by Rosie Thomas
Harriet thought she probably underestimated Robin Landwith.
He poured wine, and they touched glasses. Their fingers touched at the same time.
‘How is Peacocks?’
Harriet told him. Robin’s smile showed his beautiful teeth.
‘I thought you’d do it.’
‘I hoped we would do it.’
He put his other hand out to cover hers, on the checked bistro cloth. Harriet’s fingers were naked. She had taken off her wedding ring a long time ago.
Afterwards, Harriet didn’t remember much about that dinner. They talked a great deal, about themselves and not at all about business, and they laughed almost as much. They were the last diners to leave, when the Gallic waiters grew openly impatient.
The street outside the restaurant was deserted. Harriet looked up to see the stars, just visible through the orangey film of street lighting. She felt a little drunk, but also clear-headed and excited.
Robin put his arm around her waist. ‘Would you like me to come to your flat,’ he asked, ‘or would you rather come home with me?’
Chaotic and cat-redolent Belsize Park or tidily opulent Battersea, Harriet mused.
‘Neither,’ she answered. ‘I think I’d like to go to a hotel.’
‘Small and intimate or large and anonymous?’
‘The bigger and more impersonal the better.’
Harriet loved hotels, all the bathroom paraphernalia of shower gels and shoeshine kits, the impromptu picnics out of mini-fridges, and the sense of a tiny, complete world temporarily created behind a numbered door.
‘We’ll go to the Hilton, then,’ Robin said, as if nothing could be more obvious.
Harriet grew suddenly giggly. ‘We can’t go without luggage, can we?’
‘I got back from Milan this morning. I have perfectly respectable luggage in the boot of my car.’
‘You’ll have to lend me a shirt and a toothbrush.’
‘That will be my pleasure.’
‘Robin, it’s way past midnight.’
‘I don’t care what time it is. If you want a hotel, a hotel it shall be.’
Harriet let him take charge. She discovered that receptionists and hall porters hurried to do what he asked. She no longer felt that Robin was pompous. It was comfortable to have arrangements made for her, it was charming and flattering to be the subject of this handsome boy’s attentions.
Within minutes, it seemed, they were in possession of a room with two huge king-sized beds, a tiled bathroom, a mini-bar stocked with half-bottles of champagne, and a window that promised a view of Hyde Park, a long way below them. The porter who had brought Robin’s suitcase bowed his way out. Robin was a confident tipper.
Harriet went to the window and lifted the heavy net drapes. Far beneath she saw the dazzle of red and gold lights of cars negotiating Hyde Park Corner, and facing her across Park Lane the black curtain of the Park itself. She looked at the familiar landmarks from this unfamiliar perspective, across to the lights of Knightsbridge Barracks and northwards to Marble Arch.
Robin came up behind her, put his mouth against her bare neck. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Please.’ Harriet let the curtain drop.
He unzipped her complicated jacket and the tight leather trousers. Harriet wriggled out of them and folded them carefully on a chair. She glanced at each label, not knowing whether she was putting off the moment or prolonging the anticipation. Robin watched her while she took off the rest of her clothes. She was surprised to discover that she was shaking. She stood up straight in front of him, spreading her hands in a small gesture.
‘I’m not pretty. I wish I was.’
He caught her wrist. ‘Pretty is superficial. You have much more than that.’
His face had changed. His eyes were very wide, with anxiety and something like awe in them. He was suddenly young, much younger. Harriet was touched, and also more profoundly excited. She wanted him very much now.
Together, awkward in their haste, they pulled off his clothes. There was no tidy folding now. They clung together for a second, and then Robin pushed her back on to the wide, smooth bed. He kissed her mouth and then her skin, trying to cover every inch of it, as if he wanted to devour her.
‘Robin …’ Harriet tried to whisper. She had thought to establish her liberated, experienced credentials, to take some of the control and to tell him that she preferred to be on top. But, instead, Harriet closed her eyes on the pastel decor and the blank square of the television, and gave herself up.
It had been a long time, months, and she had been dry and diligent. Now, with Robin, she remembered all the intricate pleasures, and beguiling diversions that still led to the same engrossing destination. She let herself be carried deliciously towards it, without trying to touch the polite markers of now you, and do you like this?
It was a wonderful feeling.
She came quickly, much too quickly. Harriet, who never cried out in love-making, put her head back and blindly screamed, without a thought for the sleeping occupants of the other numbered rooms to either side of their private dominion.
Robin was quieter when his turn came. But the spasm went on for a long time, like a boy’s. Harriet held him in her arms, and they lay silent. Robin’s eyelashes were wet and black.
At last he said softly, ‘That was wonderful.’
She smiled, near to tears. ‘It was.’ There was no need to cry, after all.
Harriet listened to the sound of the traffic. It was so muted that it might just have been the sea, or the wind in the trees. After a while, beginning to feel cramped, she moved an inch or two. Although he tried to hold her closer she propped herself on one elbow to look down at him. She saw well-developed shoulders and a flat stomach, a sparse triangle of dark hair spreading over his chest to his belly.
‘You look as if you’re enjoying one of your private jokes again. Bad timing, I call it.’
‘I’m not,’ Harriet defended herself, laughing. It was nice to laugh in bed. ‘I was just thinking, you’re such a perfect specimen.’ She was teasing him, made confident by the homage he had paid her. She was, she realised, peculiarly happy. ‘Is there anything you don’t excel at?’
Robin pretended to consider. ‘Let’s see. Hmm. Well, I can’t sing.’
‘Oh, in that case …’ Harriet made as if to scramble out of bed, but he pulled her back and kissed her.
‘If you’re going anywhere, you might just bring some champagne from the fridge on your way back.’
They sat up in bed, drinking the champagne and eating fruit from the bowl provided by the management as if they were ravenous.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Late, late.’
‘Don’t you have work to do tomorrow?’
‘Of course I do. So do you, I hope. But it’s too early to go to sleep yet, don’t you think?’
‘Possibly. Or no, not possibly. Definitely. Robin …’
This time, Harriet had plenty of opportunity to express and to exercise her preferences. She straddled him and he looked up at her, spreading his arms, young-faced again, so that she rolled over with him and took his face between her hands.
It was very satisfactory.
They fell asleep, at last, knitted together.
In the middle of the night, or perhaps towards the early morning because there was dim grey light showing at the window, Harriet woke up again with Robin’s hands on her. She turned to him, reaching out, and he came inside her at once, without words, without preliminaries.
At that hour, even the distant tide of traffic was stilled. Harriet cried out again into the sleeping silence.
‘I love you,’ Robin said. She put her fingers to his mouth.
‘No, you don’t. We shared something, a little holiday, that was it.’ She remembered her cool decision to let herself off the leash for one evening. ‘Anything more wouldn’t be businesslike. Would it?’
‘Fuck business,’ Robin said. ‘This is what matters. I love you.’
They
slept again.
When it was fully light, Robin drew back the curtains so that they could look at the trees. He ordered breakfast from room service, and went into the bathroom to shower. When he came out, in a white towelling robe with his damp hair standing on end, he looked about fifteen. Then he dressed in a clean shirt and tie from his suitcase, and turned into the businessman again. Harriet watched him happily from the bed.
When it came, Robin brought the tray of breakfast to her. She sat up, naked in the coil of sheets, drinking coffee and licking drips of honey off her fingers.
‘Good?’ he asked her.
She told him, ‘Very good.’
He whistled as he poured more coffee. Harriet remembered the words of the middle of the night, and her denial of them. Now, in this morning’s intimacy, she thought how conclusively she had forgotten the luxury of being loved. And what would happen if she accepted the luxury all over again, she wondered. Which one of them was vulnerable?
‘What are you doing today?’ he asked.
‘Going to see my mother, first.’ That was important, after what Lisa had told her. ‘Then back to Peacocks.’
‘What time shall I pick you up this evening?’
Harriet was startled. ‘This evening?’
‘Of course. I don’t want to let you out of my sight for a minute longer than necessary.’
The luxury and the liability.
Her choice was either to go home alone, to Belsize Park and the cats and a folder of work, or to be with Robin. In truth there was no choice, she knew which she wanted. To hell with it, Harriet thought. We’re both grown up. We can deal with whatever happens when it happens. Luxury lapped around her; she gave herself up to it.
‘Seven o’clock.’
‘Good. And do you crave hotel anonymity?’
Harriet looked around at one smooth bed and one rumpled, crumbs and honey on the tray beside her, Robin’s discarded white robe.
‘One night is enough to remember.’
‘The first night,’ he corrected her. He was very confident, as he appeared to be in everything. Except in the secret moments, Harriet remembered. Perhaps she loved him for those. A little bit, just a little bit.
‘Perfect specimen,’ she teased him. He kissed her, and went on his way.
Meditatively, Harriet put her clothes on and travelled against the morning tide from Park Lane to Sunderland Avenue.
‘You look well enough,’ Kath said. She had come to meet Harriet practically at the baby-blue front gates.
‘I am well,’ Harriet said tranquilly. Kath was looking intently at her. ‘Let’s go inside and have some coffee, Mum. I need to talk to you.’
Kath bustled about her spotless domain. Harriet waited, looking out of the patio doors at the roses in the summer garden, knowing that her mother wouldn’t listen until a tray was properly laid and the right sort of cake and biscuits set out for Harriet to refuse with her coffee.
They went out into the garden, Harriet carrying the tray. They sat in deckchairs, in the same places as when Kath had first told Harriet about Simon Archer. If he had really been my father, Harriet wondered, would I have done any of this any differently? Meizu was so close to her heart, and her hopes for it so fierce, that she didn’t think she would have. Does that make me a good businesswoman, a bad daughter, she wondered? Robin was a good businessman and a good son. To Martin, in any case, the two were synonymous.
‘Lisa said you were upset about my telling Simon’s story.’
Kath was flustered, as always, by the threat of a scene. Her fair face turned a dull red, and she looked wildly around for an excuse to head off what might be coming. But both coffee cups were full, the milk jug was covered against the possibility of flies, and the chocolate biscuits were safely in the shade.
‘I don’t want you to be upset,’ Harriet prompted.
‘I know what he’d suffered,’ Kath said breathlessly. ‘You shouldn’t use that, for making money. You made me feel involved in it too, owning those shares, being on your board of directors. If I am a director, shouldn’t I have a say? I’d have said no, Harriet. I don’t want to be part of a thing like that.’
Harriet felt scolded, a child again. She hated to make Kath angry, hated it more if her mother was unhappy. She left her chair and knelt on the grass in front of Kath.
‘I run a company. The decision was mine, and I had to take it. I’ll tell you why.’ Kath listened while Harriet explained. The flush ebbed from her cheeks and throat but her expression was still anxious, the soft lower lip stuck out. Kath wanted to believe what she was told. She was proud of her daughter.
‘It can’t hurt Simon. I didn’t use his name, there’s no question of any of the publicity touching him. You could think of it as a generalised tribute even, to all those PoWs, to their will to survive.’
‘As well as your determination to make money out of it, do you mean?’
Harriet flinched. ‘There isn’t any money yet. Only a negative amount, the huge sum I’ve borrowed from Landwith Associates.’ The name, absurdly, made Harriet redden in her turn. She went on quickly, ‘Without the change of direction I didn’t even have a hope of paying that back. I didn’t have any choice. I had to go ahead and do what I did, or go under. Simon will understand that, when I go to tell him about it.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Um. Not before the weekend.’ There were press and radio interviews, a chance of TV-am. ‘On Monday,’ she added, deciding. ‘And when I have made the money, I can do something valuable with some of it, can’t I? Which is better than Meizu not having existed at all.’
Kath sighed, but her face had brightened. The scene had been negotiated, with no serious damage resulting. She leaned forward to Harriet, putting one hand on her shoulder.
‘You’re a good girl, Harriet. You always have been, you know.’
Harriet was pleased, and touched. ‘Have I? Keep your shares, and your directorship, won’t you? It’s important to me.’ She put her hands over her mother’s, feeling Ken’s wedding and engagement rings sharp under her palm.
‘If that’s what you want. If it makes you happy. Are you happy, Harriet?’
‘Of course I am.’ More so than yesterday. Surprisingly so, when she thought of the neutral hotel bedroom and the unneutral scenes the pastel walls had witnessed. Harriet suddenly felt so hungry that she let Kath cut her a piece of chocolate cake, so ensuring further satisfaction for her mother before she had to return to the demands of Peacocks. ‘Good girl,’ Kath said. ‘You look as thin as a stick.’
‘Is Harriet in yet?’
Monday was one of Graham Chandler’s days in the Peacocks’ office, and he had arrived early. But Karen was there first, opening the morning’s post at the front desk.
‘No. She rang yesterday to say that she was driving up to see Simon Archer first thing. She’s doing Midlands Radio, and a couple of other things as well.’
Graham had a newspaper under his arm, one of the national dailies. He unfolded it in front of Karen.
‘Will she have seen this, do you think?’
Karen read the paragraphs, where his finger pointed. Then she looked up at Graham. Her eyes were round and horrified. ‘How can they have done that? They can’t, can they?’
‘They have,’ he said. ‘And I don’t suppose this will be all. How can we reach Harriet? Or Mr Archer himself?’
Karen shook her head. ‘We can’t. Harriet’s driving, she’ll have left long ago. And there isn’t a phone at Mr Archer’s.’
Harriet had left home very early. The drive seemed familiar now. As she drove, smiling a little, Harriet thought about the weekend she had just spent with Robin. She also carefully rehearsed how she would explain to Simon the change from Conundrum to Meizu. A replica board, in its packaging that showed the faded Japanese characters of the original, lay on the back seat of the car.
When she reached Simon’s house Harriet saw that the curtains, grown colourless with age, were drawn at all the windows.
At once, anxiety tightened in her throat. The house looked worse than blind; it looked dead.
She stumbled out of her car, her legs stiff after the long drive, and ran past the barrier of the overgrown hedge to Simon’s front door. Fear made her bang rather than knock, her clenched fist thumping on the blistered paint. There was no response, nothing but silence into which street noise from beyond the hedge seeped as if leaking from a different world.
‘Simon!’
Harriet tilted her head back, peering upwards, trying to see if there was any movement behind the upstairs curtains. There was nothing there, and even though she pressed her face to the grime-encrusted downstairs glass she couldn’t find even a chink in the closed curtains.
‘Simon!’
Her knocks brought tiny flakes of paint, like scabs, off the old door, but not a sound from within. She knelt down to the trap-mouth of the iron letterbox, pushed it open and peered through the slit. She had braced herself for the sight of him collapsed in the dingy passage, but she discovered that she could see nothing at all. Some thick, dark material that smelt of dust had been hung over the wire letter-basket inside. He must be afraid, she realised, that eyes would look in at him, just as her own were doing. She let the flap of the letterbox snap shut and, still kneeling on the step, she thumped at the door and shouted, ‘Simon! It’s Harriet. What’s happened? Please, open the door. Just let me see that you’re all right. Please, Simon.’
Nothing. Harriet became aware that she was being watched. She looked back over her shoulder and saw two women staring over the gate.
‘He won’t open it,’ one of them pronounced. ‘All kinds of people have been here knocking, but he won’t open up to any of them.’
‘All kinds of people? What sort of people?’
The woman was offended, ‘I don’t know. It’s not my business. I keep myself to myself as well.’
‘Council, are you?’ the other one enquired.
‘No,’ Harriet said hastily, ‘nothing like that. I’m an old friend. I’m worried about him.’
