Flora managed all of this without ever getting her cuffs dirty. She always wore very clean, very crisp, linen shirts, often with matching trousers that gave her a stern Maoist look and impressed her clients.
Even as a child Flora had been unnaturally neat. As an eight-year-old she had chided Posy for not closing cupboards or shutting her drawers properly. On the last day of each term she’d look as neat and shiny as on the first. Her possessions endured for ever. At thirty-six she still had a mauve-plastic folding brush and comb set that she’d bought at Superdrug when she was fourteen. She had the world’s tidiest make-up bag (no clogged mascara, or stubby lipsticks, or damp, cracked compact). Her bars of soap stayed immaculate even to the last sliver. The only thing that threatened to slip out of her control was her bright yellow hair, which was curly and tended towards the frizzy. It had to be restrained in a very tight plait. Posy’s hair was similar, but she let it do what it wanted, and it made a wild brown halo around her face.
It had been seeing Posy struggle at Christmas when James and Poppy were small that gave Flora the idea for Perfect Solutions.
‘I hate Christmas. It’s a route-march of consumerism with slave labour by women!’ Posy had raged just out of earshot of her children. ‘I was up till midnight making a sheep’s outfit, and tonight I’ve got to make a page’s outfit. And tomorrow night I’ll have to do all the cards. I have to home-make everything because you can’t buy any Christmas food that won’t possibly contain traces of nuts. And then James will probably reject it all anyway, and just want soft-scoop raspberry-ripple ice cream instead.’
‘Make Frank do more then,’ Flora said.
‘Oh he’s hopeless. He acts as though all the present-buying and wrapping, and cards and shopping and decorations were some folly of mine, some private hobby that he shouldn’t interfere with. And nobody except you will get me any good presents, even though I’ll have spent hundreds of hours on everybody else. What I really need is a wife.’
Posy wanted someone kind and unflappable, a sort of human Renault Espace. Someone who would remember to buy kitchen roll, who would empty the bin without being asked, who would always have plasters and antiseptic wipes in her bag. Someone with a smooth, gentle face, and soft, strong arms.
‘I need someone like you full-time,’ she told Flora. She wasn’t really thinking of Flora. She was thinking of her friend Kate. She had once dreamt that she’d been browsing the stalls at the Pre-School Christmas Fayre hand-in-hand with Kate. They knew how many jelly beans there were in the jar, and had correctly guessed the weight of the cake. They had watched the clown show together. The children were off, safely engaged elsewhere.
The reality was that Kate would be running the raffle and Posy would be doing one of the less popular stalls; shelling out endless 20ps, whilst trying to restrain (at least a little bit) James and Poppy’s acquisitiveness and passion for gambling on the Beany Baby tombola. Her youngest would be thrashing in her arms, desperate to be crawling around on the hall’s dirty floor, to get under the stalls and to be scalded by cups of tea.
The grass on the Common was studded with cigarette butts and turning to yellow dust, but the Parousellis still went there nearly every day. They hadn’t been away this year. (Izzie was too young for a holiday to be a holiday.)
Oh August, low season for fetes, bazaars and jumbles. Posy was getting withdrawal symptoms. Her love of them was genetic. Her mother had always been on their school’s PTA, and would do the book stall or the white elephant - something that didn’t require her to make anything. Aunt Is was a queen of fetes. Every weekend there seemed to be one. Her friend Beatrice (known to the girls as Aunt Bea) made felt animals, and they donated honey for sale. If they weren’t manning a stall, then they would take their young visitors to somebody else’s Open Garden or at the very least to the WI market for a haul of jam and cakes.
‘Tuck in! Tuck in, girls!’ they’d say; words to gladden any heart.
The girls often stayed with Aunt Is in the holidays. The time dragged. Aunt Is lived in St Cross, in a house overlooking the Watermeadows. Sometimes the girls would walk along Kingsgate Road and into Winchester. If they were by themselves they could go into Bluebells, their favourite shop, and buy the sort of things that their aunt thought utterly pointless - smelly rubbers, magnetic cats, mini dried-flower paperweights, Flower Fairy notebooks and pens - and they thought necessary to their happiness.
‘Utter junk,’ Aunt Is said. ‘Lot of nonsense, no use to anyone.’ These opinions didn’t stop her from decamping to Cornwall to help Aunt Bea run the North Cornwall Bee Centre with its own gift shop and café, some years later.
Posy and Flora tried to make the walks as long as they could, visiting any museum that was free, looking in the charity shops, stopping to listen to any busker or street entertainer who didn’t look liable to involve them or embarrass them. They patted the bronze boar near the Courts, they browsed (pointless! pointless!) the Tourist Information Bureau. They would even look at whatever exhibition the Guildhall was sporting: The Guild of Embroiderers, Rotary Regalia … The citizens of Winchester seemed oblivious to the prison on the hill, and went about their Hunter-booted business as though it wasn’t there, about to slide down on a lava flow and engulf them all. Flora and Posy sat on the steps of the Buttercross and drank Coke. They sat on benches in the Cathedral Close and read and read. Sometimes there was a film crew working on an adaptation. They hoped that they might be spotted.
‘We’d be great as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet,’ Flora said, even though Posy hadn’t done Pride and Prejudice yet, and was doomed to get Mansfield Park for O level. ‘But I bet we’d end up as Mary and Kitty.’
Aunt Is always took them on a tour of the Cathedral. She was an official guide and on duty at least twice a month. The highpoint of their visit would be a trip to the Theatre Royal where they would eat ice cream in the interval and never, ever, go to the bar.
Much of the time was spent taking the dogs to the Watermeadows. They liked to walk past a house where a parrot called Persephone lived. The girls stopped and peered. Persephone’s owner waved, but never invited them in.
Aunt Is knew every dog that they met. Flora and Posy were introduced. There were long conversations about swans. If they went by themselves one of the dogs always ran away, meaning the girls yelled and searched and worried, and finally trailed the useless lead home to find that the dog had beaten them there, and was tucking in to a dinner of biscuits mixed with raw cabbage and carrot and pilchards.
‘Demon Hound!’ Aunt Is barked, handing round pieces of crumbly fudge, that might have been toffee, or perhaps Kendal Mint Cake. Often Posy and Flora couldn’t imagine how the time until the next meal could possibly be filled. Fortunately there were many meals each day, most of them involving jam. There was a whole cupboard devoted to it.
Every summer Flora rearranged the jars, putting the newest at the back, and explained the system to Aunt Is who laughed and said, ‘Thank you, Flora.’ But still five-year-old jars rubbed shoulders on the table with the only just bought. The Aunts spooned the green layers off the top (‘Penicillin. Can only do you good’). Posy chose honey, mostly because she had a crush on Rupert Brooke. Aunt Is had a 1915 edition of ‘1914’. Posy propped it up on the bedside table so that she could look at it as she fell asleep.
Aunt Is reserved some special recipes for her vegetarian nieces. The things the girls most dreaded were Cheesy Rice (a blackened pyrex dish of rice poached in milk with strings of melted cheese and chunks of boiled celery, cut to resemble caterpillars), and on their last day, High Tea. Posy, of course, always pictured them sitting on wooden thrones, a version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The reality was cold discs of very soft carrot, and hardly cooked shop-bought quiche. Aunt Is considered a whole one each appropriate.
‘Mushroom for you, Flora? Posy? Leek and broccoli? I remembered that those were your favourites last time.’
‘Mmm. Yes please,’ they would say politely. She heaped cauliflower onto t
heir plates.
‘Tuck in! You’ve a long journey.’ And then there would be delicious cakes and meringues from the WI and strawberries and plums or gooseberry fool. Mummy collected them (Aunt Is was her aunt really) and drove them home over the Hog’s Back.
Fifteen years later when Aunt Is moved to Cornwall, Flora decided to buy her house. Flora’s inheritance had been prudently invested, and was sitting there, a big fatty lump, force-fed corn. She had the house valued and paid her Aunt the asking price.
‘It will all come back to the two of you eventually,’ Aunt Is said.
It was lucky that Aunt Is took almost everything with her: nothing could have survived Flora’s plans for the perfectly streamlined, beautiful home. The old mangle and some enamel basins planted with Californian poppies that were left sitting by the back door were sent to live at Posy’s.
September
When James Parouselli gave his teacher the note, she expected it to be about ‘The Asda Incident’ as she’d come to think of it. But it wasn’t. Mrs Parouselli seemed unaware that her husband was deranged. ‘Dear Mrs Fleance’ (Posy had written in her neatest writing),
‘You might think that I am this flaky kind of person, but I am not. You have the wrong idea of me. I am very organised really. Very together.
James’s lack of plimsolls is really a sign of how organised I am. His feet, as you probably have noticed, are so narrow and so flat that I have to get special Start-rite plimsolls with velcro flaps, not just elastic, and even then he requires special insoles or they would still fall off. These have had to be ordered by Frenches and take two weeks to come. I did order them well in advance of the new term, only to find that his feet had grown one and a half sizes in a fortnight. He’s gone from 11 ½ to 1. And they were professionally measured beforehand. Incidentally these plimsolls cost £12.40 with the insoles as extra, not £2.50 as the Ladybird ones do, and we have tried Clarks ones too. They never fit.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is please excuse James’s lack of plimsolls. It isn’t his fault, and it isn’t really mine. I am a standard solid Mum, even though my children’s feet are not of standard width. Not flaky or unreliable.
Yours sincerely,
Posy Parouselli.’
‘Flaky? Flaky?’ Mrs Fleance thought of the cream crackers, and the cheese straws and the Cornish wafers that James Parouselli brought in for snack time. He did always seem to be the child with the most crumbs down his front, to come in after lunch with the biggest blobs of yoghurt on his sweatshirt.
Flaky. Was Mrs Parouselli flaky? She remembered the home-school visit she’d made to them just before James had started in Reception. She had noticed that the windows were in need of attention, the paint peeling, dry and damp wood exposed. Or perhaps she meant chocolate flakey. Mrs Parouselli could certainly once have looked like a Flake advert girl, that poppy field one, but not any more. She imagined all the Parousellis on the Common opposite their house, eating double 99s.
How should she respond?
‘There’s a lot worse than being flaky,’ she felt like saying. At least Mrs Parouselli wasn’t one of those pushy critical parents, always on about the reading scheme, and trying to prise other people’s children’s baseline assessment scores out of her. She marked the letter to go in James’s file, and gave Mrs Parouselli a special smile at hometime.
When Posy opened the door a dinosaur fell on her head, then a tunnel, and then a bucket of Popoids.
‘This cupboard!’ said Posy, trying to sound jolly, not tearful, annoyed, murderous or despairing, even though there was nobody there to hear her scream.
‘This cupboard is driving me mad!’ It merited its own item on the agenda at every St Peter’s Pre-school and Toddler Group meeting. Each group blamed the group who’d been in the hall the day before them, and everybody could blame the Sea Scouts, who had lots of irregular meetings and had once been seen mucking about on the mini-trikes and hiding things in the sand tray.
It was Posy’s turn to set up the hall for Toddlers. Isobel was asleep on the stage in her car seat, her mouth an isosceles triangle. Minute particles of dust from the dusky pink curtains, the memories of a thousand amateur dramatics, pantomimes, and ballet shows, and words of thanks from the vicar drifted down on to her as she slept. Tom was trundling up and down on a new green tractor with a trailer. He’d been the first one there and he was staying on it. The committee should have bought six of them. The Barbie bike and the ride-on Thomas had nothing on it.
Posy dragged out the water tray and the dough table, the ‘home-corner’ stuff - a wooden washing machine, cupboards, sink, oven, microwave, plastic fruit and veg, pizza, birthday cake and ice creams, and some scratched red chairs and a table.
‘Now they can sit around and moan about how tired they are and be disappointed,’ said someone behind her. ‘Want a hand?’
It was Caroline, Al’s wife. Al’s ex, Posy corrected herself. Caroline in her Boden gingham capris, looking like a sad Doris Day sans ponytail, a rare voice of dissent at Toddlers where ‘Mustn’t grumble’ was the order of the day. If only Caroline’s life had turned out more like the Boden catalogue, an endless series of perfect days on the beach with X (architect) and their three children (wearing a selection of Mini Boden).
There were plastic pieces of toast and slices of some pink stuff, possibly salami or luncheon meat from the Early Learning Centre of a bygone age.
‘“Have a reality sandwich” is what Frank would say,’ Posy said. She liked Caroline, and was unfazed by the rumour that Caroline didn’t pay her Access bill off in full each month. Even so, she thought that Caroline could be a bit of a loose cannon at Toddlers.
Caroline kept Posy up to date on the current state of hostilities with Al, often telling her things that she didn’t want to know.
‘I think I’ll get the Duplo zoo out. We haven’t had that out for a while,’ said Posy.
‘I’ll help,’ said Caroline.
There was a landscaped board, various bits of fence, and a gang of bland-faced zookeepers to keep it all under control. Caroline dropped a handful of assorted animals onto the lake.
‘This one’s Al,’ she said, picking up a hippo. She built it a very small pen and laughed as she trapped it inside.
‘Sometimes I almost start to forget what he was like. God. It was just like sleeping underwater with a hippo - all that farting and grunting like he’d eaten too many lily roots - and the great damp, sweaty bulk of him when he was drunk. And he was always at his most amorous when he was at his most smelly. What’s Frank like when he comes home after practices?’
‘Oh, I’m usually asleep by the time he gets in,’ Posy lied. She was too loyal to spill any beans about Frank; even though she often wanted to, she wouldn’t be drawn. Posy was determined that her children wouldn’t have a broken home. She and Frank lived by the maxim ‘No Raised Voices’. Meanwhile her true thoughts and resentments were punched out by a teleprinter in her head and reams and reams of them piled up unread.
‘We practically live in different time zones. He often doesn’t come to bed till after two, and I’m up at six or something every day with Isobel. But it does drive me mad when he comes in and sets the smoke alarm off with a bacon butty or by burning toast. He sometimes likes to grill things when he’s been playing. He says lighting the grill with a match is life-affirming … and possessing a toaster would be bourgeois, an affectation, and as for tumble driers, or dishwashers …’
‘Just like Al!’ Caroline laughed.
‘Shall I get the paints out, or glue? Both I suppose,’ Posy wondered.
‘How about just crayons?’
‘I know: chalks and black paper. Janie’s down for clearing up and her baby’s due in a few weeks. I want to make it easy for her,’ said Posy.
‘Takes you back, doesn’t it? Al was so dreadful at those Active Birth evenings. Talk about hostile! I should have known then.’
‘Well I ended up with Hunter S. Thompson as my birthing partner,’ said Posy.
‘When Poppy’s looking for a mate, I’m going to say “Forget Romance. What you want are DIY skills.”
‘And earning power,’ said Caroline.
‘But she won’t listen.’ They shook their heads.
‘It was when I found I was seriously contemplating killing him,’ said Caroline, ‘that I realised that divorce was better for Finn than his Daddy being dead and his Mummy being sent to jail. That’s if they’d caught me. I’d come up with the perfect murder based on a movie I saw on Channel 5. Want to know it? Might come in handy, like a spare packet of tissues in your bag.’
‘I do quite like Frank most of the time,’ objected Posy, but Caroline told her anyway.
‘I was going to put so much neat alcohol into one of his drinks that he would definitely die. I think that would have been undetectable, well, unnoticeable in someone who drinks like Al, don’t you? Foolproof, huh? And he’d have had a killer hangover if he didn’t die.’
By the end of their marriage, but just before the final split, Caroline had been consumed by hatred. She had spent her time perfecting tiny acts designed to express her contempt. Al liked his tea weak and milky with plenty of sugar. Each time she made him a mug (and she was too determined not to put herself in the wrong not to make him one if she was making one for herself) she made it a little stronger with a few grains less sugar. She stirred in extra bitterness. The last few times that they had made love (oh what a misnomer that was) she had mentally worked her way through the Lakeland catalogue, listing the things she would buy if she had unlimited funds (completely plain white matching mugs, plate stackers, machine washable doormats, a patio heater, a juicer … it was a long list). Then she thought about how she would like to replace the worktops and cupboard doors in their kitchen, if only she could afford it. Then she thought that if she stayed with Al she would never have a new kitchen. Realising this made making the decision easier. She knew that she was like a cold, hard, winter tomato. If they cut into me, she thought, they will see that all the pips have turned black.
Happy Birthday and All That Page 2