Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  Jenny furiously fumbled the loading of carrier bags to keep pace with the speedy check-out girl, wondering how she could possibly have chosen ten cans of cat food when they no longer had a cat, when she heard the breathy excitement of Laura Benstone’s voice behind her.

  ‘It was positive! Isn’t it thrilling? Due in time for Bonfire Night, just!’ the voice gushed, and Jenny mustered enough social grace to look up and say congratulations. A brief and smiling glance at Laura took in that she looked pretty as a baby herself, in a bonny-blue mohair sweater cutely oversized and with her dark, feathery fringe caught up on the tops of her eyebrows. ‘We haven’t told the girls yet; we thought, you know, they’d want it now. You know what children are like, just can’t wait!’

  Jenny triumphantly stuffed the last bag of carrots into a bag just as the stolid check-out girl rang up the total. She wondered if this job was a sort of race for her too, each time trying to outrun the customer so that she could sit and pick at her nails while the fumble-fingered or the terminally slow laboriously stowed their unwieldy purchases. She vaguely recognized the girl, taken back suddenly by the big placid face to infant school days when she (with Ben in tow) and this girl’s chirpy young mother had discussed reading schemes and sports kit.

  ‘Ninety-six pounds fifty please,’ the bored voice stated and Jenny fished around in her purse for her Switch card.

  ‘Ninety-six quid! Bloody hell, whose army are you feeding?’ Mrs Fingell, followed by a droopy youth carrying her pair of immaculately packed bags, appeared in front of Jenny, tempting her to reply, ‘The entire USA, 1944?’ Instead, an ugly squawk of rejection came from the till.

  ‘Sorry madam, this card won’t take,’ the check-out girl said, yawning widely and gazing expectantly at Jenny for an alternative means of payment. It was too late, now, to call on past shared times, remind her that she and Ben had started school together. How unfair it would be too, to talk about Ben’s A-level courses when Jenny knew for a suddenly recalled fact that the girl’s brother (only months older than Daisy) was spending the rest of his teen years in a young offenders’ institute for the apparently incurable theft of fast cars.

  ‘Oh dear!’ breathed Laura behind her, adding, ‘How frightful!’ as if she had heard of nothing more tragic in her life.

  ‘I’ll have to give you a cheque then,’ Jenny said, rummaging through the debris in her bag and wishing she didn’t keep every receipt she was ever given. Something to do with being an accountant’s wife, she thought. The girl, however, knew the rules of the job.

  ‘Only if you’ve got another cheque guarantee card,’ she said, handing back Jenny’s useless Switch card. ‘S’no good for anything else once it’s been stopped.’ She pursed her lips and waited, staring out towards the delicatessen counter, not unhappy to be held up.

  Jenny started to wonder if the girl was getting some kind of sweet revenge. The infants’ school on the edge of the estate had been one of those that the middle classes describe as ‘excellent, wonderful start, fascinating mix of people’ until the children reached eight, at which point they abandoned it (and the fascinating people) in droves and took off for their long-awaited places at the choicest prep schools.

  Faintly aware of a queue build-up and an atmosphere of niggling impatience, she stopped rifling through her bag. ‘Well it’s the only card I brought with me actually,’ she tried the confident smile, and the reassuring tone. ‘There’s sure to have been a mistake anyway, and I’ve got plenty of identification if you’ll just take my cheque.’ She started laying out a selection of documents like a deck of cards: child benefit book, driving licence, tennis club membership card.

  ‘Not allowed, sorry,’ said the girl, unimpressed. Jenny wondered if she had recognized her, noticed the name of the cards, but there was no flicker of interest in the large blank face.

  ‘Oh but surely . . .’ started Laura in support.

  ‘Look, I shop here all the time. Isn’t there a manager or someone I could talk to, explain the situation? Obviously I can’t just abandon ninety-six pounds’ worth of shopping, simply because of bureaucracy and a silly mistake by the bank,’ Jenny said, adding, threat-like, ‘and some poor person would have to put it all back on the shelves.’ She felt that if she had to walk out now without her trolley-load of stuff, she would never be able to face shopping again. Salvation, in the form of a smartly suited man with a clipboard, strolled up and the situation was explained.

  ‘One of your most regular customers,’ Jenny heard herself saying, not exactly grovelling, but feeling pulled between that and an assertion of some heartfelt right to leave the shop with the goods she wanted. She won; it was easy, what with her manner and her accent and her tennis club membership number and address scrawled on the back of her cheque.

  ‘You was bloody lucky there,’ Mrs Fingell told her as they walked back to the car.

  ‘Why? My cheque won’t bounce, and they can’t expect me to have that much cash on me, I might get mugged. I suppose I could have gone home and picked up another of our cheque cards.’

  ‘Oh no, you couldn’t have,’ Laura, still with them, said. ‘Not if there’s any dairy stuff. They can’t let it out of the store if it’s been off the shelf for more than about thirty minutes. In case you get food poisoning and sue.’

  ‘It could bounce though, couldn’t it. It’s only because you’re posh. They got no idea really,’ Mrs Fingell, infuriating Jenny, persisted. ‘Strictly speaking, you just walked out then without paying. Catch them taking that sort of chance with people like me. Or people from the estate,’ the old lady snorted. Jenny heaved all the bags into the boot of the car and slammed it shut. Mrs Fingell waited to have the car door opened for her, still ranting on. ‘When it isn’t your sort of people, when it’s people like me and the estate, it’s called something quite different. It’s called shoplifting.’

  ‘Hang on, are we talking about the same Ben? My brother Ben? You snogged Ben?’ Daisy’s voice rose, and girls in the nearby lunch queue were staring with interest. Emma looked shifty, playing with her mashed potato, but couldn’t hide her grin. Daisy put her fork down and considered her lunch finished (school ravioli, too disgusting to eat anyway). Sophie was sitting next to Emma, smiling her confirmation that the awful tale was really, actually true: Emma was now going out with Daisy’s brother.

  ‘But he’s my brother! How gross!’ she exclaimed. ‘How could you?’ and then, getting her priorities sorted, added, ‘And why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Because I knew you’d react like this,’ Emma replied. ‘I know it must be hard to think of brothers as humans, but if you took a distant, real-life look at him, say when he’s with his mates, sort of mixed up in a group of them, he’s actually not at all bad looking. And he can snog,’ she said with undisguised lust. Daisy shuddered. She couldn’t even begin to contemplate her brother doing all that stuff with anyone, let alone her best friend. Somehow it was, well, indecent. The smell of school lunch and schoolgirls was making her feel queasy. ‘Anyway, what he told me, the important bit,’ Emma went on, hoping to get Daisy back into a better mood, ‘was that his friend Oliver really fancies you. He’s going to be at Sophie’s party on Saturday, isn’t he Sophe?’ she said, appealing for help from Sophie who had made a start on her treacle pudding, the dramatic revelation safely over.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Oliver’s coming, definitely,’ she confirmed. ‘So you’ve got to find a way of getting there, Dais. He was asking about you last weekend too.’ Just in time she stopped herself adding, ‘before he got off with Lucy.’

  Daisy wandered back to the counter and picked out the greenest apple. The hall was shrill with girlish voices that maddened her ears. She longed for the day when she could leave, desperate to escape after her GCSEs, and take her A-levels at the sixth form college. She knew all the statistics, her parents and their friends quoted them like some written-in-stone biblical text, all about how girls do so much better in a girls-only school. ‘Without the distractions,’ they always
added euphemistically, meaning boys. How much they didn’t know, Daisy thought. After all, what did they think the girls at school talked about and thought about every waking moment they were together? Boys distracted you whether they were actually there in person or not. Though she had to admit that it was probably easier in a physics class not to be in a school like the one Ben said Oliver’s brothers went to, where they gobbed on the floor all the time and called girls slags every time they asked or answered a question. But then if she and Ben were at the same school, maybe she wouldn’t see him as belonging to some kind of separate species with no right to be of any romantic interest to her closest friends. She comforted herself with remembering the wicked warmth that shone from Oliver’s dark eyes as he’d watched her on the hockey field.

  ‘Sorry Emma,’ Daisy said, sliding back into her seat and trying out a smile ‘It’s just a bit of a shock. No wonder Ben’s been going round with such a huge grin on his face the last couple of days.’

  ‘Not just his grin that’s been huge, I should think,’ Sophie tittered, with a lascivious smirk.

  ‘Oh please, spare me that,’ Daisy groaned, pushed beyond her limit. She needed time to get used to the idea of Ben, awkward, flailing-limbed, blushing Ben, as an object of desire. Probably, she thought, a lifetime.

  ‘It’s a bit short notice I know,’ Carol was saying to Jenny on the Collins’s doorstep. ‘And I’m sorry. But we thought it was time for a quick meeting, just to recap, as it were. Do try and come.’ Jenny floundered for an excuse and couldn’t find one. She thought of inventing an emergency pre-exam pupil, but couldn’t trust the Mathiesons not to organize a keeping-watch rota for the entire evening to check her story, take photos and then challenge her later. ‘Your friend Sue is coming,’ Carol persuaded, tightening her lips automatically at the thought of Sue’s capacity for sherry-consumption.

  ‘Can’t you just send a newsletter round?’ Jenny suggested, wondering suddenly why there hadn’t been a daily report, published to almost professional standard on Paul’s attic computer.

  ‘Oh no, that wouldn’t do. We need the personal input, and suggestions from the floor,’ Carol insisted. She licked the end of her pencil (which was tied with lavender ribbon to the top of her clipboard) and ticked off Jenny’s name on her list. ‘I’ll put you down for a yes then,’ she stated, and was half-way to the gate, clacking busily on her little heels, before Jenny could argue. As she shut the front door, surprised not to have been issued with a secret password for the evening’s meeting, she heard next door’s gate (resting actor) open, and felt sympathy for her unseen neighbour.

  ‘I’ll come with you tonight if you like,’ Ben announced casually, sauntering down the stairs. ‘Not much homework, and it’s something to do.’

  Jenny looked at him, suspiciously. ‘It won’t be any fun, only the neighbours. Won’t you be bored?’ She imagined Ben, fed up and growing more and more horizontal, slumped in one of Carol’s armchairs. He’d pick at the fringing on a cushion, and probably unravel it. Carol would frown and hiss at him and he’d be miles away, dreaming and fidgeting . . .

  ‘No, ‘s’ OK, I’ll just come and see what it’s like,’ he mumbled, ambling back up the stairs.

  ‘Do you think it’s something we’ve done? It’s like being back at school, summoned to see the Head,’ Sue whispered to Jenny as they gathered in the Mathiesons’ sitting-room later. ‘And where is everybody?’

  It wasn’t as good a turn-out as the first meeting had been, Jenny had to admit. Fiona Pemberton had apparently sent a note of apology, pleading a parents’ evening. She hadn’t mentioned George, who was now sitting on the arm of Carol’s leather sofa smiling furtively across at Jenny and softly patting the cushion next to him in an inviting way that made her want to sit anywhere but there. Mrs Fingell was there too, smiling her witchy, knowing smile at no-one in particular from the cosiest armchair by the drinks cabinet. The resting actor and some BBC wives were gathered by the French windows, chatting about the best way to prune rambling roses, so far drinkless and wondering what to do with their hands. A power-dressed young couple looked repeatedly at their watches. Jenny waved to Mrs Fingell and smiled a greeting to the actor, then said to Sue, ‘Novelty’s worn off. There’s not really anything new to hear. Everyone’s got their window stickers and fitted their burglar locks. Probably can’t think what else they’re supposed to do. I certainly can’t.’

  ‘Oh look,’ said Sue with interest, peering out of the window. ‘Here comes Harvey and no Laura. Perhaps he’d like to come for a drink after.’

  ‘Sue, you can’t, not Harvey,’ Jenny warned. ‘Too close to home, and Laura’s pregnant again.’ She pulled her firmly away from the lace-frilled window and they both sat down, as close to the door as they could for a possible quick getaway. A smell of freshly cooked sausage rolls wafted temptingly from the kitchen.

  ‘Listen, if you’re talking close to home,’ Sue retaliated, pointing past Jenny towards the hallway, ‘Check out your Ben, then tell me, hand on heart that he always, but always volunteers to help in the kitchen . . .’

  Jenny got up, crept to the open door and looked. Through Carol’s kitchen door she could see the highly unusual sight of Ben loading glasses on to a tray. Carol was close to him, murmuring instructions, and Ben, when he turned to face them, looked quite flushed. The glasses tinkled dangerously as he carried them extra-carefully into the sitting-room and managed to put the tray on the coffee table without Carol’s entire crystal collection sliding to the floor.

  ‘Drink everyone?’ Paul said, waving the sherry bottle. ‘And then we’ll start.’

  Everyone sat, attentive as a schoolroom, waiting for Paul to put them in the picture. Ben lounged on the floor in a corner from which he had an uninterrupted view across to the tan sofa on which Carol was sitting. Hoping his mother (or worse, Sue) wouldn’t notice, he stared blissfully at Carol, whose skirt was pulled tightly across her thighs so he could gaze up towards a glimpsed triangular pennant of white underwear. He hoped, quite desperately, that no-one would ask him to go and fetch something from the kitchen. He didn’t think he’d be able to walk.

  ‘Now the problem is,’ Paul was saying, pacing about the room importantly and waving his orange Neighbourhood Watch brochure, ‘that no-one is doing any reporting in.’ There was a collective sighing and shuffling. Harvey reached across to the table and helped himself to a pair of sausage rolls, and Mrs Fingell could be heard noisily crunching nuts. No-one wanted to spend the evening being told off. ‘The Close has been full of strangers for the past few weeks, what with film crews and all.’ Everyone looked at Harvey, most with sympathy. ‘And various cars have been parked here that we all know don’t belong to any residents.’

  ‘What exactly are we supposed to do about that, though, Paul?’ Jenny chipped in, eager for him to get to the point. ‘Surely it isn’t anyone’s business who we all choose to have visiting us?’

  ‘Well, the point is to be alert.’ Paul whirled round and pointed his brochure at her menacingly. ‘Take down car numbers, check who goes into which house, and whether they come out again and maybe try another door. That kind of thing. They could be burglars, checking for regularly absent householders.’

  ‘Or they could be Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ Harvey added as he reached across to the table and casually topped up his drink.

  ‘Or bailiffs,’ Sue said passing her glass across so he could refill that too.

  Jenny felt twitchy, uncomfortable, as if every aspect of her personal life was under constant scrutiny. It was horribly like being a teenager again, with her mother checking and snooping on her every move, and marauding schoolmistresses stalking the town every lunchtime for out-of-bounds sixth formers illicitly meeting their boyfriends.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, decisively, ‘I think I’m going to opt out, if you don’t mind. I find the idea that every visitor to my house is going to have their description and car number logged, like some kind of police state, horribly intrusive, just not on.
On balance I think I’d rather be burgled.’

  ‘Me too,’ Mrs Fingell added, emphatically banging her walking stick on the carpet. Hostility gathered, as the group clung to the remains of its privacy.

  ‘But what does it matter if you’ve got nothing to hide?’ Carol peered savagely into Jenny’s face, as if any second she would try to gouge out a deadly secret. Jenny flattened herself against the back of the chair, alarmed.

  ‘Oh, now come on, everyone. No-one wants to spy, just to look after each other. It’s caring, not snooping.’ Paul tried his best to pacify them, waving his arms around in his version of an all-embracing manner.

  ‘It’s horrendous,’ Jenny persisted, slightly diverted by the fact that Ben was going dreadfully pink. Surely he agreed with her? This time it couldn’t be that she embarrassed him. She got up and groped for her handbag down the side of the chair. Perhaps she should employ Paul and Carol as private detectives, get them to check up on Alan and what he was up to – that would keep their minds off non-existent crime in the Close.

  ‘Er, sit down for one more minute, please Jenny.’ Paul took hold of her arm and pushed her gently back down into the chair. ‘It’s not just car numbers and things. What I mean is that people aren’t noticing when things are unusual. Like when you climbed over our gate to get the cat.’