by Judy Astley
About the Book
Melanie finds herself single again after years of being one half of a couple. Her friends predict loneliness, frustration, disaster. Her parents are convinced she’s a failure in life. But Melanie is overwhelmingly excited to be able to do her own thing – she plans a programme of behaving badly, after a lifetime of behaving properly. With her daughter off to university and ex-husband Roger married off at last – to his lamentably young girlfriend whom he accidentally got pregnant at the office party – she has what a teenager would call a Free House, and she intends to make the most of it.
But is the single life quite all it’s cracked up to be?
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
Also by Judy Astley
Copyright
UNCHAINED
MELANIE
Judy Astley
In memory of my mother,
Nora Fender 1921–2001
Many thanks to Adrian Lovett-Turner of Treescapes for our gorgeous prize-winning garden and to Susan Rose for amazing information on unexpected uses for dead wildlife.
And especially to my editor Linda Evans for her patience, sympathy and friendship.
One
Please yourself.
There were two ways of saying it. There was the peevish, sniffy inflection which Melanie Patterson remembered, from her teen years, as a razor-edged speciality of her mother. It was kept for those occasions (and pretty frequent they’d been) when there’d been something to be disapproved of: a skirt too short, shoes too high, a boyfriend too clearly after One Thing. The specialized tone was still in use. More recently, over twenty years since Melanie had left home, there was the house too close to the river (rats), the cat allowed to moult on the beds (fleas), the divorce (carelessness).
But there was another version of those words: the seductively drawn-out tone, the sultry emphasis on the indulgent, the luxurious, the sensuous, the time-for-yourself, the purr.
‘Pleeeease yourself.’ Melanie intended to do just that, savouring the purred version aloud as she switched on the TV then opened a family-sized packet of Maltesers. She leaned back on the sofa, shoved her feet under the velvet cushions and crammed two sweets into her mouth at once. Bliss. The chocolate seeped over her teeth and the honeycomb compacted and melted between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. Delicious indulgence. Delicious all alone indulgence for there was no-one to comment snidely about calories, no-one to say ‘Are you going to eat them all at once?’ in that eyebrows-up, pursed-mouth way that had been Roger’s speciality. (Come to think of it, why on earth had she married someone so like her mother?) He was off her hands now, delivered till Death Did Them Part into the pale skinny-fingered paws of Leonora, probably at the stage – she glanced at her watch – where the registrar was asking the assembled company about Lawful Impediment. There wouldn’t be any: Leonora would have had his decree absolute thoroughly thumbed-over by some family legal eagle, in case Roger was sneakily clinging to the means of getting out of doing the decent thing.
Here though, on a sunny afternoon with the warm autumn breeze billowing the blue linen curtains by the open French windows, the racing was about to start: first from Kempton and then the highlights from Lingfield. Melanie had a couple of quid each way on runners in all the day’s televised races. It should be a good and lucky afternoon, as scanning the lists of runners had proved so serendipitously fruitful. Better experts than her might study form and weigh up the advantages or otherwise of the going being good to firm, but for Mel the most important aspect (along with the colours the jockey was wearing) was always the aptness of the name of the horse. In the 2.30 her cash was on Bridle Sweet, in the next she’d got Promises Promises, Lingfield had yielded Bouquet and she could hardly wait for Second Honeymoon in the 5.15. It was all so fortuitously close to perfect she’d almost gone for a seven-race accumulator but had baulked at the thought she could lose the lot in the first (Bridle Sweet being rather a desperate pun), and lack a reason to keep her interest up for the rest of the afternoon.
‘I’m eighty-one you know!’ The words sang out from over the next-door fence just as the runners were being cajoled into the starting gates for the off. Melanie could swear her curtains flinched at the shrillness of the sound. This was old Mrs Jenkins’s version of ‘Cooee’, the summons for a few minutes’ company, a word about the noise from Melanie’s daughter Rosa’s music or a little domestic job her increasingly arthritic hands couldn’t quite manage. Melanie sighed and got up from the sofa. Whatever it was this time she hoped it wouldn’t take long, not today. Please, she thought, don’t let it be a long rambling letter from the daughter in Canada that would have to be read out slowly and carefully with detailed interruptions from Mrs J. to explain all the friends and neighbours chronicled so very, very thoroughly by Brenda. These were people Mrs Jenkins had never met, never would meet, but whose family histories she could recount as if they were her own.
‘Everything all right?’ Melanie looked out from behind the door to the head that nodded gently and rhythmically over the dividing fence at her. The sun glinted on Mrs Jenkins’s glasses.
‘I’m eighty-one!’ Melanie knew this more than well enough, though she wasn’t sure if it was exactly true. Mrs Jenkins had been applying this statement as a greeting for at least the past three years. When she got overexcited she could mention it (and one day Mel had counted) as much as twenty times in ten minutes. Opening the back door was always a risk, especially if you were hung-over or generally feeling unsociable. Mrs Jenkins, who usually seemed to be a bit deaf (well, at eighty one . . .), kept an all-weather radar beam trained on Melanie’s door. So very often when she dared to open it, the old lady was up from her Parker-Knoll recliner with all the swiftness of a puppy sensing someone whispering ‘walkies!’
‘Two children I raised, we didn’t always have enough to eat but they were immaculately turned out, immaculately.’ The script was always the same. Melanie smiled at the head that wagged to her across the top of the fence and the remains of the roses. The head looked a bit like a pale mauvey-grey shaggy mop on a stick. Mrs Jenkins’s children may have been immaculately turned out but their mother’s pension could no longer extend to a weekly shampoo and set, and neither did Social Services run to the grooming of the elderly. Her hair’s bizarre shade of muddy lilac was courtesy of a stack of sachets that the Meals on Wheels lady’s cousin Doreen had liberated from Luscious Locks, when she’d been fired for leaving a client under the colour accelerator for an hour and a half while she’d gone off to lunch.
‘It’s the bin bag dear, it needs to be in the wheelie thing.’ Melanie opened the connecting gate, went through to the adjoining garden and quickly hauled the bag down to the communal walled-off area just beyond the back gate, being careful where she trod in her last-Christmas Toast catalogue cashmere mules, for Mrs Jenkins’s small orange-bottomed poodle had been startlingly incontinent lately. Sometimes it sneaked under the fence and deposited a sly pile on Mel’s scraggy lawn. With any luck it wouldn’t be able to do that for much longer – Mel was about to treat her garden to a complete makeover. In celebration of Roger’s deliverance to Leonora, Green Piece, a gardening compan
y of the kind whose prices made Mel’s stomach clench, was going to transform her outdoor space into a 30-foot-by-60 semi-tropical paradise full of palms, succulents and elegant rocks. It was a non-wedding present to herself. She’d make a note about the fence – the expensive artistry of this project did not allow for the waste contents of a dog being deposited on the newly laid pristine stones.
‘Where’s that hubby of yours?’ the lilac head asked as Mel returned to her side of the fence and firmly closed the gate. Melanie had gritted her teeth already, knowing that would be the next question. It always was. Usually she just informed her neighbour, gently and with tact, for no-one likes to be reminded that their marbles are rolling away, that he’d moved out several months ago and was unlikely to be seen around this area again. Today, though, there was a new and delightful answer. She smiled as if it didn’t matter. Because it didn’t.
‘He’s gone to a wedding. His own wedding,’ Melanie said brightly, leaning forward to pluck the last non-blighted rose from the fence.
‘Oh! And couldn’t you go as well, dear?’
‘Well, no, not really. I don’t think his new wife would like it. Spectre at the feast, that kind of thing. Rosa’s gone, though, so she can tell me all about who wears what and take lots of photos.’
‘Fifty-six years me and Teddy was married. I’m eighty-one now you know. . .’ The voice trailed away as each woman returned to her solitary home, in Melanie’s case with haste and anticipation, for there was a bottle of champagne in the fridge that would be nicely chilled. Leonora and Roger would be at the ‘You may kiss the bride’ stage by now, which had to deserve a toast in absentia. The champagne was Bollinger, for this was a special occasion, very special. Unfortunately it was also one of those bottles that was stubborn about being opened, as if deliberately giving Melanie a few extra moments to reflect that lone drinking was a dangerous and slippery slope.
‘Listen you, I don’t bloody care,’ she told the bottle as she wrapped a tea towel round the cork for extra strength, tugged and tugged and hoped this wasn’t an omen. She intended to enjoy this day to the full, she didn’t want minor difficulties getting in the way. At last the cork grudgingly relented to allow Melanie to pour a first delicious glassful, and she settled back on the sofa just in time to see Bridle Sweet romp home at a neatly profitable 7 to 1.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve been a best man.’ Rosa picked at her pale green nail varnish as her uncle consulted his notes for the next line. She didn’t know why he bothered, unless he was nervous or pausing for dramatic effect – it was obvious what came next.
‘In fact . . .’ oh yes, here it is, she thought, cringing in anticipation ‘. . . in fact this isn’t the first time I’ve been Roger’s best man!’ He grinned around the room and his audience exploded into exaggerated hilarity. Rosa gazed down at the tablecloth, wishing she could find it in her to feel as wholeheartedly thrilled about her father’s new wife as everyone else clearly did. It was more than a bit insulting really, she thought as she pulled a couple of daisies from the table’s centrepiece, as if all the years he’d been with her mother had been wiped out as a lousy joke; as if this was the real thing, the other had only been an easily abandoned trial run and Melanie was quite justly rejected for . . . well, for Chrissake look at her. Rosa stared hard at the bride, who was being giggly with her matron of honour, their blonde hair swinging together at some daft private joke. Leonora’s own whippet-thin head held a coronet of fat marguerites, as if she’d just minutes ago been sitting out on a summer lawn making herself an adult-size daisy chain. She was wearing the kind of dress that Melanie (and Rosa had a rare moment of mother-appreciation) wouldn’t be seen dead in, which would be something good to report back to her. It was strapless, for one thing – a huge mistake, in Rosa’s opinion, if your collarbones look like someone’s shoved a coat hanger sideways down your throat and your spine is a bit on the roundy side. Someone should have told Leonora to sit up straight when she was little – it would take years of Pilates classes to sort that out. The dress was also a glaring bright pink like cheap bubble gum and over-stiff around the bust area, so that when Leonora turned herself sideways the bodice took its time to follow. There was a kind of darker pink chiffon bolero thing over the top, presumably an attempt at blushing maidenliness, which was a joke, Rosa considered with teenage scorn, seeing as Leonora must be about four months pregnant by now. It didn’t show, though – you’d think it would on someone as skinny as that. I mean, she wondered, where was it? Perhaps it wasn’t there. Perhaps it had all been a ruse, a way of getting Roger to commit. He’d never been quick off the mark with decisions – especially when it came to the women in his life. How many bloody Christmas Eves and day-before-bloody birthdays had he cornered Rosa in the last-minute late afternoon and said, ‘Your mother, she’s always difficult, what do you think . . .’ It wasn’t her mother who was sodding difficult.
Paul had finished his speech. Dutifully, for she had no intention of making any kind of scene, Rosa stood along with everyone else and raised her glass to the happy couple. Roger grinned at the assembled staring throng, put his arm round Leonora and kissed her. For far too long, oh God, and quite obviously with tongues. Rosa put her hand over her face. People were fidgeting, murmuring, trying not to look. Wait till she told her mum, she’d howl!
‘Shit! How embarrassing.’ Rosa stared down at the now-shredded daisies that she’d somehow crumpled and scattered across the remains of her crème brûlée. Her fourteen-year-old cousin Joel sniggered awkwardly beside her and she gave him a sharp dig in the ribs.
‘Sorry,’ he chortled. ‘But wrinklies, snogging. Worse for you, being your dad, I suppose.’
‘Yes it fucking is,’ she hissed, feeling fat tears welling up unexpectedly. She didn’t want this. Everyone would think she was mourning the loss of something – a stable family life perhaps (huh!), her parents’ togetherness (huh! again). Everyone would feel sorry for her, nudge each other and look at her, poor little only child, the lonely victim of divorce, having to hand over her dear daddy to a woman who was young enough to be her not-that-much-older sister. It wasn’t anything like that. What she was really missing, now that Alex had dumped her, was being kissed in that way, by someone who looked into her eyes and wanted his mouth on hers at that moment more than anything else on the whole planet. It would be a long time before all that happened again for her. She was about to leave for university, the very next day. Alex (the bastard) had already said his goodbyes and made it more than clear that although it had been ‘nice’ (and how shaming to have wasted all those months on someone whose vocabulary was so inadequate), he wouldn’t be expecting her to rush up to Oxford to see him every weekend, nor should she be expecting him to use his own student railcard in the direction of Plymouth.
‘I’ll always be your grandma you know, this doesn’t change anything for us.’ Rosa felt a soft patting on her shoulder and tried to shake her tears away out of sight.
‘Er, like I know?’ Rosa immediately felt sorry for her aggressive tone. Her gran was only trying to be kind.
‘Yes, of course you do.’ Helen Patterson’s tone sharpened. ‘What I meant was . . .’
‘Sorry Gran, yes I know what you meant, it’s all right.’ Rosa gave her the kind of smile that had always so pleased older people when she was small. It didn’t feel quite right, a bit stiff, but her grandmother looked a touch happier.
‘And of course Leonora’s really rather sweet, when you get to know her,’ Helen went on. ‘She’ll make a jolly good little mother, I’m sure. From what she’s said, it seems to be all she’s ever wanted.’
‘Not like Mum, you mean.’ Rosa hadn’t intended to say it but the words slid out like a cat through a suddenly opened window.
‘Well, your mother . . . she always had other interests of course, her work. Not a bad thing,’ Helen added hastily. ‘Not in this day and age.’
‘I expect Leonora will go back to work after a few months,’ Rosa teased.
> ‘Oh I don’t think so! She’ll want to look after the baby . . .’
‘Properly?’ Rosa supplied for her, smiling to take the edge off the word.
‘Oh, you were brought up properly enough. It’s the best anyone can hope for, in the end,’ Helen conceded with only half a smile. Then she brightened. ‘Now, that dress you’ve got on. Very pretty. I like to see you young girls in frocks with a bit of a flounce to them. You should wear that sort of thing more often with your lovely slim figure. All those baggy trousers you hide yourself away in, you won’t get the boys interested going round like that.’ Helen wagged a finger at her, its nail varnish in Belisha beacon orange to match the flowers on her broad-brimmed egg-yellow hat.
‘I borrowed it, Gran. Me and Charmian and Gracie have one posh dress each for sharing out at stuff like this.’
‘Oh. Couldn’t you have worn your own?’
‘Well I was going to, but it’s black. Mum didn’t think it would have been very appropriate. She said I’d look like I was making some kind of protest.’
‘Yes, for once I have to agree with her. It would have been most unsuitable.’
The restaurant was gradually emptying. The tables were a depressing bombsite of crumbs, wine stains and abandoned boulders of fruitcake. Even grown-ups only ate the icing on wedding cake, Rosa realized, though surely it was the fruity bit that was for good luck, for fertility. Perhaps in this case they thought there wasn’t much point even pretending to eat it. Fertility (if a bump on the front of Leonora ever actually appeared) had been tested and proved. The floor was a mass of party-popper streamers, dropped napkins and dollops of food deposited by Leonora’s brother’s three unruly small children. They’d be getting a new cousin soon; Rosa would be getting a half-something. It was a strange term, half-sister, half-brother, as if it was the new little person who wasn’t quite complete, not the relationship. She wondered what she’d think of it, this little half-creature, whether she’d love it to bits and regret that she’d been blighted to be an only child all this time, or whether it would be removed enough to be of little interest. Either way, there’d be babysitting money in it for her, that was for sure. Leonora was only twenty-four, there was no way, however mumsywumsy Gran reckoned she was, that she’d be staying in every night for evermore. Dad would get what was coming to him: one way or another, at his age he was going to be permanently knackered.
