Pleasant Vices (13 page)

He was still quite proud of himself really, and hurt that Carol didn't share the feeling. If only the police had caught the intruder, then things would be different. ‘My hero,' she would call him, and there'd be none of this messing about with face creams at bedtime either.

‘I hope you're going to keep this Neighbourhood Watch business under control next weekend when the twins are home,' Carol warned him. ‘I don't want them making a nuisance of themselves in the Close, and you know what you're like with a New Interest.'

Paul made a private decision to show the boys his files and make up a rota for them to keep watch with the telescope. Perhaps they could all go out together and photograph everyone's garden furniture – too much of it was being stolen all over London, he'd read in the papers. He ought to check out the iffy merchandise at car boot sales too, which might be fun with the boys. She didn't have to take over everything, after all, did she? It was always Carol who, in the holidays, took them for their swimming lessons, to riding and to karate. She said it was because it clashed with his working hours. This would be something the boys and he could all get involved in together, something just for them, a Boys' Own adventure.

Alan, with a mild but bearable hangover, said a brief goodbye and left early for work the next morning, which left Jenny to deal with a letter from the police about Daisy.

‘You can go down to the police station for an official Caution, it says here, but that means you have to be prepared to admit you did it. Otherwise I suppose we'll all have to endure some sort of court hearing.'

‘Not much doubt which you'd prefer,' Daisy mumbled rudely through a mouthful of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. Ben nudged her, warningly, and Daisy slopped milk on the table.

‘Stop it you two, you're like a pair of babies!' Jenny said to them. ‘Obviously it would be more convenient to get it all over and done with, and you
are
guilty, aren't you Daisy? They don't actually believe you really just lost your ticket, and it's impossible to prove.'

‘Didn't think it was up to me to prove I'm innocent. We're always being told that the great British justice system works the other way round. And they can't prove I didn't pay,' Daisy said, pertly.

‘They found you without a ticket. Case over!' Jenny snapped. ‘Either way, you'll have a criminal record, we'll just go down to the police station and then afterwards we can forget all about it.'

‘God, do you have to come? Can't Emma come instead?' Daisy asked, horrified that she might have to be marched along, flanked by parents, like a small child. They would probably make her wear sensible shoes.

‘Don't push it, Dais,' Ben muttered, looking sideways at Jenny's increasingly furious face. She never used to be like that, he thought suddenly, she used to be all sort of benevolent and understanding. Perhaps it was her age.

‘While we're all here, and talking of crime,' Jenny said, leaning forward and stirring her tea thoughtfully, ‘Does anyone want to tell me anything about last night? About why the police thought we might have burglars?'

‘Wasn't the police thinking it,' Ben cut in. ‘It must have been Paul Mathieson again.'

‘Yes but why? Even Paul must have had some sort of reason. I'd like to hear what it was that he saw.' Jenny sipped her tea and waited patiently.

Daisy gulped down the last of her cereal and pushed back her chair. ‘Going to be late . . .' she said, getting up and glancing warningly across at Polly sitting at the table, still with her aren't-I-a-good-girl expression. She looked so puffed up with smugness, Daisy thought, she might burst any moment, scattering little nuggets of truth all over the table like spilled Rice Krispies.

‘It was probably just Biggles, trying to get in Daisy's window. Wasn't it Daisy?' Ben said, taking his bowl to the dishwasher so as not to have to show his reddening face and quakey hands to Jenny. She could always spot lying a mile away.

‘I heard him, all the way from my room, he was miaowing and miaowing,' Polly contributed dramatically, eager to join in with the conspiracy.

Daisy glared at her over-acting sister, but had to continue, ‘Yeah, that's right. I leaned out of my window to call him in off the conservatory roof. Paul must have seen me.'

While Jenny was pondering how Paul could have mistaken a small old ginger cat for a full-sized human, Polly chipped in with an interesting thought. ‘Why was he looking, do you think?' she suddenly asked.

Why indeed? thought Jenny.

Serena was wearing an old leather biker jacket. Not a soft and subtle designer version, but a genuine, heavy-duty zipped and studded one, with the leather worn to greying scuffed patches and bits of the sleeve-fringe curling up with age. She wore it, Alan noticed, with a thin cream silk skirt, an endearing contrast of toughness and vulnerability. He wondered if that kind of jacket would suit Jenny and decided it wouldn't. It shouldn't really suit Serena either, he realized; at work, she should be putting across the serious-accountant image. But at the photocopier she passed close by him, and he caught a hint of the leather-smells of the past, of dangerous Rockers and their greasy hair and engine oil, of the warlike threat on the Brighton beaches, of his group of scootered Mods, preening and flaunting in their slick mohair suits. From outside in the hectic London streets, he thought he could hear seagulls, and The Who.

‘Sorry about the other day.' Serena's soft voice melted into Alan's thoughts. ‘I had to stay on at home and take care of Mummy's flu. She's been getting rather frail and cancelling her golf just lately. OK for next week, though. Joe Walsh is at the Mean Fiddler. What do you think?'

What did he think? He thought that right now he wanted to push her roughly against the photocopier and ravish her. Somehow, enticingly, there was about being with Serena the secret of regaining lost youth. Alan was starting to need to be closer and closer to her, as if to inhale the magic scent. As middle-aged women put their trust in ever more expensive cosmetics, so Alan put his into absorbing Serena, and while she was prepared to spend some spare social time with him, he wallowed in the glorious feeling that, just a touch and a breath away, was the elixir of eternal youth. He no longer would have agreed with the wish to die before he got old, now he wanted not to get old before he died, and it was nothing to do with how many years he lived.

Of course it would be all right for next week. Alan put out a tentative hand to stroke Serena's leather-clad shoulder, but she slid away, unnoticing, into her office. Should he touch her at work, though, Alan wondered. Should he touch her at all? Did this count as having an affair when all they did was spend the odd evening drinking beer and watching ancient rock 'n' rollers in seedy pubs and clubs? So far, Alan had convinced himself that all was innocent, simply because he assumed an affair was not a matter for guilt until he climbed into a woman's bed and body. But what, he thought, with a twinge of something that surely wasn't guilt, would Jenny call it?

‘Of course I'll never do it again. That was a kind of accidental one off. Events just took over,' Jenny said to Sue in the changing room after a fast game of tennis. ‘It was rather like being twenty again, back in the days when sex was so easy, simpler and more fun to end the evening in bed with someone who'd just bought you dinner than to find a reason why you shouldn't.' She looked up quickly from loading her tennis shoes into her bag; anyone could be in the loo cubicles, ears flapping.

‘Did you do it because you were angry with Alan, do you think?' Sue asked her.

‘Probably. And you know, I've realized I'm not really, apart from flute-teaching, not really employable. I have no
skills.
Half the orchestras that existed when I was playing have been made redundant, so I can't go back to that. Most of the musicians I worked with are now unemployed.'

‘You could do a course in something?'

‘I could. And if Alan and I really do separate, I'll obviously have to. He's an accountant, with years of practice at making sure estranged wives don't get more than their due. I just suddenly feel so vulnerable, not being able to earn some money. Not
for
anything, not yet anyway, just running-away money, like Jessica Mitford. Though the way Alan's work is going, it's going to be needed to keep the kids in school. The idea that he might have someone else makes me realize how dependent I am on him financially. It's hateful. We've just slipped into it. Women like me don't work as prostitutes, not really,' she said, thankful that she was pulling her sweater over her head at that moment.

Sue made a disappointed face at her. ‘Well you know what I think about that: one way or another we all do if we're married. And I seem to manage to be quite a lot like one even now I'm not! Hey ho, no such thing as a free lunch . . . !'

The two women walked out to the car park together. As Jenny unlocked her car she said to Sue, ‘You know, I can't imagine Alan going off and renting sex, but really, you wonder don't you? No-one knows what any of them get up to when we're not there. I mean, I'm still getting some very odd calls, so who
are
all these men who phone? Do you think they've got lovely wives and sweet broods of children at home?' She felt suddenly anxious for these unsuspecting families, as if she was personally responsible for tempting their husbands.

Sue said, rather sadly, ‘With both my husbands I always used to imagine the absolute worst. I was rarely disappointed by being wrong. There's probably many a generous, kind woman just like you, or men too, of course, out there providing the kind of thing blokes got used to in their pre-wife days, maybe something quirky they got a taste for at boarding school or whatever. It's probably what keeps some marriages together in the end, having somewhere nice and anonymous to sneak to for a spot of harmless spanking and wanking or whatever Matron's speciality with the Upper Fourths in the dorm used to be.'

‘Social services, with a difference . . .' Jenny giggled. ‘Thank God I'm in the private sector,' she said laughing, ‘at least I can say yes or no. And from now on it's decidedly no!'

At home, the phone rang twice. The first sounded unpleasantly sleazy and Jenny hung up, telling him firmly that he'd got the wrong number. It was definitely time to advertise somewhere safer than a shop window, she thought. The second caller was a bit worrying . . . a vaguely familiar man's voice simply said, ‘Oh good, I was checking you were in. I'll be round,' and then hung up abruptly. Jenny looked at the clock: almost time for Polly to be dropped off at the gate. The doorbell rang and Jenny went to open the door, a welcoming smile on her face ready for her daughter. But on the doorstep stood George Pemberton, slightly smarter than usual in a tweedy jacket with the buttons wrongly fastened as if from hurry and nerves, and clutching a bunch of tight-budded pink roses, the sort that needed an aspirin in their water if they're ever going to open properly.

‘Oh hello George,' Jenny said, the smile fading a little. ‘I was expecting Polly.'

‘Oh. Sorry,' he said, ‘does that mean you haven't got time?'

‘Time?' she said, trying to get her brain to interpret what he was saying. Vaguely, she recalled what they had said to each other as they left the Benstone's dinner party. Good grief, she thought, suppressing an urge to giggle, surely he wasn't thinking . . . oh surely not, not George.

George was through the porch and into the hallway. ‘Fiona isn't very keen on “music”. Tone deaf in fact you could say,' he told Jenny, with an unfamiliar lopsided grin that was well on its way to being a leer. ‘So I thought I'd get my flute lessons somewhere off the premises, so to speak.' George started fumbling in his trousers and Jenny, appalled, thought he was already undoing his flies, there in the hallway, where anyone could see in through the open door. Thankfully, she suddenly saw that what he was exposing was only a wad of notes.

‘Fifty quid shall we say? Cash do you?' he asked expectantly.

‘No, George, cash certainly
won't
“do me”!' Jenny said firmly, watching with a twinge of sympathy as George Pemberton's face took on a childlike expression of acute disappointment. At least he didn't ask if she took Visa. Her face felt twitchy, as she very much wanted to laugh, but she stopped herself. He looked quite forlorn, standing dejectedly in her hall, his bunch of roses and handful of banknotes now a pair of embarrassments.

‘But I thought . . . you said the other night . . .' George began. ‘And it isn't at all unusual you know,' he continued, regaining confidence as Jenny had neither slapped his face nor threatened him with the Vice Squad. ‘You read about it all the time, women making a bit on the side by having a bit on the side,' he gave a watery grin.

‘You're reading the wrong newspapers then,' Jenny told him briskly, appalled at the idea of mixing business with neighbours. ‘Now, why don't you come into the kitchen for tea and flapjacks. Polly will be home in a minute.' Thank goodness, she thought, leading George, now mild as a spaniel, into the kitchen, she hadn't had crumpets in the bread bin – she could imagine his rising hopes (and not just hopes) if she'd offered him those.

‘You won't mention this to Fiona?' he said, with an expression of panic.

Jenny laughed. ‘I wouldn't dare! Polly was caught reading
Playboy
at school, I'm in enough trouble already for being a terrible parent!' At that moment, Polly came crashing in through the back door, pulling Harriet Caine and her reluctant mother Ceci into the house after her. ‘Mum, Mum, me and Harriet want to go to Laser Leisure on Saturday and Harriet's mum says it's only all right if you say it is.' She then added in an intense stage whisper and a covert glance at Ceci, ‘She thinks it might be violent. It's not. Tell her,' Polly insisted, pulling persuasively at Jenny.