What Would Mary Berry Do?
Page 21
Usually keen on ‘kissing+’, as Robert had been known to call it, Marie felt decidedly unamorous. She was tired, her feet hurt and she couldn’t evict from her thoughts Klay’s insulting offer.
A scuffling, snuffling noise from the porch stopped her in her tracks as she approached, key out, stomach in, pout on standby. Her first thought was ‘Fox!’ and her lip curled; in common with most townies, she considered the handsome, red-coated creatures to be noisy sex addicts with a nice sideline in toxic crap. Then she thought ‘Rat!’ and took a hasty step back. But then a small four-legged beast dashed out and she thought ‘Cookie!’ and scooped her up.
‘Are you looking for Prinny? Are you? Are you?’ Marie never used baby-talk on babies, but chihuahuas brought it out in her. She was fond of Cookie, even though the yapping and the snapping and the talent for finding ‘amusing’ places to leave a meringue-like shit tested her goodwill. ‘Prinny-winny’s indoors, Cookie.’ And Prinny-winny would rather eat his own pawsy-wawsies than play with Cookie: Cookie always won their tug o’ wars.
‘Come on. Let’s pop you home.’ Marie cradled Cookie, marvelling at how light the little dog was. ‘Your mummy will be ever so glad to see—’ Marie’s cutesy monologue stopped short as she put her hand on the latch of Lucy’s gate.
Vaulting the fence that separated the Gray front garden from Erika’s, Tod landed squarely and silently in front of Marie with the ease of a seasoned cat burglar. ‘Hi,’ he said, as suave as if he’d sauntered into view with a martini. ‘I see you found our little runaway.’ He took in Marie’s freeze-framed confusion. ‘I was in Erika’s garden,’ he said. ‘Looking for Cookie,’ he enlarged. With an amused ghost of a smile he added, in a low voice, ‘Why? What did you think I was doing, Marie?’
Suddenly hyper-aware of the trollop knickers beneath her trenchcoat, Marie handed the chihuahua over the gate. ‘Nothing! It was just . . .’ Two sets of curtains twitched. Lucy looked down from one window, Erika from another. Both curtains were closed with a vehement swish, as if synchronised. ‘I’d better . . .’ She shrugged, unsure why or how the atmosphere was so awkward. Or, to be precise, why she was so awkward. Tod seemed fine.
‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’
Marie looked back from her own door to see that Tod was still watching her. She waved and let herself in, less keen than ever to make like a slut.
‘I’m home!’ she shouted. Downstairs was dark, light leaking down the stairs. Robert was already in bed, which saved some time. ‘Ready or not!’ she shouted up, removing a shoe and massaging a weary foot. ‘Brace yourself!’ She regarded herself in the full-length mirror at the foot of the stairs: she’d never realised how much she resembled her grandmother. ‘Ooh, the things I’m gonna do to you!’ she called, heaving off her coat and dragging herself up the stairs with the battered slice of cake in her hand, nylon knicks almost a-flame. At the door of the bedroom she pasted on a sultry look. ‘Hello, big boy!’ Marie hoped she didn’t look like she felt, and threw open the door.
The room was empty, the bed unruffled. The note on her pillow read: Gone to Mum’s. Strange noises in the roof, apparently. She thinks it’s a murderer, I think it’s a transparent ruse to separate us on Valentine’s Day. Don’t wait up. R x
‘Yessss!’ The temptress in the scarlet peephole bra threw back her head in ecstasy and fell on the bed.
TO MY VALENTINE
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
If I have to find a snoring, scantily clad woman
who’s rolled in cake on my bed
I’m glad it’s YOU.
Here’s to another romantic year.
xxx
APRIL
Easter
Lemon Meringue Eggs
EASTER-EGG HUNT
Clue No. 3
Q: The smallest Dunwoody
Is no goody-goody.
He’s covered in hair
And he sleeps . . . where?
A: In Prinny’s bed.
Before Lynda had fallen pregnant, all Marie knew about broccoli was that it was green and she didn’t like it.
Lynda ate broccoli every day: broccoli is an excellent source of calcium and folate, packed with fibre and full of disease-battling antioxidants. Lynda avoided swordfish. She brandished a crucifix when confronted with soft cheese. She was doing pregnancy strictly by the book, and she took her colleagues with her every tedious step of the way.
‘Week nine,’ she announced as they awaited their first patient on the day before the Easter weekend. She squinted at the pregnancy timeline on her favourite mothers-to-be website. ‘It has a face!’ she said triumphantly.
‘All babies have faces.’ Immune to the lure of motherhood, Aileen could work up not one single coochy-coo at the thought of a Smile! bundle of joy. ‘If it didn’t have a face, that would be worth telling us.’ She watched Marie pull out patient index cards for the day ahead – a task that officially fell to Aileen – and popped another Tunnock’s Teacake.
Undaunted, Lynda carried on. ‘It’s twenty-two millimetres long!’
‘Lots of things,’ said Aileen, ‘are twenty-two millimetres long.’
‘My uterus,’ said Lynda, ‘is a wondrous domain.’
‘Mine,’ said Aileen, ‘is closed to the public.’ She aimed a Tunnock’s wrapper at the bin, missed and went to the treatment room. Possibly to prepare it, possibly for a snooze.
‘Aileen’s in a good mood today.’ Marie’s method of gauging her assistant’s state of mind was a simple swear-word-per-hour system. Thus far she’d unleashed only a ‘Feck that!’ on the broken hand-dryer and a ‘Holy shite!’ when she’d burned her tongue on a dunked Garibaldi. Since her one date with Klay, two months earlier, such calm days were rare. ‘Did you hide the flowers?’
‘In here.’ Lynda tapped the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. Straightening up, she shouted, ‘Eliza!’ Then, after a beat, ‘Luke!’
‘Nice.’ It was best to say nice or pretty or great when Lynda punctuated the conversation with another possible name for her twenty-two-millimetre tenant. Engaging with her on the subject was fruitless and dangerous. When Marie had said she’d never liked the name Jessica, because she’d sat next to a girl in school called Jessica who picked her nose and ate it, there had been a froideur in reception for hours.
Aileen barged back and leaned, bored, against the wall. ‘Where is everybody?’ she griped. ‘We should be busy. The whole world has fecking teeth, after all.’ Her face was free of make-up, her overall defiantly done up to the top button. Her brief foray into sexiness had been short-lived. ‘We’d better hope for some emergencies. A nice agonising wisdom tooth. Or maybe some kid’ll knock out his front teeth falling off his skateboard. If we’re lucky.’
Although too compassionate to wish for emergencies, Marie also deplored the snowy whiteness of the appointment book.
‘Matilda!’ said Lynda.
A full and frank discussion with Robert about the future was long overdue. Marie could sense the bold move that her husband had up his sleeve. She could always sense what he wanted, whether it was mash instead of chips, or a quickie during the Coronation Street omnibus. She’d hinted at the effect Perfect You was having on her business, but the ESP didn’t work both ways; Robert was infamously impervious to hints. Mentioning a perfume forty-three times in the fortnight before her birthday more or less guaranteed she’d unwrap a three-pack of pastel tights on the day.
Scratching her scalp with a sterile dental probe, Aileen shared her Easter plans. ‘Hunger Games. A giant Easter egg. I’ll take the hard skin off me feet. Another giant Easter egg.’
‘My, how the other half live,’ said Marie, turning the pages of the appointment book and wincing.
‘We’re sorting out the nursery,’ said Lynda. ‘Six months will fly by. I’ll mark out where the cot will go. And we’re trying out paint colours. Barrington is very traditional about this. As soon as we find out the sex, it’ll be blue for a boy and a nice soft pink for a g
irl.’
‘Men are such sexist pigs,’ said Aileen.
‘Cameron!’ said Lynda.
The door opened and all three perked up, only to de-perk as the postman slapped a pile of envelopes and a dental-equipment catalogue on the desk.
‘Where’s the Sellotape?’ Aileen threw open random drawers, finding the bouquet, lying flat like a corpse in a morgue drawer. She snatched it up, the cellophane crackling and rustling around the now-bedraggled roses and gypsophila. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She thrust them head-first into the bin with a booming ‘Jaysus Christ!’
‘Because you’d do this,’ said Marie.
‘Bastard!’ Aileen wrenched the handwritten note from the roses and ripped it to shreds. ‘When will it end? When will he stop?’ She stomped out to buy a restorative Walnut Whip.
‘Did you read the note, Lynda?’
‘Do bears you know what in the woods?’ Lynda had given up bad language in case it harmed the baby. ‘Darling A, I’m begging you for another chance. Tell me what I did wrong. It could be so good between us. I dream every night of your magnificent white body.’ Lynda pulled a face. ‘I pity the poor florist having to take this stuff down every other day. There are twelve kisses – I counted.’
‘Poor Klay with a K,’ said Marie.
‘Greta!’ shouted Lynda.
‘Remember the night of the date?’
‘Who,’ asked Lynda, ‘could forget?’
Aileen had looked great. Not conventionally great, not Aileen. But Marie was raising two girls in a society bombarded with porny ideas of female beauty, so she didn’t believe in narrow definitions of ‘looking great’. Aileen’s hair, brushed out of those Cumberland-sausage plaits, had hung dark and shiny around her shoulders. Marie and Lynda had manhandled her into the loo and hectored her into removing the garish eye make-up and scarlet lipstick. A slick of gloss, some peachy blush, and Aileen was a fresher, prettier, less terrifying version of her usual self. Marie zipped her into a full-skirted dress the colour of dried blood and stood back to survey their handiwork.
‘You look lovely,’ she’d said. The glow on Aileen’s face lit the room and made Marie almost tearful; this was a big step for Aileen. A date with a man was a tiny bridge between her and the rest of the human race.
‘No swearing,’ Lynda had commanded.
‘No jumping on him,’ said Marie.
‘No accusing him of undressing you with his eyes.’
‘No accusing anybody else of undressing you with his eyes.’
‘No swiping the food from his plate while he’s looking the other way.’
‘No talk of your verruca.’ They all knew far, far more than they wanted to about Aileen’s verruca.
Lynda had tweaked Aileen’s hair one last time and whispered, ‘Here he comes!’
The three women had watched Klay cross the road from Perfect You. Feet dragging, shoulders sloped, he’d looked like a man approaching his own gallows.
‘Jaysus, he’s gorgeous.’ From Aileen, compliments sounded like threats.
‘Hmm,’ Marie had said. If you like oversized baby-men dressed in white suits one size too small. ‘Remember, Ail, don’t let him pressure you into sex.’
‘Ooh, he won’t have to pressure me.’ Aileen had hopped from foot to foot.
Wearing his dread like a cloak, Klay had taken a deep breath and entered the clinic.
‘Hiya!’ Aileen waved enthusiastically, as if from a departing ocean liner.
His face slack, Klay had taken her in. And Marie had seen a change creep over his features, like summer sun creeping up a cold wall. She checked later with Lynda and found that she, too, had noticed the metamorphosis from condemned to cheerful. Maybe it was the guileless glee in Aileen’s face, or the undeniable ecstasy his presence provoked in her, but Klay had grown six inches and returned her smile.
‘M’lady.’ He had bowed.
‘Jaysus!’ Aileen had shrieked, and curtsied. ‘He’s mental! I love him!’
‘I reckon,’ Marie had said, watching them make their way to Klay’s sports car, Aileen tottering a little on her heels, ‘that man might be experiencing genuine desire for the first time in his life. He’s bought into such a silly fake version of what’s sexy – you know, big silicone boobs on tiny frames, pillow faces, everything a kind of pooey-orange – that perhaps he’s never stopped to think about what he actually fancies. Cos we’re all individual, aren’t we? We fancy people for their quirks, really.’
The car had roared off. Marie and Lynda had crossed their fingers. Evidently they hadn’t crossed them tightly enough: the date was now out of bounds as a conversational topic.
Last to arrive the following morning, Aileen strode straight to the coffee machine. Lynda switched off the radio and she and Marie had stared at Aileen, expectantly.
‘Youse might have warned me!’ Aileen had been loud and disgusted. ‘That’s what all the fuss is about?’ She’d downed her coffee in one. ‘Sex is not half as interesting as Carrie Bradshaw makes out.’ Rooting about in the biscuit barrel, she’d come up with half a Bourbon. ‘Jaysus, the fuss!’ Aileen’s top lip had turned up in scorn. ‘He was touching me, and nuzzling me, and stroking me and telling me Oh Aileen you’re beautiful you’re a goddess you’re blowing me mind yada-yada-yada. So I screamed at him Get on with it, ya halfwit baboon.’ She’d pointed accusingly at Marie. ‘Do you like that – oh, what’s it called – foreplay?’
‘Well,’ Marie had stalled. ‘Umm . . .’
‘Waste of time, more like.’ The brief, horrible mime Aileen did with her hands would stay with Lynda and Marie forever. ‘It’s like sitting through the ads when you’re waiting for the movie to start. So, I whipped off me dress and you’d think he’d never seen bosoms before. He turned into a simpleton before me eyes. You’re a divinity, sez he. Get your willy out, sez I.’
Marie had exchanged a look of alarm with Lynda. Feeling sorry for Klay was something she wouldn’t previously have believed possible.
‘Have you ever,’ Aileen had challenged Marie, with the indignant tone of a woman returning a faulty cardi to Marks & Spencer, ‘seen a willy?’
‘Well, yes.’ At her age and after three kids, Marie had been surprised to find she could still blush that hard.
Aileen had shaken her head, slowly, the way Marie did when she wanted to communicate to the kids that she was both disappointed and appalled. ‘They’re horrible!’ She’d sketched Klay’s member in the air, and Lynda had shrunk back in her swivel chair. ‘They’re long. And bendy. And a sort of mauvy-bluey red! What sort of colour scheme does that fit in with? Imagine carrying one about all day. Like having a stick of rhubarb down your knickers. No wonder men are weird. And, yuk, the feel of it.’
Here both Marie and Lynda had protested, but there’d been no stopping Aileen. Her verdict? ‘Basically a Hoover attachment covered in sweaty velvet.’ She’d gone further, ‘And the yelps of him! I thought he was dying.’ Eventually, after a lot more in the same vein, she’d summed up her first sexual experience as ‘twenty minutes of bouncy nonsense’ and bemoaned the mess it made on her best BHS duvet. ‘Never,’ she’d finished darkly, ‘again.’
The box marked ‘sex’ had been ticked and Aileen moved on, content with her life of box sets and endless biscuits and starting arguments. Taking in the rejected roses, Marie thought But Klay thinks differently.
Early-morning calls never bring good news. In Marie’s experience, they meant death or the imminent arrival of a seldom-seen (and for a damned good reason) relative. When the Dunwoody Good Friday lie-in was interrupted by the needy trill of Robert’s mobile, she opened one eye and listened suspiciously to the one-sided dialogue being carried out in the hushed tones reserved for grave tidings.
‘What?’ Robert sat on the side of the bed, head hanging, phone to his ear. ‘No! Oh God, the poor woman . . . That’s terrible . . . Of course. Of course. Don’t worry . . . I’ll be right there.’
‘What is it?’ Marie braced herself.
‘You realise you’re dancing with happiness because a woman’s home is ruined?’
‘Oh, come on!’ Robert skipped into the en suite like a goat. ‘She’d do the same if it was me. This is an act of God. A sign from on high. The inter-departmental bank-holiday brainstorming was Caroline’s idea, and she insisted on doing all the catering. Magda’s high and dry – unlike Caroline – so who comes in like the cavalry at the eleventh hour?’ Robert’s head bobbed around the door, toothbrush poised. ‘Moi!’
‘You told Magda you couldn’t make the brainstorming. You told her we needed you for our Good Friday treasure hunt. You said you’ve been slaving over the clues for weeks. You said you’re a family man and this treasure hunt has been a tradition since Angus was little more than a dot.’ Spitting foam, Robert shouted from the sink. ‘What I didn’t tell you was Magda’s response. She was very put out. Very.’
‘Well, tough!’ shouted Marie, a vision of the thwarted twins in her mind’s eye. ‘And it’s too late to bake now, anyway.’
‘That’s the beauty of it!’ Robert was back, ramming a leg into his trousers with a gleam in his eye that Marie rarely saw outside of Top Gear marathons. ‘There’s a whole pile of fabulous goodies all ready and waiting in the kitchen.’
‘But they’re for us!’ Marie sat up, her hair a tipsy haystack that would never qualify as sexy bed-hair.
‘Don’t look at me as if I’m the Devil, darling. I’ll make some more.’