“What do you mean, just your luck?” Jims had been unreasonably irritable lately. “I’d say you’ve been pretty lucky up till now.”
“It was just a figure of speech,” said Zillah pacifically.
“A highly inappropriate one, if I may say so. Have you arranged with Mrs. Peacock yet?”
“I’ll do it now.”
But Mrs. Peacock wasn’t able to stay at Abbey Gardens Mansions for the ten days Jims and Zillah would be in the Maldives, or indeed for any part of that time. Zillah, she said, had left it too late. Only the day before she’d fixed up to go on a coach tour of Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.
“I hope she freezes to death,” said Zillah. “I hope she poisons herself on tulip bulbs.”
“Tulip bulbs aren’t poisonous,” said Jims coldly. “Squirrels prefer them to nuts. Have you never noticed?”
She had to ask her mother. Nora Watling exploded. The children had been in London less than three weeks and now she was expected to have them back again. Hadn’t Zillah understood what she’d said about not wanting to raise a second family?
“You and Daddy could come here. The children are at school all day. You could do some sightseeing, go on the Millennium Wheel.”
“We haven’t been on the wheel,” said Eugenie. “We haven’t even been to the Dome.”
“Nanna will take you,” said Zillah, covering up the mouthpiece. “Nanna will take you anywhere you want to go.”
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 making love…