Having It All Read online

  But if she was honest didn’t she miss it, the hurly burly of competition, the thrills of power, of seeing people jump when you shouted? Of course she did. But not as much as she’d missed seeing Jamie and Daisy. And lifting Daisy from her highchair she nuzzled her soft neck and knew she’d made the right choice, the only choice she could.

  And now that she’d done it she meant to enjoy every minute. Starting right now. She reached for an armful of jackets and skipped to the door.

  ‘Come on, kids, we’re going to the beach!’

  Leaning against the sun-warmed rock on the wide curving beach at Birling Gap, Liz watched Jamie and Daisy hunt for shells. There had been a storm two days ago and there were rich pickings on the shingle.

  ‘Look Mum, what’s that?’

  Jamie handed her a tiny winkle shell, stone-coloured and pristine, and rushed back to look for more booty: cockles and mussels, a shard of mother of pearl, strands of dark green seaweed. But it was Daisy who had the real find: a perfect scallop shell, immaculate and polished by the sea ready for a pocket Venus to rise out of it in the foam.

  As she sat back watching them play together, dark head against fair, she felt the sun on her back and the salt wind whipping her hair. And she wondered what she would have been doing on this Tuesday morning only a few weeks ago. And when she remembered she couldn’t help smiling. Of course, it was their weekly management meeting. Twenty assorted executives in grey suits or shirtsleeves, with her in the chair discussing overtime and budgets and the annual union negotiations.

  There might be some things she missed about Metro but the meetings and the hassles, the worry and the timewasting, and all the men with homes to go to that they never seemed to want to go to were not among them.

  Suddenly she felt absurdly happy to have escaped all that. And to Jamie and Daisy’s astonishment she scooped them up and ran towards the water’s edge, whooping with glee.

  While at home a letter waited for them that would burst the bubble of her new-found happiness.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘Look, Mum, it’s the postman!’

  Liz took the bag of shells from the car and stared at the postman in surprise. So few people knew they were here that she wasn’t expecting any letters.

  Jamie ran excitedly to the house and opened the front door. There was a handwritten letter on the mat. He picked it up and stared at it. ‘It’s for Daisy and me! Who do you think it’s from?’

  But Liz knew who it was from all right. It was from David.

  She felt the happiness of the day evaporate and the dull, familiar pain return. She tried to pull herself together and tell herself that it was better, far better, that he wrote, that he hadn’t disappeared from their world altogether, that she should be pleased.

  ‘Can I open it now, Mum?’

  Putting Daisy down next to a basket of toys she neatly slit the letter with a knife and handed it back to him without looking at it.

  ‘Will you read it for me, Mum?’

  Liz had hoped that Jamie would read it to himself, his reading was so good now, that she wouldn’t have to see David’s writing and hear his words as if he were sitting there next to them. But then she realized that was why Jamie wanted her to read it. That somehow in that small act his mother and father would be together again for a moment.

  She picked him up and put him on her knee.

  ‘Dear Jamie and Daisy, I hope you are having a lovely time at the cottage. Mummy and I are very sorry that we can’t be together for a while . . .’

  She stopped for a second. Why had he said for a while? Was it simply because, like her, he hadn’t the heart to tell them it was permanent? Suddenly she realized how hard this letter must have been for David to write, knowing as he must have done that every word would be put under the microscope of her hurt and her bitterness. She must just read the words as they came and stop this senseless analysis.

  But she had a lump in her throat as she read on. ‘Mummy and I want you to know that whatever happens, we love you very, very much and that when you are settled in I will come down and visit you.’ But when would that be? When would they have settled down without him? This year, next year, sometime, never? ‘Ask Mummy to give you a big kiss from me. I Love You. Daddy.’

  And that was it. No message to her. No covering note to apologize or explain. So what was she hoping for? A PS that said ‘Tell Mummy I love her more than life itself and that the last few weeks have been the worst time of my life’?

  When Jamie cut in on her thoughts she felt ashamed that her own pain had made her forget how he would be feeling.

  ‘Mum, when will we be going home to Daddy?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling. Not for a while. But you like it here, don’t you?’

  He smiled bravely knowing the answer she wanted.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s good fun.’ But as he slipped off her knee and went to join Daisy she heard a small but distinct sniff. He was trying to understand, to help his mother, but he was only five. Quickly he wiped away a tear and looked up at her. ‘But I’d rather be with Dad.’

  Stumbling out into the garden, Liz knew she had to be alone for a moment or she would lose the last shreds of her strength and cry in front of Jamie. Had she really done the right thing in chucking David out so finally? Not for herself but for them? Suddenly she understood for the first time why people ‘stayed together for the children’. Until now she’d thought the idea ludicrous, inhumane, Victorian. But now, remembering Jamie’s anguished face, she could understand it. Children didn’t understand divorce. They just wanted Mummy and Daddy back together. She’d read how, years later, even when their parents had married again, children dream of a reunion, of being the force that brings their parents back to one another.

  Liz wiped away a tear and looked out across the Downs. In the far distance her gaze rested on a huge white horse carved in the chalk of the hillside, and she wondered as she had done before what it signified.

  ‘I see you’re lookin’ at the horse, m’dear?’

  Liz jumped, and turned to find Ruby, her eighty-year-old neighbour, tending her rhubarb patch. ‘I was wondering why it was there, Ruby? Is it prehistoric?’

  ‘No, not prehistoric, no.’ Ruby dug out some dead plants with a fork. ‘From the 1800s, that is. Young girl fell in love with her groom, see. Course that weren’t thinkable in them days. Her parents forbade the marriage, naturally, so she rode her horse over the cliffs at Beachy Head.’

  Ruby shook the mud out of the rhubarb leaves and looked over towards the white horse. ‘Her father the squire carved that as a monument. I reckon he were sorry, don’t you? But it were a bit too late by then.’ She shook her head at the shortsightedness of the male sex and returned to her rhubarb, leaving Liz to gaze up at the white horse in peace.

  Life had been so harsh for women for so many years! They were chattels of their menfolk, forced to do whatever they were told or risk disgrace or even, like this poor squire’s daughter, death. Well, now they had choices. And she had made hers. And she must stick to it, no matter how she might wonder if she’d done the right thing. OK, so the children missed David, and his letter had been touching, but he’d betrayed and humiliated her. And she was blowed if she was going to be a victim of love like the girl on the white horse. She’d moved here to have a new life. And some of it, at least, was better than the old.

  Liz arranged a posy of the last of the Michaelmas daisies from the garden in the middle of the kitchen table and smiled. The biggest revelation over the last few weeks had been in discovering how much pleasure she got from small rituals like this: raking dead leaves, hanging clothes on the line, tidying out drawers, making pretty cushions. Never having had time for domesticity, she was taken aback by how enjoyable she found it. Was this the drudgery she’d gone to any lengths to avoid, farming it out to nannies and cleaning ladies, feeling sorry for those poor unfortunates who were sentenced to doing their own housework, God forbid? Then why the hell was she enjoying it so much?


  Guiltily, as though she were taking a lover, Liz surrendered to the joys of home-making. And gradually, week by week, she transformed the cottage from a bare scruffy unloved place with peeling walls and hidden damp patches into a haven of warmth and welcome.

  One afternoon she went as far as getting out the electric sewing machine she had bought years ago and never even taken out of its box, and sat down to read the handbook. Reading handbooks, she’d soon discovered, was the curse of the single woman. Grief and loneliness she’d managed to master, but having to read the handbook before doing the simplest task was something no one had warned her about. Maybe it was like the pain of childbirth, which everyone hides from you, thinking you won’t be able to take it. People gloss over the terrible reality of putting up shelves entirely and utterly alone. Yet it was then, huddled over the handbook on changing the Hoover belt, or trying to assemble some demon flat-pack with instructions translated from the Romanian that the true dark night of the soul arrived. Why, why, for God’s sake, were there always three screws left over?

  But the biggest surprise of all came in finding that she enjoyed making small economies. She, who had never read her Amex statements, who had thought nothing of eating in expensive restaurants and despised penny-pinching in all its forms! And now she had discovered the thrill of putting washing on the line instead of in the tumble-drier, of turning tomato ketchup bottles upside down, of re-using plastic bags. She told herself she was being Green, but the truth was she was being Mean. And loving it.

  In London she’d felt sorry for people who pulled old plastic bags out at the checkout. How petty, she’d thought, how sad. But now she knew it wasn’t sad. She realized that it was small victories like these that gave her strength. They helped her face the larger defeats she had no control over: the children’s pain, her own loneliness, and before too long money worries that no amount of re-using plastic bags would be able to head off.

  Britt watched David sleeping by her side and smiled. It was hard to believe it was already two months since he’d moved in with her. She’d never thought she could live with anyone for two months without being driven insane – a weekend was just about her record – and even then she started getting jumpy by Sunday breakfast. But it had been different with David. To her surprise it had been fun.

  He had some annoying habits of course. He kept putting his feet up on her white sofa – though to be grateful for small mercies he did take his shoes off first. But then he inevitably forgot them and she, who had never fetched and carried for any man, had to face staring at them for days or carry them upstairs herself. He also left all the towels in a damp pile on the bathroom floor and insisted on bringing home bunches of wilting chrysanthemums bought from the flower seller outside his office whose wife had just left him, because he felt sorry for him, despite her insistence that she had all her flowers delivered every week from the florist at Heal’s.

  Sometimes she wondered if they were incompatible simply on grounds of tidiness: she couldn’t sleep if the phone books weren’t stacked in the right order and David didn’t even notice if the bath had a ring like the head on a pint of Guinness and his socks were lying down and begging to be put in the washing machine. To her horror she’d once found a half-eaten fried-egg sandwich with tomato ketchup on his bedside table.

  Still, she’d sort all that out when they were married. Because marriage, Britt had concluded, was the only way she could hope to feel completely confident of keeping him. Even Britt saw the irony in that, since he’d been married when she met him and it hadn’t stopped him going off with her, but she knew he wasn’t the kind of person who would want to do that twice. Of course she hadn’t told him yet because she wasn’t sure he’d got over Liz. But he would. For the moment what he needed was more of the same medicine administered morning and night: horny, mind-numbing, explosive sex.

  Gently she slipped under the duvet and began to lick the soft flesh at the top of his thigh, up and down, her tongue rough against his skin, catlike, until she felt him begin to stir, arching towards her in his sleep. Slowly she climbed on to all fours and took his prick into her mouth. She loved it when it was like this: snail-like and sleepy, waiting to be licked and stroked into the ramrod hardness she knew so well.

  But today she realized with a slight sense of unease that nothing was happening. What was she doing wrong? Trying not to panic she tried her familiar routine, blowing softly on his balls, massaging the head of his penis with featherlight fingers, like making pastry, and snaking her finger backwards towards that other, forbidden source of intense pleasure. Still nothing.

  Ah well, thought Britt, emerging from beneath the covers, he must be too tired. It was Sunday after all and last night had been a record. Three times without uncoupling. She’d even broken the strap on her Janet Reger teddy.

  Quietly, she slipped out of bed and took her clothes into the bathroom. She’d go in to work and let him lie in. She always liked to work one day at the weekend and it might as well be today. Noiselessly she closed the door of the bathroom and turned on the taps. So she didn’t notice when he snapped open both eyes, clear and alert, and started to read his book.

  ‘Bloody thing!’ Liz kicked the stone-cold Aga with her slipper. ‘Design classic, my arse!’

  The Aga was, she knew, the ultimate object of desire to every townie whose heart was in the country. To them it was more than simply an oven. It was a way of life. It somehow symbolized everything solid and reliable and, well, countrified about the country, pumping out heat and hot water twenty-four hours a day, turning the whole kitchen into a warm inviting nest. She’d once sat through a whole TV programme, for God’s sake, where everyone confessed how their Aga had changed their lives and how they couldn’t live without it, wouldn’t ever move now that they’d found a house with an Aga.

  She even had one set of friends who’d ripped out a state-of-the-art split-level oven with white ceramic hob to instal a vast blue-enamelled Aga – and that was in Chelsea!

  ‘Mummy, why are you shouting at the oven?’ She hadn’t noticed Jamie arrive barefoot in the freezing kitchen behind her. During the night the weather had suddenly changed from Indian summer to English winter and the Aga had chosen this moment, when Mel was coming to stay for three days, to clap out.

  Liz looked with dismay at the Sussex Pond Pudding she had slaved over last night, staying up till midnight to shred the suet for the real suet pastry, carefully swaddling it round the whole lemon and brown sugar and tying muslin round the top of the pudding basin to boil for three hours on the hob this morning.

  But she wasn’t giving up yet. Not at the prospect of no hot food and a freezing house for the whole of Mel’s visit. Summoning her ‘I was a Female Programme Controller’ voice she rang the suppliers and demanded to speak to the Managing Director whom she informed that it was entirely his own, personal responsibility that her Aga had broken down and that her baby would catch pneumonia and her five-year-old son’s asthma had already returned. What was more, and this in a voice of charming threat, if he didn’t send someone immediately she would be forced to phone her best friend Esther Rantzen, queen of all the consumer watchdogs, and that would be a pity for Firle Furnaces when she exposed them on TV, wouldn’t it?

  When the unfortunate man explained politely that he had no engineer on duty today, Liz suggested that maybe he might like to pop down himself.

  ‘Mum! Mum! There’s a Bentley outside!’

  Liz, still in her Laura Ashley nightie and dressing gown, rushed to the window to see an ancient car pulling up outside the cottage and an equally aged gentleman emerge from it.

  ‘Mrs Ward, I presume?’

  Liz buttoned up her nightie and pulled her dressing gown round her. One glimpse of boob and the old boy would probably have a heart attack. Before he’d looked at her Aga.

  ‘Here, have a cushion!’ He was so arthritic that it had taken him five minutes to get to his knees and she wasn’t convinced he’d ever get up again. Gratefully he knelt on the c
ushion and put his head in the oven. Tutt-tutting he then inspected the small ovens, finally turning his attention to the gauge on the side.

  ‘Ah. Ha.’ He pulled himself to his feet. ‘I see the problem.’

  ‘Well it has to be your firm’s fault,’ snapped Liz, warming to the role of outraged householder. Mel would be here soon and the house was still freezing. ‘It was only serviced last month and these things are supposed to last a lifetime, several lifetimes even –’

  ‘Only when you put oil in them,’ he interrupted mildly.

  Liz stopped mid-fow. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said you’ve run out of oil. See this gauge. It says E. That means –’

  ‘Empty!’ shouted Jamie starting to giggle.

  ‘Shut UP, Jamie.’ It wasn’t fair. She’d tried so hard to read all the instruction books but the Aga’s had been lost since World War I. David had always looked after it. She hardly dared look at the old man. ‘How soon can you deliver some?’

  ‘A minimum of fourteen days.’

  ‘Oh no, but that’s our only heating . . . My baby’s pneumonia –’

  ‘Quite so. And your little boy’s asthma,’ he interrupted again, looking at Jamie and Daisy glowing with health beside her. ‘So as a small precaution I popped a barrel in the boot of the Bentley. It’ll last you a couple of days anyway. But I’m afraid you’ll have to refill it yourself. Have you got a funnel?’

  Liz nearly kissed him. She so wanted the house to be warm and welcoming, a picture of rural charm, by the time Mel arrived. As she showed him out she wondered why it mattered so much. After all, Mel was her best friend. She wouldn’t mind if they were in their dressing gowns and the house was freezing! She’d think it was funny and suggest they get a Chinese takeaway or go down to the pub.