This Perfect World (32 page)

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

He laughs again, in disbelief. ‘Since when did you ever
forget about a party?’

‘Yes, well, I don’t want to go.’ The TV guide is on the
floor next to the sofa; I bend and pick it up. Anything to
avoid looking at James. Upstairs both of the children are still
crying; one of us will have to go up in a minute.

‘Why don’t you want to go?’ James asks, standing there
with his arms crossed, and I shrug.

‘I’m just not in the mood to go spending an evening with
those people.’

‘
Those people
are our friends,’ he says, and I snort; I can’t
help myself.

‘I’m not so sure about that.’

James reaches down and snatches the TV guide right out
of my hand. When I look up, he starts nodding his head,
slowly, as if realization has finally dawned. ‘This is about
that thing over the asylum seekers,’ he says.

‘Well, look how they reacted! I mean honestly, James, some
people around here don’t care about anything except the
price of their houses!’

‘Laura,’ James says, ‘do you not think people have a right
to be pissed off when you start spreading around rumours
like that? Do you not think you’d be pissed off, if one of
your friends did that to you? And if Tasha and Rupert have
the good grace to invite us to their party after all that, do
you not think we ought to have the good grace to accept?’

‘Look, I just don’t want to go.’

‘Well, maybe
I
do.
I
want us to go, and I want us to be
nice to these people.’ Then, ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Now what?’

Arianne has come out of her room and down the stairs,
and is now standing in the doorway, howling.

‘It’s okay, Arianne,’ I say to her, getting up at last from
the sofa. Because people like us, we don’t fight in front of
the children. That’s what we like to think. We simmer and
we snipe and we circle each other in resentful isolation,
but we don’t fight. Oh no.

And so I can’t stop myself from saying, ‘You know, James,
the children were perfectly happy until you came home,’
before I take Arianne back upstairs and comfort her, as I
have comforted her so often. And then I settle both the children,
as I have settled them both so often.

When I come back downstairs James has gone out. He
comes back a while later with a takeaway in a polystyrene
box that he sits and eats in front of the TV, jabbing angrily
at noodles with a plastic fork. He doesn’t speak to me again
all evening, until later, when he sees me struggling to change
our duvet cover, which is covered in dirt and grass stains
from the garden.

‘Not such a good idea after all, was it?’ he says then,
ambiguously, and takes himself off to the spare room, leaving
me to sleep alone.

And thus I am punished.

Still, I do go with James to the party. Damage limitation,
James calls it, but for me it is just a swansong.

We walk there, in strained silence, through the pleasant,
leafy streets. And all the while James is just fractionally ahead
of me, so that I have to walk too fast in my heels to keep
up. It doesn’t bode well. When we arrive there are already
loads of cars parked up outside. Only Tasha could get away
with having a party in July; people will have booked their holidays around this. Just as we get to the door, James turns
to me and says, ‘Please, just don’t do anything else to embarrass
me.’

But before I can reply – and believe me, reply I would –
the door is opened and in we go.

Brittle smiles greet me as we walk the length of the hall
to the kitchen. Warmer smiles greet James. It’s all
James, hi,
good to see you
, followed by
Laura, and how are you?

Again and again and again.

I have the weird feeling of not belonging to my life any
more. Surprisingly, I don’t really care. I feel strangely free,
like a ghost walking through, just watching. James cares,
though, I can tell. Not out of any loyalty to me, you understand,
but as a reflection upon himself. There is a marked
difference. I see it clearly.

Poor James. He couldn’t come on his own, but he doesn’t
want me there, not really.

And then we are set upon by Tasha. She too greets James
first, draping her delicate arms around him, kissing him fondly
on the cheek.

‘So glad you could make it,’ she gushes, and to me, stoically,
‘I hope that tonight we can all be friends.’

I know why she says this. Just beyond her, at the far side
of the kitchen, I can see Fiona Littlewood poking things on
sticks into a giant watermelon. She glances my way and
catches me looking, and turns away again, and in no time
at all is huddled up with a group of what we always referred
to as the mums from school, all of them with their backs to
me.

‘Drinks are in the garden,’ Tasha says. ‘Do help yourselves.’

And so we wander through. Outside, they’ve a table laden
with champagne glasses and some sort of fountain-thing going on, and a couple of girls I recognize as ex-babysitters loading
up trays to circulate with.

‘Let me get you a drink,’ James says a little tersely, and
leaves me standing on the patio, from where I can look out
at the good and the great, and the not-so-good and the not-so-great, scattered across the perfectly striped lawn. There
are fairy lights strung from the trees, and plenty of patio
heaters, pumping out their fumes. Not that they are needed;
it’s a fine, warm night. Everywhere people are gathered in
little groups, chatting in that fast, urgent way that people
chatter at parties – you know, making out that everything
they have to say is just so funny and so amazing. Oh no,
nothing can ever be dull, or just plain ordinary, or
serious
in any way. The laughter trills out, carrying for miles.

‘Here,’ James says, returning briefly to hand me a glass.
And then I watch him as he so casually wanders over to a
group of the men of this town: Rupert, Peter Littlewood and
the like, and so smoothly moves in on them, slapping backs,
telling jokes. And I see how they respond, just as he wants
them to. Clearly he is not to be blamed for the failings of
his wife.

The thing is, it is unthinkable for James to be anything
other than popular. It was unthinkable for me, too, until
recently.

‘Hello, Laura.’ It’s Liz.

‘Hi,’ I say, and I slap on my party smile.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she says. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘Well, you know . . . I’ve been kind of busy.’

‘So I heard,’ she says, and she sips her drink. She’s had
quite a lot to drink; I can tell this because she sways, just
ever so slightly, like a flower in her pink strappy dress. ‘They’ll get over it, you know.’

‘What?’

She points with her glass to the far side of the garden by
the arbour, where Tasha is holding court now among a crowd
of followers. She’s showing off her dress, in which she looks
gorgeous, even though she’s five months pregnant. ‘Them,’
Liz says, and she leans a little closer to me and whispers
conspiratorially, ‘you showed them up for what they are and
they didn’t like it. I think it’s hilarious.’

And then off she totters again, back across the lawn to
the others.

I don’t want to stay. I am not a part of this any more.

To interrupt James and tell him I’m leaving would be to
induce a scene, of one type or another. So I just go. Quietly,
I slip back through the house, and out of the front door. And
the sense of freedom I feel as I start walking down that street,
on my own, in the soft balmy air, is heaven. It’s still not
completely dark and I can see the shapes of the clouds in
the sky above the trees, purple on purple. There are just big
houses in this street, set back from the road behind hedges.
No one is about. Not a single car passes me by. It would
seem that the whole world is at Tasha’s house and I am
completely alone. My heels hit the ground too noisily, and
the sound hammers back with an echo, so I take my shoes
off, and I feel the pavement gritty under my feet. Now there
is silence. Now I can truly disappear.

Emma from across the road is babysitting. She jumps up
from the TV when I walk in, surprised to see me back so
early, but I pay her for the night anyway and send her on
her way. And I wonder what I am going to do now.

I look in on my children, and see them sleeping the sweet
sleep of oblivion. I straighten their covers and close their
doors again, and creep about my house in the half-dark as if I don’t belong here. I feel I should wait up for James and
give him some sort of explanation. I think of texting him,
but remember he doesn’t have his phone; we took mine
tonight, for the babysitter. So I pour myself a glass of wine
and sit in the living room, in the silence and semi-darkness.

I feel so detached from my life. On the wall beside the
mantelpiece is a photo taken of us all last year: a studio shot
in which we are tumbling together against a background of
white, bare-footed and laughing. You know the sort of thing;
you’ll have seen similar photos of similar families in similar
houses to ours. It shows us in our uniform, our disguise. See
how good-looking we all are, with our perfect teeth and our
shiny hair. It’s a PR shot. It shows us as we want to be seen,
not as we really are.

And I remember all those photos clustered around in Mrs
Partridge’s front room, of her children and her grandchildren,
the people she loves and who love her. The snapshots
and school photos of gap-toothed, bed-haired kids, of Heddy
in her wedding dress. No air-blown perfection there, no need
for artifice. Just the real thing. So lovingly Mrs Partridge
packed them all away into old cardboard boxes, carefully
wrapping each one in newspaper. I think of their lives. Always,
for evermore, I will think of their lives and feel the hole that
has opened up in mine.

I wait for James and I wait. I feel so strangely calm,
weightless, as if I have already let go. But he comes in late,
very late, and by then I have given up and gone to bed. I
hear his key in the door; I hear him banging doors. He will
be drunk, then, as well as angry. I hear him go into the
kitchen and pour first one glass of water, then another. I lie
in our bed, completely still, hidden in the dark, and listen.

After a while he comes upstairs, but he doesn’t come into our room. He goes straight into the spare room. And this is
where he will always sleep from now on, for the remainder
of our marriage.

It is a hot night and against my skin the sheets feel cool.
I lie so still I could almost be floating. I close my eyes and
I picture my life as a box, held together with string; undo
the string and one by one the sides fall open, and inside there
is just me.

I feel the layers of myself, peeling away.

I am up early in the morning, long before James. I find some
cereal for the children and put the washing on. Strangely, I
feel the urge to be a good wife now that I feel I will not be
one for much longer. I load up the dishwasher and clean out
the fridge, which is more or less empty apart from some
suspect milk and a bag of old apples. I am sitting at the table
with a cup of coffee, and writing a list for Sainsbury’s, when
James comes down.

He comes into the kitchen and he stands there in his
bathrobe and says, ‘Why did you do it?’ in this quiet, pained
voice. He is looking tired and a little haggard; he runs his
hand back through his sleep-messed hair, tilting his head to
the side. Does he mean to be patronizing? Sometimes I find
it hard to tell. ‘Will you please just explain to me why you
find it necessary to humiliate me like that?’ He pulls out a
chair and sits himself down opposite me, and then waits, as
if he actually expects me to answer.

‘I don’t find it necessary. I don’t mean to humiliate you.’

‘Then what else is it, Laura? Why else would you come
to a party with me, and then just leave without even
telling
me?’ His voice is rising now. The children are in the living
room watching TV – they’ll hear. ‘I didn’t even know you’d gone,’ he says. ‘Till near the end and I’m looking for you
and I can’t find you, and I say to Tasha, “Have you seen
Laura?” And she says, “Oh, James, didn’t you know? She
left ages ago. I do hope nothing’s wrong.”’

‘You didn’t miss me then.’

‘Do you know how stupid I felt? Do you know how
ashamed? Everyone else knows my wife’s just walked out,
without even saying goodbye to anyone, and I don’t.’

So I didn’t escape unseen, then. I picture them all, gossiping.
How they must have loved it.

‘If I’d told you I wanted to leave, you’d have tried to stop
me.’

‘Well, of course I would have. You don’t just walk out of
someone’s party. Don’t you think that’s just a little rude? You
could at least have made an excuse or something. I mean,
God, Laura – there I am trying to smooth things over after
the last thing you did, and you just go and show us up all
over again. Why, for God’s sake?’

‘I just didn’t want to be there.’

‘You just didn’t want to be there,’ he repeats back at me,
incredulously. And we sit there, and we stare at each other.
From down the hall in the living room comes the hyper-jolly
laughter of kids’ TV.

‘James,’ I say tentatively, ‘you may not have noticed, but
I’ve had a lot on my mind just lately.’

And straight back James says, ‘Oh, I’ve noticed all right.
How could I not have noticed? You’re hardly ever here and
when you are,
God
—’ He breaks off, he shakes his head,
and he laughs that short, humourless laugh. Anger, hot and
fast, shoots its way up my spine.

‘James, do you really think it so strange that I should want to put right some wrong that I did in the past? That I should
want to help someone I was unkind to?’

‘I really wouldn’t know, Laura,’ James says, ‘but I don’t
want it affecting us like this. Maybe you could do us both
a favour and remember that we’ll still have to live in this
town, long after your little project with the headcase has
finished.’