No Place For a Man

by Judy Astley

  ‘That’s not very fair to Marilyn is it?’ Natasha countered. ‘That’s just wasting her time. We should buy something, the Gazette should pay.’ She looked down at her questionnaire. ‘It says here which designers do I prefer? What shall I put?’

  ‘Just put Miss Selfridge and Top Shop. Don’t go getting fancy ideas,’ Jess told her crossly, wondering, rather guiltily, if she’d spelled Nicole Farhi’s name right. It seemed vaguely sinful, somehow, chewing over the merits of Donna Karan and Jasper Conran when the once-bountiful well that was Matthew’s income was about to run dry. This is just my job, not real life, she reminded herself, as one of Marilyn’s colleagues hurtled in towing a rail crammed with new-season delights.

  Zoe got off the coach in the middle of the small town. With its old market hall in the centre of the square and so many half-timbered shops it reminded her of a film set for something Jane Austen-ish. There was no sign of Emily and she stood nervously at the bus stop feeling awkward, shifting her bag to her left shoulder and wondering what she was supposed to do now. Emily had said she’d try to meet her, but she hadn’t actually promised and Zoe wished she’d listened more carefully when Emily had been giving her the directions to the school. At least it wasn’t raining and miserable. It was warm enough now to take off her sweater and tie it round her middle. She waited for what seemed like endless minutes and then went into a small, scruffy supermarket.

  ‘Mansfield School? Just behind the library and across the rec,’ the assistant, pricing up tins of peas and too bored even to look up from her work, told her as if Zoe was likely to be familiar with these landmarks already.

  ‘Thanks,’ Zoe muttered, too disheartened to pursue the matter and hoping she’d have better luck with the next person she asked. At least it seemed to be within walking distance. That meant Emily and Giles must have been too lazy to wander as far as the local chemist for contraceptive supplies. Perhaps they spent all their spare cash on drugs and booze instead. Her mum had been writing about that not long ago, about how some boarding-school kids competed at being bad. She wished she hadn’t come. Emily must surely have someone at school she could have told, someone who could help her sort this problem out. Didn’t they have matrons who were motherly and forgiving and could be counted on to give them a big hug, a cup of cocoa and the number of the nearest abortion clinic?

  ‘Zoe! You came!’ Emily was bounding over the recreation ground, expertly sidestepping dollops of dog mess.

  ‘Course I did. Said I would didn’t I?’ Zoe put her bag down and allowed herself to be hugged. Emily felt horribly bony. Maybe she’d been sick a lot in the mornings and got thinner.

  Emily’s delight evaporated. ‘You’re not cross are you? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s OK.’ Zoe shrugged. She didn’t want to give Emily any reason to dissolve into the kind of tears she’d gushed the week before at the allotment. Her eyes already looked huge and troubled and ready to pour all over her big broad cheekbones. They could be hours mopping up if that happened.

  ‘Come and see everyone.’ Emily linked her arm through Zoe’s. ‘I’d really like you to meet Giles.’

  He was the last person Zoe wanted to see: she wouldn’t be able to do anything but picture him having sex with Emily and even if he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio she’d rather not think about that, but she was curious to get a look at the inside of the school.

  ‘Do you sleep in dormitories?’ she asked as they pushed through a tatty green door into a disappointingly modern addition to a grim Victorian building just like the old hospital near home that was being pulled down. Zoe had hoped for something that looked grand and important, like Winchester College which she’d seen on the Antiques Roadshow on television.

  ‘No of course we don’t. We share rooms in twos and you can’t choose who with because you’re supposed to love everyone here in a kind of, what is it, democratic way. Being best friends isn’t encouraged. I’m in with this complete spoon called Louisa who practises the bloody clarinet all the time.’

  Zoe laughed. ‘If you loved everyone democratically wouldn’t that mean you’d have slept with more than just Giles?’

  Emily frowned. ‘Ssh! Someone might hear. That was against the rules, completely. I told you. We can do anything except sex, drugs and watch the kind of telly that we really like. Oh and we can’t run in the corridors.’

  ‘Sounds fun. Not.’ They’d reached the end of the building. Zoe could hear music behind the double doors facing them and identified Travis’s ‘Driftwood’ which Natasha had played to death for the three days after she’d bought it.

  Zoe felt horribly shy. Walking into the crowded common room reminded her of crossing the square by the Leo when Tash’s old primary-school friend Mel and all her mates were sprawled on the benches smoking. You didn’t want to be unfriendly because they might say something horrible that you’d just about hear after you’d walked past, but if you smiled and got blanked it felt worse. Here, though, she needn’t have worried.

  ‘Everyone, this is my very best friend Zoe from home!’ Zoe didn’t catch any of the names, there were too many. The girls all looked similar, as if living together for so long they’d evolved a look of their own. They blurred into a type: remarkably clear complexions, long straight hyper-clean hair, trousers in varying shades of beige balanced on slim hips and tight pastel cardigans. They were smiling (perfect teeth), friendly and delighted to see her, as if a visit from the outside was an exciting novelty.

  ‘And Zoe, this is Giles.’ Emily pulled her down the room to where a lank-haired boy was slouched across a tatty blue armchair. She felt quite disappointed, almost cheated. She’d assumed that any bloke who could charm the knickers off someone as young as Emily must be the school stud: an irresistible mixture of Michael Owen, Brad Pitt and Dylan the guitarist from Simplicity. This boy, shortish, running to soft plumpness around the neck and with a prize-winning outcrop of very busy acne, was someone she and her mates wouldn’t waste the effort turning to look at even if he yelled at them from a passing Ferrari. He glanced up briefly, grunted something unidentifiable in a tone that suggested it was a huge effort to be even basically polite and went back to reading the sports pages in the Sun.

  ‘We’d better get going.’ Emily tugged at her arm. ‘We’ll miss the bus.’

  ‘Bus? I thought we were going to hitch.’ Zoe had been looking forward to that. It would have added even more to the ridiculous drama of the day.

  ‘You don’t wanna hitch,’ Giles grunted. ‘Getta cab.’ Zoe glared at him, but he hadn’t looked up from the paper.

  ‘Maybe you should give us the fare,’ she hissed at him. The room quietened.

  ‘No, Zo, come on. Let’s just go.’ Emily pulled her out into the corridor. ‘What did you say that for?’ she yelled into Zoe’s face as soon as they were a few safe steps from the door.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t exactly seem to care much about where you’re going, does he? Is he always getting girls pregnant? Has he got an account at the clinic?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with him! Not now! Oh let’s just get out of here.’ Emily stumped off out of the building and strode ahead towards the town centre.

  ‘Yeah,’ Zoe growled to herself. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s happened again: there’s definitely been someone in. Don’t tell me I’m imagining it, the house smells different.’ Angie leaned forward so that her breasts seemed to be propped up on the table like a presentation pair of George’s firmest allotment cabbages. It crossed Matthew’s mind that she could have worn something that covered her front rather more adequately. She was a bit long in the tooth (though not that long), to be honest, for those cute little cardigans that Natasha and Zoe favoured and which reminded him of babies’ matinee jackets. This powder-blue one was undoubtedly cashmere, threaded through at the edges with lavender satin ribbon that was supposed to tie the top edges together. It seemed to have given up under the strain of Angie’s anatomy and the loose ends dangled helplessly. Matthew
wasn’t used to eyeing up women in a sexually questing way. At work he had had to be scrupulously non-interested to the point where he’d no longer dared to think about it: the sharp-edged females in the PR business prided themselves on being able to read a grubby male mind from the far side of an armour-plated door. But now he was free from office life it was as if some long-lost primitive urges were filing back into the brain space vacated by conferences on media might, clients’ flow charts and the phone number for Question Time’s researcher.

  ‘Did this mystery intruder take anything?’ Matthew asked.

  Angie frowned, then just as quickly stopped as if remembering not to furrow her brow and make lines. ‘No. Nothing. That’s the thing. I mean you can’t complain to the police when there’s nothing to complain about, can you? I’d even left jewellery lying about in the bedroom. I couldn’t see anything missing.’

  ‘No, well you wouldn’t,’ Matthew commented.

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘See it. If it was missing. Sorry, just that in PR you use words carefully. It’s in case you’re misinterpreted.’ He laughed. ‘You can stretch the truth till you can make balloon animals out of it, but you have to choose words that won’t leave you floundering to explain yourself.’

  ‘Oh.’ She wasn’t interested. ‘But you don’t do that any more,’ she pointed out.

  ‘No.’ Despair threatened, to his surprise. ‘No, and that’s good,’ he rallied. ‘So why do you think someone’s been in?’

  ‘I told you, it smells different. And the towels were wet in the spare-room shower.’

  Matthew could feel his face breaking into an unattractive smirk. ‘Have you had someone in that you’ve, er, invited?’

  ‘What and forgotten about?’ Angie snapped. ‘Look, it was probably the cleaning lady or something, or a stray cat got in and sprayed. Forget it.’

  After she’d gone, Matthew wandered round the house wishing Jess would come home and cheer him up. They could go down to the travel agents and book themselves a last-minute weekend in Barcelona or something. Or check out some Internet bargains. It would do them both good to get away, blow some of the golden payout on a bit of foreign fun.

  The new and unwelcome feeling of despair lingered at the back of his mind, getting in the way of the wonderful buoyed-up excitement at life’s possibilities that he’d had since the great redundancy day. He wasn’t the only one who’d left the company that day, but he was the only one who had no intention of ever going back there, not even for a visit. One or two had made tentative plans to meet up every second Thursday in the month for a drink but he didn’t want any of that. It was too much like clinging to the wreckage of a career. And besides, without that career what on earth would they find to talk about? If they’d wanted to discuss their gardens or their families or their passion for scuba-diving off the remotest coasts of Scotland surely they’d have done it before now.

  He grabbed his jacket from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, checked that his keys were in his pocket and went out. He’d go and talk to Ben and Micky, have some lunch and put more thought into some kind of future career plans. Maybe the Cat Sat, as a concept, hadn’t really got legs, so to speak, but something else would come up, it was only a matter of time.

  Jess calculated that she was already about three hundred pounds down and it would have been a lot more if Natasha had had her way. There wasn’t any point working like this: at this rate she’d end up spending far more than she was being paid. Marilyn had hurtled round the store with Jess, Natasha and Robin in hot pursuit, barely stopping to grab clothes from the rails. ‘You like Donna Karan don’t you Jess, we’ll try this in both colours, oh and you’d love Colette Dinnigan and this Elspeth Gibson. Now Natasha, Anna Sui is just your sort of thing, and what about Press & Bastyan?’

  It was probably because of the camera: everyone in the Personal Shopping area seemed to be joining in freely in a most un-English sort of way. Natasha, of course, had taken over as the star turn. Being 5′8″, long-limbed and slim, and with a small cute face like a naughty elf she was a dream to dress. All the Home Counties ladies cooed and smiled at her and told her she looked gorgeous each time she emerged from the changing room and sashayed about in front of the mirrors while Robin’s camera snapped away. Unnoticed, and quite relieved that this was the case, Jess picked out a pair of black linen Nicole Farhi trousers for herself.

  ‘Everything looks just lovely on you, dear,’ Marilyn told Natasha. ‘Though I don’t think pale pink is your colour.’ Mid-rose was though, it was finally agreed, and Natasha, gazing at her reflection, put on her most persuasive, begging, ‘please Mum’ expression. The dress did look wonderful. It was two layers, one deep pink, one purple, high-waisted with a drawstring under the bust, short and with little puffed frill-edged sleeves that reminded Jess of toddlers’ outfits. There was absolutely no chance she would get away with saying no to Natasha. Jess looked round at their audience’s eager faces challenging her to deny her daughter, sighed, and gave in, fishing in her bag for her credit card.

  ‘Thanks Mum.’ Natasha was so thrilled she linked her arm through her mother’s as they left the store. ‘Shall we get some lunch now?’

  ‘I can’t afford lunch,’ Jess grouched. ‘What had you in mind? The Ivy? The Savoy?’

  Natasha giggled. ‘Mm, either would be nice.’

  ‘We should get home. I need to write this up while it’s still fresh in my mind.’

  Natasha tugged at her arm. ‘Can’t we just grab something fast? I’m starving. I really need something with chips. Let’s just go into … look, there’s a Café Rouge over there.’

  Natasha was halfway through her steak when she suddenly went silent and looked strangely sad.

  ‘What’s wrong, Tash? Has the pain come back?’ Jess asked.

  ‘No. It’s just, all that money.’

  ‘I know. Still, according to your dad he shouldn’t have any trouble getting himself some kind of job again soon.’ If only, she thought, saying it made it true.

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ Natasha pushed the rest of her food to the side of her plate and started picking through her salad with her fingers. ‘I was thinking about Tom. He’s probably never even seen that kind of money, and we just bought a dress and a pair of trousers with it. Just one dress, not even loads of dresses. Just one.’

  Jess wasn’t sure which way to feel. On the one hand she was delighted that her daughter was showing signs of growing a social conscience, but on the other she didn’t want her not to enjoy a bit of personal luck.

  ‘We don’t do this every day, Tasha, this was just a treat, a one-off.’

  ‘Some people just don’t get treats. Tom doesn’t.’

  ‘I take it you really like him?’ Jess knew this was a risky question. Natasha might immediately clam up. One of Nelson’s columns had been about exactly that: the delicate business of extracting romance information from a teenager. She’d likened it to trying to twiddle out the meat from inside the tiniest of a lobster’s claws: it required gentle persistence, steady concentration and light-handedness, otherwise you were left with something that wasn’t whole, was messed-about-with and not particularly satisfying. So it was with adolescents. Natasha clearly had something to say but would need delicate handling if she was to be persuaded to come out with it.

  ‘It’s like, well Tom hasn’t got a proper home.’ Natasha hadn’t answered Jess’s question. Jess wasn’t sure she minded that: how much of a fifteen-year-old’s love life did anyone really feel like finding out?

  ‘He said he’s all right though, living with foster people.’ Jess reached across the table and helped herself to a piece of Natasha’s tomato. ‘Do they give him a hard time?’

  Natasha grinned, looking down at her plate as if the grin wasn’t meant to be shared. ‘No, not any more,’ she said.

  ‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? And he can come and see us whenever you want him to, you know. The way he wolfed down that dinner last week, he certainly see
med to be in need of a square meal.’

  Natasha’s face brightened. ‘Can he? Can he live with us for a bit? He could have Oliver’s room, especially as you wouldn’t let me have it.’

  Jess laughed. ‘You’re fifteen and you want your boyfriend, who you’ve known less than a fortnight, to move in with us! Are you mad? Suppose you go off him in another week, what happens then? We can’t send him off to a rejected boys’ rehoming centre, you know!’ Natasha wasn’t laughing and Jess put on a more serious face. ‘Sorry love, let’s just see how things go, shall we? Invite him for supper again, whenever you like.’

  Natasha looked at the floor and muttered, ‘So you can see if he’s really suitable.’

  ‘No. So that you can. Shall we go home now?’

  Natasha looked up, flustered. ‘Er, do we have to? Can’t we do something else?’

  ‘No! No more shopping!’ Jess counted out coins for the tip and put her jacket back on.

  ‘But Mum, it’s early … I know, you really need a haircut. Let’s go and do that somewhere. I’ll tell them what to do and then I’ll just sit and read magazines. Please Mum, let’s not go home yet.’

  Seven

  ‘… scuba-diving the Barrier Reef – totally awesome, water colour the most spectacular blue ever. Moored up at a little island, no trees just a sand mound in middle of the reef, with beautiful turquoise sea with darker patches marking out the reef as far as you could see. The mountains of Cairns in the background and a few high cirrus clouds. Stunner …’

  She was glad he was having a good time, she was delighted for him but it was impossible not to be hugely envious. Oliver sounded so blissfully free of worries, as if, with no more exams to think about, no work to get up for, he was gradually emptying his head of everything except the joy of the moment. It must be like being a small child again. Jess imagined him lying on the sand, staring up at the sky, watching the high thin clouds scudding past. She remembered doing that when she was a teenager, she and her friends losing themselves to the mildly trippy feeling of the sky’s movement till they felt the earth turning fast with them perched precariously on top of it, like being on a slightly nerve-wracking fairground ride.