The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Page 13

  I’m not to be deflected. “And anyway, in reality, most of us work but usually it’s part-time, and whether it’s at home or in an office, it’s a job not a career. I think it’s something like 75 percent of mothers of under fives.” I’m making up statistics. “Most of us muddle through doing neither one thing nor the other, do you know what I mean?”

  They look at me blankly. Henrietta is desperately twiddling one of the earrings that she’s showcasing from her crocheted collection as if it were an earpiece through which a researcher was going to tell her what to say.

  “Go on,” says Alison, waving her hand in encouragement.

  “Thanks,” I say. “For instance, I work four days a week, depending on what’s in production.”

  “I meant go on everyone, tuck in to my cupcakes, you know you want to.”

  I stumble on, drunk on white wine and my own rhetoric. “Henrietta works at home, Alison’s four days a week and then one day from home, isn’t that right? Mitzi’s thinking of starting her own business. We’re all sort of working and sort of not working and that’s before we’ve even got onto the business of whether looking after children should accurately be called ‘not working.’ ”

  “Oh my god,” says Beth. “These are amazing, Alison. You are naughty, I just can’t resist.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It just seems to me that this whole mommy wars thing is a bit of a myth, that’s all. Surely the divide is not between those who work and those who don’t, but between those who have childcare for when they’re not working. I mean, the stay-at-home mother with no time off is just as harried as the working mother. And the only relaxed women are those with spare capacity childcare, like, I don’t know, those who work three days but have a full-time nanny, or don’t work but still have an au pair.” I’m thinking Mitzi, but I don’t say it. “It should be those with no time away from the office or their children versus those with time away from them. Or nobody versus anyone, in fact—I mean, there’s more that unites us than divides us, don’t you think? In fact, let’s not fight each other, let’s fight men. Yeah!” The rabble-rousing tone of my final word fades.

  There is a pause.

  “More macaroons?” asks Mitzi.

  It’s always like this, I think; always chitchat, never conversation. At university, I used to have those giddy, drunken discussions about what were the limits of the universe or how we knew we weren’t in fact computers or whether it might be true that we were all living in a gigantic other being’s imagination. Now I never seem to get beyond drinks-party babble. Back in my twenties the drinks were stiff, the drugs soft and the conversation flowing. Now the medium-priced wine flows, the drugs are absent and the conversation hard. Whenever these mothers and I get together with the children, at parties or in the park, I feel like our discussions are always teetering on the edge of a precipice of interest or revelation, only to be interrupted by a child at a crucial moment. It’s as if our sentences can only come in fragments, like those fridge magnets of random words we all have to help our children read, and if only we had more time we could assemble them into interesting wholes. And yet, when we do convene without the children, I realize that those interrupted half-exchanges are actually more interesting than these completed ones, for they hold the allure of what might have been said. Our minds are too busy still multi-tasking away, uselessly spinning.

  Sex: that was another thing my friends, my old pre-children friends, and I used to talk about. These conversations about sex were almost better than sex itself. Lubricated caps that pinged across strangers’ bedrooms; competitions with bananas to see who had the least sensitive gag reflex; detailed discussions about what made you good in bed. Mitzi and I were young and single when we first met. I look over to her now, gracious hostess as always, even in somebody else’s house, and I find it difficult to remember the chaotic, hilarious promiscuity of her youth. Nobody could tell as good a morning-after story as Mitzi. She was poor and scruffy then, yet even her smoky-eyed, dirty-stop-out-in-last-night’s-dress look was stylish. She made you want to leave your makeup on overnight and come into work wearing two-day-old clothes because that wantonness was so damn cool. Her laugh was as filthy as those frocks. And those stories…“Acorn boy” who never grew a mighty oak; the pop star who liked to suck a dummy; the sitcom actor who made her watch footage of his rivals and shout “You’re the funniest, you’re the best” over and over mid-coitus; the endless meat metaphors deployed to describe the anatomy of the then lowly sous-chef, now of course a well-known restaurateur. Our present-day anecdotes about our children’s reading ages are never going to be as funny.

  Everyone is playing musical sofas to avoid being stuck with Alison and her haranguing on how hard she works, combined with her ability to make you stress about whole new, hitherto unexplored areas of anxiety. She has a special trick of being able to denigrate and exalt her children and husband simultaneously. “I’m fed up with Oliver,” she’ll say of her six-year-old, “always on at me to explain cloud formations. And I bought him the unabridged Hobbit and he finished it in two days. Does he think I’m made of money? And as for Grace,” she sighs of the four-year-old, “I don’t think people realize that being gifted is as much a special need as being autistic or having attention deficit disorder.”

  “Do you remember,” I say to Mitzi, “when we used to talk about sex?” Daisy overhears me and giggles. “Do you remember when we used to actually have sex? I really can’t be arsed anymore.”

  Mitzi purses her lips into a smirking pout.

  “Do I take it you can be arsed?” I ask her. “Unfortunate choice of word.”

  She simpers again. Really? One way of avoiding conceiving more children, I suppose. “Don’t go all enigmatic on me now, Mitz, do tell.”

  “I don’t think we need know about anybody’s sex life, thank you very much,” says Alison, while everyone else tries to ignore her.

  “But we do,” I say. “Mitzi used to tell the best anecdotes when we were younger. Do you remember that time with the chef and the giant truffle? Not one of those chocolate ones covered in sprinkles, a proper one found by a pig in the woods and all that.”

  “I don’t think we need to go into that now,” she says. Of course, that’s all in the past and in her present, these women only know her as the elegant lady-wife. “Let’s just say,” she murmurs to Daisy and me in an aside, “that I am finding age is not withering Michael’s and my boudoir activities.” Her bedroom bloody is a boudoir, too, all sumptuous drapes, a velvet-covered chaise longue and one of those extra-wide beds you get in boutique hotels.

  “But you’ve got four children,” says Daisy. “Two of them are twins. How do you have the energy?”

  “Priorities.”

  “And staff,” snaps Alison, shuffling over to join in.

  “But sleep. You can’t get staff to sleep for you. You can’t subcontract out everything,” Daisy says.

  “Least of all sex with your husband,” I say. “Although, actually, I believe you can do that.”

  “Maybe I should,” says Daisy.

  “Please, do we really need to be talking about this?” says Alison. We continue to ignore her.

  “Seriously, Mitzi, what grown-up mature activities do you get up to in the bedroom—sorry, boudoir?” I ask. “Go on, inspire us.”

  She smiles enigmatically. In the old days, she’d have been launching into scurrilous detail, but ever since I got together with Joel she’s been all about secrets. She does that face, the one she puts on when she’s talking about my husband, that hints at things the rest of us shall never know. “You have to use your imagination.”

  An image of Michael, all alpha and hairy and imposing, pops into my head. “I’d rather not.”

  “I mean,” she says, “you have to use your imagination with your own husbands. Don’t you with Joel, Mary? Honestly, there’s no reason why sex can’t get better and better with age.”

  “There are a million reasons,” I say.

  “O
r just two in my case,” says Daisy. “Three if you include the man I married.”

  “If you let them. Like I say, it’s a question of priorities and I choose to prioritize my sex life. Michael is a very powerful man and it’s important to me that I make sure that power is sated and that I am as sexually desirable to him as the day we met.”

  When he was married to somebody else, I think. “Go on,” I say.

  “I make sure that my behavior and my appearance is far from mumsy.”

  I bet Mitzi has really nice expensive undies. Mine still include some post-partum big knickers and a couple of nursing bras. Becky is a fan of the ones that look like sports bras, those that bind rather than build. I wonder what underwear Cara wears. Is it utilitarian or silky? I think it may be quite sculptural, almost old-fashioned, a bit Rita Hayworth.

  “I don’t know, Mitzi, sounds a bit surrendered wife to me,” I say. “Servicing a husband’s powerful urges and all that.”

  “Believe you me,” she says with that smirk again, “I’m not always the one surrendering.”

  It shows me how far I’ve come from the world of sexual intrigue and the days when we used to swap top sex tips that I have absolutely no idea what she can be talking about.

  * * *

  It wasn’t just sex that Mitzi and I talked about when we first met, it was everything. It was one of those friendships that was like falling in love, when we stayed up all night swapping pasts and futures and I used to store up funny things to tell her.

  It was my first day at my first proper job. I had an idea that working in television was going to be glitzy, a preconception that everyone I had met in the interview process had contradicted with their clothes, which were disappointingly dowdy. All I had to do in my entry-level job was type, but I felt like a media hotshot just being allowed into the building.

  My excitement was waning after only an hour in the office. My face ached from all the smiling and my brain flagged from all the names I had to remember. I know now that there are the same types in every workplace and that in my twenties I’d always get befriended by the office joker, but back then it was all new and exhausting to me.

  People came up to me and I put my smile back on but they only ever wanted to know where Mitzi was. I didn’t even know who she was.

  Then she walked in and I knew it was her. It sounds corny, but it was as if she was accompanied by a choir and a special light filter. I wanted to be her friend so much that I could barely look at her.

  I couldn’t believe that she would like me and the mere fact that she asked me if I wanted to get a sandwich with her allowed me to become my most witty, best self. Looking back, I might have become a bit Single White Female, with my Mitzi-inspired taste for vintage dresses and newfound enthusiasm for shoes. The first time she asked me if I wanted to meet up to go shopping at the weekend, out of office hours and everything, I felt as happy as if I’d been proposed to. Our trip to the shops was like a budget, girls-only version of that scene from Pretty Woman, as she kitted me out in stylish high-street fashion finds.

  One day, she was away from her desk and I answered her phone, this being before everyone got called on mobiles. Personal calls for her were usually from men, but this was a woman, older sounding and with an accent that roamed around the globe in one short sentence. She sounded polite, yet pleading. “Can you pass on a message to Mitzi?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “But you will make sure she gets it. I don’t think my messages have been reaching her.”

  “I’ve got pen and paper right in front of me.”

  “Tell her to call her mother. Take down my number, in case she’s not got it.”

  I hung up and felt ashamed, as if I had intruded on something Mitzi did not want to share. When she came back I passed on the message and I saw her look unnerved for the first time.

  “Oh fuck,” she said, with one of those posh voices that can get away with it. “She’s back. Do you know what? In tribute to my old soak of a mother, I think we should go out and get very, very drunk tonight.”

  Later, as we bought cocktails we couldn’t afford, she leaned forward to tell me, “I really don’t like to talk about this so you must keep it very secret.”

  “Of course.” I was thrilled.

  “My mother is a love addict.”

  These days, celebrities are always claiming to be sex addicts, but back then the term wasn’t quite so widely used. It sounded very glamorous. I couldn’t imagine my parents being addicted to anything, though they did get a bit twitchy if they missed two consecutive episodes of The Archers.

  I nodded, not wanting to admit my ignorance. “In what form does her addiction manifest itself?”

  “Men, of course.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. She’s had five kids by four fathers.”

  “Really? It must be nice to have so many brothers and sisters.”

  “Haven’t any full ones. I was her only one by a good-looking bit of rough.”

  Of course, Mitzi’s parents were bound to be good-looking. “Who was he?”

  “Local builder. She left my brother and sister’s father for him. I was the result of her first transgression. Didn’t last, of course. Nor the next one, rich old bastard. A few after that. This one’s being going on for about ten years, but it’s probably on the rocks, guessing by the fact she’s ringing me.”

  “Do you get on with the rest of your family?”

  She shrugged. “Have you any idea what it’s like for your siblings to be much, much, much richer than you?”

  “How much richer?”

  “Lots and lots. Mom’s first husband has no chin but he owns a nice chunk of Somerset. His kids don’t like me because Mom left their dad because of mine and, to be honest, they’re not much to look at. My younger sister’s dad has died already and left her enough money to buy a flat when she leaves university. Jake’s poor like me, though, but with the most amazing eyelashes.”

  I imagined the feeling I used to get when Jemima got a more generous Christmas present, and multiplied by a hundred to try to imagine what it must be like to have very different financial means from your own siblings.

  “It sounds very complicated.”

  “You’ve no idea. Honestly, Mary, my childhood. It was like some sort of Catherine Cookson novel, except set in the West Country. They’d come in, father a child, leave again. There’d be a few in between them too. She’s always got to be ‘in love,’ you know—always got to be mooning over a man, has to pretend they’re Darcy or Mellors or Heathcliff or whoever. So immature. Love’s not like that.”

  “No, it’s not.” It hadn’t yet been for me. “How did you cope?”

  “I’m smart.” As if I didn’t know. “Wherever we lived I’d find the girl in my class with the most sensible family and latch on. Those stay-at-home mothers loved me. They used to bake cakes every day and proper puddings. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fat. I’d basically live with them until we moved on.”

  “Mitzi, I’d never have guessed. You seem so, I don’t know, confident.”

  “I got out as quickly as I could. I left home at eighteen and I’ve looked after myself ever since. I tell you something, my children are never going to be poor.”

  “Are you going to try to make lots of money, then?”

  “Or marry it,” she said and raised her glass.

  The next day in the office, Lily is sitting at her desk and sighing. I ignore her. She sighs some more, so much that it begins to sound like panting.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My pitch—you know, the one about the dirty house. I’m supposed to have finished it by now.”

  “The one that came out of my thoughts about gender inequality in the home?”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes, I said we should do something on the ways in which the real story about relations between men and women actually centers around household chores. And somehow it mutated into your dirty house r
eality show.”

  “Oh, right. So you can help me with it, then.”

  “Not with the format so much, but maybe I can with the background. Look.” I open up a document on my screen. “I’ve been collecting up research about the issues and what current levels of participation are.”

  She peers at it. “Do people really argue about it more than money?”

  “They do. It’s more important than sex.”

  She looks skeptical.

  “Listen, why don’t I write you an introduction and then you can concentrate on the format.”

  “Thanks Maz, you’re a star. You’ll have it done by tomorrow, won’t you?”

  I’m not going out tonight, of course. “Will do.”

  Joel is not having a good month. He’s already used up his March quota and we’re not yet halfway through. The book-group night babysitting fiasco bumped it by five debits. He’s not made it back for bathtime once and, while introducing his firstborn to the joys of video-gaming, he has now lost the cable that attaches the DVD player to the television, thus denying me my box sets. He’s used the word “hormones” three times, as in “Is it your hormones?” followed by a skyward look if I should ever dare criticize his behavior.

  I check his chest of drawers: three balled-up tissues (one with what looks like a lump of hardened phlegm encrusted onto it); two receipts for lunches that cost way more than my frugal packed ones or my occasional forays with Becky; a selection of foreign coins and a packet of Rizlas. Those receipts will never get converted into expenses, another debit on The List. He is rubbish with money perhaps because, until he had children, he never really needed any. The small stipend from a trust fund courtesy of Ursula’s illustrious forebears coupled with a natural taste for shabbiness meant that he never needed to worry. Lucky him, able to bum around with the band for all those years, then waltz into a job when necessary.

  God, the band. There’s a whole section of The List devoted to The Spitz (named for the 1970s swimmer Mark and that gloriously camp image of him with his big haul of medals and even bigger mustache). They happily reconvene for every fortieth birthday party in the Greater London area, requiring endless practice sessions. These, naturally, occur at weekends and in the evenings, so I’m left doing all the childcare. I cannot think of an equivalent female activity that would allow me to take time off, legitimately, with no one questioning it. “Mommy’s off doing her creative writing course this weekend again”; “Mommy will be off knitting again.”