The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (27 page)

My phone beeps again. He eyes it with renewed suspicion but this time it is a message from Emma, inviting Tom and me to dinner with her and Guy at her new home. She says that Guy finally agreed today because he felt so guilty about not being able to spend any time with her over Christmas.

‘It’s Emma,’ I say. ‘She wants us to meet her boyfriend.’ Mark looks interested.

‘A serious relationship?’ he asks dubiously. ‘I thought Emma’s speciality was keeping all emotions at arm’s length.’

‘They’ve moved in together,’ I say defensively.

‘But then why haven’t you met him before?’ he asks. Then he smiles knowingly. ‘He’s married, isn’t he? That was always going to be her fate, to find someone she couldn’t possibly have.’

‘I think he’s quite keen on her, actually,’ I say, then change tack, because Emma and my brother are an awkward subject. ‘Mum thinks I should go back to work.’

‘That’s no panacea for man’s condition,’ he says. ‘What good would it do your family if you go off to Iraq to chase a story?’

‘Or if I was stuck in London, jealously eyeing up my colleagues’ ability to go abroad at the drop of a hat. But perhaps I would be more involved with the bigger picture.’

‘Human existence is the sum of our relationships. We all want to connect with people,’ he says. ‘And we never stop fancying people. Just consider Petra. She’s going to be having more sex than all of us, and she’s in her sixties, or “sexties”, as we say in the age of Viagra.’

‘Just don’t go there,’ I plead.

The door opens. Tom peers tentatively round the door.

‘It’s a shame to come all this way and then spend all your time in the larder,’ he says. ‘I’m looking for a couple of chickens. We’ve decided to abort the turkey and eat it tomorrow.’ I pick up the mobile phone from the windowsill and put it deep in my back pocket, making a mental note to delete those messages as soon as I have a moment.

Later that night, I lie in bed beside Tom, filled with good intentions to tell him what I said to Mark earlier in the day. We sit there reading books that we gave each other for Christmas. For him: Alain de Botton on architecture. For her: a biography
of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes. And guess what. It turns out that Mrs Beeton was as much of a domestic fraud as I am. I wish I had given this to Petra.

It is so cold that I have done up the top button of my tartan pyjamas. We are both dressed in thick fleeces and Tom is wearing hand-knitted socks made by his mother. He has cleverly raised the back legs of the bed on piles of books purloined from my bookshelf. For the first time we are looking down rather than up at our feet.

The children are in their bedroom, asleep in their nest of duvets in the middle of their room, favourite presents scattered around them. Joe is hugging his finger-printing kit. I turn to Tom and take a deep breath, but he puts up a hand to indicate that he wants to say something first. He carefully marks his place with a bookmark and then puts it in the middle of the bedside table, fiddling around until he is sure that it is exactly in the centre. I rest mine face down on my knees, making him wince.

‘You’ll break the spine,’ he says gently, taking Mrs Beeton from me and carefully placing the flap inside the cover to mark the end of the second chapter.

‘I know what you are going to say,’ he says. ‘And I blame myself. I have been totally preoccupied by my library. Obsessed even. I forget that looking after the children is even harder work because you aren’t permitted the luxury of focusing on one subject. I also know that my compulsion for tidiness and order is irritating, but when I am around my mother I know that there is no hope that I will be able to change. It is my genetic destiny. Your brother says that there is no distinction between the personality of my buildings and the inside of my mind. Mind you, it would have been worse to be married to John Pawson.’

‘But you have always been the same. Even during your loft-conversion period, you were always absorbed by what you were doing. You are the same man that I married, the problem must lie with me,’ I say.

‘We just need more time on our own together,’ he says. ‘It’s difficult not to be possessed by this library. It is the most prestigious project that I have been involved with, and it’s taken over my life. I have been resentful of anything that has distracted me from it.’

Then I realise that he doesn’t really know anything. Tom thinks that it is all about him, a noble sentiment in the sense that he is not trying to shirk responsibility for the situation. Nor is he trying to blame me. But he isn’t looking outside of himself for answers and I find myself resenting this. He is just skimming the surface, giving the problem a light sand, when I need someone to plane back my emotions, to peel back every layer until the core is exposed.

Before I have a chance to explain that he is wrong, that I have lost my equilibrium, that I can see where I have come from but can’t see where I’m going, and that I need him to help me recover my balance, he reaches under his pillow, pulls out a present and hands it to me, smiling. I adopt what I hope is an expression of delighted surprise and open it up, expecting to see the necklace. Instead, there is a pair of Spanx pants. I unfold them. They are the colour and texture of a sausage skin and probably perform a similar function. There is a large hole around the crotch for peeing.

‘I got them in Milan,’ he says proudly. ‘The woman in the shop said even Gwyneth Paltrow wears them. They iron out every lump and bump.’

I groan loudly and sink under the duvet.

‘I got you something else too,’ he says, peering underneath to hand me a familiar cream box. ‘I was looking for the right moment to give it to you. I had it made while I was in Milan.’

I open the box and then quickly hug him, because it is a strain maintaining the pretence that I have never seen the necklace before. We are so thickly layered that we grasp on to each other, holding only layers of fleece between our fingers. The force of this movement causes the bed to fall off its books and we hit the floor with a loud bump. It would be good to have sex. But sometimes it is just too cold. Tomorrow we will eat turkey. Tomorrow I will wear my new necklace. Tomorrow I will tell Tom about Robert Bass.

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’

BACK IN LONDON
, New Year comes and goes. Drifting by. I find that there is never much to cling to at this time of year and make a few resolutions to give some structure to the uncertainty that stretches before me. I can never understand why people want to celebrate the beginning of another year. How can they be so sure that what lies ahead will be better than what has passed? Beyond the age of thirty, it takes some bravado to assume that the future holds more promise than the past. Surely there is more that can go wrong than can go right? By the end of the year, there will be more global warming. More chance of a bird flu pandemic. More dead in Iraq. More chance that I will have an affair with Robert Bass, thus irrevocably harming my marriage and giving my children a lifetime of blame and therapists’ bills to heap on me.

In order to combat all this, I have decided that this must be the year in which I finally inspire gravitas. This will help me overcome the feelings that possess me and impose order upon my life. By the end of the year, credit card debt, mould in the car, and anything else that speaks of domestic sluttery will be a distant memory.

When I woke at five o’clock this morning, despite all my good intentions, I felt heady with the anticipation of seeing Robert Bass again, after the three-week hiatus over the
Christmas holidays. I ran through what I might wear on the school run, a catwalk involving jeans with tops in various shades, knowing that I would inevitably end up dressed in the same outfit that I had on yesterday, because a wardrobe crisis is an impossible luxury on a school morning.

I indulged in a couple of my favourite fantasies, involving mostly clothed fumbles against walls on dark streets somewhere close to Greek Street, promising that this would be the last time I allowed my mind to wander so far, and justifying my intemperance with the thought that it will soon be too light in the evening for anything like this to actually happen. In the interests of gravitas, I also forced myself to think up neutral subjects for conversation, should the need arise, starting with the disappearance of Greenland and ending with the relative benefits of Polish au pairs over other nationalities. Not that we have room for an au pair, but it is a good subject to master.

Then when Tom woke up, he offered to take the children to school. I fought hard to hide my disappointment.

‘I thought you would be really pleased,’ he said.

‘That’s great, a real help,’ I said unconvincingly.

‘Honestly, sometimes women are incomprehensible,’ he said, pulling himself out of bed, eyeing the piles of clothes on the floor suspiciously. ‘Dressing up for the school run?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Are you turning into a yummy mummy? Or is there someone you’re trying to impress?’

‘I am becoming a mother with gravitas,’ I said.

‘Please don’t go neurotic on me,’ he pleaded.

I still have not confessed to Tom about my infatuation, although I have told Mark that I have, which makes me feel as though I have almost done it. I don’t like to think I am lying to
my brother, more that the truth hasn’t yet caught up with itself, as though he is living in a different time zone, some hours ahead of my own. After all, he never comes to me with a problem unless he has harvested all of its pleasures first. I resolve to tell Tom later this week.

I wonder whether Alpha Mum would allow herself to indulge in such wild abandon. She would undoubtedly have the self-discipline to contain the fantasy, to shut it firmly in a small box in one of those tidy kitchen drawers, alongside the one marked ‘cards for all occasions’. It is easy to imagine some women having sex with lots of people. Take Yummy Mummy No. 1, for example. Even though I have never met her husband, I can imagine her entwined with her personal trainer, meeting the challenge of sexual positions that require the athleticism of a twenty-two-year-old with dedicated enthusiasm. I can even imagine her entwined with her nanny or, for that matter, with Tom. Alpha Mum is a more elusive case. An obsession with germs, cleanliness and orderliness being less earthy preoccupations.

I rein myself in to remind myself of my New Year’s resolutions: 1) to become one of those mothers who gets asked advice on matters educational (specialist subject schools in north London), 2) to never forget details like picking my children up from school and 3) to regularly depilate with an emphasis on eyebrow plucking and dyeing.

Tom welcomed the first two resolutions when I unveiled my strategy last night but was less sure about the latter.

‘I don’t see how that will make a difference,’ he said. I presented him with a picture of Fiona Bruce torn from a magazine to show him.

‘It’s all in the eyebrows,’ I told him. ‘If I looked like that then
people would take me really seriously. And I would take myself more seriously.’

He looked doubtful. I kept quiet about resolution number 4: to stop having inappropriate thoughts about Robert Bass (already broken) and to avoid ever being alone with him.

I decide that my initial focus must be on the third resolution, and to that end buy a rudimentary eyebrow dyeing kit from a chemist after I drop Fred at his nursery.

‘Is there anything that can go wrong?’ I question the girl behind the counter at the chemist.

‘Not if you follow the instructions,’ she says lazily, closing her magazine to look up at me.
My mother slept with my boyfriend
,
I discovered my brother was my father
,
My dad ran off with my sister
, read the headlines on the cover. Straightforward extramarital affairs are so last century.

‘Do you enjoy reading about that kind of thing?’ I ask her with curiosity.

‘I just skim it,’ she says, fiddling with a belly-button ring. Her stomach is not an obvious asset, and I wonder why she has chosen to highlight its burgeoning power in this way. ‘Unless it’s really unusual.’

I stop myself from asking her to define ‘really unusual.’

‘Have you ever read anything about people coming to harm from botched home eyebrow dyeing kits?’ I ask.

‘Never,’ she says emphatically.

So when Fred falls asleep in the pushchair on the way home from nursery after lunch and I have an hour to spare before I set out to pick up the other two boys from school, I decide to forge ahead with the eyebrow experiment. I race upstairs to get a mirror from the bathroom. It is the one Tom uses for shaving that magnifies everything. I stare at my face, like someone who
has just had cataracts removed and is seeing herself clearly for the first time in years.

Every flaw is highlighted. The crow’s feet around my eyes have deepened to become channels that I imagine will one day be capable of directing tears down the side of my face. New trenches have opened, some in curious criss-cross fashion with vertical drops. I experiment with a few grimaces to work out exactly what facial expression might have caused these. I finally happen upon an unlikely combination that involves my mouth being wide open and my eyes being scrunched up until they are no more than small slits. Surely I cannot be unconsciously making this expression on a regular basis, unless I am doing it in my sleep.

My nose looks sharper and more pointed. Forever growing, I think, trying to envisage what it might look like in twenty years’ time. The skin on my neck looks slightly ruched. Still some way until I turn into a lizard. Or my mother. On my chin I have a small spot. By what curse do women suddenly develop adolescent spots in their thirties, I wonder? What potion of hormones is responsible for this betrayal? Still, a fine pair of eyebrows will compensate for all this and distract attention away from my flaws like a beautiful fireplace in a room with peeling paint. Then I discover that I have lost the instructions.

Not to be thwarted, I decide to press on. It all seems very straightforward. Women around the world do this kind of thing every day. I mix the dye and hydrogen peroxide with the satisfaction of someone doing a GCSE chemistry experiment. This simple motion makes me feel as though I am already regaining control of my life. I brush the dye on my eyebrows and wait for cosmetic alchemy to take place. When nothing happens after five minutes, I decide to repaint both eyebrows.