Pleasant Vices (3 page)

Jenny watched Daisy scuffing the floor with her foot and wondered if the thought of probation was actually as shocking to the girl as it was to her. Perhaps Daisy was secretly thinking it might add to her status with her friends at school. Boys might find it dangerously attractive. Suppose she was expelled? Daisy had changed into unfamiliar clothes, a neat white shirt and a red skirt that was not, for once, from a charity shop. She looked as if she was already anticipating her court appearance, trying to get round Jenny just as she would the magistrates by being as ordinarily presentable as possible. She'd even tied her hair back with a plain black cotton scarf. Usually her hair, with its irritating half-grown-out fringe, hung across her face like a lop-sided wedding veil, and was constantly being scooped back in that Sloaney gesture common to all girls whose parents paid for their education.

Jenny reached into the fridge and pulled out a pack of tagliatelle. ‘Go and call the others, supper's nearly ready. You can do the table. And make sure Polly doesn't forget to wash her hands.'

Social workers. Jenny's body went through the motions of preparing the supper, briskly washing lettuce and flinging open cupboards and drawers as if she really was concentrating on, nothing else, while her mind wondered what it would take to get everything in the family back to normal. Biggles, unfed and ravenous, seemed to know better than to complain, and waited silently on his fur-matted cushion for someone to remember he existed. Social workers didn't, Jenny knew, deal with families like hers. They existed, helpfully and rightly, for the abandoned, the feckless, the inept and the inadequate. Nice middle-class girls, surely, were never Taken Into Care, that bogeyman threat hung over the inhabitants of the council estate just the other side of the main road. Did social workers have those special labels stuck to their windscreens, like doctors, she wondered as she drained the pasta,
Social Worker on Call
? She could just imagine a neat little Vauxhall Nova parked outside the house by an efficient woman with a clipboard and a heap of scruffy buff folders, all the neighbours filing past to read the shaming sign perched on the dashboard.

‘Why's supper so early?' Ben asked as he and Polly clattered into the kitchen.

‘Mum's going out,' Daisy said in a whisper, terrified of attracting any more attention to herself. Then she added, ‘I'll babysit Polly, shall I Mum?'

Jenny plonked the dish of pasta on the table and looked at Daisy's extraordinarily humble expression. ‘Well you'll be home anyway, so you can hardly call it babysitting. Don't imagine you'll be allowed out for the foreseeable future, Daisy. I think you can take it that you're now what you'd call “grounded”. Anyway, Alan should be back before nine.' Jenny stopped in the middle of the kitchen, salad bowl in hand, gazing unseeing out of the window. What a lot there was to confront Alan with; perhaps she should make a list. She sighed, ‘God knows what he's going to say.'

Daisy slumped miserably in her chair and helped herself to a minuscule portion of tagliatelle. Jenny felt infuriated by her air of penitence – Daisy was normally so feisty. She hadn't said a word in her own defence about the fare-dodging, although she could usually be relied on to make a spirited effort at justifying any misdemeanours. It was almost as if the girl was acting, practising for a school play audition for the role of some mousy Victorian governess.

It was an enormous relief to everyone when Jenny and her cloudy mood left the house to go to the meeting. Ben opened his bedroom window and lit a cigarette to go with his chemistry homework. He sat in his room up in the attic, wondering if it was time to remove Michelle Pfeiffer from the wall and install someone else. He didn't feel the same about her since Luke at school had come back from Los Angeles after the summer and bragged that he'd actually met her, really truly spoken to her. ‘She was only this high!' he'd said, pointing at the middle of his chest. He'd made it sound like they'd spent hours together, though it turned out Luke had merely collided with her for the briefest second in a restaurant doorway. It was hard to carry on fancying someone who might actually have spoken to greasy Luke, even to tell him it didn't matter that he'd stood on her foot; such an off-putting thought that she might have wasted one of her sensational smiles on such a creep. All the same, if Michelle was actually lying on his bed right this minute, instead of being blu-tacked to his sloping wall . . .

Jenny strolled slowly up the road towards the Mathieson's house at the end of the Close, where it sat importantly in central position, watching over the rest of the inhabitants like the responsible head of a family, which was rather, she thought, the role the Mathiesons had taken on for themselves over the past few years.

The Close was a cul-de-sac, jutting like a fat thumb into the Common, giving the inhabitants a feeling almost of rural isolation. But across the main road at the end of the Close the council estate loomed high and huge. It was the mysterious hinterland from which all crime and chaos was generally assumed to originate. No-one from the Close had ever been mugged, threatened or harassed by anyone from the estate, but on dark evenings, mindful of terrifying newspaper reports of no-go areas and escalating violence, they automatically carried only credit cards or small amounts of change to the off-licence, and at night carefully took their in-car entertainment systems into their homes with them. When, through its owner's forgetfulness, a car stereo went missing, there was a man at the pub round the corner who could reliably supply and fit a replacement Blaupunkt within twenty-four hours.

The houses in the Close were big, sedate Edwardian villas, with attics Veluxed and occupied by teenagers or au pairs (Croatian was the current preference, they ate so little out of solidarity with their tragic compatriots back home, and Fillipinos always came expensively in pairs). Limed oak or pastel-sponged kitchens extended into pretty conservatories, and garages had been converted into freezing, unused, home offices and games rooms. The occupants, like a lot of the population of South West London, were an artistic collection. Apart from Alan the accountant, the stately Fiona Pemberton who happened to be Polly and Daisy's headmistress, and Paul Mathieson, who was something in software, the Close residents were mostly in TV, journalism and advertising. Several cars, all of which languished unwashed at weekends while their owners shuffled through the worthiest Sunday papers, displayed the prized badges of media success: BBC executive car park stickers on their windscreens.

Front gardens were well tended, with not an ugly spotted laurel or dull privet to be seen, but planted with choisya, philodendron, or a rare viburnum. Exotic varieties of clematis trailed around the porches, tangled with passiflora or cascades of excessively thorny but wonderfully scented Bourbon roses, all neatly under-mulched with weed-proof bark chippings. Standard bay trees stood like sentinels in ornate, frost-proof earthenware tubs by front doors and were decorated with oranges and cinnamon sticks at Christmas time. Fiona Pemberton had been horrified when hers had been stolen.

Most of the people who lived in the Close had done so for several years. They tended to buy the houses after living in smaller versions of the same thing, having developed a fondness for art nouveau stained-glass porch doors, generous room sizes and plaster acanthus cornicing that was hard to paint, imagining that they were on their way up to something even more impressive. The ultra-successful moved on to security-gated splendour on Barnes, Clapham or Wimbledon Commons or, if they could put up with the problem of parking, to something elegantly Georgian on Richmond Green.

Only old Mrs Fingell's house stood out from the rest, unmodernized, shabby, unkempt and rewarded for it by being placed in a cheaper band for Council Tax payments. Mrs Fingell, in her house that was unchanged since she had moved in in 1947, had greying net curtains haphazardly draped across her window, her grandson's rusting Volkswagen minibus perched for long-overdue repair on crumbling bricks, half in and half out of the garage, and a collection of dented dustbins that suggested a family of at least eight. Cats peed on her straggling lavender, and litter and cardboard boxes blew in through the gaps in her collapsing fence. At 79, she lived alone with her apricot poodle, unaware that pooper-scoopers had been invented, and her neighbours, who fumed quietly at the decrepit state of her house and garden, liked to think that by waving as they passed her window, they were doing their bit to keep an eye on her.

‘You know what the Mathiesons and such are all worried about, don't you?' Jenny was startled from her gloom by Sue catching up with her just outside Mrs Fingell's house. ‘It's the council estate. They think only two types of people come out of there – cleaning ladies and criminals!' Sue's springy red hair bobbed up and down as she walked, her face, lively with the anticipation of making fun out of a tedious evening, had a pleased-with-life radiance that Jenny had forgotten existed. Sue chuckled, ‘That's why they want to set up the Neighbourhood Watch thing, to frighten away the common criminals and the common people, not to mention how good it is for insurance premiums, being hand-in-glove with the local police.'

The houses they were passing didn't seem to be lacking in burglar proofing. At number 5, in spite of protests to the council (a round robin organized by Paul and Carol Mathieson), Harvey Benstone had even cut down his prize camellias so as to deprive no-good joint-casers of a potential lurking place. Large metal alarm bells hung warningly over the ornate front doors, and powerful lights flicked on and off all night as foxes and cats strolled across inaccurately beamed flower beds.

‘Will there be food, do you think? I'm starving. Last time I came to Carol and Paul's I had a McDonald's with the boys first, and then found I could have saved my money. I'm relying on Carol for dinner, there's sod-all in my fridge, ‘cept the Martini of course. I hope I've guessed right this time,' Sue said as she and Jenny arrived at the Mathiesons' wrought iron gate.

‘You have. I happen to know Carol's had an afternoon of finger-food preparation!' Jenny started to giggle. Sue always cheered her up. She had an impulse to confide in her about Alan, and about Daisy, but there wasn't time. Paul Mathieson opened his front door as the two women crunched over his gravel.

‘We've got a Crime Prevention Officer!' he said excitedly, as if announcing that tonight's dinner would be a roast ox. ‘He said a gravelled path was just the right thing, nice and noisy. Puts them off, intruders.' Paul, pleased with himself and eager as a boy scout, was wearing a multi-coloured sleeveless pullover, handknitted, with little houses on it. Jenny recognized it from the Kaffe Fassett knitting book that she had once bought. She had felt too intimidated by the degree of difficulty of the patterns to buy any wool. Carol, she saw, had not felt the same. Carol could also arrange flowers, she noticed, admiring the display of dahlias, lilies, carnations and unidentifiable greenery on the mirror-polished table in the hall, reminding her of the Bournemouth bouquet. Carol did everything neatly, even to the extent of producing, eleven years before, twin boys in one well-organized pregnancy. That, she had said at the time, got all that inconvenient childbirth business over and done with in one go. They had now been tidied away to boarding school, courtesy of a trust fund from a dead grandmother.

‘Look in there, lovely grub!' Sue whispered loudly, prodding Jenny in the back as they went towards the murmur of voices in the lemon-and-white-stippled sitting-room. Plates of teeny smoked salmon sandwich wheels, cheesy scones and other savoury bits and pieces sat, elaborately garnished and forbiddingly clingfilmed, on Carol's best lace tablecloth, hovered over longingly by a collection of Close residents, clutching schooners of sherry. Then Jenny caught sight of the policeman, her second that day, sitting importantly on one of Carol's mahogany carvers, and whispered back to Sue, ‘I think you'll have to wait till the floor show's over; you'll have to make do with a drink for now.'

‘No problem!' said Sue, picking up the two fullest glasses of sherry from the silver tray.

Polly wasn't sure if it was a knock on the door that she'd heard, so she assumed someone else would answer it and carried on watching the television. Eventually, lured by the sound of male voices in the kitchen, she crept up to listen at the door. It wasn't her father, she realized, and it wasn't just Ben talking to the cat. She slid in through the door and sat at the table, unnoticed by the gaggle of teenage boys gathered together round the kitchen scales. The boys were very big, two were wearing expensive puffa jackets and another, who looked slightly familiar in a pulled-down baseball cap, had a biker's leather jacket with patches sewn on it. Ben was looking pale and nervous, not like when he was with his usual mates.

‘What are you doing? Is it homework? What are you weighing?' Polly asked all her questions at once, before they could throw her out.

‘What's she doing here? You said there wouldn't be anyone . . .' a gingery boy was staring coldly down at Polly.

She stared back, and gave him her best smile. ‘I'm Polly. I live here,' she said. ‘What are you doing? It looks like you're weighing out Oxo cubes. Is it homework? Have you got Home Economics?'

‘Polly, get out, would you? Please?' Ben looked at her with an unusual amount of appeal in his voice.

‘Well, I was just thinking about making some hot chocolate . . .' she said slowly, enjoying being infuriating. The audience of boys, menacing though their expressions were, didn't bother her. She was on home ground, bugging her brother and liking it. There might be something in it for her.

Ben broke away from the group, got hold of her wrist and marched her to the door. ‘Just this once Polly, please will you do as I ask?' he said.

‘And what if I do? What do I get?' she smiled confidently up at him.