Of course Nora Watling agreed to come. She could hardly do otherwise. Having remarked scathingly that some people would put their children in a kennel or a cattery if they had the chance, she said she and Zillah’s father would arrive on Good Friday.
“I wish you wouldn’t teach them to call their grandmother Nanna,” said Jims. “It’s highly inappropriate for the stepchild of a Conservative MP.”
“Not a stepchild, not a stepchild,” screamed Jordan. “Want to be a real child.”
On Monday morning, a week later than expected, the Challis interview with Zillah appeared. Or something appeared. There was no photograph and the piece devoted to Zillah was about two inches long. It was part of a two-page feature on MPs’ wives, their views and occupations, and it was written in a breezy, satirical style. She was made to look a combination of feather-headed butterfly and ignoramus.
Zillah, new bride of James Melcombe-Smith, shares her husband’s interest in politics if not his persuasion. Not for her the retention of Section 28 or that ancient bastion of the law, trial by jury. Sweep them away, is her policy. Where have we heard that before? Why, from none other than the Labour Party. “People on juries aren’t lawyers,” she told me, tossing back a lock of raven hair. (Mrs. Melcombe-Smith looks a lot like Catherine Zeta-Jones.) “My husband would like to see an end to this waste of the taxpayers’ money.” He, of course, is the Conservative member for South Wessex, known to his constituents and other pals as “Jims.” They will be fascinated by his wife’s views.
Jims was less angry about this than might have been expected. He muttered a bit and predicted he’d shortly be due for an unpleasant interview with the chief whip. But these were not the sort of slips and revelations he feared, and he doubted whether more than a handful of the landowners and (in his own phrase) peasants read “that rag.” Zillah said she was sorry but she didn’t know anything about politics. Was there a book she could read?
Later that day she saw Jerry again. She was in the car, fetching the children from school, and had just turned out of Millbank when she spotted him outside the Atrium. Her first thought was for the children and the trouble that would ensue if they saw him. But both were looking in the other direction, admiring two orange-colored dogs with curly tails like pigs.
“Can I have a dog, Mummy?” asked Eugenie.
“Only if you look after it yourself.” Zillah’s mother had said the same thing to her when she asked that same question twenty-two years before. She had got the dog and looked after it for three days. Remembering, she went on, “No, of course you can’t have a dog. A dog in a flat?”
“We used to live in a house. It was nice and we had friends. We had Rosalba and Titus and Fabia.”
“Want Titus,” said Jordan, but instead of screaming he began quietly to sob.
As Zillah waited in the middle of the street to turn right into the car park under Abbey Gardens Mansions, she saw Jerry running along the pavement toward her. Without looking to her left she began to turn, causing the van coming from the left to brake violently and the driver, already galvanic with road rage, put his head out of the window and let forth a stream of obscene abuse. Zillah went on down the ramp into the car park.
“Mummy, did you hear the word that man said? Nanna said that if I used that word I’d come to a bad end. Will the man come to a bad end?”
“I hope so,” Zillah said viciously. “Stop crying, Jordan. Do you think you two could manage to call Nanna Granny?”
Eugenie shook her head slowly from side to side. “That would make her into another person, wouldn’t it?”
Zillah didn’t answer. She was confirmed in her belief that her daughter would be called to the Bar at an early age.
There was no more sign of Jerry. Jims again came home very late. In the morning he told her his new friend Leonardo Norton would also be in the Maldives while they were there, staying, in fact, in the same hotel.
Chapter 11
“YOU COULD COME with me to the Television Centre,” Matthew said. “I’d like that.”
But Michelle said no, she wouldn’t. “You’ll be better off without having me to worry about, darling.” The truth was she couldn’t face the stares and surreptitious giggles of all those long-legged girls and young men in jeans. Jeff Leigh’s “Little and Large” jibe still rankled.
It was heartening to see Matthew set off for the tube station, walking along almost like a normal person, his shoulders back and his head high. Michelle dusted the living room and vacuumed the carpet. As she lumbered around, breathless, her heart thudding, she tried to recapture what it had felt like to be a normal person herself, to have an ordinary body. Not like a model girl, not even like Fiona, but to be an average rounded woman, wearing a size fourteen. Usually, when Matthew was there, as he almost always was, she stifled such thoughts, pushing them away, pretending she wasn’t thinking them. This was the first time in how long-five years? seven?-that she had been alone in the house. There’s nothing like being on your own for having space to think.
Michelle stood still in the middle of the room and felt her body, really felt what it was like, from her three chins to the cushions on her upper thighs. First with her brain, then with her hands, growing at last fully aware of the mountain of flesh in which her delicate and fastidious mind and her loving heart had their being. She closed her eyes and in the darkness seemed to see Matthew as he might be if restored to health and herself as she was, or nearly as she was, when first they married. And into that dream came a hint, like a winged insect, a fragile wisp, fluttering across her closed lids, of the old desire they had once had for each other, the passion that sprang from physical beauty and energy. Could it ever be recaptured? The love was there, just the same. Surely with that love present, they could return somehow to
It was a long time since Michelle had been able to bend down. They had had to get rid of the vacuum cleaner they used to have, the kind with a long hose you pull along like a little dog, because she couldn’t bend down enough to fetch it out of the cupboard and put it back. The upright one they had now was better, but only marginally, because to connect the attachments, she had to make the huge effort of lifting the cleaner by its handle onto a chair and performing this operation at thigh level. Afterward she had to stand still for a moment, one hand pressed against the mountain of her bosom. But once she’d got her breath back, she managed to screw in the nozzle on the brush hose and finish the cleaning of the room. Then she went out shopping.
Not to Waitrose this time but nearer home to the Atlanta supermarket at West End Green. She put kiwi fruit into the trolley, Ryvitas, and a large pack of dry roasted peanuts, but as, almost automatically, she took a big bag of doughnuts from the shelf, her hand was stayed in midair and very slowly she put it back again. The same with the thick wedge of Cheddar cheese and the Cadbury’s Milk Flakes. She was bracing herself not to succumb but to leave the cheesecake where it was in the chilled foods cabinet when a voice behind her said, “Stoking up the boilers, are we? Maintaining the
It was Jeff Leigh. Strange things were happening to Michelle in Matthew’s absence. Her mind was in a turmoil as she thought thoughts she hadn’t had for a dozen years and looked at people she was used to with new eyes. For instance, she was seeing Jeff as if for the first time and perceiving him as very good-looking, that it was obvious why women found him attractive. And equally obvious that his charm was spurious and his looks skin-deep. Any reasonable person, not blinded by a love that must be mostly physical desire, would dislike and distrust him. She didn’t answer his question but asked him where Fiona was.
“At work. Where else?”
“To keep you in the luxury to which you’re accustomed, I suppose.” Michelle surprised herself, for she couldn’t remember saying such a thing or using such a tone in all her life before.
“It always amazes me,” he said, smiling genially, “how you women scream for equality with men but you still expect men to keep you and never to keep
“Everyone ought to work.”
“Excuse me, Michelle, but when did you last set foot in a nursery for a living?”
After she’d walked off in silence he was sorry he’d said that. It was cheap. Also it would have been funnier to have said something more about her shape and weight. Something on the lines of applying for a post with the
