Chapter II Serena #2
He was becoming panicked about money, too, which she found distinctly unappealing.
When they had got married, Ben promised Serena she would never have to concern herself with bank balances or bottom lines.
He wanted to ‘take care of her’, to ‘treat her like a princess’ and so on.
Stupidly, she had believed him. The aristocratic pedigree and country pile gave a convincing impression of wealth, but of course those ancient houses with their creaking pipes and draughty windows and hastily retrofitted central heating systems cost millions in upkeep.
After her father-in-law died, leaving Ben as sole heir to his debts, Denby Hall had chewed through their marital savings like rats gnawing through electric cable.
Her mother-in-law, Lady Katherine, still resided there in queenly splendour, but contributed nothing.
A politician’s salary was never going to move the dial.
Ben’s annual stipend as Member of Parliament for Tipworth was a fraction of what he used to make in bonuses in the city. It didn’t even cover the school fees.
Andrew Jarvis had been a great help, of course.
Ben’s old school friend had left politics at just the right time and had subsequently risen through the ranks of various financial corporations.
He now ran his own hedge fund, Dark Rock, just as Ben had once done.
They’d essentially just swapped careers, which rankled.
Serena couldn’t help but wish Ben still brought home a salary slip with multiple zeroes attached.
It would make things so much easier. Money always did.
Last year, Jarvis had offered the Fitzmaurices a generous loan for an overdue refurbishment of the Tipworth Priory bedrooms. Serena would never have been able to push for the Espalier Square wallpaper she wanted for the master were it not for him.
For this, alone, she owes Jarvis a great deal.
Every morning on waking, she experiences a shiver of delight at the delicate emerald trellis effect that surrounds her – an effect that, according to the interiors expert they’d hired, ‘gives the all-encompassing atmosphere of fruit trees trained to form tunnels or pergolas in nineteenth-century gardens’.
She had texted Jarvis to say how grateful she was and he had replied immediately in rather a flirtatious tone that had both shocked and flattered her.
They’d kept up their sporadic texting over the months that followed.
It felt illicit, even though there was – Serena kept telling herself – absolutely nothing untoward about it.
Jarvis was one of Ben’s closest friends!
She was simply being polite! He was married to loyal old Bitsy!
And yet, when she saw his name ping on her phone, it stirred a certain fluttering.
She found she was disappointed if she didn’t hear from him on any given day and she didn’t like this version of herself – the one that was weak and dependent on the attentions of a man who was absolutely not in her league.
Jarvis was bloated and red in both face and hair.
His fingers were perpetually swollen. She didn’t fancy him at all.
So why did she care about his fancying her?
Partly it was because it felt nice to be noticed – not just for her looks, but for her opinions, too.
Jarvis actually took the time to ask her what she thought about things.
At first, he asked for advice about superficial preoccupations – what tie he should wear, whether she preferred tortoiseshell or black-rimmed spectacle frames – and these enquiries would be accompanied by a selfie he’d taken in the clothes shop or the optician’s, his face serious, awaiting her verdict.
She was always clear on matters of style.
‘The knitted tie,’ she’d text back, without hesitation and enjoying the feeling of being in charge of his choices. ‘Black frames. Better for your colouring.’
Then Jarvis had started sending her links to news articles he thought she might find interesting.
Serena was surprised by how much this meant to her.
Ben never spoke to her about current affairs but over the last year or so, opinions have taken root in the soil of her mind and started sprouting with alarming insistence.
Women, for instance. Growing up, she had considered feminism an embarrassing ailment one didn’t admit to in polite company.
In her twenties, she had been grateful for reproductive rights and maternity leave inasmuch as these pertained to her own existence.
She had taken it for granted that men were in charge and that women were lucky to be invited along.
When #MeToo happened, Serena’s initial reaction had been defensiveness.
She felt the younger generation didn’t know how good they had it.
After all, she’d had a lifetime of public groping and bottom-pinching and sexual innuendo but she had never considered such antics harassment.
They were simply the price of admission, the tax you had to pay for being female.
Everyone knew that, didn’t they? But the #MeToo movement kept growing and the tweets kept coming and the Hollywood actresses kept ‘opening up’ in magazine interviews and the more women shared their stories, the more Serena realised that maybe the category error had been hers all along.
Just because she didn’t believe she’d been sexually assaulted didn’t mean that she hadn’t been.
Perhaps it was that she hadn’t been given the language to name it.
#MeToo had been a radicalising experience.
She wasn’t marching in the streets in a knitted pink pussy hat or anything (perish the thought) but she was beginning to realise that women, as a whole, are underestimated and overlooked and exploited and abused and that nothing has really changed since she was in her teens. And it was making her very cross.
She had recently driven her almost twelve-year-old son, Hector, back to his boarding school after a weekend at home and he had told her with great confidence from the passenger seat that ‘women are more emotional than men. They’re not suited for leadership roles’.
Gripping the steering wheel more firmly, Serena asked as calmly as she could: ‘Where did you get that idea from?’
‘YouTube. This guy I watch.’
He spoke with no guardedness. As far as Hector was concerned, he was just stating the obvious.
‘Well that’s complete nonsense,’ Serena said. ‘Women make great leaders. And you can’t lump us all together anyway. We’re not all emotional messes, just as not all men are stoic and strong.’
She was quite proud of herself for putting it so well.
‘Women cry more easily, Mummy. They’re weaker. It’s why there are different categories in sport.’
She wasn’t sure what to say about that. It was true that men always played up to five sets at tennis while women only had to contend with three.
‘And,’ Hector carried on, ‘our prime minister is a man. There have only ever been male American presidents.’
‘We had Margaret Thatcher,’ Serena said, feebly.
‘She acted like a man.’
‘Look, Hector, it’s just not OK for you to go around saying this stuff. Women are men’s equals. We deserve the same rights and opportunities. I haven’t raised you to think women are less good than men.’ She paused, then added: ‘It’s anti-feminist.’
‘You’re not a feminist,’ Hector said.
‘Of course I am.’
She had to make an effort to keep her eyes on the road.
‘You stayed at home with the kids while Dad went out to work. You don’t have a job. You live off him.’
He said this dispassionately. She saw that he wasn’t being rude; he was saying what he thought was true, which made it worse.
Listening to her son, she was overwhelmed with her own pointlessness.
She hadn’t been a hands-on mother – there were always nannies to do the nappy changes and night feeds – but she had been more present than many of her peers.
She had tried to teach her children when to say please and thank you, how to shake an adult’s hand and look them in the eye as you did so, how to finish their plates of food and share their toys with equanimity.
She had thought they would grow up to view the world more or less as she and Ben did.
In the car, indicating right to merge into the motorway fast lane, she understood her foolishness and that it was probably too late to do anything about it.
The creeping disillusion of middle age had made her restless, and coming to the clinic had been her attempt to regain control of herself.
Her friend, Violet, had recommended it. They’d met at a private members club located just outside Tipworth.
The club was designed to be a facsimile of the countryside, acceptable to a metropolitan media crowd who thought they lusted after cows and fields but who actually wanted a neater kind of nature that included spicy margaritas and walk-in showers and tarmac pathways with sage-green bicycles and sourdough bread delivered at the cabin door each morning.
Serena had joined when it first opened because it was a ten-minute drive from their house and offered a free crèche where she could park the kids while she went for beauty treatments at the spa.
Violet, the wife of a film producer, was a weekend visitor who had pre-booked the same spin class as Serena.
They found themselves next to each other on the bikes.
Violet had started talking to her and although Serena tried to close down the conversation with monosyllabic answers, it had proved impossible.
Violet kept coming to the same spin class.
Kept talking to Serena. Kept insisting they should have coffee together and one day, Serena grew tired of resisting.