A deeper sigh from Annie.
‘Oh bugger it,’ said the caller and hung up.
Annie sank her head on to her arms and leant on the desk. At least my work here is meaningful, she thought. She smiled into the crook of her elbow and shut her eyes tight.
And saw Jake, laughing, his eyes twinkling, his dark curls being blown slightly by a breeze.
She lifted her head quickly and checked that her phone was still working.
* * * * *
When Annie got home, Victoria was trying to feed the boys. A fine splattering of organic fig yogurt was sprayed over her hair and forehead.
‘That was clever!’ Annie said to Victoria.
‘What?’
‘Holding a sieve to your face when they threw slime at you.’
‘What?’ Victoria looked in the mirror. ‘Jesus Christ! Bastards!’ she exclaimed and she went to wash it off, leaving her sister with the boys. She came back into the room talking.
‘This is just a bloody nightmare. Why don’t they give your brain an epidural to help you cope with the childhood? Doesn’t anyone know that labour’s the easy bit?’
Just then, another dollop of organic yogurt hurtled towards
Victoria from the vicinity of her heir, Harry, so fast she didn’t have time to duck. It hit her square in the eye.
Silence descended. Annie froze, almost as terrified as her nephew, who was totally unable to comprehend how that had seemed such a good idea a minute ago.
They waited for the scream. But although Victoria’s mouth widened, no noise came out. Gradually Annie realised that Victoria’s shoulders were shaking. She was crying. Annie went towards her, but Victoria yelled something incoherent. She stood stock still, her hands splayed as if she’d just been arrested, yogurt on her rigid face. Slowly she started mouthing something, but still no noise came out. Annie edged towards her.
‘I can’t hear you Vicky,’ she said softly, genuinely worried.
Victoria took a deep breath and tried again. Still no noise.
‘Mummy!’ whimpered Harry, more terrified at Mummy’s odd behaviour than by her anger.
Still Victoria mouthed, but no noise came out. Then they all became aware of a high-pitched wail coming from somewhere. Annie was the first to realise it was coming from Victoria.
‘I need …’ was all Annie could make out.
‘You need …?’ Annie repeated. ‘What do you need sweetie? Help? A holiday?’
Victoria gasped in some air. ‘I need,’ she repeated—
‘You need—’
And then it came loud and deep, from Victoria’s very soul.
‘I NEED A
MANICURE
!’ she yelled, and then collapsed on her haunches, wild sobs racking her body.
‘Off to bed now Harry, I’ll be with you in a minute,’ said Annie to her nephew.
Harry ran.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Victoria was lying on her bed in her darkened bedroom. ‘I have to get ready for the dinner party downstairs,’ she whispered to Annie, who was sitting on the bed.
‘When you feel ready,’ said Annie, knowing better than to tell Victoria she wasn’t up to a dinner party. ‘You’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Fi and Sophie are coming here so we can all go down together.’
‘OK,’ said Annie smoothly.
When Charles rushed home from a golfing tournament an hour later, Annie was reading to the boys in bed and Victoria was sitting defiantly at her dressing table, in her underwear and silk dressing gown, scrutinising her face for signs of crying. Her nose was still a bit pink and her eyes looked tired, but in a sexy sort of way. Sort of Come-To-Bed-Or-I’ll-Cry-Till-I’m-Sick Eyes.
She shrugged. It had worked before …
The truth was she felt better now; cleansed. It was nice just to hear the word out loud. Man-i-
cure
.
Maybe one day soon.
Charles popped his head quickly round the boys’ bedroom, said goodnight and left Annie to it. He almost ran into his bedroom.
He opened the door wide.
‘Got a hole in one!’ he exclaimed to his wife.
She stared blankly at him and then turned back to her
reflection. ‘That’s more than you do in here,’ she muttered, sucking in her stomach self-consciously.
Charles stood for a while, gently deflating like an old balloon. Eventually he walked across the room and leant against the large window frame, staring out across the Heath.
Victoria opened her make-up drawer fiercely, in an ecstasy of hurt pride that he hadn’t come over to kiss her. She stared unblinking at her range of foundations.
‘Will you be ready in time?’ she asked, her voice like ice, self-pity raging through her gut.
‘Mmhmm,’ said Charles.
* * * * *
Annie dressed slowly and thoughtfully, trying to ignore the growing sensation in her stomach that today was Domesday. She had been wrong. Meeting Jake was one thing, but meeting him surrounded by her family was quite another. No, the only way she’d be able to cope with coming face to face with him again would be for her to be on her own. Preferably with live ammunition.
She’d have to make up an excuse. Say she’d been abducted by aliens. Or something.
Just as she was trying to decide whether the aliens should have one large white eye or three small green ones, a horrifying scream came from Harry’s bedroom. She rushed to the room and found Harry lying on the floor by his bed, Bertie sitting next to him. Harry was in agony, Bertie ashen faced.
Charles and Victoria raced in moments later.
‘What’s happened?’ they both asked Annie.
‘I don’t know – Harry, what’s happened darling?’ she knelt next to him. Victoria clutched Charles’s hand and he
admonished himself that he should feel grateful at a time like this.
But Harry just writhed on the floor.
‘Bertie darling, what’s happened?’ Annie held Bertie’s hand. He seemed incapable of speech.
‘Darling, we need to know so we can help Harry,’ said Annie as gently as she could. ‘No one’s going to tell you off.’
‘His nose,’ whispered Bertie.
Harry let out another agonising cry, his hands shooting up to his nose.
‘What’s wrong with his nose, darling?’
Bertie started crying.
Gently, Annie prised Harry’s hands away from his nose and looked up it. She realised his right nostril was misshapen. Something was up there.
‘What is it, Bertie? Be a good boy and tell me.’
Bertie pointed to the fire engine that was lying next to them. Annie knew the toy well. Its ladder was missing. Oh God.
‘The whole ladder Bertie?’ she asked, her voice now getting tremulous.
Bertie nodded through his tears.
Annie looked at Charles and Victoria.
‘He’s put the fire engine ladder up his nose,’ she said urgently. ‘I think he might need to go to Casualty.’
‘What?’ said Victoria incredulous. ‘What the bloody hell did he do that for?’ she shouted.
‘I don’t think that’s important right now, dear,’ said Charles.
Victoria let go of her husband’s hand. No one came home after a day’s golfing and then told her how to be a mother. Not even Charles. Especially not Charles.
She walked up to the boys and held Bertie’s arm firmly. ‘Why did he put the ladder up his nose?’ she asked. Bertie started to cry louder.
Harry sat up and still holding his nose he said – somewhat nasally, ‘I wanted to see if it would fit.’
‘If it would
fit
? Oh!’ she clapped her hands to her head in exasperation. ‘My son the bloody scientist!’ She looked over at her husband. ‘He’s an Einstein!’
Both boys started howling.
She turned her back on them and walked out of the room.
‘It’s your shift,’ she informed her husband as she strode past him. ‘Your son and heir has a hole fixation. No doubt he’ll be a golfer like his father.’
She slammed the door behind her.
Charles strode up to Harry and picked him up with a gentleness Annie had never seen before. Annie opened the bedroom door and Charles carried his son into the drawing room where Victoria was now pacing. She had her coat on over her dressing gown and was muttering under her breath.
‘There’s no way out of it, we’ll have to take him to Casualty,’ said Charles, placing a now moaning Harry on to the sofa.
‘If I’m not back in time to go to that party, I’m leaving you all,’ she said and bent to pick up Harry, who clung feverishly to his mother.
* * * * *
Two hours later, Annie had managed to get Bertie to sleep when she heard the key in the door. She rushed to the hall.
Harry was clinging to his mother’s neck for dear life, and they all looked exhausted.
‘What happened?’
‘A nice doctor took the fire engine ladder out of Harry’s amazingly big nasal orifice,’ said Victoria somewhat proudly. ‘I’ll just put him to bed.’
Annie and Charles stood in the hall quietly for a while. Charles looked at his watch.
‘Fi and Sophie should be here in half an hour.’
Annie nodded. The last thing she felt in the mood for now was a dinner party.
Victoria came out of the boys’ room and shut the door silently behind her.
‘Right,’ she said, a determined glint in her eye. ‘I should be ready just in time.’
‘Ready for what?’ asked Charles.
‘The dinner party downstairs at David and Jake’s, of course,’ she said, looking at him with her practised look.
‘You can’t go to their dinner party tonight! Your son needs you.’
‘I’ll only be downstairs. I can pop up every half-hour.’
‘How can you even think of going to the party?’
‘Well, how can you?’
‘Well someone’s got to go,’ he replied as if this was glaringly obvious.
‘Well, why the hell should it be you?’ shrieked Victoria. ‘Why don’t I get to have some fun while you do some parenting for a change? I don’t believe this! Why does everything always happen to me?’
‘Because you’re the mother,’ said Charles firmly.
Victoria exploded. ‘Oh so that means
I
have to stay at home twenty-four-hours-a-day bringing up
your
children while
you
pop out to the office for a chinwag with my father and then on to the golf course to get a birdy in one, I suppose.’
Something told Charles it was not a good moment to laugh.
Victoria was on the home straight.
‘I wouldn’t mind, but it’s my father’s money we’re living off,’ she shouted. ‘So why should I be the one who has to stay at home doing all the hard work while you’re off gadding about EVERY BLOODY DAY?’
‘YOU are his mother,’ attempted Charles, trying to ignore the fact that she looked nothing like one, now that her coat was open, showing her lacy underwear and silk dressing gown. ‘Whoever heard of a father—’
But Victoria interrupted. She wasn’t going to let Charles stop her dramatic finale.
‘How can you stand there,’ she accused, ‘even thinking about going out for the evening, when your Son and Heir lies weak in his bedroom, after emergency medical attention for a fire-engine ladder up his nose?’
It hadn’t quite had the dramatic impact she had hoped for.
Annie had heard enough.
‘I’ll stay here with him’ she said quickly.
They both stared at her.
‘I’ll cancel the sitter and stay here with him,’ she said again. ‘I’m not really feeling up to going out tonight anyway.’
‘Oh would you?’ asked Victoria, her tone now grateful.
‘You’re a brick, Annie,’ said Charles. ‘It would make our evening.’
‘Oh, thanks Annie, you’re fantastic,’ said Victoria, looking straight at Charles. They were going to go out together. Like a couple. Like old times.
Charles looked straight back at her. God she looked good after a fight. All flushed and heaving.
Half an hour later, Annie stood in her room, staring at her reflection as she slowly took off her evening clothes. It turned out that the aliens saving her from going to the dinner party were none other than her family.
Meanwhile Victoria was lying, sweating on the bed. She turned her head to Charles, whose smiling face was half hidden by her dressing gown.
He wanted to say that her eyes looked alive and warm. He wanted to say that the sex was fantastic and he’d missed it. But he knew that it would probably all come out wrong.
‘Hole in one,’ he whispered and they both smiled.
She almost said that it was a shame he didn’t spend quite as long achieving this kind as he did the other. But she let it go.
10
‘CASUALTY?’ REPEATED SOPHIE,
‘whatever happened?’
‘Well,’ began Charles, and took a deep breath in.
Victoria interrupted.
‘Your nephew decided that it was worth sacrificing his olfactory nerve so that Mummy wouldn’t leave him for a whole evening. She’d been evil earlier in the day and had only read
Postman Pat
to him eight times instead of the requisite ten. Naturally she had to suffer for it.’
‘His what nerve?’ asked Sophie.
‘He put a toy fire-engine ladder up his nose,’ beamed Charles.
Everyone gasped.
‘A whole toy fire-engine ladder?’ asked David.
‘Oh yes,’ said Charles, proudly. ‘Doesn’t do anything by half measures, my boy.’
‘Ow,’ sympathised David, remembering a long-forgotten incident involving chewing gum, a throbbing eardrum and a doctor with halitosis.
‘So is he all right now?’ asked Jake politely.
Victoria smiled a delightful smile at Jake. Difficult not to, really, even for Victoria.
‘Oh, I’m sure he’s as right as rain,’ she answered. ‘Annie – that’s my sister – is staying with him and if he wakes up she’ll read him to sleep. He loves that.’
‘Oh does your sister live nearby?’ asked David.
‘She lives with us,’ answered Victoria. ‘Upstairs.’
Sophie was only too glad to pass Jake a glass of water, as some food went down the wrong way.
‘Oh, you’d love Annie,’ Fi started telling David. ‘She’s one of the nicest people we know, isn’t she Sophe?’
Sophie nodded emphatically.
‘So she lives up there with you?’ David said. ‘She’s more than welcome to pop down to our flat any time. Why doesn’t she pop down now?’ He was a free agent since the divorce and wasn’t going to waste any time. The more women the merrier.