by Rosie Thomas
Harriet smiled at the sight of the rainbow boxes. They were almost identical to the original Conundrum ones. It was a satisfying vindication of her original concept that this year the rainbow version was outselling the Shamshuipo board.
Shamshuipo.
Harriet’s expression changed. She sat down at her desk and began to work her way through the post. It was mostly Christmas cards from suppliers and wholesalers. She arranged the bright rectangles on top of a cabinet, then looked to see what she must do next. Work was the easiest thing to do. She opened a folder and immersed herself in the proposal of a game inventor who wanted Peacocks to develop and launch his idea.
The afternoon passed like most afternoons, between telephone calls and talk with Graham, now full-time production director, and Fiona who was now in charge of promotion. Harriet was used to being too busy to think beyond the world of Peacocks.
She was surprised, as she always was, when Sara put her head around the door to say good-night.
‘Is that the time?’
‘It is. And I must go, Harriet, I’ve got a date.’
‘Enjoy yourself,’ Harriet said. She made her own more leisurely preparations to leave for the night, taking an armful of work off her desk and packing it into her briefcase, reading a final set of figures, then checking the open diary on her desk for tomorrow’s appointments. Lunch, Jane, 1.15, she read, frowning a little. It would have to be a quick one. She had a meeting with the game inventor at three.
In the reception area she admired the tree once more, then turned off the last of the lights. She felt a little reluctant to leave, and smiled at herself. There was nothing wrong with that. It was good, to feel this symbiotic closeness with her business. Both of them would continue to thrive on it. Harriet swung her heavy bag, and locked the doors behind her.
She drove northwards, up Wardour Street and across under the suspended stars of the Oxford Street decorations. In the no man’s land to the north the darker streets were inscrutable after light-washed Soho in its Christmas mode, but Harriet negotiated the route with confidence, letting her mind run comfortably over the day. It had been a good one. She was pleased with the new game idea, and was certain that she could sell it. That’s what I’m after, the owner had told her, your marketing skills. I hear you can do it better than anybody. Harriet braced her arms, swung the wheel and took a right turn into the mainstream of homebound traffic. That was how Peacocks must develop, she was thinking. To work with game designers, developing ideas, manufacturing and selling.
There would never be another Meizu, it would never work quite like that again. In her new car, a faster model than she really needed but an indulgence that she justified because she loved driving, Harriet swept on up the hill towards home. She passed the turning that would have taken her to the old Belsize Park flat because she had graduated, now, to the top of the hill and Hampstead. The cats had been restored to the care of their proper owner, without regret on either side, and Harriet had bought a flat of her own.
It was hewn, or carved, as her estate agent insisted on expressing it, from what had once been a huge family house in a quiet side street. Harriet owned the ground and garden floors. There were only three rooms proper, but they were vast and high-ceilinged, with intricate cornices and marble fireplaces and tall, solid, panelled doors. After the boxy conversion that had been her married home with Leo, and the cramped confines of her rented flat, her new home felt like a palace. Harriet loved it, for its space that was all hers, with secret, almost guilty triumph. The asking price had seemed enormous. But Jeremy Crichton had advised her that it was a sensible investment, and Robin had agreed with him.
‘Live somewhere decent,’ he had urged her from the comfort of his own well-organised house. ‘If you won’t come and live with me, that is. Won’t you?’
It was an invitation that he repeated, nowadays, almost as often as he saw her.
Harriet shook her head. ‘I’ll buy the Hampstead place,’ she said gently.
She had felt reluctant to leave her elegant offices, but now when she reached home she felt an equal pleasure in arrival. She ran up the wide steps, unlocked the front door and scooped up the post that was waiting for her. It was mostly Christmas cards, a thinner sheaf than the one at Peacocks.
Harriet unlocked the second door, that led into her own flat. She switched on the lights and felt a beat of simple, straightforward pleasure. Here was warmth, light and space, all her own. She moved slowly through the small, enjoyable rituals of being at home. She kicked off her shoes and left them by the door. Feeling polished parquet warm and slippery under her feet she padded through into her kitchen, admiring pools of light and the watery shine of marble surfaces. She opened the fridge (packed with all the latest German appliances, the estate agent had crooned about the kitchen), took out a bottle of white wine, poured herself a drink. Nursing the glass she stood for a moment at the huge window, looking down into the black expanse of her own garden, before lowering the white blinds. Downstairs, her bedroom opened on to the same view from a more immediate angle. There was a bathroom, with black and white tiles and a huge old-fashioned tub, not unlike Robin’s.
Harriet sighed with satisfaction. Sometimes she could map the sequence of achievements that had earned her all this with unsurprised logic but at other times, like now, it seemed too good to be true, as if she had won a lottery, or would wake up in a moment to find herself sitting stiffly at the rented table down the hill, her business plan in front of her and the cats hungrily crying around her ankles.
Harriet hesitated, enjoying the moment. She was aware, through her preoccupations, that she didn’t always allow herself time to savour having come this far.
I’m here, she told herself, this is what I believed in, wasn’t it? And as always, she heard the antiphonal response, At whose expense …
Perhaps, she thought, not to permit the reflection at all was best, and just to go on, making more progress, as she seemed designed to do.
She went through double doors into her sitting room, carrying her weighty bag like a shield, sat down and spread some work on the cushions beside her. She would work now, and if she felt hungrier later she would cook herself some food. She could recapture the pleasure she had felt in reaching her beautiful flat, of course she could.
Harriet worked for two hours, forgetting everything else. It was nine-thirty when she closed what she thought was the last folder, planning to go into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, and then watch the ten o’clock news.
But at the bottom of the pile there was another folder, blue, without a label on the front. Harriet flipped open the cover and looked down at a neat catalogue of press cuttings. She remembered now, Sara had been looking for something in the cuttings file. She had put the folder back on Harriet’s desk instead of replacing it in the filing cabinet, and Harriet had swept it up with the rest of her work.
There was the story, and although she knew each one she still turned the plastic-cased pages, her eyes running over the crutches and sticks of newsprint with their accompanying semiopaque windows of photographs. Her own blurred face looked up at her, smiling too much, and the cracked packing-case, and the blank eyes of Simon’s house. There was a little series of the last, all from eighteen months ago, the time when Meizu had been appearing in every shop in startling pyramids, the time when Simon had been taken away to hospital.
Harriet had telephoned Kath from the public phone box two streets away from Simon’s house. Her voice had been sharp with anxiety.
‘Please come. He’s ill, and confused, and he won’t have the doctor or anyone to help him, except you. He thinks people are spying on him.’
‘Are they?’
‘Some reporters came, about the game.’
‘Oh, Harriet,’ Kath had whispered. ‘What have you done?’
Kath came, driving Ken’s car that looked too big for her. Harriet was looking out for her, watching through a narrow slit in the front curtains. She saw her mother climb out o
f the big car, stiff with driving, and look up and down the old street. There was no visible connection with the fair-haired girl whose bicycle had collided with the lamp-post. Harriet ran to open the door to her. She had to resist the urge to throw herself into her mother’s arms in relief.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she mumbled, childishly. ‘I couldn’t think what to do, here on my own.’
Kath’s face was clouded. ‘Where is he?’
Harriet led the way back into the kitchen.
Simon was still sitting in his chair. Grey light came through the newspaper-pasted windows; the fire in the old range had a low red heart in a hummock of grey ashes. Kath didn’t glance at the shambles of the room. She crossed straight to Simon’s side and put her hand lightly on his arm.
‘Simon. It’s Kath.’ When there was no answer she repeated, ‘It’s Kath. Look at me, Simon.’
Obediently he looked up into Kath’s face. Watching, Harriet saw blankness dissipate. She saw recognition in his eyes, startled recognition, and following it an expression of exhaustion, and infinite sadness. In the confusion of his dislocated world Simon must have been looking for the sweet, fresh, unbruised eighteen-year-old that Harriet had glimpsed just once. Kath had faded hair and a lined face, and a body rounded into a cylinder.
‘Getting old, aren’t we?’ Kath said simply.
‘I’m always glad to see you, Kath,’ Simon said. ‘Nobody else.’ Harriet bent her head, accepting the rebuke in silence.
‘You haven’t been looking after yourself, Simon. And you’ve got a fever. Will you let me call the doctor, just to take a look at you and give you some medicine?’
Simon caught at Kath’s wrist. Harriet could feel the tightness of the grasp at her own flesh.
‘Only you, Kath. None of them out there. They stare in at me, as if they want to eat me.’
Harriet could still remember the look that Kath had given her then. Accustomed to her mother’s love and support and admiration, it made her want to run away and hide herself.
‘You’ll have to listen to me then, and do what I tell you,’ Kath said briskly.
Simon nodded his head, submissive.
Between them, they manoeuvred him upstairs to his bedroom. They found clean linen for him, and made him comfortable in his bed with pillows and hot-water bottles. Simon’s eyes stayed fixed on Kath as she moved around him. She went to the window and looped back the curtains, saying, ‘The sun’s shining out there. It would be nice to let it in, wouldn’t it?’
He shrank into the bedclothes, and Harriet saw the fear and bewilderment in him. She would have done anything to lessen it; the knowledge that there was nothing she could do flicked her like a whip.
‘All right, then,’ Kath said quietly. ‘We’ll leave the curtains as they are.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed. Very tentatively, as if trying to work out if she was really there, Simon touched her hand.
Harriet left them. She almost fell down the stairs in her hurry. In the kitchen she rolled up her sleeves, put water on to boil, and took the bucket and mop that she had used on her first visit from the tangle of rubbish in the cupboard under the stairs. She began to clear up, working quickly, breathing through her mouth to keep the cocktail of sour smells at bay. She was thinking about the first visit; she had washed up and cleared the table then. That Simon had still possessed the strength to be frightening. Now her fear was for him.
If she had it in her power to go back to that first time, Harriet challenged herself, would she hand Meizu back to him, to be obscured once more amongst the heaps of junk deposited in the room next door?
She knew, even before she had finished asking herself the question, that she would not. If she could do anything differently, it would be to change the story enough to protect Simon’s identity, so that no zealous journalist could ever find him. And in reality, she couldn’t even do that much for him.
Harriet hated the feeling of powerlessness that the awareness gave her. She worked with grim energy, washing and scouring.
At length, Kath came downstairs. ‘He’s asleep,’ she said. The two women faced each other. Harriet knew that her mother was hoping for her explanation, justification. She sensed again Kath’s pride in her, her own need for her mother’s approval.
‘I should have been much more careful,’ she said at last. ‘Meizu need never have touched Simon, nothing should have connected it to him. It’s my fault that people came here, prying into his life.’
‘You need never have used his story at all. You could have sold your game some other way.’
Harriet said quietly, ‘I didn’t think I could. Even now, I still don’t.’
There was a silence. When Kath spoke again, it was with the implication that there was no more to be said. ‘He’ll need a doctor, whatever we do for him. Probably hospital. They won’t want to leave him here, and we can’t stay indefinitely, can we?’
Harriet imagined the intrusion of them, what it would mean for Simon. ‘Let me finish what I can here. If I make it look cleaner, get in food and coal and whatever else he needs, perhaps the doctor will let him stay at home. A nurse and a home help could come in, would Simon accept that? There’s plenty of money, we could get a private nurse for him. Peacocks owes him money, from the sales of Meizu, we sent him cheques but he never banked them. I opened an account in his name, the money’s all there, whatever he needs it for …’
Harriet heard herself talking very quickly. Listening to it, she knew that money made no amends.
‘I’m sure that’ll be a help, love,’ Kath said without conviction. ‘Let’s do what we can for him first, then, shall we?’
Kath and Harriet stayed for twenty-four hours. Kath slept the night in the dusty back bedroom that Harriet had once used, and Harriet took a room in a nearby bed and breakfast. The proprietor, in a scarf over blonde ringlets puffed up in readiness for some celebration, recognised Harriet from a magazine article about Meizu. Back issues of the magazine were stacked up on a stool in her sanctum at the back of the house. She invited Harriet in and made her wait while she shuffled through the copies, found the article, and presented it to Harriet for her autograph. She was curious about what Harriet was doing; Harriet answered evasively that she was visiting friends nearby. Harriet was afraid the woman might have seen the piece about Simon in the local paper, but she appeared not to have done. She paid her bill for the night before going up to her room, and left very early in the morning to start work again at Simon’s house.
Between them, Kath and Harriet made the house as clean and cared-for looking as they could manage. While they worked Simon slept behind his closed curtains. He accepted some of the hot drinks they carried up to him, but he ate almost nothing.
A doctor was found who would agree to visit. He came on the second evening. Kath led him upstairs, and Harriet waited in the kitchen. Kath’s prediction was correct. The doctor, a young man with a prematurely furrowed face, insisted that Simon must be admitted to hospital. He was suffering from bronchial pneumonia, dehydration and probably malnutrition.
‘There is also some mental confusion,’ the doctor added. He was obviously overworked, but sympathetic enough. Kath and Harriet waited. ‘That can be assessed while they are treating him. You’re doing the right thing for him,’ he added, in encouragement.
Kath went upstairs again, to pack a bag for Simon. Harriet walked to the nearest chemist’s shop and bought a new toothbrush, soap and face flannel and disposable razors, packing her purchases into a zippered sponge bag patterned with bright bands of colour. The toilet items looked too new, and too cheap at the same time, as if Simon was a long-standing inmate or prisoner, who was now being hastily discharged for reasons of convenience.
Harriet put the package under her arm and walked slowly back through the hazy streets, overtaken by children on BMXs, passing pairs of teenage girls who wandered with their heads close together.
Kath was sitting on Simon’s bed; his fingers rested against her arm. Harriet waited with th
em until they heard the sound of the ambulance stopping in the street below. Simon’s eyes flickered.
‘I don’t want to go with them,’ he said.
Kath leaned forward. ‘You must go, to get better. Then you can come home again. It won’t be long, Simon. I promise it won’t.’
Suddenly, to Harriet’s surprise, he smiled. ‘You’re a good girl, Kath. I remember.’
Kath recalled his hand, on the curve of her waist, when her waist had been narrow and supple. ‘I remember,’ she told him.
The ambulance men came up the stairs in their blue shirtsleeves. They helped Simon down the stairs again, into a waiting wheelchair, wrapped a red blanket around his knees. One of them pushed him out of his front door and past the overgrown hedge-barrier. A small group of neighbours stood watching on the opposite pavement, and three small boys – one of them might have been the roller-skater who had warned Harriet of Simon’s ferocity – peered curiously into the ambulance’s interior. Simon saw them all. There were no curtains or newspapers to screen his eyes. He bent his head, and put up one arm to shield his face.
The ambulance man wheeled the chair briskly up the waiting ramp, locked the chair in position inside, and came forward to close the doors. His colleague went round to the driver’s door. Harriet and Kath stood side by side, looking up. They had encouraging smiles, and Kath lifted her hand in a wave.
‘He’ll be having a good time,’ the ambulanceman said, coming forward. ‘Isn’t that right?’ Simon made no movement. The doors closed, shutting him inside with the sympathetic, staring eyes, and the big white ambulance rolled away.
Harriet and Kath went slowly back to the house and locked it up. They came out once more without looking back, and stood between their two parked cars.
‘I’ll ring the hospital every day,’ Harriet said. ‘And I’ll get up to visit him as soon as I can.’ He would rather see Kath, she was sure of that, but Kath had Ken and Sunderland Avenue, and Ken didn’t like his wife to be away from where she belonged. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. The two women kissed each other, and climbed into their separate cars.
