The Godmother (6 page)

I have gone over that moment in my mind a thousand times since and I swear I saw her laughing. Now I realize that I was seeing only what I expected to see. Even though I was distrustful of it at the time and would have loved to have seen something else, I couldn't. I was programmed not to. And that is why, even now, knowing what I know, my memory can only recall her laughing as Neil pulled her back inside the house.

I put in an SOS call to Ben. Dinner with him was exactly what I needed. Sasha picked up his phone. I asked her whether they could join me in a decompression tank of vodka somewhere. The excuse I gave was that I'd been with babies all day and needed to talk to a grown-up.

“I'm going out. Ben's not doing anything, but I'm not sure he fulfils the criteria.”

“I don't get it.”

“You said you needed to talk to a grown-up.”

“Yes. Oh…” I walked back up to the tube station against the tide of commuters heading home. “Everything all right?”

“Don't ask.”

“OK.”

“Men are babies. I've been away on business for four days and get back to no food in the fridge, though he did remember to restock the beer; he hasn't thought to take out the rubbish or put on a wash, or make the bloody bed, or put a new loo-paper roll on. So yes, you can borrow my husband and no, I'm not sure I want him back.”

Normally I ask to borrow him, normally Sasha says, “Only if you give him back,” to which I normally reply with a jaunty, “Don't I always?,” but Sasha sounded exasperated.

“Anything I can do?”

“Can you reprogram the male species?”

“No.” I stopped outside the tube station. My travel plans were affected by the outcome of this conversation.

“Then I doubt it. Don't worry, Tessa, we're fine really. All I need is to go out with my girlfriend and slag him off for a couple of hours.”

“Come out with me,” I said, getting in the way of people hurrying up the stairs. “Either Harding will do.” I felt the uncomfortable tweak that comes with a lie and quickly slathered it with something else more truthful. “I love our girly catch-ups.”

“You won't do, Tessa. You always defend him.”

“How annoying.”

“No, it's very admirable, but this evening I need to spit some venom and get pissed. As some wise woman once said to me, ‘Just because you have a husband, doesn't mean you can't have boyfriend troubles.'”

“Who said that?”

“You did, you daft cow.”

“Did I?” I was amazed. That sounded far too intelligent for me.

“You underestimate yourself, Tessa. I'll get Ben for you.”

“Thanks. You sure everything's OK?”

“Course. Ups and downs, that's what it's all about. The trick is trying to remember that on the down bits. By the time I get home I'll love him again and no doubt rip his clothes off and—”

“Thanks, you can save me the details.”

“Anyway, he's always nicer to me when he's seen you. You're a good influence on him. So yeah, borrow him for the evening, but however reluctant he is to return, please send him back when you're done.”

“Don't I always?” I said. We'd been having these sorts of exchanges for seven years now, usually without the spitting venom bit, but fundamentally the same.

I'd been home just long enough to phone my parents when Ben called me from the car and said he was outside my building. I told him I'd be straight down, which I was. That's what I like. Being busy. Keeping moving. The smile that spread across Ben's face when he saw me was the perfect tonic to Neil's insalubrious wit, the yelping twins and Helen's nipples. In fact, Ben is the perfect antidote to almost anything. He is tall, broad and though slightly thicker around his middle these days, still as handsome as he's always been. Dark hair, blue eyes…Need I say more?

“No sprucing up for me then?”

“Sorry, you get the dog-end. I've been with my godsons and I need a drink. Now.”

Ben opened the car door for me. “What are you talking about? You look great. Sasha said you would.”

“What's going on with you and Sasha?”

“Nothing. She just went off on one because I'd forgotten to buy some milk. She does this sometimes when she's been away on a long trip. Far too used to hotel-living and having men bow and scrape to her. Once I folded the loo paper into a little triangle to piss her off when she was being so finicky.”

“That must have smoothed things over,” I said sarcastically.

“We get there in the end. You know what they say about arguments…”

“All right, all right, no need to rub my nose in it.” He closed the door and walked around the car. When he got in he looked at me again, more carefully.

“You really do look terrific, Tess,” said Ben. “A million times better than when you left. I hated it, but it was obviously the right thing to do. You're glowing.”

“The benefits of a diet of dried apricots.”

“I bet your tepee hummed.”

“And vibrated.”

“I'll open the window,” he said.

He put on his seat belt and started the engine. “So, you been busy on your first week back?”

I smiled at him.

“What? I don't believe it! Already?”

I nodded. I can't keep anything from Ben.

“Actually, I do believe it—look at you. God, I'm jealous. Was it a good one?”

“Don't be mean,” I said. “I love your wife.”

“So do I. I'm not going to get into a who-loves-my-wife-more competition, but you know, occasionally I miss the excitement, the frisson of it. It's not as if I'm doing anything or even thinking about doing anything, I'm just remembering.”

“As long as it's not too wistfully.”

“I'm allowed to miss it, aren't I?” he asked.

“You're asking the wrong person. I don't know the rules.”

“Was it one of those can't-get-the-clothes-off-quick-enough?”

I had to smile. “Exactly. Though my pants came off.”

“Naturally,” he concurred.

“His trousers too, but only as far as his knees.”

We were both laughing when we pulled out into the traffic and still laughing when we entered the bar. This was why we were such good friends, because we can talk about this sort of stuff. In fact, we can talk about anything. Unless it's ourselves.

We went to a bar that was within Ben's parking permit. He planned to leave the car there and pick it up in the morning. This was why I was borderline alcoholic. When anyone wanted to escape from their domestic bliss for a moment they called me, because I flew solo. I didn't have to phone home and ask anyone permission to go out with my friends. I didn't have to book a babysitter a month in advance. I didn't have to “do diaries.” When my single mates felt like a blast, they called me, because they knew I was entrenched in singleton and could always be persuaded to go out and drop some coin in a hotel bar. Even my eighty-four-year-old father calls me when he fancies a night out in the big smoke, which is indecently often for a man his age. I suppose I could say no to all the offers of drink. But why would I? Anyway, there are some people you never tire of seeing. And Ben was one of them.

“So what about a bottle of champagne to welcome my old mucker home?”

“Are you paying?”

“Only for the first two bottles,” he said. “Then the cocktails are on you.”

See. I watched him walk to the bar. I watched other women watch him walk to the bar. I watched other woman watch him turn back to me and smile, and then I watched them fail in their best attempts to get noticed by him. I'd been experiencing that sort of devotion from him all my life and it warmed the cockles of my heart.

Ben leaned against the bar and winked at me. He had laughter lines around his eyes that had crept up on me over the years, but he was still essentially the same blue-eyed boy with the aquiline face who'd walked into our classroom a
million drinks ago. It was halfway through the summer term, we were eleven. I remember his ridiculous long hair. Hair his gloriously unkempt hippy mother had been proudly growing his entire nomadic life, hair that Claudia and I chopped off a week later, at his behest, with a stolen pair of nail scissors. His mother had taken him wherever the mood suited her, or as we learned later, where the men suited her. The constant uprooting canceled out the vastly wider life experiences he'd had, and it was quickly apparent to Claudia and me that he was both naive and in need of some mothering. There was nothing Claudia and I liked more than a good project to get stuck into. We got him when he was weak and didn't know his own potential. Our friendship survived puberty. Nothing could break it now. If there was ever a child of the universe, it was Ben.

My phone vibrated. It was Helen's home number. Talking of former children of the universe…I put it on to answerphone. I'd had enough of Helen's happy little home for one day. Ben returned with an ice bucket. He poured out two glasses. We drank to health and happiness, as always. It was an old habit; only the content of the glasses had changed. To health and happiness. God knows, it's a big ask.

I told him about my depressing visit to Helen and Neil's house. Ben knew Neil through work. Because he worked for a media PR company their paths occasionally crossed. Usually late at night, in private drinking clubs. That was how I knew certain things about Neil that I wished I didn't.

“So you're still not feeling the love for the twins?”

Ben knew me far too well.

“For the whole lot of them, frankly. He makes my skin crawl and she's just so damn grateful. I don't know what's happened to her. You didn't get married and become an arsehole.”

“That's coz I've always been an arsehole.”

“How dare you. I won't have a bad word said against you.”

“Actually, I saw Neil the other night…” Ben grimaced at me. “Up to his old antics.”

“Not again.”

“'Fraid so.”

I blocked my ears. “I don't want to know.”

“I'm just saying, you know, maybe you shouldn't be too hard on her.”

“It's amazing, isn't it? They both decided to have kids; her life changes irreversibly, while he continues, unchecked, doing exactly what he did before.”

“Now you know why Sasha doesn't want kids.”

“You wouldn't be like that.”

Ben shrugged. “Maybe not disappearing down corridors with drunk actresses, but…” He shrugged again. “I like my life as it is, playing football in the evenings, tennis in the mornings, going out with you and getting pissed. I don't want to have to change all that for equality's sake. Then we're both sitting in, bored out of our minds.”

“But what about having children?” I stressed. Feeling he was missing the point.

“For once I am in complete agreement with my wife.”

“Really? You really don't want children?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Why?” asked Ben.

“Don't be daft. Because I do.”

“But why? Look at the grief they cause.”

“You are just being selfish. A typical selfish male.”

“Actually, I think I'm being selfless.”

I laughed. “You'll have to explain that one.”

“Sasha travels a lot, she doesn't want to end her job, and children do that unless you're happy to have full-time care, which she doesn't.”

“You could become a house-spouse.”

“House-spouse? What
Daily Mail
article did you get that from?”

I was deeply offended. “I don't read the
Daily Mail
. I made it up.”

“I'm not the type to be a house-spouse. Rule number one, know yourself. Sasha and I are not good parenting material. Better we know that than have children we don't really want, don't really know and therefore can't really love.”

Ben had a point, I thought. After all, parenting skills didn't run high in the Harding household. Why continue the misery? Still, he really was a lovely man, and they were a rare breed. It seemed a shame to me that there would be no more Ben Wards of this world.

“For what it's worth, I think you'd be a great dad. Considerate and charming and generous, all the things that you are and more.”

“You're just biased.”

“Horribly, it's true.”

“My children would love you more than they love me, like everyone else I know. Even my wife. It would be annoying.”

“You're right. And anyway, I can't afford any more bloody godchildren.”

Ben refilled the glasses. “How do you know you want kids?” he asked, after clinking glasses again. “I mean, other than just social programming? Coz from where I'm standing, your life looks pretty perfect to me. You know that, right?”

Good-time girl. Little Miss Positive. Happy. Happy. Happy. That's me. “I got to thinking,” I started tentatively. “You know. In India—”

Ben put his head in his hands, mocking me. “Oh no, you are going to go all hippy on me and join an ashram and have a brood of sniveling, knotty-haired children with a bearded fellow called Tree.”

“Falling Tree. And not an ashram, a Native American Gambling Reserve. I'll be the one in the fake nails, diamonds and excessive leopard print.”

Ben let out a bellowed laugh. “I can just see it. You'll smoke cigarettes and have a boob job and think nothing of feeding your children popcorn for dinner.”

“How dare you. I don't need a boob job!”

Ben threw his arm around me and kissed me on the cheek.

“Oh, Tessie-babe, can't we just keep on doing this, getting pissed together and having a laugh?”

“You'll leave me eventually for a younger drinking partner. Someone with more liver capacity, and fewer broken blood vessels.”

“I'd never leave you,” said Ben.

“That's what they all say, until the liver spots appear.”

“No amount of healthy hemoglobin can take the place of history.”

“And boy, do we have history,” I said. It came out before I'd had time to rethink my words.

Ben's arm tightened around my shoulder. “Don't we just.”

I pulled away. “Are you drunk?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” I smiled.

“Are you?” he asked.