by Robyn Sisman
He laughed easily, a self-satisfied, drunken chuckle. “So what are you doing this weekend, you wild unattached woman?” He sauntered toward her across Bridget’s Provençal floor-tiling. “Fancy a couple of days in the country? Green fields, farmhouse breakfast, four-poster . . . me. No strings.”
Suze stared at the swirling water in the sink. Did other women really say yes to invitations like this? For a moment she forgot she was a tough, modern career woman and felt like bursting into tears. Instead, she carefully turned off the tap, picked up a dish towel to dry her hands, then turned to look him in the eye. Charles smiled cockily back.
“I don’t think so,” she said coolly. “Thanks anyway.”
“Oh, come on, have some fun for a change.” He took one end of the towel and pulled her toward him. “Toby said you weren’t seeing anyone.”
“Then Toby is sadly misinformed,” she answered, sounding hoity-toity even to her own ears. “I have plenty of fun, as it happens. And let go of my towel.”
He held on to it long enough to show her who was boss, then chucked it back at her. “Your loss.”
When Timmy-wimmy had at last been returned to his baby lair, they played the hat game. Everyone had to write down names of famous people on slips of paper, which were folded and placed in a hat.
“Help!” giggled Katie, casting moo-eyed glances at the men. “My mind’s gone a complete blank. It must be all the pregnancy hormones.”
Marie Stopes, scribbled Suze, Germaine Greer, Herod.
They split into teams of two, one taking a slip from the hat and firing clues at the other. Toby, who had the sensitivity of a double-decker bus, insisted that Suze was partnered with Charles.
“Here’s at least one game we can play,” she said, trying to make peace. “Stick with me. I always win this.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “I think I’m past the party-game stage, actually.”
“Right, chaps.” Toby unbuckled his watch and laid it on the dining table. “Suze and Charles to start. One minute to get as many answers as poss.”
Suze drew her first piece of paper from the hat and unfolded it. She turned to Charles, trying to beam thought messages into his brain—if he had one.
“Prince of Denmark,” she prompted.
“Er, Olaf?”
Try again. “Shakespeare.”
“William.”
“To be or not to be.”
“That is the question.” Charles snickered nervously.
“Failed to marry Ophelia.”
Puzzled silence.
“Stabbed Polonius.” Suze demonstrated with a fork. “Behind the arras.”
“Hmmm. Tricky one, this.”
“A very small joint of cured pork,” Suze shouted in desperation.
“Ping!” went Toby. “Time’s up.”
On the dot of eleven Victoria jumped to her feet. “The babysitter,” she moaned guiltily. They all began collecting their coats. Charles did not offer Suze a lift. At the front door Bridget peered out at the wild night from Toby’s protective embrace. “Are you sure I can’t call a cab to take you home, Suze?” she asked, in a low, social-worker’s voice.
Suze flipped up the collar of her leather jacket. “Home?” She laughed incredulously. “Before midnight? Some of us have parties to go to, Bridge.”
And off she had walked into the sheeting rain, as jauntily as if it were high noon.
Shivering in the back of the taxi, Suze winced at this pathetic line. She hadn’t been to a party in months. No one had even asked her out for weeks—no one tempting, anyway. Besides, she didn’t have time for a social life anymore. She regularly worked a twelve-hour day. Leaving the office at eight or nine, she was too exhausted to do more than pick up a frozen calorie-counter’s dinner from the supermarket and eat it in front of the television before falling asleep. Maybe Toby was right: she would gradually turn into one of those briskly cheerful middle-aged women who ate microwaved pudding for one at Christmas and had to take a week’s compassionate leave when their cat died.
But was the married state any better? Anger welled again. What gave Bridget and Co. the right to act so superior? Why would anyone think she wanted all that stuff—the granite countertops, the ruched blinds, the wedding-present cutlery, the Italian-designed baby buggy, the arguments over who took out the rubbish, the way Toby called Bridget “old girl” and allowed her to fetch and remove dishes all evening while he blahed about the office?
The cab radio was tuned to a golden-oldie station. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray . . . The Mamas and the Papas. Her parents’ music, the music of her childhood, of magical parties that she had watched, dozing, from a makeshift bed of fun-fur coats. She remembered the smoke and noise, the texture of her mother’s velvet skirt, the thrill of being picked up and whirled to the music. Her parents were married by then, yet there had been passion, friendship, energy, laughter. What was the secret?
I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA . . .
Ha. If only. Suze rubbed a circle on the steamy window, and cupped her hands around her face to look out. They had reached Liverpool Road, a dark procession of locked shop-fronts and piles of rubbish disintegrating in the wet. One of the shops was a florist’s. She resolved to send Bridget a sumptuous bouquet first thing tomorrow, to compensate for her ungracious behavior. The food had been delicious, after all.
“Turn left here,” she shouted at the taxi driver, unpeeling herself from the seat, “third lamppost on the right.” As soon as he had stopped she cranked open the door, leaped on to the pavement and shoved a note through the window. Too cold to wait for her change, she fled up the steps to her front door.
Inside the flat, she took off all her clothes and dumped them in the bath, toweled her hair, then wrapped herself up in a man’s dressing gown made of scarlet cashmere that she’d found in a market stall. She hugged it tightly around her, and bent to check herself out in the mirror, wondering if she looked like a tragic Tolstoyan heroine, too passionate and sensitive for this world. She didn’t. Hair blackened with rain, hazel eyes leaking mascara, a potentially haughty nose completely undermined by the wide, curvy mouth so often misinterpreted as an invitation to pounce: same old Suze. The product did not match the image. She extinguished the bathroom light with a snap.
It was still not even midnight. The weekend stretched long and empty before her. She roamed the flat, looking for diversion. She ran her fingertips along the spines of her videos and CDs, eyed her freebie bottle from last month’s vodka project, opened the fridge and contemplated an individual sticky toffee pudding, shut the door again, rattled the keys of her computer. If only it weren’t Saturday, tomorrow she could go to work.
When the phone rang, she could have kissed it. An Australian voice at full throttle scorched down the line: Harry Fox, her boss. “Where the bloody hell have you been?”
“Out. But my machine—”
A small explosion interrupted her. “Machines are for wimps. Now listen, Suze, I have a problem. What do you say to four weeks in New York?”
Chapter Two
At 7:30 A.M. precisely, Lloyd Rockwell walked out of his apartment building on West Seventy-second Street and turned toward the subway. It was a morning of warm June sunshine, the air fresh, the sky bright, and he stepped out confidently, admiring the way the city’s geometry was reflected in sharp, slanting shadows on the sidewalk. He smiled at Mrs. Grumbach and her dachshund, as he did every morning, said hello to the Korean woman setting out her buckets of flowers, as he did every morning, waited at Broadway until the street sign told him to walk, then crossed over by the corner fruit store.
Today there were piles of golden melons outside, flown in from Turkey or Morocco or the South of France to reassure New Yorkers of their God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of consumer goods. Breathing in their musky, exotic scent, Lloyd felt a wild impulse to buy a whole luscious bagful to take home to Betsy for a chin-dribbling feast. But the melons were five dollars apiece, and he and Betsy we
re supposed to be on an economy drive until she had finished with Jane Austen. Resisting temptation, Lloyd walked on to his usual newspaper stand, took the exact change from his raincoat pocket (the television weathergirl had predicted showers sweeping up from the south during the afternoon) and bought a New York Times, which he slotted carefully into the outer pouch of his briefcase. Then he descended into the steamy underworld of the subway.
Hell must be like this, he sometimes thought. The harsh light, the lung-stripping air, the sudden rank smells, the press of so many people with their anxious, shuttered faces—always together, never communicating. When he was fourteen Lloyd had been forced to study The Aeneid by a Latin teacher who later got himself dismissed for smoking dope on campus. Only two things had stuck in Lloyd’s memory: the Latin word quercus, meaning a holm oak, a tree he had never come across before or since; and Virgil’s bleak picture of souls in hell, tormented by having to do the same thing over and over again without hope of remission. It was an image that rose in his mind with alarming frequency these days.
The train was packed, but for once Lloyd managed to find a seat ahead of the crowd. He tried to fold his long legs out of the way as a woman dropped her briefcase at his feet and reached for the railing above his head. As the train started to roll, her coat swung open to reveal a swelling stomach inches from his nose. Pregnant, he wondered—or just fat? Lloyd pondered his dilemma. Should he offer her his seat? It was almost certainly the right thing to do, but what if she were not pregnant, after all? Would she find it offensive to be offered a seat on the grounds of gender alone? What if she realized that he had thought the unthinkable: this woman is fat? Even if she were pregnant, would she regard it as offensive that a man deemed her incapable of standing? Life seemed full of such pitfalls nowadays—Lloyd remembered the girl who had bounced her tennis racket on his head and growled, “After you, Sir fucking Galahad,” when he had held open the clubhouse door for her. At the next station he solved his moral conundrum by surrendering his seat on the pretext of getting out, then reentered the next car.
Lloyd’s mind began to focus on the pitch he was due to make later that morning. This was the moment he liked best in his work: when the research data was collected, the competition assessed, the brainstorming sessions completed, and it was Lloyd’s job to distill the results into a single creative concept. “We try harder.” “Come to Marlboro country.” “Ich bin ein Berliner.” He was still a copywriter at heart, even if he had a fancier title these days. Whether you were selling politics, jeans, AIDS awareness or soap, it all came down to words in the end. Manipulating them was Lloyd’s favorite game.
Today’s presentation was to a Montana footwear company that had started up back in the seventies as a hippie-ish, eco-friendly commune called Sam & Martha. By a mysterious quirk of fashion it had suddenly become cool to be seen in their unbleached cotton running shoes. Kids in Harlem were playing basketball in them. Andie Mac-Dowell had been photographed for Vanity Fair wearing a pair on her ranch. Sam & Martha had risen from their hash-and-lentil trance, cut their hair, taken a suite at the Pierre and were now talking about going head-to-head with Nike and Reebok. Privately Lloyd thought this a little ambitious. Instead, he wanted to make a virtue of their hey-let’s-do-it-right-here-in-the-barn quality, and had plotted out a series of print and television ads featuring everyday domestic scenarios, using the slogan “the human race.” People said advertising was a sophisticated form of lying, but Lloyd argued the exact opposite: that the most effective advertising was the most truthful. Lately he had begun to think that not all his colleagues shared his view.
Somebody must have told Sam & Martha that it was Lloyd who had dreamed up the campaigns for Passion. They said this was “something they could really relate to,” and had insisted on interviewing him in person. Lloyd’s colleagues had been teasing him all week about how he would have to wear sandals to the meeting and call everyone “man.” Lloyd fingered the precise knot of his Brooks Brothers tie. Very funny.
If Sam & Martha liked his concept, the agency’s reputation would rise another notch, Lloyd would be flavor of the month, and a whole team of designers, PR people, commercials directors, print buyers and assorted media clowns would be let loose on the project. If, on the other hand, the client was not convinced, then Lloyd would have presided over a colossal waste of time and money. It was a lottery he played several times a year. Normally on the morning of a presentation he woke early, mouth dry, head buzzing with ideas and anxieties. But not today.
Although today seemed just like every other Friday, it was not. Today was the last day for four weeks that the subway would spring its shadowy trap, that he would feel the twitch of an invisible leash drawing him to work every day and back home again every evening. This weekend, within forty-eight hours, Lloyd would be boarding a plane to London. For six weeks he was going to live in another man’s apartment and do another man’s job. Betsy wasn’t coming—she had her dissertation to finish—but somehow going alone was part of the adventure. He would walk the same streets as Charles Dickens, take tea at the Ritz, watch the Thames slide under his feet from Westminster Bridge, ride on the top of a red double-decker bus, discover a marvelous pub with oak beams, find out what exactly Yorkshire pudding tasted like. The women would wear extraordinary hats. The men would wear tweed jackets and smoke pipes. Everyone would have a garden and a dog, and discuss the weather. They would be masters of irony, saying the exact opposite of what they meant. Lloyd sneaked a look around the train compartment, and a feeling of liberation swept through him. He might look like the rest of the commuter herd—sober suit, polished shoes, trophy briefcase—but in his heart was pure romance.
Next month he would be thirty-five, time to settle into the future he had mapped out for himself. The whole plan was clear in his head, and he was sure it was a good plan—grown-up, responsible, the right thing. But like the saint who prayed to be virtuous—but not yet—Lloyd relished the idea of one final fling.
This was the third year in a row that he had applied for the Schneider Fox exchange program. The first time he had been rejected on the grounds of inexperience; the second, because he had become too valuable to the company. This time the plum had simply plopped into his lap. Julian Jewel, his opposite number in England, had volunteered his flat as well as his office for Lloyd’s use, though Jewel himself had elected to stay in a New York hotel. Jewel sounded pleasant enough, in his lofty English way. How much damage could anyone do in four weeks, after all? Lloyd was happy enough just to lie back and think of England.
Besides, he deserved this trip. For his junior year in high school Lloyd had been chosen to spend a year at Winchester School in England. During the spring semester he had spent weeks poring over the literature they had sent him, half suspecting it was a joke on dumb Americans but smitten by the alien glamour of it all nevertheless. There were fuzzy photographs of boys in high collars and tail-coats, strolling through ecclesiastical-looking buildings; a timetable that included ancient Greek, cricket and something called “prep”; a uniform list as weird as a pervert’s wardrobe. The school alumni were known as Wykehamists—an exotic new word Lloyd had rolled around his tongue.
But that was the summer everything changed. The scandal broke in May. Lloyd had been withdrawn at once from his preppy New England school, lodged for a jittery period with his bewildered grandparents and then fled to California with his mother. At seventeen, the door had slammed shut on his childhood. He had avoided looking back. But the Winchester opportunity glimmered in his memory like a promise. Now it seemed that something was to be redeemed from those lost, innocent times.
At Christopher Street Lloyd stepped out of the train and was swept back up into daylight. He turned toward the Hudson River and tacked his way through the genial, leafy streets of the Village, suppressing a stab of nostalgia for its kooky boutiques, Zen bookstores and arty cafés, where NYU students flirted with each other over earnest discussions of Nietzsche and styrofoam cups of espresso—just
as he had done a lifetime ago. The blare of traffic hit him as he reached Hudson Street. Wind whipped across from the river, carrying a chemical tang from the Jersey shore. The Schneider Fox building rose before him, a massive block of snowy granite with its grandiose chrome entrance flashing in the morning sunlight. Lloyd had dubbed it the Winter Palace, on account of its triumphalist architecture and mercilessly efficient air-conditioning. Schneider Fox occupied two floors somewhere in the middle of the building, the meager filling in a giant’s sandwich. He wondered about the London office, indulging in a fantasy of wood paneling, sit-up-and-beg typewriters and buffoons in monocles yelping, “What? What?”
As Lloyd rode the sleek elevator, listening to its familiar whir, he reviewed the day ahead. There were photographs to pick up for this morning’s presentation, hand-over briefings to be completed, clients to be reassured. He needed to bring Sheri up to speed on the projects she would be babysitting while he was away. Most important of all, he needed to ensure that nothing could go wrong with the Passion account. If it did, he wouldn’t have a job to come back to.
The doors slid open straight on to the reception area, a chic confection of bluey-greeny grays designed to lead the eye through the far glass wall and out into the bay, where the Statue of Liberty rose like a pale-green goddess. The outsize reception desk, carved into a sinuous S for Schneider out of a single hunk of environmentally correct wood, was still untenanted, apart from a minimalist flower arrangement. Beside it crouched a postmodernist sculpture made of Perspex and animal hair that was supposed to represent a fox. Lloyd called it “Rover.” There was no evidence whatever of Schneider Fox’s trade—no campaign posters, no awards trophies, no brand-name logos, nothing more ostentatious than virgin copies of The New Yorker, The Economist and Fortune, arranged in a tasteful fan across a low, slate table. The subtext was clear. Schneider Fox was so famous that it didn’t need to advertise.
It was still too early for most people to be at work. Lloyd punched his security code into the panel of the steel-framed inner door and made his way to his very own glass box, its square footage calibrated to match his status. As a small boy visiting the magnificence of his father’s Wall Street office, with its thrilling swivel chair and attendant secretaries and masculine tang of cigar smoke, he used to wonder whether he would ever be that important. Now he knew. He dumped his briefcase, hung his jacket on the steel coatrack and tapped the entry key on his computer to release his e-mail. Most of it was junk of one sort or another, including the daily joke. Question: How many advertising people does it take to change a light-bulb? Answer: Twelve—one to fix the light and eleven to explain the concept. Lloyd saved a couple of messages to deal with later, deleted the rest, then went to see if Dee Dee had come in early as she had promised.
