Pleasant Vices Read Online Free Page A

occupied by teenagers or au pairs (Croatian was the current preference, they ate so little out of solidarity with their tragic compatriots back home, and Fillipinos always came expensively in pairs). Limed oak or pastel-sponged kitchens extended into pretty conservatories, and garages had been converted into freezing, unused, home offices and games rooms. The occupants, like a lot of the population of South West London, were an artistic collection. Apart from Alan the accountant, the stately Fiona Pemberton who happened to be Polly and Daisy’s headmistress, and Paul Mathieson, who was something in software, the Close residents were mostly in TV, journalism and advertising. Several cars, all of which languished unwashed at weekends while their owners shuffled through the worthiest Sunday papers, displayed the prized badges of media success: BBC executive car park stickers on their windscreens.
    Front gardens were well tended, with not an ugly spotted laurel or dull privet to be seen, but planted with choisya, philodendron, or a rare viburnum. Exotic varieties of clematis trailed around the porches, tangled with passiflora or cascades of excessively thorny but wonderfully scented Bourbon roses, all neatly under-mulched with weed-proof bark chippings. Standard bay trees stood like sentinels in ornate, frost-proof earthenware tubs by front doors and were decorated with oranges and cinnamon sticks at Christmas time. Fiona Pemberton had been horrified when hers had been stolen.
    Most of the people who lived in the Close had done so for several years. They tended to buy the houses after living in smaller versions of the same thing, having developed a fondness for art nouveau stained-glass porch doors, generous room sizes and plaster acanthus cornicing that was hard to paint, imagining that they were on their way up to something even more impressive. The ultra-successful moved on to security-gated splendour on Barnes, Clapham or Wimbledon Commons or, if they could put up with the problem of parking, to something elegantly Georgian on Richmond Green.
    Only old Mrs Fingell’s house stood out from the rest, unmodernized, shabby, unkempt and rewarded for it by being placed in a cheaper band for Council Tax payments. Mrs Fingell, in her house that was unchanged since she had moved in in 1947, had greying net curtains haphazardly draped across her window, her grandson’s rusting Volkswagen minibus perched for long-overdue repair on crumbling bricks, half in and half out of the garage, and a collection of dented dustbins that suggested a family of at least eight. Cats peed on her straggling lavender, and litter and cardboard boxes blew in through the gaps in her collapsing fence. At 79, she lived alone with her apricot poodle, unaware that pooper-scoopers had been invented, and her neighbours, who fumed quietly at the decrepit state of her house and garden, liked to think that by waving as they passed her window, they were doing their bit to keep an eye on her.
    â€˜You know what the Mathiesons and such are all worried about, don’t you?’ Jenny was startled from her gloom by Sue catching up with her just outside Mrs Fingell’s house. ‘It’s the council estate. They think only two types of people come out of there – cleaning ladies and criminals!’ Sue’s springy red hair bobbed up and down as she walked, her face, lively with the anticipation of making fun out of a tedious evening, had a pleased-with-life radiance that Jenny had forgotten existed. Sue chuckled, ‘That’s why they want to set up the Neighbourhood Watch thing, to frighten away the common criminals and the common people, not to mention how good it is for insurance premiums, being hand-in-glove with the local police.’
    The houses they were passing didn’t seem to be lacking in burglar proofing. At number 5, in spite of protests to the council (a round robin organized by Paul and Carol Mathieson), Harvey Benstone