Size Matters (7 page)

He himself had nothing to report as yet, well apart from party snogging and the odd feel, nothing at the Ben-and-Alan level anyway. Not that he
would
report. He'd decided to be a bloke girls could trust, so that they could all agree when they talked about him and coo to each other, ‘Oh Rory, he's just so
lovely
', not a bastard who practically ran his conquests' pants up the school flagpole for everyone to snigger at. His way, they'd like him as a friend, they'd trust him and know he wasn't just out for what he could get. Also, being A Nice Person, he might pull more of them. Not cynical at all then, he chuckled to himself as he sat down on a damp bench next to where a couple of rooks were efficiently emptying a garbage bin with their beaks.

Rory was starting to feel a bit sick again. It must have been that toast – he should have given the bread a proper look when he got it out of the pack, made sure there weren't any mouldy bits on it. Jay had said she couldn't be responsible for ensuring the bread was inside its sell-by – especially as she wasn't eating it at the moment. Bloody diets. Or it might have been the jam. Sometimes you found stuff at the back of the fridge and it looked like someone was trying to grow their own antibiotics. Lots of the food was still Imogen's, special sorts of honey that she liked, blueberry jam, lime pickle. She had her own fridge down in the basement, why didn't she move all her poxy food? He hoped she'd be a bit more germ-free when the baby arrived, otherwise the poor kid wouldn't have a chance.

Holding onto his aching stomach, Rory put his feet up on the bench and stretched out, lying full length
along the seat to see if his insides would feel better when they weren't scrunched up. Two of the old park biddies that were always in there gave him a look and a dose of tutting as they went past. They were in full olds-out-walking kit of all-weather woolly crochet hat and tartan scarf, dragging their Scottie dogs that were supposed to be white but looked yellowy round the edges, like snow that's been pissed on. He felt worse, if anything, lying down. The biddies would feel sorry for him if they knew; they'd pat his head and say grandmotherly comfort stuff. He wished he was at home now, groaning miserably in his own bed. The pain in his gut was getting sharper and was there all the time, not just twingeing sometimes like before. Whatever he'd had for breakfast would have to be evicted from the fridge the minute he got home, before everyone in the house got ill and the whole place was declared a deadly disease zone and headlined on the local TV news.

The women had done their circuit of the pond and were coming back for a second round. You'd think he'd meant to do it, by the look on their faces, the pulling back the dogs and the shudder of disgust like he was some junkie on a downer. After all, you couldn't control the moment when you barfed on the pathway. No-one could, he was willing to bet, not even this outraged pair of old wifeys.

How wonderfully useful it was to have a functioning artisan as part of the family, Jay thought as she drove out to negotiate with Mrs Caldwell, Dishing the Dirt's serial complainer. How much more handy that Imogen had fallen in love with Tristan the plumber rather than someone such as, for example, a City money trader whose expertise was only in the coffee futures market and how to get a good deal on an Audi TT. When the
time came for career choices to be made by Rory and Ellie she would encourage them firmly away from sit-down office occupations, and try to point them in the direction of carpentry and electrical work. In an area such as this, affluent, educated and devoutly non-practical, there would never be a shortage of work. There was a course at the local college grandly entitled The Built Environment, whose students, over the past few years, had constructed a whole new art block and some very fancy walling round the car park.

Ask most bright kids about their futures and they said they wanted to be ‘lawyers'. Did they really know what that entailed? Did they have a clue how many hours they'd waste trying to find someone to degunge the washing machine just because they'd got no simple hands-on skills of their own? How many lawyers could a country need anyway, she wondered as she made her way over the bridge and down to the Common to sort out why every one of her staff had now refused to do so much as another hour's work for Mrs Caldwell.

Jay pulled into the pale gravelled driveway of the double-fronted quasi-Georgian house and parked beside Barbara's Volvo estate that still had the Cats on Board sticker in the back window from the West London Area Burmese Championship qualifiers, held the weekend before. There was a window-cleaner's truck as well. His ladders were propped up against the house front and Jay could hear the faint squeaking of chammy on glass. Another essential worker, she thought. After all, how many householders these days were prepared to risk going up ladders with the Windolene Wet Wipes? Greg got dizzy at the top of his own glass staircase and had to drink half a bottle of Rescue Remedy when he was out on an architectural recce and had to shin up some scaffolding.

This meeting had to be a two-hander, for Mrs
Caldwell had a wide circle of book-group friends and she could, if she accumulated enough grumbles to report them, be extremely bad for business. The area had several van-and-mop businesses like Dishing the Dirt, and clients went from one to another as recommendations came and went. The casual cleaners did exactly the same of course, which meant that a client, changing companies simply because a girl had missed a dusty skirting board once too often, might well get the same girl back again but wearing a different logo on her apron.

‘Do come in.' Mrs Caldwell had the door open before Jay was out of the car. Disconcertingly, Jay noticed she was wearing almost identical clothes to her own – black trousers and top with a honey-coloured fine wool cardigan. She'd guess Mrs Caldwell's was cashmere as opposed to lambswool and that her trousers were Joseph, not M & S. Oh and two sizes smaller than her own. Bloody grapefruit, she thought, giving Mrs Caldwell what she hoped was a smile that combined both a business-like attitude and reassurance. Neither offering was returned with any warmth.

‘Come through to the kitchen. Your business colleague is already here.' Jay could see Barbara sitting at a long oak table and looking uncomfortable behind a row of folded garments. She caught her eye as she followed the cashmere cardi into a kitchen full of cerise lacquered units polished to a standard of blinding reflectiveness. If Dishing the Dirt's Monique had done this, it would be impossible to agree she was incompetent. Barbara gave her a weak smile that wasn't easy to interpret. Jay hoped fervently it didn't mean ‘total nutter'. She still shuddered at the memory of the woman who'd made a Battenberg-effect birthday cake for her dog out of chopped liver and tripe and then offered her cleaner a slice.

‘We have a problem.' Mrs Caldwell almost pushed Jay into a chair beside Barbara and stood looking down on them like a headmistress facing a pair of persistent truants. She was straight in, no faffing about being social. Coffee would have been nice, Jay thought, and a biscuit selection that she could virtuously resist.

‘Ironing.'

‘Ironing,' Barbara repeated, leaning forward and looking attentive.

‘Ironing,' Mrs Caldwell said again.

We're going to be here all day, Jay thought, fighting the urge to look at her watch. Her phone was vibrating in her pocket too; it might be a new client. Perhaps she could sneak off to the loo (left of front door, under the stairs, walls decorated with cases of gloomy stuffed trout caught by Mr C. To be taken down fortnightly and all glass polished) and see if Mrs Caldwell could be dealt with by a pleasing deletion from the rota.

‘Ironing.' Mrs Caldwell pointed a square-nailed sapphire-ringed finger at the assortment of items in front of her on the table. ‘Your girls don't seem to get the hang. I've left notes, I've had words – not that they understand, most of them – I've even shown by example, as here. But do they take notice?'

Both Barbara and Jay opened their mouths to reply but Mrs Caldwell was in first. ‘No they do not. Shirts.'

‘We've taught them the right order: collar, cuffs, sleeves and body.' Barbara defended her trade, her voice as crisp as starched fine linen.

‘Oh I'm sure. But then
they hang them up
!'

‘Well yes, of course. As instructed.'

‘No, no, no! I want them
folded
, I want them presented as if they've just come from the shop, freshly bought. You must tell them. And blouses and pyjama tops.' Mrs Caldwell patted the top of one of the folded heaps.

‘It sounds rather time-consuming,' Jay commented slyly. Time wasted on one job was time taken from another.

‘But it's how I want them!'

‘Of course. We'll have a little chat with the girls. Now is that . . . ?' Barbara made amove toget up but Mrs Caldwell hadn't finished. Outside the window cleaner clattered down his ladder and Jay heard water swooshing into the outside drain. For his sake, she hoped the man hadn't carelessly slopped any over the doormat or he'd be joining them in the kitchen line-up for a telling-off.

‘Not it's not all, not quite.' Mrs Caldwell reached for another garment. ‘Underwear,' she declared, holding up a pair of fine mesh pants, pink-flowered on a blue background and edged with cornflower lace. ‘They should be folded
thrice
like so . . .'

The window cleaner knocked on the kitchen door and pushed it open, putting his head round and grinning at Jay and Barbara. Mrs Caldwell whirled round, knickers still held aloft.

‘All done, love. That'll be thirty quid.' He gave Mrs Caldwell a lascivious wink. ‘Nice knickies darlin', but I think I'll give our usual little extras a miss today, ta, if it's all the same to you.'

‘Well that went well, I thought. Not,' Barbara said to Jay as they sat in Starbucks celebrating their telling-off with some much-needed coffee.

Jay stirred her skinny latte (plus two sugars) and laughed. ‘It is
her
, isn't it? I mean, it is Mrs Caldwell who's overdemanding, not us who're sloppy and hopeless?'

‘Are you serious? The woman's obsessive. Barking. She told Monique off once for winding the flex on the iron the wrong way. I mean, for heaven's sake, get
a life, woman. Some of them . . .' Barbara shook her head.

‘Some of them you just want to shake.'

‘And vac,' Barbara spluttered. ‘I had a dream once that the Dachshund Man had been freeze-dried, scattered on the floor and hoovered up. Gruesome.' She grabbed Jay's hand suddenly. ‘Don't tell anyone that, please, you promise?'

‘You got it. It's just between us, that little fantasy. What shall we do now? I don't much feel like going home and adding up how many bottles of Mr Muscle we're going to need next month – it'll probably start me on some mad train of thought about why it isn't called Mrs Muscle, or Ms at the very least. How about you? Have you got cats to de-flea or de-worm or shall we comfort ourselves some more with a bit of retail therapy?'

‘I can manage an hour or two – let's not do clothes though, let's go and do cosmetics. We could get mad-witch eyeshadow colours to scare Mrs C. next time she hauls us over the coals.'

The two of them wandered through the town centre and into the luscious scent-soaked cosmetics department of the biggest store. ‘Mmm,' Jay said, closing her eyes and inhaling. ‘The smell of lots of purchase possibilities. I need, and that's
need
, not merely want, some new lipgloss.'

She tried several, covering the back of her hand with smears of colour till she resembled the paint chart she'd used when decorating Ellie's bedroom the year before. It seemed, she thought as she paid for her choice, a ludicrous amount of money to hand over for such a titchy pot of bronzy-pink goo. No wonder women bought so much – at that price you just had to hurl all your faith into it.

Barbara declared herself well pleased with a new
perfume and some smudgy purple-grey eyeliner. ‘Makes a change from browns for me,' she said, ‘I keep buying all these taupe shades. I get them home and realize I've been influenced by the colours of my cats. Ridiculous.'

‘What's so wonderful,' Jay mused as they walked towards the car park, ‘is that make-up can't make you fat, drunk, pregnant or ill. It's a near sin with no punishment and no side effects. Perfect.'

‘If you go . . . and I'm not meaning you, this is rhetorical, you're nowhere near a candidate,' Barbara said, ‘If you,
one
, went to a sort of Overeaters Anonymous, do you think you have to rely on a Higher Power, like they do at the Alcoholics one? What do you think?'

‘I hadn't thought,' Jay told her. ‘Hadn't given it a moment's consideration. I suppose you'd have to. I just know I haven't got the right sort. My Higher Power, the one in my head that I listen to, is a jolly live-and-let-live soul who likes a drink and a good social nosh-up. It likes chocolate and doesn't even try to tell me not to have it. It says, go on, eat that doughnut, a bit of what you fancy can't hurt. He or she isn't on my side about the diet at all.'

Barbara stopped by the window of a new shop. There were all sorts of vitamin potions piled up in the window display along with diet remedies, powders and pills and drinks all claiming to be essential for toxic cleansing and inner purity. Photos of slender, bikini-clad women playing beach volleyball tempted body-envy. She and Jay wandered into the shop where soft persuasive music was playing and looked at a huge toy-like selection of primary-coloured tummy toners, exercise wheels, hand weights and elastic straps, every gadget promising to change your body shape, to tone, stretch and lengthen muscles till, presumably, they had to be folded double to fit inside your skin.

‘You could waste your whole life playing with this lot,' Barbara said, picking up a broad elastic band, putting one end under her foot and hauling hard on the other end. It escaped from beneath her shoe and snapped back at her viciously, sending her flying into an artistically arranged stack of cartons that clattered to the floor.