A Perfect Life Read online

  ‘Shall we go for a drink?’ he says.

  ‘It’s lunchtime.’

  ‘I know.’

  * * *

  Nick pulls open the door of the brasserie and Carrie walks through in front of him. Inside, a marble-topped bar is crowded with people sitting at it. The espresso machine hisses, waiters carrying plates of oysters weave between the mass of bodies, bending and yielding to find the line of least resistance. Nick puts his hand on Carrie’s waist to guide her, and he could swear that she softens and moves closer. She is separated from him for a moment by a waiter spinning with a tray of empty coffee cups, and in that instant Nick steps closer to the bar to get out of the way. A girl on a stool reaches out and touches his arm.

  ‘Hey,’ she says. She has slanting dark eyes and a diamond stud in her tongue. Her lips are dark, like good red wine, and her teeth are small and even. Nick is bewildered. The girl smells of spice and incense, expensive and complicated.

  She must have mistaken him for someone, or maybe the person she wants is behind him. He looks round, but there is no one. The girl is smiling at him, so she must be someone he knows, but who and from where? He searches as fast as he can through his mind to find out who she is.

  ‘Would you like to come and buy me a drink, or are you with her?’ She shoots a sly glance towards Carrie, who is further down the bar now, perched up on a stool, running her fingers through her hair and looking back to see where Nick is.

  Nick realises that he doesn’t know this woman after all – she is picking him up. This is thrilling. And so unexpected. What a waste that it has happened now when he is hot on the trail of Carrie. Two sensational chicks – the obvious thought flashes across his mind for a luxury moment – ‘Two!’ but he dismisses it right away – it is just too difficult to pull off. Undoubtedly he would be left with none, or worse, two very cross women. He looks at Carrie. She has taken off her sunglasses, and leans her elbow on the bar playing with her hair, shifting in her chair. She glances down the bar again to Nick and the stranger and tosses her hair back before reaching into her handbag. Any minute now she will leave. Nick needs to act fast. Decision time.

  ‘Yes, I am with her.’ Blinking regretfully – this girl has great tits under a soft, tight, brown velvet top – he steps away. Making a mock-sad face, she reaches for her drink, sipping from the straw. She looks up at him with a sideways smile.

  Christ, she’s even got dimples – that is cute, Nick sighs.

  ‘Lucky for her, pity for me,’ she murmurs. Nick laughs, moving away, his testosterone flying now as he slides on to the stool next to Carrie.

  The barman is there immediately. ‘What can I get you, sir?’

  Nick raises his eyebrow at Carrie.

  ‘I’d like a Diet Coke,’ she says.

  ‘And I’ll have an espresso and a soda water. No ice, no lemon.’ Nick has to press both feet firmly on to the floor and shove his hands into his pockets to stop himself seizing Carrie and kissing her. Some small talk. That’s what they need right now, it’s a great libido controller.

  ‘So, tell me where you come from and what you like about New York.’ He reaches a hand out and pinches the hem of her skirt on her thigh.

  Carrie laughs. ‘I thought we were here to talk about the loft,’ she says.

  ‘I’d rather talk about you.’ Nick gazes intently at her.

  Carrie looks at him, but cannot hold his gaze. She crosses her legs, swivelling nearer to him, and runs her tongue around her lips. Nick has not had this much fun for years. Adrenalin is pumping though him and he experiences the heady joy he knows is so temporary, of feeling immortal. He reaches out and pushes a strand of her hair back behind her ear. The jolt he feels is as good as a needle full of heroin.

  Angel

  The sound of Matt’s car, idling at the bottom of the drive, engine speeding up as he changes through the gears, hangs in the still afternoon and Angel leans against the closed front door, her eyes shut, listening to the sound shrinking, becoming engulfed by other sounds, a blackbird chirruping, the summer coo of pigeons and, further away, the drone of a small plane. Once she has nothing to listen for, she opens her eyes and summer leaps on her, dancing green in the freckled beauty of the beech tree. The peaceful stillness is shocking in contrast to the holiday invasion of children’s clamour, their voices echoing in every waking thought, and often every dream, too. Inescapable until they go out somewhere, and the silence of their absence is more penetrating still. Angel steps away from the house and almost sways, dizzy with a sense of being lonely, her mind travelling as if she is able to see all the way around herself with a video camera. If she was standing on a tall plinth in the middle of a wasteland a million miles away she could not feel more alone. She needs to do something, or see someone, to fill the space somehow. Dithering, she begins to kick gravel off the lawn using her bare feet, flicking with her toes, enjoying the concentration it requires to pick up one small stone between two toes and flick it back on to the drive. There is a lot to be said for low-grade labouring at times of emotional stress, and in Angel’s mind, peace begins to flower as she remembers Levin in Anna Karenina and his simple pleasure in scything the hay on his estate. She moves slowly down the side of the lawn, becoming more methodical, right foot up, curl big toe, stretch and point over the stone, gather, twist and fling. So satisfying. And probably very toning, too. The telephone rings and Angel runs back to the house, only marginally distracted from her labours, and trying to remember the name of Levin’s brother.

  ‘It’s Jake. I’m on the road not far from you and I thought I’d drop by and fill you in on how it’s going so far.’

  Angel swallows but her throat is dry. ‘OK,’ she says. There is no reason for her to be filled in. She is not working. She is out of the loop. He does not need to come. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That would be great. I’m here. Do you want to come with me to the beach to pick up—’

  ‘I’ll be about two minutes.’

  The floor tiles in the hall are cool, calming the pulse in her bare feet. She stands for a moment holding the telephone, excitement spreading through her veins. Suddenly, for no particular reason, she remembers Levin’s brother was called Nikolai. She catches sight of herself in the cloudy mirror by the door into the kitchen and rushes for the stairs, unknotting the ties of her blue dress as she goes. And into the fluttering quiet, a car speeds up to the house crunching gravel like gunshot. The door clunks open, and the music floating from the car stops. In the silence Angel freezes, suddenly alarmed that she is quite alone in the house. A moment passes. Angel yanks open her wardrobe and pulls out a pair of shorts and a purple T-shirt. Oh God, no knickers and she has already put on the shorts. No time to change. Shit. Now she looks deliberately provocative. Mind you – how can he know that she has no underwear on?

  The car door slams and she hears Jake coming through the open front door. Suddenly it seems suggestive to be running downstairs from her bedroom. Too embarrassing. Thinking quickly, Angel darts through to the back of the house and hurries down the dairy stairs into the laundry room. The door from this room through to the front part of the house is shut, and she opens it, arming herself with yet more sweet peas, today’s crop from the relentless harvest, left until now, gasping for water on a chair by the washing machine.

  Jake is sitting on the front doorstep reading a newspaper.

  ‘Hi there.’ Angel crouches next to him then wishes she hadn’t and stands up again. He looks up her bare legs and slowly brings his gaze up to her face. He stands up too, and kisses her cheek. Angel blushes, and excitement courses through her. They look at one another and Angel smiles and half turns and he takes her hand and kisses the other cheek. Oh God. Angel bites her bottom lip and looks away, then back at Jake. He lets go of her hand slowly, still looking at her. His eyes are green and changing like a moving kaleidoscope, pulling her in. What else could he have done to greet her in the heat, the closeness, with Angel barefoot in skimpy, hippy clothes he has never seen a colleague wearing bef
ore? Shaking hands would have been absurd, doing nothing too suggestive.

  ‘Good T-shirt,’ he says, still not moving away. Angel flushes again – the T-shirt has ‘Bitch 1’ written in white flowing script over the right tit. Angel can hardly breathe or move; she is melting with heat, Jake’s focused interest, the beating of her pulse and the heady scent of the flowers in her hands.

  ‘It’s not mine, it’s my daughter’s – not the little one, obviously,’ she gabbles. ‘Anyway – do you like sweet peas?’

  Jake laughs, snapping the tension. ‘I love them. Did you pick them especially for me?’

  Angel steps back, and pulls herself together. ‘Of course.’ She unclips the clasp from her pinned-up hair and looks straight at him. ‘Come on. Let’s put them in some water. Then we can go to the beach to collect the children.’

  ‘OK. I’ll brief you on work on the way, shall I?’ Jake walks back to his car and reaches in through the open window for his sunglasses, still talking. ‘The beach sounds great – can we swim?’

  ‘Yes, I think the tide will be coming in by now,’ says Angel. ‘I’ll just get some paper for these to go in.’

  Angel retreats to the kitchen and leans against the closed door for a moment, glad to have breathing space. She walks back outside, blinking in the bright light and heat. Jake goes round to the other side of the car and opens the door for her.

  ‘Ready?’ he says, grinning.

  Angel imagines a parallel scene where he pulls her towards him by the belt loops on her shorts until they are touching all the way up their bodies, and their eyes meet and then their mouths.

  ‘Almost.’ She suddenly realises she hasn’t got a towel or her handbag or anything.

  ‘I’ve just got to get my stuff,’ she calls, retreating into the house again, needing to escape the intensity coursing between them.

  Nineteen years ago Angel was escaping something else the day she met Nick Stone. A wrong love affair that lasted three weeks, so never had real wings on which to fly. Angel didn’t know she was pregnant when she got on the train to return home to her parents, having said goodbye to Ranim. He was returning to India, he was never coming back, he lived in an ashram there and his expansive views on free love got Angel into bed the first night she met him. There she stayed, consumed, falling, and allowing no safety net in herself, cut off from her friends and family, drunk on headlong sex and passion, pretending to herself it was safe because he was going away. ‘Three weeks won’t hurt,’ was her promise to herself, ‘and then I’ll get on with my life.’

  The man opposite her on the train that day was the antithesis of sleek, small-boned delicate Ranim whose liquid dark eyes promised everything, whose sensitive hands and smooth body gave her pleasure she had not known before. She mistook pleasure for love, and was yearning to see him again even as he kissed her goodbye and boarded his plane. She never did. The shock of his going numbed her, and she could only measure the extent of her pain some years later, when she noticed it had gone. Life was too big and full for her to dwell on a memory, no matter how lovely, and the affair with Ranim was more a memory than anything else.

  Out of the fantasy of what she wanted to believe at the time was the biggest love affair of her life, she allowed Nick to rescue her, a damsel in distress. He seemed strong and sure and he wanted her in his life. The distress became self-disgust when she found that she was pregnant, and Nick asking her to marry him was affirmation that she was lovable. She found it hard to believe he could still want to have anything to do with her, but Nick was drawn to complexity, and the more Angel revealed of the mess she believed herself to be, the more he loved her for being herself. And without noticing it happening, over the first year of knowing him, Angel fell in love with Nick’s courage, his willingness and his determination. Nick stopped the raging voices in her head, and in the silence she heard her own heart and was amazed it was still in one piece. And relieved to have a father for her baby. She would never stop being grateful to Nick for that.

  Searching in the kitchen for her sunglasses, Angel cannot get the grin off her face. She feels reckless and young. Desired. Just the way Jake looks at her is waking up her body, and sparkling energy runs through her, making her want to sing and dance and kiss and touch. In this moment she cannot connect with the notion that she has four children and a husband, and she runs out of the door and into Jake’s car, more or less not touching the ground but floating in a pink-tinted fantasy.

  Jem

  If she wasn’t my mother and therefore beyond sex, I would swear that Mum has been shagging when she arrives at the beach. She’s got Jake the Spaz with her and she’s wearing one of Coral’s T-shirts which says ‘Bitch 1’ on it and is tiny so a lot of Mum’s suntan is showing and more of her tits than I ever want to see. Ruby sees Mum first and she runs back past the beach huts and up the steps to where Mum is at the top of the dunes, her back to the pine trees, shading her eyes to look for us. She knows where she is looking though, because we always go to the same place on this beach. Ever since we saw the poo floating by, we have made our encampments well away from the popular stretch where the sand is soft, and instead we have gone for the Neolithic option with giant pebbles and sand like a mosaic with broken razor shells.

  Quality of life on the beach is not about texture, it’s about waste levels and pollution. Or escaping them. I like to tell Mum that we are eco-warriors. I tell her because it’s true, but also because it puts her in a really good mood to think of us having any sort of conscience or cause. Sorry to be cynical, but it’s true. We have given up buying one make of cereal completely because the company exploits African babies, and even Foss knows to look at the brand before he chooses an ice cream and he boycotts the bad one.

  Ruby has adopted an African child to make up for the wrongs of this cereal company. So far she has written her child ten letters and sent biros, pencil cases and three pairs of my old trainers. She hasn’t had anything back yet but Mum says life is all about giving, so it’s supposed to be fine. Mum’s given two hundred quid for this baby. I wish she’d dish it out to me – I could do with some new speakers.

  Anyway, Ruby makes Mum and Jake swing her, so they come across to us like some perfect family three-some. Mum’s eyes are sparkling and her cheeks are flushed; she looks amazing, and completely different from how she looked when we left the house earlier. It is a bit like a facelift. I have to say, I am not the one who notices this; it is Melons who whispers to me, ‘Hey, look at your mum, she’s cheered up,’ and Coral adds, ‘She could do with growing up a bit. I don’t know why Nick puts up with it.’

  Coral always calls Dad ‘Nick’. I think it makes her feel grown-up, like swearing at him, which she does as well. He never shouts back like he does at me, but I guess that’s to do with her being a girl. Mum always says so anyway.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Mel, ‘but she’s your mum, she wouldn’t. Would she?’

  Coral turns her back on Mum. She looks furious. ‘She’s wearing my T-shirt as well. She should just get on with being grown-up and leave the teenage behaviour to us lot.’

  Mel is anxious now, it was supposed to be funny and it’s getting ugly. ‘Let’s go and swim,’ she says, handing Coral a cigarette. They both light up from the same match cocooned in Matt’s hand.

  Foss trudges up with his bucket slopping with seaweed and water. He is doing his heavy breathing thing, but it’s just concentration, not a special need. Mel and Coral scoop him up on to Coral’s back and make sure they are off before Mum reaches us. Matt follows them more slowly, after having a good look at Jake. I don’t know what I want to do right now. The problem with going down to the sea with Mel is that when she swims her bikini is see-through and everything – like EVERYTHING shows. I don’t know how girls can cope with being so full on. Maybe she doesn’t know, but Mel is better than any poster from a magazine. It’s just as well she isn’t my sister.

  Luckily, and maybe because it is what I am related to, I don’t go for the slight dark type a
t all. Coral is like a tube. All her limbs and her body are round but narrow. She looks like she weighs nothing, and she is quite short, like Mum, and very exotic-looking, like no one in our family. Her hair is so black it often looks green. She could come from Mars. Or Tibet. But actually I suppose she was born in King’s Lynn hospital with Dad standing around looking anxious like when Ruby was born, which I can remember because Coral and I had to go too. Luckily there was a Nintendo machine in the waiting room. It took the length of time needed to complete Golden Eye for Mum to give birth to Ruby. Then we went home.

  Ruby is yakking away as usual. ‘So, Mummy, we made this castle and the fairy stables are at the back but a bit smaller than I wanted because Matt and Jem got bored, but there is still enough room for three Brat ponies – did you bring them?’

  ‘Err no, was I supposed to?’ Mum isn’t even looking at the castle; she’s playing with her hair and glancing at Jake sneakily from behind her shades.

  ‘Ooooh, Mummmmyyyyy!’ Ruby’s voice can rise on a crescendo like a dentist’s drill. ‘I sent a text from Coral’s phone to you TELLING you to bring my Brat ponies. So why didn’t you look at your messages?’

  A lot of the sparkle leaves Mum’s eyes now as she tries to talk Ruby down from her flight of fancy.

  It is never easy, and particularly when Ruby is hot and thirsty, and Mum feels guilty. ‘My phone is off. Actually, I haven’t seen it since you had it in the tree house yesterday, Ruby, when you were texting Daddy.’

  Ruby’s mouth is screwed up so tight and red and witchy it looks like a sea anemone in the middle of her cross little face. She whacks Mum right in the stomach.

  ‘Ooff!’ Poor Mum reels back and looks like she wants to kill Ruby. ‘Don’t. Hit. Me,’ she says through clenched teeth, and walks away towards the sea.

  Ruby starts howling, ‘Mummmmyyyyy’ and runs off after her. Before she can catch up, Mum starts jogging and then she is in full flight escaping from Ruby. No one is having a good time. I lie down on the sand and put my hat over my face – the bloody sun is still shining, even though it must be four or five by now. There is a sigh and someone else stretches out beside me, and without taking my hat off my eyes, I work out it must be Jake. It’s the smell of his aftershave that tells me. Quite weird. I hope he doesn’t speak.