Nina sat in a folding deck-chair on the patio of Kerry’s father’s house in Crystal Palace, drinking Bucks Fizz and watching feeble tendrils of smoke from the barbecue. It looked ominously dormant to Nina. The coals were still black, and when she put her hand above them she could only feel the faintest trace of warmth. Not enough to melt a knob of butter, never mind cook a kebab. From the kitchen came the crashing and clanging and ostentatious whistling of Kerry’s father, Bob, preparing food in a mild state of panic.
Nina glanced at her watch with growing annoyance. ‘Be early,’ she had told James. ‘I don’t want to arrive before you.’ She had been looking forward to and dreading this event in equal measure, ever since the invitations had been issued.
‘Dad said do you want to come over for a meal next Friday?’ Kerry had said on her way out one evening. ‘It’ll just be the four of us.’
‘Oh, well, thank you. Tell him I’d be glad to. Would he like me to bring something? A pudding, perhaps?’ She was already working out how feasible it would be to take a dish of poached pears in Marsala on the bus.
‘Na-a-o,’ said Kerry in her usual drawl. ‘He’ll do the food. It won’t be anything flash.’
At first Nina had welcomed this opportunity to observe Kerry en famille, and to gain admittance to this magic circle which had enclosed her son. He had often remarked that Nina would get on well with Bob; that they had plenty in common.
‘Such as?’ Nina wanted to know.
‘Your jobs for one thing.’
‘I don’t follow.’ She had a feeling that a policeman and a social worker would not be natural allies.
‘Well. Quite large sections of the public really hate you.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Plus, you’re both the same . . . generation. And you’re both alone.’
‘I didn’t think I was alone,’ said Nina, bridling at this notion of herself as middle-aged and, moreover, unloved – as both an individual and a type. ‘I thought I had you.’
‘Yeah, well, you know what I mean.’
Later, recalling this exchange, she had started to feel anxious. Will I be able to make conversation? Will I be an embarrassment to James? What should I wear? It was hopeless to look to the young for guidance in the matter of dress. Weddings, funerals, job interviews, parties: one uniform did for all. When she was a girl her mother had always taught her it would be social death to show a bra strap or an inch of petticoat. Nowadays Kerry seemed quite comfortable going out in nothing but a petticoat.
In the end she settled on a red linen pinafore, which looked smart on the hanger, but would be crumpled and casual by the time she had fought her way from Tooting to Crystal Palace on public transport. She took the precaution of arriving twenty minutes late – much against her instincts – to find the barbecue still unlit, no sign of James, and Kerry’s father threading chunks of partly frozen chicken on to wooden skewers.
He had refused all offers of assistance and installed her in the garden with a drink and a bowl of olives, where she now sat alone, overlooking neighbouring gardens to either side and a former psychiatric hospital – now luxury apartments – to the rear.
From inside came the sound of voices. Nina strained to listen. ‘Why don’t you go outside and say hello to James’s mum? She’s all on her own out there.’ This was Bob. ‘Nah.’ A male voice, early teenage, was followed by pounding footsteps and the slamming of a door. Presently pop music erupted from an upstairs window.
Bob came to the back door holding an empty bottle of sauce and looking harassed. He was slightly overweight, Nina noticed, but balding gracefully, and not entirely unattractive – apart from a green polka dot apron, which reached a couple of inches below the hem of his shorts and gave him from the front the appearance of a pantomime dame.
‘This stuff says marinade for 24 hours. I thought it said 2–4 hours. Do you think it’ll matter?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Nina. In her experience the subtleties of herb and spice were lost on food incinerated over coals. Generally one was lucky to be able to identify the meat.
‘Good.’ He pointed upwards to the source of the music. ‘My son,’ he said, apologetically. ‘He’s going out in a minute. Do you want another one of those?’ he asked, picking up her empty glass from beside a small cairn of olive stones.
‘Yes, please. Perhaps without the orange juice this time.’
‘I’m nearly done in there,’ he promised. Then, betraying precisely her own anxiety, added, ‘I wonder where the kids are. They’re not normally late.’
I wouldn’t know, thought Nina. They never eat with me. Deep inside she felt jealousy beginning to stir. She pictured it as a sinuous, fast-growing plant – bindweed, perhaps – which always left a tiny piece of root behind, however hard you tried to eliminate it, and if left unchecked would flourish and spread and choke the life out of everything beautiful and cultivated. She had felt it in relation to Jane and Guy, too: the cosiness of their set-up. And now thanks to her belated attempt to do the right thing by everyone she was lonelier than ever. All the time he wasn’t at Bob’s, James was over in Twickenham with Guy and Jane prettifying their house, while if she, Nina, wanted anything done around the place she had to do it herself . . .
She beat back an advancing thicket of bindweed and stood up. Any second now Bob would emerge from the kitchen with a rack of raw – possibly not even defrosted – chicken, to find the barbecue had gone out and she had made no attempt to save it. A couple of the coals closest to the firelighters had begun to glow orange at one corner. Nina bent down and blew on them, recoiling as a flurry of ash and grit flew up into her face.
‘Everything all right?’ asked Bob, reappearing with her glass of sparkling wine.
‘Oh!’ said Nina, conscious that her face must be streaked with soot. ‘I was just trying to ginger it up, but I think I’ve put it out altogether.’
Bob picked up a pair of tongs and gave the charcoal a vigorous stir. ‘No, you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘That’s dead, that is. This is going to set us back a bit. Are you starving?’
‘No,’ Nina lied, fractionally too late.
‘I wonder if I could use my blowtorch.’
‘To cook the chicken?’ asked Nina, experiencing a sudden loss of appetite.
‘To relight the barbie. I’ve got one tucked away somewhere.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never done it. I thought men were supposed to be experts at this. I thought it was inborn.’
‘Yeah. Like map-reading,’ said Bob. ‘I’m no good at that, either.’
Nearby a telephone rang. Bob put his arm through the kitchen window and brought out a cordless phone into which he spoke, all the while maintaining eye-contact with Nina. She found this disconcerting, if not ill-mannered. It reminded her of a former colleague from her days at Camden Council who used to do something similar. If Nina ever knocked on his door while he was on the telephone he would beckon her in and gesture for her to wait while he talked on and on, occasionally throwing her a grimace, as if to pretend she was part of the conversation.
‘Yes, she is,’ Bob was saying. ‘What do you mean “going to be”? You’re already late.’ He started to tap his foot in mock impatience. ‘Good. Well, as long as it looks nice . . . Maybe some charred bits and pieces. Love you too.’ He snapped the aerial into place and posted the phone back through the kitchen window.
‘That was Kerry. They’re going to be late. They only had a little bit left to do on the wallpapering and they wanted to get it finished. In case the paste went thick overnight or something. So they’re just setting off now.’
‘From Twickenham?’ said Nina in dismay, bindweed swarming around her ankles. ‘They’ll be ages.’
‘Hours.’
‘Well, I suppose it will give us a chance to get this charcoal alight.’
Bob gave a derisive laugh and vanished indoors again, in search of the hidden blowtorch, Nina presumed. She was therefore somewhat disconcerted when he returned a few minutes
later having discarded the apron and changed into a pair of smartish trousers.
‘Do you eat Greek?’ he said.
For a moment Nina thought he had said, ‘Do you read Greek?’ and was about to reply that she’d studied the subject briefly at school, but didn’t consider herself proficient, when the penny dropped and she was able to say, ‘Yes. Why?’
‘There’s an okay Greek restaurant five minutes from here. Come on.’
‘What about James and Kerry?’
‘When any of my children are late for a meal I don’t sit around waiting for them. Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Nina admitted. In fact, now she came to think of it, she spent an awful lot of her time waiting, attending other people’s pleasure: solicitors, judges, clients in particular, who would think nothing of keeping her stranded for an hour on their doorstep in some crumbling tenement, even though her good opinion might be crucial in deciding their fate.
‘It’s a bad habit,’ Bob advised, pocketing wallet and keys. ‘People take advantage.’
‘James never used to,’ said Nina. Until he met your daughter, she refrained from adding as she followed him indoors. What a waste of an evening, she was thinking. If she had known there was a chance that James wouldn’t be there she would never have come. She had a sudden, ghastly suspicion that he and Kerry had planned the whole thing – as a piece of prurient teenage matchmaking. Nina felt her cheeks flame at the thought that she’d been set up in this absurdly ill-judged manner. It struck her that if James himself was casting around for someone, anyone, to take her on in his absence, then she must have been displaying a pathetically needy and dependent streak which she would do well to curb. I’m not that person, she thought. I’m a confident, successful woman with inner resources. I don’t need a man – or a boy – to complete me.
‘I’ll leave them a note. They can join us if they want,’ Bob was saying. He picked through a jam jar of pens on top of the fridge, discarding one after another until he found one that worked, and scribbled a message directly on to the fridge door, which was already defaced by lists, instructions and reminders in different hands. ‘You won’t know what to do with yourself in September when he’s off to university, will you?’
‘He’ll be back in the holidays, I expect,’ said Nina, remembering too late that this wasn’t the reply of a confident, resourceful woman with wide-ranging interests. ‘I’ll adjust. It won’t be so different. He’s never in now as it is. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I might take in foreign students. Or a lodger.’ She said this casually, though the idea had only that moment occurred to her. Already she could see herself cooking Full English Breakfasts for svelte French girls and tall, homesick Germans. ‘I’ll be all right. I like my own company. Don’t worry about me.’
38
Jane parked outside Erica’s house and sat listening to Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending while she waited for her friend to appear. It was 9 a.m. and she was already tired and irritable from the protracted negotiations and preparations which had brought her to this state of readiness for one day out without children.
It had been arranged that Guy would take Sophie to school with him early, and be responsible for her once lessons were over at 3.15. ‘Well, all right,’ he’d conceded, when Jane had proposed the idea. ‘But I’ll be in a meeting until five. I can’t entertain her.’
‘So she can sit in your office and do some colouring, or a jigsaw or something,’ said Jane. ‘Or she could come to the meeting and hand round the biscuits.’ Guy rolled his eyes at that. ‘Why the hell not? You’re the head – you can do what you like.’
‘I don’t see why you can’t go at a weekend when I’m here to look after the children properly.’
‘Because it’s easier for Erica with Greg at school and Will at nursery. She doesn’t have to impose on quite so many people.’
‘What’s so special about this trip anyway?’ Guy wanted to know. He was beginning to feel a sense of kinship with the Imposed Upon.
‘Erica’s going abroad in a few weeks’ time. For two years. We thought it would be nice to have a day out at the sea before she goes. Somewhere typically English, to remind her of home. Pub lunch, stroll along the beach, look round the shops, that sort of thing. You know how difficult it would be with children tearing around.’
‘I have two hundred children tearing around me all day,’ Guy said, loftily. This was dangerous.
‘Are you saying I shouldn’t go?’ Jane demanded.
‘No, of course not. You go. You obviously need a break,’ he added. ‘What are you going to do about Harriet? You’re not suggesting I take her to school too?’
‘Well, she’s the problem.’ As usual, Jane thought. ‘I wonder if your mother would have her for the day. I could drop her off on the way down to Worthing and pick her up on the way back.’
Guy raised his eyebrows. Since their dismal meeting in London he no longer felt inclined to ask his mother for any favours. She had never exactly been an enthusiastic grandparent. She observed birthdays and Christmas, but tended to find pressing reasons not to babysit.
‘You’d think she’d be glad to have her once in a while,’ Jane remarked.
‘Try her and see,’ was Guy’s advice. ‘You might catch her off-guard and startle her into being generous.’
This was precisely what had happened. Jane had telephoned early one morning and put the question without any preamble, wondering what Mrs Bromelow would produce from her arsenal of excuses, and was surprised when, after some huffing and tongue-clicking, her mother-in-law had agreed. The only proviso was that Harriet was to arrive germ-free. ‘We don’t want any sniffles brought in, thank you. I’ve only just thrown off the most shocking cold. Everything goes straight to my chest nowadays.’ Jane had accepted this condition and everything seemed settled. Harriet was elated. Sophie was sulky at first at the thought of what she might be missing, but was soon bought off with the promise of biscuits and grown-up talk at Daddy’s meeting.
Then, last night at bathtime, just as all the details had fallen into place and the weather forecast promised that the hot dry spell showed no sign of abating, Harriet had complained of a sore throat. Jane had sent her to bed with a pre-emptive dose of that cure-all syrup from the medicine cupboard and prayed that the soreness was merely the result of too much shrieking, and not the early stage of a virus.
The following morning Jane’s hopes were dashed: Harriet came tottering into her parents’ bedroom just minutes after Jane had made her regular 5 a.m. transfer from the spare bed.
‘I’ve got a snotty nose,’ the child wailed, her face awash with mucus and tears. Jane cleaned her up with a wad of tissues and let her climb in between herself and Guy. Harriet snuggled up to her mother gratefully and was asleep in seconds, while Jane lay there, trapped uncomfortably between Harriet’s jutting elbows and knees and the precipitous edge of the bed, and wondering why it was that her youngest daughter only craved physical affection when she was carrying something contagious. A few hot, stinging tears of frustration gathered in her eyes and slid down into her hair. All her carefully laid plans were ruined now. Leaving Harriet with Guy’s parents was out of the question. Jane would have to bring her along or cancel the trip. She had looked forward to it so much; even the idea of a post-ponement was more than she could bear. She cursed Harriet for her lousy timing, and Guy, who was never inconvenienced by childhood illnesses, and was moreover enjoying an untroubled sleep in well over fifty per cent of the bed, and her own unlucky stars, and was still awake and fretting at seven when the alarm went off.
‘What are you going to do with her?’ Guy asked on his return from the shower, as they stood over Harriet’s limp form, looking in dismay at her watering eyes and runny nose.
‘Take her with me, I suppose,’ said Jane, at which point Harriet showed signs of rallying and began to bounce up and down on the bed with excitement.
‘I don’t know,’ said Guy, laying his hand on Harriet’s forehead with all the tender solicitude of on
e about to escape the sickroom by departing for work. ‘I’m not sure she should go out in the cold. We don’t want her to catch a chill.’ Jane glanced out of the window at a cloudless blue sky. The temperature was already in the twenties and climbing.
‘I’ll do my best to make a sensible judgement,’ she said, drily, as Sophie appeared in the doorway, already washed, dressed, and trying to tie her own plaits.
‘What a good girl you are,’ Jane said, coming to her aid. For being quiet and sensible, and for not succumbing to inconvenient colds, she thought.
‘Am I good?’ asked Harriet, who had slumped back on to the bed surrounded by a nest of used tissues. As she spoke she pulled another tissue from the box, screwed it into a tight ball with both hands, dabbed it ineffectually in the delta of snot on her top lip and then dropped it on to the heap.
‘Occasionally,’ said Jane, still harbouring the irrational suspicion that Harriet had made herself ill on purpose. In a moment she would have to ring Guy’s mother to break the good news, very probably waking her up in the process. The Bromelows were not early risers.
‘Have fun!’ was Guy’s parting shot as he left for school on foot with Sophie. Jane was having the car: a fortnight after the grand clear-out, Erica’s car was still packed with trash and effectively out of commission.
Jane dressed herself and Harriet, phoned her mother-in-law, and was dithering over whether to call Erica and cancel the outing when she saw James loping down the path to the front door. He had his Walkman on as usual, head lolling in time with the music. She had forgotten he was coming. He caught her gawping through the front-room window and waved.
‘Hello. You look smart. Are you going somewhere?’ he said, as Jane let him in. His mother had brought him up to be chivalrous, but Jane had in fact chosen her clothes – grey silk trousers and a black sleeveless shirt – with especial care. She always did when she was seeing Erica. This was illogical in the extreme, since, although Jane had a pretty good idea how to dress to please a man, she hadn’t a clue what was likely to impress a woman – particularly a woman like Erica, who showed no interest in clothes and often looked as though she’d slept in hers.
A Dry Spell Page 32