Pleasant Vices (29 page)

‘Ben!' she called into Sophie's bedroom, ‘are you in there? I'm tired! Is it nearly time to go home?' No-one answered, so she tip-toed across the dark room to the bed, climbing onto it and looking forward to nestling into a pile of coats that people had left there.

‘Polly! Will you get off!' Polly thudded heavily on to the floor and looked up at Ben and Emma, their blurry faces close together, peering down at her from the bed. They should have said they were there, hiding under the coats, why didn't they?

‘Oh God, she's completely pissed! Where's Daisy?' Ben demanded grabbing Polly's wrists.

‘Dunno. With some bloke downstairs,' Polly slurred back at him.

Emma switched on a bedside light and Polly's curiosity flickered briefly alive again as she noticed her fumbling about under her shirt and refastening her black lacy bra. That would be something else to tell Harriet, was her last waking thought.

‘Should we get Sophie's parents, do you think?' Downstairs, Ben watched a furious Daisy unwrap herself from Oliver on the sofa. Oliver grinned lazily up at him and winked.

‘Don't be stupid, Sophie would kill us. And then they might tell our parents too,' Daisy growled at him. ‘We'll just have to take her home and put her to bed.'

‘I don't think she can walk,' Emma pointed out, looking to where Polly sat propped against the stairs, her head lolling like an old rag-doll's on her chest.

‘Then Ben will have to carry her,' Daisy snapped. She bit her lip and tried to think quickly about how much money she had with her. A taxi would be the best thing, especially as her poor toe hurt more than ever, though a driver might refuse to take Polly in that state. Suppose she was sick all over the cab? And maybe it was illegal for Polly to be that drunk, he might tell someone and there might be police trouble again. And it was nearly midnight, so they'd get charged more.

‘We'll all go. Shouldn't be too difficult if Ben and I support her.' Oliver took charge, in the hope that he would earn enough gratitude from Daisy to take him right on to fourth base next time they got together, or even on to a home run. There wasn't a lot of progress to be made anyway, lying on a very public sofa with people falling, dancing and yelling all around them, though the signs had been extremely promising.

Daisy, Oliver, Emma and Ben tried to look casual and unobtrusive as they walked Polly down the road towards home, terrified that marauding police with nothing better to do at midnight would stop and ask what they were up to. Ben and Oliver took an arm each, and Polly's unco-ordinated feet hardly needed to touch the pavement. Her tousled head flopped up and down and she moaned quietly and constantly. By the time they got to the end of the Close, Daisy was limping painfully, her little toe now rubbed down to what felt like the bone. She was sure it was bleeding all over the inside of her lovely boot, and that her foot was sliding around in a puddle.

‘You should have asked Sophie for a plaster,' Emma told her, holding her arm and helping her to walk.

‘I know, I know. Hang on a sec, I'll take them off. I can't stand it any more, and I'll do better without them,' she said, plonking herself down onto the kerb. So when Carol and Paul Mathieson drove the Peugeot carefully and soberly round the corner by Sue's house they immediately came across the sight of Daisy sprawled on the pavement inspecting her foot, Polly slumped against the fence leaning on Ben, and Oliver and Emma sharing the lighting of a cigarette.

‘Are you all right? Is there anything we can do?' Carol asked politely, looking at Daisy's exposed foot.

Polly stiffened suddenly and sat up. ‘I feel really sick,' she wailed. Ben looked at Daisy, and they both looked at Carol, all telepathically agreeing that they couldn't even think of taking Polly home in that state, whatever the consequences.

Paul was astounded. If he wasn't absolutely certain that she'd only had one small sherry in the interval, he'd have thought Carol was quite paralytic. Taking all these people into the house at this time of night! Whatever was she thinking of?

Carol was being briskly practical, even in her silk frock. The child was clearly very drunk, and the teenagers didn't seem to have a clue what to do with her. They just skulked against the wall and draped themselves uselessly over the banisters. And they were so big. ‘It might be better if she is actually sick,' Carol told Daisy. ‘That way, she might not feel so dreadful tomorrow, and at least some of the alcohol will be safely out of her. It's really quite dangerous for her to be in this state.' Daisy and Ben stared, ashamed, at the hall rug. Carol bustled Polly into the downstairs cloakroom and propped her up against the sink. ‘Paul, go and get a large glass of warm water will you?'

No ‘please', he noted sorrowfully, automatically going to the kitchen to do as he was told. She'd been in such a good mood too, after
Charley's Aunt
, chatting away in the car and hinting that it would be nice to be home, in the warm. To their warm bed was where he'd planned to take her next, till they'd come across this rabble in the road.

‘Are you going to give her salt water?' Emma asked Carol, trying to take an intelligent interest.

‘Definitely not! That could kill her, the salt gets through to the kidneys before you know it and she could die of dehydration. Don't ever make that mistake,' Carol told her. Emma moved closer to Daisy for comfort, and they went and sat on the stairs together, Daisy rubbing her bleeding toe and hoping it wouldn't drip on the beige carpet. She put her hands over her ears as Polly started vomiting noisily.

‘Won't your parents be home by now?' Paul asked Ben. ‘Wouldn't it be best if your own mother took care of her?'

Where had they taken her, he wanted to ask, they all smelt of a sordid party, the wafts of stale cigarette smoke and alcohol that were coming from them all. Surely they could have taken better care of Polly than this? Daisy was definitely off Marcus and Sebastian's babysitting list.

‘Don't be silly, Paul,' came Carol's voice. ‘They don't want Alan and Jenny to know about this. There's no need for them to. After all, I don't think this is likely to happen again, is it?' She put her head round the cloakroom door, pink fluffy towel in hand and gave Daisy a surprisingly conspiratorial grin.

Ben was shocked. Carol had always seemed so prissy, so rule-bound. He wasn't sure he liked her like this. He'd been waiting for her to start the telling-off. He liked to rely on her unchanging staidness, the certain knowledge that there was a 100 per cent guaranteed no chance at all of seducing her (or better still, of her seducing him). That way the impossible fantasies stayed exciting.

She needs the boys home more often, Paul thought as he watched Carol fondly and tenderly stroking Polly's damp hair away from her unfocused eyes and flushed face. Something to take care of that isn't just me and those bloody cats. He sighed and went up the stairs, wondering if it was worthwhile switching on the electric blanket; Carol only liked sex in a pre-warmed bed, otherwise she shivered and found it impossible to loosen up, and complained that her feet stuck out of the duvet edges and got cold. He passed the bedroom door and went on up to his attic. He might not be allowed actually to tell Alan and Jenny about their dreadful children, but it couldn't possibly go unreported in the files. It was an Incident, it had Happened. He took down the yellow folder (number 14, Collins) and sat down at his tidy desk, sorrowfully conceding that this was the only kind of entry he was likely to be making that night.

Outside the restaurant, Jenny handed Alan the car keys and he gave them straight back.

‘Look,' she said quietly, unlocking the car and giving final goodbye smiles to Bernard and Monica who were loading themselves into their ancient Morris Traveller, ‘I don't want to have a silly argument in the car park, with everyone standing around saying goodbye, but I really think I'm too much over the limit to do the driving.' Alan slid into the passenger seat, saying, ‘We should have sorted it out earlier. I thought we had and that it was your turn. I'm over the limit too, and if I lose my licence, well . . .'

‘Are you saying that it's less important if I get banned for a year than if it's you?' Jenny argued, thinking of all the school runs that could no longer be done, the Sainsbury's bags that would have to be lugged home on the bus with all the tartan-trolley old age pensioners, the impossible last-minute pleadings from Daisy and Ben, ‘
Please
Mum, I said I'd meet Emma at 5 and it's gone that already.' Who else was there to do all that? And did any of them really matter? Other people got by.

‘No, it's not that, I'm terribly tired, though,' Alan said feebly, leaning his head against the cool, misted side window. ‘And anyway, you're a better driver than me.'

‘Flattery,' she growled. ‘OK, I'll drive, but I'm not happy and it'll take ages. You'll have to talk to me, keep me awake.'

Jenny swung the car out into the unlit road and tried to see beyond the headlights just where the road went. Alan, already half-asleep, grunted, and she reconciled herself to a long journey in which she had to drive and talk to herself.

‘Funny, isn't it,' she said to Alan's inert body. ‘People like us do this all the time, think they're just about OK, and take the risk anyway. Kids from the estate nick cars and drive around in them and the police treat them as if they're handling a murder-weapon. Which they are. But then so are we. We get fines and a ban for a while and they get Care and detention centres. It only really hits us in the insurance premiums in the long run, but they are probably made permanently unemployable.'

‘Mmm,' Alan murmured, not really listening. He was still thinking about Serena being whisked away from the restaurant in Frankie's immaculately renovated MG. If he'd taken Serena out in something sporty like that, instead of the sensible BMW, perhaps she'd have admired him as a bit more dynamic, more thrusting. All the years he'd despised the sort of men who bought cars as sexual power symbols, assuming they were making up for inadequacy, but perhaps, now that he was middle-aged and lacking any other visible sexual totems, he could concede that they had a point.

Jenny drove carefully, though not so slowly as to draw unwelcome attention to the car. At every turn she expected to be chased by a flashing blue light. Alan snored gently beside her, dreaming, she imagined, of pretty, slender bailiffs with sleek, dark hair tied up in silk scarves. She glanced at him, wondering how a man who could so ably support his family (so far) could prove to be this dense about a woman. Love may be blind, as they say, but infatuation must also be incredibly short-sighted. Poor Alan, she thought, would it eventually be any consolation when he found Serena did not fancy him to know that she didn't fancy anyone else who happened to be male either? At least that way he wouldn't take the rejection personally, which was a shame, Jenny thought, rallying a spot of malice. Being snubbed was the very least a potentially cheating husband deserved.

Slumped unprettily beside her, Alan twitched occasionally, like a sleeping cat, and she marvelled at the way he could simply cut out, like a torch, once he had made sure someone else was doing the worrying for him. As she passed the estate and pulled in to the Close just after 1.30, Jenny saw a light in her attic go out. Ben, she assumed, home from the party he'd been going to and reading on into the night. She hoped he'd had a good time.

‘Daisy, I'll collect you from school and we'll go straight to the police station from there,' Jenny said over breakfast on Monday. ‘And Polly, are you sure you feel all right now?'

Jenny put her hand on the child's forehead, but there was no sign of a fever. There hadn't been yesterday either, which had been surprising, for Polly had spent the whole day lying on her bed with the curtains closed, cuddling her old panda and saying that she felt too sick to eat.

Alan had said he smelled cigarettes on her hair and thought that Daisy, bored with babysitting on Saturday night, had let Polly have a go at smoking. ‘Good thing it's made her feel so ill,' he'd decided. ‘She won't want to try it again.' Jenny wasn't so sure he was right in either assumption, and annoyed poor suffering Polly by making her move her head up and down every hour or so, checking in case what she had actually got was the dreaded meningitis. Daisy had spent the day skilfully avoiding both parents, doing unusual amounts of homework in the sanctuary of her room, and going out to Emma's for lunch. But on Monday morning, Polly was looking pale but better, and the mysterious illness wasn't going to stop her going back to school.

‘I don't mind if you have a day off,' Jenny told her. ‘You might be sickening for something.'

‘Just sickening, more likely,' Ben said.

‘Perhaps there's something going round. Daisy, are you all right? It's so warm in here you can't possibly need that scarf.'

Polly ignored Ben's comment but was adamant that she had to go back – there was a maths test that she couldn't miss. Daisy, unloading the dishwasher, her neck swaddled in one of Jenny's favourite cashmere scarves, snorted in disbelief. ‘You want to go back for a
test
? Are you mad?'

Polly gave Daisy a very intense look and said slowly, ‘Not
just
for the test. I need to see Harriet.' Daisy went pink and pulled the scarf a bit tighter.

‘Do I have to go and see the police in my school uniform Mum?' she asked. ‘Can't I come home and change first?'

‘No, sorry, they said 4 o'clock, and it's the only way not to be late. And besides,' she added with a look that left Daisy easily guessing what was coming, ‘it's a good idea to look like a person who is normally quite responsible, as if this was just a one-off behaviour lapse. If you dress in your usual stuff, complete with boots, they'll think you're a born troublemaker and that this is just the first of many times they'll be seeing you.'