No Place For a Man (12 page)

He grabbed his jacket from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, checked that his keys were in his
pocket and went out. He’d go and talk to Ben and Micky, have some lunch and put more thought into some kind of future career plans. Maybe the Cat Sat, as a concept, hadn’t really got legs, so to speak, but something else would come up, it was only a matter of time.

Jess calculated that she was already about three hundred pounds down and it would have been a lot more if Natasha had had her way. There wasn’t any point working like this: at this rate she’d end up spending far more than she was being paid. Marilyn had hurtled round the store with Jess, Natasha and Robin in hot pursuit, barely stopping to grab clothes from the rails. ‘You like Donna Karan don’t you Jess, we’ll try this in both colours, oh and you’d love Colette Dinnigan and this Elspeth Gibson. Now Natasha, Anna Sui is just your sort of thing, and what about Press & Bastyan?’

It was probably because of the camera: everyone in the Personal Shopping area seemed to be joining in freely in a most un-English sort of way. Natasha, of course, had taken over as the star turn. Being 5′8″, long-limbed and slim, and with a small cute face like a naughty elf she was a dream to dress. All the Home Counties ladies cooed and smiled at her and told her she looked gorgeous each time she emerged from the changing room and sashayed about in front of the mirrors while Robin’s camera snapped away. Unnoticed, and quite relieved that this was the case, Jess picked out a pair of black linen Nicole Farhi trousers for herself.

‘Everything looks just lovely on you, dear,’ Marilyn told Natasha. ‘Though I don’t think pale pink is your colour.’ Mid-rose was though, it was finally agreed, and Natasha, gazing at her reflection, put on her most
persuasive, begging, ‘
please
Mum’ expression. The dress did look wonderful. It was two layers, one deep pink, one purple, high-waisted with a drawstring under the bust, short and with little puffed frill-edged sleeves that reminded Jess of toddlers’ outfits. There was absolutely no chance she would get away with saying no to Natasha. Jess looked round at their audience’s eager faces challenging her to deny her daughter, sighed, and gave in, fishing in her bag for her credit card.

‘Thanks Mum.’ Natasha was so thrilled she linked her arm through her mother’s as they left the store. ‘Shall we get some lunch now?’

‘I can’t afford lunch,’ Jess grouched. ‘What had you in mind? The Ivy? The Savoy?’

Natasha giggled. ‘Mm, either would be nice.’

‘We should get home. I need to write this up while it’s still fresh in my mind.’

Natasha tugged at her arm. ‘Can’t we just grab something fast? I’m starving. I really need something with chips. Let’s just go into … look, there’s a Café Rouge over there.’

Natasha was halfway through her steak when she suddenly went silent and looked strangely sad.

‘What’s wrong, Tash? Has the pain come back?’ Jess asked.

‘No. It’s just, all that money.’

‘I know. Still, according to your dad he shouldn’t have any trouble getting himself some kind of job again soon.’ If only, she thought, saying it made it true.

‘No, it’s not that.’ Natasha pushed the rest of her food to the side of her plate and started picking through her salad with her fingers. ‘I was thinking about Tom. He’s probably never even seen that kind of money, and we
just bought a dress and a pair of trousers with it. Just one dress, not even loads of dresses. Just one.’

Jess wasn’t sure which way to feel. On the one hand she was delighted that her daughter was showing signs of growing a social conscience, but on the other she didn’t want her not to enjoy a bit of personal luck.

‘We don’t do this every day, Tasha, this was just a treat, a one-off.’

‘Some people just don’t get treats. Tom doesn’t.’

‘I take it you really like him?’ Jess knew this was a risky question. Natasha might immediately clam up. One of Nelson’s columns had been about exactly that: the delicate business of extracting romance information from a teenager. She’d likened it to trying to twiddle out the meat from inside the tiniest of a lobster’s claws: it required gentle persistence, steady concentration and light-handedness, otherwise you were left with something that wasn’t whole, was messed-about-with and not particularly satisfying. So it was with adolescents. Natasha clearly had something to say but would need delicate handling if she was to be persuaded to come out with it.

‘It’s like, well Tom hasn’t got a proper home.’ Natasha hadn’t answered Jess’s question. Jess wasn’t sure she minded that: how much of a fifteen-year-old’s love life did anyone really feel like finding out?

‘He said he’s all right though, living with foster people.’ Jess reached across the table and helped herself to a piece of Natasha’s tomato. ‘Do they give him a hard time?’

Natasha grinned, looking down at her plate as if the grin wasn’t meant to be shared. ‘No, not any more,’ she said.

‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? And he can come and see
us whenever you want him to, you know. The way he wolfed down that dinner last week, he certainly seemed to be in need of a square meal.’

Natasha’s face brightened. ‘Can he? Can he live with us for a bit? He could have Oliver’s room, especially as you wouldn’t let me have it.’

Jess laughed. ‘You’re fifteen and you want your boyfriend, who you’ve known less than a fortnight, to move in with us! Are you mad? Suppose you go off him in another week, what happens then? We can’t send him off to a rejected boys’ rehoming centre, you know!’ Natasha wasn’t laughing and Jess put on a more serious face. ‘Sorry love, let’s just see how things go, shall we? Invite him for supper again, whenever you like.’

Natasha looked at the floor and muttered, ‘So you can see if he’s really
suitable
.’

‘No. So that
you
can. Shall we go home now?’

Natasha looked up, flustered. ‘Er, do we have to? Can’t we do something else?’

‘No! No more shopping!’ Jess counted out coins for the tip and put her jacket back on.

‘But Mum, it’s early … I know, you really need a haircut. Let’s go and do that somewhere. I’ll tell them what to do and then I’ll just sit and read magazines.
Please
Mum, let’s not go home yet.’

‘… scuba-diving the Barrier Reef – totally awesome, water colour the most spectacular blue ever. Moored up at a little island, no trees just a sand mound in middle of the reef, with beautiful turquoise sea with darker patches marking out the reef as far as you could see. The mountains of Cairns in the background and a few high cirrus clouds. Stunner …’

She was glad he was having a good time, she was delighted for him but it was impossible not to be hugely envious. Oliver sounded so blissfully free of worries, as if, with no more exams to think about, no work to get up for, he was gradually emptying his head of everything except the joy of the moment. It must be like being a small child again. Jess imagined him lying on the sand, staring up at the sky, watching the high thin clouds scudding past. She remembered doing that when she was a teenager, she and her friends losing themselves to the mildly trippy feeling of the sky’s
movement till they felt the earth turning fast with them perched precariously on top of it, like being on a slightly nerve-wracking fairground ride.

She reread Oliver’s e-mail and printed out a copy to show Matthew, who was in the garden reading the paper. She could just see the back of his head, beyond the conservatory window. His body was very still, as it always was when he was concentrating thoroughly, and she concluded he was reading something riveting about football rather than checking the job vacancies. Like Oliver, he seemed to have no cares in the world. Unlike Oliver, he was wrong.

She went through the kitchen and out to join him. The day was going to be hot in that unexpected, catching-you-out way that early April often was, and the rhododendron outgrowing its massive pot was drooping and desperate for water. Matthew didn’t seem to have noticed, or if he had he’d chosen not to do anything about it. She would reel out the hose later: it needed unwinding all the way back to sort out a kink close to the tap that was holding back the flow because someone had been careless rewinding it last time. That was the downside of delegation: you too often had to allocate the job to someone who frankly didn’t give a damn, and the resulting cock-up made you cross. On the other hand if you didn’t delegate you ended up doing everything yourself, which also made you cross. All in all, she thought, if you didn’t lighten up a bit it made for a pretty bad-tempered life.

‘Look at this.’ Jess held the e-mail out to Matthew. ‘Oliver’s having the best time, sunning himself on a yacht round the Whitsunday Islands.’

Matthew grinned. ‘Maybe that’s what I should do with all this spare time, go off backpacking like a
student and then come back full of the joys of youth again.’

‘It would be a second childhood in your case,’ she laughed. ‘Or should I say an extended adolescence?’ She sat down beside him on the bench and picked a few weeds out of the pot of thyme beside the conservatory window. The garden desperately needed attention. It was something Matthew used to deal with on Sunday mornings, usually as a way of coping with a mild hangover. The worse his headache was, the more energetically he’d pushed the lawnmower. Without the routine of daily work, without the contrast between work-days and other days, other routines had vanished too. Matthew had never exactly been one for the unbreakable ritual of Sunday morning car-cleaning (unlike Angie’s ex-husband who had woken the Grove shortly after every Sunday dawn with the whine of his mini-vac sucking dust from his precious Audi’s carpets), but there had been the chores that had got done simply because of the urgency of cramming them into what little free time there was. Now, with the weeks of non-occupation stretching ahead (Jess slapped down the thought that it might well be years), Matthew was becoming distinctly lazier. The grass had got to the waving-in-the-wind length and was sprouting a fine crop of dandelions. The surge in spring growth showed that in the race to the top of the trellis the bindweed was easily outstripping the clematis. The honeysuckle, wondrous though it would smell in a few weeks when it flowered, was now so rampant that it was clogging the conservatory guttering and causing cascades of water to overflow onto the terrace whenever fierce spring rain fell.

‘There’s an awful lot of moss on this terrace,’ she
commented, scraping at the stones with her foot. A sticky greeny-brown wodge of it collected on the end of her shoe. She scuffed it off on the edge of the bench leg where it stayed in a solid lump that resembled dog mess.

‘Hmm.’ Matthew had gone back to Manchester United’s chances in next Wednesday’s match against Real Madrid. Oliver’s e-mail lay face down on the bench between them.

‘Any chance you could give it some attention before it gets out of hand?’ she ventured.

Matthew folded the paper with exaggerated care and placed it neatly down on the bench beside him.

‘Do you want to make a list?’

‘Of what?’

‘You’re doing that thing again. Finding things for me to do. Things to fill my time that will keep me out of trouble.’ He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were cold and humourless.

‘You usually do the garden stuff, that’s all. What’s the problem?’ Jess asked.

‘Do I? I thought we both did it, on a casual as-and-when basis. Or is it what men with nothing better to do fill their days with? Do you want me to join the bowls club and get a slow old dog so we can waddle off for walkies on the common?’

Jess stood up. ‘You’re overreacting. The new equation is, I’m really busy and you’re not. The garden needs attention: at the moment you have time for it and I don’t. But if you frankly can’t be arsed, well just let it grow, I don’t much care any more than you do.’

Jess slammed back into the house and straight out again through the front door, pausing only briefly to collect her gym bag and car keys. The childish phrase
‘it’s not fair’ seemed relevant, she thought, as she started her Golf and pulled out into the Grove. It was nearly a month now since Matthew’s working life had so abruptly ended. For all that time he had done nothing except stay in bed late, then get up and mooch down to the Leo to hang about with all the other work-free men in the area. From what she could gather, they sat around giggling through the tabloid papers, telling each other jokes and working out ways to make themselves instantly and immensely rich.

Ben and Micky were the only ones actually making any money, running the bar and craftily encouraging the long hours of idle boozing and schmoozing. Eddy was still convinced the Cat Sat invention was likely to take off and had got as far, according to Matthew, of drafting an advert to place in a magazine he swore was called
Pussy Pals
to entice fond owners of precious pedigree breeds to invest in its development. It never bloody would get developed, Jess thought angrily as she crashed through the gears and pulled away too fast from the traffic lights at the square, not while its inventors spent 95 per cent of their time planning the spending of their mythical profits and the rest of their time playing daft jokes like ringing up the local paper to report that the people at number 17 had sold their dustbin area to a mobile phone company so they could put up a mast.

Jess turned into the gym car park and almost immediately changed her mind. It was mid-morning now, one of the busiest times. The changing room would be full of post-school-run mothers wittering on to each other about whether it was worth little Sebastian going in for a St Dominic’s scholarship, when, after all the expense of extra coaching, it was only worth a 20 per
cent reduction in the fees. Week after week she heard the same conversations repeated. Probably in their time she and Angie had gone over the same topics about Zoe and Emily. Not once had she heard anyone mention anything that didn’t involve proof of being majorly well off. There were debates about the merits of beech flooring over oak, of St Lucia over Tobago for holidays or Swiss over Slovenian for au pairs.

Once, she and Angie had listened with delighted amazement as a woman with a massive house on the corner of the common had shamelessly patronized her companion, saying, ‘Oh I do so envy you your garden; I’d love to have one that small, so much more manageable. The gardener does put in eight hours a week, but still …’ and so on. The gym changing room was a fantasy never-never land for the communal solving of non-problems. Not once had she heard anyone compare the tricky downside of sudden unemployment with, say, the collapsing of a twenty-year marriage or the realization that a child was actually severely thick and not acceptably dyslexic at all.