A Surrey State of Affairs (49 page)

A tropical beetle has eaten right through the leather of my sandals! I’ve had to replace them with flip-flops, the sort of rubber things that Sophie would wear, in bright turquoise. Jeffrey says I look “cool.” We’re at the Iguazu falls, in the steamy northeast. Yesterday we took a boat trip that wove so close to the waterfall we could feel the spray in our faces. Jeffrey rocked the boat on purpose and made me shriek, then grabbed me and gave me one of his bear hugs. It may be twenty-three years since he played club rugby, but he still has a powerful grasp.

Anyway, I can’t write anymore because I need to e-mail Rupert and Sophie, check Facebook for new photos of Shariah, and use the phone booth next door to check in with Harriet and Mother, who thinks that Jeffrey and I are on an extended watercolor course
in Andalucia. There is no free Internet where we are staying (although there is, thank heavens, a flush lavatory). This cybercafé connection is expensive, and the keys, as ever in such haunts, are grubby.

  
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15

We’re in Rio de Janeiro. We’ve rented a moped. Earlier this evening, I clutched Jeffrey’s waist as we zoomed along the seafront at a full seventeen miles per hour, with music from a teenager’s ghetto blaster pounding in the background, skyscrapers rising up behind us and the setting sun turning the sea the color of sherbet. As Jeffrey valiantly steered the bike around some teenage girls dancing in the street, I thought that he reminded me of Che Guevera, except without the head scarf or the extrajudiciary killings.

  
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23

We’re in Lima. I have walked the Inca trail, and encountered French-style lavatories, and survived both challenges. The lowest point of the trip came when Jeffrey and I had our first proper argument since beginning our adventure: studying the map, he was convinced that we had to follow a path leading up the left, but I was sure I could discern a bumbag hovering above a pair of broad American buttocks through the mist on a trail leading off to the right. Neither of us would give in, and our difference of opinion segued inexplicably into an argument about Natalia and Carlos. Eventually, the mist cleared, and we were distracted by the majestic crags of rock rising up ahead of us, and by another American, who appeared from behind a bend wearing a yellow waterproof poncho, tapped Jeffrey on the shoulder, and said, “The housekeeper? Man, that’s low.” I took this as a moral victory and the argument was soon forgotten.

Did you know they eat guinea pigs here? From the window of a bus (the quality of which has sadly deteriorated since Argentina) I saw a lady with a makeshift barbecue and a whole row of the hairless, roasted creatures, their expressions still bearing the indelible cheeriness of a family pet. I should tell Sophie. Perhaps it would stem the frequent complaints she puts in her e-mails about the quality of food in her hall of residence.

  
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5

News, real news! Late last night my mobile—which I had just managed to recharge—rang. It was Rupert. After I had picked up with a sleepy hello, he said that he was sorry, he’d lost track of which time zone we were in. Then, with an uncharacteristic peeved tone in his voice, he asked, “Where are you, Mum? How long are you going to go on like this? Whenever I go home to check on the house, it freaks me out. It’s spotlessly clean but so empty; the pile of mail in the hall is as tall as the hat stand. And I think Boris is starting to go nuts all by himself—he’s buying second-hand vacuum cleaners on eBay and hand-washing the carpet.”

I gave a small, sad laugh, and sighed. I do miss home. Today is the fifth of December, the fifth day of Advent, and here I am sitting in an Internet café in Bogotá, sweating in a Hello Kitty vest top that I bought in a market stall near the bus stop after the jungle moths got to my blouses. I had a sudden vision of cold, crisp mornings, of sitting down to write my Christmas cards, studying my list from last year with all the people who failed to send me a card neatly crossed out in red, and I sighed again. Every time I mention going home, Jeffrey gets the same pale, twitchy expression he acquires whenever he checks his bank account online, and he changes the subject. Our daily budget has been getting ever smaller, and I have started to yearn for life’s little
daily luxuries, the clean, warm towel on the towel rack, the cold apple juice in the fridge.

But I digress. Rupert had not finished. After I had told him that of course I missed home and that I was sure we would be coming back at some point in the not too distant future, and Jeffrey had woken up beside me with a jolt, Rupert said again: “But when? Will you be home by Christmas? By New Year? Oh, Mum, please say you’ll be back by the New Year.”

And it turned out that the reason he was so keen for us to be home by then was that he had something planned: a civil partnership ceremony with Alex.

Oh, readers, I had a mixed surge of emotion: sadness, I suppose at the finality, at the fact that Rupert’s gayness wasn’t a passing phase, like the time he got into “grunge” as a teenager, but most of all happiness, that he had found someone he wanted to be with for the rest of his life and whom he wanted to commit to in the eye of the law. As he told me of the plans—just a small, low-key gathering, family and a few close friends, perhaps dinner afterward—I could hear the contentedness in his voice, and I shared it. After all, a gay wedding is just as valid an excuse for the purchase of a new hat as a heterosexual one. Jeffrey agreed, but it took him a long time to get back to sleep.

  
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6

My head hurts. The whir of the electric fan in this cybercafé is making it worse. My own hands are as clammy as the keys. Do not be alarmed: I am not suffering from some virulent South American disease, but from the aftereffects of too much aguardiente, a spirit that is quite the thing over here and that Jeffrey tells me is a little like Sambuca.

Last night we talked about our future. Jeffrey took me to a little bar with dark alcoves and coffee-scented candles and ordered
a bottle of the spirit, which came with two squat little glasses. After he’d drunk three in quick succession, he admitted that he’d been desperate to avoid thinking about how things were going to work out when we got back home. Up until Rupert’s call, he said he’d had his head in the sand. And now he was going to try to pull it out.

“I’m scared, Connie,” he said. “I think I’ve lost my job. You don’t just go AWOL for three months and expect to get away with it. God knows what kind of messages are sitting on my BlackBerry back home. I told them I was having a personal crisis and that was that. But you can’t have a personal crisis when you’re a senior partner. You can’t have any kind of personal life at all,” he said, as he poured himself another glass of the clear, fragrant liquid.

I squeezed his hand. “But darling, I thought you didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. I thought that was what this was all about.”

“I didn’t!” he replied. “Back home, I was sick of it, sick of the alarm in the morning, the train, the meetings, the routine. I was sick of watching my nearest colleague wipe his keyboard clean with a disinfectant wipe every day. He used to do his mouse too, and his phone. All I wanted was a bit of adventure. But now…” His voice trailed off.

“Aren’t you a bit fed up of this too?” he picked up again. “Fed up of being able to go anywhere and do anything?”

I admitted that I was. I have started to have dreams—clear, vivid dreams—in which I am walking along the green to the church to bell ringing, but then suddenly I’m lost, and the familiar path has twisted and turned into something I don’t recognize, and I’m walking faster and faster but getting nowhere. Either that or I dream I’m in the kitchen, cooking a big roast for Rupert and Sophie—I can hear them laughing and chatting in the dining
room, but just as I walk through the adjoining door with a tray of Yorkshire puddings in my hands they’re gone, the room is empty, even the familiar oak table has vanished. On one occasion I found myself in the Lima bus station instead; on another, in the haberdashery department of John Lewis.

I told Jeffrey all this as I swallowed a few glasses of aguardiente, which tasted more like sherry the more I drank it. Jeffrey squeezed my hand back, and as I looked at him I realized that there were tears in his eyes, and in mine.

“I miss the kids too,” he said. “I expected that. But the oddest thing is, I even miss work. I miss putting on my tie and cuff links in the morning and coming home at the end of the day feeling like I’ve accomplished something, like I’ve earned the right to relax. Whereas with all this drifting, it’s fun, but.…”

I told him I knew exactly what he meant. Adventures, I have decided, are like shortbread biscuits. When you can’t have any, you crave them, but given a whole tin and no restraints, you soon start to sicken of them.

“So we’re agreed,” I said. “We’re going back.”

“We’re going back,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be the same.”

Then he explained why he was so worried about money. While I have largely remained blissfully ignorant of whatever has been going on in the news, Jeffrey has kept a weather eye on the Reuters Web site. All our investments have been clobbered.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to live on, or how we’re going to live,” he said, swallowing his sixth, or seventh, glass of liquor.

Perhaps it was the insulating effect of the aguardiente, perhaps the fact that a month ago I thought I was going to lose Jeffrey and end my days a lone, embittered divorcée, but these words did not have the devastating effect that they once would have.

“We’ll manage,” I said. “Don’t you worry, we’ll find a way, even if I have to start buying cheap cuts of meat and doing the Christmas shopping at Woolworths.”

“Woolworths has gone, remember?” he said. “It’ll have to be TK Maxx.”

I looked at him, and I realized that he was right: everything had changed.

  
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13