Pleasant Vices (30 page)

‘OK, OK,' Daisy said, sighing mournfully. ‘I'll make sure they think I'm Miss Goody-Goody of the year. Just so long as you all get off my case.'

Jenny went to hug her, and Daisy, rather stiffly, submitted to being touched. ‘It's only that they don't have a lot of imagination. And people tend to be snobs: they'll recognize that uniform and expect you to be law-abiding,' Jenny told her. ‘If you go along looking like a rebel and a problem, they won't see beyond that. They don't have the time and they don't know you like we do. Present them with a nice-girl image and they'll leave you alone. It's easy.' Daisy nodded and went to get her school bag. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad day, perhaps she'd see Oliver during the lunch break. Then she could show him the marks he'd made on her neck and ask him to be a little bit more careful next time.

Polly couldn't say much in the car. Jenny was listening to
Today
and concentrating on the traffic, but Polly knew better than to start telling Harriet about Saturday night. Mothers always knew when there was something interesting to tune in to, and not just in terms of radios. Harriet easily got the message that there was some information worth waiting for from the way Polly was pulling faces and whispering cryptic hints to her. At school, the moment they were out of the car Harriet pounced.

‘What have you done, why are you making important faces at me?'

‘Wait till we're inside,' Polly said, hoping to collect a wider audience on the way in. She grabbed Harriet and pulled her into the school building, where they weren't really allowed to be till the first bell had gone. She hesitated at the door, looking round slowly and furtively, and thus making sure that six or seven of her more alert classmates had seen her and become interested enough to follow, then arranged herself above them on the staircase in the central hallway, where she could both tell all, and keep an eye open for the approach of teachers.

Fiona Pemberton, up on the staffroom landing, wasn't surprised to look down and see Polly Collins holding court on the staircase. The child had no trouble collecting an audience and had been a real star in the Christmas pantomime – all that dancing probably, she thought, though if the child was to continue into the senior department she would have to stop taking time off school for ballet exams. There was already quite enough showing-off in that family; Daisy's blue hair had already been noticed, and the executive staffroom decision made to ignore it. Polly's exam results had been unexceptional, a vivid imagination had been shown in her English essay (title:
Rabbit Robs The Riverbank
), but her maths had been dismal. The letters offering places had already gone out, but Polly was on the Borderline and Siblings List, and decisions as to the last-minute offers were to be made that day. They tried to include little sisters, however dense, where possible. Fiona lingered by her office door, in practised headmistressy silence, pretending she was only casually overhearing what Polly said.

‘So by about midnight I was really drunk!' Polly was saying. ‘Totally pissed! It was really good. And when I was in the bedroom I breathed in loads of dope, so I was
well
out of it . . .' Fiona gasped, clutching the sheaf of exam papers to her thudding bosom. She peered over the banister rail, just to double check she was hearing the right person. It seemed hardly credible.

‘Did you see any sex?' Harriet was demanding eagerly. Fiona held her breath and waited in dread for the reply.

‘Not exactly. Though Daisy's friend Emma was under the coats with Ben, and her bra was undone in the dark,' came a slightly disappointed voice which soon cheered up again as she then proclaimed loudly, ‘But there was
loads
of the oral sort!' Fiona fled swiftly back into her office, collapsed with shock into her Parker-Knoll recliner and therefore missed Polly going on to say with enormous authority, “Cos really you know, mostly they just
talk
about it.' The audience was enthralled, just as Polly had intended them to be. Her headmistress, however, who had thought that in her fifteen years of running the school she could no longer be surprised by what she saw and heard, was now quaking by the telephone, barking an abrupt message to her secretary, demanding an immediate call to the Collins parents, requesting them to make an appointment as soon as possible to come into school and see her about Polly's future.

Just enough money had been raised to bail out the firm for the next quarter. The rent on the building was now astronomical, as if the recession had never happened. ‘Cuts will have to be made' was the catchphrase echoing round the building, and staff looked at each other shiftily, calculating who would be the first to be asked to leave as an economy measure. One of the measures, reflected Alan, should perhaps be a move away from the prestigious W1 address to a cheaper post code. Surely the clients would appreciate their accountants making the kind of money-saving measures that they were always being ordered to make? He put this to Serena during a break between client meetings.

‘What do you think?' he asked, as he dealt with the coffee machine in his office. ‘Do you think they'd leave us in droves just because of a move, say, from Mayfair to Mortlake?'

To his dismay, Serena's face crumpled into misery. ‘It won't make any difference to me where you all go,' she sniffed tearfully, fumbling in her pocket for a tissue. ‘I was the last in, so I'll be first out. And I haven't even finished my training.' The sniffing crescendoed into sobs and Alan, as he would for any woman, he justified later, went automatically to comfort her. He wrapped his arms round her trembling body and held her close to him, patting her gently, and softly muttering the appropriate soothing words. He could feel bones as Serena's sobbing ribcage rose and fell under his hands. A small sly devil in his head made him quickly check the doorway for anyone looking, before stroking her more urgently. She smelled of hyacinths, and he inhaled the heady perfume blissfully, nuzzling close to her neck. Romantically inclined, he would ideally have chosen a better venue than his dusty office, with its tired cream walls badly in need of fresh paint, and neglected, yellowing Yucca plant, for Serena to fall weeping into his arms. Blake's hotel would have been good: dark and expensively sensuous, or perhaps a patch of ancient English woodland on an icy-bright, golden autumnal day. Meanwhile, Serena was still crying, so he crushed her closer to him, feeling all the length of her long slim body pressed against him. He no longer cared who saw them and he sighed ecstatically as his hand travelled down her back and slid up again, under her loose silk shirt till he encountered warm bare flesh.

‘What the hell are you doing?' she barked at him, somehow, suddenly, half-way across the room. ‘You were
touching
me!
Groping
me! How
dare
you!'

Alan stood awkwardly, backed up nervously against the wall between two framed gold discs, not knowing what to do with his hands. ‘Er, sorry . . .' he mumbled limply, ‘I thought . . . it's just that I thought . . .' He didn't know what he thought, not really. He'd thought she fancied him, but now it seemed so unlikely, so ridiculous that he couldn't even begin to tell her that.

‘You
thought
? No you didn't, you just
assumed
. You
assumed
that because I'd gone out to a couple of pubs with you that I was willing to leap into bed. I'm not. I don't leap into bed with men at all, actually.'

‘Sorry,' Alan mumbled inadequately, trying to work out what she'd meant.

Serena glared at him, recovering and considering and then said slowly, ‘Sexual harassment, that's what it is. When I have to leave here,
if
I do, it's going to be with an awful lot of compensation for this!' She was almost spitting the words at him. Alan was recovering his balance, and something told him that she'd more than slightly over-reacted, hadn't she? Or was she right? Was sexual harassment a criminal or civil offence? Why had he never bothered reading about such cases in the papers, as if they could never involve him? Serena slammed the door hard as she stalked out of the room and as he shivered in the resulting draught, he wondered who she'd gone to tell first, her uncle Bernard, or the entire office full of younger staff where her desk was. Either way, Alan was in major trouble. He sat at his desk and hid his mortified face in his hands. He could still smell Serena's perfume, and wished he could shoo it out of the room and out of his life. Jenny would find out now, and hate him. And nothing had happened. Nothing ever happened. There was going to be all this trouble, for absolutely lousy rotten bugger-all. He wished he'd never gone into accountancy after all. If things like this could happen, what was the point of ever having relinquished his daydreams and gone like a good, careful boy for what he'd counted on as the safe option? He reached into the rubbish bin for his discarded copy of
Accountancy Age
and disconsolately started looking for a new job.

Up at the Tennis Club, Sue and Jenny finished their free sample Step Aeorobics (low impact) class and went to treat themselves to a gossipy fifteen minutes in the jacuzzi before conscientiously tackling a ten-length swim. The club was crowded with women concentrating hard on the serious business of making the best of themselves, dutifully toning their bodies in order to keep their husbands and lovers interested and to continue fitting into a size 12. The gym was humming with expensive machinery, and the thwacking sound could be heard of tennis enthusiasts over on the indoor courts, practising their fiery backhands against a ball-machine, or, in a couple of lucky cases, the well-muscled club professionals. Less athletically inclined women were queuing to discover disappointingly that the ‘French' option in the beauty salon was merely a way of applying nail polish.

‘Well, I'll not be doing that again,' Jenny said from the changing cubicle. ‘If I want to get fit jumping about on steps I can always Hoover the stair carpet more often.' She wondered how imbecilic the class must have looked to a passing casual observer, a bunch of too-rich women hopping up and down on toy-like, primary coloured plastic blocks in time to music. No wonder some of those young mothers with over-loaded prams she saw disappearing into the high-rises on the estate looked so scrawny: one week of the lift being out of action would shift more kilos than several hundred pounds' worth of these silly exercises. Exhausted nevertheless, she peeled off her leotard and squeezed into her swimsuit, wondering if any of this could at least guarantee that she wouldn't have to give in and buy a larger size next spring.

The pool was steaming gently, and was hectic with the flailing limbs of small children as yet too young for either the Froebel or Montessori nursery schools, all wearing orange arm bands and having swimming lessons with their eager mothers.

‘Come on now Tamsin darling,' called one of them in weary exasperation, ‘we'll do it together. Ready? Now – one, two, three and UNDER!' Jenny watched, remembering doing exactly the same with each of her three, as Tamsin's mother held her nose and bravely ducked under the water, coming up with a face full of tangled blonde hair, running mascara and a disappointed frown. Tamsin, still dry-headed, all of three years old and sucking her thumb, bobbed up and down at the edge of the pool, smirked triumphantly at her mother and shouted, ‘Your face is all black paint!'

‘Poor thing,' Sue said as they padded past towards the jacuzzi, ‘glad all that's behind me,' she said and then added mysteriously, ‘and yet, who knows? Maybe it isn't.'

‘What do you mean by that?' Jenny challenged her as they lowered their over-stretched bodies into the churning cauldron. She had a sideways glance at the only other jacuzzi occupant, a sunbed-tanned young mother obliviously reading
Hello!
magazine while her eye-make-up trickled down her cheeks from splashed droplets of water. ‘Are you pregnant?'

‘Not yet!' Sue said with a broad grin. ‘It's going to be first things first. I've been dying to tell you. I'm getting married!'

‘
Married
?' Jenny squawked. ‘God, whatever for? And whoever to? The new one?'

‘Of course the new one!' Sue said, languidly stretching out a leg from under the water to see if it needed waxing again. ‘And don't go telling me I've only known him five minutes. I know all that. At my age, our age I should say, we should be able to tell gold from goldfish at a glance.'

‘Odd saying,' Jenny said, puzzled. ‘When is it to be?'

‘Saturday after next, we've got a special licence,' Sue told her. ‘Like I said, why hang about? The only reason for delay would be if I couldn't find a suitable outfit, but I've got a neat little sexy suit lined up at Whistles, they're altering it for me right now. Collect it Monday, marry in it Saturday. Party at my place in the afternoon. Whole street welcome. Simple as that.'

‘Breathtakingly! He must be pretty wonderful. Who is he?' Jenny demanded. ‘And where will you live? You won't be moving away, will you?' She felt suddenly anxious, worried that she was about to lose the only friend she could rely on both to behave as badly as she did and never to judge her.

‘Ah. Now there's a thing. You know him, in fact you could say I met him through you,' Sue said, with a wary grin and suddenly staring with great and suspiciously guilty interest at the foaming water. ‘He parked his car outside my gate, and I just happened to be on my way out, and, well, there it is.'

Jenny could almost hear the cogs in her brain slowly grinding round as she reluctantly made her way to the truth. ‘Oh God. I don't believe it. You've nabbed David the Welshman. No feet. But he came to see me the other day!'

‘Yeah, well he likes you!' Sue said blithely. ‘I told him it was all right, after all I didn't know at first if it was going to last.' She looked worried. ‘You don't mind, do you? I mean with you it
was
only for the money, wasn't it?'