Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  ‘You haven’t done this before have you?’ David Robbins said softly. He was looking slightly past Jenny to where her flute was in its usual place in the conservatory. ‘But you know what it’s all about. It’s not music.’

  ‘No, it’s not music,’ Jenny agreed, knowing this was the moment to explain the mistake.

  In the end it was quite easy. It wasn’t music, and Sue had been right, it was much more profitable. Jenny had forgotten how exhilarating feeling truly, secretly wicked could be. In plenty of time to collect Polly from school and rush her on to a ballet class, she spent twenty minutes in the shower washing away any lingering feelings of guilt, counted her money and stashed it, together with the rest of the citrus-flavoured condoms, in a rhinestoned evening bag at the back of her underwear drawer. Must remember for next time, she thought, towelling her wet hair, the lime flavour isn’t up to much.

  Chapter Six

  Jenny spent several days hugging her shameful secret to herself, hardly daring to leave the house in case she blurted it out to someone in the street. She felt that if she allowed herself out, let loose in public, she would be sure to be accosted by someone doing a survey, and would confess, when asked, her new occupation. ‘I fellate strange men for money,’ she could hear herself announcing loudly to a bored student with a clipboard trying to sell insurance in a crowded shopping precinct. To keep herself under some sort of control she stayed home and fed the family on long-stored, unlabelled casseroles from the freezer, and when the cat food ran out she extravagantly opened a can of best dolphin-friendly tuna for the delighted Biggles.

  From the safety of her window she watched Paul Mathieson looking proudly up at the Neighbourhood Watch sign on the street lamp outside his house, and gleefully she thought, here’s one crime you haven’t spotted yet, right under your nose. How ecstatically horrified Carol would be, too. A few months ago she had walked down the Close with them as Jenny was taking Polly to one of her disco classes (‘Make-up already at your age dear?’ Carol had commented, eyeing Polly’s dazzlingly lurid lycra outfit set off by Barbie-pink lipstick) when a teenager from the estate had crossed the road in front of them wheeling frothily-frilled twins in an absolute Rolls-Royce of a pram. ‘Three guesses how she paid for that,’ she had sniffed, shocking Jenny.

  ‘Can’t guess, you’ll have to tell me!’ Polly had piped up, earning one of Carol’s Looks.

  ‘Her mother, hire purchase, or borrowed?’ Jenny had suggested, refusing to play.

  Jenny expected a suitable feeling of guilt to creep up on her in time, as she imagined it should, but every time it threatened, she thought of Alan and how effortlessly he was running his new romance alongside his wife and family. His was the greater betrayal, Jenny concluded, for she wasn’t involved with anyone, merely propping up the faltering family finances. Every now and then the name ‘Serena’ popped menacingly into her head, with its connotations of home-counties nice-girl, someone clean, placid, undemanding and unchallenging. The thought of her rival left Jenny with a compulsion to work at being defiantly the opposite. She hadn’t mentioned the message on the answerphone to Alan. If challenged (and how likely was that?) she would simply shrug and tell him it must have got lost or forgotten or something. Daisy tended to monopolize the phone and its accoutrements, considering them by rights her personal property, so Alan would not be too surprised.

  ‘Can’t you just imagine what she’s like?’ Jenny asked Sue days later, reluctantly emerging from the house to meet her for Polly’s tennis lesson and after-school tea at the club. ‘I bet she’s thirtyish, thinnish, dimmish, and wears co-ordinating shades of beige. And I bet she’s got a blue-rinsed widowed dragon-mother in Surrey who plays bridge in the afternoons.’

  Serena – the name had an unquestionable, middle-class self-certainty to it, like Fiona and Arabella, Melissa and Camilla. They were names of posh girls recalled from Jenny’s childhood, girls in fiction, or from the intriguing boarding school hidden away behind trees on the hill near her home. Her own friends at the grammar school had had names like Christine, Wendy and Sandra, with at least three other Jennifers. It was galling to think that the name Serena still could make her feel socially inferior, when it was Serena, not her, who seemed to be prepared to have an affair with a married man. On the other hand, Jenny then grudgingly reasoned, it was a Jennifer, not a Serena, who was sitting here on the tennis club balcony, having spent a suburban afternoon working as a prostitute.

  Sue, who was far less interested in Alan’s love life than in Jenny’s professional one, did her best to be consoling. ‘Well if she’s really that dreadful, he won’t be interested for long, you can guarantee. It’s just one of those symptoms of the male menopause, something young and pretty and impressionable. Men just like to check they’ve still got the old pulling power. Once he’s feeling reassured that he has, it’ll be all over.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I just have to wait it out and he’ll be back to lolling sleepily in front of the fire all evening like an ageing labrador. What I’m afraid of is that I won’t like him at all by then, for having felt he had to do it, and it will all be too late,’ Jenny said with a sigh. ‘Why can’t he be like other men and just go in for buying purple shoes, or fast cars? The male menoPorsche, it should be called, seeing as that’s what they start wanting in their forties.’

  ‘Well don’t worry, it doesn’t last. Now tell me all about the customer!’ Sue said with indecent impatience. ‘I got a good look at him, he parked outside my house. Utterly gorgeous, I thought. I’d have done it for nothing. Is he coming back for more? Will he get to be a regular? And if he does, will you introduce me?’

  Jenny squirmed, and wished she was safely alone in Waitrose, or doing a shift in the school library, anywhere but here with Sue and her vicarious fascination. She really was worse than Polly for wanting to know intimate and lurid details. Polly at least was safely out of earshot, having her first outdoor tennis lesson of the year down on the court below with five other ten-year-olds. She should just tell Sue nothing had happened, that she really was too much of a prissy little housewife to consider prostitution as a viable career option. But whenever she thought of David Robbins and what she had done, a distressingly uncontrollable smile spread across her face, along with the certainty that she was blushing. In an attempt to keep her face straight, she looked down at the women and the children’s class on the tennis courts, all dressed in similar regulation little white outfits, with the latest Air-Wear tennis shoes, none of them the sort to challenge the club rules by breaking the dress code. A bunch of Serenas, all of them, she thought, opting to tell the truth, and be damned.

  ‘It was good fun. Just like being young and free again,’ she said decisively, giving Sue a smile of pleased radiance. ‘Extremely free,’ she added, feeling the happy blush coming on – white was too dazzling a colour for tennis, she thought, reaching down into her bag for a disguise of sunglasses. Something else was dazzling her, too, little flashes of sunlight as if someone was using a mirror to catch the light and was shining it in her direction. Perhaps a magpie in a tree with a stolen piece of jewellery, she wondered, maybe the dinky kind of slim gold bangle she imagined a Serena would wear.

  Carol was dusting Paul’s attic study, spraying jets of polish and rubbing firmly at the veneered surfaces. Mrs MacNee did the rest of the house, but Carol always told her firmly that Paul wouldn’t have anyone touch his study, no-one but her. She didn’t trust anyone not to peek into the box containing his sacred Masonic kit, or go investigating the files relating to his honorary treasury of the sailing club, or poke about among the drying prints hanging in his darkroom. Radio Two trilled beside her as she worked, and every now and then she glanced out of the high window to check who was coming and going in the Close below. Paul’s telescope, with which he studied the movements of the planets, kept getting in her way as she polished and tidied, banging her on the shoulder and prodding her neck as she moved briskly round the room, sorting Paul’s crisp new Neighbourhood Watch files
(one for each household) into street-number order on the new Ikea shelving unit. She took a quick look into the one marked ‘Number 14, Collins’, found no entries yet, and wondered if she should make a note of the rather attractive hobbling man who had called on Jenny several days before. Perhaps he was just reading a meter or something, she decided, Paul’s Parker pen poised in her hand. Or perhaps he was from the insurance company, calling about the ruined wall. She rather hoped he’d call on her next time too, she thought, as she wrote blond handsome visitor (male – early 40s?), purpose unknown, 1.45 p.m. on 21st’ in the folder. She filed it away with the rest and looked down into the road. Mrs Fingell was putting a newspaper-wrapped parcel into one of her many dustbins. Whatever was in that, Carol wondered, knowing in reality that it was probably nothing more sinister than potato peelings.

  That was the trouble with taking on responsibility for the neighbourhood, it made you exceptionally suspicious about other people’s behaviour. But then, she reasoned, someone had to be, crime figures were rising all the time, and some people weren’t even bothering to report domestic burglaries any more, as the police were so unlikely to catch the culprits. Every night, police sirens wailed past the end of the Close, heading for some thieving villain gone to earth in the depths of the estate. Every week she scanned the local paper, counting up the number of charges brought against the crooks who lived so near, propping up her firm belief that a whole criminal culture was born and not made. Reading, she gave a little sigh of grateful relief every time she saw the words ‘remanded in custody’. That was what they deserved. She didn’t for a moment believe what Jenny had once told her, that many people, innocent or not, spent home-destroying months in remand centres simply because, unlike perhaps multi-million pound fraudsters, they had no owner-occupier families who could promise bail-money. She and Paul, wondering if they were right to trust their burglar locks, lay awake and watchful in the noisy nights, picturing the sordid, syringe-littered stairways, the graffitied walls, certain that chaos and riot were only a half-brick’s throw away.

  Carol finished her dusting and filing, and adjusted Paul’s telescope. By standing on an upturned box, she managed to focus it, not as it usually was on the heavens, but on houses and gardens around and below her. Heady with authority, she inspected all the gardens within range, noting the appalling weeds in Sue Kennedy’s, practically a jungle, she thought, clicking her tongue with disgust, making a mental note to have a little word at the next opportunity. Then, with some adjustment she could, she found, focus right into the Collins’s conservatory and after only the smallest hesitation, with self-righteous delicacy she focused right out again, over beyond the edge of the council estate towards the river and, to her surprise, on to the tennis club balcony. So that’s what they do in the afternoons, she thought primly, watching Jenny and Sue giggling together over cups of coffee. Sue was smoking too, which, Carol thought, rather defeated the point of expensive membership of a health club. I do wish I could hear what they’re saying, she thought, with fervent curiosity.

  ‘Why are we going to Laura and Harvey’s? We’ve never been there before, and they haven’t been here, so they don’t owe us.’ Dressing for dinner on a Thursday night, Alan was reluctant to go. He very much preferred being the one who did the cooking. Other people’s cooking, unless it was a sanctified, Michelin-starred chef, was unlikely to be up to his own standard. He tried hard, but he couldn’t enjoy an under-spiced stew masquerading as Daube de Boeuf, or soy-drenched Anglo-Thai messes adapted according to availability of ingredients, from a selection of currently fashionable cookbooks.

  You’d bloody well want to go if sodding Serena asked you to, Jenny hissed at him from the safety of the bathroom, and then said, ‘It’s because of the film people; I agreed we’d talk to them, remember? It’s just Laura being grateful.’

  ‘I just hope she’s grateful enough to know I can’t face any chi-chi attempts at squid in its own ink. No-one gets it right, they always cook it till it’s the texture of car tyres,’ Alan grumbled.

  ‘You’re very hard to cook for, you realize that don’t you? Soon no-one will invite us to eat with them at all,’ Jenny said, emerging from the bathroom to rummage in the wardrobe for her black silk skirt. She wondered whether to combine it with her comfy chenille sweater or her translucent cream shirt, and if it was worth making an effort to look good at all, with Alan in such a mood. She tied her hair back with a yellow scarf and immediately, with her angular jawline exposed, felt about ten years younger. ‘You put people off – they’re afraid of your ludicrously high standards. It’s like asking bloody Escoffier round for supper. I think Laura’s very brave.’

  ‘You said she was very grateful. So she should be, these film people mean we’ll be mucking up our tax returns. Once you start admitting to that kind of freelance operation going on in the house, they’ll never be off our backs. Every year they’ll bung in an estimated assessment, you’ll see.’

  Jenny zipped up her skirt, and pulled the chenille sweater out of the drawer, opting for comfort over glamour, seeing as Alan was giving no sign that he was the slightest bit interested in what she looked like. Time was, she recalled, he’d have fondled her gently as he fastened her zip for her, or commented on the transparency of the shirt. Instead he was looking grumpy, searching through a drawer for cufflinks.

  ‘Is there somewhere else you’d rather be?’ Jenny suddenly asked bravely, challenging him in the mirror, hairbrush in her hand. ‘I mean, if you’d rather not come out with me, please do say. We’re not chained together, I can go on my own.’ Here’s your chance, she thought, take it or forever leave it. Alan left it.

  ‘No, no I’ll come. It’s been a tough week, that’s all, and the next one looks like being no better. Accountants’ bills seem to come last on everyone’s priority list.’ He smiled, and ruffled Jenny’s newly brushed hair. ‘Sorry, Pudding. I’ll stop complaining and I’ll do my best to be sociable, and anyway I want to know about these film people, and how much they’re going to be messing up my kitchen.’

  ‘I’m sure they won’t mind if you load your entire batterie de cuisine into crates and get Harrods to take it into storage.’ Jenny smiled sympathetically at him. ‘Just try to think of the money; even after tax it could be a whole term’s school fees.’

  ‘What I am thinking,’ Alan confessed with a sly grin, ‘is that if we do have to go out for dinner, at least Laura and Harvey are within staggering distance of home and we can drink as much as we like.’

  Laura and Harvey lived in one of the prettiest houses in the Close. It was the same, structurally, as Jenny and Alan’s but maintained, like a model always ready for the photographer, in the most pristine condition. Looking at the fresh clean paintwork, Jenny wondered if it was really true that film companies who found something lacking in the decor of their chosen locations, actually did repaint at their own expense. Thinking about her flaking front door, she hoped they did. It would also be a good persuasion point for Alan. The Benstone’s front garden, with the camellias gone, was rather exposed, but the front windows and porch were charmingly trailed with clematis in spring followed by tiny, delicately scented pink roses in the summer. Tubs of topiaried box-hedge stood squarely each side of the front doorstep, underplanted with white anemones, which would be followed later by Cambridge blue trailing lobelia. Miraculously slug-free delphiniums and foxgloves grew in front of the sitting-room windows, giving the impression in the early summer of a cottage garden of Gertrude Jekyll-style opulence. The feeling of effortless extravagance continued inside the house, with generous swathes of crisp Designers’ Guild chintz at the windows, polished blond wood floors, and a pair of elfin daughters appealingly dressed in multi-coloured layers of exorbitantly priced Oilily clothes.

  Jenny, trailing the reluctant Alan, rang the Benstone’s doorbell, and was welcomed in by Harvey wearing a limp and faded rugby club sweatshirt, which didn’t at all go with the elegance of his surroundings.

  ‘Do come in!’ he bellowed
at them, waving a half-full glass of wine. ‘Lovely to see you!’ and then towards the kitchen he yelled, ‘Emily, keep hold of Pushka!’ Laura, spring-fresh in Monsoon voile, drifted gracefully out of the kitchen, closing the door on a small daughter clutching a struggling tabby cat, and the usual pantomime of air-kisses followed.

  Laura took Jenny and Alan into the sitting-room and started pouring glasses of wine. ‘Do sit down. Sorry one of the sofas is missing, we had a Mothercare shoot in here yesterday and it had to look like a playroom. You should have seen it, rocking horses and blu-tacked bunny pictures everywhere! Fiona and George Pemberton should be here any minute. Did I mention that they were coming too?’

  ‘No, actually you didn’t,’ Jenny said, her social smile congealing, dreading facing Fiona for an evening of light entertainment. Which of them would get drunk enough to mention the incident of Polly and the Playboy magazine she wondered, hoping it would be Fiona and not Alan, who, when she had told him about it, had found the tale boyishly amusing.

  ‘I did think of asking Sue from the end house, make it a real neighbours’ evening. But we couldn’t think of a suitable man.’

  ‘Sue can usually dredge one up all by herself, given ten minutes notice or so,’ Alan said.

  ‘Not that they’re essential of course, even numbers,’ Laura said doubtfully, glancing towards her dining-room and her carefully balanced table arrangements.

  A few moments later, Fiona made her usual majestic entrance, followed by a rather droopy-looking George. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Fiona boomed, sidestepping Harvey’s attempt to kiss her by thrusting her jacket at him, ‘George fell asleep watching the golf. He’s no good at late nights, likes to have a little nap first.’ George smiled placidly enough, but Jenny noticed him take a vicious kick at a stray piece of Lego.