Pleasant Vices (11 page)

Carol finished her dusting and filing, and adjusted Paul's telescope. By standing on an upturned box, she managed to focus it, not as it usually was on the heavens, but on houses and gardens around and below her. Heady with authority, she inspected all the gardens within range, noting the appalling weeds in Sue Kennedy's, practically a jungle, she thought, clicking her tongue with disgust, making a mental note to have a little word at the next opportunity. Then, with some adjustment she could, she found, focus right into the Collins's conservatory and after only the smallest hesitation, with self-righteous delicacy she focused right out again, over beyond the edge of the council estate towards the river and, to her surprise, on to the tennis club balcony. So that's what they do in the afternoons, she thought primly, watching Jenny and Sue giggling together over cups of coffee. Sue was smoking too, which, Carol thought, rather defeated the point of expensive membership of a health club. I do wish I could hear what they're saying, she thought, with fervent curiosity.

‘Why are we going to Laura and Harvey's? We've never been there before, and they haven't been here, so they don't owe us.' Dressing for dinner on a Thursday night, Alan was reluctant to go. He very much preferred being the one who did the cooking. Other people's cooking, unless it was a sanctified, Michelin-starred chef, was unlikely to be up to his own standard. He tried hard, but he couldn't enjoy an under-spiced stew masquerading as
Daube de Boeuf,
or soy-drenched Anglo-Thai messes adapted according to availability of ingredients, from a selection of currently fashionable cookbooks.

You'd bloody well want to go if sodding Serena asked you to, Jenny hissed at him from the safety of the bathroom, and then said, ‘It's because of the film people; I agreed we'd talk to them, remember? It's just Laura being grateful.'

‘I just hope she's grateful enough to know I can't face any chi-chi attempts at squid in its own ink. No-one gets it right, they always cook it till it's the texture of car tyres,' Alan grumbled.

‘You're very hard to cook for, you realize that don't you? Soon no-one will invite us to eat with them at all,' Jenny said, emerging from the bathroom to rummage in the wardrobe for her black silk skirt. She wondered whether to combine it with her comfy chenille sweater or her translucent cream shirt, and if it was worth making an effort to look good at all, with Alan in such a mood. She tied her hair back with a yellow scarf and immediately, with her angular jawline exposed, felt about ten years younger. ‘You put people off – they're afraid of your ludicrously high standards. It's like asking bloody Escoffier round for supper. I think Laura's very brave.'

‘You said she was very grateful. So she should be, these film people mean we'll be mucking up our tax returns. Once you start admitting to that kind of freelance operation going on in the house, they'll never be off our backs. Every year they'll bung in an estimated assessment, you'll see.'

Jenny zipped up her skirt, and pulled the chenille sweater out of the drawer, opting for comfort over glamour, seeing as Alan was giving no sign that he was the slightest bit interested in what she looked like. Time was, she recalled, he'd have fondled her gently as he fastened her zip for her, or commented on the transparency of the shirt. Instead he was looking grumpy, searching through a drawer for cufflinks.

‘Is there somewhere else you'd rather be?' Jenny suddenly asked bravely, challenging him in the mirror, hairbrush in her hand. ‘I mean, if you'd rather not come out with me, please do say. We're not chained together, I can go on my own.' Here's your chance, she thought, take it or forever leave it. Alan left it.

‘No, no I'll come. It's been a tough week, that's all, and the next one looks like being no better. Accountants' bills seem to come last on everyone's priority list.' He smiled, and ruffled Jenny's newly brushed hair. ‘Sorry, Pudding. I'll stop complaining and I'll do my best to be sociable, and anyway I want to know about these film people, and how much they're going to be messing up my kitchen.'

‘I'm sure they won't mind if you load your entire
batterie de cuisine
into crates and get Harrods to take it into storage.' Jenny smiled sympathetically at him. ‘Just try to think of the money; even after tax it could be a whole term's school fees.'

‘What I am thinking,' Alan confessed with a sly grin, ‘is that if we do have to go out for dinner, at least Laura and Harvey are within staggering distance of home and we can drink as much as we like.'

Laura and Harvey lived in one of the prettiest houses in the Close. It was the same, structurally, as Jenny and Alan's but maintained, like a model always ready for the photographer, in the most pristine condition. Looking at the fresh clean paintwork, Jenny wondered if it was really true that film companies who found something lacking in the decor of their chosen locations, actually did repaint at their own expense. Thinking about her flaking front door, she hoped they did. It would also be a good persuasion point for Alan. The Benstone's front garden, with the camellias gone, was rather exposed, but the front windows and porch were charmingly trailed with clematis in spring followed by tiny, delicately scented pink roses in the summer. Tubs of topiaried box-hedge stood squarely each side of the front doorstep, underplanted with white anemones, which would be followed later by Cambridge blue trailing lobelia. Miraculously slug-free delphiniums and foxgloves grew in front of the sitting-room windows, giving the impression in the early summer of a cottage garden of Gertrude Jekyll-style opulence. The feeling of effortless extravagance continued inside the house, with generous swathes of crisp Designers' Guild chintz at the windows, polished blond wood floors, and a pair of elfin daughters appealingly dressed in multi-coloured layers of exorbitantly priced Oilily clothes.

Jenny, trailing the reluctant Alan, rang the Benstone's doorbell, and was welcomed in by Harvey wearing a limp and faded rugby club sweatshirt, which didn't at all go with the elegance of his surroundings.

‘Do come in!' he bellowed at them, waving a half-full glass of wine. ‘Lovely to see you!' and then towards the kitchen he yelled, ‘Emily, keep hold of Pushka!' Laura, spring-fresh in Monsoon voile, drifted gracefully out of the kitchen, closing the door on a small daughter clutching a struggling tabby cat, and the usual pantomime of air-kisses followed.

Laura took Jenny and Alan into the sitting-room and started pouring glasses of wine. ‘Do sit down. Sorry one of the sofas is missing, we had a Mothercare shoot in here yesterday and it had to look like a playroom. You should have seen it, rocking horses and blu-tacked bunny pictures everywhere! Fiona and George Pemberton should be here any minute. Did I mention that they were coming too?'

‘No, actually you didn't,' Jenny said, her social smile congealing, dreading facing Fiona for an evening of light entertainment. Which of them would get drunk enough to mention the incident of Polly and the
Playboy
magazine she wondered, hoping it would be Fiona and not Alan, who, when she had told him about it, had found the tale boyishly amusing.

‘I did think of asking Sue from the end house, make it a real neighbours' evening. But we couldn't think of a suitable man.'

‘Sue can usually dredge one up all by herself, given ten minutes notice or so,' Alan said.

‘Not that they're essential of course, even numbers,' Laura said doubtfully, glancing towards her dining-room and her carefully balanced table arrangements.

A few moments later, Fiona made her usual majestic entrance, followed by a rather droopy-looking George. ‘Sorry we're late,' Fiona boomed, sidestepping Harvey's attempt to kiss her by thrusting her jacket at him, ‘George fell asleep watching the golf. He's no good at late nights, likes to have a little nap first.' George smiled placidly enough, but Jenny noticed him take a vicious kick at a stray piece of Lego.

‘Well actually,' Laura went and stood next to Harvey, linking her arm through his and smiling winsomely, ‘we can't have
too
late a night, if none of you mind.' She gave a little giggle and peeked out from under her fringe. ‘I'm ovulating, you see.'

Harvey, pink to the edge of his greying moustache, disentangled his arm and busied himself with the drinks tray. ‘Her and the bloody cat,' he said, clinking ice. ‘Have to keep her shut in, or she'll get herself up the duff with the nearest tom. Spends all day yowling and rolling around,' he said, with an embarrassed attempt at a laugh. The entire group froze, collectively imagining the elegant Laura, not the cat, rolling on the Afghan kelim and howling out of the window in a frenzy of sexual longing.

‘Probably something to do with the moon,' Jenny contributed at last, glancing across at Fiona and thinking surely a headmistress could be relied on to find a subject to change to. ‘Women in one house do tend to synchronize. Perhaps it even extends to cats.' Alan, she noticed, was downing his drink rather fast, staring fixedly beyond the group and through the open door towards the dining-room. She followed his gaze and together they watched as, on the immaculately laid table, all shining silver, polished glass and artlessly casual flower arrangements, the said cat was slyly picking its delicate way towards the butter dish, and finding it, was then licking rapturously.

‘Trying for a boy,' Laura, clutching a glass of mineral water, confessed coyly. ‘I do think men like to have a son, really, deep down, don't they?'

‘Can't think why. Not much sense in men, really,' Fiona argued. ‘I spend all my time teaching girls that they can achieve anything that they want without relying on men.'

Laura gave a small laugh. ‘But not making babies they can't!' she said. Fiona gave her a cool grin. ‘It's only a matter of time . . .' she said with foreboding, looking sideways at George, who was studying Laura's maple-wood bookshelves full of fat blockbusters.

‘Shall we eat? Just a simple peasanty meal tonight, I bet you haven't tried tapenade, sort of squashed olive thing, I made it to go with the lamb . . .' Harvey was confiding to Alan as he led him towards the dining table. Jenny crossed her fingers and willed Alan not to mention that this was the third dose of highly fashionable tapenade he'd been treated to in six weeks, none of which so far had measured up to his own version. She also prayed he wouldn't start wittering on about the lamb – rare breeds were his current passion, and he was quite likely to baffle poor, well-meaning Harvey with questions about whether the sheep was a Soay or a Shetland, when it was most probably shamefully anonymous. Jenny had a close look at the butter dish as she sat down – the butter along one side looked suspiciously serrated, presumably the pattern of the cat's tongue, and it was now too late and totally impossible to mention it. She tried not to think about what else might have gone on, cat-wise, while they were cooking in the kitchen.

‘. . . And the poor little sod's fanny, all swollen up and bloody. Randy little animal keeps licking it, and rolling around on her back. Moggy masturbation I suppose.' Harvey, well into the pudding and heading for a state of drunkenness that wouldn't help his chances of procreation that night, was clutching the struggling tabby cat on his lap as he ate the strawberry tart. Any moment now, Alan thought with nausea, Harvey would raise the cat's tail and show them its genitals, right there across the table. The cat escaped to the floor and Alan flinched as Harvey finger-fed dollops of sumptuous home-made ice-cream to it as it padded round his chair and Jenny tried not to link thoughts of blood with the raspberry coulis on her plate. George was keeping up a constant chortling rumble, as if he couldn't believe his luck, coming out for a neighbourly supper and stumbling on such a madhouse.

‘And how is your music coming along?' Fiona asked Jenny, rather as if she was talking to one of her fourth formers. Jenny, nevertheless, appreciated Fiona's effort to switch the topic from the Benstone family's collective fecundity.

‘Well I've lost a few pupils just lately. I'm in the process of finding some more.' This was the moment to ask about teaching at the school, while she had Fiona captive in a state of dinner-party good manners. She hesitated, knowing that if she was going to get a job at the High School, Fiona would have to be given a moment to come up with the idea herself, but the pause was scuppered by Alan.

‘Need another flute teacher at your school, Fiona? Recorder and piccolo chucked in free, so to speak?' he chipped in clumsily. Jenny lashed out at him furiously with her foot and connected instead with something soft and yielding. There was a bitter yowl from under the table.

‘There she goes again! I can get my whole next episode of
Keep It In The Family
out of that cat!' Harvey yelled delightedly, poking about under the table to retrieve his anguished pet.

Fiona glared around the table, her gaze coming to rest on Alan, seeing as Harvey's head was under the tablecloth. With her full command of grandeur she answered him. ‘I'm afraid we have our full quotient of peripatetic staff, just at the present,' she said. Jenny smirked and bit her lip so as not to giggle. She could just imagine Alan later that night, mincing about the bedroom stark naked, putting on Fiona's air of majestic pomposity and quoting her words.

‘Very Brontë-esque, your daughters' names: Emily and Charlotte,' George suddenly said to Laura. ‘If you do get a son, will you be calling him Branwell to match?'

‘Absolutely not,' Harvey answered for his wife. ‘Wasn't he a drunk?'

‘Certainly was. Probably felt in awe of the overachieving women folk in his family,' George said, winking at Jenny and helping himself to a large portion of Brie.

‘Names are so important,' Fiona chimed in. ‘At school I come across some sadly unsuitable choices. Parents should be far more careful and think ahead. Take Grace, well that's asking for trouble. The ones we get are invariably vast and clumsy creatures and honestly, I mean, can you see a Talullah for example, taking up quantum physics, and being taken seriously at it?'