Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  ‘I’m the bearer of bad news I’m afraid, Jenny,’ Paul began formally, wondering if he should advise her to sit down in case of shock. Not that she’d shown much shock when Mrs Fingell had been ‘dead’. But then Mrs Fingell hadn’t shared her hearth and home for the past ten years or so. Jenny watched him shuffling his feet and looking past her out of the window.

  ‘What’s happened Paul? Are you going to tell me?’ Jenny reminded him gesturing him to sit on the window seat. He looked quite shaky, she thought, starting to worry. Perhaps Carol was ill, or one of the twins.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but your ginger cat has passed away in our garden. Natural causes by the look of him. I didn’t like to bring him with me, because of your children, well, you know . . .’ Paul had delivered his bad news, all in a rush, and without the vicarish tones of comfort he had rehearsed in the Close on his way.

  Jenny put her flute back in its stand. Poor cat, she thought. Poor old orange thing, old Biggles.

  ‘I could bring it round tomorrow, if you want to bury it in the garden,’ he volunteered quickly, not wanting to give her the chance to start crying. He wouldn’t know what to do if she did, Carol never needed much in the way of comforting, so he hadn’t really had the practice.

  ‘Thanks Paul, but do you mind if I collect him from you in the morning?’ Jenny said softly, sinking on to the window seat next to him. ‘I’ll bury him under the strawberry patch. He used to love lying there on hot days. I’d rather Polly at least was at school while I do it. She was very fond of that cat.’ Jenny felt a quiver in her voice, at which Paul got up quickly and bolted for the door.

  ‘Must go, Carol’s cooking something. Sorry and all that,’ he called over his shoulder as he shot down the steps. Jenny followed him out through the door and picked weeds out of the terrace pots. Biggles had been Alan’s cat. Would everything that linked him to the family gradually disappear, strands unravelling all over the place, till he was cut free like a drifting boat? True, he hadn’t given up on his wall, had rebuilt it with as much care as he could be expected to spare for that kind of thing. But they both associated the wall with his mother, the last person, probably the only one, who had loved him totally, unconditionally. Jenny had never thought it such a good thing, really, that kind of obsessive mother-love, the sort that makes sons the world over think that, however appallingly, however downright evilly they behaved, there’d always be that one person who still loved them and would forgive them everything. No wonder wars, in spite of civilization, still went on. She hoped she didn’t inflict that kind of devotion on Ben; she also hoped that, as a man, he’d be able to cope without it.

  It was getting dark. Jenny was anxious that the little pile of foliage she’d collected really was all weeds, not Alan’s precious rocket seedlings, which she should have brought indoors for the night. She picked up the pot and brought it in to the conservatory, placing it tenderly on its usual shelf. Fixing a fine rose-spray head to the watering can, she then went, not to the kitchen tap, but down the twilit garden to the water-butt by the shed and filled the can with the foul-smelling, but nourishing rainwater, the better to encourage the little plants. She couldn’t do anything about the cat, and already she missed him trotting along beside her as she walked back up the garden; but there was still hope for Alan’s plants.

  By morning, Jenny still hadn’t found the moment to tell the children about the death of Biggles. She was exhausted from a restless night spent half-waking and wondering what Alan was up to in his executive queen-size double bed. She, in the lethargic dawn, had imagined him somehow inspired with rejuvenating vigour, uninhibitedly cavorting with Serena through the night, overjoyed that he hadn’t felt that good in years. Too far into sleep to drag herself awake and so choose something else to think about, Jenny had a bizarre vision of the occupants of the room next to Alan’s tapping furiously on the interconnecting wall and demanding some peace and quiet.

  Thankful when it was at last morning and her worst rambling thoughts could be put to the back of her mind to sleep, like Dracula in his coffin, Jenny got up early and automatically paced through the morning rituals. Still thrilled with her performance, and oblivious to domestic atmosphere, Polly went off to school eagerly, running to Ceci Caine’s car joyously free of exam worries, and absolutely bursting with her new-found stardom. Jenny had kissed her goodbye and felt slight trepidation that, by the end of the day, Polly could be coming home wailing dramatically (as befit a newly qualified actress) that everyone – the whole school – hated her, and she had no friends, not one, all because she’d made them so envious. Eventually, only Ben was left, lolloping round slowly, collecting his school stuff together from every corner of the house.

  ‘You’ll be late, won’t you Ben? Or have you got a free morning?’ Jenny said, hoping he had, and wondering if he would collect and deal with the cat for her.

  ‘S’OK, I can get the next bus. No leftover homework to finish in the common room.’ He didn’t look at all shifty for once, as he so often did when letting his work drift, so Jenny realized it must be true. It seemed unfair to reward such virtue with bad news about Biggles, but there was little choice.

  ‘You know when Paul came round last night?’ she started saying, before feeling unexpected tears creep up again. Suddenly Ben was hugging her, and it felt so good to be comforted that she simply gave herself up to the misery and wept. ‘It’s the cat, he’s dead!’ she howled, crying for Biggles and her disintegrating marriage.

  ‘I know,’ Ben said, tenderly stroking her shoulder. ‘I overheard Paul, but I didn’t want to say anything that close to Polly’s bedtime. You know what her imagination’s like. I thought she’d wander round all night in the dark looking for cat-spirits out on the roof.’

  Jenny laughed damply at his so-accurate summing up of Polly’s inclinations and Ben, with a newly grown-up sense of the practical, and the hope of seeing Carol Mathieson, collected a bin liner from the dresser drawer.

  ‘I’ll go and collect him. Double biology can wait.’

  Jenny blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and decided suddenly that she should be doing this herself, not automatically foisting on Ben the role of Alan-replacement for all the more repugnant domestic jobs. That was the other thing that mothers did, she realized, allocating gruesome tasks to the nearest male, everything from hauling out the garbage to unblocking the drains. Perhaps that was what you exchanged all that unconditional love for. She took the bin liner from Ben. If things like burying dead pets were what lone mothers had to get used to, she might as well start putting in the practice.

  ‘No, really, it’s OK, you go to school, I’ll deal with Biggles,’ she said firmly, giving him a small but fond push in the direction of his school bag.

  He gave in, feeling, however, that he should have insisted, and wondering why his father wasn’t there to tell him whether he should have or not. On his way down the Close he looked back at the Mathiesons’ house. No-one seemed to be home. The white Peugeot wasn’t in the drive, and on his way to the bus stop, Ben came to the conclusion (also a newly grown-up one) that collecting a dead cat from her garden would not have been the most erotic type of encounter he could hope to have with Carol.

  When Jenny rang the Mathiesons’ doorbell no-one answered, so she prowled around the front of the house, wondering which was the best way to get through to the back. She didn’t want to go home catless, and therefore have to rely on Paul to bring it round and have him fuss about the right depth for the grave. She wouldn’t put it past him to recite the ashes to ashes bit as if it was a real funeral, or tell her there were government statistics concerning the proportion of sadistic children who enjoyed torturing cats. The clean, smear-free windows of the Mathieson house stared blankly at Jenny as she tried the high wrought-iron gate through to the back garden. She should have known better than to imagine it could be left carelessly unlocked. Undeterred, Jenny dragged from its place on guard by the front door, one of the pair of stone pigs, whose necks and ears, in summer, wo
uld be cutely twined with climbing nasturtium. It weighed enough, therefore she decided it had to be strong enough to be stood on. Or perhaps it wasn’t real stone, she then reasoned when, levering herself up to the precarious top of the gate, the snout dropped off. She’d have to sneak back later with super-glue. The cat was still under the lilac where Paul had found it, though decently covered, like a TV corpse, with an old cot-sheet. Jenny felt suddenly squeamish about picking up the little body, and tried to tell herself it was only Biggles under there and she’d picked him up a million times in his ten years.

  ‘Pity you didn’t really have nine lives,’ she murmured to him as she used the edges of the sheet to scoop him into the bin liner, not looking at him too closely, preferring to remember him as a skittish young cat when the whole family had collected him from the RSPCA animal shelter, leaping four-square and wide-eyed into the air at every startling leaf-flicker, every thunderous clunk of a cupboard door.

  Jenny hauled her sad bundle back up the garden towards the gate, surprised by how heavy Biggles, in death, was. She used the freshly painted, white ironwork garden table to stand on to climb back onto the gate, and sat on top of it for a few moments, wondering how she was going to jump down holding the bag. There was no question, somehow, of flinging Biggles to the ground ahead of her, as would be sensible. She had the ridiculous idea it might hurt him, or otherwise be disrespectful. Eventually gathering courage and simply jumping down the eight feet, she cursed as her foot caught the ear of the stone pig and it, too, snapped off.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered, picking up the ear and the snout and laying them neatly by the front door, ready for sticking later. Jenny heaved the bag over her shoulder and lugged Biggles home to be buried, looking for all the world like a burglar with a bag of swag. No-one stopped to question her, no-one seemed to notice that she had climbed into the Mathiesons’ garden, or that she had vandalized their pig. So much for bloody Neighbourhood Watch, she thought.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘I’d have brought him round for you myself, if you’d only waited till lunchtime.’ Paul was reproaching Jenny for having collected the cat herself. He stood watching her, arms folded, face sulky, as she filled in the little grave in her garden. He looked disappointed, Jenny thought, though whether it was because he’d been deprived of a job that suited his position as street watchman or because she’d proved capable of breaking into his carefully fortressed back garden, she couldn’t really tell. Perhaps it was because of the stone pig.

  ‘I’m sorry about the snout and the ear,’ Jenny told him as she patted the earth flat over the cat and smoothed it gently, as if making a soft bed for him. ‘I’ll come round later and fix them back on for you; will that be OK? Or shall I get Alan to do it when he gets back?’ That should get a reaction, Jenny thought, sneaking a teasing smile towards Paul, the threat of Alan let loose for more DIY.

  But Paul wasn’t listening. ‘Are you sure it’s deep enough?’ he asked, as she knew he would, hands on hips and staring at Jenny’s spadework. ‘I mean, if you’re going to carry on growing your strawberries here?’ He looked doubtful, as if strawberries would be somehow cat-tainted. Perhaps he’d thought they’d be bright ginger and furry.

  She laughed. ‘Think of it as good old-fashioned humus! The stuff you pay a fortune for down at the garden centre.’ Paul frowned thoughtfully, considering the lack of vegetative matter in Biggles, albeit that he was 100 per cent organic, and Jenny couldn’t resist teasing him some more. ‘A pity we don’t recycle people like this too,’ she said, raking a mouse-shaped pattern over Biggles’s grave.

  ‘Oh well, with people there are certain regulations,’ Paul said pompously, safely on home ground, talking about rules. ‘After all, you can’t just plant them anywhere, can you? I mean, where would it end?’

  Jenny leaned thoughtfully on her spade and considered the miles and miles of cemetery dismally sprawled across the outskirts of London. ‘The only good thing about cemeteries is that they are open spaces. Pity to keep it all just for the dead, though. I’m sure I’d rather be buried over there under the cherry tree than lost in those anonymous miles over at Mortlake or Putney Vale. I can’t see it would be any less healthy.’ She picked up a large stone and hurled it at the hedge. ‘Did you know you can get cardboard coffins, completely biodegradable?’ she said to Paul. ‘They come in a flat pack, like kitchen cupboards. We could do our own funerals. Quite legal.’

  Paul looked worried, all furrowed around the brow, as if he had suddenly formed the suspicion that several generations of uncertified and uncoffined Collinses might already be quietly rotting under the suddenly suspiciously lush flower beds. What was going through his head, she wondered. Was it the thought of his beloved police force, blue shirt sleeves rolled up, digging rows of muddy trenches in her garden to see what was lurking down there? Biggles safely buried, she let Paul take the spade from her and watched him put it away in the shed, hiding her smile as she caught him glancing round at its contents as if checking for proper bags of garden-centre compost. Perhaps he half-expected, she thought, to find her own concoction, a sort of John Innes Number 5, Alan’s-dead-mother mixture. It gave a whole new interpretation to ‘bone-meal’.

  While Jenny was clearing up Biggles’s food and water dishes and putting them into the dishwasher, Mrs Fingell rapped on the kitchen window.

  ‘You got the men in for something?’ she asked, hauling herself across the doorstep and sniffing round the kitchen as if for the aroma of paint and carpentry.

  ‘No, why? What men?’ Jenny asked her. Still bending over the dishwasher, she filled up the appropriate plastic compartment with Rinse-Aid, checked the filter and poured in some salt. ‘Why do gadgets that are supposed to save you time need so much attention?’ she muttered, as she topped it all off with the washing liquid and switched it on.

  Mrs Fingell had come into the kitchen, plonked herself down heavily in the rocking chair and was toasting her thick-stockinged toes on the Aga. She looks very comfortable, Jenny thought, flattered suddenly that this woman was making herself thoroughly at home. It wasn’t that kind of place, really, the Close, where people were encouraged to make themselves feel snug in a room that wasn’t theirs.

  ‘Just that there’s been a good few of them in and out of here lately, that’s all,’ Mrs Fingell went on, her sharp eyes inspecting the kitchen calendar. Jenny felt chilled. So Neighbourhood Watch was effective after all. Mrs Fingell could only have seen Mr Robbins and George Pemberton (plus roses) and the film crew, but Jenny felt as guilty as if she’d been caught in suspenders and a basque loitering in her doorway under a scarlet lamp.

  ‘Just been getting a few quotes for this and that,’ she lied, wondering why she bothered, taking refuge by the sink and filling the kettle. She fiddled with the taps, taking too long. ‘Polly’s getting a bit old for her wallpaper, all those pink ponies. Are you keeping notes for Paul Mathieson or something?’ she asked, brazenly turning to face Mrs Fingell with a challenging grin. After all, what business was it of hers, especially hers, who she entertained, when and for how long?

  ‘Not going in the supermarket direction this morning are you by any chance?’ Mrs Fingell suddenly switched topics and shifted her awkward weight in the creaking rocking chair. ‘Only if you are, I wouldn’t mind coming with you.’

  It wasn’t a suggestion or a request, simply an order. There was nothing sinister, Jenny reasoned to herself, about an old lady wanting a bit of help getting her groceries. It only felt like a spot of blackmail because her conscience wasn’t as clear as it should be. A mocking chant from childhood, ‘We saw you, we saw you’, hung between the two of them, unsung in the room. Jenny felt cornered but fairly safe. Mrs Fingell couldn’t possibly know what had gone on that day when the conservatory blinds were down, and certainly, considering her own past, she couldn’t possibly be passing judgement. Jenny told herself all this as she searched obediently under a pile of junk mail for her car keys.

  ‘I do need one or two things,’
she said to Mrs Fingell. ‘We could get something to eat in their coffee shop too, if you like.’

  The old lady grinned with satisfaction at the prospect of the outing and hauled herself out of the chair. She waddled with surprising speed back to the door. ‘Come on then love, or the dog will be waiting for his walk,’ she said. Jenny, grabbing under the sink for her collection of used carrier bags, gave her a sharp look. ‘It’s all right, I can manage to trot him round the common by myself,’ Mrs Fingell called out, mockingly.

  This is the sort of thing Carol Mathieson should catch sight of me doing, Jenny thought as she gently helped Mrs Fingell into the front seat of the Golf, not showing my backside to a shop-load of customers. Not that Carol’s opinion mattered, she considered, wondering if Neighbourhood Watch was intended to make people feel more paranoid than secure.

  Hesitating by the store entrance with her trolley, Mrs Fingell looked as if she was half-hoping that Jenny would be prepared to supervise her shopping and do the reaching up to high shelves and delving into freezer cabinets for her while she pointed regally to biscuits and bananas. Jenny wasn’t playing this game – she’d seen how agile the old woman could be, and determinedly she reached for a trolley of her own and launched Mrs Fingell into the first aisle.

  ‘I’ll see you by the check-out and then if there’s time we might go to the coffee shop,’ she told her, and then relented. ‘Make a note of anything you can’t reach and I’ll come back and get it down for you. Or you could ask someone else, staff or whatever,’ she added.

  ‘Been shopping here since the day it opened. I’ll manage,’ Mrs Fingell called over her shoulder as she marched off towards the cigarette counter.

  ‘Shop till you drop’ was the phrase going through Jenny’s head as she piled food into her trolley. It must be fun to be one of those people who could apply that phrase to the whole-day excursion type of shopping, the clothes-and-shoes type. Instead, she wondered if you could die of supermarket shopping, the dismal blank that paralysed her head whenever she tried to recall what the family usually ate, which breakfast cereal to choose, just how greyish recycled lavatory paper could acceptably be. Even on the days when she went in, highly organized and efficient with a list, there would come a madness-point, something perhaps to do with the too-low, threatening ceiling, at which the slyly manipulative vendors would win, and she would start randomly hurling into her trolley bargain multibuys and special offers of syrupy orange squash, pungent floor cleaners and irresistible, ready-cooked chicken dishes that would end up welded to the iceberg at the back of the freezer. I must be the ideal customer profile, Jenny sometimes thought, detachedly lucid even at these out-of-control moments, so easily swayed, so easily – by the second aisle – losing track of sweet reason.