Every Good Girl

by Judy Astley

  ‘So he’s not married then, your brother, or is he divorced or whatever?’ Megan asked.

  Nina laughed. ‘No! Graham’s never got round to leaving home. Mother made him much too comfortable! I don’t suppose he ever will now.’ Paul and Megan exchanged glances, which Nina speedily interpreted.

  ‘I don’t think he’s gay, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s just not bothered either way,’ she told them.

  ‘Oh come on, everyone’s bothered, one way or another, surely!’ Paul said. It’s only natural. He must have some secret vices!’

  Nina felt slightly aggrieved. It was none of their business. However had she got into talking about this? ‘Well he’s happy enough, so what does it matter?’ she sipped at the wine, but found it sour.

  ‘Classic sex crime profile,’ Paul commented casually, leaning forward and looking as if he was only pretending to be serious.

  ‘What is, exactly?’ Nina asked, daring him to spell it out.

  ‘Mother’s boys. Men who’ve stayed too long tied to Mummy’s apron strings. It’s the first thing the police look for when there’s a nasty murder. You know, you must have read it countless times,’ he said simply, with a taunting grin.

  ‘Oh Paul, stop it! I’m sure Nina’s brother is a perfectly nice man who just happens to prefer home cooking to living in a bedsit on beans and take-outs.’ Megan attempted peacemaking.

  ‘Yes he is.’ Nina put her glass down, appalled to find that her hand was trembling. ‘And I’m sure that when the police catch the man who’s been molesting girls on the Common, they’ll find he’s a perfectly nice man with a saint of a wife and some perfectly ordinary children. Now, where is Lucy – I really must take her home.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Are you sure you want to go? I’m sure Joe will understand if you’d rather just stay here.’

  Nina pushed aside a pile of Emily’s clothes (clean and awaiting drawer space, or overdue for the laundry basket?) and sat on her daughter’s unmade bed. From beneath it, the sleeves of a grey jumper could be seen splayed across the floor like a murder victim. The air of chaos made Nina’s fingers twitch with the urge to start sorting. Like a child told off for fidgeting she sat on her hands, determined not to pick up so much as one grubby garment. For that way lay the thwarting of a developing independence by heady parental control: Nina refused to be tempted to emulate her own mother, who was still fondly picking up, sorting and washing Graham’s dropped socks.

  Emily was selecting more clothes, some from a drawer and some tugged out of the piles, and shoving them into a pair of Sainsbury’s carrier bags. She seemed to be covering all social possibilities: from a night of minimal dress in the gluey heat of a club to a freezing sulky walk along the wind-blitzed Thames. Late on Sunday night they would all be brought home and tipped carelessly out to join whichever heap seemed appropriate at the time and the bags would float softly across the floor, wafted by the breezes of Emily’s to-and-fro presence until they graduated to becoming the overflow for her rubbish bin. In between now and Sunday night the house would be agonizingly quiet, just the metallic click-click of Genghis’s claws on the kitchen floor, his snuffling by the door, the spooky night-time whirring of the hamster’s wheel.

  Nina shivered. She wished she wasn’t going out, wished she hadn’t promised Sally. It wasn’t the being out, or the lightly surfing chat with a table full of strangers that troubled her, nothing beyond the normal laziness that went with the effort of getting ready and actually getting to the restaurant; it was more the gloominess of coming back to a house that sounded of nothing and no-one.

  ‘I do want to go. I want to see Dad and it’s somewhere else to be. And it’s near really good shops,’ Emily said. She hauled out the grey jumper and sniffed at it. ‘There’s another day in this I think,’ she decided cheerfully, cramming it into the bag on top of a pair of emerald green boots.

  ‘There, that’s everything,’ she said, picking up the bags and heading for the door. ‘Is Lucy ready? Can we go now?’

  ‘What’s the big hurry?’ Nina asked. It was on the tip of her careless tongue to add It’s only your dad. Not so much of the ‘only’, she reminded herself.

  ‘Oh I don’t know, I’m just ready to go out. I’ve been in for ages, like some kind of invalid. Only I’m better now. Well nearly, I think.’

  Nina followed her down the stairs. Lucy was waiting at the bottom, her little cat-face looking up at them anxiously. ‘If anyone from Little Cherubs rings, you will call and tell me won’t you, Mum? Promise?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Nina told her. ‘Whyever wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Whyever should they ring, you mean, after you beat up Sophie and screwed up your audition. I bet you’re off their books for good. I bet you’re blacklisted, no-one employs troublemakers,’ Emily taunted her sister. Lucy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You are such a cow, Em.’

  ‘Oh look don’t start a fight now, not when you’re off to spend the weekend with Joe. He doesn’t need you two turning up in awful moods.’

  Though why not, Nina thought as she picked up Lucy’s bag and hauled it out of the front door and into the car boot. Why should he only get them on best behaviour terms? She made a quick wish that in his presence (and Catherine’s, oh especially Catherine’s) they should have at least one vicious (but quick) row and that they should absolutely not clean the bath after use. In addition, one of them should suddenly become vegetarian and the other might accidentally stumble heavily against the biggest shelf-load of the art deco elongated ladies. More cheerfully she went on, ‘I’m sure having the odd tantrum has never stopped most models from working. People have very short memories in that business, so don’t worry. Though I think you could write Angela a note, apologizing. That would help – you should have done it days ago really. Tantrums are one thing, but there’s no excuse for bad manners.’

  Lucy brightened and leapt into the back of the car. ‘I’ll do it at Dad’s. On his computer.’

  ‘No, by hand. More personal and more as if you mean it,’ Nina said.

  Emily swung all her bags into the back of the car, clutching them in front of her as if scared all her precious possessions might be taken away at any moment. Nina looked in the rearview mirror and noted that none of the bags’ bulges seemed to be book-shaped.

  ‘Homework, Em?’ she suggested tentatively.

  ‘No chance. I’ve been doing nothing else for days. Give me a break,’ Emily growled.

  ‘It’s your life, your A-levels,’ she conceded as she backed the Polo out of the drive.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m not going to do any exams,’ Lucy stated.

  ‘Oh yes, and how come?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Hey, if I have to, you have to,’ Emily growled.

  ‘Well I’ll be so rich and so famous I won’t need them,’ Lucy said seriously.

  ‘Look, you’re only pretty. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t get you that much in life. Only the more shallow and stupid of men,’ Emily said with exasperation. ‘And you probably won’t be pretty for that long, so what then?’

  ‘I’ll marry a mega-rich movie star man. And then I still won’t need exams.’

  ‘Give me strength,’ Emily sighed. ‘Mum, where did you and Dad go wrong with her?’

  Nina laughed. ‘Don’t know. Lucy my love, you seem somehow to have absorbed some very dodgy values from a whole other age. I know, this weekend, tell all this to Catherine and see what she has to say about it. If she’s going to keep living with Joe, maybe it’s time she put in some effort towards the other aspects of his life. He doesn’t come just as one lone person.’

  ‘You make us sound like heavy baggage,’ Emily said quietly.

  ‘No, no you’re not baggage, never that, but you are responsibility.’ Joe knew all that, Nina thought as the car crawled through the Friday evening Fulham traffic. He’d never, not once, shown the slightest sign of not wanting to take his full share in caring for the girls. Not once in the past year h
ad he said ‘No, not this weekend, I’ve got something on.’ If he’d only been half as good at husbanding as he was at fathering . . . A Fiesta cut in in front of her and she slammed her foot on the brake. ‘Bloody stupid sod!’ she shouted, over-reacting furiously.

  ‘Chill, Mum,’ Emily said, emerging from her doze against the back window.

  ‘It’s OK, I was thinking of someone else,’ Nina murmured.

  ‘So, what would you like to do this weekend? Any ideas?’

  Catherine looked at the two girls as if they were strange exotic animals with dangerous habits. She stood awkwardly in front of them, close to the front door as if she might need to bolt off into the night, and her arms were wrapped round her body as if she didn’t quite know what to do with her hands. Joe wasn’t home yet; he’d phoned from a difficult recording session with apologies.

  Catherine’s shaky discomfort made Emily feel enormously happy. It was something to do with pecking order, as in who, exactly, counted as the guests in Joe’s apartment. She was also pretty sure she hadn’t been forgiven for the early morning phone call. She and Lucy, cruelly recognizing someone in victim mode, looked at each other, which was a mistake because it sent their faces into contortions of suppressed giggles.

  ‘We don’t need to do anything special. We’ll just hang out,’ Emily told her, thumping across the polished ash floor and collapsing, with her bag-lady possessions around her, into the cream sofa. The cushions sighed gently as she settled deep into the seat and she smiled contentedly. This flat was very comfortable, very sleek, her friends would love it.

  ‘If you and Dad ever want to go away, you know, like for a few days’ romantic trip or something,’ she said, a sweetly radiant smile, hinting at willingness to please, beaming from her face, ‘I could stay here with just my friend Chloe and look after the place for you. Keep the burglars out. It’s so peaceful here, we could get on with some exam revision.’

  ‘Well that would be very . . . er, kind.’

  ‘Really, it’s no problem!’ Emily shrugged. Lucy giggled treacherously and Emily glared.

  ‘I think I’ll go and unpack my stuff,’ Lucy decided and Emily got up and followed her upstairs to the room they shared at the back of the studio balcony. Below them, Catherine was carefully rearranging the squashed cushions and brushing teenage dust off the fabric. Emily trailed her fingers along the back of the ancient grey leather sofa that used to live in Joe’s studio back at home. Her nails traced the grooves where the cat’s claws had wreaked damage.

  ‘I used to lie on this when Dad was working. I used to tell him which tunes I liked most and when I thought it was all rubbish,’ she said.

  ‘I did too,’ Lucy added. ‘It was me who told him which was the best sound for that advert where the car drives across the desert and straight up the mountain. He chose something that sounded squishy.’

  ‘Hopeless,’ Emily agreed, opening the door to their shared room. ‘I wonder how he manages without us?’

  ‘He isn’t without us though is he, we’re here.’

  ‘Yes but he isn’t,’ Emily said, throwing her collection of bags onto the blue and white patchwork-covered bed. ‘Which reminds me . . .’ She dashed out through the door and leaned on the balcony rail, looking down to where Catherine was now perched on the edge of the sofa, flicking quickly through a magazine and looking about as relaxed as if she was waiting her turn for some serious root canal work.

  ‘Catherine? I was just wondering . . .’ Emily smiled down at her, her long hair flopping forward and obscuring her expression. She shoved it back impatiently – it was important that Catherine saw her being ‘nice’.

  ‘Yes?’ Catherine said tentatively, looking tense.

  Emily continued smiling, enjoying Catherine’s upturned face, a picture of nervous anticipation.

  ‘How is your brother, what was his name? Steven, or Simon, was it?’

  Catherine smiled, clearly hugely relieved. Emily wondered what possible terror any request she was likely to make could have held. Perhaps she’d thought Emily was about to demand access to her condom collection, or had chosen this moment to confess that she and Lucy were determined to make her life such hell that she’d take off for ever and leave their dad alone.

  ‘He’s fine. He could come over if you like, he lives very near. I know he’s more your age than I am.’ She bit her lip, looking worried as if she’d inadvertently confessed to her hopelessness with Young People. As if we can’t tell, Emily thought, leaning on the rail and enjoying her superior moment. ‘I don’t mind if he comes. Or doesn’t,’ she shrugged, knowing that by the time she’d gone back through the bedroom door Catherine’s perfectly French manicured finger would be halfway through pecking out his number.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to talk about. I mean what have I done lately? I’ve seen a couple of films and chosen a bit of paint colour,’ Nina complained as she and Sally sat in the taxi on their way to the restaurant for their rendezvous with the Knights Out singles dinner parties agency.

  Sally had chosen this particular one in great excitement from an ad in the evening paper, aspiring to at least a baronet but dreaming of a duke. When Nina had pointed out that it was obviously the shining armour kind of knights that were on offer rather than the very few available other sort it had been Sally’s look of enormous disappointment that had made Nina agree to go along and try her own luck. She was wearing her blue silk suit and the skirt was feeling just slightly uncomfortably tight. It would ride up across her thighs as she sat at the table. She could only hope for a generous amount of tablecloth to avoid giving whichever man she was put next to the wrong idea. Or the right one – perhaps she should be more adventurous. ‘You never know . . .’ Sally’s favourite going-out-in-hope phrase came to mind.

  ‘I mean, I’ve done nothing. It’s all been taking care of the girls, the gallery, my mother, Henry while he painted and a measly lunch with my ex-husband. Hardly riveting stuff for a potential life partner to get to grips with.’ The steamy aftermath of the ‘measly lunch’ with Joe came quickly to mind and was banished – she hadn’t even told Sally about that one, so she was hardly likely to chat up a strange man with ‘No, I don’t do a lot, just sex and Sainsbury’s.’

  Sally was looking at her in such amazement that Nina almost believed she’d been voicing her thoughts. ‘Good grief, what’s the matter with you? Surely you don’t intend to go out with a whole bunch of strangers that you’ll never clap eyes on ever again and spend the evening telling them about your aged mother? For all they know you could have spent the last week bungee jumping in Nepal or fondling dolphins in the River Tyne. Make something up! I always do – that’s part of the fun. You can bet your uplift bra that they will. It’s as much about fantasy as it is about the love-search bit, that’s why it’s called Knights Out.’

  Nina giggled, ‘Terrible name, it made me think about jousting. But then I suppose that’s what relationships are. I know, I could pretend to be training to be the new Mother Teresa.’

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ Sally countered smartly. ‘Not if you’re hoping to pull.’

  ‘Oh. OK, then I could be a retired ice-dance champion, writing a book on the definitive triple salchow.’

  Sally sighed. ‘No idea, have you? Look, last time I did this sort of thing I was a jewellery designer – I know plenty about that because of the gallery. And the time before that I was an erotic novelist; I couldn’t resist that one, it went so well with my leopard-print shoes.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about erotic novels,’ Nina said. ‘Or maybe you do?’

  ‘Well of course I do, everyone who’s ever had sex does. And besides they had a publisher on Richard and Judy so I’d picked up a bit of the vocab. Use your imagination, choose your profession! It’s so easy!’

  The cab turned into a narrow street off the Fulham Road and slowed down. ‘We’d better get out round the corner, we’re not supposed to know each other. No-one is,’ Sally said, leaning forward to talk to the driver. Nina ra
n her tongue over her nervous, dry lips and prayed for the evening to pass swiftly. Sally looked at her as the cab stopped. ‘If you’re hoping for anything to come from this evening, pray not to be put next to a BBD.’

  ‘What’s a BBD?’ Nina asked suspiciously.

  ‘Some poor sod who’s had a bloodbath divorce. One they just can’t stop telling you about. That way lies pure and utter boredom. OK, into the fray, may yours be a rich pussycat and may mine be a stallion.’

  Recording studio staff seemed to be getting younger, Joe thought as he took a mug of tea from the tray that the tape operator had brought in. He looked like a fifth-former on a fortnight’s work experience – skinny, large-footed and mottled with rampant acne. Joe didn’t want the tea, he wanted to be home with his girls, all three of them, taking them out to eat at the Café Rouge round the corner and coming home to watch a video and sprawl on the sofa scattering popcorn. He looked at his watch and found the time had moved on only ten minutes in what he’d assumed to be the past hour. The studio was in a gloomy basement and like all such places had no windows and no feeling of fresh air and reality. The frankly sordid control room, with its musky smell of stale cannabis and cold coffee and long past their best ginger suede-and-steel chairs, could only truly appeal to young and impressionable rock musicians who’d assume this was Doing Success. To jaded Joe it felt just claustrophobic and he was pacing the floor with the urge to escape.

  ‘Run it once more, Kev,’ the girl from the agency requested. She looked at Joe and smiled, a slow and confidential just-between-us smile. He grinned back at her then sipped at his fourth mug of tepid tea. She didn’t interest him, not even slightly. With detached speculation, just to see what was stopping him, he inspected her, the slim and shiny suit with its aren’t-I-gorgeous short skirt, the sassy blond hair with its carefully asymmetrical parting and expensively cut untidiness. A year or two ago he’d be asking her if she fancied a drink after, just so he could watch those long legs curling themselves round each other on a bar stool. Now he didn’t care. As the track ran and the singer tried once more to fit the lyrics to the melody, he tested himself, trying to work out whether he was feeling just too old, asking himself how he felt about that.