The Godmother Page 2

  I sincerely hoped so. I held up two crossed fingers.

  “Do you need some milk?” he asked. “I have spare.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll go shopping in a minute. But thank you, Roman. It’s really nice to see you.”

  He carried my bags over the threshold, then left me. I was home.

  My apartment is basically a box, divided into four areas. The first, immediately on the left, is the bathroom. That has the only full-height wall in the place. I allocated a quarter of the space to the bathroom; the builder thought I was mad, but I told him I loved baths. Which I do, but actually I had designed the room with sex in mind. I’d even had stone slabs gritted under the shower—I didn’t want to slip at a crucial moment. There is under-floor heating, a bath embedded into the wall and the whole thing is tiled in slate, except for a panel of mirrored cupboards above the basin. It is a “wet room,” with all the Benny Hill, double entendre humor. Sadly, though, it has yet to be christened.

  A lot of thought went into the rest of my flat too. For a while I became queen of the swatches. Of course, I ended up painting everything white. Anyhow, where the wall ends my kitchen begins. Delineated by a bar. I like bars too. The rest is everything else. Living space and bedroom. Not a room as such, but a bed hidden behind a chest-high wall which doubles up as a bookshelf. I love books too. Can never throw them away, even the crap ones. It would seem cramped but it’s on the south-east corner of the building and one side of the box is floor-to-ceiling glass. The view is spectacular.

  I walked straight to the window and stared at the swirling mass of brown river water a hundred feet below me. So different from the cool waterways of Kerala, but, in its own way, just as beautiful. Yes, I was glad to be back. Yes, I was recovered. Sabbaticals were all very well and good, but life could not be lived running away. I knew I should unpack, sort out my washing and get some food but instead I threw myself on the sofa and got straight on the phone.

  Mum and Dad live in a small cottage in Buckinghamshire. They moved there when Dad retired. Which was years ago now. He’s well into his eighties, though I swear you wouldn’t know it. He has drunk from the spring of eternal youth. Mum, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. She was diagnosed with MS twelve years ago and is only well because she takes such good care of herself. Everyone said my mother was mad to marry a man twenty years her senior because she’d spend her life caring for an incontinent old cripple. That’s life for you, always throwing you a curve ball. My parents have taught me a lot of things; one of them is that life can’t be planned because you never know what’s round the corner.

  “My darling girl, so glad you’re home safe and sound,” said Dad.

  “How are you? Did you get my letters?”

  “They were wonderful, I was almost there myself. I’ve always said you can write beautifully.”

  I can do everything beautifully. I’m his only daughter. Only child. I once asked them why they hadn’t had any more, thinking there was some dark secret. But it turned out they only wanted one. People ask me whether I missed having siblings. How can you miss something you’ve never had? All I ever saw of my friends’ siblings when I was a kid was the constant fighting. So, no, I didn’t. I probably would now, but I have a small group of friends who replace them. They are my siblings. We all mean a great deal to one another. I chatted on with Dad for a few more minutes only to discover that my poor mum was already in the car waiting to go and see some friends. Rather than get her back in the house, I said I’d ring in the morning. I said goodbye to my father, bolstered by the pride I always hear in his voice, and started to dial another number.

  Billy is the mother of my second godchild. An incredibly special little girl called Cora. Billy’s real name is something unpronounceable in Polish. I can’t even remember why the name Billy stuck, but it did. We rented flats across the hall from each other in our twenties and became such good mates that when a cheaper two-bedroom flat became available, we moved in together. That all changed when Christoph arrived on the scene, stole Billy’s heart, then slowly began to mutilate it.

  Across town the phone in Billy’s tiny flat in Kensal Rise started to ring. Cora, the wisest seven-year-old I know, picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Billy and Cora Tarrenot’s rezi dents.”

  “Hi, Cora, it’s Godmummy T.”

  “Hiiiiiiii, where have you been?”

  “In India.”

  “Did that man at work chase you there?”

  “In a way.”

  “On foot?”

  “Not exactly. Have you been cleaning your teeth?” Cora was tenacious, you had to change the subject to something she’s more interested in. It happened to be hygiene.

  “By bike then? Or did he swim across the Indian Ocean with the migrating whales?”

  Obviously the curiosity with hygiene had been replaced. Five weeks is a long time in a seven-year-old’s life. So I went for the one that always worked.

  “I brought you a present from India.”

  “An elephant with small ears?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m weird like that,” said Cora.

  Cora always made me smile. She couldn’t help it. “Yes, you are and I love you for it. Is your mum around?”

  “She’s out, but you can talk to Magda if you like.”

  Magda was the au pair. “That’s OK. Just tell your mum I called.”

  “I will,” said Cora, and promptly put the phone down on me. Billy was trying to refine her telephone skills. I hoped she’d fail in this task. I didn’t want her growing up any faster than she was already.

  Helen, the mother of my most recent additions to the godchild pile, was up to her neck in it with five-month-old twins. I glanced at my watch. There was no point calling now. It was bath-time. Helen had constant help, but the twins still consumed her every waking hour. When I left for India she was still breastfeeding them. I hadn’t seen much of her. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried, but she had very particular views about how she fed the twins. She liked to do it alone, in the nursery, with Mozart playing. I’m not joking. Finding a time to see her between feeds was nearly impossible. She didn’t like leaving the house, and she took a lot of naps. One of the sad things I realized in India was that if I had just met her for the first time, we would not have become friends. Way, way too neurotic, she doesn’t work and she’s obsessed with her boys. But I had met her a long time ago on a beach in Vietnam, swinging from a hammock, laughing like a train, high on acid. I will never forget it. Two of my three best mates from school and I had gone to Vietnam after our A levels. We had visited every burial site, every temple, every battle ground in the country. Then we met Helen. Half-Chinese, half-Swiss, she was the most beautiful creature we’d ever seen. A concoction of Lucy Liu and Kate Moss, her limbs stretched on for miles. She is more graceful now but back then she jerked awkwardly like a newborn foal; perhaps that was just the drugs. Her long, arrow-straight dark hair spilled down her back like ink. She was the only backpacker I met who traveled with a hairdryer. She was the only backpacker I met who traveled without a backpack.

  Helen is what you’d call privileged. Her father was a very successful Hong Kong businessman who’d always looked East for opportunities. When he died unexpectedly young, Helen had inherited her father’s businesses but not his business acumen. She was a child of the universe—or so she told us. She quoted excerpts from the “Desiderata” endlessly. With little in the way of parental guidance, Helen took her bearings from a piece of writing. We were mesmerized by her and soon just as intoxicated as her. Many a happy evening passed after that day, getting stoned on China Beach with Helen reciting the poem to us until we too knew it by heart. Now she has it framed up on the wall alongside the dressing table in her enormous Notting Hill Gate house. I think it is about the only thing that reminds Helen of the girl she used to be.

  Things are very different now. Why are we still friends? Because Helen is the only person in the world who knows all my secrets,
and I, in turn, understand all her extenuating circumstances, so I persevere. Sometimes I even have to recite excerpts of the “Desiderata” to myself to quell the desire to throttle her. But I’ve got to be honest, it had been getting harder.

  Changing tack, I dialed Claudia’s number. We’ve been friends since we were seven. She hasn’t got kids. She has Al, though. Tall, bald, reliable Al. It was Al and Claudia whom I’d traveled around Vietnam with. He’d joined our school when we were in our early teens. Halfway through our twenties, their longstanding friendship metamorphosed into something else. They did that fairy-tale, romantic thing of accidentally falling in love with each other. Any doubts over the wisdom of such a high-risk coupling had been eroded by watching them withstand more heartache in the last decade than most couples experience in a lifetime. Claudia and Al have been trying to have children for nine years. Their life is lived in limbo while another kind of madness rules their household. One that lasts long into the night. The answerphone picked up my call, which I knew didn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t in.

  In the same way I leave all the pineapple in a fruit salad to the end, I called Ben last. Ben makes up the fourth in our self-contained gang of friends from school. He is without doubt my most special friend. Married but with no kids, I can almost always rely on him for a pint or two and a chat. His was the voice I savored the most. He was the person I shared all my details with. When bad things happened to me, funny-bad, I mean, like disastrous dates, or hideous court sessions, I found that they were almost worth it just for the joy of recounting the story to Ben. He’d love the one about the Swiss masseuse.

  “Tess, my darling! Thank God you’re back, it’s been years.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, grinning to myself. “I’ve been away five minutes. That’s what it feels like now, anyway.”

  “Did you have an amazing time? Are you fit and did you shag anyone?”

  “Yes, yes, no.”

  “No teepee action?”

  “Trust me, if you’d seen what was on offer, you’d understand. A couple of scrawny Germans were the best thing going. I got offers from a Swiss woman, but I’ll tell you about that over a drink. Are you busy?”

  “Now? God, I’d love to, but we’ve got to go out to some boring dinner.”

  “I heard that!” shouted Sasha from the background. Sasha is Ben’s wife. She’s the woman who took my friend away. Hating her should have been easy but she made it impossible. Thankfully, because she worked so hard, she also loaned him back to me on a regular basis.

  “You’re too good for him,” I shouted back.

  Sasha came to the phone. “That I know. Welcome home, Tessa. Was it amazing?”

  “Amazing,” I replied. “But I’m glad to be back.”

  “Good. We were afraid you might disappear into an ashram, never to be seen again,” said Sasha.

  “Not Tessa ‘homing pigeon’ King.”

  “Well, this past year has been a tough one. No one knows how they are going to react after that kind of stress. But you sound well and I bet you look great.”

  “Thanks.” Sasha always got to the heart of things; there was no namby-pamby nonsense with her. Ben reclaimed the phone.

  “She is a wise woman, your wife,” I said.

  “I know. Annoying, isn’t it? I’m glad you’re back and fully recovered.”

  “Go dine,” I replied. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Absolutely. We’ll make a plan.”

  I put down the receiver. Lay the phone on my stomach and stared at the sky. My ex-boss didn’t bother me any more; to be honest, I was happy to be on paid leave. Lying on the beach in India after another morning of hardcore yoga, it had hit me: I hadn’t had a proper break since Vietnam. When other people took a year off, I was doing articles. I had taken some form of major exam every year for nearly ten years, and since then I’d been working, working, working. My weekends weren’t exactly periods of quiet contemplation either, and holidays were about packing in as much of the other stuff I never had time for. I was exhausted. So in a way it had all turned out for the best. I had had a chance to regroup. I had had a chance to get healthy. Yes, I had recovered. I had definitely recovered. So what was this sinking feeling I had?

  I did what I always do in times like this. I called Samira.

  Samira was a relatively new friend of mine. She’s a professional party girl, which is convenient because I always have someone to play with but frightening because I thought I was an amateur. Of course, her life is different to mine in one major way: she is filthy rich, which buys a lot of love and lie-ins. Samira was rarely lonely. I didn’t like her for her money. You might find that hard to believe, but actually her absurd wealth was the hardest part of being her friend. She was very used to getting her own way. What I did like about her was that she was always up for a drink on a Saturday night, and any other night of the week. The curse of the well-funded. The way she partied she should have resembled Teddy Kennedy, but she had more personal trainers than private bar memberships, and worked very hard at being able to play the way she did. Her mobile rang until it went on to answerphone. I left an urgent message.

  I stared at my dirty laundry and decided I couldn’t face it. Instead, I stripped out of my traveling clothes, added them to the pile and stepped into my wet room. The showerhead is as big as a frying pan; it was probably the most expensive item I bought for the flat. I saved on soft furnishings. I still didn’t have curtains, for instance. But my God, it’s worth it. The water cascades down you, which is wonderful but completely impractical if you have hair as frizzy as mine. I still didn’t care. I now have a grand collection of shower caps. Shower caps and eye-masks. Oh, the joy of single living.

  After my shower, I dug out some real clothes and put on an outfit to go to the shops. Jeans. Knee-high boots. Skinny-fit, long-sleeved white T-shirt to show off the tan. Who I was dressing for remained a mystery. Why I was dressing up, the same.

  My flat is on the border of Pimlico and Westminster, a stone’s throw from Tate Britain, and still has little shops tucked away down side-streets if you know where to look. The only trouble is, you have to cross a motorway to get there. Not very good for the lungs, that particular death walk. I stocked up on essentials—milk, bread, wine, light beer, limes, hummus, carrot batons and loo paper—and set off home. Then the pub caught my eye. Samira hadn’t called, and though I loved pottering around my flat, it isn’t very big and there is only so much pottering a girl can do. So I ducked into the pub for a quick one. The landlord wasn’t there unfortunately—he’s become a bit of a mate—so after my quick half, I decided to go home. I rang Samira a few more times. Three hours later she called me back. As soon as I heard her voice I knew she was in full swing. “Darling, you’re back. What are you doing?”

  “What are you doing?” I had a bad habit of hedging my bets. Even when I was desperate.

  “I am at a friend’s house. We’re having some drinks and then going to a club, a new one. A friend of Nikki’s has organized the guest list. Come, come, you must.”

  I looked at my watch. It was already nine and now I had her on the phone, I was starting to flag. “Oh, I don’t know. Where are you?”

  “Richmond for the moment, but we won’t be here long so get your arse down here.”

  “It’s a bit late…”

  “Don’t go all hippy-shit on me, will you? I’m dying to see you.”

  I could hear voices in the background.

  “Who are you with?”

  “People, friends, you know most of them.”

  I doubted it. There was no point schlepping all the way to Richmond if they were coming back into town. “Call me when you’re on your way and I’ll meet you.”

  “Perfect. We’ll be half an hour at the most.” Samira ended the call. I knew at once I’d made a mistake. Samira’s hours were not the same hours everyone else kept. I could be waiting, all dolled up, for another three. Maybe I should just go to Richmond. I already
had some catching up to do. But you could never catch up, not properly. Evenings that started disjointed, stayed disjointed. The best thing to do would be to have a glass of wine and wait for the call. Then again…Stop it, Tessa—you’re going round in circles.

  Half an hour came and went three times over, by which time I had got myself into a state. I didn’t want to stay at home alone on my first night back watching my tan fade, but I couldn’t face getting dressed up either. I’d been traveling since 5:00 a.m. and was knackered. And anyway, they hadn’t called. Which meant I wanted to go. Even though I didn’t. Eventually the phone rang.

  “Where the hell are you?” I burst out angrily.

  “At home. Sorry—I assumed you’d be out. I was just going to leave a message.”

  “Oh hi, Fran.”

  “Tessa, I’m so sorry about today. I really fucked up.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re pissed off, I can hear it in your voice.”

  Yoga was all about releasing the anxiety, letting go of grievances, moving on. “Well, I was looking forward to it.” That was an understatement. The thought of coming home was the only reason I’d survived all those lonely evenings in my single-occupancy hut.

  “I’m sorry, you know what it’s like.”

  NO, I DON’T.

  “Nick says you look fantastic: brown, blonde and beautiful,” Francesca added, to appease me. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise, but right now I really need your help.”

  Francesca never asked for help. So I sat up and put my bad mood behind me. “I have a problem,” she said. “Caspar is being a nightmare.”

  “I’d noticed.”

  “It’s so out of character. I’ve tried everything. Talking to him, ignoring him, spoiling him, punishing him, it makes no difference.”

  “Francesca, he’s about to turn sixteen. He’s supposed to be a nightmare.”