Lunch was a gigot of lamb cooked with flageolet beans and garlic. NB Flageolet beans are a useful, sophisticated vegetable. Half-way through, I glanced at Nathan. He was talking about oil prices, but there was an abstraction about him, a suggestion of discomfort, because every so often his eyes squeezed shut.
Did Poppy notice? While she talked, she fiddled with her expensive crystal necklace – the leather thongs, feathers and beads she had loved to wear when I first met her had been long banished. It was beautiful and she caressed it reverently. When she thought no one was watching, her gaze rested on her husband and there was no doubt of her adoration.
Richard appeared unconscious of his wife. He had settled in to enjoy himself – which he showed every indication of doing. He and Nathan had moved on to detailed discussion of hedge funds, the twins were concentrating on their ice-cream and I was behaving myself.
Poppy seemed restless and had disappeared more than once into the kitchen. She jumped up again, this time to refill my water glass. ‘Daddy and Richard are boring for England.’ Her eyes rested indulgently on them as she cast around for some point of contact with me. ‘How are your friends, Minty?’
‘Oh, Paige is fine. About to have her third baby.’
Poppy put down the jug on its mat and wiped away a minute spot of water from the table. ‘She gave up her very high-powered job, didn’t she, to be with the children?’
‘She made the sacrifice.’ I spoke lightly.
Poppy’s long eyelashes beat down over the shortsighted eyes. ‘Women just don’t know which way to go.’
‘Isn’t that sloppy thinking? All we have to do is choose.’
‘But it’s so complicated.’
True, but I was reluctant to yield a point to Poppy. Furthermore, she was spoiling for confrontation. Nathan was watching me. Please, he begged silently. No arguments. Why Poppy should escape censure for some of her sillier statements, I would never fathom, but I did the right thing and, conversationally, ducked. ‘How are things at work?’
Poppy used to work in publishing but recently she had astonished her family by taking a job in a firm that imported exotic candles from China and sold them through upmarket shops. ‘Fine, fine, fine. The mad Christmas push is still going on. So mad, sometimes, I have to help with the packing.’ She sketched an imaginary box with her hands. ‘I like that. I like physically handling something, and the colours and scents are exquisite.’ She added, ‘As a culture, we’re not hands-on enough. We don’t like to get our hands dirty.’
Richard had been conscripted into telling the twins a story. Lucas was snorting with laughter, but Felix was puzzled, I could tell. His expression meant that he was questioning what he was hearing. ‘The big brown bear,’ said Richard, crooking his fingers and placing them at either side of his head, ‘gobbled up the wizard.’
‘Wizards don’t get gobbled,’ said Felix, flatly, and I rejoiced in his capacity not to be taken in.
Richard lowered his hands. ‘I can’t make you believe me.’
Lucas shouted, ‘I believe you! I believe you, don’t I, Mummy?’
I was about to reply, ‘Of course you do,’ when I met Felix’s anxious eyes, and saw that he was terrified of being shown up. Nathan sent me the tiniest shake of his head. ‘You can believe what you wish, both of you,’ I said.
‘Of course you can,’ said Richard, all good humour, but with the unease of someone who was not truly at home with children.
Felix slid down from his chair and hurled himself at me. I ran my fingers through his hair, relishing the texture of his tufty curls. His breath was scented with garlic, his body pressing mine. Whether I liked it or not, the connection between him and me flowed up through my fingers.
After a few seconds, Lucas climbed down from his chair and leant against Nathan in imitation of his brother.
‘Twins,’ Poppy reproved them. ‘We haven’t quite finished.’
‘Leave them,’ said their indulgent father.
‘But you mustn’t let them be spoilt.’ Poppy laid a hand on her father’s shoulder. ‘Not even a teeny bit.’ She shook her head and the crystal necklace glinted very satisfactorily indeed. ‘You mustn’t spoil them, Dad.’
‘They’re not spoilt,’ I said crossly. ‘Far from it.’
For a second or two conversation was suspended. Richard threw in a diversionary tactic. ‘Are you going on holiday this year?’ He managed to sound so interested that the tension was broken.
Grateful to him, I sipped my wine and assessed the room. To her credit, Poppy had got it right. A striped wallpaper in old rose and gold, comfortable chairs, flowers. The effect was simple and muted, and I wondered if I had overdone the dining room at home. Was the effect too crowded? Had I tried too hard? I decided that the Chinese figurines should go.
Later, I went up the freshly painted and carpeted staircase to the bathroom, past a shelf of photographs, all framed in the same way. And there was Rose – of course – in shorts and strappy sandals, sitting at a café table in what seemed to be a Mediterranean port. The sun was shining, and the scene exuded a shimmering iridescence. Leaning back in the chair, she was inclining her face to the camera, a mark of trust, and a smile played on her lips. One hand held a coffee cup, the other rested in her lap. Tenderness was apparent in the composition of the photograph by the unseen eye. From the bottom of my heart, I envied Rose her ease, and the sensation of hot sun on her arms and legs.
Coming up behind me, Poppy said, ‘That one of Mum was taken last year on Paxos.’
‘I saw the programme the other night. It was very good.’
‘Yes, Mum’s brilliant.’ Poppy was poised between challenge and the good manners she imposed on herself as hostess. The latter got the better of her. Which bathroom do you want to use?’
I murmured that I didn’t mind. As she led me to the second guest bathroom, we passed a small room in which a computer terminal was switched on. The screen-saver showed brightly coloured fish darting about. When I returned from the bathroom, the screen read, ‘Poker On Line. Game Five.’ Someone had been in there.
Before we left, I sought out Poppy, who was stacking china in the kitchen. ‘Thank you so much for lunch,’ I said and, then, surprising myself, ‘Is everything all right?’
She cast a glance at the crockery, and her lips tightened. We didn’t say a word but she knew I’d seen the on-line poker. Then she fixed me with defiant eyes. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t be better.’
As we drove home in the late afternoon, Nathan touched my thigh. ‘I know you’ve tried with Poppy.’ I must have started because he added, ‘Am I such a pig? Do you think I don’t notice?’
‘You’re not a pig.’ I looked out of the window, unsure how to respond. I had grown used to saying nothing. Anyway, the silences that characterized Nathan’s and my life together were deceptive: they were noisy with the unsaid. The London streets rolled past, revealing their Sunday aspect – serviceable acres of Tarmac and city trees that struggled to survive.
The interior of the 4x4 required cleaning, and smelt of the cranberry juice that one of the boys had spilt in the back. NB Put on the list for Eve. I searched my bag for a tissue. ‘Poppy and I rub along.’
Nathan’s hand tightened on my thigh. ‘I wasn’t thinking about Poppy when I married you.’
It was a small concession, but I felt a sudden comfort and pleasure in his ratification of my place in his hierarchy. In my handbag, my fingers encountered a sucked boiled sweet that Felix had discarded and I had rescued from the car seat. The stickiness, and the fact that it was in my bag, which I liked to keep immaculate, instantly banished the feel-good factor and I said, more sharply than I’d intended, ‘You married me because you thought I’d make you happy. I don’t think you are happy. And I don’t know what I can do about it.’