Comfort and Joy (6 page)

‘He’ll be back, so he will. Sure as eggs is eggs.’

Hope sniffs – Tim hands her more kitchen roll – and gazes limpidly at Pat before taking a huge glug of wine. ‘Do you really
think so?’

‘Sure he will.’

‘He’s a Scorpio. I think that’s part of the problem, you know. They have such a dark side.’

‘Their wee tails,’ Pat says, nodding.

‘Right,’ says Tamsin, whose patience has visibly been tried to the limit by this exchange and for whom the mention of astrology
is a deal-breaker. ‘That’s enough of that. Delicious prawn curry, Clara. What have you got Maisy for Christmas?’

‘Various bits and pieces, you know – pink stuff. And a doll’s house, a really nice wooden one.’

‘I got her this fantastic make-up set,’ Tamsin says. ‘She’s going to love it.’

‘We don’t let Honora wear make-up,’ Sophie says.

‘Well, it’s not really
wearing
make-up, is it?’ I say, wearily. ‘It’s more playing with it. She’s not nipping down to the pub in it in her high heels.’

‘It’s an extension of face paint,’ Tamsin says tersely. ‘It’s a child’s make-up set, not an adult’s.’

‘That’s cool,’ Hope says, ‘because I got her this bumper pack of mini nail-polishes. Our presents match.’ She smiles at Tamsin.

‘Sophie and I feel …’ Tim begins to say.

‘We are very much opposed to the sexualization of young children,’ Sophie finishes.

‘Lucky I didn’t get her the crotchless panties, then,’ mutters Tamsin.

‘I don’t think,’ Sam says, in an even-tempered way – the thing about his accent is that he makes nearly everything sound friendly
– ‘that anyone is
for
the sexualization of young children.’

‘But the things you can buy in the shops, Sam!’ Sophie says. ‘Have you seen them? Awful lingerie for little girls! High heels
for toddlers!’

‘It’s not quite that bad,’ says Tamsin, who is, let us not forget, a primary-school teacher. ‘We had a Year 6 girl come in
wearing a T-shirt that said “porn star” a couple of years ago, but apart from that …’

‘It’s just so
inappropriate
,’ Sophie says tearfully, her mouth set defiantly, as though the whole of the table were likely to rise as one and shout at
her that, on the contrary, children dressed like hookers gave us all the most disabling horn.

‘You tell them, Soph,’ says Tim, looking proud. I mean, really – what kind of people do they think we are?

‘Anyway,’ I say, making really quite a big effort. ‘What about you? What are you giving Honora?’

‘Well,’ Sophie says, having the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. ‘The thing is, we don’t like giving her any pink stuff
either.’

‘There’s an awful lot of it, isn’t there?’ This is Sam, being conciliatory. ‘We don’t like it much, but what can you do?’

‘What you can do, Sam,’ says Tim, pouring himself another glass and topping up Hope’s, ‘is resist. Put your hands up and say,
“No. No go. Not in my name.” ’

‘What kinds of girls are we raising?’ asks Sophie rhetorically, looking agonized. ‘Girls who love pink. Girls who are obsessed
with make-up. Girls who’ll clearly grow up into …’

‘Absolute tarts,’ says Tim, who must, I note, be on his fourth or fifth glass. ‘Ab-so-lute …’

‘Steady on,’ says Tamsin. ‘Aren’t we talking about five-year-olds?’

‘I love pink,’ says Hope, who is indeed wearing a very low-cut pink dress that clings to her wiry, toned yoga-body. ‘Cheers,
Tim. Chin-chin!’

‘Not quite
tarts
, Timby,’ Sophie says, throwing him a surprisingly irritated look. She is drinking water. ‘Just … silly little girls. I mean,
I didn’t get a First from Oxford –’ here Sophie pauses very slightly, so we may swoon ‘– by playing with pink stuff.’

Always nice, isn’t it, to be in your late thirties and remind people of where you went to university and how you graduated.
Any minute now Sophie is going to say ‘at my public school’.

‘And before that, at my public school,’ Sophie says, ‘we were encouraged to read and play music and involve ourselves with
societies and things. That’s the kind of upbringing I’d like for my girls.’

‘Well, yes,’ I say. ‘But – they’re awfully small for the debating society, aren’t they?’ She has a five-year-old, a three-year-old
and a six-month-old. ‘Do you really think the odd piece of pink plastic is going to make that much difference?’

At this point, I let my mind wander. The thing here is, I don’t care about the answer. I don’t give a toss. It’s boring. All
this child stuff is boring. I didn’t find it particularly boring the first or second time around – or especially gripping,
to be honest, but at least it didn’t make me want to go to sleep. But now – and with such a big age gap between Maisy and
her brothers – I know for a fact that the following are demonstrably true, unless of course a child is born with disabilities:

1. it doesn’t matter if you’re breast- or bottle-fed, or born naturally or by Caesarean
   
2. everybody learns to walk
   
3. everybody learns to talk
   
4. everybody learns to pee and poo in a lavatory
   
5. and wipe their own bottom
   
6. everybody learns to read and write
   
7. nobody gives a crap about when any of this happens.
   Nobody goes around as an adult saying ‘I learned to walk when I was barely one’ or ‘I was potty-trained exceptionally early.’
   (Some people do say ‘I was reading fluently by the age of three,’ admittedly, which pinnacle of achievement kind of tells
   you everything you need to know about them.)
   
8. it’s okay to have sweets or bad additives every now and then
   
9. giving your son a toy sword isn’t going to turn him into a serial killer; giving your daughter a dolly doesn’t mean she’ll
   never read Proust
   
10. it’s okay to ignore your children on occasion, if you’re busy and they’re safe but merely a bit bored
    
11. in fact, occasional boredom is good for children: it makes them self-reliant
    
12. children usually turn out fine, unless of course their parents become demented with all of the above
    
13. it is impossible to say any of this to people whose children are younger than yours without sounding unattractively like Old
    Mother Time, so there’s no point in even trying
    
14. which is fine by me, because
    it’s boring.
    

God, I think, idly observing Tim stare at Hope’s amazing bosoms out of the corner of his eye while he is pretending to talk
to Sam about the school play. It’s such a waste of time, all this lunacy about what they play with, or
how
they play, or how well they do or don’t do at ‘homework’ when they are five, or how many activities they do after school,
or how early they learn to ride their bike without stabilizers, or how they have dried fruit for treats because it has been
decreed that chocolate shall never pass their lips. How it bores me to the point of actual despair. It makes me want to tear
off my ears and throw
them on the floor in disgust so that I don’t have to hear. These children – mine, Sophie and Tim’s – will always be fine.
They are lucky, loved, wanted, privileged children. The end. Everything else is bourgeois hysteria.

Sophie is still droning on about the pink girly stuff, as if it were the end of the world rather than mildly irritating.

‘Have some more,’ I say quickly, largely to stop myself saying ‘Oh, do stop talking.’ I also kick Hope lightly under the table
and raise my eyebrows at her. She takes her cue immediately and starts asking Tim what he does (something to do with futures,
apparently. Good luck to her, with that). ‘And have some raita.’

‘Did you make the yogurt?’ asks Sophie.

‘No. But I did grate the cucumber.’

‘We make our own yogurt,’ says Tim, quite slurrily, from across the table. ‘Well, Soph does.’

‘Why?’ says Tamsin.

‘Why do I make yogurt? Well, you know – it’s nice to be self-sufficient, even if it’s only yogurt and bread and growing a
few vegetables,’ Sophie says. ‘It’s empowering. And the children love it. Tim and I are great
gourmets
, you see.’ She pronounces the word with a strong French accent. ‘We really
mind
about what we eat. We mind passionately. And the kids eat everything we do.’

‘Yeah,’ says Tim, rather pointlessly. ‘They do.’ He’s quite red, old Timboleeno. He’s drunk.

‘That’s great,’ I say, which it is.

‘My boys were the same,’ Pat says. ‘They ate everything we did. Chips, mostly.’

She hoots with laughter, but I can see Sam practically twitching at the direction the conversation has taken. He is, to all
effects and purposes, middle class these days, and he has no issues with most of the aspects of middle-class existence – niggles,
yes, but
nothing that really tips him over the edge. Except for this one thing: there is a certain kind of approach to eating that
sends him absolutely round the bend and that, to him, works as perfect shorthand for everything that is vomit-makingly wanky
about the social class he now finds himself occupying. Triggers include: people who say ‘leaves’ instead of salad (see also
‘fizz’, ‘vino’ and every permutation thereof); people who extol the virtues of X or Y cheese for more than one minute, particularly
where they say ‘chèvre’ instead of ‘goat’s cheese’ or specify the variety – sourdough, baguette, focaccia – instead of just
saying ‘have some bread’; people who have ninety-five different kinds of vinegar but never the one that you’d want on your
chips; people who call chips ‘frites’; people who won’t drink tap water, or – worse – people who will only drink one brand
of bottled, because they only like the taste of that one; people with ‘allergies’ who are really on diets; people who order
off-menu in restaurants; and any kind of over-thought-out, over-fussy arrangement on a plate. He can’t stand wine bores, on
the basis that nobody normal can tell the difference between a £10 and a £20 bottle of wine, ergo they’re just pretending
to, like the bourgeois ponces they are. His particular bugbear is people who make too much of the fact that their children
are omnivores.

Once, in Italy, we were sitting in a restaurant next to an English couple – overconfident, entitled-seeming, red with sunburn,
foghorn voices booming over everyone else’s conversation – who said to their toddler, ‘Try it, darling, for num-nums. It’s
called Parmigiano. Par-mee-gee-ah-no. That’s right! Come on, try it. You’ll like it. It’s only a tiny bit stronger than Grana
Padano, and you loved that, didn’t you? And do you remember the name of the greens you liked yesterday?’

‘Puntarelle,’ the child said.

Sam grabbed the table, his knuckles white like in a story, and
started swearing under his breath – ‘Get me away from the cunts, Clara, or kill me. Just kill me.’ He’s so good-natured normally
that it was quite amusing to see, and I wasn’t as incensed by the display as he was – actually I was rather impressed with
the baby’s command of language. But I know what Sam means: there comes a point, with foodie-ism, where you think, ‘These people
are just fetishists,’ especially when they see food as the echt signifier of class and social place. There’s a certain kind
of eating that basically says, ‘This is what
we
do, because we are special and unlike the herd. We are not proles. We make pesto out of ferns and acorns: that’s how evolved
we are.’ Sometimes we both pine for the days of casseroles and fondue sets, which were a great deal easier to get your head
around when you were eating at someone’s house than having to admire people’s perfect, fantastically elaborate recreations
of restaurant food – and not just any old restaurant, but ‘fine dining’, if you please. Besides, as Sam points out, he developed
his own athlete’s body on a childhood diet of potatoes, tinned food, salad cream and fluorescent fizzy drinks.

‘Wouldn’t eat this, though.’ Tim points out helpfully. ‘Spicy. Hot. Hot and spicy.’ He leers at Hope as he says this. I silently
push the water jug in his direction, trying to catch Hope’s eye, only to find that she’s just as blotto as he is.

‘Nice curry,’ says Jake. ‘Quite authentic. I lived in India, you know. For a couple of years, back in the sixties. Man, what
a country. What a place.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ says Tamsin, smiling at him. ‘How cool. You’ve done such cool stuff, Jake.’

‘I know,’ says Jake. I suppose when you get to his stage – he must be in his late sixties, though we’ve never been given a
straight answer to the question of his exact age – there isn’t much point in modesty or self-deprecation. ‘I’m rock ’n’ roll,
baby.’ This is also true: he is wearing leather trousers, for
starters. They’re quite nice, as it happens. Worn in, not all stiff, a description that could, from what I hear, also apply
to Jake.

‘We should go,’ Jake says, putting his hand on Tam’s thigh. ‘To India. Me, you and Cassie. Take her out of school for a bit.
Let her travel. See the world.’

‘Broadens the mind,’ says Pat, who has travelled to England, Greece (once, with us), Calais and to the bits of Spain where
you can get a Full English.

‘Exactly, Pat,’ says Jake. ‘Broadens the mind. Very good for children.’

Pat beams at him. ‘India!’ she says. ‘It’s that far away. Mind, you’d have to watch out for the monkeys.’

‘How long would you take your daughter out of school for?’ This is, of course, Sophie.

‘I don’t know – what do you think, Jake? Three months or so?’

‘Three months,’ nods Jake. ‘And if we liked it we could stay longer. Or move on somewhere. Go with the flow, you know.’ He
is beaming too now, his lined, weathered face split into a leathery, trouser-matching grin. Have I mentioned Jake’s teeth?
He has the most improbable gnashers, a full set of crazy, blindingly white, immaculate veneers, purchased at vast expense
and a great deal of discomfort shortly after he met Tamsin. It’s like a bathroom showroom every time he smiles – white porcelain
as far as the eye can see.

‘Three months!’ says Sophie.

‘No point going for less,’ says Jake. ‘Maybe we should go for longer, Tam. Maybe we should go for, like, a year. Hang out.’

‘Cassie’ll turn into a little monkey herself, so she will,’ says Pat fondly. ‘A little brown monkey, like a watchamacallit,
a gibbon.’