Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club (37 page)

normally keeps efficiently in check. I dose Metheny up

with a pre-emptive teaspoon of Calpol and finally manage

to get her down for her nap, but Sophie and Evie squabble

continuously for the rest of the afternoon, refusing to

settle to anything approaching sibling harmony even when

I break every household rule and permit unrestricted

access to the television on a sunny day.

‘The stupid TV’s too small Sophie says sulkily, drumming

her heels on the base of the overstuffed sofa. ‘And

there’s no Cartoon Network.’

‘Please don’t kick the furniture, Sophie. Evie, if you

need to wipe your nose, use a handkerchief, not the back

of your sleeve.’

Defiantly, Evie scrubs at her face with the starched

antimacassar. ‘I want to watch Charlie and the Chocolate

Factory. I brought my new DVD—’

‘Duh! Grandma doesn’t have a DVD player.’

‘We’ve got one at home,’ Evie whines. ‘Why can’t we

go back home and watch it? Why do we have to come here anyway?’

I sigh. ‘It’s complicated.’

Abruptly, Sophie leaps to her feet. ‘Daddy doesn’t live

with us any more, stupid! He’s not coming home! Ever,

ever, everl They’re getting a divorce, don’t you know anything?’

‘Sophie, nobody said anything about—’

She turns on me, her eyes large and frightened in her

angry, pale face. ‘You arel You’re going to get divorced

and marry someone else and she’ll have babies and you’ll

love them more than us, you won’t want to see us any

more, you’ll forget all about us and love them instead!’

I stare after her as she slams out of the room. Guilt

makes a fist of my intestines. And I know from bitter

vicarious experience that this is just the start of it.

When Sara telephones at teatime, and suggests coming

down and taking the girls out to Chessington with me

on Sunday, I fall upon the idea. My mother is clearly in

no fit state to cope with the children at the moment,

particularly when they are acting up like this, and I

certainly don’t have a better idea. I have never had to fill

an entire weekend with artificial activity and entertainment

for three small children before. I have no idea what

to do with them. Weekends have always just happened. A spot of tidying up while Mai goes to Tesco’s, changing lightbulbs and fixing broken toys. Mowing the lawn. A

game of rounders now and then; teaching the girls to ride

their bikes. Slumping amid a sea of newspapers after Sunday

lunch whilst the girls play dressing-up in their rooms.

I love my daughters; of course I do. But conversation

with children of eighteen months, six and nearly nine is

limited, at best. In the normal course of events, we are

either active in each other’s company - playing French

cricket, for example - or each doing our own thing in

separate parts of the house. Available to each other, but

not foisted. Not trapped in a cluttered house of mourning

in Esher without even the rabbit’s misdemeanours for

petty distraction.

For the first time, I realize that access and family life

are not even remotely related.

Clearly Mai isn’t scrupling to introduce our daughters

to her ‘friend’. And they may actually like Sara. Relate to

her, even. In time, perhaps, she could become more of a

big sister than anything else-

‘I hate her!’ Sophie screams the moment she sees Sara

getting out of her car the next morning.

‘Sophie, you’ve never even met her.’

She throws herself at the lamppost at the end of my

parents’ drive and sits on the filthy pavement, knotting

her arms and legs about it as if anticipating being bodily

wrestled into the car. ‘No! You can’t make me go with her!’

‘Sophie, you’re being ridiculous! Sara’s a very nice—’

‘She broke up our family!’ Sophie cries. ‘She’s a hotnewreckerV

I stare at her in shock. I can’t believe I’m hearing such

tabloid verbiage from my eight-year-old daughter. ‘Who

told you that?’

‘I heard Mummy talking to Uncle Kit on the phone!

She was cryingl Real, proper tears, like when Grandpa

died! Her face was all red like Metheny’s and she had

stuff coming out of her nose and everything! And she

told Uncle Kit -‘ she hiccoughs - ‘it’s all her fault!’

Involuntarily, I glance at Sara.

‘Please, darling. Let go of the lamppost. The entire street

is looking at you.’

Sophie pretzels herself even tighter. ‘I don’t care!’

My arms twitch helplessly.

‘Why are you being so difficult? Sara is trying to be nice to you. Chessington was her idea.’

‘So what! It’s a stupid idea!’

Evie climbs into the back of our car and sticks her

head out of the window. ‘We could always push her off

the roller-coaster,’ she suggests cheerfully. ‘She’ll splat like strawberry jam on the ground and the ambulance men

will have to use spades to scrape her off. We could put

the bits in a jar and keep it next to Don Juan’s cage—’

‘Evie, that’s enough!’

‘Why don’t you sit in the front with Daddy?’ Sara says

nicely to Sophie. ‘I’m just along for the ride, anyway.’

‘You’ll get carsick Evie says, pleased.

‘If I was going to cling onto something,’ Sara whispers

loudly to Evie as she gets in beside her, ‘it wouldn’t be

to a lamppost. Dogs love lampposts. Just think what you

might be sitting on.’

Sophie quickly lets go and stands up. She pulls up her

pink Bratz T-shirt and wipes her damp face on the hem.

‘I’m not sitting next to her, even if we go on a scary ride.

I’m not even going to talk to her.’

‘Fine. I don’t suppose she wants to talk to you much,

either, after that little display.’

‘She’ll get cold,’ Sophie warns, ruinously scraping the

tops of her shoes on the pavement as she dawdles towards

the car, ‘in that stupid little top. She’ll probably get pneumonia and die.’

‘Seatbelt, Sophie.’

She slams home the buckle. ‘She can’t tell us what to

do. She’s not our mother, anyway. She’s not anybody’s

mother.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Sara says briskly, ‘I don’t

like children.’

Evie gasps.

‘Not any children?’ Sophie demands, shocked by this

heresy into forgetting her vow of Omerta.

‘Nope.’

‘Not even babies?’

‘Babies most of all.’

‘Metheny can be a pain Evie acknowledges, regarding

her sister, who is sleeping peaceably in her car-seat, with

a baleful glare. ‘Especially when she pukes. She does

that a lot

‘Don’t you like us?’ Sophie asks, twisting round.

‘I haven’t decided yet Sara says thoughtfully. ‘I like

some people, and I don’t like others. It doesn’t really

matter to me how old they are. You wouldn’t say you

loved everyone who had red hair or brown eyes, would

you? So why should you like everyone who just happens

to be four?’

‘Or six says Evie.

‘Or six. I just make up my mind as I go along.’

‘You’re weird Sophie sniffs, but her voice has lost its

edge.

I glance in the rear-view mirror. Sara smiles, and the

tension knotting my shoulders eases just a little. Clearly

my intention to present her as a friend was arrantly naive;

certainly as far as the precocious Sophie is concerned. I

must discuss how much she knows with Mai as soon as

possible. But I could not have maintained the subterfuge

of remaining at their grandmother’s in order to console

her for very much longer in any event. Perhaps it’s better

to have the truth out in the open now. Rip off the sticking

plaster in one go, rather than pull it from the wound of

our separation inch by painful inch.

Children are remarkably resilient. And forgiving. As

Sara and Evie debate the relative merits of contestants on

some reality talent show, I even dare to hope that today

may turn out to be better than I had expected.

My nascent optimism, however, is swiftly quenched.

Before we have even reached the motorway, Metheny

wakes up and starts to scream for her mother, Evie and

Sophie descend into another spate of vicious bickering

over their comic books, and I am forced to stop the car in

a lay-by so that Sara may be, as predicted, carsick.

I turn off the engine. We had a Croatian au pair one

summer: sick every time she got in the car. Couldn’t even

manage the bloody school run. Fine on the back of her

damn boyfriend’s bike, though.

As Sara returns from the bushes, there comes the

unmistakable sound of my baby daughter thoroughly

filling her nappy.

Naturally, I have forgotten the changing bag. And

naturally again, we are far from any kind of habitation

where I might purchase anything with which to rectify

the situation.

I unbuckle Metheny and lay her on the back seat with

some distaste, wondering what in God’s name I do now.

Clearly I cannot leave her like this: mustard-coloured shit

is oozing through the seams of her all-in-one. I struggle

not to retch. We’re at least half an hour from anywhere.

Jesus Christ. How can a person this small and beautiful

produce substances noxious enough to fell an army SWAT

team at a thousand paces?

I look around helplessly. The car rocks alarmingly as

vehicles shoot past at what seem like incredible speeds

from our stationary standpoint. It isn’t that I’m not versed

in changing foul nappies; I have handled several bastards,

in fact, from each of my daughters. But not unequipped.

Not without cream and wipes and basins of hot water

and changes of fresh clothes.

Metheny’s screams redouble. There’s no help for it; I

will have to clean her up as best I can and wrap her in

my jacket. I offer a silent prayer that we reach civilization

before her bowels release a second load into my Savile

Row tailoring.

Sophie watches me struggle for ten minutes with a

packet of tissues from Sara’s handbag and copious quantities

of spit, before informing me that her mother always

keeps a spare nappy, a packet of wet-wipes and a full

change of baby clothes beneath the First Aid kit in the

boot.

I grit my teeth, aware that I now smell like a POW

latrine. I have liquid shit on my hands, on my trousers and

- Christ knows how - in my hair. I tell myself the children

are not being much worse than normal. It’s just that normal

childish awfulness is infinitely worse when endured alone.

And despite Sara’s physical presence, I realize that without

Mai beside me, I am very much on my own.

Each of the next four weekends is successively worse.

This for a number of reasons: not least of which is the

unexpected, but undeniable, new spring in Mai’s step.

‘You’ve cut your hair,’ I accuse one Saturday in mid

May.

She blushes. ‘Kit persuaded me to go to his stylist in

London. Do you like it?’

‘I love it,’ I say grudgingly. ‘It’s very short, very

gamine, but it really suits you. I don’t think I’ve ever

seen you with your hair short like this before.’

‘I used to have it this way,’ she says, Ijefore we met.

But you never let me cut it. You always insisted I keep it

long.’

‘Did I?’

‘You used to insist on a lot of things, Nicholas.’

She smiles and shrugs. I watch her flit across the

pavement to the car, where Trace is once again waiting. I

can’t fool myself that there is nothing in it any more. It’s manifestly evident that the sparkle in her eyes is entirely down to - and for - him.

Jealousy, thick and foul, seeps into my soul.

That Mai would so simply slough off our marriage like

an unwanted, outgrown skin, emerge somehow brighter

and sharper, an HDTV version of her blurry, married self,

was an outcome of our separation that I had, narcissistically,

never even considered. But every time she drops

off the children, she seems to have grown younger, closer

to the free-spirited nymph I rescued in Covent Garden. For

the first time in perhaps years, I find myself noticing her.

The ethereal fragility - so deceptive - the dancing, bottomless eyes. The way she has of drawing you in, making

you feel like the king of the world with a look, a quirk of

the eyebrows. All this extraordinary beauty and happiness

was mine; I held it in the palm of my hands. And now I

don’t even have the right to know how she will spend her

days; or, more pertinently, nights.

Nor have things become any easier between Sara and

the children. I had thought - hoped, rather - that their

hostility towards her would diminish as they grew used

to her. To my perturbation, the reverse appears to be the

case. Sophie, in particular, is sullen and uncommunicative.

Evie is simply rude. Metheny, who can have little comprehension of the grim changes stirring her life, picks up on

the general air of familial misery and responds by being

fractious, grizzly and demanding.

Understandably, Sara’s initial well-meaning patience

soon wears thin.

‘I didn’t expect rave reviews she says one day, after