The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (35 page)

‘Look at this, Lucy,’ she says. ‘His wife thinks that she is getting rent from the flat where I live.’ Sure enough, every month a payment of £2,500 is deposited in her account under the heading, ‘Rent Clerkenwell’. I look around the kitchen. Everything comes in pairs: two sinks, two dishwashers, two kettles. I start making us a cup of mint tea.

‘I’ve just noticed that all these appliances are exactly the same as the ones in my apartment,’ she says, a note of despondency entering her voice again. ‘I’m going to take a look at the bedroom.’

She rushes up the stairs and I trail behind, leaving my cup of tea on the step. On the second floor, Emma finds Guy’s bedroom.

‘I knew it,’ she says. ‘The bed is exactly the same. Can you believe that he chose exactly the same bed that he shares with his wife?’

‘It shows a certain lack of imagination,’ I say. ‘But you always say that bankers play safe and I suppose, once you have found the ideal bed, you stick with it. I think we should go now, before someone wonders why all the lights are on.’

But Emma has disappeared into a walk-in wardrobe. I follow behind. I have always been curious about Yummy Mummy No. 1’s collection of clothes and I am not disappointed. Although it is more the way in which they are organised than the content that impresses me. There is a bank of shoes, each inside a shoebox with a photograph stuck outside. There are rows of colour-coordinated cashmere jumpers. I take a picture with my mobile phone to show Tom.

Emma seems to be looking for something. She takes off her rubber gloves and I am aghast to see her rifling through Yummy Mummy No. 1’s knicker drawer. She pulls out a gorgeous Agent Provocateur bra and matching knickers and stuffs them down the front of her trousers.

‘You can’t steal her underwear,’ I say, grabbing a bra strap. ‘That’s really deviant. Put it back, you’re probably not even the same size.’

‘I want it as evidence,’ she says. ‘Do you know he bought me exactly the same set?’

‘If I let go of this bra strap will you walk out of this house now with me?’ I say.

‘It’s a deal,’ she says. ‘There’s one last thing that I want to do.’ She goes into the en-suite bathroom and comes back holding a Rampant Rabbit.

‘Two of these,’ she says.

‘You mean she’s got more than one?’ I ask.

‘No, he bought me the same model,’ she says.

I’ll never be able to look Yummy Mummy No. 1 in the eye again. Emma switches it on. The noise fills the room. She then goes back into the walk-in wardrobe and leaves the Rabbit with the battery running in the pocket of one of Guy’s suits.

‘This will prove to him that I’ve been here,’ she says, sending him a text to tell him what she has done. Guy’s weekend in the Alps has come to an abrupt end. I resist the urge to feel sorry for him. That is the trouble with being able to see everything from everyone else’s point of view.

‘There goes more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed’

SAM IS LYING
on our bed while Tom and I get ready for the school party tonight. He tells me that his next project is about the Middle Ages and wonders if we can shed any light on the subject. I am happy to be distracted. Much to Tom’s astonishment, I have been ready for almost an hour, trussed up in my wrap-dress with all its cleavage-enhancing and tummy-flattening possibilities. Over the past week, anxiety has become my constant companion and I have discovered that apart from its weight-loss potential, it has also turned me into a clock-watcher. Forget gravitas, under the skin of every organised mother lies a rich seam of neurosis.

I smooth my dress over my stomach. It is as familiar to me as an old friend, and reminds me of old times, of other parties, with different people brought together by something less arbitrary than the coincidence that our children share the same school. It connects me with a time before I was married and in this sense it is a powerful dress, because only I know its danger.

Sam watches me pouring hand cream on to the palm of each hand and then massaging it on to my fingers, taking special care with the backs of my hands. Their gnarled appearance, the incipient brown liver spots and the papery surface around the knuckles remind me of my mother. Both of us have always
washed our own saucepans. My mother never wore gloves because she thought they symbolised the domestic subjugation of women. I never wore them because I could never find them at the right moment. This I think sums up the essential difference between us. Her passion and my passivity. Yet the origin of both words is the same, from the Latin
passus
, to suffer.

Around the edges of my nails, the skin is chewed and the cream stings these raw, red channels. When my hands are so smooth and oily that they shine I switch attention to my forearms and see Sam’s eyes following the motion of my hand as it moves briskly up and down my arm.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask him.

‘I’m trying to hypnotise myself,’ he says, sitting very still. I stroke his hair and for once he indulges me, nestling into my shoulder. When Sam was a baby, I remember lying beside him on the kitchen floor, before he was able to turn over on his own, trying to calculate the value of the tiny space that he occupied and realising that there was no price that could be put on it. When I was pregnant with Joe, it seemed impossible that I would love this new baby as much. I imagined I would have to halve my affections, because surely there was a finite level of love? But that was the wonder of motherhood, the discovery that there were always untapped reserves available. And every day, despite the upheavals and the chaos, there are brief moments when that is all I feel, the unadulterated pure pleasure of love.

I have given Tom an abridged version of what took place with Emma because I knew that if he was acquainted with the whole story he would refuse to come tonight. Of course, once we get there and he recognises Guy, he will realise there has
been a small collision of two worlds, but by then it will be too late. This is probably irresponsible, but perhaps this discovery will deflect attention from the unfortunate incident of the misdirected email, a source of great worry to him. For both he and I are equally nervous about encountering Robert Bass, although for very different reasons. And I think it is enough to be worried about seeing one person. If Tom was enduring the same anxiety that I felt about also seeing Guy and Yummy Mummy No. 1, then it would be unbearable. I absent-mindedly start rubbing the hand cream on my face, forgetting that I am sabotaging my make-up.

‘What do you think the Middle Ages are about?’ I ask Sam, as I reapply foundation.

He crosses his legs, considers the question for a moment, his finger on his lips, and then says thoughtfully, ‘Your new eyebrows, Daddy going bald, being tired all the time, forgetfulness. Oh, and disintegration.’ This is his favourite new word.

‘You’re thinking of being middle-aged,’ I explain to him. ‘The Middle Ages is something quite different.’ I mention wandering minstrels, jousting, bloodletting, and the arrival of olive oil in England. Sam looks suitably relieved.

‘That sounds like much more fun,’ he says, leaving the room to go downstairs, where the babysitter is making hot chocolate for them all.

‘Do you think we are disintegrating?’ I ask Tom. It is not an image that I favour.

‘In the sense that more of us is dying than growing, then I suppose we are,’ he shouts from the bathroom. ‘We are heading towards middle age, even if people no longer like to describe themselves that way.’

‘Well, I don’t really feel middle-aged,’ I say.

‘That’s because you’re having a midlife crisis,’ he says through a half-closed mouth. He must be shaving that area to the right of his chin. ‘Clinging on to the last vestiges of youth.’

‘Define midlife crisis,’ I say, a little disconcerted.

‘Discontent with the status quo, restlessness, questioning decisions that you made years ago, thinking you’ve grown apart from your husband, wondering whether happiness lies with another man, breaking into the house of a complete stranger,’ he says, peering round the door and waving his razor at me to emphasise the latter. ‘But you’ll get over it.’

‘Why haven’t you mentioned this before?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t want to indulge your crisis,’ he says. ‘And I’m worried it might be contagious.’

‘Mark says that we no longer communicate properly,’ I say.

‘That’s because we’re always interrupted by someone, mostly our children, but sometimes your friends, and more recently my work. Lucy, I don’t have time to access everything that is going on in your mind,’ he says. ‘But I have a good grasp of the overall picture and I don’t think that hours of analysis would ameliorate anything. In fact, it might make it worse. Right now, however, I am far more concerned that you remain sober enough to avoid revealing any further details of our sex life to complete strangers.’

‘They’re not complete strangers,’ I say. ‘What’s more, we will know these people for the next six years. In fact, sometimes you find that people you think you don’t know are more familiar than the people you thought you did know. If you know what I mean.’

‘I’m not sure that I do,’ he says, sighing. You will soon, I think to myself.

‘Also, we didn’t break into Guy’s house, we had the keys,’ I insist.

‘That’s like saying the man who stole the car because you dropped the key on the doorstep was borrowing it,’ he counters.

‘You promised that you would never mention that again,’ I say.

‘I’m still reeling from the fact that you went along with Emma’s plan,’ he says. ‘And that when you came home, you woke me up to show me a picture on your mobile phone of walk-in wardrobe as though it was the most notable part of the whole exercise.’

‘Well, in a way it was,’ I say.

Less than an hour later, we are standing on the doorstep of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s house. It is now light enough in the evening to see that the steps are covered in small mosaics in white, blue and brown. There is a wisteria growing up the side that hasn’t yet come into flower. The front garden has been planted with grasses, euphorbias and enormous wine-coloured phormium. It looks beguilingly careless but I know it was the product of meticulous planning, because it was one of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s Grand Projects. The others being the Double Height Glass Extension and the Flat to Rent, which is where Emma now lives.

Someone I don’t recognise answers the door. She must be the Filipina housekeeper, I think, trying to remember the exact dimensions of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s staff. I recall mention of a clutch of East European au pairs, a man and woman, ‘so that they don’t stray,’ and one English nanny. Then, for a long time, there was a night nanny, who was training the baby to sleep through the night using Ayuverdic techniques. And the Slovakian personal trainer. That’s globalisation for you.

We are directed to the sitting room where glasses of wine are being handed out. I know before I see the bottle that it is Puligny Montrachet. Emma is right. Guy doesn’t have much imagination.

I listen to a conversation behind me.

‘We might IPO the MBO we did last year and John is going to make a fortune on his LTIP,’ says one man in a suit to another. Tom raises an eyebrow at me. Could be a long evening, the look says.

Yummy Mummy No. 1 glides across the room. She looks even thinner than she did before half-term, wispy and papery. Even though it is a school party, she clearly sees her role as that of hostess. She is wearing skinny white jeans with thick cork wedge heels and a top from somewhere ethnic via Selfridges. She looks fantastic.

What a waste of all those hours invested in the gym and that careful application to her wardrobe. It’s like revising for exams that get cancelled at the last minute. If you can do all that and still your husband strays, then there doesn’t seem much point in embarking on those time-consuming, age-defying techniques in the first place. Better to have room for improvement than attain perfection. Looking at those long legs that Emma admired in the photo last week, encased in jeans cut so tight that they taper at the knee and then expand slightly to cocoon her calf, I decide that whatever fashion dictates, I will hang on to my extra pounds and wear boot-cut jeans for the rest of my life.

I look round the room at the other parents. The other yummy mummies are dressed in variations of the same theme and, not for the first time, I wonder how they know what each other will be wearing and what is the point in going to all this
effort if everyone ends up looking the same anyway. But maybe that is the point. It’s a tribal thing. Is knowing exactly which brand of jeans from LA is in the ascent an art or a science, I wonder? For Yummy Mummy No. 1 it has definitely been raised to an art form.

The corporate mums have suits purloined from work wardrobes that look a little formal with their straight lines and sober colours. Then there are the mothers like me, the slummy mummies, the muddlers and befuddlers, the ones who don’t know what to do when a spare minute comes their way because it is so rare, wearing old dresses that have stretched with us over the years.

‘Lucy, how fantastic to see you,’ she says, leaning in to kiss me on both cheeks. The contact is unanticipated and we end up clumsily kissing on the lips. ‘And you must be Tom,’ she says, as though this is the first time that he has registered on her radar, although she must have seen him at school before.

I note that she is sporting that inverted Panda look favoured by spring skiers. White eyes set amidst a deep brown tan.

‘Did you have a good half-term?’ I ask her.

‘Les Arcs, with friends,’ she says. ‘Fantastic snow. How about you?’

‘Les Mendips,’ I say in a French accent. ‘With my parents. There was a fresh cover over Easter. Very unseasonal.’ Tom steps aside to look at me, baffled by the direction of this conversation, and shrugs his shoulders.

‘I haven’t heard of that resort. Is it in Bulgaria?’ she asks.

‘It’s a bit further west,’ I say vaguely.

‘Mark Warner? Powder Byrne? Off-piste? Tricky runs?’ she asks, using verbal shorthand to indicate the imminent closure
of our discussion on the merits of ski resorts. Sure enough, I see a herd of yummy mummies with identical tans waving at her from the other side of the room.