Unchained Melanie (12 page)

Down in the garden she could see Max looking bad-tempered. The York stone slabs were bigger and heavier than he’d expected – he’d ordered an old imperial size that no longer existed and the nursery had delivered the closest metric equivalent. He and his reluctant work-experience teenage assistant were arranging the slabs in a rectangular path, trying to keep an even distance from the boundary fence and doing it by guesswork. From the window, Mel could see that the front and back sections weren’t parallel. She’d have to go down and say something, or every time she looked at the finished garden from her study window the asymmetry would irritate her. Why hadn’t they set out stakes with string guidelines and why did she have to be the one who thought of that? Still, Max was a useful and friendly man to have around the place – he’d seen off Roger, for one thing. It had made her smile, Max’s description of Roger’s proprietorial rage at the devastation of the garden. ‘I thought he was going to hit me,’ Max had told her over a mug of tea. ‘I couldn’t tell which he thought was the worst thing: the idea that I’d ravished his garden or that I might also have ravished his ex-wife.’

‘Either way, it was none of his business,’ Mel had laughed.

‘Quite right. I think he realized that was exactly my opinion when I congratulated him on his nice new marriage-and-baby package.’

The doorbell rang when Mel was halfway down the stairs. She waited for a few moments, hoping it wouldn’t be Roger back again. What had he wanted the other day? Surely he hadn’t brought round his honeymoon photos to show her? The blurry outline of the head through the door’s frosted window was someone
smaller than Roger. It was someone fidgety, she could see, someone female. She hoped whoever it was wouldn’t want to stay long – Tina Keen needed to be rescued from her nausea and moved back into her office where she could start shouting at one of her inefficient underlings, the one who’d stupidly rinsed the murder weapon under the café’s hot water tap.

‘Mum! Nice to see you, come in. Were you shopping?’ Melanie indicated the bag her mother was hauling along behind her.

‘This isn’t shopping. It’s a suitcase,’ Gwen declared glumly, marching in past her daughter, quite effortlessly tugging the case over the step as if she was leading in an obedient dog.

It still didn’t occur to Mel that anything was wrong. She simply assumed the case was empty – her mother often brought capacious bags round to the house in search of jumble for the Townswomen’s Guild’s fundraising efforts at the Scout Hut.

Gwen didn’t stop till she’d dragged her burden into the kitchen and deposited it securely beneath the table, as if, left anywhere closer to the front door, it would somehow escape back to home and Howard.

‘I’ve left him!’ she announced loudly, removing her coat, flinging it over the back of the woven chair with the chipped pink paint and sitting down firmly.

‘What, Dad? Left him where?’ Mel assumed he was somewhere in the area, possibly in the bank at the end of the road – or in the pub indulging in his new pastime.

‘I’ve
left
him, Melanie,’ her mother went on. ‘I can’t live with him any more.’

She burrowed into the case. ‘I found this.’ The magazine was wrapped in a Sainsbury’s bag, but even this
Gwen held at arm’s length, as if in fear of contamination. ‘It was under the mattress on
his
side of the bed.’

Mel flicked through the copy of
Mayfair
while her mother averted her gaze and caught sight of the pillaged garden.

‘What have you gone and done out there? It looks like a bombsite. Your dad will be . . . Oh, what do I care what he’ll be?’ Gwen sniffed and turned away from the window, waiting for a reaction from her daughter.

‘I really don’t know what to say,’ Mel admitted. ‘Are you sure it’s . . .’

‘Who else’s would it be?’ Gwen scoffed. ‘There’s only him and me slept in that bed for the past forty-eight years. I was quite looking forward to our golden wedding. I’d been planning. It was between a function-room buffet at the Watermill or lunch at the Grange Hotel. They’ve a lovely conservatory. Oh well.’

She was slumped in her chair now, looking more defeated than Mel had ever seen her.

‘I expect he was just feeling . . .’ What could he be feeling? The word ‘himself’ came to mind, but would not be appreciated. Mel searched her mental thesaurus for something more appropriate. ‘His age,’ she came up with, lamely.

‘We’re all feeling our age,’ Gwen snapped. ‘We don’t all want to hark back and make fools of ourselves in the process.’

Mel shoved the magazine into the bin and sat down next to her mother. ‘You could have just ignored it,’ she suggested. ‘I mean, what he reads doesn’t really matter that much, does it?’

‘I don’t think
reading
comes into it. It’s just so
disgusting, so
degrading
,’ Gwen insisted. ‘I’m not having it in the house.’

In spite of trying to be soothing and sensible, Mel was actually close to feeling as shocked as her mother. Her own
father
? Getting off on soft porn? There was so much about people that you simply couldn’t know. She hoped her father would never know that Gwen had come running to her with all this. He might be able to brazen out his new (if it was new) hobby with his wife, but having your daughter knowing your sexual secrets was something else.

‘You’ll have to go and talk to him, Mel. Tell him . . .’

‘No!’ Mel’s hands went up in instinctive defence. ‘No really, Mum, this is definitely just between the two of you. Perhaps you should go home, not yet but later this afternoon, and try and talk to him. Calmly, with a little sympathy if you possibly can. He’s probably just trying to recapture a bit of what he felt like when he was younger. I’m sure there’s no real harm in it. There must be millions of men . . . well there are, aren’t there, or there’d be no market for the magazines. I bet you finding this one has really shaken him.’

Gwen sat tight, her pale lips thin and rigid. ‘I’m not going anywhere. If he wants me home again, he can come looking for me. I’m not crawling back, not till I’ve sorted out what I think. He won’t even have noticed I’ve gone yet, not till his lunch isn’t on the table.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Just gone half past ten. He’ll be on his way down to the pub by now, getting him and the dog sozzled, as per.’ She stood up, heaving herself out of the chair as if the effort had become almost too much. ‘I’ll go up and unpack. I don’t suppose your spare bed’s made up, so just tell me which sheets and I’ll do it myself. You get on with
whatever you were doing, I won’t be in your way. You won’t notice I’m here.’

So that would be all right then.

Rosa wasn’t sure if Desi was the best one from the flat to have taken with her to Sainsbury’s, but all the others were out. Two of them had even gone to lectures. On the plus side, Desi was the only one in the flat with a car that could be relied on to get them both there and back, but on the downside, it seemed that a visit to Sainsbury’s was as thrillingly novel to him as a seven-year-old’s first-time trip to Disneyworld. He would be worse than useless and would be no good for anything but steering the trolley into old ladies’ legs.

‘It’s down there, on the right, next to the roundabout.’ Rosa pointed out the store to Desi. You couldn’t miss it, the building was a local landmark, a design statement of its time, its roof designed with great triangular white shapes that were supposed to represent sails. To her, in the mood she was in, it looked as if someone had sat on Sainsbury’s roof, made a small Sydney Opera House out of bits of old Christmas card – and let them collapse.

‘It looks like a row of big prawn crackers,’ Desi commented, snorting at his own hilarity in that way that made you avoid looking at him in case stuff was cascading out of his nose. She clenched her fingers together and reminded herself it wasn’t his fault his upbringing had almost entirely been at the hands of a starchy ex-royal nanny and a remote minor public school. It wasn’t his fault that he was the one person in the whole world who thought Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-But-Dim was a terrific role model. Before he’d arrived in Plymouth, Desi hadn’t ever even
seen
a
prawn cracker. Now, unless someone did some food-shopping, he and his flatmates were in danger of living on nothing else.

Rosa consulted her list. It hadn’t been her idea, this communal kitchen business. She’d been happy enough with the original arrangement – half a fridge plus a cupboard each for their food, all individually bought, cooked and consumed as and when each of them felt like it. She’d reckoned without Kate, though, or Rota-Girl as she now thought of her, who’d appealed to simple financial student greed and worked out how much they’d save by pooling resources and even, at night, actually cooking, eating together and then washing the dishes – there and then – according to who was designated on that day’s list. The three boys had been easy to convince (Rota-Girl had mentioned the magic words ‘extra beer money’), Jemima spent all her time with her boyfriend and didn’t care, but Rosa wasn’t happy. She’d come away from home to enjoy being independent at last, to eat when and what she fancied with no-one going on about vitamins or fruit, and to sleep late with no-one nagging her. She wanted to exist on Rice Crispies if she chose, or Scotch eggs from the Shell garage up the road, followed by a Dime bar or six.

She’d pointed out the hitches such as: what if you were out a lot? What about Will being vegetarian? What about Desi, who thought a spatula was a shoulder bone and that roasting, steaming and boiling were Caribbean weather descriptions? But Kate had a weird, non-verbal approach to conflict. She just sat silently, like someone in the middle of yoga, and studied your face while you protested. You ended up feeling that if you didn’t agree with her there must be
something wrong with you, with you
personally
, not with her point of view. And she had the kind of leggy, flicky-hair blonde good looks that made most women snarl. So naturally the boys in the flat thought she was the next best thing to having Claudia Schiffer sleeping down the hall. It would be almost worth buying a mouse to release into her room, having first laid bets that she’d be the type who’d jump on the bed squealing the minute she saw it. Rosa also knew, though, that if a wild mouse turned up when no-one else was around, Kate would calmly and capably pick it up with bare hands and chuck it out of the window. One day, Rosa predicted, if the direst forms of Thatcherism ever made a comeback, Rota-Girl Kate would be in sole charge of the nation.

‘We can’t park here,’ Rosa said as Desi nosed the Clio into a parent-and-child space.

‘But it’s got a picture of a shopping bag on wheels,’ he protested.

‘No Desi, that’s a drawing of a baby buggy, you know, a pram thing? Like for babies?’

‘Right. I see.’ But from where Rosa was sitting, Desi looked as if he didn’t, quite.

As Desi parked the Clio in a more distant space, Rosa thought of her father, who would soon be perfectly entitled to park in the buggy-pictured slots. She could imagine him worrying that people might think he was the grandfather. He’d be sure to have the full state-of-the-art kit for this baby: a truly fancy pram with lots of add-on bits, like a detachable car seat and a smart rain cover. It would have cashmere blankets. Later, he’d buy Leonora one of those cool three-wheel strollers because she’d start talking about getting her figure back and would keep mentioning the idea of power-walking
through the park. She wouldn’t actually do anything so energetic, though, or if she did it would be without the baby, and in the comfort of the nice warm luxury hotel spa that she’d been talking about at the wedding. Rosa felt small stirrings of pity for her dad. He’d be on a hard-work treadmill for ever now, shoring up the mounting expense of keeping Leonora and this new child. She hoped it wouldn’t be an only one, like she’d been, though; she could do with a sympathetic brother or sister right now, someone she could just phone and moan at, grumble about trivial things (Rota-Girl, Desi’s inability to tell a lettuce from a cabbage, the permanent smell of sock from Paul’s room next to hers). As she pointed Desi in the direction of the cheapest yogurts she had one of her occasional what-if moments, about what it would have been like if her little brother had survived. He’d be fifteen now, shambling around and crashing into things as he grew too fast. He’d have spots and huge hands and probably barely speak beyond a hostile grunt. Except to his sister: he’d love his big sister. And she’d love him.

‘Is this the right rice?’ Desi cut into Rosa’s thoughts. He was holding up a packet and looking worried.

‘No, Desi, that’s for rice puddings. We need this one, the basmati.’

‘Oh, but . . .’ Desi slowly put the packet back on the shelf and reached for another.

‘But?’

Desi grinned shyly. ‘Thing is, I actually quite fancied a rice pudding. One like . . .’

Rosa took pity on him. She would never subscribe to her grandmother’s men-need-looking-after creed, but sometimes Desi resembled a confused Martian on a reluctant exchange visit to Earth. ‘One like home,’ she
finished his sentence for him. ‘I know, Desi, it’s all right, put it in the trolley.’

You’re a soft sod, Rosa, she told herself: now you’ll have to phone home and find out how to make rice pud.

When she’d said, ‘I won’t be in the way,’ Gwen really meant, ‘Look at me, Melanie, look how carefully I’m tiptoeing round the house!’ From her study, close to lunchtime the next day, Mel could hear Gwen very slowly filling the kettle, as if by running the tap at no more than a trickle it would make less noise. Cupboards were being opened and closed with all the stealthy concentration of a burglar who suspected a guard dog might be dozing within savaging distance.

She heard the back door creak as it was opened, and from her desk Mel watched Max’s face light with a broad and cheerful smile. Another cup of tea. That must be about the seventh Gwen had given him and Luke that morning. It accounted for the downstairs loo flushing every twenty minutes.

Tina Keen had returned to HQ from the mortuary. Mel got her stripped off in the locker-room shower and allowed all trace of the air of death to trickle away down the grubby drain. Tina sploshed Clarins Eau Dynamisante shower gel all over her body, reminding Mel that Tina’s creator was about to run out of the same product. Several times in her books she’d mentioned by brand name the odd luxury items – Pol Roger champagne, Bendicks Bittermints, La Perla underwear – for all of which she was enthusiastic herself, in the fond hope that some eager young executive might take it into his head (it would certainly be ‘his’, a woman would see straight through the ploy) to send her a
complimentary boxful of goodies. This craven product placement hadn’t yet worked, but at least Mel felt she was granting Tina the benefit of items she herself would prefer.