“I’m all for that, give us some o’ that,” proclaimed a voice.
“And that might be a philosophical answer, after a fashion, because it’s putting forward a theory, but the young hothead can still ask why should we promote the general happiness. . . .”
“A curse on his head, down with him, down with him!”
“No, not down with him, not if you’re still thinking philosophically. The point I’m trying to make is that if you keep asking ‘Why?,’ you’ll always just come up against someone saying ‘Because I say so,’ and that’s no kind of an answer. What it means is that it benefits certain people for you to believe it. It’s all like, it’s like . . .”
“Fashion,” I said, becoming bored with listening.
“Aye, like fashion. Go on, Katie.”
“Well, I’m only a girlie and everything, among you wise men, but I do think that fashion is like that. Some things are mysteriously felt to be better than other things: long skirts or short skirts . . .”
“I’m all for the short skirts meself,” leered a brown tooth.
“Or black or gray, or white, and sometimes there are reasons given—black’s so practical, white looks good with a tan—but ultimately it’s just because someone says so, and they say so because they want you to buy things that you don’t really need. Thank God.”
“Good contribution, Katie. And this is where my man Nietzsche comes in. He’s the only one to say that all the stuff about morality is just talk, just lies. And when you see that, you can be liberated. Suddenly you’re free from the shackles. And that’s when you can start to make your own laws, become your own legislator. So with fashion, instead of looking at the magazines and wearing what you’re told to wear, you invent your own costume, create your own wardrobe—”
“God save us from tie-dye,” I said in an aside to the baby.
“In fact, you know, I’m sure, Nietzsche talks about fashion somewhere. Would you just hold this a minute while I look it up?”
Jonah held out to me a can of Carlsberg Special Brew, also known as Kilburn Perrier. I took it from him without thinking, and he reached down into a plastic carrier bag full of books.
And then, for the second time that morning, a voice cried out, “Katie!”
I turned away from the group and beheld there on the path two women, both young, both glamorous, both pure and glowing like angels in the cold bright sunshine.
Kookai and Kleavage.
“Ayesha, Sarenna, what are you doing here?” I seemed to have lost control over the tone of my voice, and it came out as a mad screech.
Ayesha, Kookai, answered, pointing in the opposite direction to the Kilburn High Road. “I live just up there, in West Hampstead. This is the nearest park. We were having a stroll. But what about you?” Then, looking at the pram, “I didn’t realize . . . how . . . who . . . oh God, sorry.” Kleavage, Sarenna, pinched her.
“No, this isn’t mine,” I said desperately. “I’m just looking after it.”
I’d made a broad gesture with my arm, and I noticed that the two girls were staring at my hand. Not at my hand. At the can of lager. Which was foaming over, spilling onto my wrist.
“And I’m just holding this for my friend.”
Another overly expansive gesture in the direction of Jonah. More spilled beer. He was still fishing about in the plastic bag, surrounded by the bums, who were jabbering and cackling. The girls looked toward them and quickly away. Kleavage whispered something in Kookai’s ear. Kookai then said, “I’m sorry, Katie, we’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got to go and meet . . . er, we’ve got to be . . . I have to pick up my dry cleaning. But give me a call. Let’s have lunch, or supper, or . . . breakfast. That’s if you eat breakfast.”
And then they were going. “But wait, how’s Tom and everything, and what about Milo?” I called after them, but the baby had started to scream, and then Jonah shouted out, “Got it! Here it is, page two hundred and six,” and then the girls were gone.
Thinking about it later, I decided that Kookai and Kleavage had probably left to spare me embarrassment, although then and there it seemed like the bitchiest clawing I’d ever had. But who could blame them? Look at me, I thought, here with a screaming baby, wearing—Oh, Christ, I’d forgotten—a pink tracksuit, flailing about at ten o’clock in the morning with a can of superstrength lager, best friends with a gang of drunken old derelicts. And what would they do, what would I do, in the circumstances? Tell every living soul in the fashion universe about the decline and final fall of Katie Castle.
CHAPTER 19
A Winged Victory
Veronica’s letter came a week later. It had been a good week, although not good enough to take the sting out of Saturday’s humiliation. That would have required a substantial lottery win, the discovery that due to a computer error I was really five years younger than I thought, and the arrival of an offer from Armani that I simply could not refuse. Winchester had gone well. The buyer, who ran the shop with her sister, liked what she saw and showed just the right amount of skepticism about how we could do it for the price. What made things particularly sweet was what she said about Penny Moss.
“They’ve lost it, Katie,” she confided over a coffee. “The collection’s completely schizophrenic: it’s split between the frumpy and the plain weird. It’s as though half has been designed by Beatrix Potter and half by Damien Hirst.”
Ha! I knew exactly why. Penny had divided the collection down the middle with that silly bitch Sukie. It was insanity. Penny and I had always worked together. Her conservatism had tempered my flair, made it commercial, and my zip and zing had kept her classics contemporary.
“I felt obliged to order one or two things,” the buyer continued satisfyingly, “just for old times’ sake, but I already have them penciled in for the sale.”
The same sort of thing happened on Wednesday in Bath, on Thursday in Bristol, and on Friday in Sevenoaks. Penny was taking a beating, and I was filling the hole.
I recognized the lavender envelope from my stay in the Veronica household. How had she found me? Directory inquiries, I supposed. Even Veronica could manage that. I expected gloating, or more vitriol, and considered binning the letter unopened. But that would have required a stronger character than mine.
Veronica’s handwriting had the overfed, rounded look that always seems to go with dull, diligent girls with greasy hair. At least it wasn’t hard to read. This is what she wrote:
Dear Katie
Little did I think that I would ever again take up the pen and aim it at you. I thought that our time of intimacy had ended forever on that fateful day when I came in and caught you wrapped up with Roddy like two snakes in a pit. Except that he was a poor rabbit, or gerbil, and you were the snake with your coils around him and your fangs out.
But now I have heard about your sad plight from Ayesha, and I think I can forgive you. I know the baby can’t be yours, but the very fact that you are working as a child minder and drinking in the morning means that you must have really fallen apart. I pity you, and pity drives out hate. And then I have received other information, which changes things. That is why I am writing now. I also thought you might want to know about what’s happened to the world since you dropped out of it.
After you left I cried—yes, I cried all night and all day. My whole life was turned upside down. I had thought that you were the best friend that anyone could ever have, but then I saw you for what you are and I had to go back and look at everything that had happened to me all over again. And I saw at each point that you had hurt me, or done me down, or ruined things for me. It was like when the Russians went around smashing up the statues of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky after communism, well, maybe not Trotsky, but the others, anyway. It was painful, but it was healthy. It was cathartic. Suddenly I was free and I could do what I wanted.
And then, the day you left, there was a phone call from Ayesha. She wanted you, but I told her what had happened and that you’d disappeared. Then she told
me about poor Milo (who I never liked anyway), and said that she was desperate for a person to help in the office. And I knew that it was my chance. I said I could do it. I’d always got on with Ayesha, and she said she’d see about giving me a try.
So there I was, a week later, working in PR! The pain clinic people were upset about the short notice, but I said to them look, this is the first time I’ve ever done anything just for me and I think they understood. One of the women there who can sense auras said mine was all black and horrible, and that I needed to learn how to cleanse it by forgiving, but I wasn’t ready then.
Ayesha looked at me on the day I started and then went off and found some clothes from the office and said I should put them on. She said not to worry because they did that to all the new people. They were a bit tight, but they still looked quite nice. And then she said I should get my hair cut, which I did. She told me where to go, and it cost fifty pounds, which is twenty-five pounds more than I’ve ever spent before. But I felt fantastic afterward, and all the girls in the office said I looked great.
I’m just trying to tell you that what you did to me turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Suddenly I had a new life. I felt like I’d shed my old skin. I didn’t want to eat cakes anymore, and Ayesha encouraged me to take up smoking to help me lose weight, and although I still didn’t like it, it made me feel better about myself.
The work was very easy. To begin with I just did filing and making coffee, but then I helped by being nice to people on the phone. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for it! In fact, I can’t believe anyone gets paid for it. But things still hadn’t finished getting better. Because out of the blue who should turn up but Ludo! He was back on leave from looking after the poor eagles on his island, and his friend Tom, who is going out with Ayesha, told him that I was working at Smack! and that you had stayed with me. He wanted to know how you were. He took me out to lunch. He was very depressed, both about his eagles, one of which was poorly, and about you, and life and everything. He couldn’t believe how I’d changed. And I had changed. I had become beautiful, or at least pretty, and not just on the inside, and I had new friends. We had a really nice time, and I think I cheered him up. I told him all about you and Roddy, which made him laugh in a sardonic way. Or it might have been a bitter way, you can’t always tell. At the end he held my hand and said he’d like to go out for a drink one evening and I said okay, then what about tomorrow, and he said yes. I couldn’t believe I was being so decisive.
The next evening we went out for dinner at Browns. He began by talking about you, but I changed the subject to him. I don’t think he’d been given the chance to talk about himself much for the past few years, and it all came gushing out. We had quite a lot to drink, him more than me. After the meal we went to the pub. He said he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in ages, and then he sort of passed out. Somehow I managed to get him into a taxi and took him back to his flat in Primrose Hill. He half woke up when we got there and asked me to come in. I helped him up to his bed, and as I was putting him in he grabbed hold of me and started to try to kiss me. I initially resisted, but then I thought why not. He was very mushy. I hadn’t had a proper kiss since New Year’s Eve three years ago, and that was in the dark and I didn’t even know who it was. I didn’t mind that he was too drunk to do anything else. He made up for that the next morning. There was great pain in Ludo’s heart. He is the best, the kindest, the simplest soul in the world. He had all this love and goodness and nowhere for it to go. You had poisoned him, and the poison was still in his bloodstream, and I thought it was my job to suck it out. Also, it was time I had a bit of attention and love, too. I won’t say that sleeping with Ludo didn’t have other attractions. Yes, it enabled me to triumph over you! Yes, I was rid forever of my sense of inferiority and shame. Yes, I thought, I have beaten the great Katie Castle in the game of love!! I felt like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, my arms out, my wings back, my mantle flying in the breeze. But with a head, of course.
What makes a woman loved? It is never the kindest, or most generous of spirit, or the cleverest, or the funniest, or even those who are the joy bringers. Nor is it even the most beautiful. It is always the ones like you, the cruelest, the most selfish. You make people love you. That’s what you exist for. You do it ruthlessly. It’s a game. Perhaps men are drawn to evil. Is that why I loved you?
It lasted for a couple of weeks. I suppose deep inside I knew he would return to his eagles. Even deeper inside I knew that I was only a substitute. No, not for the eagles, but for you. I played at being you, which was why Ludo slept with me. I imagined I was you as we made love. By making love to me, I know he was really making love to you. But by making love to him, I was, in a way, also making love to you. He was in me, he had been in you, so I was in you and you were in me. But it was all lies. I couldn’t live with the pretense. Because yes, Katie, he still loves you. And that is why I wrote to him a week ago telling him about Roddy’s confession. You see, Roddy told Tracy that he was as much to blame as you for the incident in the bedroom. In fact, he said that you had tried to stop it, which again, I think shows his nobility of soul, although it’s a bit late now. I don’t know what it means about the other occasions with the Frenchman and the driver, but at least it clears you (partially) of one of the offenses.
So, what I am telling you is that a) I forgive you, and b) my life is now much better, thanks to you, but no thanks to you, and c) that I think you should go to him, and live with him on his island, looking after the eagles and breathing the clean air of the sea and the mountains.
I said I’d tell you about what had happened to all the people you used to know. I can tell you because people in PR hear everything that’s ever happened to anybody. The big story is, obviously, Milo. He was in hospital for two weeks. And I think while he was there he had some kind of a religious experience. When he came out he told everyone that he didn’t want to carry on as he had before. He wanted greater “spirituality.” And the next thing we heard was that he had the contract to do the PR for the Dalai Lama and had flown out to India, which must have been painful, given his bottom.
Poor Pippin was caught after a few days on the run. He was disguised as a Smithfield meat porter. Apparently he was handed in to the police after one of the other porters caught him doing something strange to one of the carcasses. I’ve no idea what, but I heard Sarenna say she’d never eat another sausage as long as she lived. It was decided that Pippin wasn’t fit to plead, and now he’s in an asylum for the criminally insane. They have a little theater there, and he’s allowed to put on plays and concerts and things, which is nice.
After Milo, the biggest news concerns poor Penny. Just last Monday Penny was working late, which apparently had never happened before, and she went down to the basement to look for some Fairy Liquid to wash her cup, which also, everyone said, had never happened before—you see, it was an incredible train of events. And then because she didn’t know where to look, she opened the wrong closet and guess what? You never could. Hugh was in there with Sukie! Of course, Penny flew off the handle and grabbed poor Sukie by the hair and literally threw her out of the building. Apparently there were scraps of hair and scalp all over the stairs. Hugh’s staying at his club, and heaven knows what will happen next, but by all accounts Penny is a broken woman.
Oh, I forgot to say about Tom. Ayesha’s found a place for him at Smack! as well. He’s incredibly good with figures, and they’ve put him in charge of accounting, and collecting money from clients, which they didn’t use to bother with in the old days. Tom says that one day soon everyone will work in PR, and I see what he means.
Well, that is the news. Sorry if it went on a bit. And you mustn’t think that I’m trying to rub your nose in the fact that you’re so out of touch. I’m beyond all that now. And although I don’t know if I can ever fully trust you again, I like to think that perhaps one day we can laugh about everything that has happened.
I have enclosed a card for Alcoholics Anonymo
us.
I genuinely and sincerely wish you luck,
Veronica
On reading this gush I gave serious consideration to, in order,
hysterical laughter,
bitter laughter,
tender laughter,
bitter tears,
hysterical tears,
tender tears.
In the end I settled for what I hoped was a wry smile, although it may have looked to an unbiased observer more like the shell-shocked expression of a raw recruit to the trenches after a six-day barrage. Too many revelations, too much to take in. Ludo and Veronica! Veronica and anyone had the smack of absurdity about it, but Veronica and my ex-boyfriend beggared belief. But then the suggestion that Ludo still loved me. What could I make of that? Was that what I wanted? Of course it was. And Penny finding Hugh in the closet with Sukie! I felt sorry for the old fellow, who’d always treated me decently. Sukie must have been insane. What was she trying to achieve?
After a second reading my wry smile became a little more convincing. Veronica’s unexpected metamorphosis from pain clinic caterpillar into PR butterfly seemed to find an echo in the way the letter clunkily changed gear from earnest moralizing to casual gossip. But it really did seem that Veronica had come of age. I felt no regret about her assertion of independence after the years of colonial rule, and if the only way to achieve that independence was by sleeping with Ludo, well, that was something I owed her. And if Ludo had to be screwing anyone, I would have settled for Veronica rather than someone cleverer and prettier than me. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t painful, and sick making, and bite-the-pillow tragic.
My speculations about Ludo were accompanied by another train of thought, one rather more practical; a harsh critic might say opportunistic. Penny was clearly in trouble. From what I had picked up from the buyers, it had been a terrible season for the business. The Sukie experiment had been a disaster; and now the Hugh thing. The incident in the park had brought home to me the fact that I could never willingly let go of my old life to forge a new one in the parallel universe of Kilburn and Willesden. The shame and frustration of that meeting had burned deep into my soul. I still wanted my life back, and now I had a chance—faint, perhaps, but a chance—to reclaim it. Sukie had left at the worst possible time of the year. The London Designer Show was only a month away, and there would be so much to do. Penny would never be able to cope on her own.
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