by Rosie Thomas
‘Only by having the opportunity to sell it. I shall be doing that for the next four days, at the trade fair. Why don’t you come and take a look?’
There was no direct response to her invitation. The two men appeared to think symbiotically without even needing to look at each other. Their silence manoeuvred Harriet into the attack.
‘I know you’ve got to calculate your risks. But wouldn’t a real venture be interesting? I’m not asking for a huge investment, I’m sure you can spread it around. And I know this will work. I know it.’ Harriet’s words seemed to echo mockingly in the plush quiet.
This time it was Robin who spoke. ‘Tell us what our exit strategy will be.’
‘USM float in three or four years.’
They approved of that. It was ambitious enough.
Martin was consulting his watch again. The meeting had reached an inconclusive finish. Harriet stood up briskly, so that she could appear to control the endgame.
‘Thank you for your time. I hope you’ll decide in my favour, Mr Landwith. Peacocks could work well for us both.’
He looked up at her; it was an odd, sidelong glance. The atmosphere in the room changed with it. It had been cool and crystalline, now it became warmer, as if thick velvet curtains had been drawn somewhere. Harriet understood that Martin Landwith had finished his appraisal of her investment potential. Now he was examining her as a woman. His eyes travelled from her mouth to her breasts. Such practised attention might have angered her, but she was interested to discover that it did not. She let him look, even squaring her shoulders and holding her head higher.
If he wants to play the game this way, she thought, I can do it too. I can play any way he likes, for the right stakes. The realisation of how much she would do for the sake of Conundrum didn’t shock her. She felt charged by it, rather, as if Martin Landwith’s deft, overdainty fingers had already worked on her. But it was the recognition of her own freedom, to do what she wanted with herself that had excited her, not anything Martin Landwith would or could do.
Robin had seen the shade of Harriet too, through the opaque business dress. They had stepped, an awkward threesome, on to different ground. Harriet looked from the father to the son, meeting their eyes squarely. Funny, she thought. Do they compete, or run together?
‘Thank you for coming, Miss Peacock,’ Martin said quietly. ‘We’ll consider your proposal.’
It was Robin who touched her elbow, guided her back through the double doors and down the staircase to the panelled hall. There was a scent of clove carnations from the flower display that Harriet hadn’t detected on the way up. She breathed it in luxuriously. She felt light-hearted, now that she was released from the strain of the meeting, and Robin became a part of the lightness. When he smiled at her they were almost co-conspirators. They shook hands, still smiling.
‘Try to come to the fair, Harriet repeated.
‘I’ll do my best for you,’ he said. Harriet wasn’t sure whether he meant the Toy Fair or persuading his father to back Conundrum. She went down the steps into the street, knowing that he was watching her go.
The glow of powerful well-being only lasted as far as the corner. By the time she reached it she was out of the patinated smoothness of the Landwith offices and back in the real world. And in the real world there were no Chinese Chippendale cabinets, no silk rugs, and no empty taxis either. It was nearly lunchtime, and every cab that passed was occupied by men, singly or in pairs, on their way to clubs and restaurants. Everyone else in the real world was on the pavement with Harriet, pushing and jostling.
She paused for long enough to look back at the stucco-fronted terrace. She wondered what the father and son were doing behind the tall, shining windows. She doubted that they were studying the copies of the plan that she had left for them. She didn’t even think they were urbanely agreeing that their visitor had been unfortunately flat-chested. She imagined that they were in some mahogany and silver washroom, ivory-brushing their beautiful haircuts ready for separate lunches with identically rich men in twin trendsetting restaurants.
The fantasy didn’t make her smile.
‘Smug shits,’ Harriet murmured. ‘I hate you.’ But she said it mechanically. She didn’t hate them enough not to long to join them.
There were still no taxis, and Harriet was due to meet Jane in five minutes’ time at the Earls Court exhibition hall main entrance. They were going to work on the stand together. Clearly there wasn’t going to be a taxi for the rest of the day. Harriet hoisted her heavy case under her arm and dived for the tube.
‘Harriet? Where have you been? They wouldn’t let me in without an exhibitor’s pass.’
Harriet was hot and flustered and guilty. Jane, loyal Jane, had freed herself from school for an afternoon in order to help her and she had kept her waiting for three-quarters of an hour. She gasped her apologies, waved her pass at the security man, and they were inside. She took Jane’s arm and steered her forward.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Landwith Associates took longer than I thought, then there were no cabs. I thought I’d never get here.’
They were half-running, half-stumbling down a long aisle. On either side there were stands where giant teddy bears reared up, where ranks of dolls smiled sweet persuasive smiles, and the rattle and whirr of mechanical toys mingled and multiplied. The dim roof-space overhead was noisy with the drilling and hammering and sawing of last preparations.
‘Slow down. Calm down,’ Jane ordered her, but Harriet rushed them faster. At last they reached a bare rectangle of space with packing cases tipped haphazardly in the centre. Harriet consulted a docket, looked at the number fixed to the stand frame, and back at the docket again.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘This is ours.’ She couldn’t keep the flatness out of her voice. The space was so bare, and dusty, and uninviting.
‘Not even a giant teddy to lend a hand,’ Jane said. Two young women in red and white Queen of Hearts costumes were eyeing them curiously from an apparently complete display across the aisle. ‘Come on, we’d better get started.’
It seemed impossible that they could ever make the stand look like anything. When she unwrapped the parachute silk and draped the creased swathes over the chipboard walls, Harriet thought she saw the Queens of Hearts covertly smiling. If it had not been for Jane, she would have turned tail, even at that last moment, and run away from the exhibition hall, right away from Conundrum itself.
But Jane raised her eyebrows by a fraction and twitched the corners of her mouth, conveying her opinion of the Queens with such perfect economy that Harriet laughed, and instead of running she climbed a stepladder with a staple gun ready in her hand.
‘How’d it go this morning?’ Jane called, over a mouthful of pins. Harriet perched on her ladder, dipping her splayed hand from side to side.
‘The smoothest pair of operators you ever saw. They’re thinking about it.’
Jane returned to her pinning. It seemed the wildest optimism to have come this far, with prototypes and printed glossy leaflets and swathes of bloody parachute silk, on the strength of two smooth operators consenting to think about further funding. Harriet had cheerfully spent all of her own capital, Jane was sure of that. If she had been in the same position she would have been too frightened to become absorbed in getting white folds of fabric to hang just so. But then, Jane reflected, she was no entrepreneur. If she were it might have been Harriet patiently waiting on the steps and herself arriving, with blazing eyes and cheeks, in a crackle of energy that made everyone turn round to look. The image didn’t attract Jane in the least. Even trying to teach The Catcher in the Rye to recalcitrant fourth-years was more appealing. Even stapling black PVC until her thumbs bled.
By the end of the afternoon, working without stopping, they had mocked-up black shiny pillars and puffy white clouds. The air in the hall stirred just enough to make the clouds drift. It was also warm enough to have caused the creases to drop out. The Queens of Hearts had stopped smirking and yaw
ning. Before they left they had begun to stare quite openly.
Harriet and Jane only ran into trouble when they unpacked the painted polystyrene blocks from which to construct the ambitious sunburst. There had been a measuring or a making error, and they didn’t fit together. The structure lurched at a drunken angle, offering slopes instead of smooth display shelves.
Harriet pushed her knuckles against her teeth. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but instead of disappearing the list only seemed more pronounced.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll have to get a saw and cut the blocks at one corner to even the thing up.’
Jane understood that Harriet contained her own kind of fright, and that she was close to letting it spill out. She left her and went to the exhibitors bar, full now of exhibitors who had finished putting up their stands and were greeting each other with annual boisterousness. She pushed her way through them and bought two plastic tumblers of gin, carried them back to Harriet and put one into her hand.
‘Drink first, problem-solving afterwards,’ she commanded.
‘I don’t know how to solve it,’ Harriet moaned.
Before they had finished the gin, Jenny arrived on her way home from her publishing house. She took one look at the mismatched heaps of painted polystyrene.
‘Oh dear,’ she said.
‘We’re going to try to cut the blocks to make them even,’ Harriet told her.
Jenny had a strong practical streak. ‘Don’t cut, whatever you do. You’ll never get them even, and you’ll end up cutting more and more off until you’ve got blocks the size of matchboxes. You’ll have to shore it up with something.’ She glanced around, and then cocked her head to the sound of sawing. ‘Hang on here.’
Five minutes later, she was back with a handful of rough wooden wedges.
It was fiddly work, but an hour later the sunburst stood level. Conundrum boards and the sunburst-bright boxes had to be balanced on it with infinite care, but they stood level too.
‘Finishing touches now,’ Harriet commanded.
She had rented black folding tables and chairs for each side of the stand. When they were put in place there were boxes of leaflets and information folders and printed order books to be unpacked.
They worked silently, because it was ten o’clock at night and they were tired and hungry. But they were not too tired to notice that the other exhibitors, the last ones who were straggling out towards the exits and their hotel beds, all stopped to look at the Conundrum stand.
At last, the job was done.
They stood back, shoulder to shoulder, to admire it. Their backs and arms ached, and their faces were smeared with dust. Harriet completed her scrutiny.
‘It’s all right,’ she said slowly. ‘In fact, it’s more than all right.’
‘It’s bloody brilliant,’ Jenny corrected her. ‘So long as no one breathes on the sun thing.’
Jane stuck her hands into the pockets of her overalls. ‘I’ll get us another drink. We’ve earned it.’ She went to the bar, but came back with the news that it was closed. ‘This is all I could get, from a machine.’ She held up three tins of fizzy orange and three vending-machine packs of sandwiches.
They sat down on the edge of the stand, very carefully in case they upset any of their handiwork.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said. She was dirty and exhausted, but she felt full of hope. Tomorrow she would be able to show off Conundrum. Tomorrow would tell. ‘Thank you for being here. You’ve made everything seem possible.’
Jane bent her head closer, so that her thick plait of hair touched Harriet’s cheek.
‘You’re doing something I couldn’t begin to do.’ Wouldn’t begin to do, Harriet silently filled in for her. ‘But I wish you all the luck.’
That this business world was so far from what Jane believed in, or truly approved of, made the good wishes seem even more valuable. She thought momentarily of Crete, reflecting that even if their goals were changing, the ties of friendship still endured.
Jane nodded at the white clouds and the shiny boxes that represented Harriet’s small capital. ‘Remember what I said about the money? Do you need it?’
Harriet did, but she didn’t want to take it. Not until she was certain that it wouldn’t be lost …
‘I’ve got plenty for the launch,’ she said determinedly. ‘After that, we’ll see.’
Jenny leaned back and stretched out her legs in front of her. She lifted her tin of Fanta. ‘I’ve got some good news too,’ she told them. ‘I’m pregnant again.’
Their shout made the last of the toy exhibitors turn round to stare. Jenny’s face was bright. ‘It’s a bit soon. But it happened, and it felt like the sun coming out. It was so dark, before.’
They came closer to her, so they could put their arms around her shoulders. Jane raised her tin of orange drink too, to make a toast.
‘Here’s to your twin projects,’ she said. ‘May they both grow and prosper. Harriet, Jenny.’
If she felt the lack of a project of her own, Jane didn’t let it show in her face. They drank and then ate their stale sandwiches, their optimism making the meal a celebration.
It was the last afternoon.
Briefly, surreptitiously, Harriet rested her head in her hands. Before the fair she had had no idea how much energy it would take, just to go on smiling and shaking hands, to go on demonstrating Conundrum one more time, until she was sick of the merry rattle of the balls, and the colours of the counters and the slick boxes and the jaunty buttons on the girls’ dresses danced in front of her eyes.
The air in the exhibition hall was hot and dry, and her feet had swollen until they felt ready to burst out of her shoes. Yet all around Harriet, on other stands, salesmen were still selling, smiling and shaking hands and cracking the same jokes that they had been cracking for the last three and a half days. Not many of them were subtle or sophisticated, any more than their jokes, but admiration for her competitors was new-born in Harriet. She had seen them working, and she could appreciate their stamina if only because her own had failed to match it.
She glanced round her own stand. Her television personality had come yesterday, and he had duly challenged buyers and the press to play the game against him. A crowd had gathered round the Conundrum stand; Harriet had posed for photographs with the star’s arm around her shoulder, and her salesgirls in their jaunty dresses had shown an adequate expanse of thigh on either side of the shaky sunburst. Kath had been there, too. She had been determined to come and see Harriet’s pitch, and as her mother timidly watched the television man sucking up the well-paid publicity, Harriet had seen that she was surprised and impressed, but nervous and uncomprehending too.
‘Aren’t you nervous of all this?’ Kath had whispered.
‘I’m not nervous, Mum. I know what I’m doing.’
Only a white lie, Harriet thought.
There had been plenty of interest, the girls and the stand itself had been enough to guarantee that. Conundrum had been endlessly played, and admired, and much talked about. There had been orders, too. Only not quite as many as she had hoped. Not as many as she needed. Harriet was left, on this overheated and oppressive afternoon, with the realisation that she had accepted orders and guaranteed delivery on not quite enough Conundrums to allow her to break even.
She hadn’t heard from Martin Landwith either. There had been messages every evening on her machine at Belsize Park, including one from Leo who sounded slightly drunk and promised to come and see ‘her show’ at the fair, but not the one message that she wanted to receive.
Harriet saw that the prettier of the girls, the one with bronze-coloured hair and the least make-up, was making an energetic sales pitch to a store buyer from the north. He released the spring mechanism, the balls played their over-familiar tune, and dropped into the wrong slots. He groaned, and the girl commiserated prettily.
‘Here you are, try again.’ She winked over his head at Harriet. There were no other customers o
n the stand, and the other girl would be back soon from her lunch. Harriet decided she could slip away for a moment or two.
She threaded her way through the thinning crowds, past the ranks of teddy bears, to the row of telephones in the foyer. She was panting a little as she dialled the Landwiths’ number.
Mr Martin Landwith was not available. Still at lunch, the fat cat, Harriet thought savagely. But Mr Robin Landwith would speak to her, should the receptionist put her through.
‘Yes please,’ Harriet murmured. She was holding too tightly to the receiver.
‘Robin Landwith.’ The voice more like his father’s over the telephone, silky with self-assurance.
‘Harriet Peacock. Mr Landwith, I hoped you might be able to come to the Toy Fair to see Conundrum on display. The fair closes this evening, so this is your last chance.’ She tried to sound warm and humorous, feeling neither of those things.
‘One of our companies has gone public this week. It’s been a busy few days for us.’
‘I’m sure,’ Harriet said, then reminded herself that she would gain nothing by sounding scratchy. ‘Look, the exhibition is hardly any way from you by cab.’ If you can get one. People like you invariably can. ‘The fair’s open until six. Come on your way home.’
She heard him laughing, a rather surprisingly nice laugh.
‘On my way home, at five-thirty? What kind of hours do you think venture capitalists work? Don’t expect me, but I’ll try to get there. How has Conundrum been selling to the trade?’
‘Very well indeed. There’ll be more orders later, of course.’
‘Hm. Harriet, we haven’t taken a decision either way, yet, you know.’
Harriet? Had he called her Harriet? ‘That’s all right. I can wait, for the right answer.’
After she had hung up, leaning against the wall of the booth, Harriet was overtaken by a cold wash of terror. She couldn’t afford to wait at all, not even a day. She was taking orders for thousands of games that she didn’t have the funding to manufacture; and if she managed to get the money she didn’t have enough orders to push herself into profit.
