Goodness, Grace and Me

by Julie Houston

  ‘So,’ I persisted, ‘you reckon I’ve done the very best I possibly could, even when times have been bad?’

  ‘None better. Just improve your Yorkshire puddings so we can eat them rather than play Frisbee with them and you’ll be the perfect wife.’

  I paused to stir the coffee that had been sitting, untouched, in front of me for the last five minutes before hitting Nick with my coup de grâce.

  ‘So, if what you say is right, if you feel I’ve done all I can to get us through the bad bits, why then are you wanting to do something which, in this bloody recession, will quite possibly really sink us into the mire?’

  Nick said nothing. Instead he stood and, without looking at me, made his way across to the main bar where he paid the bill for our meal.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said, passing me my coat and muddy pashmina before putting his arms into his own jacket. ‘It’s a long walk back, and if you want to see your dad before he goes, we’ll have to get a move on.’

  Outside, a cold wind was blowing – harbinger of the winter that was inevitably just around the corner – making me shiver and dig my hands deep into my pockets. On cold days like this Nick would normally reach for my hand, pushing it into his own pocket, keeping it warm. Instead he set off at a cracking pace back down the road that led to the edge of the Pennine hills.

  Once we had climbed back onto the moorland, Nick slowed down and said,

  ‘Hattie, I’m handing in my notice at Wells Trading tomorrow. I’ve accepted David Henderson’s offer and I’m going into business with him.’

  ‘You’ve accepted his offer without consulting me?’ I stopped walking and turned into the wind in order to face him. ‘How could you?’ I shouted wildly. ‘There are people out there who’d kill for a decent job like yours. Are you totally mad or just slightly deranged?’

  ‘Harriet, I’ve been trying to consult you for weeks. Every time I’ve tried to tell you anything about what I want to do, you’ve blanked me. You haven’t wanted to hear what I’ve had to say, so you just haven’t listened.’

  As I tried to splutter my defence, Nick went on, ‘On Thursday when I came home I needed to sit you down and tell you about the meeting I’d had with David and a couple of others but you were too busy gossiping with Grace. Last night in bed, when I tried to talk to you, you pretended to be asleep.’

  ‘I bloody well was asleep. Haven’t you been married to me long enough to know when I’m asleep and when I’m not?’ Fear made my voice strident, shrewish.

  Nick grabbed my hand but, feeling my resistance, dropped it again and took both my shoulders instead. Not a Nick gesture at all. It was as if by forcing me to be physically close, he could make me listen to what he wanted to say.

  ‘I have to do this, Harriet. I’m fed up with working for someone else, I’m fed up with not earning enough money to have the life that I want us to have and I’m bored rigid with the actual job that I’m doing at Wells Trading. I want the buzz of working for myself again.’

  ‘But that’s just it – you wouldn’t be working for yourself. You’d be working for David Henderson.’

  And Amanda.

  ‘Not exactly. David believes in me. He knows what happened with Pennine Clothing Company – knows that it was circumstances rather than my poor business acumen that forced me to quit. He’s taking a chance on setting me up again.’

  ‘And what, exactly, is in it for your Fairy Godmother? Now that David Henderson has waved his magic wand, what does he get out of it? And don’t tell me it’s altruism, because if you believe that then we’re doomed from the start.’

  ‘Little ray of sunshine you are, aren’t you?’ Nick shook his head despairingly, and then went on, ‘David will obviously get a share of the profits. He will be a main shareholder. The more money I make, the more money he makes.’

  ‘And what if you don’t make any money? What if it all goes pear-shaped again? If you hadn’t noticed, because of all your swanning around with David Henderson and his bloody wife, there’s a sodding great recession on. A business is far more likely to crash now than it was two years ago. What then, Nick? What then?’ I wanted to cry with frustration. I stopped suddenly, mid-stride, as I recalled Mike Rawlinson’s sneering face from Friday evening. ‘Nick, I don’t believe David Henderson is willing to risk investing in a new business without some sort of financial surety from you. No one in their right mind would just pump money into something these days, willy-nilly. Look at banks. They never just give people money without them putting money up front themselves, or offering their home as collateral.’ I stopped again. ‘Nick, please don’t tell me you’ve put up the house as surety.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Hat. How could I do that, even if I was stupid enough to consider it? You own the house with me. How could I start offering the house as surety without you knowing about it?’

  He had a point there, I conceded.

  ‘So, how much?’

  Nick hesitated. ‘Fifty.’

  ‘Fifty pounds?’

  There was a long silence before Nick sighed and said, ‘Fifty grand.’

  ‘Fifty thousand pounds?’ I said, in horror. ‘But Nick, we haven’t got one thousand pounds never mind fifty.’

  Nick had the grace to look shamefaced. ‘We haven’t got fifty thousand pounds, Harriet, as I’m only too aware. If we had fifty thousand pounds I wouldn’t be worrying about the hole in the roof, about the tyres on your car, about Libby’s university fees in three years. If we had fifty thousand pounds, I wouldn’t care that the council tax is probably going to rocket next year, that the bathroom needs decorating or that we don’t entertain as much as we used to because it’s just too damned expensive.’

  ‘So, Nick, if we haven’t got fifty thousand pounds – who the fuck has?’ There was an icy feeling in the pit of my stomach as if I’d just swallowed an oversized ice cube.

  ‘Mum’s lending it to me.’

  ‘Oh, Nick, no! Please, please don’t tell me this. Please don’t tell me you’ve been discussing all this with your mother without consulting me.’

  ‘Harriet, she wants to do this. I’m her only son for heaven’s sake. And if I had consulted you, you would have reacted in just the same way as you’re doing now.’

  ‘But where’s your mother getting fifty thousand pounds from? I thought that once she’d sold up and contributed towards the flat conversion, she was just about as broke as we are.’

  ‘Well I know Dad wasn’t able to leave her much. There was some capital that keeps the kids in school – you know he always wanted them to stay where they were – and of course he was able to leave her his pension, small though it is. The lump sum from the house sale provides the interest that she lives off. We’ve done some sums, and she can live, for the moment, fairly comfortably on what remains of that. Mum is totally behind me, encouraging me, which is more than I can say for you,’

  ‘But you can’t take it, Nick,’ I said, trying to ignore his last dig. ‘It’s not fair. Your mum will have so much less to live on. You know what interest rates are like at the moment. How is she going to manage? And what happens if this deal with David Henderson is all a con? You’d be without a job again and we would have to sell the house this time, but this time Sylvia would have to actually live with us – in a smaller house.’ I could feel hysteria rising and I was beginning to walk faster. ‘She’d be totally dependent on us. In my kitchen. In my face.’

  The weak October sun had slid behind a bank of increasingly grey clouds and the wind up here on the hills was no longer playful but sneaky, loitering for a while around my legs before giving me a furtive, underhand push forward. Nick tried to slow me down by putting out a restraining hand but I was in no mood for coercion. As the first drops of rain began to fall I doubled my pace, wanting to be home, away from Nick and his plans.

  ‘Slow down, Harriet, and talk to me. You’re doing it again – refusing to listen and consider what I’m saying.’ Despite his regular visits to the gym Nick was beg
inning to breathe more rapidly, while I was giving every impression of being in training for a power-walking marathon. Anger, it appeared, had given rocket fuel to my legs.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, slow down will you?’ he shouted again, his open Barbour jacket flapping in the wind like an out of control kite. ‘I can’t discuss this while you’re walking at this pace. What are you so afraid of?’

  ‘You really want to know what I’m frightened of?’ I shouted to the elements. ‘Well I’ll tell you. I don’t want to have to pick up the pieces again when your new business falls on its backside. I don’t want to have to live, and I mean really live with your mother when we can no longer afford the mortgage because you don’t have a job.’

  And I’m frightened of Amanda Goodners. Frightened of how she’ll seduce you, draw you in. Because that’s what she does.

  I finally stopped the manic speed at which I was moving and slowed back down to a walking pace so that Nick was able to catch up with me. Taking my hand and holding it tight so that I couldn’t bolt again like an unbroken horse, he said, ‘You know as well as I do that teachers never lose their job. Your jobs are for life.’

  ‘Well maybe, Nick, just maybe I don’t want my bloody job for life.’ And when Nick made no reply, I went on, ‘It seems you’ve made your mind up without even considering me and the kids.’ I suddenly felt defeated and, as the rain began to fall in earnest, I realised my worst fears had manifested themselves: I was going to have to be responsible, on my teacher’s wage, for making sure all the bills were paid while Nick made a success of this venture and kept David Henderson happy. That I could cope with. Was more than happy to do it for however long it took until we were solvent again. But what if it didn’t work? That didn’t even bear thinking about.

  ‘How long?’ I asked as we joined the road that led through our village towards home.

  ‘How long for what?’ Nick fell into line beside me after being forced to walk in single file along the grass verge for the previous mile.

  I sighed. ‘How long before you know if you’re up and running? How long before we know that it’s going to be a success, before you’ll be able to help keep our heads above water once more?’

  ‘I’ll need to give a month’s notice – I may actually get away with two weeks – and then it should be all systems go. I’ll hopefully be making my first trip in about a month’s time. After that, well, I hope we should be making a profit within the first year.’

  I stopped and stared at Nick as the rain made rivulets down his waxed jacket and fell silently onto the tarmacked road. ‘Your first trip where?’

  ‘Harriet, I’ve been telling you this for weeks. David has contacts with the Italian textile industry. We’ll be importing Italian men’s designer wear. I’ll need to be over there quite a bit to source the goods, to decide which Italian textile factories we can work with.’

  ‘So not only am I now in charge of this family financially, I shall in effect be a single mother for much of the time while you’re ‘Living La Dolce Vita’, whooping it up in Milan and Rome?’

  ‘Harriet, you supported me wholeheartedly when I set up Pennine Clothing – you were right behind me all the way. What’s the difference now?’

  ‘How about three children at private school, and a rambling house that’s got a bloody great mortgage and very probably dry rot as well? How about a mother-in-law that I am now solely financially responsible for? How about the fact that the world is in a recession? How many fucking differences do you want?’

  ‘Can you not try to look on the positive side and raise a modicum of enthusiasm for this new venture, Harriet?’ Nick pleaded as he let us both into the house.

  Feeling sick with terror at the thought of losing everything, I could only shake my head numbly. I should have known, seeing Amanda Goodners in action once more the other evening, that there was nothing but trouble ahead.

  Chapter 7

  So, you must be thinking, what exactly is the rap with this Amanda Goodners woman?

  I met both Grace and Amanda on the very same day. The first time I saw her I was eleven, terrified and desperately wishing I’d failed my eleven-plus so I’d have no reason to be sitting cross-legged in Midhope Grammar School’s cavernous assembly hall. It was the first day of term, my new grey woollen tunic scratched uncomfortably and I was waiting, along with all the other new intake of girls, to be called to join my new class. Not for me the comfort of a friendly face. I had known no one except the third-former whose newsagent father supplied my Granny Morgan with the News of the World each Sunday and who had been persuaded, rather unwillingly it seemed to me, to accompany me on the school bus that first morning.

  A blonde angel sat on the fifth-form benches at the side of the hall. Our eyes met, the angel bestowed a smile and I was hooked. My terror at knowing no one in a new school was momentarily eased by that one look, and while she was there I felt safe, secure. When my name was eventually called it seemed to hang in the air unclaimed, like a long-lost soul, and certainly not belonging to me. I had hesitated slightly, looking back once more for the angel, before joining the line of girls who were to make up one of the four parallel classes named after illustrious, long-dead women.

  Homesick for my junior school and the friends who, knowing their rightful place, had gone off cheerfully to the local comprehensive, I had followed the Pankhurst form teacher along corridors that smelt of polish and long-ago school dinners, and some other odour that I couldn’t pinpoint but was, by its very nature, overwhelmingly female. Once in the form room, I had panicked, moving into what seemed the only remaining vacant double desk. When a pale, myopic giant named Cynthia slid, spectre-like, into the seat beside me, my heart had plummeted further still.

  Rescue had come from the pigtailed moppet to my left. Nudging my arm, Grace had leaned over whispering, ‘I wouldn’t sit next to Silent Cynthia if I were you. She was at my junior school. You won’t have any fun with her!’

  Doubting that fun could ever be on the agenda at this new school, I moved gratefully across the aisle to sit by Grace, cementing a friendship that would span decades.

  Throughout that first miserable year as a grammar-school girl I would search Amanda out in the corridor, in assembly and in the lunch queue and for some reason be comforted by her presence. She would walk past me on the way to the senior common room surrounded by a crowd of girls eager to be in the shadow of her aura. Just one look in my direction was enough to put the unfathomable intricacies of French and trigonometry, over which I sobbed regularly, firmly in their place. I was besotted.

  Every autumn the second-year girls at Midhope Grammar were expected to take part in a house drama competition produced by our Lower Sixth house prefect. Before rising to the dizzy heights of head girl in the Upper Sixth, Amanda had been Pankhurst House junior prefect. It was 1987, and she was just seventeen, tall, blonde and stylish, glowing from a six-week sojourn to the family villa in Tuscany.

  Grace and I were twelve, Badger and Rat respectively in Amanda’s production of ‘Toad of Toad Hall’, and in love. We never admitted to each other that she was the object of our desires, and while it certainly wasn’t sexual, we tried to grow our hair like her, found ourselves emulating the way she spoke, and generally followed her around like devoted puppies.

  Despite the fact that my alter ego, Rat, jumped up at the wrong moment to deliver the words ‘I object’ in the courtroom scene, and Silent Cynthia the class geek vomited backstage – not very silently – into Toad’s abandoned trilby hat, Pankhurst House won the drama cup for the first time in many years.

  Our reward, although not in heaven, was, to our twelve-year-old selves, just as impressive. Amanda’s father, probably the last of his breed of Northern mill owners, invited us home for tea. Mr Goodners was God, Amanda our guardian angel, and the gates to the Goodners’ pile the entrance to Paradise.

  I’m a little hazy as to why only Grace, Serena Todd, Marilyn Baxter and myself were invited, but after taking off our costumes an
d make-up and being granted permission from our mothers who were in the audience, we climbed into Frank Goodners’ Rolls-Royce and off we went.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the sudden realisation that here was a world vastly different from my own. The entire downstairs of our council house would have fitted into the Goodners’ kitchen – with room to spare. While Grace and the other girls were at ease with the whole situation – Grace’s father was one of the town’s most prominent solicitors and he and Grace’s mother moved in the same social circles as the Goodners – I spent the two hours that we were there in mortal terror of being exposed as an impostor: the girl from the Woodglade Estate on the other side of town who must have wandered in off the street by mistake. Mrs Goodners probably thought people from our estate didn’t venture forth to this neck of the woods unless they were one of the band of cleaning women, earning a few quid while their husbands were on the dole, who regularly made the trip on the No. 21 bus. Or kids intent on a bit of breaking and entering, making the trip in knocked-off cars.

  While Amanda’s father was bluff, red-faced and jolly, with a voice that didn’t quite deny his northern roots, Mary Goodners was a product of the southern counties, educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and thereafter somewhere in Switzerland. I’m sure if Mrs Goodners had had her way, Amanda, too, would have been bundled off to boarding school at the age of eleven, but Amanda was an only child, adored by her daddy and, at his insistence, kept at home where he could delight in her very existence on a daily basis.

  After we’d romped around the grounds, where we marvelled at a tennis court with which not even John McEnroe could have found fault, and tried the almost ripe purple figs in a glasshouse that, to me, was on a par with the one in our local park, we were called in for tea.

  Whenever I look back to that afternoon, I can never understand why Mary Goodners went to such lengths over tea. A glass of juice and a crumpet in the kitchen would have been more than gratefully received by four hungry twelve-year-olds, but the trolley over which Amanda’s mother presided in the sitting room was laden with fare more suited to tea at the Ritz.