by Judy Astley
‘Perhaps he doesn’t want us to see him till the wedding,’ Greg suggested from the far side of the Sunday Times Home section, where he was reading a piece on one of his own designs, a semi-subterranean grass-and glass-covered dome for an old rock star, headlined ‘Going Underground’. ‘Perhaps he thinks it’s bad luck.’
‘I’m pretty certain that’s only the bride’s frock,’ Jay told him, making notes in her diary for a price quote for Charles’s flat.
‘Frock? Surely Delphine will be the one wearing the trousers,’ Greg said, laughing.
‘He says he’s on his way to Hong Kong,’ she read, picturing him stepping out of a cab in full-on pilot kit and tiptoeing up the path to push the note through the door. Perhaps it had been the very early hours, she thought, trying hard to feel inclined to forgive, in which case he’d hardly have liked to bang on the door and bluff his way in for a cup of coffee in the interests of making himself known to his future wife’s extended family.
‘Ah well.’ Greg murmured, turning to a page of Italianate villas for sale on a man-made Dubai island. ‘There you go. We can’t expect to compete with a 747 full of passengers revving up on the Heathrow runway.’
Jay wasn’t in a good mood. Those stupid anti-cellulite patches kept falling off every time she stretched. Barbara had said she was probably not applying them to her skin at the right tension, which made her think of knitting and how her mother had taught her to knit up little sample squares to try to get the stitches even. And then the night before, Greg had run his hand across her thigh, laughed and said it wasn’t the hottest form of turn-on, being in bed with someone who brought to mind Rory’s old World Cup sticker book. Besides, the patches were a constant stick-on reminder of her own disgraceful shallowness. What kind of mother, she asked herself in the guilty pre-dawn wakefulness, what kind of self-centred, terrible, worthless mother gives even those few moments of attention to fighting flab at the moment her beloved child is in the middle of a serious operation?
All the same, now Rory was well into recovery, Jay felt she could once more allow herself to feel grumpily certain that acquiring a more streamlined body should be easier than this. She wasn’t going to become obsessive about it (no, really, she wasn’t, she insisted to herself), but surely it wasn’t too much to ask to be back to a flab-free size 12 by the time Delphine and her pert curves, unfurrowed by childbearing, arrived.
She could just imagine her cousin looking her up and down and coming out with the single doomy word ‘matronly’. It brought to mind Win and Audrey, years before over cups of tea and pink wafer biscuits, gossiping that one friend or another had ‘let herself go’, somehow a worse crime against feminine propriety than going on the game or running off with the insurance man. Of course, it shouldn’t matter – and wasn’t it Mick Jagger (or his dad) who said it was all right to let yourself go, as long as you could get yourself back again? – Delphine was going to snigger anyway and call her Granny.
In intellectually rational moments it didn’t matter at all. But no-one’s existence is made up entirely of such moments, and somewhere on the reel of Jay’s Life-So-Far movie there was a scene from when she was fourteen and secretly passionate about her best friend Sandy’s older brother Neil. Neil was having a party, a full-scale, parents-out, free-house (if you didn’t count the au pair taking care of their seven-year-old sister Emmy), all-teen debauch session. He was a boys’ school pupil and the consequent shortfall of girls in his life meant that Sandy and Jay were invited, in a desultory, if-you-feel-like-it way, to join in and help balance the numbers. Neil had warned them to keep in the background and not get embarrassingly drunk or silly, or they’d be banished upstairs to Emmy’s room to watch TV with Birgitte.
Sandy and Jay got the silly bit over with during the afternoon in the cramped and cluttered half of the bedroom Jay shared with her sister April, who generously lent her a new lime green ra-ra skirt and blow-dried their hair for them. Delirious with anticipation of the night’s possibilities, they got themselves ready in a riot of shrieks and giggles with an all-stops-out orgy of face packs, manicuring, hair primping, clothes choosing and accessory selection. Neil and his friends were to be gob smacked by their glamour, their sophistication, their hitherto unsuspected sheer fanciability. The glorious teen world of snogging and boyfriends was about to begin. Only as they were leaving the house did it start to go wrong: Win turned up in need of a comfort chat with her sister and Delphine was handed over to Jay to keep her out of earshot of sensation-filled adult conversation.
‘But me and Sandy are going out!’ Jay had wailed to Audrey.
‘Sandy and I,’ her mother admonished automatically, then hustled the three girls out of the the door, insisting, ‘Just take her with you. She’ll be no trouble.’ In the background Jay could catch the sound of Win starting to be tearful. The words ‘other woman’ and ‘that bastard’ had been murmured more than once between the two sisters, and Delphine’s father was away a lot these days. ‘On Business’, as Delphine tended to explain, grandly, leaving whoever was listening to assume he was saving a major industrial conglomerate from certain ruin as he travelled the world on a private Concorde.
‘So at last you’re wearing a bra, Flatso,’ Delphine observed as they clattered down the road, Jay and Sandy tottering on their uncomfortable and new platform heels and Delphine in her favourite gold dance sandals that weren’t supposed to grace any surface other than polished parquet, ‘What is it, a 30 triple-A?’ Jay blushed and folded her arms across her body. Her new, first, bra and its embarrassing lack of contents were that night’s terrifying chinks in her confidence.
‘Take no notice. Just ignore. We’ll send her up to Emmy’s room and they can watch The Generation Game,’ Sandy muttered, furious at the imposed tagalong.
‘And who’s this?’ Neil leered at the interloper as soon as they arrived. Delphine, taller and precociously curvier than the two older girls, simpered at him and asked for a cigarette.
‘Definitely not, Delph,’ Jay said, then turned to Neil. ‘It’s OK, this is my very much younger cousin, only just thirteen. I’m babysitting her so she’s to go upstairs and hang out in Emmy’s playroom.’
‘I’ll get you for this.’ Delphine glowered as she was bundled up the stairs by Austrian Birgitte with a bottle of Coke and a monster bag of crisps. Jay took no notice – she was already caught up in the music and the possibilities. She soon forgot about Delphine and about the bra.
Much later, Jay was in the midsummer-warm candlelit garden sitting on a bench by the fish pond, satisfyingly spoilt for choice, boy-wise, being thigh to thigh between Neil and someone called Aaron who was stroking her bare arm from wrist to elbow. Around her were the heady mixed scents of cannabis and carnations and the sounds of couples groping their way into each other’s clothes beneath the rhododendrons. Jay grinned across at Sandy who sat on the grass entwined with her own quarry for the night, and wondered if the summer could get any better than this.
‘Jay. I’m bored, can we go now?’ Delphine appeared at her side, hands on hips and an expression of petulance on her face.
‘A bit later Delph, just half an hour, OK?’ Jay was feeling mellow and almost inclined to be generous. ‘Would you like a proper drink? Just the one? I promise I won’t tell Auntie Win.’ But it was too late for generosity – the earlier damage still told and Delphine glowered, distrusting. Then she sneezed ‘I’ve got hay fever,’ she whined. ‘I want to go now.’
‘Look, Delphine, I know it’s past your bedtime . . .’ Not a kind thing to say, Jay would be the first to admit, but she hadn’t asked to be lumbered with her cousin.
‘Any tissues out here? I keep sneezing!’ Delphine interrupted her. She was almost shouting, making a big play of searching around, picking up glasses from the table, putting them down again, sneezing with loud, exaggerated drama and generally making sure everyone was looking at her.
‘Be quiet, Delph, you’re being . . .’ Jay hissed.
‘Oh I know where there
’s some!’ shrieked Delphine, ‘Look everyone!’ Too late, Jay clutched her hands to her skinny-strapped low-cut top. Delphine, like a conjuror executing his grand finale trick, delved her hand down her cousin’s front and pulled out a wad of tissues. She then blew her nose loudly and pocketed Jay’s shaming bra stuffing, squealing in triumph, ‘So now can we go home?’ through the waves of surrounding laughter.
Well at least that was one thing that had changed, Jay thought now as she adjusted a cutting-in strap; these days it was genuine D-cup flesh that spilled over the top of her gorgeous lacy underwear, not Kleenex.
The grapefruit diet had been abandoned on grounds of paltry results and a growing certainty that it contained no magic calorie-zapping ingredient waiting to be discovered by the obese Western world. Instead, the Shape-Shake Jay had had in place of breakfast was lying heavily on her stomach. She felt as if she’d drunk a vat of wallpaper paste, vanilla-flavoured. It had been horribly sickly too, cloyed up with artificial sweetener as if all slimmers had such a deep-seated cake and chocolate habit that they could only be weaned away from it by a replacement that brought to mind the stickiest childhood sweets. This must be, she was sure, the dieter’s equivalent of methadone. She was supposed to have another one for lunch as well, and then something ‘proper’ in the evening, by which time the food would be fallen upon and scoffed down greedily as a well-deserved reward. Tonight’s ‘proper’ was going to be lamb roasted over shallots and rosemary-scattered potato slices, julienne carrots glazed in tarragon butter and courgettes pan-fried in olive oil with garlic, tomatoes and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. There would be a sauce made from the lamb juices, deglazed with port and with a smidgen of redcurrant jelly added. She knew this because she had bought all the ingredients the day before, just as the grapefruit was wavering out of favour and an hour before she’d stocked up on a bargain special offer of twenty-four assorted-flavour cans of Shape-Shake. It would be all right; she wouldn’t eat the pudding, even though it was a lush and sticky lemon tart, bought from Maison Blanc by Richmond station, and would take Olympic levels of will power to resist.
Rory was being discharged from hospital early that afternoon. It would be a relief to get him safely home and on his own again, away from that strange blonde girl who seemed to have grown roots by his bedside. He’d started to look a bit desperate. He’d only been in for a few days but there she was, this Tasha person, eternally sitting on the orange plastic chair by his bed, her legs crossed so high that he could hardly miss seeing right up to her knickers. The girl chewed gum with a ferocity that had made Greg say (fortunately only in the privacy of the glass bedroom) that he feared for any future boyfriends she might happen to fellate. She didn’t appear to need to make any conversation with her prey either, but sat bouncing and bobbing in rhythmic silence beneath a set of headphones. Rory looked as if he had barely a clue who she was. Perhaps he hadn’t. It was no good asking Ellie either. When asked, she’d just grunted, ‘That’s Tasha,’ and frowned (oh those embryonic wrinkles), discouraging any further questioning.
The state of the house wasn’t improving Jay’s mood. Even with Rory absent, the usual weekend tidal wave of free-roaming possessions found its way from rooms and cupboards and shelves. These items – books, coats, shoes, CDs, undealt-with mail, magazines and avoided homework – distributed themselves over every available surface and lay around like washed-up beach detritus, waiting for some reluctant inhabitant to be nagged into clearing up and putting it all somewhere else. The somewhere else too often turned out to be the bottom of the stairs, the bench in the hallway, the shelves in the sitting room (how did so many DVDs get themselves from shelf to floor? Did they jump down from their boxes in the night and take themselves for a spin on the rug?)
How did they do it, Jay wondered, these people whose homes appeared in magazines like Elle Decoration and Living Etc.? Did they have a skip outside the front door crammed with things they didn’t want the camera to see? All those photo-articles she gazed at so longingly, amazed and bemused that the immaculately tasteful Jeremys-and-Susannahs with their assorted under-six children (Polly, Dolly, Molly, Olly) existed without a single extraneous item or colour-uncoordinated Lego brick. There really were people out there, so she was led to believe, who successfully combined sticky infants and a moulting black Labrador with a shaggy cream rug and pale lavender suede curtains. She knew it was possible – some of the houses that Dishing the Dirt took care of looked as if no-one did any real living in them. Any children in such houses, she sometimes thought, must be kept in attic cages until they were old enough to heed the words ‘Don’t Touch’.
These were people who didn’t have fourteen half-used shampoo bottles on display in the bathroom (as did Rory and Ellie in the one they shared), whose baths had aromatherapy candles lined up seductively along the edge rather than a rusting selection of disposable razors, a paperback that had fallen in the water and a dented pink plastic duck of some weird sentimental value to Ellie. Where were these people’s newspapers? Their junk mail? Their ironing pile? The children’s luminous Barbie palace and lime green plastic pedal car? Why did their window ledges behind the kitchen sink always look so gleamingly bare, with possibly one carefully placed slender glass vase containing a single perfect lily?
If the No Clutter look was a sleek twenty-first-century wanna-have, Jay remembered that a certain order had been possible even in the country-pine kitchens of the early Nineties. Delphine’s domain had been crammed from floor to loft with dinkiness and faux-rustic knick-knacks. Baskets of dried flowers had topped every kitchen wall-cupboard. A row of floral-painted kettles had graced the kitchen window ledge. Eggs had nestled on the worktop in a frilled basket. An antique coffee grinder had stood to attention, shining and polished beside a stencilled mug tree. Jay didn’t remember so much decorative paraphernalia ever looking a mess. There’d been a lot of stuff, but Delphine’s house had never descended into the chaotic, lying-where-it-falls sort of state that her own house constantly veered towards. It was easy for her, Jay told herself. With only two adults trit-trotting neatly around the place, any fool could keep the domestic scenery in check. Throw in a few kids and all anarchy broke loose. Delphine hadn’t taken that little factor into account the day when, watching Jay trying to get a casserole into her own (decidedly neglected) oven while spooning baby rice into six-month-old Imogen, she’d come out with a classic ‘Surely it’s only a matter of a proper routine’ comment.
Jay looked across towards her own sink, trying to see it with a fresh eye, pretending for a moment she was the woman from House Doctor advising on clearing out before potential buyers came to give it the once-over. A scrunched-up J-cloth hung over the slim arched neck of the tap like a drunk over a gate. On the ledge behind was half a bottle of Fairy Liquid, a squirty Mr Muscle, two tubes of hand cream, a two-year-old Mother’s Day card, a pile of mail-order catalogues (Toast, Boden and something from the garden centre) and a row of six cling-filmed flower pots in which morning glory were supposed to be germinating but didn’t seem to want to emerge. There were several bottles of fancy vinegar which should really be kept out of the light and a small jar of truffle oil which had been there for several years and was unlikely ever to be used. A pack of holiday photos waited for someone to claim it. Imogen had left the bread out, yet again, along with the Flora and at least three knives. Not a decorative selection, all round. All these random items, she decided, except for the sulking morning glory, could be redistributed to various cupboards. The plants could be banished to Greg’s office where they might be enticed to grow beneath the glass roof. Ellie could do all this (well you could ask, you could hope) while Jay was at the hospital collecting Rory.
‘I’m starving. When’s lunch?’ Ellie strolled into the kitchen still wearing her years-old, shrunken and faded Hallo Kitty pyjamas. Her wet hair was wrapped in a vast blue bath towel, making her look like a weird, wrongly proportioned cartoon figure. If Ellie had only got to the hair-wash stage by 11.30 a.m., it would
surely be mid-afternoon before so much as a CD found its way to its rightful container – Moggie and Greg would have to be roped in for clearing-up duties as well.
‘I’m not doing lunch,’ Jay told her, ‘I’m collecting Rory at two after the doctor’s had a last look at him, then cooking roast lamb for us all at about six. Have a look in the fridge if you’re hungry now, see what you can find.’
‘But . . . uh.’ There was a sighed outburst of frustration as Ellie opened the fridge and gazed blankly at its contents. ‘Ooh there’s a lemon tart,’ she said, livening.
‘That’s for tonight, Ells, don’t touch that. Look, there’s some sausages – you can have those if you want.’
‘Mm. That sounds good,’ Greg said, folding the newspapers and (oh, there is a God) piling them into a neat heap ready for either the next reader or the recycling bin out by the front door. ‘Can you put a couple on for me as well, Ellie pet? And I’ll do a few onions to go with them. I’ve a fancy for a hot-dog and I think there’s some rolls in the breadbin. Lots of ketchup, and that lurid American mustard,’ he was now saying to himself, inspecting the jars and bottles on the fridge door shelves. Jay could feel her taste buds pricking dangerously. This weight-loss business was torture. She muttered an old slimming-club mantra: ‘A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’. It didn’t help: it just sounded arch and smug.
Ellie switched on the grill and loaded up the sausages (organic, leek and apple) while Greg chopped a big juicy onion, ready for slow-frying in a butter and olive oil mixture. The real will-power-killer was going to be the aroma – onions slowly caramelizing, the treacly ooze of the sausages . . .