Size Matters (27 page)

‘A condom?' Jay ventured cheekily.

‘Without at least being very nearly engaged,' Delphine had hissed, still outraged. ‘I'm not that cheap.'

‘Sex isn't about price,' Jay had told her, with all the high-minded hopefulness of seventeen. ‘Cos that's what you and your mum make it sound like. Swopping sex for an engagement ring is just the same as prostitution.' It sounded a good enough argument.

‘Well no-one
has
to have sex,' Delphine had pointed out. ‘For payment, for rings or for irresponsible fun. I just don't intend to till I'm ready. Men respect that. And right now,' she said, twirling in front of the mirror and admiring her rather formal slate-blue shift dress with matching long jacket, ‘what I'm ready for is what
I'm having tonight. I don't know about the sort of boys
you
go out with but
I
prefer a man who thinks I'm worth being taken out for dinner and being given flowers and chocolates and being treated like a
lady
.'

With that, she'd smirked at Jay and flounced out of her immaculate floral bedroom, leaving a trail of expensive grown-up scent. Jay, whose various impoverished sixth-form boyfriends never came up with anything more in the way of sustenance than a half of cider and a packet of dry-roast nuts from the rack beside the optics, could only shrug and marvel at this sophisticated parallel dating universe that
ladies
like Delphine inhabited.

‘If Delphine doesn't know, I don't think you should be the one to tell her,' Greg now advised. ‘Maybe she'll be perfectly happy with Charles and never need to know anything about it. Maybe there's nothing
to
know and he was just delivering a . . . a, I don't know, a misdirected letter or a Neighbourhood Watch poster. On the other hand,' and he chuckled, a deep-down dirty laugh.

‘On the other hand what?' Jay asked.

‘On the other hand it could be he's using his convenient working travel arrangements to link up with the dodgiest of the Russian Mafia and recruit a whole string of hookers for the London meat trade. He could be running a whopping great vice empire going on out there, starting with Masefield Avenue and ending up who knows where, maybe, ooh, all the way to Surbiton?'

‘Oh sure. OK it was a fun notion at first, but,' Jay laughed, ‘I think not, somehow. I mean, look at the men around here – solid, respectable, a bit dull. A whole lot of Sunday car-polishers,
Archers
-listeners and armchair football pundits.'

‘Gee, thanks,' Greg said.

‘Not you! But you know what I mean. I know you can only speculate on other people's debauchery but if it was all going off in Masefield Avenue, Mrs Howard would have to have one of those special rails for tying up dog leads outside, like they've got outside Waitrose. Dog-walking is about the only chance for men from round here to get out on their own, unless they've tunnelled out to Homebase for DIY bits. They're always being hustled into cars to do quality time with the kids on the school run, or they're dragged down the tennis club with the keen wife. Two of the pubs along the main road have had to close for lack of traditional early evening bloke custom. All the men are rushing home to get the chicken breasts into a tangy marinade and knock up a
salsa verde
.'

Reluctantly, Jay hauled herself out of the hot, bubbly water and wrapped herself snugly in a towel, patting gently at her tender tummy skin before giving her thighs a brisk, hard rub. It was important, it said on the instructions that were in the pack of anti-cellulite cream she'd bought on the way home from Mrs Howard's, to keep the circulation stimulated. A hot bath was just the thing, she imagined, though she suspected if she'd read to the bottom of the page she'd find she should have finished off by standing under a freezing shower scraping exfoliating grit into her skin. That particular approach seemed too brutal and Scandinavian for her. Ideally she imagined there should be a snow-fringed ice-strewn lake for her to plunge into, just to add that extra effective tingle. Horrible. Thank goodness for living in a moderate climate.

‘Of course, being embroiled in the vice trade might explain . . .' she went on, pulling on a strappy silk nightie for Planet Man and his telescope to admire before wandering into the bedroom, where Greg had
now started playing with the TV channels. He didn't look up (so much for the skimpy silk), so she guessed he was in eager search of football or a film with guns and spies. She sat on the bed, blocking his view. ‘. . . it might explain how Charles can afford all those fab paintings, and that glitzy place he's got to live in. Doesn't explain what he's doing marrying Delphine.'

‘How about that good old-fashioned word, “love”?' Greg said softly, leaning over to kiss her. ‘Remember that?'

Jay then felt bad. Of course it would be love. Why shouldn't it be? And
what
else would it be? Just because Delphine had been a difficult, spoiled, overbearing girl who'd somehow been a blight on a good bit of Jay's younger life, it didn't follow that she was completely unendearing to the rest of the world. Or that she hadn't changed over the past ten absent years. She'd have softened in that time. She must have: how could she not, losing her second husband after only five years? Win hadn't been oversympathetic, exactly, when Bill Durant's liver had gone into final booze overload and abruptly stopped working. She'd said it was a perfect moment for Delphine to come back home, but Delphine, understandably uppity about the word ‘perfect', said she'd got used to the sunshine and had all the emotional support she needed, thank you very much, from the Yallingup Tango Troupe. Jay remembered Win being quite miffed that her consolation skills were not to be called on, saying, ‘I never liked that man; he was always scratching himself somewhere.'

As she switched off the bedside light, Jay promised herself she would do her best for her cousin, make sure that her stay with the family was as much fun as it could be, and help send her off to her new life with as much generosity of spirit as she could muster. It
couldn't be that difficult. And it would be the proper grown-up thing to do. Whatever Charles was up to, either it would all become clear or it wouldn't.

The kitten was miaowing on the landing. Barbara had suggested shutting it in the kitchen so it wouldn't have any choice but to sleep in its own basket, but she hadn't taken into account that their kitchen didn't actually have a door. Ellie climbed out of bed and picked up the little yowling creature and took it back under the duvet with her. It settled immediately, snuggling down beside her and purring and closing its eyes. It was four in the morning.

‘Poor baby Cicely, are you missing your mummy?' Ellie whispered to it as she stroked its paws. ‘Why didn't you curl up on the sofa with Daffodil?'

But Daffodil was likely to have slunk out through the cat flap for her usual pre-dawn wander. Cats, Ellie thought as she tried to get back to sleep, had a whole secret life that their owners could only guess at. Rory was being very cat-like at the moment, smiling to himself at something secret that was happening in his own head. Usually if there was something going on he'd drop a few clues – he wouldn't be able to resist – but this time, well . . . nothing except this sly half-smile. It was there all the time which was so completely
not
how he'd been for the last few weeks, when he'd had no light in his eyes and had barely smiled at anything. She wished she knew what it was, if only to help him keep whatever secret it was safe from Tasha. If Tasha saw him looking like that, all cat-with-the-cream, she'd worm it out of him. If he'd told
me
, Ellie thought, I could help him to distract her from burrowing into the truth somehow. Unless it
was
all about Tasha? Were he and Tash . . . were they seeing each other? Had Tash finally got round him and
persuaded him that she was exactly what he wanted? This thought landed in her brain with all the force of a dropped bomb, this certainty that this was what was happening. She felt quite sick. Completely left out, as if she was just some little child who wasn't being let in on grown-up secrets. Bloody sodding Tasha, she whispered to the sleeping kitten, I just hate her.

It was a last-ditch attempt before Delphine day. Not an ounce was budging with the low-carbohydrate diet. In fact two sneaky pounds had crept back on board and she could feel others clamouring on her personal quayside, all packed and ready to join them. This was purely, Jay felt, because although it was pretty easy to avoid bread, potatoes and such during the day, by the evening you were in dire need of a bit of ballast. According to one of the books she'd been reading, a tiny miscalculation in carbohydrate grams at this point meant that all the otherwise harmless full-cream milk, the cheese, the avocado, the steak and the eggs were suddenly diverted from their job as basic fuel to larding themselves permanently onto your hips. With a family that was used to meals which regularly featured rice or pasta, and didn't include much red meat during the week, it would hardly be either easy or fair to inflict daily chunks of flesh, slabs of fish and endless, endless chicken on them all. How to have spaghetti Bolognese without the spaghetti? A risotto without the rice? Not possible. And besides, as quick lunches go, Jay was heartily sick of avocado and prawns or yet more tuna.

‘Rosemary Conley. Now that's the one for us,' Pat across the road told her when she found Jay dispiritedly bagging up more organic broccoli in Waitrose. ‘I'm doing OK at Weight Watchers but the Conley class has an exercise section as well, so that should gee things up even more, I feel.'

‘That means you can't just slope off after the weigh-in,' Jay pointed out. ‘Which also means you've got to listen to the talk bit.'

‘Well yes,' Pat conceded. ‘But you never know, it might be useful. Someone might have come up with a no-calorie cheesecake.'

So here they were, signing up for a five-week special offer in the hall of what used to be a school but was now an adult education centre. The dark-panelled walls held lists of the names of girls who'd excelled in exams over the previous half-century, all meticulously signwritten in gold.

‘I'm up there.' Pat nudged Jay and pointed to the top of the 1976 list of A-level stars on the wall opposite. ‘But they spelled me wrong. Look at that: “Patrickia” Andrews, I ask you. I feel like bringing in a pot of gold paint and crossing out the “k”.'

‘I think you should,' Jay said as they handed over their cash and received yet another diet-guide booklet full of you-can-do-it cheer and promise. ‘I think we should sneak in very early one morning and just do it. We could do it really neatly with car paint and a stencil.' She meant it. Why put up with something so annoying, albeit close to frivolously trivial, that could be so easily changed?

The Rosemary Conley diet didn't pussyfoot around with points and sins.

‘We're talking calorie control, and we're talking getting those fat percentages down,' Vanessa, the leader, told the class newcomers with back-to-basics, no-nonsense briskness. ‘Keep the calories below fourteen hundred and whatever you eat, look at the packaging and make sure the fat content's always under four per cent. That's four grams per hundred,' she added, just to make sure the maths had sunk in. ‘And if you're in doubt, refer to the books you'll be
given that show you all the calculations. OK?' Vanessa beamed and turned her attention to the whole class. ‘And now ladies . . .' she rallied them, ‘let's talk turkey rashers!'

A brief talk about dry-fried low-cal turkey-rasher breakfasts was followed by a comparison of supermarket pizzas, showing which ones were possibles for inclusion in the diet and which ones were not, all illustrated with packaging which was passed round the class.

‘I'd have thought that on any low calorie diet the simple word “no” would apply to pizza, wouldn't you?' Jay whispered to Pat as they prepared to get going with the exercise section of the class. They'd been advised by Vanessa to stand at the back for this first session and just ‘try to keep up as and when and don't worry if you find it tricksy; my ladies have been learning this routine for a few weeks now,' leading Jay to dread being expected to achieve
Chorus Line
skill after the first couple of classes. Instead, the steps were not too hard to follow, though the energy required was deceptive: it was only when they took a breather to get water that she realized she was a lot more puffed than she'd expected to be. Low-impact aerobics was replaced for the last ten minutes by stretchy floor exercises and ended with a peaceful, relaxing cool-down on the mats. Jay would, she decided as she lay and looked at the peeling ceiling, come again. But never, even under threat of severe torture, would she breakfast on turkey rashers.

It was all set. So long as he could find out for sure that this Charles bloke (sleazy pimp, as he now thought of him) would still be away (and Rory was as sure as he could be, because his mum had said Charles was off to Hong Kong this week), then it was all on for the night
of Friday week. A Saturday would have given him more time to get food and stuff (and himself) ready, but then it wouldn't give him any time to sort out any bits of clearing up afterwards. This way, he'd even be able to leave the washing up till the next morning, when he'd come back in and completely obliterate all trace of people. Not that there'd be much. It was only going to be him and Samantha and Shelley and that divvy twat Hal Clegg who apparently all the girls ‘really liked', according to Samantha, because he was just ‘
sooo
hilarious'. Rory couldn't see it himself. What was funny about a bloke who was so far into the clouds that in Art he'd actually asked whether Blu Cantrell was a light blue shade or a dark one? If Rory'd said it everyone would have thrown wet paint at him and called him a tosser for not being able to tell the difference between a pigment and a pop star. But oh no, Hal comes out with it and they're all laughing along, highly amused. Still, whatever floats their boats. So long as the guy was useful. He'd even volunteered to nick some of his dad's champagne for them so that was a good start. There was just one more essential thing Rory had to do for now and that was sort out the keys. Charles had had them copied for Barbara and left the other set with his mum so that she could take Delphine over there when she got here. It was a risk that he'd nicked them but at least she wasn't needing them for a few more days yet.