After finding that I had returned home, the children greeted me with overpowering joy. Phoebe, our eight-year-old, composed a declaration that I would never go away again and made me sign it, while Ben, the four-year-old, clung round my neck like a monkey and kept putting his hand on my cheek, as if to check I was there.
Only Kitty, the two-year-old, expressed anger that I had deserted her. She refused to let me dress her, and insisted that she was fully occupied looking after her doll.
The official view put about by my wife, Veronica, was that I had decided out of sheer laziness to spend several days on my own at Mungo’s Guest House.
All three children have birthdays coming up. Ben asked if he could have a bouncy castle party, an idea of such vulgarity that I would normally refuse it point blank, but I immediately agreed, whereupon he started marching round the kitchen table in triumph, sticking out his fingers like a rock star and shouting: “Bouncy castle, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Phoebe asked if she could have a sleepover with seven or eight of her closest friends, which I know will end with me bellowing at a roomful of over-excited nine-year-old girls at one o’clock in the morning. But I at once agreed.
Advertisement
I made peace with Kitty by grabbing hold of her and tickling her under her chin, so she was reduced to paroxysms of laughter. When I asked her who she wanted to have to her birthday party, she said in a pert voice: “Gaby!”
Gaby is the daughter of Fatima, the Brazilian woman with whom I had the brief fling that led to my being thrown out by Veronica.
I glanced at Veronica, who said: “Of course, Gaby must come. She and her mother are only next door now.”
Fatima has moved in with Raj, our new neighbour, and her cries of passion make it virtually impossible for me to get to sleep. But there was no time to worry about her now, for Hermione, my mother-in-law, was lying sick in bed several floors above us.
Veronica went up to see her, and brought word that she would like a simple breakfast brought to her on a tray, consisting of some bran cereal with milk and a ripe banana, a lightly boiled egg, hot buttered toast, some of the home-made marmalade she brought with her from Yorkshire and a pot of Darjeeling tea.
Advertisement
“Darling,” I said in as tactful a voice as I could manage. “We’re going to be late for school. Ben and Kitty aren’t even dressed.”
“You’ll never guess who’s visiting the hospital today,” Veronica said. “Tony Blair!” “Wow,” I said.
“I promised Mummy you’ll take the telly up to her room so she can watch it on BBC News 24.”
Thus it was that after taking the children to school, I could be found staggering upstairs with the telly. I feel sorry for Hermione, because her husband, Derek, recently died of a stroke, and she hates being widowed. But it is dawning on me that she is used to being waited on hand and foot, and that I am becoming the new Derek.
When I returned an hour later with a light lunch — poached salmon, mayonnaise, new potatoes, broccoli, salad, chocolate ice-cream, a few grapes and a glass of sherry “to perk the patient up”, as she put it — a newsreader was saying: “The Prime Minister spent the morning visiting the new children’s unit at a hospital in North London.”
Advertisement
“There’s Philip Potter!”
I said, as I spotted my wife’s ghastly employer greeting the Prime Minister.
“There’s Veronica!” Hermione said, almost spilling the sherry in her excitement.
“There’s Jean-François!” I said, my blood running cold. “Veronica’s introducing him to the Prime Minister!” Jean-François is the handsome young Frenchman to whom my wife has become close since meeting him at a conference in Hawaii.
Blair smiled, shook Jean- François warmly by the hand and said a few words to him in English, followed by a self-deprecatory laugh and a few words in French, in a much better accent than I shall ever have, after which the Prime Minister donned a serious expression and said: “It’s not just the new buildings we’ve been able to put up since 1997, though those are important, of course, but it’s also the fact that we’re recruiting the staff to run these new facilities, including doctors like Jean-François here, who I understand used to work in one of the best hospitals in Paris.”
Advertisement
“You couldn’t be a dear,” said Hermione a few minutes later, “and get me a fresh hot water bottle?”