The Dilemmas of Harriet Carew

‘Nothing like a man who wears his wealth lightly,’ Guy mutters as he brings a tray of dirty glasses to the kitchen. ‘A four-bedroom house in Chelsea!’

‘Chelsea is so yesterday,’ I whisper, trying to cheer him up. But in fact I am just as put out: Charlotte and Jack moving north of the river means they’re really out of our league. And to spring it on us – on me – as a surprise!

Guy is doing mental arithmetic: ‘That’ll be … oh, at least £1.5 million. Like putting five children through ten years of boarding school.’

Back at the table, Jack is beaming. ‘Never thought we could afford Chelsea … Pimlico, yes, just about …’

He drones on, and I find myself almost nostalgic for the Carew conversational code: no talk of money, religion, or women.

‘This pork is delicious, Harry.’ Charlotte is trying to steer Jack’s enthusiastic talk away from the move. ‘Organic?’

I know Charlotte too well to fall into her trap. ‘Of course.’ It’s an outright lie, but I have no remorse. Charlotte’s newfound zeal for the ‘natural way’ goes to such ridiculous ends that I have to ignore her diktats.

‘We’ve become Freegans –’ Guy gives ‘Manic Organic’, as he calls Charlotte, a wicked look ‘– we only eat food that’s free. Berries, mushrooms, a quick scour of the dustbins at the back of Safeway and Tesco’s, and’ – he prods the pork with his fork ‘– road-kill.’

Charlotte shudders in distaste: she never knows how to react to Guy’s teasing.

But I’m on Guy’s side. Charlotte drives half an hour in her Chelsea tractor to get to the Nature and Nurture Centre that sells wheatgrass at £35 a bundle, and buys faded, dimpled, wrinkly little fruit and veg at three times the price of their non-organic equivalents. This, despite her regular botox injections, eyelash tinting, and enthusiasm for very unnatural slimming powders.

‘Isn’t your son at Millfield?’ I turn to Oliver Mallard – and realize too late that this was out of bounds.

‘Don’t get me started,’ Oliver sighs, and shrinks into himself like a concertina.

‘Francis is having a rather mixed time,’ chips in Belinda warningly.

But Oliver cannot be stopped. Francis, he explains, is a ‘late developer’. Late developer is the ambitious parent’s favourite euphemism. Poor marks, insufferable behaviour, detentions, suspensions and expulsions: everything can be blamed on their offspring’s late development rather than sheer ineptitude. In Francis’s case, development is so late in coming that the school has told the Mallards that there is no point in his applying to Cambridge, even for Land Economy.

‘Never gave us a clue until now. Always led us to believe he was on track for Oxbridge …’ Oliver shakes his head, inconsolable. I can see he is still grappling with the shock that none of his brilliance has rubbed off on his only son, and none of his money can shoehorn the boy into Papa’s footsteps.

‘Shocking, the way the school handled it!’ Belinda barks indignantly. ‘And now, what are we supposed to do? Look at an ex-poly somewhere?’

You would have thought Francis faced a career as a plumber’s mate.

Guy doesn’t make matters any better by referring cheerfully to his cousin Bertie, who, having failed Oxbridge, went to a red-brick and is now a dope-smoking carpenter somewhere in Devon.

‘Exeter’s better than Oxbridge in some subjects, you know,’ Jack bursts out at one point, defending his alma mater.

Oliver doesn’t listen and goes on grumbling. Why is he paying £24,000-plus a year for a school that can’t deliver a place at Oxbridge? Why are the terms so short, and the breaks so frequent? ‘We end up seeing our children almost as much as their teachers do. It’s outrageous.’

As there is nothing like the failure of someone else’s child to reassure a proud but poor parent that their sacrifice is worthwhile, Guy is all sympathy and solicitude, eyes practically tearful as he asks Belinda if they’ve tried private tutoring.

The sympathy dries up instantly when she lets slip that her suntan, and Oliver’s, are due to a month in St Tropez. This turns the debate back into us-against-them. For some parents, school fees, like the St Tropez holiday, are just another expense; others are forced to live on what’s left.

But in Guy’s eyes there is no other option. Sending the children to private school allows him to hold his head high under the disapproving gaze of those ancestors on his study walls. Military and colonial to their bones, they would otherwise sneer at an heir who scribbles travel books for a living. And so Guy and I divide our lives into school terms: pre-paid, paid in part, paid in full. We earmark our work in terms of what it covers of the children’s schooling: Guy’s regular editing of manuscripts for his friend Percy’s publishing house pays for almost a full year at the Griffin; his article on Marrakesh for an in-flight mag paid for Alex’s and Tom’s second-hand uniforms; my three days at HAC cover – well, not even enough to contribute to the school fund, actually.

While Guy repeats the mantra, ‘Nothing is more important than the best possible education’, I’m often filled with doubts. Do I really believe that we should bankrupt ourselves and worry frantically before every deadline for paying school fees, in order for our children to study Greek and Latin among a host of Hugos and Isabellas? Do I really believe that their intelligence, confidence, health and moral compass will be compromised unless they attend the same establishment their Carew forefathers thoroughly loathed so many years ago?

Guy remains immovable: tradition is sacred, and good schooling a pillar of Carew faith. He really believes that a stint in a particular red-brick building will make all the difference in life, and that a dribbling old wreck called Podge Fitch, who taught Greek and Latin to Guy’s youngest uncle and Guy himself, will prove the ‘most important figure in Alex and Tom’s lives’.

‘They think you’ve married up,’ my mother likes to remind me. ‘They’, in our conversations, are always the Carews. ‘That means you have to take Podge Fitch with the Chippendale sideboard.’

No, I want to report: I’m stuck with Podge Fitch’s boring anecdotes about bygone boys and no Chippendale.

‘I think Oliver would be easy to work for.’ The guests have left, and we are clearing up.

‘A few blurbs on cultural tours.’ Guy stacks up the place-mats. ‘I thought I’d make a great editor for his mag, and he thought I’d make a passable writer of brochures.’

‘Never mind.’ My voice is resolutely cheerful. ‘Oliver said the brochures would be really well paid.’

‘Well, we certainly need it. I’ve only got half the school fees to hand over on Monday.’ Guy looks as crumpled as the tea towel in his hand. ‘But it means I have to take time away from Rajput, which I hate to do, because it pushes publication back again.’

‘Rajput can wait,’ I snap. I’m not letting Guy postpone indefinitely Oliver’s generous offer. As it is, I could see that Oliver was surprised that Guy didn’t jump at it. Was he in fact hinting at something, when he talked about ‘alternative employment’ for talented writers? Oliver described at length how some well-known authors wrote brochures for travel agents and tourist authorities, ‘humbled themselves and wrote for retail mags and hotel chains … Flexible, that’s what you need to be these days.’

Guy had hardly seemed to take this in, but I listened attentively. Since Guy’s last (or, more accurately, only) success, we have lived on promises. Or to be specific, we have lived off a modest legacy he had from the sale of an elderly cousin’s estate. We decided to invest it in buying time, so that Guy could work un-distracted on delivering another bestseller to a grateful public. Yet when, every two years or so, Guy does publish a new tome, the drum rolls, applause and cheers are conspicuously missing. He sometimes gets a good review, sometimes gets invited to sign copies at a local bookshop, and twice has been asked to speak at a women’s book club. But success, thus far, has proved elusive. Guy’s freelancing brings in dwindling amounts. The legacy is long gone and I had to go back to work far earlier than I wanted.

Oliver is right, and the time has come for Guy to compromise. To my husband this will sound like blasphemy – but blasphemy is preferable to bankruptcy.

‘I’m whacked.’ Guy hangs up the tea towel. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

He looks so worn out and disappointed, my frustration melts and I suddenly feel a twinge of love and compassion. ‘Darling,’ I begin. But before I can reach out to stroke his head, Guy is walking up the stairs.

On the landing I pick up a fat brown teddy and a sock with a hole (Alex’s? No, there’s no name tape: must be Tom’s). I tiptoe into Maisie’s room and place the teddy on her chest of drawers. Rufus lies asleep on her feet. I shoo him off. The children are forever sneaking him into their bedroom, but he knows he’s to sleep in his basket in the kitchen. Maisie stirs, stretches her arms out on the pillow above her head. I kiss her hot sweaty forehead.

In the boys’ room, chaos reigns. The DVDs of Lord of the Rings lie on a pile of dirty clothes and Alex’s books for next term teeter, like the tower of Pisa, in a corner. Alex, sleeping without his pyjama top and wrapped in a faint haze of Lynx ‘Africa’, lies sprawled on the top bunk. Beneath him, Tom lies curled up under his Tintin duvet, his face, uncluttered by spectacles, suddenly perfect.

By the time I have wiped off my make-up and brushed my teeth, Guy is snoring in our bed. I undress in the dark, slip on my nightgown and crawl in next to my husband.

‘Side,’ I tell him firmly. He rolls over obediently, and the snoring stops. I fit snugly against him – the only way for me to keep warm. And I fall asleep.

Three hours later I wake with a jerk to find Guy alert beside me. ‘I’ve been thinking …’ He stares up at the ceiling, one arm behind his head: what was once his favourite post-coital position is now a sign of money worries. ‘We could move to the suburbs. It would solve a lot of problems.’

‘And create new ones,’ I reply, full of visions of Norwood and Nunhead.

‘Cheap housing, great state schools, too, if it comes to the crunch,’ Guy continues. ‘And it’s a good time to sell here: house prices in Central London have gone through the roof. We could get half a million for this.’

‘I don’t think we could get anything like that,’ I resist. ‘There are only forty years left on the lease.’ Not to mention a series of ominous leaks and cracks.

‘There’s so little on the market right now, people are desperate.’ Guy has sat up.

‘They’re not blind.’

‘The thing is, even if I do accept Oliver’s offer, it’s going to be difficult to make up the rest of the school fees. I doubt he pays on delivery.’ He tugs at his chin pensively. ‘I suppose I could approach Dad.’

Guy and I long ago decided that begging money from his parents, who, though generous, are not well off, should be left for those exceptional circumstances when really nothing else was possible. But perhaps this is what we are up against now.

‘Is it that bad?’ I hardly dare ask.

‘Well … we could consider the country. Anywhere with grammar schools: Kent or Buckinghamshire. There’s a brilliant one in Devon.’