Every Good Girl Page 22

  ‘The curse of the self-employed,’ he was saying as he paced, ‘is having too much choice about how to allocate one’s time. We all do it, we’re all experts at displacement activity.’

  Nina, chopping garlic into the herbs and olive oil for lamb cutlets, privately thought that he could use some of his ‘displaced’ time to be stopping his small son from stamping on snails in her garden.

  ‘Is Sam all right out there?’ she asked pointedly. ‘He seems to be massacring the entire wildlife population.’

  Paul laughed gently. ‘Well you see, that’s typical boy stuff,’ he told her, rather patronizingly.

  Nina stabbed viciously at the garlic. ‘Actually, it’s just typical cruel stuff. If you won’t, then I’m going to tell him to stop.’ She put the knife down and went to the door. ‘Sam, please don’t kill the snails,’ she asked him, trying a polite request before resorting to outrage.

  ‘Why?’ He stopped and looked at her, genuinely amazed.

  ‘Because they’re little living things,’ she explained, wondering why his father wasn’t there as back-up. ‘They have a right to be here too, sharing the world. You’re hurting them but they’re not hurting anyone.’

  ‘Unless you count munching all your bedding plants,’ Paul drawled from the kitchen behind her. ‘What’s the difference? Sam’s foot or your poisoned pellets?’

  Sam was for the moment diverted by Lucy appearing at the entrance to the treehouse. ‘Come up and see the hamster,’ she invited kindly.

  Nina returned to the supper preparation. Paul was holding the Sabatier knife she’d been using and running his thumb along the blade. ‘Jolly sharp,’ he said approvingly, handing it back. ‘Most people keep such uselessly blunt ones.’

  ‘The difference isn’t so much for the snails,’ Nina told him, refusing to be distracted and taking the knife from his hand, ‘it’s for Sam. Surely you don’t want him to move on to setting fire to cats’ tails and dismantling butterflies?’

  ‘Oh he’ll know the difference. They all do, deep down,’ he said casually.

  ‘Well I think they need to be reminded now and then.’ Nina put the wine bottle back in the fridge in the hope that he’d get the message and go home.

  ‘Right I must go,’ he suddenly announced and Nina felt perverse guilt which she did her best to quash. ‘I’ve promised Sam we’ll go to Pizza Express and actually eat there for once, no take-out this time. Thanks for the drink. Come over to me, any time.’

  He went out through the back door, collected Sam from the treehouse ladder and made for the side gate.

  ‘Sorry, that one’s locked and bolted,’ Nina told him. ‘It’s quicker to go the front door way than to unfasten it all. Henry’s idea, because of the man on the Common.’

  ‘OK, no problem. Though you shouldn’t worry too much. Whoever it is is obviously an open air freak, not very likely to sneak into domestic premises.’ Coming back into the kitchen he gave her a sly smile. ‘By the way, how’s that brother of yours? Still living with your mum?’

  Nina looked at him carefully, calculating what he was getting at and if he really expected a reply. It seemed that he didn’t, that it had simply been a flip, throwaway comment and he gathered up Sam for a piggy-back, the two of them laughing and jostling. Nina went to the sink and finished chopping the vegetables and then, without really being able or willing to work out why, she collected all the sharp knives off the wall-rack and stashed them away carefully at the back of the tea-towel drawer.

  ‘Was that the man from across the road? I haven’t even met him yet, not to talk to.’ Emily wandered into the kitchen and started picking at pieces of raw carrot that Nina had just scraped. ‘What did he want? Did he happen to mention he might want a babysitter for Sam while he goes out and gets drunk?’

  ‘No he didn’t. I think he just wanted company,’ Nina told her. She remembered what it had been like when Emily was small, those endless days alone taking care of one small child, Joe working every possible hour, taking on any job that came his way on the basis that half the projects would come to nothing so you had to accept every one, just to get by. Sometimes they all worked out and he’d spent twenty hours a day working, shut away in the hot little upstairs studio, trying out melodies, or setting finished sound to video on the U-Matic. The house was eerily quiet without him, even after so many months, and she wished the girls would play the piano more, just to remind her of how it used to be.

  When the doorbell rang, just as Nina was putting potatoes into the oven, her first thought was that this was the worst possible time for anyone with half a brain to choose to visit.

  ‘Mum! Gran’s here!’ Emily roared down the stairs to her.

  ‘Grandmama, please!’ Nina heard Monica firmly correcting Emily on the stairs.

  ‘Mother! Hello! What brings you here?’ Nina asked, wishing immediately that she hadn’t said that in case she was the one who’d forgotten a supper invitation. Monica would be terribly hurt if she had. She did some brisk calculating. There were plenty of potatoes and salad if she wanted to stay and eat with the girls, and perhaps the chops would just be enough unless Lucy suddenly decided she was on a growth spurt.

  ‘And how did you get here? Is Graham with you?’

  Monica took off her jacket, put her large beige handbag (plenty of room for a toothbrush, nightie and next day’s knickers, Nina calculated, beginning to feel uneasy) on the table and sat down heavily.

  ‘I took a bus,’ Monica announced grandly. ‘But I didn’t have my pass with me and the driver wouldn’t let me pay. Isn’t that nice? There are still some gentlemen, you see.’

  ‘Yes, that was kind. Are you all right?’ Nina went to the cupboard and pulled out the sherry bottle. She wondered if Monica actually remembered why she had come. The calendar on the kitchen wall said nothing about a visit. It was quite possible she’d taken to wandering – she’d heard that an accident like a fall could start off bouts of alarming age-symptoms. Henry had had a grandmother, he’d once told her, who’d started spending whole days travelling London’s tube network because she couldn’t quite recall where she was supposed to get off. It had been useless trying to persuade her that she had no need to get on a train in the first place.

  ‘I was right,’ Monica announced abruptly. ‘I knew I would be.’

  ‘What about?’ Nina asked, putting a rather miserly half-glass of sherry in front of her mother, on the basis that if she was already confused, alcohol probably wouldn’t improve things.

  ‘Graham of course,’ Monica said. ‘Whoever did you think? He’s seeing a woman. Not a girl, mind. A woman.’ She sipped her drink quickly. ‘Nothing of the girl about Jennifer. You should see her. Strapping. That’s the right word.’

  ‘Heavens! This is a surprise! You’ve met her, then? What’s she like? It must be pretty serious.’ It must be very serious, Nina thought, if Graham had summoned the nerve to bring her home to meet Monica. He must have had full and thorough confidence that Monica’s opinion would make no difference to his relationship with . . . with Jennifer.

  ‘She’s wonderful,’ Monica stated with a broad smile. ‘That teal suit from Harrods will be just the thing for the wedding. I’ve come out to give them time to themselves. So I thought I could have supper with you and you could run me home a bit later.’ She chuckled slyly. ‘Let them play house for a bit. See how they like it.’

  Nina wasn’t sure how to take that. Did Monica want them to enjoy domesticity, or to discover its potential dreariness before it was too late?

  ‘She could be the answer to all my prayers,’ Monica continued to enthuse. She leaned forward and pointed her glass towards Nina. ‘And she’s a nurse. Now isn’t that just perfectly timely?’

  Nina felt puzzled. ‘I don’t know. Is it?’

  Monica got up and went to the sherry bottle, helping herself generously and slopping a good bit onto the worktop. She dabbed her finger in the spilt puddle and sucked at it.

  ‘Well of course it is! It means when I lo
se my faculties I won’t have to go into a dreadful old folks’ home called Final Solution or something! And when I finally pop off it means Graham will have someone to take care of him! She was sent by the gods, believe me. They could have that big bedroom at the front, and Graham can keep his old room for his hobbies. Frankly, she’s probably a little bit older than him, which is lucky so I don’t think she’ll be having babies. They could get a cat of their own though, if they wanted to. Oh I can just see it, so exciting!’

  Nina felt depressingly pessimistic. A long list of ‘But what ifs . . .’ immediately came into her head. One of them was ‘What if Jennifer starts wondering what’s in this for her?’ That wouldn’t occur to Monica. What was in it for Jennifer was Graham, which his doting mother would consider nothing short of life’s first prize. Monica had always been like that, always assumed that the thing she decided should happen, would happen, whoever else was involved. Once she’d made a decision, she’d always felt there was no need for anyone else to burden themselves with deciding otherwise. It had been exactly the same with childhood holidays. Nina remembered coming home from school and her mother waiting to greet her, thrilled and bursting with news: ‘It’s all arranged! We’re going off to Scotland, I’ve rented a mountain cottage. All that hill-walking. Won’t that be wonderful?’ It didn’t matter that her husband suffered acute vertigo, or that Graham had just been to Scotland on a school trip and all they’d talked about was beaches and seaside for the past three months. To thwart her was to be guilty of inflicting such severe disappointment that it was simply not worth the effort. Nina feared for the Graham-and-Jennifer pairing. It would need to be stronger than titanium. As far as Monica was concerned, the rest of her life and theirs was settled, to the absolute contentment of all concerned.

  Nina turned the chops in their marinade, imagining the two of them, at that very moment, sitting in Monica’s kitchen eating risotto and discussing the little house they could buy between them, how they might decorate it, where it might be.

  ‘Are you here for supper, Gran? Sorry, Grandmama?’ Lucy came clattering in from the garden.

  ‘Yes darling, I am. And your mother and I are going to have a nice chat afterwards about your Uncle Graham and his new friend.’

  ‘Er . . . well actually, Mother, I’m going out tonight. Sorry. You’re very welcome to stay and eat with the girls but I’m off at 7.30.’ She turned and looked into the oven, keeping Monica’s inevitable face of exaggerated disappointment firmly out of view.

  ‘Oh, oh that’s a shame. Somewhere nice? Someone nice?’ Monica hesitated just the smallest fraction of a second for fast thought (no dimming of these faculties) and said ‘A man?’, giving the word at least three rising syllables with her eyebrows zooming upwards to match.

  Nina grinned at her. ‘A man, yes but just a friend, that’s all. We’re just going to an Italian for a bit of pasta. Nothing to get excited about.’ She crossed her fingers to wipe out the severe economy of truth: Mick had managed to get a table at the River Café.

  ‘If you say so dear,’ Monica said. ‘Though if he’s at all passable, you know, don’t be too, oh what’s the word, remote, yes that word will do. They need a lot of encouragement. And you don’t want to spend the rest of your days alone like me, do you. Now a drop more sherry I think . . .’

  Graham was wary of his mother’s plans for him. He knew she was up to something, excited and secretive, and he was terrified she would take over Jennifer in some way. It was confusing because, whatever he’d said to reassure Jennifer that his mother would like her, he’d anticipated, almost counted on, her disapproval. He knew he could deal with that: he and Jennifer would then have been even closer in the face of opposition. They’d have had to have secret meetings, they might have had to resort to fast coupling at work, in the laundry store. Now he wasn’t sure, in the face of Monica’s enthusiasm (‘When’s she coming again? Would she like to pop in for breakfast after the night shift?’) quite what she had in mind. It was impossible, now, to go back to how things were: the sexy furtiveness of having a secret, the sneaking out to pretend to go owl-watching or whole-day plane-spotting. If he said now that he was off to Fairford to watch a dozen US B-1s on a NATO exercise she simply wouldn’t believe him. It would be ‘Oh you don’t fool me, I know what you’re up to’ and lots of knowing looks. He hated it. Jennifer loved it. Jennifer was now seriously fond of his mother and thinking about taking up bridge. She’d phoned to ask Monica’s advice about windowboxes while he was at work. He decided that was something to do with the choking incident, bonded together by the saving of life.

  ‘This is a lovely kitchen. It’s such a change, not feeling cramped while you cook. In the flat, you don’t have to take a single step to be able to reach everything,’ Jennifer commented as she pulled the lamb casserole out of the oven and gave it a stir. ‘I’ve always fancied a dishwasher.’ She opened a few drawers at random. ‘Now where’s the knives and forks,’ she murmured. Graham took plates down from the dresser and put them on the table.

  ‘Oh, don’t you use that lovely dining room?’ Jennifer asked in surprise. ‘Shame to slum it in the kitchen, however wonderful, if you’ve got a room like that.’

  ‘I can’t remember when it was last used,’ Graham admitted. ‘We always eat in here.’ He put the plates down, took cutlery from her hand and arranged it on the table. Playing house was one thing, playing bossy wives was something else. He liked the kitchen. It was comfortable, informal, homey. Surely not everything in his life had to change, not all at once anyway.

  ‘To be honest, I was a bit surprised you agreed to come out.’ Mick was playing with his watch strap and looking peculiarly nervous. They were at a window table, sipping coffee and watching the inky Thames flow by.

  ‘Whyever wouldn’t I? Did you imagine I have such an outrageously thrilling life that I’d actually be bored by the thought of dinner at the best Italian restaurant in the country?’ Nina teased him.

  ‘In the world, so I’ve heard it claimed,’ he corrected her.

  ‘Well wherever it’s the best of, it was all completely delicious. I don’t know when I last managed to eat so much.’

  Mick looked up and down her body. ‘Not as if you have a weight problem, is it? Some women are a pleasure to feed. You’re definitely one of them.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m glad I could do the bill justice. Feed a lot of women, do you?’ she asked, amused.

  ‘One or two,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s a lonely old life sometimes. I like meeting new people, hearing how they pass the years between growing up and passing on. I like taking people home, showing them my . . .’

  ‘Oh God, please not etchings!’

  Mick laughed, ‘Hell no, it’s books, that’s what I like. First editions. I’ve got some rare ones – Coleridge, Keats, that sort of thing. And, don’t laugh . . .’ he looked sheepish for a moment, attractively vulnerable, it occurred to Nina.

  ‘Go on, tell me,’ she encouraged him.

  ‘Enid Blyton. I’ve been collecting first editions of Famous Five books for years. They’re rare in good condition because when a child had one, they’d read it over and over again and weren’t exactly over-careful about bending the spine. I used to be terrible, myself. Used to fill in all the “o’s” with a red pen. So if you get a well-cared-for one, it’s just terrific.’

  Nina gazed at him, struck silent. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Is it just too naff for you?’

  ‘No! No, not at all. It’s just that, well from the way you look and everything I would have imagined you were about to confess to the ultimate collection of Mod artefacts or something. A pristine Vespa that you ride to rallies in Brighton or mint condition Small Faces albums. The sort of thing Joe . . . oh sorry, my ex-that-we-don’t-mention would like.’

  ‘Tell you what, you should come and have a look. Not too late, is it? You don’t have to rush back?’ Mick looked at his watch and summoned the bill, which he’d already insisted he was to pay. ‘My place is only a cou
ple of streets away, I’ll get us a cab.’ And he was up, wandering to the doorman with his request. At the back of Nina’s head, Sally’s voice was telling her not even to think about it. She wanted to go, though, wanted to be in someone’s house who wasn’t a safe neighbour or long-time friend. He was attractive too, all that soft brown hair and wit-filled eyes. Sally’s voice came back again, changing its mind saying, Go on, you’re single now, take a chance.’

  Nina had had a vague idea that Mick would live in a block of apartments: something large, newly built and with a residents’ gym and pool in the basement. It would be full of single people who didn’t really know each other. Either that, or perhaps something rundown and rambling that was part builders’ yard. It threw her when the cab drew up in a typical tree-lined Fulham street of terraced family-sized Edwardian houses, all with converted attic rooms, smart pale curtains and lavender-edged front gardens gouged out for extra parking space.

  ‘I’d better just phone home, make sure my dotty old mother managed to get home all right,’ Nina said as they went into the house. There was a child’s bike in the hall, and a pair of Siamese cats hurtled down the stairs to greet Mick.

  ‘OK, the phone’s in the kitchen. Come through and I’ll get us both a brandy.’

  ‘Oh, not for me, actually,’ Nina said, determined to keep her head reasonably straight. ‘I’ve had enough with all that wine.’

  Dialling, she quickly took in her surroundings. The kitchen was bachelor-clean but family-equipped. It wasn’t the vast amount of cooking implements that hung from every spare piece of wall, but the knick-knacks of day to day living that gave it away. On the wall hung a school term calendar, a noticeboard full of holiday photos, dating back, Nina could see from the ages of the two blond and beaming children, several years. There was a pair of very small Nike trainers by the back door and a selection of frog-face Wellingtons on a rack. A muddy football sat under the large pine table and a school homework diary was abandoned on the top of it.