No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (17 page)

“Just need to give it a good shove.”

“I'm so sorry,” the woman replied. “I'm an idiot, I didn't realize—”

Her voice was soft and beautiful with a musical inflection, the voice of an American who had studied in Europe—perhaps Italy?—for several years.

“Were you looking for someone?” asked Christy.

“Yes. Mr. Armitage. I have a letter for him.”

Of course, thought Christy, another upscale begging letter from some foundation or something. Lately she had noticed that such organizations were becoming more creative.

“He's out with the kids. I'm his wife. I'll give it to him. But let's get you out of here first.” And Teddy and Christy clambered into the ditch and pushed up, as the woman inexpertly banged the car into first gear.

Once safe on the tarmac, the woman wound down the window. Christy guessed that she was about thirty, although she had the kind of perfect skin that would be ageless if she looked after it (unlike Christy, who had spent her teenage years sunbathing with olive oil), and she had an intelligent face that was also good. In short, there was a look of a younger Julia about her, and so Christy immediately warmed toward her.

“Thank you,” the woman said, reaching her hand up to give Christy a thin white envelope. “Tell Mr. Armitage I'm sorry. I missed him.”

Yes, she had definitely spent significant time outside the States. Her phrasing and the incorrect punctuation gave her away. In another woman it might have come across as affected, but in this one Christy found it charming, despite the nervousness that made her twitch a little and the sweat stains dribbling from the armpits of the vintage silk shirt.

“You look boiling,” said Christy. “Come in and have a cold drink.”

The woman hesitated.

“I will if it's no trouble, Mrs. Armitage.”

“Christy. What's your name?”

“Sarah.” (Something very funny going on around the
r
here. Perhaps it was France Sarah had lived in?)

“Who do you work for, Sarah?”

“An international foundation. We're restoring some recently discovered Mayan temples in the Guatemalan rain forest.”

Christy glanced knowingly at her own reflection in the mirror (she realized she still had the bloodstained apron on, and, as “abattoir assistant” is not a good look, she hastily took it off) and led Sarah into the conservatory to pour her a glass of fresh lemonade. Sarah looked around with a rapt expression on her face, more like a child in sweetie land than a woman entering her fourth decade. She actually gasped when she saw the lawn leading down to the ocean.

“This is the most beautiful house I've even seen.”

“That's what I thought, too, when I first saw it,” said Christy. “Mr. Armitage's first wife decorated it.”

“It's
magnifique
. Is she an interior designer?”

“Non,”
said Christy, at that moment learning that while it was okay for her to be magnanimously nice about Vaughn's ex, it was not acceptable in a stranger. She offered to give Sarah a tour to show that while she might not be
magnifique
as far as choosing upholstery goes
,
she was certainly
gentille
!

“The drapes! The carpets! The flowers!”
Sarah exclaimed as they moved up the stairs and along the first-floor hallway, and Christy discovered a talent for real estate brokerage as she opened doors and pointed out arresting features (“The door frames are oversized to give an illusion of space”; “This bathroom is modeled on one in the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello”). Then she led Sarah into a small alcove with a narrow bookcase at the end.

“And this is the one room I did myself.”

“The girls' bedroom?” said Sarah, and, smiling, Christy pulled at
War and Peace
and
waved her inside the secret door with a flourish.

It was not until they were back downstairs in the living room, and Sarah was staring up close at the brushwork on the lily painting, that Christy realized something. She had not told Sarah that her children were girls and, as the first Mrs. Armitage was mentally unstable, she did not allow any pictorial evidence of their existence outside their rooms and strictly instructed them never to leave any of their things lying about. Sarah would not have had a clue
unless she knew before she arrived there
.

Christy flashed back to the cheap rental car in the ditch, probably rented by Sarah that morning after one more lonely night on the sofa bed in the studio apartment in Murray Hill. She saw the letter for Vaughn, probably containing some form of blackmail disguised as a declaration of undying
amour
. Sarah's armpits were guiltily sweaty, indubitably revealing the no-time-for-deodorant, it's-now-or-never haste in which she had left. It was just like the final few minutes of an episode of
Murder, She Wrote
.

Christy had been naive.
“Tell Mr. Armitage I'm sorry. I missed him”
wasn't European punctuation, it was Exhibit A for affair.

Vaughn's infidelity was something Christy had not known yet had always known. She loved him, that was for sure, but it was not a madly-in-love, jealous passion that meant the unexpected arrival of the woman in black could ruin her life. It was a “this is my life and I sacrificed things for it, and you, Miss, will never get the third share in the barn” kind of love. Christy knew now that there was one territorial bone in her body.

Meanwhile, Sarah was burying her nose in the Madonna lilies in the vase on the table. She seemed so young and clever and sad, and, if Sarah had been her younger sister, Christy would have said,
if you waste your thirties on married men it will work out only one way and it's bad for you. Don't make stalking your activity of choice on a national holiday. Find a bachelor nearer your own age who will pick a daffodil for you out of someone's plant pot on Fifth Avenue as you walk to Central Park to go boating on the lake.

But Sarah was not in the family yet, and Christy did not feel any sisterly or sister-wife loyalty to her. And when she saw the beautiful shirt moving dangerously near the lily stamens, and the red-brown pollen that she had not yet cut off quivering, ready to strike, she knew that, were it to hit that silk, there would be no amount of Sellotape could ever lift it off.

“Vaughn's never going to leave me,” she said.

And Sarah spun round, brushing against almost every bloom in the fifty-flower bouquet.

“I can see that,” Sarah replied, no longer seeming young and clever, merely sad. “I should never have come here. I'm sorry.”

“It's all right,” said Christy. “But you'd better go. And don't come back.”

As Sarah scuttled past her, Christy saw, with only a little remorse, that the hand-dyed plum now had orangey-red patches all over it. And in fashion heaven, the angels wept.

But Christy did not.

She walked into the kitchen and pulled the white envelope from the pocket of her jeans. She sniffed it. It was scented, of course, Miss Dior or something similarly predictable. It did not occur to her to open it; she simply ripped it up, took the casserole out of the oven, and stuffed bits of paper with perfect black-ink pen handwriting on it and bloody, flour-covered meat into the waste disposal.

Then she went outside to find Teddy and told him to fence round the ditch and not to mention anything about the car or the woman to Mr. Armitage.

“Vaughn,” she said firmly, “is never to be enlightened.”

•   •   •

W
HEN HER HUSBAND
and the girls returned, all three tired and happy, Christy was lying on the enormous sofa, finishing
The Age of Innocence
. She opened her arms to hug Sorcha and Sinead, and when Vaughn leaned over she tilted her face up and kissed him on the mouth.

“How was your afternoon?” he said, and smiled.

(
A young woman crashed her car into the ditch, I showed her round the house, and she turned out to be your mistress
, thought Christy.)

“I didn't feel like cooking, so I booked a table at the Meeting House,” she said.

“Perfect,” he replied. “I'll ask Teddy to drive us, so we can have a cocktail.”

And he headed out to his office, a distinctly frisky edge to his stride.

Christy leaned back and the girls lay on top of her. She gazed upward through the golden feathery strands of their hair and looked at the top-of-the-range recessed light fittings imported from Sweden. She breathed in her daughters' smell, felt their flesh born of her flesh, vowed that their life would always be more important than her life, and considered the events of the past three hours.

And finally she understood what Julia had meant that day on the beach. It might be true, she thought, but it doesn't feel
real
.

September

The kids were all right, of course. It was Robyn, already exhausted by eight-thirty, ashamed of her five-year-old beige skirt and jacket that was the same as wearing a T-shirt reading
I have to work in a badly paid boring job
, who felt trepidation as she approached the school gates.

La rentrée
, they call it in France, and for some reason Robyn found herself thinking about chic French women, the kind who take the return to school extremely seriously, using the first few days of term as an opportunity to upgrade their wardrobes and underwear and perform essential maintenance activities on their faces and décolletage. However, Robyn was not living on the Left Bank, but in a former tenement in the Loisaida, which was far too small for the four of them, despite Ryan's protestations that all it needed was more “storage space.” The only essential maintenance she would be performing today would be filing her corns in the bath after another day trudging round the bed shop.

Her face darkened, and she frowned. At this moment, a bouncy woman in leisurewear bounced past, grinning
“Everybody happy”
without waiting for a reply. Robyn realized it had not been a question, merely a statement of intent. She glanced around. Yes, everybody did seem happy. All around her, bathed in sunlight, were the shiny people of the West Village.

Maybe it was something in the soya lattes? Or maybe this particular group of adults woke up every morning celebrating the fact that, because of the zoning of their apartments, their children could go to a top public school and they could keep their summer cottages in Quogue? For a moment Robyn missed the old school, the sight of gothically gloomy Lucy Lovett peering in horror over her sunglasses at such things as a poster for
A Happyness Workshop for Siblings
, or the day Julia took over from Christy as Class Mom and reduced half the children to tears by answering the question “What is God?” with “God is something people invented to make themselves feel better about
death
.” She smiled, she couldn't help it; then she pulled herself together. She must stop thinking about Julia.

Ahead of her, something seemed to be happening at the main door and suddenly she was swept into the building. Furious that she had not paid more attention the only other time she had been there (then she had crept furtively into the school secretary's office, guiltily proffered the two utility bills from an apartment they didn't live in to secure the places, and, once she had established where the CCTV cameras were, grinned wildly into them in what she hoped was a carefree, innocent manner but probably made her look like the Joker from
Batman
), Robyn tried to orient herself, but her ten-year-old daughter, Madison, took control as usual and in about a minute had found her own classroom and Michael's and was pointing her face up at Robyn's for a farewell kiss. Robyn held her daughter's chin in her right hand and lowered her face down beside it to feel the extraordinary preciousness of her perfect skin.

“Remember,” she whispered in her ear, “if anyone asks you where you live, say ‘near Washington Square Park.'”

Madison stared silently at her. Robyn was pretty sure her expression was one of contempt, but she decided to ignore it. She hugged her and nudged her gently toward her smiling teacher, who was standing in front of a collage about “restaurants we have visited in our neighborhood,” including a photograph of a tall blond child standing outside Babbo.

Robyn took a deep breath; it would all be worth it. This was clearly a superior educational experience for her children.

“Mom!”
She turned to find Michael beside her, clutching at her handbag. “Why did we have to change schools, anyway?”

“Because your mother had sex on a yoga mat ten times with Julia Kirkland's husband.”

What Robyn actually said was “Because your father and I wanted the best for you.”

Both statements were true.

One year earlier

It was all about revenge at first.

Robyn wanted revenge on Ryan for being a schmuck. And, as a pleasant side effect, she wanted revenge on Julia—well, on all of them, actually, all those women, those Mothers at the School who never talked to her, or listened to her, or even looked at her.

She had one theory that it was the cloak of invisibility that settles on middle-aged women, normally used to refer to that fact that men no longer looked at you as an object of sexual desire. Apparently some women find this a relief, but not Robyn. Robyn felt the cloak had wrapped around her at age twenty-eight, with the twenty-eight pounds she had gained after Madison's birth that changed her curvaceous but petite figure into one that might most charitably be described as Rubenesque, if Rubens had ever painted anyone in jeans with a muffin top. Although Julia described her as “fabulously fecund,” which Robyn took as an insult until she looked it up in the online dictionary, her two babies seemed to have punched out her waist, and the clip-on, clip-off pregnancies of other women reduced her to fretful rage. When she caught sight of Christy Armitage walking her twins through the playground she had wanted to murder her. Literally. She pondered spiking Christy's solitary miniature cupcake with rat poison at the mothers' annual tea party. She even looked up a few scary sites on the Internet and worked out the exact amount of alpha-chloralose toxin required to cause instantaneous death to someone who was five-foot-ten and weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds. Understandably, this frightened her. That year she made an excuse and didn't go.

Afterward, she spent a couple of days having an imaginary conversation about it that turned out quite amusing. She tried a little riff on it at Saturday-morning soccer, but it came out wrong and no one laughed and Julia overheard, didn't have the decency to ignore her humiliation, and instead compounded it by putting her concerned face on and asking, “You wanted to kill Christy because she's thin?
Interesting.
”

Worst of all, Julia didn't get out her writer's notebook. Robyn had seen her do it so many times, she had written down something the Hot Dog Stand Guy said, for goodness sake, which could only mean that Robyn was of
no interest whatsoever
to Julia. She was not fit even to be a minor character in some piece-of-shit TV series. In her heart she knew that this was because no one wants to watch a drama about a plump, angry woman who slaves every day to support her family and honor her marriage vows, for better or worse. They can look in the mirror, or on the subway, or at their mother, after all. But this realization did not make her feel better. In fact, if she had written down her interior monologue it would have been italicized with indignation at this point.

Robyn had few choices in her life because of the most important choice she had made. She had married Ryan the year he had been named one of
New York
magazine's most promising writers. That his name, Ryan Anthony James, sounded like that of a successful novelist there was no doubt; in fact, it sounded like the name of someone who writes thick novels with foil titles that sell millions. But Ryan had spent seven years crafting his slim volume of short stories that eight hundred people bought. And one hundred of them were his family and friends. That seemed to be enough for him.

“I'm just an old Romantic,” he would say, quickly explaining that this was with a
capital
R
, not that he wished to buy her jewelry or take them on a mini-break.

“Art for art's sake,” he would say, a lopsided grin lighting up his bad skin but still handsome face. “I love the work. It's not about an audience.”

While Robyn had found such idealism thrilling when she was twenty-three years old, fifteen years on she knew the reality of Ryan was that he might love
the
work, but he didn't like
work
at all. She had lived for years under a false impression about artistic types, which she had drawn entirely from the musical
Rent
, a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and her own upbringing. Robyn's mother was “creative”; it was the one thing both her parents agreed on. One Christmas Eve she decided to decorate the tree with miniature goldfish bowls and, as the light from behind her eyes twinkled particularly brilliantly, she and Robyn plopped a tiny orange fish into each one. Unfortunately yuletide itself was one of Mother's bad days, and Robyn, her father, and her beleaguered older brother awoke to find no presents and dead fish in the living room. Another year, the Christmas decorations remained up until summer, the cheap tinsel strung across the hallway a constant reminder that creativity and depression often live side by side, and sometimes when Robyn crawled into her mother's bed and snuggled beside her, looking for love, her mother would tell her how she had so many ideas for poems or stories she just had to write, but that having children had destroyed any chance of her doing it.

Robyn's brother became an accountant and married one. Robyn married Ryan and made a solemn promise to dedicate herself to the cause of his genius and protect him from the responsibilities and messiness of life, giving him the opportunities her late mother had not had, or so she believed. This had been a mistake.

The removal of this illusion was again Julia's fault, as after only the briefest acquaintance with her you would know that she wrote all the time. There was no wandering round waiting for inspiration to strike. She was a workaholic, in fact, and while Ryan might sniff at the “commercial” nature of her output (he had seen an experimental film she had written about Virginia Woolf in 1999 and declared it the only good thing she had ever done), Julia made a very decent living and kept her husband and children in a style that made Robyn want to weep with envy. She was riven with self-recrimination at her youthful gullibility. Didn't she remember reading
Little Women
? Jo March scribbled till her fingers practically bled. This was not a fate ever likely to await Ryan.

At the beginning Robyn had a romantic (with a
small
r
) notion that Ryan should stay at home and write while she supported them. In due course this would be rewarded by the kind of life she wanted. This had been vague at first, with fantasies of a bohemian home, interesting friends, a literary soiree or two, but quickly solidified into a life where she didn't have to worry about money. This did not happen. She worried about money all the time, for the very simple reason that they did not ever have enough of it. In fact, after four years and thirty thousand words, although he assured her that his prose was reaching new levels of liquidity, it was Ryan who suggested he take a job. Before she could say “Don't you have a job?” he informed her he had one lined up at a gallery of photography in SoHo. He would be on the front desk from eleven to seven every day, minimum wage, of course, but he could get commission if he sold a photograph. Best of all, he would still be writing, although when and if the companion volume would appear she had given up asking. And so it came to pass that he got to swan over the cobbles of Wooster Street and she trudged back and forth to Hell's Kitchen through months that inexplicably became years, and two uncomfortable pregnancies, and then worked extra hours to pay for the childcare that Ryan did not feel was compatible with his artistic needs (while he supported her desire to experience motherhood, he would have been more than happy with one child, he always said).

Then one January morning, when they emerged from their building, late and arguing, and Michael had forgotten his pencil case and Madison cried when a puddle ruined her new sequined shoes (and Robyn wanted to cry, too, as she knew they did not have the fifty dollars that month to replace them), and they looked up just as a burst of rain streamed straight down from the sky with the speed and pressure of a series of fire hoses, suddenly she screamed (as she occasionally had done in the bathroom to herself, but this time it came out loud) that they
couldn't live like this anymore
. And ignoring the placatory lopsided grin that he rolled out on these occasions, which normally elicited a pseudo-maternal calming response from her, she told him that she had been talking to his parents and that she wanted them all to move to his old home in Orange County. His parents had got planning permission to build a three-bedroom bungalow with study on the vegetable patch at the bottom of their garden. Robyn could work as his dad's office manager, the local public school there was excellent, and the children would have grass to play on, a basketball hoop, and they could all spend time together.

Ryan froze. Robyn tried to pull the kids out of the shower, but he stood, hands juddering, as the rain poured over them. And then theatrically pretended that he had not heard her.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Did you just say you've been plotting with my parents to imprison me in Disneyland?”

Madison and Michael looked at Robyn. They loved Disneyland and were very interested in her idea.