Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jenny asked Daisy. ‘Won’t you be happy to get your freedom back? I don’t even mind paying you for tomorrow, either.’

  Polly was staring backwards and forwards at the two girls, wondering what was going on, and piecing together some remembered bits of knowledge that seemed to start with the sight of Daisy climbing out of her bedroom window. She nudged Harriet and said, ‘Mind if we skip pudding? We’re just going out in the garden for a bit.’

  ‘But it’s dark now. Whatever do you want to go out there for?’ Alan asked her.

  ‘Oh nothing, just looking around. We’ll take a torch,’ she told him, busily not looking at him, but grabbing Harriet’s barely-finished plate and making unusually quickly for the dishwasher. She scuttled about the kitchen, pulling Harriet after her, grabbing wellingtons and coats and hissing ‘Hurry up!’ at her friend.

  ‘Wanted to get out of clearing the table I expect,’ Jenny said as she piled up plates, and for once she was prepared to be indulgent. ‘Just leave them for tonight,’ she told Daisy and Ben, ‘I’ll do them. I expect you’ve got things you want to be doing.’

  On behalf of Ben and Emma, Daisy blushed furiously at Jenny’s heavy-handed tact, and snarling ungraciously, dragged Emma towards the stairs so that her hair-dyeing could be finished.

  ‘Now what have I said?’ Jenny asked Alan.

  ‘No idea, thought you were doing them a favour actually. Now about dinner tomorrow night . . .’ he was saying, closing in for a hug. Jenny was just wondering if he’d notice how tense her body was when the phone rang. ‘Bugger,’ he said, kissing Jenny’s ear and reaching across to take the call.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said again as he hung up a few minutes later.

  ‘What’s up? Work problems?’ she asked. He looked nervous, she thought, shifty even, though she tried not to think it. It was all too exhausting, trying not to interpret every one of his gestures and expressions. No-one should have to do that much scrutiny, or be subjected to it.

  ‘Tomorrow night. Dinner’s on, if you want to come, but not just the two of us I’m afraid. Senior partner thinks we should get together before Monday and have a chat about the financial situation. Suggested dinner out at some place out near Watford. More convenient for him than us, but then he’s paying.’

  ‘Dinner on the company won’t help its cash flow,’ Jenny commented. ‘Why can’t you just have a meeting early on Monday at the office?’

  ‘Walls have ears. Some of them electronic,’ he said mysteriously, making Jenny think for a moment that the place must be bugged, like an old Eastern Bloc embassy. ‘All those fancy phone systems and computer stuff. Not to mention the cleaning lady who knows what’s going on before the rest of us do. And she’s about as good at keeping secrets as a tabloid journalist.’ He looked morose, his good-intention family feelings slipping away. Who else would be at the dinner, he wondered? Not Serena, he prayed – though she was Bernard’s niece and it was a possibility.

  As if Jenny was reading his mind she asked casually, ‘And who else is going to be there? Bernard’s wife, Monica, isn’t it? Any others from the staff?’ she wasn’t looking at him, folding the tea towel with more care than she ever had before, draping it carefully over the Aga rail as if it was a precious cashmere sweater.

  ‘Don’t know. Sorry, I didn’t think to ask,’ Alan said, stacking glasses into the dishwasher, wondering if he was imagining any other questions unasked and unanswered between them. ‘Anyway, you like Monica, don’t you? I’m sure it won’t be so bad. Sorry, though, I did intend it to be just the two of us, but you know what work has been like lately.’

  Jenny did know, all those awful bank statements. She also knew that Bernard’s wife Monica, a matronly and energetic chairwoman (no man, person, or simply ‘chair’ titles for her) of her local Townswomen’s Guild, would exhaust her within half-an-hour with an intimidating list of her latest Good Works and charity events. She would have to spend the entire evening being impressed.

  ‘Got any candles?’ Polly and Harriet burst excitedly in through the back door, gasping plumes of cool, fresh air.

  ‘Yes, cupboard under the stairs. Take the power-cut supply,’ Jenny told them, watching them scatter mud flakes all over the wooden floor, and not particularly caring. She rinsed out the sink and went about inventing a couple of sponsored runs and a charity bike ride with which to do her equal share of impressing, and made up her mind to have quite a lot of anaesthetizing alcohol.

  ‘Now what are they up to?’ Paul was asking himself up in the attic. Carol wanted to watch a video of Oklahoma! the version recently produced by the local operatic society, so he felt banished from the sitting-room and was taking refuge with his telescope. He’d given the All-Clear to the rest of the garden that he could see, and it seemed to be all quiet, too, up at the Tennis Club and on as much as he could see of the estate. But the Collins’s back garden was full of the kind of torchlight activity that only usually went with Bonfire Night. There was a flickering circle of what looked suspiciously like candlelight too. If only he could see what they were up to, and who was actually up to it. He opened the window and let in an unwelcome blast of chill air. He listened carefully, head sideways like a budgie, ear cocked for clues. There was traffic roaring from the main road and some loud car-music from the estate as usual (he sometimes thought that a fast car was considered a viable party venue for those people), but not much else. He was startled by a cat or a fox bashing at one of Mrs Fingell’s many dustbins and hit his head on the window catch trying to crane further out. Suddenly the still air was filled with blood-curdling shrieks of terror. The torchlight in the Collins’s garden was waving chaotically up and down and racing for their back door. Most of the candlelight went out, kicked over in the rush probably, he imagined. Whatever Satanic rites that unruly family had been practising, it served them right, felt Paul, they’d obviously called up evil spirits and frightened themselves half to death. He took the relevant file down from the shelf and filled in yet another entry for number 14. Theirs was the fattest and most frustrating file he’d got, stuffed with dates and dealings but nothing more positive than a sure as hell hunch that something was going on.

  Alan thought the phrase ‘bats out of hell’ didn’t seem inappropriate as the two girls came like whirlwinds crashing in through the back door.

  ‘Polly! Tell me! What’s happened, who’s out there?’ Jenny tried to peel the shrieking, clinging child from her neck. Harriet looked calmer but was alarmingly sick-looking and grizzling woefully.

  ‘Come on girls,’ Alan entreated them gently, ‘tell us what happened out there.’ He went and stood by the back door, peering out into the bleak darkness for some sort of clue. One or two of the candles still fluttered unreliably in the dark and he thought, but couldn’t be sure, that some of the garden tools were littered across the lawn. ‘I’ll go and have a look,’ he told Jenny, sounding more brave than he felt. Their screams had been truly blood-freezing.

  ‘I think they’ve seen something. Or someone,’ Jenny whispered, gathering the pair of trembling children into her arms.

  ‘He’s in there! He wasn’t supposed to be!’ Polly whimpered, and Jenny felt the back of her neck tingle. Someone in the garden? Daring to spy, or chasing her child? Maybe there was a point to Neighbourhood Watch after all, unless, and she felt slightly sick, there was a Neighbour out there, doing some off-the-records unofficial Watching.

  ‘Daisy! Take care of Polly a moment will you?’ she yelled up the stairs. ‘And ask Ben to come down too please!’ Sensing emergency in her voice, Daisy, Emma and Ben clattered immediately down the stairs, Daisy swearing slightly and dripping blue hair dye onto a pink towel. Leaving Daisy and Emma to comfort the sobbing Polly and quaking Harriet, Ben, Alan and Jenny set off into the garden with torches and collective courage.

  ‘Can’t see anything. What did they say it was?’ Ben asked. Jenny got hold of Alan’s hand, preparing herself against the moment when the mad axeman leapt out of the viburn
um. The shed door banged open in a sharp breeze and Jenny gasped.

  ‘Oh God, look what they’ve been doing!’ she said suddenly, shining her torch on to the vegetable patch. Spades had been abandoned on the ground next to the strawberry bed and heaps of earth were dug out and piled loosely around. She giggled, slightly hysterically. ‘The little ghouls have been digging up that poor cat!’

  ‘Looks like they found him, and spooked themselves to bits,’ Alan said, shining his torch into the hole and pulling a rather sickened face. ‘Or what’s left of him anyway. You go in and take care of them, and we’ll fill this in again before the foxes get him.’ In what was left of the candlelight, Alan looked cold and shivery and Jenny, once again, thought of the unfairness of women foisting the awful jobs on to men.

  ‘No, Ben can go, I’ll help you,’ she said softly, picking up a spade. ‘After all,’ she told him grinning, ‘I’m the one who’s had practice at this lately!’

  ‘Too late now, I suppose, to check if this cat had an identification disc?’ he said, looking closely at Jenny and willing her to agree that it was.

  Jenny hesitated; if she’d truly started to hate him, she could insist he dug up the cat and had a look. She hoped she’d never loathe him that much. ‘Definitely too late,’ she told him, shovelling resolutely and fast.

  ‘You’re so stupid Polly! Why did you do it?’ Daisy and Emma doing their reluctant bit to take care of the little girls, had made them rush back up to the bathroom with them so that Daisy’s blue hair dye wouldn’t be ruined. Harriet and Polly sat forlornly on the landing being shouted at. ‘AND I’ve got to babysit you tomorrow. That’s not fair. You’d better do everything, and I mean everything, that I tell you.’

  She started hissing furiously at Emma, Polly craned her neck to hear what she said over the noise of the shower. ‘What am I going to do now? It’s wrecked, completely wrecked my brilliant plan! I’m trapped with little Miss Macabre here, with the best party of the whole year happening without me just a mile away!’

  Oklahoma! was still blaring away downstairs; Paul could hear it two flights away. If the twins had the TV on that loud Carol would have had something to say. He could just picture her now, down there on the sofa, feet up and the paper in the box of All Gold crackling as she reached in blindly for one chocolate after another. Sporty people, he could see down the telescope, were leaving the Tennis Club. It was getting late, and even from this far away he could hear car doors being thoughtlessly slammed. A Range Rover glided smoothly into the Close and cruised along towards him. As the lights from the house mingled with the headlights on the car he could see the driver as she inconsiderately reversed into his drive to turn back down the Close. It was the big blonde woman with hair like tiger stripes, who was always doing that – usually in the morning when she picked up Polly. One day he’d be down there in the hall and catch her at it, crunching carelessly across the pavement right on to his gravel. Where was she going?

  Focusing on the Collins’s garden once more, he could see shadowy figures shuffling about, bending and moving and looking ridiculously (for the time of night) as if they were gardening. Two of them, Paul counted, and watched them digging and working together. If it was anywhere but in the Close, he’d have suspected they were burying a body. Perhaps Jenny hadn’t been joking about do-it-yourself funerals after all, though he was sure even she, odd as she was, wouldn’t hold a burial without the proper sort of ceremony (drinks, bits to eat, flowers) that went with it. It was far more likely she’d been up to the Garden Centre and bought some shrub that would flourish best if planted out on a waxing moon.

  ‘What are they up to?’ he asked the night air, his eyes sore from the strain of peering. Now they looked like they were doing something romantic, all wrapped round each other. Had to be the teenagers, he thought, turning to get the Collins file down again and put the Range Rover woman into it. Grown-ups never do things like that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘If you want coffee or tea, I hope you don’t mind helping yourself. I’m a bit stuck, as you can see,’ Jenny said to Sue who came strolling in through the back door. Jenny, on that Saturday morning, was aware that she looked perfectly ridiculous, perched at the kitchen table listening to Loose Ends and reading the paper with each elbow squished into half a scooped-out lemon. She had a million and one other weekend things to do, starting with the clearing up of the ruined strawberry bed and the planting out of a batch of campanulas. Lazily she settled her arms deeper into the lemons. ‘The things we do to be beautiful. Can’t possibly be seen out with crumpled elbows,’ she sighed, thanking her stars that Alan, in spite of knowing he was dining out that night, had been unable to resist going out for his usual social round of food shopping.

  ‘Why don’t you just wear something with long sleeves?’ Sue suggested with simple logic, settling herself opposite Jenny and stealing half the newspaper.

  ‘I thought of that, but I’ve got that lovely black velvet thing with the short, tight sleeves, not too short that they show the flabby armtops, but somehow thin-making. Why on earth do elbows go?’ Jenny asked her. ‘I can see that chins and bums will drop and expand with use and age, but how worn-out and ancient-looking can an elbow get? What does it do for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I can think of some men whose elbows must be just about corrugated with overuse,’ Sue muttered darkly. ‘The ones I’ve tended to know, anyway. And talking of men . . .’ she flung the paper down hard for dramatic emphasis, ‘guess what?’

  Jenny looked suspiciously at the vibrant, I-know-a-secret face, and groaned at her friend. ‘Oh not again Sue,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve met another Mr Wrong!’

  ‘No. Well yes!’ Sue was beaming like a lovestruck teenager. ‘Only he’s Mr Right, this time I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Sue, you’re always sure of it, every single time!’ Jenny laughed and shifted and dislodged the left lemon, sending it skidding to the floor. ‘Bloody thing.’ She peered round at the back of her arm. ‘Look at this, it’s as pink and rough as a ninety-year-old charlady’s kneecap. Do you think lemons are really any use?’

  ‘Can’t tell you. All the magazines say so, though. Like cucumber for puffy eyelids. You could lie around all day looking like a glass of Pimms and see if it makes any difference.’

  ‘I’m beginning to suspect it’s just that lemons are the right shape to fit elbows, just as cucumbers are the right shape for eyes, and avocado is the right texture for mashing up and slapping on your face. We should probably have it all the other way round for it to work.’

  ‘No, you’re way off the mark.’ Sue scrabbled in her bag for a cigarette. ‘You’re supposed to have a go at all these natural remedies, the ones they dig out every six months or so for the makeover pages, and then after you’ve made a horrible mess and your nails are full of pith and pips, and you smell like a leftover salad, you can’t wait to rush out and spend a fortune on the kind of cosmetics that simply melt into your grateful skin.’

  ‘Not me. Not after that cellulite stuff. I’m permanently cynical about it all now. I’d like to claim I’m no longer a cosmetics victim, but if that were true I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this. It’s getting harder and harder to know what I should wear, too. I wish there was some way of being absolutely sure what I look good in, so I wouldn’t make expensive mistakes,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Well don’t ask a man, whatever you do,’ Sue advised. ‘Last one I asked what I looked best in said “A darkened room”. I divorced him. Well I had to, after that, didn’t I?’

  Jenny started giggling, glad that she wasn’t also wearing a face pack that would now be cracked like an old plate. ‘Anyway, tell me about Him, who is he, where did you meet him, and what makes him different from the rest of your collection?’

  Sue took her time inhaling and thinking, and said, ‘Well, he’s certainly different, not local, just someone I met by chance.’ She waited, avoiding Jenny’s questioning eye and staring at the pots of herbs on the window-sill
, as if deciding how much she should be revealing. Jenny was just considering this unusual reticence when Daisy walked in.

  ‘God, Mum, what are you doing?’ she said, slouching into the kitchen in Jenny’s cream satin dressing-gown and making straight for the kettle.

  ‘Good morning Sue, how nice to see you. Isn’t that how it goes?’ Sue reminded her.

  ‘Sorry Sue. How are you?’ Daisy conceded.

  ‘I’m extremely fine thanks, and I quite like your blue bits of hair, but not an awful lot,’ Sue replied. Jenny drew a sharp intake of breath, waiting for Daisy to stamp out of the room or say something fearsomely rude.

  ‘T’isn’t permanent, it’s just for a, er, a laugh for a while,’ she said instead.

  What’s she up to? was Jenny’s immediate thought. The predicted reaction should have been for Daisy to scowl and snarl, ‘well sorree’ with as much heavy sarcasm as she could dredge up and then stamp around the kitchen, pointedly making a drink only for herself. From the activity around the cupboards and the fluttering of tea bags all over the floor it rather looked like Daisy was making a rare pot of tea for the whole household. I hope she’s not going to ask me a favour, Jenny thought warily, trying to guess what it might be. Money? A friend to sleep over? Both of those could probably be accommodated, just so long as it wasn’t the loan of tonight’s black dress. But then, she reminded herself, Daisy wasn’t going anywhere that night.

  It wasn’t any use thinking of appealing to Ben. He wouldn’t be able to come up with a solution. He was going to Sophie’s party whatever happened, he and Emma, playing at sick-making cosy couples. Daisy took her tea back up to her room and wondered how she could iron her dark blue dress with the gold stars on it without arousing suspicion. ‘You never iron anything! What’s going on?’ would be the instant reaction of her mother, who, with her trouble-seeking radar, would suspect the worst and get Securicor in to guard her for the night. Or worse still, stay in and keep watch herself. One teeny crime, one tidgy mistake, and Jenny was turned instantly into the kind of mother that everyone else at school had. It just wasn’t fair. Daisy collected together her new Senseless Things tape, a couple of joss sticks in a wine bottle and her Happy Hippy bath gel and went into the bathroom to make a start on the day-long process of getting ready to go out. She prayed it would not be for nothing.