Taylor lifted her head. Her hair was tied back in a high ponytail, but there was a frizz of disobedient reddish curls around her hairline. ‘Are you going to offer Stacey a job?’
There was a pause. Gaby ran a finger round the inside of one slipper, against her foot, as if smoothing something out. Then she said, ‘Trouble is, I can’t.’
‘Oh?’
Gaby lifted her head and looked across the bathroom at Quin. She said, clearly,
‘Because of Sarah.’
‘Oh Lord,’ Quin said. ‘I’d forgotten about Sarah.’
‘Who’s Sarah?’ Taylor asked.
Gaby got to her feet and perched on the edge of the bath. ‘Sarah is Will Gibbs’ partner.’
‘Who’s Will Gibbs?’
‘He’s Tom Hathaway’s father. He and Melissa had a holiday fling years ago and Tom was the result. Will and Sarah met after that, and now they live together and have two little boys. Sarah came to work for me almost eighteen months ago, and she’s great.’
‘Goodness,’ Taylor said. ‘Does Tom know?’
‘Does Tom know what?’
‘Does Tom know,’ Taylor repeated patiently, ‘that his father’s got two more boys and this Sarah person?’
Gaby glanced at Quin. ‘Yes. Yes, he does, I talked to Melissa.’
‘But why,’ Taylor said, ‘does that stop you offering a job to Stacey?’
‘Because neither Stacey nor Melissa know that I gave a job to Sarah Parker, even though I found out after the event that she lived with Will Gibbs. And, if I’m honest, Sarah does the kind of thing that Stacey might do, if I had room for her. Which I don’t. So I can’t offer her a job, and I can’t tell her why I can’t offer her a job. Which puts me in a very awkward position because Melissa has already emailed Stacey, cc’ing me, suggesting that we talk about it.’
‘Yikes,’ Taylor said.
Quin looked at her. ‘What would you do?’
Taylor put her hands behind her head and pulled her ponytail tighter. ‘I’d tell everyone everything.’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Gaby said. ‘That’s the problem with you. You don’t tell anyone anything and then we’re supposed to guess what’s the matter from the atmosphere you’re creating. I wish you would tell everyone everything.’
‘I can’t,’ Taylor said melodramatically. ‘I – I can’t.’
‘Well,’ Gaby said, ‘in this case, nor can I. So I will just have to put up with all of them thinking I’m a selfish, hard-hearted cow.’
Taylor got to her feet.
Gaby said, ‘Where are you going?’
Taylor sighed again. ‘To Facebook Flossie.’
‘But I thought . . .’
Taylor slouched towards the door. ‘Maybe I’ll text her.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Quin said.
Taylor gave him a brief glance. ‘No,’ she said.
When she had gone, there was a brief and complicated silence. Then Gaby said, ‘Is she miserable?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Quin replied. ‘Sometimes, if no one’s looking, she even seems quite happy.’
‘What am I going to do about Stacey?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I can’t do nothing. I’m in a position of hiring power and I will be expected to help Stacey.’
‘Well, help her then. Tell her about Sarah Parker and Melissa and all that.’
‘Sarah’s good.’
‘I’m sure she is.’
‘I don’t really have space for Stacey.’
‘Well, that sorts it then.’
‘And,’ Gaby said, ‘there’s something else.’
Quin was standing too, studying the phone which he had taken from his pocket. ‘Is there?’ he said, absently.
‘There’s Claire.’
‘Claire?’
‘Beth’s Claire,’ Gaby said. ‘It was Claire who found me Sarah Parker. Claire has known about the Will Gibbs situation all along. I thought she must have told Beth. I thought she must have. Are you listening?’
Quin lifted his head. ‘Of course.’
‘But from what Beth said earlier, and the suggestions she was making, it seems that she doesn’t know.’ She gave a little stamp, in her suede slipper. ‘Quin,’ she said, ‘I loathe this. I feel awful for Stacey and bad for Melissa and cross with Claire, but what I feel most of all, what I cannot stand most of all, is having work compromised. I tell you, Quin, I won’t have it. I won’t have work touched, sullied, by any of this. I won’t. I tell you. I won’t.’
Quin put down his phone again and folded his arms. Years of living with Gaby had taught him when to engage and when to allow her as much rope as she needed. He cleared his throat. ‘Then don’t,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
BETH
The house Beth shared with Claire had been bought just before Tower Hamlets became a modish destination for young entrepreneurs of the new technology. When they were first together – a junior academic and a trainee lawyer dissatisfied with the law – they had a flat above the old market in Spitalfields, a series of small dingy rooms whose only advantage was the view from the sitting-room window of Christ Church, Spitalfields, in all its Hawksmoor – although as yet unrestored – glory. The bedroom windows looked down into the shabby ordinariness of Brushfield Street, and the smell of perpetually cooking curry permeated the whole area like fog.
Living in unfashionable east London in the heart of the established Bangladeshi community had been a deliberate choice. Beth had grown up in an Aberdeen suburb with her adoptive parents, and Claire on a farm in the West Country, and both had learned an instinctive avoidance of the expectations of small communities. London offered the first escape, and east London a refinement of it. In the flimsy plywood cupboard that served as their only hanging space in the market flat, Beth hung her claret silk doctoral robe, the wide sleeves held back by claret-coloured cords. The robe was a symbol to both of them of what was to come, rather than representing the disjoint that currently existed between what they were and how they lived.
Beth’s father came down from Aberdeen for the ceremony which awarded her a doctorate in psychology. Neither he, nor her late mother, had travelled south for her first degree ceremony, but then her mother, though punctilious in all the duties attached to motherhood, had never been able to refer to Claire as anything other than Beth’s friend. After her death, from cancer, Beth’s father, an engineer who specialized in the particular deep-sea pumps required by the oil industry, and who had taken a job in Aberdeen accordingly, came down to London on a regular basis, sleeping on a sofa bed in the sitting room of the market flat and marvelling at the way all the streets round about had their names enamelled in Bengali, underneath the English.
He was, Beth knew, very proud of her. In the Aberdeen flat where he had moved after his wife’s death, on a highly varnished occasional table prominently positioned in the sitting room, was a framed photograph of Beth, sturdy and serious, but, as an interviewer was later to describe her, ‘darkly handsome’, taken when she was awarded her PhD. When he wrote to her after the ceremony – and he wrote conscientiously, on paper, every few weeks, even after he had discovered email – he always addressed the envelope with her academic qualifications, carefully specified. When she became an assistant professor, in her early thirties, she knew that he, in his quiet way, had almost nothing left to wish for. And when, later, he offered money to help restore the decayed house in Wilkes Street, it would have broken his heart for her to have done anything other than accept it.
By the time they took the decision to restore the Wilkes Street house, they were both more established, in any case. The rented market flat had given way to a freehold flat in Shoreditch with a scrap of garden and a kitchen big enough to accommodate a dining table. They had acquired two cats, a present from Gaby, whose children had named them Banker and Bonus, and Claire had given up the law to start a small and increasingly successful head-hunting agency, which specialized in finding opportunities for women, e
specially those who were returning to work after children. When Beth was promoted to associate professor, at the new and architecturally dramatic University of East London, the time had come, they agreed, to graduate from being a couple with cats in a ground-floor flat, to being serious house owners and citizens.
As a house, Wilkes Street offered a very serious proposition indeed. It was properly Georgian, with two bays either side of the front door, three storeys, and a cluster of terracotta chimney pots on the roof. Its neighbour on one side was a similar house, possibly even more decrepit, and on the other, an old textile factory which had been crudely converted into flats, with irregular metal-framed windows and redundant cables looped haphazardly across the facade. The house itself was built of dark brick, the windows outlined in paler brick, with peeling pilasters either side of the sagging front door, concrete infills here and there and sheets of plywood nailed across the windows in place of curtains. The yard behind the house was a vision of dereliction; broken detritus from numerous kitchens and bathrooms lay abandoned among jagged lengths of corrugated iron and rusting coils of wire. If it had not been for the staircase, and the panelling, and the proportions of the rooms, all of which had miraculously survived the aggressive neglect and abuse of decades, they would never, they assured their friends, have even contemplated such a project.
It took them three years. A skip in the street outside became such a permanent fixture that the neighbourhood took to using it for all the rubbish that would not fit conveniently into a standard bin bag. Broken furniture and no longer functioning fridges from other people’s lives took up as much space as their own rotten floorboards and historic, if now useless, lumps of lath and plaster. Weekends were spent labouring in the house, week nights poring over plans and estimates. The salvation of Wilkes Street became as all-consuming as if the house had been a human hostage in need of rescue. It made them mildly obsessive, too committed to dare to think about much else, and too tired to be teased. From the relative order of their own houses, the others watched the progress of Wilkes Street with the occasionally exasperated anxiety of those monitoring the haphazard recovery of an addict.
When it was finally done, and the builder had topped out his labours with a bush in a chimney pot as he said his father and grandfather would have done, Beth and Claire threw a party. Most of the rooms were unfurnished still, but there was something glamorous about the resulting empty spaces, with clusters of candles on the cider-coloured floorboards, against the shining dark window glass. There were trestle tables draped in sheets and covered with food and drink, and the newly installed central music system piped Joni Mitchell – Beth’s all-time favourite – hauntingly throughout the house. The party went on until four o’clock the next morning, and when Beth went to check on the cats, shut into the new linen cupboard for safety on the top floor, she found them asleep on a couple of guests who had nested among the spare duvets and pillows and were sweetly unconscious themselves.
‘I think we’ve done it,’ Beth said to Claire, standing at their bedroom window and looking down into the street where dawn was already making the street lamps redundant. There was no reply. She turned round and saw that Claire was already asleep, neatly on her side as was her habit, her dark, curly head in the exact centre of the pillow and her lashes thick on her cheeks. Beth stood and gazed at her, golden in the glow of the lights that had been ingeniously inserted into the headboard of their lavish and certainly statement bed. It was one of those moments, she told herself, that needed nailing into the memory, as representing the proof that joy, however elusive and occasional, was something that both existed and could be known.
——
That party had been three years ago. They had followed it the subsequent year with a party at Gaby’s house to celebrate all four of them turning forty-five. Claire gave Beth a Virginia Overton weathervane, which she had bought from the White Cube gallery, and which featured a metal girl sitting nonchalantly above the indicators of the four poles. Beth had it installed on the brick chimney stack at Wilkes Street, and almost at once, pigeons and seagulls began to colonize it. Then the two of them went to Venice, for the Biennale, to celebrate, and on their return hired a garden designer to make something usable out of the yard behind the house. This coincided with Beth being made a full professor, in the same month that she was offered a lucrative part-time consultancy as a business psychologist to a major airline, as well as becoming a spokeswoman for the subject across the media. She was suddenly, and alluringly, in demand.
‘Professor Mundy,’ Claire would say, laughing, ‘isn’t exactly who I signed up to live with.’
And there was, every time she said it, just the slightest tension in the air; nothing menacing, nothing that needed to be drawn down into a discussion, but there, like the smallest twig in the world tapping on the window. Just once or twice. Lightly.
——
Claire was twelve years younger than Beth. She had been a student of a legal colleague of Beth’s during Beth’s first academic job, and an introduction hadn’t been hard to manage. It was Claire’s first major love affair, and the first time that Beth had known that this was in a different league from anything she had been involved in before.
‘I think you should leave right now, as a penniless academic can’t offer you more than three dreary rooms in east London.’ She had said this to Claire, after their first heady full weekend together, and they had both known that she didn’t mean a word of it. When Claire was twenty-two, and Beth was thirty-four, Claire moved into the flat above Old Spitalfields Market, revealing a considerable aptitude on the sewing machine. They painted the walls, and built bookshelves out of planks and columns of bricks, and at weekends helped out in the back room of the local gay and lesbian bookshop, unpacking stock and facilitating meetings and making coffee. It was a period when everything seemed to be unrolling in front of them, and the future, being only hinted at, at best, shone with possibilities.
Claire passed all Beth’s secret tests. Claire loved Beth’s closest friends. She was interested in food, and art-house movies, and Third World music, and radical cultural movements and interior decor. At Beth’s suggestion, she took a sauce-making course at their local catering college, cut her exuberant hair shorter and took to painting her nails. Also at Beth’s suggestion, she took the plunge of abandoning the law to set up her own business with a friend, Beth nobly guaranteeing the loan taken out for the start-up costs against the value of the Shoreditch flat, which was in both their names even though Beth had paid the lion’s share of the deposit. Claire was very grateful for Beth’s generosity. She said so often, and demonstrated her gratitude too, in ways that made Beth very slightly uncomfortable because of their servitude. Claire wanted, she often said in the first eight or ten years together, to get married. She wanted Beth to marry her. She wanted Beth to take her father’s mother’s old brilliant-cut diamond ring out of the jewellery box where she knew it was kept, and slide it onto Claire’s wedding finger in front of a registrar in a register office. But Beth, conditioned by who knew what ghosts and circumstances from her past, did not believe in marriage as an institution. She said, frequently, that she gave evidence of her commitment to Claire, and Claire alone, a hundred times a day. There was no moving her. And after the dust had literally settled in Wilkes Street, Claire discovered that the diamond ring was missing from Beth’s jewellery box, and when she confronted Beth about it, Beth didn’t even look up from her iPad.
‘Oh, that,’ she said, ‘that went towards doing up our bathroom. I asked Dad and he said good use for it, so I sold it. They were good stones, but the cut was so old-fashioned that they weren’t worth all that much. I think they paid for the shower. Next time you’re having a shower you can say thank you, Granny, for the diamonds.’
Claire took to having showers in the guest bathroom. Unless Beth’s father was staying, the guest bathroom was almost unused and, having been made out of a second-floor bedroom, had a window looking east towards Brick Lane and th
e tall, silvery minaret of the mosque on the corner of Fournier Street. If you were at the back of the house up there, at certain times of day, you could hear the call to prayer. The mosque, Beth said, had been a Methodist chapel and a Jewish synagogue and a Huguenot church, in its time. The minaret had caused a lot of controversy, being so tall and perforated that it resembled – said some locals – a series of drums from a washing machine. Claire, whose upbringing outside Tiverton had suggested that almost all innovation was by its very nature suspect, was secretly charmed by it.
But then, life in Wilkes Street was generally very charming. The graceful proportions of the house, as well as the extravagance of space it afforded, were a joy to come home to. Claire’s business was flourishing and the calibre of clients she was attracting was not only impressive, but international. And Beth – well, Beth was becoming something of a superstar for her thinking, and now her hugely successful books, on the way companies and business life were going to change over the coming decade. Her buzzwords were ‘innovation’ and ‘energy’. Her theories about the inescapable march of organizations towards putting the needs of their employees at the centre of their business – in her words, making work fit for humans, not the other way about as was traditionally the case – were becoming increasingly heard and acted upon. In the first interview she gave after she was made consultant to the airline, she declared that the company would have to change its priorities to continue to excel, putting its workforce before its fleet of planes. She wrote three books in three years – Energy Means Excellence, Teamwork – Why We Are Better Together and Power to the People – and all of them won prizes. Two years after Wilkes Street was finished, Beth flew to New York to collect a substantial award as one of the top twenty published strategic business thinkers in the world that year. Claire did not accompany her – they had discussed the idea, and agreed on her staying behind – but organized, through the Internet, for a sheaf of long-stemmed white roses to be waiting in her hotel room. When Beth got back, she went straight to her study and downloaded her publisher’s offer for her fourth book, on the topic of how to attract and – even more crucially – keep the best employees. It was to be called Hand in Glove: The Right People in the Right Places, and would be launched with a series of articles in the financial press, the first of which was to be entitled ‘Mad About the Mission’. Claire wondered if Beth would even take her coat off before she started writing. Her cabin bag from the journey, still bearing its fluorescent priority tags, stood unpacked in the hallway where the taxi driver had left it. Claire walked past it, swiping her jacket off the hook as she went by, and let herself out through the front door, pulling it quietly closed behind her and hearing the lock click into place, smooth and definite.
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