Slightly Foxed (22 page)

Wednesday to meet you both."

"Girlfriend? What, Dominique? I thought he'd stopped

seeing her."

"Girl called Sarah." I took positive pleasure in knowing

something Alasdair didn't. "From Manchester, apparently.

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Very pretty girl." This was pure assumption, but it was a fair

bet.

"Oh. Tamar hasn't mentioned—neither has he, come to

that. Well, I'll look forward to meeting her then. Now, if

there's nothing else?"

How come he made me feel as though
I'd
been the one

making the call? I hung up, mildly pleased that I'd managed

to score back a few I-know-something-you-don't-know points

in the Divorced Parents' Sunday League tables.

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Slightly Foxed

by Jane Lovering

When I met Florrie from the London train she seemed to

have grown a couple of inches and she smelled different.

Exotic. My familiar-as-my-own-face daughter was suddenly

angular and foreign. "Good trip?" I eyed her outfit, not one

item of which I'd ever seen before.

"Pretty good, yeah." This was new too, the cool

offhandedness. "London is a wild place, there's so much to

do. So, what did I miss? Piers got a new flat yet?"

"No, but he's got a new girlfriend, apparently."

Florence stopped walking. I thought for a moment she'd

snapped the heel off her Red or Dead sandals. "
Piers?
" She

couldn't have sounded more surprised if I'd said the Pope.

"He told
me
he was sick to death of those brain-dead bimbos

always hanging round him, he was giving himself six months

celibacy to decide what he wanted. She must be really

something?"

I didn't know Florence knew words like celibacy. London

must have done her vocabulary good, if nothing else. "I don't

know. No one's met her yet."

Florence wheeled on her spike heel, her gypsy dress

flowing against her minimal curves with maximum effect. A

platform sweeper nearly drove his cart into the newspaper

stand. "Then I guess
I'll
have to find out all about it, won't I?

Are we taxiing home, only I'm really shattered and these

shoes are bloody killing me."

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Given their pointed toes, pointed heels and very little

superstructure in between, I wasn't at all surprised but

refrained manfully from pointing this out. They certainly

looked spectacular with the frilled layers of her dress which

made her waist impossibly tiny and her B-cup bosom

incredibly bountiful. The taxi drivers were falling over

themselves to take us home. Luckily Florence didn't ask what

I'd been up to whilst she'd been away, but began a

commentary about how much better life was in London

compared to York. How much there was to do, how fantastic

the shops were. It even appeared that she'd visited a

museum or two.

Back at the flat, Florrie reverted to her normal at-home

persona, grabbing the phone and talking to her entire

collection of friends. I slumped down on the sofa. Although I'd

missed her, the flat seemed to shrink as soon as she came in,

the sound of another voice in another room pulling the walls

and ceiling towards me until the place became uncomfortably

oppressive.

I cupped my hands over my eyes and pressed, trying to

relieve the tiredness. My eyes felt like a couple of ripe boils

wrapped in sandpaper. Jace hadn't been in the shop so I'd

suffered a day of Simon's vigorous attention to detail without

the usual relief of being able to snigger about him behind his

back. Oddly though, when I'd asked Simon if I should phone

Jace to find out how she was and whether she'd be in

tomorrow, he'd come over all awkward.

"I should leave her for today," he'd said, eventually. "She'll

be in tomorrow, I'm sure." Which made me wonder. Did he

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know what was up with Jace? Or did he not know, but care

even less, in which case, was her job safe? She'd certainly

been taking quite a lot of time off lately, usually with some

fairly feeble excuses. If she wasn't in tomorrow, I was ringing

her for sure and warning her.

A high-pitched shriek from Florrie made me jerk to my feet

and hurtle through her door. "What is it?"

She'd seen the letter from the vet, stuck to the side of the

fridge. It detailed treatment so far, and the cost. I was

keeping it so I could track how much I owed Piers. All the

sophisticated trappings of Florrie's London fortnight fell away,

and she was just a scared child crying in my arms, as I

explained my predicament over the world's scabbiest cat.

"Don't have Grainger put to sleep, Mum. Don't."

"We can't let him suffer, Florrie." I stroked her back. Under

the filmy dress I could feel the bones of her spine, vulnerable.

My daughter fragile for all her worldliness. She looked up at

me, her highlighted hair stuck to her cheeks, her eyes

washed free of the make-up and cosmopolitanism. She was

seven years old again, wanting me to make everything all

right.

"But he's always been a healthy cat, he can get over it.

The vet must think there's a chance or they'd have put him to

sleep. Straight off, no messing."

I didn't tell her that this had been the vet's first

suggestion. "I'll ring the vet's tomorrow, early. See when

they'll let us bring him home." I thought this was unlikely to

be any time soon, but my need to appear confident and in

charge stopped me from breaking down alongside her. It's

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lesson one in the Mother's Handbook. Never let them see how

panicked you really are.

Florence sat up and wiped her eyes with her hand. "I

couldn't imagine life without Grainger, could you? Remember

that time he brought that rabbit in alive and left it in the

living room, and you had to catch it under the rubbish bin?"

I smiled back at her, but the thought of a catless house

made me remember the tabby body curled in Piers's arms,

which had triggered the guilt again. Now, with Florrie here,

that house in York seemed an interplanetary distance away.

That night in the summerhouse with Piers. A space seen

through alcohol, filtered through a dream.

We sat companionably for a while longer, chatting about

nothing very much. It was wonderful, amazing, my daughter

seemed to have matured into the kind of person I'd actually

want
to spend time with. I was congratulating myself on the

terrific job of motherhood which I'd clearly done, when her

mobile rang, and she turned instantly back into the sulky

child she'd been before.

"Yeah?" she demanded, snatching up the handset. "What?"

I rolled my eyes and got off the bed. "Yeah." Florence looked

at me over the phone, her tone a little softer now. "It was

great. Hey, what's this new girlfriend like? Mum told me

you'd—"

There was a moment's pause, and Florrie lifted the phone

away from her ear, stared at it, then pressed a button.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Dunno. Bad signal maybe?"

"Piers?"

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"Yeah. I'll call him later." She shook her head briefly.

"Now, Mother dear." I paused in my attempts to leave the

room. "What about this
man
you've been hinting about the

last couple of weeks?"

"Man?"

"Tell you what, I'll make us some tea and you can tell me

all
about him." That was it. Proof positive that my real

daughter had been stolen away by the pixies and replaced by

a Stepford teenager. She went out of the bedroom, but

popped her head back around the door a second later. "Only

not the sex stuff. Cos that would just be
gross
."

Probably still the real Florence then.

I updated her on the Leo situation as best I could over tea.

I wanted to give her as true a picture of the man as possible

whilst all the time aware this could be a person she might be

forced into proximity with in the near future. Didn't mention

the poetry. I had the feeling that it would make him sound

too nerdy. I needn't really have worried. As soon as I

mentioned the ponies, she was all for moving down to Devon

on the next train south.

"Look, Florrie, Leo and I haven't even
discussed
moving in.

I think he likes his own space. After all, we hardly know each

other yet."

"But you would if he asked you, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know. I don't even really know how I feel about

him. He's a bit shy. Quiet."

"Yeah, but, Mum, you have to realise, your chances are

going to get less as you get older. I mean, you've still mostly

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got your looks, and your body's
okay
, I guess. Maybe you

should go for it while you still can."

A little blunter than I'd been with myself, but echoing quite

a lot of my own feelings.

"And if he's got cash, you can always have plastic

surgery," Florence continued, practical to the end. "Right. I'm

going to call Piers," and she skipped off, leaving me with the

washing up and no doubt that this was
definitely
my real

daughter back.

I was settling down on the sofa with Iain Banks and half a

bar of fruit-and-nut, when Florence came wandering back

through, phone pressed tight against her ear. She began to

make herself a sandwich. "Yeah, I guess," she was saying,

"but he was so cool I couldn't turn him down."

I tried really hard not to listen and she was clearly trying

to change the subject.

"Why won't you tell me about
her
? What've you got to

hide? She's not a big ug, is she?"

My head whipped round. "You're not still talking to Piers,

are you?"

Florence flicked a dismissive finger at me and carried on

buttering bread. "Yeah, just the Old One giving me grief, you

know how they get. Look, you want to come over? You can

bring whatever-her-name-is if you like, we can go get

pizza..."

"Florrie! It'll be costing a fortune."

Wearily Florence lowered the phone from her ear. "That's

why I asked him over," she said, as though I was an idiot

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child, then back into the phone, "Yeah, I'm going over to

Dad's tomorrow, probably see you then. Okay. Cheers."

"He didn't want to come?" I felt a bit downcast about that.

I'd been wanting to apologise to Piers for our falling out.

"Nah." Florence looked slightly puzzled. "Dunno why. He

got a bit weird when I asked him—you haven't said

something to him, have you?"

"Like what?" My eyes wouldn't focus. Oh God, was Piers

avoiding me? Was it something to do with Sunday night? No,

surely I'd offended him in the taxi, that was all. But what if it

wasn't
all? What if he'd let something slip, and now he

couldn't face me because he knew—shit. Paranoia.

"It's just that usually he's dead keen to come over here,

always on about how cool you are, how much he likes

hanging out with us."

"Maybe he's out with his new girlfriend and they want to

be—you know. Alone together."

"Well she'll be pretty pissed already. He's spent three-

quarters of an hour talking to me."

I felt itchy, edgy.
Was
Piers avoiding me? Seemed a rather

extreme reaction, considering. I had to know. "Have you

finished with the phone, Florrie? I've got a couple of calls to

make."

"I wanted to phone Jude."

"Use your mobile." Behind the safety of my bedroom door,

I flopped onto the bed and dialled Piers's mobile.

"Hey, Flo." Piers sounded bright, not conscience-stricken at

all. Neither did he seem reluctant to talk, or as though he'd

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been dragged from the arms of his beloved to answer.

"What's up?"

"It's me," I said, in low tones. "Alys."

"Hey, Alys, then." A little of the brightness died, a guarded

edge creeping in. "Did you want something?"

"Just wondered why you didn't want to come over tonight."

I tried to keep the worry out of my voice, but even I could tell

there was a tremble in it. "You can bring Sarah. Obviously we

quite understand if you'd rather have a quiet night with her,

but Florrie would
so
like to see you—"

"I'll see her tomorrow at Ma's."

"Is everything all right?" A telling pause. "Piers? Have I

done something to—"

"No." I heard him sigh. "Look, it's okay. I'm not going to

say anything to anyone about the other night, you can trust

me on that one."

"Then?"

He sighed again. "I just thought—a bit of space, you

know? I mean, I've got things. You know, like,
things
."