Size Matters (5 page)

Jay's mother lived in a bungalow that adjoined her sister Win's. This pair of widows had long ago accepted that their differing approaches to housekeeping made it impossible for them to share living accommodation, but they relished existing within such close grumbling distance. Living alone, Audrey saw no need to confine her sewing to its own specific room and so she lived happily among a shifting drift of fabric offcuts, shreds of flimsy paper patterns and trailing threads. Clumps of chiffon, satin, Lycra and net were heaped around the place, every fragment kept in case a tiny rose trim was needed to complete a costume, or to augment a hair decoration. Half-finished catsuits, leotards, fur-fabric animal outfits and voluminous classical tulle ballet dresses hung from every door frame. Stray threads of cotton wafted throughout the bungalow after her, ingraining themselves too deeply into carpets for the vacuum cleaner to reach.

Win, visiting from next door, picked sequins out of the sugar bowl and tut-tutted about A Place for Everything. On returning to her own home, she'd spend a good long time in her hallway tweaking minute threads and bits of fancy feathers off her shoes and clothes and making sure they didn't escape into her own immaculate furnishings. Audrey saved her best domestic efforts for the garden. Whereas Win had covered her half of the semis' gardens with no-fuss obliterating gravel (so you could hear the approaching crunch of midnight burglars, not a joyful prospect that, as Audrey had pointed out), enlivened only with small plaster statues of miniature poodles and the occasional ugly variegated shrub, Audrey had cultivated gloriously
thriving beds of flourishing perennials and arrays of spring and autumn bulbs that would bring a joyful tear to Alan Titchmarsh's eye.

‘Watch out for pins on the carpet,' Audrey said as she opened the front door to Imogen and Jay, ‘I've been on the go with four tutus since early this morning. It's a bugger, net. Nasty springy stuff. Tea? We'll have to go in the kitchen, I'm cutting out a lion in the sitting room.' Audrey led them through the hall to her kitchen.

Behind Jay, Imogen groaned quietly. ‘No tea for me, Gran, thanks. I've gone right off it.'

‘Oh really?' Audrey said, half-turning to look at her granddaughter and colliding with a pair of turquoise Lycra leggings that hung from the banisters. ‘That's new. What's brought that on? Some kind of diet fad?'

‘Er no. Nothing like that.' Imogen cleared a heap of paper patterns and a bag of knitting from the chairs and sat beside Audrey's old round pine table.

‘You young girls, you're always on some new health kick or other. When we were young we ate what we were given and were thankful. But then of course,' Audrey said, scooping several packets of cakes and biscuits out of the cupboard, ‘food was in a lot shorter supply in those days. You wouldn't think of picking and choosing and snacking on crisps.'

Audrey plonked her squat brown teapot down on the table and arranged three mugs in a triangle beside it. The nearest one to Jay showed a profile of the Queen's head and ‘Silver Jubilee 1977' written in gold beneath it. Imogen's refusal of tea had been ignored, as they had both known it would be, and she was toying with the handle of a mug that instructed her to ‘Protect and Survive' beneath a CND symbol.

How had this ancient mismatched crockery lasted? Last summer Jay, forever in pursuit of the kind of order so alien to her mother, had bought a dozen beautiful
large handcrafted cups, each painted with bold brash bluebells, from a potter in Devon, only to see most of them vanish in less than a year, victims of clumsy handling, of unskilled dishwasher loading or of Rory carelessly chipping them against the sink. She feared for the sink too, at those moments. Corian was supposed to be a hyper-tough kitchen surface but if anyone could make a dint in it, surely the heavy-handed Rory would be able to manage it.

Audrey had barely poured an inch of tea into the CND mug when the back door was flung open. Win, plump and jowly, came bustling in and in one slick long-practised movement had whipped another mug from the cupboard, cleared magazines from a chair and sat down.

‘I saw your car,' she said to Jay. ‘Just thought I'd pop in and say hello.'

‘You mean you smelled a pot of tea on the go through a brick wall,' Audrey muttered. Win was eager and clearly pent up with things to tell, and took no notice.

‘You'll have come to talk about the news,' she said to Jay, smiling gleefully. ‘Wonderful isn't it? I bet you're pleased. I said you would be.'

Imogen gasped. ‘How did you know? Who told you?'

‘Delphine of course. She phoned.' Win pushed her hand deep into the massive black patent bag she carried everywhere. ‘And now she's written. She always does prefer to write – she's got such lovely handwriting and there's always lovely descriptions. The scenery . . .'

‘But she . . . ah. Cross purposes Ithink.' Jaygave Imogen a warning look.

Win's hand was now scurrying again among the many zipped bag sections for her reading glasses. She gave up the search and handed an envelope (sugaredalmond pink, lined with pale green tissue, purely and
perfectly Delphine) to Jay. ‘Go on, you can read it for yourself.'

But before Jay got the chance, Win announced the contents. ‘She says she's going to live near Kingston, just by the river, in one of those lovely new apartments. Your Greg had something to do with those didn't he?
Penthouse
.' Win savoured the word as if it was part of a prayer. ‘She'll be up the road practically, here for her poor mother in her old age.'

Audrey pulled a face at Jay, who stifled a giggle. ‘And this new fiancé.' Win took a second or two to sip her tea, grimaced and reached back to the worktop (without needing to look) for the sugar bowl. ‘This new fiancé, he's an
airline pilot
.' There was another small silence for her audience to absorb the ‘hasn't-she-donewell' aspect of this occupation. It was obviously part of the same prayer as ‘penthouse'.

‘Anyway, Jay my dear,' she said, patting Jay's hand, ‘he's away ever such a lot so she says it would be a good idea for your cleaning people to go in and do a complete scrub-through before she gets here. You do do that sort of thing don't you? Cleaning?'

Jay, feeling close to speechless, managed to mutter, ‘Yes. Well the staff do, the girls I employ, you know . . .'

‘Jay stop it, you're rambling,' her mother cut in. ‘It's a perfectly good job, nothing wrong with cleaning.'

Imogen, looking round the terminally cluttered kitchen, spluttered over her chocolate mini-roll, sending crumbs scattering.

‘Oh nobody said it wasn't.' Win nodded, briskly, her several chins wobbling and setting up a sort of ripple effect. ‘Funny you should end up doing it for a job though, you being the clever one and all.' Jay held her breath and counted. ‘What with your degree, and Delphine not even passing her eleven-plus. Not that it's held her back, oh no . . .'

‘What about me?' Imogen stood up, went to the sink and poured her tea down the drain, then refilled the mug with water from the tap. ‘What about my news? Doesn't anyone want to know?'

‘Go on then dear, what have you done? Have you got yourself engaged as well? To that boy who talks nicely?'

‘Win, do shut up and let someone else get a word in,' Audrey said.

Imogen laughed. ‘Engaged? That's like sooo naff? Apart from the big fancy ring I suppose. That'd be OK. No. I'm pregnant. You two are going to be a great-gran and a great-great-aunt.'

There was a five second silence while the two sisters exchanged glances that seemed to include a mutual counting of too many ‘greats' for comfort. They then duetted, ‘So when are you getting married?'

Imogen looked puzzled, as if they'd mentioned a long-discontinued ritual that she'd only vaguely heard of.

‘I don't think they've thought of getting married yet,' Jay said quietly, then making the mistake of adding, ‘they're a bit young.'

‘Not too young to have a baby though,' Win pointed out, lips pursed.

‘They'll be all right. They've got the downstairs flat to live in and all of us around to help.' If Jay had her own doubts, she wasn't going to let on to Win. And did she have doubts? How could she not? What about baby-care when Moggie left college and started teaching? What about . . . oh what was the point? There was a long way to go yet, time to think it through, or rather time for
Imogen and Tris
to think it through.

‘Well I think it's wonderful. A baby is always a welcome addition.' Audrey said, putting her arms round Imogen and hugging her tight.

‘You've said that before,' Win reminded her sister. ‘When Jay got herself into trouble and fell for young Imogen here. Still, at least
she
managed to get Greg to do the decent thing.'

Win poured herself some more tea and gave Imogen a somewhat pitying look. ‘I'll get some wool, dear. The baby'll need a proper layette and I don't suppose you girls today have got the first clue with a pair of needles. Lemon. I'll get lemon. Boy or girl, you can't go wrong with lemon.'

Grapefruit. The kitchen was full of them. They were down among the oranges in the splintery old wooden fruit bowl, as if trying to hide for fear of being crammed on top of the juicer and having their soft innards cruelly gouged out. They lurked in the chiller box at the bottom of the fridge, too cold to hang onto their flavour, waiting their turn to be promoted to join the oranges and lemons. They also sat, these plump yellow globes, lined up like fat smug suns on the breadboard, occasionally lolling slowly to one side or another and down to the floor from where Rory kicked them at the fridge, with as much drama and posturing as if he had just been brought on in place of Wayne Rooney. Jay was sick of the sight of grapefruit. She was, however, three pounds lighter after barely a week. It was tempting to show off this fact, to strut about saying things like, ‘Does my bum look small in this?' but she knew better than to tempt ridicule, more of which she frankly did not need.

‘You're definitely going yellow, Mum,' Rory had commented as Jay tackled her pre-supper half-grapefuit the night before. ‘You're going to end up the colour of custard.'

Jay had smiled weakly at him, feeling the cold sour juice stinging her teeth as she bit into the flesh. It was
surprisingly sticky stuff, grapefruit, and it got everywhere. Despite its searing sharpness it managed to leave her fingers as cloyed as if she'd dipped them in syrup.

After the second day, Jay had taken to eating the grapefruit in an almost secretive way. It was all right in the mornings; grapefruit with breakfast (or even
as
breakfast) was a perfectly acceptable food item. But at other meals grapefruit was a gatecrasher, to the extent that there was something antisocial about sitting down by herself and working her way through this diet food. It rated somewhere between medicine and ostentation. Ellie disapproved, scowling in the near-vocal way only a near-fourteen-year-old could achieve.

‘It's very bad for me to have a dieting mother,' she told Jay. ‘I'm impressionable. I'm at an age where I might get a food disorder.'

‘You make it sound like something you shop for,' Greg teased her, ‘In which case I'd have thought you wouldn't be seen dead with something your mother's got, seeing as you're at that age too.'

Ellie's scowl deepened – not that Greg noticed, being deeply involved in trying to get the hang of something deathly on Rory's PlayStation – to the point where Jay wondered if she should warn her that she would be queueing up for Botox by the time she was seventeen if she furrowed her brow so dramatically and so constantly. Ellie had such a little face, her eyes and mouth looked far too big for it, as if she'd been allocated somebody else's in the pre-birth handout of features. Every frown and grimace seemed to crumple too large a proportion of her skin, as if her expressions were already fully adult-size but the rest of her hadn't yet caught up. On the plus side, when she looked really happy she was glorious, completely alight with pleasure. In repose, her expression might well tend
towards moodiness apart from those giveaway corners of her turned-up mouth.

Sometimes, in one of those horror moments that sneak up and pounce on all mothers' imaginings, Jay frightened herself by thinking that Ellie looked like the classic teenage schoolgirl murder victim. She was little for her age, sexy without knowing it, too pretty with only nature's help: overall a paedophile's wet dream. She was noticeably smaller than most of her contemporaries, inches shorter and skinny-bodied just as Jay herself had been. There were times, when Ellie came home with a friend (especially the hulking Serena who'd been last year's best friend) or Jay gave some of them a lift in the van, when it was hard to remember not to talk to these girls as if they were so much older than Ellie, as if they were the near-women they resembled.

At the same time, she had to be careful not to treat Ellie too much like a young child. She might look barely more than primary-school age, but inside her head there must be teen stuff going on, close to fourteen years' worth of growing and learning and thinking things out just the same as her blowsy, fleshy friends. Jay remembered well enough how hard it was to be the undersized one, to know she hadn't a hope of getting into an over-fifteen film or to be eyeing up the boys on the way to school but knowing they'd never look twice while she was still wearing pony-print knickers with ‘age 11–12' on the label.

It was hard to know just what
did
go on in Ellie's head. She didn't give a lot away. Just recently though, she'd been looking as if there was something pleasing her in a secret way.

‘She's up to something,' Jay commented to Greg as they lay in bed that night under the planes, the stars and the possible observance of Planet Man.

‘Probably,' Greg agreed. ‘She's getting to the Age of Secrets. A boy, do you think?'