Unchained Melanie (13 page)

She allowed Tina to dress (it wouldn’t do, somehow, to leave her shivering) in lavender satin underwear, a simple though decidedly clingy tee shirt and a suit that she hoped would pass for Armani, then closed down the computer and went downstairs. The noise in the kitchen was reaching a crescendo: her mother was in search of lunch.

‘Haven’t you got any soup?’ Gwen asked, as Mel came into the room.

‘I don’t think so, unless there’s some instant packet ones in the cupboard,’ Mel told her. ‘Look, there’s a couple of things I need, so why don’t we go into the town and have lunch at Fasta Pasta? My treat?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Gwen looked flustered. ‘I’m not keen on all this spaghetti sort of thing. I’d rather just have a sandwich, I think. I’ve found plenty of tuna.’ She had, too: at least seven cans of it had been extricated from the cupboard and piled high on the table.

‘Well, it’s one of those things you always pick up in the supermarket, isn’t it?’ Mel grinned at her. Her mother gave her a look. ‘So’s soup,’ she said, and Mel started counting to ten.

‘Are you there?’ Mrs Jenkins’s lilac head bobbed up and down by the fence. Mel opened the door. ‘Yes, it’s OK, I’m here. Are you all right?’ she called back.

Mrs Jenkins unhooked the gate and came through, shooing her little dog back to its own side. ‘I don’t want him getting anything on his paws,’ she explained, glaring at Max and Luke and their soggy mud-pie heap of concrete with which they were filling in the gaps
between the stone slabs. She followed Mel into the kitchen.

‘They’re making a big mess out there. My daughter Brenda will be looking down on that when she comes to visit,’ Mrs Jenkins told Gwen.

‘It
is
a mess, you’re quite right,’ Gwen agreed. ‘I don’t know when they’ll ever get it finished. Or what it’ll look like.’

Mrs Jenkins, happy to have found a like-minded ally, sat down at the table and picked up the top tin of tuna from the pile. ‘You don’t see so much salmon these days,’ she mused, perusing the label and screwing up her eyes to read ‘dolphin friendly’.

‘Mrs Jenkins, this is my mother, Gwen Thomas.’ Mrs Jenkins looked at Mel as if she was crazy. ‘I know that. You’ve got her nose.’ She turned her attention to Gwen. ‘I’m eighty-one you know.’

‘That’s a good age,’ Gwen commented obediently.

‘No it’s not. It’s a bloody terrible age. But Brenda’s coming over in two weeks
and
with the children.’ She got up and peered into Mel’s bread bin, hauling out a large linseed and soya loaf that Mel trusted to ward off any pre-menopausal forays of symptoms. ‘Shall we have a sandwich, dear? Though this bread’s got a lot of seeds. They’ll get under my plate. Haven’t you got any Mighty White?’

‘No, sorry, I haven’t.’ Mel watched as Mrs Jenkins ran her fingers over the bread’s surface and the little seeds fell off into the sink. Her mother watched, hungry and eager.

‘This is better.’ Mrs Jenkins showed Gwen the bald bread surface and the two of them nodded together, solemnly.

‘OK, I’ll make you a sandwich.’ Mel took the bread
from Mrs Jenkins’s gnarled fingers, wondering if she should go out and round up Max, Luke, possibly Perfect Patty from number 14 and anyone else who might like to work their way through seven cans of tuna.

‘No, it’s all right, dear, Mrs Jenkins and I will be fine on our own.’ Gwen was slyly insistent. ‘Why don’t you go out? Take yourself off to that spaghetti place you were just talking about. You could do with a break.’

It was like being sent out of the room for talking in class. Mel, feeling unwelcome and outnumbered in her own home, abandoned Tina Keen for the day, left her mother and Mrs Jenkins discussing their respective families, drove into Richmond and parked in Waitrose’s car park. With no particular plan in mind she wandered down the road towards the shops. At Pret a Manger she bought a small sushi selection and a bottle of orange juice, then went and sat on a bench beneath a chestnut tree on the green. There was a breeze gathering, and every few minutes there would be a soft thud as a conker hit the grass.

‘You don’t want to sit there, love,’ a man carrying a bucket and a short ladder called out to her as he passed the bench. ‘You’re right in the line of fire.’ She didn’t mind, she quite enjoyed the mild feeling of risk: most of the conkers were still encased in their spiny green shells, reminding her of mines that threatened warships in old films. She was also directly under the Heathrow flight path. Every sixty seconds a massive plane roared across the green, ripping through the otherwise tranquil air. There’s no bloody peace, Melanie thought, as she got up and stuffed the sushi box into a litter bin. Across the road a coachful of elderly ladies was being unloaded for an afternoon
theatre trip. Every one of them had a silvery-grey perm and she thought of Rosa who’d have given them one glance and muttered ‘cauliflower-heads’. She strolled along to look at the billboards, see what was on – Maureen Lipman was starring in
Peggy for You
, about the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay. Seeing this suddenly seemed a far more attractive prospect than trailing round the shops trying on clothes that she didn’t particularly need.

Inside the cool dark theatre there really
was
peace. Now that Mel was sitting in the scarlet and velvet dress circle (a spritzer pre-ordered at the bar for the interval) with no need to make conversation or do any thinking, working or placating, she almost felt as if she’d run away. No-one knew where she was. No-one expected her to be anywhere, or could reach her by phone, fax or e-mail. She would do this more often – it was a delight to be able to be this spontaneous – and you could only do it when you had no-one to answer to. Around her the matinée ladies chatted away about plans for Christmas, plans for holidays and plans for further outings, and she relished her own silent moments by thinking about nothing at all. Then there was the moment of never-failing thrill when the lights dimmed and the curtain went up. Maureen Lipman sat silently on a sofa being Peggy Ramsay, theatrical agent, reading a script. Among the first words was ‘fuck’, and the audience of leisured ladies drew in its excited collective breath.

‘Now no excuses, Mel sweetie – as you’re so determined to be completely unattached you’ll be free to come to supper on Wednesday, won’t you?’ This was Sarah’s slightly less than gracious invitation to Melanie on the phone. Mel was in the garden, sitting on the wall and waiting to help Max spread bags of pebbles between the new stone slabs. It was a soft golden late October day, the kind that makes you think summer is trying very hard not to give in to the approaching winter.

Mel laughed. ‘Does being unattached mean I can’t have a social life unless mates like you feel sorry for me? Do I have to stay in and crochet in front of
Friends
every night, eating lonely Mars bars and wishing I had a mad New York loft existence?’

‘Yes, it means exactly that – though actually that version sounds bliss. So you can come, then? I’ve got a surprise for you . . . no, don’t even try to guess, you never will . . . just come. Don’t bring anything, it’s just kitchen food. Cherry’s coming too.’

‘So it’s feed-the-singles night, then?’ Mel teased.

‘What? Heavens no, anything but! See you on
Wednesday. Eightish. Oh, and wear something gorgeous . . . er . . . well at least not your old jeans, OK? Bye, darling.’ And she was gone.

It was always a treat to eat at Sarah’s. Mel was a lazy and reluctant cook, but Sarah excelled at the hostess arts that were currently scorned as being well out of fashion, making her guests feel that she’d really pulled out all the culinary stops for them. Her idea of a ‘kitchen supper’ was what would definitely qualify these days as the best parts of a full-scale dinner party, with elaborate table settings that had you convinced Sarah must have been a model pupil at a finishing school, stunning food, lavish and delicious wines, yet all without the tense formality that everyone used to suffer at such weirdly stylized events. In their own homes, Mel or Cherry might knock together a bubbling lasagne with salad followed by various fruits and cheeses, served casually on the scrubbed bare table for their guests. Sarah, on the other hand, would consult her many shelves of cookery books and come up with a menu that might well combine the trickiest of Raymond Blanc, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. Napkins would be all of a match with the tablecloth, which would probably be something new in crisp rough linen from Designers Guild and complemented by a row of candles and tightly packed posies at intervals along the table – lilies of the valley, sweet peas, tiny pink rosebuds or the narcissi that don’t smell of cat pee.

There was one aspect of dinner at Sarah’s that intrigued Melanie: the instruction about what to wear. Sarah was clearly up to something – she must have found a free-range available male whom she considered the perfect new man for Mel, and she expected
her to dress for the role of Woman Seeking Life Partner. Presumably she’d discovered a glut of spare blokes somewhere (where? the only massed lone men in this area lurked under the bridge and smelled of excess cider), and was having a last-ditch attempt at fixing up Cherry as well. She’d have to go through her wardrobe and come up with something appropriate – something that would look as if she was at least trying to obey Sarah’s instructions, but which was also an outfit decidedly not aimed at seducing a fellow guest. Not an easy call.

Max hauled the last of a dozen big bags of stones from the back of his truck. ‘Bloody hell, Melanie, I should be charging you . . . oh, what’s that thing where houses fall into complete disrepair . . . dilapidations. That’s the one. This job is wrecking my poor old body. I’ll never be the same again.’

Mel watched him as he clutched his back like a massively pregnant woman. He leaned against the wall beside her, took out his tobacco pouch and started constructing a skinny roll-up. ‘It’s going to look superb, this garden. Excellent.’ He nodded slowly, approving the work that he’d put in. There wasn’t yet a single plant in sight. The York stone paths were now all laid, the beds round the edges of the garden were dug over and ready for planting, and in the squares between the stone there was a lining of black semipermeable fabric, onto which the bags of pale pinkish pebbles were to be emptied.

‘I love this feeling of space. It almost makes me reluctant to plant anything at all,’ Mel said, dipping her hand into the first bag of smooth stones and running them through her fingers. They felt warm and silky.

‘That might be taking minimalism a bit far. But it’s good to be able to see the scope of the place. That’s what happens when you throw out all the dead wood. You have to be so very careful what you put back in.’

‘Oh, I’m being careful all right, don’t worry about that.’

‘I’m not worried.’ He turned to her and grinned, hesitant. ‘I admit I had one or two doubts at first. Not about getting rid of all that stuff that was there. There’s no point being sentimental about rose bushes that have got mighty infestations of black spot and rust like yours had, but – well – nothing but palms, bamboos and succulents. The complete banishment of blooms – that’s a bit harsh.’

‘A bit like “no flowers by request” at a funeral?’

‘That’s the one. I always think that’s a bit unnecessarily miserable.’

‘I don’t think that’s what Roger thought when he came round. I think he minded that I was uprooting something more than plants. Our life together. He’s probably right.’

Max chuckled and coughed on his cigarette. ‘Like I said, dead wood.’

‘Mmm. Good title for my next book. I’ll go and write that down.’

‘If God was so all-powerful, why did he need to have a rest on the seventh day? And how did he know it was the seventh day – that would mean he must have invented counting before he’d made people, and stuff.’ Ben was leaning against the door frame on the threshold of Mel’s study, clutching a mug of tea. Using Rosa’s computer, he’d finished his essay, checked his e-mails and downloaded (‘accidentally’, he planned to
say if challenged) some blurry scenes of Dutch teenagers engaged in oral sex that didn’t look as thrilling (to them, and therefore not to him) as he felt it should.

Mel, at her desk working towards the final chapters of
Dying For It
, glanced up at him. He was a good-looking boy, but still at the stage where he wasn’t yet sure of this. He had a very angular body: other people leaned comfortably against things but he seemed to be propped awkwardly against the door frame like a series of precariously balanced planks. The obligatory tumbledown jeans he wore, and the droopy skate-boarder’s fleece, couldn’t disguise the lack of softness beneath. He was so different from the usual baggy-faced doughboys that she usually saw – the ones Rosa had always brought home. When they were thirty they’d have run to greasy mounds of flab, but Ben would simply be trimly muscled by then. For now, though, he looked almost breakable. Even his hair, fluffed up (many minutes of mirror and care, this) to look as if he’d just climbed out of bed fresh from a session with some raunchy girl-band singer, looked as if it might snap off halfway down its rough fair tufts.

‘And do you think he hated Mondays too?’ he went on. ‘Because if he did, he should’ve just un-invented those.’

Mel considered for a moment. ‘But then that would mean people would hate Tuesdays instead – and all the way through, and then there’d be no days at all and no time and nothing would exist.’

Ben gave this a few seconds’ grave thought. ‘Perhaps nothing does,’ he concluded with a shrug.

Her mother had given her the raised-eyebrow
treatment about Ben’s visits. ‘I told you you’d miss having Rosa around. She’s only been gone a few weeks and you’re already filling the house with replacement teenagers.’ Gwen delighted in what she saw as her fulfilled prophecy. ‘You’ll be getting a new man in your life next. You can be too independent, you know.’ Melanie had joined in, laughing as she duetted the last sentence with her mother.

‘No, no new men. Absolutely not. I’m going to enjoy being one of those women who is difficult to place at dinner tables but I’ve got a cab account so no-one has to drive me home. It’s the way I like it.’