Size Matters (3 page)

Barbara didn't really have time for much more than that. She had her breeding queens (Burmese, the source of Jay's crazed cat Daffodil) to deal with, her cat-show schedule and her kitten list to organize. Jay had her chaotic home life, Moggie and Tristan making babies in the basement flat and two moody teenagers whose activities required a constant stand-by taxi service. Yet here she was at Mrs Ryan's, hauling a dangerously overfull bag of fish-stink garbage out of the swingbin. And Barbara was almost certainly, right now, up on
Putney Hill, showing the two newly recruited Brazilian language students how to differentiate between Lemon Flash and Beeswax Pledge (quite important that, when faced with a cherrywood dining table), and making sure they understood that Fairy Liquid wasn't what you used to clean the inside of Mrs Latimer-Jones's fat-splattered oven.

Up in Mrs Ryan's chilly spare bedroom Jay sank her behind down on the silky sky blue bedspread and attached a soft brush to the end of the vacuum-cleaner hose. The room was kept polished, dusted and as sprucely ready as a Hilton suite for visitors who had never, as far as Jay could tell, turned up. The room reminded her of cousin Delphine's teenage bedroom years ago, all co-ordinated fabrics – swagged Austrian blinds, fringed scatter cushions and quilted button bedhead – in blue and pink rose prints. Delphine had kept her room as immaculately tidy as this one now was, all her clothes were hung in colour order in a massive mirrored wardrobe that spanned an entire wall and had a light that came on when you opened the door. Her shoes had been perched inside on sloping racks, as if they were pertly tripping down a slope towards the thick cream carpet. Belts and scarves hung on a battery-powered gadget that turned like a tiny carousel.

‘Lovely isn't it?' Auntie Win had sighed to her sister Audrey, Jay's mother, the day after the decorators had left and Delphine had at last arranged her silver-backed hairbrushes and combs on the glass dressing-table top.

Audrey had had a quick glance round and said, ‘Yes dear, but where does she keep her books?'

‘Books?' Win had looked at her, puzzled, then pointed to a white wicker contraption by the bed. ‘Oh, over there!' she said triumphantly. ‘The magazine rack. There's room for at least a years' worth of
Vogue
.'

Jay, now whooshing the brush round the unchipped white skirting, thought of her own teen bedroom. She'd shared it with her older sister April. Their mother had made a point of being uninvolved with nagging about cleanliness, on grounds of respecting their privacy, and their inadequate wardrobe space and overflowing drawers made the room resemble a serious burglary aftermath. Little scraps of fabric – fluorescent nets and vivid satins and sequinned taffeta – found their way all over the house, escaping from Audrey's sewing room where she put together elaborate costumes for the area's ballet schools, assorted competitive ice skaters and ballroom dancers. Jay and April's bedroom walls were carelessly Blu-tacked with posters of angel-faced rock musicians. Homework and paperbacks and socks and abandoned crumb-strewn plates obscured the floor. Surfaces were obscured by make-up, magazines, records, jewellery. Jay, faced with a tangle of wire hangers on which her clothes were hung three items at a time, longed and longed for Delphine's immaculate expanse of pristine cream carpet, the line-up of satin padded coat hangers, each one with a little lacy dangling bag of lavender, and the drawer dividers separating row after row of immaculate white pants.

She sat on the bed again to swap the vacuum-cleaner heads back and took her phone out of her pocket. Perhaps there'd been messages. Perhaps the office phone had almost rung itself off the desk with people clamouring for a few months' casual cleaning work. It was coming up to spring – you often got students getting in quick for a way of making summer cash, or affluent sporty boys back from the ski season ready to save up for the next big trip.

‘Mog? Anything I should know? Any calls?' It was no surprise that Imogen was up in her mother's kitchen instead of downstairs in the basement flat. The heating
there was free for one thing, so was use of the washing machine and the contents of the food cupboards. Jay could picture her daughter, sitting on the kitchen worktop reading her horoscope in a month-old
Marie Claire
and sipping at her fourth cup of coffee, very, very slowly getting herself in the mood for writing an onerous line or two of her final year university dissertation on drugs education for the under elevens.

‘Hmm,' Imogen murmured. ‘Yeah there were one or two work ones. I've written them down. They're on your desk.'

‘Thanks. And Imogen?' A thought crossed her mind suddenly. The news of the pregnancy was coming up for twenty-four hours old for the immediate family, but there were others who should know. That was Imogen's job.

‘Have you phoned Gran?'

‘No? Why?'

‘Well don't you think you'd better tell her? About the baby?'

‘Oh. Right. Well I thought you could . . .'

‘Oh no, Moggy, that's your job. She was bad enough when I got pregnant with you. It's your turn now for the “throwing away your education” lecture!'

‘But you didn't throw it away. You got your degree. I'm going to as well. Uni is cool about it, I told you.'

‘I know, I know. But Gran doesn't. Just give her a call, there's a love, get it over with. And tell Tristan to tell his parents. They won't want to be the last to know.' Why was she having to say this, she thought, why was it all so uphill all the time?

‘Reminds me,' Imogen said, ‘Auntie Win phoned and said you'd want to be
first
to know about this. She said Delphine is coming home. From Australia. To live.' It crossed Jay's mind that this must be a prime example of ‘think of the devil'.

Jay looked down at her hand, flabby and oversoft from being encased in its stifling rubber glove. Delphine would look and tut and advise cotton liners inside the Marigolds. She'd be right, as ever.

‘Mum? Did you hear me? Delphine's getting married again. God, at her age! She's leaving Australia and she's going to live near here. Win said you'd be really, really pleased.'

‘This cousin. You two must be really close or . . .'

Jay watched as Barbara paused to adjust the wriggling cat she was grooming so that its fang teeth didn't succeed in chewing holes in the brush handle. The lithe little pinky-grey animal squirmed on its back under Barbara's big broad-fingered hand and gave a long disgruntled miaow of protest. Barbara cooed kindly and brushed away expertly at its short silky fur, smoothing out the cat's lean body across her lap.

‘. . . you must be really close or it wouldn't be important, would it? She'd just be a distant family member back from foreign parts. You'd get together for a reunion tea with the rellies, she'd get stuck into living back here again and then everything would carry on as per normal.'

Jay sighed into her spritzer – it was a bit early for a drink, barely past four thirty, but Barbara considered Monday to be the longest, hardest day that needed to have its working end rewarded with alcohol as soon as was decently negotiable. While Jay had been standing in for the cold-stricken Katinka, sweeping spider nests from the back of the Dachshund Man's wardrobe, Barbara had been giving her overstressed employees a
much-needed extra hand clearing the debris from a client's weekend-long eighteenth birthday party that no-one had thought to warn them about. ‘It's quite staggering,' she'd told Jay, ‘that anyone can imagine that cleaning up after eighty teenagers – and it looked like a bloody good time had been had – could just pass as “regular cleaning” and can be whizzed through by two students in their usual couple of hours.'

‘The thing about Delphine isn't really about closeness. She was always a lot more than
just a cousin
,' Jay said, wondering how to explain. ‘She was always
there
for a start, like a sort of shadow. Auntie Win had this idea that as Delphine was an only child, and I was the closest of my lot in age to her, that I'd have to play the sister part for her. “Your best friends are your family” she used to say to Mum, who didn't actually agree but there was no telling Win – whatever you said she didn't listen.'

‘All families are like that,' Barbara said gloomily. ‘My kids don't listen to anyone either. They're convinced they know it all.'

‘Mine too.' What was it she'd said to Imogen about being on the pill? Something about it being a good idea so long as you were the sort of person who remembered to take it, every single day? And there was lovely Moggie, the sort of dreamy, scatty person who barely remembered that breathing out came after breathing in . . .

‘Anyway, Delphine, well she defined my childhood. She was . . . how can I put it . . . she was what I
failed to be
, with the emphasis on the “failed”.'

Barbara let the cat jump down to the floor and went to wash her hands at the kitchen sink.

‘Oh come on now, who said you failed? Not your mum, surely. I can't imagine that. She's too laid-back. When she looks at you it's in an approving sort of way,
like she's standing back and thinking she's pretty pleased with how you turned out. Don't tell me I'm wrong?'

Jay leant across the table to the plate of chocolate Hobnobs that earlier she'd pushed out of her own weak-willed reach. The outstretched hand looked pallid and bloated and rough-skinned and still smelled faintly of Mr Muscle (bathroom), in spite of a thorough washing and a rub-over with
La Remedie
hand lotion.

‘Heavens no, Mum was fine, very hands-off but generally OK. She thought her sister Win and the pampered infant Delphine were a hugely amusing source of entertainment. She, well all of us, we used to giggle like anything over Win indulging her little princess. There were lots of things that used to have her in stitches, like Win telling us she hung Delph's school skirt inside a stocking every night to keep the pleats in place, and that she anointed Delphine's eyelashes with Vaseline every night to strengthen them.'

Barbara shuddered, laughing. ‘Everything I achieved,' Jay told her, ‘Delphine sort of managed to outdo, everything I had, she had a better version. If you were looking at it from a ten-year-old's point of view, Delphine was someone's life-work; she simply had it all, in spades. Everything from high-heeled silver ballroom-dancing shoes to a fluffy white fun-fur coat and her own pony down at the riding school. Sorry Barbara,' she laughed, ‘I know this all sounds pathetically juvenile. It was really left behind years ago, finally taken away when Delphine went to Oz about twelve years back and she wasn't there any more to tell me I should have got proper carpets instead of wood floors and rugs that slip.'

‘So do you think she'll bring it all back again? Like luggage?'

‘
Just
like luggage – I hope not but it's possible. You
assume you change with the years but I know I'll have to work at not falling into the old patterns. We should be past all that. The grown-up thing would be to be delighted to see her. I will be.'

Barbara didn't look convinced. ‘This is like sneaking into someone else's therapy session. What else bugged you?'

Jay eyed the Hobnobs then continued, ‘Well, she was what Auntie Win called “perfectly formed”. I, believe it or not, was an undersized, puny little thing, all bones and flatness. You can't believe how toe-curlingly embarrassing it was, having your aunt look you up and down and say something like, “Not developing yet then?” when you're pancake flat and nearly a year older than your curvy cousin in her first rosebud-patterned bra. I suppose I would've appreciated it if Mum had been a bit more in my corner, so to speak, but she wasn't at all bothered about my fragile little ego.'

‘Yes but you're all grown-up now aren't you?' Barbara pointed out crisply, topping up Jay's wine glass. Jay mentally added another hundred calories to the day's intake. So much for detox. That must have been the shortest attempted pre-diet in history. How long had it lasted? Five minutes that morning? Seven at a push?

‘Sure, I'm all grown-up. But these things linger, or their effects do.'

‘And
don't
tell me you ever went in for competitive swanking about your own children's attributes!'

Jay laughed. ‘Not at championship level, no, not like Win, but I'd have stuck up for them if anyone else had pitched their daughter against mine so they were in no doubt they were gorgeous – or at least I would have when they were that small. They deserve the odd boost to their confidence. Though just lately Ellie is so
grumpy and foul-tempered that if anyone compared her unfavourably with their own thirteen-year-old I'd probably agree wholeheartedly and offer to swap.'

‘So you'll be pleased to see her then, this Delphine. Personally I can't wait.' Barbara laughed. ‘I want to meet this woman who can still get you so rattled.'

‘Gee thanks! Yes, I'll be pleased to see her, of course I will. Though only when I've had my roots done, lost a stone and we've got some more reliable staff so it won't be a complete lie about you and me running the business rather than it running
us
.' Jay looked down at her middle and poked it hard. ‘You know there must have been a time, maybe only a day or a week or two sometime, when this body was just perfect, size-wise, not shamingly skinny any more and not wodgy like this either. I wish I'd appreciated it at the time and taken more trouble with it.'

‘What you need is grapefruit,' Barbara said, tumbling another heap of Hobnobs onto the plate. Jay, with great difficulty, managed to resist helping herself to yet another one. Barbara, who was blessed with the shape and height of Joanna Lumley, took two, one in each hand.

‘Grapefruit? Why?' Somehow, Jay was still thinking of her first 30 AAA trainer bra and imagined shoving fruit down her front, padding out her teen flatness just as she had with tissues, in the days when she'd raced into the changing rooms after school games to get safely back into her uniform shirt before anyone could catch her in her underwear.