by Judy Astley
Sue giggled and snorted. ‘Like Burglar Bill. Swag and all,’ she laughed.
‘Exactly like Burglar Bill. That’s it,’ Carol stated, leaning forward and jabbing an accusing finger at Jenny. ‘And nobody noticed. Not a single one. No-one in the entire street . . .’ The finger was shaking with fury now as it roamed the room, accusing them one and all. The BBC wives stared guiltily at the carpet. ‘No-one reported her climbing over the gate and back again, blatantly with a sack.’ She leaned back on the chair again, her skirt rucked up even further from the excitement, much to Ben’s delight.
‘Carol,’ Jenny said gently, as if to someone close to the edge of madness, ‘Carol, that’s because it was only me. If anyone did see me they probably wondered what I was up to, felt a bit curious, but they know me. I’m not worth a crime report. And I’ve apologized about the broken pig.’
‘But you could have been anyone! Someone from the estate!’ Carol wailed.
‘But I wasn’t! I was me! And the people on the estate do more nicking from each other than from anyone else! Why do you think half those doors up there are boarded up? Don’t you ever read the papers? Oh this is ridiculous. I’m going home to watch telly.’ Once again Jenny got up to leave; Sue greedily swigged the last of her sherry and got up to join her. Carol was looking daggers, and irresistibly Jenny jibed her some more, announcing to the room in general, ‘I’m going just across the road, Carol. Don’t feel you need to watch or take notes.’
Outside in the Close, Sue and Jenny took gulps of free, fresh air. ‘Is it just me, or is Carol getting control-crazy?’ Jenny asked. ‘And what was all that about “if you’ve got nothing to hide”. What was that supposed to mean?’
‘No idea,’ Sue said, yawning. ‘What I’d like to know, though, and call me a nosy-cow neighbour if you like, but why is your Ben still in there?’
Chapter Thirteen
Alan drove home very fast from Leicestershire, relieved, somehow, that he hadn’t been able to persuade Serena to accept a lift home and that she’d insisted on going back to London alone, by train. She told him she’d got a book she was dying to finish, apologizing for being anti-social and hoping that he didn’t mind. No he didn’t mind. He’d rather be alone with his thoughts and his music than have to make a hundred and fifty miles’ worth of conversation. He’d be sure to end up relating cosy anecdotes about the family, turning himself inevitably into some humdrum avuncular figure who would come over as lovable but not libidinous. He hadn’t tried too hard to entice her into his car, conscious as he was of having been far too cowardly to seduce her. He’d failed even to make a wholehearted attempt to, counting too much on her to realize what he was getting at and somehow join in as he clumsily skirted round her body and plied her with vodka. The very small consolation was that as nothing had happened in reality (everyone dreams don’t they? he reasoned, fantasy life doesn’t count) he didn’t yet have to feel guilty, and could at least go home still just about able to look Jenny in the eye.
As he sped down the Ml, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was playing on the car radio, whisking Alan immediately back to his first meeting with Jenny. Enthralled by her playing in the college Mozart concert, to which he’d reluctantly accompanied a dull cousin, he had been amazed when Jenny had agreed to have dinner with him. He’d felt as foolish as a backstage hanger-on, callously ditching the cousin and sidling round to the stage door, not even knowing what name to ask for. Back at his flat, and hardly even able to believe his luck that Jenny had agreed to go there with him, he’d put his precious new Led Zeppelin album on the record player and then cravenly apologized for his musical taste; but from the shelf next to his chaotic desk Jenny had picked up his old school recorder and played the haunting opening bars of Stairway to Heaven. They’d been in bed by the guitar solo. He’d been incredulous at his success, by how easy it had all been. Now, an attempt at seduction, even the thought of an attempted seduction, left Alan with dry-throated, heart-pounding terror. He tried to put it down to lack of practice, adrenalin and the adventure of the chase. It felt dangerous, life-threatening, and the compulsion to see it through was like a deathwish. It was probably horrendously bad for his blood pressure, and he hated the feeling that he had actually reached the age where he had to consider his health. When media doctors wrote of mid-life stresses, they meant him. It was too depressing. Did getting older mean spending the rest of his life with a careful lack of over-excitement? And somewhere deep inside was a suspicion, though nothing to do with the pain and potential disaster from being found out, that the ludicrous biological urge to do all that sexual fiddling about with a new person’s body might just not be worth it. He was setting himself up, surely, on the day he managed to make his lust known to Serena, for pitiless rejection and toe-curling humiliation. And if he succeeded what would be his reward? Only sex, nothing different, and as the saying went, he could get all that at home. But, he reasoned, muttering to himself as he turned at last on to the M25, what about rejuvenation? He was feeling old, greying, thinning and losing what small measure of charm and attraction he had clung to, and which had for years buoyed up his schoolboyish lack of confidence. If Serena could make him feel better about all that, then that really would be something he couldn’t get at home.
It was just as well Alan was late getting back, Jenny thought at 1.30, wishing the man David Robbins had sent had got himself thoroughly lost. Why, she wondered as the doorbell rang, do people manage to be so punctual, so capable of finding the right address on time when it’s for something illicit. She could hardly begin to count the number of people who turned up late for dinner at the house, all flustered and apologizing that they’d taken a wrong turning after Putney Bridge, or ventured accidentally into the estate, as if she and Alan lived in the back end of nowhere and the A-Z was written in Sanskrit.
To the immaculately pin-striped businessman now standing expectantly on her doorstep Jenny said firmly, ‘I won’t pretend you’ve got the wrong address, but I just don’t do that sort of thing any more.’ There was some apologetic murmuring from the disappointed client, and then from the road, the approaching click-clack of Carol Mathieson’s unmistakable shoes.
She stopped and peered with frank curiosity at Jenny’s visitor and, with no introduction forthcoming, said, ‘I forgot to say last night, I was so sorry about your poor pussy! What a shame!’
‘Oh good grief, what a thing to come out with,’ Jenny muttered under her breath, smiling as steadily as she could manage at both Carol and the pinstriped client. Jenny realized she was still wearing her yellow rubber gloves from wiping down the kitchen cupboards, and suddenly thought the man might suspect, especially after Carol’s bizarre comment, that she was lying, and that she’d got a customer for more bizarre practices already inside, perhaps tied naked to a chair prior to being beaten with the floor mop.
If she’d ever thought she might be tempted to continue earning cash from servicing men, the Neighbourhood Watch meeting the night before had killed all such ambitions stone dead. There had to be less risky ways of making a living, ones that didn’t have the neighbours writing down doubtful car numbers and making you lie about having the decorators in. There must also be ways that didn’t involve cheating on Alan, too. The possibility that he was up to something was so painful to her that she didn’t want to risk having him feel that way as a result of her behaviour. He could hardly be expected to think that, just because she had done it for money, it didn’t count as infidelity. If Alan left, there was mini-cab driving, or mail-order delivery, any old job till some full-time teaching could be found.
When David Robbins arrived half-an-hour later, Jenny started her speech while he was still half way up the path. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him, ‘I really can’t go on doing this.’ She laughed at his mock-crestfallen expression. ‘I’m retiring to a life of virtue. You’ll just have to make an effort and go and join a dating agency or something.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, footloose and fancy free, that’s me. Foo
tless, anyway. Actually I just called to say thanks but I’ve met someone,’ he said with a happy grin, making Jenny feel she’d been over hasty and made herself look rather silly. She then wondered about offering him a cup of tea, but could foresee conversational complications. What on earth would they talk about? So, supported now by only a pair of sticks, David walked on his new plastic feet back towards the corner, round which he had been so careful to park. No chance of Paul Mathieson logging that particular number at least, Jenny thought, feeling, as she closed the door and prepared to be a scrupulously honest wife again, that she was saying goodbye to a friend. Full of good intentions, she spent the next hour running off copies of her CV on Daisy’s computer and sending them out on spec to all the local schools. Somewhere out there, she reasoned, there must be the chance of a proper job.
When Jenny returned from collecting Polly (and Harriet, back with them for supper) from school, Alan was home and in charge of his beloved kitchen once again. The rich aroma of the Madeira sauce that he was gently reducing on top of the Aga wafted out welcomingly and filled the hallway. The smell of enjoyment-cooking, as opposed to the more tedious necessity-cooking so thrilled Jenny’s taste-buds, she had to suppress a greedy groan as she and the girls tumbled into the house. ‘Ooh yummee,’ she said, following the smell into the kitchen, ‘that smells just so scrumptious!’
Alan was settled comfortably in the rocking chair, pots and pans gleaming around him, full of vegetables and herbs, ready to go. He looked solid, happy, pleased to be back, the newspaper open at the football page and the cat purring on his lap. Jenny leant forward to kiss Alan and then jumped back in horror.
‘Biggles! What’s he doing here?’ she exclaimed, clapping a startled hand to her mouth.
‘Oh thanks, Jen, so good to know you’re pleased to see me!’ Alan said, grinning accusingly at her.
‘But Biggles is dead!’ Polly stated baldly. ‘That’s a ghost!’
Jenny wanted to smack her, suddenly; after all, he’d been Alan’s cat, and the awful news could have been broken to him more carefully than that. She had thought it too cruel to tell him over the phone, even as a punishment for nesting cosily in a smart hotel with slinky Serena. Except that Biggles, (unmistakably Biggles) ecstatically purring and rubbing his great big head against his favourite person, was clearly very much alive.
‘He’s dead. You buried him, Mum. Didn’t you?’ Polly went on, looking hard at Jenny for a sign that she might be going mad and have made the whole thing up.
‘I buried something. I was waiting till you got back to tell you,’ Jenny said doubtfully to Alan, eyeing Biggles suspiciously as she went to hang her coat up by the back door. She kept looking at him, as if any minute he was going to turn back into a damp and earthy corpse, and she peered at the floor for muddy footprints (and possibly the old cot sheet in which he’d been draped) leading from the cat-flap. Harriet hadn’t budged from the kitchen doorway, but stood gawping with her amazed mouth dropped wide open.
Polly patted the very grubby cat on the head. ‘You’ll have to be renamed Jesus,’ she announced importantly. ‘’Cos it’s the third day, isn’t it, and you’ve risen again.’
Jenny and Alan looked at each other and burst into incredulous laughter. ‘Well I can’t think where he’s been, must have been locked in an oily garage somewhere. He’s absolutely filthy. I didn’t even think to check the other cat’s collar. I couldn’t bring myself to see if it even had one,’ Jenny was saying. ‘Some other poor person out there must be missing their pet.’
Polly, looking like she’d had a brilliant idea, suddenly grabbed Harriet, and, bored with the subject of dead and alive cats, the two girls scrambled out of the room and thundered up the stairs.
It felt strange to have Alan back at home. Jenny had spent so much of the previous night vividly picturing him in flagrante that she found his familiar, daytime self rather odd, as if it was something of a disguise. At any moment she expected him to shove the cat to the floor, put down his drink and start the end-of-marriage announcement. She had a tight, tense feeling inside, and was finding it hard to breathe in the warm kitchen.
‘Just going to get something from the car,’ she told him, needing a moment to get used to how unchanged, how ordinary he was.
Out by the BMW, Jenny was tempted to open the door and sniff the air for girlish perfume. There was nothing on the seats, no giveaway glossy magazines, no abandoned lipstick. The back window had acquired a new sticker proclaiming No to Terminal Five. Half the cars in the Close had them (as well as ones about aircraft noise), even though most of the residents expected to be able to rush out and catch a plane at any old time to dash off for business meetings in far countries. That way the tax-free (legitimate business expense) travel could accumulate enough air miles to take their families on lovely foreign holidays. They were forever complaining about the crush at the airport, and Jenny thought they should be delighted to get a new Terminal building.
She looked in her car for something she could have gone to fetch and saw Polly’s French dictionary on the back seat. Just as she unlocked the door, there was a splintering crash of breaking glass from across the road. She wandered into the Close and dutifully strolled across to look.
Harvey Benstone came sprinting out from number 5, mindful of his neighbourly responsibilities. ‘It’s the Pembertons’ house I think,’ he said, catching up with Jenny. ‘Probably kids from the estate after the video and stuff so they can buy drugs. Bit bloody much in broad daylight.’ He was so puffed up with the certainty of being right that Jenny could only admire the way this seemed to make him totally oblivious to the possible danger of being beaten senseless by several large, strong teenage thugs. But when they got to the Pembertons’ garden, behind their pair of lilac trees was only the contorted figure of George trying to climb in through the hall window.
‘Bloody woman didn’t leave the key,’ he huffed at them, bright pink with wasted effort. Jenny left him and Harvey to sort out a way of getting in and trailed back to her own house. At least it was something to tell Alan.
‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ Daisy asked Emma, up in the bathroom. ‘And why aren’t you having yours done?’ Very carefully, nervous that it might dissolve the floor tiles, Daisy opened the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, sniffed it cautiously and winced. ‘It smells dangerous.’
Emma took the bottle and sniffed too. ‘No, it smells effective,’ she pronounced. ‘I’m not doing mine because I’m already blonde. And blondes have more fun, isn’t that what they say? I’ve been thinking for a while that you’re a bit, well a bit mousy, hairwise. This’ll be good.’
‘Well at least Mum won’t mind, being the way she is. Though I don’t know, can’t be as sure of her as I used to be,’ Daisy said, laying out the collection of equipment on the bathroom shelf. She opened the precious pot of Atlantic blue dye and sniffed at that too. ‘As long as it’s only the ends, at least I can cut them off if it looks dreadful. Yeah,’ she said, perking up and finding enthusiasm, ‘come on, let’s do it!’ Daisy perched on the side of the bath and Emma separated her hair into about thirty small sections and applied peroxide (using one of Alan’s pastry brushes) to the end inch of about fifteen of them.
‘It’s like doing someone’s roots, but in reverse. You’ll look like you’ve got the ends of a load of blue-tipped paintbrushes dangling from your head,’ she said, grinning at Daisy in the mirror.
‘Gee thanks, can’t wait,’ Daisy told her doubtfully. ‘I hope I can trust you with this.’
‘Trust me with your brother, don’t you?’ Emma teased, looking over her shoulder towards the door in case Ben had crept up the stairs and was listening.
‘Don’t start. You promised. I need time for getting used to that,’ Daisy warned her.
Emma secured all the peroxided bits of hair in strips of Bacofoil and put tiny elastic bands (stolen from her sister’s orthodontic kit) round them. ‘We’ll finish the colouring bit after supper,’ she told her. ‘Your hair
will take a while to bleach out.’ She heard a set of footsteps thumping on the stairs to the attic, and the sound of a door closing firmly. ‘I think your brother’s home,’ she said, abandoning Daisy’s hair and fluffing out her own in front of the mirror. ‘Got any lipstick?’
Over supper Jenny told the family about George Pemberton smashing his own window. They all laughed in the right places, but she still felt odd, as if everything she said had to be rehearsed first mentally to filter out anything that might trigger Alan into telling her something she didn’t want to know. It was easier to talk to the children.
‘What are you doing to your hair?’ she asked Daisy with interest, watching the silver-papered strands dangling dangerously over the potato dish. ‘I don’t suppose, whatever it is, that Fiona Pemberton is going to approve,’ she giggled, earning herself a dose of Daisy’s scorn. In her opinion it wasn’t part of the function of parents to join in the antagonizing of headmistresses.
‘My mum would never let me do mine blue. You’re so lucky, Daisy,’ Emma said with a wistful sigh.
‘Blue? Those bits under there are going to be blue? Good God!’ Alan said, disbelievingly. Ben said nothing, ate little and sneaked blushing glances at Emma, to whom, in the past, before Saturday’s electrifying physical contact, he had never had any trouble finding something to say. Jenny, with a mother’s perception, noticed, felt maternally tremulous for him, and had to bite her tongue not to comment. For once the thought of youthful romance didn’t make her eyes want to fill with envious tears. What was there to envy? All that tension, embarrassment, uncertainty and some hopeless fumbling if you were very, very lucky.
‘I thought we might go out tomorrow night,’ Alan said to Jenny, pouring her a third glass of wine. She was looking flushed and bright and rather jumpy. Time he took her out somewhere special. ‘Just the two of us, a place I read about in The Sunday Times last weekend. You can babysit Polly, can’t you Daisy, and we’ll make that the last weekend of your being grounded.’ He waited for her to look pleased, let-off and forgiven at last, but she and Emma were staring at him, still and shell-shocked, as if he’d just informed them that he was a serial killer and they were next.
