Cousin Fleur, has never felt any similar compunction.
At the firm’s parties, where my mother likes to play the family card, act like Lady Bountiful with the workers, Fleur’s chilly little favourite is: ‘I see your mother’s enjoying herself,’ the phrase normally accompanied by a thin smile and a nod in the direction of Babs growing steadily more raucous in the corner.
(Oh God, if only our mother would get tired and emotional.)
‘I’m only surprised your mother hasn’t heard,’ Fleur said, that day she dragged me in for tea, a bitchy remark but one entirely well-founded, my mother being the human equivalent of a sniffer dog when it comes to searching out family scandal and misdemeanour.
‘HA!’ my mother said with a smile the size of a watermelon when I passed on the startling news about Fleur leaving Martin.
‘Old-Poker-Up-The-Arse’ this being the nom de guerre Babs Gordon coined for her niece close on thirty years ago when Fleur, still only fifteen, strayed fatally beyond her years to ask at one of those family parties, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Auntie Barbara?’ Suffice it to say that my mother did not approach the question in any sense as rhetorical, and that everyone standing within a radius of fifty feet took the answer to be in the negative.
To put all this into context, i.e., to appreciate the significance of Fleur leaving Martin, you need to be aware of the way in which Fleur has played the little wifey during the twenty-three years of their marriage. On the night they got engaged, for instance, she informed me in all seriousness that she considered the occupation of wife and mother ‘a woman’s highest calling’ (she used those words precisely).
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You and Joseph Goebbels.’
Fleur was nineteen when she got engaged to Martin. They were married two years later.
‘I’ve been the perfect wife,’ she said that day at her kitchen table, looking over the top of her mug at me, and I couldn’t argue. Apart from anything else, she’s even looked the perfect wife – her long straight fair hair sitting impeccably behind a velvet Alice band, her lobes graced with no more than small pearl earrings. She brought up her children too with this same degree of perfection, three of them – Mark and Hannah and James – all of whom have that same perfect straight fair hair and perfect teeth, and who have so far failed absolutely to do the slightest thing to disgrace their parents (Hannah at some fancy cooking school, Mark and James both at good universities).
I suppose it was always inevitable that Fleur would play the part of older wiser women with me, and this despite being seven years younger.
‘Relationships are something you have to work at, Riley,’ she told me severely on another occasion, hearing that another one of mine had bitten the dust.
‘I’ve got a job,’ I said. ‘Who needs another one?’
Over the years, Fleur’s conversation has been entirely dominated by Martin and I, and our house … our car … our holiday… our children. Her tongue would slick along those pale pink lips in self-satisfaction as she said the words. To all outward appearances she and Martin were joined at the hip. A few years ago, for instance, she offered me a free weekend in Paris she’d won in some upmarket shopping competition.
‘I can’t go,’ she said. ‘Martin’s working.’
‘Go with a friend,’ I said. ‘All else fails, I’ll go with you.’
She looked at me like I was suggesting group sex or experimenting with hallucinogenics. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I simply couldn’t. Martin and I do everything together.’
Only not any more, apparently.
‘He’s become so boring.’
Now this was a shameful lie. A total untruth. Martin had not become boring at all. Martin was always boring. Martin is a country estate agent. He drives a Volvo. He’s a member of Rotary. He’s supposed to be boring.
In her new kitchen that day, as the small army of women washed up and put stuff away around her (apparently all in the wrong places), Fleur clattered our mugs together and got up from the table with the air of someone setting out on a journey.
‘I told Martin now the children are away I want time for ME … time to find myself, time to get my head together.’ (Time to find a new scriptwriter. R. Gordon.)
She said, ‘I need space…’ a particularly nice touch, this, I thought, since she was leaving behind an executive home with half a dozen bedrooms, a games room in the basement, an ensuite with sauna, a swimming pool and a lounge the size of Wembley Stadium.
Listening to Fleur that day I felt as though I’d slipped into some alternative reality, like someone had wound the clock back. I was hearing phrases that day I thought never to hear again, that I’d thought safely dead and buried by the end of the seventies. And if I was hoping that somewhere along the line Fleur would see the irony of all this, bearing in mind all that kinder, kirche, küche, stuff she’d put the rest of us through over the years, I was about to be disappointed. Clearly Fleur didn’t do Nazi allusions.
‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for him over the years.’ Her grey eyes were innocent, open wide. Challenging disagreement. ‘I’ve been nothing but a wife and mother.’
That was when it occurred to me that something seriously sinister might be happening, that maybe Fleur had been the subject of some spooky personality transplant, a kind of Stepford Wife reversal, or maybe – this would work – maybe it wasn’t Fleur at all. Maybe she’d been substituted overnight by a lookalike, possibly as part of a plot involving an alien species.
‘I’m going to do all the things I’ve never done, all the things I’ve never had time to do.’ There was something severe, dedicated, nun-like in her face. She was staring into the distance. I swear to God she was pledging.
‘Like what?’
‘I’m not sure yet. There’s so many things. I thought I might take art classes, perhaps even do a foundation course. Or there again,’ and here she paused and there was a small gleam of something that might have been spite,’ I thought I might do what you do – write some kids’ stories.’ Her arms were crossed against her chest in a self-satisfied fashion as we stood on the landing and below us the lift began clunking upwards.
‘The children have been on at me for years to do it.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. I always told them stories, you know. When they were young. They loved it.’
I was musing on the horror of this when suddenly her face was right there beside me.
‘I’m going to tell you something now.’
Her voice had changed. It was girly, confidential, which is when I thought: oh God, no. Please, God, no. Not one of those horrible marital secrets.
She said, ‘In the whole of my married life …’ and I thought, no, no. Please, no. Nothing personal. Nothing horribly intimate like she never had an orgasm with Martin, or he wanted to wear her shoes or he would only have sex with her in the back of the Volvo. Please, God, nothing that’s going to flash up over Martin’s head next time
