by Judy Astley
‘Do you think it’s really her, though, Greg?’ Jay had said to him when he’d pulled the original sketches out of his files to show her the layout. ‘I mean we’re talking about a woman who was keen on floral tapestry cushions and asked for a hostess trolley on her wedding list.’
‘Hmm. Good point. If they put in chintz sofas and a marble fireplace I’ll be going down for murder, I swear,’ he’d said, leaving her wondering why he sounded as if he almost relished the thought. Jay was less keen: she was, after all, going to be the one who oversaw the loos being properly bleached and the inside windows (and there were so many square metres of them) properly Windolened. At least there were no pets. She’d lost count of the times she’d had to explain to picky householders that it really was a waste of her time and their money to expect her staff to deal with scummy fishtanks or long-neglected gerbils.
‘When Delphine moves in I just want to be a background consultant-type person. I’m not doing any of the hands-on stuff. You do know that, don’t you?’ Jay reminded Barbara as she swung the van into a visitor’s parking bay.
‘It’s OK, you’ve only said that about nine times. I do sympathize, I wouldn’t want to be my cousin’s skivvy either, not for a million quid.’
‘I’d do it for a million. I’d do anything . . .’ Rory muttered.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Jay teased him as they all climbed out of the van. ‘Don’t forget I’ve seen your bedtime reading material.’
It was mega. Unbelievable. Completely, mind-stonkingly stylin’. Rory could almost feel his jaw dropping in amazement. Why, he thought, would anyone live in an ordinary house if they could live in something like this? Why didn’t his own family have this flat? His dad had designed it, after all. So he obviously knew there was this kind of option out there and yet they all existed in a house that was (mostly, he conceded, OK it was only mostly – no-one he knew had that much glass) like everyone else’s in the road.
‘It’s amazing how much space in a house is wasted by an ordinary stairwell,’ Jay commented as she stood in the kitchen (white lacquer, cloud-grey slate) and gazed through the double-height sitting room towards the deck outside. ‘You get a lot of acreage in a flat. I mean it’s only two bedrooms but it gives an illusion of being massive.’ It wasn’t an illusion, not entirely. The sitting room must have been fifty feet long, even if part of it was under a sort of mezzanine floor at the end: home-office space, she presumed.
‘There’s a lot of mirror in here,’ Barbara called from the main bedroom, sounding distrustful. She flicked open a wardrobe, looking a bit nervous. Rory joined her and peered in, curious. What had she been expecting to see – a row of blow-up dolls hanging like dresses? A dead body all cut up in binbags stashed away for disposing of later? The geezer had plenty of shoes, that was for sure. They were mostly old-man shoes, brown or black polished and with laces, though there were some that looked a bit more beaten about, sports shoes and sailing ones and those horrible things with the little fringy flaps at the front that he’d seen on golfers. He couldn’t see any pilot kit, but then he supposed he must have taken that with him.
‘What do you think, Rory?’ Barbara asked him.
‘What? The shoes? A bit girly, all on racks like that . . .’ Rory had an inner conviction that a real man would have them chucked around at uncaring random under his bed.
‘No, I meant the flat!’ She was laughing at him. ‘First impression: do you like it?’
‘Brilliant,’ he shrugged, feeling gloomily conscious that if he was ever going to get a place like this for himself he’d have to get a billion exam passes at grade A, possibly as an ongoing, rest-of-his-life exercise, unless he turned to crime or gambling. Obviously it’s sodding brilliant, he thought. How could it not be? It had pale blue-grey suede sofas, long, low squashy ones that looked more for lying on than for sitting, and see-through tables with bits of weird twisted silvery sculpture on them. The telly wasn’t just a telly – it was a whole cinema set-up about ten feet across, up on the end wall between chrome speakers that looked like the radiator grilles off the front of an American truck. There were huge splodgy paintings and these mad lamps here and there, looking like the sort they had in old film studios. On the treacle-brown wood floor there was a socking great blue rug, all long curly strands of tuft. A perfect shagging-rug, he couldn’t help thinking, for when you’d got bored with doing it on the sofas and the enormous bed. Well you couldn’t help thinking that about the whole place. It was a wildest-dreams lerve-venue. It would be impossible to bring a woman back here and not get lucky, surely.
What the hell was this Charles bloke doing with old Auntie Delphine? Unless she’d morphed into a complete fox since he’d last seen her, which was not possible, being as how she was the same sort of age as his mum and he remembered her as the type who only wore on-the-knee straight skirts. She was going to look as out of place as a nun on a racehorse.
‘It’s a bit like Through The Keyhole,’ Jay said as she came down the curved staircase from the mezzanine level. ‘You can just imagine Loyd Grossman asking who lives in a place like this. I’d never in a million years guess it was anyone who’d be about to marry my cousin. This is more of a young City-type’s place. Though of course . . .’ She stopped and laughed.
‘What?’ Barbara prompted.
‘Well OK he’s a pilot – but none of us has actually seen him. He could be half her age for all we know. Should be interesting . . . I can’t wait to meet him. And have you seen . . .’ She grabbed Barbara’s arm and led her back up the stairs. ‘Up here, look at this painting over the desk – do you think it could possibly be original? Do you think they all are?’
Rory followed them up the staircase, his feet slipping slightly on the aluminium treads. Design fault, that, he noted with satisfaction, you could break your neck falling down these stairs. He’d mention to his dad that it could do with a carpet – and then he’d run and hide behind the sofa before the missiles that Greg threw hit him. The two women were looking at a smallish oil painting, hung out of the way of the light from the huge main windows. He’d seen something like it before.
‘Picasso?’ he ventured. They’d been doing him in Art at school. Mrs Gillibrand had been sly enough to get them interested by detailing the artist’s woman-count.
‘Oh well done Rory,’ his mother said, with that smile they do when you’ve made them proud. He scowled, feeling he should remind her not to be patronizing but deciding it was a trivial thing compared to being in the presence of a real Picasso painting. He was impressed, very very much so. Along from the Picasso was something else that looked familiar. David Hockney, that was the one. But with him, he recalled, Mrs Gillibrand had mentioned a man-count. He didn’t say anything this time, in case his mum patted him on the head.
‘And a Bridget Riley in the main bedroom, no less,’ Barbara commented rather quietly. Rory said nothing, but assumed it was the big black and white thing that made his eyes hurt.
‘Hmm. They’re not prints. Top-rate copies, possibly? Surely not originals?’ Jay said. Rory could see she was looking thoughtful. She was probably, he decided, thinking about how much this place didn’t need cleaning. It looked perfect already. What was there left to do? Even the shower room (just a big space, no naff cubicle or anything) only had a couple of towels lying on the floor and a few marks on the taps. It also had a telly set into the wall. It actually hurt, how very, very much he envied that. He hoped she’d charge him a bomb though, this guy. He was, obviously, truly mega-loaded.
At last. Ellie had been waiting for this day for the whole of this school year so far. She’d even practised what to do about it so now that it had happened it was – almost – no hassle. At last, at long bloody (ha ha!) last the Tampax in her bag wouldn’t be a bluff. When she sympathized with friends about period pains and feeling a bit too fragile for netball she wouldn’t be faking it any more. She felt a bit silly about that now, a bit embarrassed, as if all that pretence was part of a child-Ellie who had now
pushed her way through a one-way turnstile into Adult-World. She thought she’d tell Imogen that she’d started, but not her mum. Mothers fussed about things. She remembered when Mog had got her first period (twelve and three quarters, lucky her), Mum had cried and hugged her and told everyone over supper that Imogen had Become a Woman. Ellie hadn’t had much of a clue what they were talking about at the time. She’d thought it meant that Mog would have to leave school and go out to work and start driving the car. She remembered asking, ‘Is she going to have a baby?’ and everyone had laughed except Rory who, at eight, had also thought it a perfectly reasonable question.
It made a difference. She could feel it. The new, fully-functioning-female Ellie strode around the school that morning as if she was hyper-charged with fresh energy.
‘You’re practically running everywhere,’ Amanda complained, trying to keep up on the way to French. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
Ellie couldn’t tell her because then she’d know the truth and Amanda might tell. At very nearly fourteen, she was possibly one of the last in her year to start, if you didn’t count the anorexics. Her mum had told her that she’d been over fifteen, herself, but that was probably usual back then, before there were all the hormones injected into chicken and tons of junk food and everyone’s tits started to bud at nine. She’d only been trying to make sure Ellie didn’t worry but it just made things worse at the time – how mortifying must that have been? You really wouldn’t want to admit that your womanly inside bits hadn’t kicked in till way after you started to think about snogging boys.
Ellie and Amanda came out of the French class and went into the girls’ cloakroom. Ellie lined up alongside the other dozen after-school preeners, studied her face in the mirror and thanked God for her lack of spots. Her skin was baby-smooth with no need for the kind of heavy-duty camouflage that Tasha went in for. When she saw her piling that stuff on she wanted to do a mother thing – tell her she shouldn’t cover up and smother her pores like that (especially with that grubby little sponge) but let her skin breathe so the grot had a chance to escape.
‘You coming or what?’ Amanda cut into her thoughts as Ellie gazed at herself in the mirror. ‘What are you looking at yourself like that for? You look just the same as yesterday. Come on Ells, stop admiring yourself, it’s time to go home.’
Ellie smiled as she fluffed out her hair with a brush, then pulled a lip-gloss out of her bag and smoothed it across her mouth. It was true, she did look the same. But she wasn’t the same. Not even close to it.
‘April’s coming down for the weekend. She’s bringing Freddie to look at a university and she’s buying one of Barbara’s kittens and she says she’ll be staying with you.’
This succinct answerphone message from Audrey was the first Jay had heard of it, but she didn’t mind. She hadn’t seen her sister for a few months, not since April and Oliver’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party up in Cheshire, where they lived among footballers’ wives and a connoisseur’s choice of cosmetic surgery clinics. April would probably remember to phone and let her know just as her car was pulling into the driveway, breathily apologetic and dizzily forgetful as ever. She was easy to forgive. Jay was always delighted to see April because being with her reminded her of the many comfortable bits of her childhood – the giggling in the dark in their untidy bedroom, the week-long games of Scrabble (along with Matt who did not at all temper his competitive streak for the sake of his younger sisters), the time they’d painted a wall to resemble a Rousseau jungle scene to accommodate the lifesize cardboard tiger April had pinched from her school’s production of The Jungle Book. The five-year age gap and their mother’s sewing commitments meant that it had been nine-year-old April who had read the Magic Faraway Tree books aloud at night to Jay, giving her a lifelong certainty that every deep dark wood contained at least one tree full of talking owls and fairy folk. Later April passed on to her her own collection of Monica Edwards’s pony books, which had made her go to sleep dreaming of stealing Delphine’s Cobweb and galloping him through the fields and woods in pursuit of robbers and villains.
Jay had left a note at Charles’s apartment inviting him to a Sunday lunch. He could pick his own Sunday; not knowing exactly when he’d be back, she’d left that to him. His was the answerphone voice that followed Audrey’s: ‘Hi, Charles here. Thanks so much for the kind invitation . . .’ He had a smooth, creamy voice like an actor. Possibly an actor typecast back in black-and-white-movie days as a bit of a cad, so that Jay instantly pictured him in a maroon spotted cravat and having a tendency to stand just that bit too close when he talked to women. He’d opted for the following Sunday, hoping (slight hint of throaty chuckle in voice) that it was all right with her. Well it was all right, the sooner the better as far as Jay was concerned, and with so many people in the house there’d be plenty to fill in any conversational holes. It would feel less like an awkwardly contrived inspection event.
‘Listen to his voice, Greg, he sounds too old for that apartment,’ Jay told Greg, playing the message back again for him to hear. You couldn’t call it a flat, that was too mundane a word for it, reminding her of tatty student accommodation and makeshift conversions in gloomy Edwardian houses.
‘Perhaps . . .’ Greg mused as he stirred a handful of coriander leaves into a saucepan full of blissfully aromatic chilli con carne ready for that evening. Jay tried not to let her taste buds get too excited – they’d only be disappointed later when she got back from yoga and they were allowed just a small and virtuous portion.
‘Perhaps he was minding it for a much younger millionaire friend and the friend died in tragic and mysterious circumstances and left it to him and he hadn’t the heart to leave, preferring to stay and cherish the memory of this brave young . . .’
‘Stockbroker? Footballer? Drug dealer?’ Jay laughed. ‘Who else could afford something like that?’
‘I’m surprised a pilot living on his own could,’ Greg said. ‘Those places went for quite a hefty price, even off-plan two years ago. Maybe he came into an inheritance from that same young, tragic, mysterious multi-millionaire. Male friend or female friend, do you think? Any traces of girliness there? Any photos? Any old bras knocking about?’
‘No notable girliness that I could see, not that I poked about in any drawers. The place was pretty neutral, a bit anonymous like a hotel suite. Any inheritance would have to be a big one – you should see the art collection. Even Rory went quiet.’ Jay backed away from the kitchen, and the tempting tang of food, to pull the bag containing her new yoga mat out from the under-stairs cloakroom in readiness for her first class with Cathy, ‘God, just listen to us,’ she called back to Greg. ‘We sound just like Win and Audrey – speculating like mad about a complete stranger and making two and two add up to a dozen.’
Charles was probably, she decided, a massively good catch for anyone. As she stashed her yoga mat into the car she tried to put together some kind of picture of him and came up with a cross between Roger Moore (in The Saint days) and the Duke of Edinburgh. Mentally, she separated this incongruous pair of men and placed Delphine between them, flirting girlishly at each in turn so that Jay could work out which one she was better suited to. She dressed the men in stagey velvet smoking jackets and Delphine in . . . It was no good. Somehow Delphine refused to join in, sliding away from anything seductively, strappily silky and remaining stubbornly in a sensible piecrust white shirt and a straight, on-the-knee skirt. The most frivolous twist her imagination could manage was a dinky kick-pleat at the back. She’d just have to wait for the real thing.
Cathy’s yoga class was held in a big aerobics studio at the back of the local leisure centre. The studio had glass doors covered by sheets of coloured paper. Jay assumed this was because people had complained about casual gawpers in the corridor staring at the activities inside. She sympathized with these imaginary complainants, identifying with the uncoordinated and plump of thigh, furiously puffing through their paces and mortified by the background mirth.
As it was, she considered there were far too many mirrors. You really couldn’t miss seeing yourself from angles you’d rather not know about, and she resolved to focus on her Inner Being or whatever it was you were supposed to do to make you feel that essential yogic peace. Those who had arrived before her were already doing just that: lying around the room on their mats, under blankets and with their eyes closed. Music played softly in the background. It was the tuneless, wafty sort that Jay associated with beauty salons where she’d had facials. Greg called it ‘ambulance’ music, aware it was known as ‘ambient’ but judging it mournful to a suicide-inducing degree.
‘Hi Jay, I’m so glad you could make it!’ Cathy greeted her as she greeted all her pupils, with a gentle hug and a feather-light kiss on each cheek. Cathy smelled faintly of vanilla and was looking inspiringly slender and fine-muscled in a tiny strappy vest and black stretchy trousers that just about balanced on her bony hips. Jay was amazed – out and about at home Cathy tended to go for the layered look, clothes-wise. To be this thin underneath she must have been piling on her entire wardrobe on a daily basis.
‘You know I haven’t done yoga before, apart from a taster session on holiday once,’ she told Cathy. She was beginning to feel nervous as the room filled with the sound of deep slow breathing from those on the floor.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. This isn’t the advanced class – we’ve got all sorts. You should take the moves to the level that makes you feel comfortable. Where do you want to be? At the front?’
‘Er . . . somewhere in the middle, I think.’ What Jay meant was, out of range of the mirrors.
‘Fine – oh good, you remembered to bring a blanket. What we do at the start is, we lie down and just take a few minutes to settle our bodies and our minds into a calm, centred place, to leave the outside world and the events of the day behind us.’