Haven't They Grown(3)
There’s something comforting about living with two people who never think about or question your behaviour. I tried to explain this to Dominic once, when he complained that the kids never ask how our days have been. ‘They’re teenagers,’ I said. ‘Anything happening outside of the teenage arena, they couldn’t care less. Be thankful – remember the time Ben found cigarettes and a lighter in your jacket pocket, and you told him you gave up ages ago, and they must have been there for at least ten years? You didn’t mind then that he didn’t pounce on that and say, “But wait, you only bought that jacket last month.”’
I don’t have any bad habits that I’m concealing from the children. I’ve only ever had one near-miss on a par with Dominic’s cigarettes-and-lighter scare, and that was when Zannah was four and still interested enough in people outside her immediate peer group to notice strange things her mother did. She walked into the kitchen and found me with a pair of scissors in one hand and a photograph in the other. I must have looked upset and guilty, because she asked me if I was okay. ‘Of course, darling,’ I said in a bright voice.
How could I have explained to a four-year-old what I was doing – or to anyone? Dominic was working in the lounge, which was next to the kitchen in our old house. He’d have been horrified. I remember holding my breath, praying that my unnaturally high-pitched ‘Of course’ hadn’t aroused his suspicions. Four-year-old Zannah looked doubtful, but she didn’t ask any more questions.
The photograph she’d caught me holding was of the Braid family: Lewis and Flora and their three children – Thomas, Emily and Georgina. A happy family portrait, taken in the back garden. Flora had included it with their Christmas card. She always sent a photo, just as she always signed the card ‘Lewis, Flora …’ His name had to come first because it was traditional, and the Braids cared about things like that. Dominic and I discussed it once. He said, ‘There’s no way Lewis has ever said to Flora, “Make sure to put my name first”. He’d totally leave the Christmas card sending to her, wouldn’t he? I can’t see him giving it a single second’s thought.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘But he also would never have ended up married to the kind of woman who wouldn’t automatically put his name first on all correspondence.’
So often over the past twelve years, I’ve wanted to tell Dominic what I did to that photograph and ask him which he thinks is worse: that, or what Flora did to me.
If I did, he’d probably laugh and say, ‘You’re mad, Beth,’ in an affectionate way. He’d say the same – that I must be insane – about what I’m going to do next, which isn’t what I’ve just told Ben.
I’m not going to the supermarket to buy tonight’s dinner.
I’m going back to Wyddial Lane.
I’m amazed by how much more I notice now that I’m alone and there’s no pressure from an imminent football match to distract me: the black metal postbox attached to a gatepost, with ‘16’ on it in white, the burglar alarm, the row of what might be tiny security cameras or some kind of motion sensors lining the top of the house just under the guttering, like a string of paranoid fairy lights.
As I drove back here, the grey sky gave way to a hazy blue and the sun appeared. Now it’s properly warm for the first time this year. Even with the window down, it’s already too hot in the car. I don’t want to put on the air conditioning – that would involve starting up the engine, and the last thing I need is for Flora to look out and wonder about the stationary car with its engine running.
That’s funny: I’m assuming that, if anyone’s home, it’s going to be Flora. Twelve years ago, when I still knew the Braids, Lewis’s job on Saturdays was to ferry Thomas and Emily around by car to their various hobby-duties: swimming lessons, drama club, tennis coaching. Five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily had an absurd number of unmissable appointments. Lewis drove them to and fro while Flora caught up on the housework. He often used to say, ‘When I sell my company for a trillion dollars, we’ll have a fleet of chauffeurs and I’ll be able to spend weekends watching telly with my feet up.’ In those days, he was always making jokes about how he would one day be rich. If we went to a crowded bar or café where we had to raise our voices to be heard, Lewis would announce, ‘When I’m rich I’ll have four chefs living in the annexe of my mansion – Indian, Italian, French and English – so that I don’t have to put up with other people’s noise in order to get great food.’ Flora would tut at his imaginary extravagance and say, ‘Lew-is,’ in the same voice she used to subdue her small children when they were making a spectacle of themselves in public.
As it turned out, Lewis didn’t need to worry about selling his company in order to get rich. His hoarder-miser grandfather died and left him several million pounds that nobody in the Braid family had known the old man had. Lewis and Flora moved from a three-bedroom basement flat to 16 Wyddial Lane, which looks as if it must have at least eight bedrooms, and now perhaps Lewis has all those chefs and chauffeurs he used to joke about acquiring. Maybe he and Flora and their kids are all inside the house now, staring at their iPhones.
What age would Georgina be? Twelve, so not quite a teenager. We didn’t let Zannah have a phone until she was thirteen, but her teenager behaviour had definitely started by then. She was eleven the first time she raised her eyebrows and asked me why I imagined in my wildest dreams that she might want to go into town with someone wearing a carpet. (I was dressed in a beautiful woollen poncho at the time.)