The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (26 page)

“Do tell.”

“Lowering your standards,” she laughs. “I apply the same logic to my appearance. In fact, you can combine the two by having only dirty mirrors in your house. And certainly no mirrors in which you can see below the waist.”

I wish I could channel the spirit of lazy Daisy.

“And drinking lots,” she adds. “I need a drink after the day we’ve had.”

Alpha male Michael is, of course, on drinks duty, giving us old-fashioned spirits rather than the cans of lager and glasses of wine that serve as aperitifs at our house. Everyone compliments him lavishly for his way with the gin bottle. It’s unseasonably warm and I find myself drinking the spirits as if they were my usual wine. I notice that Becky is doing much the same.

After a few of these, I begin to feel shaky. I go to the loo to check out my mottled cheeks.

“Do you really mean it?” Becky corners me as I emerge.

“Mean what?”

“What you said about not wanting to be with your children?”

“No, of course not. Not really. It was just a silly joke.”

“Does having children make you happy?”

Oh, god, here we go. Why can’t Becky ever want to chat about reality television and celebrities? I am feeling as shallow as a Norfolk beach with the tide out.

“Yes, sometimes. Anxious, too. Stressed, but happy, yes, generally, I think. I don’t know.”

“You must know. Do Gabe and Rufus make you, Mary, happy?”

“I can’t imagine life without them. My biggest fear is that something might happen to them. I would never, ever, want to
unwish them. I would give up my life for them but at the same time I have this terrible fear of not being around for them.”

“But do they make you happy?”

I think to myself of the way I am sometimes woken up at dawn and my first thought is, oh, god, another thirteen hours until their bedtime. Of how I want to stick pins in my eyes rather than read another page of another Thomas the Tank Engine book. Of how my favorite moments of the day are often those without them—going to the cinema, a coffee alone, even my journey to work. Of the perpetual, eternal, overwhelming chaos.

And then I think of how, when they’ve gone to bed, I find myself longing for them to be awake again because I miss them so much. Of how I gorge myself on Gabe’s beauty. There is something in the truism that all newborns are ugly and all toddlers are beautiful. Especially my second born, who has Joel’s dark skin and my pale eyes. You know when you meet an exceptionally beautiful girl and you want to put on dark glasses in order to stare at her? When you have a toddler, you can stare all you like without embarrassment and they are all beautiful.

And Rufus’s endearing earnestness, the funny things that he says and his capacity to learn, they make me happy. I love that he goes through the day multiplying every number that he comes across to the power of a hundred for no reason other than that he wants to. I love how he over-uses the word “actually,” draws pictures of domestic appliances, and thinks that the stories I tell him and Gabe when we’ve no books on hand are better than any story we could read. I love that he teaches me that however perfect you think an age is, he grows up and shows me that it just keeps on getting better. I thought that a baby sitting up or a toddler’s early speech could never be beaten, but I didn’t know how good a conversation with a child could be, that it could delight
me in a way that none had since those early biography-swapping late-night talks in my early days with Joel.

“You’ll never get a straight answer out of a parent,” I finally say to Becky. “It’s not a choice that can be rationalized, even by you. I’m glad I’ve got them, really I am, but I don’t believe that on balance people with children are any happier than those without. I’m sure I’ve even read some study or other that says that.” I have to say this to Becky, whatever I really think, because I know there’s every chance she won’t have children herself. I am groping for the balance between encouragement to try and platitudes if she doesn’t succeed.

She sighs. “I’m still trying to weigh it up.”

“You’re thinking too much. You always think too much.”

“I know, I do.”

We sit down to eat fashionably old-fashioned British food, lots of lovage and obscure cuts of meat, alongside the samphire we picked earlier. I think it’s quite disgusting, but everyone else swoons.

“What is this?” I ask, prodding at my custard-like pudding.

“It’s lemon posset,” says Mitzi.

“I thought posset was what babies bring up—you know, regurgitated milk.” Which is frankly what this looks like.

“There’s a word for that,” says Joel. “You know, the opposite of a synonym. When the same word has two totally different meanings.”

“Well, this posset is a wonderful old British recipe made with cream, lemon and sugar. Divine, isn’t it?” says Mitzi.

“What a shame,” I say. “Dairy.” My plate is quickly swiped away by Joel, who looks happy for the first time all day.

“Do you want to race tomorrow?” Michael asks Joel.

“Race what?”

“Enterprises.”

“Sorry, is this some sort of City thing?”

“Dinghies. It’s a two-man jobbie and I’ve put myself down for the Enterprise class in tomorrow’s regatta. You’d make good ballast.” He points at Joel’s posset-filled belly.

“OK.” He shrugs. “Could be a laugh.”

“It’s no laugh,” says Mitzi. “The regatta’s taken very seriously around here.”

“I warn you, Michael, Joel was born without the competitive gene.” It had shocked me at first. He’d lose to me at tennis and he’d just offer congratulations and give me a hug, never insisting we play again and again until he’d won, or blame the racquet for his poor performance.

“Does it involve me getting up early?” asks Joel.

I give him a look. “I think what he’s trying to say is, does it involve him spending a lot of time away from looking after his children?”

“Cut the poor bloke some slack,” says Michael. “As far as I can see all he does is look after your children. Don’t worry, under-the-thumb boy, high tide isn’t until one.”

“Of course you must go,” I say, faking magnanimity. “And I’ll find something to do away from the children in the morning and you can look after them then. It’s called tag-team parenting.”

“There are some dear little shops in the village,” says Mitzi. “Very cute interiors, lots of lovely stripes and checks.”

“Over-priced bags of fudge,” says Becky. “Cara insisted on going to them today. Some rather sweet lavender-stuffed dog-shaped door stoppers, but of course I wasn’t allowed to buy one of those.”

“I’m going to walk across to the island at low tide,” says Cara. “First thing in the morning, before all the tourists.”

“Grockles, we call them around here,” says Mitzi. “Isn’t that
too divine?” I’m not sure when she began to talk as though she were in an Evelyn Waugh adaptation.

“Why don’t you come along?” Cara says to me.

“That would be nice,” I say. How strange to walk at my own pace. To enjoy the journey instead of spending all of it worrying about whether the boys will be able to walk all the way back, whether I’ll have to carry one of them, whether they’ll understand the point of our destination. These have been the years of living vicariously. “How early is early?”

“Very. I love early mornings. So efficient. Seven o’clock?”

“That’s practically the afternoon. I’d love to. You can do breakfast, can’t you, Joel?” A rhetorical question. He’s got an afternoon of being shouted at by Michael, I get a dawn walk with Cara. I win.

I’m having a dream about opening a cupboard door at home to reveal a whole extra wing, including indoor swimming pool and gym, that we never knew existed. “I know,” I’m telling all my friends who have gathered in awe, “I suppose we’re just lucky.” I wake up just as I hit a small barrier of stress when it comes to cleaning out the pool, especially since I can’t find my swimming costume.

“What are you doing?” I hiss at Joel, who is crashing around the bedroom trying to find a T-shirt to put on over his boxers.

“Am hungry.”

“No, you’re just drunk. Go back to bed.”

“I’m starving. Small portions.” He’s got his T-shirt on by now.

“You can’t go downstairs. Here, have a cereal bar.”

“No, need meat. There’s a whole ham in the larder.”

“You’re not going downstairs on your own.”

“I promise I won’t play with knives.”

“I don’t trust you to tidy up after yourself. Bloody hell, Joel,
why can’t you sleep through the night without a midnight snack? You’re worse than a baby. A strangely carnivorous newborn.”

We creep down our staircase, past the utility room and approach the kitchen.

“Shh,” I say. “What’s that noise?”

“It sounds like a ghost.”

“Don’t be daft,” I snap, though it is a sort of moaning sound.

“You go first.”

I open the door to the kitchen. The moaning has turned to voices from beyond the recycled glass barrier between the kitchen and the family room. Joel comes to stand beside me and we watch transfixed, knowing that we should return to our room and never speak of it, but unable to tear ourselves away. We are in darkness, but the figures are lit by Mitzi’s clever combination of up- and downlighters. They shimmer behind the wobbling imperfections of the glass like cars on hot tarmac, giving their actions a hazy, dream-like quality. At first it is difficult to make them out, but my eyes quickly become accustomed, as if I have been forced to wear glasses with the wrong prescription but my vision has now readjusted. The curve of the glass and the large mirror above the fireplace increases the circus freakshow feel of it all. A tall 1930s movie lamp illuminates the scene, appropriately since it is like something out of a porn film. Not that I’d have ever watched something so specialist.

Mitzi is naked but for a pair of Marigolds and an apron that manages to cover up neither her primary nor her secondary sexual characteristics. She is holding a squirt-gun dispenser full of bright yellow liquid. Michael’s top half is dressed in shirt and tie, while he is naked from the waist down. He is speaking quietly, but he has one of those public-school voices, trained in oratory, that carries.

“You’re a dirty bitch,” he says to Mitzi.

“I’m sorry.”

“And you know how we punish dirty bitches, don’t you?”

“We make them learn how to clean.”

At this point Michael climbs onto the glass coffee table as Mitzi lies down beneath it. I worry that it’s not strong enough, but that anxiety pales into insignificance after the next development.

He crouches down. His face strains. He crouches further.

“Oh my god,” Joel whispers.

I don’t believe what I’m seeing. I must still be asleep. I want to look away but I can’t, I have to keep looking.

“Shit!”

“Exactly,” Joel says and stifles a horrified giggle.

“Tell me what you can see, my mucky little bitch,” orders Michael.

“It’s beautiful. It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen,” Mitzi replies as she shimmies out from under the table with what looks like well-practiced ease. She then pulls out a wet wipe and cleans her husband’s arse.

“Sniff it,” orders Michael.

Mitzi murmurs as if handed a swatch of Chanel No. 5.

“Now clean it up.”

We watch transfixed as she does so, just like a dog owner in the park, except she’s giving the occasional French-maid-like wiggle as she does so. She appears complicit. Certainly happier about it than I am when I’m wiping up the kitchen after one of Joel’s baking sessions. It’s the small details, like the conveniently placed diaper sacks used to put it in, that most transfix me.

“Oh my god again,” says Joel as we watch Michael piss a big M across the coffee table. “They really do monogram everything.”

“Now who’s a mucky pup?” says Mitzi. “I’ll need to get a cloth to dry it. It will be soaked. What shall I do with the cloth afterward?”

We don’t get to hear the answer to this question as she begins to walk toward the kitchen part of the room and we realize that we’ll be discovered. We attempt to reverse stealthily up the stairs. Neither of us breathes until we’re safely in our room with the door shut. We bury ourselves under the duvet and finally give in to horrified laughter. Every time we look at each other, we start giggling again.

We stay silent under the duvet for about five minutes, clinging to one another in shared horror and humor.

“Oh my god,” I finally say.

“He has nothing to do with it.”

“Godliness, cleanliness, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Do you think god doesn’t like dirty little bitches?” says Joel, imitating Michael’s well-bred tones. We giggle again, as silently as possible.

“I don’t know what I’m most shocked about,” I say. “That Michael’s a pervert or that Mitzi wasn’t using environmentally sound cleaning products.”

“Somehow neither surprises me much.”

“Michael always seems so straight.”

“Yeah, straight like a politician.”

“Ooh, it is a bit tabloid exposé of an MP, isn’t it? But still, I’m shocked—I really am.”

“I was most taken aback by Mitzi’s Hollywood.”

“I love that you know what a Hollywood is,” I say to Joel, feeling an unexpected warmth toward him. “Do you like it?”

“Of course not. Why would I want my woman to look like a pre-pubescent?”

The image of Mitzi’s hairless genitals and sleek Pilates-toned body comes into my head again. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I suspect that they may have been sad. Or amused. I don’t really know her anymore.

“She once told me that Michael had powerful urges that needed servicing or something. I just hadn’t realized they involved him—oh, god, I can’t even say it. Mind you, she also told me she never ever poos in front of him as she doesn’t want to spoil the mystery.”

“Well, as far as we know she never does shit in front of him. She just has to clear up his.”

“Don’t.”

“I know. My eyes, my eyes.” Joel presses them dramatically.

“We should never have stayed there gawping. We should have left as soon as we saw them. If they’re pervs, we are too—voyeurs.”

“But we’re staying here. We’re their guests.”

“Perhaps that’s why we’ve got our own little wing.”