Pleasant Vices (7 page)

He held his breath as he scooped the foul-smelling Whiskas. The two food bowls had the word ‘Pussy' in ornate script painted on them, bought in humourless innocence by Carol, but which never failed to bring a silly schoolboyish smirk to Paul's face. He bent to put the dishes on the floor, keeping the evidence of his dirty mind turned away from Carol, in case she caught him and gave him one of her looks. The cats, tigerish, hissed at each other over the food and jostled stupidly for the same bowl, ignoring the other one. Paul squatted on the floor to push them apart, getting scratched for his effort, then sat back on his heels and watched Carol's bum jiggling slightly in its tight mauve trousers as she vigorously cut carrots. It was a trim bum, apple-round and temptingly biteable, it seemed to Paul. He could see the imprint of her knickers showing through the fabric, and knew they were the blue lacy ones, cut high and trimmed with jaunty satin frills round the legs. Paul, influenced by the cats, bared his teeth in semblance of a lecherous snarl, just as Carol turned to look at him.

‘What
are
you doing?' she demanded, incredulously.

‘Er . . .' The doorbell rang, saving Paul from inventing an explanation. Rearranging his features into a twisted grin, he scrambled up from the floor and leapt into the hallway, almost falling through the frosted glass into the porch in his eagerness to be away from Carol's interrogation. ‘Come in, come in!' he yelled into Jenny's surprised face. ‘Come and have a drink.' He steered Jenny into the sitting-room and placed her firmly in front of the drinks cabinet, opening it (damn, unlocked all the time) with a flamboyant flourish and hauling out the sherry bottle.

‘Er, actually have you got something else . . . ?' Jenny was saying, but found herself holding an engraved schooner, with copper-coloured liquid being slopped shakily into it.

Carol bustled through from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a flower-appliquéd towel. ‘Jenny, Paul is
so
sorry about Daisy's tape player,' she purred, and then added waspishly, ‘aren't you Paul?' as Paul was looking resolutely blank.

‘Oh yes. Of course. Though it was an understandable error. You never know these days, crime is all around us, bombs, terrorists, drug dealers. It's a war out there,' he waffled, swilling down his sherry and reaching for a refill. ‘Top-up Jenny?'

Jenny, who thought it wasn't really very understandable at all and had barely sipped her sherry, put her hand firmly over the top of the glass. ‘No thanks, really, this is fine.'

Carol took over, guiding her to the squeaky sofa. ‘Of course you know, Jenny, he's right in one way,' she said. ‘The increase in crime, especially burglaries in areas like this, well it's appalling. I blame all those unemployed boys with nothing better to do.' She leaned forward eagerly, and then back again, frowning as she caught Paul's gaze homing in on her cleavage. ‘Have you been in that estate up across the main road? All day long, absolutely heaving with people, all milling about with nothing to occupy them. We're heading for a revolution, that's what I think. They'll come pouring across that road and ransack nice, law-abiding places like this, just like Russia.'

God, she's mad, thought Jenny. Stark staring. Carol would never go across the main road into the estate, in case she was robbed both of her values and her valuables. How could she possibly have a clue what went on over there? But Carol, her spun-sugar hair jerking briskly like a rooster's crest, was just warming up.

‘And the children, not a father present between them! No role models. I thank God we were able to send our boys safely off to a decent prep school where they can learn what's what. And there's a lot to be said you know, for joining the cadet force. Channels their energies.'

Into learning how to kill each other, crossed Jenny's mind, but she said instead, ‘They could learn what's what here at home, surely, with both parents present?' suddenly keen to defend her own version of family life, ‘if all you think they need is a father-figure?' Carol gave her a sly look, something conspiratorial, as if what Paul could teach her sons wasn't likely to be worth knowing.

‘You know,' Jenny told her, ‘the vast majority of crime by young people is done by boys. The same lone parents are also bringing up girls too. So surely it's the messages that are getting across to boys in society that are damaging, not necessarily their family structure.'

Carol, for a moment looked stumped, but soon rallied. ‘Oh well, the girls, we all know what they're doing don't we? Getting themselves pregnant and straight up the housing list, that's what.'

In the face of such prejudice, Jenny could only give up. It was time to go before Carol progressed to the benefits of bringing back National Service. ‘I must get back, I've got a chicken in the oven,' she said, leaving her sherry glass on the floor beside the sofa and hoping that one of the snaky cats would knock the dregs out of it onto the cream carpet. No wonder they had to send the boys away to boarding school, she thought, the pastel furnishings would never stand up to healthy wear and tear. In any normal family, that pallid sofa would have a generous quota of felt pen marks.

‘We haven't paid you for the Walkman,' Paul said, pulling his cheque book out of his pocket. ‘How much, about thirty quid?'

‘Thirty-five should just about cover it,' Jenny answered, wondering why on earth she'd ever thought of going through all the bother of claiming on house insurance.

‘Though, really I suppose,' Paul wavered, ‘if it wasn't for Mrs Fingell poking about . . .'

‘If you've got it, I think Daisy would actually prefer cash,' Jenny persisted ruthlessly.

‘Oh, right.' Paul slowly counted out the notes. ‘Here you are then, and do tell her it was only out of a spirit of neighbourliness, won't you?'

Alan felt self-conscious in the pub. It hadn't felt like this in Dorset, perhaps this time it was because he was still wearing an office suit. Serena was buying the drinks. He watched her queuing at the bar, her long legs in black lycra, her long body in an oversized cream silk shirt and embroidered waistcoat. She didn't look conspicuous – every girl in the place was dressed in some sort of version of what she had on. It was Serena's idea of what to wear to the office. A bit whacky for accountancy, Alan's partner Bernard had thought, but she was the most highly qualified of the new young applicants, as well as Bernard's niece, and as Alan pointed out, they weren't exactly offering the kind of salary that would run to power-dressing.

Alan felt he still smelt of the office, but worried more that when he got home he would smell of smoke and pub, and that Jenny would be needing an explanation. He worried, too, about Serena and the flowers; she hadn't said anything, perhaps his daft romantic gesture had embarrassed her. He imagined her giggling about them, heartless and youthfully brittle with her flat-mate. It wasn't likely that she had, in her shared basement flat, anything suitable to put them in; things like huge, expensive vases were accumulated by people like himself and Jenny over many years of organized domesticity. She'd probably dumped them in a plastic bucket. Maybe it was too much, they'd only gone to a casual gig together after all, not for a night of passion at the Ritz. It had been a rare spontaneous gesture, the result of relief at finding, right there in his own office, someone to share his interest. It was easy with his cooking, everyone could eat and appreciate the results and say all the right things. But music was a different matter. At home, it was only when he was drunkenly playing air-guitar to Free's
Alright Now
at the tail end of one of his own parties that he could feel uninhibited about his tastes. That they weren't shared by his family and friends usually became obvious as Ben and Daisy left the room in over-exaggerated embarrassment (‘Oh
Dad
') and life-long friends started looking for their coats and car keys. He'd never, in all truth, shared Jenny's love for classical music, although years ago the sight of Jenny, dizzily blonde and slinky, playing her flute in tight black velvet had attracted him quite madly. There was still something sensuous about watching her play; the way she licked her lips and carefully prepared her soft mouth for the flute. But Mozart did not move him, Mick Jagger did. In polite company, where middle-aged, middle-class musical taste had settled at the point of unobtrusive Dire Straits CDs as dinner party background, he hoarded this secret as guiltily as if he still had a yearning to stand anoraked and train-spotting on Crewe station.

The pub was pretty sordid, with a brownish swirl-patterned carpet disguising goodness only knew what kind of stains. There was a smell of stale beer and air freshener and the walls and ceilings were murky with congealed fumes from micro-waved chips. Alan rarely went into pubs with Jenny; perhaps on holiday in Cornwall looking for a beer and a sandwich, always to somewhere clean, rural and picturesque with lavishly planted hanging baskets, where hearty, home-made bread and organic Stilton would be served. Outside this one, the traffic roared past on the North Circular and an ancient greasy roadie in the corner was sound-testing a microphone, murmuring the usual ‘one, two,' into it. Alan liked that sound, it was like a comforting, long-familiar mantra. His suit felt ever more out of place as the bar filled, everyone else in jeans or leather or cords. He should have taken a change of clothes into work with him, he thought, like he had in school days, hiding his fur-trimmed parka in his bag for travelling home on the bus and trying to pull girls from the grammar school. You got detention if you were caught doing that, he recalled. He wondered what the punishment, if Jenny could catch him now, would be.

Serena brought over the drinks, and the band came on to the tiny stage and started flicking at their guitars. Alan looked around the room; he wasn't the only ageing rocker in the place, which wasn't surprising, seeing as the band had been in business 25 years. He caught the eye of a balding man, about his own age and they exchanged half smiles, acknowledging each other's long service as rock aficionados. Was he another refugee from an over-cultured home, Alan wondered? Just then the band, the tweaking and tuning satisfactorily completed, slammed heavily into their first number, and he felt the music, hard as a gut-punch, with just the same thrill as at his first Yardbirds gig back in 1963. Back then, he had suspected that not even sex would come close to this, and, if pressed thirty years on, would have to acknowledge that he had suspected right.

Jenny had never had an obscene phone call before. You certainly didn't expect it in the middle of supper. The awfulness of it, she thought, could only potentially be rivalled by a call from any woman hoping to get Alan and then pretending she'd got a wrong number. The man had been very specific about what he wanted, though how she was supposed to provide that kind of service down the phone she had no idea – perhaps he, like Polly, also thought oral sex was some kind of conversation. Back at the table, Jenny pushed the remains of her chicken round her plate, bereft of appetite.

‘But what did he actually
say
?' Polly demanded eagerly, wondering if oral sex, after all, actually involved talking on the telephone. This would be something to tell Harriet, as far away as possible of course from Mrs Spencer and any other schoolteacher busybodies.

‘Yeah Mum, what did he say?' Daisy asked, wishing she had taken the call. It was so rarely that she let anyone else answer the phone too, reasoning accurately that most calls were usually for her.

‘He wanted, er, well, wanted me to do things. Offered money too,' Jenny said, brightening slightly and giving a weak grin. Perhaps it would be best to make light of it, especially in front of Polly. Lucky that Polly hadn't picked up the phone, she'd have kept the man there for hours, talking pornography and acquiring new depths of knowledge.

Ben, trying to stay calm and wishing some woman would call him and offer to pay him for rendering obscene services, reached across and spooned up too many potatoes from the dish, messily dropping some of them onto the pine table. ‘Isn't that the sort of thing you're supposed to tell your vigilante group about?' he asked. ‘Won't you have to report the crime to your leader?'

Jenny shuddered at the thought of repeating the details of the call to Paul. He'd write them all down, verbatim, and file them away in one of the folders Carol said he kept neatly shelved in his attic den. She could just see him, licking the tip of his biro and saying, ‘Now can we just go over that again, make sure I've got it right. What was it exactly he wanted you to do?'

‘No, because it's no threat to anyone else in the road. I won't be telling anyone else. Definitely not.' Except Sue, she thought privately, who could be relied on to lighten the sordidness of it. Then she grinned at him. ‘Oh and Ben, don't call them vigilantes, it's only Neighbourhood Watch. Can you see Paul and Harvey and old Mrs Fingell wandering round with cricket bats, defending the Close and beating up suspected villains?'

‘I can,' said Daisy, ‘especially Mrs Fingell, and Carol even more. I think she'd like a uniformed man with a barrier across the end of the Close, letting in no-one but people like her in sequined Italian tracksuits, oh and perhaps the postman and the John Lewis van. None of my friends would get near the place, not ever.'

‘You still haven't told me what he said,' Polly grumbled into her cauliflower. ‘If I don't know what a dirty phone call sounds like, how am I going to know if I ever get one?'

‘You'll know, Polly, believe me. And let's hope it never happens.'

Polly hoped for no such thing, and was determined to spend the rest of the evening hanging around as close to the telephone as she possibly could, even if it meant missing
EastEnders.

Even though it was after midnight when Alan came home, Jenny was still awake. Eager to get on to the next day and hope it turned out better than this, she had gone off to bed early, tried to sleep but couldn't. Daisy's music, essential accompaniment to homework, was still thump-thumping from her room. Jenny wondered if it might be better to ask her to turn it up till it was identifiable, rather than having to lie there trying to guess what she was playing from the heavy bass rhythm. Then there were her thoughts: two odd phone calls in one day, the first one about the flute lessons, where she and the caller seemed to be talking at bizarre cross-purposes, and then the blatantly obscene one. She wondered about the postcard in the newsagent's window; perhaps there were pervs out there who simply wrote down a few numbers at random and gave them a call, on the off-chance. Did that happen to the people trying to sell old sofas, or their wedding dress? Perhaps her handwriting had looked too distinctly feminine; next time she'd type her advert. She had at least, thank God, not put her name and address on it.