Separate Lives (12 page)

“No, sorry, birthday boy—and Susie—I'm not having any of that. It's back to the ranch for a nightcap before we let you go. Bridge will be thrilled to see you,” and even though I was nearly as exhausted as if I'd actually done something properly outdoorsy in my recently acquired smart fabric layers, I was quite intrigued by the idea of Bridget, so I agreed.

“That's the spirit, Susie. You know it makes sense,” said Phil, and Alex helped me into my coat and gave my arm a little squeeze as he did so, as if to say, “Look, we're new in town, we need all the help we can get . . .” and that was fair enough because it was true.

“We're only round the corner,” said Phil, and indeed they were, just around the corner and next door to the church, in—oh, glorious cliché—The Old Rectory.

“Shoes off,” said Phil as we huddled inside the elegant porch. “Bridge'll have my guts for garters if you don't.” At which point (and not for the last time) I wondered if this extraordinary sitcom-bonhomie version of Phil was the inevitable outcome of leaving London. And then I dismissed the thought, slightly ashamed that I was being an urban snob. Anyway, we were now inside and here was Bridget. Or at least by a process of eliminating every other woman in the world I assumed this was Bridge, for just as Phil had embraced the hirsute Haddock look, so Bridget had, astonishingly, acquired about six stones and was therefore kind of a big-knicker-wearing Renée-Zellweger-as-Bridget-Jones version of the old twiglet-Bridget. It was so completely extraordinary and unexpected that I had to stop myself gaping, goggle-eyed and carp-like.

“Wow, is that Alex and Susie? Omigod. Come in. Let's have a hug, you guys.”

Judging by the expression of joy on Bridge's face I sensed she probably didn't get out much—and certainly never very far from her fridge. But maybe that was triplets for you? That, or being married to Captain Haddock.

The triplets—two boys, one girl: Theo, Josh and Daisy—had apparently just turned five and started school in September.

“Which is great,” said Bridget, over a glass of Maker's Mark straight up (an ex-fashion editor drinking bourbon? Truly the world had tipped on its axis), “because it means I can get myself a bit of a life again.”

“Yes, Bridge has been doing some styling for
Sussex Life
—it's actually a glossy—as well as sorting out the windows of
our local designer retail outlet, making sure they don't put a double-breasted camel coat over a cerise wrap-dress, eh Bridge?”

And poor Bridget, for whom I suddenly felt extreme pity, blushed slightly and said, apologetically, “Actually, camel and cerise is a good look. But yes, I'm a bit out of the loop. Some friends asked me to help, so . . .” She tailed off, and I recalled in a flash that she had once been the deputy fashion editor of
Marie Claire
, and I sort of wanted to hug her quite tightly. Instead I asked where the loo was.

It was after 1:30 a.m. when we finally poured ourselves into a mini-cab.

“Well, happy birthday, Alex,” I said.

“I thought that was pretty great, actually,” said Alex. “I mean, it could have been just us staring at each other all night across the cow pies, but it was really nice to catch up with Phil and Bridget, don't you think? Even if I would never have recognized them in the street, what with The Beard. And Bridget turning into the Forth Bridget. But I think it's worked out really well for them, don't you? Phil seems to have got his shit together with his own business. And Bridge has very obviously got over the eating disorder.”

“Well, yeah, she's obviously got over one sort of eating disorder.” And I glanced at Alex to see if he was joking about it being nice to see Phil-n-Bridge, but I could tell he was a hundred percent sincere. This didn't, it must be said, immediately square with my own feelings about Mr. and Mrs. Phil Bingley, which were that if you prized the lid off their (admittedly lovely) Old Rectory, you'd effectively also open a can of . . .

“Bloody gorgeous house too, eh Soos? Fingers crossed we find something like that.”

Well, yes, obviously. Fingers crossed. No disagreement there.

So, here we were, a month before Christmas, living out of boxes in the Wonky Rental and signed up with every estate agent in town while we searched for the Dream Home in which the
famille
Fox would finally find themselves, both literally and metaphorically. Those were the facts and that was the truth.

Or at least it was a kind of one-dimensional version of The Truth. Seen from a slightly different perspective, The Truth was that, as a family, we were rather suddenly and quite dramatically drifting in different directions, tugged along by seemingly hidden currents beneath the tides and attempting to grasp any passing flotsam. Yeah, I can do sea metaphors.

The thing about moving out of your comfort zone and starting over on what is effectively a sea-and-sunshine-and-ice cream-in-the-summer whim which fuels one's escapist fantasies, is that it's tough enough when you all want the same things, share the same dreams and motivations . . . and are strong swimmers. If you're not, you may just find yourself delaying—and distracting yourself from—the inevitable. Suddenly you're not waving but drowning.

Away from friends, family, neighbors, school, work, the park, the tube, the bus, the corner shop (where they automatically put aside your copies of
Grazia
,
Private Eye
,
Vanity Fair
,
Heat
and
Radio Times
and sneak your children Haribo), never mind Selfridges, Starbucks and Soho members' clubs . . . away from all those things that reinforce who you are and the life you're living and which, for all their apparent mundanity, also make you feel safe and whole
and which, of course, you entirely take for granted—well, when they're gone you're thrown back on yourself and, without warning, discover you're not so much a rock-solid family of four and an island of emotional and practical self-sufficiency but an archipelago balanced precariously atop tectonic plates, so almost anything can happen. Your partner could even morph into a total stranger right in front of your eyes.

There were four and half months in between moving into the Wonky Rental in November and moving into the Dream Home, during which Christmas came to Random. Inside Poundland there was more tinsel than you could poke an acrylic fingernail at, while outside the mall in the square there was an ice rink the size of a paddling pool with a “rustic” picket fence. I'm partial to a bit of ice skating but my center of gravity wasn't quite low enough for this rink. Still, they had these big plastic push-along penguins for the little kids to cling on to while they were crying, which was a nice touch.

Turns out, Random's shopping mall was “famous” for two things. First, for being built on the site of what I imagine was a lovely cricket pitch, an act of consumerist barbarism inappropriately commemorated by a bronze of a cricketer, and secondly for having a multi-story car park of such willful complexity that once out of the car and on foot you needed a compass to find the lifts to take you to a selection of oddly, and then again evenly, numbered levels . . . which in turn connected, in an entirely arbitrary fashion, to a whole other set of levels, requiring another set of lifts to take one down, or possibly up, to the shops.

On the other hand, because disabled drivers and the parents of toddlers had been gifted relatively easy access to the
retail outlets, drivers sometimes emerged from their cars wearing comedy plaster casts and accessorized by a selection of Tiny Tims on crutches in order to facilitate a relatively unimpeded pathway to the door of Bhs. Though if you didn't want to go to Bhs you were stuffed, obviously. Imagine a shopping center designed by whoever invented Tomb Raider, but with all the fun extracted.

Anyway, having parked the car elsewhere, while browsing the mall with Heinous, child-free (and therefore as relaxed as possible when there were only however-many-there-were shopping days left until Christmas), next door to Claire's Accessories I chanced upon a new “pop-up shop” selling only calendars. Of course, I'd not only never been inside a calendar pop-up shop before, but also entirely failed to realize that calendars are such brilliantly niched products that not only can all one's calendrical needs be met under one roof, but many of one's emotional needs, too.

“Look,” I said to Heinous. “A Miffy calendar. And look at this Busy Mum's calendar, with stickers and everything so it doubles as a reward chart. That's exactly what I need. And I can think of at least half a dozen people I know who'd like that R-Patz calendar. OK, so I don't quite get the R-Patz thing myself, but frankly why would I? He's like twelve or something. Oh, but I have to have this Simpsons calendar.”

So after an inevitably calendar-heavy Christmas and a lost weekend of a New Year, a sluggish January was enlivened only by finding the Dream Home.

We'd jumped at it and offered close to the asking price, but why the hell wouldn't we? It ticked every conceivable box in our personal Dream Home checklist: listed, stuccoed, corniced, with an embarrassment of garden (not that I was remotely embarrassed—merely daunted), it was also
a beach-pebble's throw from Heinous's house. This was indeed a Kirstie Allsopp “Forever House,” and even better than that, it was going to be ours practically mortgage-free. During the weeks before we moved, I was keeping a scribbled list-cum-diary which, when viewed in retrospect and with the volume on The Clear Light of Day turned up to No. 11, reveals just how much the tectonic plates were shifting.

There was, for example, the note headed SCHOOL stuck to the pin-board in front of my desk:

Then there was a tense scribbled exchange between me and Alex in early February, written on a scrap of paper that had originally been left on the kitchen table and which I subsequently re-discovered torn into tiny pieces in the bin and which I extracted and re-read. And, weirdly, saved.

I know—not good. Then there was the fact that our social life was, so far, effectively Phil and Bridget and Heinous—only one of whom I actually liked (though Chuck adored
the triplets) and because Heinous also occasionally doubled up as our babysitter it made breaking new social ground pretty tricky. Hence the following “shopping” list, also on my pinboard:

And then there was the Friday in December when Charlie came home from school looking a bit crestfallen and said over supper: “Mrs. Davidson doesn't like me.”

“Oh I'm sure that's not true, darling,” I said breezily. “Now remind me who Mrs. Davidson is again?”

“My form teacher.”

Yeah, if it wasn't one thing, it was another. Inside Wonky it was rapidly turning into the winter of discontent and disconnectedness. Though surely this was inevitable?

Something had happened to Alex. At first I simply put it down to general out-of-sorts “WTF?-ness,” after all I was suffering my own version of What/Why-The-Fuck? For example, WTF were we doing in Random-on-Sea in the bleak midwinter? Or WTF were we hoping to achieve? WTF would owning the Dream Home actually mean? WTF was Alex doing spending every minute of the day, spare or otherwise, glued to his bloody Mac? (Answer: “Learning how to use Photoshop.” But
for twelve hours a day
?)

In fact, Alex had already been given a little photographic joblet: to take some moody pictures of Random for the website of one of Phil's local business clients, a boutique B&B, which was lovely and everything, apart from the fact that he was being paid £250. So while I had my doubts about
photography being the sort of profession you could easily, never mind lucratively, crack in middle-age while based in Random-on-Sea, I figured it was probably best to keep them to myself. Anyway, Alex had squillions of magazine contacts and he was an arse-kicking Alpha Fox, so presumably he'd be fine.

And then there was the weirdness of Alex being in the house all the time, yet also strangely absent. I have always been a great believer in the absence/fond heart equation, so this new omnipresent Alex, always here yet, oddly, not, forever behind a closed door, was a new and entirely unfamiliar concept and not one, if I'm honest, that I was coping with particularly brilliantly. Some of that was due to the fact that he was so tetchy whenever I mentioned the word “work” in almost any context. As far as Alex was concerned, if he woke up, had a piece of toast and coffee and went into his office, emerging briefly at lunchtime and then disappearing again, finally re-emerging to do the school run, it was because he was (bring on the air-quotes) “working.”

Meanwhile, I was working very hard. Admittedly my work isn't always an eight-hour day, five days a week; more often it comes in bursts which can involve several weeks of very long and frenetic days followed by periods of relative calm. Currently, though, I was in headless-chicken mode because I needed to nail the new restaurant guide by the end of January in order to meet the publisher's deadlines. This meant pushing the guide's writers to meet
my
deadlines while trying to squeeze in quick sprints up to town for meetings about how best to expand the guide's website, which had recently won a “Webbie” award. These were four-hour
round-trips on the train, never mind the meetings, so while I hadn't imagined the logistics of living in Random would dramatically affect my work, after a two-week period during which I was commuting to London almost daily, I realized this assumption was hopelessly wrong.