Homing Instinct Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Homing Instinct

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. January

  2. February

  3. March

  4. April

  5. May

  6. June

  7. July

  8. August

  9. September

  10. October

  11. November

  12. December

  About the Author

  Diana Appleyard is a writer, broadcaster and freelance journalist for a number of national newspapers and magazines. Until two years ago she was the BBC’s Education Correspondent in the Midlands, before deciding to give up her full-time job and work from home. She has two children, eleven-year-old Beth and five-year-old Charlotte, and lives with husband Ross in an Oxfordshire farmhouse with four dogs, two cats, three ponies and a great deal of mud. This is her first novel.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409010425

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  HOMING INSTINCT

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 0 552 99821 4

  First publication in Great Britain

  Black Swan edition published 1999

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Diana Appleyard 1999

  The right of Diana Appleyard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the

  Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers Ltd,

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  Australia Pty Ltd, 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW 2061, in New Zealand by Transworld Publishers, c/o Random House

  New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland and in South Africa by Transworld Publishers, c/o Random House (Pty) Ltd,

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  Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks.

  To Ross, Beth and Charlotte

  1

  JANUARY

  Monday 5 January

  Why is it that men can spend so much time inert, like a gas? Ever since Christmas and New Year – which, combined, left the house looking like it had played host to a convention of poltergeists – I have desperately been trying to pull things together and achieve at least a semblance of order in our lives. Mike, on the other hand, has lain like a sea slug on the sofa, exhausted by over-indulgence and the inescapable presence of two children under seven. How thankfully he slunk back to his office this morning, clutching his mobile phone and brushing off the last of Tom’s early-morning milk-puke from his pin-striped shoulder. How thankful I was this morning to witness the arrival of the Angel Claire. Hugely embarrassed at the state of the house, I spent a feverish hour kicking toys under beds and hurling knickers and underpants into the wash basket before she arrived. I do not want her to think she has been employed by a slut. That can become clear in its own good time.

  The Angel Claire is a Sloaney-type with a velvet hairband over very neat long dark hair, who, when she came for interview last month, made me feel that the curse of middle age has definitely struck. She seems so young – hardly more than a child herself. I sat there with the children twining round me, and asked stagey questions like: ‘What are your views on smacking?’ and ‘What would you do if one of the children choked?’ in a voice remarkably similar to the Queen’s. She answered with confident aplomb in a surprisingly well-spoken voice (why does she want to be a nanny? Is she thick?) and turned out to be the only girl I interviewed who seemed to have half a brain and didn’t actually look like an axe murderer. Halfway through our ‘little chat’ Tom began straining towards her, and she picked him up quite unselfconsciously. She’s clearly used to children. He sat on her knee like a big fat contented teddy bear, purring loudly. The turncoat. I hope he’s not going to forget me so easily. Rebecca was more wary, and circled Claire like a suspicious fox. She is currently going around with the martyred expression of a six-year-old due back at school at the end of the week whose mother has still not found her ballet clothes. They’re definitely here somewhere. Perhaps the fridge? I must get organized before next week. Lists are going to be the answer.

  Thursday 8 January

  Had a quick glance through my wardrobe this morning. What exactly am I going to wear for my grand return? All I’ve been dressed in for the past six months are over-sized leggings and vast T-shirts, like one of the Diddymen. My work suits look suspiciously small. Was I ever really such a tiny size? I sneaked up on one of my skirts while it wasn’t looking and heaved it up over my thighs – but the waistband exacted revenge by garrotting me in the middle. It gave me not so much an hourglass figure – more a figure of eight. I shall have to go into work bent double, and refuse all food.

  Meanwhile Claire, my lovely perfect nanny, was downstairs playing with Rebecca and Tom. They’re actually painting – well, Rebecca is painting and Tom is sticking his fat little hands into a tray of paint to make hand-prints. I’m all for the idea of painting, but the reality of the event often falls far short of the expectation. Some of our painting sessions have been known to end with both children sitting whimpering in their bedrooms while I thrash about with a mop and bucket swearing loudly, wondering how the hell we managed to get paint inside the breadbin. The same often happens with baking. I’m quite happy to make cakes with both of them, as long as Tom is in his high chair where I can see him and Rebecca stands by the door. But Claire seems to go in for the full-blown painting-with-easels job and, most miraculously, the kitchen was tidy afterwards. If Mike could be persuaded to have sex with her (and I’m sure he wouldn’t be too reluctant on that front), I could move out completely and no-one would ever notice.

  Friday 9 January

  Last night Mike had an extended, and I suspect heartfelt, if-not-somewhere-else-felt, moan about how little sex we have been having since Tom was born. But how can I feel sexy when my tits still look like vast blue-veined Gorgonzola cheeses and my stomach ripples and flutters in the wind? At one of the handful of ante-natal classes I attended prior to Tom’s birth (been there, done that – kuh! What can you tell me about having babies? With the first baby you’re so desperate to gather every teeny-weeny bit of information you can, you hang onto the ante-natal teacher’s every word as if she’s the Dalai Lama, whereas with the second you know how bloody awful it all is so the less you have to think about it, the better) they handed out a questionnaire for us to fill in about the things we’d most like to know about after the birth. Over half of these mad women put sex! Still, most of them wer
e first-time mothers. We old-timers laughed hollowly and rejoiced in the private thought that if their husbands came near them as much as three months after the birth they’d attack them with a pitchfork.

  I remember in the immediate days after Rebecca’s birth, when I was lying in bed like a stunned mullet breastfeeding her, which I did more or less continually until I went back to work, the midwife came round to see how we were all getting on. We chatted about cracked nipples and bathing routines, while Mike sat on the end of the bed with an increasingly red face. Eventually, he came out with it. ‘How long,’ he said, oh-so-casually, ‘is it normally before we can have – erm – make love?’

  The midwife looked at him with a pitying air, while I looked at him in horror, my thighs involuntarily squeezing themselves together. ‘Six weeks would be the very earliest,’ she said.

  ‘Six weeks!’ he exploded.

  Anyway, there we were, lying together on the bed like two exhausted kippers, and he began stroking my back (always a preamble to much more). I instinctively stiffened and he said, ‘But it’s been over two weeks.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said, turning towards him and pushing my hand into his thick, blond hair. It isn’t that I don’t fancy him – how could I not, with his tall, lean frame and eyes of Sinatra blue – it’s much more the case that I can’t conceivably see how he could fancy me at the moment, post-Tom. How true it is that women need to feel good to want sex, whilst men want to have sex to feel good. ‘I’m just so knackered, and I’m really worried about going back to work. How will Rebecca cope?’

  ‘The children are the last thing on my mind,’ he said, turning over in a huff. ‘You seem to forget that I’m here too.’ What he really means is that his little needs are just as important as those of two small demanding children. He then made a point of reading his book in a very loud and sexually frustrated way, with lots of crackly page-turnings and humphing about. (Don’t I realize that sex is vital to release the only hormone in men’s brains which allows them to sleep deeply and peacefully?) The problem is that I do feel so unattractive, and when we do (very occasionally) make love, I have to stop myself peering down obsessively at my vast spreading thighs and surreptitiously pinching the spongy cushion of flesh between waist and hip, instead of concentrating on the matter in hand. So to speak.

  Monday 12 January

  What a novelty. I took Rebecca back to school this morning. In the past, I’ve tried to get the day off to take her on her first day back, but something has always cropped up to make it imperative I got in for an early meeting. More often than not it was totally pointless, and I sat there fuming while the editor wanked on about extending the programme by two minutes, and I looked out of the window and keened towards home. But today I swept up the drive to Rebecca’s school like a real mother, and fussed about getting her book bag and sports kit out. I tried to hold her hand going into school but she hissed, ‘Get off, Mummy,’ and wouldn’t let me kiss her goodbye, the ungrateful toad.

  Peter Cressingham’s mum Caroline (full make-up, new Shogun, flat gold-buckled shoes, husband with millions) caught me just as I was leaving. ‘Hellooo – I didn’t know you were still at home. I’m having a coffee morning next week – perhaps you’d be able to come along?’ Suddenly very thankful that I’m back at work next week

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I have to go back to work,’ making my mock-sad face.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said. ‘But it must be lovely to have such a glamorous job, unlike all of us housewives.’ All this is said with the confidence of a woman who has the entire day free to play tennis and leaf through clothes shops.

  I hate Perfect Professional Mothers whose children never forget their games kit with a huge, loathing vengeance. What she’s really thinking is, poor thing, her husband can’t afford to keep her. The only equality women like Caroline believe in is being able to dip into their husband’s big fat bank account without actually having to contribute anything at all apart from the odd perfect tarte au citron. Instead of doing a useful job, they transfer all their competitive instincts onto their hapless children, so apparently jolly get-togethers become a chance for ruthless one-upmanship not only about the perfection of their home but also about the academic and musical brilliance of their vile offspring. It even begins at the baby stage, with cut-throat competitiveness over crawling, toilet-training and first words. ‘Josh managed a perfectly grammatical sentence last week,’ they crow, beaming fondly at their Osh-Koshed one-year-old. ‘Really?’ says fellow Professional Mother, looking dispiritedly at her one-year-old, who hasn’t emitted anything more articulate than wind.

  ‘I’d so love to join the rat-race like you,’ Caroline said with a little tinkly laugh. ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t be so thick, get off your arse and do something a bit more stimulating than shopping.’ No, of course I didn’t really say that, although my friend Jill – a part-time teacher, whose two children go to the state school down the road and has an enlightened, if waspish, outlook on life – would have done. I’m not that brave and, to be honest, women like her frighten the life out of me. What is the point of coffee mornings? What actually happens? How do they have the time to spend a whole morning sitting about having coffee? I guess they all get to have a good nosy at each other’s houses and say things like, ‘Oh, a two-oven Aga. We swear by the four-oven ourselves.’ There is a whole ritual of womanhood that has completely passed me by.

  Wednesday 14 January

  Claire and I are indulging in a ‘baby-share’ this week, after I’ve taken Rebecca to school. I am allowed to get Tom up and dressed, and then Claire sweeps in and bears him off for some stimulating play, as opposed to lying on the sofa watching cartoons with me. It should be a harmonious arrangement, allowing me to get myself together, go shopping for new clothes, ring chums at work and gear myself up psychologically towards The Return.

  In reality it’s more like a subtle form of warfare. I sneak in and grab Tom while she’s ironing. (Yes, she irons like an angel as well, and even appears to enjoy it. Weird.) Then she realizes he’s missing, trots round the house like our Labrador, Turtle, looking for a bone until she finds him, then sweeps him up saying, ‘Let’s let Mummy have some time on her own and we’ll go out for a lovely walk, won’t we, darling?’

  But I don’t want time on my own. I want Tom. I’m going to be without him for great big gobs of time very soon, and I want as much physical contact with him as possible. Cooking his lunch, we silently wrestle over the cooker with pans of baked beans and mashed potatoes. I know I should just leave her to it, but I am finding it so very hard to let go. After only a few days Tom’s babygros are all fluffy and white and folded in his drawers. I’m losing ownership of him. To be perfectly honest, half of me is relieved to be giving up the bone-numbing boredom of looking after a six-month-old all day every day, while the other half is silently screaming, ‘Get off! That’s my baby,’ as Claire fusses over him and calls him her ‘little man’ (when she does this I have to leave the room for fear of killing her).

  Yesterday she buttonholed me in the kitchen, as I was peering hopefully into the fridge looking for something non-fattening but tasty to eat. Impossible. ‘I’ve drawn up a timetable so you’ll be able to see exactly what we’re up to while you’re at work,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Umm, lovely,’ I said, my mouth full of chocolate mousse (immensely fattening but delicious). I peered down the chart, which she’d carefully divided into days using different coloured felt-tip pens. The list for Monday read:

  8.30 a.m. – 9 a.m. Rebecca school (gym kit, recorder, book bag).

  9.15 a.m. – 10 a.m. Tom jigsaws/drawing/storytime.

  10 a.m. – 11 a.m. Walk with dogs.

  11 a.m. – 12 noon. Tom sleep, tidy up and ironing.

  12.30 p.m. Lunch.

  1 p.m. – 2 p.m. Tumble Tots, village hall.

  2 p.m. – 3 p.m. Tom sleep, prepare tea.

  3.30 p.m. Rebecca home from school.

  4 p.m. – 5 p.m. Rebecca
homework, Tom structured play.

  5.15 p.m. Tea.

  5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m. Supervised play, bath.

  Tom and I looked at each other agog. If I achieved even one of these things on time I would regard it as a minor miracle. Our family was about to be organized with a capital ‘O’. I only just restrained myself from asking if she might draw up a similar list for the dogs.

  At least Rebecca hasn’t welcomed her with totally open arms, and is maintaining a kind of froideur which I think Claire is finding extremely difficult. I am not gaining any private satisfaction from this at all, because to do so would make me a very small-minded person indeed. Of course I want my children to love her as much as possible. Only not more than me, please.

  Sunday 18 January

  Bill and Sue came round for dinner last night and couldn’t understand why I was yawning like a giraffe by eleven o’clock. It’s all right for them – they don’t have any children yet and go to places like Mauritius for their holidays. How does anyone have enough money to spend so much on just a holiday? We’re being forced to live like the Amish at the moment following my financial blow-out of Biblical proportions at Christmas, but at the weekend I spotted that a ‘For Sale’ notice has gone up at the farmhouse by the green in the next village to ours, which I’ve been secretly coveting for ages. It would be perfect for us. I may well be indulging in a dangerous fantasy but it’s got a small orchard and a stream. A stream! My children can grow up in an Enid Blyton fantasy world. I slipped into the estate agent’s to pick up the details this week and the snotty cow behind the desk took one look at my leggings and milk-stained T-shirt and tried to pretend she’d run out, until I spotted some on the desk behind her. They’re currently lodged like an unexploded bomb in my handbag and I keep taking surreptitious peeks.

  They were all on for a good session – I realized this when Mike started rooting about with the feverish determination of the very pissed for his old Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple LPs – but I had to duck out, for fear of falling asleep with my head in the Cambozola. It was actually a relief when Tom started crying, and I could slip upstairs to see to him. I breastfed him – what am I going to do with all this milk next week? – and then the two of us sat in peaceful silence in the dim light of his room. He fell asleep on me, curving his plump little body into my stomach, and for some bizarre reason I felt like weeping. It was probably the gin.