A Crowded Marriage (7 page)

“Golly, you're early. Good day?” I hazarded nervously.

“Reasonably diabolical, thanks. Roger Bartwell has taken over my Hedges and Butler account. I hope the brakes on his new BMW fail and he dies in a heap of twisted metal in excruciating agony. Crash and burn, that's what I say, crash and burn. Put Mummy's lipstick down, Rufus.”

“She said I could.” Rufus dabbed experimentally at his lip.

“I don't mind,” I said indulgently.

“YES, WELL I DO!” Alex roared, shooting me a look. Rufus dropped the lipstick and glared at his father.

A silence ensued as Alex changed out of his suit. He took off his jacket and tie while I smoothed down the bottom sheet and plumped the pillows.

“We'll be near Aunt Hannah, won't we?” Rufus hazarded at length. He'd surreptitiously picked up the lipstick again and was twiddling it furtively, under cover, in the drawer. If this comment was designed to get back at his father, it certainly worked.

“Yes, that's the downside of this little venture,” Alex snapped, sitting on the bed and taking his shoes off. He hurled one across the room. “Your bloody sister!”

“And Uncle Eddie,” Rufus reminded him brightly. “I like Uncle Eddie.”

This caused Alex to hurl his other shoe. “Eddie!” He groaned, flopping back dramatically on the bed, arms out like a starfish. “With his bloody balls!”

Rufus and I giggled.

Hannah, my elder and much more forthright sister, had married Eddie Sidebottom many years ago when they'd met at a commune in Istanbul. Hannah, in those days, was a right-on leftie with a heart that bled all over the place and a social conscience she was determined to dump somewhere. She traipsed around the world looking for causes, desperate to revolt against the bourgeois, middle-class upbringing she'd never had, and irritated beyond belief that she hadn't. That we lived in bohemian Highgate and my father was an actor and not an accountant, and my mother, far from being a blue-rinse Tory, wafted round in beads, pulling distractedly on her ciggie, not knowing what day it was, was a source of constant annoyance to Hannah. It irked her that no one noticed her rebellion. In fact, when she came back from the commune, Mum asked if she'd had a nice time in Cornwall.

“Cornwall? I've been to Istanbul!”

“Oh, I thought you said Cornwall. And who's this?” She smiled.

“This is Eddie. We're getting married.” Hannah squared her shoulders defiantly.

“That's nice,” said Mum, adjusting her new Bo Derek wig in the mirror. “Is he a taxi driver?”

“No, why?”

“You get a lot of taxi drivers in Istanbul.” She'd looked at Hannah in surprise, as if she should know this. “Pity,” she murmured, leaning in to the mirror to check her teeth for lipstick. “We're very short of taxi drivers round here. Poor Bertie Featherstone waited two hours outside the Arts Club the other night.”

Eddie was in fact a teacher from Wigan, and was as different in his laid-back, laissez-faire way from Hannah—who could be chippy and bossy—as was possible to be. He was tall and shy, with long grey hair—even at twenty-three—and delightfully charming: a gracious Sergeant Wilson to Hannah's terrierlike Captain Mainwaring. He deferred to her at all times, called her “my little angel,” and clearly thought the sun shone out of her kaftan. We definitely thought it shone out of his, and when they duly got married and settled down to what Mum and I regarded as a giggle-makingly bourgeois, unrebellious life in a semi in East Sheen, we were delighted. They both taught at the local poly—Hannah, art, and Eddie, English—and Hannah got fatter and Eddie's hair got shorter and whiter, but other than that, nothing changed. The move to the country came some years later when they decided to get away from the rat race, buy a cottage, teach locally and, of course, have loads of children. They achieved all of the above effortlessly, but sadly, no children. After years of trying and some lengthy, invasive, expensive investigation, it was discovered that they were both culpable and they decided to give up. They were surprisingly philosophical about their infertility, discussing it at length with all-comers, with Hannah, in typically robust style, balking at nothing.

“My vagina's too acidic,” she informed the entire family over a pub lunch one Sunday when we'd gathered to meet Dad's latest girlfriend—Mum included. “And even if I douche it with yoghurt on a regular basis, which, frankly, defies gravity and makes a terrible mess,” (the female members of the group winced and crossed their legs) “it's still not going to create a conducive enough environment.”

Samantha, Dad's latest squeeze, appeared to be choking on her scampi.

“And the thing is, Eddie's sperm are terribly lazy,” she confided loudly as Eddie nodded sagely into his pineapple juice. “Even if he saves them all up for about a month and then lets them go in one massive ejaculation, they still can't make it up my cervix.”

Visions of Eddie, roaming around the countryside with a scrotum fit to burst for weeks on end, staggering in and out of work with his mighty cargo, and then finally waddling up the stairs to the bedroom and discharging it like a mammoth tsunami, sprang inconveniently to mind, over the Scotch eggs.

“You could always use a syringe,” offered Mum, brightly.

Hannah made a gormless face. “We've told you. We don't want IVF.”

“No, I meant to get the yoghurt up.”

There was a short silence as our little group digested this. At length Dad sighed, patted Eddie sympathetically on the shoulder, and tottered off to the bar to get another round in. “Bad luck, laddie,” he muttered as he went.

But Eddie didn't mind. As a self-confessed hypochondriac, there was nothing he liked better than discussing his bodily functions, and he viewed his lack of fecundity with resigned fatalism.

“I knew it,” he'd say, hunched over his empty glass, a maudlin look in his eyes. “I just knew it. It's hereditary. I blame my father.”

“How can infertility be hereditary?” asked Alex. “Your father had you, didn't he?”

“Yes, but then look what happened to him. I'm on to the next stage already, you see. I'm one step ahead. It's all in the balls.”

Eddie's father, also a hypochondriac, had had the last laugh when he'd died suddenly of testicular cancer. Eddie was convinced it was only a matter of time for him, and according to Hannah, inspected his balls on an almost daily basis.

“And not always in private,” she hissed. “We were on a train the other day. He looked like a pervert fiddling away under his overcoat!”

“I felt a twinge,” said Eddie, unrepentantly.

Recently, though, only a regular checkup at the doctor's would pacify him. Eddie's doctor, a mild-mannered, old-style practitioner, who'd seen it all before and was already overfamiliar with Eddie's twinges and pangs, was happy enough to oblige. Once a month, Eddie went to the surgery, dropped his trousers, and Dr. Williams had a rummage. They discussed the weather and the Test at Headingly and Freddie Flintoff's spin bowling, and then Dr. Williams would sit up, declare that Eddie's bollocks were in peak condition, and send him on his way. This happy relationship only foundered when, one morning, quite unexpectedly, Eddie found himself dropping his trousers for a Dr. Earnshaw.

“Where's Dr. Williams?” Eddie asked in panic, clutching at his belt.

“He's on a sabbatical,” Dr. Earnshaw replied smoothly, sucking the end of her pencil and eyeing him over the top of her glasses. “Drop your trousers, please.”

Eddie's testicular cancer improved dramatically after that, with Eddie declaring his twinges far less frequent. Unfortunately they didn't take long to relocate and were now in the vicinity of his chest, just below his ribcage. Very close to his heart.

“He won't have a bath with the door shut any more,” Hannah hissed furiously down the phone to me, “in case he has a heart attack!”

Neurotic about his health he might be, but to Rufus, Eddie was simply a joyous uncle: an uncle who always had time for him, who played chess with him endlessly, took him bird watching, taught him to distinguish a pigeon's egg from a plover's, and more importantly, let him play with his blood pressure machine.

“That's it, lad, pump it up…now sit back and relax. Watch the dial.”

“Can't I jig about a bit?”

“Can do, but it'll register off the scale, like.”

Some energetic dancing would ensue, which, sure enough, sent Rufus's reading through the roof, and then Eddie, unable to resist, would indulge in some break dancing, which he was particularly good at, and they'd compare coronaries.

“Will we be quite close to Hannah and Eddie?” asked Rufus, spinning round fast on the stool now, using his fingertips on the dressing table to propel himself.

“Too close,” muttered Alex, throwing his socks in the laundry basket and unbuttoning his shirt as he headed for the shower. “Don't do that, Rufus, you'll break it.”

“What?” Rufus glanced after him.

“Yes, nice and close, darling,” I said quickly as Alex disappeared.

After a moment, though, his head popped back around the door. “You're changing the sheets again? I thought you'd only just done that!”

“I dropped some tea on them this morning,” I lied, colouring up and busying myself with the poppers on the duvet cover. For some reason my husband found clean sheets incredibly provocative and, in the old days, couldn't resist ravaging me on them.

“Oh. Right. What's for supper?”

“I bought a couple of fillet steaks. And
Four Weddings
is on again later. I thought we might watch that when Rufus has gone to bed.”

Alex rubbed the side of his face and yawned widely. “I'm a bit knackered actually, Imo. I'll probably just watch a bit of footy in the kitchen and then turn in, but you watch your film.” And off he padded to the shower. Then he called out as an afterthought, “I'll have that steak, though.”

“Bye, then.”

I looked damply at Kate and walked into her arms. We stood clutching each other in her sunny front garden opposite my house. My old house, I should say, which, less than a month ago the estate agent had walked around sucking his teeth at, opining that it would be “a tricky one to shift, Mrs. Cameron,” but then miraculously, had shifted it in days. An American couple, he'd rung to say breathlessly, were desperate to move in, the husband's job having already started over here, his wife in the States champing at the bit to come across and get the children into schools. Could they move in in two weeks' time? Well, what could I say? They were offering a jaw-dropping amount for six months' furnished accommodation, and although we'd planned to take our furniture with us, Shepherd's Cottage had apparently got all the basics—beds, sofas, tables and chairs—so, as Eleanor said, letting it out furnished was actually a bit of a blessing.

“Perfect,” she'd declared to me down the phone. “So you don't have to cart all your stuff down or put it into storage, and you can be here next week!”

Yes, perfect I thought as I held on to Kate under her magnolia tree and promised, in a choked voice, to ring soon. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rufus and Orlando sheepishly kicking gravel, unsure how to handle this.

“Bye,” muttered Orlando eventually, thrusting his hands in his pockets and addressing his shoes.

“Bye,” agreed Rufus. He picked up a stone and threw it at a tree for composure.

Alex and Sebastian were doing slightly better, pumping each other's hands in a good-humoured, matey fashion. They'd got along well enough and had shared a few bottles of claret over the years, but they probably wouldn't give each other another thought and were merely going through the motions, aware that their wives were in trouble.

“We'll speak soon,” I sniffed, drawing back and fishing a hanky out of my pocket.

Kate nodded mutely, her face pale and stoical, but tears were spilling down my cheeks now. Alex came over to extract me before we were awash.

“Bye, Kate.” He squeezed her shoulders affectionately and gave her a kiss, before disentangling me and leading me away. “Come on, darling,” he said gently.

“Wait,” I croaked, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “I haven't said good-bye to Sebastian.”

I was in real trouble now, and Sebastian took the brunt of it.

“Oh God, I'll miss you so much!” I released a gaspy sob into his cashmere pullover, clinging on for dear life. Sebastian was tall and spare, and if you believed Alex, had a fence post inserted rectally. He wasn't really the sort of man you slobbered over.

“I love you both so much!” I cried, hanging on tight.

He patted my back, awkwardly. “Come back and see us soon!” he said with forced jollity, which made me realise he wouldn't be coming to see
us
. Sobered me up, rather. With Alex's help I managed to peel myself away, blow my nose, and with a last buckled smile at Kate, who had her arms tightly folded, lips compressed, got in the car beside Alex.

A trailer was attached to the back of our car, carrying most of our belongings, but the Volvo was nevertheless crammed to the gunwales with the immediate trappings of our lives. Our very much London lives, I thought sadly, glancing round at the cappuccino maker and the Cath Kidston bed linen piled high in the back, where Rufus had to clamber in now, beside boxes of carefully packed John Pawson porcelain and Villeroy and Boch brushed steel. We may be poor, but we were stylishly poor. No doubt it would be all Boden and Le Creuset in the country, I thought miserably.

Alex let out the handbrake, and in another moment we were away, Rufus hanging out of the window, all inhibitions gone now, shouting, “Bye! Bye!” to Orlando, who was running along the pavement beside us, seeing how long he could keep up. Alex drove slowly, letting Orlando keep pace for a bit, then speeded up when we got to the end of the road. Orlando stood and waved madly, and as I watched him in the wing mirror, it struck me as a painfully poignant tableau: a little boy waving good-bye to his mate across the road, whom he'd never be as close to ever again. I was ambushed by tears, and sensibly, Alex didn't attempt to console me. He let the torrent run its course, which was well on the way to the M4.

At length, though, we hit the motorway and I dried up. Rufus was listening to
Harry Potter
on his headphones, oblivious to his mother's snivelling, and Alex slipped in a CD: Bach's cello concerto, full of pain and longing, didn't help enormously, but next up was a frisky little Mozart number, which was cheering. And actually, the further we drove, the better I felt. The lull of the music and the purr of the engine was soothing and I wondered, perhaps, if we shouldn't move to Scotland? I'd surely be a new woman by the time we got there.

By exit 8 I was tapping my foot and humming merrily, and it was only when we hit the B roads ten minutes later that I remembered what we were doing here and felt sick. I sat up in my seat and looked apprehensively out of the window.

“I'd forgotten how rural it was,” I commented as lush spring meadows flashed by in a haze of emerald green. “Are you sure this is only Buckinghamshire? Not Herefordshire?”

“Quite sure.”

“And it's still commutable?”

“An hour and a quarter door to door, Piers assures me.”

“Piers. And how would he know? How often does he trouble the London underground, I wonder?”

“His tailor's in Savile Row, apparently. He's having a few suits made at the moment.”

“What, plus fours and gaiters?”

Alex smiled thinly and I remembered that whilst my husband could joke about my friends and their fence posts, it wasn't always so funny when I joked about his.

We purred through the Latimers' village. My village, I thought, looking around with interest, Little Harrington. It wasn't exactly picturesque, no duck pond or village green or creeper-covered pub, just a ribbon of featureless houses running alongside the roadside built in the local pale grey stone and plunging off occasionally into side streets, but it had…well, it had integrity, I decided staunchly. Oh, and look, a village shop! Well, OK, a Spar. It flashed past in lurid green and orange. There didn't seem to be anyone about, though. Putney High Street would be buzzing by now; where was everyone? And what was the Little Harrington look, I wondered? Ah, there was a woman of about my age. Overcoat, bare legs and trainers. Right.

Didn't Eleanor get lonely, I wondered nervously as the car plunged into semidarkness and we began our ascent through some woods, climbing to the top of the hill to where Stockley sat, in a commanding position overlooking the valley. My stomach began to churn.

“We're on Latimer land now,” Alex informed me grandly. “These are Stockley's woods.” Stockley's woods. So they owned them. I wasn't quite sure where I stood
vis-à-vis
owning woods. Weren't they—you know—God's? Look at all those trees.
More
trees. How many trees did a person need? But no neighbours. Not even a simple peasant, doffing his cap and carrying his sandwiches in a hanky on a stick. A deer startled at our car, making Alex and me jump, then leaped back into the woods again.

When the trees parted and Stockley came into view, I decided solitude had its compensations. I'd forgotten how beautiful it was. It was large, but not overly high and mighty, more long and low and very symmetrical, with crumbling stone pillars either side of the white front door. Its pretty Queen Anne windows looked out like benign eyes, and the sun glanced off its mellow stone façade. I could quite see why Eleanor had fallen in love with it. The fact that Piers came with it was just a minor inconvenience, I imagined. We swept on past the gates with its little lodge house, and my head swivelled back in surprise.

“We're not going in?”

“Not yet. I thought we'd go to our place first, don't you think? She's left a key out for us. Under a pot.”

“Oh. Fine.”

Alex, as usual, was party to more arrangements than I was but I was determined not to be piqued.

“And you know where the cottage is?” I asked pleasantly.

“Just down this lane, apparently. Then left down a track.”

“There's a track!” cried Rufus, and Alex obediently swung the wheel and we lurched through a gap in the hedgerow. Rufus took off his seat belt and leaned forward excitedly between us.

“And there's the house, look!” He pointed as, sure enough, after we'd rattled over a couple of cattle grids and snaked down a chalky zigzag track, it came into view. A tiny whitewashed cottage with a grey slate roof crouching, or perhaps cringing, in the fold of some hills, which rose up to the woods beyond. The cottage was flanked by a small square yard, a barn full of hay, and acres and acres of wide open space.

“Looks like a farm,” Rufus commented excitedly.

“Perhaps it once was,” I agreed. “It's tiny, though, isn't it?” I said nervously.

“These cottages can be awfully deceptive,” Alex informed me as we got out. “Perhaps it's bigger inside.”

It could have been pretty, I decided, as we waded through knee-high grass to get to it, but it had a forlorn, decrepit look: the green paint on the front door was peeling and the windows were equally distressed. The small front garden, such as it was, was just a jumble of nettles and ragwort. My heart sank, knowing I had a husband who would neither notice nor care. The back garden, as I've said, was a yard. With a stinking manure heap parked centrally. I swallowed and glanced at Alex, who was standing and nodding appreciatively, hands on hips, eyes narrowed, like a man who's Come Home. Like a man who's missed the smell of the new-mown hay and the call of the wood pigeon, but I knew better. Alex's late father might have called himself a land agent but he was, in fact, an estate agent and the family had lived firmly In Town. The only Pony Club activity Alex had participated in was snogging at dances.

Next to the front garden was a field, which appeared to be inhabited.

“Cows!” yelled Rufus excitedly, running to the fence to see.

“Bulls, actually, darling,” I said, looking at their huge horns with horror. “Rather a lot of them, too. Fancy putting them all together in one field? Surely they'll fight?”

We regarded the bovine group, who raised their heads and stopped their rhythmic chewing to stare opaquely back.

“Oh, I'm sure they're friendly,” said Alex jovially, and reached tentatively over the fence to pat one. It mooed loudly and a tongue the size of a salmon enveloped Alex's hand.

“Christ!” He snatched his hand back. “Tried to bite me!” He looked at me in horror, clutching his fingers.

“And sheep! Look at all the sheep!” Rufus was running to an adjacent field and jumping on the fence in excitement.

“You can get a terrible disease from sheep,” Alex said as we followed nervously at a distance. “Eddie told me.”

“Eddie,” I scoffed. “What does he know about sheep? And as Hannah pointed out, you do actually have to fondle them to get it. Have to get really quite intimate, and with the best will in the world I don't think there's any danger of—RUFUS, DON'T TOUCH THEM!”

“Look, Mum, little lambs!”

“Yes, but you mustn't touch!” I rather bravely scaled the fence to rescue my son from the jaws of a tiny white lamb. “Not without gloves. Now come on, let's go and see the cottage.”

Alex had already deserted the bucolic scene for the relative safety of the front doorstep. “I've found the pot, but there's no key,” he informed us, lifting a dirty terracotta pot gingerly in his fingertips like exhibit A. A couple of beetles scuttled to safety.

“Perhaps she meant round the back.”

We traipsed round to another peeling green door, but there wasn't even a pot by this one. Just that manure heap. Alex frowned.

“Right. Well, I suppose we'll have to go up to the house. She must have forgotten.”

“Com
pletely
forgotten,” I squealed, barely disguising the note of triumph in my voice.

As we made for the car, though, a cry went up behind us.

“Mum, I'm in! The window was open.”

We swung round and, sure enough, Rufus was hanging out of a downstairs window, grinning from ear to ear.

“Oh, well
done
, darling!”

We hastened back, full of renewed optimism as he ran to open the door. The optimism was short-lived, however, as we found ourselves stepping into what was indeed, a very deceptive cottage. It was even smaller than it looked from the outside. There was a tiny sitting room—or parlour, perhaps, since there was definitely a Dickensian feel to all this—an even smaller everything-else-room with a table and four chairs, a cupboard-sized kitchen, and upstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom you surely wouldn't want to linger in on account of the distressed sanitary ware. I looked at the cracked basin in dismay. Everything, from the banisters, to the sticks of rudimentary furniture, to the window ledges, I discovered, running my finger along them, was covered in a thick layer of dust. I set my mouth firmly and came back downstairs. I've often thought that a child's presence can have a very civilising effect and this was one of those moments. Rather than reaching for the nearest chair and hurling it at him, I merely flashed my husband a look that went beyond hatred and hissed, “Marvellous. Absolutely marvellous.”

“Well, it's certainly got potential,” he was saying foolishly, jangling coins in his trouser pocket as he bent to peer out of the sitting-room window. “Terrific views too.”

I treated both these comments with the contempt they deserved and swept past him to the kitchen.

“I know we're not parting with much money here, Alex, but common courtesy dictates that you at least sweep the kitchen floor or put some milk in the fridge. Look at this!” I threw open a cupboard and something grey and furry fled. We shrieked and clutched each other.