The Square (3 page)

Belle acknowledges the woman, deposits her bag, cape-coat, hat, gym bag and scarf onto the floor in one grand gesture of entitlement and ascends the stairs. She loves the fact that her mother employs workers for her benefit in the house.

Anya, falling in behind, automatically picks them up. She knows this is expected of her. It is just one more thing, however, which she will be glad to leave behind. Anya has told nobody but she is intending to go back to her home in Lodz quite soon.

Belle runs lightly upstairs, heading towards the top of the house. Children in the Square always sleep at the top. Everyone on the Square arranges their homes from roof to cellar in the same way, as if there was a strict pattern guide.

At the bottom is a small room either used for laundry, or the au pair. Or, in some cases, both. The rest of the basement is devoted to the kitchen. The kitchen is always vast; a cavernous space which has been ‘knocked through’ from front to back. Knocking through is obligatory. Everyone does it. Nobody wants to repeat the dreadful episode of The Family Who Didn’t Knock-Through, and therefore could not eventually sell up.

“They were completely stuffed,” Jane would say by way of explanation. “Nobody was interested, apart from a family from Hull who offered way, WAY below the asking price. No knock-through, you see.” To avoid this hideous and shaming fate, everyone knocks-through.

The paint scheme of each kitchen is doggedly bright, as if the kitchen were a primary school. A small blackboard on the walls, indicating vital elements for the next shopping mission, continues the illusion. These are always foreign and aspirational. Fenugreek. Persimmon. Star anis.

Belle likes to occasionally adulterate the blackboard with more everyday items such as Elastoplast or Tampax. Once she even put nit lotion down. Tracey always rubs them out as soon as she sees them.

Opposite the blackboard is the obligatory ‘island’. Every kitchen has one, a marooned stone rectangle surrounded by a cluster of chrome stools. Somewhere on it there will be a single, commanding tap. There might be a recipe book propped up on a lectern, like a religious text.

Beside the island is a colossal, humming fridge and a vast six-burner appliance capable of feeding an entire church choir, should one drop in. This is known as the ‘range’. It is not used very much. Hot meals still tend to come from the microwave, or local restaurants, whose takeaway menus are pinned to a cork board.

The entire room glories in laboratory-style cleanliness. There is an entire cupboard devoted to cleaning implements and chemicals. There is a bespoke bottle for the kitchen’s myriad surfaces, each of which has been quarried, quartered, buffed and bullied into a properly gleaming state of submission.

Kitchens in the Square are a miracle of processed nature. Marble, granite, steel, quartz, slate, with accents of wood and chrome brought together in one glorious assemblage. The kitchens are like a geology lesson.

At night, the au pairs creep out of their small rooms. They enter these bright, soulless places and erect computers upon the marble islands. They perch on the chrome stools and talk via Skype to their families in languages which to Belle’s English ear sound like falling water. Alone and undisturbed, they explain to their fascinated relations how things are in the Square, a place full of money, nerves and giant, unused ovens.

After the kitchen, on the next floor up, is the living room. The living room, or as Jane has it, the music room, is the domain of soft furnishing, Indian cushions, large sofas, monochrome wedding photographs, and antique chairs on which nobody sits. There is never a television or games console. There is never a computer. Hence, these rooms are usually deserted. Occasionally drinks parties are held in them. Sometimes a solitary child is forced to enter them, dawdling, for the obligation of meeting grandparents for an obligatory kiss, or music practice.

Belle goes up to the second floor. This is where her parents sleep. All parents in the Square sleep on the second floor, in ‘master’ bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and vast beds in which Belle suspects sex never takes place.

There is a spare room on this floor permanently held in a state of tense readiness for the sake of the relations, whenever they descend, which is hopefully never, and then, at last, the top floor.

Belle’s domain. Tiny rooms, low ceilings, poky sash windows. The floor where the servants used to live. Except kids aren’t the servants in the Square. They are the masters.

Belle kicks open the door of her room. It is full of small, winking appliances. Digital clock, scales, monitors, speakers, music systems. An electric guitar. A long electronic keyboard. These items softly glow amid drifts of giant, fleecy clothes in earthy colours. The floor looks as if it has been inundated with a tidal wave of mud.

“You don’t have a wardrobe. You have a floordrobe,” her father says jovially.

In the middle of all this winking sludge sits her younger sister. Grace.

“Get out,” says Belle. “Now.”

“Aw, why?” whines Grace.

“Because I say so,” says Belle, with inescapable logic.

“Well, anyway,” says Grace, flouncing towards the door. “I’ve got news for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. No piano lessons. Any More. No more Roberta. Mum says so. Says we are all having to Pull In Our Belts. Tee hee!”

As she darts out, Belle casually throws a copy of the final edition of Harry Potter at her disappearing form. It misses, cracks onto the door. The spine, already bent in a dozen parallel lines, breaks.

“Thanks, Mum, for cancelling my piano!” she shouts down the stairs. She’s very pleased about this.

She hates her piano teacher Roberta. Silly cow, making her play all that, what was it? Hanon. Sounds like knitting.

She hears a vague response from downstairs.

“What? What?”

Tracey is coming up the stairs.

Her head is entirely obscured by a giant cheeseplant which she is laboriously carting up through the house.

“Belle, it is normal to say hello to the rest of the family when you come back from the gym. I had no idea you were here until just now.”

“I said hello to Anya.”

“Yes, but I am talking about your Family.”

“I thought Anya was meant to be a member of the Family,” retorts Belle. “Why on earth are you bringing that vile plant up?”

“Oxygen,” puffs her mother. “I don’t think you have enough oxygen up here.”

Belle has no response to this.

“Read about it in
The Mail
,” manages her mother. “Putting plants in your room helps your brain develop. So I thought you could have a spell with Charlie. He’s been in the garden for far too long.”

“Charlie?” echoes Belle.

“Yes,” grunts her mother, heaving pot and plant on a table. Quite a lot of soil falls out of the pot and lands on the carpet.

“Damn. Gosh, that was heavy. Charlie the Cheeseplant.” She strokes a leaf.

“Had him in our first flat.”

Belle isn’t interested in her mother’s memoirs. She’s not interested in having a giant, dusty, soily cheeseplant in her vicinity, either. Now that piano practise has been magically removed from the equation, she is however quite keen to go out. She senses she needs to close down the piano conversation.

“So, no more Roberta? Ever? Thank God.”

Tracey holds up a manicured hand. She is always perfectly groomed. Even before the Lottery win, she was beautifully turned out.

Tracey is part of a beauty product pyramid scheme which relies on people flogging cosmetics door to door. It used to be her sole income. She still does it, from time to time. The positive effect of this is her physical perfection. The negative side is that such a job wholly relies on the market. And people aren’t investing, much, in beauty at the moment.

“I have arranged a small break with Roberta, Belle. Just until Easter. Then, hopefully, things will have picked up, and we can continue. Will you continue practising, though?”

“Yeah, yeah. When can I go out?”

“Tonight? You can’t.”

“What?”

“Sorry. We have the Residents’ Association meeting tonight and you need to stay in and look after Grace. We have all been waiting for you to get back from the gym.”

“What? But, Mum!”

“Too bad.”

“What about Anya, for God’s sake? She’s meant to be here to look after Grace. That’s the whole reason she’s here! She IS the au pair. I’m just a blood relation.”

“Anya is coming with us.”

“What?”

“Anya is coming with us. Belle, will you stop saying ‘What’? You heard me perfectly well. Anya is coming with us, because she needs to learn how a proper meeting is held. It’s for her Business Studies Course.”

There is a pause.

“What?”

“She says she needs to see the minuting and so on. Frankly, Belle, she’s very switched on. A bit more than you are. Don’t you have any interest in how a meeting is run?”

Belle rolls her eyes at her mother. She smiles and waves her arms in the air.

“Oh, Mum,” she says.

“What, darling?”

“I can really feel the oxygen surging up here! It’s amazing!”

“Thank you, Belle. We’ll be back at nine.”

Belle goes into her room, winds an olive-coloured scarf around her neck and picks up her electric guitar. If her mother wants her to do music, she’ll do music. Her kind of music. Four floors down, and about ten minutes later, the front door slams.

Chapter Three The Residents’ Association Meeting

Harriet is standing at the island of her knock-through kitchen, laboriously putting small pieces of smoked salmon onto Philadelphia cheese which has been spread onto tiny circular pancakes. The fish is slippery and flaky. It does not fold out of the plastic wrapper in flat long flaps, but must be forked out in small shavings. This is because it is discount smoked salmon. Harriet’s fingers are covered in fish grease accented by a smear of Philly. They slip on the handle of the fork, making the tines poke into the soft mound of flesh between the first finger and thumb of her other hand.

“Bugger.”

She blows a strand of hair out of her mouth and raises her head, lips open, as if she was a turtle surfacing for air.

“Jay?” she yells, and then continues, not waiting for a reply.

“Have you got the Cava? Or Prosecco, or whatever it is? I left some in the fridge!”

Can’t afford Champagne. Can’t afford nice flat pages of proper, decent smoked salmon. Probably having a holiday in a bloody tent this year, thinks Harriet crossly, eating cream cheese out of the white plastic oval with a spoon.

Harriet is Jay’s wife. She is a large woman. Her body speaks of luxury and indulgence, of not stinting. Her breasts are voluminous. They cause her jumper to form an unbroken matronly reef across her chest. Her stomach sticks out, a collapsed box. Her haunches are dimpled, carrying a shape of their own unrelated to the line of bone buried deep within the copious flesh.

She and Jay came to the Square in what they now regard as the Good Old Days. The days when you could really get plastered on proper ’poo. When everyone had taxi accounts, and private schools, and decent holidays in Tuscany.

Harriet isn’t sure she really likes the current mood. A former teacher who gave up work when their only child, Brian, was born, she is wholly dependent on the money her husband earns. And he hasn’t been earning as much of late.

Harriet is having to be careful. She doesn’t like being careful. She doesn’t want to be careful about things like smoked salmon, or buying new bags. She likes having a new Mulberry handbag every winter. She doesn’t like camping. She doesn’t want to go on holiday to live in an Amish-style sense surrounded by tents and truly appalling food. She wants Italian villas, olive studded bread and the Widow Cliquot.

She eats a canapé and reflects that she doesn’t, really, like hosting meetings for the Residents’ Association on the Square either. But Jay insists. Says it’s good to ‘be neighbourly’. Jay loves his neighbours. Harriet doesn’t realise quite how much he does.

The door bell rings. She hears the sing-song welcome and the thud on the floor above of people taking off their shoes.

She pops another canapé into her mouth.

“Last one,” she says. Then she puts the plate of discount smoked salmon canapés onto a tray, and moves heavily to the sink to wash her hands. As she does, she makes sure to throw away the wrapper for the discount salmon. Can’t have anyone spotting it.

“Well, maybe one more.”

She eats a third, then stomps upstairs with the tray of canapés.

Upstairs in the living room, Harriet observes that Jay has got out all the antique Chippendale-style chairs which are really only in the room for decoration and has assembled them in a circle.

It’s as if the house had been turned into a posh old people’s home, thinks Harriet as she enters with the tray.

Everyone is standing around the chairs, as if they are about to play a game, and are waiting for a sign.

Tracey and Larry are there, smiling ferociously at their Eastern Block au pair. Tracey is wearing something tiny, Harriet observes. That’s because she is so thin. Harriet doesn’t hold it against her, she likes her friend, who had after all come from absolutely nowhere (but then won a shed load of cash), she just wishes she had her figure.

The door bell rings again. It’s the single mother from across the road. Harriet has no idea what she’s called. Sophie? Karen? She’s about fifteen years younger than Harriet. Then Patrick and Jane arrive. God, Jane looks good, thinks Harriet with a surge. How does she manage it? It is confusing. She sees Jane at plenty of occasions where there is food, but she must simply never eat. And how does she have time to appear so perfectly coiffed? She always makes Harriet feel messy, and dowdy.

Two other couples arrive. Harriet is pleased to see Jay dealing with them, handing each a glass of Cava, proffering canapés.

Jane advances on Harriet, eyes shining, smiling furiously. She has kept on her shoes, a spectacular pair of snakeskin mules with a vertiginous heel. Harriet wishes she was wearing heels, and not her Converse baseball boots, which she thought made her look young, but now she feels like mutton dressed as lamb.