Tags:
Fiction,
Juvenile Fiction,
Girls & Women,
School & Education,
Art,
Secrecy,
Schools,
Identity,
Fashion,
Lifestyles,
secrets,
City & Town Life,
Identity (Psychology),
Clothing & Dress,
Schoolgirls,
Fashion designers
feels almost like an ordinary day, if we had
ordinary days and lived in an idealized world. The house is calm, the children are in their rooms playing with their new things,
everything is clean and shiny and there’s a delicious smell. It is, frankly, blissfully domestic. Pat has put in her teeth
and put on some underwear, as well as some clothes. There’s champagne chilling on the balcony, what with the fridge still
being crammed to capacity (I don’t know why I buy stuff as though we were going to be under siege for days: the shops re-open
tomorrow). King’s College carols are streaming through the house via my computer; we even have a fire going in the sitting
room. It’s all extremely charming: a perfect scene, really. And I am delighted as I look at it. All that haring around, all
that effort, and I think the result is worth it. Here we are: it’s Christmas Day and the surface, at least, is gloriously
lovely.
My former husband, Robert, is the first to arrive. He’s been living in New York for the past three years, and Paris before
that, which means the quality of his presents is really excellent. And I’m pleased to see him, too, obviously. Robert has
gone, pretty much seamlessly, from being my husband to being my very good friend; we speak two or three times a week and hang
out with the children when he’s in London for work, which is every four weeks. It helped that I had already met Sam just before
we separated: it cut the time I spent wailing and weeping. It also helped that I wasn’t entirely inclined to weep and wail
for long, once the shock of being dumped had passed. That’s the main thing, really, about dumpage – the humiliation. Is that
an awful thing to say? It’s what I felt, at any rate. Twenty per cent sad; eighty per cent crushed with humiliation. Just
really embarrassed, as though I’d farted exceptionally loudly, fusillade-style, at a very quiet wedding (an apt analogy, that
– in all the time we were married, I was never aware of Robert having any bodily functions of the evacuative sort. He pooed
in secret.
For eight years
).
Which isn’t to say that being dumped doesn’t suck, even when nothing very dramatic happens and you just peter out for no very
good reason. You’re like a stiletto when everyone’s wearing wedges, all alone and unloved, gathering dust at the back of the
wardrobe, not yet knowing – because you’re too busy feeling miserable, and, er, also because you’re a shoe and your brains
aren’t that huge – that your time will come again. I don’t mean that my time with Robert will come again – Jesus, what a thought
– but rather that you don’t realize, when you’re a shoe, that everything is cyclical. At some point you – shunned shoe, shoe
of shame, shoe with the wrong heel and the unfashionably pointy toe, shoe with shoe-babies – will be in demand. You will be
the shoe du jour. Sure, as Pat says, as eggs is eggs. But it’s pointless telling a shoe that at the time of its despair.
‘Hello, Clara,’ says Robert. ‘You look gorgeous. Merry Christmas.’
‘My mummy always looks gorgeous,’ says Maisy, who has appeared at my side, wearing a pair of felt antlers on her head and
a dress with an appliquéd Christmas pudding on the front. ‘It’s because she has beautiful boobies. Daddy has
hairy
boobies, because he is a man. You’re not my daddy, Uncle Robert. Come and see my presents now please.’
Robert sweeps her up and gives her a kiss. ‘Boobies?’ he says, raising an eyebrow at me. Robert’s innate fastidiousness, which
is legendary – he edits fashion magazines, and this has only made him worse – extends to language. ‘Why not “knockers”, while
you’re at it? Or “jugs”, like the trusty print companion of my teenage years?’
‘I didn’t teach her “boobies”,’ I say. ‘Obviously. She learned it at school. It could be a lot worse.’
‘Come on, Uncle Robert,’ says
C. J. Cherryh
Learning to Kill: Stories
John O'Riley
Brenda Sinclair
Christopher George
Stephen Lloyd Jones
Karl Iagnemma
Celya Bowers
Jill Gregory
Aria Cunningham