by Rosie Thomas
In the meantime, I know you won’t like to hear this, but I’m sure Ronny is right. If you do join in and make friends, you will find that school is more fun than if you are angry with everyone. It’s easy for me to say so, because I haven’t got to be at school any more, but I can remember what it was like. You also have to trust what your friends – if you count me as a friend, and I wish you would – tell you. We can talk some more about this when we meet.
I’m sorry you are unhappy. I’ll do whatever I can to help.
With love, Harriet
PS. Can you tell me exactly what makes them assholes? If you’re going to use words like that, you should know how to spell them. Do I sound like a teacher? H.
She sealed the letter and addressed it.
Harriet decided that she would ask Robin to ask his mother for the telephone number of the uncosy house that Caspar Jensen owned in Little Shelley, so that she could ring Linda’s Ronny and discuss the problem with her. Harriet sighed. She didn’t suppose that the woman would welcome her interference, but that couldn’t be helped.
And then, having done what she could for the moment, Harriet put Linda’s letter aside. She didn’t go shopping in the end, nor did she do more than glance at the business pages of the newspapers. She opened her briefcase and took out some paperwork, becoming absorbed in it. She worked until the telephone rang beside her.
The caller was Jenny Thimbell, reminding Harriet that she had promised to come for a family tea, before going out to the theatre with Robin.
‘I’ll be there at four o’clock,’ Harriet promised briskly. ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’
In the afternoon Harriet drove over to the Thimbells’ house in Islington. Jenny and Charlie lived in a tall, thin, Georgian house that seemed to have more stairs than horizontal floor-space. The house seemed also to be in a perpetual state of structural mobility as walls were resited, plasterwork exposed and shutters divested of decades-worth of pastel gloss paint. As she rang the bell Harriet tried to estimate how long the restoration work had been in progress, and then gave up the attempt.
Charlie opened the door. He was wearing overalls and brandishing a paintbrush.
‘Prominent Financial Editor in Cupboard Crisis,’ he announced. ‘The painter didn’t show up all week, so how is the kitchen to get to the next stage? You guessed. Charlie does it.’ He leant forward, holding the paintbrush approximately away from her, and gave Harriet a kiss. ‘God, how svelte you look. How can you bear to come in here? But come in anyway. Jenny and the kids are in the garden. I’ll do one more cupboard while Harry’s out of the way, then I’ll be out.’
Smiling, Harriet picked her way along the hallway to the back of the house. The floorboards were all exposed, and on the equally bare stairs there were heaps of babyclothes in laundry baskets, toys and books and shoes, piled up waiting to be carried up to the floors above by whoever next undertook the steep climb.
A door at the end opened on to a tiny semicircular wrought-iron balcony, and a narrow wrought-iron spiral stair led down to the garden.
Jenny was sitting on a rug spread on the grass below. The baby was kicking her bare feet beside her, and Harry was pottering in his sandpit with a wooden spade.
The sun shone on Jenny’s smooth blonde head.
‘What an idyllic scene,’ Harriet called. Jenny looked up in surprise.
‘Harriet! I didn’t hear the door. Come down here.’
Harriet hitched up her narrow skirt and climbed over the safety gate at the bottom of the stairs. Harry rushed at her, waving his spade and scattering sand in a wide arc. Harriet swung him off his feet.
‘How’s my best godson?’ He beamed at her, showing small teeth in a mouth circled with sand and earth. He smelt of sugar, hot skin and nappy.
‘Watch out, Harriet, he’s filthy.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Harriet said. ‘He’s grown so big. Do they all grow like this?’
‘I think so,’ Jenny said happily.
‘And Alice?’ Harriet leant over the bundle on the rug. The baby stared up at her, serious faced. Harriet imagined how she must seem, a huge dark moon blotting out the light, and quickly sat back again.
‘Alice is fine. She’s a better sleeper than Harry was. We’re down to only one feed a night, already.’
‘Is that good?’
‘It is. Life begins to seem distinctly possible again.’ Jenny’s eyebrows drew together.
‘I don’t want to sound as though I’m complaining. I don’t, do I? You and Jane, of all people, know how much I wanted them.’ She reached out then, for Harry, as if an unseen hand might snatch him away, and held him until he gave a wail of complaint. Jenny laughed at herself. ‘Sleep just becomes a precious commodity.’
‘I sympathise with that,’ Harriet told her. ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing.’
Jenny gestured at the little walled garden, shady, planted with ivy and lady’s mantel and London pride, with the sunny patch in the centre, and the tall house at her back. Harriet looked up at its windows, and the windows stretching away on either side of it, the other houses of the terrace in which probably lived families like Jenny’s, husbands and wives and children growing up.
She suddenly felt conspicuous, sitting on the corner of the tartan rug in her theatre-going clothes.
‘Just this,’ Jenny said. ‘One o’clock club, tea with other mothers, the park and the shops and the baby clinic. It doesn’t sound much, does it, compared with what you do?’ Harriet didn’t look at her. She was picking blades of grass from the lawn and laying them out in neat tramlines on the rug.
‘You could argue that you’re doing much more important work than I am.’
It wasn’t an argument that Harriet wanted to pursue. She knew that they could laud one another’s roles, and that the praise wouldn’t change their estimation of their own in any way. She was glad when Alice began to grizzle and then to cry properly. Jenny hoisted her up, undid the front of her dress and put the baby to the breast. Harry came within whacking distance with his spade, and Jenny gently fended him off.
‘What does it feel like?’ Harriet asked, watching the greedy sucking.
‘Comfortable,’ Jenny answered. ‘Reassuring, to be able to give her everything she needs.’ She added, ‘For now.’
Harriet sighed. ‘I think I’m too selfish to be a mother,’ she said half to herself.
‘No, you’re not. You learn that you can’t be selfish, except for them. Have you seen Jane?’ she asked abruptly.
Harriet shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t seen anybody. I’ve been so busy, you know, with preparing for the launch.’ It sounded so drab, and so preoccupied, that she added, ‘I’ve seen Robin. He wants me to marry him.’
Jenny studied her, her head on one side. ‘Will you?’
Harriet grinned suddenly. ‘Perhaps, I’m not sure. I’ve told him to ask me again after Tuesday.’
‘At least he could buy you a house that doesn’t breed concrete mixers and dust and builder’s rubble like this one does.’
‘I’d rather buy my own house,’ Harriet said, and then regretted the stiff sound of it. The French doors leading from the basement kitchen swung open and Charlie, divested of his overalls, backed out with a loaded tea-tray in his hands.
Harry saw him and made a tottering lunge across the grass with his fists waving.
‘Bicks,’ he shouted. ‘Bicks!’
‘It’s a fine thing when your son’s only attempt at the glory of language is biscuits,’ Charlie complained.
‘He says other words too,’ Jenny said mildly.
‘Not half as often as he says biscuits. Pour the tea, Jen, will you?’
They sat in a circle on the grass, drinking tea and eating strawberry cake.
‘It’s nice here,’ Harriet said, recognising envy in the complicated net of her impressions of the calm afternoon. ‘It’s really nice.’ She laughed at the inadequacy of the words but Charlie and Jenny didn’t hear. They had embarked on a disparaging duet
about the dilatory builders and their prompt bills, but they looked affectionately at each other. Harriet felt her conspicuous singleness again.
If she married Robin Landwith, she wondered, would they have children together, and a garden with a mown lawn, and a humorous duet of their own?
She tried hard, but she couldn’t imagine how it would be.
Charlie leaned over and patted her thigh.
‘So, Tuesday’s the big day? The issue’s heavily stagged, I hear.’
‘It looks promising,’ Harriet answered with circumspection.
‘Oh, come on. Do you know what Harriet stands to be worth after Tuesday, Jennifer? Guess? No. Something like four million. Isn’t that right?’
Amazement turned Jenny’s face into a set of circles, absurdly like Harry’s. ‘Four million? Oh, I see. I see what you mean about buying your own house. You could buy anything, couldn’t you? You’re rich.’ She made it sound like, infectious.
‘Harriet will be head of a publicly-quoted company, Jen. It’s big league. Real, proper, serious business.’
‘I know what it means,’ Jenny snapped. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
There was an awkward silence. To break it, Harriet tried a deprecating laugh. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s only on paper. I’d only get the money if I sold my interest in the company, and I won’t do that.’
But Jenny didn’t answer. Harriet saw that she was staring at her, and that Charlie was looking at her too.
‘It doesn’t make any difference …’ Harriet began. But evidently it did make a difference. She saw the distance that the news had created between them. In a matter of minutes she had become an object of curiosity, a specimen of self-made womanhood instead of a trusted old friend. She wondered how she could apologise for her money, somehow rub the effect of it away, and then she thought, no, I did it, I worked for it, and I’m proud of it. Apology would be hypocrisy.
‘What will you do, Harriet?’ Jenny asked.
She said quickly, ‘Nothing. Go on working for Peacocks, selling Meizu and the new lines. If I sold up I’d have the money and the time to spend it as well, I suppose. But now, all it means is that there will be an injection of funds for the company. I can expand, perhaps look at my own factory.’ She went on a little, talking about the intricacies of recapitalisation, until polite boredom replaced astonishment in Jenny’s face.
It was Jenny who apologised. She leaned across Alice, asleep on the rug, and put her hand over Harriet’s. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realised how big it all was. I’m proud of you, I really am.’
There was another small silence, and then Charlie began lazily to recount some City gossip. The moment passed, but Harriet knew that it would not be forgotten.
The sun had moved off the patch of lawn. It shone on the windows overhead, turning them into polished metallic plates. Harriet scrambled to her feet, and ran to Harry in the sandpit.
‘Come on, Harry. Let’s make a huge castle for you to knock down and jump on.’
A little while later they went into the kitchen. Harriet sat at the table with Harry in his high-chair beside her. He scooped egg and slices of toast up from his dish and squeezed them between his fingers, then pressed the remains into his mouth. Alice sat in her bouncer in the middle of the floor, watching Jenny’s cat weaving between the adult legs. There were toy’s underfoot, more baskets of ironing, and photographs of the babies pinned to the unpainted walls. Charlie was cleaning his paintbrushes, whistling, and Jenny was slicing vegetables. Harriet thought of her own clean, elegant silent flat. It was warmer and brighter here, in the family muddle.
She drank some of the gin and tonic that Charlie had brought her, and then caught Jenny’s eye over the rim of the glass. They both started to laugh.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with us all,’ Harriet gasped. ‘Why aren’t we satisfied with what we’ve got?’
Charlie looked up from his brushes. ‘I am,’ he said.
‘Yes, you are,’ Jenny answered him. ‘That’s why I love you.’
Harriet finished her drink.
‘I’d better go,’ she said at last. Charlie and Jenny followed her down the dusty hall.
‘Come and see us soon. Harry’ll forget what you look like. Good luck for Tuesday.’ Charlie stopped her on the front step. ‘I’m proud of you as well, Harriet.’
She smiled at him. ‘Thanks, Charlie.’
She left Islington behind, driving west towards Shaftesbury Avenue where Robin would be waiting for her in the theatre stalls bar. As she drove, Harriet looked around her, at cars and houses and shop windows.
You could buy anything, couldn’t you? Jenny had blurted out, in her amazement. Harriet had recognised the complicated equations of money and power and money and sex long ago in the Landwiths’ offices, although she was no nearer to solving them for herself. But she had never, as far as she could remember, analysed her possible wealth simply in terms of the things it might buy her.
Is that naïve, she wondered, or preoccupied, or rather morally admirable?
She wished Jane or Jenny were with her to share the joke.
I could buy that. Or that, or half a dozen of those. By the time she reached the West End she had sized up and rejected a large swathe of central London. The ideas were so ridiculous that she was light-headed and giggly by the time she found Robin in the bar. He looked hard at her, and then asked exactly how many drinks she had had with the Thimbells in Islington.
Two days, and then only one.
On the night before impact day Harriet went to bed early, but she found that she could not sleep. She got up again, pulled on a tracksuit, and let herself out of the front door. The big houses in the street were dark and silent behind their screens of limes or chestnuts. The sound of late-night traffic was only just audible in the distance. Harriet breathed in deeply. She felt better outside in the cool air. The tension that had knotted inside her, making her twist to and fro under the bedclothes, began to slacken its hold. She padded the length of the street, a dark shadow under the trees, looking up at the blind windows. The corner of her eye caught sight of a movement and she jumped round, and then saw a cat sliding beneath a privet hedge. They had the night to themselves.
Harriet came to the end of her street and hesitated. The silent network of residential roads fanned away from her, possessed by other people’s sleep. She knew that she should go back, but the sweet-smelling air and the silence drew her on.
She crossed the road and began walking faster, but with no sense of purpose. She straightened her back and stretched her legs, and as she swung her arms the back of her hand brushed against the garden hedges. She broke off twigs and smelt them, distinguishing the rank flatness of common privet and aromatic choisya. A long way off, she heard the rising wail of a police siren. Awareness of violence or danger somewhere at hand made her draw closer into the deep shadows, but her pace did not slacken. A long road sloped away to her right. She followed it, and a single car passed her. She turned her face away from the yellow wedge of the headlamps. At the bottom of the hill she came to the fringe of Hampstead Heath. The darkness was wide and completely impenetrable. She stopped for a moment and stood looking across the road. The airy, invisible space drew her, but she knew that it would be madness to walk across there. Instead she turned and walked up the hill parallel to it, in and out of the cones of light thrown by old-fashioned street lamps.
The hill grew steep here and the climb made her pant for breath. She began to veer left again, away from the open space of heath and through more deserted streets.
Harriet felt exhilarated. The city’s quietness made it seem an unfamiliar place, but at the same time she felt that she possessed it by the simple act of being awake, and walking through it. She thought of nothing as she walked. The rhythm of her footsteps was soothing, her mind emptied.
Once she thought she heard footsteps behind her. She shrank into a gateway and looked back the way she had come, but there was nothing there. When she sta
rted walking again she could only hear the soft lick of her own feet.
At last, without being aware of the direction she had been heading, she reached the street that ran at right angles to her own. She came to the corner and looked down towards her own house. The light she had left on in her hallway seemed so bright she thought it must be the only one she had seen in all her hour’s walk. Harriet knew she would sleep now.
She let herself back into the flat, dropped her clothes in a heap and climbed into bed.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Tuesday, the fifteenth of June, Harriet arrived by taxi at the offices of A.R. Allardyce & Co. Ltd. For her sponsors’ breakfast Harriet had not, in the end, bought a new power outfit. Instead, she had taken out of her wardrobe a navy-blue suit by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. The buttons of the slim jacket were embossed with the linked Cs, the lapels bound with braid. The shoulders were almost unpadded, the narrow skirt reached to the middle of the knee. It was the least aggressive of her business suits, but it was also the one that remarked money in the most muted but patrician tones.
Harriet had smiled when she put it on. It reminded her both of Annunziata’s Chanel that had so impressed her at the New Year’s Eve lunch, and of Robin’s old friend Rosalie Fellowes in her Lagerfeld sequins at her Christmas party.
I’m here, now, Harriet told herself. She smoothed the waist of the jacket that fitted her own as if moulded to it, and picked up her bag. It was not her customary briefcase, because the paperwork was all in the hands of others now. Today she was the star. A small quilted bag in the exact navy of her suit swung on its chain from her shoulder.
At the bank Harriet stepped out of her taxi, crossed the strip of sunlight that lay across the pavement, and walked without hesitation through the great doors.
James Hamilton and his minions were waiting for her. They formed a phalanx around her and swept her up to the directors’ dining room on the top floor of the bank. As doors opened ahead of her and closed soundlessly in her wake, Harriet felt exactly as if she were the Queen.
A final pair of double doors, leading to the sanctum itself, was opened by a real-life, country-house butler in a black coat and striped trousers. Harriet blinked at a room full of people all gathered around a white-clothed table. They made way for her, smiling and greeting her, and she found herself seated at the centre of the table on James Hamilton’s right hand.
