This Perfect World (5 page)

But there’s more, Mrs Partridge tells me. Much more. And
I’ll need to know it all if I’m to help. She’s gabbling now,
still clutching my arm with her bony fingers, and bombarding
me with information about hospital dates and psychiatrist’s
reports and the downward spiral of medication. She shakes
my wrist in her agitation.

‘Perhaps you’d come with me, dear. See her for yourself.
You could talk to them – to the doctors.’

Just the thought of it fills me with horror. I’ve got to get
out of there, but she’s still holding my arm. And she’s staring
at me with those dark, desperate eyes.

‘Mrs Partridge, please . . .’ I manage to free myself from
her bony fingers and I pick up my bag, getting ready to leave.
My heart is pounding now, hard. Carefully I start pushing
myself out of the sofa. ‘Look, I really have to go.’

She stands up too, jumping up quickly, and we almost
bang heads. ‘Tuesday,’ she says. ‘That’s the doctor’s day. Oh,
they come and go on other days, of course, but always on
a Tuesday . . .’

She follows me out to the hall. She’s too close. I’m afraid
she’s going to grab hold of me again and my skin prickles
in the effort to get away.

‘Tuesday,’ she says again, as if I hadn’t got the message.
‘That’s the best day for the doctors.’

‘Mrs Partridge, I really don’t know what I’m doing on
Tuesday.’

‘But if you have the time?’ she insists. ‘You’ll come if you
have the time?’

And just to get myself out of there I say, ‘Look, I’ll have
to check my diary.’

I practically fall out the front door in my haste to escape,
and immediately I am hit by the brightness of the day after
the gloom inside that house, and I have to squint against the
sun. Mrs Partridge feels it too and cowers back into the hall,
then peers round the half-closed door as I get into my car. I
wish she’d go right inside and shut the door. I’d like to just
sit there for a moment to clear my head before driving off,
and I need to phone Penny, to confirm the time for lunch.
But I can’t do that with Mrs Partridge standing there watching,
so I stick the key straight into the ignition. She’s still there
as I pull away; I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, waving.
I should have waved back, I suppose.

She didn’t want to let me go.

I feel sorry for her now. She didn’t want me to go, but I
couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

I stink of Mrs Partridge’s cigarette smoke. I can smell it
on my hair, my clothes – horrible. I open the windows, all
four of them, to try to blast the smell away, and the wind
whips at my hair, fresh and spring-scented, blowing Mrs
Partridge away.

Some bizarre curiosity sends me on a detour through Barton
Village on my way back to Ashton. Barton Village is a 1970s
conurbation on the north side of Forbury, about a mile and
a half out down the long road that winds past the reservoir,
the blackberry fields where the gypsies used to turn up every
year, and the pig farm. The road always seemed like a divide,
keeping the two places apart, and I’m surprised to see that
it’s like that still, that the blackberry field is still there, and
that more houses haven’t sprung up, closing the gap.

I haven’t been down here for years and years. It’s not just
new houses. There’s an old pub too, and a couple of sweet
little cottages, the pretty bit before the rest begins. At juniors,
I was friends for a while with a girl who lived over here,
Kim. Whenever I came to her house I wondered how she
remembered which one was hers. They all looked the same,
still new back then, and neat, built in tidy rows. You love
that sort of thing when you’re young, that sameness. We
played on the square of grass outside Kim’s house with the
other children on her block, and their mums could see us
from their little front kitchens.

Kim seemed special to the rest of us in Forbury, because
she had to come to school by car and be picked up again
afterwards. Her mum was always there at twenty-past three,
right outside the school gates in her little white Mini. Everyone
else walked, but you couldn’t walk all the way to Barton
Village, and the bus into Forbury only came once an hour. In
fact, if you didn’t have a car you were stuffed. I picture Heddy
living out here with a young baby, isolated. I picture her struggling
with a pushchair and the shopping, getting on and off
buses, red-faced and sweating.

There’s a small parade of shops built under some flats,
right on the corner of Kim’s block, with a lay-by out the
front. I pull in here quickly to phone Penny, and watch as
one or two or maybe three people wander in and out of the
newsagent’s. I remember running round there with Kim to
buy sweets, and a loaf of bread for her mum from the baker’s
next door. The baker’s is gone now, boarded up, like a shut
eye between the betting shop and the newsagent’s. As I sit
there, an oldish, fattish man comes out of the betting shop
wearing a badly fitting brown suit and his slippers. Clearly
it’s been a good morning; he grins up at the sky and shoves
a roll of money into his trouser pocket before shuffling into
the newsagent’s. As he goes in, a young girl comes out, pushing
an angry child in a buggy. The man forgets to hold the door
for her, and as he goes past her it starts to swing closed,
bumping the girl from behind. She pushes it back open with
her shoulder as she wrestles the buggy out, muttering furiously.
Once outside, she uses her teeth to tear open a bag of
sweets for the child and drops them into his anxious, clutching
hands. Then she sticks a cigarette in her mouth and strikes
up a match to light it, cupping her hands against the wind.
She takes a long drag in, flicks the match into the gutter and
leans forward, resting her weight on the handle of the
pushchair for a second as she blows the smoke out of her
mouth sideways, thereby avoiding her child’s head. Then
she’s up on her feet again, clack, clack, clacking down the
road in her black high heels, one hand pushing the buggy,
the other holding the cigarette. She’s dressed optimistically
in a halter-neck top and a tight, short skirt that strains as
she walks. She cannot be more than seventeen.

I wonder where Heddy lived. Naturally I picture her in a
house like Kim’s, with chipboard partitions for walls and
open-slatted stairs going up from the living room. Those stairs
would be hell for someone with a small child, a constant danger.
Kim was small and thin, and her family were smallish and
thin too – I remember them as modern and bright and stripy-clothed, like the families on frozen-food adverts; they seemed
to fit their house, back then, when everything was new. Now,
with my adult eyes, I can see a different scenario. I see Heddy,
fat like in that photo at Mrs Partridge’s, clad in the oversized
clothes of post-pregnancy, too big for that house, too alone.
I see her sitting on her sofa and staring at her reflection in
the glass of the patio doors. I see the squareness of the room,
of the windows, of the patio outside, boxing her in.

I hear the baby cry, I hear Heddy cry, and for a moment
I shut my eyes.

Penny and I meet at Chico’s in the High Street. Tasha joins
us, last minute; she bumped into Penny earlier in John Lewis.
You always bump into someone in John Lewis, it’s guaranteed.
We kiss the air beside each other’s cheeks and I breathe
in the heady scent of expensive perfumes and easy lives.

Tasha has a dilemma because she’s just bought a house
that needs renovating and can’t decide whether to have
wooden floors throughout, or just downstairs.

‘What do you think, Laura?’ she asks, pushing her blonde
hair back from her face and staring at me with serious grey-blue
eyes. She’s had streaks put in her hair, red under the
blonde, beautifully done at André’s in the village, where we
all go. The hand that pushes back the hair is newly manicured
too, and thin; we are all thin, all exactly so.

We sit picking at our panini and discuss this, and other
issues, such as Roman blinds versus curtains and whether a
built-in fridge with ice dispenser would be better than one of
those huge free-standing American things. We lean close as
we talk and we talk fast, sometimes all of us at the same
time. We talk about Tasha’s house with the same level of
enthusiasm as we talk about our children and the school, and
our husbands too, sometimes, when we’ve had a glass of wine
or two. And this talk is like a web that we spin around
ourselves. I know this, and yet I sit there, I talk, I spin.

Penny has a funny story about Belinda. She looks behind
her to check who else is in Chico’s, then leans forward. We
do the same, tight.

‘Well,’ she says in a stage whisper, and we’re hanging on,
Tasha and I, grinning already in expectation, ‘you know that
house they bought in Walpole Road? You know what a dump
it was and how they were living in it when it was being done
up?’

‘Urgh! I could never do that!’ I say.

‘Me neither,’ Tasha agrees, tossing her hair back over her
shoulder to show her new streaks to full advantage, and we
shudder in unison.

‘Well, apparently it was really raining hard one day – you
know, a total downpour – and Belinda was in the toilet when
the weight of the rain caused the roof to cave in.’ She pauses
a moment, for dramatic effect. ‘Right on top of her!’

Tasha and I slap our hands over our mouths, horrified.

‘She got hit on the head by a plank of wood,’ Penny says,
and Tasha and I are collapsing into giggles behind our hands.
‘Knocked unconscious. The builders had to get her out.’ She
pauses again, checks around the room once more, then shields
her mouth with her hand, and says, ‘Knickers still round her
knees!’

We’re beside ourselves now, Tasha and I, mortified on
Belinda’s behalf. Tasha dips her head to hide the laughter,
letting her hair fall forward over her face. Then she tosses it
back again, apparently oblivious to how it swings so perfectly
into place.

Penny manages to keep her face straight. ‘It wasn’t funny,
you know,’ she says, and tucks her own sleek, neat hair
behind her ears in a perfect parody of Belinda, and we laugh
even more. Penny’s laughing too now and people are looking.
We hope none of them knows Belinda, but for the moment
we don’t care.

‘How did you hear that?’ Tasha asks.

‘Stephen told me. Belinda’s husband Mike told him. He
was at some old boys’ do last week and Mike was there,
propping up the bar apparently. You know what he’s like
after a few beers.’

I roll my eyes. ‘James can’t stand him. Thinks he’s a total
dickhead.’

Then we are back onto serious things again: weighing up
the cost of decorators and discussing what Fiona Littlewood
has had done to her dining room. And just then my phone
rings. I fish it out from my bag, see it’s a number I don’t
recognize and stupidly I answer it. It’s
her
. Mrs Partridge.

‘Laura?’ she’s saying. ‘That you, Laura? Can you hear me?’

I can hear her and so will everyone else. I lean away from
the table as far as I unobtrusively can and switch the phone
to my other ear. ‘What is it?’ I hiss.

‘It’s Violet Partridge here.’ Her voice is loud, too loud.

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

I see Tasha glance at me, then at Penny, and raise an
eyebrow.

‘I wondered if you’d had time to consult your diary yet,
dear. About Tuesday.’

‘
What?
’ I don’t believe this. It’s less than two hours since
I left her house. Penny and Tasha have stopped talking now,
and are both sitting there, watching me.

‘About Tuesday,’ she says again. ‘Will you be free on
Tuesday?’

Out of the corner of my eye I see Tasha mouth the word
Tuesday
.

‘Yes, yes, that’s fine,’ I say, just to get her off the phone.

‘You will?’ I hear the surprise, the relief in her voice.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fine. I’ll see you then.’ And I hang up. ‘Dentist,’
I say to Tasha and Penny, who are both staring at me, expectantly.
‘Change of appointment.’ And I don’t care right then
if they believe me or not. ‘Fiona Littlewood’s wallpaper,’ I
say now, to stop them looking at me like that. ‘Where did
you say it was from?’

And so I steer us back into the smooth, benign conversation
of our own safe, parallel world. And I do not mention
Mrs Partridge, or the fact that this morning while Penny and
Tasha were shopping in John Lewis I was trapped on that
old sunken sofa in Mrs Partridge’s cramped, dark front room.
I do not mention this because I want to talk about the things
in our world, our perfect world. I want to forget Heddy
Partridge and everything to do with her. I want to forget her
as I had forgotten her for the last however many years. She
has no place in my life now; she never did. So I laugh about
Belinda and I talk about decorators and kitchen plans, but
still I can’t help wondering what it was like for Penny and
Tasha and Fiona Littlewood and all the other Ashton women
when they were younger,
before
they were Ashton women. I
wonder what it was like for them when they were at school.
Were things always so smooth and easy? Do any of them
know a Heddy or someone like her? Do any of them have
a skeleton rattling around in their cupboard?

Do they?

Oh, I’m sure they must do, but no one will ever know.
We meet, we chat, we think that we are the dearest of friends,
but we all keep our cupboard doors firmly shut.

She got breasts before the rest of us. That’s the second thing
I think of when I think of Heddy Partridge. After the ballet
incident.

She got breasts too soon, before it was fashionable to have
them. And we could all see them, two fat bumps inside her
white school shirt, no matter how hard she tried to hide
them.

‘Heddy’s got boobs,’ we used to say, and the boys would
run their hands up her back, to see if she was wearing a bra.
Then they’d twang the strap and Heddy would pull away,
embarrassed to the point of tears.