Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  ‘Look at them, just look at them. Ripe for the picking, like a tree full of plums,’ Luke was saying, leaning forward and inhaling deeply on his Marlboro. Ben stared at the women on the nearest court and, fancying them not at all, still sensed the familiar rising feeling inside his trousers. He crossed his gangly legs and wished he didn’t blush so easily. It was such a giveaway.

  ‘What about that red-haired one?’ Oliver said, taking a sudden keen interest.

  Ben could sense Oliver’s sexual antennae tuned in to the woman walking across the club balcony. ‘God, not her, she’s one of our neighbours,’ he told Oliver.

  ‘Married is she? Not that it matters.’

  ‘Divorced,’ Ben conceded. ‘I know her sons . . .’

  ‘All the better. Every woman’s dream, that’s what we are, when they get to that age. Look at this lot; if they’ve got time for tennis they’ve got time for sex. Only common sense they’d rather educate an innocent teenage boy than clean the windows. They think of it as social work!’

  Ben couldn’t fault Oliver’s logic, but most of the women didn’t attract him. It was Carol and her firm, gym-mistress bum he wanted to see. Even when playing tennis, her hair stayed strictly in place. He almost groaned aloud to think of the times he’d watched her running neatly around the court, with her crisply pleated skirt flashing sensible plain white knickers. He would be willing to bet she wore a dazzling white sports bra too. He could almost hear her saying ‘spotless’, a word that always triggered his mother into falling about with snobbish laughter. He had no time for all that lacy underwear stuff, all cutesy frills and come-on-look-don’t-touch daintiness. All the teasing High School girls wore it, and flimsy though it looked, so far it had always proved impenetrable.

  Jenny left Sue to have her daily run on the gym’s high-tech machines, and strolled in weak sunshine across to her car. The car park was full of Mercedes Estates, convertible BMWs and Renault Espaces, reflecting the fact that the club members could afford a lot more than the astronomical joining fee. As she unlocked her Golf, she glanced back at the club. She could see into the gym, where a line of elegant, agile women in cutaway leotards ran, with expressions of determination, on rubber treadmills. They’re just like hamsters on a wheel, Jenny thought. All around her was park land, the Common, miles of riverside towpath, and here were grown-up, sensible people, paying an annual fortune to do their running in a room.

  She got into her car and switched on Woman’s Hour, reflecting that she was getting very cynical. After all, she knew that no woman in her right mind would go and run alone on the Common, however much was to be gained from fresh air and inspiring surroundings. There was too much to risk in terms of flashers, rapists, murderers and muggers. Funny how it was more or less all right for dog-walking, though, she thought, pulling out on to the main road and heading for the shops. As if being accompanied by a bustling little Jack Russell, or a loping labrador, was any kind of protection.

  Jenny parked outside her local newsagents and went inside for a packet of postcards. It wasn’t a bad place to advertise for pupils – everyone seemed to do their local buying and selling there. The window was full of cards, some smartly computer-printed, selling everything from car parts and washing-machines to gerbils and baby buggies. She looked over the collection, working out what to say, and found herself counting the number of ways ‘accommodation’ had been spelt. Then a sudden thought occurred to her, a thought in the shape of Carol Mathieson, all-seeing Neighbourhood Watch Kommandant personified. Did she really want her advertisement to be that local, so local that no-one in the Close, unwrapping a wickedly fattening Dime bar outside the newsagents, could possibly miss this undignified bid for additional income?

  Jenny shoved the postcards into her bag and got back into her car. She drove up through to the other side of Putney and found another branch of the same shop, with the same kind of ads in the window. No-one here, she was sure, would recognize her phone number, though it wasn’t too far for pupils to travel to her house. And it was yet another area with enough spare money for music lessons. They were an essential part of the local kit, along with riding, ballet and the more obscurely philosophical of the martial arts.

  Jenny drove home absent-mindedly, roughly working out how much extra income she would need to earn to compensate financially for being husbandless. It would have to be an awful lot, because an awful lot was what Alan earned, in spite of recent panic over the business, and what they as a family spent. She wondered what the alimony rate would be if the worst happened and they divorced, Alan going off with Ms Right (mark 2) to raise an entirely new brood of expensive children. (Ms Right would be sure to want them; after enticing men like Alan into their temptingly uncluttered, child-free lives, they nearly always started drifting in and out of Mothercare round about their mid-thirties.) Lost in calculations, Jenny almost didn’t see the blue-and-white ribbon stretched across the Close, and very nearly drove through it, like a sprinter winning the Olympics.

  She stopped the car and stared into the Close. Police cars and vans were parked at angles so random as to suggest maximum speed and importance. The ribbon was the sort they used when they’d found a dead body. Whose, Jenny wondered, and where? She had a sudden vision of Mrs Fingell sprawled among her dustbins, one of Alan’s stainless steel Sabatiers plunged hilt-deep into her back. Perhaps he couldn’t face any more of her tedious teases as she caught him unloading Sainsbury bags from the car, all that ‘Poor Mr Collins, is she making you do the cooking again? (cackle cackle),’ which always drove Alan demented.

  Returning to reality, Jenny realized it was most likely Laura Benstone at number 5, renting out her house for another episode of The Bill. She was always doing it, pleading poverty and school fees to pay, and hardly a fortnight went past without some film crew or other blocking someone’s drive with their catering trucks. She might have let us know, Jenny thought, wondering if they really had to take over the whole street.

  Ahead of her she could see a gaggle of policemen walking about in the road, shepherding a collection of reluctant residents towards the main road.

  A police sergeant approached her, walking heavily and importantly to her car window. ‘Sorry Madam, you can’t come in here. I suggest you park over on the estate. We have an Incident.’ He said it proudly; this had clearly made his day. In her car, Jenny fled before the Close residents, collectively, could catch up with her. But having parked, she couldn’t resist joining them on the patch of grass that separated the estate flats from the main road, just to find out exactly what was going on.

  ‘I called them in,’ Paul Mathieson was saying proudly. ‘After Mrs Fingell came round and told me. You can’t be too careful. Not with bombs.’ Jenny peered past the group, which consisted of two young mothers and an au pair with a brood of toddlers, John Jordan the ‘resting’ actor from number 10, Laura Benstone’s husband Harvey, who was furious at having been interrupted half-way through writing a vital scene in a TV sitcom (serve him right, thought Jenny, both for the catering trucks and for cutting down those camellias), Paul Mathieson, Mrs Fingell, and the rarely seen George Pemberton, semi-retired lawyer husband of Fiona. From balconies above, Jenny could hear the chatter of estate residents revelling in a rare visit from the police that was to the Close and not to themselves. More accustomed to police cars chasing suspected joy-riders round their labyrinthine lanes, they cat-called and gloated delightedly.

  The police cars and vans had chosen a crazy place to park if something really was about to explode, dangerously close to what Jenny took to be the bomb. She also noted that the object in question was sitting on her own garden wall. Alan had built that wall. It had been the only use he’d ever found for his mother’s final Christmas present, a Reader’s Digest guide to DIY. It had been open on the path, like one of his cookery books, as he carefully measured out sand and cement. Jenny often thought he’d erected the wall as a monument to his mother, and at the time had half-expected him to top it off with a sculpted angel, an
d to carve her name and the dates of her birth and death on it, seeing as she, tidily cremated and secretly scattered at Blenheim Palace, had no gravestone.

  Now it looked as if the police were going to detonate whatever device it was they’d found perched on it. Jenny shivered. What would have been a playful little breeze in the lush and sheltered gardens of the Close was, here under the looming blocks of flats, a freezing blast of tunnelled wind.

  ‘Whatever made you think it was a bomb?’ Jenny asked Paul. ‘It’s hardly IRA territory is it? Did you have a close look?’ She peered past him, squinting against the weak sunlight. The object on the wall was hidden in what looked like a Waitrose bag. Someone, out of curiosity, must have been peering in to see what it was.

  ‘You wouldn’t think Hampstead was IRA territory either,’ Paul was saying, ‘but they had a bomb there, didn’t they, just before Christmas.’ He was smiling smugly, practically wagging a finger at her. ‘It’s a sort of square black thing with wires trailing. You can’t take chances, not these days.’

  Down in the sealed-off Close, blue lights on police cars were still going round and round. Just showing off, Jenny thought, wishing she could get home and go to the loo.

  It was a very small explosion, what the police always referred to as ‘controlled’, but enough to wreck the wall. It fell almost willingly to the ground, crumbling with a shameful lack of resistance. Perhaps Alan had misread the recipe for the mortar after all. He is going to be furious, Jenny thought, wondering at the same time if the damage was covered by house insurance. Did it count as an act of war, malicious damage, accident or what?

  ‘Bloody waste of time,’ George Pemberton rumbled crossly. Overwhelmed usually by the presence of his wife, he was hardly ever heard to speak, and Jenny turned to look at him. ‘I could see it wasn’t a sodding bomb,’ he said. ‘The fool wouldn’t bloody listen.’

  ‘Did you see what it actually was?’ she asked him. He looked such a mild sort of man, very beige in a wool shirt and old man’s cardigan with leather buttons, the sort of man who would smoke a pipe and be good at crosswords, not the sort to have such fury bubbling away inside.

  ‘Just a teenage thing,’ he said, his glare, as he looked Jenny up and down, mutating into something unnervingly close to an ogle. ‘One of those things they’re always listening to when they walk into you on the pavement. Gives them a glazed look. Yours have them,’ he finished, glowering at Jenny accusingly.

  The police sergeant came back, walking even more slowly. ‘You can all go home now. Panic over,’ he said, with a hint of a smile.

  ‘What about Mrs Collins’s wall?’ Paul stepped forward and asked.

  ‘Are you Mr Collins?’ the sergeant asked, puffing out his chest like a sparrow squaring up for a territorial battle.

  ‘No, I’m not. As a matter of fact I’m the Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator,’ Paul replied, puffing out his hand-knitted chest to match the sergeant.

  A small, knowing smile crossed the face of the policeman. ‘So you’ll be the one who called us in,’ he said, looking Paul up and down as if he was exhibit A.

  Paul beamed and nodded, proud as a schoolboy at a prizegiving. Confidently, he waited to be congratulated.

  But the sergeant’s grin was not a friendly one. ‘So you’ll be the person,’ he hissed, coming very close to Paul and adding with the kind of sneer only achievable by a man in uniform, be he commissionaire or Colonel, ‘Sorry, I’ll rephrase that. What I mean is you’ll be the complete and utter dickhead who can’t tell Semtex from a Sony Walkman. Tell me, Sir, am I right or am I right?’

  There wasn’t much scope for fantasy, being an accountant, even one with so many clients in the music business. Alan sat behind his impressive, environmentally hostile teak desk and tried to feel interested in the table of disheartening figures in front of him. On his walls in the cream-and-chrome office hung dusty gold and platinum discs donated by rock stars in their past prime, with gratitude to their money-minder. Often, Alan had been given tickets to see bands that he had long known he should be feeling too old to watch. He’d tried offering them to Daisy or Ben, who had scorned these heroes of his youth, pretending, he thought, that they’d never heard of them. Jenny never wanted to go either, unless, which was rare, he could promise her a flute player in the band, or a comfortable seat at the Albert Hall. All these things had served as excuses down in Bournemouth, driving Serena half-way across the county to see one of his favourite bands. ‘I adore these old dinosaur bands,’ she had said, referring to the fact that they’d been famous since her babyhood. Alan couldn’t see the relevance to an extinct creature; dinosaurs died out, some old rock ‘n’ rollers, thank God even against overwhelming odds, never did.

  The client in the chair opposite was unhappy, complaining that the Inland Revenue were claiming his blood and bones as well as what was left of his now meagre income. Alan found meetings like this more depressing than any other, for although his own long-ago fantasies of stardom remained just that – distant unreality – here at least was one who had, at the time, done all the fantasy-fulfilling for him, for him and his generation. At nineteen, after three blissful, girl-pulling, school work-wrecking years in an atrocious part-time band called Snakepit, Alan had given in both to the nagging of his frantic parents and the growing knowledge that he was an essentially inept guitarist, and sold his precious Telecaster. Sadly he had not, as he had daydreamed, been telephoned by Mick Jagger begging him to join the Rolling Stones in place of the dead Brian Jones. He was nowhere close to the Jimi Hendrix league when it came to sex appeal. So, worn down by a finger-wagging lecture from his headmaster that he had been undeservedly lucky not to fail his A-levels, Alan had been persuaded that one day he might want to live somewhere more secure than on a mattress in the back of a Transit van with a woman who would hang around for more than a torrid twenty minutes in the Watford Gap car park, and he had gone off to study accountancy for no worthier reason than that he was better at maths than anything else. It had felt like conceding defeat, abandoning his fantasies and joining the grown-ups, but at least there were still other, braver people who would do the rich and famous and badly behaved bit on behalf of him and the rest of the more cowardly conventional. Now he sat, comfortable in his well-worn leather chair, watching one of those whom he had relied on to fulfil his there-but-for-qualifications-go-I dreams, scratching round in a column of pencilled figures for the wherewithal to fund his next telephone bill.

  Alan felt depressingly adult. He studied the lined face of the man opposite, a drug-ravaged face that looked as if it had lived three debauched lifetimes, and he felt sorry for him. Alan didn’t like this feeling, he didn’t want to feel pity for a former hero, that wasn’t what heroes were for. The whole point about them was their indestructibility. They were supposed to be made of different, star-dusted stuff.

  He sighed, promised to sort out the official receiver and, charitably, did not point out that the lifetime earnings of the average middle management employee must have been sniffed up the client’s nose during the past ten fame-diminishing years. There was no point, and it would make no difference now. Unfortunately for this client, cocaine was not tax deductible.

  When Jenny eventually got into the house, there were already two messages on her answerphone, both of them from men enquiring about the flute lessons. Jenny was pleased that men were taking an interest in their children’s music lessons. She was too used to pushy mothers, asking things like why hadn’t little Petronella been entered for Grade 3 yet, surely she was more than ready. Fathers tended to keep out of the way, occasionally turning up to collect their children from the lessons, but as often as not hanging around outside in the car boredly flicking through their AA Book of the Road rather than coming in and risking a chat about progress and practice.

  Jenny was just opening the front door to go and collect Polly from school when the phone rang again.

  ‘It says flute lessons on your card.’ Yet another male voice, this time sounding like he
had a bad cold and was talking through a handkerchief, mumbled at Jenny.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said brightly. ‘Is it for a child?’ Jenny tried to be welcoming, business-like. ‘I normally charge £16 per hour, £9 for a half hour . . .’

  ‘A child what do you mean, a child?’ the man interrupted, spluttering down the phone at her.

  ‘Well, I teach all grades of course, complete beginners too . . .’ The phone went dead. ‘Oh terrific,’ she said into it. ‘Thanks for wasting my time and making me late.’ She flung the phone down and dashed out to the car, glaring at the ruined wall as she passed. It might be a good day for seeing Fiona Pemberton about teaching flute at the school. Biggles was sitting in a patch of sunshine on top of the rubble, washing his back leg. I wonder how long it will take Alan to sort that lot out, she thought. It could end up like Mrs Fingell’s garden. She bent down to stroke Biggles, and picked up a blown-in Snickers wrapper.

  ‘Pity about your wall!’ Carol trilled at her from the window of her all-white Peugeot. Pity about your bloody husband, Jenny felt like shouting back.

  Polly was looking unusually subdued, sitting big-eyed and wary out on the school steps, watched over protectively by her loyal friend, Harriet Caine. Jenny sensed trouble as she struggled to squeeze the Golf between a Nissan Patrol and a Vauxhall Frontera.

  Harriet did the talking. ‘Mrs Spencer says she would like to see you,’ she reported quietly to Jenny, standing guard in front of the guilty-looking Polly.

  Jenny gently moved Harriet aside. ‘What have you done now, Polly? You know this is an important time, with your exams coming. I hope it isn’t anything naughty.’