Every Good Girl (6 page)

‘It was Dad's fault,' she muttered now, like a lifesaving mantra as she shuffled through the knickers in her drawer, looking for some that didn't really matter, seeing as it was only a boring Sunday, with just Gran (or
Grandmama
as she preferred being called) coming for lunch.

‘What's Dad's fault?' Lucy still hovered by the door. She was very interested in breasts at the moment and hoped to catch sight of Emily's, so she would know, if these things ran in the family, what she could expect hers to look like quite soon.

‘Oh nothing, just sod off,' Emily hissed at her, throwing her copy of
Man-Date
at her.

‘Mind my face!' Lucy yelled, chucking a shoe back, ‘I've got a re-call for
Barbados
next week!'

Emily stalked across and slammed the door, though Lucy, fearing more violence, was already halfway down the stairs. ‘You and your fucking
beauty
!' Emily shrieked after her.

‘Goodness, that girl's got your temper!' Monica said to Nina in the kitchen. She pattered about, dipping her finger in the mint sauce, looking for napkins in the wrong drawer and downing most of her sherry in three fast slugs. Nina concentrated on stirring the gravy, wondering what would be the least petulant and childish reply to that little comment of her mother's. Only Monica had really been allowed full use of good old-fashioned anger in the house when Nina had been a child. Lack of consideration of any sort would set her off, directing equal rage towards a neighbour with a waywardly overhanging tree and towards her husband for going off to Bognor with a barmaid. Any display of rebellious fury by Nina or Graham would be skilfully quashed by recourse to a threatened migraine. ‘You're making me
ill
,' Monica would plead as teenage Nina stormed ‘It's not
fair
!' when Graham, two years younger, was allowed to stay nights with friends and Nina had to be home by ten. Monica would drape a purple crocheted shawl round her broad shoulders and put one delicately probing cyclamen pink fingernail to the pulse on her temple. ‘
Throbbing
, my skull is
throbbing
!' she would wail, throwing herself on the lavender chenille sofa and pleading for the curtains to be closed and camomile tea to be brought. Graham learned very young that anger was a profitless emotion and became doggedly passive, learning how to get his own way by appealing to his mother's awe of his male supremacy, watching, placid, treasured and contented as Nina battled her way through adolescence.

‘Hi Grandmama.' Emily, smelling of an optimistic overdose of deodorant, drifted into the kitchen with her hairbrush.

‘Not in here, Em, go and brush it in the downstairs cloakroom,' Nina told her.

‘Hello darling,' Monica air-kissed Emily, and sniffed. ‘Interesting perfume,' she said. ‘Peach blossom and
L'Air du Silk Cut
if I'm not mistaken. Poison, darling, absolute poison.'

Emily smirked cheekily, ‘What, the peach blossom, Gran? You're right – it's disgusting. Just didn't have time to shower though. I'll be back, just got to brush hair.' And she was gone.

‘She's just like you were,' Monica said admiringly. ‘Nothing but trouble.'

Nina laughed. ‘You make it sound as if I was the perfect daughter. I must say it would have helped if you'd given me that impression at the time.'

‘Oh but I was your mother. Mothers are for laying down the tracks and making sure you children run properly on them. Grandmamas are for indulging and adoring from a safe distance. She'll turn out fine, one day, you'll see.'

Nina poured the gravy into a jug. ‘I don't even begin to doubt it actually. She's not a problem, you know.'

Monica laughed heartily, almost choking on the last of her sherry, ‘Oh darling of course she's a problem!
She's a girl – they're always at loggerheads with somebody, especially their mothers. Boys now, they were born to
please
their mothers. They do it all their lives, it's that special bond. You wouldn't know of course, only having girls.'

Nina slowly counted to ten. ‘Let's eat, shall we?' she sighed. ‘Everything's ready. Can you call Lucy while I put the vegetables on the table? She's outside, up in the treehouse playing with the hamster.'

Monica went to the kitchen door and looked back at Nina. ‘You'll have to carve, won't you,' she said, eyeing the steaming, rosemary-spiked leg of lamb doubtfully. ‘Such a pity Graham couldn't come. Carving does need a man.' She was out in the garden before Nina could reply.

Nina sighed and picked up the carving knife. ‘Any fool can carve meat,' she muttered, piercing the skin viciously with a fork. Hot juices spurted up and caught her on the chin, making her suddenly want to cry. ‘Any fool with enough practice.'

‘Cheese and prosciutto croissant or smoked salmon bagel?'

Joe had both the huge stainless steel fridge and the emerald Perspex breadbin open and was peering into them alternately. Sunlight streamed in through the window, making all the apartment's pale wood surfaces look bleached like parched driftwood.

Catherine lay nestled in the cushions on the cream sofa surrounded by newspaper. Joe looked at her, watching her sleek yellow head turn prettily sideways to an attitude of cute thought. If she puts her finger to her chin, like 1950s fashion models, I'll know she's deliberately posing, he thought. It occurred to him that this might be a near-critical thought about her, the first
in their three cohabiting months. It might be something to do with the hints about babies: now he was just waiting for her to drop in something about being hungry enough for two, or to catch her shoving a cushion up her dress to check out what pregnancy would look like in the mirrored door of the wardrobe. He was quite relieved when she simply turned to him, pose-free and said, ‘Both, if there's enough. I feel wickedly greedy.' She grinned and bit her lip, resting her chin on the back of the sofa and watching him.
Now
she's posing, Joe decided, turning away and reaching into the fridge for the cream cheese. ‘It's all that exercise,' Catherine said, narrowing her eyes at him suggestively.

She has a smaller, neater mouth than Nina, Joe was thinking as he put her croissant into the microwave. Being fellated by Nina had been an act of delicious terror. Her big, roaming lips had reminded him of overgrown exotic sea-anemones, threatening to devour him, penis, balls, body, brain and all. Catherine was more of a nibbler, making him think, even at the most unsuitable moments, of Lucy's pet hamster. I wonder what they're all doing now, he thought as he crossed the many metres of blond polished ash floor to serve his love with delicacies. With just a little masochistic nostalgia he recalled the wafting odours of roasting meat and crisp, floury potatoes. The smoked salmon, as he bit into it, felt limp, cold and hostile. His stomach rumbled, an old man's noise; he hoped Catherine hadn't heard.

‘Next Sunday when the girls come, I'll cook us all a proper roast dinner,' he promised her. She looked up at him in wide-eyed surprise. ‘Heavens, whatever for? It'll take half the day.'
The sexy half, before the girls get here
hovered behind her frown. Joe took no notice – his plans had moved on to the vegetables. ‘Mm,' he
murmured. ‘With carrots poached in butter and tarragon . . .'

‘You girls will do the dishes for your mother, won't you darlings?' Monica smiled from Lucy to Emily.

‘Mum and Dad always say we don't do things “for” her, like we're helping, because that makes out that all housework is just her job really and no-one else's and that's wrong,' Lucy corrected Monica, managing to sound as if she was reciting Holy Writ without quite understanding it.

‘Quite right,' Monica agreed readily. ‘There are now three grown-up women living in this house and chores should be shared equally. So that means you'll
definitely
be doing the washing up, won't you?' She piled plates together and passed them across to Emily who scowled, but took them across the kitchen to the dishwasher.

‘Give us a break, we've only just finished. Why don't you and Mum finish the wine and Luce and I'll clear up in a minute?'

‘OK, but just stack that lot first, please Em, then you can go off for a while if you want,' Nina told her. She felt depressed. Lunch seemed to have taken an unsociably short time, as if none of them had really felt like making much of a conversational effort and it had simply been a matter of functional feeding. Reluctant as she was even to think it, she was pretty sure it had something to do with the lack of men. As a family of women dining together they suddenly seemed an apologetic, sad lot. She and her mother were
leftovers
, and probably about as unappealing as the lamb would be by tomorrow. Perhaps she should have invited Henry, just to balance things a bit; he was always happy to accept a free meal. But then he'd have so
charmed Monica she'd be forever after dropping comments about
that nice man down the road, how silly for you both to live alone
. . . She poured more red wine into her glass and took a deep swig.

‘
Château La Lagune
,' Monica read from the label, waving her glasses vaguely between her nose and the bottle. ‘Rather nice. I don't think Graham would have liked it though. Did Joe buy it?'

‘No, I did,' Nina snapped. ‘I know what I like.'

‘All right, no need to get touchy, darling. I just wondered if it was left in the cellar from before . . . well, you know.'

‘Before Joe left. Yes I know.' Nina could feel herself getting crosser and searched her mind for a decent reason. ‘Sorry. It's just that Sunday feeling,' she said, shaking her head as if it was surrounded by summer midges, hoping to clear a space in her mind for some cheerfulness.

‘Would you like some cheese? I've got Brie and Yarg and something from Italy I think.' She walked across to the fridge and pulled cheeses from the top shelf. If Joe had been there he'd have remembered to get them out well before lunch. He'd have laid them carefully on a leaf green plate with ice-cold grapes and a fat bunch of purple sage from the garden. She shook her head again – he had no business trespassing in her mind at all. He'd been neatly tidied away long before now.

As she went back to the table she looked around the room. It seemed very cluttered, suddenly, being, in estate agents' terms, ‘a large family room' and therefore a collecting place for books, homework, television, assorted pet baskets and chatting, in addition to cooking and eating. The houses on this side of the road were built on a front to back slope and the kitchen took
up all of the large basement, leading out by way of a small conservatory to the walled back garden where the shrubs she and Joe had chosen so carefully ten years before now threatened to strangle each other and block out most of the sun.

That all needs clearing out as well, Nina thought, turning away and inspecting the cool blue walls of the kitchen that had collected smudges and plaster chips where Lucy's school artwork had been blu-tacked up and then carelessly pulled down again, and mystery smears that might have been from the exuberant killing of wasps. There were, too, the sad pale patches where Joe had taken framed photos of the girls to put in his new flat. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were crammed with paperbacks that Nina had read so long ago that many could reasonably be passed on to the school fair, and the window shutters had grey fingermarks because nobody ever bothered to use the awkward little (tarnished) brass rings to close them. Even the cushions strewn on the sofa annoyed Nina, being of the fussily 1980s chintz-and-frill variety. Suddenly she longed for plain cream linen and the smell of fresh paint. And the sharp Mediterranean colours of the restaurant she'd been to for that strangely unsettling lunch with Joe.

‘Yes it could do with a lick of paint,' Monica said, surprising Nina with her accurate thought-reading. ‘You'll have to get someone in.'

‘Well I might do it myself actually,' Nina decided, though even as she said it, she felt her right shoulder tweak with anticipatory pain at the very idea of painting what must easily be 600 square feet of ceiling. Perhaps Henry . . .

Nina went to the window that faced the road at the front and inspected the curtains. They needed
cleaning, or better still throwing out. Up in a bedroom window across the road at number 26, someone else could be seen measuring a window. ‘We're getting new people across the road,' she said. ‘They're in there now, measuring up.'

‘Really? That'll be nice for you.' Monica came and stood beside Nina and peered across the road. ‘Look at us, aren't we shamelessly nosy,' she said. ‘Why don't you run across and invite them in for coffee?'

‘I will soon, but not today. Let's just leave them to it, I expect they've got loads to do.' She dropped the curtain edge and turned away. She imagined a young, optimistic couple strolling round their new house together, laughing over paint-chart disagreements, picturing their furniture, where it should go, what they would need. The emptiness she'd been feeling all day gnawed harder at her.

‘Mum, Mum do you mind if I go out for a while? After we've cleared up?'

Nina looked suspiciously at Emily, who had tied her hair back in honour of asking the favour. ‘No I don't mind, as long as there isn't homework you should be doing. Where are you going? Chloe's? Nick's?'

Emily went to the sink and started rinsing cutlery. ‘Er, no actually, I just thought I might just drop in and see what Dad's doing. He said we could, any time.' Her face was hidden as she bent to drop knives into the dishwasher.

Nina was on the point of saying, But its not his turn . . . but stopped herself. She and Joe had agreed it wouldn't be a matter of ‘turns' and complicated arrangements. Emily was nearly eighteen, long since capable of getting on a bus to Chelsea and visiting her father by herself.