Pleasant Vices (24 page)

‘Biggles! What's he doing here?' she exclaimed, clapping a startled hand to her mouth.

‘Oh thanks, Jen, so good to know you're pleased to see me!' Alan said, grinning accusingly at her.

‘But Biggles is dead!' Polly stated baldly. ‘That's a ghost!'

Jenny wanted to smack her, suddenly; after all, he'd been Alan's cat, and the awful news could have been broken to him more carefully than that. She had thought it too cruel to tell him over the phone, even as a punishment for nesting cosily in a smart hotel with slinky Serena. Except that Biggles, (unmistakably Biggles) ecstatically purring and rubbing his great big head against his favourite person, was clearly very much alive.

‘He's dead. You buried him, Mum. Didn't you?' Polly went on, looking hard at Jenny for a sign that she might be going mad and have made the whole thing up.

‘I buried something. I was waiting till you got back to tell you,' Jenny said doubtfully to Alan, eyeing Biggles suspiciously as she went to hang her coat up by the back door. She kept looking at him, as if any minute he was going to turn back into a damp and earthy corpse, and she peered at the floor for muddy footprints (and possibly the old cot sheet in which he'd been draped) leading from the cat-flap. Harriet hadn't budged from the kitchen doorway, but stood gawping with her amazed mouth dropped wide open.

Polly patted the very grubby cat on the head. ‘You'll have to be renamed Jesus,' she announced importantly. ‘'Cos it's the third day, isn't it, and you've risen again.'

Jenny and Alan looked at each other and burst into incredulous laughter. ‘Well I can't think where he's been, must have been locked in an oily garage somewhere. He's absolutely filthy. I didn't even think to check the other cat's collar. I couldn't bring myself to see if it even had one,' Jenny was saying. ‘Some other poor person out there must be missing their pet.'

Polly, looking like she'd had a brilliant idea, suddenly grabbed Harriet, and, bored with the subject of dead and alive cats, the two girls scrambled out of the room and thundered up the stairs.

It felt strange to have Alan back at home. Jenny had spent so much of the previous night vividly picturing him
in flagrante
that she found his familiar, daytime self rather odd, as if it was something of a disguise. At any moment she expected him to shove the cat to the floor, put down his drink and start the end-of-marriage announcement. She had a tight, tense feeling inside, and was finding it hard to breathe in the warm kitchen.

‘Just going to get something from the car,' she told him, needing a moment to get used to how unchanged, how
ordinary
he was.

Out by the BMW, Jenny was tempted to open the door and sniff the air for girlish perfume. There was nothing on the seats, no giveaway glossy magazines, no abandoned lipstick. The back window had acquired a new sticker proclaiming
No to Terminal Five.
Half the cars in the Close had them (as well as ones about aircraft noise), even though most of the residents expected to be able to rush out and catch a plane at any old time to dash off for business meetings in far countries. That way the tax-free (legitimate business expense) travel could accumulate enough air miles to take their families on lovely foreign holidays. They were forever complaining about the crush at the airport, and Jenny thought they should be delighted to get a new Terminal building.

She looked in her car for something she could have gone to fetch and saw Polly's French dictionary on the back seat. Just as she unlocked the door, there was a splintering crash of breaking glass from across the road. She wandered into the Close and dutifully strolled across to look.

Harvey Benstone came sprinting out from number 5, mindful of his neighbourly responsibilities. ‘It's the Pembertons' house I think,' he said, catching up with Jenny. ‘Probably kids from the estate after the video and stuff so they can buy drugs. Bit bloody much in broad daylight.' He was so puffed up with the certainty of being right that Jenny could only admire the way this seemed to make him totally oblivious to the possible danger of being beaten senseless by several large, strong teenage thugs. But when they got to the Pembertons' garden, behind their pair of lilac trees was only the contorted figure of George trying to climb in through the hall window.

‘Bloody woman didn't leave the key,' he huffed at them, bright pink with wasted effort. Jenny left him and Harvey to sort out a way of getting in and trailed back to her own house. At least it was something to tell Alan.

‘Are you sure this is going to work?' Daisy asked Emma, up in the bathroom. ‘And why aren't you having yours done?' Very carefully, nervous that it might dissolve the floor tiles, Daisy opened the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, sniffed it cautiously and winced. ‘It smells dangerous.'

Emma took the bottle and sniffed too. ‘No, it smells effective,' she pronounced. ‘I'm not doing mine because I'm already blonde. And blondes have more fun, isn't that what they say? I've been thinking for a while that you're a bit, well a bit
mousy,
hairwise. This'll be good.'

‘Well at least Mum won't mind, being the way she is. Though I don't know, can't be as sure of her as I used to be,' Daisy said, laying out the collection of equipment on the bathroom shelf. She opened the precious pot of Atlantic blue dye and sniffed at that too. ‘As long as it's only the ends, at least I can cut them off if it looks dreadful. Yeah,' she said, perking up and finding enthusiasm, ‘come on, let's do it!' Daisy perched on the side of the bath and Emma separated her hair into about thirty small sections and applied peroxide (using one of Alan's pastry brushes) to the end inch of about fifteen of them.

‘It's like doing someone's roots, but in reverse. You'll look like you've got the ends of a load of blue-tipped paintbrushes dangling from your head,' she said, grinning at Daisy in the mirror.

‘Gee thanks, can't wait,' Daisy told her doubtfully. ‘I hope I can trust you with this.'

‘Trust me with your brother, don't you?' Emma teased, looking over her shoulder towards the door in case Ben had crept up the stairs and was listening.

‘Don't start. You promised. I need time for getting used to that,' Daisy warned her.

Emma secured all the peroxided bits of hair in strips of Bacofoil and put tiny elastic bands (stolen from her sister's orthodontic kit) round them. ‘We'll finish the colouring bit after supper,' she told her. ‘Your hair will take a while to bleach out.' She heard a set of footsteps thumping on the stairs to the attic, and the sound of a door closing firmly. ‘I think your brother's home,' she said, abandoning Daisy's hair and fluffing out her own in front of the mirror. ‘Got any lipstick?'

Over supper Jenny told the family about George Pemberton smashing his own window. They all laughed in the right places, but she still felt odd, as if everything she said had to be rehearsed first mentally to filter out anything that might trigger Alan into telling her something she didn't want to know. It was easier to talk to the children.

‘What are you doing to your hair?' she asked Daisy with interest, watching the silver-papered strands dangling dangerously over the potato dish. ‘I don't suppose, whatever it is, that Fiona Pemberton is going to approve,' she giggled, earning herself a dose of Daisy's scorn. In her opinion it wasn't part of the function of parents to join in the antagonizing of headmistresses.

‘My mum would never let me do mine blue. You're so lucky, Daisy,' Emma said with a wistful sigh.

‘
Blue
? Those bits under there are going to be blue? Good God!' Alan said, disbelievingly. Ben said nothing, ate little and sneaked blushing glances at Emma, to whom, in the past, before Saturday's electrifying physical contact, he had never had any trouble finding something to say. Jenny, with a mother's perception, noticed, felt maternally tremulous for him, and had to bite her tongue not to comment. For once the thought of youthful romance didn't make her eyes want to fill with envious tears. What was there to envy? All that tension, embarrassment, uncertainty and some hopeless fumbling if you were very, very lucky.

‘I thought we might go out tomorrow night,' Alan said to Jenny, pouring her a third glass of wine. She was looking flushed and bright and rather jumpy. Time he took her out somewhere special. ‘Just the two of us, a place I read about in
The Sunday Times
last weekend. You can babysit Polly, can't you Daisy, and we'll make that the last weekend of your being grounded.' He waited for her to look pleased, let-off and forgiven at last, but she and Emma were staring at him, still and shell-shocked, as if he'd just informed them that he was a serial killer and they were next.

‘What's wrong?' Jenny asked Daisy. ‘Won't you be happy to get your freedom back? I don't even mind paying you for tomorrow, either.'

Polly was staring backwards and forwards at the two girls, wondering what was going on, and piecing together some remembered bits of knowledge that seemed to start with the sight of Daisy climbing out of her bedroom window. She nudged Harriet and said, ‘Mind if we skip pudding? We're just going out in the garden for a bit.'

‘But it's dark now. Whatever do you want to go out there for?' Alan asked her.

‘Oh nothing, just looking around. We'll take a torch,' she told him, busily not looking at him, but grabbing Harriet's barely-finished plate and making unusually quickly for the dishwasher. She scuttled about the kitchen, pulling Harriet after her, grabbing wellingtons and coats and hissing ‘Hurry up!' at her friend.

‘Wanted to get out of clearing the table I expect,' Jenny said as she piled up plates, and for once she was prepared to be indulgent. ‘Just leave them for tonight,' she told Daisy and Ben, ‘I'll do them. I expect you've got things you want to be doing.'

On behalf of Ben and Emma, Daisy blushed furiously at Jenny's heavy-handed tact, and snarling ungraciously, dragged Emma towards the stairs so that her hair-dyeing could be finished.

‘Now what have I said?' Jenny asked Alan.

‘No idea, thought you were doing them a favour actually. Now about dinner tomorrow night . . .' he was saying, closing in for a hug. Jenny was just wondering if he'd notice how tense her body was when the phone rang. ‘Bugger,' he said, kissing Jenny's ear and reaching across to take the call.

‘Bugger,' he said again as he hung up a few minutes later.

‘What's up? Work problems?' she asked. He looked nervous, she thought, shifty even, though she tried not to think it. It was all too exhausting, trying not to interpret every one of his gestures and expressions. No-one should have to do that much scrutiny, or be subjected to it.

‘Tomorrow night. Dinner's on, if you want to come, but not just the two of us I'm afraid. Senior partner thinks we should get together before Monday and have a chat about the financial situation. Suggested dinner out at some place out near Watford. More convenient for him than us, but then he's paying.'

‘Dinner on the company won't help its cash flow,' Jenny commented. ‘Why can't you just have a meeting early on Monday at the office?'

‘Walls have ears. Some of them electronic,' he said mysteriously, making Jenny think for a moment that the place must be bugged, like an old Eastern Bloc embassy. ‘All those fancy phone systems and computer stuff. Not to mention the cleaning lady who knows what's going on before the rest of us do. And she's about as good at keeping secrets as a tabloid journalist.' He looked morose, his good-intention family feelings slipping away. Who else would be at the dinner, he wondered? Not Serena, he prayed – though she was Bernard's niece and it was a possibility.

As if Jenny was reading his mind she asked casually, ‘And who else is going to be there? Bernard's wife, Monica, isn't it? Any others from the staff?' she wasn't looking at him, folding the tea towel with more care than she ever had before, draping it carefully over the Aga rail as if it was a precious cashmere sweater.

‘Don't know. Sorry, I didn't think to ask,' Alan said, stacking glasses into the dishwasher, wondering if he was imagining any other questions unasked and unanswered between them. ‘Anyway, you like Monica, don't you? I'm sure it won't be so bad. Sorry, though, I did intend it to be just the two of us, but you know what work has been like lately.'

Jenny did know, all those awful bank statements. She also knew that Bernard's wife Monica, a matronly and energetic chairwoman (no man, person, or simply ‘chair' titles for her) of her local Townswomen's Guild, would exhaust her within half-an-hour with an intimidating list of her latest Good Works and charity events. She would have to spend the entire evening being impressed.

‘Got any candles?' Polly and Harriet burst excitedly in through the back door, gasping plumes of cool, fresh air.

‘Yes, cupboard under the stairs. Take the power-cut supply,' Jenny told them, watching them scatter mud flakes all over the wooden floor, and not particularly caring. She rinsed out the sink and went about inventing a couple of sponsored runs and a charity bike ride with which to do her equal share of impressing, and made up her mind to have quite a lot of anaesthetizing alcohol.

‘Now what are they up to?' Paul was asking himself up in the attic. Carol wanted to watch a video of
Oklahoma!
the version recently produced by the local operatic society, so he felt banished from the sitting-room and was taking refuge with his telescope. He'd given the All-Clear to the rest of the garden that he could see, and it seemed to be all quiet, too, up at the Tennis Club and on as much as he could see of the estate. But the Collins's back garden was full of the kind of torchlight activity that only usually went with Bonfire Night. There was a flickering circle of what looked suspiciously like candlelight too. If only he could see what they were up to, and who was actually up to it. He opened the window and let in an unwelcome blast of chill air. He listened carefully, head sideways like a budgie, ear cocked for clues. There was traffic roaring from the main road and some loud car-music from the estate as usual (he sometimes thought that a fast car was considered a viable party venue for those people), but not much else. He was startled by a cat or a fox bashing at one of Mrs Fingell's many dustbins and hit his head on the window catch trying to crane further out. Suddenly the still air was filled with blood-curdling shrieks of terror. The torchlight in the Collins's garden was waving chaotically up and down and racing for their back door. Most of the candlelight went out, kicked over in the rush probably, he imagined. Whatever Satanic rites that unruly family had been practising, it served them right, felt Paul, they'd obviously called up evil spirits and frightened themselves half to death. He took the relevant file down from the shelf and filled in yet another entry for number 14. Theirs was the fattest and most frustrating file he'd got, stuffed with dates and dealings but nothing more positive than a sure as hell hunch that something was going on.