by Nuala Casey
One thousand and forty.
She strides along the street, on and on, leaving behind the Edwardian splendour of Old Bond Street and crossing onto the fashionable minimalist strip of New Bond Street with its black-and-white awnings and immaculately polished shop windows that bat the rays of the sun away like unwelcome customers.
One thousand and fifty-three.
Once, numbers had been her weapons; she could control them, distort them; manipulate them into things of beauty. ‘Mathematics,’ her father had told her, ‘is the elixir of life. Once you crack its code, you hold the secrets of the universe inside your head. Numbers are the only things you can trust in this life, Kerstin; they will keep you sane.’
One thousand and ninety-five.
Something brushes against her face and she looks up. One thousand, one hundred and three. It has just begun to rain, though the sky above New Bond Street is still blue and the sun is shining. This is a light, almost invisible rain. It isn’t settling anywhere and when it comes into contact with the pavement it seems to leave no mark, just disappears into the granite like a secret teardrop.
One thousand, one hundred and nine. Kerstin stops walking and nods her head once, twice, three times. This is her signal that the counting is done, the glorious number has been reached. Now, all she needs to do is replace the purse and everything will be fine, nothing bad will happen to her. The numbers have saved her, like her father told her they would.
She looks at the place she has stopped outside. It is a double-fronted glass building; plain with no elaborate awnings. The glass windows are bare but the door, shaped like a rectangular lego piece, is painted gold. Kerstin steps towards the window. There is a row of pink handbag-shaped tissue paper parcels pressed against the glass and behind them a little pyramid of leather purses of all shapes and colours: red, purple, green and grey. Grey! It is the perfect replacement, thinks Kerstin, the perfect shade. She can buy it, dispose of the ripped one and it will be like nothing ever happened. As she pushes the gold door open, the maroon flag above it flutters with the back draft. A gold woodcut drawing of a tree looms above the name which is displayed in simple gold, block lettering: MULBERRY.
The first thing she sees as she enters the shop is a large circular gold cage standing in the middle of the room surrounded by mannequins in hot pants, patterned shift dresses and leather jackets, all holding a Mulberry bag. It looks like the cages used by cruel circus ringmasters to keep lions in, to taunt them with scraps of meat in exchange for performing tricks.
The shop, though rectangular in structure, gives the impression of curvature. Every surface is elongated, from the curvy display cabinets to the crescent moon shelves and they all seem to bend inward so that as Kerstin walks through it feels as though she is being led deeper and deeper into the centre of a great, complex puzzle.
She makes her way towards the back of the shop where she can see a long, oval, glass-topped counter. There is a sales assistant standing behind it, staring into space. Her expression is similar to the soldiers that stand guard outside Buckingham Palace, only instead of a busby she has a helmet of glossy, chestnut-coloured hair framing her immaculately made-up face.
She tilts her head slightly as Kerstin approaches, but otherwise her pose remains rigid and unmoving. When Kerstin reaches the counter, the woman opens her mouth, preparing to begin the long scripted dialogue that will start with ‘Can I help you?’ and end with a sale, but before she has the chance Kerstin speaks.
‘I need a purse,’ she demands, her German accent sounding more pronounced than usual, as it always does when she has been counting.
The sales assistant seems taken aback by this bluntness and the familiar, over-rehearsed lines desert her.
‘A purse?’ she replies. There is a sharp South African lilt to her voice and it seems as if she is trying to match Kerstin’s terseness.
Kerstin is fiddling with the zip on her bag, trying to dislodge the ripped purse from the front pocket without having to make too much contact with it. She doesn’t look up as she answers.
‘Yes, a purse. I would like the grey one over there in the window. Could you get it for me? I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
The woman raises an eyebrow and languidly moves around to the front of the counter. She is very tall – five feet eleven at least – and her height is exacerbated by the vertiginous heels she is wearing. She brushes her hand through her hair and as she does so a trio of thin gold bracelets ripple down her arm like snakes.
‘The grey one,’ she repeats, looking into the middle distance as though trying to solve a difficult algebra equation.
‘Yes,’ says Kerstin, who has now managed to extricate the damaged purse from the bag. She holds it between finger and thumb like a dirty rag ‘It’s in the window next to the pink handbags, I mean the tissue-paper handbags.’
‘Ohhh,’ says the woman, clasping her hands together as though in prayer. ‘You mean the Continental wallets. Grey? That will be Parisian Dove.’
Kerstin nods her head, assuming that this is the one. After all, doves are grey sometimes aren’t they? ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The Parisian Dove. I would like the Parisian Dove.’
‘Of course,’ says the woman, slowly. She smiles weakly at Kerstin then disappears into the curved maze of the shop-floor.
Kerstin taps her fingers on the glass counter as she waits. Then she stops herself. Tapping always makes her want to count and she mustn’t count in here, otherwise she will never get out. Instead she looks at the pretty display cabinet next to the counter. It is filled with tiny leather key-rings and credit card holders. Kerstin smiles to herself. This will be the perfect purse, she tells herself. She likes this shop. She likes the bare wood and glass and gold, the simple decadence of it. It reminds her of the shops her mother used to frequent in Cologne. There was something so ordered and elegant about those places where all of the products were displayed discreetly on beautiful, square white tables; not like the department stores in London with their garish, fluorescent lights and messy piles of clothes loaded onto flimsy shelves. Those places unsettle her, the untidiness makes her feel unclean; makes her want to count and never stop. The memory of shopping in Cologne takes her back twenty-five years, a little girl following her beautiful mother as she picks up various scarves, blouses and perfumes. She remembers thinking that those airy palaces of light and wood were what money must look like.
‘Is this the one?’ She looks up and the image of Cologne breaks up like a shattered mirror. The woman has returned with the purse; a long, stippled leather wedge with a small, gold plaque in the centre.
‘Yes,’ replies Kerstin. ‘That’s the one.’ The woman nods and takes the purse round to the other side of the counter.
Kerstin looks at her watch: 5 p.m. Her mouth goes dry. How is it so late? She must get back to the office; she must get on with the report. She pulls her credit card out of the ripped purse with the edges of her fingers, and puts it down on the counter.
The woman is carefully laying a sheet of silvery embossed tissue paper out in front of her.
‘No, no,’ says Kerstin. ‘I don’t want it wrapped thank you. I’ll take it as it is.’
‘You don’t want it wrapped?’ The woman looks appalled.
‘No, I don’t,’ says Kerstin. ‘If you could just put my card through now please. I’m in a great rush.’
The woman pauses, her hand lies flat on the tissue paper, as though not sure what to do next. This just doesn’t happen in Mulberry. Customers always want their purchases wrapping in beautiful tissue paper and they always want to walk out holding the iconic carrier bag.
After a moment she moves the tissue paper aside and picks up the purse. Looking at the price tag, she types in a series of numbers on the till.
‘That will be £275, please,’ she says not looking up.
Kerstin pushes the credit card across the counter. The woman takes it and is about to slot it into the card machine when she stops.
�
�Would you like to be added to our mailing list?’ she says, her voice deadpan as she reclaims her rehearsed lines. ‘It just takes a couple of minutes to fill in your contact details and then we can let you know the latest news.’
Kerstin is becoming increasingly agitated. It feels like the tainted purse and the time ticking on her watch are burning into her skin like acid as she stands waiting.
‘No, thank you, I would not. I just want to buy this purse,’ she says in a loud, firm voice.
‘Right,’ says the woman, with equal firmness and she places the credit card into the slot. ‘If you could just type in your pin number.’ She holds the machine towards Kerstin.
Kerstin looks at the buttons on the machine and for a moment she thinks she can see the sweat from the woman’s fingers glistening on the numbers. She cannot touch it; she cannot taint herself any further.
‘Would you mind putting it down on the counter?’ she asks the woman. The assistant frowns and makes a clicking noise with her tongue as she puts the machine down.
‘Thank you,’ says Kerstin, as she pulls the sleeve of her silk blouse over her index finger and gently taps in the pin number.
The assistant shakes her head and picks up the machine. After a long pause, the machine whirrs and the assistant rips out the sales docket, removes the card from the slot then smiles weakly at Kerstin.
‘That’s all gone through.’
She hands the card back to Kerstin, who receives it with her sleeve still stretched safely over her hand. Then, grabbing the new purse, she rips off the price tag. The woman looks at her with a horrified expression, but Kerstin doesn’t notice. She takes the old purse and starts to empty its contents onto the gleaming counter: her ID card for work; her debit card; her Sainsbury’s loyalty card; four twenty-pound notes. Then she unzips the middle section and pours a pile of loose change out.
‘What are you doing?’ asks the woman.
‘I need to get rid of this purse,’ says Kerstin as she slots the cards and notes into their new home. ‘Would you mind putting it in your bin?’ She puts the damaged purse onto the counter. The woman looks at it in horror, like she is being handed a dead fish.
‘Put it in the bin?’ she says, her expression one of utter bewilderment.
Yes,’ says Kerstin, as she scoops up the coins and drops them into her new purse. ‘It’s ripped.’
‘Oh,’ says the girl, taking it from the counter. ‘But this is a Prada wallet.’ Her eyes light up as she touches the golden lettering. ‘Are you sure you want to get rid of it. It’s not a huge rip.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ says Kerstin, tucking the new purse safely into the left hand pocket of her bag. ‘Thank you.’
She walks away, leaving the woman holding the Prada purse like it’s an abandoned child. As she steps out onto New Bond Street she takes a deep breath. The purse and the counting must surely have rectified it all. If she keeps calm, she can still get the report finished by Wednesday and redeem herself. Her mind falls silent as she walks back to St James’s Street.
*
Seb smiles to himself as he walks across Albert Bridge, Cosima’s voice still ringing in his ears: ‘Bye, Daddy. Don’t work too late!’
He has safely deposited her with Yasmine’s mother, Maggie, in her tiny, cluttered maisonette on Battersea Bridge Road; the flat his wife grew up in. It is difficult to imagine a family of four sharing such a cramped space for so many years. Even now, with her children grown up and left and her husband dead, Maggie fills every last square inch of the space, though so tiny herself. Yet, the happiness and loving disorder that permeate that flat is hard to resist; there is always something delicious being cooked in the kitchen and Magic FM is a constant in the background, creating a kind of easy-listening aural soup that you have to swim through as you walk in the front door. When Seb left Cosima she was dancing around the kitchen to ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ while her grandmother chopped the onions for the sunshine rice, her feet tapping on the linoleum floor, her bottom wiggling in time to the beat.
It is a world away from the immaculate Dorset country house where he used to visit his own grandmother as a child. Visits there were sporadic and pained. When he was a toddler, his grandmother would only let him into the house if his parents kept him strapped into the pushchair or held tightly on their knees. Heaven forbid he should scrape the polished floor with his toys or smear chocolate on the William Morris patterned sofa. On the rare occasions when he was allowed to play on the floor, he would feel anxious and wary, looking up for approval from his parents who would be sitting miserably around his grandmother’s oak dining table, politely drinking tepid tea and nibbling tasteless, expensive cakes. He remembers his grandmother’s beady eyes watching him intently; waiting to pounce the moment his little hand came too close to an ornament or vase.
His family is a sore subject between him and Yasmine. Coming from a loud, carefree family where anything and everything is freely discussed, his wife finds it hard to understand the lack of communication that blights Seb’s family. He has never discussed anything personal with his parents; he doesn’t know how he would even begin. The idea of hiding feelings, of burying hurt and pain had been so ingrained in him as a child that he had thought it normal. It was only when he met Yasmine that he realised it was not a sign of weakness to feel depressed, to have bad times, to be vulnerable.
Yasmine has gone some way towards opening up communication with Seb’s parents; in fact she gets on with her father-in-law splendidly. He likes her pragmatism and boyish sense of humour; while she understands his military bluster and eye-watering bluntness. Yet his father cannot look Seb in the eye; he has never understood his artistic second child who cried at the beginning of each school term and was more at home in the art studio than on the rugby field. Even now if they find themselves alone in a room for more than a few minutes, a heavy awkward silence descends; the sound of two people who are utterly bewildered by one another. It saddens Seb, it always has, but that is the way it is, and anyway, it is the only blot on his otherwise blemish-free world.
It is a beautiful afternoon; the sun is still hanging onto its last moments and sharp silver light streaks across the windows of the seventeenth-century terraces on Cheyne Walk as Seb crosses the Embankment and heads towards Oakley Street.
As he walks, he plans his evening: if he can get three of the pictures up tonight then there will be time, in between meetings tomorrow, to finish off the big painting – his surprise gift for Yasmine. She has put her heart and soul into launching this restaurant and she deserves to be a success. When they first met, she was working as a sous chef in a little French restaurant in Waterloo. Their dates were spent walking along the South Bank in the early hours looking at the twinkly blue lights in the trees and the alien glow of the London Eye as it hovered above the river like a giant space ship. Her hours were crazy – 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. most days – but she was a hard worker and passionate about food. She was always trying out new ideas, new combinations of flavours; testing out her creations on Seb. She had even enticed him, a committed vegetarian, to eat meat with her sumptuous, slow-cooked Moroccan lamb dishes. She was never going to settle for being a sous chef, though, and soon she was ready to take on the next challenge, becoming Head Chef of a fusion brasserie on Lavender Hill.
But it was North African cooking, the food of her ancestors, where her passions lay and as Seb’s painting career started to take off with the help of three sell-out London shows and a wealthy collector investing in some of his back catalogue, the idea began to form that maybe they could open up their own restaurant. When Seb’s best friend and business partner, Henry Walker, came on board, they knew that it was going to become a reality. Henry doesn’t believe in failure and whatever he invests in receives the full force of his enthusiasm and ambition. After building a successful model agency, an art gallery and a string of fitness studios, a London restaurant was next on his wish-list. But not any old restaurant, no that would never do for Henry; he was going to ta
ke them right to the gastronomic heart of London: Soho.
Seb had smirked when Henry showed him the proposed site – a vacant building right next door to Seb’s old drinking haunt, The Dog and Duck pub on Frith Street. For a moment, he had hesitated. What if being back in Soho resurrected old demons; what if the temptation to slip back into his binge drinking proved too great? But then he had looked at how far he had come – his family, his successful business, his sobriety. It would take more than a little strip of street to tear all that away from him. And Yasmine had fallen in love with it on the spot, so he had given Henry the go-ahead and here they are, eight months later, ready to launch Soho’s newest restaurant: The Rose Garden.
As he crosses the busy King’s Road, he sees a number 19 bus in the distance. Happiness surges through him as he walks towards the bus stop. There is something so complete about this day; all is as it should be. He feels sharp, clear, completely connected to everything around him: the gleaming red fire engines lined up outside Chelsea Fire Station; the sparkling fairy lights twinkling in the window of Heals, even the angry-faced newspaper seller outside the bank – they all have their place, their roles to perform, just like him. Yes, he thinks, today is a positive day.
He smiles as the bus comes closer; its destination displayed in thick, white letters: PICCADILLY. He climbs aboard, scans his Oyster Card and takes his seat by the window. As he stretches his legs out in front of him, rain, that has been threatening all afternoon, starts to fall; a gentle rain, smearing the windows and giving the world outside a vague, dreamlike quality. The doors close and the bus pulls away towards Sloane Street. The rain starts to come down quite heavily and as they stop at the lights a procession of tight-faced women clutching large carrier bags from Harrods, Prada and Harvey Nichols run across the road, umbrella-less and exposed, their perfectly blow-dried hair wilting in the downpour. Seb smirks, thinking of his grandmother’s perfect drawing room; her hawkish eyes. Rain is the great leveller, he thinks, it makes sopping wet rags of us all.
