Yumi shrugs. “Have to work. London too much money. Worse than Tokyo even. So we get tired from work. Apart from Vanessa.”
“I get tired from my boyfriend,” says Vanessa.
“But we like your lessons,” Yumi says with conviction. She smiles at me, and I realize how pretty she is beyond all the war paint. “It’s-what do you say?-nothing personal.”
She looks down at her desk, then back at me, still smiling, until I am the one who is forced to look away.
When I get home I find Lena crying in the kitchen.
This shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. Since Oranges for Christmas went through the roof and my parents moved to this big white house, there have been a succession of au pairs and I have seen a few of them crying in this kitchen. There was the Sardinian who missed her mother’s cooking. The Finn who missed her boyfriend. The German who discovered she didn’t like getting out of bed before noon.
My parents treated all of these young women very well. Neither my mum nor my dad had grown up around any kind of hired help so they were far more than friendly to our au pairs. They were almost apologetic. Yet the au pairs still found a reason to cry all over their low-fat yogurt.
I thought Lena was different from the rest. She has that untouchable air about her that only the truly beautiful possess. For those of us who are merely average looking-or in my case, slightly below average-beauty seems like a magic shield. You can’t imagine life ever wounding someone who has that magic shield around them.
But the ordinary looking always overestimate the power of beauty. Just look at Lena. A fat lot of good beauty did her. She has been crying her heart out.
Embarrassed to see me, she starts to dab away her tears with a piece of paper towel. And I’m embarrassed too, especially after I ask a stupid question.
“You all right, Lena?”
“I’m fine,” she lies, wiping her perfect nose with the back of her hand.
“You want a coffee or something?”
She looks at me with wounded eyes.
“Just some milk. There’s some organic left in the fridge. Thank you.”
I bring Lena her glass of organic milk and sit across from her at the kitchen table. I don’t want to get too close. In the presence of beauty, I always feel that I should keep my distance. Even at a time like this.
I watch her taking little bird sips from her milk, her lovely face red with spent emotion, her large blue eyes all puffy from crying. Strands of her blond angel’s hair are damp with snot and tears. She twists the piece of paper towel in her fingers.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, although I sort of know the answer already. An au pair doesn’t cry these kind of desperate tears just because she misses Mutti’s apple strudel.
This is man trouble.
Lena is silent for a while. Then she looks up at the ceiling, her mouth and chin trembling, her eyes suddenly full of tears.
“I just want someone who is going to love me forever,” she says quietly, and I feel a surge of sadness and fear for her.
Forever? There’s one thing wrong with forever. These days it seems to get shorter and shorter. That’s the trouble with forever.
Blink and you miss it.
In the morning my mother waits until my father has gone to the gym and then she tells me that she wants us to give him a birthday party.
My mum is full of smiles and very pleased with this idea, even when I try to talk her out of it.
“He hates parties,” I say. “Especially birthday parties. Especially his own.”
“He’s going to be fifty-eight,” she says, as if that makes all the difference. “And he’s got lots of friends, your dad.”
Sometimes when I am talking to my mother I get the impression that we are having two different conversations. I tell her that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his age. She tells me that he’s going to be fifty-eight and that he has lots of friends. My mum often makes me feel like I’ve missed something.
“Mum, what’s turning fifty-eight got to do with it?” I say. “You think he wants to be reminded that he’s fifty-eight? And he hasn’t got lots of friends. Who are his friends?”
“You know,” she says. “There are the journalists he worked with at the paper. All the sports people he knows. The book people.”
“None of these people are his friends, Mum. They are just people he knows. He doesn’t even like most of them.”
She’s not listening to me. She has made her mind up and she is busy getting ready for work. She already has her uniform on-a short-sleeved gingham dress made of nylon or some other man-made material with a kind of fake apron stitched on to the front. Later she will pull back her hair-still glossy and dark, although I think she might have been coloring it for a few years-and put on a little white pillbox hat.
My mum is a dinner lady at a local school. It’s not the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, where I taught. She works at Nelson Mandela High, which is co-ed and even tougher. “The girls are as bad as the boys these days,” my mum says. “Worse.” But she refused to give up what she calls “my little job” even when the serious money started to pour in from my dad’s book. That’s why my parents need help with their big house. That’s why Lena’s here. Because my mum wouldn’t give up her little job.
My mum loves Nelson Mandela. She really does. She likes having a laugh with the women she works with in the kitchen. She likes getting out of the house and giving some kind of shape to her day. But what my mum likes best about her job are the children.
I say children, although of course many of them are hulking great baritones who would sell their granny for the price of an ounce of pot. At least that’s how I see them. My mother thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad child.
“My kids,” she calls them. She’s sentimental about the children she feeds even though she has seen the worst of them, even though she has experienced them in all their surly, foulmouthed violence, even though they are obviously not worth getting sentimental about. My mum still calls them “my kids.”
She doesn’t let her kids cheek her when they are lining up for their burgers and fries. She doesn’t tolerate bad language in the school canteen. She doesn’t even let the little bastards scrap with each other (better they beat the hell out of each other rather than their poor underpaid teachers, if you ask me).
My mother has been known to put down her ladle-or whatever it is she dishes out the gruel with-stride into the playground and break up a fight. I have told her dozens of times that she is barking mad, that she could get seriously hurt. She doesn’t listen to me. She’s only five foot two, my mum, but she’s tough. And very stubborn.
She has worked at Nelson Mandela for almost twenty years, back in the days when it was still the Clement Attlee Grammar School. This means that there are men and women on the verge of middle age who remember her from their own years at the school. You might be walking down the street with my mother when some beer monster will suddenly come up to her and say, “Hello, Mrs. Budd, remember me?”
“Used to be one of my kids,” my mum will say.
I don’t understand how she can feel the way she does about these children. I guess it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Far more than my father and myself ever really needed from her.
When I was growing up, my mother had a series of miscarriages. It’s not something we talked about at the time. And it’s not something we talked about later. But I clearly remember being a bystander to my parents’ loss.
I don’t know how many times it happened. More than once. I can remember that there were these times in my childhood when there was a lot of talk about me having a little sister or brother. Not from my parents-I guess after the first miscarriage you are too wary to count on anything-but I remember aunts and female neighbors smiling down at me, talking about how soon there was going to be someone that I would have to look after.