Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (15 page)

Perhaps she would call him back? 'Bye,' she said from the kitchen. She had her Van Morrison turned up and was humming to it.

'Will you be having a bath later, then?' he called.

She put her head round the kitchen door. 'I always have a bath, Derek, every night,' and she was gone again.

Something had definitely got up her nose. He smiled over his teeth. Well, with the new unit installed it couldn't be
that,
now could it?

He tried to close the door loudly but the new Softaslam fitting meant he couldn't. Everything was against him. Even the building inspector, who had said there just wasn't room to extend the loft. Derek had been so disappointed. He'd got himself all geared up for it. The Vent-Axia had been a little bit of compensation for them both.

By the time he reached the gate his crossness had evaporated. Hallo? What was this? One of the hinges not quite right. He'd have to fix that. Indeed, now he came to think of it, the whole fence looked a bit dodgy. Perhaps that's what he should do this weekend. He set off down the pavement, swinging his anorak and calculating the amount of wood required, and felt quite cheerful again.

The Little Blonde Secretary sighed with relief. She had cleaned the bath after Derek, hoovered up all his mess — in the bathroom, along the landing
and
in the bedroom for heaven's sake - and now she was soaking in their nice, new big bath. A faint whirring above her head made her look up. A new plastic object stuck out from the wall, ugly and irritating. The steam rose towards it, it whirred even louder. She tried to lie there with her eyes closed and think nice thoughts, which is what that article on relax your way to beauty had said, but she couldn't. It sounded like there was a dentist drilling away in the room with her. Oh, for God's sake! She got out.

As she dried herself and put on her nightshirt, she thought that
surety-she
had the right to feel angry. First, his mess left all over the place (was he blind or what?); and second, here she was, the first time for ages, alone in the house and able to enjoy the peace (no drills, no smell of paint, no hammering) and he hadn't even done the job properly, because, whatever that thing was up there, it was making an awful racket and obviously needed attention.

She did her nightly face cleanse, taking particular trouble with the pores at the side of her nose. These - she peered more closely - seemed to be getting a little larger. Perhaps she should get one of those face-steamers she had seen advertised. As she plucked away at a few odd stragglers around her eyebrows, she gave a sour little snort; better not tell Derek she was thinking of buying that sort of thing or he'd volunteer to build one. But she
did
like everything to be nice about herself; if you looked nice, then you felt nice, and if you felt nice, then your life was nice. How that plain telephonist at work could actually be pregnant, looking the way she did was - well . . . The Little Blonde had no intention of letting herself go,
ever,
because once you did - she shuddered - it would be impossible to get the niceness back. That woman in the tube the other day, for example.
Gross,
absolutely gross . . . No wonder she stared so hard at her. Envy. Not surprising.
Gross.

She read a Janice Gentle for a little while in bed, and when she felt drowsy she curled up her legs, snapped out the light and fell prettily and daintily asleep to dream of exotic places, beautiful clothes and a man who was faceless but who didn't seem to be Derek at all, because he was — odd, really — a dentist.

Derek, returning a while later, slipped in beside her and reached for that nice curving bit she had at the bottom of her stomach. He tried to wake her by squeezing it, but she rolled away and brought her knees up to her chest and slept on. Ah well. He turned his mind to the satisfying new addition in the bathroom. 'And what did you think of my little surprise, then,' he murmured happily. 'I see you had a bath. Good, isn't it?'

He ran his tongue over his teeth. He had forgotten to clean them. Oh well. If she couldn't come and look when he wanted her to, why should he do what
she
wanted all the time? He closed his eyes. Ken was probably right about being able to reuse some of the existing wood for the new fence. He pushed his back up against hers. As he dozed off, he reflected that he wouldn't mind a bit of the other - a little reward for all his efforts — but she was far away now and he couldn't imagine that she'd be pleased to be woken up just for that. Ah well. He put his hand on his own private bits. They'd die down soon enough. He yawned - what with the beer and everything -and, feeling very contented, he snuggled himself further into his wife's sweet-smelling posterior and drifted off to sleep.

*

Square Jaw was lying awake and feeling sorry for himself. He felt misunderstood and undervalued and the dry-cleaning hadn't removed all the marks of the take-away she had up-ended over him. There were no two ways about it, women were neurotic and whatever you did was wrong. They could
be taken in by the contrived noti
on of a bunch of flowers and other such devices, while when you
did
do something nice they'd say it wasn't what they needed. Then if you asked, 'Well, what do you need?' they'd say, 'If I have to tell you, then there's not much point.' As if you were a bloody fortune-teller or something. Well, that was it, certainly it so far as Melanie was concerned. He could get sex any time without all this fuss. He just had to go to a club or something. There was always plenty of it flying around, and you were all right, providing you used condoms. Not that he particularly fancied sex much at the moment - he didn't seem to fancy anything much - but, then, the weather was oppressive. Of course he was all right during the day, because he had his work, which concentrated his mind completely, but apart from that the stuffing seemed to have gone out of him.

Naturally enough it was going to be a bit hard at first, but he was looking forward to being single again. It would free him up for all kinds of things. In the evenings it got a bit difficult, but he managed to watch television or go out. Last night he had been to see a film someone at work had said was really sexy,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
but it had depressed him rather than excited him. And one or two lines that the woman said reminded him of - well, they sounded familiar, anyway. So he came out again and didn't see the end. Sentimentality. That was all it was. It was also disturbing to see them making love like that. It hadn't made him horny so much as — well, a bit low-spirited, really.

Sex was what cornered you, it was sex that gave you a need for a relationship. If it weren't for that, he would probably never look at another woman again. They set snares for you with- their curves and their smiles and the way they were so accommodating at the beginning. Anyway, he had put all
her
stuff - scent bottles, nighde, flannel, hair-dryer, make-up, clothes (a surprising amount) - into a cardboard box and shoved it under the bed. He certainly wasn't going to sit around being reminded of all that shit, nor of
her.
If he found himself wondering what she was up to, he soon stopped. What good did that do? Chewing things over in your mind didn't help - he wanted to bury it all and just forget. He sniffed his jacket. He could definitely still smell the lamb pasanda, and he was sure he still had some in his ear. God -
women.
Melanie's face was suddenly in his head. What was she doing? He went and had a shower and turned on the hi-fi loud. He didn't want to know. He thought of that woman in the tube train, the fat one with the piece of ham lolling out. Who was to say Melanie wouldn't end up looking like that, anyway? What he must do was keep himself busy, fill up his
time
so that he didn't find himself alone and having to
think.

Melanie had done several things. She had hit the bottle alone. She had gone out to a wine bar and felt wonderfully in control as she flirted, and the man had been lovely really, saying all sorts of nice things and being very complimentary, but suddenly she didn't want him and refused, very firmly, when he asked to take her home. 'You're mad,' said her friend Becky, 'he's really nice.' Melanie thought to herself, So was the other one once. And she went home, sorrowing alone.

Then she had sat with girlfriends, talking it all over, paring it down to the last
little
detail, working out what
he
felt, why
be
said this, did that, until, eventually, shaking their heads, they declared that The Way Men Were was impossible to deal with and that Melanie had had a lucky escape. It didn't feel like that when, the next night, in an unbearable rush of needing, she had driven past his flat and seen him getting into his car looking haggard. At first she felt pleased, then she cried, for his haggard appearance probably meant he had been living it up, burning the candle, sleeping with loads of women. She suddenly wanted to know if

this was true, and dialled all but the last digit of his telephone number before hanging up. She
didn't
want to know, just as much as she
did.
She had cried during a film, cried in the office, cried at home, in the car, even cried in Marks and Spencer when she saw the orchids, because they were the flowers he had brought her on their first date. The only thing that sustained her was that this terrible separation gave him time to think and understand what had gone wrong - as long as
he
was confronting it, as long as
he
was thinking about it. As long as he was, then surely he'd understand . . .?

*

In the garden in Cockermouth Red Gold was leaning on her gate, looking harassed and being talked at very earnestly by a headscarfed woman of slightly older years. 'There is too much sin,' said Headscarf.

'Or not enough,' said Red Gold defiantly, and then immediately colouring, both for the little thrill she felt and for the effect the statement was likely to have.

'That is hardly the observation I would expect of a vicar's wif
e,' said the shocked woman questi
oningly. 'What do you mean?'

Red Gold thought quickly. 'I mean,' she said, her tone suitably humble, 'that the less sin there is in the world the more righteously can the majority condemn the weak minority who sin and whom the Bible tells us to love.'

The headscarfed one's jaw dropped. There was something wrong with that but it sounded very plausible.

The vicar approached. His eyes were on his wife, on the curve of her neck, on the line of her arm, on the shape of her hand as she brushed it among the blue delphiniums. Near to the hand that brushed the flower-tops was another, gloved, clasping and unclasping the top of the fence paling. It raised itself in greeting, to which he responded with similar gesture. His wife did not look round.

'Good morning,' he said to his discomfited parishioner, 'you look startled.'

He took his wife's hand and pressed it to his lips unselfconsciously, a gesture of connection, a little piece of loving; something had made her tense, he could tell from the way she was standing.

'Your wife thinks that there is not enough sin in the world.' The parishioner was not amused. Either by the statement or by the hand kiss. Apart from anything else, the parishioner was privately in love with the vicar herself, rather as she had been with his predecessor. As the woman who did most of the flowers and polished up the brasses, she had a right to love her vicars secretly. Part of the private love was feeling sor
ry for him, seeing him as a man
made unhappy by his married mate. When he kissed his married mate's hand like that, it was hard to sustain the pity, and if that went - well, it might be the love to go next.

His wife removed her hand. Surreptitiously she rubbed where he had kissed it; it was not that kind of kiss that had been in her thoughts. He put his hand on her shoulder, lightly, and felt her stiffness. He wanted to say that her eyes matched the flowers and to lie down with her in the daisy lawn with the morning sun warming them. God, who knew everything, would just have to accept that he had thoughts like this. She did not know, his parishioners (perish the thought) did not know, it was only between himself and his God. He touched the bone of her shoulder, and he knew that if he followed it downwards it would lead to the soft delight of her breast. He smiled appeasingly at the headscarf, who had raised her nose and stuck out her chin and was waiting, the onus on him, to hear a rebuttal.

'That,' he said galla
ntly
, 'is because she knows I like to be kept busy. And now I am afraid that I must whisk her away. We have the donations to count before Sunday and I have no head for figures . . .'

The vicar's wife trailed her hand back and forth across the tops of the flowers, watching the pollen dust scatter and the fading pods fall to the ground.

There was
not
enough sin in the world. Half an hour of it last week, and she was still savouring every minute, every second. She had gone into Body Shop and made up her face (trying not to look too closely as she did so:
little
red lines from the cruel northern winds, puffy tissue around the dulled eyes, mouth grown thin - no longer the rose he had called her). She had brightened herself up with a scarf worn as she used to wear it, thrown around her shoulders - casual elegance, not the sort of thing she indulged in nowadays. Funny, all the same, how the scarf had just fallen into place immediately. A latent skill, London scarf-throwing, one which you apparently never lost. It was almost as if she were being reminded that another life existed, that this life was still there if she wanted it, still there .
..