Dangerous Pleasures

by Patrick Gale

  In her youth, she had despised her parent’s suburban rivalry with their neighbours; the race to the first Flymo, the first double garage, the first conservatory, the first retirement, the first brush with death. When she became pregnant, however, several years into her marriage to Brian, and the two of them decided it was time to exchange their sexy flat in Soho for something larger, cheaper and further out, she was brought to a fuller understanding. She and Brian had neighbours on either side in Islington; the Kilmers and the Pengs. The Pengs were Chinese and industrious and their house was council-owned. Not that Chrissie had anything against people in council housing — far from it — but the Pengs were somehow unapproachable. She always said hello and stopped to admire their (really very sweet) children, but she found it hard to understand why they continued to throw money away on rent when they could be investing it in an endowment mortgage. The Kilmers on the other hand became firm friends soon after the delivery of Brian’s first BMW convertible.

  Everything Chrissie wanted, Jade and Ian bought. Or maybe it was the other way around. They took midwinter holidays in Phuket, booked boxes at the opera, sent a son to Hill House and had him down for a place at Westminster. Ian played expensive, perilous sports while Jade belonged to a chic women-only health club and probably wore hand-sewn underwear beneath her kaleidoscopic array of designer clothing. These blessings of existence scarcely needed parading when the two couples got together; their abundance made them unmissable. As the younger, less wealthy pair, Chrissie and Brian could only fawn and coo. And envy. That Jade was old enough to have a son at prep school was small consolation to her masochistically observant neighbour and that her figure failed to justify so much expenditure was, if anything, a goad.

  Then, after five cosy, neighbourly years, three things happened to change the course of Chrissie’s life. She was promoted to marketing manager for her company’s expansion into Europe, Brian came to fit less and less with her image of the life she felt she should be living and the Kilmers took delivery of an au pair boy from a good Bordelais family.

  ‘Laurent has beautiful manners, he cooks like a dream and actually likes it and he’s doing wonders for Sebastian’s French,’ Jade had exclaimed as Laurent, tall, tanned and twenty-three, set warm duck salad before them and went to open another bottle of wine. ‘Besides, what would I want with some sulky girl around the house? I mean, Chrissie, can you picture it? Lisa had that Marie-Paulette all last summer. She almost had a breakdown, she and Vaughan barely speak now and Sharon still managed to fail her GCSE. Ask anyone. Au pair girls are torture, but au pair boys…well!’

  ‘What do you do all day?’ Chrissie asked Laurent, once he was seated before her and had pouted becomingly in response to the compliments on his salade tiède.

  ‘Oh. Not much. I take the little ones to school, I tidy the house, I do some shopping and then perhaps I go swimming or play tennis.’

  ‘The answer to every maiden’s prayer,’ laughed Ian and returned to some lecture he was giving Brian on market research and demographics.

  ‘Quite,’ said Chrissie. ‘Actually, if you get bored, and if Jade can spare you, of course, I’m going to need to draw up five or six French documents for some presentations in Paris and Toulouse next month and you could be a huge help. The company would pay you, naturally.’

  ‘Of course I can spare him,’ Jade laughed. ‘So long as you promise not to cook for her too, Laurent.’

  ‘Mais bien sûr,’ Laurent said, with a smile that revealed his dimples. ‘I’d be delighted,’ and Chrissie, who had the figure if not the clothing account, was not surprised to feel his shoeless foot unmistakably caressing her calf.

  In the fortnight that followed, it caressed her again, as adventurously as an inquisitive typist and the glass partition walls of an open plan office would allow. Chrissie found herself stirred up to an uncharacteristic fever pitch of desire and frustration. She ached for a bed, for any discreedy situated horizontal even, but Jade could only spare Laurent on weekday mornings, times when Chrissie’s employers could rarely spare her.

  As usual, her love of things or, more properly, her love of other people’s, brought her a solution. Jade and Ian owned a farmhouse a little north of Banbury, where they retreated most weekends and where they had often invited Chrissie, Brian and Sarah-Jane. Whenever he was there, Brian became soft and sentimental about his country childhood (spent in a red-brick suburb of Reading) and exerted pressure on Chrissie.

  ‘It would be a good place to bring up children,’ was a typical opening. ‘Sarah-Jane loves animals.’

  ‘What about schools?’ she would retort. ‘She’d have to board. She wouldn’t love that. And if you think I’m commuting, you’ve another thing coming, Brian Warner.’

  But later she noticed that Ian occasionally let Jade take the children to the farmhouse while he stayed behind to work, which seemed to involve his dressing in his smartest casuals and leaving the house on Saturday afternoon, reeking of aftershave (a waft of it blew through the trellis as he slammed the car door) to return in the early hours of Sunday afternoon. Brian typically failed to notice this dereliction. Chrissie, a childhood subscriber to Look and Learn, was extra kind to Jade and kept her observations to herself.

  Another weekend was spent in Oxfordshire with their neighbours and Laurent’s unbearably stimulating foot. Chrissie made a big effort. She cajoled them all to a nearby church fète. She taught Sarah-Jane to make daisy-chains and Laurent how to make scones. (‘No, rub the butter in like this.’ ‘Like this?’ ‘Oh. Laurent. Yes. Exactement.’) Leaning her head on Brian’s shoulder as he drove them home, she asked, with just a hint of a knowing smile, ‘Why don’t we get a little place in the country?’

  ‘So you want one now?’

  ‘Why not? I mean, nothing large. Not like Jade and lan’s. That’s too much hard work and, well, frankly I think they’ve made it rather common.’

  ‘Mmm. All those paint effects.’

  ‘And those fussy curtains. No. I was thinking of a cottage. A real cottage. A contrast to London.’

  ‘Somewhere quite run down that we could do up?’

  ‘Exactly. Everyone’s going on exotic holidays nowadays. I think it might be rather smart to spend some time in England for a change. A cottage would be the perfect excuse.’

  ‘When shall we start looking?’

  ‘Oh God. Brian, you know how I hate house-hunting.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You remember what I was like over Islington. I can never picture how things will look. I just see squalor and naff things that people have done everywhere. And I get so tired. Couldn’t you go on your own. I trust your judgement implicitly.’

  ‘Well that wouldn’t be so much fun. Why don’t you take a Friday off and we can make a weekend of it?’

  ‘Not a weekend. Sarah-Jane’s got her ballet classes on Saturdays until the twenty-fourth. Let’s take off a day midweek. The roads will be clearer then. We could get a babysitter for Sarah-Jane after school and come home late. How about Wednesday? There was going to be a sales briefing but Janine had to cancel.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Their Wednesdays were taken off accordingly, a babysitter arranged and Laurent was informed by a message slipped across Chrissie’s desk on the previous Friday: ‘Jettes-toi les chausettes — mercredi on aura un lit!’ Then, on Tuesday night, she returned just in time for supper and announced, with a passable show of irritation, that Janine was now available again and the sales briefing was back on for the next day.

  ‘But you’ve taken tomorrow off. They can’t make you go in.’

  ‘They can’t make me, Brian,’ she agreed, ‘but I can hardly stay away. Now can I? You wouldn’t in my position.’

  They argued the question from every angle. Then, for several awful minutes, Brian threatened to spend his day off working at his accounts instead. Chrissie found herself, watched across the dining table by Sarah-Jane’s pinched and questioning gaze, protesting that of course he should go ahead
. He knew so much better than she what houses would suit them and which would not.

  ‘It was your idea after all,’ she added.

  ‘It was yours!’

  ‘Hardly. You’ve been suggesting we get a place in the country ever since Ian and Jade had us to the farmhouse for the first time. You know how envious you were of them. Besides, it would be fun to have a day off. The weather’s going to be great.’

  ‘More fun with two.’

  ‘Now don’t start.’

  Suddenly Sarah-Jane interrupted them with the unfamiliar sound of weeping. She hardly ever cried. She was a sensible, well-ordered little girl; her mother’s child. Tears coursed down her sweet, fat cheeks at an alarming rate and she screwed her fists back and forth on her eyelids.

  ‘Don’t,’ she sobbed, ‘Don’t don’t don’t!’

  Brian lifted her into his arms and walked up and down, rubbing her back and stilling her cries.

  The subject was dropped until the next morning, when he made one last abortive effort to dissuade Chrissie from work. She had put on her smartest blue linen suit with a deep purple blouse and jet black accessories. Sarah-Jane complimented her enchantingly as they left the house together. It was a pity she was getting so fat. Even her ballet teacher had commented on it. The Fultons’ little girl was so lithe and pretty.

  Laurent was loading his charges into Jade’s other car for the school run. As he pulled out alongside Chrissie and the children waved and called frantically to each other, he smiled at her through the racket and showed his dimples.

  ‘A bientôt,’ she mouthed through the glass and smiled.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Sarah-Jane piped up as they waited at the junction with Caledonian Road.

  ‘I’ve a hard day ahead of me this morning,’ Chrissie told her crisply. ‘Try to be good.’

  WHEEE!

  for Anna Gale

  IT WAS NOT, she reflected, the way one imagined one’s mother going. Elderly mothers were meant to slide peacefully to their death in a snoreless doze in lemon-yellow rooms scented with barley sugars and fresh lavender with wheeling seagulls beyond an open window and a distant sound of waves dragging through shingle. At best, they died in their own beds after a brief and painless illness, at worst, in hospital, after a harsh but still seemly medical crisis. They did not wantonly make spectacles of themselves. They did not leap to their deaths from cliff tops in bald daylight and high season. If they did commit suicide — and Matilda still saw no reason why her mother should have done so — they contained the urge until the wetter, greyer months, so as to do the deed unobserved. It was a wonder, she considered, that no holiday makers had been wounded or even killed by the body flying so suddenly onto the rocks in their midst. Retaining a shamingly sweet tooth to the bitter end, her mother had not been a small woman. No unworldly old bird she.

  In her brief interview with the police, foul play was immediately ruled out. Not only was there no discernible motive — the old woman had little to leave her only heir and, however irritating, could hardly be believed to have goaded anyone into murdering her out of pure malice — but it was accepted that a person pushed from so great a height would let out a scream, or at least an audible gasp. The sound widely reported to have emerged from Matilda’s plummeting mother was a full-bodied laugh. Either from tact or apathy, the old woman was allowed to have lost her footing.

  ‘The grass can be slippery up there,’ the policeman explained, ‘even in summer. And there’s a deceptive overhang. Could happen to anybody.’

  The possibility of self-murder dangled between them unacknowledged. Matilda had been brought up to trust in policemen and was happy not to question their wisdom now.

  The funeral had been excruciatingly embarrassing. The sole surviving relative, she had assumed she could slip quietly down for the day and see the whole business conducted swiftly and with no fuss. The matron of the home had greeted her tearfully, of course, but one expected some of that; a good show of solicitude was one of the things one paid her for. But then the wretched woman announced that so many friends had been telephoning and calling round since the unhappy event that she had felt obliged to lay on a small spread of sandwiches, cakes and tea. Matilda’s mother, it appeared, had actually made herself popular. Very popular. In her discussion with the recommended local undertaker, Matilda had booked the smaller of the two crematorium chapels, not wishing to have a grim event made grimmer by having to preside over the coffin as sole mourner in a grotesquely large space. There were already some thirty people waiting eagerly in their pews when she drew up behind the hearse, however. By the time the priest was intoning the opening sentences — again she had requested the smallest possible rite, with no fuss and no hymns — so many mourners had arrived that a crowd of them was forced to remain outside the open doors, craning their necks and discreedy jockeying for a better view. Young, aged, men, women, smart and down-at-heel, white, brown, swarthy and even Oriental; they were so heterogenous a crowd, so entirely not the kind of friends she might have expected a woman of her mother’s age and background to have acquired, that she actually wondered if she had followed the wrong hearse and attended the wrong funeral. They all pressed around to wring her by the hand afterwards, however, and pursued her back across the town to the rest home for a funeral tea that was little short of riotous. Few of them were wearing black so she felt herself conspicuous in their colourful midst as a raven caught up in a chattering flock of budgerigars. This, like the ruling out of suicide, was some consolation in such a crisis; her status as chief mourner and sole next of kin was apparent for all to see.

  The token servings of milky tea were soon superseded by alcohol as bottles of wine, and even stronger stuff, were smilingly presented and thirstily splashed into disposable cups. In her anxiety to have the ordeal done with as soon as possible, Matilda had fondly assumed that, once the small rafts of sandwiches, Battenburg and Jaffa Cake mis-shapes had been swept away, the guests would show some sense of decorum and take their leave. Rather, bags of crisps and small boxes of sausage rolls began to materialize. One ridiculous woman even broke merrily into what appeared to be her week’s supply of grocery shopping, brought along to the funeral in several plastic bags.

  ‘Plenty more where this came from,’ she said and gaily offered Matilda a selection of lurid fondant fancies. Matilda flinched but found herself taking the nearest one, in a kind of desperation. It was pink. It tasted pink. Impulsively she snatched a second before a man in a turban and medals could whisk them out of reach. Someone took away her teacup and thrust a beaker of warm Chardonnay into her unwary hand. She glanced at her watch, saw with alarm that it was nearly six, and drank.

  She had not once felt tempted to tears during the funeral. Ritual and the iron laws of good behaviour had saved her from that. As this unstructured, seemingly endless celebration continued, however, she repeatedly felt her nose-tip tingle and her tear ducts bum. Guest after guest came to pay their respects. Several, deeply moved, did so more than once. Some described themselves as friends of her mother’s — women who played her at gin rummy, who knew her from her watercolour class — but many freely confessed to only a slight acquaintance but a strong impression of her character. There was a man from the library she had regularly dealt with, who recalled her taste for the most challenging modern fiction. A Hindu couple who often met her walking on the cliff paths cherished vivid recollections of a long conversation she had begun on the subject of the afterlife.

  ‘We don’t understand it,’ she was told repeatedly. ‘She seemed so happy-go-lucky’, ‘So bursting with vim’, ‘So audacious’, ‘So funny’.

  She told the first few that the police had diagnosed an accident but she felt crushed by their sad, understanding little smiles of reply and, refusing to give them further opportunity to humour her with simpers, made no further allusion to suicide and let them infer what they pleased.

  The picture they built up of her mother could not have been further from the woman she knew. Her mo
ther was independent certainly — it had been she who insisted on entering a rest home after her second hip replacement, waving aside Matilda’s (admittedly half-hearted) offer of a new base in her spare room — but she was hardly merry. She had always struck her daughter as the quietly humourless sort, the kind of woman who works years in the corner of an office only to be distinguished by her eventual absence. They saw each other rarely. Matilda had followed her husband to the other side of the country and remained there alone on his death. They rarely spoke — each hated the telephone — but Matilda had been a dutiful correspondent, firing off a tidy three-and-a-half sides on blue Basildon Bond once a month. Her mother’s replies were erratic, which Matilda put down to a lack of news in her life, and largely composed of dry comment on the gossip Matilda had passed on. She wondered if, were she to read them again, she would detect a note of vigorous, even cruel merriment in them.