The Yummy Mummy (8 page)

“Ignore her,” says Alice. “Jasmine’s had rather too much to drink.”

“Again,”
slurs Jasmine. She has a huge mouth. Lips like swimming aids. “Go on, say it.” Alice shakes her head. “Hair of the dog,” explains Jasmine.

“Cocaine hangover,” whispers Alice. “She DJ’d last night. Suffering, aren’t you darling?”

Jasmine nods slowly, as if nodding hurts her head. Her sunglasses slip down her tiny nose. She thumbs them back up.

“And this is Annabel, with child.”

“You can’t really miss it.” Annabel smiles broadly from behind her bump. Her voice is head-girl confident. “You don’t mind if I don’t get up?” Annabel is wearing a wrap dress covered in black and white geometric patterns. She has long hair worn in a seventies center parting, like the pages of an open book. Because the rest of her is so slim, so unwaterlogged, her bump looks prosthetic.

“And
this
is the infamous Blythe!”

A crescent of dazzling dentistry. Fake, I’m thinking. Fake teeth. Tan. Corn blond. Boobs, round as bagels, beneath a tight caramel cashmere V neck. Fake boobs? Blythe is the only person here without a glass of white wine in her hand. She is drinking something that looks like cranberry juice in a tall glass. “Hi, Amy,” she drawls. Ah, Blythe is American.

“Hullo.” She looks so familiar. “Er, um, think we may have met before,” I say apologetically.

“Oh really?” She gives me the once-over. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Hmmm . . .” Where the hell would I meet someone like Blythe? Work? Joe’s friends? Oh God. Yes! Dare I? “Primark!”

Everyone starts. Alice’s curls vibrate with laughter.

“You must be mistaken,” Jasmine says. “Of all the people in the Northern Hemisphere, Blythe is the least likely one to be found in Primark.”

“Not her habitat,” confirms Annabel.

The accent. The hair. It’s definitely her. “Last Saturday. You were buying loads of white T-shirts.”

A thought troubles her smooth complexion. Alice looks at her quizzically. “Okay, I confess.” Blythe puts up a twiggy tanned arm. “My name is Blythe and I am a Primark shopper.”

“What were you doing
there
?” Annabel asks. “It’s so cheap. What on earth is there to buy?”

“Oh, I was driving back from Hampstead from yet
another
school open day. Thought I’d stock up on T-shirts for a certain function coming up in the distant future. . . . ,” Blythe smiles conspiratorially.

“Aha!” Alice colludes and whispers the words “baby shower” to me. “Terribly organized of you, Blythe.”

“You know me, I like to be on schedule. And I wasn’t about to go to Calvin Klein for things we’ll wear once and throw away.” She sips her drink and the lime wedge nudges against her nose, leaving a wet dot on its snub. “I don’t know why you have such a problem with it, Annabel. You’re missing out. Pile it high, sell it cheap,” Blythe continues, rather too loudly, as if she were speaking into a mobile. “Free market in action.”

Alice nods. “Amy’s on the money. Primark’s so cheap it’s cool,” she declares, not wholly convincingly. “Haven’t they done a cute military jacket for a fiver or something?”

“Exactly! Of course you have to remember to wash your hands after touching the money that’s touched the sticky paws of the checkout girl,” adds Blythe. I can’t tell if she’s joking. “But hey, no issues.”

Everyone laughs, light confident laughter like you might hear in a movie. Jasmine catches her silver flip-flop on my pram and curses.

“Why don’t you shove it in here, Amy?” Alice says quickly. “Get it out of the way.” She helps me nudge my battered old Britax (secondhand, an annoying unturndownable gift from a cousin) in between the gleaming contraptions of chrome and denim with huge wheels and so many First Class Flyer accessories (drink holders, reclining padded seat, meshed air vents) that a retractable DVD screen wouldn’t seem extravagant.

“Careful of the Bugaboo,” Blythe says.

“Sorry, the . . . ?”

“Bugaboo.” Alice winks. “The Frog. As used by Gwyneth, Kate, et al. Murder to get into the car boot.”

“Unless it’s an SUV,” mutters Blythe.

“Now, meet the little darlings.” Alice points down at four toddlers, Lilliputian in their enormous chariots, asleep or zoned out, fiddling with toys. They are beautifully dressed: mini Converse trainers; cashmere ponchos; Petit Bateau nautical blue and white stripes. Evie is in a two-for-one grubby white Poundland Babygrow, accessorized by two tusks of snot streaming from her nostrils. A pang for the flabby comfort of the NCT group.

“Right. Alfie, my boy, you’ve met,” Alice says, pointing to a ringletted blond toddler. He looks twice the size out of his swimming trunks. “Asleep, just how I like him. And that little princess next to him is Blythe’s Allegra. Jasmine’s Marlon. That’s Annabel’s Finn. The youngest of her three.”

“Three?” And she’s pregnant with her fourth? Christ. Superwoman.

“Absolutely. Annie’s single-handedly raising the birth rate of Queen’s Park.” Annabel bats Alice playfully with her elbow. “We’re drinking to her health. Now, another glass . . .”

“I suppose Amy should have mine,” Annabel says reluctantly. “Doctor Marhajessh would kill me if she knew.” She swirls the glass gently, sluicing the sides. “Still, it is only
one
teeny tiny glass, my first glass of wine all week.”

“It’s Monday!” Blythe blows out crossly.

“If you got pregnant for the fourth time you’d need a drink, too.” Annabel huffs, filling half of her glass with fizzy mineral water. “Look, a spritzer! Happy?” Annabel turns to me and grins. “Blythe thinks we’re a nation of alcoholics.”

“Now, where’s that waiter?” tuts Alice, waving at a model-type who looks like he resents waiting tables. “Er, where were we before Amy arrived?”

“
Divorce
Envy,” Blythe says, slamming her hand on the table. She has a diamond the size of one of Evie’s pram beads on her engagement finger.

“Come on, you’ve got lovely, sexy, and rich, very rich husbands. Me and Jasmine struggle away with single motherhood . . . ,” Alice says archly.

“Hardly, Miss Footloose,” declares Annabel. “I would love, LOVE, to hand my kids to their father for the weekend and get them delivered back on Monday morning. Like an Ocado shop. Gosh, how fabulous.” Her bump judders beneath her dress. “Imagine . . . lovers and a permanent babysitter in the form of their father to dispel any abandonment guilt.”

I snigger self-consciously and curl my badly trainered feet around the chair legs in the hope that no one will see them. There is a pause.

Blythe nods to me. “And you?” she asks.

“Er . . .” I’m not entirely sure how to answer this. Is Joe my “partner”? Sounds so ridiculously politically correct. We haven’t established our new labels yet. “On maternity leave. Joe . . . my boyfriend . . .”

Blythe looks interested for the first time and interrupts. “Oh, what do you do?”

I try and reclaim a bit of my old identity, a bit of status. “I work, worked, in PR, Nest PR. Er, home stuff mainly. I work with companies that make watering cans, linen, scented candles, that sort of thing.” Work seems like another life. Am I the same person? Can I still care about a raffia cushion?

“Really?” Blythe brightens. I’m more interesting company now. “I worked in PR in New York City a couple of years back, beauty products. Great freebies. Never had to pay for any treatments. I’ll be mighty tempted to return when we go home. Will you go back to work?”

“Um, not sure. They keep the job open for a year. I’ve got a bit of time.”

Blythe’s mouth slacks. “A year! Jesus! If pregnant New York girls knew that, you’d have planeloads smuggling themselves across the Atlantic in Louis Vuitton trunks, claiming asylum. But, then again . . .” Blythe shudders. “They wouldn’t want to risk your hospitals.”

“You get three years’ maternity leave in Estonia,” I add, unnecessarily.

Blythe looks at me as if I’ve just recited a train timetable backward.

“Not going back five days a week are you, Amy?” asks Annabel, rubbing her belly in a circular motion like a window-cleaner. The question feels loaded.

“Not sure.”

“Do you want my opinion?”

“She’s going to give it anyway,” Alice says, face down, texting a message into her mobile phone. “Annabel doesn’t approve of work.”

“You’ll find it bloody hard. No picnic. And it’s tough, really tough on little babies. God, Alice, do you remember Tess’s Zach? That poor little boy.” She pauses, swirls her spritzer. “Tess went back to her job as a fashion journalist, Sunday newspaper. Left at eight in the morning, didn’t get back until eight at night, on a good day. And that’s when she wasn’t off comparing front row shoes in Milan or Paris. That poor little boy . . .”

“What happened to him?”

“Got the most terrible separation anxiety. Took far longer to walk than my Finn and Cosmo. Couldn’t be potty trained until he was four! Shat under the kitchen table like a scared kitten.” She takes her glass to her lips, weighs her thoughts. “I don’t regret giving up work because, and you can shoot me down for being politically incorrect here, babies and careers do not mix.”

“Annabel!”
shrieks Alice, giving her a play-whack on the wrist. “Not fair. Tess had to work.”

“Had to? They could have cut back on a few inessentials. . . .”

“Like you do? Come on.”

“Shush, ladies,” Blythe says with an arch wave of the wrist. “You’re forgetting. The thing is, Tess is a bit old school.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, bewildered.

“Well, we’ve got wise to it now. That old ‘having it all’ bollocks. Well, you can. But you won’t enjoy it all. I’ve seen too many women feeling guilty and frazzled with miserable kids and a pissed-off husband who knocks off his twenty-three-year-old secretary, the one whose breasts haven’t been sucked dry by his little darlings.” Will this be Joe in five years? One year? Now?

“Er . . . sounds brutal.” Oh, for an opinion.

“Absolutely! Besides, by the time you’ve paid the nanny full-time and gone up a tax bracket it’s hardly worth working more hours,” Blythe declares.

“Because you only employ nannies who have worked with Euro-pean royals and Elle Macpherson,” says Alice dryly. “If you’d just make do with a nice Eastern European girl . . .”

“Who can’t speak proper English and happens to be illegal?” says Blythe.

“My Hana is probably better qualified than you!” interjects Annabel. “She’s a fully trained doctor, but, fortuitously for me, can’t earn more than a pittance back home. Besides, there are always the Australians. Wholesome, reliable, slightly more expensive, of course.”

So there’s a caste system to nannies, too? I strain my ears and apply what’s left of my ability to concentrate. Since having Evie I’ve stopped skipping over the women-at-work debates in the newspaper to get to the lifestyle pages. Nothing shakes one out of a shoe-centered singleton apolitical existence quite like a baby. Although this lot may prove the exception to that rule.

Annabel sighs, leans back, hand on bump. “But you’re right, Blythe. Nannies are bloody expensive, without adding the cost of work clothes and travel.” She thoughtfully smooths her curtains of hair. “My nanny bills will go through the roof when I take maternity leave.”

“But . . .” Can you take maternity leave from motherhood?

Alice nudges me under the table. “I’m loving your wifestyle, Annabel.” She leans back in the sunshine, rearranging her top to avoid tan marks.

“Can you imagine full-time motherhood without any help? Who’d organize the parties? The playdates? I swear my little Cosmo’s diary is busier than mine: His playdates are booked three months in advance,” continues Annabel. “Motherhood with no help would be almost as bad as full-time work, you’d just never have a spare moment.”

Right. Motherhood’s no exception: The rich are different.

Blythe raises her glass. “Yes, my dear, life would be quite impossible if one had to look after one’s own children,” she says in an archly comical Queen’s English accent. “Weird English middle-class ideal anyhow. What’s left of your upper classes have it sussed. Big, fat, unattractive nanny in the early years. Then pack them off to boarding school to network!”

“Speaking of which . . . where are they?” Jasmine cranes her neck and squints into the restaurant at a quiet table of women in their early twenties drinking coffee. “Plotting a tabloid expose or comparing paychecks . . .”

“Your nannies?” I ask. Jasmine nods. “How come they’re here?”

“Oh, you know, they’ll take the older ones—not allowed in—and collect the babies after the film so we can hit Westbourne Grove unimpeded,” she explains matter-of-factly, glancing at her watch. “Hey, time’s up, the hordes are arriving.”

I stop uncouthly drawing faces in the canvas of condensation on my wine glass and look up. From all directions, Portobello Road, north and south, women and prams migrate toward the Electric with the collective consciousness of wild salmon. How do they all know to come here at the same time? How do they know that the Electric does mother-and-baby showings on a Monday? No one told me. I’ve suspected for some time that I am not plugged in to the cool mothers’ network. NCT coffee meetings every couple of weeks does not a social life make.

“Unless you’ve booked it’s really unlikely you’ll get in. Let me go and check.” Alice springs up from her chair.

“Ahh.” I am making that embarrassed “ahh” noise. I try to think of something intelligent to say and can’t. Fortunately, Blythe and Annabel are transfixed by the approaching competition: SUV motherships disgorge more alien creatures onto the pavement. And more. All around us now, jabbering and laughing and air kissing, twenty, thirty of them. Sunglasses. And not your two-for-one Spec Savers jobs either. Birkenstocks in bubblegum pink and silver. UGG boots, despite the sunshine. Sequins. Apple-green bra straps. Frayed denim minis. Tanned lean legs.

Do these women not work? Evidently not. There is no sign of any tailored office clothes. No, these women are either full-time yummies or, like me, on maternity leave, having a sabbatical from working life. If the latter is the case, why aren’t
they
frumpy and disoriented and unable to engage in witty adult repartee? Was there some prenatal class in postpartum glamour that I skipped? And how come they all look like they know what they’re doing? Perhaps I am the only mother in London who feels like she’s muddling through, pretending.