by Judy Astley
‘Jay! Lovely to see you again. Change of plan! Being sent to Singapore to bring a bus home. Regular chap was taken ill over there and I’m down as a spare,’ he explained. ‘Didn’t mean to be in your way, just come on in and feel free. Your hard-working colleagues are already here.’
‘Shame you won’t be here tomorrow when Delphine gets here,’ she said. ‘You two are going to cross in the sky.’
‘I know. Can’t be helped but duty calls. I’ll be back in a week though, just in time for the big day. Still,’ he laughed, ‘it’ll give you two girls chance to catch up and for Delphine to haul you round the shops.’ He looked at her in a mildly calculating way for a moment, then said in a lowered voice, ‘Er . . . do you know a little shop called ‘Agent Provocateur’?’
‘Er . . . yes . . . underwear.’ Good grief, need she know about this?
‘Absolutely. Delphine might like to pick up a few little somethings there.’
‘Um . . . Charles, I hope you don’t mind me asking . . .’ Too bad if he did, she was going to anyway – when would she get another chance?
‘This club that you . . .’
He laughed, a bit of a surprised one, in her opinion. ‘Oh that! Just a little investment to supplement the pension.’ He made for the door, looking back at her with a rakish grin. ‘Purely investment, nothing “hands-on” as it were. Ciao, see you at the do!’ And he was off, his bag clattering along behind him like a toddler’s dog on wheels.
‘Girls’ indeed, she thought, as appalled at being so described as she was amazed to be pointed in the direction of saucy knickers. ‘Girls’ was even worse than ‘Ladies’.
After Charles had gone, Jay cornered Barbara in the main bathroom where she was clearing a smart selection of male cosmetics out of the mirror-fronted cupboard.
‘Nice stuff here. Expect he gets it duty free,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was actually here?’ Jay asked, still feeling flustered.
‘Why? What’s the difference? I’d still have needed you to bring the stuff. And anyway, he was on his way out. Another five minutes and you’d have missed him.’
‘I don’t know.’ Jay sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘It’s just this thing that I don’t want to be seen as Delphine’s cleaner.’
‘Your problem, sweetie, it’s between you and your inner therapist. There’s nothing wrong with it, even if he does see you as that. If it makes you feel better, just walk away, right now, straight out of the door. You aren’t down for this job.’
Out in the hallway, Monique was singing to herself as she unhooked an armful of coats out of the cupboard.
‘OK, I’ll see you later,’ Jay said. She’d got the Dachshund Man to talk to about all the jars of marmalade he’d rescued from the bin last time they’d cleaned out his larder. Some of them were over three years out of date. There was also a tin of syrup he wanted to keep that had swollen to dangerous proportions.
‘Whatever she got up to last night,’ and Jay indicated Monique, ‘it’s put her in a lively mood!’
‘Oh she’s been singing and smiling away since the early hours. It’s driving me mad,’ Barbara said with a grin. ‘Plus, she seems to have been offered another job. She told your Charles person that she’s not really a full-time cleaner, she’s a dancer, and he’s given her a card and told her to go and see someone he knows at some club. I don’t know what it’s got to do with him, or what he’s up to, but it looks like one way or another we could easily be down one member of staff again.’
Well he didn’t waste any time or opportunity, this Charles. He’d got in quick with Monique. Jay imagined him in a club in the pre-opening hours, giving the assembled lap dancers a warm-up talk like a football manager before an important Premiership match. She shuddered, imagining him demanding for the paying punters something along the lines of ‘More thrust’, ‘More writhing’. Unavoidably, and before she could stop herself, she had a vision of Delphine, doing a slinky tango in baby-pink satin underwear, a swirl of satin ribbons and rippling marabou, with Charles partnering her, dressed to fly in his pilot outfit, all gold brocade cuffs and a sharply angled cap.
SIXTEEN
Magic Pants
There was the usual disorientating chaos in Terminal Three at Heathrow. Jay had arrived too early. She spent twenty minutes browsing in the bookstalls, nervously opening and shutting books without making sense of any words. Unable to concentrate enough to focus properly, she tripped over passengers’ bulky hand baggage that had been parked in the middle of the floor as their owners flicked through magazines. Any real concept of time quickly vanished in the flaky dry air conditioning and harsh strip light. People here felt compelled to shop to relieve the tension, she thought as she tried to decide if there was anything she might need from Accessorize. What with that, and endless grazing in the coffee shops and bars, no wonder so many found it next to impossible to make it to their departure gates on time. They were too busy distracting themselves from the atmosphere of anxious anticipation and mild panic that air travel induced in even the calmest, most seasoned voyager.
She wouldn’t have minded, she thought as she heard the swoosh of an espresso machine, a cup of something hot and strong and a big, gooey, comforting Danish pastry. And of course she couldn’t be fancying anything more off limits – that was the downside of diets. Whichever one she picked for the day, low-carb, low calorie, whatever, she couldn’t hope to get away with a concoction of sugar, processed fruit and far too much butter.
Up on the Arrivals floor stressed and crumpled passengers, newly hatched from the snug, stale shells of aircraft, emerged through the airside doors and were scooped up by those who’d been pacing impatiently, waiting and craning for the first view of friends, colleagues and relatives. Jay stood close to the chrome rail that divided travellers from greeters, between two drivers, each carrying a placard with the name of their quarry scrawled in felt tip. One of them smelled strongly of a recent cigarette, and he fiddled with something inside his trouser pocket that Jay politely assumed was a lighter.
Delphine, looking as spruce in her cream trouser suit as if she’d merely made the forty-minute hop from Manchester, strode into view pushing a trolley laden with a pair of matching blue leather suitcases bound with pink straps. Of course they were matching, Jay thought as she moved forward to greet her. Did she really imagine that this perfect cousin would arrive with the kind of assortment of mismatched baggage, duty-free carrier bags and lumpy packages that Jay herself always ended up travelling with?
‘Delphine! Over here!’ Delphine, perfectly made up and with short sun-streaky blonde hair, turned towards her and smiled.
‘Hi, Delph! Great to see you!’ Jay hugged her cousin. ‘And ooh, you smell gorgeous!’ she told her. ‘You’d never think you’d spent twenty hours travelling.’
‘Hello Jay. Been a long time, hasn’t it?’ Delphine stepped back slightly to inspect her, brazenly looking her up and down, taking in, Jay imagined, every inch gained over the years, every last ounce, every frizzing, grizzling hair. Was she, Jay wondered, about to tell her she was a lot less than all right?
‘You look really well.’ Delphine decided, smiling. ‘But where’s Mum?’
‘Chiropodist! Didn’t you know?’
‘Chiropodist?’ Delphine laughed. ‘Her only daughter comes home after ten years on the other side of the world and she’s gone to have her bunions trimmed?’
‘Corns filed, actually, but yes, I’m afraid she has. It was unmissable, apparently,’ Jay told her. ‘Come on, let me push the trolley. The car’s through here.’
‘You look just the same, apart from the hair. Suits you short,’ she remarked to Delphine as they loaded the baggage into the back of the Golf.
‘You don’t look the same,’ Delphine said. ‘You look . . .’
‘Older? Fatter? Well I am. So are you. It’s what happens.’
‘I was going to say, softer,’ Delphine told her, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘But I see you�
��re as bristly as ever.’
Oh don’t start, Jay thought, switching on the car engine, or it’s going to be a very long few weeks.
‘So you met Charles, then,’ Delphine went on as they got under way. ‘What did you think?’
Ah, a tricky one. What could she say? Very nice for a pimp? Unfair, that. Jay negotiated the selection of roundabouts at Hatton Cross and concentrated on getting into the right lane at the lights.
‘We had an excellent lunch for him,’ she said eventually. ‘He was very good company, very easy to geton with. How . . . how did the two of you actually meet?’
‘Thought you’d have asked him that,’ Delphine said. ‘Obvious question, really.’
She was right, it was, and of course she, or possibly April, had asked him. She had a feeling that Delphine already knew this.
‘We met at a dinner and dance in Perth. Charles was there with some friends.’
‘I didn’t know people still had dinner dances. It sounds like one of those Masonic ladies’ nights that Win used to go to.’
A bit of a time warp, that, she thought, remembering Win getting togged up in sparkling finery a couple of times a year to go to what she called a ‘do’. She always used to get Audrey to come round, ostensibly to stitch up a bit of hem or advise her about jewellery, but April had said it was just to show off. Then she’d sweep out of the front door with her escort, trailing a fur stole that she boasted was mink but Delphine, playing on her cousins’ love of felines, told them was actually Abyssinian cat.
‘It wasn’t Masonic. It was the Perth Latin American Society Ball. I’d been giving a tango seminar in the city.’
‘A . . . what?’
‘I’ve been a dance teacher for the past five years. Didn’t you know?’
Jay laughed, ‘I’m surprised I didn’t. Win still does that thing she does when she talks about you.’
‘Oh heavens, does she? Not the old “my Delphine”? You’d think I was still twelve!’
‘I suppose it’s just a mother thing. Most of them do it. I expect I will, and then Imogen in her turn,’ Jay said, contemplating the idea of laid-back Moggie turning into a version of her great-aunt Win.
‘A mother thing? I wouldn’t know,’ Delphine said. Jay bit her lip.
Delphine had been only in her early thirties and not long married for the second time when she’d gone to live in Australia with Bill-the-boozer. There was so much about her that Jay no longer knew, such as had it been a sadness, or not, that she had no children? As the car pulled up at the house, she wondered if they would now become close enough for things like this to come out. One thing she suddenly remembered as she parked, switched off and opened the door, was that Delphine used to sneeze in the presence of cats. Not good timing then to have acquired a new, attention-needing kitten.
‘I brought a cake. One I made this morning,’ Win announced immediately as Jay let her and Audrey in through the front door later that afternoon. ‘I didn’t think you’d have made one,’ she added, peering past Jay to see if there were unexpected telltale signs of baking – flour scattered across the floor possibly, viscous eggshells all over the worktop, a searing smell of burning perhaps. She looked satisfied to have been proved right.
‘That’s kind of you. Delphine’s upstairs, having a shower and a bit of a lie-down. I’ll give her a shout.’
‘She’ll be very jet-lagged,’ Win told Ellie, who had arrived from school minutes ahead of her aunt and grandmother. ‘It stayed with me for weeks after I got back last time I went over there,’ she said, sitting down on the kitchen sofa and stretching out her legs, rotating her ankles as if she was remembering being on the plane and doing her anti-thrombosis exercises.
Delphine followed Jay down the stairs. She’d already unpacked, showered and was now dressed in sleek black trousers and a soft pink cashmere sweater. How had she managed, Jay wondered, to have not a single crease in an outfit that was straight from a suitcase? Had she packed each item with tissue paper or sneaked in a travel iron?
‘You look amazingly unruffled,’ she commented to her.
‘I hung it all up in the bathroom while I was showering,’ Delphine told her. ‘Works every time. Got to smarten up to face Mum, you know what she’s like . . .’ Delphine said, taking a deep breath as they approached the kitchen.
‘I don’t know why you didn’t come to stay with me. I’ve got a lovely spare room you know,’ Win started in as soon as the greetings were over.
Delphine grinned past her mother towards Jay. ‘I thought I should stay with my matron of honour,’ she said. ‘We’ve got outfits to co-ordinate.’
‘I could have done that. I’m your mother. And I’m good at hats,’ Win sniffed, helping herself to a second slice of her own lemon drizzle cake.
‘I know but . . .’
‘Well it’s true we’ve got shopping to do.’ Jay came up with an instant brainwave. ‘And we’re not just staying here, I’m taking Delphine to a spa for a bit of pre-wedding pampering,’ she told them, ‘The weekend before the big day.’ She glanced at Delphine, who looked relieved at this solution.
‘Suits me. And also I’ve got to go to the apartment and do some sorting out as well, and Jay’s helping me with that. So you see . . .’
‘Yes I see.’ Win sighed, surrendering all hope of her spare room being occupied by anyone other than her own fat poodle. ‘Still, at least you’re here, and in one piece. You’re looking very well, I must say. Not spreading into middle age yet, like Jay has,’ Win commented, surveying her daughter with satisfaction.
Audrey looked at the ceiling and tutted. ‘Win, you’ve no manners have you?’ she told her sister. ‘And when someone’s travelled twelve thousand miles, do they really want to discuss what shape everyone is?’
‘I’m only saying,’ Win went on, ‘that Jay was getting quite plump. You’ve lost a bit of weight lately, haven’t you dear? You’re almost looking quite trim these days, compared.’
‘Yes, you do look quite well,’ Delphine said, sounding unflatteringly surprised. ‘Though I must share with you one sure-fire tip for your shape: side-fastening trousers.’
You were supposed to say thank you for comments like that, Jay conceded as she felt Win and Delphine and Audrey staring at her hips. Somewhere in the midst of that lot you were supposed to sift out a compliment. She tried very hard, but failed to interpret anything but the negative. All that calorie-counting, all that carbohydrate avoidance. Right now she wondered if it had all been worth it.
‘It’s only going to be a small affair. Just our family plus Charles’s best man,’ Delphine told Jay as they pulled into the lane beside Harrods and waited their turn in the car-park queue. ‘But all the same, I want it to look right. I know just the colour I want you to wear.’
‘But surely . . .’ Jay began, for about the fortieth time. She didn’t get any further. She never did. This time it was because it was their turn in the queue and she had to climb out of the car, hand her keys over to the attendant and drag out her handbag from under the seat. Delphine climbed out of the passenger door, clutching her own, much larger, handbag containing the essential pieces of fabric for which a co-ordinating outfit had to be tracked down for Jay.
It was going reasonably well, so far. Delphine had only upset Greg once, commenting that now he was older, surely it was time to move on to less dramatic tastes in household decor. ‘You’d find adding a selection of soft furnishings very soothing,’ she’d told him, as if all the glass, chrome and steel in the house represented an overlengthy attachment to juvenilia, as suspect as if he was still hanging onto posters of the Bay City Rollers.
‘I don’t want to be soothed,’ he’d replied, patiently but aping her tone. ‘If I want to be soothed I’ll have a large Scotch and soda, thank you very much.’
Jay had stepped in here, fast, diverting Delphine by taking her upstairs for another look at the bridal outfit. Delphine had brought with her from Australia a loose, lacy coat in a sort of bricky pink, with a ma
tching sleeveless dress underneath. The price of it almost took Jay’s breath away and she wished she thought it as stunning as its cost deserved. Instead, she only just managed to stop herself saying that it rather reminded her of the late Queen Mother. So Delphine, she could see, was still dressing older than her years. As a child she’d preferred nice neat skirts and blouses to jeans and T-shirts, then there’d been the Jackie Kennedy teen phase. Jay had assumed she’d now have sort of caught up with herself and in middle age have landed in a clothes realm where she’d always been comfortable. And yet, even now, she seemed to want to be looking ahead to the next generation. Another few years and the going-away outfit she’d be shopping for would be the one she planned to wear in her coffin.
‘So you see,’ Delphine explained to Jay about the colour, ‘that’s why I want you in something peach. It’ll tone.’ Oh it would, that was undeniable. But not, in Jay’s opinion, attractively.
‘But shouldn’t it be the bride in the lighter colour?’ she’d suggested, brightly, thinking it would be quite useful to get something in a rich cocoa brown, perhaps with, if Delphine insisted, peachy accessories. But no. It had, for some deep reason, to be a particular pinky, orangey, pale peach.
‘You’ll look like . . .’ Imogen had started.
‘. . . a trifle,’ Jay had finished for her. ‘Yes I know, Barbara has already pointed this out and found it hilarious, thank you very much.’
‘Well the two of you together will, definitely,’ Imogen agreed. She’d even, brave girl, said the same to Delphine, who had simply looked at her in a chill way and said, ‘Don’t be silly.’
At least the cats weren’t causing any problems. ‘I’m not allergic to short-haired pedigree cats,’ Delphine had declared. ‘Only cross-breeds. Burmese have very fine fur and don’t shed much of it.’