Separate Lives (11 page)

“I hear you,” (Lisa did enjoy an earnest American cliché) “I
toadally
hear you, but you guys are good now, right?”

“Yeah, we're pretty good. All things considered. Alex is feeling quite positive about his, uh, mid-life crisis. We're thinking of . . . well, let's just say we're thinking of all sorts of new and interesting things. But anyway, just never mention Pippa again to me, under any circumstances, and we'll be fine. And can we please talk about wedding plans? You any nearer to fixing a date?”

So I'd ironed things out with Lisa. And I'd left Alex to sort things out with Guy. Their twin-thing was pretty much impenetrable; they had all the psychic bonds you'd expect if you've ever read ancient doctors'-waiting-room women's magazines in which “The Weirdo World of Twins” articles are a pretty consistent theme. There was the time, for example, when Guy had had a burst appendix playing rugby when he was thirteen and at precisely the same moment Alex had suddenly fallen off his stool in the chemistry lab at their school, clutching his lower abdomen and screaming “Guy! Guuuuy!”

This independently verified event had immediately passed into both school and family lore, to be regularly trotted out at family gatherings, often with interesting new embellishments. For example, since I'd first met them both, the story had expanded to include Guy shouting Alex's name as he writhed on the rugby pitch and Alex on the floor of the lab clawing at his stomach so much he ended up with a temporary scar, just like Guy's permanent one. Though the event itself had definitely happened, I had always been intrigued by the fact that this didn't seem to be enough to
keep it interesting—that over time, both Guy and Alex had embroidered it.

I thought this said a great deal about notions of “truth”; that basically your version of an event is necessarily your “truth” and my version of the same event is going to be my “truth” and anybody witnessing it will inevitably have their own version of that “truth.” This has made me slightly suspicious of some of the more fervent claims of truthfulness, if only because truth often seems to be entirely subjective. However, the “truth” of the matter in this case was that Lisa and Guy couldn't make it to our leaving party because they had taken the twins to visit Lisa's family in Brooklyn, and specifically her ailing grandmother—who wasn't expected to make it to next spring—and that this had been arranged for weeks, long before we even had a date for completion on the house. Yup, that was the whole truth and nothing but, so help me.

Will was a no-show too, what with being in Afghanistan doing brave RAF-type things and not due back until his tour ended at Christmas. But we had Isobel and the kids, and Nigel and Joan, obviously, and my dad and Cathy. Despite, on the surface, having zilch-zero-nada in common (certainly not golf) with either Nigel or Joan, Dad always made a fabulous effort to slay them with an onslaught of charm, not to mention the sort of urbane name-dropping you could tell they didn't entirely trust but secretly rather enjoyed. And then Dad and Nigel would eventually find some common ground, which usually involved slagging off politicians at both ends of the spectrum as well as the bits in the middle, united as they were in their dismay at anybody younger than—maybe even other than—themselves being allowed to run the
country. Meanwhile Joan and Cathy always defaulted to a conversation about food and were therefore as happy as a pair of pigs-in-blankets.

So (as Tony from marketing would say, infuriatingly) “it's all good.” And it
was
all good. We had friends, we had food, the kids were being sweet and exceptionally well-behaved—seen a lot but not heard as much as they might be—while passing around the pizza slices, and it should have been an evening of warmth and optimistic excitement laced with an inevitable poignancy that all this was about to pass. And I suppose it was all of those things, up to a point. Alex was more attentive to me than I might have predicted while maintaining his Fox-y hail-fellow cheeriness with everybody else. I was having some interesting chats, not least with Isobel (things were still simmering along with the saucy Tosser) who had also taken a very proprietorial approach to making sure that Alex had been adequately compensated for losing his job. Which, thanks to Isobel's mate, the Ball-Breaker, he had been. We could now easily get by for a year without Alex earning a penny, though obviously that wasn't the plan.

But even so, something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it precisely, other than to say I was extremely aware that, for some reason, somewhere along the way, my sense of humor had recently gone AWOL. This was a worry because my default setting, my saving grace, even my USP, was always finding something funny. Not (I like to think) in a cruel, offensive, just-because-you-can-make-a-joke-doesn't-mean you-should, Frankie Boyle sort of way, obviously, but being funny was, I'm pretty sure, the very first thing Alex found attractive about me. I think he went on to find other things attractive too—well, I know he
did—but the night we'd first met, by chance, standing at the bar of a Soho member's club while waiting for separate cabs a couple of weeks before Christmas a decade ago, I had made him laugh. I remember it so vividly—despite being pretty pissed at the time—because one of the staff had just come up to me and said:

“Sorry, Susie, it's a 'mare of a night for cabs. We've ordered you one but they're saying anything up to an hour. Is that OK?”

And I'd nodded, “Yeah, no problem, that's fine.”

Then she'd turned to the man standing next to me.

“But Alex, I think yours will be here any minute.” And then she'd looked at both of us and added, “Do you two know each other? Because maybe you could share if you're heading vaguely in the same direction?”

And, without even looking at the man and with all the insouciant confidence of a pleasantly drunk single woman of twenty-nine wearing Vivienne Westwood and feeling good, I'd said: “Well I don't know Alex, but that wouldn't stop me vaguely heading in his direction. I'm good at directions and brilliant at vaguely.”

And Alex had laughed. “Well I'm vaguely heading west—you're welcome to vaguely share.”

And I'd looked at the tall, handsome, smiling man in the definitely-Prada shoes and jacket I was pretty sure was Comme des Garçons, and I'd said: “Tell you what, unless you're busy, why don't we have a drink and wait for my cab? I mean Hackney's west, right?”

And he'd laughed again, and said, “You're funny. My mates have just headed off to a party I don't fancy going to, in Shoreditch. What are you drinking?”

And I'd said, “Vodka and slimline. And I really live in Cricklewood.”

And he said, “Well waddya know—Kilburn.”

And he'd ordered two vodka tonics and then we'd left together an hour later and that was pretty much that. We'd been together ever since.

Of course I've often wondered what would—or indeed wouldn't—have happened if we hadn't been standing next to each other at that bar at that precise moment, both waiting for cabs on one of the busiest nights of the year, but it's a pointless exercise. Life is invariably constructed of just such fleeting moments, piled on top of each other like Jenga bricks.

So on a drizzly day in November I found myself standing in the kitchen at our “good-bye London” party, momentarily pausing and wondering if the decision to leave all this behind and start living “a different sort of life” (and yes, that phrase still rang in my ears) wasn't in fact turning out to be the removal of the first brick in our own Jenga tower. Or perhaps a couple of key bricks had already been removed without us noticing, which had in turn made our little tower even more precarious than we thought?

But I couldn't answer these nagging internal questions. Not yet. And the fact that they were questions I was already asking made me feel weirdly ashamed. As if I had maybe already removed a couple of bricks myself without telling anybody, and then hidden them like a guilty toddler who knows they're doing something wrong but doesn't know quite what that is . . . and now I was waiting for the rest of the bricks to come tumbling down.

At which point Isobel sidled up to me, looking furtive, and said, “Quick word about, er,
cooking
, Soos?” and the moment had passed.

Just under a week later, on the following Saturday morning, all was predictably chaotic as countless cardboard boxes were taped and un-taped (I'd spent a long time in particular trying to wrap the Venetian glass mirror, until Alex took over) and small pointless objects (was that a Happy Meal toy, FFS?) were shoved into them before re-taping and scribbling on them with marker, while Joan, who had “kindly” volunteered to “help,” kept things cracking along at a predictably military pace with the aid of nonstop tea and admonishments to the kids to “keep out of the way, you two.” Indeed, when the kettle was finally packed into the last box—and thus sensibly, albeit mostly theoretically, meant to be the first out of the van—it was still hot.

The van set off for the wonky rental just before we did, so I spent the last few minutes wiping kitchen surfaces and skirting boards like some sort of sad Mrs. Stepford-Bourgeois so that the two Chrises wouldn't think I was a slut. This despite the fact that a surprisingly moist-eyed Ruby was already cleaning the place in preparation for their leisurely arrival the following day, accompanied (I liked to think) by two posh cats, a super-king size-bed, an enormous Ligne Roset sofa and a couple of rather fabulous statement pieces of art. Admittedly this was mostly a fantasy about the domestic lives of stylish gay couples, but it was a potent one because, pathetic though this may seem, I wanted to believe that our beloved house was marrying up.

Meanwhile, we had (albeit temporarily) traded down. The rental was even wonkier than I'd recalled, its “period
features” (both the boiler and the fridge looked as though they should be listed) less stylish than eyesore, not to mention potentially lethal. Still, we had space, having sensibly pruned our belongings down to the leanest of basics—beds, sofas, clothes, pots and pans, computers—and then dispatched the rest to storage, optimistic that we'd find our Dream Home long before we ever needed even one of the several hundred packets of IKEA tea-lights I appeared to have acquired over the past decade.

The first week was a blur. Unpacking should have been the worst of it but taking two children to start a new school two-thirds of the way through a term wasn't ideal, though I think probably more stressful for us than it was for them. And at the end of the week, before we had even managed to locate the bottle opener, it was Alex's birthday, which called for an emergency phone call to Heinous who kindly offered to babysit as long as she and Edie could have a built-in sleepover, while Alex and I went to the closest entry in an ancient edition of the
Good Pub Guide
, which was about five miles away.

We walked into the predictably beam-bedecked gastro-hostelry and ordered a vodka and slimline for me and a pint of Old Tory Fart (at which point I realized that Alex—hitherto a bottled lager kind of bloke—was startlingly keen to embrace our new environment by drinking whatever it took to fit in). We found ourselves a table close to the inglenook fireplace and shrugged off several layers of smart fabrics—“smart” as in “intelligently warm” that is, not smart as in remotely attractive—and ordered variations on the theme of pie and chips, then sat back to check out the locals. Suddenly there was a voice we both recognized, coming from a mouth we did not. And the reason we didn't immediately
recognize the mouth was that it was mostly hidden by an impressive Captain Haddock-y layer of beard, underneath which was a man, who said: “Well I never. Alex and Susie. Long time. What the hell brings you here?”

Blimey, it was Philip—formerly of marketing and now apparently moonlighting as a pirate—which was a sort of pleasant surprise, though perhaps, if I'm honest, more of a surprise than it was entirely pleasant. Yet he and Alex fell on each other like long-lost friends rather than lapsed acquaintance-colleagues, which, I was already discovering, is precisely what happens when you're new in town and friends are scarce, if not entirely absent. Anyway, within moments we had established that Philip was on his habitual Friday night out with the boys and “Bridge” was home with the kids, and also that we were now going to become a table of six and, hey, waddya know—it was birthday drinks and artery-clogging pies all round.

“So you've escaped the rat-race, eh? Congratulations,” said Philip's beard.

“Yeah, we're so out of all that,” said a new super-cheery, backslapping, ale-quaffing, booming-voiced version of Alex Fox, who I had never known was quite such a social chameleon.

“That's great. Really great. You'll love it down here. Wonderful quality of life. Great for the kids. Where've you bought, then?”

“Renting at the moment, but looking in Random-on-Sea. I'm sure we'll find something soon,” said Alex.

“I'm sure you will, I'm sure you will. Fantastic houses, and all for the price of—”

“A two-bed flat in Media Vale,” said me and Alex, in perfect harmony.

“Well, exactly. Now let me introduce you to . . .”

It was handshakes all round with three other interchangeable-looking ruddy-faced men wearing a selection of beards and fleeces, whose names I instantly forgot but who were conceivably all called Peter. And because I was suddenly a bit tired, not to say outnumbered, I sort of sat back and let the rest of the evening wash over me, occasionally dipping in and out of the masculine anecdotage about houses and work and “the missus.” By about 10:15 I was really wishing I was back at Wonky, having a mint tea with Heinous, so I sort of nudged Alex and whispered and he pretended not to hear, so I did it again, at which point he turned to Philip—apparently now re-branded as Phil—and winked archly and said, “The missus is suggesting we call it a night. Long week.” And I would've fallen off my milking stool if doing so wouldn't have attracted too much attention because Alex seemed to have morphed into Jerry from
The Good Life
, albeit wearing a North Face jacket instead of a blazer and turtle-neck. Anyway, Phil wasn't having any of that.