The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (11 page)

Then, when Sam was born, medical expertise became the new priority. It became crucial to know exactly how to use a glass to distinguish between viral and meningococcal rashes; it was useful to know that digital thermometers gave readouts that were always slightly too high; and it was humbling to discover that the anti-inflammatory powers of Savoy cabbages and frozen peas made them much more than vegetables. Now the specialist subjects have widened further. Schools top the list. The depth of knowledge required to dominate that particular area is worthy of a PhD.

I look up and see Tom running towards me, waving his arms.

‘It’s not there,’ he shouts.

‘God, it must have been stolen again,’ I say. At least this time I know that I haven’t lost the spare key.

‘Are you sure that you left it at school? I’m going to go inside and ask Sam if he remembers,’ he says, immediately taking charge of the situation and running towards the house again. Within minutes he is running out again. There is something comical about all his rushing around, as though he is living life in fastforward, while I meander along on play and rewind, and I start to giggle.

‘I don’t know why you find this funny, we’re three-quarters of an hour behind schedule,’ he shouts, this time in anger, because his face is so close to mine that there is no reason to raise his voice. ‘Sam says that you left it outside Starbucks.’ But the angrier he gets, the more I giggle.

‘It’s strange because as I was running back I saw a blue Peugeot on the corner of that street but of course I didn’t
realise you had parked it somewhere completely different.’

So we set off running together. Past the same trees and houses that I walk by every day on my way to school, waving to the nice man with the black Labrador walking in the opposite direction, noting that one of the street lamps is broken, past the new Tesco Metro, hurdling the legs of the homeless man who always sits outside. Although our pace is evenly matched and we run in time – and to the people we pass on the pavement, there must be a satisfying physical symmetry in our movements – we could not really be further apart. We do however find the car.

‘Lucky this happened tonight and not on a school morning,’ I say.

‘It’s nothing to do with luck, Lucy, and everything to do with poor planning,’ says Tom.

I would like to continue the conversation we were having earlier, but I know that all my energies must now be invested in lifting the mood that has settled over the evening.

Tom drives silently, gripping the steering wheel in quiet fury, silence being the greatest punishment of them all. I am grateful that there is no moon tonight. I am grateful that we are going on ill-lit back roads through the underbelly of north London. Most of all, I am grateful for the fact that Tom is not in the passenger seat. All because the car is still in a state of unmade bed and I am aware that the seat and I are as one because the chocolate buttons down the back are slowly melting and sticking to my coat, and that when I move, even with the gentlest movement, old crisp packets and bits of paper from school crackle underneath. I pick out a couple of apple cores from under the handbrake when he turns right on to Marylebone Road and hide them in my handbag.

The traffic is at a standstill. So slow that no one even bothers to use their horn. So slow that some people have switched off their engine and are standing around the three-lane highway, discussing what might have happened. There is no way forward and no way back. And neither of us wants to be the first to break the silence.

I am reminded of a journey home the previous summer from my brother’s fortieth birthday party. I was driving on this same road and Tom had fallen asleep in the passenger seat minutes after we’d left Mark’s house in west London. There was an inexplicable midnight traffic jam just off the Westway, and I was left alone to roam around conversations I had had with various people at the party.

Some way into the evening, Emma said that she wanted to tell me something and led me by the arm to a quiet corner in the corridor by the front door. I baulked at her timing, because I was in the middle of a conversation with my brother about why the death of my father-in-law a couple of years earlier might have sparked Tom’s mother’s obsession with clearing out her house.

‘It is probably a way of letting go,’ Mark said. ‘Every time she gives something away, she reviews all the memories that surround that object and then moves on. Either that or she is preparing for her own death.’

‘Well, that leaves a lot of scope,’ I said.

Then Emma came over. There had been some unfinished business between her and my brother years ago, I didn’t want to know the details, and there was a brief but awkward exchange before she led me away.

‘I’ve met this man,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone, because he’s married.’

When Tom and I moved in together around a year after we first met, one of his first observations about the inner workings of my life was the magnitude of confidences that I inspired. Some men might have found this irritating, since it often involved long phone calls at inconvenient moments and bottles of wine over the kitchen table late at night. But Tom said that it was much more interesting than the kind of conversations he had with his friends, and wondered how the surfaces of peoples’ lives belied what lay underneath. Coming from a family in which emotional honesty held no currency and was largely viewed with suspicion, this was a new world to him.

Emma explained how she had met this man at a dinner between executives from her news organisation and a handpicked group of senior bankers. She told the story slowly and precisely, as if each detail was significant. It was quite different from the way she usually spoke about relationships, trying to downplay their importance by deflecting any serious questions with humour, and viewing any attempts at emotional engagement with distrust.

‘I normally don’t have any interest in these types. They don’t actually have much to talk about beyond business. They work so hard there’s no space for anything else in their life, not even their family. He sat next to me, and we hardly spoke during the meal. It was as though we both knew it wasn’t a good idea. At least that’s what he said to me later. There was definitely a connection, not just a lust thing, because at that stage I hadn’t really examined him closely. It was more a feeling of being drawn to someone.

‘When they brought round the coffee, my mobile phone rang, so I bent down to get it from my handbag. At the same time he knocked a spoon off the table on to the floor with his
left hand, and as he tried to pick it up his finger touched my own, in fact, it was less than a touch, more the sensation of something brushing past, but I felt something inside me stir and so did he. We both knew as soon as we looked at each other. It was as quick and simple as that. Like an electrical current.’

‘That sounds amazing. Has he done this before?’

She looked at me askance, because people always like to consider their own situation unique, so I bravely continued.

‘Tom has a theory,’ I told her, ‘that affairs happen not because people find each other attractive, because that happens all the time, but because people allow themselves to get into situations where they can thrive. And after you’ve done it once, it can become a habit that’s difficult to break.’

‘Well, he certainly created the situation, because on Monday morning he phoned me and asked me to go out for lunch. He didn’t even pretend that we were going to talk about anything related to work. We didn’t get beyond the first course, there was too much tension, and so we went to a hotel in Bloomsbury. In the lift on the way up, we stood apart. I don’t think we even talked. He locked the bedroom door behind us, and that was the first time we had touched since we met at the dinner.’

‘How did you know about the hotel?’ I asked.

‘Lucy, you always have such an offbeat line of questioning,’ Emma said. ‘But to sate your curiosity, I had been there before. He hadn’t, and judging by his paranoia about his wife finding out, I really think this is the first time he has played away. You can tell men who make a habit of it. Anyway it was amazing, all-consuming. We’ve met every day since then. And we’ve talked a lot more.’

As we sit in traffic I think about the prospect of a trip alone to a pub with Sexy Domesticated Dad looming on Monday evening and I realise that, actually, I don’t really want to go. Although my more recent musings over Sexy Domesticated Dad have evolved into the kind of daydreams that you don’t share with friends, involving, as they do, tussles in alleyways in Soho, where having sex in the street is more common than in the suburbs, they remain a fantasy. I decide I am dealing with my inner toddler, having a tantrum over something I can’t have and then rejecting it out of hand when it is offered to me on a plate. It dawns on me half-heartedly that having a fantasy does not necessarily mean that you want it to become a reality. I know I am probably ahead of myself at this point, because there is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t be able to go out for a drink with one of the parents from school without it being any more than a simple social engagement. A drink and perhaps more banter about his book, and how exactly he is going to help me in my imminent role as class rep.

Part of my petulance is because as far as Sexy Domesticated Dad is concerned, it was I who made the first move in sending the enigmatic text, And then what? It is strange how the juxtaposition of three innocuous words can amount to something approximating a proposition. As the facts stand, he will be looking to me to manage the situation, since I was the one who created it.

There is no way of getting out of it without making it look as though I am turning down the invitation because of doubts over the spirit in which it is intended. I am pretty certain that his suggestion amounts to no more than a friendly gesture. And therein lies the rub. I realise with sudden clarity that I don’t really want to become friends with Sexy Domesticated Dad,
because to do that will detract from the possibility of the fantasy.

Apart from old male friends, it is years since I have done anything on my own with a relative stranger. In fact, apart from sleeping, I have probably spent no more than four hours alone at any given stretch since I gave up work. Really, I shouldn’t be allowed out on my own at all. With Fred starting nursery and the eldest two at school most of the day, it is becoming apparent that I need to rejoin the adult world and relearn basic social codes.

‘By the way, my mother has said she will babysit for you on Monday night so that you can go to your school meeting. She’s going to come and spend the day with you and stay the night,’ says Tom, shattering the silence. The deadlock is broken.

‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks for sorting it out.’

‘You aren’t planning to be out too late, are you? You know how she worries that she might fall asleep and then not hear the children if they wake up.’

‘No, I might go for a drink with some of the mothers afterwards. Just to be friendly,’ I say. ‘Right now, I think I should call Cathy and warn her we’re going to be late.’

‘Good idea,’ he says.

Over the years, I have become an expert in domestic shorthand. This involves swift and exquisite analysis of situations where it is incumbent to be economical with the truth to protect harmony and deflect arguments. So I do not consider my response to be a lie, but more a partial truth. A grey area.

‘I still can’t really understand why you want to do this class rep thing, Lucy. I never saw you as the committee type, and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think your great strength is organisation,’ he says, tapping the steering wheel with his fingertips.

‘What do you think are my great strengths, then?’ I say.

‘I think you are a wonderful mum, maybe a little short-tempered sometimes, but always there for your children. And on those rare occasions when we are both awake at the same time and there are no children in our bed, I still really like having sex with you,’ he says, looking straight at me. ‘And you’re good at drawing.’ I’d forgotten that one.

Then he decides to put on a CD. I feel the blood coursing through my veins, because I know the CDs are all muddled up. He picks up an album by the Strokes and finds
Best of the Mr Men
inside.

‘I’m not going to say a thing,’ he says.

‘When I take a CD out to put another one in, I generally put the one I have taken out in the case belonging to the one that I have just put in,’ I explain in an attempt to derail a potential crisis.

‘Why don’t you put it in the right one?’ he says.

‘Well, because that one has got the one that I took out to put the new one in,’ I say.

He looks confused.

‘ “Fish in a tree, how can it be”,’ he mutters, quoting Fred’s favourite line from Dr Seuss.

‘Coldplay will be in the
Goblet of Fire
case, because that is what it replaced,’ I say. And I am right.

‘So where is the
Goblet of Fire
?’ he asks.

‘In the
Best of Bob Dylan
,’ I say confidently.

‘And where is the
Best of Bob Dylan
?’ he says. ‘Actually, I don’t want to know. It’s a bit like playing “I packed my bag”.’

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘There is a logical system. It just requires a little reverse psychology. Tell me what you’re looking for and I will be able to find it.’

‘David Gray,
White Ladder
,’ he says. I think for a moment.

‘That will be in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
.’ And it is.

This could have been much worse. He is lining up cases on the dashboard and putting piles of CDs on his knee. But it is good displacement activity when stuck in a small space, unable to go out for dinner because of a traffic jam on a Friday night. I look at the clock. It is almost twenty to ten. We have been here for three-quarters of an hour. And, actually, I think we are behaving pretty impeccably.

Tom peers out the front windscreen as the driver of the car in front switches on his engine. Then other people start to wander back to their vehicles. As mysteriously as it knitted together, the complex web of cars packed bumper to bumper as far as the eye can see unravels and everyone slowly drives away back to the drama of their own existence.