‘Well that’s complete nonsense,’ Serena said. ‘Women make great leaders. And you can’t lump us all together anyway. We’re not all emotional messes, just as not all men are stoic and strong.’
She was quite proud of herself for putting it so well.
‘Women cry more easily, Mummy. They’re weaker. It’s why there are different categories in sport.’
She wasn’t sure what to say about that. It was true that men always played up to five sets at tennis while women only had to contend with three.
‘And,’ Hector carried on, ‘our prime minister is a man. There have only ever been male American presidents.’
‘We had Margaret Thatcher,’ Serena said, feebly.
‘She acted like a man.’
‘Look, Hector, it’s just not OK for you to go around saying this stuff. Women are men’s equals. We deserve the same rights and opportunities. I haven’t raised you to think women are less good than men.’ She paused, then added: ‘It’s anti-feminist.’
‘You’re not a feminist,’ Hector said.
‘Of course I am.’
She had to make an effort to keep her eyes on the road.
‘You stayed at home with the kids while Dad went out to work. You don’t have a job. You live off him.’
He said this dispassionately. She saw that he wasn’t being rude; he was saying what he thought was true, which made it worse. Listening to her son, she was overwhelmed with her own pointlessness. She hadn’t been a hands-on mother – there were always nannies to do the nappy changes and night feeds – but she had been more present thanmany of her peers. She had tried to teach her children when to say please and thank you, how to shake an adult’s hand and look them in the eye as you did so, how to finish their plates of food and share their toys with equanimity. She had thought they would grow up to view the world more or less as she and Ben did. In the car, indicating right to merge into the motorway fast lane, she understood her foolishness and that it was probably too late to do anything about it.
The creeping disillusion of middle age had made her restless, and coming to the clinic had been her attempt to regain control of herself. Her friend, Violet, had recommended it. They’d met at a private members club located just outside Tipworth. The club was designed to be a facsimile of the countryside, acceptable to a metropolitan media crowd who thought they lusted after cows and fields but who actually wanted a neater kind of nature that included spicy margaritas and walk-in showers and tarmac pathways with sage-green bicycles and sourdough bread delivered at the cabin door each morning.
Serena had joined when it first opened because it was a ten-minute drive from their house and offered a free crèche where she could park the kids while she went for beauty treatments at the spa. Violet, the wife of a film producer, was a weekend visitor who had pre-booked the same spin class as Serena. They found themselves next to each other on the bikes. Violet had started talking to her and although Serena tried to close down the conversation with monosyllabic answers, it had proved impossible. Violet kept coming to the same spin class. Kept talking to Serena. Kept insisting they should have coffee together and one day, Serena grew tired of resisting.
Over oat-milk cappuccinos, Serena found, to her surprise, that she enjoyed Violet’s irreverence and celebrity-adjacent life, while Violet admired Serena’s aristocratic pedigree and co-ordinating Lycra workout sets. They’d got to know each other fairly well over the years, so when Serena had confided over one of their Sunday brunches (avocado on toast for Violet; egg-white omelette for Serena) that she wasn’t feeling quite herself, Violet had told her about the Wurttensee Clinic.
‘My friend Harry absolutely swears by it,’ Violet said, casually dropping the name of one of the most famous actors in the world. ‘He went there to get in shape for a movie and came back one stone lighter. Darling, he was only there two weeks!’
‘Amazing,’ Serena said.
‘You should go. It’s just what you need. Treat yourself. Have some me-time. Honestly, I’d go myself if I could,’ Violet said, leaning back in her chair so that her cropped T-shirt rose up over enviable abdominal muscles. Violet was several years younger than Serena and dressed like a Kardashian.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Serena said, swiftly moving the conversation on to the latest gossip involving an aged rock star recently linked to a minor royal several decades his junior.
She’d brushed Violet’s suggestion aside. But then Covid happened, and the pandemic had been shattering. Their favourite nanny went back to the Philippines; their housekeeper contracted the virus and was hospitalised for months. It was a nightmare to find more employees. After the first lockdown, Ben had pulled some strings and flown them all out to Turks and Caicos where they got vaccinated before anyone back home. He had to return to the UK for parliamentary duties and so Serena had stayed on with all four children and a skeleton staff. For the first few weeks, she had felt more alone than ever. Paradise wasn’t blissful when it felt like banishment. But she quickly slipped into a rhythm: early-morning walks along the beach and then returning to freshly made coffee on the balcony, waiting for each of her children to wake and begin their sleepy shuffle into the kitchen where the chef would have made croissants. She discovered that it was nice to have uninterrupted time. It had been so long since she’d had all four of them under the same roof together and she realised she’d missed their squabbles and their kisses, their humour and their messiness. At four, Bear was still young enough to be babied, held close and cuddled under the blankets while she inhaled the sweet milkiness of his skin. Seven-year-old Hector, freed from the need to perform for the other boys at his prep school, hadbecome chatty and started to hold her hand again. Her girls – Cressida and Cosima – had grown closer, too. There were three years between them and Serena liked to watch them sitting next to each other on the white linen sofas – a nine-year-old Cressida on the iPad; Cosima reading a book – and the sisters’ silence was companionable, for once, rather than attritional.
Ben visited when he could but his presence disrupted the equilibrium. Serena would have to put on mascara and make an effort with her clothes. He’d want to talk about vaccine roll-outs and travel protocols, without ever once asking what she thought, and she’d have to listen and smile and pretend not to be bored. Hector would want his father’s approval and resume his tiresome cockiness; Bear would become shy and hide behind curtains and armchairs; Cressida would pirouette and pout until she had Ben’s attention and Cosima would be angry that he never had enough time left over for her. Ben, who couldn’t see how much his eldest daughter wanted to be loved by him, would dismiss her surliness as teenage hormones. Cosima had started her period the year before and Ben took great pride in knowing about it, believing this made him a modern kind of man. And yet he was seemingly unaware that it couldn’t, logically speaking, always be Cosima’s time of the month when he visited. It was unfair of him to keep bringing it up. Then, after a couple of weeks, he would leave again, sweeping out of the large beach house with an air of importance, and it would take days for the quiet routines to reassert themselves. Serena was relieved when she felt the peace returning to their little household. She began to think she might want another child.
Of course it wasn’t all unmitigated bliss. There were the usual arguments and meltdowns; the sporadic breakouts of rough and tumble and he-said she-said nonsense, but even these fractious moments seemed special to Serena because she was the one who stepped in to find a resolution. This, she understood, was mothering. She discovered she was good at it; that she even enjoyed it.
Then the lockdowns lifted and they returned home and Serena, who should have been delighted, found that her children were onceagain taken from her by the age-old traditions of the ruling class, and there was very little she could do to stop it. Because, after all, weren’t they the traditions she believed in? Wasn’t that the deal she’d willingly made?
With her children back in the care of nannies and boarding school, she looked in the mirror and saw that two years of her life had disappeared and she was now old, with sun spots on her face and jowls that seemed perilously close to sagging. She realised she’d been silly to wish for a baby. She was past it. Her blonde hair was turning grey and she needed to up the frequency of her six-weekly appointments in London. She tried to grab hold of her vanishing selfhood, to visit the best dermatologists and doctors and holistic acupuncturists, but nothing worked. The bloom lay unreclaimed. She no longer knew who she was. When her eldest, Cosima, had been suspended from school for truancy, it had been the final straw. She had booked into the Wurttensee.
In the dining room, she scrapes the last vestige of sheep’s curd onto a corner of the cracker and gazes out of the window to the green-watered lake and the undulating hills beyond. A thin mist veils the tops of pine trees. As it slips and dissipates, she thinks of Ben.
His infidelity had never particularly bothered her because the objects of his affection were usually insubstantial passing flings. Transient obsessions, nothing more. They have a silent agreement. It is Serena that he returns to; Serena who has always held the power. Besides, she’s had her own amusing dalliances. Men have fallen in love with her a lot, but Serena has always possessed a natural distance, a remove that has made her untouchable. Or so she believed. Over the last few months, a distracting sentimentality has stained her thoughts. Suddenly she wants Ben to be hers and hers alone. But I can’t keep his attention anymore, she thinks, the panic beginning to claw at her insides. She longs for those lockdown days again, where she felt loved and needed by her children (and more than that, capable). Without this sense of purpose, she’s just not sure what she’s for. The thought of Bear, now eight and unhappy at his boarding school, is enough to move her to tears.
She can feel her eyes prickling and is furious with herself for giving in to an emotional weakness she has always disdained in other people. She dabs at her eyes with the corner of her napkin. Without meaning to, she catches sight of the woman sitting at a table opposite. The woman is also a faded blonde, well dressed, with expensive jewellery. But her mouth droops to one side, the tell-tale sign of a stroke. The woman tries to smile at Serena. But her facial muscles won’t allow it. With a lurch, Serena pushes back her chair and rushes out of the dining room.
Back at her room, she is so agitated it takes her three attempts to slot the key into the lock and open the door. She switches on the television. A golfing tournament. She sits on the sofa, trying to watch, but her mind wanders. She turns the TV off and decides, instead, to make herself a cup of tea. There is a lot of herbal tea here, all of which tastes the same. As she waits for the kettle to boil, Serena looks out at the lake beyond the window. Three white-sailed boats are circling on the water. She recalls a sailing holiday with her father, her bare legs wind-whipped, her hair damp across her face. He had patted her upper thigh, lean and tanned in denim cut-offs.
‘You’re getting chubby, Sissy. You have to watch out for that, my darling.’
