All at Sea, page 16
The one compensation of single parenthood I would have predicted turns out to be a misapprehension. At times the directorial autonomy used to look enviable to me, for like most couples Tony and I often disagreed about parenting methods, and like most parents I believed I was right. Now I would give anything to have him here to disagree with me, for in this new domestic dictatorship I am implicated in every single thing that goes wrong, and all my old certainties have vanished. My old delusions of omnipotence are exposed for just another self-congratulatory fantasy. Tony and I had never conformed to traditional gender roles; I was the principal breadwinner, he was enthusiastic about housework. I thought of us as largely ambidextrous parents – until in the car one day Jake starts singing a song from the film Frozen. ‘Do you wanna build a snowman?’ he warbles.
‘Decca,’ Joe interrupts, ‘do you want to build a snowman?’
No. No, I do not want to build a snowman. I don’t want to put up a tent, light a bonfire, build a den, teach the boys how to ride bikes, go fishing, or do any of the other things I only now realise were all Tony’s department. How could I not have noticed how long this list had grown? Who is going to do these things with the boys? I see now why odious men target single mothers. We are so nakedly needy. A fully committed predator would have to be a fool to waste his time on anyone else.
It must be a measure of the power of denial that compelling evidence of our new domestic inadequacy nonetheless fails to dissuade me from buying two kittens. When Jake had been unreachably distraught in Jamaica, his sole comfort had come in the form of Minerva’s two cats, and at the time I made a mental note to install some at Tubslake as soon as possible.
It is my understanding that cats are low-maintenance. A quick search on Gumtree brings up a bonanza of adorable kitten porn, and after many happy hours spent cooing over the impossible cuteness advertised all over my computer we find the perfect pair. A boy and a girl, they are tortoiseshell and fluffy; we phone their owner, and set off in high spirits to their address.
‘It smells in here,’ whispers Joe doubtfully as we walk through the door, but Jake has already fallen upon the kittens, and the dreamy rapture in his expression settles the matter within seconds. There is a heart-stopping moment when their owner agrees to sell us only the boy; another woman has already come to view, and been promised first refusal on the girl. I take a deep breath, and say lightly, ‘Can I have a quick word with you in the kitchen?’
‘Look, I hate to do this,’ I confide once out of earshot of the boys. ‘But I think you should know.’ As I explain why these kittens matter so much to my son, her mouth falls open and sympathetic horror fills her eyes. It’s a look with which I am becoming familiar, and the temptation to exploit its currency is one I am already well aware of, and concerned to resist. But this feels to me like a morally acceptable exception, and as I see her hesitate I take her hand in mine. ‘Please? Could you let us have them both? Please?’ We drive home triumphant, with two kittens in a basket on the back seat. We name the girl Millie, after Minerva’s cat, and the boy Calabash.
They are an unmitigated disaster. Although allegedly house-trained, neither displays any interest whatsoever in the litter trays, nor do matters improve once they are old enough to be allowed outside. It’s not that they pee randomly on the floor; that would be a manageable problem. No, their preferred choice of toilet is a nice soft duvet. They pee all over every bed in the house, every day.
Duvets are laundered, pillows dry-cleaned, mattresses thrown out. The sheer volume of pee feels anatomically implausible. We institute an all-bedroom-doors-closed regime, but enforcing it with any consistency on a three-and four-year-old is laughably ambitious, and the builders are scarcely any better. I waste a fortune on the false promises of useless odour-eliminating potions, and hours in internet forums dedicated to cat lovers, more and more doubtful that my feelings about these kittens qualify me for membership of such a category, only to find that no one has a clue how to solve the problem. Nor, more mystifyingly, do most fellow sufferers appear to even mind. ‘Cats, huh? Hilarious!’ seems to be the general consensus.
One Sunday morning I wake up to find the kittens have snuck in and peed all over my bed while Jake, Joe and I were asleep in it. We are sodden. Downstairs a double duvet is suspended over chairs in front of the Aga, like a big downy tent, drying out from its latest consignment to the washing machine. Another is bagged up at the door in a bin liner, awaiting collection by the rubbish men. The bathtub is full of pillows soaking in the most recent and ruinous odour-remover purchase from Amazon. Frantic posters are pinned up on every bedroom door: KEEP CLOSED AT ALL TIMES!!!!!! The whole house stinks. It looks like a mad lady’s home. In my head I tot up all expenses incurred since the kittens’ arrival a month ago – purchase price, cat food, dry-cleaning bills, new bedding, assorted feline paraphernalia – and find the total comes to more than £1,000. Enough is enough. Even if I were willing to continue living under siege, we can’t conceivably afford to. The kittens have to go.
Had anyone suggested I was the type of person who buys pets off the internet and gets rid of them when they become a nuisance, I would have laughed. I’m not laughing when I drive away from the local Blue Cross rehoming centre on Monday morning. I feel like Judas. Having been given up for adoption, Tony always had a visceral disgust for anyone who gave an animal away, and I thank God he cannot see what I have done. I’m equally glad he can’t see me a week or so later, when I pull in through the gates of our local prep school. Had anyone suggested I was the type of person who considers educating her children privately, I would have been indignant. But the person I used to be wasn’t lonely, or frightened of the future, nor highly suggestible.
The social possibilities presented by Jake’s school playground have thus far looked limited. This had not been a significant consideration in our calculations when Tony and I were deciding to leave Hackney, but if I am going to make our new life in Kent work without him I will need to make more friends, and several old ones in London assure me that a more fertile place to look would be this prep school. Coffee mornings with aggressively well-groomed bankers’ wives don’t sound to me like a solution to my isolation, and I would like to think the suggestion would have been briskly dismissed, were it not for another new concern.
When Tony was alive, I never doubted our parental credentials to bring up two boys. If this was naïvely arrogant I will now never know, but the assumption no longer feels reliable. Pitched against all the pressures and temptations of their peers, will I alone be enough to fortify them with the confidence and values they will need? In my current diminished state it feels doubtful. Loyalty to lifelong political disapproval of private education might, in fact, now be recklessly irresponsible; perhaps the boys need every ounce of middle-class scaffolding they can get. ‘You could apply for bursaries,’ the friends point out. No longer confident of my own instincts or judgements, I am talked into visiting the prep school, ‘to at least have a look’. It is mouth-wateringly spectacular, and I leave dazzled. But in the dead of night later that week my conscience takes its revenge, and the punishment is brutal.
Nightmares about Tony first began when we were still in Jamaica, and have ambushed my sleep so often that humdrum predictability has downgraded their status from trauma to tiresome inconvenience. But this is a nightmare of a different order altogether.
I dream that Tony comes back. He just walks into the kitchen one afternoon, gives me a hug and puts the kettle on. My speechless incredulity seems to amuse him; it’s no big deal, he shrugs casually, smiling. He was just dead for a while, and now he’s alive. ‘What’s been happening?’ he asks. ‘Did I miss anything interesting?’ He makes himself a coffee and rolls a spliff.
I am horrified. He can’t just come back to life; what will everyone think? We’re going to be in terrible trouble. No one is going to believe this; people will think he’s a fraudster. They are going to be furious, they will hate us. Thinking fast, the only solution I can see is to kill him again before anyone finds out. I dash off down the lane to the prep school, and hire the geography teacher to shoot him.
But when I return, my resolve begins to falter. Tony takes me in his arms again, and the sensation of his touch, the smell of his skin, is so intoxicatingly comforting that I stop caring how difficult this will be to explain. Every rush of love I ever felt for him is coursing through my veins at once; I am engulfed by a euphoria unlike any I have ever known. I can’t wait to tell him all about his funeral, and how many people were there. We snuggle up on the sofa to look through photos of the service, and all the anecdotes and dramas make him laugh. I am delirious with joy.
When I remember about the prep-school teacher I’ve hired to shoot him, in a panic I race off to search up and down the lane but can’t find him anywhere. I decide to go home and explain the situation to Tony; he’s bound to understand, and will probably have a clever solution. I find him standing in the hall, near the front door. Just as I’m about to break the bad news the catflap rattles open, and in scuttles a tortoiseshell kitten. It’s Calabash.
How did he get here? How did he find his way back? Tony crouches down to stroke the kitten, and asks, ‘So which one’s this, then? Millie or Calabash?’
I turn cold. How does he know their names? For a moment he blusters and bluffs, but then, as if owning up to pocketing a lighter, admits, ‘Well, okay, I didn’t really die. I just pretended to. I thought it would be a bit of a laugh. But I didn’t like how you gave away the kittens. So I thought I’d go and get them and bring them back.’ But how did he fake his own death; how did he disappear? ‘Oh, it was actually pretty easy. I got Tom to help. He was in on it all along.’
I stare, nauseous with revulsion. The man is a monster. My brother is a psychopath. And no one will believe this was pulled off without my complicity. If Tom was in on the plot, I had to be too. I will be defined for ever by the grotesque celebrity of disgrace; Jake and Joe will be taken away from me, and never want to see me again.
Where the hell is that geography teacher? But he never shows up; he is not coming. I am going to have to stick by Tony’s story, and tell the world he really did die and has now – it’s a miracle! – come back to life. I will have to look like the happiest woman in the world. And because I can hardly then leave him, I am stuck here for the rest of my life.
I wake with a jolt, drenched in sweat and trembling. I search the bed and scan the bedroom. Where is he? I try the bathroom. By now the lights are on, I am wide awake. But it is fully half an hour before reality reasserts itself convincingly enough to discredit the dream. I sit on the bed and weep with relief that he is not alive. I weep for the obscenity of being glad he is still dead. But the bitterest tears I weep are for the loss of what I had felt in his arms.
Jake is having nightmares too, but won’t talk about them, and the cool dexterity of his evasions troubles me. One day I ask if he ever talks about Tony at school.
‘No, never.’ Why not, I ask. ‘Because everyone would laugh.’ His tone is inscrutably glib. Does he mean they would laugh if he simply mentioned Tony, or would laugh at the fact he is dead? ‘That he’s dead.’ Mirroring his airiness, I smile and ask why.
‘Because when Lulu did a fart, everyone laughed. And I did too, Dec. I laughed too.’
‘Well, farts can be quite funny,’ I agree. ‘But I’m not sure they would laugh about Tony dying. I’ve told quite a few children he’s dead’ – I offer a few names – ‘and none of them laughed.’ But this makes no discernible impression. He shakes his head firmly. ‘Everyone in my class would.’
His emphatic hostility towards the ocean is reiterated regularly. ‘I’m never ever going in the sea again,’ he will calmly announce, apropos of nothing, and I take this to mean he no longer blames himself, until the day when a much older boy from school comes home with us for a play date. As we are parking outside Tubslake the boy points to Tony’s car. ‘Whose is that?’ I tell him it belonged to Jake’s dad, and see from his look that he knows Tony died.
‘I made him dead,’ Jake says abruptly. His expression is as blank as his tone. ‘He’s dead because of me. I walked into the sea, and that’s what made him dead.’
The boy studies Jake in amazement. ‘No, Jake, that’s not right, you mustn’t think that. He was your dad, he wanted to look after you.’ Jake is impervious. ‘No, it’s my fault, I made him dead.’
Later I ask if this is what he has been thinking all this time. Has he forgotten what we talked about – that it was the sea’s fault, not his? ‘No, I haven’t forgotten. I did think that for a while. But then I remembered it was my fault.’
As the end of the year draws near, there are further milestones to navigate. Jake’s school has a Halloween disco, and both boys want to go, so when tickets go on sale in the playground I ask for a family ticket. ‘We’re not a family,’ Jake corrects me. ‘We’re not a proper family. Not now Tony’s dead.’ To my relief, the boys take the ghoulish festival of skeletons in their stride; they have been curious about what is happening to Tony’s body in the ground (‘Would he bleed if I jumped on him?’ Joe asks) but appear to make no connection with the luminous skulls and zombie outfits everywhere.
I have dreaded Guy Fawkes night, afraid the boys will want another bonfire party at Tubslake. Tony always had a boyish excitement about pyrotechnics, and the previous year our field had been filled with children twirling sparklers around a bonfire so enormous no one dared go near it, and he had to find a blowtorch to toast the marshmallows. It is another relief when no party request comes. My return to work, on the other hand, presents an altogether bigger problem.
It used to feel faintly fraudulent to describe myself as a ‘working mum’, because whereas most husbands of my acquaintance who call themselves feminists don’t know how to operate their own dishwasher, Tony could whip up a Sunday roast in his sleep while cleaning the fridge and bathing the boys. I used to fly off for days without a thought for domesticity. In fact, he made my job so easy that I was oblivious to how frequently it took me away from home. Within a week of my return to work, the household begins to fall apart.
Charlotte the nanny fields an unmanageable blizzard of emergency phone calls from train-station platforms as my schedule keeps changing, and I find myself engineering a frantic patchwork of overnight childcare from different hotel rooms; neighbours, nursery mums, the cleaner, even the decorator are all roped in, but the boys cannot keep waking up to someone new. Their regression to tearful clinginess and volcanic outbursts is sudden and shocking. When Jake’s school and Joe’s nursery report that they have both been wetting themselves, I am forced to concede that this isn’t going to work. I will have to advertise for someone to live with us.
As job applications and CVs begin arriving, it quickly becomes clear that we are nothing like the type of family who employs a live-in nanny housekeeper. Army colonels and QCs feature prominently among the names of referees, and once the interview process begins it becomes equally clear that anyone who has chosen to make this position their profession is not someone I want to live with. The experienced ones are either ominously starchy or eccentric, while the younger candidates are sweet and charming but inspire little confidence in their being equal to unblocking a toilet. One or two trigger no obvious alarm bells, but are so stupefyingly bland that our very identity – or at least my vanity – feels imperilled. Is this what we have come to? Are we really going to wake up on a Sunday morning with someone who cites ‘shopping and surfing the internet’ as her preferred choice of pastime?
Salvation comes in the unlikeliest of forms. Michelle is a firefighter by profession, grew up on a Native American reserve, has a foxy South African girlfriend called Amba, and has never been a nanny or a housekeeper. After twenty years in the emergency services she is ready for a change. Elfin, quiffed and androgynous to the point Jake has to ask if she is a boy or a girl, were Michelle to be cast in EastEnders viewers would complain about lesbian stereotyping. We fall for them on the spot. When Charlotte leaves to go travelling in the new year, Michelle and Amba will move in. Our new domestic set-up will probably raise some eyebrows in Jake’s playground, but I know Tony would have approved.
Before then we must get through Christmas. Frightened of being left alone to manufacture a charade of festivity, I formulate an itinerary that looks promising on paper, and might indeed have been fun, had Jake and Joe been at least ten years older than they are. We set off on Christmas Eve to Jenni’s house in the Cotswolds, and by the time we reach my dad’s the day after Boxing Day the boys are already disoriented and fractious, addled by sugar and the carousel of unfamiliar beds and faces. We plough on to Matt’s house in Gloucestershire, tempers fraying from the relentless battle to keep them on their best behaviour, and on again to friends in Somerset for a new year’s eve party.
I used to feel sorry for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but as we limp home to Kent I am beginning to think they might be onto something after all. Signing up to peddle the Watchtower would be a radical solution, but I am dreading next December already, and open to anything that would provide an excuse to cancel Christmas.
There is a more urgent problem confronting us, however, and one considerably more serious. With the loss of Tony’s income, and the new expense of a nanny, we are structurally insolvent – and his will leaves us not a single penny.
10
For almost a decade, Tony had been meaning to get round to updating his will. A month before we flew to Jamaica he even got as far as our local solicitor’s office, but the fee had been more than £300, and as he pointed out when he came home from the appointment, ‘We’re about to go on holiday.’ He would rather save the money for Treasure Beach. ‘I’ll sort it out when we get back,’ he said. So Tony’s last will and testament is the one he made in the nineties, naming his first wife as his sole executor, and leaving everything to her.
