Pleasant Vices by Judy Astley Page A

running his new romance alongside his wife and family. His was the greater betrayal, Jenny concluded, for she wasn’t involved with anyone, merely propping up the faltering family finances. Every now and then the name ‘Serena’ popped menacingly into her head, with its connotations of home-counties nice-girl, someone clean, placid, undemanding and unchallenging. The thought of her rival left Jenny with a compulsion to work at being defiantly the opposite. She hadn’t mentioned the message on the answerphone to Alan. If challenged (and how likely was that?) she would simply shrug and tell him it must have got lost or forgotten or something. Daisy tended to monopolize the phone and its accoutrements, considering them by rights her personal property, so Alan would not be too surprised.
    â€˜Can’t you just imagine what she’s like?’ Jenny asked Sue days later, reluctantly emerging from the house to meet her for Polly’s tennis lesson and after-school tea at the club. ‘I bet she’s thirtyish, thinnish, dimmish, and wears co-ordinating shades of beige. And I bet she’s got a blue-rinsed widowed dragon-mother in Surrey who plays bridge in the afternoons.’
    Serena – the name had an unquestionable, middle-class self-certainty to it, like Fiona and Arabella, Melissa and Camilla. They were names of posh girls recalled from Jenny’s childhood, girls in fiction, or from the intriguing boarding school hidden away behind trees on the hill near her home. Her own friends at the grammar school had had names like Christine, Wendy and Sandra, with at least three other Jennifers. It was galling to think that the name Serena still could make her feel socially inferior, when it was Serena, not her, who seemed to be prepared to have an affair with a married man. On the other hand, Jenny then grudgingly reasoned, it was a Jennifer, not a Serena, who was sitting here on the tennis club balcony, having spent a suburban afternoon working as a prostitute.
    Sue, who was far less interested in Alan’s love life than in Jenny’s professional one, did her best to be consoling. ‘Well if she’s really that dreadful, he won’t be interested for long, you can guarantee. It’s just one of those symptoms of the male menopause, something young and pretty and impressionable. Men just like to check they’ve still got the old pulling power. Once he’s feeling reassured that he has, it’ll be all over.’
    â€˜Yes, I know. I just have to wait it out and he’ll be back to lolling sleepily in front of the fire all evening like an ageing labrador. What I’m afraid of is that I won’t like him at all by then, for having felt he had to do it, and it will all be too late,’ Jenny said with a sigh. ‘Why can’t he be like other men and just go in for buying purple shoes, or fast cars? The male menoPorsche, it should be called, seeing as that’s what they start wanting in their forties.’
    â€˜Well don’t worry, it doesn’t last. Now tell me all about the customer!’ Sue said with indecent impatience. ‘I got a good look at him, he parked outside my house. Utterly gorgeous, I thought. I’d have done it for nothing. Is he coming back for more? Will he get to be a regular? And if he does, will you introduce me?’
    Jenny squirmed, and wished she was safely alone in Waitrose, or doing a shift in the school library, anywhere but here with Sue and her vicarious fascination. She really was worse than Polly for wanting to know intimate and lurid details. Polly at least was safely out of earshot, having her first outdoor tennis lesson of the year down on the court below with five other ten-year-olds. She should just tell Sue nothing had happened, that she really was too much of a prissy little housewife to consider prostitution as a viable career option. But whenever she thought of David Robbins and what she had done, a