Pleasant Vices (32 page)

‘Bit late to think about honourable and decent isn't it?' Jenny said waspishly. ‘Whatever did you think was honourable and decent about cheating on me?'

Alan sighed and stared into his glass like a miserable old drunk. ‘But I didn't. That's the point.'

‘No it isn't. You tried to, and it hurts.
That's
the point. The fact that you failed dismally has nothing to do with it. If you'd succeeded, when, if ever, would you have told me? And what would have happened to us, to the family? What do you think will happen now?' Jenny snapped.

Alan stared at the table, like a caught-out schoolboy, shredding a fallen petal and choosing his words. ‘It was just fantasy, something separate,' he said. ‘I don't honestly know what I'd have done if she'd responded. Not very likely, though, was it? Be honest.' He looked up and stared at the blurry outline of himself reflected in the darkening windows and grinned ruefully, a sad hopeless grin, full of a new awareness of his own fading attraction.

‘Not so very unlikely,' Jenny said softly, feeling his need for consolation and, from long and loving habit, sympathizing. ‘You're not that gruesome. You are a fool though, Alan, did you honestly have no idea that she was a lesbian? Didn't you twig at that restaurant? Did she say nothing at all about her home life?'

‘No, well not really.' Alan fidgeted with his glass, looking baffled. ‘She'd mentioned the flat-mate. People have them. How was I to know?'

‘Sexual harassment.' Jenny tried the words aloud. They sounded important. What would a tribunal think? According to Alan he had made one fumbled and ill-timed pass in his office, taking a sympathetic hug too far. There could be so much more to it than that, but, like any wife, she could either decide to know only what Alan chose to tell her, or torture herself with an imagined torrid version of her own. Jenny wondered what Serena's story would be. She'd find out for sure if Serena really did take things further. The cosy, homey aroma of Alan's cooking suddenly seemed nauseatingly cloying.

‘I'm just going out,' she said, getting up so quickly that the tulips shed their remaining petals. ‘Just round to Laura's. She's got the cheque for when we rented the kitchen for that breakfast cereal ad.' Already she was half-way out of the back door, gulping desperately needed fresh air while Alan mopped at the pollen. ‘Won't be long . . .'

Eventually, given time, Alan's minor transgression would all be forgiven, Jenny knew, because it was all too understandable, clichéd even. And if she wanted their life together to continue, the burden of getting over this would fall on her. Why were men so predictable? she wondered, crossly snapping off twigs of sprouting fuchsia and wisteria as she walked up the road. Whenever she read a magazine feature on the classic things that husbands did at certain stages of their lives, she tended to dismiss it angrily as stereotyped rubbish. After all, no-one was allowed to generalize like that any more about women, were they? And now here was Alan, having the kind of unimaginatively standard mid-life crisis that he could have copied from a manual. Perhaps it really was all there, the final chapter, an appendix in the back of his DIY book.

‘Going somewhere nice?' Jenny was startled from her reflections by Paul scurrying to catch up, walking beside her.

‘Just to Laura and Harvey's,' she said, not feeling the need to report to Paul exactly what her reasons for the visit were, but also feeling that he expected her to. She felt conscious of Paul next to her, his head bent round at a strange angle, like a zoo monkey peering round a tree stump, willing her to look at him. She allowed him a neighbourly smile, and wearily noted his odd expression, on the edge of wanting to tell her something, as if he knew something that she didn't know, and was dying for her to ask him to tell her. I'm not in the mood for asking, she thought.

‘Carol was saying she hasn't seen you lately,' he said at last.

‘No, well, busy life, you know,' Jenny answered, glad to have reached Laura's gate. Paul stood by the gate, reaching over to unlatch it for her, determinedly gentlemanly, but groping awkwardly at the hinge side. She flicked at the catch and quickly opened the gate, Paul still beside her hovering awkwardly, as if not sure whether to unleash his secret or not. He reminded Jenny of Ben when he was little, quite unable to stop himself revealing what he had bought her for her birthday. Suddenly a loud, roaring groan came from inside Laura's house.

‘Oh God, whatever's that?' Jenny said, peering, alarmed, at the lighted window. Suddenly a naked leg could be seen, kicking high and fast and disappearing just as quickly.

‘Trouble!' Paul said decisively, sprinting up the path.

‘No wait!' Jenny called, laughing. ‘Suppose they're . . .'

At the front door, which Paul had unhesitatingly rung, the two of them heard more oohing and aahing. There was, Jenny had to admit, no doubt that this was pain, not pleasure. Unless they were one and the same to Harvey, who knew?

‘The man said no-one's to come in.' The door had opened and a small girl in a Liberty smock stood blocking their way, solemnly repeating what she had been told to say.

‘Is Mummy home, Emily?' Jenny asked the child.

‘What do you mean “the man said”? Which man?' Paul demanded of the little girl, who promptly burst into frightened tears. ‘Right that's it. I'm going in. Could be murder in there,' Paul declared, as if he was ready to storm the gates of hell.

‘No Paul, wait,' Jenny said, grabbing his arm, but it was too late and with the groans and roars reaching a crescendo, and the sound of glass breaking, Paul flung open the door of the Benstones' sitting-room.

Laura emerged from the kitchen with Charlotte, a smaller version of Emily, looking calm and serene, just as Jenny and Paul were taking in the scene on the polished wood floor. Harvey was lying on the floor on his front wearing only a pair of Fred Flintstone boxer shorts. His gingery-furred legs (which for a moment reminded Jenny of Biggles) were gathered up behind him and across them, forcing his weight onto Harvey's shoulders, was a delectably muscled young man in bulging purple cycling shorts but nothing else, scowling up at them crossly. It looked to Jenny like torture, and it also looked like the kind of torture people pay to enjoy, though surely not with the entire family also at home?

‘Er . . . sorry to intrude,' Paul said, for once quite deflated.

‘Emily!' yelled a blushing Harvey, his eyes rather glazed from effort. ‘What did Jeremy tell you about coming in here?'

‘T'ai chi massage,' Laura explained simply from behind Jenny. ‘Terribly good for his back. All that sitting around typing does him no good at all. Have you come for your cheque?'

Back at home Jenny folded the cheque into her building society book and did a few additions. There was enough, she calculated, to keep the family for maybe a month if Alan was really suddenly unemployed, and together with savings and a couple of life insurance policies, there could be enough for Polly and Ben's school fees for the rest of the year, and perhaps even further. This was the moment for regretting that she'd been so insistent that Ben stayed on at his school to take A-levels, when he'd so much wanted to leave and go to the sixth form college. When it was Daisy's turn they'd let her. How casually she and Alan had committed themselves to finding the necessary eleven thousand extra pounds that the two years would cost! And what would Ben get at the end of it? Three good A-levels, exactly the same as he would have got free at the tertiary college. She looked out of the bedroom window, down the Close to where Mrs Fingell could be seen stuffing another of her newspaper-wrapped parcels into her dustbin. I must tell her about the bottle bank, Jenny thought. I don't mind taking them there in the car for her. Mrs Fingell looked up and waved to her before disappearing back into the house. Her sitting-room light was on, and the curtains open. Perhaps, Jenny reflected, retired tarts still liked to spend time sitting at lighted windows, remembering the bad but busy old days. She had a sudden rather sad mental picture of Mrs Fingell sitting under a red light with her skirt hitched up over her support-stockings, squinting at a knitting pattern as she turned the heel on a lemon bootee for her latest grandchild. She must visit her soon, Jenny thought, sensing loneliness along the road.

Fiona Pemberton had had years of practice at expelling pupils. She had collected quite a wide range of methods, all skilfully based on letting parents know, as if bestowing some kind of secret privilege, that they could do far better for their child than educate them at her school.

Alan and Jenny, dressed with the same sort of smartness they would have adopted if they'd been summoned to attend court, waited in front of Fiona's desk while she chose her words carefully, very much the headmistress and not at all the neighbour. Her office, inconveniently placed at the top of the school so that visitors arrived panting and wilting from climbing the two flights of stairs, was positively sumptuous compared with the tatty squalor of the rest of the building. Fiona had peaches-and-cream-striped wallpaper, a determinedly feminine shade of baby pink carpet that no over-nervous first-year would ever dare be sick on, and a framed array of the best of the sixth form A-level work. On shelves stood appealingly lopsided jugs, brightly painted ceramic plates and several clay cats on loan from the school pottery room. Jenny smiled expectantly, waiting to be told that clever Polly had achieved at least the school drama award, which would give her free extra speech and drama lessons and a guaranteed starring role in every school play for the next seven years. She tried to keep out of her head the vision of Fiona's husband haggling on her doorstep for sexual services.

Alan, gloomy about his future and confident only of disaster, was therefore less shocked than Jenny when Fiona began her well-rehearsed speech, both arms resting on the desk and her ample bust stacked firmly on top of her blotter.

‘. . . abilities that would be far better catered for in a more artistic environment . . .' Fiona was saying, her face lengthened into her well-practised ‘this hurts me more than it hurts you' expression.

‘Polly will be quite a loss to the school, such a, er, lively pupil.' She stopped to sigh, as if this was on a well-learnt script, and continued with a decisive ‘But . . .' just as Jenny was opening her mouth to protest. ‘But it is our responsibility, our duty, to put the child first, even at the expense of losing one of our more colourful pupils. That is the creed upon which this school, and its consequent success, is based.'

Alan looked out of the window, watching cars whizzing through amber traffic lights, and wishing he was in one of them, heading perhaps for the distant wilds of Scotland, with just Jenny.

Fiona wasn't entirely without scruples, especially when she had to share the Close with these people, and had now moved on to the practical suggestions, leaning forward eagerly to sell her idea to Jenny and Alan. ‘Polly will do reasonably well academically wherever she is. But the academic field is not where her main interests lie, as I am sure you know.' She paused to smile, waiting for them to agree that here was a headmistress who really understood her young charges, before delivering her chosen solution. ‘Have you thought of a school for the performing arts? I happen to know the principal at . . .' and before Jenny could so much as ask a question she had reached down to scrabble in her desk drawer and handed over a large and glossy brochure featuring students on the cover dressed as the rude mechanicals from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

‘Well, no, we hadn't thought of it, not at all,' Jenny told Fiona, surprised to find that she still had a voice to use, so dismayed as she was that they were having this conversation at all, and flicking obediently through the prospectus.

In what seemed like seconds, Jenny and Alan had been expertly dismissed, whirled down the staircase by the secretary and were out on the street wondering what to do with Polly for the next seven years.

‘I wonder why Fiona wants Polly out. Do you think it's because of Daisy – worried that criminal behaviour runs in the family?' Jenny asked Alan.

‘Possibly, Daisy's a bit wild, maybe. And Polly's reasonably bright but no genius. Perhaps the school is over-subscribed with Oxbridge hopefuls and there's no room for the good all-rounder.'

‘Or in Polly's case, the slightly below average all-rounder.'

‘Anyway, what do you think?' Jenny asked Alan, watching him glance through the brochure again as he walked back to the car. ‘Do you think it's Polly's sort of thing? Hours of singing and dancing and drama and dressing up? Longer hours than regular school, too?' She waited for him to prevaricate, to pass the responsibility over to her, as it fell within the domain of home-and-family. Before, when the children had been at the school-changing stage, he had left everything to Jenny, telling her he was sure she would be better at making the right choices than he was, and so never having to endure the hectic scrums of open days. But then, with a decisiveness that surprised her, Alan looked up and announced with a broad smile, ‘I think it's exactly Polly's sort of thing. She'll absolutely love it.'

What was it about weddings? As Sue and David exchanged their optimistic vows in the clinically pale green register office, Jenny dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and felt her eyeshadow dissolving. Daisy hissed a cynical ‘Oh God, Mum,' secretly eager to impress Sue's younger son home from boarding school, and not wanting her embarrassing parents drawing the wrong kind of attention to her. Sue looked radiant, as a bride should, in cream silk moiré, pleased with herself and everything else. Her blue-rinsed mother in a lavender-and-pink flowered Queen Mother hat, beamed all round at everyone, delighted with her daughter, as if this wedding was Sue's first real one, and the other two had been merely insignificant trial runs. Outside in the mellow spring sunshine, the proud old lady roamed regally, waving an elegant kid-gloved hand at all the guests and mishearing all the introductions. ‘A lady registrar!' she exclaimed loudly to Fiona Pemberton, perhaps recognizing equally queenly qualities. ‘We haven't come across one of those before, have we Susan dear?'