by Pippa Wright
As I trudged downstairs in my pyjamas and dressing gown, I could hear Eleanor’s high, girlish laugh rising up the stairs, suggesting she had a visitor. This was not the kind of laugh she wasted on either Auntie Lyd or Percy. When I opened the door she was sitting at the kitchen table in her usual bird-like pose, her manicured hands wrapped around a glass. Ever since Percy had made us all aware of her early morning whisky habit, Eleanor had switched from a teacup to a brazenly unrepentant cut-glass tumbler. I’d asked Auntie Lyd why she didn’t do anything about it, but she had looked at me with stern disapproval, declaring that as long as Eleanor wasn’t harming anyone she was welcome to behave as she liked. Auntie Lyd had also, rather unnecessarily I felt, said that as long as I was sulking around the house like a moody teenager, I might want to suspend judgement on how anyone else chose to deal with their own issues. Then she lit another cigarette.
Leaning against the sink, tools laid out in front of him on the work surface like a surgeon’s bench, was Jim; clearly the beneficiary of Eleanor’s flirtatious giggles.
‘All right, Dawn?’ he said, smiling in my direction with the overconfident star quarterback’s expression that instantly made my hackles rise. ‘Do you live in that dressing gown or what?’
‘I’ve just got up,’ I muttered crossly. I didn’t need a commentary on my morning habits, least of all from him. Surely one of the benefits of being single is being able to keep to your own timetable instead of anyone else’s?
‘At eleven o’clock?’
‘I had a late night,’ I said, hoping that this conveyed something more exciting than the truth. Not that I cared what the plumber thought of me, but the whole unsuitable-men project, embarrassing enough in front of my housemates and work colleagues, became even more so in front of strangers.
‘Rory was on a date, weren’t you, dear?’ said Eleanor, patting the chair next to her. ‘You must come and tell us all about it.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jim, looking highly entertained as he adjusted a spanner. ‘You must.’ I could see that he had already decided I was the house’s most likely source of amusement. Despite the fact that he was the one wearing a T-shirt that said:
Donkey Sherbet’s Icy Grill. Playa del Carmen.
Did he have an entire wardrobe full of hideous tops?
‘I need tea before I do anything,’ I said, ignoring him as I shuffled over to the kettle.
‘Sorry, Dawn, no water in the kitchen this morning,’ said Jim, leaning against the work surface so that the slogan on his chest was fully visible. I had no idea what donkey sherbet was, but it sounded absolutely revolting.
‘Seriously?’ I snapped, my hand already on the kettle handle. ‘I suppose I can’t even have a shower, can I?’
‘Don’t panic, Dawn,’ he said, grinning infuriatingly ‘I left the water on upstairs. Just no tea. You’ll live. At least your hair looks better this morning.’
I would not rise to the bait. I would not, I would not, I would not.
‘I suppose I’ll just have to settle for toast then,’ I said. ‘Unless you’ve disconnected the toaster as well?’
Jim just laughed. He’d taken up far too much space with his tools, seeming to have absolutely no consideration for the fact that people might want to make themselves breakfast. I huffed and tutted as I pushed the bread down in the toaster, but Jim didn’t even seem to notice as he bantered cheerfully with Eleanor. Watching them together I sulked by the toaster, feeling as if I was the interloper. Even in her seventies Eleanor was still very beautiful and age had not diminished her charm one bit as she flirted with Jim; all flashing eyes and coquettish hand gestures.
‘Goodness, Jim,’ she breathed, running a finger slowly round the rim of her glass before touching it to her lips, ‘are those enormous muscles of yours just from wrestling with pipes?’
Jim looked delighted, although if you ask me he had practically begged for the compliment. No man wears T-shirts that tight without wanting to have his torso commented upon. ‘All from wrestling, Miss Avery,’ he countered, ‘not necessarily just with pipes.’
Eleanor laughed girlishly. ‘Oh you are terrible, honestly, but I suppose all this hard work keeps you very fit, I’m sure I couldn’t keep up.’
‘I’m sure you could, Miss Avery,’ laughed Jim, glancing over to me as if I might share his amusement at Eleanor’s flirtatious ways. Fresh from my date with Teddy, I felt infuriated by his assumption. Of course it must be a joke if an older woman chose to flirt with a man at least forty years her junior, I thought bitterly, but no one in Wilton’s had batted an eyelid at my date with an old-age pensioner. It was a double standard that had me ready to borrow Auntie Lyd’s hessian dungarees and wave an angry placard. Jim clearly thought he, with his sprayed-on T-shirt and highlighted hair, was far too good for Eleanor. I glared back at him until he looked away.
‘So, Dawn,’ he said as I settled down at the kitchen table with a slice of toast and marmalade. ‘Tell us about this date, then.’
‘Oh yes, do,’ said Eleanor, her eyes bright with interest or whisky or a combination of the two.
‘Er, it was fine,’ I said.
‘Who was he?’ asked Jim, his eyes twinkling as if he found the very idea of me dating comical. Thank God he hadn’t actually seen Teddy in person or he would probably be rolling around on the floor in hysterics.
‘Just a cousin of a work colleague. He’s a landowner from Scotland, actually,’ I said. ‘He lives on a big estate just outside Perth, but he was down in London on business.’ I kind of hated myself for showing off about Teddy like this, but it was better than being regarded as a figure of fun.
‘Your aunt said he was nearly seventy!’ said Eleanor, unwittingly treacherous. ‘Most unsuitable, I thought. Well done you.’
Jim’s mouth twitched as if he was having trouble keeping a straight face. I stared resolutely at my toast, although now I had no taste for it.
‘Nearly seventy?’ he echoed, sniggering. ‘Sixty-nine, was he?’
‘Sixty-eight, actually. I happen to find older men very charming company,’ I snapped defensively. I didn’t have to justify myself to the plumber.
‘And of course Viagra has completely transformed the over-fifties dating scene,’ Jim said, very seriously.
‘Oh, I know!’ giggled Eleanor, and Jim grinned at me again.
Auntie Lyd came stalking into the kitchen with Mr Bits following closely behind; I shrank a little into my chair, knowing she would disapprove of my not being properly dressed at this hour. But instead she directed her comments at Eleanor.
‘Eleanor Avery, will you please stop sexually harassing poor Jim,’ she said, sweeping past the kitchen table and opening the larder. ‘I don’t know how he is expected to get any work done with you hanging off his arm like that.’ Mr Bits wound pleadingly around her feet.
‘I’m delighted to be sexually harassed by anyone at all, Miss Bell,’ said Jim affably. ‘Though apparently I’m a bit on the young side for your niece.’
Auntie Lyd smiled over at me indulgently. ‘Morning, Rory. So when you aren’t being distracted by my house guests, Jim, how are you getting on?’
He sighed heavily, and then drew in air through his teeth, shaking his head as he looked at the floor: I wondered if all tradesmen were taught this exact sequence of movements at training college, to be used on any occasion but with particular application to queries from women. It conveyed, without a single word being exchanged, imminent difficulty, great expense and the complex, unknowable mystery of the task ahead.
‘In words, please,’ said Auntie Lyd, sensibly not standing for any of this nonsense.
‘In words, Miss Bell, the pipes in your house don’t appear to have been touched since the British Empire governed half the planet,’ said Jim, shoving his hands into his pockets and shrugging his shoulders. ‘I’ve had a go at patching up the worst bits, but the pipes are just falling apart in my hands. Not to mention I haven’t seen a boiler like yours since I was a child.’
&
nbsp; Auntie Lyd looked at him shrewdly, as if sizing up his reliability. She was also probably speculating why anyone would voluntarily wear a T-shirt that compressed their internal organs like that.
‘So you’re saying . . . ?’
‘It’s all got to be replaced,’ said Jim. ‘My advice would be that you move out for a fortnight and I can get it all done in one go.’
‘Out of the question,’ said Auntie Lyd, opening a foil pouch of cat food and tipping it out on to a saucer. She placed it on the floor for Mr Bits. ‘Where would we go? Can’t you do it in stages?’
Jim whistled through his teeth again, and ruffled his hair so that it stood up in tufts. He shifted from one foot to another, resting a hand on the work surface. ‘It’ll take longer that way,’ he said. ‘And that makes it more expensive.’
‘Not as expensive as finding alternative accommodation for four people at a moment’s notice,’ said Auntie Lyd briskly. ‘I’ve already had half of my paying guests move out. You’ll just have to work around the rest of us; there’s no other way.’
He rubbed his chin ruefully and shook his head again, as if accepting the job was at great personal inconvenience. ‘If you say so, Miss Bell.’ He offered her a trademark cheeky-chappie grin.
I rolled my eyes; like he was disappointed this job was going to cost an absolute fortune. Replacing the entire plumbing system at Auntie Lyd’s was going to be able to keep him in tight T-shirts and cheap blond highlights for the rest of the year.
But Auntie Lyd just smiled. ‘Let me have your quote this week, Jim, and please, do call me Lydia.’ I couldn’t believe even she allowed herself to be charmed by someone as obvious as the pumped-up plumber. And people said I was useless at identifying unsuitable men. At least I’d spotted this one from a mile away, while Eleanor and Auntie Lyd just swooned over his muscles.
I retreated to my room, but the constant banging on the pipes seemed to echo through the whole house; I couldn’t hear the radio, or concentrate on reading, so I decided to while away the afternoon in Clapham instead.
Auntie Lyd had moved to number 32 just before I was born, when Elgin Square, now planted with elegant cherry trees and carefully tended floral borders, was the sleeping ground for the local homeless population by night, and centre for drug dealers by day. South London was notorious back then, and that was probably part of its appeal for Auntie Lyd, who rather liked to think of herself as the black sheep of the family, despite the fact that Mum was extremely proud of her actress sister. No one was quite sure how Auntie Lyd had afforded to buy an entire house with her sporadic income as an actress – although it must be admitted that the early eighties had seen Auntie Lyd’s finest professional hour, when she and seventies sexpot Linda Ellery had played warring sisters Destiny and Angel in Anglia Television’s Those Devereux Girls.
Over the course of three years they had bitched and schemed a shoulder-padded path through the wobbly sets that depicted the headquarters of the Devereux Corporation. They struggled with their grief after the death of the family patriarch, Daddy Devereux, and fought for the approval of their cold, wheelchair-bound mother, Ma. They stole each other’s husbands and swapped toyboys; they battled corporate takeovers and illegally altered wills; they delivered lines like ‘You won’t find Ma’s love in the bottom of a wine glass’ and ‘I can’t believe he survived the crematorium’. But it was the legendarily mud-spattered cat-fight on Daddy Devereux’s grave in the show’s final season, with its somewhat incestuous-lesbian subtext, that had won both Lydia and Linda a particular sort of affection in the hearts of the nation. Apart from the odd commercial, Auntie Lyd hadn’t acted since, but you have only to mention the name ‘Lydia Bell’ to men of a certain generation to see their eyes mist over in fond memory.
In her more romantic moments Mum would speculate that Lydia’s house must have been bought for her by an admirer – perhaps a wealthy, married one who had to express his devotion discreetly. It seemed to me discreet to the point of downright offensive that a man would buy his television-star lover a house comprising seven dirty bedsits and a basement flat in a neighbourhood that taxi drivers refused to visit. But we would never know, as Auntie Lyd enjoyed cultivating an air of mystery about the whole business and refused to discuss it.
Once the drug dealers had been moved out of Elgin Square and its surroundings, Auntie Lyd’s neighbourhood had been colonized instead by small boutiques in which the local residents were relieved of their disposable income in exchange for patchwork cushions, scented candles, Welsh blankets and seashore pebbles painted with expressive words such as love, peace or more money than sense. Okay, I made that last one up. No longer having a home of my own in which to display such items, I found that there was little temptation to spend as I wandered around the boutiques that morning; instead I treated the shops like a series of small museums in which you could pick up the exhibits. I flicked through several books on cupcakes and whoopie pies, I tried on expensive cashmere gloves and scarves, I noted the number of bored boyfriends loitering in doorways and told myself how lucky I was to be free of having to indulge someone else’s interests on a Saturday afternoon.
When I had exhausted the shops of the High Street and Old Town, and been followed twice round Oliver Bonas by a suspicious security guard, I took myself to the tiny French patisserie that overlooked the Common, grabbing a seat at the high wooden bar that faced the street. The warmth of the cafe had misted up the window, so I rubbed it with my sleeve to see outside, where the light was just beginning to fade. Shoppers walked past the window briskly, rushing to get home before dark, and a few small children played on the muddy strip of grass across the road, next to the shallow paddling pool that had been emptied for winter. The cafe was nearly empty, except for two waitresses speaking in French to the chef. I waved one of them over and ordered a hot chocolate; it wasn’t exactly a sophisticated treat but I felt the need for a bit of indulgence.
When it arrived, I was surprised to find that the sight of the tiny pink and white marshmallows bobbing on its surface made my heart sink. I had thought it would remind me of my childhood, and it had, but not in the comforting way I had hoped. Instead I was taken back to the desolate weekend afternoons of my teens, sitting alone in cafes feeling lonely and misunderstood while Mum was off with her latest boyfriend. Of course I should have been off with friends and boyfriends of my own, but the constant moving, as Mum tired of locations as quickly as relationships, had left me drained and insecure. Every new school had a different set of rules: not the ones set by teachers – those were easy to follow – but the far stricter ones agreed upon by the students. The friendship bracelets that were my passport to cool at one school marked me out as a hopeless loser at the next. My skirt was too long at one school, too short at another, and at a third school all the girls spurned the official uniform that Mum had bought me in favour of subtly different trousers and aertex shirts from Pilot.
Is it any wonder that I took refuge in History of Art, where everything not only remained reassuringly the same (a reproduction of Canaletto’s ‘A Regatta on the Grand Canal’ in York was still a reproduction of the same regatta when viewed in Dorset, after all), but also had a clearly delineated context? History was so much safer than the present, so fixed and certain. However, as you can imagine, the ginger-haired new girl with her passion for the Pre-Raphaelites did not find herself at the centre of the popular students, nor even at the centre of the unpopular ones. Before I met Martin I had become used to spending time by myself; I’d even come to believe I didn’t mind it. Now, sitting alone again while everyone else rushed past in pairs or groups, I felt it all come rushing back.
I felt a pang for that poor lonely teenager, and wished I could go back in time to tell her that it would be okay. That she’d get to university and make friends there, friends who didn’t think it was weird to discuss chiaroscuro or egg tempera; that she’d meet people who spoke about church altarpieces with an enthusiasm equal to her own; that there would be lecturers who�
�d think she was clever, talented even. There would be parties and gigs and a boy who would think she was amazing; she’d fall in love. But then I realized that I’d also have to tell her that several years later the boy would end up cheating on her, she’d be stuck in a menial job with only the most tenuous connection to art history, and she’d find herself facing thirty, single, dating pensioners and living with her chain-smoking aunt and two ancient actors. Probably best to let that poor lonely girl dream of something better, I decided, cruelly mashing a marshmallow against the side of my cup with a spoon.
If Ticky was right, and dating the unsuitables was meant to be a kind of education, what was I supposed to take away from last night? Apart from a bit of a hangover and the memory of Teddy’s shiny red face looming over mine. I hadn’t really needed to go out with a sixty-eight-year-old man to learn that I was hoping to end up with a younger one. Perhaps, though, the evening pointed to another bit of Rory Carmichael cluelessness – shouldn’t I have been able to pick up on the signals before Teddy tried to kiss me? Now that I looked back, his attitude towards me had slightly changed once he realized we were on a ‘date’. He hadn’t tried anything on in the restaurant – I wasn’t so clueless I wouldn’t have noticed an attempt at under-the-table footsie – but he had ordered a lot more wine all of a sudden. And maybe there had been a new twinkle in his eye, although my own eyes had been practically looking in two separate directions by then, so it was hard to tell. And yet I’d continued to play the pert niece, failing to respond to any of the clues that Teddy’s intentions had changed. Was I really so used to being attached that I’d lost the ability to notice when someone was interested in me?