Having It All Page 19

  But Liz knew how much it mattered to her if the house were cold and dark when Mel arrived. Then Mel might think she’d made a mistake in coming to live here. And she needed Mel to think she’d done the right thing. Because just at the moment, she realized she wasn’t too sure herself.

  It took Liz a full ten minutes of searching high and low to find the funnel, but eventually she did and carefully filled the oil tank up with enough oil to last three days.

  As she knelt on the stone-flagged kitchen floor and watched the dial snake slowly upwards she put her hand against the oven and felt the first faint flicker of warmth.

  Sitting back on her heels, she threw back her head and laughed as Jamie cheered. She, who had only weeks ago run a vast technological empire, was glowing with relief and happiness that she hadn’t allowed herself to be defeated by a lump of iron that had been made nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

  ‘Mum, it’s your friend!’

  ‘Oh no! It can’t be!’ But Jamie was right, Mel’s car was pulling up in the lane outside the cottage nearly an hour early and she was still wearing the filthy tracksuit she’d worn to help the old boy from Firle Furnaces carry in the oil. She’d meant to change into the new blue jeans she’d bought last week in Lewes and get the children into the bright Clothkits outfits that really suited them, a picture of healthy, apple-cheeked, country children.

  Oh well. Telling herself to stop being pathetic she rushed to the door and watched Mel get out of her company BMW. She’d come straight from a conference and she was still wearing her Working Woman suit, though being Mel she’d teamed it with a jade silk blouse cut interestingly low in the neck.

  As usual Mel broke all the rules: her huge dark glasses clanked against vast dangly earrings, and she sported leopardskin shoes that wouldn’t have shamed a hooker. But she did it with such panache, putting it all together with a suit so well cut, so screamingly chic, that the whole thing looked terrific.

  For a fraction of a second Liz felt depressed. In her BMW and her £500 suit Mel was like a visitor from another planet. And though it might have been a planet Liz had left willingly, there are always things you miss about the Auld Country. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Liz longed for the camaraderie of the office, the gossip and the banter, the loaded comments in the lift. She looked down at her oil-stained tracksuit. If Mel had arrived half an hour later and Liz had been waiting ready at the door as she’d planned, the quietly chic mother with her two charming children, a Sussex Pond Pudding bubbling deliciously on the hob, maybe she could have warded off this tidal wave of envy suddenly threatening to engulf her.

  ‘Liz!’ Mel had noticed her on the doorstep at last. ‘Lizzie!’ and threw herself into her friend’s arms. And as she took off her dark glasses to kiss her, Liz realized they hadn’t been for show after all. Mel’s eyes were red with crying.

  ‘He hasn’t phoned, Lizzie. Not once in two months. And if I so much as appear in a room at Femina, he’s out of it. He’s even started sending his articles in instead of delivering them! He’s avoiding me, I know it. I must have rung him a dozen times! I know I shouldn’t be hounding him, but Lizzie, he’s the most wonderful man I’ve met in years!’

  Suddenly, as though a heavy weight had been lifted off her chest, Liz saw that none of the trappings of success made any difference. You could edit a glossy magazine and be just as lonely as the girl in the postroom. The power and the money, the expensive restaurants and the smart parties, none of it meant anything if you loved a man and he didn’t want you.

  ‘Oh Mel!’ She put her arms round Mel and held her friend tight. ‘It’s so bloody wonderful to see you!’

  Britt looked at the pile of work she’d been planning to get through while the office was empty and the phone silent for once and realized it was no good. She just couldn’t concentrate. Every time she started on something the thought of David’s limp cock came back to haunt her. Maybe she was making too much of it. Still, everyone had problems from time to time. Maybe they just overdid it last night. She really must pull herself together.

  She looked out of the window at the empty streets. Everyone was at home with their families except for the real hard-line workaholics like her. She’d always prided herself on how hard she worked – right through the night if the job demanded it. She loved to boast that she could work any man under the table. Sooner or later they always cracked. The lure of wifey or the telly or the hundred per cent duck down duvet always got them in the end. But not Britt. Or at least not till now. Suddenly she didn’t want to be at work, even though today she actually needed to be. She wanted to curl up on the sofa with David and read the Sunday papers like everyone else.

  For God’s sake, Williams, she told herself, shocked, you’re going soft. Next you’ll be cooing over babies and mugging up on recipe books. Get a grip on yourself for God’s sake!

  But it was no good. If she couldn’t have him in bed, she still wanted to be with him, to sit by him and just be together. Looking at her watch she had a sudden inspiration. Five-thirty. She’d take him out for an early dinner. Her favourite restaurant, Chinatown, the oldest Chinese restaurant in London, was only a mile from her flat. Feeling cheerful again she made a booking for an hour’s time and drove home to give David a surprise.

  ‘Mmmm . . . something smells wonderful!’ Mel leaned on the Aga and sniffed the warm tangy scent of lemon.

  ‘That’s the speciality of the house. Sussex Pond Pudding!’

  ‘Local recipes already. I am impressed!’

  Mel looked round the cottage admiringly, taking in the fat pink roses on the chintz curtains and the rag rugs and the pretty pine furniture. ‘Lovely curtains.’ Mel didn’t know a lot about curtains. She left all that to her decorator.

  Liz blushed. ‘I made them myself.’

  ‘Wow! Hold the front page! Network Honcho Makes Own Curtains Shock! I can see the headline now in Variety!’

  Liz giggled. ‘Ex-Network Honcho if you don’t mind. Come and see the Honcho’s runner beans.’

  She dragged Mel out into the garden, laughing at her as she picked her way through the cabbages and sprouts in her four-inch heels.

  ‘You’d never make a countrywoman!’

  ‘Too right! If I’m not within a taxi-ride of The Groucho Club I start having dizzy spells.’

  ‘Mum! Mum! Come inside!’ Liz knew that Jamie was jealous and wanted her attention but seeing Mel was manna from heaven so she pretended not to hear him and went on showing Mel her garden.

  ‘These are my Albertines. They’re pale pink and flower twice a year. I’m trying to persuade them to grow round the door like they do on chocolate boxes! Then these are delphiniums, I grew those myself, and foxgloves and Canterbury Bells. And these’ – she pointed to a clump of pale green leaves – ‘are my greatest achievement – cottage lilies!’

  Mel smiled at the pride in her friend’s voice. Gardening was like jogging to Mel; if she felt the inclination coming on she lay down till it passed, but she could tell how much it meant to Liz. And she looked so serene, dammit, kneeling there in her dirty tracksuit boasting about her cottage lilies and her delphiniums as though they were million-pound deals she’d just pulled off.

  Much as she loved her, Liz was a mystery to Mel. When she’d given up her job to be a wife and mother, Mel had been horrified. It had seemed like sacrilege to throw away all that power and privilege as if they didn’t count, as if thousands of women wouldn’t kill for what you had. And when David had gone off with Britt, although she’d been devastated to see Liz so hurt, it had somehow seemed a judgement on this mad, crazy step. You give up being a high-flyer to be a home-maker and your husband goes off like greased lightning with your career bitch of a best friend. Of course he does! What had Liz expected?

  It was a sign of the times. Twenty years ago your husband might have left you if you dared to be a career woman, but not any more. Now he left you because you dared to be a housewife! Yet here was Liz, husbandless and jobless, hemming curtains and planti
ng flowers and knocking up Sussex Pond Pudding and seeming to thrive on it!

  ‘Don’t you ever miss work?’ Mel asked curiously.

  Liz stood up. ‘Of course I do! I did this morning when you swanned up in your bloody BMW and your power suit! Suddenly I yearned to be hiring and firing, to hear a spot of office backbiting, to find out if Conrad had left his wife for Claudia, just to feel the thrill of making a brilliant programme!’

  Mel grinned, relieved.

  ‘But then I remembered all the politicking and the time-wasting and all the endless meetings which some man has kindly scheduled for six p.m. because he doesn’t want to go home anyway! And then it all flooded back to me. We still only win by playing men’s rules, Mel! We’ve even become like them. We’ve taken on their aggression and their competitiveness. We’re turning into Britts, God help us. We’ve learned to put work first and screw the rest of it!’

  She broke off one of the last of the roses and handed it to Mel.

  ‘I know you find it utterly incredible, but I enjoy myself here. I have things called evenings! I decide every morning what I want to do today. I have the one thing you don’t have – I have time. Time to sit in the garden, to cook, to play with the kids, to read . . .’

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ Jamie put his head round the door again. ‘There’s a funny smell in here.’

  ‘I’d better go. He’s probably imagining it but I ought to check. Back in a tick.’

  Mel wandered round the garden clutching her glass of wine and trying not to impale herself on the lawn. The frost had cleared leaving blue skies with just a hint of cold in the air. Even she had to admit, it really was a wonderful place. The whole village seemed to be cradled in a fold of the Downs that the centuries had simply passed by. Living here you could forget that that other world of hustling and shafting even existed. For the first time she wondered if Liz might have a point.

  Suddenly she heard gales of giggles coming from the kitchen and picked her way back across the lawn. Jamie and Daisy were rolling on the rag-rugged floor as Liz clutched a blackened pot, tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks as she pointed to the charred remains of the Sussex Pond Pudding.

  ‘Thank God for that!’ grinned Mel, putting her arms round Liz and joining in the helpless laughter. ‘Maybe you’re not cut out to be a bloody Earth Mother after all!’

  CHAPTER 18

  Britt ran up the stairs to the flat two at a time, too excited to wait for the lift, imagining David’s smile when she told him about her surprise.

  She put her head round the kitchen door but he wasn’t at his usual spot, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper or doing his crossword. Then she heard the television upstairs in the sitting room.

  David was lying, fast asleep, with his shoes off and his feet up, surrounded by the sports sections of every newspaper on the market, not even considering whether the ink of the newsprint might be sullying the winter white of her new sofa. Two empty cans of Dos Equis beer lay on the white carpet next to him and the football blared on the television.

  Britt looked everywhere for the remote control and in the end leaned down to switch it off by hand. Halfway through the gesture, she stopped. There was something different about the room. On top of the mantelpiece was a silver photograph frame, David’s first contribution to the decor of the flat. And in it was a snapshot of Jamie and Daisy. Britt sat down holding the photograph and studied it. They were lovely children. For a moment she felt a pang of guilt, followed swiftly by her usual rationalization. She hadn’t broken their marriage up. Liz had. And as she studied the photograph for signs of David in his children, she was hit by a truth so blindingly obvious that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before. Of course! How dumb she’d been. That was what was wrong with David, the reason why even sex was beginning to pall for him: he was missing his children.

  For a few minutes Britt sat silently and wondered what to do about the problem that would soon, she saw very clearly, threaten their relationship and wreck the plans she had made for their future together. Unaware of even the sudden roar from the crowd as Arsenal scored against Spurs, Britt saw that there was only one solution: if she wanted David to forget the children he’d had with Liz, she had to give him one of their own.

  Quietly, so as not to wake him, she took out her Filofax from her bag and opened it. Britt was a systems lady. She had kept, over the years, an exact record of every penny she’d earned, every pound of tax she’d paid, and every item of allowable expenditure she could set against that tax since the day she’d started working. She kept the phone number of anyone she had ever met who could conceivably be of use to her. And, fed up with being asked at every check-up for the date of her last period and never knowing, she had also kept a record, going back five years, of the exact length of her menstrual cycles.

  Getting out her calculator Britt computed that her last ten cycles had lasted exactly twenty-eight days. She smiled in satisfaction. That would make things much easier. Then she carefully marked Day Fourteen in her diary. It was next week. Tomorrow she would go out and buy champagne and more silk underwear.

  On the TV screen Spurs equalized just seconds short of the halftime whistle and their fans went mad. Britt glanced over in annoyance. Bloody football! And at the same time she spotted the remote control on David’s chest. Pointing it at the screen she had the satisfaction of seeing the Spurs striker disappear right in the middle of his moment of glory. Jolted by the sudden silence, David woke up. Seeing Britt sitting next to him he forced himself to smile. But he was dimly aware that in the split second before his conscious mind took over, his reaction had been very different: it had been irritation. Irritation at no longer being in a pleasant dreamworld free from circulation wars and interfering proprietors. Irritation at missing the football. And most of all, irritation at finding Britt there.

  ‘Hello darling.’ Britt quickly put away her Filofax and leaned towards him, her smile strange and sphinxlike. ‘I’ve got the most wonderful surprise for you . . .’

  A small crowd of Christmas shoppers gathered round Selfridges to look at their world-famous Christmas window displays. But only one of them was fighting back tears. It had been more than two months since David had seen the kids, and he’d missed them every single day. It was only his shame and his fear of Liz’s contempt that had stopped him trying to see them by now. That and the feeling it might be fairer for them if he didn’t see them till things were sorted out.

  Then he’d come down Oxford Street for a meeting and he’d seen it. A giant Ghostbusters tableau. And he’d pictured Jamie’s face lighting up with excitement. And although it was three p.m. on a bright sunny December afternoon he’d had to look away in case he cried.

  Britt watched David with annoyance. It was Day Fourteen, and she’d rushed home early to cook a special dinner and put the champagne on ice. She’d put on the new silk lingerie under his favourite dress and even slipped into the video shop to get a sexy film, just in case.

  But looking at him now she realized a crate of champagne and a dozen blue films wouldn’t help. He kept glancing at the photograph and he wasn’t listening to a word she said. She’d even noticed him look away during Help A London Child’s Christmas appeal.

  It was time she did something. But what? This longing to see the kids was getting out of hand. She had guessed he’d wanted to phone dozens of times, but was afraid Liz wouldn’t let him speak to them. Well, maybe it was time he tried. At least then he might feel more like what she had in mind later on. And it couldn’t do too much harm. After all, if everything went right, he’d soon have a new baby to worry about.

  ‘David, darling’ – Britt came round and stroked his neck – ‘why don’t you ring Liz and ask to see the children? Isn’t it about time you saw them again?’

  She felt a flash of guilt when she saw how his face lit up with gratitude and relief.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes I do. I really do.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t
mind?’

  ‘Of course not, darling.’ Like hell she wouldn’t. But it was the only solution she could think of. Hoping she wouldn’t live to regret it, she handed him the phone.

  Liz was making Christmas decorations with Jamie when the phone went. For years she’d bought Good Housekeeping and Homes and Gardens and cut out the articles with titles like ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’ and ‘How To Make Your Own WelcomeWreath’. Of course she’d never done any of it. It had all been a deluded fantasy since the most preparation she’d ever had time to do was to rush to Harrods Food Hall, late night, and fill her trolley with shop-bought Christmas cake and Christmas pudding. She knew Elizabeth David would have had a heart attack but her best Christmas present for years had been when Marks & Spencer brought out a turkey, ready-stuffed with Sausagemeat & Herb one end and Chestnut & Orange the other and de luxe mince pies so delicious that they made home cooking seem like an unnecessary indulgence.

  But this year it was going to be different. This year, for Jamie and Daisy’s sake, she was going to make Christmas extra special. All morning they’d been out in the woods looking for holly, pine cones and Norwegian fir, which the article promised could easily be wrapped round wire, twisted into garlands and decorated with red satin bows to make a glorious festive splash. She’d often watched Ginny effortlessly plaiting ears of wheat into corn dollies and drying flowers for pot-pourri. Surely she could manage a simple welcome wreath.

  Sitting at the kitchen table she’d found that simple was one thing it wasn’t. After an hour of pricking herself with holly leaves and mangling pine cones she’d produced a sorry-looking object which was just about identifiable as the lush and glossy garland in the photograph.

  ‘Never mind,’ Jamie consoled, ‘not all mums can be good at making things.’

  She was about to biff his ears for him when the phone rang. They all looked at it in surprise. Then Jamie jumped on it. ‘Hello. Who’s speaking please?’ he enquired in his best posh receptionist voice till he abandoned all attempts at politeness and screeched ‘Daddeeee! It’s Daddeeee!’ and tried to fight Daisy off as she too realized who it was on the other end of the phone and tried to grab it.