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First published 2002
Reissued in this edition 2011
Copyright © India Knight, 2002
The permissions on p.261 constitute an extension of this copyright page
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-193870-7
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgements
India Knight is the author of three novels: My Life on a Plate, Don’t You Want Me? and Comfort and Joy. Her non-fiction books include The Shops, the bestselling diet book Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet, the accompanying bestselling cookbook Neris and India’s Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook and The Thrift Book. India is a columnist for the Sunday Times and lives in London with her three children.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Praise for India Knight:
‘Brilliantly funny and knowing … Clara Hutt could eat Bridget Jones for breakfast’ Evening Standard
‘With its intelligence, exuberance and its admirable charm, My Life on a Plate is a welcome revival of a tradition of mondaine comedy which seemed to have become extinct with the death of Nancy Mitford’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Almost unbearably funny’ New Statesman
‘Knight is brilliant on comic details … and spot-on about relationships’
The Times
‘Tender, tough, schmaltzy, witty and heart-warming all at once. Knight has a great comic touch’ Metro
‘Fabulous. Laugh-out-loud funny’ Cosmopolitan
‘Knight has a keen eye for delicious detail’ Herald Scotland
In memory of my father,
Michel Aertsens,
1927–2001
Where is the life that late I led?
Where is it now? Totally dead.
Where is the fun I used to find?
Where has it gone? Gone with the wind.
A married life may all be well,
But raising an heir
Could never compare
With raising a bit of hell
So I repeat what first I said:
Where is the life that late I led?
– Cole Porter
I am lying in my bed, listening to Frank having sex again. ‘Gur-runt, gur-runt, gur-runt, gur-runt, gur-runt’ is what it sounds like: coitus as iambic pentameter, which you must admit is unusual. His is the only voice I can hear: is he having the sex with himself, I wonder? Because he’s being unnecessarily vocal for a solo performance: if you have a quick Barclays, you hardly need to provide your own running commentary. What can he possibly be saying to himself? ‘You’re hot, Frank, mate. You make me hard, know what I mean? Does this feel good, Frankie, baby?’ God, how creepy. How deeply, deeply creepy. The freak!
I do not deserve my life, I really don’t. I’ve never deliberately hurt anybody, I pay my taxes, I love my child, and what do I get? An absolute pervo smut-freak of a house-mate: a man who lies there dirty-talking himself. Oh, yuck. Oh, blee. I might have to switch the light on and pace up and down for a bit.
Still, makes a change, the solo business. It’s usually a duet.
But I spoke too soon, for lo, here’s tonight’s ladyfriend, who’s been silent as the tomb until now: ‘Eee,’ she’s saying – perhaps she’s from Yorkshire. Very high-pitched, at any rate. ‘Eee.’ Oh, I see: ‘Frank-eeee.’
I suppose that makes it marginally better. But still … I am really, really happy for Frank that he’s having so much sex – someone in this house has to, and it sure as pants isn’t me. But I’d rather not be listening. Not that that’s what I’m doing – listening. I am overhearing by accident. You couldn’t not. Oh, I wish I was earless and had lots of elegant turbans, like my great-aunt, who of course had ears, but you get the gist.
On and inexorably on it goes: ‘Gur-runt, gur-runt …’ (Frankie’s sexual technique is quite impressive: it’s been at least twenty-five minutes. Dominic took about half this time, including foreplay. Still, he was English, so what can you expect? I’m lucky I got away with my bottom intact.)
I know what you’re thinking: that it’s all very well for me to sit, or rather lie, here complaining, and that if I don’t like it then I should stop listening like some depraved voyeur, or rather écouteur, and maybe put some music on, or get into the shower, or just go somewhere else. But I can’t. It’s two a.m.: the creak of floorboards, let alone a sudden blast of either water or Puccini, would simply make it perfectly clear to Romeo and Juliet that I can hear everything. Besides, I’m cosy in my bed: I don’t want to go out anywhere. And it’s raining. It always rains here.
Christ, I wish he’d hurry up. Why are the walls so bloody thin, anyway? There’s a whole bathroom between us: I really shouldn’t be able to hear a thing. This is a big fat square Victorian house: you’d think the walls were as thick as tree trunks. They probably made them thin on purpose, so that Mr Unwholesome Victorian could hear the maids being shagged. Bloody pervy, weird English (I must stop saying that, actually, or even thinking it: I’m half English myself).
Thank God Honey is tucked up two floors away. Brahms’s Lullaby this ain’t, comme on dit à New York.
‘Woah, God,’ Frank suddenly shouts, sounding agonized. ‘Woah, God.’
‘Eee,’ she says. ‘Aaaa. Aaaa.’ And then, sounding oddly tribal, ‘Oa. Oa. Oa. Oa.’ Exactly like that: four times. She likes the simple vowel sounds, clearly.
And then she screams.
Clear as a bell, she screams, ‘In my face. Yurgh. Yurgh. Hoooooooo yes. Hoooooo yes. RAAAAH.’
And then, finally, there is quiet.
So obviously it’s a teeny bit awkward at breakfast the next morning. I wasn’t going to say anything – I tend not to – but I wake up both knackered and in a furious bad mood. I didn’t get to sleep until after three, and Honey woke up at six, as toddlers will. Mary, her baby-sitter-cum-occasional child-minder, has finally arrived to look after her for a few hours, and the two of them have gone off into the living room armed with puzzles, board books and a vast collection of dollies.
Honey looks as fresh as a daisy. I look like a gnarled old oak, especially under the eyes. It’s just before nine, and here we are in the kitchen. Frank’s wearing his favourite battered tartan dressing gown and is squeezing oranges. The oranges match his hair (body, head and, presumably, pubis). So if you think this is one of those ‘And there the love of my life was all along, right under my nose’ stories, you are very much mistaken.
Frank has a lot going for him: he’s charming, he’s clever, he’s funny, he’s kind, and he is extraordinarily professionally successful – my ex-husband Dominic now sells his paintings for tens of thousands of dollars. His face is nice too: stern jaw, flinty grey eyes and a mouth that looks potentially cruel (very sexy, I always think) until he smiles his lovely, faintly goofy disarming smile. Great body, too: lanky yet broad but not overdeveloped, and marvellous sinewy arms from all that painting.
So on paper, yes, foxy in the extreme. On paper, I’d read about him and shout, ‘Go on, my son,’ to myself. On paper, I’d be the one having sex with him, and teaching him the beauty of consonants. But this isn’t paper, and while all of the above are true, there is one insurmountable problem.
If I got desperate enough, I could just about go with light strawberry blond. Or pale Titian, maybe, or whatever lying excuses for ‘ginger’ people come up with. But Frank isn’t merely ginger. He is, as I said, as orange as the fruits he is squeezing: not merely ginger, but practically fluorescent. He makes the average carrot look pretty peaky.
The problem isn’t just his head hair. The problem, for me, with gingers – and yes, I happily admit I have a problem, so you don’t need to bore me with ‘What would it sound like if you substituted “black people” for “gingers”?’ because I know, I know how bad it sounds – lies in the secondary hair. (Black people, cleverly, never have ginger hair.)
If it was just the head, I could make my ginger lover wear a hat at all times, or I could just shave it off. There would still be a faint marmalade shadow, but if I kept my contact lenses out, I probably would barely notice. No, it’s the other hairs. It’s the ginger chest hair, and the ginger arm and leg hair and – here’s the crux of it – the ginger armpit hair, all damp and curlicued after lovemaking … and the pubic hair. The orang-utan-orange pubic hair of someone like Frank. I simply can’t countenance it: for some people it’s hairy backs that make them dry-heave, or men with pronounced female buttocks (never, I’ll grant you, a good look), or the old weeny peeny problem. Or – God – man-boobs. For me, it’s orange pubes: no pasarán.
That’s not all, unfortunately. And I can’t dismiss the other stuff as easily – as facetiously – as the orange body-wool, either. The fact is that Frank is casually promiscuous in a way that stuns and fascinates me in equal measure: joyfully, guiltlessly, permanently up for it. Which is fine, of course, but one wouldn’t necessarily want to go there: every woman Frank sleeps with becomes a notch – an instantly forgettable, inconsequential little notch – on his bedpost.
He’s forgetful in other respects too. I happen to know that Frank has a child up in Newcastle, where he comes from (Frank never wears coats). A child – a daughter – whom he never sees and never mentions. And the child presumably has a mother, of whom Frank has never spoken. And I have a problem with that, I really do: such a problem, in fact, that I can’t even bring the subject up with him. I am silenced by my own disgust. So let’s just say Frank is not my dream date, and leave it at that.
But I digress.
‘Morning, Stella,’ Frank beams, handing me a glass of orange – natch – juice. ‘Sleep well?’
I raise one eyebrow and give him a slow, deliberate look. He understands it, and a hot blush starts creeping up his Celtically pale face.
‘Maybe you could very sweetly buy me a present,’ I tell him sternly.
‘What, like a bunch of flowers? It’d feel a bit like apologizing to the landlady,’ he smiles.
‘I was thinking more of earplugs.’
‘Oh, God,’ says Frank, covering his face with his hands in the usual way. ‘Oh, God. I’m really, really sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I tell him. ‘But honestly, Frank, you do this all the time, and if you’re going to be quite so, um, vocal, then earplugs really might be an idea.’
‘Yeah,’ says Frank, staring at his bare toes, which are scrunched with horror. ‘Honestly, Stella – I didn’t even know it was going to happen, otherwise, you know …’
‘What? Otherwise what?’
‘Well, we could have gone to hers, or whatever.’
‘You never do, though, do you? Are they all homeless? Anyway, I hope it was worth it. Was it good?’ I’ve gulped down my juice and am standing by the coffee machine. ‘Coffee?’
‘Yes, please. Was what good?’
‘The sex, Frank.’
Frank, I am pleased to notice, has gone scarlet. What with the tangerine above the red face, he looks like the kind of cardigan women wore in the late Nineties.
‘Stella, honey, you can’t ask things like that,’ he says, trying not to stammer. He shakes his head. He is scrabbling for something to say. ‘I’m a good Catholic boy,’ is what he comes out with, absurdly.
‘Yuck! Don’t talk to me as if I were your mummy. Firstly, you’re not a boy: you were a thirty-five-year-old man, last time I looked. Secondly, Catholic doesn’t come into it, frankly.’
‘Stella,’ Frank interrupts.
‘Thirdly,’ I interrupt him back, ‘thirdly, Frank-eee, there is nothing good or Catholic or even boyish about coming on women’s faces. Classy number, was she? Known her long?’
Frank slams his juice down on the counter, spilling it.
‘For fuck’s sake, Stella! Have some respect!’
‘What, like you respect the female form?’
‘Stella! Stop it!’
We stand in uneasy silence, glaring at each other. I might have gone too far, I think to myself. On the other hand, it gets really on my nerves when people – English men – are all uptight about something you’ve actually heard them do. I’ll just go a little further: test his mettle.
‘Oa. Oa. Oa,’ I shout, right into his face. ‘Oa, Frankie, baby.’
Frank looks truly appalled. He runs his hand through his hair, which is standing up in soft peaks, like egg whites would if egg whites were orange. And then he smiles, and I smile, and then we giggle.
‘You’re an appalling human being,’ he says. ‘You do terrible things.’
‘Pot,’ I reply. ‘I don’t believe you’ve ever met kettle.’
He rolls his eyes.
‘Really, Frankie. I know it’s none of my business, but “oa, oa”?’
Frank is trying to look severe, and failing. He laughs through his nose, and then properly, out loud. When he laughs, his eyes start watering, which always sets me off. He does it now. We laugh, and then he snorts, and then we’re friends again.
I expect you’re wondering how I come to be sharing a house with a sex-obsessed ginger man. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’d better tell it, and that way we’ll have got the boring explanatory bit out of the way and can go on with the rest.
My name, as you will have noticed, is Stella. It’s really Estelle, but I got so tired of the mispronunciation I had to put up with daily – ‘Ee-stell’, ‘Eh-stelley’, ‘Es-tewell’, even ‘Esther’ – and with people asking me to spell it for them, that I anglicized it some years ago. I am, as I mentioned, partly English, on my mother’s side. My father is French (and, I think, possibly gay, though I can’t be quite sure; certainly, he’s the campest man on earth, as you will see). I was brought up in Paris, speaking French, although Mummy, being one of those tenaciously snobbish Englishwomen who spend twenty years abroad and deliberately don’t quite master the basic gist of the language, always spoke English to me at home.
So I was brought up bilingual, although obviously living in Paris meant that all my day-to-day business – school, friends, shops, restaurants – was conducted in French. We spent summer holidays in England every year, staying with my maternal grandparents at their house in East Sussex, and this, combined with my mother’s descending like a ton of bricks the second her immaculate ear discerned anything approaching a French accent in me – ‘Darling, don’t be froggy’ – means that I speak English like, well, a native.
(Odd of my mother to marry a Frenchman and then be embarrassed by Frenchness, isn’t it? If she imitates someone French, she literally says, ‘Nee nor nee nor’. But it often happens when English people marry ‘foreigners’, I notice: blissfully exotic for thirty seconds, and then an albatross of shame for the next twenty years.)
I spent a couple of years at a boarding school in the shires when Mummy and Papa separated, when I was fourteen. That was when I realized, on a daily basis, that I could sound as English as Judi Dench, but that, like it or not, in the middle-class world which I inhabited, I was hopelessly, helplessly foreign: I liked my family better than I liked horses, I couldn’t eat grey mince, I’d done snogging, I liked cigarettes and was allowed to smoke one a day at home, I refused to play lacrosse on the grounds that it would ruin my calves (I know: terrible of me – true, though), and so on and so inexcusably foreignly forth. Still, I made some nice horse-faced friends and became good at tennis, so it wasn’t entirely wasted.
I shan’t bore you with my days at university – two years at the Sorbonne, one at Cambridge, reading Romance Languages. All you need to know is that I didn’t work particularly hard, went to a lot of parties and generally had a lovely time. After Cambridge, I got married to the boy I’d been going out with in the summer term: we were only twenty-two and, really, it was doomed to failure. In the event, it lasted two silly, giggly years and the split was entirely friendly: Rupert is even Honey’s godfather.
Unfortunately for lonely old me – I could do with an extra friend right now – Rupert, having lived the post-marital life of an eligible west Londoner to the full – shag-pad in Ladbroke Grove and so on – decided six months ago to grow a beard, up sticks and move to the Hebrides, where he studies birds, eats crabs, wears itchy sweaters and is, by his own account, blissfully happy. Funny how people always revert to type: I remember his mother telling me that he spent his entire childhood collecting feathers and climbing up trees to find nests.
I moved around Europe for a while and then, aged twenty-seven, I went home to Paris and started working as a translator. I had a wonderful life: a flat in the Marais, good friends, a fantastic bistro right underneath my apartment – they’d send up old-fashioned soupe à l’oignon when I had a cold or a hangover. The only fly in the ointment was work: there’s a limit to how excited you can get translating endless documents about petrochemical companies’ plans for expansion. Still, it seemed that the more boring and technical the job, the better you got paid, so I pottered along happily. The odd love affair along the way kept things zinging nicely; I was, with the luxury of retrospect, perfectly content.
I met Dominic Midhurst when I was thirty-four, through my poofy father, who has always had a fondness for contemporary art (at one stage during my childhood – this would have been the late Sixties – he decided we should live in a bare white house with white rubber flooring and huge disturbing, nightmare-inducing canvases of what I remember to be carcasses, though surely they can’t all have been, adorning the double-height walls. We also had a small, graphically realistic painting in the downstairs loo of an erect, perfectly pink penis called, not unreasonably, Le Penis, artist unknown, though I always suspected Papa had sketched it).
When we met, Dominic, who was a couple of years younger than me, was just beginning to create his empire: he understood the importance of PR and publicity before anyone else did, and had a stable of young conceptual artists (what does this mean? Don’t all artists have a concept? It’s like the houses you see advertised for sale, proclaiming themselves to be ‘architect-designed’); artists who could all be relied on to grace the gossip pages of the tabloids on a regular basis with some outrage or other.
My father bought some works – you could hardly call them paintings – for his XVIième apartment, and after a few months it turned out that Dominic needed someone to translate his increasingly hefty, wordy catalogues for him. Oddly, since he’s never claimed to actually like Dominic much, Papa volunteered me, and although neither the idea of my daddy getting me a job, nor the art, nor the pale, blond, effete Dominic was exactly my cup of tea, the alternative career-wise would eventually have involved something like moving to Brussels to translate at the European Commission. Working for Dominic meant I could keep my beloved flat, keep taking the onion soup, and continue my affair with a Parisian bookshop owner with a foot fetish (inexplicable, as fetishes go. I mean, feet). So I took the job and started translating the quasi-nonsensical catalogues.
Eventually Dominic decided it would be easier for everyone concerned if I worked from his Paris gallery rather than from home (there were then two galleries, one in Paris and one in London: he divided his time between them) with, in many cases, the art hanging in front of me, for clarification purposes. As well as translating the catalogues, in which ludicrously pseudy sentiments were expressed in award-winningly ludicrous pseudy sentences, I began involving myself with the general day-to-day life of the gallery; this occasionally involved going to lunch with Dominic and some potential buyers.
Dominic, like my mother and Jane Birkin, spoke only the most rudimentary, heavily accented French: very charming, boldly fast, but not quite up to a serious discussion of the various merits of our various artists. After the clients had left, we’d sit and drink a cognac companionably, and slowly came to realize we quite enjoyed each other’s company. ‘You make me laugh, Stella,’ he once said, with the sense of shocked, not entirely delighted wonder one might use if saying, ‘You make me poo.’
So yes, obviously, we started dating, but it took two years: hardly the old coup de foudre. Sitting in the back room of the gallery, I’d noticed he had a predilection for vacant-seeming leggy blondes with artfully striped hair: the kinds of women who look best in sports cars (Dom had two, both red: if big car = small dick, I thought to myself, does big car × 2 = ‘Is it in yet?’ proportions?).
I had the legs, but that was about it: in every other respect, I was the physical antithesis of what he usually went for. I’m tall, have shoulder-length dark brown hair, once poetically described by Dominic as being the colour of bitter chocolate, and matching eyes. I’m OK – I really like my eyelashes – but you wouldn’t necessarily think ‘polo and champagne’ if you looked at me, and polo and champagne were very much what Dominic seemed to be about deep down: he was about those women who you think must have micro-manicurists, invisible to the naked eye, permanently welded to their immaculate fingernails. My fingernails were bitten and, at the time, I wore no make-up and no heels: I dressed out of (French) thrift shops, in fourth-hand old dresses by Dior and Balenciaga. I looked remarkable, I’d always tell myself, but in the capital of style, I must have also looked pretty peculiar.
He was hardly my type either: he was like my school friends’ brothers. You know the look: sort of Bleached English, complete with floppy former public schoolboy hair and a pronounced liking for scuffed Chelsea boots and frayed pale pink shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Being an art dealer, though, this look was accessorized with a perfect mockney accent and a selection of sharp black Prada coats that deliberately confused the issue class-wise: his artists, it seemed to me, appeared to believe that Dom was a geezer done good. He didn’t disabuse them.
But then, two years after I’d first met him and six months or so into those lunches, Dominic lunged (the English always lunge, as if they want to pin you down before you run away). It was easy not to resist. The amount of time he spent in Paris convinced me that he was not problematically English, especially when it came to sex: he didn’t want to spank me, or be spanked, for instance. Dominic was charming, witty, spoke French fearlessly badly and was always whisking me off to some m’as-tu-vu new restaurant where, very occasionally, people would recognize him. How could I resist him?
We got Not Married, which is to say official cohabitation began, in 1999, which was also the year we moved to London. I was thirty-six and hadn’t spent time in the capital for over a decade. In my heart, I knew even then that he was hardly the love of my life; but then surely that was the point of getting Not Married: you could always walk away without too much debris. In theory, at any rate. Even then, though, the theory seemed a bit half-arsed: I mean, either love someone and marry them, or don’t, and keep your own apartment. (I didn’t, sadly: my Marais flat went up for sale, and all my stuff got packed into boxes and shipped to London.)
To his credit, Dom didn’t claim that I was the love of his life either: what he said was, ‘We’ll have such good fun, Stella. We’ll have everything we want. You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t bore me.’ I was charmed by this last sentence, as you would be. And then, even though we were from the generation that didn’t get married – too bourgeois, which is a laugh, considering our circs – he clicked open an old box from Cartier and presented me with a Thirties emerald, when I’d expected either nothing or a ‘contemporary’ number with metal spikes and stones that looked like ploppety pellets. So that, conclusively, was that.
He was right: we did have fun, we liked each other, and if the bed-action quickly became unremarkable, we never discussed it. He kept his promise, too: our life by then was, I suppose, really quite glamorous from the outside: dinner invitations arrived by their dozen every week at our big, leafy Primrose Hill house; there were two or three parties a night; and Dominic’s growing fame meant that, although we still hung out with his posse of artists, our social circle grew increasingly large, with all sorts of creative types lounging about our drawing room, as well as the odd promising young MP, media tycoon or on-the-up actor.
By the time Honey was born – a year later, making me, as my obstetrician kindly pointed out, an ‘elderly’ first-time mother – it would not be an exaggeration to say that we knew what passes for ‘everyone’. The world, or at least London, was our oyster, and if every now and then I wondered why the oyster had no pearl – well, that was just me being spoiled. And if a part of me wondered why pregnancy hadn’t spurred us on to tie the knot – it seems incredibly rude to me not to marry someone when they’ve gone to the trouble of carrying your child and pushing it out of their poor vagina – well, ditto.
I was never entirely comfortable with the boho notion of Not Married: it seemed a bit of a swizz from the female standpoint, and once Honey came along the feeling just got exacerbated. It’s all very well to lie about how ‘It’s only a piece of paper’ and to make jokes about balls and chains, but really – who, given the choice, wouldn’t swish around Mayfair with a twenty-foot train? But having done it once, I told myself that wanting to do it again was just greedy. I told myself a lot of things in those days.
The real problems started occurring shortly after Honey’s birth, when I finally pointed out to Dominic what had become painfully obvious to me over the past year: namely that the social circles we moved in may have been glittering, but the people in them were fantastically dull. Most of his artists were what Dom, in his nastier moments, freely described as ‘barely literate oiks’ (secretly despised) who believed their own publicity so much that they found their own unintelligent boorishness potently, dizzyingly charming. They all drank like fishes and would end many an evening vomiting and exposing their cocks, like unattractive adolescents with an interest in being ‘outrageous’. The problem was that some of these Bright Young People were by now in their forties, and you just died of embarrassment on their behalf, or at least I did. Dominic pretended to look amused, and then rang the gossip columns.
I never got on especially well with them once I knew them properly (which took seconds: there often wasn’t anything to know). Sometimes I’d wish someone would point out that this particular Emperor or that had no clothes. Hard to do, though, when you’re the agent’s wife: instead, you had to smile and say things like, ‘I adored ShitMan. So clever of you to create beauty out of your own, er, waste,’ and then look enthralled as Artist A or B haltingly, as if translating simultaneously from Xhosa, explained the (literal) ins and outs of the creative/lavatorial process. That was when I started developing internal Tourette’s: the words that came out of my mouth were perfectly reasonable; but the words galloping around my head were dementedly not.
There wasn’t much more luck elsewhere. Dominic’s handful of old school friends, now MPs and journalists, seemed oddly ingratiating: I think it’s fair to say that, residual fondness aside, they only really liked Dominic and me because of our so-called friends. ‘One meets the most extraordinary people at your house,’ the Member for Acton’s wife once told me, with the kind of sniff, familiar from my mother, that meant, ‘It may very well be fun, but it isn’t quite cricket.’ My own school friends were now married women running large households in the Home Counties: sweet, but hardly soul-mates, banging on about Pony Club, pressing jam recipes on one and moaning about their lack of sex lives. They, too, considered me a curiosity: having thought of me for years as bad French Claudine from Mallory Towers, they were interested enough in the superficial gloss of my life to remain in touch, but the gloss, such as it was, was so alien to them that any conversation would end with them faux-shuddering and saying, ‘Oh, Stella. What a funny life! I don’t know how you do it.’ I wanted them to envy me; it was clear they didn’t.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that I was lonely. Not pitiably lonely, certainly, and the old thing about making your bed and lying in it certainly applied. But once my darling little Honey came along, I started asking myself what kind of a household she was being brought up in. Our five-bedroomed Primrose Hill house was a sort of upmarket dossing place for Dominic’s clients, friends and assorted hangers-on, even when Dom wasn’t there (he still spent half his time in Paris): I’d come down with her for the early-morning feed, nightied and leaky-breasted, and find strangers lying across the brutal and frankly ugly designer furniture. I was too old for this, I kept telling myself, and besides had never had any kind of yearning for this rock ’n’ roll lifestyle: I wanted hardcore domestic, in the way that you always want the opposite of your own childhood. Something, it became clear, had to give, and since Dom was either unwilling or unable to abandon – well, his life, it made sense to remove myself from it. We separated a year ago, when Honey was eight months old. I wasn’t sorry: disliking Dominic’s life was one thing, but I’d also begun to dislike him.
Dominic, who is so freakily controlling professionally, was pretty much exemplary about the split, which is more than I can say about our friends. Not Marriage notwithstanding, he gave me the house, a decent amount of alimony – which I supplement with the odd translating job – and moved, conveniently, to Tokyo, where gallery number four was about to open (number three’s in Los Angeles), his Japanese girlfriend in tow. Dom surfaces for a few days once a month. It’s not ideal as far as Honey is concerned – her main contact with her father is via Hello Kitty parcels from Japan, faxed drawings and little notes – but he claims to be devoted to her and I see no reason to disbelieve him. On the other hand, the house is now a haven of blessed peace and calm, there are no horrible surprises in human form when we come down to breakfast, there is no dirt, and Honey is the cheeriest, chirpiest eighteen-month-old imaginable, so we must be doing something right.
I’ve completely redecorated the house, funding myself from the sale of a couple of the more hideous art works which Dominic had given me during our marriage: a giant sculpture of a seven-foot-tall man that looks just like Morph’s spastic brother, excreting the world while screaming with bottom-ache (This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You, plaster and cigarette ash, 1996, sold on by me for – seriously – £20,000); and a drawing by Kevin Autan, who may or may not have limbs – I’d guess he held the pen in his mouth – of a woman with the face of a mosquito (Stung, crayon and biro, 1998, £8,000).
So where there were concrete floors and stainless steel, there’s now reclaimed oak flooring and cherry-red cupboards (the kitchen); where there were hideous Seventies love-seats, hard lines and pale grey walls, there’s fresh yellow paint, squishy sofas, flowers and faded patchwork throws (the living room); and our bedroom, formerly an angular minimalist nightmare, is a softly lit, hot-pink den of sin: I took my inspiration from the New Orleans bordello look. Except, of course, that I have no one to sin with.
I didn’t like many of the people Dominic and I hung out with, but I never let them know it: I fed them, watered them, gave them beds to sleep in and cooked them eggs in the morning. I went to their boring dinners and spent weekends in their country houses, I talked to them. I was as gracious as I am capable of being. I bought their children presents, even though most of their children behaved like monsters and were so plain that really the best present would have been a brown paper bag. I even went on holiday with a few of them, an experience reminiscent of finding oneself in a Victorian freak show, sandwiched between the Pinhead and the Bearded Lady, with their child the Torso, writhing about on the floor, making subhuman noises: it would always take me weeks to recover.
Now, I’m not saying these friends of Dominic’s should have sworn eternal allegiance to me when Dom and I split up. But they vanished, proving that some clichés only endure because they are so true. Sure, a few of the men took me out to dinner, were affronted when I wouldn’t weep prettily, bemoaning my fate, let alone bitch about Dominic, and lunged just before pudding, with varying degrees of crudity. And yes, a couple of the women rang me to see whether I was ‘all right’, and seemed disappointed to hear that I was (just as a few women became oddly watchful of their husbands when I was around, as though their portly, balding partners were all Brad Pitt, and as such irresistible to me). But that was all.
I can’t say I miss them, exactly, but you’d think that in 2001 people would understand that an amicable separation doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole world has to take sides. But take sides they have: Dominic is rich, successful, knows everyone and throws great parties. I’m a non-working housewife of sorts, left in my big house, barely knowing anyone really – not properly – and although the invitations haven’t quite dried up, I sometimes feel like a horrible kept thing, rattling about my cage, beholden.
Frank, bless him, was the only one who really stuck by me. I met him a couple of years ago in Paris: Dominic had meetings all day and Frank, already a star client, needed to be entertained (he paints giant, twelve-foot-plus canvases of cows: not quite my thing, but at least he can draw – the cows do look like they’re about to come up to you and moo). I took him to lunch at L’Ami Louis, where we ate perfect roast chicken and drank perfect white Burgundy well into the afternoon, and then we went shopping for candles at Diptyque on the Boulevard St-Germain, and then we went to look at Marie Antoinette’s sad cell at the Conciergerie. ‘Don’t start,’ I said as we ascended the dark, narrow stairs. ‘What?’ asked Frank. ‘I know the revolution was a good thing et cetera et cetera,’ I said, ‘but I won’t have you making jokes about nobs all deserving to have been dragged to the guillotine. Not while we’re actually looking at her things.’
He didn’t, and later he said he’d like to see Versailles, and this seemed so unlikely, so improbable – Francis Keane, artist as pop star, wearing his working-class credentials like a badge of honour, wanting to see the prettiest, richest, most glittering thing he could see in Paris – that I was enchanted.
We became firm friends, and when Frank needed somewhere to live upon coming back from Berlin, where he’d been working for the past six months as a consultant to some German museum of modern arse, I offered him a room in my house. He’s been here three months and is, in many respects, a marvel: he’s a domestic god, and not only on the cooking front – within two weeks of arriving, he secured the services of Mary O’Connor, an old friend of his mother, to look after Honey. There’s clearly something not quite right with Frank in the commitment department – the number of women who have been up my stairs are testament to that. Still, so what, really? Each to his own: I don’t see that it’s actually any of my business. I just wish that I could view his slapperiness with the amused detachment I would probably muster up if I were with someone myself. But I’m single, and the amount of sex Frank gets is getting me down, and if I’m not careful it’ll make me bitter. I must find some of my own.
I know I bang on about the English being strange, but clearly a little part of me isn’t quite convinced, since I’ve sort of married two of them. I must make more of an effort, I resolve, and be less condemning, and here, in this morning’s post, is my chance: a postcard from Isabella Howard, one of the former friends, not sighted for months, asking me to dinner on Friday. Which is tomorrow – rather impolitely short notice, but I am not in a position to mind. Surely Frank or Mary could baby-sit.
Human company! New people! I practically skip upstairs to get dressed – little vest, green cardigan with brown fur collar, violet tweed skirt and my favourite shoes, pea-green slingbacks. It’s October, but I can never quite manage tights. I stuff my hair into a rubber band, slick some Vaseline on to my lips et voilà: hardly glamorama, but ready to face the day.
Frank must have gone to his studio; there’s no sign of him. I scoop Honey out of Mary’s lap, because today we’re off to playgroup. Felicity, one of our neighbours, recently noticed I had a child roughly the same age as hers and asked me along to Happy Bunnies, a parent-run playgroup a couple of streets away. It’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays and two of you take it in turn to do shifts, reading the children stories and changing their nappies and so on. The other mothers are there too, keeping an eye on things, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Today is our first time, and I’ll be tailing Felicity as Helper Number 2 and sort of learning the ropes.