Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Do you want to drive?’

  She was conscious of the photographer and the parking attendant and a waiter or two watching their tail end. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Then you will have to let me.’

  They whirled up the lane, away from the Sunday-outing riverside. When she felt that they were safe Harriet asked, ‘Who was that?’

  Caspar shrugged. ‘One of Dempster’s people. Or someone like him.’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘One of the waiters tipped him off. Or one of the customers. You never know.’

  It must happen to Caspar Jensen all the time, Harriet realised.

  ‘You’d better be prepared to read all about it. Caspar’s New Love. High-Life for Business Girl Harriet. They’ll drag in whatever they already know about you.

  Harriet watched the road. It seemed to unwind steadily, reassuringly slowly. She let her head fall back against the seat, aware that her heart was thumping.

  ‘There isn’t very much to drag. My PR people will probably be thrilled. Any publicity, as they say.’

  So long as it isn’t Simon, she thought. Just so long as it isn’t Simon.

  Caspar began to whistle softly. Gentlemen songsters out on a spree …

  It was not far to Little Shelley. When they were almost there, Harriet asked, ‘Are you a drunk, Caspar?’

  There was his loud laugh. ‘I’d have difficulty producing much evidence to the contrary.’

  They drove along the leafy road, past the big houses invisible behind their screen of trees, and came to Caspar’s house. Harriet hadn’t tried to imagine what would happen once they were here. It had been enough to obey the simple urge to follow Caspar. Now she looked up at the expressionless windows. The house didn’t look much more inviting by day than it had done at night.

  Inside, the big square hallway was faintly chilly. The same boxes and cases that Harriet had seen at New Year still stood against the walls. Caspar led the way to a large kitchen with a refectory table and too many empty chairs, and an Aga that, when Harriet put her hand to it, she found was cold. It was a family house without a family.

  ‘Where’s Miss Page?’ she asked, wondering a little what the pale creature would think when she saw her here with Caspar. Caspar made the same connection, jumping some links in the sequence.

  ‘In her own flat, I dare say. It’s my house, you know.’ And what I do here is my business, Harriet supplied for him. She wondered what exactly he did do. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  She shook her head. She went to the long windows at the end of the room and looked out at a colourless garden, hearing the rattle of ice cubes. It made her sad to think of Linda wandering through these deserted rooms. Caspar’s touch startled her.

  ‘Come with me.’

  She followed him past so many doors that she couldn’t imagine enough uses for the rooms within and up a wide staircase to more rooms. He opened a door at the far end of the house and led her inside. Caspar’s bedroom was spartan, almost monastic, except for the books and manuscripts that were heaped on every surface. He made a gesture that signified apology, and dismissal, and put his drink down on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘You did say that I didn’t have to try to seduce you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then, will you come to bed with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harriet felt neither urgency nor diffidence. She simply knew that to do this was right. Caspar began to undo her buttons. His fingers were clumsy and he fumbled. Harriet half-closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think of all the other bodies that Caspar must have explored, bodies much more beautiful than her own, and all the pretty, eager faces that he had kissed as he was kissing her now. Nor did she even want to remind herself that she was in Caspar Jensen’s bedroom, that this was Caspar Jensen removing her clothes. That way, she could only have been frozen with self-consciousness.

  Instead she focussed on a separate, warm and ordinary Caspar that she was sure she knew, and wanted to love.

  They lay down together on the bed. Caspar’s love-making was direct, without any of Robin’s imaginative finesse. He entered her quickly and Harriet let him lead, although with Robin she had learned to direct as well as to accept. His breath made a small snicking sound in his throat as he reared up and down.

  He came quite quickly. Harriet watched his face contract, the spasm seeming almost to cause him pain. When it was over he lay with his face against her neck, his mouth warm and loose against her cool skin. Harriet lay still too, feeling the muzzy pressure of happiness at the periphery of her consciousness.

  After a little while Caspar moved. He raised himself on one elbow and rubbed a hand over his face. Then he touched Harriet’s cheek.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said gravely. He reached down, beside the bed, for his whisky glass. He drank from it, saw Harriet watching, and kissed her again. His tongue was cold, from the dissolving ice.

  ‘You asked me why I drink. Tell me something, Harriet. Did you feel it, down at the Waterside, while we were sitting in that restaurant with the flowers and the drapes and the silverware? Did you begin to suspect that it was all a set, and that we were playing a scene that involved you and me having lunch together, and that somewhere the cameras were merrily rolling? That none of it was real at all, not the food nor the silver and least of all us?’

  ‘I did, a little.’

  Caspar laughed, a drier laugh than usual. ‘I feel it all the time. Sometimes I have to stop and think, really quite hard, where the hell am I today? In character or out? That’s why I drink. There comes a point towards the bottom of the bottle when you’re too drunk to bother any more, too drunk to care either way. That feels good. That’s what I drink for, Harriet. Don’t look down your nose because of it, because it won’t do any good.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Harriet said softly.

  Caspar sighed. His glass empty, he lay back against the pillows. ‘Your breasts are pretty,’ he told her. ‘Round and pretty.’

  ‘They’re too small.’

  ‘I like small ones. Clare’s were too big, they rolled like the sea.’

  Harriet had seen them in enough films. She suddenly felt the absurdity of the moment, of finding herself in bed with Caspar discussing Clare Mellen’s breasts. She laughed, and then saw that Caspar was falling asleep. He had thick, grizzled hair on his chest and she let the palm of her hand rest on it. She could feel his heart beating beneath.

  While Caspar slept, Harriet lay in her contentment and watched the sun fading outside. It occurred to her that she had forgotten to telephone her office, and the omission seemed not very important. The house was utterly silent. She was thinking, as she lay there, that this conjunction between Caspar and herself was real enough. It should not need fixing with whisky.

  Harriet drew up in her car at Jane’s front door. She climbed out, rested one hand on the shiny top and reached into the back for a bunch of flowers in florist’s wrapping. With the flowers in the crook of her arm she walked up the path through the tiny front garden. Jane had watched her arrival through the window and she bit the pad of her thumb reflectively, waiting for the bell to ring, instead of going straight to the door.

  There was a brisk ring. Jane went, then. Harriet was smiling on the step, holding out the flowers. She looked elegant, and incongruous against the backdrop of drab houses.

  Unusually, they didn’t kiss each other. Jane stepped backwards, hands in the pockets of her khaki trousers, murmuring her welcome. Harriet’s scent and the proffered flowers combined powerfully in the confined space of the hallway.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ Jane invited. ‘Lovely flowers. How are you?’

  In the slightly bigger area of the kitchen Jane saw that there was no need to ask. Harriet seemed burnished, not by the sun although her skin glowed, but by some less definable and equally powerful influence. To her irritation, looking away from the gloss of Harriet, Jane noticed that the surfaces of her kitchen were covered with a film of gr
easy dust, and that the marigolds in a stone jar on the table must have been dead for at least a week. She scooped them up, dripping greenish slime, and dumped them in the already full pedal bin.

  ‘Shall I put these in water?’ Harriet offered. ‘Where’s a vase?’

  Having lived here, in her pre-millionaire days, Jane thought impatiently, Harriet bloody well ought to know where to look for a vase instead of drifting about expecting one to materialise.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Sit down and have a drink.’

  She took an already-opened two-litre bottle of Soave out of the fridge and poured two glasses full. It would probably make her sick, she thought, but she needed a drink quite badly enough to risk it.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, watching Harriet briefly inspecting the seat of the wooden chair before committing the folds of her maize-coloured linen skirt to it. She took an unattractive green glass vase out of a cupboard and thrust Harriet’s irises into it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Harriet.

  Nothing, Jane wanted to say, that a haircut like yours and a dab of Chloë and a Ralph Lauren jacket not to mention a few hundred thousand pounds in the bank wouldn’t solve. But instead of saying it she flopped into the chair opposite Harriet, easing the belt of her trousers that bit into her middle, and took a defiant gulp of wine. Harriet was her friend, however little they appeared to have in common at this moment. She let her face crease into a smile.

  ‘Where shall I start? With feeling jealous because you look so good?’

  Jane disapproved of jealousy as a principle. It was not constructive. But she felt it now, and the feeling wasn’t eased by admitting it. It’s easy for Harriet, she caught herself thinking, and then wondered if she were going slightly mad. She had always prided herself on her rationality.

  ‘You don’t want to hear all that,’ she said quickly. ‘Cheer me up. Tell me something interesting.’ She refilled their glasses, although Harriet had only sipped at hers. ‘Shall I?’ Harriet was saying, ‘Shall I tell you what’s happened?’ She looked almost dazed with well-being.

  ‘Go on.’

  Harriet needed no further invitation. She had kept the secret of Caspar for three days. After the first he had telephoned her and then telephoned her again to ask her to come to Brighton with him for the weekend. He had assumed that she would be free, and Harriet had made herself free although she had arranged to see Robin.

  ‘Brighton is essential’, Caspar had told her, ‘for the proper conduct of a love affair. Sea air and seedy grandeur, a stimulating combination.’

  Harriet hugged to herself the words love affair. She felt her happiness and excitement fomenting inside her, ready to spurt out under the slightest pressure. She needed to talk, to spill some of it, and so had come to Jane.

  ‘You’ll never guess. It’s very extraordinary,’ she laughed.

  ‘Don’t make me guess. Just tell me.’

  Harriet told her that she had fallen in love, and then told her whom she had fallen in love with, and how.

  Jane listened, in spite of herself, intrigued. The images of fast cars and restaurants by the riverside, orchids and runaway children and big, empty houses were powerful enough, and then there was Caspar Jensen’s famous face to animate them. Was it this Harriet, she wondered, who had cooked lasagne in this kitchen and occupied the upstairs spare bedroom because she had nowhere else to go?

  ‘I don’t care what happens, you see,’ Harriet finished simply. ‘I just want to be with him. I can’t not be with him. I never felt it before.’

  Jane nodded, although she had never felt it. If I had, she wondered, would I look like Harriet does now? In the situation in which she now found herself, the speculation struck her as ironic.

  ‘That’s quite a story,’ she said aloud. ‘No wonder you looked fit to burst with a secret.’

  ‘It’s not much of a secret,’ Harriet answered, less thoughtfully than she might have done, ‘as from this evening.’ She took a folded tabloid newspaper from her handbag and passed it across the table, confident that Jane would only have seen the Guardian.

  ‘I’m happy for you, if you’re happy,’ Jane said primly and unfolded the evening paper.

  It was a gossip column snippet, and a photograph. Harriet had turned to Caspar for protection, startled by the man who had reared up in front of them, but in the blurred picture she appeared to be nestling against his shoulder as coyly as any starlet. Jane read the brief paragraph. It was mostly about Caspar and Clare, but Harriet featured as ‘go-getting business-woman Harriet Peacock, better known as Meizu Girl’. Meizu itself was described as the ‘tragic PoW game that became a worldwide craze’, and the piece concluded with the inevitable speculation, ‘What game can Caspar be playing now?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jane said, curling down the corners of her mouth. ‘Can you bear to have this sort of stuff written about you?’

  ‘There’s been worse,’ Harriet said. ‘As you know.’ She looked harder at Jane and then asked, ‘What is the matter? You’ve gone very white.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ Jane announced, ‘that’s what the matter is.’

  She was gone for ten minutes. Harriet had got up to try to follow her, but Jane had pushed her back into her chair as she rushed past. Harriet sat still, trying to think, but she had been unable to think properly for three days. She sat down in the office to study the relative advantages of different factory sites and her thoughts looped back to Caspar. She sat still now, staring unfocussedly into Jane’s back garden, busy with her dreams.

  When Jane came back she leaned weakly against the doorframe, but spots of colour were beginning to show in her cheeks again.

  ‘Evening sickness,’ she said drily. ‘Wouldn’t you know nothing goes according to plan?’

  Harriet stared stupidly at her. ‘You’re pregnant?’ she said at last.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Jane confirmed, with no inflection in her voice.

  ‘Is that good? Or bad?’ Harriet asked gently.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Jane answered. ‘I really don’t know.’ She was aware that she was going to cry and that she didn’t want this new Harriet to see her crying, not after her stories of Caspar Jensen and Brighton and sudden, startling love.

  ‘How pregnant?’

  Jane sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. ‘One hundred per cent. There are no half measures, you know.’

  ‘I meant how long.’

  ‘Ten, eleven weeks. They tell me the throwing up will stop in another two or three.’

  Harriet was absorbing the new information, setting it in its context. Bringing logic to bear on problems had become a habit. After a moment she said, ‘You told me at Christmas how much you wanted a baby. Do you remember? You said you felt the need, like a pain.’

  ‘I know I did.’ Jane felt that her own powers of reasoning were deserting her. Familiar standpoints seemed to have shifted, leaving everything else awry. She had wanted a baby, Harriet was right. Specifically, she had wanted David’s baby, in a partnership with David, although Harriet knew nothing about that. She had tried hard enough for both, in the short time that they had been together, but the elements had obstinately refused to unite and so, in the end, had their begetters. David had moved on as, she suspected, he was bound to do. Jane was far too matter-of-fact to think in terms of broken hearts. And that, she remembered, had been the stage she was at when she met Harriet for their uncomfortable lunch before Christmas. That was the time when Harriet had failed to disguise the fact that she was in too much of a hurry to talk about anything, much.

  ‘I did want a baby.’

  It was merely ironic that, after all her wishing and wanting with David, this baby should be the result of a two-night stand with a teacher from Chatham, met at a conference on computerised teaching aids, and not contacted thereafter by mutual consent. The pain that she had described to Harriet had turned into an altogether different pain, of anxiety and uncertainty, heightened by loneliness.

  ‘Then w
hat’s wrong?’ Harriet asked in the same patient, analytical voice.

  ‘I suppose I wanted it in different circumstances. With a man.’

  ‘There must have been a man.’

  ‘Not really so you’d notice. Not a venture capitalist or a film star, for example.’

  Harriet heard the bitterness and tried to reach out. ‘What do you want, Janey? It’s not too late to decide not to have it.’

  Jane lifted her head and looked full at her. ‘Yes, it is. I do want the baby. I want …’ She made a little circle in the air with her cupped hands. ‘It. I’m afraid of the practical things. Where to live, how to look after it on my own, how to go on doing my job. Just earning a living, for the two of us.’

  ‘Be practical, then. Will the father help you?’

  When Jane only looked, but didn’t answer, Harriet went on. ‘All right. Move to a better area. Think about changing your job. Think about child-minders, crèches. This is your area, Jane, not mine.’ And, with a touch of exasperation, ‘What does Jenny say?’

  ‘That you start feeling better after three months.’

  Jane felt as if her familiar self was beginning to crumble, slipping and trickling away like fine sand, while Harriet faced her cast in stainless steel, bright and definite and invincible.

  Jane was jealous of more than Harriet’s appearance. She was jealous of her success, of her independence of the men that she could, seemingly, take or leave or choose to fall in love with, and of the strength that her money brought her. If Harriet had a baby, she could employ a nanny or two to take care of it. Contemplating the distance between them, Jane knew that it was money that separated them. Money cushioned and comforted, and Jane needed comfort now. The change of perspective that Harriet’s wealth forced upon her heightened her sense that all the old values were changing, leaving her adrift. She had been certain, once, that it was the common good that mattered and that individual ambition was in some way suspect. Equally she believed that wealth was for distribution not personal accumulation.

  But I worked for my success, she could hear Harriet say. I earned it.