The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (7 page)

I pull on Joe’s Spider-Man hat and shrink below the level of the dashboard to drive within two hundred metres of school. Then we all sit there, quietly waiting for a break in the cloud of parents wafting along the pavement.

I note Alpha Mum, striding down the road in a pair of heavy walking boots and wearing a rucksack. She lives miles away. She can’t have walked here, but judging by the zealous look on her face she has. Just as she is level with the car, Fred gets up and starts banging on the window. ‘Help, help,’ he cries.

I try to pull him away, but he is rubbing the steamed-up window with his tiny hand. A nose appears, pressed against the glass, one of those turned-up, slightly superior noses that never has freckles because it is always protected from the sun with wide-brimmed hats and factor forty. Then a pair of eyes, wide open and blinking, tries to focus on the tiny face inside. The overall impression is ghoulish and Fred starts to cry louder. It is Alpha Mum. ‘Someone has left a child locked alone in this vehicle,’ she shouts loudly down the street. Clearly she is a woman who enjoys taking charge in an emergency. ‘I’m going to inform the school. Will you stay here and try and comfort it?’

I hear Alpha Mum’s walking boots stomping along the pavement out of earshot and shut my eyes, practising deep-breathing techniques that I hope will keep the car steamed up. Then I hear another voice on the side of the car facing into the road. ‘Look at that rubbish on the front seat, there’s apple cores, melted chocolate buttons, clothes, plastic plates, it’s unbelievable. And what are all those weird paintings on the dashboard?’ It is Yummy Mummy No. 1. Another voice, male and under different circumstances now generally welcome, joins the conversation.

‘I recognise some of these things. Isn’t this Lucy’s car?’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad.

Alpha Mum rejoins the group with the headmistress. ‘Mrs Sweeney, are you in there?’ I open the car door and step out with a flourish. ‘We were practising a Tracey Emin installation for the “Artists of the World” project. It’s called “An Unmade Car”,’ I say excitedly. The headmistress claps her hands in joy. ‘How clever of you. We must arrange for some photos, so that the whole school can see it. Well done, Mrs Sweeney. That is so imaginative.’

She takes the two eldest children by the hand and leads them towards the school. Then Sam comes running back. ‘Mum, remind me what I mustn’t say,’ he whispers.

‘Don’t tell the teacher that I did three of your paintings and don’t tell anyone that the car always looks like that. I’m not asking you to lie, I’m asking you to be economical with the truth.’

‘Is this a grey situation?’ he asks.

‘It is.’

As I stand on the pavement, holding on to the hood of Fred’s coat, I shut my eyes briefly and hope for a moment of reprieve. It is not even nine o’clock. When I open them, Fred has his trousers down round his ankles and is peeing against the wheel. ‘My wheel,’ he says proudly and I bundle him back into the Peugeot.

I look up to see Sexy Domesticated Dad sitting on his bicycle beside the car. He is leaning back, legs splayed, and slightly bent at the knees, to stabilise him on the pavement. His helmet hangs from his broken arm. He is wearing a pair of jeans and looks satisfactorily dishevelled and wild, a white T-shirt hanging below a slightly too-small green straight-cut
jacket. I would like to say that he is unconscious of the overall effect, but I think there is a hint of vanity there, because he always is careful to remove his cycling helmet and run his fingers through his hair before he goes into school.

I notice the suggestion of a paunch where the coat doesn’t do up and the T-shirt wrinkles over his stomach.

‘It’s my wife’s,’ he says apologetically when he sees me scrutinising him, and smoothes down the jacket over the ripples. But despite all this, and despite his north London obsessions with borlotti beans and cycling as a replacement for religion, there is something inescapably raw and dirty about him.

‘You’re good at thinking on your feet,’ he says, getting off his bike by lifting his right leg over the bar at the front. I’m unsure whether it is a compliment or a challenge, and I know that I should go home right now, because even that small comment will resonate much longer than it should until, by endless replay, it is invested with meaning that he never intended. And then I realise that my mother-in-law has it slightly wrong. The imagination involved in loving your husband is less than the imagination involved in elaborating an unreciprocated fantasy. Attempting to end rather than begin a conversation, I reply, ‘Years of practice, Robert,’ in what I hope is a dry, laconic tone.

It is one of those early-autumn mornings when it is cold enough to see your breath, and he is now so close that when I speak, our breath becomes entangled. I am not wearing any make-up and I feel my cheeks go red in the chill.

‘I’m sorry I had to rush off yesterday,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘I’m having a bit of a work crisis. Can’t seem to find the right structure for this book and the Americans want to launch it before the Sundance Film Festival next year.’

It could sound as though he is showing off, but he isn’t. He is trying to engage.

‘At the moment I’m writing about Zapata Westerns,’ he says. ‘Those are the ones that were set during the Mexican Revolution like
A Fistful of Dynamite
, but although they were inspired by Mexican history there wasn’t much other Latin American involvement . . .’

I nod knowingly.

But I am exploiting this unusual verbosity to make a thorough appraisal of his right forearm, which has suddenly been freed from his wife’s jacket, as he uses his arm to emphasise a point.

To my mind, there is no other part of a man’s body that so perfectly summons up the promise of what lies within than the forearm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you see a man’s forearm, you can define pretty accurately what the rest of his body will look like and he will have no idea of how much can be extrapolated from even the briefest glance. You can gauge tone, texture, length of limbs, how much time he spends in the gym, whether he has been abroad recently. Sexy Domesticated Dad has a near-perfect forearm, medium range, strong without being chunky, enough hair to seem manly, but light enough and thin enough to pretty much guarantee no back hair. I smile at him.

‘What do you think?’ he says.

‘Promising,’ I say emphatically. ‘I love Sergio Leone.’

‘Good,’ he says, pushing the sleeve of his jacket back down, ‘except that is not what I was asking. I changed tack when I could see your eyes glazing over. Doesn’t matter. It happens all the time, unless I start talking about Benicio Del Toro, then women generally pay attention. I was asking whether you are
going to put yourself up as class rep. I’ll help you, but I can’t run it myself because of deadlines. I want to do my bit to help the school.’ He pauses. ‘You look surprised.’

I couldn’t be more astonished if he had asked me to lick his forearm.

‘Well, of course I’m considering it, my youngest one has just started nursery and it would be a good time to do something like that. But I don’t want to look too pushy.’ It sounds so credible I almost believe myself.

‘I’ll vote for you,’ he says good-naturedly. ‘So will Isobel. She was saying that it would be really entertaining if you won.’

‘Oh, did she?’ I say, entirely mistrustful of Yummy Mummy No. 1’s motives.

‘I told my wife what happened yesterday. You know, the, er, imbroglio with the underwear. She thought it was very funny. Simpatico. So did I.’

I wonder in what context it was discussed, what adjectives he used, whether he told her that we were sitting so close together I could feel the heat from his thigh. After he had cooked dinner, or when they were in bed? What were they wearing in bed?

‘Pyjamas,’ he says. ‘I told her about the pyjamas too.’ I know that I should feel gratified that he has shared this with his wife, because it hints at the promise of friendship. I imagine cosy foursomes sharing dinner, family picnics on Hampstead Heath, even holidays abroad. But I realise that I don’t want anyone extraneous intruding on my fantasy because they could dilute its escapist potential.

In the evening I lie at one end of the sofa, watching Tom at the other end reading last week’s copy of the
Architects’ Journal
.
After almost a year’s delay, building work is finally to begin on his library in Milan, and his mood is buoyant. Our feet are touching. The witching hour is over. The children are in bed and a bottle of wine has been consumed in lieu of dinner.

He will be travelling to Milan in the next couple of weeks. He tells me this apologetically, at pains to demonstrate awareness of the burden this will place on me. But I know he is excited because tonight there have been no searches in the fridge for food that has exceeded its sell-by date. No forensic examination of bank statements, looking for evidence of parking fines and other misdemeanours. No questions about new scratches on the side of the car.

‘I’ll leave an alarm clock, so that you aren’t late in the morning. I’ll put one hundred pounds in cash in the chest of drawers, in case you lose your credit card. I’ll babysit for you when I come back. I’ll buy my own socks at the airport.’

The less I say, the more extravagant his offers, so I keep quiet.

‘We won’t ever go camping again. Next time, we’ll rent a house. We’ll never have such an awful holiday again. And we might even be able to afford to have a cleaning lady twice a week.’

I make all sorts of rash promises in return. ‘I won’t lie about little things. I’ll put out the school uniforms the night before. I’ll look in the fridge before I go shopping.’

Then the phone starts to ring. After swift negotiations Tom answers on the fifth ring, as a quid pro quo for my opening another bottle of wine.

‘It’s for you,’ he says. ‘One of the dads from school.’ He raises an eyebrow and holds the phone just out of reach.

‘Tell him I’m busy,’ I whisper, but Tom pushes the phone into my hand.

‘Hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘Are you in the middle of eating?’

I slap my cheeks in a desperate attempt to sober up. ‘No, no, we’ve just finished dinner actually,’ I slur. ‘Some vegetable stew my husband rustled up. Delicious.’

Tom looks at me in astonishment. ‘Why are you lying? Tell him you put the wrong month on the Ocado order and there’s only an onion and a jar of marmalade in the fridge,’ he mutters bemusedly, starting to lurch towards me with lust in his eye. ‘I love it when you try to dissimulate, you are so bad at it.’

Not now, not now, I think, pondering the complex dilemma unravelling before me: to end the sexual fast of the past two months or to risk alienating Sexy Domesticated Dad at the outset of our friendship. I start to push Tom away with my foot.

‘The thing is,’ Sexy Domesticated Dad continues obliviously, ‘I put your name forward to be class rep.’ All thoughts of sex with either man fade rapidly. ‘But a competitor has already emerged, and she is phoning around other parents to warn them off you. Sort of a smear campaign.’ I struggle to digest this information. ‘In essence, she is saying that you don’t have any experience of running anything and that your exotic domestic habits are no recommendation.’

‘It’s Yummy Mummy No. 1, isn’t it? I knew she was untrustworthy,’ I say in full slur. ‘What does she know about my domestic habits?’

Tom is taking off his shirt and pointing to the sofa.

‘Look, we could talk about this another time,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad, obviously disturbed by my tone. ‘And, actually, it’s not Isobel. It’s the one whose children are learning Mandarin.’

I hear my voice rise into a wail. ‘Alpha Mum. That’s it, the truce is over,’ I yell into the phone.

‘Look, don’t shoot the messenger,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad shirtily. ‘I was calling to offer to be your campaign manager.’

The phone goes dead and I reconsider my options. Then the doorbell rings. It’s the Internet shopping man, looking a little worried.

‘Where do you want us to leave all these onions?’ he asks Tom. ‘We thought we were delivering to an Italian restaurant.’ He brings three large sacks into the kitchen.

Tom starts rifling through the bags. ‘Explain how this is possible,’ he asks, baffled.

‘I thought I was ordering by unit, not by kilo.’

‘But why did you want to order thirty red onions? I’m off to bed.’

‘The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge’s wing’

WINTER IS DRAWING
in, this much I know, because the annual war of attrition over the heating has begun. I turn up the thermostat when Tom leaves the house, and then occasionally remember to turn it down before he comes home. But even on the good days, he uncovers any subterfuge by putting a hand on the radiator that runs along the passageway from the front door.

‘We had an agreement. And the warmth of the radiator is exactly proportionate to the scale of deception,’ he says one Friday evening in late October. Downstairs in the kitchen, Emma has opened a second bottle of wine and is reluctantly nibbling Little Bear crisps for want of anything else. The children are upstairs asleep in bed.

‘I know we said November, but the weather is not subject to your will. This is going to be the coldest winter ever recorded, colder even than the great freeze of 1963, and I think we will have to suspend hostilities until spring,’ I tell him, speaking a language I know he will understand.

There is a knock at the door. As he walks along the passage to open it, I quickly turn the thermostat up a couple of notches. He turns round, I stand motionless, hand in the air a little north of the dial. We are playing an adult variation of grandmother’s footsteps.

‘All right, Lucy, you’re in charge of heating until spring,’ he acquiesces. I think he is relieved to have the responsibility taken away from him, although he would never admit this.

There are secrets in every marriage. There are large-scale acts of deception. Then there are the smaller, more innocuous kind. Despite being married for almost ten years, Tom still hasn’t uncovered the following: 1) I have five sources of credit card debt, 2) the car got stolen shortly after I lost the spare key, 3) I have an unconfessed infidelity dating from the second year of our relationship. The last one might qualify as a big one, except that I know he has one of similar magnitude.