No Place For a Man

by Judy Astley

  She reread Oliver’s e-mail and printed out a copy to show Matthew, who was in the garden reading the paper. She could just see the back of his head, beyond the conservatory window. His body was very still, as it always was when he was concentrating thoroughly, and she concluded he was reading something riveting about football rather than checking the job vacancies. Like Oliver, he seemed to have no cares in the world. Unlike Oliver, he was wrong.

  She went through the kitchen and out to join him. The day was going to be hot in that unexpected, catching-you-out way that early April often was, and the rhododendron outgrowing its massive pot was drooping and desperate for water. Matthew didn’t seem to have noticed, or if he had he’d chosen not to do anything about it. She would reel out the hose later: it needed unwinding all the way back to sort out a kink close to the tap that was holding back the flow because someone had been careless rewinding it last time. That was the downside of delegation: you too often had to allocate the job to someone who frankly didn’t give a damn, and the resulting cock-up made you cross. On the other hand if you didn’t delegate you ended up doing everything yourself, which also made you cross. All in all, she thought, if you didn’t lighten up a bit it made for a pretty bad-tempered life.

  ‘Look at this.’ Jess held the e-mail out to Matthew. ‘Oliver’s having the best time, sunning himself on a yacht round the Whitsunday Islands.’

  Matthew grinned. ‘Maybe that’s what I should do with all this spare time, go off backpacking like a student and then come back full of the joys of youth again.’

  ‘It would be a second childhood in your case,’ she laughed. ‘Or should I say an extended adolescence?’ She sat down beside him on the bench and picked a few weeds out of the pot of thyme beside the conservatory window. The garden desperately needed attention. It was something Matthew used to deal with on Sunday mornings, usually as a way of coping with a mild hangover. The worse his headache was, the more energetically he’d pushed the lawnmower. Without the routine of daily work, without the contrast between work-days and other days, other routines had vanished too. Matthew had never exactly been one for the unbreakable ritual of Sunday morning car-cleaning (unlike Angie’s ex-husband who had woken the Grove shortly after every Sunday dawn with the whine of his mini-vac sucking dust from his precious Audi’s carpets), but there had been the chores that had got done simply because of the urgency of cramming them into what little free time there was. Now, with the weeks of non-occupation stretching ahead (Jess slapped down the thought that it might well be years), Matthew was becoming distinctly lazier. The grass had got to the waving-in-the-wind length and was sprouting a fine crop of dandelions. The surge in spring growth showed that in the race to the top of the trellis the bindweed was easily outstripping the clematis. The honeysuckle, wondrous though it would smell in a few weeks when it flowered, was now so rampant that it was clogging the conservatory guttering and causing cascades of water to overflow onto the terrace whenever fierce spring rain fell.

  ‘There’s an awful lot of moss on this terrace,’ she commented, scraping at the stones with her foot. A sticky greeny-brown wodge of it collected on the end of her shoe. She scuffed it off on the edge of the bench leg where it stayed in a solid lump that resembled dog mess.

  ‘Hmm.’ Matthew had gone back to Manchester United’s chances in next Wednesday’s match against Real Madrid. Oliver’s e-mail lay face down on the bench between them.

  ‘Any chance you could give it some attention before it gets out of hand?’ she ventured.

  Matthew folded the paper with exaggerated care and placed it neatly down on the bench beside him.

  ‘Do you want to make a list?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘You’re doing that thing again. Finding things for me to do. Things to fill my time that will keep me out of trouble.’ He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were cold and humourless.

  ‘You usually do the garden stuff, that’s all. What’s the problem?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Do I? I thought we both did it, on a casual as-and-when basis. Or is it what men with nothing better to do fill their days with? Do you want me to join the bowls club and get a slow old dog so we can waddle off for walkies on the common?’

  Jess stood up. ‘You’re overreacting. The new equation is, I’m really busy and you’re not. The garden needs attention: at the moment you have time for it and I don’t. But if you frankly can’t be arsed, well just let it grow, I don’t much care any more than you do.’

  Jess slammed back into the house and straight out again through the front door, pausing only briefly to collect her gym bag and car keys. The childish phrase ‘it’s not fair’ seemed relevant, she thought, as she started her Golf and pulled out into the Grove. It was nearly a month now since Matthew’s working life had so abruptly ended. For all that time he had done nothing except stay in bed late, then get up and mooch down to the Leo to hang about with all the other work-free men in the area. From what she could gather, they sat around giggling through the tabloid papers, telling each other jokes and working out ways to make themselves instantly and immensely rich.

  Ben and Micky were the only ones actually making any money, running the bar and craftily encouraging the long hours of idle boozing and schmoozing. Eddy was still convinced the Cat Sat invention was likely to take off and had got as far, according to Matthew, of drafting an advert to place in a magazine he swore was called Pussy Pals to entice fond owners of precious pedigree breeds to invest in its development. It never bloody would get developed, Jess thought angrily as she crashed through the gears and pulled away too fast from the traffic lights at the square, not while its inventors spent 95 per cent of their time planning the spending of their mythical profits and the rest of their time playing daft jokes like ringing up the local paper to report that the people at number 17 had sold their dustbin area to a mobile phone company so they could put up a mast.

  Jess turned into the gym car park and almost immediately changed her mind. It was mid-morning now, one of the busiest times. The changing room would be full of post-school-run mothers wittering on to each other about whether it was worth little Sebastian going in for a St Dominic’s scholarship, when, after all the expense of extra coaching, it was only worth a 20 per cent reduction in the fees. Week after week she heard the same conversations repeated. Probably in their time she and Angie had gone over the same topics about Zoe and Emily. Not once had she heard anyone mention anything that didn’t involve proof of being majorly well off. There were debates about the merits of beech flooring over oak, of St Lucia over Tobago for holidays or Swiss over Slovenian for au pairs.

  Once, she and Angie had listened with delighted amazement as a woman with a massive house on the corner of the common had shamelessly patronized her companion, saying, ‘Oh I do so envy you your garden; I’d love to have one that small, so much more manageable. The gardener does put in eight hours a week, but still …’ and so on. The gym changing room was a fantasy never-never land for the communal solving of non-problems. Not once had she heard anyone compare the tricky downside of sudden unemployment with, say, the collapsing of a twenty-year marriage or the realization that a child was actually severely thick and not acceptably dyslexic at all.

  Jess turned the car round and headed out of the car park again. ‘I’ll go and see if Dad’s at the allotment,’ she said to herself. And then, she thought, she’d go and map out a few chapter headings on the computer. If she had only six months left of writing Nelson’s Column, perhaps there was scope for collecting together the work of the last couple of years and putting them out as a book. It had worked for Jilly Cooper.

  ‘I can’t believe Emily could be that stupid,’ Zoe said again. She was sitting cross-legged on Natasha’s desk in her bedroom, picking at some loose threads at the hem of the curtain.

  ‘I can. She was always a track short of the full CD,’ Natasha told her. ‘Don’t you remember that time when she came round and said that her rabbit was lying down and had gone all hard and she
thought it was because it had stuffed itself with too much food and would get up again after a sleep?’

  ‘It probably did die of overeating. She was always giving it bunny-munch sugary snacks. Maybe if she’d given herself a few bunny-munches, then she wouldn’t be bloody anorexic. I can’t believe she thought she was pregnant. She probably hasn’t even done it. God it was so embarrassing!’ Zoe put her hands over her face as if she was still in danger of blushing scarlet. ‘When the woman came in and asked Emily, in that oh-so-gentle way, why she had thought she was pregnant! I could’ve killed her! The woman looked sort of pitying as if she’d never met anyone this ignorant.’

  ‘Probably hadn’t,’ Natasha agreed. ‘But Zo, didn’t you ask her if she’d done a pregnancy test? Hadn’t Giles asked her? Hadn’t anyone?’

  ‘No. I just assumed. I mean if someone says they’re pregnant and drags you with them to a clinic you imagine they know what they’re about. I don’t think Giles gives a toss either way.’

  ‘She’s still got a problem though,’ Natasha pointed out. ‘She’s got too thin for periods and that’s dangerous. The school must have noticed.’

  Zoe shrugged. ‘All the girls there were thin, like really thin, the ones I saw anyway. They all wore really low beige trousers and you could see their hip bones, all jutting out and pointy. Funny, because all the boys I saw were really pudgy. Perhaps they grab all the food, like pigs at a trough.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘Hey look,’ she pointed to the end of the garden. ‘There’s Tom, down by the railway. Are you supposed to go out and meet him?’

  Natasha hurtled across the room and peered out of the window. ‘Where is he? Oh yeah I can see. No we hadn’t fixed anything but I think I’ll go down anyway. Actually Zoe, there’s something I wanted to ask you …’

  Matthew felt bad about Jess and about the garden. On his way back from the Leo that afternoon he thought, though not too deeply, about cutting the grass. He wouldn’t make a thing about it, none of that ‘OK, look at me, I’m doing this for you’ attitude. He’d just get on with it and be cheerful. He’d cut back the honeysuckle a bit and hack out the scraggy remains of last year’s perennials as well so the new stuff could get going properly. It wouldn’t take long and he could do with the exercise. As he walked down the road he patted his stomach. It wobbled alarmingly and felt like an unfamiliar thing, an addition like a small bag. He’d only had one pint, too, along with the baguette with Brie and salami and all those squishy semi-sun-dried tomatoes. He’d always been slim, slim but solid. He’d taken it for granted that the outside edges of his body would remain the same, holding everything inside together in the same shape for more or less ever. The front part had now broken away just a little to hang over his chinos in the style of a gossiping neighbour leaning forward slightly over a fence to pass on a discreet confidence.

  He slowed as he approached Eddy’s house. There was a police car parked outside and he wondered if some miserable Grove-ite had noticed that Eddy’s sturdy pot-plants lined up on his kitchen window sill were exactly that: pot. It would be a shame to see Eddy carted away to be done for possession, and tragic if it was ‘with intent to supply’; he’d got used to the reminiscences of his fame days and rather envied him his stock of tales of disgraceful behaviour. It must have been fun to have a working life that involved, and so very profitably, the kind of seriously bad conduct that would have got you expelled from even the worst sink school.

  It wasn’t Eddy’s house that the police were visiting, Matthew realized as he slowed his pace even more out of sheer curiosity, but the one next to it. Matthew could see the front door standing open in the manner of all premises where there is disaster. Eddy was just inside the door, ushering out an infantile constable. Eddy’s arm, Matthew noticed as he grinned at him over the gate, was firmly round the slim shoulders of the householder, an attractive, divorced red-headed woman he’d spoken to only once, at the kind of Christmas drinks party where everyone’s apologetically brought along a lost-looking house-guest and no-one gets past the ‘Oh number 34! I’ve always admired your stained-glass porch’ stage.

  ‘Eh Matt, Clarissa here’s been burgled,’ Eddy called as the constable returned to his car. Eddy and Clarissa emerged from her house and she turned to double-lock the door with great care.

  ‘Burgled? Bloody hell,’ Matthew said as the two came down the path.

  ‘I’m just taking her into my place for a quick medicinal one.’ Eddy winked at Matthew. Clarissa seemed quite content to be snuggled into Eddy’s chest as if she still needed protection from the thief, either that, Matthew thought, or she was in such a state of shock that she was oblivious to the tatty condition of his ancient Eric Clapton Live at the Budokan tee shirt.

  ‘Did they take much?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘Small things. The radio, CD player, the kids’ PlayStation, stuff like that.’ Clarissa’s voice was whispery. She looked up at Matthew and gave him a weak smile. She was terribly pale, more as if she’d discovered a body than a burglary. She’d clearly been crying – her fierce, angry green eyes were damp and her lightly freckled skin had livid pink patches on her cheekbones. Eddy was obviously looking forward to doing further comforting.

  ‘What did the police say? Are they likely to catch them?’ Matt asked. He was enjoying stalling Eddy, who was by now almost hauling Clarissa in the direction of his own front gate.

  Clarissa shrugged. ‘They said there was a lot of it about and to call up my insurers.’

  ‘Did you see that young bloke they sent?’ Eddy commented as the police car drove away. ‘Practically a sodding teenager. Probably on work experience. Bloody burglars, they’re not big enough fish for them. But if I get my hands on whoever did it …’ He clenched his available fist and punched at the air, a disconcerting few inches from Matt’s nose.

  ‘Er right, I’ll leave you to it. See you tomorrow?’ he said to Eddy.

  ‘Yeah man, tomorrow, usual place.’ Over Clarissa’s bent head he turned and leered at Matthew before guiding his prey up his garden path. Matthew headed on towards home, looking forward to opening a beer and telling Jess the news. The garden could wait awhile.

  * * *

  The garlic was going to be ready early this year. The leaves were thick and strong and George was terribly tempted to pull up a bulb and see how it was coming along. When he’d been a child, he had found it impossible to resist, following his father round the garden and tweaking out a carrot here and there to see if it was ready. Then, and it must have been over sixty years back, he’d said the rabbits must have done it and his father had been kind and pretended he was right. Looking back all those years, George marvelled at the patience of the man: those had been years of hardship. Growing food then hadn’t been a hobby like it was now. Every wasted carrot would have meant just a few less mouthfuls of nourishment for someone who really needed it. The people who worked these allotments now mostly did it for exercise and to escape from the confines of home, not because of the sheer need for food. The woman a couple of plots down the row grew fancy lettuces, red ones and green ones all laid out like a chessboard, and then complained about spoiling the pattern when she picked a few leaves to eat. And Dave, who was easily ten years older than him and must remember the days when the difference between feeling full and going without was the number of potatoes you could scavenge from the earth, well he only grew competition stuff now. He had a weird thing about mammoth vegetables too, which George suspected were all but inedible. How much flavour could there be in a five-pound onion?

  ‘I’ve got the weeds out from the radishes. Anything else you want me to do?’ George grinned at the boy. He wasn’t a bad worker, this Tom, not considering how young he was.

  ‘No, you’re all right for now lad, thanks.’ George fished about in his pocket for spare cash. ‘Here y’are. Don’t go spending it on those alcopops!’

  Tom laughed. ‘No-one drinks those, well not blokes anyway.’

  ‘Girlie drinks, are they? They always like the swe
et stuff, nothing’s changed there since I was a boy. Some things never do.’ He gave Tom a long hard look. ‘Kids have always run away from home. I bet one of Adam’s brothers did a runner from the Garden of Eden.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘I haven’t run away from home.’

  ‘You’ve run away from something though, haven’t you?’

  ‘Dad! Hallo!’ Jess pushed open the main allotment gate and picked her way along the narrow grassy path towards her father’s scarlet shed. ‘Oh and hello Tom, what are you doing here?’

  ‘He’s been helping me. He’s not a bad worker, for a teenager.’

  ‘No school?’

  ‘Not everyone stays on to eighteen, you know Jessica, even in these days of NVQs and the like,’ George teased. ‘Some of them like to get on with the real doings of life.’

  ‘Er, yeah. I’ve gotta go. Gotta see someone.’ Tom scurried away so fast that he left Jess with only the fleeting impression of his dazzling smile, fading slowly after him like the Cheshire cat’s.

  ‘He’s still seeing Natasha,’ she said. ‘But they keep to themselves. I just see them sliding in and out of the house now and then. All I’m getting is a back view. She sort of asked if he could move in, have Oliver’s room but I said no. Now she’s giving me the polite-but-non-communicative routine.’

  ‘Do you want her to tell you everything she’s up to?

  You never did at her age, especially when there was a boy on the go.’

  ‘I suppose not. Though how are you supposed to know if there’s something to know if there’s nothing you are being told?’

  George laughed. ‘Oh you know all right. With girls anyway. I thought you were the expert on all this stuff. You’re the one who’s always writing about the kids.’