How to Kill Your Family(53)
Ah look, I have wasted time. But it pays to have a sense of her – even if it’s just so that I can congratulate myself on my restraint as I remind myself what eventually happened. She was young – younger than Jimmy and me, but she was remarkably possessed. A lawyer, as I’ve mentioned, who specialised in complex business takeovers. She explained her job as ‘the organiser if Nike wanted to buy Adidas’. I had not asked for an explanation. I think this particularly patronising description was the specific moment when I realised that I hated her. She neither tried to win me over nor did she smother Jimmy to show her ownership. She was cool with him, which of course made him even more frantic in his affection, and she was matter-of-fact with me. We spent a couple of hours circling around each other, but I didn’t really give it my best shot because all I could really focus on was how rapt Jim was. How much nervous energy he was emitting. How desperate he was for us to connect, be firm friends, link around him. I felt rising anxiety, feeling my fingers crawl up my neck, desperate to scratch. At 11 p.m., in the middle of a story Jimmy was telling about a family holiday where we ended up climbing a mountain by mistake, Caro put her hand over his and rubbed the skin between his thumb and finger and said that she had to go to bed. And just like that, the evening was over. The bill was requested, Ubers were ordered, and I was dispatched with a bear hug from Jimmy and an air kiss from Caro which did not require her to touch me. Their cab came first, and they drove off, Caro looking down at her phone without a backwards glance. Neither of them had suggested another meet up.
I knew that there was no way to play this and win. Jimmy was completely infatuated with this woman, and any sign of reluctance from me would have propelled him towards her even faster. I’ve always wondered why people get so defensive about criticism of their partners. If your mother, a person who has known you since you were a screeching potato in a onesie, thinks that the person you’re with is a bit off, why the fuck would you discount that? Tell me if the person I’ve fallen in love with seems like a monster. List the ways. Do a deep dive into it, make graphs. I want all the information. But nobody else ever seems to. And Jimmy was no different. All I could do was be nice and hope that Caro got bored. Her attitude towards him had hardly screamed ‘devoted’ and I clung to that for a while.
A night at the Latimers’ soon slashed that particular dinghy. I had long moved out by then of course but the penance I paid for escaping (middle-class kids stay at home throughout their twenties in London; they might rent a flat somewhere else for a bit, but even then they partially live at home until their parents stump up some deposit for a mortgage and they can actually have their own place for real) was that I had somehow found myself promising Sophie that I’d come for supper at least twice a month. This was a promise I really had no intention of keeping – modern life is 75 per cent cancelling plans and both parties feeling relieved – but I underestimated Sophie’s need to stay involved, to always feel as though she played a vital role in the lives of those she knew. I tried to cancel at the beginning – I’d cry off with headaches or late nights at work. Every single time I offered up a plausible excuse that would save us both from the hassle, she’d offer her commiserations and promptly suggest another date instead. And if I cancelled that date, she’d just offer up another. She didn’t really want me there, you understand, but it was a good show to keep up with the orphan that she had so selflessly taken in. I fast realised that I’d be better off picking the dates that worked best for me and sucking it up. For years that meant the second and last Sundays in every month. Always at the family home. Always an Ottolenghi recipe that called for spices that even Sophie, who spun out over local grocery shops in the way that others might salivate when they see a shop window full of diamonds, couldn’t find. As a result, every meal tasted predominantly of basil, since she could get that at any Waitrose going.
The Sunday when I saw that Caro had burrowed deeper than I’d previously realised was an unusual one, in that neither John nor Annabelle (nor Jimmy for that matter) were around to join us. Normally we were buffeted along by other people, indulging in pointless talk about how awful it was that the local library was to close, and wasn’t austerity finally revealing its true victims. The kind of politics talk that achieves nothing but that a certain type of person perseveres with because it makes them feel like they’re doing something about it just by mentioning it. God knows none of the Latimers ever went to the local library in the years I spent with them.
Sophie was completely undeterred by the concentrated chat we would now have to have with each other. Sophie never feels awkward in conversation. The way she views it, she always has something interesting to say, and what on earth could make her feel inadequate when armed with that certainty?
As she poured me a glass of wine and shoved the aged cat off the sofa, she began to gush about Caro. ‘Lovely girl – Jimmy said you’ve met her. She’s actually the daughter of Anne Morton – you know, the last foreign sec, and Lionel Ferguson. He writes fabulous books about the British empire. We knew them fairly well from an NCT class we took when I was pregnant with Annabelle – we both had these big bumps and bonded over the ridiculously judgey group leader we had. We saw them at parties over the years but of course Anne had a demanding job and by then they’d moved to Richmond. So remarkable that our boy has ended up dating little Caro.’
Oh God. Of course. That kind of self-assuredness that Caro had didn’t come from nowhere. Her father was called fucking LIONEL. Her mother was a politician. And on top of the privilege she’d been born with, she was striking and smart too. I used to flick through the society pages of Tatler in the office sometimes, usually to see if Bryony was featured, where the women in the photos were always the daughters of earls or dukes as standard. But it bothered me that they were also ethereal, limby, beautiful. How did the luckiest in society also get to be physically superior? I’d assumed the breeding pool for those kinds of people was so small as to ensure genetic weakness, but here they all were – the Caros floating around looking effortless and perfect, gliding through life with the confidence that they won the birth pool jackpot.