Pleasant Vices (10 page)

‘Alan, it's Serena,' she heard. ‘Look, sorry to ring you at home but I can't make Thursday night. Do you think we could do it next week instead? I hope you haven't already got the tickets . . .'

The voice was young, breathy and eager. Jenny froze. So ‘darling' had a name, she was reality, flesh and blood and voice. She was being taken somewhere by someone else's husband, somewhere that required tickets: theatre? a concert? So Alan was besotted enough to arrange something. It was usually Jenny who did all this – Alan seemed to think that turning up at the right place in more or less suitable clothes was an adequate contribution to their social life. Now he was showing himself capable of organizing one of his own, ‘playing away' Jenny had heard hearty rugby types calling it.

‘Hope I'm not too early.' Jenny, through heart-pounding misery, heard a voice by the door. ‘I didn't expect this place to be so easy to find.'

With a choice of doing her explaining right there on the doorstep, with, just yards from her front gate, Carol Mathieson bossily supervising the erection of Neighbourhood Watch placards to one of the Close's three street lamps, or foolishly inviting the stranger into her home, Jenny instantly opted for danger. David Robbins, firmly supported by a pair of sturdy crutches, lumbered into her kitchen and heaved himself into the rocking chair. He didn't, Jenny noticed heart-sinkingly, have a flute with him.

‘Tea or coffee?' Jenny asked, resorting to the safety of social graces while she decided what to do. ‘Tea would be nice,' he said, giving her an odd, attractive smile. He looked, she thought, as if he was beginning to think he might be the one who had to come up with an explanation for a mistake. And no wonder, she realized, filling the kettle and bustling around in a domestic sort of way. How often do people visit tarts in cosy, affluent suburban homes, children's paintings on the walls, cat on the window ledge and homework abandoned on the kitchen table? Then she remembered Cynthia Payne and the luncheon voucher parties in Streatham.

‘I parked round the corner, and staggered up the road. Never know which to do really,' he said, grinning at Jenny. ‘Can't work out which one draws less attention, not with these.' He prodded at his legs.

‘If you don't mind me asking, what happened?' she asked. ‘And do you want sugar in this?' I can't believe this is happening, she thought. It's like one of those near-death things, I feel like I'm watching myself from the ceiling. He was a good-looking man. Sue would be kicking herself if she saw him, not one she'd imagine having any trouble attracting women. What was he
doing
here?

‘Accident with a train. I did think of telling people it was a Falklands landmine, or frostbite from guiding Ranulph Fiennes across Antarctica, but the truth tends to come out.' David Robbins stirred his tea thoughtfully and looked at Jenny. ‘Wife went off after that. We're in the last stage of divorcing now. At first she made jokes about me being permanently legless, but it was all a front. I think there was someone else anyway.'

‘You live round here, do you?' Jenny asked tentatively, nervous that she might come across him some time in the Waitrose car park.

‘Cardiff. But no-one fits limbs like they do at Roehampton. They made my new feet. I feel like Douglas Bader. Now and then I come up for a spot of adjustment, and for this sort of thing. Suits me right now not to look for anyone long-term.' He gave her a shyish grin and Jenny could feel a blush. She wanted to ask him why he thought he had to pay for sex, but was afraid to cross over from the safety of small talk. There was a silence, broken only by the busy sounds outside of Carol and her workmen, scrabbling busily about with ladders and hammers.

‘You haven't done this before have you?' David Robbins said softly. He was looking slightly past Jenny to where her flute was in its usual place in the conservatory. ‘But you know what it's all about. It's not music.'

‘No, it's not music,' Jenny agreed, knowing this was the moment to explain the mistake.

In the end it was quite easy. It wasn't music, and Sue had been right, it was much more profitable. Jenny had forgotten how exhilarating feeling truly, secretly wicked could be. In plenty of time to collect Polly from school and rush her on to a ballet class, she spent twenty minutes in the shower washing away any lingering feelings of guilt, counted her money and stashed it, together with the rest of the citrus-flavoured condoms, in a rhinestoned evening bag at the back of her underwear drawer. Must remember for next time, she thought, towelling her wet hair, the lime flavour isn't up to much.

Jenny spent several days hugging her shameful secret to herself, hardly daring to leave the house in case she blurted it out to someone in the street. She felt that if she allowed herself out, let loose in public, she would be sure to be accosted by someone doing a survey, and would confess, when asked, her new occupation. ‘I fellate strange men for money,' she could hear herself announcing loudly to a bored student with a clipboard trying to sell insurance in a crowded shopping precinct. To keep herself under some sort of control she stayed home and fed the family on long-stored, unlabelled casseroles from the freezer, and when the cat food ran out she extravagantly opened a can of best dolphin-friendly tuna for the delighted Biggles.

From the safety of her window she watched Paul Mathieson looking proudly up at the Neighbourhood Watch sign on the street lamp outside his house, and gleefully she thought, here's one crime you haven't spotted yet, right under your nose. How ecstatically horrified Carol would be, too. A few months ago she had walked down the Close with them as Jenny was taking Polly to one of her disco classes (‘Make-up already at your age dear?' Carol had commented, eyeing Polly's dazzlingly lurid lycra outfit set off by Barbie-pink lipstick) when a teenager from the estate had crossed the road in front of them wheeling frothily-frilled twins in an absolute Rolls-Royce of a pram. ‘Three guesses how she paid for that,' she had sniffed, shocking Jenny.

‘Can't guess, you'll have to tell me!' Polly had piped up, earning one of Carol's Looks.

‘Her mother, hire purchase, or borrowed?' Jenny had suggested, refusing to play.

Jenny expected a suitable feeling of guilt to creep up on her in time, as she imagined it should, but every time it threatened, she thought of Alan and how effortlessly he was running his new romance alongside his wife and family. His was the greater betrayal, Jenny concluded, for she wasn't involved with anyone, merely propping up the faltering family finances. Every now and then the name ‘Serena' popped menacingly into her head, with its connotations of home-counties nice-girl, someone clean, placid, undemanding and unchallenging. The thought of her rival left Jenny with a compulsion to work at being defiantly the opposite. She hadn't mentioned the message on the answerphone to Alan. If challenged (and how likely was that?) she would simply shrug and tell him it must have got lost or forgotten or something. Daisy tended to monopolize the phone and its accoutrements, considering them by rights her personal property, so Alan would not be too surprised.

‘Can't you just imagine what she's like?' Jenny asked Sue days later, reluctantly emerging from the house to meet her for Polly's tennis lesson and after-school tea at the club. ‘I bet she's thirtyish, thinnish, dimmish, and wears co-ordinating shades of beige. And I bet she's got a blue-rinsed widowed dragon-mother in Surrey who plays bridge in the afternoons.'

Serena – the name had an unquestionable, middle-class self-certainty to it, like Fiona and Arabella, Melissa and Camilla. They were names of posh girls recalled from Jenny's childhood, girls in fiction, or from the intriguing boarding school hidden away behind trees on the hill near her home. Her own friends at the grammar school had had names like Christine, Wendy and Sandra, with at least three other Jennifers. It was galling to think that the name Serena still could make her feel socially inferior, when it was Serena, not her, who seemed to be prepared to have an affair with a married man. On the other hand, Jenny then grudgingly reasoned, it was a Jennifer, not a Serena, who was sitting here on the tennis club balcony, having spent a suburban afternoon working as a prostitute.

Sue, who was far less interested in Alan's love life than in Jenny's professional one, did her best to be consoling. ‘Well if she's really that dreadful, he won't be interested for long, you can guarantee. It's just one of those symptoms of the male menopause, something young and pretty and impressionable. Men just like to check they've still got the old pulling power. Once he's feeling reassured that he has, it'll be all over.'

‘Yes, I know. I just have to wait it out and he'll be back to lolling sleepily in front of the fire all evening like an ageing labrador. What I'm afraid of is that I won't like him at all by then, for having felt he had to do it, and it will all be too late,' Jenny said with a sigh. ‘Why can't he be like other men and just go in for buying purple shoes, or fast cars? The male menoPorsche, it should be called, seeing as that's what they start wanting in their forties.'

‘Well don't worry, it doesn't last. Now tell me all about the customer!' Sue said with indecent impatience. ‘I got a good look at him, he parked outside my house. Utterly gorgeous, I thought. I'd have done it for nothing. Is he coming back for more? Will he get to be a regular? And if he does, will you introduce me?'

Jenny squirmed, and wished she was safely alone in Waitrose, or doing a shift in the school library, anywhere but here with Sue and her vicarious fascination. She really was worse than Polly for wanting to know intimate and lurid details. Polly at least was safely out of earshot, having her first outdoor tennis lesson of the year down on the court below with five other ten-year-olds. She should just tell Sue nothing had happened, that she really was too much of a prissy little housewife to consider prostitution as a viable career option. But whenever she thought of David Robbins and what she had done, a distressingly uncontrollable smile spread across her face, along with the certainty that she was blushing. In an attempt to keep her face straight, she looked down at the women and the children's class on the tennis courts, all dressed in similar regulation little white outfits, with the latest Air-Wear tennis shoes, none of them the sort to challenge the club rules by breaking the dress code. A bunch of Serenas, all of them, she thought, opting to tell the truth, and be damned.

‘It was good fun. Just like being young and free again,' she said decisively, giving Sue a smile of pleased radiance. ‘Extremely free,' she added, feeling the happy blush coming on – white was too dazzling a colour for tennis, she thought, reaching down into her bag for a disguise of sunglasses. Something else was dazzling her, too, little flashes of sunlight as if someone was using a mirror to catch the light and was shining it in her direction. Perhaps a magpie in a tree with a stolen piece of jewellery, she wondered, maybe the dinky kind of slim gold bangle she imagined a Serena would wear.

Carol was dusting Paul's attic study, spraying jets of polish and rubbing firmly at the veneered surfaces. Mrs MacNee did the rest of the house, but Carol always told her firmly that Paul wouldn't have anyone touch his study, no-one but her. She didn't trust anyone not to peek into the box containing his sacred Masonic kit, or go investigating the files relating to his honorary treasury of the sailing club, or poke about among the drying prints hanging in his darkroom. Radio Two trilled beside her as she worked, and every now and then she glanced out of the high window to check who was coming and going in the Close below. Paul's telescope, with which he studied the movements of the planets, kept getting in her way as she polished and tidied, banging her on the shoulder and prodding her neck as she moved briskly round the room, sorting Paul's crisp new Neighbourhood Watch files (one for each household) into street-number order on the new Ikea shelving unit. She took a quick look into the one marked ‘Number 14, Collins', found no entries yet, and wondered if she should make a note of the rather attractive hobbling man who had called on Jenny several days before. Perhaps he was just reading a meter or something, she decided, Paul's Parker pen poised in her hand. Or perhaps he was from the insurance company, calling about the ruined wall. She rather hoped he'd call on her next time too, she thought, as she wrote
blond handsome visitor (male – early 40s?), purpose unknown, 1.45 p.m. on 21st
' in the folder. She filed it away with the rest and looked down into the road. Mrs Fingell was putting a newspaper-wrapped parcel into one of her many dustbins. Whatever was in that, Carol wondered, knowing in reality that it was probably nothing more sinister than potato peelings.

That was the trouble with taking on responsibility for the neighbourhood, it made you exceptionally suspicious about other people's behaviour. But then, she reasoned, someone had to be, crime figures were rising all the time, and some people weren't even bothering to report domestic burglaries any more, as the police were so unlikely to catch the culprits. Every night, police sirens wailed past the end of the Close, heading for some thieving villain gone to earth in the depths of the estate. Every week she scanned the local paper, counting up the number of charges brought against the crooks who lived so near, propping up her firm belief that a whole criminal culture was born and not made. Reading, she gave a little sigh of grateful relief every time she saw the words ‘remanded in custody'. That was what they deserved. She didn't for a moment believe what Jenny had once told her, that many people, innocent or not, spent home-destroying months in remand centres simply because, unlike perhaps multi-million pound fraudsters, they had no owner-occupier families who could promise bail-money. She and Paul, wondering if they were right to trust their burglar locks, lay awake and watchful in the noisy nights, picturing the sordid, syringe-littered stairways, the graffitied walls, certain that chaos and riot were only a half-brick's throw away.