by Rosie Thomas
‘Of course.’
The three of them laughed. Harriet felt the weight and the warmth of friendship. Its fuel was the interlinking of their ordinary lives, and their trust in one another. They never spoke of its significance, but her awareness of it buoyed her up. She felt happy, and wealthy, because she possessed it.
‘What have you been doing since you left me?’ Jane asked. ‘She looks OK on it, Jen, doesn’t she?’
‘She looks great.’
‘I’ve been packing, clearing the flat. Leo was there this afternoon.’
‘Was it grim?’
‘It was, rather,’ Harriet admitted.
‘It will be better when you’ve sorted out the domestic details,’ Jane said decisively. ‘What you need now, what we all need, is a drink followed by some food followed by some dancing and more drink.’ She called out to the room, ‘Come on, everybody.’
In entertaining, as in everything else, Jane believed in leading from the front. Jenny and Harriet smiled covertly at each other, but Jane intercepted the look.
‘Could you two please mingle a little?’
‘I’m going, I’m going,’ Harriet protested. ‘I’m going into the kitchen to find Charlie.’
She eased herself across the room and into the hall, and down the two steps to the kitchen at the back. From this room french windows opened on to Jane’s sunny patio garden where she grew herbs and Alpine strawberries in pots. Tonight the dining table had been pushed right up against the doors, and it was laid with baskets of French bread, brown earthenware dishes of guacamole and aubergine dip and garlic pâté, and dimple beer glasses filled with sheaves of celery. There were quiches, already half-eaten and spreading freckles of wholemeal pastry crumbs, and a whole uncut Brie. On the back burner of the gas stove there was a big pan of hot soup, probably carrot and coriander. Harriet had helped Jane prepare for parties in the past.
The tiled worktop along one wall was a jungle of bottles, all different colours and shapes, interspersed with glasses, plates, and party tins of beer. Charlie Thimbell leaned against the worktop, with a full glass of the Bulgarian Cabernet in his hand. He was talking vehemently to a nervous-looking girl in an embroidered blouse. They were pinned in place by more groups of chattering, laughing people. The girl looked to be in two minds about their tête-à-tête.
Charlie was only about the same height as Harriet, but his broad shoulders and thickset figure made him seem a much bigger man. Beneath the bluster, he was a shrewd financial journalist.
‘Totalitarianism,’ Harriet heard him shouting. The girl shrank beside him.
Harriet reached them and touched his elbow. ‘Charlie?’
He stopped in mid-tirade. ‘Hello, darling.’ He kissed her noisily and then glanced over her shoulder. Harriet realised that he was looking for Leo. In the same instant Charlie remembered that Leo would not be there. His face turned a shade redder.
‘It’s all right,’ Harriet said mildly. ‘I forget, too, and turn round to ask him something. Force of habit is surprisingly strong.’ She turned to the embroidered girl, intending to introduce herself, but the girl was already backing away.
‘What did I say?’ Charlie demanded, when she had gone. ‘Or was it you?’
‘It was you. When did she last get a chance to say anything?’
‘I gave her plenty of chances. She just didn’t take them.’
Harriet put her arm through his. ‘Charlie, I want to ask you something. Can we go somewhere quieter than in here?’
He looked alarmed. ‘About you and Leo? Not my strong point, all that sort of thing. Ask Jenny.’
His unwillingness was a pose, Harriet understood that, but she also knew that like most poses it exposed more truths than the poseur might wish. Charlie could talk all night about the money supply, or Arsenal’s prospects, or the Booker prize, but he didn’t like to talk about what he felt, or feared. As if to do so was to become vulnerable, in some way less than entirely masculine. Harriet remembered what Jenny had said. At least Jenny had her and Jane, the network of women, to talk to. It was probably harder for Charlie.
‘Business advice,’ Harriet said carefully.
‘In that case,’ he winked at her, ‘come upstairs.’
In the end they perched at the top of the stairs, looking down on the heads below. The man in the smock was still doing door duty. Harriet took the first mouthful of her wine.
‘How are you, Charlie?’
‘I’m fine. What is it you want advice about?’ Deflecting her from his own concerns, of course. What was it Jenny had said? It hasn’t been very easy for us to live together. Harriet thought of Leo, and then of the spectacular strength of women’s friendships.
‘Are you sure you don’t really need a solicitor?’ Charlie prompted her.
Harriet smiled. ‘I’ve got a solicitor.’
Her plan had become important to her. More than important, almost a lifeline. Charlie would be the first person she had shared it with and she didn’t want him to laugh at it or dismiss it, because she valued his judgement. She took a breath, launched herself.
‘Listen.’
‘I’ve been given a game, a game of skill and calculation, by a friend of mine. He invented it, and it’s very clever, very original. I want to develop the game, market it commercially. I think it will sell.’
She glanced sideways and saw that Charlie was staring gloomily down the stairs.
‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it.’
To her relief, Charlie’s face cleared. ‘That encourages me a little. Originality is the first requirement.’
‘What’s the next?’
Behind them, on the landing, someone stumbled against the bathroom door. Downstairs the music suddenly boomed out at double volume. The party was warming up.
‘If you’ve really no idea, then you should abandon this scheme at once. Go and ask that man in the blouse to dance with you, to take your mind off it. I’ll dance with you, if it will help.’ He looked at her face then, and changed his tone. ‘You work in retailing. You own a shop selling fashion goods, don’t you? You tell me what your first step should be.’
‘I do know,’ Harriet said. ‘I just wanted to … rehearse it with you. When you’re married you get used to someone being there, don’t you? To listen to you thinking aloud, setting your ideas straight? You notice the loss.’
She had told Simon, she remembered, that to listen was one of the duties of friendship.
Charlie was contrite. He took hold of her hand. ‘I’m sorry. Go on then, rehearse.’
‘Research.’ She began ticking off points on their linked fingers. ‘Look at the market, establish what the competition is, study their figures. Define my own market. Get a prototype made, establish manufacturing costs. Figure out how to sell. Make a business plan, taking a best-possible and a worst-possible set of results. Get into the City and raise the capital. Or something like that.’ She made a sound that was half a nervous laugh, half a groan of dismay.
Charlie nursed his drink in his free hand. ‘Do you want to do all this?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘Oh yes, I want to. I need to do it.’
Charlie looked at her again. It seemed incongruous to hear this talk of business plans and market research in Jane Hunter’s impeccably homespun house. To Charlie, Harriet looked hungry and just a little driven. Need, he thought, was probably just the right word. And if she was to make her scheme work, it would take all the drive she could muster.
‘There will be a heap of work to do,’ he told her, ‘even before you’re ready to go out and get your requests for investment turned down.’
‘I’m not afraid of work.’ A shrug of Harriet’s shoulders told him, eloquently, that she had nothing else to focus on. He felt the vibration of sympathy. Work was a useful palliative.
‘Have you got any capital of your own?’
‘My half of the flat, once the sale goes through. Twenty thousand. I’ve rented somewhere cheap for a year.’
‘Yes. Harriet, do you know about the risk/reward ratio?’
‘Not exactly.’ She was reluctant to admit not knowing anything that might be relevant to her plan.
‘You have to ask yourself whether all the effort and energy and time that you will have to put into developing this business will pay off for you in the end. Will you get enough out of it to make it worthwhile?’
Harriet didn’t hesitate. ‘I want to do it. The game exists, I want to go with it. And I could make a lot of money, couldn’t I?’ Charlie laughed, looking cheerful again. ‘There would be no point otherwise. You’d better let me have a look at this wonderful game of yours. Are you sure there’s no problem over the rights?’
‘I was told that I could do what I like with it. But I’ll make sure, don’t worry.’ For a moment, in place of Jane’s cream-painted stairwell with its framed prints and hanging plants, and the rising scent of carrot soup, she saw Simon’s dim house and smelt the damp and decay. She shivered a little and, mistaking the reason for it, Charlie put his arm around her.
‘Do you remember Crete, Harriet?’
‘Yes, I remember Crete.’
They had been travelling in Greece, half a dozen of them, in their last student vacation. Charlie and Jane and Harriet had all been there; Jenny had been doing something else that summer.
They had reached Vai on the eastern coast, finding a crescent of white sand and a fringe of palm trees, and underneath the palms there were the painted camper vans and orange tents of other travellers. They pitched their tents beside this company, hung up their travel-dirty clothes, and ran down to the sea to swim.
The days were hot, and the hours stretched or telescoped under the eye of the sun. They basked in the sunshine, swam in the iridescent water and read their paperbacks in the shade of the palms. They exchanged travel stories with bearded German boys, although their fund was meagre compared with the Germans who had quartered Europe in their Volkswagen campers. In the red light of beach barbecues they talked to the blonde, beautiful Scandinavians and smoked joints and listened to guitars with the friendly Dutch.
‘It’s perfect,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s Utopia.’
Jane sat cross-legged, with her hair crinkled by sun and salt loose over her shoulders. Even the soles of her feet looked tanned.
‘No violence, no greed, no theft.’ The sun had hypnotised them all, they had few possessions and less money. ‘No vanity, no competition, no racism.’
‘No prudery, nothing to hide.’
A few yards away, on a blanket, Geza and Inge the Swedes were making love. They took a long time over it, and appeared to have endlessly healthy appetites for the banquet of one another. Charlie opened his eyes.
‘Are they still at it? Would you really be happy to go on living like this?’
‘For ever,’ Jane murmured.
‘And the work ethic?’
‘I could subliminate it.’
‘Man lives to work as well as to love,’ Charlie reminded them. ‘One could point out as much to our friend Geza.’
At night, under the formidable stars, they sat around their driftwood fires and set about changing the world. For all the differences in shades of opinion, they were all certain that when they had drunk enough retsina and when the angle of the sun in the sky had declined enough to suggest autumn instead of high summer, they would return home to inherit systems that could be altered to suit their visions. They were full of innocent optimism and zeal.
One evening, as the talk eddied in circles, someone had asked, ‘What do you want, then, Harriet?’
Someone else had responded, ‘Harriet wants to be rich and famous.’
Defending herself with a quick retort she had answered, ‘Just rich will do.’
It was such an unfashionable response, such a bathetic contrast to the house of high-minded talk that had preceded it, that just as she had intended everyone laughed. In the days afterwards she was teased about her bourgeois ideals and exploitative intentions.
And then not long after that, as if governed by the same impulses as swallows gathering on telephone wires in English villages, the campers began to put on their tattered clothes once more and to talk about the long trek homewards to Munich and Amsterdam and Manchester. Harriet’s remark was forgotten as sleeping bags were rolled up and stored in the camper vans, and the tents were collapsed and folded away. A cold wind had started to blow from the east, whipping the sand up the beach. They slung their guitars from their shoulders and tied on their headbands, then set off in twos and threes down the rutted track that led away from the beach.
Utopia seemed a long way behind them even before they reached Heraklion.
‘Yes, I remember Crete.’ Sun and salt water, retsina and talk, endless talk. Harriet no longer felt young or innocent, and she knew that it was illogical to feel a shiver of regret for ten years ago. But she felt the shiver just the same.
‘I remember that I said I wanted to be rich.’
‘Have you been nursing entrepreneurial ambitions all this time?’
But Charlie had misunderstood her. They were not entrepreneurial ambitions, but ambitions for Simon’s game.
‘I said what I said, all that time ago, as a kind of joke. A joke that was forced on me.’
‘There’s no need to excuse it, then or now. I admire you Harriet. If you want to do it, go ahead. The financial climate is good, as you know, this government approves of enterprise, as you also know. I wish you the best of luck, if that’s what you want to hear. If there’s anything I can do to help you, you know I will.’
Harriet stood up, as if he had given her his blessing. She kissed Charlie’s cheek, finding it solid and warm. At the same moment she felt the blood in her own veins, and the bones under her skin. There was no husband downstairs. There was nothing, except her plan. She felt weightless, intoxicated with excitement all over again.
Charlie looked up. ‘I’m sorry about Leo,’ he said, surprising her.
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Harriet answered. ‘We didn’t make each other happy. Someone, or something, else will.’ She didn’t think he heard the qualification. It was for herself, in any case, not for Charlie. ‘Thanks for your advice. I think I’ll take the rest of it, and go and dance with the man in the blouse.’
Harriet was leaning over him. Without thinking, Charlie reached up and slid his hand inside her red shirt. He held one warm, bare breast in the cup of his palm. The weight of it felt nice, comforting.
Harriet smiled and gently removed his hand. She had lived naked for a month on a Greek beach with Charlie Thimbell; it would be prudish to object to his touch. And it gave her a small shock of pleasure that was not particularly sexual. It was more a thrill of novelty, of freedom.
‘Thanks,’ she said again. Charlie watched her as she retreated down the stairs. It was years since he had asked himself whether or not he found Harriet physically attractive. He supposed that at some stage he had decided not, because he preferred women who were pretty, and seemingly pliant, like Jenny. Yet tonight he had felt some charge in Harriet that was definitely stimulating. It was probably a good thing, he reflected, that she had separated from Leo Gold. He was afraid that it would be less of a good thing for her to divert her energies into marketing some game.
Charlie’s thoughts completed a circle and returned to Jenny. He felt a mixture of tenderness, exasperation, and the chafing of his own grief. He wanted to find a way to assuage Jenny’s sorrow, but the extent of it seemed as daunting as the sea. She had retreated into the depths of it. They had not made love since the baby had died. The brief flicker of desire that Charlie had felt for Harriet transferred itself to Jenny, and steadied.
Charlie stood up. It was time to take Jenny away from this party, away home to bed.
Downstairs again, Harriet was drawn into the party. There were other friends to see, some who were close and others she was glad to catch up with. She drank some wine, found herself laughing, and talking over the music as the circles forme
d and reformed. It was a good party. Harriet caught a glimpse of Jane dancing with a man in a blue shirt, and was pleased that she was enjoying herself too.
Charlie and Jenny looked in at the door, both wearing their coats. Harriet waved, and blew a kiss.
The dancing started seriously. Jane’s teacher colleague found Harriet and drew her into it. He was quite drunk, and he wound his arms around her as if without her support he might fall down. He mumbled hotly in her ear, ‘You’re asking for trouble, coming without your husband.’ Harriet removed his hands, less affectionately than Charlie’s.
As soon as she could she disengaged herself and wandered through to the kitchen. The smock and ponytail man was noisily drinking soup from a Royal Wedding mug. Harriet introduced herself and discovered in quick succession, that his name was Bernard, that he was a vegan and an amateur astrologer, and that he wasn’t the kind of man to whom she wanted to talk for a second longer than was necessary. To her relief, the girl in the embroidered blouse came to claim him.
Harriet turned away and with automatic energy began to clear the empty bottles from Jane’s tiled work-top. When that was done she emptied the sink of dirty plates and glasses, and stacked them neatly on the draining board ready to be washed. As she worked she was reflecting that she had come to the party in search of something, and that she had failed to find it. It wasn’t as a replacement for what she had lost with Leo, not love, of course, and equally certainly not sex.
She picked up a tea-towel and began to dry some plates, wiping carefully and then stopping to stare into the black glass of the window that reflected the room behind her. She saw Jane’s plum-coloured outfit move in a blur of other people. Jane had given up hostessing in favour of having a good time. Harriet smiled. What she had found at the party was the company of friends. The warmth that had greeted her stayed with her, buoying her up.
When she looked into the window again, she saw the reflection of a man behind her. He was wearing a bright blue shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. She had seen the same man earlier, dancing with Jane.
Then from behind her shoulder he asked, ‘Is that more interesting than mingling with your fellow-guests?’
