by Marie Joseph
She found most things a bit of a hoot, to use her own phraseology, and took life and its vicissitudes completely for granted, including her husband Leo, who at thirty-five had risen to the dizzy heights of public-relations officer in a thriving firm of industrial computer manufacturers.
Her children were delightful, neither brilliantly clever, nor disappointingly slow, and Melissa wasn’t averse to giving them a swift backhander now and again when they stepped out of line.
She had borne them with ease, breast-fed them with pleasure, and was never too busy to hear them read or to pick them up from birthday parties, Cub meetings, Brownie ditto, or to make them angel costumes for Nativity plays at school. With the aid of a striped towel she could turn an aggressive four-year-old into an unlikely John the Baptist in five minutes flat.
She knew, of course, that she was lucky to be married to a man who had got so far in so short a time, and she fully appreciated all the perks that came with his position. As Leo’s wife, she had picnicked with the VIPs at Epsom off cold chicken and champagne; she had ridden in a splendid veteran car on the Brighton Run; she had dined lavishly beneath glittering chandeliers at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, and had occupied a front seat in the stalls at the opening night of more plays than she could count.
‘What a hoot!’ she said as she telephoned her friend Petra one afternoon in June to arrange about baby-sitting. They did this on a reciprocal basis, although Petra’s jaunts were far less exciting. ‘Leo has to take a bunch of rival directors to Ascot, with a hired private box on the top tier, and I’ve to wear a hat, he says. The only hat I’ve got is a straw thing we bought in Italy the last time we could afford a holiday abroad, and Benjie made it into a nest that time he was trying to hatch a duck’s egg.’
‘The only thing I’ve got,’ came Petra’s voice doubtfully over the wires, ‘is a sort of single flower sewn on to a black velvet band. It’s in the girls’ dressing-up box, but I’ll fish it out if you like.’
‘That’s super!’ Melissa said, ‘and I can wear last years’s shirtwaister, the one I never wore because it was too hot. Shirtwaisters are always OK. I read that in a magazine at the dentist’s.’
‘Which year was it published?’ Petra asked, still in doubt, but Melissa laughed, the infectious bubbly laugh that Leo had heard across a crowded room and fallen in love with on the spot.
It was a long time since he’d told her anything as romantic as that, and if he’d tried she would have laughed. They seemed to spend a lot of time laughing, they even laughed when they made love. Not at the crucial moment of course, but for most of the preliminaries leading up to it.
‘Aren’t we lucky that we both think sex is not to be taken seriously?’ she asked him the night before the Ascot trip, mimicking a strip-club artiste by dangling her bra at arm’s length as she got ready for bed.
Then, at a look in his eyes she couldn’t quite fathom, she qualified this. ‘Well, I suppose that is rather an ambiguous statement with four kids asleep in the house, but you know what I mean.’
And climbing into brushed nylon pyjamas (much more sensible than shorty nighties when ministering to crying children in the middle of the night), she bounced into bed.
‘I want you to be particularly nice to Miles Fenton from Green Brothers and his wife,’ Leo said, as they lay in their favourite spoons-in-a-box position facing the window. ‘Their contract’s worth a cool million and a half to us. He’s married again; the week after his divorce came through, as a matter of fact. I believe his new wife’s still in her teens.’
‘The dirty old dog,’ Melissa said happily into her pillow. ‘His first wife always struck me as being rather a nice little body.’
‘Perhaps that was why,’ said Leo, but Melissa, who always dropped asleep with the suddenness of a stone plummeting into a well, was already too tired to ask him what he meant.
Sleeping curled up in the foetal position, she was totally unaware that there were nights when her husband lay awake long after she slept, raising himself on one elbow and gazing down at her unconscious face as if puzzled about something.
And if she had opened her eyes and seen him she would have concluded merely that he was suffering from a tummy upset and got out of bed without complaint to search for the indigestion tablets.
Melissa was driving out to Ascot herself, picking Leo up in the car park, and as she slid behind the wheel she gave a cursory glance in the driving mirror.
Getting the two older children off to school and the two younger ones to their kindergarten, plus chucking a load of washing into the automatic, it being such a sunny day, not to mention whisking round the house like a whirling dervish, had left her with roughly twenty minutes to get ready.
She had dressed without being properly dry from her shower, and her tights had stuck to her legs. Pulling fiercely at them with one eye on the clock, she’d used a word that would have made her Yorkshire grandma revolve in her grave, and although the shirtwaister looked nice enough, the hat filched from Petra’s dressing-up box sat uneasily atop her blonde head with its Peter Pan hairdo.
Twice she’d torn it off, and once she’d flung it to the far corners of their bedroom, but Leo had said she must wear a hat, and so a flaming hat it would have to be, even if it did make her look like Danny La Rue when he wasn’t trying very hard. ‘What a hoot,’ she said as she switched on the ignition . . .
Leo was waiting for her in the car park, having sent the company car back to roost, and Melissa told him he looked like a deserted bridegroom. Then, patting his slight paunch, she told him to breathe in. ‘Don’t stand sideways on to anyone you want to impress and you’ll be OK, love,’ she said.
But Leo was waving to the occupants of a car which had just drawn in, so tottering gaily on shoes she hadn’t worn since her last child’s christening, Melissa followed him, smiling the wide smile calculated to make everyone within its radius feel that the world couldn’t be such a bad place after all.
Introductions were made, another car drove up, then, with one of the little striped badges Leo had handed round fixed firmly to her definitely cushiony bosom, Melissa swept their small party through the private-boxes entrance and into the lift for the top tier.
Gin and tonics were handed round, and Melissa was particularly nice to Miles Fenton’s new wife, a small girl who looked as if she was dressing up in her mother’s clothes.
‘That’s a gorgeous hat you’re wearing,’ she told her, meaning every word of it, then, as the girl blushed crimson, she went on to describe how she’d struggled to fix the full-blown rose to her own head.
‘It’s so firmly anchored, it feels as if it’s growing out of my scalp,’ she said, and laughed her infectious, gurgling laugh, the laugh that years ago Leo had heard, then gravitated towards as if she’d been magnetised.
But this time he didn’t even turn his head. He was talking animatedly to the most stunning girl Melissa had ever seen.
‘Tom Johnson’s secretary,’ she heard someone say. ‘His wife’s got the shingles, I hear.’
‘Nasty thing,’ his companion said, and Melissa, never flagging in her duty, inclined her head to ask – entirely without envy – a director’s wife in a pea-green peplummed outfit where she’d been to get such a super tan.
Leo was moving out on to the balcony, ushering the fantastic girl before him, balancing two replenished gin and tonics in his outstretched hands, and looking, to Melissa’s amusement, positively besotted. Going over to where she had a better view, she studied the girl with interest.
Straight burnished hair, the sheen and colour of a copper warming pan, fell pencil-straight to her jawline, curving forward on to her cheeks in the merest semblance of a wave.
The only woman without a hat, she stood by the balcony rail, the cream lines of her long jersey dress flowing gently round her fabulous figure. ‘That’s a hostess gown, not an Ascot thingummy, the silly creature,’ Melissa told herself, smiling radiantly at a man with sandy eyebrows and trying frantical
ly to remember his name.
Out on the balcony, Leo was handing the beautiful girl his binoculars, standing behind her so that she leaned against him, twiddling them into focus for her with his chin resting on her glorious hair.
But she seemed far more interested in looking at Leo than looking at the racecourse, and the next time Melissa turned round, she was once again staring up at him, drinking in every word as if each syllable thrilled her to the marrow of her fine bones.
Placing her first bet before sitting down to lunch, the girl bowed to Leo’s judgement as if he had inside knowledge of every single horse’s form, then, toying with her smoked trout, she listened to his conversation with the air of someone who was trying to commit it to memory.
What was he talking about? Politics? Hardly that, when the last General Election had provided them with many a belly laugh, switching off the sound on television and having hysterics at the speaker’s gestures. An in-depth discussion of Art? No, it couldn’t be that . . .
Melissa listened with courtesy to what the sandy-eyebrowed director’s little son had said on his return from nursery school, then capped it with an anecdote about Benjie, one half of her mind feverishly trying to eavesdrop on the apparently riveting conversation taking place across the table.
No, it wasn’t what Leo was saying. It didn’t seem to matter what he was saying. It was the way the girl was looking at him. As if he possessed Alan Bates’s looks combined with Jeremy Thorpe’s charm.
Leo. Her Leo. With his square-shaped torso, with his nondescript features that even his doting mother referred to as ‘open’. From the depths of her heart Melissa willed him to smile at her, to remember she was there, but nothing happened.
After the meal was over, he went to collect the secretary bird’s winnings, for of course the horse he’d recommended had cantered home an easy first.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ Leo asked her as they stood together for a brief moment later on.
‘What do you think?’ Melissa asked him, her voice trembling with uncharacteristic sarcasm. He smiled at her in an absent-minded way, then left her to go and point out a jockey in a purple-and-red-quartered cap to the girl with red hair.
And the next time Melissa was alone with him was when all the goodbyes had been said and they were driving home, Leo sitting in the passenger seat because he said the champagne cocktails had given him one of his heads.
She was a good driver, handling the car like a man, as Leo had often said. Now and again, at traffic lights, or when they were caught in a slow-moving queue of cars, she turned her head and examined his profile.
Chuffed with himself was her conclusion. Glowing was the word she’d have used if she used words like that. His head was lolling forward on to his chest, and she saw the way an incipient double chin was settling itself in a pink fold over the top of his stiff collar. He was doing a lot of that lately, dropping asleep in front of the television. Melissa wished the red-haired girl could see him now. Coming to a clear stretch of road, she put her foot down hard on the accelerator.
Only the night before he’d gently snored himself through the late-night news, waking with a start when she’d gone up behind him and kissed the top of his thinning hair.
‘What a revolting sight you are,’ she’d told him fondly, and he’d clouted her on her trousered behind.
‘That makes two of us,’ he’d said.
Ten years married. Good old Leo and his scatty wife. Four kids and a mortgage that would scare the pants off a lesser man. Inveterate party-givers, and the life and soul of any they went to, a proper scream, a right pair . . .
Whilst Melissa ran baths, stuffed arms and legs into pyjamas, read stories, tucked the children beneath their respective duvets, Leo watered the garden, mowed the lawn, and as far as she could see, spent a fair amount of time staring into the middle distance.
She was in the kitchen preparing their supper snack when he came in. He had changed from his suit into slacks and an Aran pullover that made him look like the third member of a lifeboat crew.
Yesterday, she would have told him so.
‘Did you know you’ve still got your ’at on?’ Leo teased her as she set two trays and put the cheese on toast underneath the grill.
Immediately she snatched off Petra’s full-blown rose, pulling what felt like half her hair along with it.
‘It made you look like . . .’ he began, but she didn’t hear.
‘Danny La Rue when he wasn’t trying,’ she said on cue, and gave him the cheese, which had blackened on one side for no reason that she could fathom.
That had always been Melissa’s one fault, as the husband of one of her best friends had said. She wasn’t intuitive. Dead funny of course, but her humour was of the sixth-form variety.
‘Bet she was games captain for three consecutive years,’ he told his wife, and with Judas-like eagerness, for all Melissa’s friends were well aware of her popularity, his wife had agreed. ‘Not a subtle bone in her lovely big body,’ he’d added.
Now Melissa was shaken, and she didn’t know why. Proper flummoxed, as her Yorkshire grandma would have said. Not jealous. Goodness no, not that.
But later, when they went up to bed she found herself wishing she had a nightie so fluffy and revealing that the parts of her that mattered would be revealed embellished with frills; or even better, a pair of black cami-knickers with suspenders dangling provocatively.
At the very thought of it her ever-ready laughter bubbled to the surface, but even to herself it seemed to have a hollow ring.
Going over to the chest of drawers with her bouncy tread, she got out a clean pair of pyjamas and cleaned her face with the same brand of lotion she’d used for swabbing her babies’ bottoms.
It was no use, she told herself with her usual good-tempered resignation; one day at the races couldn’t be expected to turn her into a femme fatale.
And when Leo, rather damp and sweating slightly – he always took his showers too hot – padded into the bedroom and got into bed beside her, she accepted his good-night kiss with affection, turning over obediently to fit herself into the curve of his stomach.
‘Good day, wasn’t it, love?’ he said, his voice filled with lazy satisfaction. Any minute now and he’ll start to purr, she thought rather nastily.
Now was the time when she could tease him about the secretary-bird. Tell him he’d looked like Casanova going into his seduction routine. But the intuition her friends swore she didn’t have, kept her silent.
She was tired, so tired that turning over to face him was a feat of mind over matter. Raising herself on one elbow, she switched on the light, leaned over him and traced the outline of his mouth with her finger. Then she kissed him in a way that left him in no doubt as to her intentions.
‘I was proud of you today,’ she said softly, ‘really proud of the way you hosted our little crowd at the races.’ She kissed him again. ‘That suit looked absolutely right on you.’
Leo opened his eyes, waiting for the funny punch line, but to his amazement his wife was looking at him as if he were as handsome as Alan Bates, with the charm of Jeremy Thorpe thrown in for good measure. He’d seen that same expression on someone else’s face, but he couldn’t bring whoever it was to mind. And now wasn’t the time to try to remember.
‘I was pretty proud of you too, love,’ he whispered, and tightened his arm round Melissa’s ample curves.
‘I love you,’ she told him, and still a vestige of suspicion lingered as he waited for her expression to crinkle into laughter, but this time Melissa was perfectly serious.
And as he stretched out an arm and switched off the light, so was Leo . . .
The Cat who Came in from the Cold
‘I FORBID YOU to feed it,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve fed it we’re stuck with it. For ever!’ He folded his arms. ‘Till it’s grown into a great fat ugly monster.’ His eyes narrowed into what she considered to be mean, calculating slits. ‘For the next fifteen years, at least.’
‘Oh?’ she said, stung. ‘So you think we’ll still be together in fifteen years? That’s a laugh!’
‘I can’t see you laughing,’ he said nastily.
‘Ha ha, then,’ she said, ever ready to oblige.
Then she turned on her heels, stalked smartly into the cupboard that the estate agent had said was a kitchen, and, pouring out a saucer of milk, lowered it to the floor.
The little cat, a soggy mass of dripping black fur, made for the saucer with the sure instinct of a homing pigeon and started to lap up the milk, its pink tongue jerking in and out with the rapidity of a piston gone berserk.
‘It’s starving,’ she said, kneeling down on the floor, her soft hair falling round her face. ‘It followed me from the bus stop, crying all the way, didn’t you, my sweetie? Oh, just look at its little white paws. Little Pretty-paws, that’s what you are, aren’t you then?’
‘Little what?’ he said. ‘What did I hear you say?’
‘Pretty-paws,’ she told him, ‘that’s what I’m going to call him. Or her,’ she added doubtfully.
He closed his eyes as if he were suffering from a terrible pain and bravely putting up with it.
‘Out!’ he said. ‘The minute it’s finished licking that saucer, which, incidentally, I shan’t fancy till it’s been scalded clean. And if you’re too soft in the head to do it, then I’ll do it for you.’
Holding the little cat before him, his jaw set firm with disapproval, he walked over to the door of their basement flat, opened it and deposited the quivering bundle on the area steps. He rubbed his hands together as if to decontaminate them, then suggested it was time she got on with the supper.
It had all been done so quickly she could scarcely believe it had happened. She was so angry that for a minute she couldn’t speak.
‘You’re cruel,’ she managed at last. ‘A cruel, unfeeling pig.’
‘Not really,’ he said, starting to lay the table from force of habit, and because he was hungry, having lunched off one cheese sandwich and half a pint of mild. ‘Just practical-minded, that’s all. How can we keep a cat when we’re both out at work all day? It wouldn’t be fair.’