by Judy Astley
Peter Bicton might have thought so too, seeing himself as rather a bit-part player in the event. A few years later he’d admitted to a lifelong passion for his second cousin and decamped from the rag-rolled, stencilled, pot-pourri-stocked cottage in East Sheen to live with her on a scruffy smallholding near Norwich. He told Delphine he could no longer bear having a kitchen where real live wandering hens weren’t welcome, retrieved his pheasant-blood-stained Barbour from where Delphine had banished it to the loft and drove off to the substantial bosom of his first love.
Jay, on her way up the stairs to sort out the third-time bride-to-be’s accommodation, checked her watch and calculated that Delphine was quite possibly now sitting on her sunny terrace near Dunsborough, Western Australia, sipping Earl Grey tea and nibbling on a piece of toast with the crusts cut off. The marmalade would have been decanted into a small white bowl with a silver spoon and there’d be one of those beaded nets over it to keep the flies off. Delphine, even if she was alone, would have a starched linen napkin on her lap and her tea – leaves not bags – would be (and Tristan would approve here) poured from a small chubby teapot into a bone china cup. How on earth, Jay wondered, would she fit into the food-on the-run chaos of their household? Would she shudder at the lined-up schoolbags and discarded shoes in the hall? Avert her appalled gaze from Ellie dipping her buttery knife into the honey? Would she understand that Jay’s mental Ideal Home also featured a family who didn’t festoon every radiator with trousers that Must Not Be Tumble-Dried, even though these were battles that were not only lost long ago but were also not really worth fighting?
Delphine’s room (as Jay now thought of it, even before she’d told the family to expect the guest) used to be Imogen’s before she’d moved into the basement with Tristan. It had a small en suite shower and loo – all chic white mosaic tiles with lots of sparkly chrome and mirror. This was currently home to a pile of supermarket boxes containing many of the childhood leftovers that Imogen had sorted when she’d moved into the flat, but had neither wanted with her nor had the heart to throw away. When she came to stay, April never minded stepping over them (she’d said it was just like home) but Delphine wouldn’t be happy without a clear route to the facilities and a certainty that all the floor could be got at for hygienic mopping.
Where to put the boxes? Jay considered. The loft space was tiny now that the glass bedroom and bathroom took up so much of the roof. All cupboards were already overoccupied. Ideally she’d have that woman from The Life Laundry round. She wouldn’t be one of those who wept and whined to keep every trinket, oh no. She’d go to a health spa for a few days, then come back when it was all over to luxuriate in the empty spaces. So long as she still had the family photos, the diamond earrings Greg had given her (she’d wear them to the spa, just to be sure) and a few of her choicer items of clothing (OK, Trinny and Susannah could join in for that bit), she’d be perfectly happy.
Jay opened the shower-room door and peered into the first box. It contained soft toys, dozens of them. Pandas and teddies, a fat furry owl, grubby pink and blue bunnies and a rakish-looking Rupert Bear. Moggie would just have to be persuaded that she didn’t need them any more, that some other small children could give them some love and attention. Otherwise they’d be there for years, forgotten till way after Mog’s own child had got well past the cuddly-toy stage. Jay had Dishing the Dirt clients like this, people who stored their life souvenirs on shelves, in boxes, in plastic bags, all heaped into cupboards. At some point it would occur to them that they wanted Jay’s girls to give everything a thorough blitz of a spring-clean but instead of chucking stuff out, it was the cupboards and shelves they wanted polishing and then all the stuff was to be put back again till next time. Why, she and Barbara frequently wondered, did people want a dark understairs space expensively scrubbed out simply to stuff into it a pile of grubby Sainsbury bags full of outgrown toddlers’ clothes or old gas bills?
Jay ran down the stairs and out through the kitchen doors and down the spiral metal staircase to the basement.
‘Moggie? Are you in there?’ she shouted into the open doorway, hesitating on the mat. Strange how rude it would seem, crashing into her own daughter’s premises without knocking first, even though only a couple of years ago she’d been the one who’d had to stride into her room and haul the girl out of bed so that she wasn’t late for her A-level exams. It was doubtless due to her sharing her life with Tristan – that tricky privacy balance that coupledom required.
‘Mum? Oh brill, you’re here.’ Imogen rushed at her, coat on and bag over her shoulder ready to go out. ‘I was just coming up to get you. I’m late, we have to go now. Got your keys?’ Imogen pulled Jay, tugging her out through the door and slamming it shut after them both.
‘Where are we – you – going? What’s the rush? I needed you to come up and sort out . . .’
‘No, Mum, no time. Tris was supposed to come with me but now he can’t, he phoned. He’s got a ’mergency leak in Sutton. You come instead, please? I need someone.’
Imogen had somehow hustled Jay back up the stairs and into the kitchen and was shoving her jacket at her. ‘Please Mum, I don’t want to go by myself.’
She was looking close to tears. ‘Moggie, what is it?’ Jay asked, frantically pulling her jacket on and grabbing her keys. ‘Is it the baby?’
Oh please don’t let her lose it, Jay prayed silently, conscious of how few years ago it was that she’d pleaded, every time Imogen left the house with a gruesome, sexed-up, mouth-breathing boyfriend: please don’t let her get pregnant.
‘It’s my scan. At the hospital this afternoon. Tris was supposed to come and now he can’t. I wish he could.’
Full-scale tears threatened as they hurtled out of the front door. Why, it crossed Jay’s mind, did Imogen always do everything at last-minute racing speed? How would she ever slow down to a toddler’s pace?
‘It’s all right Moggie, of course I’ll come with you. I’ll be thrilled to, actually.’
Imogen had been born at this same hospital nearly twenty-one years before. Jay remembered all too clearly the rush-hour traffic jam that had made her sure at the time that her first child would have to be born at a bus-stop pull-in.
‘You’d think there’d be privileges,’ she remarked. ‘Surely you count as an Old Girl, like school.’
‘What, like Frequent Flyer points?’ Imogen laughed. ‘I wouldn’t mind being upgraded to private patient class.’
‘Oh I’m sure you’ll be all right. In a ward you get to meet all the other mothers and compare birth experiences.’
‘Yuck. I don’t think I’ll want to go on and on about it.’
Jay looked at her. ‘You’ll be surprised. It’s all so mind-boggling, you sometimes wonder if you’ll ever talk about anything else ever again.’
‘Not me, matey,’ Imogen said, lying back deeply in her seat and putting her feet up in their habitual place on the dashboard. ‘Me and Tris will just want to get back to normal life. Besides . . .’ She looked pensive.
‘Besides what?’
‘I don’t think there’s anyone my age. The midwife said they’re usually either fifteen or forty. Boring.’
‘You’ll be OK, there’s bound to be someone. Anyway we’re here.’ She turned the Golf into the hospital’s gateway and slowed to go over the speed bumps to the car park.
‘Careful Mum, don’t bounce the car. I had to drink a litre of water for this scan and I don’t think there’s room for it.’
Jay wasn’t the only patient’s mum in the waiting room. Imogen had been right – two of the girls didn’t look much older than Ellie. The only other customer was a smartly suited woman with a briefcase that bulged with files, one of which was taken out and studied fervently, as if even here where life was slowed to a baby’s growing pace she couldn’t afford for work to come second. Jay, in her pregnancies, had more or less relaxed for her hospital check-ups, thrilled to use each waiting time to catch up on magazines full of celebrity gossip and pr
oblem-page delights.
‘Do you want a photo?’ she said, nudging Imogen and pointing to a sign on the wall.
‘What? Oh of the baby? Ooh yes, but you have to put money in the machine for a voucher. Have you got any on you?’
Jay handed over the cash and Imogen paid for her voucher, then sat clutching it tightly as if it was a winning lottery ticket. It was better than that, Jay thought, feeling a rush of tender mumsy thoughts towards her daughter. It was a ticket to a picture of an exciting, brand new, tiny life.
‘Ms Callendar?’ The radiographer opened her door and called to Imogen. ‘Come through here dear and bring your friend with you if you like.’
‘Come on Mum, come and have a look at your grandchild.’
Jay sat beside Imogen and watched as the gel was rubbed over her tummy. The bump was definitely showing now. It reminded her of a tiny version of one of those smooth, swelling Wiltshire hillsides. She crossed her fingers and wished for Imogen an absence of stretch marks, puckered flesh and aching legs.
‘Look, Moggie, that’s its head!’ Jay exclaimed as the image came up on the screen.
‘Where? Which bit? It all looks mad to me.’
The radiographer pointed to the screen. ‘Look, there’s a hand, and these are its legs. Everything seems to be in the right place. If you want to know what sex it is, that’ll take a little while.’
‘No, no don’t tell me! I want it to be a surprise,’ Moggie said, her eyes shining with excitement.
‘OK, Imogen, I’ve done a couple of pictures, one for you and one for Granny.’
Jay, on being handed the photo, almost looked round for another person. Who was ‘Granny’? It was her. It didn’t sound anything like as bad as when Greg had said it. In fact it sounded a bit wonderful. She was actually related to this little black-and-white paper scrap. Amazing. Truly amazing.
THIRTEEN
Chips
‘Ellie?’ Jay called up the stairs, trying to catch her before she raced out of the bathroom, down the stairs and straight out of the house to school. ‘Do you remember if I ever asked you to put Dishing the Dirt flyers through the doors in Masefield Avenue?’
‘Not a clue!’ came back the immediate reply. No thinking had gone into the response, that was obvious. Ellie didn’t do multitasking yet. If she had gone to clean her teeth then that was exactly what and only what she’d be doing. There was no spare compartment in her adolescent brain for anything else. It would be as much as her morning mind could take to remember what came next, as in brush hair, get coat, grab bag, go to school. The more time Jay spent with teenagers the more she understood that thinking about and doing more than one thing at a time was a skill acquired only in adulthood and perfected only by women.
‘I don’t remember asking her to do it,’ she commented to Rory back in the kitchen. ‘In fact I’m sure I didn’t. We haven’t sent any out for ages.’
Strange. The woman who had called had definitely said she’d had one through the door. These days new clients were usually word-of-mouth contacts, from ads in the local paper or from Yellow Pages. Sending out door-to-door flyers had been something she and Barbara had done way back at the beginning when they’d first been setting up the business. By the simple means of cash incentive, Rory and Ellie had been persuaded to deliver most of them and had shamelessly conspired to exaggerate how long it took in a brazen attempt to boost their earnings.
Rory gathered up his toast crusts and put them in the bin. ‘Masefield Avenue?’ he asked. ‘Er . . . where’s that exactly?’
‘Oh you know, up past the park, a couple of roads before the station.’
Rory opened the dishwasher (warily, as if it was a dangerous, unfamiliar beast) and painstakingly stashed his plate and mug inside. He was gazing inside the machine, lost in thought, as if he was noticing it properly for the first time and possibly wondering what it did. Jay, watching, realized she could be witnessing a significant stage of development being achieved here. She held her breath while he carefully closed the door again. Was it possible that he would, please God, at last turn into a Tidy Person? First stop the dishwasher, next the unexplored jungle terrain beneath his bed? If only.
‘Ah. Right. Yeah I think I know the road.’ Rory did a lot of overemphatic nodding, then picked up speed and dashed past her yelling, ‘Gotta go . . . late, bye! Oh, and the post’s here!’ There was a scraping sound in the hallway as his bag was dragged across the polished floor (he would surely have worn a groove in it by the time he’d got through his A levels) then the door slammed shut with the usual wall-shaking brutality, leaving only the sound of the lonely white rat scuffling in the sawdust at the bottom of its tank, and the occasional glug from the coffee machine. It was very nearly possible to hear the house sighing with relief.
Jay picked up the mail from the doormat, poured a heap of Special K into a bowl and added a handful of raspberries. These were straight from the fridge and too cold. She’d intended to leave them on the worktop all night so they’d be up to room temperature, but someone had tried to be helpful and put them away. Too chilled and they had little flavour, not to mention setting her teeth on edge. Win had had a point, all those years ago, mixing up Delphine’s breakfast at body temperature. This breakfast was two Weight Watchers points, she worked out, crunching through the cereal. It didn’t seem a lot to sustain a body through a hectic morning, but ten pounds had now gone, so something among all these diets and the agonizing scurrying round the park must be working.
There was yet another pink envelope in the post. Delphine again, revving up in pre-wedding, pre-moving mode. Why couldn’t she just phone, Jay wondered, or did she find calculating the appropriate time, given the different hours, completely impossible? It was a card this time, a picture of an appealing, wide-eyed pony almost identical to her long-ago pet.
‘Remember Cobweb?’ Delphine had written inside. ‘Didn’t we have some good times on him?’
Hmm, Jay thought, remembering the stressed afternoons at Mrs Allen’s and Delphine’s manipulative bargaining that guaranteed she’d never have to clean her own tack or haul her own heavy saddle on and off her pony.
‘I wanted to ask you if you’ll be the Matron of Honour or whatever it is you have at Register Office weddings. If it’s yes, get something peachy to wear. See you next week, Delphine.’
And if it was no? Jay felt old rebellions stirring inside, a mild huffiness at being bossed around by a cousin she hadn’t seen since Delphine had gone off to Australia ten years ago with Bill Durant (husband number two, succumbed to liver failure three years back), and had communicated with, till these last few weeks, only at Christmas and birthdays. But then, it couldn’t be no, could it? If it was, she’d have to phone Delphine and tell her and be callously aware she was being pointlessly hurtful, and what kind of a person would do that? After all, who else was Delphine going to ask? How many non-family old friendships would she still have over here that she could so casually revive when she needed them? So it would be yes, of course it would. But . . . peachy? That was a puzzle. What did that mean, exactly?
Jay put the card on the table and zapped around clearing up the kitchen, ready for Monique to come in later in the morning and give it a proper clean. In fact, she decided, she would treat the house to an all-out blitz before Delphine got there, or better yet, she’d treat herself and Delphine to one. It would be a perfect pre-wedding trip out for the two of them, an all-dayer at a spa and then home again to a spankingly scrubbed-out house.
‘What do you think she meant by peachy?’ Jay asked Barbara as they drove the van over to Masefield Avenue to talk terms with their potential new client. ‘Do you think she means the colour? Or is peachy a sort of Australian term for cute, do you think? I’m way too old for cute, but oh please God, don’t let it be the colour.’
Barbara frowned and looked at Jay. ‘Heavens I hope it isn’t the colour. You can’t wear peach, not with your browny-blonde hair. You’ll look like a trifle.’
‘Thanks, B
arbara, don’t wrap it up for me will you? You’re right though, peach only looks good on six-year-old bridesmaids with cream tights, yards of tulle underskirts and freesias in their hair.’
‘But weren’t you thrilled to be asked?’ Barbara said, giggling. ‘It must mean that her man’s been in touch and told her you’ve passed the entrance exam. What did you think of him? Was he the Perfect Man for Ms Perfect Cousin?’
Jay thought for a moment. ‘Well he was . . . really nice. The sort of man you say “Oh he’s a really nice man” about. I think he did that trick of making sure everyone liked him without actually giving much away about himself.’
‘Clever knack that, not one that most women have, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s just a man thing. You must have found out something.’
‘Well I’m racking my brains, but he managed to sidestep any probing about ex-wives, children etc. Very metaphorically nippy on his feet – must be all that dancing.’
‘Do you think he’d fancy you in peach?’
Jay made a face. ‘No-one would fancy me in peach! Mind you, I’ve been Delphine’s bridesmaid before. Peach or no peach, believe me, getting to choose my own outfit is definitely a plus.’
‘Why? What did you wear last time then?’
Jay shuddered, remembering, ‘Elastoplast pink. Duchesse satin, something called “ballerina length” – not good on a short person – skintight bodice with dropped waist and pearl beads sewn on the shawl-neck bit. I looked like a chrysalis that’s been out in the rain. I was away at university and stupidly sent the measurements instead of getting back home to try it on. And by the time I did, well, let’s just say Delphine ordered me to starve for five days so all the fifty-six buttons would fasten. I was a little bit pregnant with Imogen.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
‘I did. She got into a panic that I’d throw up halfway down the aisle, or faint in front of the altar or something, and Auntie Win had a right old go and said I was very selfish, getting myself pregnant for Delphine’s big day. As if I’d done it on purpose, specially for that. Mum was great – she said it served them right for not getting her to make the frocks, after all the years she’d spent running up glitzy little Latin American numbers for Delphine’s competitions. She very sniffily told Win that a first-class dressmaker who really knew her stuff would have allowed a bit extra for “give”.’