Every Good Girl (19 page)

‘You could be next,' Emily waved her spoon to the middle one, a slim bossy woman with streaked red hair and a brave pink suit. ‘You could leave that studio and out by the car park there might be A Man who wants to treat you like scum. Don't ever forget it, because I bloody won't.'

Nina arrived at her mother's house at the same time as the Social Services inspector and they squashed through the gate together, awkwardly. Rather to Nina's surprise, while she was laughing an apology, the social worker bossily pushed her way ahead up the narrow, lavender-fringed path, leaving Nina, amused, in no doubt that the woman was more than sure of her own importance. The woman was probably, Nina would
guess, no older than she was, but had taken on the tight grey curls and faded large blue spectacle frames that she perhaps thought might give her the authority of someone older.

Graham opened the door before they reached it, looking anxious, worried, Nina assumed, in case the rapid modifications that had been done in order that Monica could be allowed home might not be adequate.

‘It's like not being allowed out of prison till the probation arrangements have been set up, isn't it?' Nina commented cheerily as Graham stood aside to let them in. The social worker – ‘Call me Julia,' she instructed by way of abrupt greeting – did not smile.

‘You wouldn't believe how many hospital beds are occupied by people who could manage perfectly well at home if only the right arrangements would be made. The Council can only do so much, you know,' she said rather crossly as if the last thing she needed was to be putting up with someone lacking suitable seriousness.

‘The council had nothing to do with it,' Nina told her, feeling waspishly defensive. ‘We used Yellow Pages and folding money.
And
it was all done and finished three days ago. We've been waiting for
you
.' Graham was frowning, his eyes imploring Nina not to get on the wrong side of this person who seemed to have so much power.

‘Yes, well. That shows initiative,' Call-me-Julia approved grudgingly.

Nina stood behind her in the hallway while the stairs were inspected. Julia had a no-nonsense body, solid and firmly encased in a firmly belted navy blue mac. She had, Nina thought, a very businesslike bottom, broad, firm and flat. It would not swing round during a tricky blanket bath and knock things off a table. As Julia stood above her on the third stair,
tugging at the new rail that was fixed opposite the banisters, Nina fought a terrible urge to prod at the efficient derrière, like the woman in the Beryl Cook painting of the three bowling ladies. ‘Is it all OK?' she enquired instead.

Julia was giving nothing away, turning to face them as she made a cryptic note on her clipboard. She clasped that firmly to her bosom, which was also firm though not flat, as if she was secretly making notes on their suitability, not just the house. Graham sighed. ‘Would you like some coffee?' he offered, heading for the kitchen.

‘Ah the kitchen.' Julia followed him and he increased his speed, alarmed. ‘Kettle? Plugs? How much dangerous leaning, how accessible?' She looked around swiftly, taking in instantly Monica's pristine grey and white kitchen. She stared at the floor tiles, weighing up their slip-rating, quickly looked at the cordless green translucent kettle and murmured, ‘Yes, good. Now upstairs.'

Nina and Graham followed. Nina looked at her brother, trying silently to express how like a child she was feeling, like a nervous Brownie about to win or lose her badge for Age Care.

‘Hmm. Oh, and a child! Where . . . ?' Julia had opened the wrong door, Graham's.

‘No, no that's my room,' he blustered, pushing past and closing the door swiftly. His face was pink. Nina had caught sight, very briefly, of the model aircraft, swaying from the strings in the rush of air from the opened door. She recognized his embarrassment and sympathized. His room was no-one's business but his. There was no call for Julia's clipboard comments on that. ‘
This
is my mother's room,' she volunteered, swiftly taking over as leader.

She went into Monica's room and inhaled its faint papery scent of old-fashioned roses, her favourite flowers. The wallpaper was patterned with bold deep pink and scarlet full-bloom roses and their fresh bright green leaves, vivid against a white background, with scarlet, green and white striped curtains. She thought back with guilt to the bedroom at Joe's flat, the peachy washed-out bud-sprigged fabrics, the drenching of all surfaces in exhausting cloths. She might have been lying on that bed while her poor mother lay upside down on the stairs. Nina hadn't been inside her mother's room for, oh years, she thought. It seemed to be an intrusion, standing there, uninvited, inspecting the furniture for traps to floor the unsteady. Her bedside table, though, and the dressing table and the old green velvet chaise-longue remembered from childhood stood massive and unchallengeable: they stared back at them all, somehow collectively asserting that it would take more than one wobbly old lady to knock these gleaming polished pieces sideways. They stood as ever, firm and friendly, and even Julia appeared diminished beside them.

‘The bed's a bit high . . .' she attempted, but without conviction.

‘Mother is quite tall. We all are. She'll be all right, and I'll be here,' Graham countered, gaining strength from the surroundings.

‘And there's a phone right here beside the bed, and Graham's only across the landing,' Nina added.

‘Hmm. Yes, well, with the new handrails in the bathroom I don't see any
real
problems. If you've made the arrangements, I don't see why your mother shouldn't come home today. Doctor permitting, of course.'

‘Of course,' Nina agreed, biting her lip against a grin. Nina could just imagine Julia's cowed deference in the
presence of a medicine man. Perhaps she even became quite coy and twittery in the Presence.

‘I'm so glad she's gone,' Graham said when he had closed the front door. His skin glistened with the perspiration of tension. Nina felt sorry for him. ‘I'll make us both a cup of tea,' she said, ‘to celebrate. Though you know, well better than most of us, that they really don't want people like Mother to stay in the hospital, because they need the beds. There wasn't much doubt really.'

‘I'm not so sure,' Graham said, following her to the kitchen and leaning against the door frame. ‘I expect they worry about being sued. I mean, suppose she came home and slipped in the bathroom the very next day?'

Nina concentrated on the cups and the tea, vaguely aware of the sound of the cat flap behind her. A horrible choking noise suddenly filled the quiet air of the kitchen and she and Graham watched with interest as the grey striped cat sicked up a barely digested mouse on the floor, neatly and carefully, so it seemed, selecting a white tile. Nina looked at Graham and together they dissolved into helpless giggles, of a sort they hadn't shared in years, not since as small children they'd stood together behind their wildly ranting mother as she'd declaimed to whatever gods were listening that she deserved better.

The cat sat looking at them, licking its lips clean, narrowing its eyes in satisfaction, and then delicately curled a pale front paw and began washing.

Catherine sniffed cautiously at her bedroom air like a cat suspecting there might just be something interesting to find if only the right scent could be selected. Joe lay sprawled in the cane armchair watching her, comfortably guilt-free (old lovers, particularly old
wives
, couldn't possibly count), and waited for her sensitive nose to tell her whether he'd left a fermenting sock under the bed or that the water in the vase of tulips was slightly less than fresh. He discounted entirely the possibility that she could smell Other Woman. Nina's presence had been several days ago now, and so fast and furious as barely to leave an imprint on the duvet. He shouldn't be thinking about it, not now Catherine was back, but the memory still gave him a secret smile and a joyous lurch in his blood pressure.

Catherine liked to take a long and decidedly unspontaneous time to get ready for sex, which at first he had thought was some kind of seduction technique that she and perhaps a dorm full of girls at her boarding school had concocted as being a terrific tease. Now he knew better – she just liked titivating herself; it was some sort of solitary foreplay. A less lazy man than Joe might wonder if the process was almost insultingly masturbatory. She dressed and made up one way for work, another for bed, simple as that. It wasn't psyching-up time she needed, like athletes going for the hurdles
final, it was simply that she prepared thoroughly for sex, thinking about what to wear as if it was a tricky business meeting. Did that make him a client? Dressed and anointed, he thought, that's how she presented herself on a bed, like an elaborate dinner-party main course. Sometimes, mid-coitus, her hand would stretch out, not in blissful languor, but to pluck a stray pillow back into place.

His fingers twitched on the arms of the chair and he watched her slender round bottom as she bent to put shoes in their appointed pocket of the hanging rack in the wardrobe. Suppose he jumped on her now? Fondled her from behind, wrenched off her silk knickers and simply pinned her to the bed. Maybe just this once she wouldn't give him that sultry over the shoulder wait-for-it smile as she slinked into the bathroom with a teeny handful of Agent Provocateur purple lace, feverishly running the shower and shaking out the perfumed oils. It must have been something she'd read somewhere, he decided, ‘Smell sweet, keep him sweet', or worse, ‘Treat your body as an altar, he will worship you.' They were living together for heaven's sake, not first-dating, he couldn't care less whether her French knickers were the same mint green as her bra and properly ironed before they were slithered out of and abandoned to the floor. Nina had had a compelling scent of warm busy human, something so profoundly arousing that he wondered why no-one had yet bottled and patented it.

‘You've changed the duvet cover. How sweet of you,' Catherine said, looking at as much freshly laundered froth of pink beribboned easy-care poly-cotton as could be seen under the many frilled silky cushions.

Joe shrugged, eyeing the marshmallow bed without interest. Like the rest of the bedroom, it did not feel as
if it was his, simply somewhere he was expected to visit Catherine. He felt rather more comfortably at home the nights he crashed out on the old black leather sofa up on the studio balcony when he'd worked late on a piece of music, often finishing only hours before recording. He'd done that often enough back at the house and the sofa was the only piece of furniture he'd taken away, something to curl up with, cosy, grubby and home-scented like a security blanket. Bedwise, his own taste ran to plain white cool Egyptian cotton, of the sort he and Nina had collected over the years from various Heals sales. In the back of his mind he could still hear the echo of his mother-in-law warning Nina ‘You're letting yourself in for years of ironing', and looking at him with dark hostility as if she suspected him of deliberately setting traps designed to keep Nina chained to sweaty domestic tasks while he swanned about womanizing.

That bit at least wasn't so terribly far from the truth, he now thought vaguely to himself, remembering how ridiculously, childishly, excited he'd always become whenever some gorgeous, breezy and independent young ad-agency woman, keen to make her mark in the business, had made it known that she and her body just might be available for the price of dinner and some easy flattering assurance that her career path was sure to be meteoric. Not that Nina had exactly been chained to the sink, he reasoned, any more than Catherine was. They were both the sort who sent bedlinen to the laundry.

‘So what did you get up to while I was away? Did you go out to play with lots of old girlfriends?'

Catherine drifted around the room, hanging clothes in the wardrobe, taking worn underwear through to the laundry basket in the bathroom. He smiled but didn't
answer, slightly irritated that she was treating him like a wayward ten-year-old when he'd been out and earning his own living since she was playing kiss-chase in top infants. He watched her many reflections swinging to and fro as she moved the mirrored wardrobe door and noticed how Bambi-thin her girlish legs were. Nina's were still slim but they had a reassuringly solid womanliness to them. Catherine's legs reminded him of Emily's and Lucy's. They were so young and fragile they could only mean
responsibility
. He missed Nina then, quite achingly and he tried to evict the feeling from his brain, only to find that that wasn't where it was lodged: it seemed to be stuck like indigestion in the region of what would pass for his heart if he believed in that sort of thing. Logically, he tried to reason that he wouldn't be feeling at all like this if Catherine happened to have solid, head-prefect, school-hockey legs. Equally logically, he acknowledged that he wouldn't be sharing this hellish cosmetic bag of a bedroom with her if she had.

Catherine, sublimely unaware of his disloyal thoughts, pulled a pair of unworn tights from her brown leather Mulberry holdall, rolled them up and went to put them away in their drawer. She hesitated and frowned, her fingers picking their way through the neat plastic dividers that separated the different deniers and colours.

‘I'm sure I had a new pair of black velvet Calvins in here.' She looked up, puzzling at her own reflection. Joe watched coolly, waiting to see if her imagination would come up with an interesting explanation for their disappearance. It wasn't likely, he thought, depressed. And he was right.