by Judy Astley
As everyone sorted themselves out, April leaned across the table, past Tristan, and murmured to Jay, ‘Well you’ve failed there; Delphine would have had individual place names printed up in gold.’
‘Oh surely, hand-embroidered.’ Jay whispered back as she handed round the starter plates piled with crab and grapefruit salad.
‘Oh this is nice,’ Win commented. ‘Did you use tinned segments, dear?’
Jay tried to smile. ‘The grapefruit? Win, please! This is a Raymond Blanc recipe! I think he’d faint at the very idea.’
Well that was true, she thought, not daring to meet April’s eye, Monsieur Blanc quite possibly would. Of course she’d used canned segments, carefully rinsing off any hint of tinny juice. She’d made this salad before and it required the meticulous peeling of every tiny morsel of fine translucent skin from every slender slice. How many hours would that take on such a busy Sunday morning?
‘So.’ Audrey launched the bidding for information as soon as the starter plates were cleared and Jay, Greg and April were safely out of their chairs, busying themselves with the roast beef and vegetables. ‘So, Charles, how long have you been a pilot?’
April grinned at Jay over the gravy she was pouring into its jug. ‘She means “Do you qualify for a top pension?” ’ she whispered.
‘Years and years,’ Charles replied. ‘Not for much longer though, I’ll be pensioned off soon, just another year or so.’
‘And your family, are they local?’ Audrey chipped in.
‘I think that’s “Tick appropriate box for: wife/ children/inconveniently expensive dependants”.’
‘April, shh! Give me a hand with this lot and shut up!’ Jay told her, taking the dish of potatoes to the table.
‘I’ve a brother in Scotland but no-one else, alas,’ Charles said, looking mock-sad. Strange that, Jay thought, what was amusing about being alone? Or was he being defensive in the face of interrogation? She didn’t blame him.
‘Oh that would explain you living in that funny penthouse,’ Audrey said. ‘I mean it’s a single man’s type of place, hardly Delphine’s kind of thing is it? Have you thought of moving to a nice detached with proper neighbours once you’re married?’
‘Gran!’ Imogen blurted out. ‘That’s like soo rude?’ Jay looked along the table at Greg, who was doggedly cutting up his meat and refusing to meet anyone’s eye. She suspected he was covering up an attack of hilarity.
‘Was it?’ Win opened her eyes wide. ‘But Audrey was only saying . . .’
‘My dear ladies, it’s fine.’ Charles smoothed away the possible (though unlikely, in Jay’s opinion) beginnings of an apology. My dear ladies? Jay wondered if it was part of a pilot’s training, to soothe ruffled old women.
He went on, ‘Actually, we haven’t quite decided yet exactly where to settle so we’ll start off in my apartment and see how it goes.’
‘Sounds like a good plan,’ Imogen said. ‘How did you meet Delphine?’
‘Oh, didn’t she tell you?’ Charles said. ‘At a dinner dance. We have that in common, you see, the dancing.’ Jay blinked, trying to get out of her head a picture of Charles and Delphine whizzing across a polished floor, wearing Day-Glo spandex and sequins, competition numbers strapped to their backs and contorting themselves in a stylish lambada.
‘Of course she’s a lovely dancer, my Delphine,’ Win purred. ‘Always has been.’
‘I intend to get a lot more involved in it when I finish flying. I’m a small investor in a little club in fact . . .’
‘Oh for the dancing? Ballroom? How lovely,’ Audrey said. ‘There’s not a lot of it about these days.’
Charles looked at her in a mildly speculative way before smiling (rather to himself, Jay thought) and agreeing, ‘Indeed.’
‘Lovely beef dear,’ Win commented to Jay. ‘Though a bit pink, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Do you think so?’ Greg said. ‘I can’t tempt you to a slice more, then?’
‘Oh go on, twist my arm,’ she said quickly, watching beadily as Greg piled another couple of very large juicy pieces on her plate.
You’d think no-one had eaten all week, Jay thought, as she and Ellie at last cleared away the empty plates. She surveyed the few remaining flecks of the phenomenally expensive joint of best organic fillet that could also have been tomorrow’s cottage pie if Audrey and Win hadn’t been stoking up their constitutions against their usual ‘it’s hardly worth cooking for one’ theme. All the vegetables had gone as well, even the broccoli and the aubergine and cinnamon thingy that usually only Ellie liked. There wasn’t a single roast potato left. Shame about that; tomorrow was to be the start of Weight Watching and it would have been delicious to exit the day’s greed zone later that evening with a toasted fried-potato sandwich, topped with pepper, too much salt and a dribbly slick of tomato ketchup, munched on the sofa in front of Midsomer Murders.
‘I’ll just get the corkscrew,’ Greg was saying as Jay took the meringue and strawberry concoction from the fridge.
‘No! Let me, I’m much nearer,’ Win trilled, leaping out of her chair and scurrying rather girlishly across the kitchen.
‘No! Don’t, I’ll get . . .’ April dashed after her, too late.
‘Uuugh! What’s this disgusting mess in here?’ Win stepped back, appalled, peering into the drawer at the now congealed coating of abandoned ice cream that had blobbed over the contents. She sniffed at it, doing her substance-identifying from a safe distance.
‘You were always hopelessly messy, Jay, but really, just look at this!’ Win said, delving an experimental hand in, pulling out the corkscrew and delicately holding it in thumb and forefinger under the tap.
‘I’m sure Jay has talents in many directions,’ Charles said as, tight-lipped and fuming, Jay started to slice the meringue. She looked at him, a smile freezing suddenly as the man actually, to her amazement, winked at her. Smooth sod, she thought, and any more of that and he’ll be promoted to ‘slimeball’.
Thank goodness for Nigella’s strawberry miracle, Jay thought as she concentrated on this unseasonal treat for her taste buds. Conversation was flowing fine without her for the moment. Win and Audrey were giving Charles a few minutes’ respite while they listened to Cathy telling Imogen about safe yoga for pregnancy.
‘I don’t think she should do too much bending and stretching in her condition,’ Win told Cathy firmly. ‘Something might give.’
Later, Jay blamed herself for leaving the big glass kitchen door open to let in a much-needed blast of cooling air. She was just beginning to feel that the meal had gone smoothly enough (though without any doubt the ice-cream incident would get straight back to Delphine), just beginning to ask who wanted coffee and did anyone fancy another glass of wine when Daffodil clattered in from the garden, dragging something huge and black and flapping.
‘Shit!’ Imogen yelled. ‘What’s she got?’
Every chair scraped back as the cat hurled itself and its outsize prey round the room, finally letting go and allowing a fully grown black rook to flap onto the worktop.
‘Oh God, what now?’ Jay said to April who was uselessly giggling with Cathy, the two women almost falling off their chairs with laughter.
‘Catch it, someone!’ Audrey ordered, from the safety of the far side of the garden door. Greg and Charles made a lunge for the poor creature, Charles getting there just ahead, grabbing the bird by the claws. It bit him, hard, but he clung on, grinning at Jay over its head and giving her the dreadful impression that he was about to wring its blue-black neck and present it to her as a trophy, like a felled dragon.
‘I hope your tetanus is up to date,’ Cathy said, as soon as the bird, apparently unharmed, was safely sent flying free in the garden again. While Jay was hunting for plasters, Cathy held the injured hand under the tap, rinsing blood onto the remains of the potato peelings that hadn’t quite made it into the waste disposal.
‘Oh we pilots keep everything well up to date,’ Charles told Cathy with a lo
psided grin.
Of course she couldn’t have expected it all to go right, Jay reflected later after everyone had gone. She, Cathy and April sat at the glass kitchen table, working their way through a final bottle of wine and polishing off bits of left-over meringue. On the worktop by the sink, in a cage too small for it, a half-grown white rat gnawed noisily at a carrot. Audrey had tripped over it on the doorstep as she was leaving. It had been abandoned there, with a mysterious note, like an unwanted Victorian baby. Win had said to let the thing go, but Jay hadn’t the heart, not after everything else.
‘It’s not your fault.’ April tried to console Jay. ‘If Win hadn’t been so keen to impress Charles with how sprightly she was, she’d never have leapt up to get the corkscrew from the drawer and seen all that ice cream in there.’
Cathy laughed, ‘I thought it was funny, myself. Her face! Like she’d found a dead frog or something – definitely more appalled than when they found the rat.’
‘Win and Delphine would never tolerate domestic spillage,’ April explained. ‘They’re the people who buy every possible anti-splash gadget from the Lakeland catalogue and they fry eggs in little flower-shaped moulds for a perfect presentation.’
‘And the bloody cat. . .’ Jay groaned.
‘Well it’s what cats do. And you couldn’t have known about the rat. Maybe we should give it a rub with a wand, see if it turns into something handsome. Old Charles wasn’t a bad looker either, didn’t you think?’
‘Very charming,’ Cathy said, pursing her mouth and looking cryptic.
‘Hmm. Good choice of word.’ Jay nodded slowly. ‘Charming, bordering on the . . . suave, I’d say. One or two things he said, I wasn’t sure quite which way to take them, especially, you know, just before he left and he gave me a sideways look and a sort of smirk and said it was all right, he’d chucked out the empty beer can from his kitchen.’
‘He’s got you down for a secret drinker, round his gaff,’ April said.
‘We didn’t touch his drinks. I didn’t even open his fridge.’
Bit of a near miss about the beer can, Rory considered as he settled into his bed with his remote control in his hand and the TV channels of the world to choose from by way of a bedtime story. Bloody Freddie, it was his mistake. He was the one who’d helped himself from the fridge. Of course it worked both ways though. If Charles had pushed it further, if he’d even thought of looking in his direction with a hint of accusation, he could have dropped a little hint of his own that he knew something as well. After all, if you want to sneak around in and out of hookers’ houses on the way to visiting your future family members, you don’t drive something as obvious as a silver Porsche Boxter. Not round here you don’t, matey. No way.
ELEVEN
Weight Watchers
Jay woke abruptly, sat upright in bed and opened her eyes. It was still dark and for a second or so she had the sensation that she had gone suddenly blind. It used to happen a lot when she was a child – Audrey was a great believer in total darkness for sleeping and had lined all the house’s curtains with blackout fabric. You took your life in your hands, negotiating strewn-about hazards like shoes and books, heading for the loo in the night.
What had woken her? Her heart was racing and she knew something had given her a bad fright. She rubbed her eyes and waited a while for them to get used to the dark, focusing on the window beyond which a foggy sodium glow overlaid west London’s night sky with a grubby shade of brownish orange.
‘Whassup?’ Greg whispered. He put his hand on her back. The warmth and gentle pressure made her feel safer.
‘Not sure; nothing probably. I think I was dreaming.’
She had been, she realized now. She’d been dreaming about a doll, a big one, so fat as to be almost globular and the height of an average four-year-old child. She wore an outfit like Alice in Wonderland: sky blue dress and white frilled pinafore, white tights and black patent shoes with rhinestones across the front. Her hair was waist-length, luminously golden blonde and . . . Jay lay down again and stared at the ceiling. That’s what had woken her, it was the hair and the flash and the bang and the terrible thing she’d done to the face. She’d been curling up the doll’s hair with Delphine’s Carmen rollers which seemed mysteriously to be connected to the mains, so her head looked as if it was attached to an execution gadget of the type that rednecks in America’s southern states might invent. After the flash she’d slowly turned the small figure to face her. The doll’s chubby pink cheeks had gone black, the blue eyes that had had a vacant, slightly startled gaze had vanished, blown away, leaving bloodied caverns leaking trails of gore and sinew down the rigid porcelain face.
‘Bad dream or a good dream?’ Greg was waking up properly now. In the morning he’d be impossible to shift, sleeping late and feeling groggy and out of sync. Not good on a Monday, she recognized, it could throw his whole week out. He’d drink too much coffee then wonder why he got stomach cramps.
‘Bad dream. I killed Delphine with her own Carmens.’
‘Eh?’
‘Heated hair curlers. I managed to electrocute her or something. Not that you can, only in dreamworld. She was a fat dolly in Delphine’s dance shoes.’
Greg sighed and put his hands over his eyes. ‘You’ve lost me now.’
‘Well you did ask. You should never ask people to tell you their dreams, you know that. They’re always either incredibly boring or completely barking mad.’ Was it mad? Or bad? Only a jury could decide. Herself, Jay would plump for mad – she wouldn’t really wish this fate on a dolly, let alone a real human.
She was feeling cross. It wasn’t Greg’s fault, he’d only been trying to sympathize, but she wasn’t up to more explaining. She even felt annoyed with herself for being so contrary. But the thing with bad dreams was that you needed a bit of silent, thinking-through time to get rid of the demons they left behind. You needed time to reassure yourself that you hadn’t done the dreadful thing you’d dreamed, not really. It was only pretend, nobody’s fault.
Jay climbed out of bed and wrapped her comforting old cotton waffle dressing gown round her body, then slipped out of the room and down the stairs. Daffodil (still in disgrace after the rook) pattered along in front of her, swishing her brown tail out of the way of Jay’s feet. On the middle landing she could hear Rory muttering in his sleep and hoped his dreams were less disturbing than hers.
It was years and years since she’d had a Killing Delphine dream. Certainly before Delphine went to Australia, so at least ten years. At their peak they’d turned up every fortnight or so, and for a time her cousin must have been the most serially slaughtered dream object on the planet. There’d been the Riding Accident (cruel to poor Cobweb, having him hurl himself into a canyon, but something had to be the weapon), the one with the crumbling cliff edge, the drowning (such a short but impossibly paralysed hand-stretch from the riverbank). The previous worst had been the one with the silver cake-slice that Win kept in a display cabinet alongside Delphine’s under-fourteens Home Counties (South) Latin American Formation cup. When she’d settled from the sweating horrors of that nightmare, Jay had calmed herself by deciding it would have been impossible anyway, you really couldn’t put a cake-sized cross-section of a person onto a small plate. You’d need a whopping great serving platter, and even then the flesh wouldn’t stay in its neat wedge shape. It would flop.
Jay pulled a chair up to the dishwasher which was still warm from its late evening cycle. She felt shivery and slightly sick and peculiarly foolish. Dreaming about killing your cousin out of sheer spite was just so juvenile. Daffodil miaowed softly and jumped onto her lap, settling quickly and purring, pushing her head against Jay’s hand, demanding fuss and forgiveness. This had been a real throwback dream. They’d been quite a feature of her teen years, starting, she was pretty sure, on the night of Delphine’s eleven-plus results. Jay had passed hers easily the year before and was settling happily enough into the local girls’ grammar school, hating some aspects (her too-big uni
form, algebra, the sadistic Bingham twins) and loving others (English Lit, Thursday’s semolina, hanging upside down from the gym wallbars). On the day Delphine failed her eleven-plus she cycled round to visit Jay on a brand new five-geared bicycle, all lights and bells and sparkly pink reflectors.
‘Oh you passed then!’ Audrey hadn’t been able to keep the surprise out of her voice. Delphine was, school-wise, what even her fond mother could only describe as a ‘doer, not a thinker’. Win frequently scolded Jay, April and Matt for always having their noses in a book, unable to understand why they wouldn’t prefer to perfect the quickstep, as Delphine had, or turn themselves into a dab hand with floral arrangements.
‘I’m going to St Miriam’s!’ Delphine had announced grandly, naming a small, private establishment where girls were not troubled with excess academic exertion.
‘So why d’you get a bike then? It’s ages till your birthday,’ Jay had asked, understanding that Delphine had not passed the eleven-plus. Nobody in the area went to a private school unless they’d failed to get into the grammar and had parents who went pale and faint at the thought of their darlings attending Broom Lane Secondary. Even years on, when both schools became comprehensive, it was still the ex-grammar that was oversubscribed.
‘I got it for being me,’ Delphine had smirked, stroking a speck of dust off her gleaming dynamo light.
‘It’s silly to be jealous, you know,’ Audrey had said later when Jay had spent the afternoon sulking on her bed with a book and refusing to fetch her own bike (second-hand, a bit undersized, slightly rusty) and go to the park with Delphine. ‘And it’s rather nasty as well. Delphine isn’t as clever as you and she can’t help that. I’m sure Win only wanted to make sure she felt as good as the girls who can pass exams, and show her that you didn’t just get presents for being bright.’
But that was the thing, Jay had been given a congratulatory hug when she passed her exams. There was no big fuss, no celebration, just as it had been for her sister and brother before her. ‘I’m not doing big presents, it’s not as if you needed to be bribed to pass,’ Audrey had said.