by Judy Astley
Fifteen
There was a peculiar noise. A strange beeping woke Melanie. Surfacing from deep sleep into the early morning greyness, she at first half-dreamed there was a sad, trapped bird somewhere in the room, one that had spent the night quietly seeking an escape route but with daybreak had been forced to resort to cheeping for help. Then she sat up fast, her thoughts turning to disaster, to fire and smoke and being trapped alone at the top of a blazing stairwell. But there was no smell of smoke and she quickly realized that it was the phone that was alerting her to its presence. She picked it up as a computer-generated voice ordered her quite crossly to ‘Hang Up Now’. She tried hard to remember the last call she’d made. Surely she hadn’t been out of contact since returning Cherry’s call the morning before? Why had the silly gadget not piped up to tell her off before now? She smiled to herself as she went down the stairs to make a cup of tea – there must have been a highest-level phone company meeting at some time about that. Directors, soberly dressed in proper suits, must have congregated round a boardroom table, solemnly discussing how long a phone could reasonably be expected to be off the hook before a householder should be jolted into reconnecting. The women would opt for a longer time than the men, she decided, as she stacked last night’s abandoned plates and cutlery in the dishwasher. They would be able to imagine plenty of situations where someone might want to leave the phone off the hook. She thought the men would be more reluctant – some might go for a ten-minute maximum, not because of a need to be contacted, but through a general shakiness about having something electronic in the house that was less than fully functioning.
Mel yawned and stretched, catching sight of her tousled bed-hair in the mirror on the dresser. Even though her new edgy hairstyle was meant to look as if she’d been dragged through a bush, this amount of matting and tangling would only look sexy on someone under twenty. Perhaps her mother had a point. How seductive was it to pad around the house in the early morning in a pair of ancient (but free) Virgin Atlantic in-flight oversized grey pyjamas? But then, unless she invited Neil to share her nights, who was there to be seductive for?
When she turned round again, Max was looking in at her through the back-door window and she could feel all her nerves leap at once. ‘God, Max, you made me jump!’ she said as she unlocked and opened the door.
‘I could see that,’ he said with a grin, coming into the kitchen and kicking off his muddy wellies. ‘I thought you were going to hit the ceiling! Sorry. You look nice,’ he commented, grinning at her in what she took to be mock admiration.
‘Sure I do,’ she replied, thinking she could do without sardonic humour at such an early hour. He reached across and switched the kettle on again, then helped himself to a mug from the cupboard and a tea bag from the jar. ‘You do, actually, but you’re so sodding defensive I won’t bother saying it again. It’s bloody cold out there. One of those days when I’m sure I’m in the wrong job. I nearly stayed at home to do the VAT and I don’t often consider that to be an attractive option.’
‘I didn’t think I’d see you again,’ she said as she pushed a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, ‘not after your big win.’ She tried hard, but could feel herself failing, to keep out of her voice a note of slight acidity. It was a thing that didn’t matter, really it didn’t, even though he’d asked her, even though she’d allowed herself to feel a bit flattered, almost honoured. If he’d decided he had more reliable, more trustworthy, probably in truth more downright knowledgeable Friends to Phone than she was, well, that was his choice. It had obviously paid off. Being told now that she ‘looked nice’ felt a bit like being a dog thrown a very tiny bone.
‘It was a big enough win, and a hugely welcome one, but hardly enough to retire on! If I’d only known for sure, and I should have done, that chloroplasts were not present in animal cells . . .’ he laughed. ‘Still, it’s enough to take time out for a bit of travelling. I quite fancy a gap year. I don’t see why kids straight out of school should have all the fun.’
‘Are you leaving right now or will you find a minute or two to wrap up my plants?’ Ridiculously, Mel felt close to tears. She occupied herself quickly, taking the butter and marmalade from the fridge, clattering about with cutlery.
‘Of course I’m not leaving right now. I’m here, aren’t I? Reporting for work? I just wondered . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Why were you gossiping on the phone yesterday morning? I really needed you and I couldn’t get through. In the end I had to ask my sister which writer Elizabeth Jane Howard used to be married to.’
‘Kingsley Amis,’ Mel answered promptly.
‘I knew you’d know. She wasn’t sure if it was him or William Golding. It cost me a fifty-fifty lifeline. If you’d been available instead of yacking all day I might be looking at a cheque for a million.’
Melanie laughed. He didn’t really sound as if he minded too much. So he had tried to contact her. She felt a bit pathetic that such a small thing sent her spirits soaring. Perhaps her mother was halfway right, hormones might be involved. ‘The phone got left off the hook. It was an accident, I was a bit distracted by events, I’ll tell you about it. Though I was rather surprised to see you on the programme, I only caught the part where you were going off with your cheque. You never said the day before that you’d be on.’
‘I didn’t know! It was recorded that morning, all very, very last-minute. They keep a couple of spare contestants ready in the studio in case someone keels over with nerves. But during a break the night before, four of them went and pigged out on dodgy chicken burgers from a van outside the studio and got instantly ill. I was only called in because I lived near. And then, well we had to put four Welsh towns in alphabetical order. Abergavenny, Aberystwyth, Abersoch and one I can’t remember and I did it fastest.’
‘That was clever of you. I’d just rush it and get it wrong.’
‘It’s from looking in plant directories – I’m always searching the index for stuff.’
‘I thought you’d changed your mind – that you’d decided you didn’t need me.’ She hadn’t at all intended to say it. The words had just let themselves out without any help.
‘And you minded?’ Max looked mildly incredulous.
She shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, just a bit. Not a lot, you know.’
‘Yeah, I know. Go and get dressed, Mel, you can help me wrap these plants.’
Mel was in the shower when Neil phoned. He left a message on the machine saying he’d be round that evening to take her out for supper, and that he wasn’t going to leave her a number and give her a chance to think up an excuse not to see him. Bloody control freak, she thought, cutting off her options. Perhaps she could just go out, or hide in bed with the lights off. On second thoughts, going out would be good for her and possibly good fun too.
‘I don’t know why he bothers,’ she told Sarah on the phone, ‘I haven’t exactly been over-encouraging.’
‘Well, you did have sex with him the first time you set eyes on him after more than twenty years,’ Sarah reminded her, rather unnecessarily in Mel’s opinion. ‘Perhaps he thinks that as you’re so impulsive, your impulses in the old sex department might just kick in again at any moment.’
‘I don’t think they will. Definitely not here on home territory anyway – I’m keeping my bed as a personal man-free sanctuary. Anyway, why I phoned is, do you have a number where I can reach him? You must have had one for that time you invited him to the dinner at your place.’
‘Sorry sweetie, would love to be of use but it was on a tatty scrap of paper and I’ve lost it.’
Melanie couldn’t help picturing Sarah with her long skinny fingers crossed. She could almost see the bronze-varnished nails flashing as they moved swiftly to placate the gods against the lie. She felt inclined to drive round to Sarah’s immaculate, brilliantly organized house, open her desk drawer and look under ‘N’ in her address book. Sarah didn’t go in for ‘tatty scraps of paper’. Neil would certainly be listed t
here, address and phone number neatly noted down by Sarah’s Mont Blanc fountain pen and luscious purple ink. Mel couldn’t be cross with her, though. Sarah liked everything properly arranged. She was simply doing her best to tidy Melanie away into convenient coupledom. It was too late now to insist to Sarah that she didn’t want to tell Neil that she wouldn’t go that night – she only wanted to know what time they were going and where to. Clothes-wise, it would make a difference. She didn’t want to wear jeans and a snug old sweater to the Ivy or her little black suede dress to Pizza Express.
Mrs Jenkins’s son Brian was even bigger and sturdier than his sister Brenda. He squeezed through the gate in the fence into Melanie’s back garden as she and Max draped thin layers of protective fleece carefully around the Washingtonia and secured it with string. Brian was wearing a huge plaid woodcutter’s jacket that Mel guessed had been sent by his sister from Canada, probably at a time when he’d been a good bit thinner. He moved slowly across the garden, treading warily and staring with suspicion at the palms. The poodle, expecting to follow him as he used to with Mrs Jenkins, yapped furiously from the other side of the closed gate.
‘I saw you from the upstairs window,’ he told Mel. ‘I didn’t think you’d hear me if I rang your front doorbell.’
‘That’s OK,’ Mel said, wiping her earthy hands on her scarf. ‘How is your mother?’
Brian shoved his hands deep in his pockets. He gazed at the ground and scuffed at the pebbles with the toe of his shoe, kicking them up into a pile and exposing the layer of black fabric beneath. Mel glanced quickly at Max, who was looking at Brian with an expression of furious outrage, like an artist who finds someone in their studio casually picking chunks of oil paint off a precious canvas.
‘She’s not very well,’ Brian said eventually. ‘She’s had a big shock to the system and she’s going to need full time care.’ He looked terrified by the prospect, as well he might, Mel thought: he’d be her only relative in this country when Brenda escaped back to Canada.
‘So we thought – we might do a bit to the house.’ He gestured with his shoulder towards his mother’s home. ‘Tart it up and sell it. It’ll pay for her keep in a home down near me.’
‘A home?’ Mel said, astonished. ‘Like a full-time residential place? Is she really as bad as that?’
‘Well, she can’t look after herself, that’s obvious – her eyesight’s rubbish and the knock on her head, well, they think it might have triggered a minor stroke. We can have her for a little while, just till she’s properly herself again, like, but . . . well, there’s the wife.’ He was starting to sound angry now, defensive, as if Mel had put up a series of arguments against what he’d decided. ‘I’ve got to think of the wife. She’s not well herself.’
‘Oh really? I’m sorry about that,’ Mel said.
‘It’s her nerves.’ Oh, is it? Mel thought, feeling anger rising which she tried hard to quell – after all, who was she to say who should or shouldn’t share their home with Mrs Jenkins? Unless she herself was prepared to take her on, it didn’t exactly do to criticize others.
‘And I’m working, it would all fall on her. Mum’ll be all right. We’ve found somewhere she’ll like.’
‘Have you?’ Max chipped in. ‘My, that was quick.’
‘Yes, well. We’ve kept an eye on things. Doesn’t do to be unprepared, does it?’
‘Oh no,’ Max agreed, turning back to securing the last of the Washingtonia’s bonds. ‘It doesn’t do at all.’
‘We’ll take the dog on though, that’s something.’
‘Mmm. Yes, it almost is,’ Max muttered.
‘If she stayed here in her own home – I could keep an eye on her,’ Mel suggested.
‘But you already have,’ Brian pointed out. ‘You’ve been a good neighbour, she said so. Brenda said so. But this still happened. And next time she might fall down the stairs or something. And what if you’re away? On holiday or something?’
‘She could have one of those alarms, the ones that go round your neck, you know, just in case.’
Brian laughed. ‘She wouldn’t use it. She’d think she was being a nuisance.’
He was right, Mel knew he was. Mrs Jenkins wouldn’t come back to her home. She’d leave the hospital in Brian’s car and go and live in a Somerset town where she knew nobody. She and Mel would send Christmas cards to each other. Mel would write now and then and let her know what was going on, tell her when Roger’s new baby was born, when Rosa graduated. Gradually, as time passed, little of it would make sense to her former neighbour, but she’d be thrilled to receive the letters. Mel knew how excited she always was about the post. An assistant at the home would read them to her – she might even find her frequently-mislaid reading glasses for her so she could, at last, do it herself. She would tell people she was eighty-two, and with luck might remember when she got to eighty-three. Then one day Mel would have a short note from Brian saying that Mrs Jenkins had died. He’d say ‘passed away’. The funeral would already have taken place, and none of her former friends and neighbours would have been there to send her on her way over the horizon to the next life.
Brian went back through the fence gate to start packing away his mother’s possessions. Mel hoped he and Brenda wouldn’t simply throw most of them away carelessly, but, on present form, she wouldn’t be surprised to see a skip outside before the weekend.
Mel was on her way out to get her manuscript photocopied in the town when Ben called round. ‘Oh, you going out?’ he said, catching her at the door already wearing a coat, scarf and gloves.
‘Sure am, Ben, do you want to use the computer?’
He shuffled his feet about on the path. ‘Well, if you don’t mind . . .’ he said. ‘I won’t touch anything.’
‘It never occurred to me that you would,’ she told him. ‘Come in, help yourself to tea or coffee and biscuits. I’ll be about an hour.’
What on earth did he imagine that she’d think he’d want to ‘touch’, she wondered, as she drove into the town and parked at Waitrose. Perhaps it was that teen-boy thing of having so much sex on the brain (and nowhere else) that he imagined she’d think he’d be rifling through her knicker drawer as soon as she was safely round the corner. Well, Patty had been clear enough about that – she didn’t need to be convinced that Ben would have no interest in her and her underwear at all.
Christmas was in full swing in the town. Dickins and Jones’s windows were full of fairy lights and outfits of the glitter-and-velvet combination that turned up every year for what magazines called the party season. It was strange, Mel thought as she walked past, how the same clothes, the moment Twelfth Night was past, looked overdone and faintly ridiculous. It was like leaving the decorations up for too long. Possibly it was even unlucky to go out in a velvet and diamanté frock after 6th January, especially if the dress was scarlet and strappy and teamed with a sequinned pashmina, as was the one she’d stopped to look at.
‘Looking for something to wear tonight?’ Sarah appeared next to Mel.
‘Oh hi, Sarah. Tonight? No! I was just wondering who on earth buys these things. And where do they wear them?’
‘They are corporate wives who go to Botox parties and they wear them to the firm’s annual Christmas dinner dance. The pashmina isn’t to keep warm, it’s to obscure flabby arms.’
Mel laughed and continued, ‘But after a few drinks, when it gets a bit hot, the pashmina falls to the floor and . . .’
‘And Mrs Corporate Wife takes to the dance floor to shake it all about to “Dancing Queen”.’
‘Does she know all the words?’
‘She does and she sings them. I know. My name is Sarah and I am that Corporate Wife.’ Sarah pulled a face of mock tragedy.
‘Get lost, you don’t have the arms for it.’
‘That’s true.’ She took a last look at the dress as they moved on. ‘And I’d have it in black, not red. One is not Santa Claus. Let’s treat ourselves, Mel, seeing as it’s only a few short hectic weeks til
l Christmas, let’s go in All Bar One and have a spritzer.’
The place was busy, loud with post-lunch lingerers and shoppers surrounded by bags, who, having achieved a serious amount of purchases, were recharging themselves for another few hours battling in the stores.
‘Two spritzers please!’ Melanie yelled over the racket to the barman.
‘I’ll bring them, find a seat!’ he shouted back.
‘OK, we’ll be just over . . .’ Melanie said as she turned to look for a table. ‘Well, just look who’s here,’ she said to Sarah, spotting Neil at a table with a woman a good few years younger than themselves. ‘Let’s go over here by the window, I don’t much want to see him right now so . . .’
She shouldn’t have mentioned him – in this crowd Sarah might not have noticed. But it was too late. ‘Oh yes, so he is! And there are spare seats at his table.’ Sarah either wasn’t listening or didn’t hear and marched across the bar, picking her way between bags and people.
‘We’ll be over there at that corner table,’ Mel told the barman, racing after Sarah, hoping to catch up with her before she said anything mad, ambiguous or downright incriminating.
‘Hello Neil, mind if we join you?’ Sarah was saying as she arrived.
‘Oh!’ Neil looked up, instantly flustered. ‘Er, hello Sarah, Mel, are you well?’ he asked.
