Pleasant Vices (2 page)

She padded serenely round the kitchen (stylish cherry and maple fittings with no overdone, over-carved twiddly bits), doing comfortable housewifely things, alone with
Start the Week
on the radio giving her a vague feeling that she was listening to dinner party conversation without having to worry about choking on fish bones, or make any scintillating comments herself. The washing machine and dishwasher were humming busily. The floor was drying, and the swing bin, rinsed out with Flash (though Jenny thought she could still smell a hint of decaying prawn shell lingering from Saturday's supper party), was upside down on the Delabole slate worktop. Gleaming down at her from the rack above the Aga, Alan's precious Italian saucepans shone like much-loved family silver. Other men, she thought, polished their golf trophies. Alan's passion was reserved for his cookware. Watching him painstakingly cleaning it was like watching a proud new mother lovingly bathing her baby. Jenny guiltily eyed her shamefully tarnished flute in the corner of the conservatory. She had no pupils on Mondays, and as she peeled off her rubber gloves she promised herself a session with both the silver polish and the Poulenc Sonata later that afternoon.

As Jenny smoothed hand cream into her fingers, she consulted her wall calendar. Polly had written in her ballet, tap and jazz dance classes in thick red felt tip pen, which left little room for the rest of the family's activities. But tonight at 7.30, Jenny read, there was to be the first Neighbourhood Watch meeting. Typical idea of Paul Mathieson, she thought. Another attempt to rope the residents of the Close in for an evening of local bonding. It was always Paul and Carol, rounding up the inhabitants for the annual bonfire party (‘Do come, such a lovely opportunity for us all to get together . . .'), the Christmas Eve bash, or a series of acrid barbecues on damp and dewy summer evenings that were never quite warm enough.

Sue at the corner house said she suspected him of having Northern roots. ‘It's not in the blood of us Southern suburbanites,' she'd said to Jenny over a subversive coffee. ‘We don't socialize collectively, not herded together in street parties. People like us would rather get a taxi to the All-Nite Supermarket than pop next door and borrow a cup of sugar. There's always that risk you'll have to look at someone's daughter's wedding photos.'

It wasn't so much the gathering together of the neighbours that bothered Jenny, it was more the idea of setting up something by which they were actively encouraged to keep an uncomfortably close eye on each other. It was like having an official excuse to peer out of the windows with a ghoulish sense of duty. Alan, over the weekend, had dismissed it all as pointless, on the grounds that any street organized enough to set up this kind of thing was obviously doing more than enough peering through its metaphorical net curtains already. In Alan's opinion, any baseball-capped teenager who dared to give an envious second glance to number 28's XR3i was already likely to be surrounded instantly by a posse of amateur law-enforcers. Old Mrs Fingell across the road at number 21, the only one in the street who actually had, shame of it, real net curtains to hide behind, must be tee-heeing with delight at the thought that her snooping would now be officially endorsed by police and a quorum of Close residents.

With her thoughts on that evening's meeting, Jenny had to remind herself that she wasn't actually spying when she went through Alan's pockets before sending his grey suit to the dry cleaners. It was really an act of virtue, especially when compared with the possible alternative of sending a wad of twenty-pound notes to be hand-finished, or a credit card to have its magnetic strip rendered lifeless. Jenny sat on the frilled bed, denting the crisp, white cut-work duvet with her still-slender hips, and selflessly sorted through a heap of crinkled Visa slips, fresh from Alan's wool-and-mohair mix pocket. It was always the same when he'd been away to a conference, as he had the week before. As she sorted the receipts into chargeable expenses and personal sections, she wondered fondly how an accountant could be so carelessly inefficient with his own finances. Cobblers' children syndrome, she supposed, like Sue who had always grumbled that her landscape gardener husband (before the divorce) could never be bothered to mow the lawn.

The receipt for the flowers was a surprise. What flowers? I haven't had any flowers, not lately, thought Jenny, holding the piece of paper and wondering why Alan hadn't mentioned them during the weekend. Surely if he'd sent her an Interflora bouquet from Bournemouth, he'd have expected to see one of her heavy-handed arrangements on the hall table. Quickly she shuffled through the receipts, looking for the one that corresponded with the Visa slip. Alan always kept a VAT receipt, just in case there was something he could claim. And there it was, a pale pink order form from a Bournemouth florist, the carbon-smudged message just readable.
Wonderful tonight, till next time, all love
. No signature, but Alan's pocket. Wonderful tonight, to Jenny, sounded vaguely familiar. She trawled her memory and scooped out of it a song of that title by Alan's beloved Eric Clapton. The words ‘wonderful tonight' were preceded by ‘My darling you were . . .' An everlasting loyalty to the music heroes of his youth had always before seemed rather endearing, touchingly boyish, as if a taste for the rock music of 1968–75 (Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones et al), was something most men were expected to grow out of, like reading the
Beano
, and train spotting. This was one of the songs Alan would croon around the house late at night, drunk, while clearing up after a dinner party. It was a signal that he was on the way to feeling like sex. But this message:
all
love? Who was all this love allocated to?

Jenny sat on the bed, facing the big gilt mirror over the chest of drawers, the chest she had so lovingly tortoiseshelled with a foul mixture of stainers and vinegar after attending classes in decorative painting techniques the year before. The face staring back at her looked more puzzled than stricken. She reached out and got hold of the brass rail at the bedhead, feeling the need to steady herself, and that the safe level ground of marital harmony was tipping slightly.

Slowly and reluctantly, her brain allowed in the possibility that her husband might be having an affair. It wouldn't be casual sex because, dangerous as it was these days, that certainly wouldn't rate £45 worth of flowers – not from an accountant anyway, money conscious as they habitually were. Such a huge amount of money, too, when Alan had been worrying lately that the cash flow in the accountancy practice was a long way from healthy. Somehow he'd collected too many clients with diminishing incomes and a reluctance to pay their bills. And Alan wasn't the type of man to have an affair, Jenny told herself sensibly. But a little voice (sounding like Sue's) was also telling her that there was no such thing as the type of man who didn't. Here, maybe, was a torrid romance with someone he thought of as, if he followed the words of the song, ‘Darling', whereas Jenny he tended to address, in moments of tenderness as ‘Pudding'. Someone to whom he sent £45 worth of flowers, delivery and VAT extra, yet to Jenny he occasionally brought a limp bunch of tulips, grabbed in a hurry from the van outside the station, and never quite enough of them to make one of those generous over-blown arrangements that she admired in
The World of Interiors
, but couldn't do.

She inspected herself closely in the mirror. She was looking for what Alan saw when he looked at her, not for what she took for granted about her own face. She saw a woman who looked less than her age, could still pass for under forty; a woman who wore slightly too much red lipstick, as a hangover from her student days when she'd once been hungry enough to supplement her meagre grant and parental stinginess with what was politely described as ‘escort' work. A woman who still thought it wasn't ageing to wear her fairish hair thickly hanging to shoulder length and who was probably wrong about that, as tying it back took another five years off and messily piling it up looked so drop-dead sexy that no-one noticed her age.

Jenny tried to imagine what Alan would think of her now if he was meeting her for the first time, say at a party. Had she now become depressingly housewifey? No longer fanciable? Peering at herself in the mirror, she searched for any trace of the girl Alan had first met, the thrilling, lemon-haired flautist, shimmering in black silk in the orchestra. Instead she saw a harassed middle-aged mother of three, a part-time flute teacher with tarnished hair and lines on her face that she liked to think were from laughing rather than ageing. What, these days, was Alan seeing? Had he met someone fresh, young and perfect, someone who, newly discovered, still found it more exciting to go to bed with him than with a gardening magazine?

Jenny wondered if she would ever move from the edge of the bed. Her fingers were frozen round the flimsy bits of paper, and her eyes, in the mirror, were dulling with the cloud of unanswered questions. Who was this ‘Darling' who had been ‘wonderful'? And which night? Age? Height? Brainpower? Surely to God, not another accountant? And not, oh please not, that desperate old cliché – his secretary?

She forced her reluctant limbs to unfold and walked stiffly down the stairs like someone recovering from flu, and into the sitting-room, wondering what was the right thing to do next. She thought about TV plays she had seen about this kind of thing, where wives set fire to their husbands' dearest possessions in a frenzy of furious resentment. The immaculate saucepans were reputedly indestructible and anyway essential – it was pointless to smash anything she might need to use again. The image of a blazing train set came to mind, even though Alan, as far as she knew, hadn't touched one since Daisy was little. He didn't play golf, so she couldn't test her angry strength bending a set of priceless clubs, and she used his camera and hi-fi just as much as he did. Anyway, maybe it was all a mistake, she thought hopelessly, feeling that she should at least go through the motions of giving him the benefit of the doubt before she made a bonfire with his clothes and his cookery books.

Then the phone rang, and immediately the news of Daisy's arrest pushed all thoughts of Alan from Jenny's mind. Clutching the phone, listening to the police sergeant, she could foresee, in the months ahead, Daisy in court, fined, expelled from school and abandoning her GCSEs half-way through the course. She asked to speak to Daisy, and through the window watched Carol Mathieson tripping along the Close with her determined high heels and shiny, stiff
Come Dancing
hair. She reminds me of one of the three Billy Goats Gruff, Jenny thought, watching her clicking along, trip-trap, trip-trap over the ricketty-racketty wooden bridge. Perhaps she'll be eaten by a troll lurking behind number 16's lime tree.

Carol, seeing Jenny watching her, trotted across the road quickly and mouthed an eager hello at her over the garden fence. Jenny, with the ruins of Daisy's life grasped in the phone in one hand, the wreck of her marriage among the bundle of receipts in the other, smiled rigidly while Carol made faces about the meeting. ‘You are coming, aren't you?' she cooed persuasively over the fence. ‘I'm just going to make a start on the finger foods!'

Jenny waved limply at her, wishing, not for the first time, that the local preference for knocked-through rooms and all-exposing windows didn't leave her feeling that her entire domestic life was simply a big-screen video, switched on for all to see, like watching opera with the excluded masses in the rainy piazza at Covent Garden.

When she heard the faint and sorry voice of Daisy saying, ‘I'm sorry Mum, I didn't mean to . . .' down the phone, somehow she couldn't stop thinking about Carol's buffet. Troll-au-vents. Daisy heard her mother giggling down the phone and thought that it was sure to be entirely her fault that at last the poor old thing had flipped.

‘Whatever were you thinking of? You get enough money for fares, don't you? And why weren't you in school?' Jenny leaned back on the Aga rail, arms folded, facing her daughter with enough parental fury to satisfy even Daisy's high standards. Polly and Ben had fled quietly up the stairs to avoid getting caught in any crossfire in the kitchen, and Polly was taking advantage of the atmosphere of tension to seek comfort in Ben's room with his Sega Megadrive instead of doing her homework.

It had taken Jenny all afternoon to get round to confronting Daisy. In the car on the way home from the station her shocked brain was still reeling with thoughts of Alan's Bournemouth romance. Revving angrily at the traffic lights, she'd suspected she might burst into tears if she started talking. Daisy would just have to interpret her lack of communication as hurt silence. Daisy had waited patiently to be told off and had sat quietly in her room all afternoon, finishing some long-overdue maths. She had been surprised not to be taken straight to school, but hadn't dared ask Jenny why she was being brought home instead, as if her crime was a sort of illness that could be infectious to the other girls.

Jenny gave the tomato sauce a vigorous stir and turned to face Daisy again. ‘You know what will happen now, don't you?' she said. ‘You'll have to go to court, and you'll probably be let off with a warning, seeing as it's your first time. This
is
the first time isn't it? You don't make a habit of cheating British Rail do you?'

‘'Course not,' Daisy mumbled, staring at the pale wooden floor. It wasn't entirely a lie, it was the first time she'd been caught. She counted the knots in one of the wooden planks, not daring to meet Jenny's glittering gaze.

‘And the worst thing is, you'll have a record. They'll make social reports on you. Social workers might start coming round. God, I suppose there's even a chance you'll be put on probation! It'll be either that or a caution or nothing at all, the sergeant said. And it won't be nothing at all, you can bet,' she said, waving the wooden spoon threateningly.