There was only one problem with Pilar, which was that she was going to be leaving them to go back to Spain. That was scheduled to happen just before Christmas. Pilar had told Arabella weeks before, very decently giving a full three months’ notice. She was going back to a job at a nursery school in Spain. A new nanny would begin work in the new year, but the Younts would be without any childcare over the holidays. When she had realised that and begun to think about it, Arabella had the initial flickering of an idea.
For some time now, almost everything about her husband had made Arabella cross. It had begun with the birth of Conrad, eased off a bit after he got to his second birthday, then got much worse when she was pregnant with Joshua, and worse still after he was born. Joshua was now three years old and Arabella was as cross with her husband as she had ever been. The shorthand term for what she felt was ‘competitive tiredness’. She felt she was so tired that she could not think or see straight; she felt that she began the day tired, thanks to the broken and shallow sleep she had been having now for, literally, years, and got more tired as the day wore on, and that there were times when she was running on, as she put it, ‘sheer adrenaline’; but that when her husband came home from work he had the temerity to act as if he was the one making all the effort, as if he was the one who had, by the time he got home, the right to sigh and put his feet up and talk about what a tiring day he had had! Blind! Oblivious! He didn’t have a clue! As for weekends, in some ways they were even worse. Sheila the Australian weekend nanny was very helpful (though she was no Pilar – for one thing she couldn’t drive) but there was still masses to do, and her husband did very little of it. He didn’t cook, except show-off barbecues on the occasional summer weekend at his silly boy-toy gas grill, and he didn’t wash clothes or iron them or sweep the floor or, hardly at all, play with the children. Arabella did not do those things either, not much, but
that did not mean she went through life acting as if they did not exist, and it was this obliviousness which drove her so nuts.
The idea Arabella had had was quite simply to vamoose and leave Roger to it for a few days, with no warning. He could learn about looking after the children and the house by doing it for a few days, solo. While he was doing it, Arabella would be at x. x was nowhere specific, not yet, and yet Arabella had very specific ideas about x. It was going to be a luxury hotel, somewhere not exhaustingly far from London, with a spa.
Arabella was not contemplating running away for ever. She couldn’t possibly leave Conrad and Joshua. The point was to give her husband a nasty shock. Ideally, the shock of his life. He had no idea,
no idea
, of the burden actually involved in looking after the children and running the house. No idea. Well, this would bloody well give him an idea. Arabella was going to go away, without warning, for three days and during that time she was going to be completely out of contact with home. Her husband would have no idea where she was – she could be in Reykjavik, she could be on Mars.
Beside Arabella on the floor was a pile of perhaps twenty hotel brochures. If her husband had noticed them – which assumed that he ever noticed anything – he would have thought she was planning to nag him about holidays. This would teach him. In addition the web browser on her computer had six different screens open. The current most promising candidate was a hotel in the New Forest which offered a residential package starting at £4,000 for the two of them, though the nicer-looking package, which included a daily massage and pampering, was £5,300, not unreasonable, Arabella felt, for what it was. The idea of luxury, even the word ‘luxury’, was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn’t see herself as one of
them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.
The tricky thing could be friends: you needed friends who felt the same way. And who had the money to act on the feeling. Luckily, Saskia was one of them. She had been dumped by her shit of a husband eighteen months before but had cleaned him out in the divorce so she was more than good for her share of it. For this sort of adventure she was perfect. Clicking around the website, Arabella thought this New Forest package looked by far the strongest candidate yet. They had availability. She picked up her mobile phone, flipped it open, and said ‘Saskia’. The phone rang four times.
‘Babes!’ said Saskia, who was thirty-seven.
‘Darling!’ said Arabella, who was also thirty-seven. ‘I think I’ve found somewhere down south. Shall I read you all the porn or just book?’
‘Darling, you know I trust you.’
‘Cool,’ said Arabella, who without thinking about it had stood up and moved across to the mirror in what she called her dressing room. She often went to look at herself when she was speaking on the phone; when she was in the street and took or made a phone call she would stop in front of a shop window and consult her reflection. Although Arabella was conscious of her appearance, careful with her clothes and her blonde highlights and tentatively interested in cosmetic surgery, her skin always the same very faint golden colour to set off her hair, this habit was not vanity but an occasional, sudden, vertiginous loss of self, brought on by the experience of talking to a voice over the airwaves, and not a person in the flesh. When talking on the mobile she needed these occasional reminders that she was still actually there, and it was this unconscious need which underlay this habit of wanting to look at her reflection. ‘I’ll go ahead and book,’ she said, turning her face from side to side and keeping eye contact in the mirror. ‘I’ll send you the deets. Big kiss.’
‘Love you lots,’ said Saskia, who then broke the connection. Arabella moved back to her computer and started to fill out the hotel booking form. From downstairs she could just hear the sound of three voices, in three familiar tones: Conrad was making an accusation, Joshua was raising his voice to drown him out, and Pilar was interceding between them. But it was not a ‘go to’ noise and Arabella had no difficulty in ignoring it. Then Arabella heard something which got her full attention: the flap of the letter box opening and closing, and a thump of mail landing on the doormat. It sounded as if there were some catalogues there; and Arabella loved her catalogues. She opened the door of her dressing room and came down the stairs as quietly as she could, making a mental note to have Bogdan look and see if there was a way to make it less creaky. Catalogues! Arabella bent and picked up brochures from two different travel companies – that was in case she finally got her husband to agree to go to Kenya for February half-term. There were a couple of uninteresting-looking letters for him, a credit-card bill for her, and a postcard with no addressee other than their house number. Her first thought was that this was an unsolicited offer from an estate agent: these came through at the rate of two a week and she enjoyed being irritated by them and the compliment they paid to the desirability of her house. Arabella noticed the postcard carried a second-class stamp; no one she knew used second-class stamps. The printed text on the card said ‘We Want What You Have’. The postcard was a photograph of their front door. It must be a viral ad thing. There would be a follow-up and then another card finally revealing the point of the exercise as some semi-criminal estate agent finally confessed to a wish to sell her home for her. Arabella took the catalogues and the card upstairs, the catalogues to read and the card to keep for the rainy day when they decided to sell up and get somewhere bigger.
A
t ten o’clock Shahid was stacking unsold men’s magazines behind the counter, prior to returning them to the wholesaler, when the only customer in the shop fainted. She was a little old lady who had come in and was looking at the dairy products in the fridge. Or at least that’s what she was doing one moment. The next thing Shahid knew, there was a thumping sound and she had fallen sideways in the right-hand aisle. It was not a loud noise but it was an unnatural one – the unmistakable noise of a body falling over. Ahmed, who had been in the kitchen doing paperwork, came running through and joined him as he lifted the counter flap and hurried to her.
The old lady was already stirring where she lay; she couldn’t have been out for long. Perhaps she hadn’t even lost consciousness. Shahid didn’t think he’d ever seen her before, but he had the young man’s obliviousness to the old – to him, everyone over the age of sixty looked the same. Ahmed on the other hand did seem to know her, because as he bent down to help, he said, ‘Mrs Howe!’
‘I’m all right, dear,’ said the old lady, not sounding the least bit all right. She was doing that thing people do when they have accidents, of pretending nothing had happened and that they were completely fine. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. Wobbly for a second but I’m fine. Right as rain!’
‘Take your time,’ said Ahmed. ‘Sit for a moment.’ He sat beside
her with his arm on her shoulder, looking a little uncomfortable at the intimacy he had offered. Shahid went behind the counter. On the CCTV camera underneath the till, Ahmed and Mrs Howe looked strange, like something out of a
Crimewatch
reconstruction: the Asian man crouched on the floor next to the old white lady, neither of them moving. If it had been a film you would have soon tired of it. For the next quarter of an hour Ahmed sat talking to the old lady while Shahid served three customers with a
Daily Mirror
, an Oyster top-up, and five scratchcards respectively. It was a strange lull, Shahid carrying on normally while his brother squatted beside the ill woman like a paramedic. Ahmed was a pompous dickhead in many respects, but Shahid had to admit, it was his brother’s good side that he knew who the woman was and didn’t treat her just as a nuisance to be cleared up as briskly as possible.
‘I’m going to help Mrs Howe home,’ said Ahmed, coming behind the counter to pick up his jacket. ‘She’s just around the corner. Back in five.’
‘I’ll hold the fort,’ said Shahid, saluting. Ahmed didn’t seem to think that was funny.
Ahmed gave Mrs Howe his arm and helped her lever herself up off the floor. Old people were right to dread falls. His first thought when he saw that she had fallen was that she must have broken something, a leg or a hip, which at that age could be the beginning of the end, but she seemed to be physically intact. Ahmed picked up her bag and, with Mrs Howe still holding on to his arm, the two of them headed for the door. Ahmed knew that Mrs Howe lived in Pepys Road but didn’t know in which house.
‘I’m about halfway down the road,’ Petunia said. A couple of hundred yards. At the rate they were travelling, that was going to take a while. ‘I’m so grateful and so very very sorry.’
‘It is me who should be grateful. If I weren’t with you I would have to be doing my accounts. I hate doing my accounts.’
‘I don’t know what came over me. Everything just started whirling. Next thing you know I was on the floor. Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever fainted. Managed to get to eighty-two without doing it. Bad luck for you, eh?’
‘I won’t hear of it,’ said Ahmed.
The day was clear and cold. The light was so bright that Ahmed had to hold up his hand to block it out when they crossed the road. He could feel Mrs Howe’s thinness; he could feel her trembling, either with cold or shock or fatigue or a little of all three. Petunia knew that he could feel her shaking and was also conscious that this was the first time she had touched a man other than her son-in-law and grandsons since Albert died.
For Ahmed, who felt that he was always in a rush, that any given day was at its heart an equation with too many tasks and too few minutes, the list of things to do never shrinking while the time in which to do things constantly contracted, there was something very strange about moving so slowly. It was like one of those exercises where they make people walk backwards, or wear blindfolds in their own houses, to make the familiar feel different. He could feel – he couldn’t help himself – a wave of the irritation he so often felt, at so many different things, in the course of an ordinary day. At the same time he managed to slow himself down and check the irritation, by telling himself that there was no point in doing a good deed if all it made you do was feel bad-tempered.
‘Just suddenly everything was going round,’ said Petunia, still on the subject of her first-ever faint. Then she said, ‘Here we are,’ and opened the gate of number 42. The window had some old-fashioned coloured glass in it, an abstract circular pattern. Ahmed – he couldn’t help himself – wondered for a moment what the house was worth. If it was tatty on the inside but structurally sound, which would be his best guess, one and a half million.
‘I’m fine from here,’ said Petunia.
‘Let me see you in,’ said Ahmed. He helped her over the threshold. His guess had been right. There was clean but old carpet and ugly wallpaper with a flower pattern, and a telephone in the hallway. One million six. Ahmed reprimanded himself and gave Mrs Howe his full attention. There was some back-and-forth about whether he should call her daughter for her, or call a doctor, and her saying she wouldn’t hear of it, and then to get rid of him Petunia had to promise that he could bring the newspaper around on days when she wanted it –
she didn’t get a daily delivery because she didn’t want a daily paper. They were mostly full of rubbish and why would she want to keep up anyway?
‘OK, OK,’ said Ahmed. ‘Let me write the telephone number down.’ He had a biro but no paper, and went to look for some in the scraps on the table beside the doorway, next to the telephone. There were leaflets for pizza and curry; he took one up and wrote the number on the back.