by Rosie Thomas
‘It’s what I’m here for,’ he mumbled. But he was pleased, just the same. He felt that he would willingly go through the pandemonium of the last weeks all over again.
Harriet was good at commanding loyalty.
Karen gave up her evenings for Peacocks’ sake, even Jeremy Crichton the marmoreal accountant worked his hardest for Harriet.
‘Jeremy will be pleased with us,’ Graham said. ‘Have you talked to him?’
‘Yep. B double plus.’ Jeremy’s pessimism was a company joke. For Jeremy, the rating was a rave.
‘And Robin?’
Harriet paused in the doorway. ‘Not yet. I’m saving that one up.’ She winked at Graham, and went away to her telephone call. He returned, with some reluctance, to his work.
Radio Brighton wanted Harriet on the morning show. She was going to play Meizu with nurses and doctors from the children’s hospital, as part of a fund-raising week. It had been her own idea, enthusiastically received. Now the programme researcher wanted to know if she would be willing to be interviewed herself, to talk about discovering and marketing Meizu.
‘Of course,’ Harriet said. ‘I’d be glad to. Anything you like.’
She would talk about anything under the sun, to anyone who wanted it, she thought, so long as it generated publicity for her game.
‘And what about the man himself? Would he come with you? I do understand he doesn’t normally do publicity, but …’
There had been many other offers, of course, from television companies and national newspapers. Harriet thought, for the thousandth time, if only Simon would.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Is he in fact your father?’ the girl persisted, as if that was what everyone assumed.
Harriet turned very firm. ‘No, he isn’t my father. There’s no more I can tell you, either. What time would you like me to arrive?’ She made the necessary arrangements, and then rang off.
Harriet sat back in her chair for a moment, biting her lip. Then she reached out for the sheaf of press cuttings that she had taken through to show Graham, and looked up from those to the sales chart on the opposite wall. There was no need for it to be there, all the sales information was carried on disk, but tending it was the single time-wasting activity that Harriet allowed herself. Optimism seemed to radiate from her chart. The dingy office, that had so oppressed her in the Conundrum days, now seemed only temporarily inconvenient.
Harriet sprang up from her desk and walked the three or four steps to the window. When she swung back again she passed the new Meizu boards and boxes displayed on top of a battered filing cabinet. They seemed to fill their space much more effectively than the old rainbow ones had done.
Musingly, Harriet picked up a board. She turned it, admiring the verisimilitude that Graham and Mr Jepson had achieved.
‘Meizu.’
She was thinking of Simon. It had been a bad thing to do, to take his privacy, she was all too aware of that. But she could also defend it as a good thing. As she had told Graham, Peacocks was going to make it. There were enough orders already to put the company healthily into profit. There would be reorders before the game was officially on the market, yet more in the long runup to Christmas. The first hurdle had been triumphantly cleared. If she could get the balance right now. Not to manufacture too many units that couldn’t be sold, not to underorder so that stock couldn’t be supplied to the shops rapidly enough to meet demand.
Harriet paced up and down, her fists clenched in her pockets.
She had stolen Simon’s story, turning his tragedy into a marketing tool. But she had protected Simon himself. She wasn’t proud of what she had done, but she had been practical. Meizu was selling, better and faster than she could ever have hoped. Harriet was frowning, but her steps were springy. She felt charged with energy, it radiated out of her and fired everything she touched. The sensation suited her. She was strong. She felt happier and more alive than she had ever felt in her life before.
And so, Harriet thought, perhaps it was time to stop being cautious, and practical, and businesslike. She returned to her desk, forgetting about Simon and about balancing supply and demand. Just for an evening or so, she told herself.
She hadn’t seen Robin Landwith for some time. Landwith Associates had advanced the necessary capital for the repackaging and relaunch of Conundrum, and then had left her to get on with the job. Presumably Jeremy Crichton reported back to them.
Harriet crossed her legs in supple black leather and dialled the Landwiths’ number. She stopped frowning, and smiled wickedly instead.
‘Robin? It’s Harriet. I think it’s my turn to buy you dinner, isn’t it?’
‘What a good idea.’ She liked his voice, even on the telephone, she realised. ‘I’ll look in the diary.’
Harriet’s smile broadened. ‘I was thinking about this evening, actually, Robin.’
He sounded startled. ‘This evening? Well, I don’t think …’ She waited. She could almost hear him thinking. Then, a second later, ‘But why not? Where would you like to go?’
‘I’m taking you, remember?’ Harriet answered. She named a place, a French bistro much frequented by journalists and publishers, an old favourite of hers. She was sure that Robin would never have heard of it.
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Robin said.
Harriet replaced the receiver, quite satisfied. To feel powerful, she reflected, was to be powerful.
Harriet had arranged to meet Lisa, first, for a drink. They had made the date a week before, and the wine bar they had settled on was near enough to the French bistro. Harriet called good-night to Karen and Graham and was, for once, the first rather than the last to leave Peacocks’ offices.
When she stepped out into the mews she looked up at the domes of tall trees just visible over the line of roof-tops, and decided that she would walk instead of waiting for a bus. It was a clear, warm evening of the kind she loved, when the summer was still new enough to be fresh and green, and the city was full just of Londoners, good-humouredly en fête to celebrate the fine weather.
Harriet passed the tall, crumbling terraces of the immediate neighbourhood, where sunshine had drawn shady inhabitants out of curtained rooms to perform more publicly on front steps between peeling stucco pillars, and where pairs of policemen strolled up and down in their shirtsleeves. She plunged across the main road, between shimmering red buses, catching a whiff of warm tar that reminded her sharply of some childhood game in a street not much different from those she had just left. Ahead of her, beyond some railings, was the park. The trees’ shade, when she reached it, was welcomingly cool. Harriet took off her zippered jacket and walked on in her white T-shirt, one finger hooking the jacket over her shoulder.
The grass was lush after a wet spring, but there were bare dusty patches under the great trees. Predatory urban squirrels chased through the dust, then shot up tree trunks as smoothly vertical as stucco pillars. They were undisturbed by the joggers who thumped past, stirring hot air in their wake. Harriet smiled and went on at her own pace, her head empty. It was pleasant to be walking without the weight of a briefcase at her side, without the immediate pressure of work to be done. She felt as though she was taking a tiny holiday. The evening in prospect lent a stimulating edge, even meeting Lisa. They didn’t often see one another alone, away from the upholstery of Sunderland Avenue.
When she reached the opposite side of the park, Harriet saw a group of people gathered near the tall gates at a point where a much narrower path diverged through dense shrubs. When she came closer she saw that they were passers-by, mostly home-going office workers taking a shortcut like herself, standing in a circle round an elderly woman. The woman was crying. She let the tears roll down her face, making no effort to stop them. A policewoman was holding her arm, a policeman was listening to a man in a suit who was describing what he had seen. As Harriet drew level with them, a police car turned in through the park gates, blue light languidly flashing.
A woman had been att
acked, mugged perhaps, in the shelter of the thick bushes. Harriet passed by, looking exaggeratedly in a different direction to spare the woman the sense of being stared at. There was nothing else to be done.
The sight of the incident changed her perceptions of the evening; she knew that the woman’s wet face would stay in her mind. The green colonnades of the park were as dangerous as the sleepy, tarry streets on the other side. And yet, thought Harriet, it was the very rawness that sharpened her appreciation of the mundane, lovely familiarity of the city.
Out from under the trees, the roar of the traffic clamped around her again. She went on more soberly, her senses sharper, feeling the warmth of the pavements striking up through her thin shoes. She was passing big shops now; from the opulent windows mannequins in summer tableaux stared out over her head.
When Harriet reached the wine bar she saw that tables had spread out on to the pavement. Every chair at the tables was taken, and there was a buzz of talk and laughter from customers pretending that London was a Mediterranean city. Harriet squeezed between the tables, but Lisa was nowhere to be seen. She passed through the open doors, and peered into the gloom within. She did see Lisa then, sitting on a high stool drawn up to the bar. She was talking to a man and it was a full two seconds before Harriet realised, with a guilty beat, that the man was Leo.
Lisa saw her, waved, and when Harriet reached them offered her cheek for Harriet to kiss.
‘I bumped into Leo outside the Tube.’
‘Really?’
Lisa enjoyed making mild mischief, but Harriet was inclined to believe that it had just been a chance meeting. There was no point in bringing Leo along for a surprise confrontation because no sparks would be struck from it. Their marriage had simply ended, so conclusively that Harriet found it difficult to imagine how it had ever existed. She looked at Leo as he stood up, leaned across to kiss her. Their cheeks brushed, dry and cool. She didn’t feel that she knew this particular man any better than the one next to him who was drinking kir royale with a silent blonde, or the Australian barman, or any of the others in the crowded room.
It was chilling to think of the years that they had spent together, years that seemed now to have evaporated without trace, putting Leo on the same footing as the men in suits and herself with the silent blonde. Strangers, having a drink together. As she studied her husband’s face Harriet guessed that it was the same cold sense of waste that gave Leo his baffled, irritable air whenever they met. Her own response was to cling more tenaciously to the idea of her work, and her determination to make a success of Peacocks. That, at least, would not evaporate.
She wanted to put her hand up to touch Leo’s face, to say I know, but she didn’t. She smiled at him and said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
They found a barstool for her and she perched on it, accepting a glass of wine.
Leo asked, ‘So how’s the entrepreneur?’
The question was mildly sarcastic, in Leo’s irritable mode, but Harriet took it straight.
‘Busy, but reasonably optimistic.’
‘When will you make your million?’ Lisa enquired.
‘Probably not until Peacocks goes public.’ Harriet noticed that Lisa was looking a shade older, although no less pretty. The touch of maturity suited her. Lisa felt her scrutiny and reached out to touch the soft leather creases of Harriet’s trousers, choosing to ignore her half-sister’s threat to become rich.
‘Aren’t you hot in those?’
Harriet laughed. ‘Just a bit. I didn’t look at the sky very carefully this morning.’
There was always this same friction between them, inflamed by tiny things too small to be called jealousies or resentments. Sometimes the two of them achieved a truce and Harriet thought, Now, we’re adults, at last. But then the abrasion came back again. Tonight it seemed stirred up by Leo’s presence. Harriet wished he was somewhere else.
‘How’s Mum?’ she asked neutrally.
Lisa told her, relating some tiny snippets of Sunderland Avenue gossip. Then, relieved of the possibility of having to give Harriet’s affairs first mention, she added, ‘Mum thinks it’s terrible, what you’ve done.’
‘What?’
‘Taken Mr Archer’s story like that and made a sales gimmick out of it.’
‘It’s not a gimmick,’ Harriet said harshly. ‘It’s a story that deserved to be told.’
Lisa shrugged her shoulders. ‘That’s not what Mum says. She was wondering how he must feel, having his life served up in front of everyone.’
‘No one knows it’s his life. His identity is a secret.’
‘He knows, doesn’t he? Mum was so upset about it, she said she’d have to give you her shares back and resign her directorship. Actually, I said I’d take them off her hands.’
Harriet stared at Lisa. She hadn’t seen Kath for a little while, the relaunch of Meizu had taken all her attention.
‘Mum’s never mentioned anything to me.’
‘Well, you know what she’s like. Anything rather than have a fuss, or a scene.’
Lisa was right in her judgement of that, of course. Harriet twirled her glass. She must go and see Kath, and explain that she had only done what had to be done. And she must also make the journey to see Simon, to put it to him as gently as she could. She had put the duty off, out of a sense of distaste that she had later suppressed, and then she had been too busy, and then it had seemed too late. She consoled herself with the certainty that Simon would not have heard anything about Meizu in any case, living in isolation as he did.
To Harriet’s surprise, Leo defended her. ‘As a commercial decision, it makes perfectly good sense.’
Lisa glanced sharply at him, betraying a kind of complicity. Harriet wondered what they had talked about on their way from the station, and sitting over their wine while they waited for her to arrive.
‘I’ll go and see Kath,’ Harriet murmured. ‘She’ll understand, when I’ve had a chance to talk to her.’
Her mother’s approval was important, and so was her support. Harriet was dismayed to hear that Meizu had upset her.
Lisa appeared to have lost interest. ‘By the way,’ she said breezily, ‘I’m moving out, leaving home at long last. I’m getting a flat in Blackheath, Ken’s given me the deposit.’
‘That’s good,’ Harriet said, glad of a change of subject. ‘A very good thing. It’s time you had your independence.’ It would do Lisa good to have to fend for herself, Harriet thought. ‘No more coffee and walnut cake for everyone who calls.’ Leo laughed, like the old Leo, with his own recollections of Kath’s hospitality. ‘How is the big love?’ Harriet continued.
Lisa pushed back her curtain of hair. The man with the blonde glanced at her, then looked with appreciative interest. ‘I’m not seeing him any more,’ she said flatly.
Harriet’s eyes met Leo’s. Just like that, just like us. She felt pity again for the waste of it, but she knew it was incontrovertible. There was nothing more, but neither of them had mentioned divorce. She supposed that would come, in time. She had heard somewhere, perhaps from Henry Orde, that Leo was now seeing someone else. She hadn’t enquired who it was. For her own part, there had been no time for anything of the kind.
Harriet looked away first. She felt the complicated knots of family business enmeshing the three of them, and then she remembered the taut and enticingly separate thread of her evening with Robin Landwith. The thread drew her with surprising force.
Leo and Lisa and Harriet finished their bottle of wine. They talked about the layout of Lisa’s new flat and her plans for decorating it, and Leo and Harriet agreed that some of their equipment from the old flat could be unpacked and given to Lisa, who needed it. Then they talked about some work Leo was doing, and his prospects for the rest of the year.
The wine bar was beginning to empty, and there was space at the tables outside. Harriet glanced at her watch. It was nearly eight o’clock, and time to go to meet Robin.
‘Let’s have dinner,’ Leo said. ‘
Where would you like to go?’
Out of the corner of her eye, Harriet saw Lisa frown.
Harriet said, ‘I can’t, tonight. I’m meeting someone else for dinner. In fact I should go now, or I’ll be late.’
They didn’t say anything, but both pairs of eyes demanded who?
‘The man from the venture capitalists. The one who put up the money.’ That was too explanatory, of course. ‘Robin,’ she finished. ‘I’ve really got to go.’ She put down her glass and gathered up her jacket and handbag.
Harriet saw that she had separated herself from them. They were resentful of her business elsewhere, and of her talk of capital. Their small circle had been uncomfortable but she was wrong to remove herself from it.
‘Good-night.’ Harriet kissed them both, and extricated herself. Her last glimpse of them, through the windows of the wine bar, revealed them watching the doorway that had swallowed her up.
It was cooler now. Harriet put on her jacket and fastened the zips. She was glad to have escaped the knots of the evening, and she deliberately put the ravel of them behind her. Just for tonight, it was her holiday.
She was walking quickly, almost running. She breathed in the city smells of street dust and engine fumes, mingled with the mould and leafy scent of the park. It was good to be free, she chanted silently, in time with her own footsteps. It was good to be in charge of her own destiny. She had come to it late, but she would make the most of it now.
Thinking of the months since she had separated from Leo, she realised that she had been cold and preoccupied. What she needed now, what she wanted, was some fun, some love, and a rest. Or if not a rest, then a change from the relentlessness of work.
Robin was already at the restaurant when she arrived. He stood up when she reached the table, and she saw pleasure and admiration in his eyes.
She was breathless. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been having a drink with my sister.’
‘It was worth waiting for,’ Robin said simply.
They sat down facing each other, wedged into a cramped space under a Lautrec poster and a framed collage of claret labels. Robin was less formally dressed than usual, not even wearing a tie. He might have been one of Charlie’s friends. He looked as at home amongst the checked table-cloths as in the grand restaurant where they had first eaten dinner together.
