My mother texts like people once sent telegrams, as if words cost money. Particularly ones like ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘love’:I MUST talk to you about your brother! Phone soonest.
I add so many kisses and hearts to Rachel’s messages that they’re often a sea of pink and red. I know that when Joey gets a phone, in the very distant future, I shall have to call a halt to this outpouring of love. Boys go off to school holding their mothers’ hands, but by the time Joey is twelve and gets a phone, he’ll be teased mercilessly at any sign of a heart emoji.
Nate’s message is better than my mother’s but not much:
Talked to Steve earlier. I asked him and Angie to dinner tomorrow. Know it’s a bit last minute but you’re fabulous at pulling rabbits out of hats. Asked Finn too. He’s coming alone. What about Bea and Luke? Nate
Nate is not a man given to kisses at the end of messages. He finds my outpourings of adoring emojis ludicrous and he teases me mercilessly about them.
In person, however, he’s very affectionate, so I can live without smiley faces and hearts. He’s also the sort of man who’d have been called a bon viveur in another era. He’s tall, strong and muscular from lots of exercise, has a fine singing voice and is always delighted to get his old electric guitar out at parties, so he and his two best friends, Finn and Steve, can sing the folky rock they used to perform when they busked during their college years.
My Nate loves parties, always has, always will. He’s never happier than when the house is full of our friends, but these days, I feel too tired to entertain so much. The endless cycle of work, housework, grocery shopping and making dinner is getting to me.
Sometimes, I simply need time to relax with just us. But I can’t break his heart like that.
I fire off a couple of messages, telling Nate it’s fine – although it’s not, really – and texting my mother that I will phone her on the way home.
At my desk, instead of working, I scribble a few frantic menu ideas. I love dinners with my family. Weekend cooking is the best: when there’s no rush, I can mess around with recipes and we all have a lazy dinner where there’s no studying, homework or anything to hurry us. I don’t even mind lazylast-minute dinners where I throw the takeaway menus on the table and we come to a consensus, but there’s no hope of that with Steve and Angie.
I like Steve. He and Finn are Nate’s oldest friends: they met at college through the running club and now, two and a half decades later, they’re still friends. The fourth part of the gang wasJean-Luc, Bea’s husband, who died in a car accident nearly ten years ago.
We’ve kept our friendship going through those awful years afterJean-Luc was killed, when Bea couldn’t cope withget-togethers because it was too painful to remember how it used to be. Somehow, we got her back into the fold because, as Nate insisted, she was part of us. We’d be letting both her andJean-Luc down if we didn’t try.
Bea is amazing: she’s raised their son, Luke, on her own, workspart-time as a secretary in a dental and medical clinic, so she is always there to collect Luke from school, and she’s a lioness protecting him, trying to give him everything his dad isn’t there to give. Her coming back to our group is partly because of Luke – he and Joey are the same age and, I like to think, because the three men provide role models for a fatherless son.
I like Steve but I admit to loving Finn like a brother. He’s kind, warm, clever and, since he broke up with hislong-term girlfriend, Mags, has demonstrated unerringly bad taste in girlfriends. I wish I could find someone fabulous for him; I had hopes for him and Bea, to be honest, but they are just friends.
Plus, I don’t think you can make other people fall in love with each other – it happens organically or not at all.
Steve used to fly through women as if he thought the world was ending and spreading his seed was paramount. Then he met Angie.
I can’t honestly say how I feel about Angie because she makes me feel inadequate on so many levels that I’ve never managed to reach the bedrock of knowing whether I like her or not. There: I’ve said it. I feel guilty saying it because she’s so nice but I can’t help it. Some people push us into being our worse selves.
First time I met her, I saw this vision of sexy, beautifully dressed blondeness getting out of a taxi at the restaurant and my insecurities covered me like a warm, sticky blanket. I felt like I used to when I was a child and my mother was listing my imperfections.
That night, Angie was perfectly pleasant to everyone, talked warmly to me and Mags and discussed work – it would have been easier if she’d been beautiful and brainless but no, she’s anaward-winning architect in a practice with another woman. She enthralled every guy at and near our table. Her existence pushed every button in me, the ones that said my hair is wrong (goes frizzy so easily), my clothes are wrong and I could lose six pounds without it putting a dent in my overall body mass.
Eleven years later, nothing has changed.
Duh.
A dinner with Angie will mean me pulling out all the stops on my precious Saturday morning off.
Maybe not all the stops, I remind myself, because the grocery bank account is not looking particularly healthy right now. The mortgage is still not paid off and even though people assume that any financial job like Nate’s is the equivalent of having amoney-printing press in the basement, we are not rich.
I tell myself to go through the bank direct debits and payments this weekend. A financial audit. Although that scares me, because an audit will make me face up to why I bought Lululemon –Lululemon!– track pants for running when I never run. But the leggings were so soft and lovely, I just thought, maybe with the right leggings Iwouldrun? Hopefully?
I work my way through a pile of paperwork, make some phone calls, write some emails and finally finish for the day.
In our business, the working day is anything but anine-to-five one. Evening and Saturday showings are part of the business and if you’re a mother, you need a brilliant child minder.
But I have been in Hilliers and McKenzie for a long time and have moved up the ladder enough to ease that pressure. Happily for me, gone are the days of standing for severaltwo-hour bursts in a series of show houses where you cannot use the facilities, make tea or barely sit on one of themini-sized couches brought in to make the rooms look bigger, all the while fingering speed dial on your phone in case a weird viewer comes in and you are alone. Now, I am a senior negotiator and handlebigger-value properties and theone-offs, which means I have more power over my own diary. I still have to spend plenty of Saturdays and late nights showing houses but I can arrange it all myself, rather than the more junior staff members who have their showings assigned.
As I head out into the winter rain, I phone my mother and prepare myself for the onslaught.
‘Your father’s still in the allotment. He should have married that allotment,’ my mother shrieks, full volume, down the line.
Dominic, my younger brother who is currently living back home, is in his room ‘all hours, never cracks open the window and he doesn’t know how to put on a wash!’.
