Unchained Melanie (27 page)

‘I don’t know why he bothers,’ she told Sarah on the phone, ‘I haven’t exactly been over-encouraging.’

‘Well, you did have sex with him the first time you set eyes on him after more than twenty years,’ Sarah reminded her, rather unnecessarily in Mel’s opinion. ‘Perhaps he thinks that as you’re so impulsive, your impulses in the old sex department might just kick in again at any moment.’

‘I don’t think they will. Definitely not here on home territory anyway – I’m keeping my bed as a personal man-free sanctuary. Anyway, why I phoned is, do you have a number where I can reach him? You must have
had one for that time you invited him to the dinner at your place.’

‘Sorry sweetie, would love to be of use but it was on a tatty scrap of paper and I’ve lost it.’

Melanie couldn’t help picturing Sarah with her long skinny fingers crossed. She could almost see the bronze-varnished nails flashing as they moved swiftly to placate the gods against the lie. She felt inclined to drive round to Sarah’s immaculate, brilliantly organized house, open her desk drawer and look under ‘N’ in her address book. Sarah didn’t go in for ‘tatty scraps of paper’. Neil would certainly be listed there, address and phone number neatly noted down by Sarah’s Mont Blanc fountain pen and luscious purple ink. Mel couldn’t be cross with her, though. Sarah liked everything properly arranged. She was simply doing her best to tidy Melanie away into convenient coupledom. It was too late now to insist to Sarah that she didn’t want to tell Neil that she wouldn’t go that night – she only wanted to know what time they were going and where to. Clothes-wise, it would make a difference. She didn’t want to wear jeans and a snug old sweater to the Ivy or her little black suede dress to Pizza Express.

Mrs Jenkins’s son Brian was even bigger and sturdier than his sister Brenda. He squeezed through the gate in the fence into Melanie’s back garden as she and Max draped thin layers of protective fleece carefully around the
Washingtonia
and secured it with string. Brian was wearing a huge plaid woodcutter’s jacket that Mel guessed had been sent by his sister from Canada, probably at a time when he’d been a good bit thinner. He moved slowly across the garden, treading warily and
staring with suspicion at the palms. The poodle, expecting to follow him as he used to with Mrs Jenkins, yapped furiously from the other side of the closed gate.

‘I saw you from the upstairs window,’ he told Mel. ‘I didn’t think you’d hear me if I rang your front doorbell.’

‘That’s OK,’ Mel said, wiping her earthy hands on her scarf. ‘How is your mother?’

Brian shoved his hands deep in his pockets. He gazed at the ground and scuffed at the pebbles with the toe of his shoe, kicking them up into a pile and exposing the layer of black fabric beneath. Mel glanced quickly at Max, who was looking at Brian with an expression of furious outrage, like an artist who finds someone in their studio casually picking chunks of oil paint off a precious canvas.

‘She’s not very well,’ Brian said eventually. ‘She’s had a big shock to the system and she’s going to need full time care.’ He looked terrified by the prospect, as well he might, Mel thought: he’d be her only relative in this country when Brenda escaped back to Canada.

‘So we thought – we might do a bit to the house.’ He gestured with his shoulder towards his mother’s home. ‘Tart it up and sell it. It’ll pay for her keep in a home down near me.’

‘A home?’ Mel said, astonished. ‘Like a full-time residential place? Is she really as bad as that?’

‘Well, she can’t look after herself, that’s obvious – her eyesight’s rubbish and the knock on her head, well, they think it might have triggered a minor stroke. We can have her for a little while, just till she’s properly herself again, like, but . . . well, there’s the wife.’ He was starting to sound angry now, defensive, as if Mel
had put up a series of arguments against what he’d decided. ‘I’ve got to think of the wife. She’s not well herself.’

‘Oh really? I’m sorry about that,’ Mel said.

‘It’s her nerves.’ Oh, is it? Mel thought, feeling anger rising which she tried hard to quell – after all, who was she to say who should or shouldn’t share their home with Mrs Jenkins? Unless she herself was prepared to take her on, it didn’t exactly do to criticize others.

‘And I’m working, it would all fall on her. Mum’ll be all right. We’ve found somewhere she’ll like.’

‘Have you?’ Max chipped in. ‘My, that was quick.’

‘Yes, well. We’ve kept an eye on things. Doesn’t do to be unprepared, does it?’

‘Oh no,’ Max agreed, turning back to securing the last of the
Washingtonia
’s bonds. ‘It doesn’t do at all.’

‘We’ll take the dog on though, that’s something.’

‘Mmm. Yes, it almost is,’ Max muttered.

‘If she stayed here in her own home – I could keep an eye on her,’ Mel suggested.

‘But you already have,’ Brian pointed out. ‘You’ve been a good neighbour, she said so. Brenda said so. But this
still
happened. And next time she might fall down the stairs or something. And what if you’re away? On holiday or something?’

‘She could have one of those alarms, the ones that go round your neck, you know, just in case.’

Brian laughed. ‘She wouldn’t use it. She’d think she was being a nuisance.’

He was right, Mel knew he was. Mrs Jenkins wouldn’t come back to her home. She’d leave the hospital in Brian’s car and go and live in a Somerset
town where she knew nobody. She and Mel would send Christmas cards to each other. Mel would write now and then and let her know what was going on, tell her when Roger’s new baby was born, when Rosa graduated. Gradually, as time passed, little of it would make sense to her former neighbour, but she’d be thrilled to receive the letters. Mel knew how excited she always was about the post. An assistant at the home would read them to her – she might even find her frequently-mislaid reading glasses for her so she could, at last, do it herself. She would tell people she was eighty-two, and with luck might remember when she got to eighty-three. Then one day Mel would have a short note from Brian saying that Mrs Jenkins had died. He’d say ‘passed away’. The funeral would already have taken place, and none of her former friends and neighbours would have been there to send her on her way over the horizon to the next life.

Brian went back through the fence gate to start packing away his mother’s possessions. Mel hoped he and Brenda wouldn’t simply throw most of them away carelessly, but, on present form, she wouldn’t be surprised to see a skip outside before the weekend.

Mel was on her way out to get her manuscript photocopied in the town when Ben called round. ‘Oh, you going out?’ he said, catching her at the door already wearing a coat, scarf and gloves.

‘Sure am, Ben, do you want to use the computer?’

He shuffled his feet about on the path. ‘Well, if you don’t mind . . .’ he said. ‘I won’t touch anything.’

‘It never occurred to me that you would,’ she told
him. ‘Come in, help yourself to tea or coffee and biscuits. I’ll be about an hour.’

What on earth did he imagine that she’d think he’d want to ‘touch’, she wondered, as she drove into the town and parked at Waitrose. Perhaps it was that teen-boy thing of having so much sex on the brain (and nowhere else) that he imagined she’d think he’d be rifling through her knicker drawer as soon as she was safely round the corner. Well, Patty had been clear enough about that – she didn’t need to be convinced that Ben would have no interest in her and her underwear at all.

Christmas was in full swing in the town. Dickins and Jones’s windows were full of fairy lights and outfits of the glitter-and-velvet combination that turned up every year for what magazines called the party season. It was strange, Mel thought as she walked past, how the same clothes, the moment Twelfth Night was past, looked overdone and faintly ridiculous. It was like leaving the decorations up for too long. Possibly it was even unlucky to go out in a velvet and diamanté frock after 6th January, especially if the dress was scarlet and strappy and teamed with a sequinned pashmina, as was the one she’d stopped to look at.

‘Looking for something to wear tonight?’ Sarah appeared next to Mel.

‘Oh hi, Sarah. Tonight? No! I was just wondering who on earth buys these things. And where do they wear them?’

‘They are corporate wives who go to Botox parties and they wear them to the firm’s annual Christmas dinner dance. The pashmina isn’t to keep warm, it’s to obscure flabby arms.’

Mel laughed and continued, ‘But after a few drinks,
when it gets a bit hot, the pashmina falls to the floor and . . .’

‘And Mrs Corporate Wife takes to the dance floor to shake it all about to “Dancing Queen”.’

‘Does she know all the words?’

‘She does and she sings them. I know. My name is Sarah and I am that Corporate Wife.’ Sarah pulled a face of mock tragedy.

‘Get lost, you don’t have the arms for it.’

‘That’s true.’ She took a last look at the dress as they moved on. ‘And I’d have it in black, not red. One is not Santa Claus. Let’s treat ourselves, Mel, seeing as it’s only a few short hectic weeks till Christmas, let’s go in All Bar One and have a spritzer.’

The place was busy, loud with post-lunch lingerers and shoppers surrounded by bags, who, having achieved a serious amount of purchases, were recharging themselves for another few hours battling in the stores.

‘Two spritzers please!’ Melanie yelled over the racket to the barman.

‘I’ll bring them, find a seat!’ he shouted back.

‘OK, we’ll be just over . . .’ Melanie said as she turned to look for a table. ‘Well, just look who’s here,’ she said to Sarah, spotting Neil at a table with a woman a good few years younger than themselves. ‘Let’s go over here by the window, I don’t much want to see him right now so . . .’

She shouldn’t have mentioned him – in this crowd Sarah might not have noticed. But it was too late. ‘Oh yes, so he is! And there are spare seats at his table.’ Sarah either wasn’t listening or didn’t hear and marched across the bar, picking her way between bags and people.

‘We’ll be over there at that corner table,’ Mel told the barman, racing after Sarah, hoping to catch up with her before she said anything mad, ambiguous or downright incriminating.

‘Hello Neil, mind if we join you?’ Sarah was saying as she arrived.

‘Oh!’ Neil looked up, instantly flustered. ‘Er, hello Sarah, Mel, are you well?’ he asked.

Mel slid into the seat opposite Neil’s companion, who was looking bemused. She was an attractive woman, mid-thirties Mel would guess, with chin-length blonde hair so flat and straight it looked as if someone had carefully ironed it. She wore a black suit that Sarah was blatantly pricing up and clearly guessing between Whistles and Joseph.

‘And are you friends of Neil from work?’ the woman asked.

‘Oh no!’ Sarah began. ‘We know him from . . .’

‘Actually, Charlotte,’ he cut in, rather rudely, Mel thought, ‘these are two of the students I used to teach a long, long time ago. We ran into each other at a reunion not long ago.’

‘You used to
teach
them? So how old are you?’ Charlotte’s question was addressed not to Neil but to Sarah, who blinked hard and looked stumped for an answer.

‘It was his first job.’ Sarah wasn’t about to part with a number, not unless someone pulled out all her perfectly manicured nails first. ‘He was newly qualified, just a babe in arms. Putty in our hands,’ Sarah told her with a suggestive smirk.

‘Two spritzers?’ the barman arrived. Mel felt uncomfortable and started gulping her drink. She’d quite like to leave, escape to some fresh air.

‘Putty!’ Charlotte pouted her slicked lips at Neil. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was the right word for you, darling.’

Sarah narrowed her eyes. ‘Neil, you haven’t properly introduced us to your friend. I’m Sarah,’ she said, not giving him a chance to make up for his bad manners, ‘and this is Melanie . . . and you are . . .’

‘Oh, I’m Charlotte. Didn’t he mention me at your “reunion”? I’m his wife.’

Oh right, thought Mel, of course you are. Silly me – no wonder he didn’t leave a phone number.

‘Time to go, sweetie,’ Charlotte purred to Neil. ‘Pick up the kids . . .’

‘Ah. So I take it that dinner tonight is now off?’ Melanie said calmly to Neil.

It was hard to make a dignified exit, encumbered by a coat and by having to squeeze through the crowd, but as she took a deep breath on the pavement she didn’t regret what she’d said.

‘Ooh, that was brave!’ Sarah squealed as she caught up with Mel outside Matches.

‘No it wasn’t. It was spiteful and childish,’ Mel told her. ‘But I don’t in the slightest bit care.’

Well, the day couldn’t get much worse, Mel thought as she drove home. At least
Dying For It
was now safely in the post to Dennis. There was nothing more she could do with Tina Keen for the moment, except hope she and her latest case would get a completely fabulous reception from the people who mattered.

There were lights on in her house as she drove up. It meant Max was still there, which was good, though she couldn’t imagine what he was still finding to do. Perhaps he’d had a tricky time planting the
bamboos and spent many an hour arranging and rearranging them. Or maybe his newly fixed wall had fallen down. Whatever it was, she would be very happy to see him.

The sound of raised, angry voices could be heard as she approached the front door. One was a woman, high-pitched and shrieky. A slow, male tone seemed to be doing its best to be calming. Don’t tell me, Melanie thought as she pushed the key into the door, that Max too has a wife and she’s shown up to see what was keeping him on a job that should have only taken a fortnight at the most . . .

But it was Patty at the bottom of the stairs, yelling at her son, who was standing on the landing above her. Max was beside Patty and was clearly preventing her from racing up and clouting someone. Ben was shielding Lee-Ann from next door – not very effectively, given that she was twice his width and looking beautifully pink and round-limbed in only her purple bra and thong.

‘And when I’ve told that little tart’s mother what was going on . . . !’ Patty was yelling, then, as Melanie appeared behind her, she turned her attention to her. ‘And
you
! I blame you! Letting young boys come in here and use your place like a knocking shop! Do you know how old he is?’