Getting a Life Read online

  “That on you,” I said excitedly of the strange item the girl had persuaded Isobel to try, pelisselike but sleeved, pink and fawn and minutely pleated as the gills on the underside of a field mushroom. “That’s so clever, like Madame de Sévigné meets Simone de Beauvoir.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, staring hard at herself in the mirror.

  “I think it’s right for you,” murmured the salesgirl.

  She was some fifteen years younger than either of us, a few inches of golden stomach open to the air, her navel pierced with a diamond-tipped silver ring. Isobel and I are both in our mid-thirties, the age of heroes in Russian novels, halfway through the threescore years and ten.

  “Try this,” said the girl to Isobel, holding against her a dress in a green so violent that you narrowed your eyes to see it. It was the color of a cricket pitch before a thunderstorm.

  “Yes,” said Isobel slowly, nodding.

  The girl dropped an acid yellow mantilla over her left shoulder and we let out our collective breath with a hiss. She smiled in triumph.

  After that, Isobel was in the buying vein. Straight onto the yes pile went a jacket the good honest color of carrots and their paler core; a gray linen suit with the mauveness of dry earth; a blue-and-white dress like a willow-patterned teacup.

  I cannot imagine what color has to do with emotion, but the two are certainly inextricable. When I call my daughter to mind, I see her pale hot eyes, a furious light blue, fair-fringed, and the coral-freckled pink pallor of her father’s thin skin. My best friend (to use my daughter’s terminology) appears, and her celadon eyes are full of understanding without hardness, translucent, like sage backlit or the clear green of chives, their color and light remarkable as if reflected off a silver plate.

  When I think of women I know, I always see their eyes; with men, I see their mouths, their hands, the shape of their heads. I’ve tried to imagine why this is, and can only conclude that it’s because women and men still do not fully meet each other’s gaze.

  Isobel’s mobile phone sang out in muffled urgency from her bag. It was buried beneath a heap of bias-cut frangipani-petaled skirts and pinstriped peignoirs, pink plush toreador pants and a richly ribboned pea jacket.

  It rang and rang.

  She looked at the heap of clothes as though it cradled a howling baby. She scowled, and the frown line between her brows was like a fault line running clean through her.

  “Leave it,” I said. “I can’t even hear it.”

  “It might be important,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  It stopped after a while.

  Both of us ought to have been somewhere else. Both of us had too much to do. Her time is so precious that it is charged out to other people at a pound a minute. Five pounds a minute. Ten!

  Isobel’s words floated back to me from that high-flying Financial Times interview. “It’s unreal to say you can balance work and children. At the end of the day you have to make up your mind whether you’re going to bake cakes with them or go to work.”

  Cakes again! Why do hardworking women always bring cakes into it when they’re discussing child care? Nobody bakes cakes these days, they’re difficult to cook and bad for us. Surely we should be more concerned about the impossibility of persuading the childminder to prepare, and then to persuade the children to eat, plain fresh food. That’s invisible work all right; that’s a labor of love. But no, it’s always cakes that are mentioned. It’s obviously something to do with having our cake and eating it.

  “Do you feel guilty?” I asked Isobel.

  “What about?” she said.

  “Work,” I mumbled. “The children.”

  “Why should I?” she said. “If you don’t want to be financially dependent on your partner, then you have to work. That’s obvious.”

  How strange, I thought; that sounds just like the sort of thing you say before you have children. After all the what my ex-husband would term “personal growth” I’ve been through in recent years, nothing is obvious to me anymore.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “guilt is not a useful emotion.”

  I almost fell on the floor. I had never before considered emotion in terms of its usefulness. I was amazed.

  “Try this,” said Isobel, surprising me again.

  And so I tried on a long peculiar dress, yellow as a pear with mulberry-stained panels from armpit to hem, and a sash which tied over the stomach, making a present of the wearer like the bow on a box of chocolates. It was a mad figment. It was unhinged. And yet I stood between big Isobel and the little salesgirl and we all smiled at the mirror, even Isobel, that expert shopping smile. The dress was made for me.

  The salesgirl held up her fingertips in some cabalistic continental sign indicating perfection. I don’t look at my reflection much these days, but now I was doing so and felt rather shy, like laughing, as though seeing a once-close friend after a long time. Isobel said, “That’s you. It’s got that look you have. Don’t mind me saying so.”

  She was a little embarrassed. After all, we didn’t know each other from Adam. These were intimate exchanges. And yet we probably saw the point of each other, the visual point, more than our husbands, or ex-husbands, did.

  Do you know that old euphemism “a bit of the other”? To me it suggests a different world just on the edge of our own, a middle-earth free of the usual cares and weights. Well, this dress was a bit of the other, it was what you might wear to a middle-earth party. I felt aerated and energized, the very opposite of the creeping dismay which descends when you buy and immediately know you should not have bought, so that the new garment dogs you grimly, haunts you miserably, to flap at you from the touchline of your dreams.

  As for Isobel, she had accumulated a heap of finery and was now standing frowning by the till while they totted up how much it would cost. She looked like a baffled monarch, unable to believe that she was preparing to hand over vast sums to these illusionists.

  “I think these things are right for you,” said the salesgirl consolingly. She smiled and nodded her head and wandered back to her patch.

  We were now in the hands of two assiduous bustling boys. One was removing the price tags and the other was folding and wrapping.

  “This gilet, it does not have a ticket,” said the first boy. “ ’Ow much is it?”

  The second boy raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “One hundred fifty? Two hundred, I think.”

  He shrugged and held it in the air, hallooing up to his colleague in the chemise gallery.

  “ ’Ow much is this, Gianni?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “Three hundred,” he repeated, turning back, unblinking.

  “Three unnerun fifty,” called someone from another corner of the shop.

  Figures ricocheted around in the air, as at an auction.

  “No, three hundred,” came the final estimate from the woman at the till, chimed out as though announcing a bargain.

  Isobel moved her head from side to side as if she had been swimming and was trying to shake the water from her ears.

  After such an exchange in Wurstigkeit, everything is so unreal that payment becomes something oddly casual and insouciant. You are anesthetized against the usual anxiety at handing over money. It is pure thaumaturgy. I remembered my own first visit here, years ago, when I had asked the price of something, and politely scoffed at the answer and walked out. Then I’d wandered around the narrow streets thinking about the silly little garment in question, and it was just like going down with flu, like falling victim to an epidemic. Actual feverishness joined forces with a sense of suddenly lowered resistance, and I had gone back in and handed over my money.

  “You’ve got to hand it to them,” I quipped.

  Isobel gave a wan smile.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “I’d have to wear that dress eight hundred times before it came down to thirty pence a wearing. So that’s twenty-seven times a year until I’m sixty-five.”

  “You would sp
end the same on a picture,” commented the owner as he strolled past. “Is the same thing.”

  “Is not the same thing,” hissed Isobel to me.

  “Have them both,” I said as she havered between two shirts, the one pale pink and the other bright Saxe blue.

  “You’ve got to make choices, Laura,” she said sternly. “You can’t have everything.”

  “Why not?” I inquired. “Here at least.”

  I wandered off while she paid. When I returned she sat sprawled on a chair, flushed and exhausted and leaden-eyed.

  Our salesgirl approached with a little tray holding a crystal noggin of eau-de-vie and a few frail sugar biscuits. These Isobel wolfed down.

  Then she said crossly, “What are they for.”

  We turned and watched as a pair of cowry-trimmed chaparejos was wrapped in silver tissue paper.

  “They are smart but casual,” pronounced the beautiful boy who was wrapping them.

  “Yeah yeah,” said Isobel rudely.

  Back in her work clothes, the spell was wearing off. She glanced at her watch and clicked her tongue impatiently.

  “You can wear them anywhere,” he insisted, looking up from under raven’s-wing brows.

  “Like where?” snapped Isobel.

  He shrugged superbly.

  “You can do the gardening in them,” he said.

  “Oh yes of course,” said Isobel. “The gardening!”

  And at last she capitulated. She was positively wreathed in smiles. I barely recognized her. Amusement played on her face and made it appear like floating quicksilver. She was transmogrified; she had literally lightened up.

  “I can offer you a five percent discount,” said the boy, superbly magnanimous.

  “Well,” she gurgled, “that might just tip me over the edge.”

  I glanced at my watch. Good grief, was that the time? It was.

  Things started to move fast. Her 5 percent was restored in a hurry, the crackling carrier bags were handed across like hot-cakes, and we were out in the real world again, turfed out onto the pavement with the numberless door closed firmly behind us.

  “Where are you going next?” she asked.

  “Eastcheap.”

  “We can share a cab,” she said. “Do you know, I’ve got eight hundred pages to read before four o’clock.”

  We were walking fast towards the main road, almost skipping. Her strong face was alive with pleasure and sweetness, silvery and flickering with smiles like water in the sun.

  “And I’ve got to go and interview the head of sales,” I laughed. “Guilty as hell. Out on his ear!”

  “That reminds me,” she said, slowing down for a moment. “Now I’ve paid, I want the password.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  We stopped, she stooped down, and I stood on tiptoe to whisper it into her ear.

  She laughed aloud.

  HURRAH FOR THE HOLS

  These were the dog days all right, these last flyblown days of August. Her maternal goodwill was worn thread-bare. This was the nadir of Dorrie’s year, all this holiday flesh needing to be tended and shameless bad temper on display.

  She was sitting at a table in the unshaded barbecue area by the pool over a cup of terrible coffee. And yet it was supposed to be the annual high-water mark, their summer fortnight, particularly this year when they had rejected camping or self-catering in favor of splashing out on a room in this value-for-money family hotel.

  “You really are a stupid little boy. You’re really pushing your luck,” said the man at the next table to one of the three children sitting with him. “I want to see that burger finished now. Can’t you for once in your whole life . . .”

  His voice was quiet and venomous. What was he doing here alone with his children? It must be the same as Max was doing with their three now, playing crazy golf to give her some time to herself. This man’s wife was probably just round the corner over just such another cup of coffee. Was she too feeling panic at not making good use of that dear-bought commodity, solitude?

  “If you don’t do what I say right now there’ll be no ice cream. No swimming. No puppet show. I mean it.”

  The small boy beside him started to cry into his burger, wailing and complaining that his teeth hurt.

  “And don’t think you’re going to get round me like that,” snarled the man. “I’m not your mother, remember!”

  All over the place, if you listened, you could hear the steady exasperated undertone of the unglamorously leisure-clad parents teasing their tempestuous egomaniacal little people into, for example, eating that sandwich up “or I tell you what, and you’re being very silly, but you won’t be going to the Treasure Island club tonight and I mean it.” It stuck in her throat, the bread of the weeping child. The parents said nothing to each other, except the names of sandwich fillings. She and Max were the same, they couldn’t talk over, under or round the children, and so it turned them sour and obdurate in each other’s company. They held each other at night in bed but again could say or do nothing for fear of their children beside them, sleeping like larks, like clean-limbed breathing fruit.

  She sipped and grimaced and watched the snail’s progress of the combine harvester on the adjacent cliff. There was a splash as someone jumped into the pool, and a flapping over wasps and a dragging round of high chairs to plastic tables, and howls, hoots, groaning and brokenhearted sobbing, the steady cacophony which underscores family life en masse. At least, sitting here alone, she had been noticing the individual elements of the composition, she realized with surprise and some pleasure. When she was with her brood she noticed nothing of the outside world, they drank up all her powers of observation.

  Here they came now, off the crazy golf course, tearstained, drooping, scowling. Here comes the big bore, and here come the three little bores. Stifle your yawns. Smile. On holiday Max became a confederate saying things like “They never stop” and “That child is a cannibal.” Their constant crystalline quacking, demanding a response, returning indefatigable and gnat-like, drove him mad. There must be something better than this squabbly nuclear family unit, she thought, these awful hobbling five- and six-legged races all around her.

  She could see they were fighting. She saw Martin hit Robin, and Robin clout him back. It was like being on holiday with Punch and Judy—lots of biffing and shrieking and fights over sausages. What a lumpen, moping, tearful, spiritless mummy she had become, packing and unpacking for everybody endlessly, sighing. Better sigh, though, than do as she’d done earlier that day, on the beach when, exasperated by their demands, on and on, all afternoon, she’d stood up and held out her hands to them.

  “Here, have some fingers,” she’d snarled, pretending to snap them off one by one. “Have a leg. Have an ear. Nice?” And they had laughed uproariously, jumping on her and pinning her to the rug, sawing at her limbs, tugging her ears, uprooting her fingers and toes. Such a figure she cut on the beach these days, slumped round-shouldered in the middle of the family encampment of towels, impatience on a monument growling at the sea. Or was it Mother Courage of the sand dunes, the slack-muscled white body hidden under various cover-ups, headgear, dark glasses, crouched amidst the contents of her cart, the buckets, wasp spray, sunblock, foreign legion hats with neck-protective flaps, plastic football, beach cricket kit, gaggle of plastic jelly sandals, spare dry swimsuits, emergency pants. If she lumbered off for a paddle all hell broke loose.

  “Did you have a nice time?” she said weakly as they reached her table.

  Martin was shrieking about some injustice, his father’s face was black as thunder. Robin sprinted to her lap, then Maxine and Martin jumped on her jealously, staking their claim like settlers in some virgin colony.

  “She’s not your long-lost uncle, your mother,” said Max, unable to get near her. “You only saw her half an hour ago.”

  Things got worse before they got better. There was a terrible scene later on. It was in the large room by the bar, the Family Room, where at six o’clo
ck a holiday student surf fanatic led all the young children in a song and dance session while their parents sagged against the walls and watched.

  And a little bit of this

  And a little bit of that

  And shake your bum

  Just like your mum

  sang the children, roaring with laughter as they mimed the actions. After this, glassy lollipops were handed out, and then the surfer started to organize a conga. The children lined up, each holding the waist of the one in front, many of them with the lollipops still in their mouths, sticks stuck outwards.

  “That’s dangerous,” murmured Dorrie, “if they fell,” and she and other mothers discreetly coaxed the sweets from the mouths of their nearest offspring with earnest promises that these would be returned immediately after the dance had finished. Then she glanced across the room and saw Martin in the line, lollipop stick clamped between his teeth. Max just beyond him, sipping from his first bottle of beer, caught her eye; she, without thinking as hard as she might have done, indicated to him the lollipop peril, miming and pointing.

  The conga had started, the music was blasting out, and yet when Max wrenched the stick from between Martin’s clenched teeth the boy’s screams were louder even than the very loudly amplified Birdy song. Martin broke out of the line and fought his father for the lollipop. Max, looking furious, teeth bared inside his dark beard, was a figure both ridiculous and distressing, like a giant Captain Haddock wrestling with an hysterical diminutive Tintin. Their battle carried on out in the hall, where Max dragged Martin just as the conga was weaving past, with screaming and shouting and terrible fury between them. They were hating each other.

  Dorrie edged up to them, horror-struck, and the next thing was that Max was shouting at her. All right, it was their first day, they were all tired from the journey, but this was dreadful. The other parents, following the conga, filtered past interestedly watching this scene.