Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  ‘’Course he is. Heart attack I should think, a bit drunk and a lot over-stimulated. All he can expect at his age.’ Mrs Fingell sniffed disapprovingly, even though George must have been quite a bit younger than her. She took off her coat and rolled up the sleeves of her best cardigan like an old-fashioned hospital matron about to tackle a challenging enema, and approached George. Jenny closed her eyes and shuddered, avoiding the sight of Mrs Fingell attempting to tuck George’s penis neatly back into his trousers. ‘Damn, he’s got it stuck. No wonder he snuffed it, that zip must have nipped like a ferret,’ she said. Jenny half-opened her eyes and met the sight of her neighbour rather brutally waggling the piece of pink flesh and battling with the stuck zip. ‘Look at that! Completely trapped. Not much we can do about that, we’ll have to leave it. Or cut it off,’ she suggested hopefully, looking at Jenny with a grin of gleeful malevolence.

  Jenny started to come to her senses. ‘We can’t do that, and we can’t really leave him here. Poor old soul, who’d want to be found looking like that? And God, imagine what everyone will think has been going on!’ The warmth flooded back to her face and she sat down heavily on one of the cane chairs. ‘And Fiona! She wouldn’t be able to think anything but the worst! I refuse to have anyone believe that I’ve been having an affair with George!’ Jenny got up and paced up and down the small room. ‘Perhaps we could move him. In the long run it’ll be kinder for everyone. It’s probably illegal though. Will you help me?’ she pleaded urgently with Mrs Fingell.

  ‘’Course I will,’ Mrs Fingell replied, accepting a hand up from the floor and adjusting her incongruously cheerful scarlet hat. ‘I know,’ she said, tapping her temple to help the thought out, ‘if we can get him across the road and leave him behind his lilac tree, everyone will think he dropped dead having a pee in his own garden. What do you think of that?’ Mrs Fingell looked pleased with herself, but Jenny could see flaws.

  ‘But why would he have to pee in his garden. Wouldn’t he have a door key?’

  Mrs Fingell cackled. ‘You know Fiona Pemberton as well as I do dear, George isn’t allowed a key, ‘cept in emergencies.’

  ‘We’ll have to hurry,’ Jenny said. ‘Alan will be round looking for me, it doesn’t take long to giftwrap a set of table linen.’ Then she started to realize the impossibility of the project, her voice rising with panic. ‘How on earth can we do this? Someone’s bound to see us!’

  ‘No they’re not. They’re all getting pissed at the wedding party and that’s safely up at the end of the road. I’ll get one of the trolleys from my garden. Hang on here a sec and get that rug up while you’re waiting. Be just right to wrap him in.’ Mrs Fingell, having issued her orders and taken command, walked back through the hallway, at a far brisker and stronger pace than usual. Jenny felt desperate to follow her, and trailed after her into the hall to find some comfortable shoes. Cowardly, and horrified at being left alone with the fish-eyed corpse, she wanted to go and snuggle up against the Aga for comfort, but instead had to move the cane chairs and table into the far corner of the conservatory to get at the big cream rug. She sidled past George, avoiding his fixed gaze, and then, unable to stand it, she went back to a drawer in the kitchen and covered his face with a freshly ironed tea towel depicting various Cornish harbours.

  Luckily, Mrs Fingell’s garden nearly always contained at least one abandoned supermarket trolley. Carol Mathieson was always tut-tutting about them. The one she manoeuvred up Jenny’s garden path had a full set of working wheels and was only slightly bent around the handle. It would do very well. Back inside the house, she and Jenny pulled George down from the sofa and arranged him across the end of the rug before rolling him up firmly. Jenny bit her lip to stop herself feeling sick, and tied string tightly round the ends of the rug to stop him from sliding out. The parcel looked like a flaccid and badly stuffed uncooked pastry Christmas cracker, the sort of thing that only Delia Smith can make successfully.

  ‘Lucky he isn’t very tall. Or wasn’t, I should say,’ Mrs Fingell puffed as they loaded George onto the trolley. ‘Fits nicely.’ She stopped for a breather, leaning on the wall and sighing lustily. ‘I always liked that rug.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ Jenny told her immediately, grateful that she wouldn’t have to live with it and be reminded of this awful day for ever more. How she’d explain its absence to Alan didn’t even begin to rate as a problem. Getting George’s cooling corpse unseen across the road did, however, and as the two women guided their heavy, clanking load along the pavement, Jenny wished and wished that supermarkets had understood the need for silent rubber tyres on their trolleys.

  ‘What’ve you got in there then? Cleopatra?’ Jenny froze, terrified, as Paul Mathieson, his vast Nikon suspended importantly round his neck, stalked down the middle of the road towards them from his own house.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, just transporting a body or two,’ Mrs Fingell told him. Jenny felt herself gasp involuntarily. Mrs Fingell winked. ‘And where are you going with that great thing?’ she asked Paul, nodding towards the camera.

  ‘Oh just going to take some impromptu photos at the party. Official photographers are all very well for the formal stuff, but you can’t beat the ones taken by a competent friend; more natural,’ he said, proudly stroking the lens of his camera. Then he raised it to his eye. ‘Want me to take one of you two? Good light out here . . .’

  ‘No!’ Jenny yelled, putting her hand up in front of her face melodramatically, then recollected herself. ‘I mean, don’t waste it on us here, save it for the party. We’ll be back there in a few minutes, soon as we’ve delivered the rug. Really good idea about the photos, I’ll look forward to seeing them; we all will,’ she flattered him, knowing his mind’s eye was already looking ahead to an evening of neighbourly photo-viewing, complete with sherry and Carol’s best finger-buffet. She prayed he wouldn’t offer to lend a hand with the rug, wouldn’t take over hauling it into Mrs Fingell’s sitting-room and helpfully insist on unrolling George Pemberton’s mortal remains all over the floor. Vanity, as Jenny had gambled, easily got the better of Paul and he eagerly strode off along the Close back to the party. ‘Whyever did you say that about transporting bodies?’ Jenny gasped as they struggled on to the opposite pavement and along towards the Pemberton garden.

  Mrs Fingell sniggered, irreverently. ‘I’ve always found,’ she said, ‘that when things are at their worst, if you just tell people the absolute truth they will never believe you. They don’t want to.’

  ‘Well, let’s just hope he doesn’t look back,’ Jenny replied, but he didn’t.

  The really hard bit, as it turned out, was going back to the party and acting as if nothing had happened. Jenny suddenly wished, as she rejoined the celebrations, stuck a social smile on her face and delivered the wedding present, that she hadn’t panicked and had simply left George where he had fallen and phoned for an ambulance. She could see that the adventure had made Mrs Fingell quite jaunty, and dreaded what truths she might try testing on everyone after a glass or three of champagne.

  ‘Of course, you know what they say, don’t you love,’ Jenny overheard her confiding loudly to Carol Mathieson. ‘Red hat, no drawers!’ Carol was looking in horror at the old lady’s scarlet hat and blushing vividly as Mrs Fingell winked broadly at her.

  Fiona Pemberton, securely unaware that she was now a widow, had got Daisy trapped against a fence and was talking to her in strong terms about her mock GCSEs. Jenny didn’t have to hear every word to know that some of them consisted of ‘important not to slacken off at this stage’ and ‘thorough revision now means less ground to cover later.’ Nor did she have any doubts that the accompanying words in Daisy’s mind were any different from ‘Sod off you old bat, leave me alone.’ Poor Fiona, Jenny allowed herself to think, surely she’ll miss having the daft old man to boss around? Or would she celebrate, indulging in uncharacteristic frivolity, perhaps spending the long Easter holidays taking an extravagant cruise in the Caribbean and saucily plaguing the life out o
f gay young pursers?

  No-one had noticed how much Ben had drunk. He’d lost count, accepting and losing track of glasses of champagne as trays came round and were offered. It was a noisy, busy party and the first one at which he hadn’t, as neither child nor adult, felt hugely out of place. Usually when he was dragged along to this sort of thing, he found himself wishing he was still Polly’s age and able to dash off and play daft games with any other available child. Adults were stiffly polite to each other and talked about education, au pairs, houses, the awfulness of Nassau and the best route to Provence, and any other teenagers usually skulked in corners as shyly as he did. This time, though, he was sparkling, witty even; some of the younger Welsh girls were laughing with, not at, him. He put that down to his success with Emma. If it wasn’t for Polly’s abrupt interruption, he’d have definitely, easily, he felt, got to what Oliver called third base with Emma. He felt almost as good as if he actually had, and there’d be other times, now they were actually seeing each other.

  Bravely, buoyed up by the success of a joke-telling session with some of Sue’s new in-laws, Ben stopped in the kitchen to chat to Carol Mathieson. ‘You like jokes? Here’s one,’ he said to her. She smiled, because Ben was a nice boy deep down, she was sure of that. ‘Come out here and I’ll tell you,’ he said, emboldened by her smile and by the inflaming fact that her pearly silk blouse had enough buttons undone to show the edge of a pristine white, untrimmed, sensible bra. Carol followed him to the hallway, prepared to be daring as it was a party, and secretly a bit flattered that a good-looking teenage boy should seek her out.

  Ben propped himself up against the stair-rail and leaned towards Carol. ‘What’s the difference between a clitoris and a pub?’ he whispered intimately into her ear. His face could feel the air whistle past him as Carol’s shocked head whirled round to face him.

  ‘What did you say?’ she shrieked at him. ‘No, don’t repeat it! Please!’ she ordered as Ben opened his mouth to say it again. He’d shocked her, he realized, which he had to admit was almost as exciting as the white bra.

  ‘It’s only that men can always find their way to the pub,’ he finished feebly, hoping that at least now she’d see the funny side. She didn’t. What, he wondered was wrong? The Welsh girls had laughed like drains. He thought drunkenly about the words of the joke, perhaps he’d said it wrong. He knew it would come over better from a woman, but the idea of him telling it was to distance himself from the sort of men who hadn’t a clue about women’s anatomy. Oliver had told him it couldn’t fail, but obviously it could, with knobs on. He was too drunk for intellectualizing. Carol was now tapping her suede foot and waiting for an apology. Or was she, he wondered. If she was really 100 per cent shocked, surely she’d be in the garden by now, complaining to Jenny about the appalling way she’d brought up her eldest child. Ben moved even closer to her, intending to manipulate her into the cloakroom. He pushed gently at the door thinking Carol could be slid inside the small room before she knew what was happening, but instead the sudden roar of flushing water could be heard and the door was abruptly opened from the other side. Ben cannoned past Carol into a man who, from his size, was probably a reserve Welsh prop forward, before ricocheting drunkenly down to rest on the floor, his head jammed beneath the wash basin and a pink fluffy towel draped over his hair like Laurence of Arabia. Hopeless, he thought, bloody-sodding-useless-stupid-dickhead. He’d give up the pursuit of older women, he resolved, as he unwound painfully from his undignified position on the floor. People were looking and tripping over his great long feet. He would stick to Emma from now on, this was obviously a lesson. However, staggering up awkwardly from the floor, he caught sight of Carol in the cloakroom mirror. She adjusted her hair, put a finger to the corner of her mouth to remove a lipstick smudge and then winked naughtily at her own reflection. When do you ever know the right stuff about women, he thought, trailing unhappily into Sue’s sitting-room to find a phone and ring Emma for comfort.

  It was time for Sue and David to leave for their honeymoon in Italy. Jenny was feeling the effects of both champagne and shock, and knew that it could only be a short time before someone made the dreadful discovery of George spreadeagled sadly beneath his lilac tree. At least it wasn’t raining. However awful George had been, Jenny could never have abandoned him under that tree to become pathetically sodden. Fiona Pemberton was still at the party, getting on extremely well in a corner with David’s Uncle Matthew, who was a headmaster in Cardiff. Jenny had heard various snatches of their conversation in which they were comparing National Curriculum problems and the desirability of bringing back the 11-plus. She seemed oblivious to the fact that her husband hadn’t returned. Perhaps she wasn’t expecting him, or perhaps she didn’t care. Either way, perhaps Uncle Matthew would be usefully available later to provide comfort for the new widow. Mrs Fingell was dozing in the dining-room, her feet up and her shoes off and her cherry red hat sitting on the table, complementing perfectly a bowl of scarlet tulips. I wonder what she’s dreaming about, Jenny wondered.

  In the garden, Polly sneaked up behind the stone bench and whispered delicately in the ear of Sean, Sue’s younger son, ‘Just now, when you put your baseball cap on, I realized I’d seen you recently in our house. You were the one in the leather,’ she told him.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ he asked her.

  ‘Because,’ she went on in a mocking sing-song voice, ‘I know what you were doing!’

  ‘No you don’t,’ he told her in a way that confirmed to Polly that she did.

  She went on, close enough for him to smell chocolate ice-cream on her breath, ‘Measuring out that stuff that they all smoke, and selling it to Ben. He sells it at school, I heard about it; everyone knows. But they don’t know where it comes from. Only I do, so far.’ She held out her grubby little hand and requested with her most charming smile, ‘Only a fiver.’ The boy, digging into his pocket for some of his ill-gotten earnings, sighed and knew he was beaten, just for now.

  The wedding guests filled the front driveway and overflowed the pavement into the road as Sue and David prepared to leave. Jenny hugged Sue and wished her luck and Sue threw her bouquet to one of David’s pretty young cousins while everyone cheered.

  ‘We’ll go home now, shall we?’ said Alan, putting a cosy arm round Jenny and squeezing her gently. It was getting so near to the moment she was dreading, the inevitable scream when someone, Fiona most likely, discovered the body behind the tree. The Welsh contingent and some of the boozier neighbours went back into the house, turned up the music and seemed set to party on till dawn. But to Jenny, it felt comforting to be walking home along the Close with her entire family around her, even with Polly and Daisy trailing behind and squabbling.

  ‘Did you get that message from the school?’ Ben asked her. ‘I forgot to tell you old Jeavons was going to call. Sorry.’

  ‘Who is old Jeavons? Please don’t tell me you’ve been expelled as well . . .’ she said anxiously, easily convinced now that it was always right to expect the worst.

  ‘No, no, he’s head of music. The other bloke they’ve got has gone and got a record deal so they need a new music teacher fast. They’d got your CV.’

  ‘Well that’s brilliant! I’ll give him a call first thing on Monday,’ Jenny said, just managing to stop herself from saying that thank goodness at least someone in the house would be employed. Alan didn’t need that kind of put-down, and in spite of everything, Jenny thought, didn’t deserve it. Something was going right, at last, she thought, feeling like smiling for the first time in hours.

  Ahead of them, still with his camera bumping heavily against his chest, Paul Mathieson proudly surveyed his territory. He walked, slightly unsteadily, along the middle of the quiet road, occasionally dashing to the gutter to collect stray litter, or peering over a fence to check whether a car door was actually lockedor not. Jenny felt her insides tighten painfully and she held her breath as Paul caught sight of a Snickers wrapper blown by the wind just into the Pemberto
ns’ lilac-framed gateway. Any second now, this would make Paul’s day. Quite soon, less than half-an-hour away, the Close would be full of flashing blue lights, ambulances, police, stripey ribbon cordons, a weeping widow needing sherry and comfort. The balconies on the estate across the main road would be lined with gleeful sightseers, and there’d be pictures in the local (perhaps even the national) papers. Beside Jenny, Alan watched Paul and chuckled deeply.

  ‘Look at the silly old sod, he’s like the Queen inspecting the troops. Can’t think why he bothers, nothing sinister ever happens in a place like this.’

  the end

  About the Author

  Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for becoming a writer. There were several false starts to her career: secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when she’d have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for the Summer.

  For more information on Judy Astley and her books, see her website at www.judyastley.com.

  Also by Judy Astley

  JUST FOR THE SUMMER

  SEVEN FOR A SECRET

  MUDDY WATERS