Separate Lives (3 page)

Of course. This is the form in Joan's kitchen. A proper control freak (and it takes one to know one, so, like,
respect
) she habitually both welcomes and excludes at the same time. Today my head is crammed full of so much other stuff that I really don't mind being let off the culinary hook, but it's very important to make all the right noises.

“Well, just shout if you need me. And those volleyballs are looking magnificent.”

“It's really all down to the girls. You'll have heard of them, I'm sure—‘Hot Sausage and Mustard'?”

This information checked my social autopilot for a moment. “Hot Sausage and Mustard” are the indubitably
twee-ly named county caterers
du nos jours
—the last word in “our home cooking, cooked in your home” comfort food for fans of “robust English fare.” And for avoiding adding a “y” to “fare,” food writers remain very grateful. But more important even than this is the fact that HS&M is the brainchild of a woman called Harriet Harvey, who is the only person in the whole world I have ever actively hated. Momentarily stumped for an appropriate response and in the absence of worry-beads, I picked up a wodge of stray pastry and attempted squidgy origami.

“You must know of them, Susie? They're all over the press, aren't you, girls?” There is mumbled assent from the “girls,” the youngest of whom is probably mid-twenties. None of them, I'm relieved to see, is Harriet.

“You'll meet Harriet Harvey in a minute, I'm sure. Hot Sausage is her ‘baby,'” (here Joan did air-quote fingers, which she considers groovy), “I think she's outside with the van.”

“Lovely,” I said, dropping my pastry crane. “Long journey, Joan. Excuse me—loo.”

Since the time Joan told me about naming the house Whispers and I had had to retreat to quell my giggles, I have spent large chunks of the last decade in the Foxes' downstairs loo. Usually I've been dealing with countless nappy-changing and toilet-training emergencies, though there was the memorable—to me, anyway—incident when Alex had announced our engagement at a family gathering on New Year's Day and I'd overheard Joan's stage-whispered response: “Alex, darling, are you really
sure
about this one?”

Now here I was again, staring blankly at the framed Klee print and selection of ancient yellowing
Punch
cartoons (the loo apparently having been time-capsuled in
about 1976—something which, as an only child without a lifetime's worth of “home” to call my own, I found quite comforting) and contemplating the fact that I was within moments of meeting my teenage nemesis, “Heinous” Harvey. A woman from whom I'd only recently received (and delightedly ignored) an emailed press release alerting me to the success of “Hot Sausage,” with an added personalized note: “Long time, eh?! Anyway, thought you might be interested, Love HH.”

“Love?” I'd thought incredulously. How dare the woman who, with the assistance of her hapless weak-willed crony, Clare (“Hunchback”) Hutch, once mugged me behind the sports hall, stealing not only an unread copy of
Smash Hits
and the Keith Haring Swatch I'd got for my fifteenth out of my backpack, but also my diary. An event about which I could still feel a surge of psychic pain if I dwelled on it for more than a moment. How dare “Heinous” pretend to “love” me, I'd thought before consigning her email to the desktop Trash with a flourish.

A knock on the door. “Mummmmeeeee. Is that yooooo?” Chuck.

“Yes, it's me. Are you OK?”

“What are you doing in there? I need a weeeeeee. Are you hiding?”

“No, no of course I'm not hiding. I'm having a wee, too.”

“A wee and a number two?”

“No, sweetie. Not a number two.”

I sighed, unlocked the door. Charlie was hopping from foot to foot holding his father's hand and though Alex wore an expression of boredom coupled with indifference, Charlie was clearly about to cry. I watched helplessly as a dark wet patch spread across his crotch.

“Alex, surely one of the great things about both big and small boys who urgently need a pee is that if the loo is busy they can do it in the garden?”

Alex pulled a face. I interpreted this to mean that the idea of al-fresco peeing at Whispers was totally beyond the pale. He was always intractably up-his-own-arse about all things lavatorial. I blame Joan, but then I blame Joan for a lot of things.

“Whatever. I'm pretty sure I—no, in fact make that we. As in pee—forgot to bring a change of trousers,” I muttered, and Alex shrugged, immediately altering his expression to reflect the belief that remembering to bring a change of trousers for a four-year-old was pretty much 150 percent not within his parenting remit. At which point (and not for the first time) I felt the onset of a particular kind of resentment familiar to all mothers of small children whose partners not only
just don't fucking get it
but automatically assume women are genetically pre-programmed to remember this stuff. We haven't in fact been forced to delete numerous interesting files in our brains labeled “Shakespeare's sonnets” or “quantum mechanics” or “Kerry Katona's private life” in order to download “Always remember to take a spare pair of trousers to the outlaws' golden wedding anniversary party just in case the four-year-old wets himself.”

I removed Chuck's trousers and pants and figured that if I stuck them in the rockery they'd probably be dry in an hour. In the meantime Joan was bound to have an ancient (which predates “vintage” by about twenty-five years) pair of children's velvet knickerbockers folded in tissue paper inside a drawer full of handmade lavender pouches.

Thus far the day was not going particularly well; however, I was grateful that in the garden there was no sign
of Heinous, just a lot of fit blokes with their tops off doing butch stuff with tarpaulin and ropes. I lingered awhile. And though I doubted if any of these men had ever remembered a change of trousers for a four-year-old either, I wasn't living with them, just ogling. Like a sad on-the-threshold-of-middle-age woman with a husband who was probably having an affair with a piece of work called “P.”

Which reminded me. After I'd hung Charlie's clothes out to dry on a small palm, I walked around the end of the marquee in an attempt to spot the “Hot Sausage” van, but without being seen. And lo—there was Heinous, sitting half in and half out of the passenger door, wearing a magnificent pair of boots and shouting into her mobile.

“You know what? I don't bloody care. I totally do not fucking care one iota what you think, OK? Actually, strike that ‘OK.' If I didn't in fact totally not fucking care, I'd definitely hope it was not OK. OK?”

Which semi-articulate sentence of rage did rather impress me. It sounded good, sounded a lot like I was feeling. And then I thought about it a bit more and realized that it actually did make sense, so kudos to Heinous. Anyway, this was the point when I should have ducked out of her sightline, but when she hung up with a robustly delivered “so just fuck off,” almost inevitably she happened to glance my way. She squinted and grinned. Busted. This was it—twenty years of emotional baggage was about to be fly-tipped all over Whispers' freshly raked gravel drive.

“Susie
Poo
? Is that really you?”

See? One of the very best things about being proposed to by Alex had been the prospect of dumping my old surname and high-tailing it down to the post office to have my passport rebranded as Fox. As would the Righteous Post-Fem
squad if their surname had been Poe and they were at school with Heinous.

“Hein—er, hey.” I scuttled—I don't think I've ever scuttled before—out from behind the marquee. “How's tricks?” And no, I've no idea where “How's tricks?” came from because I'd never said it before; however, there always had been something about Heinous that made me turn into a character from her movie, not mine.

“Tricks are fine. Tricks are good.” Heinous glanced at her phone. “Good-ish. How are your ‘tricks'? And look, Susie, I'm sorry about the diary.”

For one disarming moment it looked as if she were about to lunge at me for a hug, before thinking better of it and thrusting out a hand, which I ignored. It was going to take more than a bloody handshake to eradicate the memory of Heinous removing pages from my diary and posting them on the common-room noticeboard.

“It's haunted me for years. You may be relieved to know that I am no longer that girl. Not anymore. I'm properly sorry.”

“OK, thanks. But it was a shit thing to do. When Tara Maplethorpe . . .” (aka Maple Syrup, because we were at an all-girls school and had read too much
St. Clare's
at an impressionable age) “. . . found out I'd got off with her boyfriend—what was his name? Mark Thingy?—while we were both waiting for the night bus after the St. Benedict's disco, she never spoke to me again. And I'd only got off with him to keep warm because Mark Thingy was wearing a puffa. And you also nicked my Swatch.”

It was amazing how much I sounded exactly like my sixteen-and-a-half-year-old self. Heinous must've thought I'd gone mental. Possibly as a direct result of her actions.

“Totally accept that. Totally out of order. But actually the Swatch was Clare. She's probably still wearing it. And not in a cool, retro, referencing-the-eighties way.”

Against all my instincts this made me laugh. Heinous too. It suddenly occurred to me that my day was already so shit there was no point in making it any worse.

“OK, Heinous Harriet Harvey. Whatever. Bygones. Shall we seek some closure?”

“You know, that would be a massive weight off my mind. Thanks.”

“I'm not saying I've forgiven and forgotten. Just that I'm probably grown-up enough to try.”

“Good enough for me. So, your bloke is somebody here?”

“Yes, though he's still my bloke only by the skin of my—his—teeth.”

This was slightly mad of me. It was clearly going to take a while to adjust to this new, quasi-likable Heinous, one who suddenly felt like somebody I could talk to. Perhaps because her surname wasn't Fox? Or maybe because we were bonded by so much history. And Hockey. And Latin. Anyway.

“I'm sorry. And there's a man heading this way.” I liked that Heinous sort of hissed this, collusively. I turned.

“Alex. You won't believe it but . . . this is Heinous Harvey. You know . . .”

“Yeah, I've heard all about Heinous Harriet Harvey, Scourge of the Sixth. And you're actually speaking instead of sticking chewing gum into each other's hair during Prep?”

“We are. She's apologized.”

“Better late than.” Alex thrust forward a hand. “Alex Fox. You still got the Swatch?” He was suddenly all charm and smiles and twinkling eyes and really quite handsome. Like somebody else's husband.

“No, that was Hunchback. I was just saying to Poo—Susie—that she's probably still wearing it.”

“Very funny. So you're the sausage woman?”

“That's one way of putting it.”

“Well, good to meet you. You're not half as hideous in real life.”

She had the grace to laugh. Probably because whatever she now was, “Hideous Heinous” she definitely wasn't. She was looking great. I knew she'd just turned thirty-nine, on the first of June. There are some bits of pointless information you really try to forget—or imagine will get lost inside a head filled with spare pairs of toddler's trousers—but weirdly, Heinous's birthday wasn't one of those things.

The rest of the day was entirely bearable, the afternoon a sunny, “Whispery” blur of family small talk with a smattering of small-p politics and some gossip. I spent nearly an hour with Isobel, who was excessively interested in some rumors about a Michelin-starred chef who was apparently putting it about a bit, to the predictable displeasure of his TV weathergirl wife. Turned out Isobel had met the chef at a mutual friend's dinner party. Apparently “there were definite sparks.” And, Isobel eventually revealed, definite texts.

“In the interests of research,” I told Isobel, “I went out with a chef, back in the 1990s when they were still just blokes who cooked for a living. He liked doing it
al fresco, al forno, al dente
—basically as often as possible, everywhere. And being a creative soul, in all sorts of ways, with lots of olive oil.”

“I am
so
listening.”

“OK, so the morning after one particularly memorable night before he made me a cooked breakfast in the nude—my own naked chef, back when Jamie Oliver was still
burning water. He tried to get me to assist, but I said that if the nudity was compulsory I'd rather just lie around in bed rather than end up hauling my second-degree post-coital glow off to A&E.”

“Yeah, I can see that wouldn't be a very good look.”

“Anyway we split up shortly after that. He said it was because he was emigrating, but I've always wondered if it was because I refused to make bubble and squeak in the buff.”

“These days I'd be perfectly happy to make bubble and squeak in the buff,” said Isobel. “Though it would be my poor kids who'd probably end up emotionally scarred for life. Mind you, when they leave home I may feel a sudden compulsion to cook something complicated in my smalls.
Nostalgie de la bouillabaisse
. Bring it on.”

I tried to persuade Isobel that the chef, though undoubtedly good with his hands (and other extremities), was a tosser, but perhaps when you've been single for as long as Isobel then having breakfast cooked for you by a naked celebrity tosser is a prospect worth entertaining.

And so the day rolled into the evening, and because I'd drunk the Pimm's lake pretty dry, everything was very nearly sort of lovely when we finally sat down to dinner. Lula was entirely occupied by the presence of her cousin, while I fed sausages and mash to Charlie, who fell asleep on my lap before being spirited away to our sleeping quarters by one of the nannies Nigel and Joan had thoughtfully hired so that we grown-ups could fulfill our adult destiny, i.e. get even more spectacularly pissed, especially during the speeches, when Nigel referred to Joan as “less Joan of Arc, more Joan of My Heart,” which in turn made me snort snottily. Eventually (and surely it was Tuesday by now?) everybody hit
the dance floor, commandeered for the purposes of total embarrassment by Ipswich's own DJ Jeff and his Spectacular Strobe, and threw their version of middle-class-white-people-can't-dance shapes to “Brown Sugar,” and thus the proverbial Good Time Was Had. Meanwhile, Alex and I barely exchanged a word.