by Judy Astley
Slowly and reluctantly, her brain allowed in the possibility that her husband might be having an affair. It wouldn’t be casual sex because, dangerous as it was these days, that certainly wouldn’t rate £45 worth of flowers – not from an accountant anyway, money conscious as they habitually were. Such a huge amount of money, too, when Alan had been worrying lately that the cash flow in the accountancy practice was a long way from healthy. Somehow he’d collected too many clients with diminishing incomes and a reluctance to pay their bills. And Alan wasn’t the type of man to have an affair, Jenny told herself sensibly. But a little voice (sounding like Sue’s) was also telling her that there was no such thing as the type of man who didn’t. Here, maybe, was a torrid romance with someone he thought of as, if he followed the words of the song, ‘Darling’, whereas Jenny he tended to address, in moments of tenderness as ‘Pudding’. Someone to whom he sent £45 worth of flowers, delivery and VAT extra, yet to Jenny he occasionally brought a limp bunch of tulips, grabbed in a hurry from the van outside the station, and never quite enough of them to make one of those generous over-blown arrangements that she admired in The World of Interiors, but couldn’t do.
She inspected herself closely in the mirror. She was looking for what Alan saw when he looked at her, not for what she took for granted about her own face. She saw a woman who looked less than her age, could still pass for under forty; a woman who wore slightly too much red lipstick, as a hangover from her student days when she’d once been hungry enough to supplement her meagre grant and parental stinginess with what was politely described as ‘escort’ work. A woman who still thought it wasn’t ageing to wear her fairish hair thickly hanging to shoulder length and who was probably wrong about that, as tying it back took another five years off and messily piling it up looked so drop-dead sexy that no-one noticed her age.
Jenny tried to imagine what Alan would think of her now if he was meeting her for the first time, say at a party. Had she now become depressingly housewifey? No longer fanciable? Peering at herself in the mirror, she searched for any trace of the girl Alan had first met, the thrilling, lemon-haired flautist, shimmering in black silk in the orchestra. Instead she saw a harassed middle-aged mother of three, a part-time flute teacher with tarnished hair and lines on her face that she liked to think were from laughing rather than ageing. What, these days, was Alan seeing? Had he met someone fresh, young and perfect, someone who, newly discovered, still found it more exciting to go to bed with him than with a gardening magazine?
Jenny wondered if she would ever move from the edge of the bed. Her fingers were frozen round the flimsy bits of paper, and her eyes, in the mirror, were dulling with the cloud of unanswered questions. Who was this ‘Darling’ who had been ‘wonderful’? And which night? Age? Height? Brainpower? Surely to God, not another accountant? And not, oh please not, that desperate old cliché – his secretary?
She forced her reluctant limbs to unfold and walked stiffly down the stairs like someone recovering from flu, and into the sitting-room, wondering what was the right thing to do next. She thought about TV plays she had seen about this kind of thing, where wives set fire to their husbands’ dearest possessions in a frenzy of furious resentment. The immaculate saucepans were reputedly indestructible and anyway essential – it was pointless to smash anything she might need to use again. The image of a blazing train set came to mind, even though Alan, as far as she knew, hadn’t touched one since Daisy was little. He didn’t play golf, so she couldn’t test her angry strength bending a set of priceless clubs, and she used his camera and hi-fi just as much as he did. Anyway, maybe it was all a mistake, she thought hopelessly, feeling that she should at least go through the motions of giving him the benefit of the doubt before she made a bonfire with his clothes and his cookery books.
Then the phone rang, and immediately the news of Daisy’s arrest pushed all thoughts of Alan from Jenny’s mind. Clutching the phone, listening to the police sergeant, she could foresee, in the months ahead, Daisy in court, fined, expelled from school and abandoning her GCSEs half-way through the course. She asked to speak to Daisy, and through the window watched Carol Mathieson tripping along the Close with her determined high heels and shiny, stiff Come Dancing hair. She reminds me of one of the three Billy Goats Gruff, Jenny thought, watching her clicking along, trip-trap, trip-trap over the ricketty-racketty wooden bridge. Perhaps she’ll be eaten by a troll lurking behind number 16’s lime tree.
Carol, seeing Jenny watching her, trotted across the road quickly and mouthed an eager hello at her over the garden fence. Jenny, with the ruins of Daisy’s life grasped in the phone in one hand, the wreck of her marriage among the bundle of receipts in the other, smiled rigidly while Carol made faces about the meeting. ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ she cooed persuasively over the fence. ‘I’m just going to make a start on the finger foods!’
Jenny waved limply at her, wishing, not for the first time, that the local preference for knocked-through rooms and all-exposing windows didn’t leave her feeling that her entire domestic life was simply a big-screen video, switched on for all to see, like watching opera with the excluded masses in the rainy piazza at Covent Garden.
When she heard the faint and sorry voice of Daisy saying, ‘I’m sorry Mum, I didn’t mean to . . .’ down the phone, somehow she couldn’t stop thinking about Carol’s buffet. Troll-au-vents. Daisy heard her mother giggling down the phone and thought that it was sure to be entirely her fault that at last the poor old thing had flipped.
Chapter Two
‘Whatever were you thinking of? You get enough money for fares, don’t you? And why weren’t you in school?’ Jenny leaned back on the Aga rail, arms folded, facing her daughter with enough parental fury to satisfy even Daisy’s high standards. Polly and Ben had fled quietly up the stairs to avoid getting caught in any crossfire in the kitchen, and Polly was taking advantage of the atmosphere of tension to seek comfort in Ben’s room with his Sega Megadrive instead of doing her homework.
It had taken Jenny all afternoon to get round to confronting Daisy. In the car on the way home from the station her shocked brain was still reeling with thoughts of Alan’s Bournemouth romance. Revving angrily at the traffic lights, she’d suspected she might burst into tears if she started talking. Daisy would just have to interpret her lack of communication as hurt silence. Daisy had waited patiently to be told off and had sat quietly in her room all afternoon, finishing some long-overdue maths. She had been surprised not to be taken straight to school, but hadn’t dared ask Jenny why she was being brought home instead, as if her crime was a sort of illness that could be infectious to the other girls.
Jenny gave the tomato sauce a vigorous stir and turned to face Daisy again. ‘You know what will happen now, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go to court, and you’ll probably be let off with a warning, seeing as it’s your first time. This is the first time isn’t it? You don’t make a habit of cheating British Rail do you?’
‘’Course not,’ Daisy mumbled, staring at the pale wooden floor. It wasn’t entirely a lie, it was the first time she’d been caught. She counted the knots in one of the wooden planks, not daring to meet Jenny’s glittering gaze.
‘And the worst thing is, you’ll have a record. They’ll make social reports on you. Social workers might start coming round. God, I suppose there’s even a chance you’ll be put on probation! It’ll be either that or a caution or nothing at all, the sergeant said. And it won’t be nothing at all, you can bet,’ she said, waving the wooden spoon threateningly.
Jenny watched Daisy scuffing the floor with her foot and wondered if the thought of probation was actually as shocking to the girl as it was to her. Perhaps Daisy was secretly thinking it might add to her status with her friends at school. Boys might find it dangerously attractive. Suppose she was expelled? Daisy had changed into unfamiliar clothes, a neat white shirt and a red skirt that was not, for once, from a charity shop. She looked as if she was already anticipating her court
appearance, trying to get round Jenny just as she would the magistrates by being as ordinarily presentable as possible. She’d even tied her hair back with a plain black cotton scarf. Usually her hair, with its irritating half-grown-out fringe, hung across her face like a lop-sided wedding veil, and was constantly being scooped back in that Sloaney gesture common to all girls whose parents paid for their education.
Jenny reached into the fridge and pulled out a pack of tagliatelle. ‘Go and call the others, supper’s nearly ready. You can do the table. And make sure Polly doesn’t forget to wash her hands.’
Social workers. Jenny’s body went through the motions of preparing the supper, briskly washing lettuce and flinging open cupboards and drawers as if she really was concentrating on, nothing else, while her mind wondered what it would take to get everything in the family back to normal. Biggles, unfed and ravenous, seemed to know better than to complain, and waited silently on his fur-matted cushion for someone to remember he existed. Social workers didn’t, Jenny knew, deal with families like hers. They existed, helpfully and rightly, for the abandoned, the feckless, the inept and the inadequate. Nice middle-class girls, surely, were never Taken Into Care, that bogeyman threat hung over the inhabitants of the council estate just the other side of the main road. Did social workers have those special labels stuck to their windscreens, like doctors, she wondered as she drained the pasta, Social Worker on Call? She could just imagine a neat little Vauxhall Nova parked outside the house by an efficient woman with a clipboard and a heap of scruffy buff folders, all the neighbours filing past to read the shaming sign perched on the dashboard.
‘Why’s supper so early?’ Ben asked as he and Polly clattered into the kitchen.
‘Mum’s going out,’ Daisy said in a whisper, terrified of attracting any more attention to herself. Then she added, ‘I’ll babysit Polly, shall I Mum?’
Jenny plonked the dish of pasta on the table and looked at Daisy’s extraordinarily humble expression. ‘Well you’ll be home anyway, so you can hardly call it babysitting. Don’t imagine you’ll be allowed out for the foreseeable future, Daisy. I think you can take it that you’re now what you’d call “grounded”. Anyway, Alan should be back before nine.’ Jenny stopped in the middle of the kitchen, salad bowl in hand, gazing unseeing out of the window. What a lot there was to confront Alan with; perhaps she should make a list. She sighed, ‘God knows what he’s going to say.’
Daisy slumped miserably in her chair and helped herself to a minuscule portion of tagliatelle. Jenny felt infuriated by her air of penitence – Daisy was normally so feisty. She hadn’t said a word in her own defence about the fare-dodging, although she could usually be relied on to make a spirited effort at justifying any misdemeanours. It was almost as if the girl was acting, practising for a school play audition for the role of some mousy Victorian governess.
It was an enormous relief to everyone when Jenny and her cloudy mood left the house to go to the meeting. Ben opened his bedroom window and lit a cigarette to go with his chemistry homework. He sat in his room up in the attic, wondering if it was time to remove Michelle Pfeiffer from the wall and install someone else. He didn’t feel the same about her since Luke at school had come back from Los Angeles after the summer and bragged that he’d actually met her, really truly spoken to her. ‘She was only this high!’ he’d said, pointing at the middle of his chest. He’d made it sound like they’d spent hours together, though it turned out Luke had merely collided with her for the briefest second in a restaurant doorway. It was hard to carry on fancying someone who might actually have spoken to greasy Luke, even to tell him it didn’t matter that he’d stood on her foot; such an off-putting thought that she might have wasted one of her sensational smiles on such a creep. All the same, if Michelle was actually lying on his bed right this minute, instead of being blu-tacked to his sloping wall . . .
Jenny strolled slowly up the road towards the Mathieson’s house at the end of the Close, where it sat importantly in central position, watching over the rest of the inhabitants like the responsible head of a family, which was rather, she thought, the role the Mathiesons had taken on for themselves over the past few years.
The Close was a cul-de-sac, jutting like a fat thumb into the Common, giving the inhabitants a feeling almost of rural isolation. But across the main road at the end of the Close the council estate loomed high and huge. It was the mysterious hinterland from which all crime and chaos was generally assumed to originate. No-one from the Close had ever been mugged, threatened or harassed by anyone from the estate, but on dark evenings, mindful of terrifying newspaper reports of no-go areas and escalating violence, they automatically carried only credit cards or small amounts of change to the off-licence, and at night carefully took their in-car entertainment systems into their homes with them. When, through its owner’s forgetfulness, a car stereo went missing, there was a man at the pub round the corner who could reliably supply and fit a replacement Blaupunkt within twenty-four hours.
The houses in the Close were big, sedate Edwardian villas, with attics Veluxed and occupied by teenagers or au pairs (Croatian was the current preference, they ate so little out of solidarity with their tragic compatriots back home, and Fillipinos always came expensively in pairs). Limed oak or pastel-sponged kitchens extended into pretty conservatories, and garages had been converted into freezing, unused, home offices and games rooms. The occupants, like a lot of the population of South West London, were an artistic collection. Apart from Alan the accountant, the stately Fiona Pemberton who happened to be Polly and Daisy’s headmistress, and Paul Mathieson, who was something in software, the Close residents were mostly in TV, journalism and advertising. Several cars, all of which languished unwashed at weekends while their owners shuffled through the worthiest Sunday papers, displayed the prized badges of media success: BBC executive car park stickers on their windscreens.
Front gardens were well tended, with not an ugly spotted laurel or dull privet to be seen, but planted with choisya, philodendron, or a rare viburnum. Exotic varieties of clematis trailed around the porches, tangled with passiflora or cascades of excessively thorny but wonderfully scented Bourbon roses, all neatly under-mulched with weed-proof bark chippings. Standard bay trees stood like sentinels in ornate, frost-proof earthenware tubs by front doors and were decorated with oranges and cinnamon sticks at Christmas time. Fiona Pemberton had been horrified when hers had been stolen.
Most of the people who lived in the Close had done so for several years. They tended to buy the houses after living in smaller versions of the same thing, having developed a fondness for art nouveau stained-glass porch doors, generous room sizes and plaster acanthus cornicing that was hard to paint, imagining that they were on their way up to something even more impressive. The ultra-successful moved on to security-gated splendour on Barnes, Clapham or Wimbledon Commons or, if they could put up with the problem of parking, to something elegantly Georgian on Richmond Green.
Only old Mrs Fingell’s house stood out from the rest, unmodernized, shabby, unkempt and rewarded for it by being placed in a cheaper band for Council Tax payments. Mrs Fingell, in her house that was unchanged since she had moved in in 1947, had greying net curtains haphazardly draped across her window, her grandson’s rusting Volkswagen minibus perched for long-overdue repair on crumbling bricks, half in and half out of the garage, and a collection of dented dustbins that suggested a family of at least eight. Cats peed on her straggling lavender, and litter and cardboard boxes blew in through the gaps in her collapsing fence. At 79, she lived alone with her apricot poodle, unaware that pooper-scoopers had been invented, and her neighbours, who fumed quietly at the decrepit state of her house and garden, liked to think that by waving as they passed her window, they were doing their bit to keep an eye on her.
‘You know what the Mathiesons and such are all worried about, don’t you?’ Jenny was startled from her gloom by Sue catching up with her just outside Mrs Fingell’s house. ‘It’s the council estate. T
hey think only two types of people come out of there – cleaning ladies and criminals!’ Sue’s springy red hair bobbed up and down as she walked, her face, lively with the anticipation of making fun out of a tedious evening, had a pleased-with-life radiance that Jenny had forgotten existed. Sue chuckled, ‘That’s why they want to set up the Neighbourhood Watch thing, to frighten away the common criminals and the common people, not to mention how good it is for insurance premiums, being hand-in-glove with the local police.’
The houses they were passing didn’t seem to be lacking in burglar proofing. At number 5, in spite of protests to the council (a round robin organized by Paul and Carol Mathieson), Harvey Benstone had even cut down his prize camellias so as to deprive no-good joint-casers of a potential lurking place. Large metal alarm bells hung warningly over the ornate front doors, and powerful lights flicked on and off all night as foxes and cats strolled across inaccurately beamed flower beds.
‘Will there be food, do you think? I’m starving. Last time I came to Carol and Paul’s I had a McDonald’s with the boys first, and then found I could have saved my money. I’m relying on Carol for dinner, there’s sod-all in my fridge, ‘cept the Martini of course. I hope I’ve guessed right this time,’ Sue said as she and Jenny arrived at the Mathiesons’ wrought iron gate.
‘You have. I happen to know Carol’s had an afternoon of finger-food preparation!’ Jenny started to giggle. Sue always cheered her up. She had an impulse to confide in her about Alan, and about Daisy, but there wasn’t time. Paul Mathieson opened his front door as the two women crunched over his gravel.
‘We’ve got a Crime Prevention Officer!’ he said excitedly, as if announcing that tonight’s dinner would be a roast ox. ‘He said a gravelled path was just the right thing, nice and noisy. Puts them off, intruders.’ Paul, pleased with himself and eager as a boy scout, was wearing a multi-coloured sleeveless pullover, handknitted, with little houses on it. Jenny recognized it from the Kaffe Fassett knitting book that she had once bought. She had felt too intimidated by the degree of difficulty of the patterns to buy any wool. Carol, she saw, had not felt the same. Carol could also arrange flowers, she noticed, admiring the display of dahlias, lilies, carnations and unidentifiable greenery on the mirror-polished table in the hall, reminding her of the Bournemouth bouquet. Carol did everything neatly, even to the extent of producing, eleven years before, twin boys in one well-organized pregnancy. That, she had said at the time, got all that inconvenient childbirth business over and done with in one go. They had now been tidied away to boarding school, courtesy of a trust fund from a dead grandmother.