No Place For a Man

by Judy Astley

  ‘Well, he did work for six months,’ Jess pointed out. ‘It didn’t leave much time for anything else.’

  ‘It left enough time for clubbing, drinking and sleeping,’ Matt said with a grin. ‘I used to be terribly envious. Now I’ve got time for all three and …’

  ‘And the one you don’t much fancy is clubbing?’ Jess finished for him.

  ‘Well … I dunno, should give it a try I suppose.’

  ‘We need to go out and do something, all together,’ Jess said to Matt one night while they were making coffee in the kitchen after another subdued, unnaturally polite supper.

  ‘We could visit Highgate Cemetery,’ he suggested. ‘Get a historical perspective. And then we could drop in at the Natural Death Society, the office is quite close by …’ His words trailed away. ‘Sorry, just thinking in terms of research,’ he said. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘So you’re still pursuing the undertaking idea?’ It had been over a week, she thought disloyally: given the usual pattern, he and the Leo crowd should have moved on to another million-making brainwave by now.

  ‘Course I am. We all are. But what’s all this about an outing?’

  ‘I’ve got to go and do that sport thing for the Gazette this week, and Paula’s secretary has booked me into a really smart golf club at a converted stately home in the middle of Surrey. We could all go, they’ve offered a free lunch.’

  Matthew looked doubtful. ‘I thought there was no such thing. There definitely wasn’t when I was working. I don’t think it’s got much teenage appeal either,’ he said. ‘It sounds like the “Sunday run out” our parents used to take us on when we were kids. About as much fun as typhoid.’

  ‘Mine didn’t. You know George never approved of cars.’ Jess laughed. ‘We used to go to museums in town by tube or out to the country by Green Line bus. That was exciting, Dad never used to check if there was a bus home again so it was always a bit of an adventure.’

  ‘Did you get marched round stately homes? We did – Blenheim and Hampton Court Palaces, Windsor, Arundel and Leeds Castles – they all blurred into one after a while. And they were all freezing.’

  ‘No we didn’t! Can you see Dad handing over money to prop up the aristocracy? He’d only have paid to see them guillotined!’

  ‘Perhaps we could bribe the girls with something?’ Matt suggested.

  ‘Well, I’ve thought of that. This place is also a hotel and health spa, so I thought while I’m doing the golf lesson and talking to the people who run it, the girls could go and have a treatment or two, a massage perhaps or a facial and a manicure, something like that.’

  ‘Mmm. And what kind of incentive can you offer me?’ He nudged her across the kitchen till he’d got her pressed up against the fridge. ‘If I forego the manicure do I get a massage with some seriously filthy extras?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Jess laughed. ‘It’s a highly respectable establishment!’

  ‘Oh boring. I’ll just have to make do with what I can get at home …’

  It had been surprisingly easy to get Zoe and Natasha to agree to go to Featherfield Hall. Even Natasha had allowed herself to break out of her long sulk and show a bit of enthusiasm. The car had barely pulled out of the Grove before she started on a tentative shopping list.

  ‘When you have a facial, I read in Marie Claire that it’s really important to buy some of the stuff afterwards. Otherwise you can’t keep all the good work going. So can I?’ she asked. It was going to be an expensive day, Jess realized: this wasn’t the kind of place where bargain-priced products were used.

  ‘You can, but don’t go mad,’ she agreed. ‘You only need a bit of mild moisturizer at your age.’

  ‘Oh and cleanser and toner and something round my eyes at night so I don’t get lines and some face-mask stuff would be good as well,’ Natasha went on, recognizing, and preparing to exploit, Jess’s attempt at bridge-building.

  ‘Don’t push your luck,’ Matt warned. ‘Or your mother will have nothing left from what she earns today.’

  ‘Tash is good at that,’ Zoe said. ‘And if she’s having things, I should too. I need really top-quality gloop: my skin is very sensitive.’

  ‘So is my credit card,’ Jess reminded her.

  It was a very long time since they’d all been out together in one car as a family. The two girls slumped comfortably in the back seat of the Golf, Zoe occasionally pecking at her Gameboy and Natasha gazing out of the window as if it was a long time since she’d seen the fascinating views from the M3. Jess had another missing-Oliver moment. It would be a crush these days if he was with them as well (and he’d probably be the one driving) but she indulged in a bit of nostalgia, remembering the journeys to holidays in Devon and Cornwall when the children were little. There’d been the downsides of course, such as the ‘When are we there?’ questions that had started the moment they’d passed Basingstoke and turned off on to the A303, and Tash had gone through a phase of feeling sick and having to be let out for some dramatic and exaggerated gulps of air every ten miles. She remembered Zoe’s tape of nursery songs and the day, after the seventeenth rendering of ‘We are Woodmen Sawing Trees’, Matthew had removed the tape from its slot and hurled it out of the window somewhere near Honiton. Zoe had wailed so desperately they’d had to do a three-point turn right there on the jammed-up bank holiday A30 and go back to retrieve it from the hedge. ‘That’s why you often see great long shreds of tape along the grass verges,’ Matt had grumbled as he’d clambered out of the nettle-strewn ditch with the tape. ‘If you played them, I bet every single time you’d hear that bloody “Wheels on the Bus”.’

  Perhaps there was a positive side to Matthew being out of work after all: at least he now got to join in with the day-to-day family stuff. Even over the Natasha/Tom episode, he hadn’t been able to cop out immediately after the weekend and take refuge in the office. She felt quite sorry that over the long years of the children growing up, his involvement with them, apart from holidays, had usually been limited to evenings and weekends. It happened to too many men, being left out so that they hardly knew which road to take if they were delivering a child to ballet or to the stables. Angie had said that part of the reason she’d sent Emily and Luke to boarding school was that she couldn’t bear David giving her a vague and questioning look whenever she asked him to come with her to sports day or to pick them up from the after-school drama club. She said that if they weren’t actually present in front of him, David found it hard to recall that he had children at all. There’d been something of a backfiring outcome here when Angie had discovered that by kindly relieving David of the daily burden of his children she seemed to have given him the impression that she’d set him free from his wife as well, and he’d gone off to live in the kind of loft apartment aspired to by far younger men, equipped with a woman half Angie’s age.

  At least, so far, Matt hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to go the same way as Angie’s David. It seemed to be enough for him to hang about with the ‘lads’ at the Leo. It wouldn’t be enough for long though, she thought. Smoking Eddy’s home-grown after a lunchtime drinks session, playing at looking for billion-earning business opportunities and ringing up the council about carelessly placed wheelie bins and unlit skips in the road wasn’t going to satisfy him for long. She took a quick look at his profile as he drove. He had a look of contentment tinged with amusement, as if he’d just recalled a joke someone had told him and was thinking of putting it into words for the rest of them to enjoy.

  ‘I’ve never wanted to play golf,’ he said, as if sensing that she knew he was about to speak.

  ‘Well that’s OK, you’ll never be forced to.’ She patted his arm in a gesture of mock-comforting.

  ‘I know everyone thinks that’s what all men are desperate to do the minute they’ve retired, or been retired, but I’ve never seen the point,’ he went on. ‘I mean what do you get from hitting a little ball round a park?’

  ‘Tiger Woods gets lots of money,’ Natasha
said smartly.

  ‘And you see the point of cricket,’ Zoe added. ‘Most of the rest of us can’t.’

  ‘Ah, now cricket’s different. It’s a glorious game and it’s about teams and tradition and …’

  ‘Grandad says it’s about Britain’s shameful imperial past,’ Natasha interrupted. ‘And how we enslaved poorer nations and all that stuff.’

  ‘Well maybe it was then,’ Matt conceded. ‘But with either game I’ll never be good enough to make money at it. I think I’ve only just realized that, that I’ll never excel at anything. I think most people get their heads round that one by my age. I must be a bit slow.’

  Jess pointed out a sign for Featherfield Hall and Matt turned the car off the main road.

  ‘I’ll never be an Olympic gymnast, not now, or a swimmer. I’ve got my head round that OK,’ Zoe announced.

  ‘Did you want to be?’ Jess turned and asked her.

  Zoe shrugged. ‘What? Be an Olympic swimmer? No, not really. Think of the massive effort. And so boring, all those pointless lengths for hours on end.’

  ‘Lazy sod.’ Tash prodded her.

  ‘The list of things you won’t be brilliant at just gets depressingly longer as you get older,’ Jess told them. ‘The trick is to recognize what you do like doing at a time when you can get good enough at it for it to be fun.’

  Matthew stopped the car in front of Featherfield Hall next to a sign that said ‘No parking, members only’.

  ‘It’s what I’ve been saying ever since I got fired,’ he told Jess. ‘Never waste your life on something that only feels so-so.’ He looked around at the view. ‘Now where do we go from here?’

  Featherfield Hall, courtesy of a major hotel chain and a vast amount of smart City investment, had been restored way beyond its former glory. It looked as clean and fresh as it must have done when it was built: from its vast pillared main door to its crenellated roof the very bricks looked as if they’d been individually scrubbed back to the pale gold colour of weak winter sunlight. Neatly trained wisteria was about to break into flower beneath all the upstairs windows and a froth of clematis montana bloomed around the porch.

  Jess peered around her as she stepped out of the car. There was no sign of golfers, no earth-scarring sand bunkers and no snappy little notices about not walking on the greens and allowing foursomes to tee off first that were the usual features of suburban golf clubs. Instead she looked out towards a long slender lake, over a Capability Brown-style landscape complete with mature trees, little bridges and in the distance what looked like a pretty mock-classical temple. It was as if someone in charge had struck a deal with nature by which the man-made element would do its best not to intrude into the landscape so long as nature didn’t run too rampant in return.

  ‘Where’s the golf then?’ Matt asked, surveying the view. ‘I was all ready to say what a crap deal it was, wrecking a landscape with fairways and scissor-clipped little greens and that. This looks OK.’

  Robin the photographer was waiting just inside the reception area. As ever he looked gloomy and as if he doubted he’d ever get a decent photograph out of the situation. He eyed Matt warily, as if wondering how much damage he was likely to do to today’s assignment.

  ‘There’s a bit too much sun,’ he complained as Jess commented on the perfection of the day’s weather. ‘It’ll be all shadows and squinty eyes.’

  ‘Cheerful bugger isn’t he?’ Matt whispered to Jess as he and the girls left to go in search of less sporty facilities.

  Jess and Robin were introduced to Ned the golf club professional by the receptionist, climbed into a buggy and were driven away by Ned across the landscape.

  ‘I can’t see any of the usual signs of golf going on. Is all this part of the course?’ Jess said to Ned, indicating the sweeping parkland in front of them. Ned grinned at her. He was Australian, young and disconcertingly good-looking. He wasn’t wearing a multicoloured diamond-patterned V-neck sweater, nor were his trousers the dreadful mustard or pea green colour she’d so often seen on TV golf tournaments. It would be hard, at this rate, to write the pithily scathing article she’d mentally planned out. She’d assumed she could do some deeply amused piss-taking and express a sort of staggering incomprehension about the whole concept of the game.

  ‘The grounds are kept as natural as possible,’ Ned explained, waving a hand to indicate the meadow-like grass speckled with early wild flowers.

  ‘But isn’t it all private, only members and hotel guests allowed in?’

  ‘Nah, anyone can come. We get hundreds of walkers. Here we are, the practice range. Let’s see what we can get you to do.’ Jess and Robin climbed out of the buggy by a field in which were planted several distance markers, and Robin wandered around looking at the sky and the grass and the surrounding oak and beech trees as if the perfect composition would eventually inspire him.

  ‘You’ve really never played before?’ Ned asked Jess as he took a club from his bag.

  ‘Er, no. Never held a club. Should I be wearing these shoes? Is it OK?’ she asked. Two-tone lace-ups with spikes were what she’d expected to be told to wear. She’d expected to be marched into the club shop and, with deep disapproval at her favourite black trousers and comfortably floppy pale grey cotton Joseph sweater, ordered to equip herself with a lavender polo shirt, beige bum-enhancing polyester slacks and a green eyeshade. It was almost disappointing.

  ‘You’re fine. Golf doesn’t need special equipment. Just be comfortable, that way you’ll play your best. Now, how to hold the club …’

  Ned stood behind her, pressed in close, arranging her fingers on the club’s shaft and linking her thumbs together. It felt more than slightly sexually pleasant, she thought, having this blond young Australian squashed against her like this. She had a sudden rush of contentment with life, something that hadn’t happened for quite a few weeks now, as she looked into the distance and then back down at the little white ball on the grass. It was a beautiful day, she had a beautiful family and a job she loved. Even Matt and his redundancy seemed strangely irrelevant and distant today. What more could anyone want?

  ‘That’s good,’ Robin’s voice called. ‘Can you hold it just like that for a bit?’

  ‘No problem,’ Ned muttered into Jess’s ear. Oh absolutely not, she agreed silently.

  ‘This is Henry Reid’s message service, please talk after …’

  Natasha hung up and collected her 20p back from the payphone. At the time when Tom had given her the number, she’d asked where he’d got the phone from. ‘A mate,’ he’d replied, with that same crooked grin that had made her feel so gorgeously wobbly the first day she’d met him. So either the ‘mate’ was this Henry Reid or Henry Reid was the unknown but rightful owner of a nicked phone. When she’d told him her own phone was out of action because she couldn’t buy any more time for it till she got her next month’s allowance, he’d pulled a selection of pay-as-you-go vouchers from his pocket and offered them to her. Her phone was an Orange, though, and the vouchers were not. She’d asked him where he’d got them and, there again, it was ‘a mate’, who’d somehow intercepted a delivery of them.

  Natasha, as she walked down the corridor to the beauty therapy suite, asked herself if she minded that Tom was turning out to be a bit dodgy in the honesty department and decided that she didn’t actually care. It’s only because he hasn’t got any money or any family, she said to herself. She just knew he wouldn’t do it unless he had to. And he only went into houses of people who were pretty well off and could spare a bit for those who hadn’t got it, if Angie and Eddy were examples. There was a lot of her grandad in her, she thought quite contentedly as she sat down to leaf through the latest magazines before her facial, he’d be really proud of her.

  ‘I can quite see how people get obsessed,’ Jess was saying over lunch. ‘Once you’ve held the club the right way, understood how to connect with the ball and then clouted it a really good distance, you just want to do it again and again.’

  Mat
t, Zoe and Natasha all groaned at once. ‘Oh God, now you’ll be joining a club and talking about “Ladies’ Fours”, whatever that is, and buying weird kit. Then your bum will get huge and you’ll get a butch haircut,’ Matt said. ‘Just don’t get any of those ideas along the lines of “This is something we could do together”, will you?’

  Jess laughed. ‘No I promise. After today I’ll probably never pick up a golf club again.’ Or a gorgeous young golf pro, she thought with a small private sigh. Not that she really had, of course. Ned was sure to have a stunning athletically-built girlfriend somewhere in the background and his very much hands-on, flirty approach was just as sure to be one he brought out to get middle-aged women to part with the exorbitant membership fees. Still, now and then it was fun to speculate … ‘So what did you all get up to while I was out there swinging a stick?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve had an aromatherapy massage,’ Matt told her, narrowing his eyes seductively at her. ‘I think it’s done me good.’

  ‘And we’ve both had facials and our nails done,’ Zoe said, holding out her hands to be inspected. ‘I’ve had a French manicure. Tash’s are a really gross blue.’

  ‘It is not gross,’ Natasha snapped at her. ‘It’s choice. I love it.’ She stared down at her nails, admiring the blue which was exactly the near-turquoise, Jess thought, of her i-Book computer at home. It seemed strange to think that the whole day was merely supposed to be material for a magazine piece. It felt more important than that, almost as good as a holiday, certainly far more durable, as if this was an important load-bearing brick in the family structure. Natasha seemed close to normal again, though sometimes Jess could catch a look of fleeting worry on the girl’s face. It was to be expected really, she thought: Tom was Natasha’s first proper boyfriend and it could hardly be painless that she wasn’t going to be seeing him again.

  George finished sweeping out the shed and hung the brush away on its hook just to the left of his second favourite spade. He liked order in his surroundings. He liked small rituals like lifting the dahlias every November when the flowering was over and storing them under sacking just as his father had taught him to do all those years ago. Hardly anyone bothered lifting dahlias these days, he thought as he lit the camping-gas stove to boil water for his tea. It was all to do with global warming and not getting proper winters any more. We get the same old summers though, it occurred to him; they couldn’t have got that much better or people wouldn’t keep harping on about the summer of ’76.