The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Yes, he is,’ replied Gloria, smiling sweetly. ‘I told him you were just coming.’ She turned towards Adam in the manner of someone about to go off for her tea break.

  Jennifer returned the smile and marched off towards the Staff Only door and her office.

  It did take some getting used to, this idea of Gloria and Adam getting back together and now hurtling, unstoppably, towards marriage. It changed the way you looked at things. For instance, it made you think that if that incident hadn’t happened four years ago, perhaps Adam and Gloria wouldn’t have broken up after all. Perhaps they would have stayed together and got married years ago. Perhaps (and contrary to what you had assumed at the time) they had been happy together then and were happy together now, and the awkward breakup and the three years apart had not been a blessing after all.

  It made you wonder if, in fact, you hadn’t got the whole thing totally wrong.

  But that made it sound as if she had orchestrated the incident with Adam just for their sake, to help them out of a dead-end relationship, when in fact she hadn’t thought about them at all. Not at the time. Only afterwards, when it had been necessary to explain her actions to herself. No, at the time she had been thinking entirely about Nick. Well, Nick and herself and their own forthcoming wedding. Actually, she had been thinking mainly about herself.

  And she hadn’t orchestrated anything. Not really. At least not until she had sat on Santa’s lap at the staff Christmas party four years ago. She hadn’t even wanted to go to the staff Christmas party but Nick had invited her to his own office’s Christmas drinks at some Mexican-themed wine bar in Islington and she had definitely wanted to avoid that.

  She’d found herself avoiding Nick quite a bit in the weeks leading up to that Christmas. Pretty much dating back, in fact, to that drunken night at Rafael’s in early December when they had split a bottle of Frangelico and had ended up engaged.

  It had seemed a hilariously amusing thing at 3 am in the back of a black cab somewhere near Victoria. An engagement had seemed less amusing the following morning, especially when Nick had excitedly begun drawing up guest lists and ringing caterers. By the time of the Gossup’s Christmas party a date had been set for early spring and she was feeling distinctly odd about the whole thing.

  Odd, bordering on panic-stricken.

  Not about Nick exactly, just the wedding. It ought to have been the easiest thing in the world to say, Hold on, I’m not ready, let’s not do this, but somehow it wasn’t easy, and as the weeks had passed it had got less and less easy until she had woken up on Christmas Eve with a wedding date set, a celebrant organised, a reception booked and a roomful of guests already shopping for presents.

  So she had gone along to Gossup and Batch’s Christmas party staged, as per custom, in the executive meeting room on the sixth floor and, after some misgivings and three vodka and oranges, had sat on Santa’s lap. Which was when she had realised that Santa wasn’t Gary Harding from Sportswear this year, but Adam Finch, the new assistant manager in Computers who was going out with Gloria Clements and who, last time she had seen them together, had been arguing and looking pretty miserable.

  After that moment of recognition, what had followed soon after had become as inevitable as the conga along the executive corridor. Two more vodka and oranges, and a half-hour of dancing to ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’, and she had found herself on the rooftop terrace leaning dizzyingly against the wall and peering across the clear icy night sky towards the Christmas lights along Regent Street.

  She hadn’t had to wait long to hear the footsteps behind her, feel warm breath on her neck and two hands placed on the wall on either side of her, enclosing her. She didn’t need to look around to see who it was.

  ‘All alone?’ he had asked, and she had hoped he was in his own clothes again—she wasn’t so drunk that kissing a man in a Santa suit seemed appealing.

  ‘Not often, no,’ she had replied, turning to kiss him. He was in his own clothes. But that hadn’t stopped Clarice Fennel from Homeware identifying him, identifying them both, and before the night was much older, Gloria had left in a cab and Adam had thrown up in the women’s toilets on the fifth floor.

  And really that had been the extent of it. Except, of course, that Adam and Gloria had split up early in the new year, and Gloria had asked for a transfer which she hadn’t got and had been frosty towards Jennifer ever since.

  The other thing, apart from a nagging sense of unease at her own rather trashy behaviour, was a realisation that if Nick found out about the incident he’d be... well, not happy about it. Might even call off the wedding.

  And actually that would be much simpler than calling the whole thing off herself.

  So, with Adam a free man now, they had seen a fair bit of each other that January—just coffees and films and lunches and the pub after work—but it had made Nick stop and think. And that was all. Nick, it had transpired, was not the suspicious type—what woman would look twice at someone else when they had him?

  But then she had had a stroke of luck. Adam had rung up and left a cryptic message on her answering machine on the one rare occasion that Charlotte had been at her flat.

  Charlotte. If ever someone was going to take sanctimonious delight in spilling the dirt on her own sister, it was Charlotte.

  ‘Oh, Adam!’ Jennifer had said, rolling her eyes at Charlotte’s arch questioning. ‘Adam works with me, that’s all. We go out. We have fun. It’s not serious.’ And Charlotte had pursed her lips and said nothing but you knew, you just knew, what she was thinking, that she couldn’t wait to find some opportunity to tell Nick all about it. There would be a row, a falling out. The wedding would be cancelled. No need to break up, just a bit more breathing space. Perfect.

  But it hadn’t been perfect.

  Charlotte had said nothing. Not a damn thing. And it wasn’t as though there hadn’t been ample opportunity in those final weeks before the wedding. Consequently, Nick had suspected nothing. The wedding had loomed closer and closer until only the last-minute discovery of herself and Adam sharing an illicit moment in Nick’s own bed could have halted the steam train that was marriage.

  But she couldn’t do that to Nick, not that, not in his own bed. So she had stopped the lunches and the films with Adam and gone through with it. Oh well, a marriage isn’t forever, she had told herself and so it had proved, for just two years later they were divorced and now Nick was living with Milli, and Jennifer saw almost as much of him as she had when they’d been married, only now he asked for her advice on things and told her what he was thinking. It was quite sweet really.

  ‘Ah, hello. Excuse me.’ She had almost made it to the Staff Only door and now some Hugh Grant type had accosted her. ‘I’m looking for something for my little boy. He’s eight—well, nine really. It’s his birthday. Last week, actually.’

  Jennifer stopped and turned round.

  She took great pains not to wear a black suit or to look in any way like a sales assistant in order to prevent just this sort of thing happening but the clipboard she was clutching and her hand on the Staff Only door had given her away. Now this idiot was going to try and get her to choose a present for his brat of a son whose birthday he had obviously forgotten and who probably lived with his ex-wife and her boyfriend in Essex or somewhere and whose very existence he had probably forgotten about entirely until this morning when the boy’s mother had rung him up at work to abuse him, and now here he was.

  Jennifer turned on a smile. He did look astonishingly like Hugh Grant. Perhaps it was Hugh Grant, although she was fairly certain Hugh Grant didn’t have a nine-year-old son.

  ‘Of course, sir, I’ll get someone to help you.’ She raised her head to catch the attention of one of the sales assistants, but every cash register in sight appeared to be unattended, which meant a couple of staff were going to get it in no uncertain terms at the next staff meeting.

  ‘Peacekeeper™,’ she said, grabbing a long, flat cellophane-wrapped box from the t
op of an untouched pile nearby. ‘It was our biggest seller this Christmas—you’ll have seen it advertised on TV?’ The Hugh Grant look-alike nodded vigorously. ‘It’s a thrilling adventure game but you learn about life at the same time,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Right,’ he said hopefully, and Jennifer thought, you haven’t got a clue.

  ‘Every boy in his class either has one or wants one.’ That clinched it. She handed him the box and pushed him firmly in the direction of the cash register.

  Mr Gaspari was still on hold.

  She pushed open the Staff Only door and made her way along the drab uncarpeted corridor that ran the length of the fifth floor and at the far end of which was the office she shared with Gary Harding, the Sportswear Manager. Outside the office was Gloria’s desk, neat and empty but for her PC (logged off) and her telephone, on which a red light was flashing urgently. It was late January but Corporate Services still hadn’t removed the Christmas on-hold CD, which was Bing Crosby’s Christmas Classics—though for some reason whenever you got put on hold he was only ever singing ‘The Little Drummer Boy’.

  She pushed her office door shut with her foot and was disappointed to see Gary Harding was still at lunch—a phone call from the board of directors was something she’d quite like him to overhear.

  ‘Hello, Mr Gasp—’

  ‘Arumpa-pum-pum!’ sang Bing, and Jennifer stabbed at another button.

  ‘Mr Gaspari?’

  ‘Oh, Jennifer, there you are. It’s Aunt Caroline.’

  Aunt Caroline?

  ‘Your secretary put me on hold. I’ve been listening to ‘The Little Drummer Boy’. I think I prefer the Boney M version—’

  ‘Aunt Caroline, I have to put you back on hold—’

  ‘Oh, I only wanted to be very quick. It’s about that television program yesterday—’

  ‘Ah, you saw that? How—did Mum—?’

  Jennifer had been about to say Did Mum tell you about it? but as the idea of her mother ringing Aunt Caroline for a cosy chat seemed unlikely she stopped herself.

  ‘This might come as a shock to you, dear, but I do occasionally watch daytime television.’

  It did come as a shock.

  ‘Now I did want to talk to you and I thought you should come up. Shall we say tomorrow? Afternoon tea?’

  Jennifer experienced a moment of panic. If Aunt Caroline had watched Kim’s program, who else had? She had deliberately told no one about it—except Nick, of course. And Mum and Charlotte...though hopefully they hadn’t, in the end, watched it. Had they? Neither of them had emailed her. Perhaps they had rung? She hadn’t been home to check her messages.

  ‘I can’t possibly come up tomorrow, I’ll be working. Sorry but—’

  ‘Don’t you get days off? Aren’t you the manager?’

  ‘Yes and that’s why—look, I’ll call you straight back,’ and she stabbed the other line.

  ‘Mr Gaspari?’

  ‘At last! My dear girl, do you have any idea how long I have been kept waiting on this telephone?’

  Mr Gaspari, whom Jennifer had never actually met, sounded exactly like a petulant great-uncle she dimly remembered from childhood. She had an idea most of the board of directors were well over seventy and she adjusted her manner accordingly.

  ‘Yes, I am sorry, Mr Gaspari, I was just caught with a customer.’ That was good, the older directors liked management to stay in touch with the consumer.

  ‘Don’t you have sales staff to do that?’ he snapped back.

  ‘Well, yes...’

  ‘Never mind. It is about this television program. Yesterday afternoon—’

  Surely the board of directors didn’t watch daytime television? Had word somehow got out that she was going to be talking about kids’ computer games? But the producer had cancelled that show and instead she’d done ‘I Saved My Sister’s Life!’ because Kim was desperate. The board could hardly complain about that, could they? Anyway the show had been recorded on Monday night in her own time and you couldn’t get in trouble for talking about your personal life in your own time.

  ‘Board isn’t happy. Company policy to clear all media interaction through Marketing and P.R. You know that. It’s in your contract.’

  Jennifer tried to recall that particular clause of her contract. Then she tried to recall if she had, in fact, ever read her contract.

  ‘This is a clear breach. Board wants a letter of explanation before the next meeting. On my desk 9 am Monday. Understand?’

  ‘Yes but—’

  ‘Good.’ The line fell silent and so did Jennifer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AUGUST 1981

  IT SEEMED TO CHARLOTTE that everything changed after Grandma Lake came to live with them.

  On a Monday evening nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Charlotte sat silently in the doorway of her and Jennifer’s bedroom and looked across the landing to the study that was now Grandma Lake’s room. Downstairs Crossroads had just ended and, in the bathroom, Jennifer vomited noisily into the toilet bowl. But here in the doorway it was still. Calm. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was shut.

  Even before Grandma Lake had arrived a year ago, silent and bewildered in the back of the Austin Maxi, the signs had been ominous. How, for example, could there possibly be room in the house for an extra person? It was a three-bedroom semi, five people already lived there. And for how long was she expected to live with them? No one had said, and to ask would have been tantamount to saying, how long will Grandma Lake live?

  Dad had been furious.

  They had all sat around the kitchen table at the tail end of last summer—Mum, Dad and Aunt Caroline—and, when the suggestion was made, Dad had looked up from the sports section of The Times long enough to halt the conversation around the table. Then he had shaken out the paper as though someone had been reading it on the beach and there was sand between the pages, folded it, stood up and left the room. He hadn’t needed to say anything to make his position quite clear.

  Who had first made the suggestion that Grandma Lake should come to live with them? It certainly wasn’t Grandma Lake herself. She was living quite contentedly (you presumed, if you ever thought about it) in the poky Victorian terrace in Oakton Way, Acton, where she’d always lived. That was where she’d always been and that was where, in your mind, you always put her.

  You didn’t put her here in your own home.

  Acton was less than twenty miles away, though Grandma Lake rarely came to visit. It had been left to Mum and Dad to drive over there to collect her at Christmas or on Easter Sunday or August Bank Holiday and bring her over for the day. This had meant a fraught ninety-minute drive into west London that encompassed twenty-two sets of traffic lights and eight roundabouts and probable roadworks at Hangar Lane, as Dad never tired of observing. If Grandma Lake could just find it in herself to take the bus to North Acton and get the Ruislip train, he could pick her up there and save himself an hour-and-a-half round trip twice in one day.

  But Grandma Lake didn’t like to take the bus, much less the tube.

  And once a year, on Grandma Lake’s birthday, everyone piled into the Austin and spent a grim day in Acton, an ordeal that far outweighed the inconvenience of Grandma Lake coming to visit you because it was a whole day of your weekend gone and, worse, you were stuck there until Dad successfully caught Mum’s eye and Mum announced it was time to leave.

  On the face of it, then, you would think Dad had more reason than anyone to wish his mother-in-law closer to home. And perhaps he had wished it. Perhaps he had envisaged her selling up and purchasing a nice little bungalow or a ground-floor flat or a room in an old people’s home somewhere close by like Uxbridge or Hillingdon or Ickenham. Close enough that Mum could tootle over there in the Austin every week to take her to the shops or for a pot of Earl Grey at the tea shop in the high street.

  He probably hadn’t envisaged her selling up and moving into the study.

  So it must have been either Mum or Aunt Caroline who had made
the fateful suggestion that morning. They were the only ones likely to notice a change in Grandma Lake’s circumstances. And there must have been a change—no one would suggest their elderly mum move in with them unless there was a pretty compelling reason. Whatever the reason, one Sunday in late summer as the roast was spitting and hissing in the oven and Graham was watching Happy Days on the telly, Mum and Aunt Caroline and Dad had had a discussion around the kitchen table and by the end of the discussion Grandma Lake’s house had been valued, her possessions assessed, her longevity and health analysed, the problem of the stairs up to the study sorted and Dad had shaken out the sports section of The Times and left in disgust.

  There had been no question that Grandma Lake move in with Aunt Caroline.

  Aunt Caroline, who was in her mid-fifties, had quite suddenly become betrothed to a Yorkshireman, Ted Kettley, whom she’d met a few months earlier at an auction in Skipton. He was a valuer or something, employed by the local council. This meant that, after a lifetime of having a maiden aunt whom you could reasonably expect to remain a maiden, Charlotte and Jennifer and Graham had found themselves in the unexpected position of preparing to attend Aunt Caroline’s wedding in North Yorkshire to a red-faced, large-eared, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman who was, suddenly, their Uncle Ted. It had seemed to Charlotte at the time an example of the unforeseen and world-reeling changes that were suddenly dumped on you and that, as an adolescent, you had no control over. You were simply meant to deal with them. Grandma Lake’s arrival was another example of this unsettling phenomenon.

  Aunt Caroline had sold her high-ceiled Art Deco flat in Perivale and moved into Ted’s modern and centrally heated bungalow in North Yorkshire. It had been disturbing, though not nearly as disturbing as the realisation that North Yorkshire was too far away to relocate Grandma Lake and that an ageing mother-in-law was hardly a wedding present Uncle Ted could be expected to take on.