Every Good Girl

by Judy Astley

  She has a smaller, neater mouth than Nina, Joe was thinking as he put her croissant into the microwave. Being fellated by Nina had been an act of delicious terror. Her big, roaming lips had reminded him of overgrown exotic sea-anemones, threatening to devour him, penis, balls, body, brain and all. Catherine was more of a nibbler, making him think, even at the most unsuitable moments, of Lucy’s pet hamster. I wonder what they’re all doing now, he thought as he crossed the many metres of blond polished ash floor to serve his love with delicacies. With just a little masochistic nostalgia he recalled the wafting odours of roasting meat and crisp, floury potatoes. The smoked salmon, as he bit into it, felt limp, cold and hostile. His stomach rumbled, an old man’s noise; he hoped Catherine hadn’t heard.

  ‘Next Sunday when the girls come, I’ll cook us all a proper roast dinner,’ he promised her. She looked up at him in wide-eyed surprise. ‘Heavens, whatever for? It’ll take half the day.’ The sexy half, before the girls get here hovered behind her frown. Joe took no notice – his plans had moved on to the vegetables. ‘Mm,’ he murmured. ‘With carrots poached in butter and tarragon . . .’

  ‘You girls will do the dishes for your mother, won’t you darlings?’ Monica smiled from Lucy to Emily.

  ‘Mum and Dad always say we don’t do things “for” her, like we’re helping, because that makes out that all housework is just her job really and no-one else’s and that’s wrong,’ Lucy corrected Monica, managing to sound as if she was reciting Holy Writ without quite understanding it.

  ‘Quite right,’ Monica agreed readily. ‘There are now three grown-up women living in this house and chores should be shared equally. So that means you’ll definitely be doing the washing up, won’t you?’ She piled plates together and passed them across to Emily who scowled, but took them across the kitchen to the dishwasher.

  ‘Give us a break, we’ve only just finished. Why don’t you and Mum finish the wine and Luce and I’ll clear up in a minute?’

  ‘OK, but just stack that lot first, please Em, then you can go off for a while if you want,’ Nina told her. She felt depressed. Lunch seemed to have taken an unsociably short time, as if none of them had really felt like making much of a conversational effort and it had simply been a matter of functional feeding. Reluctant as she was even to think it, she was pretty sure it had something to do with the lack of men. As a family of women dining together they suddenly seemed an apologetic, sad lot. She and her mother were leftovers, and probably about as unappealing as the lamb would be by tomorrow. Perhaps she should have invited Henry, just to balance things a bit; he was always happy to accept a free meal. But then he’d have so charmed Monica she’d be forever after dropping comments about that nice man down the road, how silly for you both to live alone . . . She poured more red wine into her glass and took a deep swig.

  ‘Château La Lagune,’ Monica read from the label, waving her glasses vaguely between her nose and the bottle. ‘Rather nice. I don’t think Graham would have liked it though. Did Joe buy it?’

  ‘No, I did,’ Nina snapped. ‘I know what I like.’

  ‘All right, no need to get touchy, darling. I just wondered if it was left in the cellar from before . . . well, you know.’

  ‘Before Joe left. Yes I know.’ Nina could feel herself getting crosser and searched her mind for a decent reason. ‘Sorry. It’s just that Sunday feeling,’ she said, shaking her head as if it was surrounded by summer midges, hoping to clear a space in her mind for some cheerfulness.

  ‘Would you like some cheese? I’ve got Brie and Yarg and something from Italy I think.’ She walked across to the fridge and pulled cheeses from the top shelf. If Joe had been there he’d have remembered to get them out well before lunch. He’d have laid them carefully on a leaf green plate with ice-cold grapes and a fat bunch of purple sage from the garden. She shook her head again – he had no business trespassing in her mind at all. He’d been neatly tidied away long before now.

  As she went back to the table she looked around the room. It seemed very cluttered, suddenly, being, in estate agents’ terms, ‘a large family room’ and therefore a collecting place for books, homework, television, assorted pet baskets and chatting, in addition to cooking and eating. The houses on this side of the road were built on a front to back slope and the kitchen took up all of the large basement, leading out by way of a small conservatory to the walled back garden where the shrubs she and Joe had chosen so carefully ten years before now threatened to strangle each other and block out most of the sun.

  That all needs clearing out as well, Nina thought, turning away and inspecting the cool blue walls of the kitchen that had collected smudges and plaster chips where Lucy’s school artwork had been blu-tacked up and then carelessly pulled down again, and mystery smears that might have been from the exuberant killing of wasps. There were, too, the sad pale patches where Joe had taken framed photos of the girls to put in his new flat. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were crammed with paperbacks that Nina had read so long ago that many could reasonably be passed on to the school fair, and the window shutters had grey fingermarks because nobody ever bothered to use the awkward little (tarnished) brass rings to close them. Even the cushions strewn on the sofa annoyed Nina, being of the fussily 1980s chintz-and-frill variety. Suddenly she longed for plain cream linen and the smell of fresh paint. And the sharp Mediterranean colours of the restaurant she’d been to for that strangely unsettling lunch with Joe.

  ‘Yes it could do with a lick of paint,’ Monica said, surprising Nina with her accurate thought-reading. ‘You’ll have to get someone in.’

  ‘Well I might do it myself actually,’ Nina decided, though even as she said it, she felt her right shoulder tweak with anticipatory pain at the very idea of painting what must easily be 600 square feet of ceiling. Perhaps Henry . . .

  Nina went to the window that faced the road at the front and inspected the curtains. They needed cleaning, or better still throwing out. Up in a bedroom window across the road at number 26, someone else could be seen measuring a window. ‘We’re getting new people across the road,’ she said. ‘They’re in there now, measuring up.’

  ‘Really? That’ll be nice for you.’ Monica came and stood beside Nina and peered across the road. ‘Look at us, aren’t we shamelessly nosy,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you run across and invite them in for coffee?’

  ‘I will soon, but not today. Let’s just leave them to it, I expect they’ve got loads to do.’ She dropped the curtain edge and turned away. She imagined a young, optimistic couple strolling round their new house together, laughing over paint-chart disagreements, picturing their furniture, where it should go, what they would need. The emptiness she’d been feeling all day gnawed harder at her.

  ‘Mum, Mum do you mind if I go out for a while? After we’ve cleared up?’

  Nina looked suspiciously at Emily, who had tied her hair back in honour of asking the favour. ‘No I don’t mind, as long as there isn’t homework you should be doing. Where are you going? Chloe’s? Nick’s?’

  Emily went to the sink and started rinsing cutlery. ‘Er, no actually, I just thought I might just drop in and see what Dad’s doing. He said we could, any time.’ Her face was hidden as she bent to drop knives into the dishwasher.

  Nina was on the point of saying, But its not his turn . . . but stopped herself. She and Joe had agreed it wouldn’t be a matter of ‘turns’ and complicated arrangements. Emily was nearly eighteen, long since capable of getting on a bus to Chelsea and visiting her father by herself.

  ‘OK, good idea. You could discuss your gap year with him, see what he thinks,’ she said. ‘Have you phoned him?’

  ‘No. I just thought I’d surprise him. He might not even be there, but I don’t mind chancing it.’

  Nina smiled. ‘It’ll surprise Catherine too.’ The thought quite cheered her up.

  Up in her room Emily undressed completely and padded across the landing to the bathroom she shared with Lucy. Under the shower she soaped away the
stale lingering smells of last night’s cigarettes and the grubby pub that she, Chloe and Nick with friends from various local schools and colleges frequented at weekends. The night before there had been a bizarre tweak of pleasure in not going on to his house and having sex with Nick: nothing, not even a goodnight kiss. He was nice to snog, but if you got as far as kissing him it was as if all the right buttons were suddenly pressed and he was on autopilot till the after-sex cigarette. If you stopped him halfway, you did damage: his mother had told him this, told him it wasn’t safe to stop once he’d got going because he’d end up with prostate cancer or something. According to Nick, that would mean it was all Emily’s fault if she refused to finish what she’d started. That meant, Emily reasoned, that it followed it was all his mother’s fault that she, in the interests of his health, had therefore refused to start anything at all. So tough luck.

  Back in her room, she chose underwear far more carefully than she had before lunch. ‘Well you never know, Simon might be there, and then he might just want . . .’ she murmured to the cat sleeping on her unmade bed as she picked out the scarlet satin bra and knickers that she’d bought with a Knickerbox gift token the previous Christmas. The bra was now rather tight, she noticed, which meant she’d grown in the past three months. The mirror told her it gave her quite a cleavage, which, being used to a fairly flat teenage figure, slightly unnerved her. ‘God I look like a woman,’ she told the cat. ‘Proper tits.’ She felt quite shocked, as if she was looking at someone else, someone she didn’t know very well.

  ‘Can I come too?’ Lucy knocked and came into the room at the same time. ‘That looks nice. Like a bikini,’ she said, admiring Emily’s underwear. ‘Is it a bikini? Are you going to the pool?’

  ‘No, I’m going man-catching,’ Emily told her, turning to the wardrobe and flicking hangers past, looking for something to wear that would hint at the treasures beneath without looking too obvious.

  ‘How do you do that exactly?’ Lucy asked solemnly.

  ‘I can’t really tell you,’ Emily said, holding up a very short black velvet dress and checking for old, unattractive stains. ‘It just comes naturally when you get to the right age.’

  ‘I thought you were going to Dad’s. That’s what you told Mum,’ Lucy continued. ‘She said we should always tell someone, even if it’s not her, the truth about where we’re going just in case of accidents. So you’d better tell me, hadn’t you?’ she smiled persuasively at Emily, who grinned back at her. No wonder she gets all this modelling work, Emily thought, she really has got the most peculiarly pointy little cat-face. Not so much pretty-pretty as unusual. And her mouth’s too big, in every sense. No way would she ever tell Lucy a secret.

  ‘Actually I am going to Dad’s. And this time no you can’t come in case I go on to see Nick later. Sorry, maybe next time,’ she said, patting Lucy on the head in a gesture she hoped the child would take as the nearest she’d get to open affection, and not simply feel she was being put down.

  ‘I’ll have to go for a walk on the Common with Gran, then,’ Lucy complained glumly. ‘She always wants to walk on the Common. She says it’s good for the digestion. And she always goes really fast so that she can get back home in time to cook something for Uncle Graham.’

  ‘Well it’s good for the dog. Genghis will love it, and then it won’t be your turn to walk him tomorrow will it?’ Emily grinned at her, opened the door and ushered Lucy out ahead of her. She shut the door firmly, so Lucy would know she wasn’t expected to make a return curiosity visit in her sister’s absence. Together they went down the stairs, back to the kitchen.

  ‘Joe shouldn’t have left the dog for you to look after. You’d think he could have taken it with him,’ Monica was saying as she watched Nina attaching a stout lead to the collar of the ancient and supremely idle Afghan hound.

  Emily laughed, ‘No way. These dogs are just so uncool now, Dad wouldn’t be seen dead with him.’

  ‘Come on Emily, that’s not true. He could hardly live in the flat with Joe. It wouldn’t be fair.’ Nina patted Genghis’s soft shaggy head. ‘Not fair on whom?’ Emily asked as she gave Monica a goodbye hug.

  Graham sat in his Fiesta in the Waddington Aviation Viewing Enclosure, notepad and book of USA Military Aircraft Serials in hand. A satisfying day. A rare day off from the demands of both home and hospital and no fewer than three F–117 Nighthawks had arrived, slinking over the horizon and down on to the runway just in front of him. Their weird black shapes reminded him of sinister origami. No wonder the media liked to call them Stealths. They even looked fragile, but deceptive like the small plain spiders that have the deadliest venom. The Brits had nothing like the F–117, not military, though he was sentimentally both fond and proud of Concorde. And if they had got something that special, it definitely wouldn’t be out and flying on a Sunday. Weekends and three weeks in August: any amateur aircraft enthusiast could tell a hostile nation that that was the time to invade.

  Right now his stomach told him it was more than lunchtime so he waved briefly to the small band of equally committed hobbyists comparing their electronic scanners by the airfield fence and drove towards the village. As well as hungry he felt quite old. The others waiting in the WAVE with him were, at the most, only just out of their teens. Partly this was cheering: that youngsters hadn’t all gone over to mugging and computer games in place of plane-spotting and bird-watching. But it reminded him uncomfortably that people generally, most people, expected to grow out of it. He hadn’t. He didn’t want to. His military aircraft log must be about the most comprehensive in the country, way back to 1971. If it had flown in, from whichever world air force, he’d been to see it, photographed it, written it down.

  He looked at the car’s clock. Only 2.15. After the burger (which Mother mustn’t know about because of BSE), if he drove fast, he could get home and get in a couple of hours of number-logging on the computer before his mother got home and started her ‘Oh you’re not shutting yourself away again with that stuff are you?’ nagging again. If he went out she’d moan about being neglected. He couldn’t win.

  ‘So tell me about Barbados. When are you going?’

  Monica strode along across the breezy Common beside Lucy, trying not to gasp at the pace. The dog, too hopelessly unreliable to be let off its lead in an open space, hauled Lucy along in an attempt to get her to run with him.

  ‘I might not be going. They liked me, but they liked about ten others as well and we’ve all got to go back next Thursday for a re-call. I think we’ll have to try some of the clothes on. That’s what usually happens. And if they don’t look good on us we don’t get it.’

  ‘Barbados though, that’ll be lovely won’t it, darling? I’m sure you were easily the prettiest, you’re bound to get it.’

  ‘Don’t build her hopes up, she might not, you know.’ Nina murmured a warning to her mother. Monica frowned at her.

  ‘Oh don’t be so defeatist, let the girl fly while she can. You did, in your day. Of course she’ll get it. She usually does, doesn’t she? And of course you’ll get to go as well, chaperoning, but if you don’t want to, I’ll go.’

  ‘Last time I got a hot country job, we only went to Ealing to a big shed. They’d made scenery and got loads of palm trees.’ Lucy laughed. ‘It was really cold and we had to dance about and pretend it was a party on a beach. That was an advert for Tropi-choc sweets. They were disgusting.’

  ‘Joe isn’t very keen. He says it interrupts her school work,’ Nina admitted.

  ‘But it was him who got her involved in all this in the first place, wasn’t it, taking her to a casting for some awful ad for, what was it, yoghurt?’

  ‘Yes, but he thought it would just be that one-off, just for fun. We used to argue about it quite a lot.’

  Monica sniffed. ‘Well, you know what I think. You could have found a way of sorting it out without resorting to words. You let that man slip through your fingers, simply because you’ve never managed the art of quiet subtlety. There’s many a
way to skin cats, you know. Perhaps if you’d given him a son . . .’ She made it sound like a gift, or a bribe, Nina thought, as if for the sake of a son he’d have stopped showing off his manhood with a succession of dozy young girls and stayed home being dutiful. Sally, though, had ‘given’ each of her two husbands a son and they’d still gone off and left her, but then she was of the opinion that if you had a boy-child, they were so utterly treasured by their doting mothers that the husbands got jealous anyway . . . Either way, the female of the species, daughter, wife or mother, clearly couldn’t win.

  ‘Come on Genghis, let’s go, shall we?’ Nina took the lead from Lucy and started running. The Common was Sunday-afternoon busy. Lunches were being walked off, lone fathers were having parental access, quality time with sweets and promises. Children ran and squabbled and kicked footballs. Men and women, arms linked in domestic solidarity, strolled together and sorted their weekend differences. Dogs more biddable than Genghis were running loose, sniffing for rabbits and for each other.

  ‘“Slipped through my fingers” did he? I’d say he prised them apart and forced his way through,’ she whispered to herself as she ran. The dog loped gently just ahead of her, his big golden ears flopping. If she let the lead go he’d run till he dropped, unseeing and purposeless, for miles and miles and miles.

  ‘The doorbell’s ringing,’ Catherine murmured into the pillow. Joe didn’t move. He lay sprawled and exhausted beneath the duvet, trying not to fall asleep because, wise grown-up as he was, he knew he’d be in for a restless night later if he gave in now in the late afternoon.