Harriet

by Jilly Cooper

  Spotty lay his cheek against hers and thumped his plumed tail.

  ‘What kind is he?’ she said.

  ‘A setter, I think,’ said the owner, sensing weakness. ‘He’s only a puppy.’

  Harriet melted. ‘Hang on,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and ring my boss.’

  Cory had started work and was not in the mood for interruptions.

  ‘Er-Mr Erskine, I mean Cory, there’s this absolutely sweet puppy here.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cory unhelpfully.

  ‘He’s got to be put down unless they can find a home for him. He’s so sweet.’

  ‘Harriet,’ said Cory wearily, ‘you have enough trouble coping with William, Chattie, Jonah and me, not to mention Tadpole and Tarbaby. We haven’t got rid of any of Ambrose’s kittens yet and now you want to introduce a puppy. Why don’t you ring up the zoo and ask them to send all the animals up here for a holiday? Telephone Battersea Dogs’ Home, and tell them we keep open house.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harriet, chastened.

  ‘What’s his name?’ said Cory.

  ‘Spotty,’ said Harriet, ‘and he’s a setter.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Well, you’d better think up a new name before you get him home,’ said Cory and rang off.

  Harriet couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘We will look after him,’ she said to the woman, ‘and he’ll have another dog to play with.’

  She was worried Spotty’s owner might burst into tears, but she seemed absolutely delighted, and later, as Harriet drove off with the dog, she saw her chattering very animatedly to a couple of friends. Not so Spotty, who howled lustily for his mistress for a couple of miles then got into the front seat beside Harriet, and finally collapsed moaning piteously all over the gear lever, his head on her lap.

  ‘I must think of a name for you,’ she said, as they got home. She opened the AA book and plonked her finger down blindly. It landed on Sevenoaks.

  ‘Hullo, Sevenoaks,’ said Harriet. ‘You’ve got a cattle market on Monday, two three star hotels and you’re twenty-five miles from London.’

  ‘Harriet,’ said Cory, as Sevenoaks charged round the drawing room, trailing standard lamp wires like goose grass, ‘That is not a puppy — nor is it a setter.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Harriet, trying to catch him as he whisked past.

  ‘He’s fully grown,’ said Cory. ‘At least two and virtually untrainable.’

  Sevenoaks rolled his eyes, charged past Cory, and shot upstairs, followed by Tadpole, who was thoroughly overexcited. Sevenoaks had already received a bloody nose from Ambrose, a very frosty response from Mrs Bottomley, and tried to eat one of Cory’s riding boots. Now he could be heard drinking out of the lavatory. Next he came crashing downstairs, followed once more by Tadpole, and collapsed panting frenziedly at Harriet’s feet. She looked up at Cory with starry eyes.

  ‘Look how he’s settled down,’ she said. ‘He knows he’s going to be really happy here.’

  All in all, however, Sevenoaks couldn’t be described as one hundred per cent a success. Whenever he wasn’t trying to escape to the bitches in the village, he was fornicating with Tadpole in the front garden, digging holes in the lawn, chewing everything in sight, or stretching out on sofas and beds with huge muddy paws.

  The great love of his life, however, was Harriet. He seemed to realize that she had rescued him from death’s door. He welcomed her noisily whenever she returned, howled the house down if she went out and had a growling match with Cory every night because Cory refused to let him sleep on Harriet’s bed.

  The following Wednesday was another day of disasters. Cory was having trouble with his script and was not in the best temper anyway, particularly as William was teething and spent the day screaming his head off, and Sevenoaks had chewed up Cory’s only French dictionary. Harriet botched up Chattie’s lamb chops by burning them under the grill while she was filling in a How Seductive Are You quiz in a women’s magazine, and she’d just finished pouring milk into William and Tarbaby’s bottles when Ambrose came weaving along and knocked the whole lot onto the floor. She was also in a highly nervous state, having at last promised Sammy she would accompany her to the Loose Box that evening.

  It was half past seven by the time she’d cleared up and got everyone to bed. There was no time to have a bath; she only managed to scrape a flannel over her face and under her armpits, pour on a great deal of scent and rub in cologne in an attempt to resuscitate her dirty hair.

  At five minutes to eight the doorbell went. Sammy was early. Harriet rushed downstairs with only one eye made up, aware that she looked terrible. Cory met her on the landing.

  ‘Going out?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said defensively. ‘It’s my night off.’

  She opened the front door to two earnest-looking women with wind-swept grey hair. One was clutching a notebook, the other a rather ancient camera.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ said the woman with a notebook. ‘It’s a very difficult place to find at night.’

  Chattie wandered down the stairs in her nightgown. Visitors always meant a possibility of staying up late.

  ‘And who are you, young lady?’ said the woman with the camera.

  ‘I’m Chattie. I had a pretty dress on today.’

  ‘And I’m Carol Chamberlain,’ said the woman with the notebook. ‘We’ve come all the way from London to interview your Daddy.’

  ‘Come into the drawing room and I’ll get you a whisky and tonic,’ said Chattie.

  Harriet went green, fled upstairs and knocked on Cory’s door.

  He didn’t answer. She knocked again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking up, drumming his fingers with irritation.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, with infinite weariness. ‘What the hell have you done now? Have all Sevenoaks’ relations arrived?’

  Harriet turned pale.

  ‘I-um-I’m afraid I forgot to put off Woman’s Monthly. They’ve come all the way from London. They’re waiting downstairs.’

  ‘Was he absolutely insane with rage?’ said Sammy, who always enjoyed stories of other people’s disasters. It was a source of slight irritation to her that Harriet got on so well with Cory.

  ‘Absolutely insane,’ said Harriet miserably. ‘I may well have joined the great unemployed by tomorrow.’

  They were tarting up in the Ladies of the Loose Box. Crowds of girls around them were back-combing like maniacs. One girl was rouging her navel.

  Harriet was fiddling with her sweater.

  ‘Do you think it looks better outside my jeans?’ she said to Sammy.

  ‘No,’ said Sammy. ‘Doesn’t give you any shape. Let’s see what it looks like tucked in. No, that looks even worse. Leave it hanging out. You look absolutely fantastic,’ she added with all the complacency of someone looking infinitely better.

  She was poured into black velvet trousers and a low-cut black sweater, her splendid white bosom spilled over the top like an ice-cream over a cone. She was also wearing black polish on her toes and fingernails, and a black rose in her newly dyed mahogany curls.

  No-one’s going to want to talk to me, thought Harriet as they went into the arena. All around her people were circling and picking each other up. Some of the girls were ravishingly pretty. It could only have been a spirit of adventure, not a shortage of men, that led them to this place.

  Sammy was already leering at a handsome blond German in a blue suit.

  ‘I’d just love a sweet Cinzano,’ she said fluttering long green eyelashes at him.

  The German fought his way to the bar to get her one. The next moment a pallid youth had sidled up to her.

  ‘I work in films,’ he said, which he patently didn’t.

  ‘Really,’ said Sammy. ‘I’m a model actually.’

  Harriet had completely forgotten the hassle of hunting for men. She kept trying to meet men’s eyes, but hers kept slitheri
ng away. Don’t leave me, she pleaded silently to Sammy. But Sammy was on the hunt like Sevenoaks after a bitch, and nothing could deter her from her quarry.

  ‘It’s always been my ambition to go to Bayreuth,’ she was saying to the handsome German.

  The worst part of the evening for Harriet was that she wasn’t a free agent. She couldn’t split because Sammy was driving and she hadn’t brought enough money for a taxi.

  Sammy having downed eight sweet Cinzanos was well away with the German, and seemed to be having an equally devastating effect on his friend, who had spectacles, a nudging grin and a pot belly.

  ‘Come over here, Harriet,’ said Sammy. ‘You must meet Claus.’

  She pushed the fat, nudging grinning German forward.

  ‘Harriet’s frightfully clever and amusing,’ she added.

  Harriet became completely paralysed and could think of nothing to say except that the weather had been very cold lately.

  ‘Ah but the freezing North brings forth the most lovely ladies,’ said the fat little German with heavy gallantry. He was in Yorkshire, he told Harriet, for a textile conference and had lost 10 kilos since Christmas. Harriet didn’t know if that were good or bad.

  ‘Isn’t he a scream?’ said Sammy.

  She pulled Harriet aside.

  ‘They want to take us to The Black Tulip,’ she said. ‘It’s a fantastic place; you have dinner and dance, and there’s a terrific group playing.’

  ‘It’s going to make us frightfully late, isn’t it?’ said Harriet dubiously.

  ‘Oh come on,’ said Sammy, drink beginning to make her punchy. ‘No-one’s ever taken me to a place like that before. It’s the chance of a lifetime.’

  Oh God, thought Harriet, I mustn’t be a spoilsport.

  The Black Tulip was even worse than the Loose Box. Harriet found her smile getting stiffer and stiffer as she toyed with an avocado pear.

  ‘First I cut out all carbohydrates,’ said the little fat German.

  Opposite them Sammy and the handsome German couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They were both getting tighter and tighter. Harriet wondered who the hell was going to drive her home.

  ‘Then I gave up bread and potatoes,’ said the fat German.

  He must have been huge before he lost all that weight, thought Harriet, as she rode round the dance floor on his stomach. She suddenly longed to be home with Cory and William and the children. What would happen if William woke up? Mrs Bottomley slept like the dead. Cory’d go spare if he had to get up and feed him. She wondered how long he’d taken to get rid of Woman’s Monthly.

  ‘A new penny for your thoughts, Samantha,’ said the handsome German.

  ‘They’re worth a bloody sight more than that,’ said Sammy.

  They all laughed immoderately.

  ‘I also cut out all puddings and cakes,’ said the fat German.

  ‘I get no kick from champagne,’ sang the lead singer. ‘Pure alcohol gives me no thrill at all.’

  You can say that again, thought Harriet.

  Sammy was leaning forward, the fat little German gazing hungrily at her bosom.

  ‘Shall we go for a drive on the moor?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Harriet, violently. ‘You all can,’ she added. ‘But could you drop me off first?’

  ‘We’re all going back to Heinrich’s hotel for a little drink,’ said Sammy, getting rather unsteadily to her feet.

  ‘I must get back in case William wakes,’ said Harriet desperately.

  After some argument, Sammy relented. ‘We’ll get you a cab,’ she said. ‘Claus can pay. The only one going at this hour is driven by the local undertaker.’

  Harriet felt as cheerful as a corpse, as she bowled home under a starless sky. She couldn’t stop crying; she had no sex appeal any more, the world was coming to an end, she’d never find a father for William.

  As she put the key at the door, Sevenoaks, who usually slept through everything, let out a series of deep baritone barks, then, realizing it was her, started to sing with delight at the top of his voice, searching round for something to bring her.

  ‘Oh please, Sevenoaks, lower your voice,’ she pleaded.

  But as she crept upstairs, Cory came out of the bathroom with a towel round his waist, his black hair wet from the bath, his skin still yellow-brown from last summer.

  ‘Did Woman’s Monthly stay for hours?’ she said.

  ‘Hours,’ said Cory, ‘I had to throw them out. It must have been pre-menstrual tension I was suffering from before they arrived.’

  Harriet was feeling too depressed to even giggle.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said.

  Sevenoaks sauntered into Cory’s room and heaved himself up onto Cory’s bed.

  ‘Get him off,’ snapped Cory. ‘That dog’s got to go. He’s been whining ever since you went out. Where have you been anyway?’ he said in a gentler tone, noticing her red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘To the Loose Box, with Sammy. We met some Germans, one was quite good-looking, the other one was awful. The good-looking one fancied Sammy, so did the awful one, but he had to put up with me. I tried to get out and find some people of my own age, but I don’t think they liked me very much.’ And with a sob she fled to her room.

  When she turned down the counterpane and got into bed, she found her electric blanket switched on, and a note pinned to the pillow.

  ‘Dear Harriet,’ it said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what He says, we think you’re smashing, and so does he really, love from Tadpole, Ambrose (Miss) and Sevenoaks.’

  Harriet gave a gurgle of laughter. Suddenly the whole evening didn’t seem to matter very much any more. She lay in bed and thought about Cory. She felt like a child joining up numbers to discover what a picture was; she felt she hadn’t managed to join up any of Cory’s numbers at all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Harriet was ironing in the kitchen when a car drew up.

  ‘Come on, let’s hide,’ whispered Chattie. ‘It’s awful old Arabella. She only turns up when Daddy’s at home.’

  ‘We can’t,’ protested Harriet, watching a tall girl get out of the car. ‘She’s seen us.’

  ‘Anyone at home?’ came a debutante quack from the hall.

  The girl who strode into the kitchen was in her late twenties, very handsome, high complexioned, athletically built, with flicked-up light brown hair drawn back from her forehead.

  ‘Hullo, Chattie,’ she said breezily. ‘How are you?’ But before Chattie could answer she turned to Harriet. ‘And you must be the new nanny. I’m Arabella Ryder-Ross. Cory’s spoken about me, I expect.’ But before Harriet could answer the girl turned to William, who was aimlessly beating the side of his chair with a wooden spoon.

  ‘What a darling baba. Not another of Noel’s castoffs?’

  ‘No, he’s mine,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Oh?’ said Arabella. It was strange how someone could get four syllables out of that word.

  ‘Doesn’t your husband mind you taking a job?’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘Oh, how amazingly brave of you.’ Arabella paused and looked at William again. ‘I must say Cory’s a saint, the lame ducks he takes under his wing.’

  ‘One, two, four, five. Bugger it. I’ve left out three,’ said Chattie, who was counting Ambrose’s kittens.

  Harriet tried not to giggle. Arabella looked appalled.

  ‘Chattie, don’t use language like that. Run along and play. I want to talk to Nanny.’

  ‘She’s not called Nanny, she’s Harriet, and I don’t want to play, thank you,’ said Chattie. Then a foxy expression came over the child’s face. ‘Would you like a sweetie, Arabella?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer Nanny one?’

  ‘It’s my last,’ said Chattie. ‘And I want you to have it.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Chattie,’ said Arabella, popping the sweet into her mouth. ‘I get on so well with children,’ she added to Harriet. ‘People are always sa
ying I’d make a wonderful mother.’

  At that moment Cory wandered in and Arabella flushed an unbecoming shade of puce.

  ‘Hullo, Arabella,’ he said. ‘You look very brown.’

  ‘It fades so quickly. You should have seen me last week. I’ve just got back from St Moritz, or I’d have been over before. We’re having a little party next Friday.’

  Cory frowned. ‘I think something’s happening.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have it on Saturday then.’

  How could she be so unsubtle? thought Harriet.

  ‘No, Friday’s all right,’ said Cory. ‘I’ve just remembered. It’s Harriet’s birthday. It’ll do her good to meet some new people. Yes, we’d like to come.’

  Harriet didn’t dare look at Arabella’s face.

  ‘Did you like that sweet, Arabella?’ said Chattie.

  ‘Yes thank you, darling.’

  Chattie gave a naughty giggle.

  ‘Tadpole didn’t. He spat it out three times.’

  Harriet scolded Chattie when Arabella had gone, but the child shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I hate her, and Mummy says she’s after Daddy. I hope she doesn’t get him,’ she added gloomily. ‘She never gives us presents; she says we’re spoilt.’

  ‘She’s got a point there,’ said Harriet.

  ‘She’s just told Daddy he ought to give you the push, because we’re so naughty,’ said Chattie, picking up one of the kittens. ‘But he told her to shut up, and we’d never been better looked after. Goodness, Harriet, you’ve gone all pink in the face.’

  Trees rattled against her bedroom window. She looked at the yellow daffodils on the curtains round her bed and felt curiously happy. William was getting more gorgeous every day. She was getting fonder and fonder of Chattie and Jonah. Sevenoaks lay snoring across her feet. She felt her wounded heart gingerly; she was not yet deliriously happy but she was content.

  ‘Happy Birthday to you,’ sang a voice tunelessly, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Harriet, Happy Birthday to you.’

  And Chattie staggered in with a breakfast tray consisting of a bunch of wild daffodils, a brown boiled egg, toast and coffee.