Pleasant Vices (9 page)

Jenny really wished people wouldn't say things like that. Into her head rushed an unstoppable vision of Laura and Harvey having frenzied sex in their kitchen against their vast Bosch Gourmet Food Centre, magnetic plastic fridge letters clattering to the floor around their feet like multi-coloured rain. Jenny fiddled guiltily with her trowel and tried to concentrate.

Laura, huge eyes staring appealingly out from under her dark fringe, was looking alarmingly as if she might cry, making Jenny feel personally responsible for the eventual size of Laura and Harvey's family.

‘OK, OK, I'll do it,' Jenny told her. ‘Or at least, they can come round and talk about it so I can find out what's involved. It'll have to be a stupendous amount of cash if it means weeks of disruption, though,' she warned Laura.

‘It won't, I promise. They only usually take one day. Oh super, you're wonderful!' Laura gushed delightedly. ‘I won't forget this, you and Alan must come to dinner.'

Well if she couldn't get flute pupils, this would have to do instead, Jenny thought as she scrubbed earth from under her nails in the kitchen. The spectre of a future on half the income with the same expenses briefly chilled her again. But just then the phone rang. Perhaps it will be one of the answerphone parents ringing back at last, Jenny thought, as she hastily dried her hands.

She liked the man's voice, there was a sense of humour in it. She didn't get much of that in the usual music-pupil parents. Usually they were too concerned with instrument prices, making sure they got their full half-hour, and the whereabouts of the nearest Royal Academy examination centre to waste time with friendly badinage. It would be nice to teach a grown-up for once too, someone who was learning to play because they had chosen to.

‘Is my being disabled a problem? Or, sorry, I should say, “physically challenged” shouldn't I?'

‘As long as you can hold a flute, it doesn't make any difference,' Jenny told him, which for some reason made him laugh. ‘How mobile are you?' she then asked, wondering if he intended to travel to her house and would need a ramp for a wheelchair to get over the front doorstep. There was probably something in the shed that Alan could rig up.

‘Oh, pretty mobile. It's just the new feet, well you'll see.'

Jenny rather hoped she wouldn't, not seeing their relevance to music. ‘Have you got your own instrument?' she then asked, and the cheery man laughed again.

‘Certainly have, love. Never go anywhere without it!'

‘You got him from an advert? Flute lessons in a shop window? Are you mad? You might as well have put “Friendly fellatio, thirty quid a blast”!' This wasn't the response Jenny had expected, when she went to see Sue to show off about her new pupil. Sue was in her kitchen, stirring their lunch – Waitrose lentil soup from a carton – and looking over her shoulder at Jenny with an expression of complete astonishment. ‘Are you the only person on the planet who doesn't know what ‘flute lessons' means when it's on a sleazy postcard?'

‘It wasn't a sleazy postcard! And no, I may be ridiculously naïve but I didn't know. There's obviously a gap in my education,' Jenny retorted from Sue's kitchen table, where she was slicing the Waitrose garlic bread (also from a carton). ‘I put an ad, as I told you, in a perfectly ordinary newsagent's window. I didn't notice any French lessons, Swedish massage or lists of Miss Whiplashes, anything like that!' Then she stopped slicing abruptly, and, knife poised, stared horrified at Sue. ‘Oh God what have I done?'

‘Why, what
have
you done? Given him your credit card number as well?'

‘Apart from booking him in for a lesson next Thursday at two, I asked if he'd got his own instrument. No wonder he laughed.'

‘Not surprised.' Sue took the soup to the table and giggled happily. ‘I expect he said he was incredibly attached to it!' She gave a delighted snort, relishing the joke.

Jenny thought she could feel her face going pale. ‘Don't laugh, he actually did say something like that. Whatever is he going to expect?'

‘A blow job of course, and a good one. What will you charge him?'

Jenny still looked pale, and also determinedly prim. ‘For a flute lesson I charge £16 per hour, £9 for half an hour. I wouldn't do
that
to a stranger for any amount,' she told Sue archly. Sue's eyes twinkled, disbelieving. Not these days, anyway, Jenny added to herself. It had been different back in the days when she'd once found it the only way to keep herself in food and music papers. For a couple of weeks, well into an end-of-term overdraft, it had been that or give up college altogether. In terms of payment she'd have been happy, if the clients only knew it, with just the sumptuous meals they'd provided. But that had all stopped when she met Alan and he'd taken pity on her empty fridge. She'd never told him. Whatever would have been the point?

Jenny made a decisive start on her soup, but Sue was waving her spoon about and had a hard-thinking expression. ‘You could charge a lot more than that, and it would only take a few minutes . . .' she calculated.

Jenny's spoon splashed into her soup. ‘No I couldn't not for any price!'

‘Bet you would! Bet you'd do it for £50.' Jenny stared back coolly at her, but Sue didn't give up. ‘OK, but you'd do it for a thousand.'

Jenny laughed. ‘Oh well, for a thousand, I suppose most people would, unless they were filthy rich already. Yes, OK, I'd do it for that. But I'm not being offered a thousand, I shouldn't think anyone would be. And I'm not doing it, I'm not a tart.'

Sue had a triumphant grin on her face as she ripped apart a slice of garlic bread. ‘Ah, but it's like that old joke isn't it? If you say you'll do it for a thousand quid, then we've already established that a tart is what you are, now we're just haggling about the price!'

Half an hour and the best part of a bottle of wine later, Sue and Jenny were in the sitting-room, each reclining on a kelim-covered sofa and clutching mugs of coffee. Jenny liked the room, it reminded her of the hippy dens that she and fellow students fashioned for themselves at university long ago. The walls were a cosy womb-red, though hung with vivid, driftwood-framed abstract art rather than the concert posters she had had, and the floor was swathed in a collection of ancient rugs. Divorced from her pair of husbands, and with her sons away at a famous public school, Sue lived, also student-like, in a state of perpetual clutter; no-one had ever seen the surface of her desk, so strewn as it was with letters and documents. It only needs the smell of joss-sticks, Jenny thought, and we could be way back then . . .

Sue broke into her thoughts. ‘I mean, it's not as if you've never done it before, what could it hurt?'

‘My dignity, integrity?' Jenny countered. ‘Plus the fact that I'm supposed to be a happily married housewife?'

‘Doubly titillating for your customer. You could dress the part in floral crimplene, fluffy slippers and a pinny,' Sue argued. ‘And where did the “happy” come from all of a sudden? What about Alan and whatever he's been up to lately? Can't you think of it as sweet and lucrative revenge?'

The wine and the warmth from Sue's log fire were making Jenny sleepy. She looked out of the window across the main road to the ever-lively estate. No wonder Sue had a broader outlook on life, because, compared with staring over the never-changing Close to number 15's neat festoon blinds, a wider view was literally what Sue had.

‘I did a lot of it in my teens – for free I mean,' Jenny admitted, thinking aloud. ‘It was to do with being Catholic. We all knew we couldn't have sex, that was a sin. The nuns never mentioned the oral stuff, well they wouldn't would they?' Jenny smiled to herself at the very thought. ‘As long as we didn't actually go all the way – remember when it was called that? – anything else was fine. By the time we'd made it into the sixth form, there were girls who'd seen as many dick-ends as weekends and could still call themselves virgins.'

‘Well there you are then,' Sue said, as if it was game, set and match to her. ‘And if you use these,' she fumbled under the sofa and pulled out a packet of condoms, ‘they're labelled “assorted citrus flavour”, you'll be able to close your eyes and pretend you're sucking a fruit gum.'

I'll just have to explain it's just a dreadful mistake, Jenny thought several days later. She hadn't been at all organized, not even taking the man's telephone number. Even with a real music pupil she should have done that, in case she had to cancel for some reason. She should have taken far more details. She'd actually booked time to be alone in her house with an unknown man; he could murder or rape her, and she was every kind of fool for being so casually negligent. He'd
said
he was called David Robbins, though if he was looking for something other than a music lesson, it wasn't very likely to be his real name. Jenny had a cursory look in the phone book, but couldn't bring herself to phone any of the twenty-seven possible numbers. What could she say? ‘Hello, this is Jenny Collins, sorry but the service I provide isn't actually fellatio after all'? Suppose she had to say it to twenty-seven different answering machines? Would it be worse than saying it to his face, as she would obviously have to?

Wherever she went, driving Harriet Caine and Polly to school, trailing round Waitrose, restocking at the garden centre, Jenny searched for cheerful-looking youngish men in wheelchairs. The few she saw looked miserable and ancient, wrapped up in hand-crocheted blankets and pushed by weary women. They looked more in need of a square meal than anything furtively sexual. She eyed drivers with ‘disabled' stickers on their cars, but couldn't see which bits of their bodies weren't in full working order. She even crept up behind a man on crutches outside the local greengrocer's and started talking wildly about the inflated price of cauliflowers, just so she could hear his voice. Jenny thought she'd recognize the sound of David Robbins's voice anywhere, a slight Welsh lilt on the edge of breaking into a chuckle. But the man on crutches, possibly because his leg hurt, was devoid of humour and sourly remarked, in an accent that was pompously London SW, that caulis were always that price in February, hadn't she noticed?

On the day of David's appointed visit, Jenny could barely think straight for nerves. Always quick to take advantage of a lapse in concentration, Polly complained over breakfast of feeling a bit ill.

‘It's like a cold starting,' she said, putting on a pained look and trying to make her voice sound croaky. ‘You wouldn't want me to infect the whole class, would you Mum, not with the entrance exams coming up?'

‘What have the exams got to do with it?' Jenny asked, determinedly packing Polly's break-time snack for her and shoving it firmly into her school bag.

Polly had a ready answer. ‘All the other mothers would know it was your fault, for sending me to school ill. They'd say you'd done it on purpose, because I'd be better by exam time and their children would all be horribly ill. And they'd All Fail!'

‘They'd only know it was my fault if you told them,' Jenny pointed out, refusing to be threatened. Polly was trying not to grin, relishing her attempt at blackmail.

‘She's only putting it on. She's always doing it. Spends half the day up in the nurse's room pretending she's got a headache,' said Daisy, wishing she'd been that resourceful at Polly's age. In five years' time, she could foresee, Polly would never get caught doing something as mundane as fare-dodging. She'd be more likely to get away with hijacking the entire train.

Polly pulled a face at Daisy. ‘It's true,' she bragged loudly, ‘I
do
get headaches. Sister Hamilton says I'll have to have a brain scan if I go on like this.' She passed a dramatic hand across Tier brow and fluttered her eyelids. Jenny and Daisy laughed.

‘That was Sister Hamilton's idea of a threat,' Daisy said. ‘Poor woman doesn't know Polly very well, or she'd realize all that special attention would be just what she would love.'

Eventually Polly gave up, trailed reluctantly out to Ceci Caine's car and Jenny had the house to herself. All she could do now was pray that Polly wasn't really ill enough to be sent home from school. Hard-heartedly, but excusing herself on the grounds of protecting her child from something worse, she switched on the telephone answering machine so that if the school nurse called to demand that Polly be collected and brought home, she could pretend to be out.

Pretending to be out, or actually
going
out were options that crossed her mind more than once that morning as she did fervent house-cleaning in an attempt to take her mind off David Robbins. She phoned Sue. ‘I can't face him, not even to tell him there's a mistake. Why don't you come round and tell him for me?' she pleaded.

‘Not a chance. I think you should go ahead and do it. Think of the money, think of the naughtiness of it, God knows you've behaved yourself well enough over the years, you deserve a bit of fun.'

‘If you think it's such fun, why don't you come and do it instead? After all, he won't know.'

‘Sorry, got a bikini wax booked up at the Club. Anyway, there's just an outside chance he really wants to learn to play the flute, and then what would I do? I got chucked out of recorder class at nine!' Sue argued, laughing down the phone. ‘Either do it, or tell him you can't. I bet you haven't even taken that card out of the newsagent's window yet have you? That should tell you whether you want to or not . . .'

At lunch time, Jenny was on her way out of the house to do exactly that when the phone rang. With the front door open, she hovered in the hallway, bag and car keys in hand, letting the machine do the answering, but listening in case Polly had developed genuine pneumonia during the morning and had been rushed to hospital.