“Is this…this…boy really worth leaving your husband for?”
“Ed won’t discuss it,” I say. “He’s acting very strangely.”
“Ed is!”
“I didn’t leave Ed,” I explain patiently. “He asked me to go.”
“I can’t believe it. He was so worried when you weren’t at my place. Why didn’t you come to me first?”
“I did. I spent half an hour trying to hammer your door down. I thought you were still in Prague.”
Jemma looks horrified. “When?”
“Late,” I say. “Very late.”
“Shit.” Jemma looks mortified. “I took a Temazepam at about eleven and went to bed with my earplugs in.”
“Thanks. I wish you’d told my husband.”
“How did I know you’d be trying to break down my door?”
“Christian lives around the corner. I had nowhere else to go. Ed thought I was lying and had gone straight to ‘my boyfriend.’”
“Oh bugger, buggeration,” Jemma sighs.
I glug my wine, and by now it’s starting to make me feel considerably more mellow. “My thoughts exactly.”
“Come to me now,” she offers.
“And stay where? There’s loads of room at Christian’s. It’s a temporary measure until we sort things out.”
“Do you think you and Ed will get back together?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and at this moment I really have no idea. I feel like I’ve been torn into a million shreds and it’s going to take one of those funky new magicians like David Blane or someone to come along and reassemble me.
Jemma twirls her wineglass by the stem, deep in thought. “Do you think you’ll divorce?”
Divorce? What a truly horrible, final word. I hadn’t realized how harsh it sounded until now. Divorce. Fracture. Detach. Disintegrate. Divorce. I divorce. You divorce. He, she or it divorces. They divorce. We divorce.
“I don’t know,” I stammer.
Jemma is suddenly tearful, and it was easier when she was lecturing me. “I don’t think I could bear to think of you two no longer being a couple,” she sniffs.
A double-decker thunders past, giving the windows a good rattle, and the ground vibrates beneath me, shaking me to the core. Right at this moment, neither can I.
CHAPTER 34
Ed threw the tea towel over his shoulder and opened the front door. He stood back in surprise. “Oh, hi.”
Nicola Jones looked very bashful. “Is this an inconvenient time?”
“No. Yes. No. Well, sort of.” Ed stood aside. “Come in. Come in.”
Nicola smiled and walked past him into the hall. “I’ve come to see how Elliott’s arm is.”
“Oh, right. It’s fine. Fine,” Ed said. “Well, no. It’s not really. It’s giving him a bit of pain. And he can’t play computer games or football, which also makes him cranky.”
Nicola laughed. Ed stopped and turned to her. “Nicola,” he said, pausing to bite his lower lip. “This is a bit difficult.”
Elliott’s teacher looked suitably concerned.
“You see…” He chewed his lip a bit more. “You see…my wife has left me. Us. Only yesterday. And, you see…”
“Ed.” Nicola touched his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” He tried to smile chirpily. “These things have a habit of happening, don’t they?”
“All too often.” Nicola’s mouth turned downward, and she looked incredibly cute when she was sad, Ed thought, and then was astonished he could think such a thing while still knee-deep in the aftermath of his separation. “How are the children handling it?”
Ed shrugged. “Remarkably well, but I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Nicola asked.
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “I’m not even sure what there is to do. I’m your typical hopeless, undomesticated male.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that for one minute!”
Neither did he. Not really. It would be difficult coping without Ali—after all, she did run a very tight ship—but he could manage. How many mysteries could there be to Bold Automatic washing powder?
“I could mind Elliott after school for you,” Nicola offered, “if that would help.”
“That would be fantastic!” He resisted the urge to kiss her. Even out of gratitude it would be unseemly. “Come through. He’s in the kitchen. I’m just about to increase their cholesterol levels with egg and chips.”
Nicola held his eyes. “You’re very brave,” she breathed.
Ed shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Stubborn. Foolhardy. Stunned. These were all adjectives which were more appropriate under the circumstances.
“And modest,” Nicola continued. “I like that in a man.”
Elliott appeared at the doorway, Buzz Lightyear’s arm dangling from the corner of his mouth like a lime-green roll-up. “My mummy’s gone, Miss Jones,” Elliott mumbled.
Nicola crouched down next to him and wrapped her arms round Elliott, hugging him to her. “I know. I know. Poor, poor lamb.” Elliott adjusted his Buzz cigarette. “I’ll help daddy to look after you.” She smiled up at Ed.
“Will you?” Elliott brightened considerably.
Nicola ruffled his hair. “Of course I will.”
“Will you stay for tea, Miss Jones?”
“Elliott!” Ed warned.
“I’d love to,” she said, standing up. “But I can’t. Not tonight. I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
“We’re having egg and chips,” Elliott informed her.
“Elliott!” Ed said. “Miss Jones has got better things to do than entertain us.”
“It’s just a friend,” she protested. “An old friend.”
“Daddy says we’re never having chicken nuggets in this house ever again,” Elliott piped up.
“Ali’s speciality,” Ed explained wanly. When Elliott was better, Ed thought, he would remind himself to kill him.
“That seems very sensible,” Nicola said to Elliott, who, given his chicken-nugget addiction, amazingly looked as if he agreed. “I came to see how your arm is.”
“It hurts,” Elliott said with a pitiful grimace. “But I think it will be better enough to go on the climbing frame again tomorrow.”
“Elliott!”
Nicola laughed. She laughed a lot, but it was sincere and not all girly and giggly, which would have driven Ed mad. “We’ll see,” she promised and whisked back her hair. “I won’t keep you from your supper. I just wanted to…well…”
“Yes,” Ed nodded. “Thanks for popping by,” he said as he showed her to the door.
“I meant what I said,” she reiterated. “I want you to call on me whenever you need help.”
“Thanks,” Ed said. “I appreciate that.”
“That’s what friends are for,” Nicola Jones added and, with a coy smile, she turned and walked away.
Elliott was picking at his chips with his fingers.
“Use your knife and fork,” Ed instructed.
Elliott picked up his cutlery. “It hurts my arm,” he complained.
“Nonsense. Just eat them, Elliott.”
Tanya was cutting burnt bits off her egg white, and Ed noted that in her one day as a vegetarian she had become very picky. She had been extraordinarily quiet since she’d returned home from Brighton to face possibly the most devastating news of her short and relatively pain-free fifteen years. She had retreated into her bedroom, put on her headphones and had ventured out precious little since then. He would talk to her. Properly. Father to daughter. Later. Tomorrow. Soon. He hadn’t imagined telling the children would be so hard. Why? What was he—some sort of emotional vacuum? Of course they’d be devastated. He was devastated.
“Why did Mummy leave?” Elliott asked for the seventeenth time since they had returned from the Häagen-Dazs café at the front of the Odeon cinema in Hill Street and he had the unenviable task of informing them Ali had gone.
Ed s
ighed and put down his knife and fork. “Sometimes grown-ups fall out of love with each other.”
“That doesn’t sound very grown up,” his son observed.
“I know.”
“Is falling out of love like falling out of a tree?”
“Yes,” Ed said. “It is. Exactly like falling out of a tree.”
“It must hurt.”
“Yes,” Ed said. “It does.”
“More than my arm?”
“Even more than your arm.”
Elliott looked suitably impressed. He toyed with another chip. “Are you in love with Miss Jones?”
“No.” Ed was taken aback. “Whatever makes you think that?”
“I love her,” Elliott said plainly.
“Eat your egg, Elliott.”
The little boy pushed his plate away from him. “Daddy. Do you know how you can tell when you’re in love with someone?”
“No.”
“You get an erection.”
Thomas spat a half-chewed chip out onto his plate and started to cough. “Thank you for sharing that with us, Elliott,” Ed said.
Ed passed Thomas a glass of Coke, which he gulped gratefully. Out of all of them, he was most worried about his quiet, thoughtful son. Elliott would jabber his way through a crisis. Tanya would go all moody. But he never knew what went on in Thomas’s studious little head. “Okay?” Ed inquired with a concerned smile.
Thomas nodded.
“Do you get an erection when you see Miss Jones?”
“No.” Ed sighed. “Elliott, I’ll only tell you one more time. Eat your tea before it goes cold.”
“Do you get an erection when you see Mummy?”
“Look, Elliott, can we have this conversation when you’re about thirty-five? Or preferably never.”
“I only wanted to know,” his youngest son said huffily.
I used to get erections, Ed thought. I used to get them all the time. At one time his penis had a mind of its own. Never matter whether he was in a board meeting or on a shoot filming a commercial about a glass of milk, his old fella would be popping up all over the place. The word “inopportune” never troubled it. Even a stiff breeze would have it standing to attention. Now erections sort of had to be coaxed out of it. He needed time to be cajoled and caressed. The epitome of his sexual virility could be said to be having a bit of a sulk. He wondered whether that was what had made Ali develop wandering eyes, wandering hands and, ultimately, wandering feet. He wasn’t impotent—not by a long chalk. But there was, he admitted, a certain sluggishness in the trouser-snake department. It had, somewhere along the line without him realizing it, semi-retired into more of a trouser slug. You could buy all the conservatories you liked and call it caring, but deep down women liked nothing better than some well-aimed passion and ardor. And his ardor had, he admitted, been sadly lacking. It was only Harrison Ford who had moved him to any kind of passion recently, and even that was only in the movie sense rather than the biblical interpretation.
He’d like to bet that Ali was bouncing round the bedroom like a space hopper on speed with her new man. You did, didn’t you, in that first flush of euphoria? The “new man” wouldn’t be put off by the fact it was a weeknight and he’d be required to go to work knackered in the morning. Oh, no. When sex was new, it was energizing, liberating, it put a spring in even the most tired of steps. When you’d been making love to the same woman for a third of your life, it made you utterly, utterly shagged. The next morning your balls developed a dull ache and your briefcase dragged along the ground. Jemma had said this Christian was a boy—nay, a child! Ed remembered what he had been like at the tender age of nineteen. If he’d had a pound for every lustful thought and every errant erection, he would have been living in a swimming-pooled mansion in Bel Air by now.
These thoughts were not good for the digestion. Ed put down his knife and fork and stared at his cold, congealing egg. When he looked up, all three of his sorrowful, doe-eyed children were staring back at him, food abandoned. Thomas looked as if he was about to cry. How could he have been so foolish! He needed to get hold of Ali and talk to her sensibly about all this before too much damage was done. He had neglected her—and not just in bed. But that’s where the rot started, didn’t it? They would have a few days’ cooling-off period in the best-honored tradition of time-share. Perhaps Ali would get this fling out of her system and would come back and be prepared to carry on her uneventful life once the dust had settled. All Ed knew was that he wanted her back in his life, his bed, his kitchen—chicken nuggets and all.
CHAPTER 35
“Can everyone stand still, please!” Neil shouted. It was clear they couldn’t. He was facing his fourteenth lot of mini-monsters that day, all decked out in matching maroon sweaters and all fidgeting more than a sack full of fidgety ferrets for the sole purpose of taking the time-honored “class photo.”
He didn’t know what was worse, trying to snap bunch after bunch of motley urchins or the mammoth task of getting a whole school to smile and stand still both at once. Neil tugged at his tie, which seemed to be getting tighter by the minute. It was a hot, muggy day, one of the few that punctuate the blossoming days of spring, the ones that are usually welcome unless you happen to be standing outside on a shadeless school playing field trying to take photographs of hot, bored and petulant pupils dripping in their unnecessary sweaters.
The children had all been sorted according to descending order of height so that when he eventually managed to record this for posterity on film, it would make a wonderful photograph that would, no doubt, then spend the next thirty years gathering dust in someone’s loft until it was thrown in the bin by an overzealous spouse on a spring-cleaning mission. Life was constantly cruel.
“Tallest two in the middle, please!” The teachers herded the chosen pair forward and into place standing on the benches that had been purloined, as they were every year, from the gym equipment corner—a ragtag of broken sports gear hidden behind a 1970s psychedelic curtain in the far reaches of the assembly hall. “Next two! One on either side.”
Daylight, his patience and his life were rapidly running out while Neil tried to capture this snapshot moment in the lives of years One, Two and Three of The Bleeding Heart of Bernadette Lower School. And it wasn’t just Bernadette’s heart that was bleeding. His own heart was being put through the mangle day after day, doing this. It wasn’t what he wanted. He knew that. He wanted to take photographs of women draped seductively over chaise longues deep in chenille throws, wearing skimpy designer frocks that didn’t cover their bottoms. He wanted to capture on film similarly semi-clad females running through the edge of the surf on some secluded Seychelles beach. He wanted to be snapping starlets as they arrived at film premières in Leicester Square or, preferably, LA. What he did not want was snot-nosed brats in Bermondsey, Balham or Brixton.
During his reverie, the children had been filing in a disorderly manner onto the benches. “Back row, stand up. Nice and tall,” Neil instructed. “Middle row. Sit up. Come on—sit up. Nice and straight now. Fingers out of noses. Good. Good.” He looked through his camera. “Front row, cross legs. All the same way. Right foot over left. Left. Left. This one. This one. Like this.” Neil crossed his legs. “Good. Good. Stay like that. Fingers out of noses.” He checked the setup again. “Those of you with no front teeth, remember to try to keep your lips together when you smile. You don’t want to look back at this when you’re sixty and see nothing but a big hole in your face.” Neil emulated a smile with his lips closed together. The class giggled.
“Are we all ready? Sir! The gentleman at the back in the middle. Tongue inside your head where it belongs, please!” The tongue was duly retracted. “Back row, stand up straight. Hands behind backs not in noses.” Neil looked up and attempted a grin, which, at this stage in the day, probably came out as a snarl. Fingers were also hastily retracted. “Middle row, sit up. Gentleman at the end! You can find what’s in your ear later. Front row. Listen to me. Listen to me. Arm
s folded, like this.” Neil folded his arms. “One on top of the other. Like this.” The front row, it seemed, were not blessed with lightning dexterity or coordination. “Like this. See?” He folded his arms again. It was better, he’d learned through bitter experience, to give them something to do with their hands. That way they were less likely to explore bodily orifices with them—either their own or their neighbor’s. “Good. Good. Are we ready?”
It was on days like these when he wondered why on earth he wanted to settle down and produce more of these little horrors of his own. What was the attraction of children anyway? Every school he went to they all looked absolutely identical—scruffy, bad-mannered, and with hair that needed combing. Only the color of the sweaters changed or the design of the school badge. There was always a class clown, always a bully and always the poorly dressed little boy or girl with a patch over one side of their glasses and an unhealthily pale complexion who tugged at his heart-strings.
He had been doing this for more years than he cared to admit, and in that time he had watched the children grow year by year. It was strange watching them race through life from a distance. You could tell the girls who would break hearts and the ones who would get their hearts broken. You could tell the ones who would be pregnant and out of school by the time they were sixteen. You could spot which boys would be accountants and which would turn out to be criminals. You could even tell the ones which would be criminally inclined accountants. And despite all the downsides, he did want a family of his own, and it wasn’t just because he was keen on the conception part. He’d always envied Ed and Alicia. They seemed to be the perfect family, and it was gut-wrenching to see how quickly it had all disappeared.
He’d been to see his brother yesterday after Ed had phoned to say that Ali had gone again. It seemed that her fling with this Christian guy was more serious than Ed had first thought. His brother looked stretched and white-faced and suitably distraught, but Neil couldn’t help feeling that there was a certain family trait of stubbornness in Ed’s demeanor that wasn’t exactly helping the situation. It was ridiculous to stand by and watch them both destroy all they’d built up. Their kids were fantastic. Didn’t they deserve more than having two supposedly intelligent adults with locked horns damage their lives? Neil sighed to himself and realized that Year Two were getting restless. Perhaps he was better off single after all.