Every Good Girl (9 page)

‘OK. And we'll do it white. Clean, fresh-start white,' she said. Henry chuckled. ‘White. Fine. But only
some
of it white. The ceiling and some wall. But I can see you want colour. You're
yearning
for colour. You're just holding back.'

Nina sat on the arm of the sofa and picked at loose threads that the cat had pulled from the fabric. She wondered, after the wrist-grabbing business, if they were really still talking about paint colour or if there'd been a subtle detour in the direction of her sex life. She decided that she was imagining things, this was only Henry. If she chose any other interpretation, then
he'd
be the alarmed one and she'd have to get professional decorators in, chosen at random from Yellow Pages.

‘You're right,' she told him. ‘For someone who spends their working life selecting and rejecting bits of art and craft and trusting my taste, I'm being pathetically indecisive about my own home.'

‘Hmm. It's only lack of practice,' Henry decided. ‘We'll start with white and you can add. Take it one step at a time, like alcoholics.'

‘And babies,' Nina added, wondering where that little notion had sprung from.

Emily stood as close as she could to the girl using the school payphone, hoping to intimidate her into cutting short her call. She was practically breathing in her ear. You sure have to suffer for love, she thought, trying not to inhale the soupy smell of exuberant hockey-field
perspiration. ‘Get on with it!' Emily hissed at her, prodding her muscly hip. ‘Some of us have a life to get on with, you know.'

‘You're so fucking rude,' the girl told her, face blotched red with anger as she hung up the phone. ‘That was an
emergency
, my mum's having a
baby
.'

‘You're joking,' Emily said. ‘Whoever would want another kid like you?'

The end-of-break bell rang and Emily swore as she punched in Simon's numbers, copied from the back of her hand. ‘Oh shit,' she murmured as a recording told her to leave a message after the beep, he'd get back to her later. He sounded so strangely adult, almost like her father. This was probably a serious mistake. Nick's mobile had a silly message, ‘Leave a name, dame,' that kind of thing. Everyone's did, silly attempts to be slick or cool and not managing to be either.

Simon's beep sounded before Emily had decided what to say. There hadn't been time to rehearse anything impressive in her head. She should have just hung up and started again but she had no more money. ‘Er, it's er . . . Oh shit,' she waffled and slammed the phone down. ‘Jesus, what a stupid prat he'll think I am, like some dopey little lovestruck kid fancying one of Boyzone,' she muttered. She'd have to try later, try his work number this time and pretend the other message was nothing to do with her. She picked up her bag of books and swung them over her shoulder carelessly, banging her hand hard against the wall. ‘Ow!' she yelled, licking the bruise and rubbing at it. Too late, she realized what she'd done: the phone numbers were no more than a blue blur smeared across the back of her hand. Oh well, she thought despondently, it must be fate.

‘Emily's gap year. Do you think it would be a good idea to meet up and discuss it?'

Joe sounded very business-like, Nina thought, as if Emily's future was simply the next thing on life's agenda. He'd probably had this programmed into his electronic organizer since before her GCSEs and now it had made a punctual ‘bleep' and reminded him. Nina felt defensive: she didn't like it when he called her at the gallery, for out of sheer consideration to customers she was forced to be politely acquiescent, whatever he said. The gallery was unusually full. Nina wished she'd remembered to put some music on. At least seven browsers drifting near her desk were able to hear every word she said and interpret for themselves what Joe's end of the conversation might be.

‘With Emily as well, do you mean?' she asked. ‘After all, it is her own time, isn't it. She's sure to have been thinking about it.'

‘Well, I just thought the two of us to start with, and then see what she comes up with.'

‘Actually I think it should be the other way round, but whatever. Funny you should be calling about this now,' she went on. ‘I told Emily to have a word with you about it when she came round to see you last Sunday. If you'd been in, you could have chatted to her, see what ideas she's got, if any.'

‘Sunday?' Joe sounded as puzzled as if he'd never heard of the day. He used to do that sort of thing a lot, Nina remembered with irritation, doing one-word questioning, head on one side, whenever she asked him something he didn't have an honest reply ready for. ‘Holidays?' he'd puzzle, when she'd try to pin him down to discuss the wheres and the whens, as if waiting for her to define the term. Later, just after the first of his many extra-mural romances, she realized he
used it simply to give himself time for the concoction of excuses.

‘Yes
Sunday
,' she hissed into the phone. ‘God's day off, great hunks of roasting meat, you know. Emily came round to see you after lunch, and you weren't there.'

‘No. Right,' Joe said blankly. Nina gave up. Why should he tell her, anyway, where he'd been? Did she really want to hear that he'd had some socially thrilling day out with stimulating and amusing people so that she could have a good masochistic brood about walking her aged dog and mother round the windswept Common?

‘OK, maybe we should get together. Why don't you come to the house?' she said. Don't, she prayed, let him him say ‘House?'

‘Better than that, what about a mid-month lunch? Just a sneaky little extra one,' he suggested. She could hear by the increased breathiness of his voice that he was now holding the phone very close to his mouth, being secret from those who might be tempted to overhear. She'd seen him do that at home, when one of his silly smitten girlies, despairing (rightly) of ever hearing from him again, had plucked up the courage to call him and he'd had to do some swift verbal fending off. She remembered how vivid and excited he'd looked afterwards, positively sparkling with the danger of illicit naughtiness, hovering around her grinning and waiting like a puppy for her to notice. This time, he must be gleefully anticipating
not telling Catherine
. Sally, battle-wise from long experience, would say this was the typical behaviour of a man who liked the idea of infidelity far more than the reality.

Nina, now faced with two people lined up at the counter tapping their feet and waiting to pay, agreed
quickly and hung up. She smiled at the customers. ‘I'm so sorry. I do hate it when people in shops do that,' she apologized to the first one, a neat woman in stiff navy blue with a white crisp collar standing to attention round her neck. ‘When they conduct their private lives over the shop phone and you feel you're interrupting.'

‘Quite. Absolutely,' the woman said brusquely and with no smile, handing over a velvet beaded evening bag to be wrapped. The tall, youngish man standing behind her stuck his tongue out rudely at the back of the woman's head and winked past her to Nina who had to fight down a schoolgirl giggle.

‘Forty-five pounds fifty please,' she said, trying to sound efficient and rummaging in the till to hide her face.

‘Well
she
wasn't the forgiving type, was she?' the man said as the woman left the gallery, shutting the door behind her with a smart, cross tug. He looked familiar, but this was an area inhabited by many actors, so Nina was careful not to assume she'd actually met him.

‘No, she wasn't. But then I expect she's one of those lucky people whose life slots into convenient compartments that never overlap.' He was buying a pink and white spotted teapot with a silver-edged lid. Nina found herself speculating as to whether it was for him, his wife, mother, girlfriend or boyfriend. It was probably just for himself, she decided as she folded it carefully into bubble-wrap. He had a kind of confident, arty look (old black jeans and a collarless teal blue shirt that looked vaguely Chinese) that would easily carry off serving tea from something boldly pink. The tea would not be in bags and would not be cheap and there would be coffee cake oozing gloopy chocolate cream with a hint of brandy . . .

‘I've seen you in the Crescent. We've moved into number 26. Am I right to take it you live there too?' he went on. Without waiting for a reply he held out his hand: ‘I'm Paul Brocklehurst.'

‘Oh of course! So that's where I've seen you. A few mornings ago, early,' Nina said. She shook his hand over the counter, feeling foolish. She must have sounded as if she spent every waking moment peering across the road. When he went home, he'd probably be looking to see if she had net curtains twitching. She wondered who ‘we' referred to, whether it was a wife, or the man she'd seen him going into number 26 with.

‘I'm Nina Malone,' she told him. ‘Number 23. Welcome to the Crescent. I'm sorry if I've been very remiss as a neighbour, I should have been round with a bottle or a cake or something.' Nina had a qualm as soon as the words were out. He could interpret it as fishing for another meeting. That was another irritating difference from the days of Joe: the simple change in implication that so-ordinary sentences could have. It could only matter to her: there was no way he could know she was a Lone Woman, unless there was some special alerting scent that went with the state, Eau de Solitude, or Abandonée, that only men could smell, a warning like the kind of whistle that only dogs can hear.

‘That's soon remedied. Come over tomorrow night for a drink, I was going to put a note through your door. Er . . . with your husband?' Well if she
had
been fishing, it had more or less worked, she then thought with a tiny tweak of triumph. She was too old (she supposed) for him, (and possibly the wrong sex), but this was just a spot of flirt-practice.

The gallery doorbell clanged and she saw Sally
come in. Sally caught her eye, winked and mimed a disappearing act before creeping out again with exaggerated tact.

‘I don't have a husband,' Nina admitted. ‘Not any more. There's just me and the daughters now.' And a gruesome hell-house full of ricocheting hormones
that
sounded, she thought.

‘Oh I'm sorry. I thought, well I saw you leaving the house the other day with that chap with the grey hair, and I just assumed . . .'

Nina thought for a mystified moment and then burst into laughter. ‘Oh no, that's just
Henry
. He's from number 7. Very good at borrowing, but also very good at tap-fixing and video-tuning.'

‘Any good at babysitting?' Oh well, thought Nina, he was bound to be married, really.

‘Your babies?' Well he could have meant
hers
, she thought.

Another customer approached, clutching a pleasingly expensive vase. Nina bent to retrieve more bubble-wrap from under the counter. When she looked up, Paul had backed away without replying to her question, making space for the vase-buyer.

‘Tomorrow night then? About 6.30ish for drinks?' he said, heading for the door.

‘OK, thanks. See you then.'

At the door he collided with Sally making her way back in. Nina wrapped the vase, put cash into the till and then turned to Sally. ‘Coffee?' she asked.

‘Mmm, please. God, the traffic. So who was
that
? I could tell from right out on the street you were being blatantly chatted up.'

‘Come on Sal, he's only about thirty.'

‘Thirty
plus
. He's got a few lines.'

‘Probably sunbathes.'

‘Crows' feet. A teeny bit jowly too. Could be pushing forty, just.'

‘Hey what is this?'

‘Just finding you a new playmate. I can tell you need one.'

Nina sighed. ‘Do you know, I'm beginning to think you're right. It's really annoying. When Joe and I finally split up, I felt nothing but relief. It was so blissful not to have to think about how to
keep
a man. So restful just to find I was perfectly OK without. Now I'm beginning to wonder. Do I really want to be on my own for ever more? Does staying celibate for the rest of my life just so I can feel restful really
compensate
?'

‘Ugh! I should hope not!' Sally said with some vehemence. ‘I don't approve of celibacy, I'm sure it leads to trouble in the downstairs area. I know, I'll take you out with me for one of those dinner party dating setups. They're good fun and much better for the beginner than the one-to-one, Waterloo Station/red carnation type of thing. Trust me, you'll enjoy it.' Sally was grinning happily as if all in Nina's life was now safely sorted, and she rummaged through her bag for a cigarette.

Nina stamped off into the little kitchen at the back of the gallery and switched on the coffee machine. ‘OK maybe I'll give it a go. What's to lose, especially if Joe's moving right on to the baby-and-family stage? I don't want to be stuck for ever in the abandoned wife mould, like something turned to stone. It's all right for men. They all get snapped up by piranha women the moment they're back in the pond. Joe must have been on the loose for what? a month or less before Catherine sidled up with the handcuffs.'