Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  ‘The mocha mousse looks nice,’ said Angela.

  Sadie gnashed her irritation into a lettuce leaf. ‘Call me an interfering old biddy,’ she hazarded.

  ‘As if, Ma.’

  ‘But I know the score, Ange. Sit and fester over what might’ve been, and you get out of bed one day and find a couple of years have whizzed past unnoticed.’

  ‘Caused by a rift in the time-space continuum?’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘I know.’ Angela banged the menu shut. ‘For some reason, the more you and Rache try and help me, the more I resent the pair of you. I’m just an awkward customer at the moment. Please try and forgive me.’

  Back home, Angela donated online to Sadie’s favourite charity. She agreed with Sadie on one thing. There were always people worse off than you, and if they couldn’t benefit from your days of smug contentment (when you forgot their existence), it behoved you to remember them when personal misery came to call.

  She caught the nine-fifty to Victoria. The commuter rush had passed and there was a leisurely day-tripping atmosphere among the backpackers and ladies who lunched. Angela sat carefully upright in her suit. It had seen better days.

  She was tall, long-boned and sallow, not suited to lilac. But at least the suit was clean and pressed and, what was more important, went with her only pair of dressy shoes. They were cream, square-heeled court shoes, bought six years ago for Rachel’s wedding-that-never-was. After Rachel had changed her mind at the eleventh hour and given Kevin the boot, Angela had mothballed the shoes. She wasn’t sure why. She did think Rachel mad to dump Dr Kevin Whitaker. Tall and dark with a killer smile, he was the archetypal hero of the hospital romance he’d kindled with Rachel.

  Rachel could be hard on men, thought Angela, tucking one cream shoe over the other. Kind men eventually bored her, handsome men were too much competition (in Angela’s silently held opinion), rough trade no more than a temporary distraction. But then, Rachel wasn’t looking for Mr Right and roses round the lintel. She was hooked on variety, the spice of life ‒ and that tended to jade the palate quickly.

  Angela fidgeted on her seat. It seemed ages since she’d visited London by train. Now and then, she and Robert had driven up to take in a show. But his heart was never in it. He hated the traffic and fell asleep before intervals. Les Misérables made so little impression on him that, by the following week, he was convinced it was Riverdance that they’d seen. They’d argued pointlessly until Angela dug out the programme.

  Angela had sold the car after his death. It cost too much for a non-driver to tax and insure.

  She flattened her forehead against the window as the train slid into Victoria station, shrieking brakes startling a flock of pigeons out of the rafters. Angela’s heart quickened. The immensity of London, reflected in the boastful masonry of its Victorian railway stations, oppressed her once more.

  On the concourse, a respectable-looking man, using Sadie’s index for such things, was kicking a chocolate dispenser. Builders mooched atop the inevitable scaffolding. Scurrying dots converged at the Underground sign, occasionally colliding and twirling in a brief dance of concourse rage.

  Angela hurried, head down, out of the station. London flowed past her and soared above her. The air was pungent with an over-succulent potpourri of chip fat, exhaust fumes and roasting coffee.

  She reached the rambling gothic façade of Marchbank Publishing ‒ in days of yore an alms house ‒ with inflamed nerve-ends, but its carpeted foyer and smiling receptionist soothed her. That was, until the receptionist buzzed Goss! and announced, ‘Mizz Carmody’s here for her eleven-fifteen.’

  ‘Carbery,’ mouthed Angela.

  The receptionist put down the phone. ‘Take the lift to the second floor, Mizz Carmody, and somebody called Marla will meet you there.’

  Marla Symonds was chief sub-editor of Goss!

  Angela practised her death’s-head grin in the lift mirror. Who would stick their hand out first for the handshake? If she did it simultaneously with Marla, there might be an embarrassing collision of fingers, like warring stick insects.

  Just as the lift doors opened, Angela noticed that one half of her blouse collar was poking over her jacket lapel. She prodded it back into place and found Marla’s hand swooping down to shake hers.

  ‘Hello, I’m Marla! Thanks ever-so for coming in to see us.’

  Wasn’t that the brush-off speech at the end of the interview?

  ‘Thanks for having me,’ mumbled Angela and cringed.

  Marla didn’t seem to notice. Her sensible shoes tapped efficiently down a narrow corridor. Angela following in her wake because there wasn’t room for two abreast. This meant that Marla had to toss small talk over her shoulder and Angela had to field it back deftly.

  ‘Smooth journey getting in?’

  ‘Oh yes, very smooth.’

  ‘Avoiding the early-morning scrum makes all the difference.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Well, here we are. Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Neither, thanks,’ beamed Angela, dry lips cracking.

  Cups of tea and coffee, like squishy chairs, were best avoided. Too much scope for slopping and flailing. She was four years out of this game, but she wasn’t a complete greenhorn.

  In Marla’s tiny, chaotic office, the large and horsey Marla pored over Angela’s CV, apparently reading it for the first time. She looked up and smiled invitingly. ‘Tell me a bit about yourself.’

  For pete’s sake, screeched Angela’s desperado inner voice, all about myself is on my CV, you silly bint!

  ‘Well,’ she began, folding her hands on her lap, ‘as you can see, I was widowed fairly recently. I gave up my sub-editing job four years ago to, um, assist my husband in his car dealership business, but before that, I had a lot of varied experience in the magazine industry. I love subbing,’ she lied, with solemnly sincere eye-contact.

  Marla nodded. ‘So, you were helping hubby with the books and admin, that sort of thing?’

  Angela nodded modestly. ‘It was a small-time operation, but it kept us ticking over. I had to wind things up after Robert died.’

  This lie was strictly functional. No prospective employer would be impressed by the Tufnell Park incident. Thankfully, Lazlo had waved her off four years ago with a glowing reference and a kindly-meant plea to ‘get some therapy’.

  ‘You’re very brave,’ said Marla, eyes pools of professional sympathy. ‘It’s not easy re-entering the fray after a lay-off. I took a year out after my baby, and found it hell on wheels getting back into the old routine. You wouldn’t mind if we give you a little subbing test? I’ve set you up on a spare Mac here in my office.’

  Alone in Marla’s office, Angela peered onscreen at a feature posing the question: ‘Who’s got the biggest-earning booty, Kim K or J-Lo?’

  Her tights were scratchy with heat on her inner thighs and she wanted to leave that second, but Marla’s office was glass on two sides and even her body language might be under scrutiny. She straightened her shoulders, clicked on the mouse and began.

  Angela liked an interview to be followed up by a letter. Phone calls threw her. When Marla rang two days after the interview, Angela was about to poke a knife into her toaster in search of a slice that had never popped out.

  ‘Angela, it’s Marla Symonds. Listen, we’d like you to join the team, if you’d still like to join us. Congratulations!’

  ‘Er ‒ wow ‒ thanks.’

  ‘I assume you’re available for an immediate start? We should’ve discussed it at the interview, but it’s all hands to the pumps, and we could do with an experienced sub a.s.a.p. Does the day after tomorrow suit?’

  ‘Yes ‒ I mean no! Oh boy, Marla, you’ve caught me out with such a swift comeback. You see, I booked a holiday a few weeks back, you know, before I saw the ad for the job. I’m going ‒ tomorrow ‒ for two weeks. Sorry.’

  A tiny pause lasted an eternity. Marla was pissed off.

  Marla was withdra
wing her offer. ‘Fine!’ said Marla, perhaps too chirpily. ‘Nil problemo at all. You’ll be refreshed after your break and we can work you like a slave. Hah! Only joking. Going anywhere nice?’

  ‘Canaries,’ supplied Angela crisply. Good choice. She’d have been caught out with a destination that closed down for the winter.

  ‘Right, I’m just readjusting my diary,’ murmured Marla, flapping pages her end. ‘See you on Monday the sixth then, nine thirty. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’

  ‘Sure won’t, Marla!’

  God, why did people say that? She couldn’t imagine doing anything that Marla, with her robust, loose-limbed horsiness, wouldn’t do in a flash.

  Angela sat down on the stairs, heart thumping. She’d lied out of panic (again!), as soon as she’d heard the word 'team’. She’d never expected to get the poxy job, and now she’d have to leave herself in reception every morning, and grin with new-girl eagerness to please, at least for the first few weeks.

  But with two weeks’ grace, why not go on holiday? A week would do. Ian Bradley, manager of Hartley’s, had begged her at Robert’s wake to pop in any time and avail of an under-the-counter bargain.

  No time like the present, she decided, with a spurt of adrenaline. After all, somebody wanted to employ her! She did a little dance of self-importance. She could afford to bask in the moment, before reality kicked in and forced her to consider rail ticket prices, wildcat strikes, leaves on the line, unpaid overtime and being called no fun at the Christmas party.

  Angela pushed open the door of Hartley’s. It would always give her a wrench to come in here. Magdalena looked up from Robert’s desk and smiled. Angela’s heart froze. Magdalena had a degree in leisure and tourism, woefully under-used booking fly-drives to Florida and booze-ups to Ibiza. She also had great dark, soulful eyes, courtesy of an Italian mother, and an air of obdurate humility that got Angela’s goat. Since Robert’s death, Magdalena had been promoted to his job.

  Now, as Magdalena’s liquid eyes settled on Angela, they brimmed à la Spanish urchin over the fireplace. ‘Mrs Carbery ‒ Angela ‒ what a lovely surprise! How can I help you?’

  Angela took a deep breath. ‘Actually, Magdalena, I came to see Ian. Nothing personal,’ she lied.

  Ian Bradley bobbed out of his back office. ‘I’ll deal with Mrs Carbery, Magdalena. Pull up a chair, Angela. What can we do for you? You’re looking splendid, considering all you’ve been through.’

  Ian was a man with the right word for every occasion. Robert had made fun of him, but Angela liked to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was plump and shiny, like a sausage about to burst its skin. A fortysomething bachelor, he lived with his mother, wore slightly outré ties and called women of a certain age, susceptible to flattery, ‘bonny hens’.

  ‘I need a cheap week somewhere hot, at short notice,’ explained Angela.

  ‘Let’s see.’ He spread brochures over his desk. ‘Lanzagrotty? Not your scene. I see you somewhere more ‒ sophisticated.’ He sat back and narrowed his eyes to visualise Angela in this context.

  She fidgeted. ‘I don’t think budget bookers can afford to be sophisticated. I’m afraid it’s straw donkeys and sangria by the funnel over yachts cruising the Aegean.’

  ‘OK. Morocco. It’s up and coming, but not too pricey. And the lager louts find it too foreign.’ He pushed a brochure towards Angela. As she studied a picture of Agadir, his plump finger slid against her wrist.

  Angela drew back as if scalded.

  ‘Fancy it?’ grinned Ian.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The Hotel Maroc, Agadir. I can wangle a week at short notice, with no single supplement.’ He paused. ‘Maybe we could discuss it over a late lunch.’

  ‘I can’t. Is that the time?’ She leapt up shakily. ‘I’m meeting my mother for lunch. I’ll take the hotel wotsit, leaving whenever. I’ll ring you when I get home to go over the details. Thanks so much for your help, Ian.’

  Outside, Angela drew a deep breath. She hadn’t imagined that fat finger. He was Robert’s boss, for pete’s sake! While she was obviously carrion for every circling vulture. Bloody hell! No longer giving Ian Bradley the benefit of the doubt, Angela stomped towards Boots in search of suntan lotion.

  Climbing out of the pool, she reached for her large beach towel. The Hotel Maroc in the sun-kissed resort of Agadir was a low-key, three-star place, its poolside patrolled interchangeably by lugubrious waiters and cats, on the respective lookout for tips and scraps. Angela preferred the cats.

  Encased in her towel, she scurried to her room to prepare for that afternoon’s half-day excursion to a Berber village in the mountains.

  It was brilliant being so far away from the richly imagined team at Goss! But she was missing Robert with a physical pain.

  At a rational level, she’d known how difficult this would be ‒ her first holiday alone, after a year spent pottering no further than the town centre.

  She was thrilled that she’d reached Morocco at all without a major panic attack at the airport. It was the thought of Sadie’s likely reaction to any volte face decision ‒ disappointment hardening to impatience ‒ that had buoyed her up.

  But now, actually on holiday, the vibrancy of the place struck a forceful reminder that Robert wasn’t there to feel the sun on his back and rub factor thirty into hers. She’d already found nicknames for the other hotel regulars, a favourite game of theirs on holiday.

  ‘That’s Cat-shooer,’ she told Robert now, leaning on her balcony and pointing down to the bodies arranged under the fringed spheres of poolside umbrellas. ’He shoos away every poor kitty who comes looking for food. Though one day, he tried to fob one off with a chip dipped in ketchup! There’s Big Boobs with her Danielle Steel. She’s been wearing the same tight top since she got here, just in case anyone’s failed to notice what eyepokers her bazookers are.’

  She broke off her bitchy litany to ponder a sobering thought. What did the other holidaymakers call her? Stand-offish Woman? Pubic Hair Eruption? Every time she thought her bikini line was under control, she’d emerge from the pool with long, dark stragglers stuck to her thigh. Maybe couples talked about her, lying in bed at night with the balcony doors open to the heat, giggling. ‘Have you seen that funny old trout on her own who treads water in the shallow end? Old man bolted, d’you reckon?’

  Angela sat down on the room’s single rattan chair, and had a brief, cathartic cry. Deep down, though, she felt proud of herself.

  She’d chatted to people in the bar most nights; she’d even got up and danced with a curly dagger strapped to her waist at the Moroccan dinner under canvas in the hotel garden. She’d resisted the urge to court pity and admiration by confiding her widowhood to casual acquaintances like Renee and Norm from Bromsgrove, who’d clocked her wedding ring but made no comment on it.

  I am a presentable thirty-eight, thought Angela firmly, blowing her nose and stirring herself to put on trousers. She remained too white and goose-pimply to risk her single pair of shorts.

  At least on excursions (this was her third), she could sit at the back of the coach and draw Robert’s attention to the tree-climbing goats and the village women in biblical blue, balancing pots on their heads.

  She waited outside the hotel for the coach, checking the pile of coins in her battered leather purse. Wherever you went as a foreigner, you were accosted as a matter of routine by old, apologetic men, young, impatient men, excited children and breast-feeding mothers, all with hands outstretched for alms. Angela was happy to oblige. She felt she was giving something back, however small, in return for exploiting their country in the fatuous pursuit of picturesque palms, teeming souks and Technicolor sunsets.

  The tour coach was late. Eventually, a battered Land Rover drew up and a huge man swung his brown legs out of the driver’s seat. ‘Car Berry?’ he asked in mellifluous foreign tones, and Angela’s heart sank.

  ‘I’m Angela Carbery. Where’s the rest of the tour?’ she squeaked.

  ‘You’r
e the only one,’ he smiled kindly, ‘so we go by car instead. We can go further up the mountains in car. You see more.’

  So, this personalised service at no extra cost was Angela’s treat.

  She slid about in the back of the Land Rover, an unlashed cargo of arms and legs, while big, brown Habib careered round mountain hairpins and kept his eyes fixed on her, delivering an informative commentary on tribal conflict, flowering desert and average rainfall. ‘To your left, you see a typical rock formation,’ he shouted above the engine rev. ‘No Mr Car Berry then?’

  God, she’d wondered when he’d get to this. ‘Didn’t come with me,’ she yelled back evasively. Handsome nosy git!

  By the time Habib had led her round a souk and blocked a road with the Land Rover so she could photograph a donkey with a determined glint in its eye that reminded her of Sadie, Angela was thawing out a bit towards him. He was direct, not nosy. And she was too hard on Arab men. They were probably no bigger sexists than Lazlo.

  Habib bought her sweet black coffee in a café overlooking date-palmed gorges, before the return trip to the hotel. He told her, casually, that he was looking for a western wife.

  ‘Why? Easier to browbeat?’ probed Angela controversially.

  Habib smiled his man-sized smile. ‘Because they live their own lives. I don’t want to have to make all the money.’

  ‘Maybe you could just marry it.’

  ‘Oh, if only I could.’ His smile grew wider, and Angela realised that he was teasing her as much as she was teasing him.

  She relaxed. ‘So it’s not economically viable to follow Muslim tradition and have four wives?’

  ‘Only for the rich,’ grimaced Habib. ‘And just think, four mothers-in-law! Not a problem for your husband, I think.’

  ‘He’s dead, actually. I’m a widow, but not a rich one. I have to work.’

  Habib’s face expressed regret, understanding and admiration, in the correct sequence. ‘But you are young enough to marry again.’

  ‘That’s what my mother reckons.’