Out of My Depth (30 page)

‘Did you make the children’s sandwiches?’ I asked pointedly. I knew the answer.

‘What’s that?’ asked Patrick. ‘Oh, sandwiches. Forgot, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, though, Susie. I won’t let them bother you when they finally decide they’re hungry.’

‘Very good of you,’ I said sharply.

‘Not at all,’ he said, and when I saw him glancing at Tamsin, with what looked like lust and complicity, I was suddenly furious.

‘I’ll go and ask them if they’re hungry,’ I said, tightly, ‘before I put all this away.’ I stalked across the grass, to my shed. The sunlight made me blink, and black blotches clouded my vision briefly. I carried on, wondering where Roman was, and whether our relationship was a sham. I longed to see him, to feel his physicality, to find out whether it still made me feel safe. The grass was brittle, the ground hard, and I could see that all the farmers whose fields surrounded my house were brazenly flouting the water restrictions, as ever. The trouble was, the penalties were too low. Even though it had rained at the beginning of August, the crops would die without extra irrigation, and a farmer could afford a thousand euro fine for the sake of a twenty thousand euro field. Roman and I had been flouting water restrictions, in our own small way, this summer. Roman was for ever topping up the pool, claiming it was evaporating away.

The heat was strong on the top of my head, and I touched my hair, which was strangely hot. When I walked round the side of the studio, I heard a child crying. It sounded like a serious cry, a cry of pain. It was not just a grizzle.

When I got past the old oak tree, I saw that it was Sam. He was sobbing in his mother’s arms, and Izzy was hurtling towards me, carrying Sam on her front. His arms were clasped round her neck. Her face was transformed by worry.

I jogged over. ‘Is he hurt?’ I asked. I touched Sam’s hair, and felt my loss.

‘He says a bee stung him,’ Izzy said, ‘but he seems really ill.’ She kept running.

‘How’s he ill?’ I tried to look at him, but his face was buried in his mother’s neck. His cries were getting louder. It was unbearable. ‘Is it shock?’

‘I don’t know. His leg looked pretty red. Let’s get him inside and have a look.’

We sat Sam on the table, indoors, and examined his leg. I could see the big red patch with the sting in the middle of it. The swelling was getting bigger every second. Patrick had vanished, but Tamsin came and looked.

‘Take him straight to hospital,’ she said at once. ‘I’ve seen this. It’s a reaction. There’s no telling how bad it’s going to be. Seriously. Get in the car this instant and take him to hospital. Actually, got a credit card or something? I can get the sting out first.’

I drove. Izzy sat in the back and held Sam on her lap. Tamsin jumped into the front seat. The brakes squealed as I reversed out of the drive, and set off on a course for the nearest hospital, which was, unfortunately, seventeen kilometres away.

Patrick was bemused by the exodus. One moment he’d been sitting with Tamsin having an extremely pleasant chat about Australia, and an ill-advised second glass of rosé, and then he’d popped to the loo. When he came back, they were all clustered around the dining table. Then they rushed off, out of the front door, and he’d stood in the doorway and watched Susie driving her car off at a hundred miles an hour. He had just about picked up that it was about Sam, and possibly to do with a reaction to a sting. He hadn’t got close enough to see whether they were in the grip of a collective gender-related panic, or whether there might actually be something in it.

As he listened to the silence, he remembered, guiltily, that Amanda was upstairs. She was, without a doubt, waiting for him to arrive with a peace offering. He sighed. Tamsin’s words sounded in his head. ‘If it wasn’t for the money, she’d be a down-and-out,’ Tamsin had said. He wished he could go and live in Australia, away from it all. He smiled as he remembered snippets of his delicious lunchtime conversation.

‘When I left, John Major was in charge,’ Tamsin had said, reminiscing. ‘But everyone thought he’d be booted out by Kinnock at the next election. And everyone was up in arms about the poll tax. And Diana was on the front of all the magazines, and that Andrew Morton book hadn’t quite blown the lid off the Camilla stuff yet. So I knew that Britain would have changed. I knew that Diana was dead — you could hardly escape that; the mawkishness was probably worse in Australia than it was in Britain. I knew all about Tony Blair. I even had an idea that there was Starbucks everywhere and everybody had mobile phones and everyone sold their old stuff on eBay. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be so fucking busy. And so crowded. You can’t move in Britain. Everybody’s rushing somewhere.’

He had sighed. It would be wonderful to have missed that happening. Imagine being surprised by Britain’s crowded roads and jostling crowds! Now he could see why expats retained a rosy view of their homeland.

For half a moment, Patrick allowed himself to dream. He pictured himself and Tamsin, boarding a Qantas jet at Heathrow and soaring off into the sky, around the world together to start a new life. It could never happen. He had the children to consider. He also had a wife.

‘Buggeration,’ he said to himself, and he set about collecting a lunch for her. Susie had dumped everything on the kitchen worktops, and he easily put together a large slice of onion tart, a selection of cheeses, a wedge of butter, half a baguette, and some token pieces of salad. It was a gourmet ploughman’s, without the pickle. He took the rosé from the fridge and filled the largest wine glass he could find. A linen napkin — Amanda insisted on a napkin — and a flower from a vase on the mantelpiece of one of those interminable sitting rooms, and his tray was ready.

He knew he was being weak. He knew he was allowing her destructive behaviour and her depression to grow and thrive by feeding it like this, but he did not have the stomach to see the fight through right now.

The door was firmly shut, and Patrick tried to open it with his elbow, but just succeeded in spilling rosé onto the tray. He knocked with his foot. After a loaded pause, Amanda’s voice called a condescending, ‘Come in, Patrick.’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I need you to open the door.’

He was full of dread as he waited. She was going to be mean to him, without a doubt. Sure enough, she stood in the doorway, wearing enough make-up to sink the Titanic, smiling menace.

‘Too little too late,’ she said sharply, motioning to him to put the tray down on the bedside table. He saw her looking him up and down and sneering, and Patrick knew that he made a silly sight, that he was never going to be a great romantic hero. He was probably lucky to have a wife as feisty and well-dressed as Amanda was. It was just as well, really, that he had such an ugly mug, because as things stood, Tamsin would never in a million years be interested in him, and that would save everybody an awful lot of trouble. She had let him touch her arm, but she’d only been being polite, he knew that.

Amanda took her wine glass and gulped. ‘Nice and cold,’ she commented.

‘Straight from the fridge.’

‘What was all the commotion?’

‘Sam was stung by something, as far as I could tell. It was swelling up so they’ve taken him to hospital.’

‘Fuss about nothing, no doubt.’

‘You never know.’

‘Where’s our two?’

‘Oh. Outside, I think. Or maybe indoors helping themselves to a late lunch.’ He knew he had to broker a peace deal. ‘Erm,’ he added, with what he hoped was a rueful smile. ‘I’m sorry about what I said to the kids. Wasn’t really thinking, somehow. Last thing I wanted was to undermine you.’

She rolled her eyes and torpedoed contempt at him. “‘Not really thinking.” Just for a change. Patrick, you know the way the family works. You do your job and I’ll do mine. Mine is the kids, for my sins. You don’t know the first thing about what they do and why they do it. So do us all a favour. Leave it all to me and for Christ’s sake, don’t jump in and make random promises to Freya just because you want to look good in front of Tamsin and Isabelle.’ She glared through narrowed eyes. ‘Tamsin, mainly.’

‘That wasn’t what I was doing.’

She raised her voice. ‘Oh no, not much it wasn’t! Jesus, Patrick, what were you doing then? You wanted to look good in the kids’ eyes and everyone else’s. That was it.’

He coughed. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it didn’t really seem fair. I had no idea exactly how much extra gubbins they did. And they are so young. They seem happy here, just relaxing. And that’s how I feel and it seems a bit . . .’ he tailed off.

A bit what?’

Patrick took a deep breath. Both he and Amanda wondered whether he would dare to continue. ‘Well, a bit sad, to be honest, Amanda. They’re tiny little things, still. Do they really need maths lessons on Saturdays, for instance?’

Yes they fucking do! Now, fuck off and leave me alone.’

Freya was confused. She didn’t understand why they were still walking. It was getting harder and harder for her to keep going, because she was hotter than she had ever been in her life before, and she was very, very thirsty. They were still struggling through the thick stalks, and they were still not in the garden. They had both dropped their cobs of corn long ago. Freya never wanted to see sweetcorn in her life again. Still, maybe it would come up in biology or geography one day. At least she knew how it grew.

‘Jake?’ she said. ‘We should be there by now, shouldn’t we?’

Jake turned round and Freya decided that he looked scared but that he was pretending to be brave. ‘I thought so,’ he agreed. ‘The thing is, even if we’re going the wrong way, we just have to keep going, along the same line of corn, and we’ll get there in the end. We’ll get out of this field because we’re walking straight and very, very soon we’ll get to the edge. It can’t be far away.’ For a moment, his fear showed on his face. ‘It really can’t,’ he said, more firmly. ‘We just keep going this way and we’ll get out.’

‘Can we just sit down for five minutes?’ Freya asked. ‘Please? I’m too tired to keep going.’

Jake paused. Freya sat down, pushing some stalks of maize aside, and looked at him challengingly. He smiled and sat next to her.

‘We definitely shouldn’t split up,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘That would be the worst thing to do. So it looks like I have to wait for you.’ He sat down next to her. Freya leaned back on her hands. The earth was cracked and dry, and it made her palms sore. It was like being in a weird tent. She tried to breathe deeply, but she felt hot inside.

‘Are we suffocating?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Jake assured her. ‘We’re just overheating. We might have the opposite of hypothermia.’

They relaxed for a few minutes. Freya started to feel drowsy. She lay back, crushing a few more plants together, and closed her eyes.

Amanda tried to savour her lunch, but it didn’t work. She wolfed it down. She was confused by her strong feelings, and since she was unsure what exactly she was feeling strongly about, she channelled it all into rage and indignation. What she deserved, she decided, was an outing. It was high time she had some fun.

She tiptoed to the bathroom, hoping not to meet Patrick on the way or, worse, in there. His clothes were folded neatly on the wicker chair. The car keys were in the pocket of his shorts. This meant, she imagined, that he was in the pool, presumably with the children, probably making them all sorts of stupid promises to make them like him better than her. She was pleased that she didn’t have to make him hand the keys over. He wouldn’t have wanted to do it. She would have forced him and there would have been a scene. Yet another scene. She was sick of trying to pretend that their marriage was fine. The crisis was impossible to ignore, now, and their friends knew about it. Everything about him infuriated her, at the moment; from the pink dome of his stupid bald head to his ugly hairy toes. She hated the craven way he tried to reason with her. If he had a problem, she would respect him far more were he able to come out and say it. A real row, a shouting match, would be cleansing. This passive-aggressive tiptoeing was driving her barmy. She hated having to do all the shouting, while he spinelessly agreed with her, and didn’t mean it.

She folded his shorts again, as anally as he had done it in the first place, and swung the keys from her index finger. She was off to have an adventure. She had been happy that morning, when Roman took her abseiling. Already, that episode had the air of a fantasy. It was her bloody domestic situation that was making her miserable. Roman had shown her that. Dangling from a rope, with her life in his hands and those expensive tiles waiting for their chance to crush her skull, she had been happy. With Patrick snivelling at her and messing around with the detail of their dull-as-fuck married life, she had been instantly miserable again. Therefore, Patrick was the problem. She would not leave him, of course. She wouldn’t deal well with the fallout of a divorce, and Izzy was hardly an advertisement for single parenthood. But something had to change.

It was not the business with Tamsin. That had happened years ago, and it hadn’t been her fault. Suzii had been the ringleader, and anyway, they were too drunk to be responsible for their actions.

She changed quickly into a dark olive Ghost dress, which was sack-like but forgiving, and matching Birkenstocks. She put her shades on her head, to keep her hair off her face, and gave herself a shiny red lipsticked mouth. The rest of her make-up was still in place.