The house itself is at the end of a terrace of identical Georgian houses about half a mile from the Tube, opposite a very gentrified pub. When I was first looking to buy in this area, it was pitched to me as up-and-coming. Now it has very much up-and-come. There used to be fights outside the pub opposite on a fairly regular basis come chucking-out time on a Friday night, proper rolling-on-a-car-hood, torn-shirt, smashed-pint-glass dustups. Now you can’t get a table for brunch at the weekend unless you’ve booked one, and the menu features cod cheeks, lentils, and chorizo.
One of the reasons I try to get as much writing as I can done in the morning is that after about midday the doorbell never stops. Every time Emmy asks a question on Instagram like, “Coco has decided she doesn’t like her multivitamin—which new one should we try?” or “Does anyone know a serum that can get rid of these eye bags?” or even “Our blender has broken—which one do you mamas recommend?” she immediately gets a flood of messages from PRs asking if they can courier something round. Which is precisely why she does it, of course—it’s quicker and cheaper than an Amazon order. All this week Emmy has been moaning about her hair, and all this week companies have been sending us free hair straighteners, free styling products, free shampoos and conditioners in ribbon-tied bags stuffed with tissue paper.
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’m pretty sure that when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace he didn’t have to get up and sign for another box of free stuff every five minutes.
To get to the front door, you go past the end of the stairs up to the first floor (three bedrooms, one bathroom) and past the living room, where the sofa and TV and toys are. Squeezing past a pram, a balance bike, a micro scooter, and the overloaded coat rack, I step for the second time on the same dropped unicorn and swear. You would hardly believe the cleaner came yesterday. There are Lego bricks everywhere. Shoes everywhere. I have turned my back for five minutes, and the place is a total fucking mess. The novelist and man of letters Cyril Connolly once rather sneeringly wrote that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art. In our house the pram in the hallway is also the enemy of being able to get down the bloody hallway. I inch my way around it, check my hair in the mirror, and open the door.
Standing on the doorstep are two people, a man and a woman. The woman is youngish, in her late twenties perhaps, not unattractive, vaguely familiar-looking, with ash-blond hair tied back in a messy ponytail. She is wearing a denim jacket and from the looks of things had been just about to try the doorbell for a fourth time. The man is slightly older, thirtysomething, balding, bearded. At their feet there is a large bag. The man has another bag over his shoulder and a camera around his neck.
“You must be Papabare,” says the woman with the ponytail. “I’m Jess Watts.”
The name is vaguely familiar too, but only as we are shaking hands does it come to me from where.
Jesus Christ.
The Sunday Times.
It’s only the journalist and photographer from the Sunday bloody Times, here to interview and photograph Emmy and me.
Jess Watts asks me if I would mind giving them a hand with the bags. Of course not, I say. Then I pick up the large bag with a slight grunt and gesture them into the house.
“Do come in, do come in.”
Apologizing about us all having to squeeze around the pram and everything else, I lead them through to the living room. The mess is even worse in here. Someone appears to have shredded the leftover weekend papers and thrown them about the place. The TV remotes are on the floor. There are crayons everywhere. As I turn to tell the cameraman where to dump his bag, I catch Jess making a note of something with a pen in a little notebook.
I am about to say something about how I thought they were coming on Wednesday—that’s certainly what the note on our fridge calendar says, the day I remember Emmy and myself discussing—when I realize this is Wednesday. It is unbelievable how easy it is as the parent of a new baby to lose track of the days. I can remember Sunday. I can remember Monday. What on earth happened on Tuesday? My mind is a blank. I suspect when I opened the door my face was a bit of a blank too.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?” I offer. “A coffee?”
They order one white coffee with two sugars, one herbal tea with a little honey if we have it.
“Emmy!” I call up the stairs.
I really think my wife might have reminded me that today was the day the Sunday Times were coming. Just mentioned it, you know. Perhaps when I came to bed last night or handed over the baby this morning. I have not shaved for a day or two. My hair is unwashed. One of my socks is inside out. I would have had time to scatter some interesting books around, as opposed to a sun-wrinkled two-day-old copy of the Evening Standard. It’s hard to look like a serious person when you are standing there in an old denim shirt with two buttons missing and a smear of porridge on the lapel.
The Sunday Times. A five-page spread. At home with the Instaparents. I make a mental note to email my agent about the article and let her know when it is coming out. No publicity, as they say. It would be good to email her anyway, to be honest, just to remind her I’m still alive.
The man with the camera and the interviewer are now discussing whether to do the shoot or the interview first. He starts wandering around the room taking light readings, looking thoughtful. “This end of the house is where people usually take photos,” I say helpfully, pointing through to the conservatory. “On this armchair, with the garden behind.” Not that I’m usually in the photo shoots, of course. Sometimes, occasionally, I am just out of shot, pulling faces at Coco or observing. More often, when the house gets invaded like this, I retreat to the studio at the end of the garden with my laptop. I say studio. It’s more of a shed. But it does have a light bulb and a heater.
The woman has taken down from one of the bookshelves a photograph from our wedding day—Emmy and me and her childhood friend and maid of honor, Polly, the three of us arm in arm and smiling. Poor old Polly; she obviously hated that dress. Emmy took our wedding day as an opportunity to give her best friend—a pretty enough girl, even if she does dress a bit like my mum—the makeover she had always politely but firmly refused. It was a public service for her single friend, Emmy said, before looking over the guest list and asking if I had invited anyone without a girlfriend, wife, or partner. Personally, I thought Polly’s dress looked great, but every time the camera was pointed in the other direction or Emmy wasn’t looking, I would catch her covering up her bare arms and shoulders with a bobbly cardigan or taking off a high-heeled shoe to rub the ball of one of her feet. To her credit, no matter how uncomfortable she felt, Polly kept a smile on her face the whole day long. Even if the eligible friend we sat next to her at dinner did spend the whole meal chatting up the girl on the other side of him.
“So I understand you write novels, Dan,” the woman from the Sunday Times says, with a faint smile, putting the picture back. She says it in the manner of someone who’s not even going to pretend that my name is familiar or that they might once have read something I’d written.
I sort of laugh and say something like, “I guess so,” and then I point out the hardback and paperback copies of my book on the shelf and the spine of the Hungarian edition next to that. She angles the hardback copy out a bit, examines the cover, and lets the book fall back into place on the shelf with a slight clunk.