by Judy Astley
‘Well actually,’ Laura went and stood next to Harvey, linking her arm through his and smiling winsomely, ‘we can’t have too late a night, if none of you mind.’ She gave a little giggle and peeked out from under her fringe. ‘I’m ovulating, you see.’
Harvey, pink to the edge of his greying moustache, disentangled his arm and busied himself with the drinks tray. ‘Her and the bloody cat,’ he said, clinking ice. ‘Have to keep her shut in, or she’ll get herself up the duff with the nearest tom. Spends all day yowling and rolling around,’ he said, with an embarrassed attempt at a laugh. The entire group froze, collectively imagining the elegant Laura, not the cat, rolling on the Afghan kelim and howling out of the window in a frenzy of sexual longing.
‘Probably something to do with the moon,’ Jenny contributed at last, glancing across at Fiona and thinking surely a headmistress could be relied on to find a subject to change to. ‘Women in one house do tend to synchronize. Perhaps it even extends to cats.’ Alan, she noticed, was downing his drink rather fast, staring fixedly beyond the group and through the open door towards the dining-room. She followed his gaze and together they watched as, on the immaculately laid table, all shining silver, polished glass and artlessly casual flower arrangements, the said cat was slyly picking its delicate way towards the butter dish, and finding it, was then licking rapturously.
‘Trying for a boy,’ Laura, clutching a glass of mineral water, confessed coyly. ‘I do think men like to have a son, really, deep down, don’t they?’
‘Can’t think why. Not much sense in men, really,’ Fiona argued. ‘I spend all my time teaching girls that they can achieve anything that they want without relying on men.’
Laura gave a small laugh. ‘But not making babies they can’t!’ she said. Fiona gave her a cool grin. ‘It’s only a matter of time . . .’ she said with foreboding, looking sideways at George, who was studying Laura’s maple-wood bookshelves full of fat blockbusters.
‘Shall we eat? Just a simple peasanty meal tonight, I bet you haven’t tried tapenade, sort of squashed olive thing, I made it to go with the lamb . . .’ Harvey was confiding to Alan as he led him towards the dining table. Jenny crossed her fingers and willed Alan not to mention that this was the third dose of highly fashionable tapenade he’d been treated to in six weeks, none of which so far had measured up to his own version. She also prayed he wouldn’t start wittering on about the lamb – rare breeds were his current passion, and he was quite likely to baffle poor, well-meaning Harvey with questions about whether the sheep was a Soay or a Shetland, when it was most probably shamefully anonymous. Jenny had a close look at the butter dish as she sat down – the butter along one side looked suspiciously serrated, presumably the pattern of the cat’s tongue, and it was now too late and totally impossible to mention it. She tried not to think about what else might have gone on, cat-wise, while they were cooking in the kitchen.
‘. . . And the poor little sod’s fanny, all swollen up and bloody. Randy little animal keeps licking it, and rolling around on her back. Moggy masturbation I suppose.’ Harvey, well into the pudding and heading for a state of drunkenness that wouldn’t help his chances of procreation that night, was clutching the struggling tabby cat on his lap as he ate the strawberry tart. Any moment now, Alan thought with nausea, Harvey would raise the cat’s tail and show them its genitals, right there across the table. The cat escaped to the floor and Alan flinched as Harvey finger-fed dollops of sumptuous home-made ice-cream to it as it padded round his chair and Jenny tried not to link thoughts of blood with the raspberry coulis on her plate. George was keeping up a constant chortling rumble, as if he couldn’t believe his luck, coming out for a neighbourly supper and stumbling on such a madhouse.
‘And how is your music coming along?’ Fiona asked Jenny, rather as if she was talking to one of her fourth formers. Jenny, nevertheless, appreciated Fiona’s effort to switch the topic from the Benstone family’s collective fecundity.
‘Well I’ve lost a few pupils just lately. I’m in the process of finding some more.’ This was the moment to ask about teaching at the school, while she had Fiona captive in a state of dinner-party good manners. She hesitated, knowing that if she was going to get a job at the High School, Fiona would have to be given a moment to come up with the idea herself, but the pause was scuppered by Alan.
‘Need another flute teacher at your school, Fiona? Recorder and piccolo chucked in free, so to speak?’ he chipped in clumsily. Jenny lashed out at him furiously with her foot and connected instead with something soft and yielding. There was a bitter yowl from under the table.
‘There she goes again! I can get my whole next episode of Keep It In The Family out of that cat!’ Harvey yelled delightedly, poking about under the table to retrieve his anguished pet.
Fiona glared around the table, her gaze coming to rest on Alan, seeing as Harvey’s head was under the tablecloth. With her full command of grandeur she answered him. ‘I’m afraid we have our full quotient of peripatetic staff, just at the present,’ she said. Jenny smirked and bit her lip so as not to giggle. She could just imagine Alan later that night, mincing about the bedroom stark naked, putting on Fiona’s air of majestic pomposity and quoting her words.
‘Very Brontë-esque, your daughters’ names: Emily and Charlotte,’ George suddenly said to Laura. ‘If you do get a son, will you be calling him Branwell to match?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Harvey answered for his wife. ‘Wasn’t he a drunk?’
‘Certainly was. Probably felt in awe of the overachieving women folk in his family,’ George said, winking at Jenny and helping himself to a large portion of Brie.
‘Names are so important,’ Fiona chimed in. ‘At school I come across some sadly unsuitable choices. Parents should be far more careful and think ahead. Take Grace, well that’s asking for trouble. The ones we get are invariably vast and clumsy creatures and honestly, I mean, can you see a Talullah for example, taking up quantum physics, and being taken seriously at it?’
No, Jenny thought suddenly with pain, you need a name like bloody Serena for that kind of thing.
‘I always think your girls have such pretty names,’ Fiona went on, turning to Jenny. ‘Polly and Daisy – they always remind me of Victorian parlourmaids.’ She gave a tinkling little laugh, and Alan said to Jenny with a grin, ‘Well there go our daughters’ chances of a Nobel Prize for biochemistry. Doomed from the font.’
The party broke up when Laura, having served coffee very quickly after the cheese, became clearly fidgety. Any moment now, Jenny thought, she will be checking her temperature and going to splash on some more Giorgio. Fascinated, they all watched as Laura gazed lovingly into Harvey’s unfocused eyes and crooned, ‘I don’t think you should drink any more, darling.’
Bit late, Jenny thought, obeying the signals, and gathering her thoughts and her handbag together. George, amused and bloody-minded, sat back in his chair and started chatting amiably about half-hardy annuals, until Fiona stood up and stated briskly to him, ‘Time to go, it’s getting late. Charming meal, you two, you must come to us soon.’
Alan repeated a similar version of the same words and suddenly the four of them were on the doorstep. Jenny, just about to turn off towards her own house, suddenly felt George’s hand on her arm. Looking up quickly she caught George grinning slyly at her.
‘You could try advertising your flute lessons,’ he said quietly. ‘Though you know what you might get instead of pupils don’t you?’ He had a very cunning look in his eyes.
‘Yes I know exactly what I might get,’ Jenny told him quietly, and then added recklessly, ‘and it pays a hell of a lot better than bloody music.’
Chapter Seven
‘They won’t be back till at least eleven,’ Ben promised Daisy. ‘You’ve got plenty of time to try getting out and back in again. You don’t actually have to go anywhere.’
‘I might as well, once I’m out. I’ll go and see Emma for an hour. I don’t intend to risk my life and then waste the effort.’
Daisy pulled on a pair of ancient and terminally uncool trainers, hoping no-one out in the dark would recognize her in them. The Doc Martens wouldn’t do at all, not for climbing out of her window down via the conservatory roof to the back garden. They were much too heavy and inflexible. On the night of Sophie’s party, she’d have to change into them at Emma’s. Even getting over the back fence would be difficult, with the mouldering compost heap, the honeysuckle threaded through with lethal blackberry thorns and the gate double-locked against intruders from the Common.
‘You look just like a burglar. Where are you going?’ Polly, her face peering with intense curiosity round Daisy’s bedroom door, couldn’t bear to miss out if something was going on. ‘You’re not going out, are you Daisy?’ she said with thrilled relish. ‘You’re still grounded! You’re not allowed!’
‘I’m not going out Polly, not exactly,’ said Daisy, wondering what kind of a bribe it would take to get round Polly.
‘No, she’s not going out,’ Ben joined in quickly. ‘She’s just, er, just practising for, um, the Duke of Edinburgh award. She has to learn how to do some climbing, that’s all. It’s called an initiative test.’ Polly looked disbelieving, so Ben tried appealing to her sense of conspiracy. ‘Only don’t tell Mum, because Daisy’s trying to make up for being bad by doing this as a surprise. Think how pleased they’ll be when Daisy gets a medal.’
Polly’s expression was of deep calculation. ‘No-one gets a medal for being able to climb out of a window,’ she said, with a knowing look. Then she conceded, ‘I’ll think about it. A Snickers bar would help,’ she said eventually.
‘I’ll pick one up at the shop on the estate,’ Daisy promised, opening her window. ‘Now don’t forget, Polly, it’s a surprise. OK?’
It looked an awfully long way down, really. Much further than it looked from down below. It had seemed such a good idea when she and Emma had discussed it at school. Now it seemed ludicrously Famous Fiveish, scrambling down the drainpipe dressed in camouflage black, to escape the villainous captors. Except that in this case the captors were her terminally insensitive parents. It would be more of a giggle if Ben would do it with her, but he had refused, saying that two of them would make too much noise, and besides, when he went to Sophie’s party he intended to go the easy way, out through the front door. With immense care, Daisy put a foot over the window-sill and felt around in the dark for a foothold on the ridge pole of the conservatory.
‘You OK?’ Ben called from the safety of her bed.
Daisy glared at him. ‘Seeing as I’ve still got most of me inside the room, yes Ben, I’m OK so far, thanks for asking,’ she retorted with sarcasm. ‘You should try this, it isn’t that easy.’ It was all right for him, she thought, lying there all limp and gangly like an abandoned string puppet. He was so long, he could probably step straight out of the window down to the ground, though he’d probably manage to knock out every pane of glass from the conservatory on the way.
‘You should try paying your train fares, then you wouldn’t have to try this either!’ he snapped back. ‘I’m on your side, remember.’ And mine, he admitted to himself, knowing for certain that if Daisy made it to Sophie’s party the next weekend, her desirable friend Emma would be sure to be there too.
Holding on to the loo window ledge and levering herself carefully across the conservatory roof, Daisy jumped down to the ground by way of the upturned pile of flower pots on the garden table. For a few moments she stood leaning against the wall, shaking with nerves and fear. It would be all right next time, she knew. It was only that first attempt that would unnerve her. Next time, she’d be down from her window as lithely as Biggles.
Daisy now wanted, really, to go back into the house lie around on the sofa for the evening and watch TV, but bravado, and the need to appease Polly, made her stride off up the road towards the shop on the corner of the estate. She felt more than slightly silly, dressed all in black and with her face streaked with charcoal from the barbecue kit. She was sure that anyone who saw her would think she was some kid playing Let’s Join The SAS. But Ben had insisted, saying that she must minimize her chances of being seen, especially with the Neighbourhood Watch on constant alert.
She phoned Emma from the payphone on the corner and was quite relieved to discover she was out. It was nearly ten already, and if the parents got sudden food-poisoning at the Benstone’s, or had a row with Harvey about the overall dismal quality of the British sitcom, they could be home any time now. Daisy hung around in the shadows outside the estate newsagent’s until she was sure there were no hostile crowds of ragga boys inside who could mistake her, in her black disguise, for a Goth and beat her up, bought the Snickers bar and strode back down the Close, keeping tight in against the hedges and overhanging trees. As she climbed up to the roof of the conservatory again, using the terrace bench as a step-ladder, she started to relax. This is quite easy, she thought, just so long as the parents assume I’m in my room doing homework, I could get away with this.
She’ll never believe me, Paul thought to himself as he peered down from the attic, eyes screwed up against the dark. She’ll accuse me of crying Wolf, especially after last time, with the bomb that wasn’t a bomb. Only his terror of Carol’s scorn kept Paul from rushing straight to the telephone and dialling 999. And perhaps she was right, it might be as well to double-check.
He squinted down into the Close again, wishing his telescope and his multi-lensed Nikon camera had the wonderful kind of night vision that made such brilliant TV programmes about badger-watching. Then, when the police asked him to inspect a line-up of potential felons, he would be able to astound them with his unswervingly precise identification, or even an amazingly sharp photo. He would put together a Photo-fit picture that would have the villain skulking in his home, terrified to go out. He could just imagine it, the local police chief emerging from the courtroom and congratulating him personally: ‘We dream of witnesses as observant as you, Sir.’ There would be something in the local paper; he might be described as a community leader. Excited now, Paul made a note of the time in the file for number 14 (Collins). He then had another look down into the Close. The dark figure was still there, struggling a bit, halfway up the Collins’s conservatory and heading for one of their bedroom windows. And Jenny and Alan, he knew, were at the Benstones, he’d watched them go earlier. Their poor defenceless children, alone in that house, at the mercy of a ruthless cat burglar. It was no good, even if he had to drag Carol up to the loft so show her, and so waste precious time, he would have to get the police. Wasn’t that what Neighbourhood Watch was all about?
The police car, blue light whirling and making eerie shadows on the trees, passed Alan and Jenny as they walked up the Close towards home.
‘Hope it’s not old Mrs Fingell,’ Alan commented. ‘Poor old thing, all alone with that smelly orange dog, anything could happen.’ Jenny hoped it wasn’t her, too. Like everyone else in the Close, she put a generous amount in the annual Help the Aged envelope, and had once shovelled snow off Mrs Fingell’s path (leaving it treacherously icy), but when it came to real helping, on a day-to-day shopping-and-mopping basis, they all quailed before the rank seediness of Mrs Fingell’s existence. The Close residents who actually ventured inside number 21 tended to be those who, out of curiosity, or a desire to reconstruct original decorative features, wanted to see what their own houses had looked like in the days before modernization. Awestruck, they had all reported a magnificent claw-footed bath, original but crumbling cornices and an odour of pre-war squalor that quite took the breath away. Everyone who had been in Mrs Fingell’s kitchen agreed that the council should provide her with at least a Home Help.
Jenny and Alan arrived at their gate at the same time as the police car which screeched to a halt beside them. Suddenly a far more appalling scenario than an injured Mrs Fingell sprang to Jenny’s mind. Suppose David Robbins had really been an undercover vice squad member? Was she about to be arrested for keeping a disorderly house as the quaint old-fashion
ed charge called it? Or, as was more likely (the wearing of two false feet being quite an extreme disguise for even a plain-clothes cop) had he discovered that he could get services such as Jenny had provided for a quarter of the price and twice the expertise in King’s Cross, and grassed on her in a fit of outraged consumer pique? Jenny felt prickles of perspiration and her heartbeat rocketed up to danger level.
‘Report of attempted burglary,’ a bearded policeman said, pushing past them and up their path. ‘Got a key?’ he asked, as Jenny and Alan stood on the path unmoving and puzzled.
‘Yes, of course, but there are three people in there. Or at least there should be,’ Jenny told him, shaky with relief but suddenly fearful that only vulnerable little Polly might be in the house, alone facing a ruthless team of professional robbers, Ben and Daisy having callously abandoned her for the sake of some unmissable teenage jollies.
‘We got someone round the back, they won’t get away,’ the policeman said with commendable confidence as Alan opened the front door.
‘What’s the matter, what’s Daisy done now?’ Polly in her Mickey Mouse pyjamas hovered at the bottom of the stairs, riveted by the sight of the policeman.
‘Why?’ the policeman asked her, speedily picking up on a possible line of enquiry. ‘What has Daisy done before?’
‘Nothing!’ Polly lied, spinning out the word into at least six emphatic syllables. She clutched her biggest Snoopy, looking suspiciously like, Jenny thought, an innocent little girl who was over acting the part of, well, an innocent little girl and determinedly justifying £70 per term spent on Extra Drama. She was also standing firmly on the bottom step, blocking any possible progress up the stairs.
The policeman asked her questions about what she might have heard, and Alan asked her where Ben and Daisy were. ‘Oh they’re upstairs doing some homework,’ Polly said. ‘Have been most of the evening,’ and then she added, ‘except when they watched telly,’ as if she had realized she was going too far.