by Rosie Thomas
‘I try to keep a look-out for him,’ the first one said, lugubriously. ‘Going down the street for his few bits. But you can’t push yourself on people, can you, not if they don’t want it?’
‘He’s in there,’ her friend announced. ‘And he was all right first thing.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He’s lit his fire, hasn’t he?’
Harriet walked back to the gate, and all three of them craned upwards. A fine wisp of smoke, so pale as to be little more than a hazy distortion of the blue sky beyond, rose from the chimney.
‘A fire, this time of year?’ the other woman demanded.
‘Old bones, isn’t it? Just like ours, Doll.’
‘Thank you.’ Harriet cut short their laughter. ‘Thank you, I’ll just stay here and keep on knocking until he does answer.’
As soon as the two women had gone she knelt on the step once more and put her mouth to the letterbox. ‘Simon, it’s Harriet. I know you can hear me. I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.’ Because Harriet knew whatever it was, whatever had happened to Simon behind his closed curtains, must in some terrible way be her fault. She had done it to him, and she must find out exactly what it was. ‘Please.’ She pressed her palms flat against the solid wood. ‘Please, won’t you let me in?’
At last came the sound she had been waiting for. There was a faint, slow shuffling and the rattle of the doorchain following less identifiable bumping and scraping sounds. Harriet waited, levering herself up from her knees.
At last, the door opened by a grudging crack.
Harriet’s instinct was to dash forward and wedge her shoulder into the crack in case it should close up again, but she stopped herself in time. Instead she even stepped back a little.
In a low voice she said, ‘May I come in? I won’t stay for very long.’
After another interval she heard the chain being taken off. The door opened wide enough for her to see Simon standing in the passage. Harriet almost cried out.
He looked like an animal, trapped in its lair. He also looked very sick. His face, under a coarse mask of grey stubble, was collapsing inwards. His cheeks and eyesockets were pronounced hollows, his filmy eyes stared at her out of pouches of tobacco-coloured skin. Harriet was appalled, and she was also frightened. She thought at first that he was beyond recognising her, but then she saw in his eyes that he did know her and, more than that, that he had been waiting for her.
She made herself say, in her calm voice, ‘Can I come in, Simon? It’s hard for me to talk, out here, with your neighbours going by …’
That was enough. He shot a vicious glare at the gate, then beckoned Harriet to follow him inside. Once past the door she saw what had created the bumping and scraping sounds. An old sewing machine on a stand, a broken-down armchair and a long wooden joist had been dragged up against it. Simon had tried to barricade himself, against the invaders.
In the kitchen, the smell was like a wall. Newspaper had been pasted over the windows. Harriet edged around the table, mounded with debris, to Simon’s side. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked pointlessly, seeing that everything was wrong. ‘What’s happened? Tell me, and then I can help.’
The animal eyes regarded her. There was fear in them, making her ashamed of her own, but also the threat that like an animal’s his fear might lead to a wild leap forward.
‘What can I do?’
Simon made a lunge with his shoulder. Harriet nearly flinched, but she stood her ground.
‘You could put something on the fire.’ It was the first time he had spoken.
She understood that he was gesturing at the old range at the other end of the kitchen. She had never seen it lit before, but now there was a low, sullen fire burning in it. She went and rummaged in the clutter beside the range, found a yellow plastic sack empty except for some black grit. There was nothing else that looked obviously like fuel. The rationality of the request encouraged her, however.
‘The coal’s all gone. Is there any more?’ There was no answer. ‘If you’re cold, Simon, shall I make you a hot drink?’ He looked as if he had a fever. Harriet went to the sink, and tasted sour juice in her own mouth at the sight of what lay in it.
‘Don’t you have any fresh food? Any milk? Have you been out to buy anything for yourself?’
At once, at the word out, Simon lunged forward and slammed the door that connected to the passage. ‘I won’t go out. They’re all out there, watching for what they can see, all of them. The job is to keep them out of here. They think they can look in, free and gratis, see what they want, any time they like. Spy on me. But I lock them out, don’t I, and stop their staring.’ He went to the small window and ran his hands over the newspaper lining, almost crooning at it, ‘I did a good job. Kept those staring eyes out.’ Then he faltered, his head sagging into his shoulders. ‘Most of them. Some get in. I don’t know how. Even upstairs.’ He frowned, and turned away from the window. In a different voice, as if an uncovered window had opened briefly on to normality, he added, ‘I only let you in because … because, you’re Kath Peacock’s daughter, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said softly. ‘That’s right. I’m Kath Peacock’s daughter. Harriet. After Harriet Vane, do you remember?’
‘If you were a boy, you were going to be Peter.’
Gently, so as not to startle him, she took Simon’s arm and led him to a chair beside the last glow of the fire. She brought up another chair for herself and sank into it, letting silence settle around them while she tried to think what she could do.
Simon had been eccentric before, a recluse with odd ideas even in Kath’s day, but he had been sane. Now something had happened to upset what must have been a precarious balance. Harriet thought of the watching eyes that he seemed so afraid of. He had overbalanced into paranoia, into a persecution complex. Harriet grimly rehearsed the superficial, colour-magazine labels for depths she knew she didn’t understand.
‘It’s because of you, isn’t it?’ His eyes were fixed on her.
Harriet took a breath. ‘I’m afraid it might be, yes. Can you tell me what has happened? So that I can do something about it?’
Simon laughed, and the laughter was more disturbing even than the look in his eyes.
‘I’ve done everything.’ He pointed at the newspaper over the windows. ‘Fixed ’em, haven’t I?’
‘Tell me, Simon.’
‘The first one came banging at the door, got in here before I could stop him, with his questions. I was that PoW, wasn’t I? What does he know? What do any of you know?’ He was shouting, not at Harriet but at observers she couldn’t see.
‘You don’t like questions. He should have known that,’ Harriet soothed him. But Simon turned to look full at her, with sudden plain rationality. ‘He had a piece of paper of yours, about me and my game. Lieutenant Archer, isn’t it? That’s what he said. Like a spy.’ Harriet understood what had happened. Some clever journalist had uncovered the tracks.
‘What did he write?’
Simon stood up, shuffled unsteadily across the room. He came back with a crumpled, torn newspaper. Harriet took it, noticing that it was a popular local tabloid, wondering which neighbour had brought it for Simon to see.
She found the piece, and read it.
It was titled, Heroism’s reward?
From the horror of Shamshuipo emerged spectacular courage, and a game that was literally a game of life. Now, the same game is set to break every sales record. While the tills ring, the same brave officer sits alone in a comfortless room.
The journalist named the town and the street where Simon lived, and gave his real name. Harriet put the paper aside. She knew, now, just what she had done. The knowledge felt like an ugly weight lying beneath her heart.
‘It’s just a newspaper story. A horrible, intrusive story, but they print stories like this every day. It’s gone now. It’s wrapped the chips, and been forgotten. I’m sorry, Simon. I thought I’d done enough to protect you.’
‘They f
ollow each other. One comes, and the others follow, like rats, looking for more. They knock on my door and look in through my windows.’
So there had been other journalists, after the story. Harriet saw that it was a reflection in dirty water, of her own energetic pursuit of publicity.
‘I’ll stop them coming.’
Simon began to cry. The tears dropped down his face and he made no attempt to rub them away. Harriet remembered the weeping face of the woman who had been attacked in the green avenue of the park. She went to Simon, leaned over his chair, put her arm round his shoulder. Even through the thick clothes he wore she could feel that his skin was dry and very hot.
‘Simon, listen to me. I think you might be ill, perhaps some kind of fever. If I call your doctor will you see him, let him give you some medicine?’
The reaction was as violent as she had feared.
‘Is there a neighbour then, someone you trust? To do some shopping for you?’
‘I don’t want them looking at me, seeing in.’ He repeated the words mechanically, as if they made a constant chorus within him.
Harriet knelt down so that she could see his face. It was impossible to tell where the dividing line came, between clarity and confusion, and how finely it was drawn. Now that she was close to him, she was as afraid for his physical condition. His arms were bone-thin, and she could hear the rasp of his breathing. And at her back, there was the squalor of the rotting kitchen.
To bring help was essential, but she shrank from the responsibility of bringing more intruders into this precarious sanctuary. It was easy to imagine white coats, brisk professionals, Simon’s helplessness at their hands.
I’ve done enough to him already, Harriet thought.
But she must do something.
Still kneeling, with her back to the room, Harriet saw a sudden clear picture of her mother’s kitchen. It was sharp-edged, scoured, scented with pine cleaner and aerosol polish. With the image, the idea came to her of her mother as her own sanctuary, as invincible as she had seemed in early childhood. Harriet longed for Kath, here and now.
With Kath, she could confront the decay within the walls of Simon’s house. Between them, they could go out and find the right kind of help for him. With her mother’s help, only with Kath, she could try to undo what she had done.
Harriet seized on the idea, like a spar floating in a shipwreck.
Gently, she asked, ‘Would you like to see Kath? Would you let her come?’
In the following silence Harriet was afraid that he had forgotten Kath, beset as he was by hostile eyes, real or imagined.
But at last Simon murmured, ‘She’s a pretty girl, Kath Peacock. A good girl, too, whatever she thinks of herself. I always like to see Kath.’
Harriet wondered if he had lost the intervening years, if he was still imagining a soft-faced girl. But she touched his hand and said, ‘I’ll go and telephone Kath. She would like to see you, too. While I’m out I’ll buy some more coal, and some groceries. Will you let me in, when I come back? I’ll just knock once, very softly.’
Simon looked straight at her. His tears had dried. ‘Just once,’ he repeated. ‘Very softly.’
From the telephone kiosk at the end of the parade of shops two streets from Simon’s house, Harriet dialled the Peacocks number first. She wasn’t sure when she would be back at the office again, Karen would have to hold the fort.
‘Peacocks,’ Karen’s warm voice answered after two rings. The thought of the office, piled high with Meizu boards and orders and PR leaflets, made a vicious contrast with what Harriet had just left. Karen’s voice turned anxious at the other end.
‘Have you seen today’s Express?’ she asked.
‘Read it,’ Harriet ordered.
It was the same story. Lieutenant Archer, the real-life hero. Life and death, Meizu and money. There was a little more, even; a picture of Harriet, a particularly glamorous headshot, and of the new Meizu packaging. And another, of Simon’s house with the curtains all drawn, just as she had left it five minutes ago.
There had been a photographer, then, pointing his lens eye into Simon’s windows.
‘The implication is that we’re ripping him off, Harriet,’ Karen said. ‘We’re not, are we?’
‘The only people we’ve ripped off so far are Landwith Associates,’ Harriet answered grimly. ‘And they’re well able to stand it. If anyone calls about this. Karen, I’m away on business and you’ve no comment.’
‘Right. Robin Landwith called, asking for a contact number for you.”
‘Yes. I’ll get back when I can, Karen.’ Harriet replaced the receiver.
There was nothing else to be done, she told herself. If Meizu was to survive.
She had got what she wanted. Publicity bred publicity, and she didn’t bother to hope that the other papers wouldn’t carry their own stories, in their turn. She reflected heavily that it would do ‘Meizu’ itself no harm. She could even hear her own voice, jauntily repeating the truism about all publicity being good publicity over some celebratory drink.
All she could do now was to try to shield Simon from good publicity. There was no undoing what had already been done.
Harriet picked up the telephone once again and dialled her mother’s number.
Ten
1983
In the warm air, the Christmas tree gave out its scent of anticipation and celebration. Harriet stopped to breathe it in, admiring the frosty sparkle of the decorations.
‘A designer tree, no less.’
The lights were tiny white points, the balls were of translucent glass, and the silvered branches were tipped with white ribbon bows. There was no red and green tinsel, no plastic lantern lights, and no cottonwool blobs of the kind that Kath brought out every year for the tree that stood in the awkward angle of the stairs at Sunderland Avenue. Harriet had ordered the Peacocks Christmas tree by telephone and it had materialised this morning in a van marked ‘Decorations for All Occasions’. Harriet enjoyed finding the right people to do the job. If she gave a big party, she mused, a really big company celebration, she would have Decorations for All Occasions to design a theme for it.
‘It’s so pretty,’ Karen said.
Her desk was at the opposite side of the reception area. She sat at a right-angle of pale blonde wood, with a huge Peacocks logo, a stylised fan of feathers, on the wall behind her. At one end of her desk, supplied by the people who had brought the tree, there was a Christmas arrangement of ivy, holly and Christmas roses. Harriet went to examine it, touching the waxy curls of the holly leaves, and the boss of stamens at the centre of the ivory petals that left a sooty print on her fingertips.
‘And this, too,’ Harriet agreed.
‘I love Christmas,’ Karen said. ‘I tell myself that I’m too grown-up to get excited about it, but every year it still happens.’
She had glanced at Harriet before initiating the conversation. Sometimes Harriet was too busy to chat, and when she was she didn’t care for the implication that any of the others had time to spare. Karen didn’t blame her for that, she knew Harriet drove herself hard, but it made her treat her with more circumspection.
‘Anyway, she is the boss,’ Karen had said to Sara, Harriet’s secretary, when they discussed it.
Harriet smiled at Karen now. ‘I know. Me too.’ She looked around her, from the strong lines of the feather fan against the pale wall, to Karen’s neat workstation beside the switchboard console, and back to the shimmering tree. She sighed. ‘This place is my Christmas present. I still can’t believe we’re here.’
They had been in the new offices for a month. Harriet was prudent, they were not over-luxurious, but they were newly decorated, and they were in Soho. There was carpet, matching and unstained, throughout, solid doors that fitted tightly so that conversations held behind them were inaudible, and enough space for a full-time staff of eight. Peacocks was still expanding.
‘It’s been quite a year,’ Karen breathed. She felt, sometimes, as if she was
being washed along on a flood tide. In the sixteen months since its launch, Meizu had outsold every game on the market. It had been written about, talked about, been bought and gift-wrapped and accepted until it seemed that every household in the country must possess one. ‘Meizu’ had been launched in America, and this Christmas it was being sold under licence in thirteen other countries.
To do it, Karen reflected, Harriet had turned herself into a selling machine. There had been a time, the summer before, when it seemed there was nothing she would refuse to do for publicity’s sake, so long as the attention focussed on her and on no one else. Meizu Girl, the tabloids had called her.
Karen looked quickly at the switchboard. Two lines were busy, Graham Chandler was still talking to a printing company in Italy. No one was waiting, that was all right. It wouldn’t do to let a caller hold on for more than two rings with Harriet standing right beside her. Even if it did look as though the festive spirit had mellowed her.
‘Quite a year,’ Harriet echoed. ‘But just you wait for the next one. Karen, we’ve only just begun.’
I could do with my Christmas holiday first, Karen thought. I need a rest. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ she asked Harriet.
‘A bit of time with my parents; seeing some friends, if they still remember who I am. What about you?’
‘The same.’ They smiled at each other, acknowledging the irrationality of feeling excited at such a prospect. But the scent of the Christmas tree, the garland of ivy and holly, had worked on both of them. Harriet took a last look at the white and silver sparkle of the tree, picked up the afternoon’s post that Karen had put out for her, and carried it, with less enthusiasm than usual, into her own office.
The room was still bare; there had been no time yet to collect pictures or personal ornaments. The only decorations against the pale walls were Meizu boxes. This Christmas, to sell alongside the original version that had been last year’s runaway success, Harriet had introduced a new design. The board was black, with white wishbones, the balls and counters and packaging were in bright primary colours.
