Unchained Melanie (23 page)

‘You’re mad. There you are, every young man’s dream: an experienced Older Woman with no ties, a comfortable, warm, empty house and plenty of free time.’

Melanie switched off her machine and started on a few calf stretches. Sarah was also slowing down and leapt gracefully to the floor. ‘Just imagine, you could have your very own
oooh young man
situation. You could run a string of them,’ she suggested.

‘Actually,’ Mel was thoughtful as they walked to the changing room to get ready for a swim, ‘it’s only just occurred to me, but I think one of my neighbours thinks I’m up to no good with her son. I’ve been so caught up with finishing the book and watching what Max is up to in the garden . . . Jeez, she
does
think that. I’m so slow – I’ve only just realized what she meant.’

‘Who? What?’

‘Perfect Patty. Number 14. Her son Ben comes in now and then to use Rosa’s computer. Except he doesn’t come as often as his mother thinks he does, mostly he just used me as an excuse for a couple of weeks so he could go next door and get it on with old Mrs Jenkins’s granddaughter. She’s gone to Europe for a while, back tomorrow I think. Patty was giving me a warning about “encouraging” Ben. And she thinks I get him pissed. I was covering for him, so I didn’t think to deny it. She’s been a bit sniffy since then.’

‘Well, you’re a woman on your own – it’s like being the village witch.’

‘I’ve even got a cat.’

‘There you are then. This woman will be round any minute checking your shed for a broomstick.’

Mel laughed. ‘I haven’t got a shed.’

‘You’re not denying the broomstick, then?’

‘Or my trusty cauldron. There’s a lot to be said for a good witch.’

The plants arrived in the afternoon. Max and Melanie had been waiting like anxious parents expecting an overdue homecoming child, and they were sitting on the bench under the kitchen window with their third mugs of tea when the truck drove carefully down the narrow alleyway at the back of the house. It was a gloomy but calm day, the sulky sort where you expect rain but it never quite falls, and dusk was already gathering, far too early, as if the sun had given up and gone home. It seemed to Melanie completely the wrong season and weather for the exuberant kind of plants associated with sun, warmth and light. As the truck progressed along the line of back-garden fences, the palms’ fronds and the bamboos’ whippy stems, safely bound together by tape, were waving their graceful leaves in the breeze like royalty acknowledging an admiring crowd.

‘Poor things, they look like brave refugees,’ Melanie commented. ‘I hope I’m giving them a home they’re going to like.’

‘It’ll be a bloody expensive mistake if you’re not!’ Max laughed. ‘You shouldn’t worry so much. They’re strong, Mel, don’t underestimate them. They’ve got plenty of resistance. Lighten up and enjoy! This is always the best bit, when everything’s been completely prepared and it’s all waiting for the final stage.’ He looked at her, serious for once. ‘I hope we’re not going to have a falling-out about what goes where.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Melanie assured him.
‘Anyway, won’t it be like your original design? I liked the look of that.’

‘Yeah, but when the stuff actually gets here . . . there’s always room for a bit of juggling, a bit of artistic licence.’

‘Well, you’re the artist . . . you choose. I’ll just sit here and supervise!’

‘Hmm – not sure how that’s going to work.’

The plants in their containers were manhandled through the gate by Max along with the nursery’s deliverymen. Mel carried in the dozen bamboo plants and arranged them in a line along the back fence where Max had planned for them to go. They were quite small plants now but in the spring would start to grow fast – up to a foot a day, according to Max, though she wondered what he’d been smoking when he worked that one out. The variety of their stem colours was astounding, even in the grim November light – the many shades of yellow, green and black would glisten and change hue like rippled water when the summer sun played on them, and their leaves would shiver and rustle in the lightest breeze. Exchanging the miserably tangled old clematis for this, she thought, as she placed them carefully beside the fence, was like stripping off a stifling tight wool suit and putting on a simple thin silk shift dress.

The truck had a small crane attached to it and when all other possible unloading had been done, the three largest plants were manoeuvred into a roped tarpaulin cradle and winched over the fence. Each of these containers was at least three or four feet wide and of similar depth. It was a delicate, tricky procedure and was also the point at which Melanie realized the operation was being closely watched by just about
everyone in the neighbourhood who could get a view into her garden.

Patty was leaning out of Ben’s bedroom window. ‘Goodness, aren’t we going exotic!’ she called.

‘It’s certainly different,’ came a gruff voice from next door, which Melanie identified as that of Gerald, a retired tax inspector whose preferences, garden-wise, were fat, velvety roses, hanging baskets and a stripy, close-cropped lawn. The voice didn’t sound approving.

‘Not your sort of thing, Gerald?’ she called over his fence.

‘It won’t give you much to do outside,’ he replied.

‘That’s exactly what I wanted!’ she told him. ‘But wait till next spring, when everything’s properly in and starting to flourish. You might find you like it.’

‘No proper flowers . . .’ The disgruntled voice faded away and there was a sound of a door being firmly shut.

‘I’ll call that a vote against, then, shall I?’ Melanie said to Max as he, Pablo and Brian from the nursery unhooked the biggest plant, a massive, many-branched
Chamaerops Humilis
, from the crane and pulled it into place at the far corner of the garden.

‘Ooh, look at this! It’s like abroad!’ Mrs Jenkins came through the fence gate to see what was going on. She was warmly wrapped against the autumn day in her favourite grey fleecy coat and her pink crocheted hat.

‘What do you think? Do you like them?’ Max wiped his earthy hands down the front of his mud-coloured sweater.

‘You need to get your wife to wash that, dear,’ Mrs Jenkins told him, pointing her yellow mitten at his chest.

‘I don’t have one,’ he replied, with an expression of mock-regret.

‘Oh, don’t you? Melanie?’ she called to Mel, who was talking to the deliverymen. ‘Melanie, do you hear that? He hasn’t got a wife! So there you are!’

Brian and Pablo looked with speculation from Melanie to Max and back again.

‘You are so embarrassing,’ Mel told her. ‘I’ve only just offloaded one useless husband, I’m in no hurry to get another!’

‘Well, thanks for that,’ Max said. ‘I do all this work for you and I’m written off with every man on the planet as useless. You wait till spring and you want this lot dug in.’

‘The useless referred to husbands,’ Mel told him. Max leaned back on the wall and grinned at her. ‘Lucky I’m not one, then,’ he said. ‘Especially yours.’

‘Oh good grief, you know what I mean.’ Mel stomped into the house, thoroughly flustered. She’d heard the doorbell ringing – two long rings, Sarah’s signature tune. As she went back in through the kitchen door she could hear Mrs Jenkins telling Max, ‘Brenda comes back tomorrow. They wanted me to go to Paris but I’m eighty-two . . .’

Sarah, Cherry and Helena – the painter whose work Melanie had been to see – were on the doorstep.

‘You said this would be plant-delivery day, so we thought we’d come and have a look. And we brought this!’ Sarah handed over a Waitrose bag that clanked and bulged with bottles of wine. ‘And Neil’s on his way over too, he seems to think he might be able to help.’ She followed Mel into the kitchen and opened the drawer in search of the bottle opener.

‘Does he?’ Melanie laughed. ‘With what? Telling
Max what to do? I’d like to see him try!’

‘Mel, you’re mad – Neil’s a lovely, available bloke with all his own teeth . . .’

‘That I haven’t checked.’

‘. . . who takes any excuse to be with you and what do you do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Exactly.’ Sarah stabbed the end of the corkscrew into the first bottle and gave it a vicious twist. She was sounding quite fierce, as if Melanie had a lingering illness and was refusing to try a well-proven remedy.

‘Sarah, there’s nothing I want to do. I like him as a friend but I didn’t ask him to want to be with me.’

‘Now if it was me . . .’ Sarah wasn’t in the mood for hearing reasons or excuses. As she reached into the cupboard for glasses, she looked out of the window to where Max was hauling the last of the three
Phoenix Canariensis
into position halfway along the left-hand fence.

‘Well, no wonder!’ Sarah declared, turning to Mel with a grin. ‘Just look what you’ve been keeping on the premises all this time! You sly cow! Why didn’t you say? Did Cherry know?’

‘Hell, Sarah, Max is just the gardener! I
pay
him to be here!’

‘Mm, so would I,’ she murmured, pouring a large glass of red wine and opening the door. ‘Hi!’ she shouted. ‘Could you fancy a glass of something warming?’

‘Sarah’s such a lying slapper,’ Mel was saying as she took glasses and a bottle through to the sitting room to Helena and Cherry. ‘She’d never cheat on Nick – she’s just window-shopping and . . .’ Melanie’s voice wavered. Cherry and Helena were sitting close together
on the sofa, holding hands. Cherry looked up, eyes sparkling, her face alight with a new adoration. ‘Mel, there’s something we want to tell you . . .’

Roger watched Leonora undressing. He lay back on the pillow and tried to remember what she’d looked like when she had a waist. She still wore clothes that he thought were too dangerously tight, as if she was deliberately ignoring her expanding centre. There was a livid dark red band round her middle, the top of her trousers must have been squeezing in against the baby. It couldn’t be doing it any good. Which bits would it be pressing against, he wondered, the tiny brain, its tender tummy?

He knew better than to raise the subject with Leonora. He’d said something about maternity clothes just once and she’d laughed. A huge, in-your-face insulting kind of laugh, as if he’d committed the most ludicrous faux pas. Worse, she’d made it quite clear that the term was entirely, utterly out of date, passé, hopelessly from the middle of the last century if not the one before. ‘Nobody wears that stuff any more!’ she’d shrieked, clutching her sides with sheer hilarity. He’d only meant . . . well, what had he meant? That it looked, to him, more than a bit odd, wearing clingy tee shirts, trousers that followed every line, every curve of the new bump. In the house she was often too hot and wore skimpy little vest-tops that rode up and exposed the tight vulnerable skin. Her navel stuck out like a puppy’s nose. There seemed so very little padding to protect the baby beneath. He supposed he meant that she was still going round looking as if – as if she was still trying to attract someone. It bothered him. He knew it shouldn’t, he knew it was just what women
(especially young ones) wore, but it bothered him.

‘I suppose if it was down to you we’d be all swanning around in billowing smocks!’ she’d scoffed, curling her lithe legs beneath her on the sofa and delving a spoon into yet another tub of her favourite mint-chip and double-choc ice cream. The baby would be mottled green and brown like a tropical snake if she ate much more of that, he was completely sure.

‘Not at all,’ he protested. ‘I just wonder if you’re really comfortable like that, all tight and trussed up.’

‘But I’m not all tight and trussed up. That’s the miracle of Lycra,’ she explained slowly, teasing him as if he was the oldest man on Earth. Sometimes he felt as if he was.

Tonight, watching her pad around the room naked, Roger could feel little desire for his luscious young wife. She wanted sex often just now. Hormones were doing something to her libido, she claimed, and when they made love she seemed to be far away in a primitive, sexually fervid world of her own. He could, at those moments, as he watched her closed eyes and almost snarling, almost animal expression, be absolutely anyone, anyone at all with a fully functioning penis. It frightened him. He wasn’t, in the coming years, going to be enough for her. She would move on. He would have been a useful and formative phase. Eventually, he could tell, sometime in years to come he would be living alone. He would end his days in a lonely flat with a cat or two, and the hope that his children would find space in their full lives to visit him. He would stay late at work, putting off the moment of getting home to switch on the lights to a soulless scene where there was existence but not life. He wished he could talk to Melanie about it, but she would be the
last one to want to know. He could just hear her now: ‘You should have thought of that.’ Melanie’s unforgiving voice went through his head.

He smiled to himself as Leonora climbed into bed and, misinterpreting his expression, leaned her swollen breasts against him and squeezed his thigh. More in duty than desire, he slid his hands round her eager body.

It was after midnight when the last of them left. By then the house looked as if thirty teenagers had been in having a good time. There were empty bottles all over the place, cigarette ends and Max’s roaches in every saucer Mel possessed, and the kitchen surfaces were a sticky mess of toast crumbs, grated cheese, smeared Marmite that had missed its target and crumbs from the chocolate cake contributed by Patty.

‘I thought I might as well come with him, see what your computer’s got that ours hasn’t,’ Patty had said when she turned up on the doorstep accompanying a hugely embarrassed Ben and his bag of school books.

‘Heard the music and the sound of a fun time, more like,’ Sarah had whispered to Mel, as she poured Patty a drink and introduced her to the others. ‘Thinks we’re going to gang-rape her little boy,’ Sarah added. Mel, glad of the very loud music (Max’s Nelly Furtado tape from his truck), tried not to giggle. The idea of herself, Sarah and Mrs Jenkins pouncing on Ben and ripping his clothes off must be entirely ludicrous, even to his doting mother.

It had been a long-drawn-out joint effort, getting the plants into positions that everyone was happy with. Instead of simply Max and Melanie deciding between them, Sarah, Cherry and Helena, the nurserymen and
Mrs Jenkins had all contributed their opinions. The original plan had been spread out on the kitchen table and was soon covered in grubby marks where everybody in turn had pointed a finger and said, ‘Put that big wandy one there,’ or, ‘The vicious spiky thing, you don’t want that near the path.’ Neil arrived in the middle of the discussions and, ever the teacher, tried to take over, waving his arms about as if he was directing traffic.