But it wasn’t constituency stuff. It was his mother telling him that his sister was dead.
Serena checks her watch. She has a facial booked for 4 p.m., where the therapist will use a newfangled freezing technique on her cheekbones in the hope that they will look lifted and youthful in three months’ time. There are still hours of the afternoon to get through.
She glances at her phone. No missed calls. No unread messages. She has archived her WhatsApp chat with Violet and blocked her number. And yet, in spite of herself, Serena wants to hear from her. She is lonely, she supposes. How very boring of her.
She should call her mother but doesn’t want to. Her mother will only tell her that she looks tired or drained or old. Instead, she opens Instagram. The first image she sees is a targeted advert from the fitness brand where she bought Violet’s oatmeal co-ord. The model is long and lean, with no discernible stomach, and glares moodily at thecamera. Serena looks down at her own tummy with its small but noticeable protrusion, like a mammalian pouch. No number of abdominal crunches can get rid of it. She tries to embrace it, tries to remind herself that this is the body that birthed four children, tries to engage with the current trend for positively celebrating one’s curves and wobbly bits, but she can’t ever fully convince herself. She came of age in the 90s and can’t shake the deep-seated belief that women should be skinny. They should look like Kate Moss in her Corinne Day photoshoot. They should eat one bowl of Special K a day and supplement their diets with SlimFast shakes. They should control their calories and their greed. They should make themselves as slender as possible and then, perhaps, one day they could disappear entirely and let the men take over.
Serena keeps scrolling. A sunset in St Barths. A friend’s modernist holiday home in LA. A fashion show in Milan. A designer she likes is hosting a pop-up in Knightsbridge the week after next. A forty-eight-year-old film star has announced her pregnancy and is thanking God for His Blessings.
‘As if,’ Serena mutters, because she knows such pregnancies are usually the result of highly paid egg donors and surrogates, found through elite agencies in California and New York.
One of her Notting Hill set, the barrister Dominic Malik-Edwards, has posted a picture of his son at a protest, holding aloft a hand-painted sign that says ‘Keep the Body Politic Away from Policing Our Bodies’. She’s not sure it works. Too wordy. Too clever by half.
Dominic’s caption reads: ‘Proud of this one’.
She clicks on Dominic’s avatar and spends a few minutes trawling his grid history. She always had a half-hearted crush on him. He wasn’t handsome but he had presence and intellectual power. Plus, he was tall, which counted for a lot. Although there had been a spot of bother with him and Fliss, hadn’t there? Poor, darling Fliss. She did have a tendency to throw herself at Ben’s friends, with varying degrees of success. For as long as Serena had known Fliss, her late sister-in-law was desperate to be found lovable. In the early days oftheir relationship, Ben told Serena that he’d stopped inviting his school friends home at the weekends for fear of his older sister making a pass.
‘She gets drunk and just loses all sense of propriety,’ he said – rather pompously, Serena thought. ‘And then she gets kind of … fixated, I suppose, and scares them away.’
Serena had laughed it off as exaggeration, borne out of sibling competitiveness. But over the years, she had witnessed it herself. At Serena and Ben’s annual summer party two years ago (held to coincide with a local music festival beloved of Gen X-ers clinging on to their youth), Fliss and Dominic had been discovered in a state of compromising undress in the kitchen pantry. The rumour spread that a jar of turmeric had been broken in the throes of passion and, for weeks afterwards, Dominic’s cock had been stained orange.
It was awkward. Ben had had to do a lot of smoothing-over. Fliss did her usual thing of apologising and saying it wouldn’t happen again before checking herself into yet another rehab facility. Dominic’s wife, Iso, was told about Fliss’s troubled reputation and had eventually forgiven her husband.
It’s always easier to blame the woman, Serena thinks, even if it’s also a woman doing the blaming. Especially then. On Instagram, she tries to view Iso’s profile but it is set to private. Iso is an American former model who runs an eco-conscious fashion label; a striking Black woman who had always stood out waiting in line at Daylesford Organic. Serena had never spoken more than a few words to her. She had, in truth, been worried about saying The Wrong Thing.
Serena lazily contemplates sending Dominic a message. A casual hello. An invitation to play tennis the next time she’s in town.
But before she has a chance to do so, the phone vibrates. A photo of her eldest, Cosima, flashes up on screen. It’s vanishingly rare for her to call. Serena’s fingers slip and fumble in her rush to answer. There is a simultaneous beat of panic and hope.
‘Cozzie?’ Serena says.
No one answers. Instead, there is the sound of rustling and traffic.A group of teenage-girl voices in the distance, their words overlapping and indistinct.
‘Cozzie? Are you there?’
Nothing for several more seconds and then—
‘Hello?’
Her daughter’s voice, shrapnel-clear.
‘Cozzie. You called me.’
‘Mum?’
‘Who else would it be?’
‘Oh. Sorry. Butt dial.’
‘What?’
‘Butt dial. I didn’t mean to call you.’
‘Right.’
Static silence.
‘Well, as long as you’re alright,’ Serena says. ‘Bye.’
