by Judy Astley
‘You will come back and see everything in the summer when it’s got properly established?’ she said to Max as they drove back to the house.
‘Like on Ground Force where Alan Titchmarsh and the crew sneak up a year later and catch the garden they’ve made over filling up with weeds and half the stuff’s dead?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one.’
‘Lucky I didn’t put in a water feature, then.’
‘Too right – they’re always the first things to silt up and go weedy. I’ll try and do better than that.’
‘I know you will. And yes, if you like I’ll be back for a tour of inspection.’
* * *
It was all quiet again next door. Mrs Jenkins’s family had taken off for Paris and Berlin and weren’t expected back for a couple more weeks, for just a brief two-day stopover on their way home to Canada.
‘They wanted me to go to Paris with them,’ Mrs Jenkins reported to Melanie over the fence. ‘But I said no. I told them they didn’t want an old woman trailing around with them. I’d only slow them down. You do, you know, when you’re eighty-one.’ Mrs Jenkins looked a bit regretful, and Mel guessed Brenda and Hal hadn’t put up quite enough of a fight to persuade her to change her mind. She could imagine Mrs Jenkins in Paris, riding along the Seine in a bateau-mouche and admiring the sights. She would enjoy sitting at a pavement table at the Café de Flore and telling passers-by, ‘J’ai quatre-vingt et un ans, vous savez.’ She pictured her looking dignified, contented, as if she was waiting for Jean-Paul Sartre to join her for coffee and a croque monsieur.
‘Perhaps they thought you’d like a bit of breathing space, time on your own to recover from their visit.’
‘At my age – I’m eighty-one, you know – you get more than enough time on your own,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘It’s time not on your own you look forward to.’
The Christmas question still hadn’t been resolved. If Mel was to avoid being holed up for a long stifling afternoon in Vanessa’s peaches-and-cream dining room, enduring her brother-in-law Lester’s leery asides about a good stuffing, she’d have to hurry up about making alternative plans. She had e-mailed Rosa more than once but had had no reply. Her mobile phone was either permanently off or was being used so frequently that the message service was the only link. Rosa was probably avoiding the issue – and Mel didn’t blame her. Who wanted to be asked what they fancied doing for Christmas when they weren’t used to planning further ahead than the next afternoon? Big questions during Rosa’s day were more likely to be a matter of Which Pub Tonight or choosing between the blue baggies or the minxy suede skirt.
It was now November 5th. Patty and David were having a bonfire party and had dropped a card through Melanie’s door inviting her ‘and friend’ to join them in their garden for hot dogs and treacle toffee. Melanie had decided to take the ‘and friend’ literally and rang Cherry.
‘Um, I’d love to go but I’m already going out. With Helena, that artist you met at the gallery, we’re going to her little boy’s school firework display. Sorry.’
Cherry sounded quite flustered. ‘Are you all right?’ Mel asked her.
‘Not really, I’m doing a bat and I can’t get its wings into position. It keeps falling over.’
‘The coat-hanger technique not working, then?’
‘Not funny, Melanie. I’ve got it stapled to a cake rack at the moment and propped up between a big vase and the toaster, but it’s not quite what I wanted. I need a proper all-round view.’
‘Can’t you hang it from something? Like a model aeroplane?’
‘Hmm. Not sure. Hold on a second . . .’ The phone clattered to a hard surface – Mel guessed it was the kitchen table. She could hear scufflings and shufflings and Cherry saying a triumphant ‘Aha!’
‘You’re a genius, Melanie, what are you? That’s going to work – but I’ve got to do something tricky with stiff wire. Come round tomorrow and I’ll show you. I should have asked you in the first place – being by yourself makes you so resourceful, doesn’t it? Who needs men!’
Perfect Patty was looking wonderful in a soft leather jacket the colour of a rich tea biscuit and lined with long-haired furry stuff that Melanie had seen in the window of Joseph the week before, and had thought glamorously louche. At the time it had so thrilled her it had made her heart beat faster, but she’d hesitated over the alarming price tag: with the bill for the plants still in the system, her credit card might explode. Now, seeing that Patty had nabbed it, she rather regretted her indecision: she couldn’t get one now, obviously, and felt ratty with envy.
Patty looked puzzled to see Mrs Jenkins with Melanie. ‘You said to bring a friend,’ Mel reminded her quickly, fearful that Patty’s initial surprise at greeting the pair of them on her doorstep might turn to tactless incredulity when she realized Mrs Jenkins really had come to join the gathering, and hadn’t coincidentally turned up at the same time as Mel on a quest to borrow a cup of sugar.
‘Lovely!’ Patty rallied. ‘Come through to the back garden! There’s a super little bonfire on the go and David will get you both a drink. Mulled wine?’ She raised her voice to address Mrs Jenkins, as people do in the company of those they consider truly ancient.
‘Thank you, dear,’ Mrs Jenkins said to Patty. ‘You’ve got a lovely boy. He says please and thank you.’
‘Ben? Yes I know!’ Patty beamed, raising her eyebrows slightly to Melanie across the top of Mrs Jenkins’s pink crocheted hat.
‘I’m eighty-one, you know. He’s nice and tall, your boy.’
‘Oh, he is!’ Patty agreed, taking her arm and leading her firmly through her house to where groups of friends and neighbours stood around sipping steaming scarlet drinks in the garden.
Melanie had met most of the guests before – at Christmas drinks parties, summer barbecues. There was Gerald, retired and curmudgeonly, from next door chatting to Paula and Sean from the house opposite, whose window posters frequently proclaimed their anti-Euro views. The rest were mostly fortyish couples with busy working and social lives and children who were forever being ferried to and from extra-curricular lessons: ballet, riding, piano, county-standard rugby, championship-level tennis, in the manner of all the area’s pushed and privileged youth. It was as if, Melanie had often thought, children must be kept occupied at all times in case they sank into terminal couch-potato mode. Given Rosa’s capacity for endless sofa-hogging with no more exercise than a finger-twitch on the remote control, this was probably right. The girl was surely sadly lacking in the necessary social arts of today. If she’d lived in Jane Austen’s time she would have been an equivalent case, hopelessly untutored in bezique, croquet, embroidery, harpsichord playing or watercolour painting.
Patty’s garden fences were prettily strung along their length with fairy lights. The decking she’d had built the year before had a pair of patio heaters blazing out enough kilowatts to keep a good-sized house warm. Melanie took off her gloves and shoved them in her pocket. Mrs Jenkins, installed comfortably at the head of the eight-foot teak table, was unravelling her scarf and helping herself to a sausage from a plateful that had been brought out from the oven. She dunked it into a dish of hot mustard and sucked at it with steady concentration, like a small child being careful with an ice lolly.
‘I like your new haircut. Makes you look very young and fluffy.’ David, Perfect Patty’s not so perfect husband, topped up Melanie’s glass of wine and stood too close beside her. Mel shifted her feet – he was practically on her toes.
‘On your own tonight?’ he went on. ‘Oh sorry, I forgot! Roger’s moved away, I gather. Oh dear, a faux pas.’ David placed a commiserating arm on her shoulder, squeezing and kneading at the base of her neck as if certain she must be sorely missing manly physical contact.
‘He’s got married again. They’re expecting a baby,’ Mel told him. She knew he knew this, Patty would have been sure to tell him, but she also accepted that was no guarantee that he’d either listened or taken the information in. Sarah alway
s said they didn’t, men. Her theory, she’d told Mel, was that all domestic conversation counted as girl stuff unless it was going to make a direct difference to them in some expensive way.
‘You must get lonely, all by yourself with Rosa gone as well. Don’t you get fed up on your own? In need of company?’
It was hard to know if there was something he was getting at. If Melanie was one of those women who was utterly certain that she was permanently at the peak of astounding attractiveness, she might assume he was on the verge of being suggestive. He was more likely to be simply making conversation: Patty was not known as Perfect for nothing. David was not perfect: for one thing, he was a sweaty man. In all weathers his skin leaked unattractively. Tonight, beneath the massively efficient gas heaters, with the warmth stealing up the garden from the bonfire at the far end where a group of children were gathered, he oozed oil like a slab of haddock from a dodgy chip shop.
‘I’m enjoying living on my own. Believe it or not, I’d actually been looking forward to it. I can do just what I like for the first time . . . well, practically ever.’ She should get cards printed, it would save trotting out all this same stuff each time.
‘And you can see who you like, too. A new man on the horizon, is there? I can’t believe a woman like you would be lacking company.’ He leaned even closer. ‘You must let me know if I can . . .’
‘You’re right,’ she interrupted with a sweet smile. ‘You can go out with who you like. I do,’ she said, indicating Mrs Jenkins, now on her second sausage.
‘Darling, a word, do you mind?’ Patty, the gorgeous jacket abandoned because of the heat, took David by the arm and pushed him towards the far end of the garden. Then she grabbed Mel by the wrist and hauled her back into the house.
‘Just a little word, about Ben. Ben and alcohol, I’m sure you’ll understand . . .’
Melanie didn’t. ‘Sorry, Patty, what about it?’
They were in Patty’s silvery-blue conservatory. She had delicate wicker chairs (no sign of any unravelling, who would dare?) with silky-shiny pink cushions – little sparkly beads were embroidered here and there on them. Tiny driftwood picture frames hung in a double row on one wall, each containing just one unblemished seashell.
‘It’s just that on school nights, we’d rather he didn’t drink. You see, the other night I couldn’t help but smell it – after he’d been to you – beer on his breath. And he was home awfully late too, which was frankly a surprise after that little chat we had in the deli. Now I know you must be missing Rosa, but, well, you do see my point, don’t you? Tempting as it must be to have the company of a replacement teenager – well, I’m sorry but we have to think of Ben’s schoolwork. You do see?’
Well, there was a choice. She could protest the truth: that Ben hadn’t been to make use of her computer more than half a dozen times and hadn’t had anything stronger than a Coke from her fridge, or she could keep schtum for him and allow herself be thought of as a sad and lonesome old teen-napper.
‘Of course, Patty, yes, I completely understand,’ she said, seeing Patty’s anxious face break into a highly relieved smile. She watched from the window as the first of the fireworks were lit. Above the sound of the collected oohs and aahs the excited voice of Mrs Jenkins could be heard, at last declaring herself to be eighty-two.
Twelve
It wasn’t hard to guess where Melanie would find her father. Every day since her early childhood he had walked the dog (from the first crotchety Sealyham to the current toothless fox terrier) along the same route: to the top of the avenue, across the main road, through the park with the luridly clashing begonia beds and out to the edge of the common. From there it was a brief pavement stroll round the corner by the Shell garage and back on the home straight. The suburban parade of shops were on this last stretch, where, when she’d been a child, her father had picked up the evening paper on his way home from work. Now long-retired and out and about by mid-morning, he’d tie the dog’s lead to the railing outside the newsagents while he collected a paper (and presumably, if he was still pursuing the soft-porn option, anything else whose front-cover ladies took his fancy). He would then walk the terrier the few yards on to the Three Horseshoes, where the landlord kept a water bowl for dogs beneath the dartboard.
The pub was shabby and scuffed round the edges. No-one had yet seen an opportunity here for gutting and theming. Its buttercream paint peeled and flaked and the carpet was faded and threadbare. The smell of disinfectant saturated the air, overlaid with the scents of a century of spilled ale and exhaled tobacco. Sunlight streamed in through the frosted windows onto the freshly polished oak tables. It was early-morning quiet – Mel could hear no sounds of occupation apart from the rhythmic swish of a floor-mop beyond the door marked ‘Gents’. Across the sticky carpet, beneath a lifeless fruit machine, her father sat wearing his reading glasses, immersed in the Telegraph’s Deaths column. A few other elderly men were dotted around singly, looking as if they’d been deliberately placed at equal distances from each other, each with a newspaper, some also with dogs lying beneath the tables, both dogs and humans tired from their walks. There were no women: this scruffy pub seemed almost to have had its air of neglect cultivated deliberately, to turn it into a male refuge. It was, it occurred to Melanie, the opposite of the spruce, clean home her mother had created. Perhaps there was a theme here, after all – a kind of grubby anti-domestic atmosphere cleverly designed to appeal to over-fussed retired men like her father, who were forever being asked to move their feet out of the way of a vacuum cleaner.
‘Dad? How are you doing?’ Howard looked up in astonishment as Melanie sat down next to him. The dog shambled to its feet, wagged its tail briefly and flopped down again.
‘Melanie! What are you doing here? Is Gwen . . .’
‘It’s OK, Dad, there’s nothing wrong. I can’t pretend I was just passing, so I’ll be honest – I wanted to see you without Mum.’
‘Oh.’ He looked down at the obituary column again, reminding Mel of a sulky child avoiding all-seeing parental eyes.
‘It’s about Christmas.’
‘Christmas?’ He looked as if he’d never heard of the word. Mel felt bad – he obviously thought she’d pursued him to his sanctuary on special orders to find out if he was up to no good. It was as if he imagined she’d been following him, sent by Gwen to body-search him for porn mags, and then report back so she could evict him to spend his remaining days in his shed.
‘Christmas,’ she insisted quietly. ‘I don’t particularly want to go to Vanessa’s. I’m too old to play the failed single daughter – I just can’t be doing with it. It was bad enough last year, everyone knowing Roger and I were just about over. Vanessa kept giving me those looks. So I’m making a grown-up choice: I’m not going. How do you think that will go down with Mum? She seems to think it’s a fait accompli. She’s not very easy to . . .’
‘I know, I know.’ For Howard it didn’t need saying. ‘Melanie, as you just said, you’re an adult. You live on your own, you run your own life. You can do what you like.’ He sighed heavily, and reminded himself with a wry grin, ‘I’m a grown-up too, of course.’
‘Do you mean you don’t much want to go to Vanessa’s either?’ She grinned. ‘Let’s both not!’
‘Well. No. Hand on heart, I love to see both my daughters. But it’s not as if I have to do anything but turn up in a suitable outfit and sit where I’m told to sit. But . . . that Lester’s a dull old bugger, isn’t he? And there’s something odd about those children. Never a word out of them, a pair of Midwich Cuckoos.’
‘So you prefer Boxing Day?’
‘Oh, I do!’ His face lit up. ‘There’s racing on the telly, leftovers to eat as and when . . . no fuss. Yes, I much prefer that.’
‘We could go to Kempton this year if you like, lose a few quid on some no-hopers, in real life instead of by way of the box. What do you think?’
Howard laughed. ‘We could! Let’s! What a brilliant idea. Now that really gives
me something to look forward to.’
She realized immediately that this meant she couldn’t now go away. She couldn’t book into a madly expensive health spa or a Maldives diving centre. It was probably just as well. Getting away from Christmas was an idea that only seemed to work in theory. The thing tended to follow you, to get to you wherever you tried to hide. Why else were holidays a hundred per cent price-inflated during the Christmas/New Year fortnight? It was so that hotels frequented by Western travellers at every corner of the planet could justify rigging out their premises with plastic fir trees and glittery baubles. It was so that hotel staff could ‘entertain’ guests with carol singing and turkey barbecues and Santa in a scarlet and white fun-fur bikini.
So, instead, Mel and Rosa probably would spend the day chez Vanessa after all. Vanessa had a Christmas book that she brought out every October in which she checked off all the things to be done. She always sent out Christmas cards with the current year’s specially organized family photo on the front. When the children had been little she’d got them to wear cardboard antlers, angel haloes or Santa hats. Now there was just body language that wasn’t even remotely ho-ho-ho. On last year’s, William had been scowling, Theresa’s vacant eyes had been avoiding the camera and Vanessa’s smile had looked frantic. In this year’s, Vanessa could well be hiding a sharp knife behind her back to warn against one of the perfect family smiles slipping. She peeled and prepared the sprouts on 22nd November and stashed them in the freezer. Her stuffing was ready by 15th December. She was probably the one person of her generation who insisted on silence for the Queen’s speech. But hell, this wasn’t for life, it was only for Christmas. It was just one day. How much could it hurt?
