Every Good Girl Page 14

  Emily was starting to feel hungry and wanted to get up, eat Weetabix and watch Richard and Judy in the kitchen. Henry would be jolly (not because he wasn’t sympathetic, but because he was convinced, despite being done over by Joe, that a good laugh fixed everything) and she wasn’t sure she could face that. The TV would be under a dustsheet or even stored away in the big cupboard under the stairs. Every time Nina painted a room things got put into that cupboard, and only half the things came out again because Nina then had a splurge on obliterating clutter. ‘One day me and Lucy will be in there,’ Emily said to herself as she climbed out of her bed. ‘I’m surprised that’s not where Dad ended up.’

  She went and showered, then searched around for clothes to face the day in. They had to be all-covering, all-enveloping. ‘How can you wear all that when the weather’s getting warmer? You look like you’re going walking up a mountain or something,’ Lucy had said the day before when Emily had come downstairs in jeans, boots, a polo neck jumper and a snug fleece. ‘It wasn’t your fault you know,’ her mother had pointed out with crass obviousness. ‘It wasn’t a matter of what you were wearing, just a matter of where you happened to be at the time.’ Emily knew all this, deep down inside. Truths like that raged round in her head tangled with the anger. Right now it was a question of keeping her body, her legs, even her hands private for her viewing only, just for a while.

  The phone rang as Emily was trailing slowly down the stairs. She didn’t dash to answer it as she normally would, even though she immediately worked out that at school by now it would be morning break time and that the call was probably Chloe or Nick (stupid bloody Nick, so much was all his fault). Eventually she heard Henry booming ‘hello’ down the phone in the kitchen. She sat on the top step of the basement, listening while Henry chatted up Chloe, asking her how her love life was going. There were long silences when Chloe was presumably telling him. People did that with Henry. Every now and then he gave one of his big laughs, the sort that made you quite sure you’d just said the funniest thing he’d heard all day. It was a deep rumbling laugh, lovely but not as lovely as her dad’s. She wished it was him painting the kitchen. She sneaked down the stairs till she could see Henry, lolling back in the big deep armchair (squashing its shroud of old sheet), with his feet on the kitchen table. He was wearing one blue sock and one black one.

  ‘Are you colour blind or just a poser?’ she asked him, interrupting rudely as she came into the kitchen. Henry didn’t move, just grinned at her over the top of the phone and continued listening. ‘The Princess has just come down, do you want to talk to her?’ he said. ‘Of course she bloody does, you don’t think she’d be calling you, do you?’ Emily tried being rude to him, but couldn’t resist smiling. He was so like one of those outsize soft toys that people buy for babies, which they can’t play with till they’re far too old to want to. ‘And don’t listen,’ she hissed at him, taking Henry’s place in the chair and shoving her own feet onto the table. Pulling a face, Henry tugged at an imaginary forelock and returned to his ladder.

  ‘Chloe? How’s things? What have I missed?’

  ‘Nothing. What’s there to miss?’ Chloe grunted. ‘Though I think you might have used up your sympathy quota because I overheard a mention that your La Peste essay might be getting done while you’re at home. Is it?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Emily laughed. The essay had actually been done the day before, swiftly and angrily finished in a burst of mind-numbing concentration that effectively shut out any humiliating thoughts of the man on the Common.

  ‘I think you’ve done it and I bet it’s brilliant,’ Chloe replied, impressing Emily with her perception. ‘It’s terrible when we have to work to take our minds off things, isn’t it?’

  ‘Suppose so,’ Emily agreed, feeling depressed.

  ‘Nick sends love. He thinks you’ve got flu.’

  ‘Fuck Nick,’ she said. ‘Though actually no, I don’t recommend it.’ As she said this, Emily could sense Henry up his ladder turning to look down on her in wonder. She looked up at him and frowned. ‘I should have taken this call upstairs,’ she said to Chloe. ‘There are some very big ears flapping down here.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you after school – I’ll bring a surprise, a nice one I promise.’

  ‘Lovely, just so long as it’s not Nick,’ Emily ordered, putting the phone down. She lay back in the chair and gazed up at Henry, who sensed her eyes on him again and smiled at her.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Wondering if I’ll tell your mum what you’ve been up to with this Nick?’

  Emily looked suitably scornful. ‘Stroll on, she’d be worried sick if she thought I was actually still a good little virgin. My mum’s a Seventies swinger, or whatever they were called, don’t forget. I expect you were a Sixties one,’ she added with calculated cruelty, watching with satisfaction as an expression of mock pain crossed Henry’s face. He sat down on top of the ladder. ‘Must rest the ancient aching legs,’ he said. ‘And yes, I was that Sixties swinger. If it moved, you shagged it. One is not necessarily proud of that.’ She laughed: he looked so weary it was hard to imagine him in active and hot pursuit of some short-skirted, plum-lipsticked girl.

  ‘What about now?’ she asked quietly, wondering as she said it what she was really getting at.

  Henry stood up and turned his attention back to the ceiling and started painting with care and concentration. ‘What a question! So rudely personal. Now, I’ve come to an age where discretion is all. A gentleman never tells.’

  ‘You mean, this gentleman isn’t getting any,’ Emily concluded with teenage brutality. Losing interest, she clambered out of her chair and started rummaging in cupboards for Weetabix. She made coffee for the two of them, then took herself off up the stairs to indulge her need to watch daytime TV in the sitting room.

  Only half listening to a sofa discussion on how less than perfect bodies could find a way to wear translucent dresses that summer (don’t even think about it, that’s how, was Emily’s damning conclusion), she continued thinking about Henry. She felt safe alone in the house with him, but wondered, in a detached way, whether she should. It could have been anybody out there on the Common. That muffled voice and wrapped-up head could have been anyone at all. It could have been Henry or Simon or that new Paul man from across the road or Mr Clements from primary school. She tipped Weetabix off the spoon, halfway to her mouth, feeling slightly sick. At least it couldn’t have been her dad: he was with Lucy, hauling her off that little sneaky brat Sophie and bringing them home. In theory, though, in nauseating, actual puke-inducing theory, it could be any man on the planet and every one of them. They’d all got that power to intimidate, to terrify, to subject. Just suppose they really spent all their time having to be careful to keep under civilized control, with the urge to break out only just under the surface. She looked at the TV screen where three over-groomed women sat chatting and smiling in sublime happy confidence, blithely advising women on how to make themselves look seductive.

  ‘You could be next,’ Emily waved her spoon to the middle one, a slim bossy woman with streaked red hair and a brave pink suit. ‘You could leave that studio and out by the car park there might be A Man who wants to treat you like scum. Don’t ever forget it, because I bloody won’t.’

  Nina arrived at her mother’s house at the same time as the Social Services inspector and they squashed through the gate together, awkwardly. Rather to Nina’s surprise, while she was laughing an apology, the social worker bossily pushed her way ahead up the narrow, lavender-fringed path, leaving Nina, amused, in no doubt that the woman was more than sure of her own importance. The woman was probably, Nina would guess, no older than she was, but had taken on the tight grey curls and faded large blue spectacle frames that she perhaps thought might give her the authority of someone older.

  Graham opened the door before they reached it, looking anxious, worried, Nina assumed, in case the rapid modifications that had been done in order that Monica could be allowed home might
not be adequate.

  ‘It’s like not being allowed out of prison till the probation arrangements have been set up, isn’t it?’ Nina commented cheerily as Graham stood aside to let them in. The social worker – ‘Call me Julia,’ she instructed by way of abrupt greeting – did not smile.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how many hospital beds are occupied by people who could manage perfectly well at home if only the right arrangements would be made. The Council can only do so much, you know,’ she said rather crossly as if the last thing she needed was to be putting up with someone lacking suitable seriousness.

  ‘The council had nothing to do with it,’ Nina told her, feeling waspishly defensive. ‘We used Yellow Pages and folding money. And it was all done and finished three days ago. We’ve been waiting for you.’ Graham was frowning, his eyes imploring Nina not to get on the wrong side of this person who seemed to have so much power.

  ‘Yes, well. That shows initiative,’ Call-me-Julia approved grudgingly.

  Nina stood behind her in the hallway while the stairs were inspected. Julia had a no-nonsense body, solid and firmly encased in a firmly belted navy blue mac. She had, Nina thought, a very businesslike bottom, broad, firm and flat. It would not swing round during a tricky blanket bath and knock things off a table. As Julia stood above her on the third stair, tugging at the new rail that was fixed opposite the banisters, Nina fought a terrible urge to prod at the efficient derrière, like the woman in the Beryl Cook painting of the three bowling ladies. ‘Is it all OK?’ she enquired instead.

  Julia was giving nothing away, turning to face them as she made a cryptic note on her clipboard. She clasped that firmly to her bosom, which was also firm though not flat, as if she was secretly making notes on their suitability, not just the house. Graham sighed. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ he offered, heading for the kitchen.

  ‘Ah the kitchen.’ Julia followed him and he increased his speed, alarmed. ‘Kettle? Plugs? How much dangerous leaning, how accessible?’ She looked around swiftly, taking in instantly Monica’s pristine grey and white kitchen. She stared at the floor tiles, weighing up their slip-rating, quickly looked at the cordless green translucent kettle and murmured, ‘Yes, good. Now upstairs.’

  Nina and Graham followed. Nina looked at her brother, trying silently to express how like a child she was feeling, like a nervous Brownie about to win or lose her badge for Age Care.

  ‘Hmm. Oh, and a child! Where . . . ?’ Julia had opened the wrong door, Graham’s.

  ‘No, no that’s my room,’ he blustered, pushing past and closing the door swiftly. His face was pink. Nina had caught sight, very briefly, of the model aircraft, swaying from the strings in the rush of air from the opened door. She recognized his embarrassment and sympathized. His room was no-one’s business but his. There was no call for Julia’s clipboard comments on that. ‘This is my mother’s room,’ she volunteered, swiftly taking over as leader.

  She went into Monica’s room and inhaled its faint papery scent of old-fashioned roses, her favourite flowers. The wallpaper was patterned with bold deep pink and scarlet full-bloom roses and their fresh bright green leaves, vivid against a white background, with scarlet, green and white striped curtains. She thought back with guilt to the bedroom at Joe’s flat, the peachy washed-out bud-sprigged fabrics, the drenching of all surfaces in exhausting cloths. She might have been lying on that bed while her poor mother lay upside down on the stairs. Nina hadn’t been inside her mother’s room for, oh years, she thought. It seemed to be an intrusion, standing there, uninvited, inspecting the furniture for traps to floor the unsteady. Her bedside table, though, and the dressing table and the old green velvet chaise-longue remembered from childhood stood massive and unchallengeable: they stared back at them all, somehow collectively asserting that it would take more than one wobbly old lady to knock these gleaming polished pieces sideways. They stood as ever, firm and friendly, and even Julia appeared diminished beside them.

  ‘The bed’s a bit high . . .’ she attempted, but without conviction.

  ‘Mother is quite tall. We all are. She’ll be all right, and I’ll be here,’ Graham countered, gaining strength from the surroundings.

  ‘And there’s a phone right here beside the bed, and Graham’s only across the landing,’ Nina added.

  ‘Hmm. Yes, well, with the new handrails in the bathroom I don’t see any real problems. If you’ve made the arrangements, I don’t see why your mother shouldn’t come home today. Doctor permitting, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nina agreed, biting her lip against a grin. Nina could just imagine Julia’s cowed deference in the presence of a medicine man. Perhaps she even became quite coy and twittery in the Presence.

  ‘I’m so glad she’s gone,’ Graham said when he had closed the front door. His skin glistened with the perspiration of tension. Nina felt sorry for him. ‘I’ll make us both a cup of tea,’ she said, ‘to celebrate. Though you know, well better than most of us, that they really don’t want people like Mother to stay in the hospital, because they need the beds. There wasn’t much doubt really.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Graham said, following her to the kitchen and leaning against the door frame. ‘I expect they worry about being sued. I mean, suppose she came home and slipped in the bathroom the very next day?’

  Nina concentrated on the cups and the tea, vaguely aware of the sound of the cat flap behind her. A horrible choking noise suddenly filled the quiet air of the kitchen and she and Graham watched with interest as the grey striped cat sicked up a barely digested mouse on the floor, neatly and carefully, so it seemed, selecting a white tile. Nina looked at Graham and together they dissolved into helpless giggles, of a sort they hadn’t shared in years, not since as small children they’d stood together behind their wildly ranting mother as she’d declaimed to whatever gods were listening that she deserved better.

  The cat sat looking at them, licking its lips clean, narrowing its eyes in satisfaction, and then delicately curled a pale front paw and began washing.

  Chapter Eleven

  Catherine sniffed cautiously at her bedroom air like a cat suspecting there might just be something interesting to find if only the right scent could be selected. Joe lay sprawled in the cane armchair watching her, comfortably guilt-free (old lovers, particularly old wives, couldn’t possibly count), and waited for her sensitive nose to tell her whether he’d left a fermenting sock under the bed or that the water in the vase of tulips was slightly less than fresh. He discounted entirely the possibility that she could smell Other Woman. Nina’s presence had been several days ago now, and so fast and furious as barely to leave an imprint on the duvet. He shouldn’t be thinking about it, not now Catherine was back, but the memory still gave him a secret smile and a joyous lurch in his blood pressure.

  Catherine liked to take a long and decidedly unspontaneous time to get ready for sex, which at first he had thought was some kind of seduction technique that she and perhaps a dorm full of girls at her boarding school had concocted as being a terrific tease. Now he knew better – she just liked titivating herself; it was some sort of solitary foreplay. A less lazy man than Joe might wonder if the process was almost insultingly masturbatory. She dressed and made up one way for work, another for bed, simple as that. It wasn’t psyching-up time she needed, like athletes going for the hurdles final, it was simply that she prepared thoroughly for sex, thinking about what to wear as if it was a tricky business meeting. Did that make him a client? Dressed and anointed, he thought, that’s how she presented herself on a bed, like an elaborate dinner-party main course. Sometimes, mid-coitus, her hand would stretch out, not in blissful languor, but to pluck a stray pillow back into place.

  His fingers twitched on the arms of the chair and he watched her slender round bottom as she bent to put shoes in their appointed pocket of the hanging rack in the wardrobe. Suppose he jumped on her now? Fondled her from behind, wrenched off her silk knickers and simply pinned her to the bed. Maybe just this once she
wouldn’t give him that sultry over the shoulder wait-for-it smile as she slinked into the bathroom with a teeny handful of Agent Provocateur purple lace, feverishly running the shower and shaking out the perfumed oils. It must have been something she’d read somewhere, he decided, ‘Smell sweet, keep him sweet’, or worse, ‘Treat your body as an altar, he will worship you.’ They were living together for heaven’s sake, not first-dating, he couldn’t care less whether her French knickers were the same mint green as her bra and properly ironed before they were slithered out of and abandoned to the floor. Nina had had a compelling scent of warm busy human, something so profoundly arousing that he wondered why no-one had yet bottled and patented it.

  ‘You’ve changed the duvet cover. How sweet of you,’ Catherine said, looking at as much freshly laundered froth of pink beribboned easy-care poly-cotton as could be seen under the many frilled silky cushions.

  Joe shrugged, eyeing the marshmallow bed without interest. Like the rest of the bedroom, it did not feel as if it was his, simply somewhere he was expected to visit Catherine. He felt rather more comfortably at home the nights he crashed out on the old black leather sofa up on the studio balcony when he’d worked late on a piece of music, often finishing only hours before recording. He’d done that often enough back at the house and the sofa was the only piece of furniture he’d taken away, something to curl up with, cosy, grubby and home-scented like a security blanket. Bedwise, his own taste ran to plain white cool Egyptian cotton, of the sort he and Nina had collected over the years from various Heals sales. In the back of his mind he could still hear the echo of his mother-in-law warning Nina ‘You’re letting yourself in for years of ironing’, and looking at him with dark hostility as if she suspected him of deliberately setting traps designed to keep Nina chained to sweaty domestic tasks while he swanned about womanizing.