A Surrey State of Affairs (50 page)

I am home, and it feels like I’m in a different world. No more sweaty cybercafés and sticky heat: I am wearing a woolen jumper, sitting in Jeffrey’s study in a leather-clad swivel chair, LapTop balanced on a solid oak desk, shelves of old legal textbooks and tennis trophies stretching up on either side. Out the window it is winter, and I realize just how long I’ve been away. When I left the garden was still lush with the final throes of summer; now it is bare, trimmed back, bleak. Randolph did a good job before returning to America.

My own reflection in the bathroom mirror gave me a shock. I was accustomed to seeing a pale, neat image of myself looking out against the backdrop of cream marble tiles. Now I am a toasty, golden brown, with freckles crowding all over my forearms, and my hair grown long and wavy, streaked through with white and gold. I wonder what the children will say when they come around tomorrow.

Jeffrey and I got back last night, worn out after the first economy flight we were able to book home. I had no idea that one was expected to eat with plastic cutlery and watch the same film as all the other passengers at the same time. I think Jeffrey struggled to adjust. He looked irritable and distracted throughout the whole of
Mamma Mia!

Now that we’re back, he has been pacing the house, opening
the doors to the rooms, closing them again. He has given Boris, who kept the house in an immaculate state, two weeks’ notice. The poor man is a luxury we can no longer afford, even if he did bake us a welcome-home cake and buff every piece of furniture with beeswax while we were away. He took the news with his usual unflinching courtesy, but afterward I heard the mournful sound of one of Rupert’s old Radiohead albums drifting from his room.

  
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14

Bliss. Rupert and Sophie together under my roof, for Sunday lunch, and it was just like my dream, except when I walked through the door to the dining room they were both still there, Rupert with a navy turtleneck pullover and a touch of stubble, Sophie grinning despite her “monster” hangover. She took the train home this morning for the Christmas holidays, and apparently she’s already missing university. All those stabs of guilt I felt for abandoning her as I woke up in a strange bed in Brazil or Bogotá were unfounded. Left to her own devices, she has flourished. She has filled out a touch—whether this is the result of a wholesome lifestyle or too much white wine I cannot tell, but it suits her; and there is something changed, more confident, in her general behavior. The tongue stud has gone (“the only other girl with a tongue stud was a goth, so it had to go,” she explained). Not only did she refrain from hiding her peas under her knife, but she declared that she was no longer a vegetarian, and that I should feed the nut roast to Darcy because she would much rather tuck into some lamb—all the veggie options at halls were “minging,” she said, so she’d given that up too. I met Rupert’s eye, and we both smiled.

Rupert asked a lot of questions about our trip, and there was
a gleam of pride in Jeffrey’s eye as he got out his atlas after dessert and showed them both where we had been, the many borders we had crossed. I took out my camera and showed them some of our shots, from the hundreds of penguins huddled against the wind in Argentina to Jeffrey standing on Copacabana beach with a piña colada in his hand and a cocktail umbrella tucked behind his ear. Sophie said it looked awesome, just like a trip her other best mate, Liam, took in his gap year.

Rupert admired all the pictures, and then asked, in a tentative voice, “But are you glad to be back?”

Jeffrey and I held hands, looked into the young, smiling faces of our children, looked out at the cold December drizzle, and said that, yes, all things considered, yes, we were. I tried to hold that thought in my mind as I visited Mother, who told me that I was as brown as a farmhand.

  
MONDAY, DECEMBER 15

10 A.M.

I can’t sit still. I am too nervous. Jeffrey has gone in to see Andrew, the senior par1tner at Alpha & Omega. I had to tie his tie for him this morning; he had forgotten how. This does not bode well for a seamless return to corporate life.

3 P.M.

He is home. He is no longer a partner, I am no longer a partner’s partner, as it were. And yet, as I shall explain, all is not entirely lost.

When his car crunched up the gravel on the drive and he got out, I struggled to read his expression. He had loosened his tie; he wasn’t dejected and hangdog, he wasn’t ecstatic with relief. It wasn’t until I had made him a cup of tea and we had
both sat down at the kitchen table that he told me what had happened.

“Well, my career as I knew it is over,” he said, nonchalantly. He then told me how he had met up with Andrew and a severe woman from HR with a blond ponytail and metallic glasses. I did not like the sound of her. My instincts were correct. While Andrew asked him what had happened and whether he was okay, HR woman asked him if he realized how much disruption his disappearance had caused the company and its clients. Jeffrey said that he had explained as best he could that he had had some sort of personal crisis, but HR woman coldly asked him if he could supply a doctor’s note to back that up. Jeffrey asked if she would accept the receipt for a leather cowboy hat in lieu, but she would not. And on it went in circles, until Andrew said that it was time to cut to the chase: sadly, Jeffrey could never have his old job back. It had already gone to Amanda (Andrew had at least had the good grace to look ashamed of himself, Jeffrey told me), and besides, in these tough economic times the company had to have 110 percent confidence in its partners. However, there was another role being offered: training the junior lawyers, on a part-time basis, and sharing the job with a woman who was just back from maternity leave. The salary would be half what he was previously on (or really a quarter, given the reduction in hours), but Jeffrey was not in a position to say no.

“Law is a small world,” he said. “And most of the big firms are laying people off. Who else would take me on now? And do I even want to go back to the way I was before?”

So they had shaken hands, and he had signed the contract, and he will start work in his new, reduced capacity in the New Year. As soon as HR woman had retreated with the paperwork, Andrew took Jeffrey to lunch at The Cheddar Cheese, a musty old pub off Fleet Street—apparently the budget no longer stretches to the
likes of Nobu, at least not for Jeffrey. There, he admired Jeffrey’s tan, and Jeffrey told me that he caught a wistful look in Andrew’s eye as he was telling him all about his prowess with the lasso and the moped.

All in all, as we finished our tea, we both agreed that things could have been a lot worse. I asked Jeffrey how we would get by with the money, and he said we would have to see. He’s meeting with his financial adviser tomorrow; he said he was pretty sure we could no longer afford a financial adviser but that, just at the moment, we couldn’t afford not to have one either.

  
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16

We’re going to have to sell the house. I can’t write anymore because I’m crying and because I need to go into Boris’s room to get Radiohead back.

  
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17

For the first time in many months, I once again turned to bell ringing for comfort last night. I lay down with a slice of cucumber over each eye for half an hour first, so nobody would know that I had been crying. For a moment, I thought of recycling them for a salad, but decided we were not, yet, that desperate.

As soon as I walked across the churchyard I began to put the house to the back of my mind, savoring the anticipation of seeing my old friends. I was not disappointed. Reginald started and stared at me as if I were some sort of heavenly vision, then clasped me in a bear hug. Gerald looked a bit awkward, but gave me a small, quick hug and told me I looked very well. Rosemary was by his side, wearing a tweed skirt and a V-necked pullover looking for all the world as if she had never once fleetingly joined a traveling circus. During the coffee break, she came over and
whispered, “Don’t worry, he told me everything. I know that you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. It was just as well he tried his luck with you, and not Miss Hughes. She’d have snapped him up, make no mistake. I know her sort: there was a bearded lady in Vilnius who had just the same glint in her eye.”

What with this reflection on the universality of human nature and the need to concentrate intensely on my bell after months with no practice, I managed to spend almost the entire evening without thinking once about a stranger taking down my pictures and traipsing up my stairs with his clumpy stranger’s shoes and opening the door to the bathroom with his grubby stranger’s hands.

  
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18

Today, Boris gave me a briefing on everything he does to look after the house, which will fall into my hands when he leaves. He will be going home for Christmas on Monday, and will be back in Britain to look for a new job in the New Year. I’m sure someone will snap him up. When I told him he could keep the vacuum nozzles he bought, tears of gratitude welled in his eyes.

As he described dusting the tops of the wardrobes in all five bedrooms, polishing the floorboards in Jeffrey’s study, vacuuming the rugs, scouring clean the downstairs bathroom, the family bathroom, and the master bathroom, the prospect of moving into a new, smaller house became a little less terrible.