Love to Hate You (4 page)

Since I'm quite used to all this, I head for the front door, assuredly sidestepping the cats and dogs sleeping around the porch. Years of practice have got me quite good at this, so it only takes me a few seconds to get myself inside the house, and the killer goose that's had its sights on me since I arrived is left honking outside the closed door. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

“Mum, I'm here!” I shout, so she can hear me.

“In the kitchen,” my mother's mellow voice comes back.

And there she is indeed, preparing a vegetable soup with an unusual perfume. Never ask what she puts in her cooking, you might die of fright.

“Oh,
there
you are, Jenny, we were worried about you. You're an hour late,” she says immediately. Today my mother is wearing a bright yellow dress which, judging from the dazzling colour, is probably meant to be some sort of homage to the Sun.

“I'm not late. I told you I'd be here by one and here I am – punctual as a Swiss watch.”

Between you and me, I always try to arrive
exactly
on time when I go to my parents'. Never a minute too early, or it might give them enough time to start asking a lot of nosey questions.

“Let's have a look at you, love. Oh, your face still looks so grey. What on earth are you eating? Not meat, I hope?” asks my mother, noticeably shocked at the mere idea.

Obviously, having been raised by vegetarian parents, I don't eat meat, but I do sometimes indulge in a bit of fish or an egg. I'll never have enough courage to tell my mother this, though – if she found out that I was a lazy vegetarian and not a hardcore vegan, the shock might kill her.

“No, mum,” I answer, “it's nothing to do with meat, things are just very hectic at work at the moment.”

I see immediately from her face that I've said the wrong thing. “Well, I'd say that's your own fault, given the job you chose. What were you even
thinking
when you chose the tax field? And now you work for a merchant bank… Don't you realise that it was them who caused the collapse of our financial and economic system?” she says, for the thousandth time. I've heard this story so often I could tell you word for word what she's about to accuse me of, and I'd probably be about 99 per cent accurate.

“I thought you were happy about the collapse of our financial and economic system.”

My mother turns to look at me, wooden spoon still in hand. “Of course I'm happy about it! Finally everybody can see what your father and I have been saying for forty years.” Her eyes sparkle as she speaks, which makes her look much younger.

“In that case, you should be even happier, knowing that I am helping bring it about. One way or another,” I add, almost smiling.

I'm sharp, and my mother knows it. She gives up and turns back to her big pot.

“Where's Charles, by the way. Hasn't he come with you?” she asks as she stirs. God, I was hoping they wouldn't notice his absence, or at least not straightaway. I thought the recriminations about my job would have given me a few more minutes breathing space.

“Yeah, Jenny, where's Charles?” asks my brother, appearing out of nowhere by my side.

“Ermm—” I mumble, and the sound is enough to make my mother explode.

“Oh my God, you split up!”

“Well—”

Michael realises that I'm struggling and steps in to help. “Come on, mum, don't be so dramatic! Charles was probably just busy today, wasn't he?”

He knows perfectly well we've split up, he's not stupid, but this isn't the right day for that kind of news, apparently. My mother is usually a fairly calm person, but she just went berserk at the idea. Better to hold off with the official announcement for a while.

“Yeah, he's away at a conference,” I lie confidently. I've been practicing this type of thing for years.

“What a shame. I'll just have to give you some leftovers to take home for him, then. You know he loves my cooking.”

I admit I should have married him for that alone. I'll never find another man who truly appreciates my mother's cooking. And Charles really, honestly loved it, not so much for its taste, but because of the philosophy underpinning it: he thought that if the ingredients were ethical and logical, the result was too. The taste didn't matter.

Because the taste is really, really questionable. And I say that with all the love that a daughter can have for her mother.

“Come on, it's ready,” says my mother shortly afterwards, motioning us to follow her as she makes her way towards the large living room. It feels large because it's very empty, as the rules of feng shui they've starting applying, demand. My father is already sitting at the head of the table, which is made of natural wood (no cold materials are admitted at my parents'), chatting away with Tom, my sister Stacey's husband. They've got another organic farm, a few kilometres away from here, and their two children, Jeremy and Annette, are chasing each other round the table.

My sister is entertaining Hannah, Michael's girlfriend. She's a German doctor. They met a few years ago in a refugee camp and have been deeply in love ever since. They should be getting married soon, if their jobs let them.

They've actually been trying to get married for over a year, but the wars that humanity can't seem to live without keep them quite busy, so my impression is that they'll never actually get to the altar because they're waiting for a moment of world peace, but why should I step on other people's dreams?

These are people whose ideals and convictions are their bonds – passionate, committed people. And I'm like a fish out of water.

The truth is that I was raised to be so aware of all the world's atrocities that I had to build some personal defences of my own, and that's why I chose to do something completely
separate
from their convictions, something they consider stupid and frivolous but which allowed me to put some distance between us. I was certain that I wouldn't be able to know myself until after I'd somehow moved away from them. I'd always felt the need to exist as a separate entity, not just as part of a community where everyone had to share the same ideas.

Being one of the top students at Oxford allowed me to re-inforce that distance, and helped me to move away to London and re-invent myself.

I haven't quite succeeded yet, or at least not from a human point of view. My career is the only aspect of my life that's keeping me afloat, even though I might not like to admit it.

“Hi, Jenny,” says my father. “Isn't Charles here?” Luckily his tone is friendly and not as agitated as mum's was a few minutes ago.

“No, he's busy with uni,” I repeat, lying skilfully.

“In that case he's excused,” he says solemnly. I have to work during the weekend, I'm never excused for not showing up. Just so you know.

“So, what's new in the City?” asks Tom.

“Nothing much. Business as usual,” I answer, as we take our places at the table.

“You're not about to go bankrupt, like Lehman Brothers, then?” asks Stacey, in a worried voice.

I touch wood under the table. “No, I doubt we're about to go bankrupt right at the moment.”

There's more chance of the Bank of England going bankrupt than one of the big merchant banks, I think to myself, but there's no point boring them with stuff like that.

“You know, a couple of days ago I was at the hairdresser's, and I was reading about an aristocrat who works at your bank,” says Hannah. She's allowed to read gossip rags sometimes, because ‘she's German'.

The piece of rye bread I'm chewing on suddenly sticks in my throat. What is this, a bloody persecution?! Do I have to hear him mentioned even in the
only
place in England I thought would never have heard of him?

“What's his name? He's very handsome, you must have seen him,” insists Hannah, blithely.

Everybody stops eating and looks at me. Wow, what suspense. Roll on the drums, please.

“Ian St John, the count of Langley,” I cough.

“That's him!” says Hannah, sounding satisfied. “Do you know him?”

I feel tempted to tell my future sister in law that, actually, I broke the handsome count of Langley's nose, but that might get my normally pacifist family over excited, so I'd better keep quiet about it.

“I've seen him about,” I say.

And anyway, who can really say they know Ian St John? No one, I'd imagine.

It's still unclear what he's doing in a large American merchant bank, what with the vast number of companies his family owns around the world. I remember reading somewhere that he'd had some argument with his family that led to him refusing any position his grandfather offered him. But surely being an employee, no matter how well paid, can't compete with managing the holdings and assets of a powerful family.

The truth is that he could have chosen not to do anything, like many people in his position, instead of mouldering away in a gloomy office for hours on end every day. Almost as many hours as me. Which makes me hate him even more.

The conversation at the table soon returns to more familiar subjects, like the gradual transition from nuclear to renewable energy in Japan, or recent English social policy and so on.

A few hours later, I'm back in my car with a carefully packed tub of the worst vegetable soup in history by my side.

For some reason, just the sight of it gives me the energy I need to get back home.

“I'm back!” I shout loudly as I walk into my flat. It's way out at the edge of zone two, it's got three lovely bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, and I share it with Vera and Laura.

Over the last few years my salary's gone up considerably, so hypothetically I could afford to live somewhere a bit more central and a bit less dodgy, but my friends wouldn't be able to afford to come with me, and so I decided I'd stay here with them until I got married or moved in with a boyfriend. I've no doubt, though, that I'll actually be here for ever.

“Hello, Jen,” says Vera, who is lying on the living room sofa reading a book. Vera is
always
reading a book, even while cooking, cleaning or doing the shopping. She works in a library and seems to have an obsessive need to read everything that's ever been written, so she can't waste time. Ever.

“Hi. Good book?” I ask as I collapse into the armchair in front of her.

She nods without lifting her eyes.

“Everything ok at your folks'?”

“Same as usual,” I admit, dumping the leftovers on the coffee table.

“What's in the bag?” she asks. I don't know how she managed to see it without once taking her eyes off her book, but I'm guessing that at this point she's developed some kind of paranormal ability.

I'm already laughing when I answer, “My mother's vegetable soup. For Charles.”

At my words, she immediately puts her book down on the table and gives me a worried look with her beautiful green eyes.

“You're kidding, right?”

“I wish I was,” I answer resignedly.

“So your parents don't know—”

“Today wasn't the right moment. I've got too much on my plate at the moment to deal with them as well,” I say, trying to find an excuse for my behaviour.

“You need a holiday,” says Vera. And she's not wrong. “You need to forget about everything and everyone for a week. Go somewhere exotic, like Mauritius or the Seychelles.”

“You do realise that if I went somewhere like that I'd have to tell my parents I was helping refugees in Afghanistan, don't you?”

Vera looks at me philosophically. “God – compared to your family, mine's almost normal.”

Coming from a person whose mother has been married five times and whose father has three children with three different women, that's pretty serious.

“I'll get round to telling them eventually. I'm not going to lie to them
forever.
I just need to get all this hassle at work out of the way and get back to normality,” I answer tiredly.

“Oh, I'm so sorry about what you're going through,” she says, comfortingly.

“I know. And I'm really grateful to you and Laura for your support. The next few weeks would be completely unbearable without you two, even for a warhorse like me.”

“Why? What's going on?” she asks worriedly.

“I'm going to be working with an 'exceptional' partner,” I say, feigning happiness. But she doesn't buy it.

“And what does that mean, exactly?” she asks, suspiciously.

My expression answers her question.

“Oh, God, not with—” she says, her phrase theatrically hanging in the air.

“Yes, of course. 'Miss Percy, we are offering you a grand opportunity: you and Count Langley are perfect for this suicide mission.' I've decided that I'm going to try and see the funny side of the situation – I don't think I've got a choice, anyway.

“Oh, God, I'm so sorry, Jen,” she says with a serious face.

“Don't worry about me, Vera. I can take care of myself, promise.”

She thinks for a while, then bursts out laughing. “Anyway, who's going to protect the English aristocracy from you?” she asks, sarcastically.

“Please, don't tell me we're supposed to treat them like some kind of endangered species now,” I reply worriedly.

“You can't break his nose this time, even if he deserves it. You know that, right?” Vera reminds me. “And I'm not saying it for the sake of his nose, which I don't really give a monkey's about. I'm saying it for the sake of you and your career.”

“I know, I know,” I re-assure her. “Anyway, I shouldn't have broken his nose the first time. I'm supposed to be a believer in non-violence. Well, Gandhi wouldn't have been very proud of
that,
and neither would my mum. Years and years of non-violence and then how do I react when the pressure's on? I punch somebody in the face! How pathetic—”

“Well, it wasn't just
any
body,” my friend points out.