Other People's Fun, page 10
She got to work. I closed my eyes. It was so pleasant: the smell of the product being spritzed over my hair, the click and gentle tug of the hot tongs. Her industry, my passivity. I sat there with my eyes shut and it was, frankly, a wrench when I had to open them and take an interest in her handiwork, the technique she had used, and the discount she was prepared to offer me. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, collecting my bags and moving off, away from the fountains and the planters filled with palms. ‘I’ll think about it, thanks so much—’ and I felt terrible, but I also felt, in some way, restored, and that sensation lasted for a while – longer than the beachy waves, at any rate.
Gretchen and I strike out beneath my umbrella and at first we struggle to find a rhythm, each adjusting our step in an effort to accommodate the other, an ancient echo of the three-legged race that our girls took part in during a primary-school sports day. Rain muddles the brake lights in the puddles.
We exchange headlines about our daughters and then Gretchen says she met an old friend of mine recently, at a dinner in Westbourne Grove. ‘Sookie Inchcape? When she found out where we lived, she mentioned your name, said you were at Howard at the same time. That place is a very rich resource for Francis and his colleagues at the Mail, what with the nepo-babies and Everyone’s Invited.’ Sookie and her husband Murray – he was at Cambridge with Francis – seem like such a fun couple.
As we head up the hill, water is coursing down it, gushing over kerbs and the pedestrian crossing, creating a lake outside McDonald’s. Gretchen says, ‘You heard about Sookie’s daughter, I suppose. Some difficulty at her boarding school – I gather she was asked to leave. You can’t exactly ask What for? but it’s usually drugs, isn’t it? They’re looking at those tutorial colleges in South Ken, and Sookie was putting a brave face on it, but for the time being she’s cancelled her plans to join Murray in Singapore. Can’t be easy. She said she’d had problems getting hold of you recently.’
‘I’m terribly fond of Sookie, but you need to be in the right mood,’ I say, recklessly. ‘She can be a bit one-way, and I haven’t had the, um, capacity recently.’
Gretchen makes I hear you noises. ‘Well, of course.’
‘I wasn’t sure how close you actually were,’ she adds, ‘because she didn’t know about – you know.’ Gretchen doesn’t want to articulate my difficulty, but I won’t help her out. A bus passes too close, sending up a fan of spray and forcing her to raise her voice. ‘Robin. I think I let the cat out of the bag there, she seemed quite taken aback. I hope I didn’t put my foot in it.’
I say it’s fine, not to worry, I was only waiting for the right moment. As I speak, an itch is spreading along my arms, over my chest, a hateful sensation like scratchy wool against skin, because now Sookie knows something about me that I hadn’t wanted to share with her. She and Gretchen have discussed me, pulling melancholy faces, and a little of my power has leaked away as a consequence. Now I understand that flurry of messages: she wanted to show her compassion, her sensitivity, take an interest in my sorry drama, which might somehow make her feel better about her own, both public and clandestine.
But maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe she just wanted to find out how I was.
Gretchen says goodbye in a hurry because her bus is sailing towards the stop, a vessel full of warm breath and cold light. She steps on and her bright coat is lost in the jostle.
Along my street, people are coming home with bags-for-life and bicycles and children. Front doors open and close, lights go on and curtains are dragged over flickering TVs and dishevelled sofas, potted plants, floor lamps lurching at barfly angles, many lives underway. For a moment I conceive of this, the vivid cumulative urgency of all these other stories. A life may be small, and still be a part of something frantic and tremendous.
Coming into the flat, I prop the umbrella against the radiator as I get out my phone. Full-length mirror selfie, new jumpsuit. She can’t decide whether to stick or twist. Fabulous! I type, bathed in the screen’s wash of light. Only you could pull this off.
She was so glad when I reappeared. ‘I had the feeling it wasn’t like you to just vanish like that. I worried maybe I’d said the wrong thing – that it was my fault somehow!’ She says this with playful frivolity, as if it’s the most preposterous idea. After all, it’s never her fault.
Her expression turns grave, the shadow of clouds blowing over a pretty view. ‘I was terribly upset when Gretchen told me about… you know.’
More squeamishness, more ghastly delicacy: as if my circumstances are unspeakable, as if I might scream or weep or fall fainting to the floor if she used the word ‘divorce’. I can’t bear – although of course I always do – this particular tone of voice, the expectation I will be ruined by events. She really knows nothing about me. There’s that, at least.
‘Must have been dreadful for you,’ she says. ‘I feel so bad you never said anything to me.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I say, because it’s always all about her. Maybe she catches an inflection in my voice because she lifts her hands and says she’s the one who should be apologising.
I say, There’s no need, I’m quite all right. It was a bolt from the blue, a real shock, but that’s wearing off now. A relief, really. It’s not clear if I mean the split itself is a relief, or time passing, or not having to talk about it with her. She doesn’t press me on it. Either she’s being tactful or she isn’t paying attention.
It’s true that I didn’t see it coming. He ran rings around me, upending my belief in my powers of observation, and this – why didn’t I see it? – undid me as much as the loss of the rest. However, these are things I don’t wish to discuss with Sookie, because there is nothing exceptional about the end of our marriage; it’s the usual dreary story. Still, is it such a disgrace, to be gulled by a con? His deceit was so polished; a conjurer’s illusion refined, it seems, over many performances.
Sookie will know all about this sort of thing.
She leans against my kitchen counter. I saw her glance around when I let her in, a quick assessment, not unlike the estate agent’s. Even as we embraced I could feel her head move as she sized it all up: the cracks in the tiled floor, the shoes kicked higgledy-piggledy under the stairs, the toilet rolls I keep meaning to carry up. She will be wondering what he’d taken, what it was like before.
I can’t offer her a G & T because the freezer drawers are stuck, a glacier slab creeping over the ice tray, the bags of peas, Tupperware coffins labelled ‘bourguignon’ and ‘cacciatore’ (some of it his handwriting); scraps of dinner parties and festive feasts lost to permafrost. I’m fine without ice but she will feel entitled to it, so I give her the choice of tea or wine, and while I work the corkscrew I tell her as much as I want to, which isn’t very much, really. Were she a better listener – keener, more curious – I might weaken, I might be obliged to give her the things she expects: desolation, some kind of confession, maybe some fury, and eventually, as I pull myself together, some brave jokes. But Sookie has never had to solicit friendship. People have always brought it to her, laid it before her, like a gift she has every right to refuse, because of the way she looks and behaves, and this means she lacks some skills that the rest of us consider basic and vital. It doesn’t come easily to her, this business of other people’s dramas. She has so many of her own.
But still, she’s trying. I’ll give her that.
‘Oh no, how awful,’ she says when I mention that the flat is on the market, and I watch her thinking: What, somewhere smaller and pokier than this? I’m sure that’s what she is thinking.
‘I wish you’d said,’ she says again. ‘You should have told me. I feel so stupid.’
‘It was nice not to have to talk about it,’ I say. ‘To be honest, it was kind of restful,’ as if my life is full of clamour and sympathy, people cheering me on for getting up in the morning, sending me Beyoncé memes. ‘Sometimes it’s good to have a break from it, you know?’ and that lands, I can see the flare of comprehension, like a boiler pilot catching. She puts her hand on mine, solitaire winking, a gesture that’s meant to be comforting.
‘I guess we’re in that zone,’ she says. ‘I mean, it’s hard, isn’t it? Marriage. I don’t know how any of us manage it.’
And just like that, tiring of my story, she shifts the balance of the conversation. Obediently I say of course her own life must be very complicated at the moment, and I ask if she has a date for joining Murray in Singapore. She says, ‘Oh dear, well, some news on that front, actually.’
I ask if her father’s OK.
That’s not the problem, she says. No, he’s made a terrific recovery. She popped down to see them last week and he’s back to his old self, they did a five-mile walk, his consultant is very pleased with him. No, that’s not the reason.
I wait, wondering how frank she’ll be.
‘Perhaps Gretchen told you, we have a bit of a situation with Ava. Look, sorry – would you mind terribly if I had a fag?’ She goes and stands by the open window, tapping the ash over the sill, but after a while she forgets to aim the smoke at the gap. She gives me the encrypted version, which I translate without difficulty: some problems with her friendship group means ‘allegations of bullying’; losing focus in class means ‘disruptive’; grades had started to slip means ‘kicked her out because league tables’. She doesn’t hint at drugs but why would she?
‘Oh, how awful – poor girl,’ I say.
Sookie says it’s just as well she was in the country to pick up the pieces. It’s completely outrageous, the way the school treated her daughter. My God, and all the promotional guff on the website, wanging on about holistic education and exemplary pastoral care! Such an eye-opener, she feels so stupid for falling for all that nonsense. The place is a meat-grinder, she sees it now. She’ll make an official complaint to the governors once things have calmed down. For now, though, she is focusing on Ava, who is settling into her new school, a boutique rescue centre for the delinquent offspring of celebrities.
‘We went all around the houses but in the end we decided that keeping her in London was the best option. We thought about taking her out to Singapore, transferring to an international school, but Ava dug in, she begged to stay in London, so much of her social life happens here now… she made a very strong case. So we thought: well, the mews makes it fairly simple, just get her through A levels, and this time next year she’ll be all set for art foundation. And then I can join Murray. It’s not ideal, for sure, but it’s what Ava needs; it’s not hard when you look at it that way.’
I picture mother and daughter in the little house, which must feel cramped now, rather than cosy. I wonder where Sookie and Waxham are conducting their trysts.
‘Lots on your plate,’ I say. ‘Poor girl, how traumatic,’ and Sookie drifts back to the sofa, clutching her fags and lighter, saying absolutely, careful handling is very much required. Her own role is to administer a steady supply of love and reassurance, confidence-boosting treats, things that make Ava feel good about herself. This reminds her: she pulls out her phone, taps it. ‘Just letting her know I’m out – she probably hasn’t even noticed.’
I say she is very welcome to stick around for supper, nothing fancy, but she refuses, though she doesn’t seem minded to make a move, settling back into the sofa, relieved, perhaps, to share her story with me, if only because no one else is quite so willing to listen. Not for the first time I am reminded how alone she is here, how isolated.
She has established some ground rules for Ava: no going out on school nights, that sort of thing, ‘and I’m keeping a close eye on her; you know what it’s like, I’m getting whiplash from all the ups and downs. There’s this boy Milo, she seems very keen on him, maybe too keen, but I’ve learned to keep it zipped; anything I say is obviously massively irrelevant and embarrassing – there’s quite a lot of slamming of doors going on.’ She laughs, but with a certain reverence, impressed by the performative display of teen passion as much as by the emotion itself.
I say, ‘Because your advice is worthless, of course! What do you know?’ and there’s a certain thrill in saying this to her, to her face.
She blinks and says, ‘Exactly.’ Sometimes she hears this in Ava’s voice or catches her expression. It’s not even pity. You have to notice someone to pity them, and as far as Ava is concerned Sookie is not really worth noticing. All she knows is that there’s something quite pointless about her mother. Something tragically out-dated, like fax machines, or handwriting.
From online surveillance I know that Ava deploys banners, ribbons and black squares in response to various causes and outrages; like her peers, she is quick to identify many varieties of discrimination; and yet she will condemn her mother for the monstrous sin of ageing. I make a little grimace of sympathy, but Sookie’s head is bowed. Maybe she’s examining the worn patches in the rug; maybe she’s admiring her trainers, a brand I recognise from social media (vegan; favoured by the Californian duchess). Or perhaps she’s considering the frustrating chaos of her life, the jumble of obligations and blocked desires. My difficulties haven’t held her attention for very long.
The song of an unseen blackbird drifts through the window. A supermarket van pulls up close by, the doors slide open and someone starts to stack the grocery crates on the kerb. A toddler is led past, complaining that they are too tired to walk.
‘I have no advice,’ I say. ‘Living with teenagers is a nightmare – I’m still recovering,’ a necessary betrayal because in truth Elizabeth was never troublesome, being diligent, self-contained and averse to confrontation, qualities she inherited, perhaps, from both Robin and myself. It occurs to me that the three of us moved through the days like figures in one of those displays you used to see in toyshop windows at Christmas: tiny folk on skates, toboggans and chairlifts, endlessly repeating the same jerky circuits, never colliding with anyone else.
She looks up, meek with gratitude. ‘I had all these ideas about how it would be, how much she’d need me,’ she says. ‘But it’s not like that. And it’s great that we’re able to use the mews house, of course… but if I’m honest there’s not enough room to swing a cat. And all her emotions are so enormous.’
Without thinking, she has pulled out another cigarette, and now she lights it. I say I’ll fetch her an ashtray, and as I go into the kitchen I can hear her beginning another routine pantomime of apology: oh, she’s so sorry! What a lot of trouble she’s causing.
Locating an unlovely saucer at the back of a cupboard, I remind myself that Sookie has little experience of parenting teenagers. Ava must have gone off to board five or six years ago, and since then someone else has been cooking for her, washing her clothes, waking her up in the morning and turning the lights off at night. Sookie and her daughter were strangers to each other long before Ava sealed herself away behind the chilly disdain of adolescence. After so much sub-contracting, it must be quite a shock, the graft of close-contact parenting.
‘It feels rather claustrophobic,’ she says, accepting the saucer. ‘The thing is, I’d actually started to appreciate living on my own for a change. I rather liked it!’ She launches into the speech about how she’s never had to do it before: school to flatmates to boyfriends to marriage and children, the same spiel as last time, because she’s forgotten I’ve already heard it. On she goes, the cigarette shrinking and spilling ash, and I suppose if someone was feeling ambivalent about the single life, this little homily about the glories of solitude – all the time for me – might boil one’s piss.
All in all, this break in the UK is not the end of the world. Murray is OK about it. He has people to look after him (by which she means domestic staff) and a full diary. He’ll be over here a fair bit. They’ll manage.
I look at her. She shrugs, mashes the cigarette in the saucer. ‘Oh, no – he wouldn’t.’ When Murray was in his teens, you see, his father left the family for a KLM air hostess called Floor. Murray never recovered from that, never really forgave his father, or Floor. He is very easy-going about most things (‘mowth thingth’), but that is an absolute no-no.
Murray lives a busy life. He has his career, and that spills over – as is the way with his line of work, with its targets, time zones, client entertaining obligations and corporate memberships – into everything else. It’s not so terribly different from boarding school, really. Always something going on.
But is it enough for her? She’s not certain. Recently she’s noticed a twitchiness, a sense of shortfall.
As she begins to give an account of her situation – which is, after all, only a partial version of one particular truth – her manner is hesitant, semi-reluctant, but before long she becomes more expansive, swept away by the tidal pull of her own drama. Soon she is so deep in her story that she loses track and keeps having to double back to explain something, or provide more context. Her incoherence suggests this story hasn’t really been told before: it is quite fresh. I have the sense, as she speaks, of reality shifting. Maybe it’s a little like switching between Instagram filters, or adjusting privacy settings from ‘public’ to ‘close friends’.
She knows some couples who thrive on the nomadic life: happy to pitch camp for a while, excited by each new city, and then just as excited to pack up and move on. But for Sookie the process is losing its appeal. It’s nothing to do with Murray. He’s her best friend, her rock, her champion. He wraps her up in his devotion. As she talks about him, she makes him sound both puppyish and bearish, neither boy nor man. She always knows exactly what he’s thinking, no one makes her laugh as much as he does, and the thexth is certainly loads better than the thexth most of her friends seem to be having with their partners of long-standing. No complaints there – none at all. But sometimes she wonders if this – all this – is enough.
