Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘No, it’s okay.’

  ‘We want a word in private,’ Sean said. ‘If you don’t mind . . .’

  Georgie ignored him, glancing at Lin, who nodded reluctantly. We retreated to the kitchen, where Meredith said: ‘Bugger. I was winning that game. I know what you’ll say when we go back. You’ll say we’ve forgotten where we were, so we can’t go on playing.’

  ‘Probably,’ Georgie replied. ‘And don’t say bugger.’

  ‘Why not? You say it.’

  ‘I’m grown up. I’m allowed.’

  ‘How old do I have to be to say bugger?’

  ‘Eighteen. On your eighteenth birthday you can say it all you like. Bugger bugger bugger bugger. Until then, you have to say bother instead.’

  ‘Bother!’ Meredith echoed scornfully.

  ‘How do you get on with Sean?’ I asked. I noticed he hadn’t even greeted her.

  Meredith shrugged bony shoulders. ‘He doesn’t like me. Mummy says it isn’t because I’m me, it’s because of Daddy. She left Sean to live with him, so he doesn’t like me. I think that’s stupid. I wasn’t even born then.’

  ‘Some people react that way,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe I could start eating some ice cream?’

  ‘No.’

  Sean went about half an hour later, leaving Lin strained and anxious. ‘He said Ivor could’ve abused the twins,’ she complained. ‘I told him, Ivor’s thing was little girls. There’s nothing in his record about boys. Sean said a paedophile is into any kind of child, which is totally wrong but I couldn’t make him listen. He came over all paternal and protective – all very well, only he doesn’t contribute very much as a father under normal circumstances. It’s like . . . he’s using this as an excuse to be macho.’

  Lin wasn’t usually so critical – or so perceptive.

  ‘Could well be,’ Georgie said. ‘Still, what harm does it do? You’re not worried about him beating up Ivor, are you? I mean . . . would it matter if he did?’

  ‘No. I’m just . . . worried. Generally.’ She tried for a smile that didn’t come off.

  ‘That’s a natural reaction,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure the worst is over now.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Lin.

  Chapter 11

  If I or she should chance to be

  Involved in this affair,

  He trusts to you to set them free

  Exactly as we were.

  It seemed to me that you had been

  (Before she had this fit)

  An obstacle, that came between

  Him, and ourselves, and it.

  Don’t let him know she liked them best,

  For this must ever be

  A secret, kept from all the rest,

  Between yourself and me.

  LEWIS CARROLL: She’s All My Fancy Painted Him

  The next week started badly. Cal was back from holiday, not looking particularly rested but rather grimly resolved. Holidays are difficult with a disabled child: they’d gone to a hotel in the West Country which they’d visited before, where the staff understood Jamie’s needs. There were wheelchair ramps everywhere, a shallow pool where he could splash around supported by his parents, and an adjacent farm with a children’s area where he liked to stroke the animals. And for Allan there was a much deeper pool, a beach a short drive away, tennis and golf. Cal said with some pride that he was the new Tiger Woods and could even beat his dad. But it was clear Georgie had been on his mind. He’d obviously missed the scene in Lyndhall Road that night, since he didn’t mention it, and Cal wasn’t the sort to conceal what he knew, but he went into Georgie’s office early on, asking her if they could go for a drink later and talk.

  ‘Preferably without having a row.’

  Georgie said: ‘Okay,’ but she didn’t feel optimistic.

  ‘This isn’t working,’ he said when they met after six. ‘We have to sort it out – stop arguing – stop hurting each other. After all, we’re in the same office.’

  ‘Sort it out how?’ said Georgie.

  He avoided her eye, fiddled with a pen, spinning it between restless fingers. When he spoke, the sentences came out in short bursts, with silences in between. ‘I think we need to accept that it’s over. We’re not going to be able to fix it. You want . . . more than I can give. The children need me, Christy needs me. I can’t walk away from that. Things may never change. Allan will grow up, but Jamie – Jamie will always have to have care. I can’t be there for you, not the way you want. You deserve so much more.’

  ‘You said you loved me,’ Georgie said numbly. ‘You said I was part of you, part of your life. You said you’d always be there for me.’

  ‘I’ll try. As much as I can. We’ll be friends . . .’

  ‘We’ve been lovers.’ Georgie’s voice was bleak. ‘How can we be friends?’

  ‘Of course we can. We are friends, best friends. That won’t change. It may take a little time, but . . .’

  ‘One day we’ll go out for a drink – reminisce – compare notes on our new loves? Is that it? Everything we felt – everything we were – will just be a comfortable memory?’

  Cal looked far from comfortable. ‘No. More than that.’

  ‘More than comfortable – less than passionate?’ She stopped. ‘Sorry. There’s no point in talking, is there? You’ve made up your mind.’

  He didn’t answer. The pauses between them stretched out, becoming yawning gulfs of non-communication which even Georgie could not bridge. Georgie the articulate, the professional communicator.

  Eventually they said goodnight, and she walked away, feeling that awful emptiness inside when your heart has gone out of you, and your soul has gone out of you, and there’s nothing left, and nothing weighs as heavy as lead. Cal had offered to get her a cab, but she said no. The nights were getting cooler now, and she shivered in her light jacket, but the discomfort didn’t matter. She thought: I had love in my life, the deep thing, the true thing, and now it’s gone, and it will never come again. Never again. She’d always believed that somehow they would make it work, their love would make it work, but he’d given up trying. Maybe if she’d been a better person, more patient, more unselfish, less demanding . . . But I’m me, she told herself, in realisation, in revelation. I can’t change that. And it was me he loved – wasn’t it?

  She crossed a road, nearly walking under a bus, not deliberately, but because she wasn’t paying attention. The bus creaked to a halt while the driver honked his horn. Georgie glanced round vaguely and waved, knowing how maddening that is, but she didn’t enjoy it the way she used to. For the first time she understood how people could want to kill themselves, because the vacuum inside drained all colour and joy out of the world, and life was no longer worth the struggle. She had dealt with Franco’s alcoholism, the disintegration of her marriage, all the failure and futility of human existence – she’d never looked back, never looked down, lived for the present, kept her eyes on the future. She’d been brave and hopeful and naturally buoyant, with the bounce-back quotient of a large rubber ball. But someone had let the air out, and the bounce was gone, and there was nothing left to hope for any more.

  Back at home she thought about crying, because crying was what you did at these times, it was supposed to heal you; but she was too empty for tears. She sat on the sofa all night, motionless and awkward, with the emptiness going round and round inside her head. Only when the dawn came did she stumble to her bed and sleep at last, and sleep and sleep, oblivious to the alarm that called her to go to work.

  Cal got in on time, but I knew as soon as I saw him that things hadn’t gone well. He didn’t even smile at me, not out of rudeness, but because he seemed to have forgotten how. ‘’Lo, Cookie,’ he said in passing, and that was that. No flirty remarks, no mischief-grin. This wasn’t the Ice Age: he had the preoccupied look of a senior staff officer in a war movie, overseeing the downfall of Norway from a backroom, knowing there was nothing he could do. He went to immerse himself in work and was barely seen all day.<
br />
  Georgie showed up at lunchtime, pleading an upset stomach.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ Alistair said, giving her an automatic once-over. A more kindly, compassionate boss (if there are any) would’ve suggested she went home early, but he didn’t. ‘We’ve got the preliminary meeting at three about the PR for Jerry Beauman. Hope it hasn’t slipped your mind.’

  ‘No,’ said Georgie. ‘I’ve prepared some suggestions.’

  ‘Good. At three then, my office. Cookie, you’re coming too.’

  I failed to radiate energy and enthusiasm, but he didn’t notice. ‘Why is it,’ I asked the world at large, and Georgie in particular, ‘that publishers spend a fortune promoting writers who are already hugely successful, and practically zilch on the ones who really need it?’

  ‘You know the answer,’ Georgie said wearily. ‘Egotistical literary stars always demand a colossal publicity budget, regardless of whether or not it’s really necessary. It’s a question of vanity. And the sales justify it, even if they would’ve done anyway, so the Accounts Department can accept it. Lesser lights have to sell a certain number of books without backup before anyone thinks they’re worth the outlay. So unless they’re picked up by a magazine or newspaper, they haven’t a chance.’

  Cynicism without humour wasn’t her style, and it worried me. To divert her, I filled her in on the info I’d received from Andy Pearmain about Beauman’s nefarious financial dealings. She showed a little interest, but not much. Lin showed none at all.

  ‘Dryden’s the company which sold the land to the developers who are building Acme City,’ I explained, hoping to elicit a brief spark of curiosity. ‘Andy said they got about twenty million – I think I remember Jerry mentioning a similar figure. Apparently, all that was there originally was a group of derelict warehouses in the jewellery quarter. I didn’t know Birmingham had a jewellery quarter – I thought jewellers hung out in places like Hatton Garden, all glamorous and expensive – but I was wrong. Anyway, the area was pretty run down. Andy said it used to belong to a family business, Bryan Fortescue, but they sold it at a knockdown price to a company based in Switzerland, who sold it to Dryden. Now, this is where it gets really interesting.’ Georgie looked automatically attentive, Lin lacklustre. ‘Jerry took this call from Sir Harold Chorley, right? And it sounded as though he was being put through the wringer. Well, Sir Harold is on the board at Bryan Fortescue – and so’s Jerry. And the Swiss company who bought the warehouses is a one-man show: Pierre Wahid. That was the name of the caller Jerry was talking to the first time I overheard him. From the sound of things, they were partners in the deal. Which seems to mean that Jerry sold a clutch of tumbledown buildings to himself on the cheap, and then sold them on – to Dryden – at a profit of half a mil each for him and his chum Wahid. All very underhand and unethical.’

  ‘So he’s a crook,’ Lin said. ‘We knew that anyway.’

  ‘Is it actually illegal,’ Georgie wondered, ‘or just sneaky?’

  ‘According to Andy, it’s fraud,’ I said. ‘Like insider trading. He abused his position on the board at Bryan Fortescue.’

  ‘And he’s got half a million quid tucked under the bath in Berkeley Square,’ Georgie said, a note of wistfulness creeping into her voice. But it was faint. She really wasn’t herself.

  ‘Why can’t he use it?’ Lin asked. ‘Launder it or something.’

  ‘That’s the catch. Acme City is a high-profile project – that’s why attention’s focused on Dryden and Jerry’s deal – and people at Bryan Fortescue are starting to take notice. They could hardly fail to see that this bloody great shopping mall’s going up on their land and they didn’t make any money out of it. Vid. Sir Harold Chorley. Wahid is the dodgy link in the chain; Jerry must’ve engineered the sale to him, and they’ve begun to suspect a connection. So Jerry has to be very careful that his dirty money can’t be traced. It’s too large a sum for a quick spending spree or to slip in an account somewhere.’

  ‘So he’s stuck with it,’ Georgie said. ‘How awkward. To be stuck with half a million quid.’ The wistful note had intensified; she was paying attention now.

  ‘What are we supposed to do about it?’ Lin said tepidly.

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Appropriate it,’ said Georgie. ‘Ill-gotten gains belong to anyone who can get their mitts on them.’

  ‘Who made that rule?’ I demanded.

  ‘Appropriate?’ Lin said. ‘You mean steal.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so literal,’ said Georgie. ‘Anyhow, we could . . . we could give some of it to charity. After I’ve paid my credit-card bill.’

  ‘It’s wrong,’ said Lin, but without her usual vehemence. ‘You know it is.’ Her moral fibre – like her nerves – was evidently worn to the consistency of a rubber band. One big twang and it could snap. ‘Shouldn’t we pass the information on to the police?’

  There was an unreceptive silence.

  ‘Would they listen?’ said Georgie with a trace of contempt. She’d been a student in the seventies, and sometimes it showed. ‘We don’t know any of this for sure. It’s all hearsay and surmise, as they say in court.’

  ‘Do they?’ I murmured.

  ‘If we tell them the money’s under the bath, and there’s nothing there but plumbing, we’re going to look prize idiots. Whatever we decide to do, we can’t do it until we’ve located the loot.’ I detected fiendish subtlety here. I was quite sure Georgie had no intention of calling in the cops. ‘I think I need to work more closely with Jerry Beauman on the PR campaign. Meetings at his flat: that sort of thing.’ She nodded to Lin. ‘You’re my assistant. You’ll have to come with me.’

  I opened my mouth to say something discouraging – and shut it again. With the end of her affair with Cal Georgie needed something to think about, something to plan, a fantasy to fill the space in her head, if not in her life. I’d hoped to intrigue her, hadn’t I? And I’d succeeded. As for Lin, at least being drawn into Georgie’s schemes would offer her a slight distraction from chronic guilt, pain and anxiety. Any distraction was better than none.

  ‘I’m not crawling around in Jerry Beauman’s bathroom sounding the Jacuzzi for secret passages,’ she was saying with more animation than she had yet shown. ‘What if someone came in?’

  ‘Then you can be the lookout,’ Georgie said.

  ‘You’ve got to get there first,’ I reminded them. ‘The PR meeting’s in half an hour.’ I looked at Georgie. ‘Have you got your spiel prepared?’

  ‘Don’t need to prepare,’ said Georgie. ‘I can spiel off the cuff. You should know that by now. All I have to do is ring Beauman myself, tell him what a big star he is, and say I want to discuss extensive publicity. He’ll jump at it.’

  ‘I got the impression Alistair wanted all discussions filtered through him,’ I said. Presumably to stop things getting out of hand and over budget. ‘He won’t want you doing that.’

  ‘He hasn’t told me so, has he?’ Georgie said. ‘Which is why I’m going to do it now – before he does.’

  Jerry was unavailable that week but was only too eager for a meeting the week after. As predicted, Alistair greeted this news with marked disapprobation. ‘Georgie, what were you thinking of? The plan was to sort out our ideas this afternoon, sketch out the campaign, and present him with a fait accompli. The last thing we want is writers’ input in their own PR – that’s always been a house rule.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . this is Jerry Beauman,’ Georgie said innocently. ‘He must be our biggest star. I thought he was a special case.’

  ‘Our biggest star is that American chap what’s-his-name who, thank God, never visits this country at all. Jerry just thinks he’s our biggest star. All right, all right, he’s bloody important, a sizeable bite of our annual sales. All the more reason to keep him out of our PR plans. He’ll want us to go mad with stunts and tours and Lord knows what. These writers are all the same. Carry on like rock stars – and really, nobody gives a damn about them, least of all the
people who buy their books.’

  ‘They’ll give a damn about Jerry, won’t they?’ I said cautiously. ‘What with his prison record and so on. You said we should be capitalising on that.’

  ‘I said, I said . . . Yes, of course we should.’ Alistair charged on, unfazed by his own inconsistencies. ‘But we don’t want to drag him into it – not till we absolutely have to. He can pay for his own launch party – Bolly and toad-in-the-hole, it always is – sign when he’s told to sign, smile for the cameras, though not too much, his readers’ stomachs may not be that strong. Point is, to keep him under control. Invite him in on the ground floor and before you know where you are he’ll have a beachhead in the attics.’

  Quite a metaphor, I thought, mildly stunned.

  Georgie was looking contrite. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said.

  ‘You’d better,’ said Alistair.

  The little fracas was the only incident to enliven a week that badly needed enlivening. We weren’t spending every evening at Lin’s any more, but I was round the night Andy called back, and once again, I answered the phone. (I suspected that when alone Lin had been leaving the machine on full-time to screen out most callers.) I couldn’t tell him the truth, Lin still refused to talk to him, and he was sunnily planning a trip to London to give Ivor the once-over and send his fiancée on a designer shopping spree. ‘I was thinking of Saturday week,’ he said. ‘Lin may’ve forgotten, but the wedding’s next month and there’s still a hell of a lot to do. She is well now, isn’t she?’

  ‘Fine,’ I assured him, while Lin shook her head in frantic denial. ‘Absolutely fine. She’s . . . out tonight, that’s all. I’m sure she’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Time she got her mobile fixed. I can never get through.’

  Lin’s mobile had run out of credit nearly a fortnight earlier and she said she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

  ‘She – she might be out of range,’ I floundered. ‘On the Underground . . . or in some place really noisy where she can’t hear it ring.’