1001 Nights Cast

It began badly, anyway. Just parking in that enclave of West London cost her dear. As she thumbed more pound coins into the slot of the meter, her children irritable in backseat harnesses and too many layers, she fumed inwardly. Not to mention the Mayor’s congestion charge—a payment which meant that she would pay for being unable to use a pram on a bus, to cross London, to see an old friend, with her children. The words trotted round and round her head. This led to that, that led to the other, the other led nowhere, in the meantime, this had gone wrong, and needed to be redone.

Tess braced her hand against the roof of the car, and looked down briefly at the crackled mud in the dry gutter. She felt her hand immediately sticky from the lime tree’s exhalations, and the heat of the day seeped through her fingers. She wiped them on her jeans.

She unpacked the children, and dawdled them to Natasha’s front door, bouncing Ben with his fat fist hooked around her shoulder, holding her daughter’s upstretched hand. The way a baby used his own weight to balance himself against his mother, the wordless insistence of it, never failed to shock and delight her. She gripped her little girl’s hand tighter, as compensation. Anya scuffed the dust.

Natasha opened the door. She was puffy, and slipped about Tess like a cat, but also, Tess thought, like an absence. They hugged. Tess tried to cross the gulf of the doormat. The huge marbled hallway shone with the wood and brass it supported. Anya squealed and rushed forward into what was probably the first of many antechambers, an accidental nursery-cum-dining room, all round table and letters ready to post, which barely prepared you for the glossy tongue of the kitchen uncoiling just beyond. The open door only drew attention to the several other closed doors of the hall. Behind them, whole worlds might have been stacked.

Natasha’s two little boys, blessed in their sunstruck playroom, snarled at Tess’s children. The room seemed filled with white sofas and spinning tops. Ben bellowed as Randolph sank his teeth deep into the baby’s virgin forearm. Natasha rushed to fuss over Ben, laughing and finger-wagging at Randolph, who was jerked away by the nanny. Or perhaps she was the nursery nurse. Or the housekeeper. Tess was never sure afterwards how many staff Natasha said she had.

As they towelled the children dry after a bath creamy with foam, Tess heard herself blurt, ‘It’s like a nineteenth-century story, you’re like the châteleine’. The water gulped down the drain, with the sound of an empty stomach. Tess could not decipher whether she had been charming or excruciating. The truth didn’t matter here, however it was bodied forth. It simply flopped off the handpainted silk walls and sank into the Persian pile of the rugs.

‘We can lend you the money, you know’, Natasha muttered. She spoke as if the room was bugged. Tess’s face contorted as though she were trying to swallow a boa constrictor.

‘No—sorry—what?’

‘The whole lot, we could lend it to you. Then you could move. For the children’s sake.’ Her hand hot on Tess’s forearm. ‘I’ve already asked Dan. It’s fine. He did really well last year. We don’t need it.’ Tess was hypnotized by the words tumbling out. The children ricocheted in the background, Randolph barking, Anya shrieking to be read to. Natasha’s newborn had disappeared. The light was just beginning to sink exhausted into a calm puddle of its former self. The rough towel in Tess’s hands, hammocking Ben’s meaty thighs, steadied her as she took in Natasha’s words.

‘It’s just more and more of the same. Dan—just pumps out more.’

Tess shook herself awake, and started the dutiful refusals. The mirror above the mantelpiece in the bathroom beckoned to her to walk through it, to taste life on the far side. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly…it’s just my—our—ethics. We couldn’t borrow the money for a house, it’s crazy, ridiculous.’

‘Please—it would give me pleasure. For the children. You won’t be happy unless they’re settled. It’s for them.’

A vision of Tess’s father came into her mind as she listened to Natasha. She had never seen him at work, but she had seen photographs, all of them dated in the 50s on their flipsides, of the oil installations. Him, white-shirted, and grinning, hands on hips, looking out from under a baseball cap or some such. Usually next to a black or Hispanic-looking guy, also grinning into the camera. Standing in front of what looked like a giant’s car engine, sprawled on a desert somewhere, it never mattered where, the lunar landscape was always the same. Above his head, in the background, would be that plume of fire and smoke that would turn up again in television footage of the first Gulf war.

As she drove back across London, Charlie and Lola tweeting on the car’s CD player, she listened to herself calling Greg on the mobile, telling him they should accept the offer. No strings attached. They were allowed. They could pay it back when they sold the flat, it would be as though it hadn’t happened. In the rearview mirror, Anya stared out of the window and sucked her thumb.