June didn’t want to chat.
‘I’ll get the kettle on. She’s in here.’ And, bold as brass, June opened the door to the front room which was now home to the telly (much better ITV reception on the street side of the house), several migrant pouffes and June’s entire glass animal collection tricked out across the mantelshelf. Every now and then she’d come home with a new specimen tenderly wrapped in newspaper but they all looked like the bastard children of a gazelle and a giraffe. Jane reckoned they fiddled with the glass first then made up the animal afterwards. Like those poodly things made of skinny pink balloons you got at funfairs.
In the corner lurked an enormous wooden playpen where Georgette sat on her fat plastic backside, furiously whacking at a celluloid clown contraption. She wanted it to lie down and shut up but the painted smile kept lurching upright again, dongling cheerily as it rolled with each punch. Eventually, Georgette pushed it flat and laid the puzzle-bricks box on top of it.
‘Night-night,’ she said firmly. She was her mother’s daughter.
No one took a blind bit of notice.
Uncle George didn’t hold with the play pen – ‘She’s not a wild animal. You ought to let her run about more’ – but he didn’t want her running about anywhere near him. He’d sneaked off down the end of the garden before June could get Georgette into her coat and boots for a bit of fresh air so she just popped her back in her cage. She was all right. Still wasn’t talking, mind you. The only words so far were ‘June’, ‘Wibena’, ‘night-night’ and ‘wee-wee’. June was a bit worried about this – they were doing Child Development at college this term.
Doreen looked like death warmed up. There was a good inch of grey roots on her lazy twist of Golden Amber hair. She was dressed but June had made her wear a fluffy pink bed jacket over her clothes as if to show she wasn’t quite the ticket. She was sat on the settee sucking thoughtfully on a banana. It still had the skin on.
Half an hour was going to be more than enough, Jane decided. Even when you went to see someone in hospital (one of Doreen’s few hobbies) you never stayed longer than that, so as not to tire the patient and before you yourself got tired of sitting there, sneaking grapes and promising them their old selves.
Doreen was definitely not her old self but maybe she didn’t want her old self. As soon as she recognised Jane (which took a bit of time: she had to take the mink hat off) she cracked open her face to show all her own teeth.
‘Don’t you look nice? Lovely colour. Don’t she look nice, June? Lovely colour on you. What colour would you call that?’
‘Purple?’ June was clueless about colours.
‘Purple?’
‘Purple.’
‘Lovely purple colour.’
Doreen had so seldom sat down in the front room – even at Christmas she was always in and out to the kitchen moaning about not having had a chance to take the weight off her feet – that she thought she was staying somewhere else. Somewhere a bit posh to judge from all the tea trays and doilies June kept serving up. The kettle whistled and June dived back into the kitchen.
‘Nice here, innit?’ she whispered, chummily.
She was wearing pale blue bedroom slippers. These seemed to bother her slightly. None of the other guests had slippers on. Did they let you wear slippers in the lounge?
‘Next time I come here I’ll wear my tan pumps. Bit smarter.’
She caught sight of Jane again and smiled a bit more. Her face ached with the unfamiliar exercise.
‘You do look smart. Lovely colour. What colour would you call that?’
Christ on a bike.
June came back in with a tray. The second-best tea set, which had only ever had one (disastrous) outing from the china cabinet to the best of Jane’s knowledge, suddenly appeared, complete with a new cake plate and a doily and a pile of slightly burnt-looking cupcakes decorated with what looked like bits of red and green plastic – fun to make, ten minutes to bake.
June had taken to making tea all the time and packet-mix cakes which she was convinced were more convenient (it said so on the box). Her new best friend Valerie’s mother had a two-tiered cake plate with doilies. And a biscuit barrel. And jam in a cut-glass pot. June had bought Doreen a cake plate for her birthday in February so that there’d be something nice on the table when Valerie came round but Doreen (this was before The Turn) took it back to the department store and exchanged it for a waterproof sheet for Georgette and a pair of support stockings. June could buy all the cake plates she wanted now.
June’s new mumsy manner had got into her conversation. Jane looked very smart. The buses could be murder. Had she had a good journey down?
Oh thank you, God.
‘Oh June, thank goodness you’ve reminded me. I ought to take a cup out to my driver. He’s waiting in the car.’ (She didn’t say ‘Bentley’ in case they didn’t know what it was.)
Time was when Doreen’s fat blue and white hand would have broken the handle off the teacup on hearing such a pile of swank but the new, improved Doreen looked up, and her face cracked into another dazzling black smile.
‘Car?’
A nicer person than Jane would have offered to take her out for a ride but then a nicer person would have come on the bloody bus.
June covered her surprise by faffing about getting another cup and saucer – being careful not to get the one with the glued handle. ‘Did you hire one of them mini cabs then?’ June simply couldn’t make out what Jane was doing with a driver.
‘He works for some friends of mine. They didn’t need the car today.’
‘Nice friends you got.’
Bob was curled up with Titbits – Nudity on Our Stages: does it go too far? – smoking his way through a pack of ten Player’s Navy Cut. His cap was pulled low over his eyes against the morning sun. He looked very sexy suddenly. She passed his tea (two sugars) and cupcakes (just add an egg) through the window of the Bentley. She knitted him a brave little smile.
‘I’m so glad you’re here. I shan’t be too much longer.’
A dozen net curtains twitched back into place as she modelled her way back up the front garden path; Jane is wearing a Vision in Violet in a cunningly cut lightweight worsted bouclé lined with pure silk and it cost more than your last bloody rates bill.
Doreen got a big kick out of the tea tray but she was convinced that the hotel waitresses were watching her every move so she came over all genteel, sticking her little finger out sideways as she stirred in the sugar and passing the cake plate to Jane.
‘Do have another sandbag.’
Sister June weighed in with her two pennyworth.
‘She forgets words. Doctor’ (‘Doctor’: Dr What? Like there was only one) ‘says you have to expect that in her condition. But we try to keep her Mentally Alert.’
This basically involved getting Doreen her first ever library book. A large-print edition of Phyllis Matthewman’s Wife on Approval was on the table beside her, the polythene cover all tacky with handling. Doreen seemed to thoroughly enjoy it – ‘Charles Trevor’s career depended on his being married, and quickly’. June had taken it back to the library one Saturday afternoon after Doreen had finally finished it.
‘Where’s my book?’
‘I got you a new one, Cupid in Mayfair. It’s the same writer. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
‘No, but where’s my book? My book I was reading.’
Sunday was murder but June had managed to get to the library on Monday lunchtime and get Doreen’s old book back again. She must have read it twenty times over by now but she always cried in exactly the same place: ‘He held her closely, murmuring incoherent love words.’