No Place For a Man (11 page)

Zoe looked at her, fearful. ‘Tash, you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone. Emily would kill me if she knew
I’d told you. You won’t say anything will you? Promise again?’

‘Course I won’t,’ Natasha reassured her. ‘But if you’re not back by six and if anything happens to you … well I don’t think you should hitch, that’s all.’

‘You’re starting to sound like Mum. Nothing will happen. I owe you one.’

Natasha looked at her for a long moment, weighing up whether this was a good moment to strike a deal on the payback. She heard her mother’s feet on the stairs, clumping awkwardly in unusually high shoes. There wasn’t time just now. The return favour she needed would have to keep for later.

Jess had assumed Robin the photographer would be a woman, someone she wouldn’t mind having alongside her in the changing room, someone who would understand that at her age there were bits of her that were completely off limits for photos. Instead, waiting by the Personal Shopping area and festooned with the equipment of his trade, was a pale, twitchy young man whose hair had clearly turned prematurely grey. It stuck up in untidy silver clumps and as she and Natasha approached he prodded at it in a way that suggested a nervous habit. He didn’t look like the sort who would understand if she pointed to her neck and asked him to keep that bit in the shadows.

‘Robin? Hi, I’m Jess Nelson and this is Natasha, my daughter. I brought her along for a bit of moral support.’ Robin’s eyes widened with what looked like terror at the sight of Natasha.

‘Are they doing both of you then?’ he asked, sneaking a quick glance at his watch.

‘No, it’s supposed to be just me. But don’t worry, I
don’t expect it will take too long.’ She might be new to this, but Jess wasn’t going to have him rushing her.

‘But if they offer …’ Natasha cut in.

‘Well yes, of course, if they offer …’ Jess teased.

‘Where are all the celebs?’ Natasha whispered as she and Jess sipped their coffee in the waiting area. ‘I thought there’d be at least Madonna and Posh Spice.’ Jess had privately thought there would be too, but the other customers, settled into deep armchairs and quietly flicking through magazines, looked surprisingly ordinary – very much along the lines of up-for-the-day from Surrey.

‘Perhaps celebrities get appointments out of opening hours,’ Jess suggested, looking at her watch. Robin was taking a long time to set up his equipment. He seemed to be struggling with an endless supply of diffusers, reflectors, deflectors and tripods, all pulled out of a couple of bags that looked far too small to have held everything, like magicians’ props. The woman beside Jess, too well-mannered to ask directly what he thought he was up to, glanced up now and then as he made experimental light-meter readings on Jess’s face. Marilyn, a cheery thirty-something Scot who was to do the clothes selecting and who looked as if this job kept her in better muscle condition than all Jess’s efforts at the gym, had already taken a Polaroid of Jess as well as one of the ‘cute wee girl’ for good measure. Jess had gritted her teeth at the description of Natasha. That was the kind of thing that would normally have the ‘wee girl’ glaring and glowering but Natasha simply smiled with her maximum radiance and asked if it was all right if she too filled in a form about her clothing preferences, just for fun.

‘Of course, my pet! Let’s see what we can find for
you too!’ Jess gave Natasha a look but it was too late. ‘We’re not actually buying anything,’ she hissed at her.

‘That’s not very fair to Marilyn is it?’ Natasha countered. ‘That’s just wasting her time. We should buy
something
, the
Gazette
should pay.’ She looked down at her questionnaire. ‘It says here which designers do I prefer? What shall I put?’

‘Just put Miss Selfridge and Top Shop. Don’t go getting fancy ideas,’ Jess told her crossly, wondering, rather guiltily, if she’d spelled Nicole Farhi’s name right. It seemed vaguely sinful, somehow, chewing over the merits of Donna Karan and Jasper Conran when the once-bountiful well that was Matthew’s income was about to run dry. This is just my job, not real life, she reminded herself, as one of Marilyn’s colleagues hurtled in towing a rail crammed with new-season delights.

Zoe got off the coach in the middle of the small town. With its old market hall in the centre of the square and so many half-timbered shops it reminded her of a film set for something Jane Austen-ish. There was no sign of Emily and she stood nervously at the bus stop feeling awkward, shifting her bag to her left shoulder and wondering what she was supposed to do now. Emily had said she’d try to meet her, but she hadn’t actually promised and Zoe wished she’d listened more carefully when Emily had been giving her the directions to the school. At least it wasn’t raining and miserable. It was warm enough now to take off her sweater and tie it round her middle. She waited for what seemed like endless minutes and then went into a small, scruffy supermarket.

‘Mansfield School? Just behind the library and
across the rec,’ the assistant, pricing up tins of peas and too bored even to look up from her work, told her as if Zoe was likely to be familiar with these landmarks already.

‘Thanks,’ Zoe muttered, too disheartened to pursue the matter and hoping she’d have better luck with the next person she asked. At least it seemed to be within walking distance. That meant Emily and Giles must have been too lazy to wander as far as the local chemist for contraceptive supplies. Perhaps they spent all their spare cash on drugs and booze instead. Her mum had been writing about that not long ago, about how some boarding-school kids competed at being bad. She wished she hadn’t come. Emily must surely have someone at school she could have told, someone who could help her sort this problem out. Didn’t they have matrons who were motherly and forgiving and could be counted on to give them a big hug, a cup of cocoa and the number of the nearest abortion clinic?

‘Zoe! You came!’ Emily was bounding over the recreation ground, expertly sidestepping dollops of dog mess.

‘Course I did. Said I would didn’t I?’ Zoe put her bag down and allowed herself to be hugged. Emily felt horribly bony. Maybe she’d been sick a lot in the mornings and got thinner.

Emily’s delight evaporated. ‘You’re not cross are you? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. It’s OK.’ Zoe shrugged. She didn’t want to give Emily any reason to dissolve into the kind of tears she’d gushed the week before at the allotment. Her eyes already looked huge and troubled and ready to pour all over her big broad cheekbones. They could be hours mopping up if that happened.

‘Come and see everyone.’ Emily linked her arm through Zoe’s. ‘I’d really like you to meet Giles.’

He was the last person Zoe wanted to see: she wouldn’t be able to do anything but picture him having sex with Emily and even if he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio she’d rather not think about that, but she was curious to get a look at the inside of the school.

‘Do you sleep in dormitories?’ she asked as they pushed through a tatty green door into a disappointingly modern addition to a grim Victorian building just like the old hospital near home that was being pulled down. Zoe had hoped for something that looked grand and important, like Winchester College which she’d seen on the
Antiques Roadshow
on television.

‘No of course we don’t. We share rooms in twos and you can’t choose who with because you’re supposed to love everyone here in a kind of, what is it,
democratic
way. Being best friends isn’t encouraged. I’m in with this complete spoon called Louisa who practises the bloody clarinet all the time.’

Zoe laughed. ‘If you loved everyone
democratically
wouldn’t that mean you’d have slept with more than just Giles?’

Emily frowned. ‘Ssh! Someone might hear. That was against the rules,
completely
. I told you. We can do anything except sex, drugs and watch the kind of telly that we really like. Oh and we can’t run in the corridors.’

‘Sounds fun.
Not
.’ They’d reached the end of the building. Zoe could hear music behind the double doors facing them and identified Travis’s ‘Driftwood’ which Natasha had played to death for the three days after she’d bought it.

Zoe felt horribly shy. Walking into the crowded
common room reminded her of crossing the square by the Leo when Tash’s old primary-school friend Mel and all her mates were sprawled on the benches smoking. You didn’t want to be unfriendly because they might say something horrible that you’d just about hear after you’d walked past, but if you smiled and got blanked it felt worse. Here, though, she needn’t have worried.

‘Everyone, this is my very best friend Zoe from home!’ Zoe didn’t catch any of the names, there were too many. The girls all looked similar, as if living together for so long they’d evolved a look of their own. They blurred into a type: remarkably clear complexions, long straight hyper-clean hair, trousers in varying shades of beige balanced on slim hips and tight pastel cardigans. They were smiling (perfect teeth), friendly and delighted to see her, as if a visit from the outside was an exciting novelty.

‘And Zoe, this is Giles.’ Emily pulled her down the room to where a lank-haired boy was slouched across a tatty blue armchair. She felt quite disappointed, almost cheated. She’d assumed that any bloke who could charm the knickers off someone as young as Emily must be the school stud: an irresistible mixture of Michael Owen, Brad Pitt and Dylan the guitarist from Simplicity. This boy, shortish, running to soft plumpness around the neck and with a prize-winning outcrop of very busy acne, was someone she and her mates wouldn’t waste the effort turning to look at even if he yelled at them from a passing Ferrari. He glanced up briefly, grunted something unidentifiable in a tone that suggested it was a huge effort to be even basically polite and went back to reading the sports pages in the
Sun
.

‘We’d better get going.’ Emily tugged at her arm. ‘We’ll miss the bus.’

‘Bus? I thought we were going to hitch.’ Zoe had been looking forward to that. It would have added even more to the ridiculous drama of the day.

‘You don’t wanna hitch,’ Giles grunted. ‘Getta cab.’ Zoe glared at him, but he hadn’t looked up from the paper.

‘Maybe you should give us the fare,’ she hissed at him. The room quietened.

‘No, Zo, come on. Let’s just go.’ Emily pulled her out into the corridor. ‘What did you say that for?’ she yelled into Zoe’s face as soon as they were a few safe steps from the door.

‘Well, he doesn’t exactly seem to care much about where you’re going, does he? Is he always getting girls pregnant? Has he got an account at the clinic?’

‘It’s nothing to do with him! Not now! Oh let’s just get out of here.’ Emily stumped off out of the building and strode ahead towards the town centre.

‘Yeah,’ Zoe growled to herself. ‘Let’s go.’

‘It’s happened again: there’s definitely been someone in. Don’t tell me I’m imagining it, the house smells different.’ Angie leaned forward so that her breasts seemed to be propped up on the table like a presentation pair of George’s firmest allotment cabbages. It crossed Matthew’s mind that she could have worn something that covered her front rather more adequately. She was a bit long in the tooth (though not
that
long), to be honest, for those cute little cardigans that Natasha and Zoe favoured and which reminded him of babies’ matinee jackets. This powder-blue one was undoubtedly cashmere, threaded through at the
edges with lavender satin ribbon that was supposed to tie the top edges together. It seemed to have given up under the strain of Angie’s anatomy and the loose ends dangled helplessly. Matthew wasn’t used to eyeing up women in a sexually questing way. At work he had had to be scrupulously non-interested to the point where he’d no longer dared to think about it: the sharp-edged females in the PR business prided themselves on being able to read a grubby male mind from the far side of an armour-plated door. But now he was free from office life it was as if some long-lost primitive urges were filing back into the brain space vacated by conferences on media might, clients’ flow charts and the phone number for
Question Time
’s researcher.

‘Did this mystery intruder take anything?’ Matthew asked.

Angie frowned, then just as quickly stopped as if remembering not to furrow her brow and make lines. ‘No. Nothing. That’s the thing. I mean you can’t complain to the police when there’s nothing to complain about, can you? I’d even left jewellery lying about in the bedroom. I couldn’t see anything missing.’

‘No, well you wouldn’t,’ Matthew commented.

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘See it. If it was missing. Sorry, just that in PR you use words carefully. It’s in case you’re misinterpreted.’ He laughed. ‘You can stretch the truth till you can make balloon animals out of it, but you have to choose words that won’t leave you floundering to explain yourself.’

‘Oh.’ She wasn’t interested. ‘But you don’t do that any more,’ she pointed out.

‘No.’ Despair threatened, to his surprise. ‘No, and
that’s good,’ he rallied. ‘So why do you think someone’s been in?’

‘I told you, it smells different. And the towels were wet in the spare-room shower.’

Matthew could feel his face breaking into an unattractive smirk. ‘Have you had someone in that you’ve, er, invited?’

‘What and forgotten about?’ Angie snapped. ‘Look, it was probably the cleaning lady or something, or a stray cat got in and sprayed. Forget it.’

After she’d gone, Matthew wandered round the house wishing Jess would come home and cheer him up. They could go down to the travel agents and book themselves a last-minute weekend in Barcelona or something. Or check out some Internet bargains. It would do them both good to get away, blow some of the golden payout on a bit of foreign fun.

The new and unwelcome feeling of despair lingered at the back of his mind, getting in the way of the wonderful buoyed-up excitement at life’s possibilities that he’d had since the great redundancy day. He wasn’t the only one who’d left the company that day, but he was the only one who had no intention of ever going back there, not even for a visit. One or two had made tentative plans to meet up every second Thursday in the month for a drink but he didn’t want any of that. It was too much like clinging to the wreckage of a career. And besides, without that career what on earth would they find to talk about? If they’d wanted to discuss their gardens or their families or their passion for scuba-diving off the remotest coasts of Scotland surely they’d have done it before now.