Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  ‘So many people, so little time,’ she said almost truthfully. ‘You were there, you know how it was. It was like a covens’ convention,’ Mel said. ‘Does your school ever have reunions, Cherry?’ She couldn’t look at Neil but could sense him bursting with their sinful secret. It was a conspiracy she really didn’t want, but it was far too late to state boldly, ‘Well actually we did meet and we had sex in the old sanny,’ and it would have a definite ring of unsavoury showing-off about it.

  ‘I went to about six schools. My parents were forever in pursuit of the perfect city to live in,’ Cherry said. ‘They tried Oxford and hated it because they weren’t part of the university; Bath but couldn’t cope with the tourists; Durham was too cold and they’ve ended up in Canterbury, where they now say there’s not enough, theatre-wise.’

  ‘Ooh, I went to the theatre the other day – saw Maureen Lipman. Brilliant,’ Mel cut in.

  ‘Who with?’ Cherry looked surprised.

  ‘What, besides Maureen Lipman? Can’t remember, I’ve kept the programme though.’

  ‘No, you. Who did you go with?’

  ‘Oh, no-one. I went by myself, on a whim.’

  ‘By yourself? That’s a bit sad, why didn’t you ring me? I’d have gone with you.’

  ‘So would I,’ Sarah added. ‘You don’t have to do things all on your lonesome, you know.’ She leaned across the table towards Neil and summed up, as if Mel wasn’t there, ‘She’s divorced, you know. Remember I told you – husband recently remarried, having a baby.’

  ‘But there wasn’t time to ask anyone else,’ Mel chipped in before any more bits of her personal history could come out. ‘It wasn’t planned – I was passing the theatre.’

  Just as Mel was feeling uncomfortably defensive and starting to wonder if perhaps she was getting a bit odd, Mr Lime-Green – who was called Lenny – agreed with her. ‘I love doing things on the spur of the moment like that. And you don’t have the hassle of date-arranging or thinking about whether to eat or not afterwards.’ He leaned forward and grinned conspiratorially at Mel, who felt most encouraged until he added, ‘Sometimes there are advantages to being left on the shelf, aren’t there?’

  Gwen wandered around her daughter’s house dusting the tops of the many picture frames. Melanie had a lot of paintings, mostly unfathomable abstracts where the whole point, as far as Gwen could make out, was that the colours clashed. Whoever was doing the cleaning – and Gwen hadn’t caught Mel or anyone else with a vacuum cleaner to hand during these few days – didn’t seem to believe in getting to the bits where no-one could see. Hidden dirt, that’s what it was. Gwen didn’t trust it. Such stuff harboured germs. Neglect and decay were only a blink away.

  At last, happy enough for now (the skirtings were another story but they’d have to wait till daylight), she ventured into the kitchen. Melanie lived on all the wrong food. She didn’t even have proper mealtimes, just ate as and when. She was forever cooking up peculiar messes with pasta or standing by the fridge spooning up a yogurt. A body needed meat and potatoes and vegetables, separately laid out on a plate – that was what Gwen had raised her family on and it had done them pretty well. Vanessa believed in plain home cooking, too: her children had good solid constitutions, whereas Rosa often looked as if she was in need of a square meal. She doubted that Mel had the makings of a decent casserole anywhere, but it was worth checking the freezer just in case. If she found anything worth defrosting she could leave it overnight and have it in a low oven before lunchtime the next day.

  As she’d expected, the icebox contained more frost than food. She unearthed some chicken wings (no date on the pack), a battered box of ice lollies (presumably Rosa’s, but you could never tell) and a single cling-filmed trout. The big Harrods bag looked more promising – something delicious and costly from the food hall, she hoped. It was heavy, possibly a large ham, she guessed, her mouth beginning to water. She put it on the kitchen table, tipped out the contents, staring at the frozen badger for a few bewildered moments before letting out the most horrified scream of her life.

  Nine

  It was a pity about the badger – Cherry would not be pleased. If Melanie had only gone into the kitchen for a glass of water, instead of crashing straight off to bed when she came home from Sarah’s, she might have been able to salvage it. By the time she found it, late in the morning, it was smelling like something Tina Keen’s detectives might be called to deal with, and dripping liquid nastiness onto the floor. Even the cat was keeping his distance, staring in nervously from the garden side of the catflap. The table and the floor would need a thorough scrubbing with Dettol. Lying soggy amongst the badger’s leaking fluids was the note from her mother, which was an exercise in suppressed outrage and must have taken some thought to construct:

  ‘Have phoned your father and he is collecting me right now. Thank you for having me to stay. Mum.’

  No love, no kisses. What Gwen had been doing poking about in the freezer was unclear, but Mel guessed accurately enough that it was connected with the notion of proper food.

  Just as she was plucking up the nerve to grab the beast (never had she been so thankful for her mother equipping her with rubber gloves) and stuff it into a double-strength bin bag, the phone rang. It was tempting to pick it up and simply state, ‘I’m wrestling with a melted badger, please call later,’ but if it was her publisher, agent or anyone else expecting her to make sense, this would not be wise.

  ‘Hi Mel, it’s Neil. Funny old evening, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Hello, Neil. I suppose you could call it that.’

  ‘Hey, don’t sound so po-faced – it was a hoot!’

  ‘Well, my favourite skirt was burned to cinders, I was sympathized with for being “on the shelf” as the lime-green man put it, and I had to spend the evening pretending not to have seen you . . .’

  ‘Let alone slept with me . . .’ Neil purred, less seductively than he imagined.

  ‘. . . well, “slept” isn’t what I’d call it . . . I was going to say, not to have seen you for twenty-five years, when one of my two best friends was perfectly well aware of the truth and almost bursting blood vessels with the effort not to tell. Fun, then, if you like.’

  ‘So Cherry knew the whole truth?’ he chortled.

  ‘Actually she did,’ Mel admitted.

  ‘I’m sorry about not letting you know I’d be there,’ Neil went on. ‘It’s just that when you left the reunion I ran into Sarah and she was so insistent that I come for supper and not tell you. I could hardly tell her that we’d just missed all the speeches because we were . . . catching up elsewhere, so to speak, could I? That wouldn’t be the act of a gentleman. Let me take you out for a meal – start again. Please? Or I could come to you, bring ingredients. I’m a brilliant cook, honest.’

  Mel considered for a moment. If Neil was outside the house this minute she’d gratefully haul him in and get him to bury the furry corpse, but the idea of going out, making man-woman conversation and then finding an excuse not to have sex exhausted her. She’d tried the casual fling: it had been a one-off experiment that wouldn’t improve in the repeating. She’d rather spend all her evenings, for evermore, working late, living on her mad sandwiches and watching post-midnight rubbish TV. But then she’d end up deranged. Alone, friendless, crazed and gibbering or even, she thought, staring at the rotting badger, doing weird secret things to dead animals.

  ‘OK, next week, say Tuesday. Thanks, Neil, that will be . . .’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it will be.’

  She’d changed. Leonora, Roger could honestly say, was no longer the woman he’d married. Mel hadn’t done that – she’d been entirely, dependably herself from day one to day – well, zero was probably the right number in the circumstances. Her reliability was probably why he’d been so stupid as to take her for granted and cheat so flagrantly and so often. Leonora was no longer even a grown-up woman – not by his standards, anyway. She’d reverted to child-pet, to pretty-princess, to m
ummy and daddy’s special baby girl. The house seemed constantly to be full of her parents; Leonora’s mother dropped in most mornings, and left evidence of her visit in the form of cerise-lipsticked coffee cups lined up beside the sink – the opening mechanism for the dishwasher seemed to be a secret known only to Roger and the cleaning lady. Colin, her father, sometimes stopped by on the way back from the golf course. As he arrived home from work, Roger’s heart would sink at the sight of Colin’s Jaguar skewed at a proprietorial angle across the drive. He’d try, and fail, to squeeze his Passat between the car and the front door. Later there’d be a kind of back and forth dance-like skirmish of the cars, as Roger backed down the drive while Colin manoeuvred his vehicle round the central circular flower bed and inevitably (being by then more full of early evening gin than he’d admit to) ran over the surrounding stonework and crushed the struggling lavender.

  Leonora hadn’t been encumbered by these people when he’d met and dated her. She’d savoured their relationship being a secret one – a married man, so many years older, wasn’t what her doting parents had had in mind for her. Leonora, now he looked back on that time, had treated the whole thing as a naughty game. She’d lied about him to her family, elaborately, for the sheer childish fun of it. He remembered how, when they’d gone away to Scotland for a weekend’s skiing, she’d phoned her mother from their hotel bed and told her, in great detail, about the health spa she wasn’t really at with a girlfriend who probably didn’t exist. What, he’d asked at the time, had that been about? Why hadn’t she just said she was going skiing with her boyfriend? She’d laughed, hadn’t answered, distracting him by winding her slender legs around him and hauling him back beneath the duvet. Now that everything was official, he felt rather as if he’d been the prey and was successfully shot and bagged. He’d fallen for something – a woman who was a con, almost a joke.

  And there was going to be this baby. He’d have to work hard at claiming it as his, for although there was no question about its actual paternity, he felt there would be keen challenge for what could only be termed ‘ownership’ from Colin and Maureen. He hoped for a boy, for the child’s sake. Another girl would be too much competition for the role of household princess. The house, already awash with rather Eighties frills, would turn into a Temple of Pink. A boy might even the balance and give him an ally.

  Leonora and Maureen were busy organizing the nursery. Occasionally Leonora would ask him to arbitrate: this shade of blue or that one, blinds or curtains. He didn’t know how much difference, if any, his responses made, and suspected he was simply being asked out of politeness or to back up a decision already made. He flicked through a book of wallpaper samples that Leonora had left on the conservatory table. The book fell open at a page where the corner was turned down. The design looked vaguely familiar – white background with a watery pattern of occasional clouds, drifts of wave-tops and small children in sailing dinghies. Roger was surprised it was still in production. He and Mel had liked that one, all those years ago. It had reminded them of Swallows and Amazons. They’d ordered seven rolls of it and never collected them; they were probably still piled up in a stockroom somewhere, waiting to be pasted up in the room of the boy who would now have been fifteen and who would have covered this whimsical pattern with black paint and posters of pert girls. Roger wondered about the turned-down corner: Leonora must have got it on her list of possibles. Quickly checking that she wasn’t within hearing distance, he ripped the page out, scrunched it up and shoved it in his jacket pocket. This was one decorating decision he was going to make by himself.

  * * *

  Cherry had forgiven Melanie for the loss of badger. And so she should, Mel thought, seeing as she had just bought her a substantial lunch at the River Café to make up for it. They were on their way to an exhibition, a private view held at the unusual time of 2 p.m. to catch, according to Cherry, the school-run-mother trade. ‘They’re the ones who make the decisions about what goes on the walls. And they’ll all turn up because they’re grateful to be asked to a grown-up event in the daytime,’ Cherry told her as they walked up the Fulham Palace Road, looking backwards for an available taxi.

  ‘I can understand that. When Rosa was little, the only discussions I seemed to have were with other mums who had some small person twined round their legs. You’d be forever saying something like, “Did you see that play on BBC2 last night no darling don’t eat the ice cream from the wrong end.” Completely mad conversations that were only half there and never went anywhere.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, but I know how to get a woman to buy a painting,’ Cherry said, flinging out her arm to hail a fast-approaching taxi. ‘And you’ll like the artist – she paints domestic interior scenes, a bit like those old Dutch paintings but about this century instead. Great wobbling oversized women, every bit of cellulite on show, staggering beneath mounds of laundry, that sort of thing.’

  The gallery was in the middle of a row of chic shops at the Notting Hill end of Kensington and was indeed, as Cherry had predicted, crammed with women clutching drinks and chatting to each other – few seemed to be taking much notice of the paintings. Mel overheard words familiar from the gym locker-room vocabulary range such as ‘scholarship’, ‘au pair’, ‘exorbitant’ and ‘Sardinia’. Collectively, the women all looked remarkably similar – mid-thirties, predominantly pinky-beige in colouring, with chin-length highlighted English-mouse hair and ditsy little tight cardigans in sugared-almond colours worn over black trousers. Mel wondered how many of them had independent careers other than being full-time wives and mothers. She tried not to do them an injustice: any or every one of them might be a skiving novelist just like her, or an off-duty lawyer, a nurse or a night-shift police surgeon.

  Whatever these women filled their daily lives with, the contrast between their sleek, well-kept appearance and the subjects of the paintings could hardly have been greater. The artist, as Cherry had told her, had painted big angry canvases crammed with ironic social realism (so Melanie read on the catalogue, and which she didn’t feel qualified to dispute). She particularly liked a six-foot-square scene depicting a kitchen table piled high with family detritus. There were school-books, a computer, newspapers, junk mail, a sleeping cat, half a Lego castle – anything but food – the table looked as if it had never been used for meals. In the corner, cowering against a big fridge, lurked a fat woman spooning baked beans into her mouth, guiltily, covertly, cold from the tin. It was a scene of true domestic desolation. Another painting showed a defeated-looking woman waiting in a long bus queue, clutching a toddler, a buggy and several bags of shopping. Close by, great hulking lads sped fast and free along the pavement on too-small Chopper bikes. The paint looked as if it had been applied with fury – great splodges and streaks of muted, rather ugly shades livened with the occasional startling bolt of primary colour.

  ‘A dismal thing, real life, isn’t it?’ Cherry appeared at her side with two glasses of white wine.

  ‘Not exactly a symphony of domestic bliss,’ she could only agree, ‘but I like these, they’ve got a lot to say.’

  ‘Mel, this is Helena – she’s the artist.’ Melanie was surprised to find herself looking at a small slim woman with pale ginger hair scrunched back in a neat high ponytail. She was wearing no make-up, and her nose was dotted with the kind of freckles that little girls are usually reassured will disappear with age. The paintings with their fierce energy looked like the work of someone much bigger, and much older, too. Helena couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and surely hadn’t yet had time or experience to become as domestically jaded as her paintings.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Mel said to her. ‘These are terrific and I see you’ve sold a lot already. You must be pleased.’

  ‘Mmm, I am! I didn’t expect to sell this many – I just handed out invites to all the mothers at the gates of my son’s school.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice to confiding level. ‘I targeted the ones with the biggest cars, the off-roader
types. I didn’t dream they’d all turn up!’ Helena was as excited as a child, high on her success. To Mel, she didn’t look old enough to have a child, let alone a school-age one. ‘How old is your son?’ she couldn’t resist asking.

  ‘Eight. I know what you’re thinking – I still get asked for ID in pubs. I did actually have him when I was seventeen. His dad’s not around – it’s just the two of us.’ A girl approached carrying wine, topping up glasses. ‘Goodness, I mustn’t drink any more – I’ve got to pick him up later. Luckily the school’s just round the corner.’

  Melanie laughed. ‘I remember that feeling. When you’ve had a lunch with a friend and you’ve shared a bottle, that’s always the day Miss wants to haul you in to talk about the reading scheme.’

  ‘Or the PTA rep starts a long spiel about the summer fête.’

  ‘And you’re standing there breathing so slowly through your nose you think you’ll faint, but the alternative is to have it all round the staffroom that Rosa’s Mother Drinks.’ As if to confirm the truth of this, a woman behind Melanie could be heard saying, ‘No, not for me, I’m driving,’ followed by a swift recant, ‘Just half a glass, then.’

  Helena drifted away to be congratulated elsewhere, and Melanie felt peculiarly out of place. She was at a different stage from most of the women in the gallery. Their homes were full of the hustle of family life, their voices full of false complaint at how busy they were, how rushed life was. She was by contrast a slowed being, able to choose the hours she kept, the routines she set herself. She could live as mad as a skunk, pile old newspapers into string-tied heaps, keep garbage in carrier bags on the stairs, make smelly towers out of empty cat-food cans. She could, with only a small deviation of decisions, become a witch-creature, alone with her cat and frightening to children. She had an unsettling vision of herself as a much older woman – double-locking doors, fearful of strangers, wary of unexpected telephone calls, taking her handbag up to bed at night. She gave herself a small mental shaking.