But it wasn’t true! Harriet seriously considered having little cards printed up for circulation purposes: Harriet Lee—Friend or Acquaintance: It’s Completely Up to You! Margot found out and nixed this plan.)
Harriet’s shop-floor uniform was a work of faded grandeur—its collar had once been covered with brambles of bronze. Such a collar . . . finely worked and richly threaded—sometimes Harriet smoothed and tapped that part of the robe for the sake of what had once been there . . . she’d seen it all in a photograph that was older than her. Margot said the photo was nice, but as things stood in the here and now, the robe was nothing more than an ankle-length rag. From a distance its color was a grainy gray, but the fabric draped well, and up close (but you had to come very, very close) you could see its true multicolor, tens of thousands of tiny rainbows tumbling and vaulting across the cloth. The wearer of this gown had the provenance and special features of every item in the shop ready for recital, but all anybody asked about was the price; she’d get flustered, give incorrect information, and have to amend the price just before the final sale. The object on the counter always cost more than she’d initially said it did, and then she’d replace the antique while the customer went off in a huff. Harriet often sent Ari psychic reprimands for giving her clothes and a bicycle instead of giving her tips on how to persuade a customer to make that investment in her as a salesperson and buy the things she wanted them to buy. One of the greatest blasts of despair Harriet sent Ari Kercheval’s way followed a visit from a woman wearing a leather jacket and a tutu skirt who walked up to the shelf where the antique books were displayed, picked up a leather-bound Latin tome in both hands, and asked: What is this about? in a harried tone of voice, as if she wasn’t the one who’d picked up the book but the book was harassing her, had cornered her, and was mumbling about how it had something to say. Apart from times like that, Harriet didn’t mind spending a few school days at the shop; it made her like school even more when she went back.
(Perdita says, “Hopeless,” and her enunciation is the clearest it’s been in weeks.)
Also, seeing Gabriel was worth missing school for. He hadn’t come in with the group Harriet hoped were hagglers, but she didn’t see or hear his arrival. Rather, she became gradually aware of him moving around the shop too, picking things up and putting things down as the others were.
It had been about eight months since Harriet had last heard from Gabriel; she’d switched schools, but Tamar had called to tell her all about his having finished school covered in the glory of seven A’s at A Level. Harriet presumed he was working for Ari now, like Rémy was. He looked good. A little on the thin side, but, as he said later, she could talk. The shop was poky and narrow and L-shaped, so sometimes Gabriel was snuffed out of her line of sight, only to rekindle in a different spot, looking at her over, under, and through the displays. Each time this happened he showed her an object he’d taken from one of the shelves, and he seemed to want to know whether or not she thought he should buy this thing. She laughed, thinking, at first, that this behavior was out of character, then conceding that the character she must have previously assigned to him—whatever it was that made her think “this is out of character”—could’ve been a misapprehension on her part. She nodded when he picked up a brass measuring wheel: Yes, you may approach with your well-chosen purchase.
What is it? Gabriel asked, as he handed over his card.
She told him everything. She told him where, when, and by which company the measuring wheel had been made, she told him the location of the seamstresses’ workshop the measuring wheel had been used in and the dates between which that workshop had been in operation. Harriet told Gabriel staff numbers, key names from the history of the workshop, and the exciting honor of being selected to supply chiffon to one of Paris’s grand fashion houses (now also long forgotten). She told him how the brass measuring wheel had found its way to the shop in a boxful of other objects that had already been sold. She laid out tracing paper and showed him how the seamstress would have used it to gauge how cloth would curve around a neckline or the opening of a sleeve, where buttonholes could go, from what distance a pattern should repeat itself. Gabriel stuffed the measuring wheel into his coat pocket and said he’d cherish it. He was looking at her wheat-sheaf ring. Harriet stifled her laughter; he’d been all happy and playful when he’d thought she was no longer wearing it, but now that he saw she still was . . . she put away the tracing paper and whispered the rest of the story of the measuring wheel to herself as she moved boxes around underneath the counter. Gabriel was still there when she returned to the surface.
Sorry I didn’t call you back, he said.
Huh, call me back when?
Gabriel stood aside while someone asked how much a gilded statuette of the goddess Athena cost. Then he said: I think it was last week?
Last week? I didn’t call you last week.
He smiled (more smirked, really—what was the matter with him?) and said: OK. Anyway, sorry. And now I’ve got to go, but I wanted to see you . . .
That’s . . . nice to hear.
He wanted to see her . . . , and he kept saying he had to go and then just staying. She wrapped and boxed the Athena statuette and a strand of green malachite beads, then asked Gabriel if he was going back to work. He said he was going back to uni. She could see how this would have come about—Gabriel preparing to join the company and Ari telling him to go and train as a solicitor first, perhaps sugarcoating the long delay: We need a great lawyer, and you’ve got more of a head for this sort of stuff than Rémy . . .
As he headed for the shop door, he said that even if Harriet wasn’t the one who had called him, she should keep a better eye on her phone . . . thirty-eight missed calls were a bit much . . .
OK, stop right there . . . er, please. Gabriel had his phone in hand. Harriet took it and scrolled through his call history (Mum, Mum, Uncs, Mum, Dad, Uncs, who’s Jocasta, who’s Kaidi, who’s Polly, lots of calls from them, Uncs . . . ) and eventually she found her own name, in red, with the number 38 in brackets beside it. She was taken aback by the fact that she really did seem to have done this, and she was dismayed by his having seen all the calls and still not calling her back.
Same thing last month, but the record doesn’t go that far back, Gabriel said, taking his phone.
I . . .
Should I go first? Gabriel asked. OK, I missed that window of time. You know, the one that lets you respond without it being blatant that you thought too much about how to respond . . . or too little. And then I thought it’s not as if we talk much on the phone anyway. We’re always good in person. Aren’t we? There was something you really wanted to talk about, so. Here I am in person.
Something I really wanted to talk about, eh? I wish I knew what it was!
Really? His voice, or perhaps just the closeness of it, made her realize they were the only ones left in the shop. He put one arm around her waist, then the other. Her hands rose as his lowered. She laid both hands against his chest, just to let them rest there, but he stepped back as if pushed away; he was saying Sorry and I shouldn’t have—
That was no good. She put her arms around him this time, and his hands covered hers. They breathed, hand over hand. She looked up at him and thought:
I think he thinks I—
He’s right. (Mostly? I think? Seventy-five percent? Sixty percent? More than fifty, anyway.)
Oh, he’s going to—
She grabbed a large snow globe and a crossbow, held them up on either side to obstruct the views of both security cameras, and she and Gabriel kissed and kissed and kissed the way they’d wanted to for years, the way only a hormonally enflamed sixteen-year-old and a likewise enflamed eighteen-year-old can. He kept trying to talk but she kept kissing him, and she tried to talk but he kept kissing her, but eventually they were able to hold off just long enough for her to put down the snow globe and the crossbow and rest her arms, thoug
h she and Gabriel kept very close together in case of urgent kiss deficiency. During this pause he was able to tell her, I was seeing someone, but we broke up . . . we broke up because you called me thirty-eight times in a row . . .
* * *
—
HARRIET STAYS OFF ALCOHOL because it brings out deviousness in her—a self-directed deviousness. Drunken Harriet creates puzzles that sober Harriet is then expected to solve. Take those two dates on which Harriet bombarded Gabriel’s phone with calls (and left voicemail . . . it took him months to tell her about all the voicemail she left)—both were boozy picnic days. Drunken Harriet had retreated to the corner of the studio with her phone and decided to work on her own love life. She felt exempt, marvelously exempt from all those rules that usually seemed to be in place to keep her from full and honest expression of her thoughts . . . perhaps this was what it was like to be her mother. Now she could inquire whether Rémy would risk it for a chocolate biscuit. Or she could call Gabriel. Gabriel or Rémy, Rémy or Gabriel. Wouldn’t chasing Rémy be like running after a tiny kitten that turned around, morphed into a cheetah, and hunted you down because you’d stepped on its tail? Whereas Gabriel would be the kitty that got a bit cross, then just lapped up some milk and went back to sleep.
I know, thought Drunken Harriet. I’ll phone Gabriel and ask if I can ever be anything more to him than a good deed his family did. Oh, he’s not answering. I’ll leave him the question in a voicemail. That was a mistake; I’ll call and tell him to delete that voicemail without listening to it. Still not answering . . . now I’ll scream WHO CARES, YOU’RE JUST SOME BOY, JUST SOME BOY . . . I WOULD BE A GREAT GIRLFRIEND, YOU WISH YOU DESERVED A GIRLFRIEND LIKE ME. What to do now? Apologize, apologize, and apologize. No more calls. Wait, just one more. This is the voicemail I should have left in the first place. When he hears this he’ll come to me. I’ll tell him he is Paradise and that I want him really badly, and then I’ll laugh and cry and snuffle like a little piglet. He will find this endearing. No, he won’t. Why did I make a mess of all those voicemails . . . I know, I’ll delete the call records from my recent calls and turn my phone off. Sober Harriet won’t remember a thing, Gabriel will be too scared/repulsed to mention it, and it’ll be just as if this never happened.
Both times Drunken Harriet had done this, Gabriel had been with his girlfriend—
Polly, Kaidi, or Jocasta?
He wouldn’t say. But Polly-Kaidi-Jocasta had been amused and then suspicious, had held on to his phone saying, Let’s see how many times she calls, and thus become the villain of both evenings. Then the voicemails themselves . . . Gabriel let Harriet listen to the voicemail she’d left, and afterward all she could say was: Clever, clever drunken me.
I just thought you . . . must like me a lot, Gabriel said.
And you liked me a lot, Harriet told him.
Play the messages that demonstrate this?
Don’t need to. You listened to all that voicemail, and you still came to find me.
Gabriel’s room at his Oxford college was just like his room at Kercheval House—so clean and neat and bare it was like a crime scene. The unsightly deed had been tidied away, but its magnitude filled the room invisibly, scraping away at each molecule of air, scraping away. The other girl was still there, incredulously observing Harriet’s struggle with the simple act of undressing. See that? Polly-Kaidi-Jocasta jeered. That’s a button—don’t you know how to undo those? And that’s a zip. But naked she and Gabriel lost all circumspection; skin to skin, Harriet didn’t care about anything else. Gabriel laid her down on those sheets so pristine that something dreadful must have happened there, and his look was so soothing, his touch was so soothing, it was about to happen again, the same thing that had happened to the other girl; Harriet was in the crime scene now, and she didn’t care. Ultimately the sex was like the kissing in that they didn’t seem able to stop it at all—nor did they want to, of course—their rampant repositioning and eagerness to do absolutely everything to and with each other was sometimes comic and sometimes Romantic (not lowercase romantic—hardly that at all) in a flesh-bound-quest-to-supersede-flesh sort of way . . . the coupling of a succubus and an incubus. You can say “it’s always the studious ones” or whatever else you want to say, but really who knows what it was. Gabriel was in love. Harriet . . . loved him, but.
She didn’t love Gabriel’s friends and the “pranks” they played on him—
(Someone’s at the porters’ lodge for you—looks like your dad . . . sorry, did I say at the plodge? I meant outside the chapel.
What are you talking about, he’s waiting in the bar! Oh, there was no one there? He must’ve had to dash . . . )
She never would like their raising and dashing of his hopes, no matter how much he laughed it off. University was demanding much more of his intellect than school ever had, and the boy who’d liked Druhástranian all the more for its difficulty was dead and gone. Gabriel had lost interest in learning. The grades he used to receive as rewards for his dedication were now necessary to maintain . . . what? He never told her, but she did know that he put more time and effort into turning out essay-length pieces of plagiarism than he would have just thinking through his arguments and writing his own essays. He copied paragraphs out of myriad books and glued his artful collages together with thesaurus substitutions. And even after all that his marks were middling. Gabriel told Harriet to enjoy all those A’s of hers while they lasted. He didn’t know that she knew what he did at his desk, and she didn’t confront him because she had no cure for the malady his essays were symptomatic of. Originality wasn’t a strength of hers either, so there was a possibility of her going up to Oxford too and finding herself doing exactly the same thing. Another reason for not confronting him was that she thought she might have stolen some of his brainpower. The notion of fucking Gabriel’s brains out as a physiological actuality—of course you may sneer at this, but it didn’t seem like an impossibility to Harriet, who’d experience the sexual equivalent of phantom-limb syndrome for a few minutes after their bodies had disconnected. It could really have been love after all, but. And when Harriet thought about the “but,” she divided down the middle into Drunken Harriet and Sober Harriet. Sober Harriet couldn’t tell whether Drunken Harriet had tried to help her by revealing that she was in love or had been trying to make her life more difficult by obligating her to hide that she wasn’t in love so that they could keep fucking without either side holding back. Gabriel was probably better off with his ex-girlfriend, who loved him without a but. Harriet saw it in the photos they’d taken together and read it in the affectionate notes Jocasta tucked into the snack boxes she left for him at their porters’ lodge. You know you forget to eat when you’re essaying. Tamar must have told her Gabriel would come back once he’d had time to think. Jocasta was sunny-natured, had the kind of first-rate brain that was equally well applied to both academics and activism, and on top of all that, she was the kind of leggy beauty model scouts chase down Oxford Street. Tamar took Gabriel and Jocasta out to lunch whenever she was in Oxford, offered to send them away on holiday together. It was funny . . . they were so young. But Tamar wanted to get a mother-in-law lock on Jocasta. In the fullness of time, the daughter-in-law would be made prime minister, and Gabriel would hand his role at the Kerchevals’ company over to their son or daughter and focus on scrubbing up well as the Prime Ministerial Spouse. The UK’s first black prime minister would need a full-time husband/consultant and a steady home base. Gabriel and Jocasta were a win-win. Jocasta seemed game, but Gabriel just picked at his lunch and left. Something was badly wrong . . . Tamar phoned Margot and told her she felt that someone was corrupting her son . . .
Corrupting how? Margot asked, putting the call on loudspeaker so Harriet could hear the answer.
Hmm . . . it’s just—he’s just—maybe it’s nothing. Tamar said that in a tone that strongly suggested it had better be nothing.
Before she went back
to sleep, Margot said: It’s not you, is it? Oh shit, it is, isn’t it? Listen, if you wanted to make a splash, why not just seduce Ari . . . when Tamar finds out she’s going to act as if you did just that.
Shhh, she’s not going to find out.
One afternoon Harriet and Gabriel ran into Jocasta at Oxford train station, and Jocasta said: Oh, is this is your friend, the one—the one you told me about? It’s so nice to meet you at last. Now that Harriet was standing before her, Jocasta saw that it had been silly of her to worry about all those phone calls and she became solicitous, kept her tone gentle, signaling, I am willing to adopt you, just like my boyfriend did.
Gabriel put his arm around Harriet, and the embrace was . . . stilted . . . he held her as if he was holding a parcel, so it might have looked and felt better if he’d used both arms. Jocasta took in this scene and far from seeming jealous, she looked touched.
On another afternoon Harriet ran into Tamar at Oxford train station and froze. But Tamar hugged her, was pleased to see her, fired a round of questions at her, and somehow managed to answer them all herself before Harriet could get a word in edgeways. Harriet watched Tamar Kercheval get onto the train satisfied that the Gingerbread Girl had no designs on her son and had just come up for an Open Day. She sat down in First Class, and Harriet could practically read the think bubble above her head: Hope she gets a place . . . how wonderful to think that thanks to us she’s been able to make something of herself . . . so glad to have been able to introduce her to opportunities beyond gingerbread . . .
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