Learning curves: a novel of sex, suits, and business affairs

by Gemma Townley

  You, she imagined him saying. You were responsible for that article, weren’t you? The one that’s going to ruin my business? You prompted my heart attack . . .

  But instead, George shrugged. “I expect it’s my fault for not eating rabbit food and running mindlessly in the gym for hours on end. Bloody waste of time. Can’t abide the places. So, Jen . . .”

  She looked at him nervously. “Yes?”

  “How was your Christmas? Have you been doing lots of work on your MBA studies? I meant to call, but you know how it is . . .”

  He doesn’t know, Jen realized. He hasn’t seen the papers yet. The thought filled her with relief for a second— the heart attack wasn’t her fault! But then she realized that it wasn’t the great news she’d thought it was. He was bound to find out anyway—the word yet was a bit of a killer. And when he did find out, he’d probably have a relapse.

  She smiled hesitantly, remembering that she was meant to be having a normal conversation. “Oh, you know what Christmas is like,” she said, trying to sound as cheerful as she could. “Too much time spent with family for my liking . . .” She blushed, realizing too late what she’d said. For so long she’d only thought of her mother as family. “I didn’t mean . . . I mean . . . ,” she stammered and George grinned.

  “Couldn’t agree more. So, your studies?”

  Jen shrugged and smiled slightly. “It’s my holidays, Dad. I don’t want to work.”

  The words echoed the conversation they’d had the Christmas before he left. Perhaps argument would be a better word for it. She’d slammed a door, he’d threatened to dock her pocket money, and all because he wanted her to study more for her GCSEs.

  George smiled in recognition. “How did your GCSEs go, by the way?” he asked softly.

  “Straight As,” Jen said, choking slightly. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Her words hung in the air for a moment or two, then George smiled cheerfully. “Good thing I made you work through the school holidays, then, isn’t it?”

  “You’re late.”

  Jen looked at her friend guiltily and gave her a quick kiss. “Angel, I’m sorry. I’ve been at the hospital. I’m only ten minutes late, though.”

  They were at Shepherd’s Bush tube, an outpost of West London that housed the BBC, a small amount of gun crime, increasing numbers of London families who couldn’t afford to live in Notting Hill or Holland Park, and Shepherd’s Bush Market, where you could buy everything from sweet potatoes and plantain to boot-legged DVDs and outfits with more bling than anything in R Kelly’s wardrobe.

  Jen had promised Angel two weeks before that she’d be there, and after five reminder phone calls and two text messages, she hadn’t had the heart to cancel, even though going shopping for wedding outfits didn’t quite chime with her new “perfect daughter” routine, especially as she’d only been doing it for two days. Still, she supposed that being a good friend was probably pretty important, too. And anyway, her father had spent most of the day before sleeping, so with any luck he wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t there.

  “Fifteen. You’re fifteen minutes late, I have eleven outfits to buy and we only have one afternoon, so fifteen minutes matters, you know?”

  Jen nodded seriously. “You really need eleven outfits? I thought you ‘viewed arranged marriages with suspicion and disagreed with the cultural paradigm behind them,’ ” she said, quoting directly from Angel’s own tirade a few months before. “How come you’re so keen to conform now?”

  Angel narrowed her eyes. “I am not conforming; I’m supporting my brother in his choice. Life is not black and white, Jen, as you well know—there’s a lot of gray, and the trick is to navigate it without losing too much integrity along the way. I do not want an arranged marriage or to spend my life cooking curry for five children. If my brother’s happy to live that life, then it’s fine by me.”

  Jen lowered her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I know,” Angel said briskly. “So anyway, to answer your question, yes, I do need eleven outfits, and that’s quite an achievement seeing that I’ve got it down from sixteen. Honestly, Jen, you have no idea. The pre-engagement party, the engagement party, the welcoming her family into our family party, the welcoming our family into hers party, her formal hen party, her real hen party, the pre-wedding dinner . . . and so it goes on. Believe me, eleven outfits isn’t bad for an Indian wedding.” She stopped talking suddenly and looked at Jen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even ask—how is he?”

  Jen smiled. “He’s okay, actually. I mean, the doctors say he’ll be absolutely fine. Another week or so in hospital, a strict diet of lentils and vegetables, and he’ll be back to normal.”

  “You’ve been to see him a lot.” Angel asked the question without inflection, almost as a statement. But Jen knew what she was getting at. “A lot” was an understatement, actually—she’d been there for two days straight, telling him all about her life, refusing to buy him chocolate muffins and bringing him bananas and apples instead. It felt almost like it used to when she was younger. Just a bit more self-conscious.

  “I guess,” she said noncommittally. “So, where are we doing all this shopping?”

  “Follow me.”

  Angel led her down through the market to Goldhawk Road and into a shop with silky-looking fabrics adorning the window. Angel grinned at Jen. “This is where we buy the official stuff.”

  She raised her eyebrow at the assistant who came wandering over to them. “I need to order five saris,” she said firmly, putting on her mother’s strong Indian accent. “None of your rubbish fabrics, I want pure silk only. And I don’t have much time. Okay? Well, go on then!”

  As the assistant ran off obediently, Angel winked at Jen. “I’d make a great Indian matriarch, no?”

  Two hours later, they finally left Shepherd’s Bush and made their way down toward Kensington High Street.

  “And now,” Angel said, “we go to Karen Millen.”

  Karen Millen’s windows were glitz city. It was the January sale and the end of the Christmas party season, and the displays were full of skirts with glittery patterns, bejeweled corset tops, and jackets covered in sequins. Angel’s eyes lit up and Jen rolled her eyes. She could never understand Angel’s fascination with gold and shiny things. She was a vegetarian yoga teacher, which in Jen’s book meant that she should be wandering around in the sort of things that Christie Turlington wore—long lean lines, flowing and natural looking, and not looking like she’d raided J-Lo’s wardrobe.

  She trailed after Angel, watching wide-eyed as her friend descended on rack after rack of clothes, taking one of nearly everything and handing it to a rather bemused sales assistant.

  Finally, Angel reached the end of the shop and sighed. “Well, that will have to do for now,” she said with a little sigh, and disappeared into the changing rooms, leaving Jen sitting on the chairs usually reserved for bored boyfriends and husbands. She was beginning to understand why men weren’t so keen on shopping—it wasn’t anywhere near as fun when you weren’t buying anything yourself.

  She found her eyes wandering to a rack positioned near the changing rooms, on which navy pin-stripe suits were hanging alongside sparkly hot pink vests and silk leopard-print tops. Jen could almost see them on a magazine page explaining how to dress work clothes up for an evening do with a deft change of top and the use of accessories, something she’d never exactly seen the point of since she’d never really distinguished between day-and nighttime dressing. Sure, she’d put on high heels if she was going out, maybe a bit of lipstick, but she found that jeans had a wonderful way of moving seamlessly from work to play. They could be worn to an evening out, but were equally at home slobbing out in front of the television. A perfect combination, she felt.

  She looked away again and Angel came out of the changing room in Outfit Number One: the official hen night. Top: not too low, but glitzy enough to say “I’m making an effort.” Skirt: just below the knee in a silk bias cut with en
ough sequins to look worth the £85 price tag, reduced from £150. Shoes: ridiculously high, but then Angel didn’t seem to have a problem with heels. She was only five-foot-three and had spent her teenage years practicing walking in her mother’s shoes until her feet were almost shaped diagonally. Maybe that’s why she was such a yoga fiend, Jen thought to herself. It was a chance to straighten everything out again.

  “So?” Angel demanded. “Does this say ‘I’m obviously doing okay for myself and reflect well on my family, I know how to dress well but am definitely not in the husband market yet?’ ”

  Jen thought for a moment. “That’s exactly what it says,” she said seriously. “At least it covers the chic and fabulously wealthy part. Just explain how that look says ‘not in the husband market’ for me?”

  Angel shuddered. “That was just wishful thinking. My brother’s fiancée has a brother, and I just know the family is already hatching a plan for me. Okay, so, time for outfit number two. This one has to say ‘good-time party girl who still reflects well on her family but also knows how to enjoy herself.’ Okay?”

  Jen nodded, slightly bemused as Angel disappeared back inside the changing room. After a while her eyes wandered back to the clothing rack.

  She’d never actually worn a suit and had always been suspicious of those who did. Suits were about conformity, a demonstration of power—in other words, everything she hated. And they weren’t particularly practical either. Protestors didn’t tend to wear one of Calvin Klein’s finest when conducting a sit-in on a field up for development, and at Green Futures the look was more “geography teacher” than “smart city consultant.” Some of the guys there wore sandals with socks, for God’s sake. Tim was the only one to wear a suit, and he was an accountant. It would look weird if he didn’t.

  Bell was a different story, of course. Everyone wore suits. Even people in the MBA program wore them sometimes—when they were giving presentations, that sort of thing. And her father . . . well, he looked strange out of a suit, like female physical education teachers when they turned up at staff meetings wearing skirts instead of their usual tracksuits. It was just . . . wrong, somehow. On weekends, George used to mooch around in cords or slacks and a jumper over a shirt that didn’t have a stiff collar—none of which went together particularly well and all of which made him look faintly ridiculous. In a suit he was George Bell of Bell Consulting. Out of one, he was just like anyone else.

  Well, she didn’t have that problem. She didn’t need to wear a suit to be someone. She was fine as she was.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and recognized that perhaps she wasn’t that fine. Passable, maybe, but she wasn’t going to set the world on fire looking like this—an old baggy T-shirt and old jeans. And that suit hadn’t exactly been a 1980s-style power suit, after all. It had low-waisted trousers. The jacket looked kind of cool, really. She could actually ignore the fact that it was a suit altogether and just wear them as separates . . .

  Slowly she stood up and made her way over to the rack, picking up one of the suits and holding it up against herself. She wondered what she’d look like in one. Wondered what it would feel like, striding around in a pinstripe number like this with her father watching her proudly from the sidelines. “Hello, I’m Jennifer Bell. Yes, George’s daughter. Oh, you know him? Yes, we are close, actually. You think I look like him? Well, you know, you could be right about that—perhaps I do. So anyway, I believe you need some help with leveraging your core strengths to drive up your business performance? Let me see what I can do . . .”

  She frowned. What was wrong with her? She hated suits. She wouldn’t be seen dead in one, full stop, end of story. Quickly she put the suit back.

  “Do you want to try it on?”

  Jen turned to see a sales assistant looking at her and blushed. “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I was just looking. I mean, I’m not really a suit kind of person . . .”

  “It’s more of a going-out suit than a work one,” the sales assistant said. “That’s why it’s hanging with the sparkly tops.”

  The sales assistant pointed at the tops, and Jen felt the need to look at them with interest as though she hadn’t seen them before.

  “Oh, I see,” she said, smiling at the sales assistant to emphasize that she did indeed see.

  “So, do you want to try it on?”

  Angel stuck her head out of her cubicle. “These trousers are all wrong. I need another size. And some different shoes . . .”

  The sales assistant nodded and walked over to Angel, turning back to Jen as she reached the cubicle. “You can go in there,” she said, pointing at the cubicle next to Angel’s.

  Jen hesitated, then, holding the suit several inches away from her as if it were a wet dog, she strode quickly into the cubicle. I’m just going to try it on, she told herself firmly. There’s nothing wrong with that.

  “Wow!” Angel said appreciatively five minutes later as they both came out to take a little look at themselves, self-consciously standing in front of the large mirror and checking their behinds for unattractive creasing. “I’ve never seen you in a suit before. It looks great!”

  Jen shook her head bashfully, but she knew she wasn’t convincing anyone. She did look great. Much better than she looked in her jeans, which had become so comfortable that they no longer held any shape, draping over her legs as if hungover and unable to think what else to do.

  “It feels odd,” she said, unable to take in the authoritative-looking woman staring back at her from the mirror. “It isn’t me.”

  “What’s ‘you’?” Angel asked with a shrug. “We’re not simple creatures, are we? You’re doing an MBA— you were bound to get more business-ey.”

  Jen looked at Angel indignantly. “I’m not doing an MBA. I mean, I am, but I’m not . . . you know . . . doing one. Not properly . . .”

  “You’re doing a pretty good job of it though, aren’t you. Studying for that exam before Christmas, getting yourself a new boyfriend who actually has a proper job and doesn’t spend his time sleeping on other people’s floors. And your father . . .”

  “You think I’m selling out?” Jen asked hotly.

  Angel shook her head. “You’re the one who thinks that. I think you’re moving on. And it suits you. But look, we’re not here to deal with your identity crisis— we’ve got mine to worry about. So tell me the truth, do I look too slutty? I do, don’t I? I can just hear my mother’s voice—‘Anuragini, do you wish to bring my house into disrepute? Have you no respect for your family? Oh, why do I have such a daughter? Why do you never listen to me?’ ”

  She mimicked her mother’s accent perfectly and Jen giggled. “I think you look fab. And this is the unofficial hen-night outfit, right? So will your mum even see you?”

  Angel groaned. “You really have no idea, do you? Of course she’ll see me. Not in person, but through my cousins’ descriptions, which will get more and more exaggerated as people pass on the story until my mother hears that I was wearing nothing but a thong.”

  “So it probably doesn’t matter what you wear then, if you’re going to get aggro anyway,” Jen suggested.

  Angel smiled. “I knew I brought you along for a reason. Perfect logic. I like that. Okay, so, now I need a ‘demure, respectable sister who doesn’t put the bride’s family off her brother’ outfit. Are you going to get that suit?”

  Jen shook her head. “God, no. No, absolutely not. I mean, it’s just not . . . Well, just no. No, I’m not.”

  “So, yes, then?”

  Angel grinned and Jen looked at her hopelessly. “What’s happening to me, Angel?”

  “You’re playing a new role,” she said simply. “Get used to it.”

  18

  Jen got home with an hour to spare before she had to leave again to meet Alan for her promised coaching session. This was meant to be her Christmas holiday, she thought to herself, but she’d never been so busy. She took her new suit out of its smart paper bag and hung it up in her wardrobe, then
ran herself a bath. Was Angel right? Was she just moving on? Could you do that so easily—just put on a new skin, turn into a new person with different ideals, different thoughts, and different loyalties? It felt so . . . weird. And so easy. Surely you had to agonize over stuff like this. Go into hibernation for several months. Face some sort of ritual at the end of it, a test of some sort.

  She smiled to herself as she poured scented oil into her bath. Maybe the MBA was the hibernation and the final exam the ritual. She imagined everyone on the MBA doing a tribal dance and being pronounced fully fledged members of the business community. Then the smile disappeared off her face. Jesus, was that what she was doing here? She’d been thinking so much about impressing her father, she’d forgotten that in the process she was becoming everything she’d ever hated.

  Jen frowned as she undressed. Everything was topsyturvy —her mother was now the liar; her father the person she wanted to protect. Business wasn’t so evil anymore, whereas Gavin the eco-activist had betrayed her. She’d just bought a suit, and now she was about to spend her Saturday night out with Alan, the MBA geek, teaching him how to chat up women. Well, only part of Saturday night; she’d promised Daniel that she’d be at his place by ten P.M. at the latest. Daniel, her new boyfriend with his own flat, his own business, his own everything. She shook her head and got into the bath. If fate had some grand plan for her, some explanation that made sense of the strange new world she seemed to be inhabiting, she wished she could have a little peek at it.

  An hour and a half later, Jen made her way into a dark and dingy pub on the corner of Tottenham Court Road for her assignation with Alan, a pub he’d chosen and which in retrospect Jen wished she’d known was at the top end of the street, because she could have got off at a different tube stop and avoided a twenty-minute walk.

  She found Alan at a table in the corner, and he looked up at her nervously.

  “What a nightmare journey!” she said, sitting down in a heap. “Alan, why did you have to choose somewhere so far away?”