the kind of house that looks unarguably attractive in estate agent's windows or on
Location, Location
,
Location
but which has always struck me as absurd for anybody less than 300 years old to actually live in.

I grew up in London, in an Edwardian mansion flat, and have always been about high ceilings and cornices and lots of light and never particularly charmed by a beam, which always makes me think I'm in the kind of hearty, engraved-tankards-behind-the-bar pubs I invariably want to leave immediately. The Foxes, on the other hand, are into their inglenookery and have spent their entire lives collectively banging their heads on lintels, which may explain a lot but, nonetheless, is all the more perverse because they are a family of giants—the shortest person in the family, Alex's mother, Joan, is five foot nine.

The Foxes habitually refer to the family homestead as The Pink House, though it is in fact called (gag-reflex alert) “Whispers,” after the sound of the East Anglian winds breezing through the fronds of the Weeping Willow by the stream. If I had been an American marrying into this family,
I would probably have died of the joy of Englishness when I first heard this. However when Joan first told me about Whispers I had to suppress a snort and retreat to the loo. Forever after, if only by me, The Pink House was referred to as “Careless Whispers.”

The most annoying thing about Careless is not the low-slung ceilings (I'm five foot seven so it's navigable with minor stooping) but the fact that every room leads off every other room and none is quite big enough to contain everybody comfortably, especially if “everybody” is more than six people, which it invariably is, what with Mr. and Mrs. Fox having four offspring and, thus far, seven grandchildren.

However, I do appreciate the gardens, even though, as a confirmed Londoner, I have never seen the point of having more garden than house. Houses are the bit that matter, gardens a luxury. And gardens with lawns that have to be mowed by small tractors (the Foxes have three acres) are a luxury from which I am pretty certain I shall forever be excluded. Owning a proper garden is, to me, a bit like waking up one day and suddenly finding oneself welded to a trug, yearning to vote Tory and knowing how to pronounce “tsk-tsk.” But the kids, needless to say, adore Careless, and as we pulled into the gravel with just enough wheel-spin to announce ourselves, even I had to admit it scrubbed up pretty well for a 300-year-old, without recourse to lip-gloss, and on this warm mid-June day, with its “anyone-for-tennis” lawns and herbaceous border ablaze, Careless had never looked more like a double-page spread from
Country Living
. Or, indeed, a particularly pastel scene from
Fantasia
.

Nigel Fox—Alex's father—was already at the (wisteria-festooned, obviously) door, glass in hand.

“Aha. Alex. Susie. Offspring. You're last. Welcome.”

Nigel does actually talk like this, in short barked sentences. He was one of six children so presumably while growing up he rarely got a word in and it was a habit that stuck. When he joined the RAF it was probably considered an asset.

“Dad,” said Alex, with no particular inflection or warmth, and I noted, not for the first time, that Alex instantly deflates from his habitual Alpha-maleness as soon as he comes into contact with his father. I used to worry about it a bit, feel for him—but not these days. I've had more conversations with Alex about his ego-puncturing relationship with his father than I can count and I wasn't particularly looking forward to the one we'd almost certainly be having on the drive home tomorrow. The contents of my empathy cup, far from running over, had all but evaporated.

“Grown,” barked Nigel, pointing at his grandchildren, “haven't they.” Statement not question.

“They do tend to,” I said. “I've tried pruning them but it's no good.”

“Ha. Susie. Funny.”

Inside Careless, a skulk (“it's the collective noun,” Nigel had told me, the first time we'd met) of Foxes “Hi”d and “How are you?”d and jostled for some kissing. A newly reinvigorated Charlie instantly disappeared with his five-year-old cousin, Jack, Isobel's second “miracle” IVF baby, and the one for whom that Mumsnetty term “Little Emperor” could have been coined. I have always failed to be charmed by Jack but Charlie worships at his (designer-shod) feet. Lula, meanwhile, had already paired off with her eight-year-old cousin, Isobel's daughter Chloe, a bright, devastatingly plain, tomboyish dogs-and-ponies girl of whom I was extremely fond, though I feared that now Lula was coming over all Girls
Aloud she and Chloe were bound more by familial ties than by any shared interests. But still, vanishing children was one of the upsides of a Fox family gathering. It meant I could conceivably reclaim a portion of otherwise-occupied brain for myself.

So, apart from Nigel, who thinks kissing is common, in no particular order I kissed:

• * Prickly, put-upon, wildly clever Isobel, Alex's older sister, successful human rights lawyer and single (“through choice! MY choice! And my choice of donors too!”) mother to Chloe and Jack.
  
• * Guy, Alex's older-by-five-minutes twin brother. Handsome, charming Guy, a professional rugby player turned sports agent who had not only retained his genetic share of Alpha-maleness but somehow kept on acquiring even more. One day I imagined the potentially flammable combination of success and testosterone might cause him to explode in a puff of machismo.
  
• * Guy's brand-new, as of last weekend—though they had been together three years—fiancée, the no-longer-borderline-anorexic and therefore even more exhaustingly beautiful American ex-model turned hip boutique owner, Lisa, who predictably thought Whispers was “like,
  toadally
  heaven.”
  
• * Guy and Lisa's (runs in the family) twins, six-month-old Stanley and Poppy, who virtually at birth had been dubbed Pea and iPod by Isobel—nicknames that were in danger of sticking.
  
• * The Fox firstborn, Will, an RAF officer and owner of an upper lip so stiff that on the rare occasions when he smiled, as now, it appeared to if not actually crack then certainly creak a bit. Will had suffered a horrible loss
  when his childhood sweetheart, Marianne, died of breast cancer when they were both thirty (he is forty-seven now, so I never knew her). Their son, Luke, meanwhile, was just nine months old when his mother died and Will has brought him up alone and, despite the demands of his job, quite brilliantly ever since. Still single, though stalked by squadrons of women bearing both sympathy and, no doubt, Myla thongs, Will is an acquired taste but one worth acquiring. Alex, interestingly, is not remotely close to his big brother.
  
• * Finally, in the kitchen—the only part of the house that references the twenty-first century because, despite the Aga, it's surprisingly un-farmhouse-y and, with its limestone work surfaces and handle-less drawers and cupboards, rather more Bulthaup-y—I found Joan doing her usual bossy matriarchal thing alongside four young cooks hired for the occasion: tonight's sit-down dinner for a hundred in a marquee which, I could now see through the French doors, was being erected, distractingly, by numerous topless men.
  

“Darling. Susie. Just the woman. Come and kiss me. But I'm very floury.”

If Will is a taste worth acquiring then Joan is a taste that may well be a lifetime's work, like learning to appreciate hundred-year-old eggs. On the surface we get on very well—she's clever and funny (if Will is Nigel Junior then Joan is Isobel Senior) and very much the flame around which her family gathers for warmth. However, if she didn't actually give birth to you and you try to get a bit too close then you're always in danger of meeting a moth-like fate.

After ten years of dealing with Joan and more than a few slammed doors and stamped feet (on both sides), not to
mention a handful of “Alex, your fucking mother is driving me MAD!”s, we've now reached a kind of truce. If she can avoid competitively criticizing my parenting skills, or lack thereof, and stick to the stuff we both agree on, i.e. food, which is Joan's great passion and happens to be my career, we're fine.

I'm a restaurant critic. Did I tell you that? Apologies—distracted. If push came to shove I could probably struggle by without sex, but I couldn't cope without having food at the center of my life. If I couldn't have either, I would become a recluse and retreat to a darkened room where I'd grow twelve-inch fingernails and watch films like
Tampopo
(foodily erotic) and
Babette's Feast
(erotically foodie). And even though I think
Last Tango In Paris
is about as sexy as a cholesterol test, remaking it with
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter
would've been a disaster. Anyway.

“This looks very good, Joan. Anything I can do?”

“No, darling. I have these wonderful girls,” (at which point Joan waved an arm proprietorially around the kitchen), “and they're doing marvelous things, but of course I always appreciate your expert eye!”