Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Laurence said, with a generosity which I should’ve appreciated more. ‘It’s a real chance to show what you can do. Beauman needs so much work – it’s a hell of a job, and beyond the portals of Ransome Harber no one will know, but in the company your stock could skyrocket. Besides, tactful handling of impossible bastards seems to be your forte. You did well with Todd Jarman.’

  Unaccountably, I was annoyed. ‘You can’t possibly compare Todd with Jerry Beauman! Anyway, I – I wasn’t tactful. We . . .’ We struck sparks off each other?

  In Alistair’s office, my worst fears were realised. (It’s funny how often worst fears are realised – and not just in this book. You never read of worst fears not being realised, do you? You’d think we’d learn from experience, and tone down our fears – but then perhaps the unpleasant future would just creep up on us unawares, which could be far nastier.)

  ‘Sit down,’ Alistair said with an expansive smile. It reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s crocodile – it was smug, it was laid back, and it said: You’re dinner.

  I sat.

  Alistair launched into his spiel about the publisher’s mission, winding down when he inferred, possibly from my expression, that I’d heard it before. Then came the doom-laden words.

  ‘I’ve got a wonderful opportunity for you.’

  Later that same evening . . .

  The three musketeers were sitting in a nearby wine bar with a bottle of celebratory champagne, though I for one was not at all sure what we were celebrating. Cal had gone straight home due to family commitments and Laurence had declined to join us. ‘We’re celebrating your freedom, not Cookie’s enslavement,’ Lin had claimed.

  ‘Pah!’ said Laurence, or something that sounded like that. Which was interesting, because I couldn’t recall ever hearing anyone say ‘Pah!’ before; it’s the kind of thing people said in novels of the mid-twentieth century, when writers weren’t allowed to go for anything stronger. Possibly Laurence was more camp than he pretended. ‘Sorry – thanks for the invite – but “Pah!” just the same. What’s the point of being one of the lads when you’re categorised solely by what you do in bed?’

  ‘Ladettes,’ said Georgie. And, as he walked away: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To start a collection of Princess Di teacups!’

  So it was just the three of us, and the champagne. Lin had called in her latest emergency babysitter, the teenage daughter of a neighbour who was anxious to earn some extra cash. ‘How tough is she?’ Georgie had inquired doubtfully.

  ‘Well, she’s got multiple lip-piercings, a nasal stud, and her hair dyed black with purple streaks, so she looks tough enough,’ Lin said, not pretending to misunderstand.

  ‘Does she wear vomit-proof clothing?’ I asked, adding, delicately: ‘You told us about Meredith’s little problem . . .’

  ‘Oh – yes. She wears leather. At least, fake leather. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll think she’s cool. Though they were really taken with you two . . .’

  ‘Kids always appreciate natural authority,’ Georgie declared airily.

  We drank to my new role as Jerry Beauman’s editor, dissuaded Lin from phoning home in a panic (more worst fears could’ve been realised there), and fished for other things to drink to.

  ‘There’s always the wishes,’ Lin said. ‘I’ve had a date, even if it wasn’t a big success, and Cookie’s become a sex goddess.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Georgie, forestalling my protest. ‘We’ve still got to find a suitable event where she can shine in all her goddessly glory. The Christmas party’s way too far off. It may have to be a book launch.’

  ‘Launches aren’t really sex-goddess territory,’ I said hastily. I could see a certain gleam in Georgie’s eye which was making me nervous. Something told me another transformation scene could be in the offing, and I wasn’t sure my credit card could stand it. ‘How about you? Met any good millionaires lately?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of.’ Georgie looked tragic. ‘I’m supposed to be going out with a glamorous doctor at the weekend. The Harley Street kind. He sounds glamorous by e-mail, anyway. He’s taking me to the opera.’

  ‘Why’re you looking so gloomy about it?’ Lin asked. ‘I should think that would be wonderful. Andy took me to Glyndebourne once: The Marriage of Figaro. It was out of this world. Is this Glyndebourne?’

  ‘Covent Garden.’

  ‘You do fall on your feet,’ I said, a little enviously. ‘What’s the opera?’

  Georgie was still looking tragic. ‘Wagner.’

  ‘Oh.’ I thought I understood her gloom. ‘Can be heavy going.’ Years ago, I had attempted to sit through a video of the Ring Cycle, in order to impress an operatically minded young man with my musical knowledge. I had tried to absorb it piecemeal, over several days, frequently leaving the room to make coffee and fortifying myself with a book on the side, but it had still been hard work and very unrewarding. The young man had preferred a fan of Bananarama. Now, all I could remember of the production, bar its length, was the opulent black diva who had been singing Frigga – a particularly unlikely Nordic goddess. ‘Which Wagner?’

  ‘Lohengrin,’ said Georgie. ‘Slow and grim.’

  ‘That’s not too long, is it?’ I said, hearteningly.

  ‘About four hours,’ Georgie responded. Her gloom was unalleviated.

  ‘Could be worse. The Ring goes on practically forever.’

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ Lin insisted. ‘Opera’s amazing, isn’t it? You must have been to lots when you were in Italy. Italy’s the home of opera. The Italians are all mad about it.’

  ‘No,’ Georgie said baldly. ‘They ain’t. Italy may be the home of Rossini and Puccini and other composers ending in –ini, but most Italians don’t give a damn. There’s a small clique at La Scala who reminisce about Callas and throw tomatoes at singers they don’t like; everyone else just goes for the party. Opening night there is the biggest social event of the season. It’s all about dressing up like a Christmas tree and being photographed in a whirl of celebs; no one listens to the music.’

  ‘I should’ve thought that would be your scene,’ I said. ‘I mean the dressing up and the celebs.’

  ‘Only when I’m part of it. During my marriage, I wasn’t. We went once, after – after things started to go wrong with me and Franco.’ A quick smile chased the shadow from her face. ‘It was something called La Vestale – unbelievably dreary. Vestal Virgins, Ancient Rome, large men in togas. I don’t think the toga does anything for anyone; it just makes you look as if you’re wearing your bath towel. And there weren’t any hit songs. I took a small torch and a book.’

  ‘How did you get away with that?’ Lin asked.

  ‘We were in a box. I sat at the back.’

  ‘Maybe your doctor will get you a box,’ I said.

  ‘Bit iffy,’ said Georgie. ‘Too secluded. He might try to make a pass at me in the sex scenes.’

  ‘Sex scenes?’ Lin and I stared. ‘In Wagner?’

  And: ‘What’s this doctor’s name, anyway?’ I inquired.

  His name, apparently, was Neville Fancot. It didn’t sound promising, but when they met in the foyer, locating each other by mobile phone and a series of passwords, Georgie found herself thinking with surprise that he looked presentable, even attractive. Her previous experiences had not engendered optimism, and she checked hastily to see if his eyes were too close together or there were signs of a latent mother-complex. In fact, he had a thin, rather brown face with folded lines in his cheeks that unfolded when he smiled and a respectable distance between his eyes. His hair was brown-going-grey (or possibly, Georgie speculated, grey-going-brown), his voice plummy, with an upper-class accent that belonged more to British films of the forties and fifties than the present day. His suit bore the hallmarks of Savile Row tailoring, with a carnation in the buttonhole for recognition purposes. (Georgie’s suggestion: ‘Let’s say it with clichés.’) After considerable research, Georgie had abandoned any idea of full evening dress and wore h
er slinky black skirt and a top with the inevitable plunge neckline, draped in a pashmina for subtlety. If Dr Fancot was impressed, he managed not to show it.

  ‘I’ve arranged dinner in the restaurant in the intervals,’ he explained. ‘I think we should go and order now.’

  ‘So what’s someone like you doing using the classifieds?’ Georgie inquired while they awaited the maître d’, hiding blunt interrogation behind a dazzling smile. At least, she hoped he was dazzled. ‘You don’t look the type.’ If there was a type – after her previous dates she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Nor do you.’

  ‘The ad says it all.’ Georgie grimaced. ‘I need a millionaire in my life. Do you have a cardiac condition?’

  ‘’Fraid not. I’m forty-eight, pretty comfortably off, and my back plays up from time to time, especially after too much tennis. Will that do?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Georgie said cautiously.

  The maître d’ materialised to take their orders: both went for the smoked salmon, followed by rare steak. ‘Couldn’t you order something with more cholesterol?’ Georgie demanded.

  Neville started, then grinned. ‘Sorry. If we have coffee afterwards, I’ll eat all the chocolate mints.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ she resumed, over champagne at the bar. ‘Why the classifieds? Are you married?’

  ‘Divorced. The usual story: I have a busy life, limited time for socialising, I wanted to meet someone outside my everyday circle. Not for any sinister reasons, just for the fun of it. Your ad made me laugh.’

  ‘It wasn’t a joke,’ Georgie said darkly.

  ‘Well, I may not be rich enough, but at least let me give you a good time this evening.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Unfortunate choice of words. I mean—’

  ‘You call Wagner a good time?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve never done Wagner before. I’ve always played safe with Verdi and Mozart. I was hoping all this would impress you. Are you keen on opera?’

  ‘I lived in Italy for years,’ Georgie said.

  ‘So you’re an expert.’

  ‘So I know nothing about it.’ She began to explain the popular misconception about Italians and opera.

  ‘Then this is a first for both of us,’ he said bracingly.

  He’s nice, she thought, determined to be positive. Probably a good doctor. Quietly competent, reassuring, not too charming. She had a hazy idea doctors shouldn’t be charming: there was something deeply suspect about anyone in a position of trust exuding even the subtlest form of sex appeal. Besides, Georgie liked to be the one with the charm. It gave her an edge – yet at the same time it was a quality she despised, since it came to her so easily, and she used it so lightly, and it meant so little. I read in an old Margery Allingham that charm is ‘the ability to make people think you like them’, which sums it up nicely. Georgie – who is only superficially superficial – had enough discernment to place little value on hers, even though she would exercise it without scruple.

  A bell summoned them, and they polished off their champagne and headed for the auditorium.

  Afterwards, Georgie said she was ready for what she called the Herrenvolk bit, in which some king or other pushed the theme of Germany for the Germans. I’d rung an opera buff the previous day who looked Lohengrin up in Grove, so I’d been able to inform her that the writer George Eliot had described the music as resembling ‘the wind whistling through the keyholes in a cathedral’. But Georgie paid little attention to the lack of good tunes. Even before the (relatively brief) Nazi propaganda was over, it dawned on her that the militant monarch was dressed exactly like Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace. The villain appeared, in a vast black cloak which swirled as he strode across the stage – though curiously, several of the characters failed to detect his villainy, despite that giveaway cloak. Then came the heroine, in white with earphones. (‘It was just like Star Wars,’ Georgie assured us on Monday, ‘only the music wasn’t as good.’) A red-haired villainess added spice, someone called Waltraud singing Ortrud, or possibly vice versa. Lohengrin, the hero knight, arrived floating on a swan, causing Georgie to wonder if they’d switched to the ballet by mistake. He was operatically fat – about .4 on the Pavarotti scale – which was disappointing, since the rest of the cast were of normal proportions. If he had been covered in armour he might have passed for merely hefty, but the costume designer had put him in a sort of flowing tunic, full-length, which made him look like a pregnant woman in eveningwear. He and the heroine married, on condition that she never asked him his real name, so of course you knew she would. After a long wedding-night scene she put the fatal question (‘If he’d given her an orgasm she’d have gone to sleep perfectly happy’: Georgie). He revealed that he was Lohengrin, son of Parsifal (see prequel), and now she had broken her promise he would have to return to the otherworldly Eden where he lived forever under the ’fluence of the Holy Grail. The swan reappeared, and turned into the heroine’s long-lost brother, a character so unimportant the audience had forgotten all about him. The villain had bitten the dust in a skirmish with light sabres some scenes earlier and Lohengrin departed, leaving the heroine to collapse in a swoon or die of a broken heart, depending on interpretation and her state of cardiac health. In the stalls, Georgie found herself applauding with the rest.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ she told Neville, to her own surprise. ‘Star Wars and Indiana Jones and everything. I loved it.’

  During the intervals, they had sprinted up to the restaurant and wolfed down their dinner with undignified haste. ‘I should have booked somewhere afterwards,’ Neville said. ‘But Wagner goes on so long it would have been much too late.’

  They went to a wine bar for more champagne and Georgie allowed him to drive her home, feeling fairly confident he was neither stalker nor axe-murderer. He kissed her on the cheek by way of goodnight and didn’t suggest another meeting. Damn, Georgie thought.

  If Georgie’s Saturday was a qualified success, mine was definitely a failure. My sister Sophie had rung on Friday, announcing her intention of coming up to London for a day’s shopping and appropriating my company on her usual careless assumption that I could have nothing better to do. I didn’t, which didn’t make me feel any happier about it. I love Sophie: as big sisters go, she has been kind, protective, not unduly bossy and only intermittently patronising. But she has also, always, been the pretty one. She has the sort of naturally slim figure that ignores calories – quick metabolism or some other injustice of Nature – and even after two children her waistline has hardly thickened. Her face is heart-shaped, her hair a glossy bob, straighter than mine and blow-dried into sleekness. That weekend she arrived wearing the kind of trousers that show off slender thighs, her casual tan enhanced by a pink top with judicious gaps. Somehow, even with my new image and hour-glass proportions, she managed to make me feel like a lump. A short lump. She’s only an inch or two taller than me, but it feels like a yard.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she greeted me, accusingly. ‘Looks good, but be careful you don’t get anorexia. I had a friend years ago, desperate to lose a stone. She tried every diet going and ended up living off black coffee and pickled walnuts. She got addicted to them – couldn’t stop – wound up in hospital weighing the same as an eight-year-old child. And it wasn’t like she was ever really fat. If you ask me, we shouldn’t try to conform to fashion: it’s dangerous. Much better to just go with whatever Nature intended.’

  Easy to say, when Nature intended you to be a size 10.

  And a bit later, suspiciously: ‘You’ve got an awful lot of pickles in that cupboard. Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Nigel liked them,’ I said.

  ‘Well, at least you’re rid of him; that’s one good thing. Sorry, darling, but he was awful. All that phoney left ideology went out with the seventies. Nobody goes in for that stuff any more.’

  ‘It wasn’t phoney,’ I said defensively. ‘Anyway, he didn’t want to conform to political fashion.’

  ‘Wha
t? Oh – clever little sis. But he did conform: you know he did. There’s no one as conventional as an extremist.’

  And the annoying thing about that, I reflected, was that it was probably true.

  At school, Sophie had been very bright in an idle, don’t-give-a-damn way in which minimum effort produced maximum results. But by the time she got to university (Bristol), indolence or indifference began to take hold. She flunked her degree and instead landed a job on a Paris-based fashion magazine, where she shacked up with a photographer some ten years older and enjoyed what seemed to me, then still a child, a wildly glamorous lifestyle. When I was thirteen she invited me to visit, but my parents wouldn’t allow it, so I knew she had to be having fun, moving in a world of unimaginable glitz and decadence. (Though of course I imagined a good deal, undoubtedly exaggerating in a mist of envy and awe.) At seventeen, I was just about to leave on the longed-for trip when the relationship foundered and Sophie returned home. She didn’t stay long, going to see a friend in New York and falling on her feet as usual with another magazine job and an offered flat-share in a brownstone. While she was there she met an English banker based in Wall Street – the kind with looks and money, an apartment in the Village, a house in the Hamptons. In due course she came back to England with a huge diamond and a date for the wedding. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my embarrassment and horror when, co-opted as chief bridesmaid, I waddled up the aisle behind her in stilettos and lilac chiffon, feeling like something that maiden aunts put on top of a loo roll. Relocated back to London, Gareth retired from banking at thirty-five, bought a garden centre near Oxford, and moved to an idyllic country house from which to run his idyllic country business. Needless to say, he made money. Sophie junked the world of magazines, had children and a maid, and frequently declared, with a certain smugness, that she was turning into a vegetable.

  ‘Why London?’ I asked, when the subject of Nigel had been brushed under the carpet. Sophie always said the boutiques in Oxford were second to none.

  ‘I felt like a change. Anyway, I thought I might as well give you a bell. It’s been a while.’