by Rosie Thomas
‘I needed some things. The shop was open late.’
She closed her eyes, then opened them again, too aware of Jane’s concerned scrutiny. Worse than the bruising, worse than the splintered bone in her jaw, was the shock the assault had dealt her. She thought it was like a friend’s betrayal. She had lived in London all her life, and she had taken its crowds and its diversity as allies. She had never felt lost or afraid in the city – threats had come from much closer to home, from people who knew her, not from the mass of the city itself. Yet now, at random, it had thrown up her attackers, out of the darkness that she had mistaken as protecting her. The youths, faceless because she couldn’t even attempt a description for the policewoman, had taken more than her handbag. They had dispossessed her. They had made her afraid of her own place. Harriet shuddered at the thought of street corners, of empty tube platforms and windy open spaces.
Jane patted her hand. ‘It’s shock,’ she said. ‘Shock does weird things. You’ll get over it. Look, the tea trolley’s coming. I’ll get us both a cup.’
She had become the old Jane again, capable and brisk. Harriet knew that she could depend on her to do anything she could to help, anything that was practicable. She knew that Jane would visit her every day, however inconvenient it might be for Jane herself, that Jane would make sure all was well at the Hampstead flat, would organise her homecoming. Obediently, Harriet drank her tea.
‘When they say you can come out, you’ll come home to me, to Hackney, won’t you?’ And then, ‘Please don’t cry. You’ll make me cry too. You’ll be all right. You’ll be better in a couple of days.’
‘I know. I know I will,’ Harriet said grimly.
Charlie ate the chocolates that Harriet’s jaw was too painful to allow her. ‘You know why, don’t you? Why everyone wants to rush in, and take care of you, and heap flowers on your head?’
Like Jane, and Jenny, and Kath, and Leo, and Lisa who had brought the chocolates that Charlie was busily despatching, and even Caspar and Robin from their safe distance. Harriet nodded slowly.
‘Exactly. You’d be naive if you didn’t. It makes them feel good. You’ve been hurt, you need them, they can look after you. It’s not so easy to think of anything that needs doing for a self-made multi-millionairess.ʼ
‘I’m still a multi-millionairess.’
‘Yeah. Just a rather battered one.’
Charlie put another chocolate in his mouth and gave a little wave to Ivy who was pretending not to listen to their conversation.
‘Harriet, are you okay in this ward? It’s full of old ladies.’
‘Yes, thank you. I like the company.’
When Charlie had gone, Ivy got out of bed and shuffled across to Harriet.
‘He looked like a nice young man.’
‘Yes. He’s the husband of an old friend of mine. They’re both old friends.’ We used to go on holidays together when we were all young and broke. We went to Crete, once.
‘Oh. Not yours, then.’ Ivy was disappointed.
‘No. Not mine.’
Ivy peered up and down the ward, then wrapped her dressing gown more tightly around her chest, a sure sign of a confidence about to be delivered. She jerked her chin at the tiers of flowers. ‘I know who you are. A lady down the other side told me. You’re that Meizu Girl.’
‘I was,’ Harriet said. ‘I used to be.’
Her most surprising visitor was Alison Shaw. She came down the ward with a bunch of tulips in her hand, her raincoat folded over her arm. Harriet was very pleased to see her, surprised by how pleased.
‘I wanted to come.’
‘I’m very glad you did. I’m sorry about the programme.’
‘There’ll be other programmes.’
They smiled at each other.
Alison sat down, and they began to talk. It was not a profound conversation, but Harriet found that it was comfortable to begin the definitions of a friendship that was entirely new, and so did not have to adjust itself either to her bruising or her money. They talked about television, a magazine article they had both read about women executives, a new novel they had both admired. Alison had strong opinions; she was formally educated and widely informed. Harriet found herself drawn to her out of her own more random and piecemeal culture.
Her visitor stayed for almost an hour. At the end of the time a smell of brown stew announced the arrival of the ward supper. The two women exchanged expressions of amused revulsion. Alison prepared to leave; Harriet would have liked her to stay longer so that she could enjoy more of the conversation that did not make her cry, or feel guilty, or long to be left in peace.
‘What happens now?’ Alison asked. ‘Are you going to open a florist’s?’
They laughed at the flowers. ‘I’ll be out of here in a day or two. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Or where. I’m not very keen on London at the moment.’ The understatement masked all Harriet’s fear of the dense streets and the cold spaces.
Alison glanced at her.
‘Retire to the country, then. I’ve got a place in Kent, my weekend bolt hole. Come and stay there, recover yourself. It’s very quiet.’
‘That’s very nice of you. I might just take you up on the offer.’ It was a conventional response, Harriet didn’t know how seriously the invitation had been made. Alison held out her hand. Harriet remembered the unpainted nails, ringless fingers. The big, square diamond still adorned her own right hand. The muggers had missed that, somehow.
‘Do you live on your own?’ Harriet asked.
‘Yes, I do.’
They clasped hands, warmly.
After Alison had gone Ivy darted across. ‘I’ve seen her on the telly.’
Two days later, Harriet went home. Jane was there, ready to look after her, as Harriet had known she would be. She carried Imogen in a kind of canvas pouch strapped to her chest.
‘You don’t look too good,’ Jane said, with her characteristic bluntness. The bruises on Harriet’s face were turning yellow and purple, her neck and jaw were still distended.
‘I’ll mend.’
But in truth Harriet felt weak and shaky. It had been an effort to make the mugs of coffee that they were drinking at the kitchen table. Held close against her mother, Imogen was making contented little noises. Jane’s face was smooth and determined, a modern Madonna, Harriet thought.
‘Come home to Hackney, with me.’
‘I’m fine here, you know.’ That was another untruth. The sight of the pale walls and the neutral pictures disturbed her. The emptiness was too apparent. But Harriet didn’t want to go outside either. She kept remembering the boots that had kicked her, the distorted faces, the stink of the white-tiled tunnel.
‘Let me go out and do some shopping for you, at least. There’s nothing in the cupboards.’ The last shopping had ended up as a slimy quagmire of broken jars and spilt packets at the bottom of the steps, of course. Harriet tried to conceal her shuddering.
‘Is it cold in here? If you could, just get some milk and bread and stuff. I’ll go out tomorrow and do a proper shop. Leave Imogen here with me, if you like.’
Jane’s hand cupped the small dark head. ‘I’ll take her with me.’
She brought back a mound of provisions and arranged them in Harriet’s cupboards. They drank a cup of tea together, and there seemed no reason for Jane to stay any longer. After she had gone Harriet went to the window. The street was quiet, the houses opposite as mute and prosperous as always. She wondered what the façades were concealing.
She turned sharply away from the window. She went across the room and clicked on the television. Tomorrow, she resolved, she would go to Peacocks and pack up her personal belongings.
But as it happened, there was no need. Graham and Karen came with Harriet’s possessions in the back of Graham’s estate car. Graham brought in the Emma Sergeant portrait of Harriet and leant it against a wall. Harriet eyed it with dislike. She thought now that it made her look smug.
Karen carried in the old packin
g-case game and laid it gently on the table. Harriet rested the palm of her hand on the splintery wood. She was glad to have the game back but the rest of the things – an early Conundrum, framed photographs from launches and presentations, souvenirs of success – looked like meaningless junk. Harriet thanked Graham and Karen warmly, sat them down, gave them drinks. They stared uneasily around the room. Harriet knew that they were examining her curtains and cushions out of politeness, rather than be seen to stare too openly at her. She looked from the satisfied portrait-face to the reality in her gilt-framed mantel mirror.
The sight made her want to put up her hands to cover the damage. The swelling and the stitches, the half-closed eye and the livid marks mottling the skin appeared to Harriet as the external manifestations of her defeat. The loss of Peacocks and the beating she had suffered became connected, shaming.
She turned her back on the mirror and the portrait. She plied Graham and Karen with more drinks.
‘It looks much worse than it is, you know,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Tell me what’s been going on, will you? I’m starved of news.’
They jumped at the opportunity. They told her about the new managing director brought in by Robin, about his methods and innovations and reorganisation at Winwood. Harriet listened avidly, hardly able to believe that all this was happening without her, that she no longer held Peacocks in her hands.
‘But what’s he like, this new man?’ she begged.
‘Probably quite capable,’ Graham admitted. He would be, of course. Robin was no fool.
‘But he’s not you, Harriet,’ Karen wailed. ‘We all miss you so much.’
‘I miss you too. But you never know. We may all get the chance to work together again some day.’
Their faces were transformed at once. ‘Are you planning something?’
‘It’s too early to talk about anything yet.’ Harriet felt her nullity. It seemed more pronounced then than at any moment since the last meeting. Come on, she admonished herself. For God’s sake, Harriet.
When they were leaving, Karen hugged her very carefully. Graham kissed her cheek. She didn’t think he had ever done that before. ‘We’ll keep in touch,’ they promised each other. When she was alone again Harriet carried the portrait out into the hallway and stowed it out of sight, in the back of a cupboard. Then she went back into her drawing room and picked up the old Shamshuipo board. With the tip of each finger she traced the path down the slope, examining each of the fragile gates and the pencilled numerals beside them. Very gently she placed the counters in the bottom slots and set the balls behind the barrier at the top. She opened or closed the gates in their sequence, all the way down the slope. Then she released the balls. They set up their rolling and clicking. As she held the board, watching their pursuit through the maze, Harriet felt how fragile the old packing case had become. There was a long crack through the middle of the panel and the barely-joined halves shifted in her grasp. The movement pushed Simon’s ingenious grids a little out of alignment; wood of a slightly different colour showed beneath them. Harriet gazed at the Japanese characters that even in the time she had possessed the board seemed to have faded almost to the colour of the silvery wood. Soon they would no longer be distinguishable. Simon’s game was slowly disintegrating.
She put the board down, but she still followed with her eyes the paths through the gates and the thickets of numerals.
She was thinking about the mugging. She was lucky, as the doctors had told her. The faceless attackers might have killed her. It was not inconceivable that she might have died, where she fell, at the top of the tunnel steps.
She thought again of Simon, joined to her by his game and by her mother, and of Miss Getz, who she would never know.
Meizu was a metaphor, as Simon had always been aware. Harriet touched the slots at the bottom, where the counters and the balls from her last shot lay snugly in their proper sequence. The conclusion was the same and inevitable, however directly or circuitously that conclusion was reached, and however high or low the score achieved en route. The recognition comforted her.
Harriet lifted her head. She did not want to spend any more time immured in her silent rooms, mourning the loss of her company and the failure of her love affair with Caspar, wearing her injuries like the marks of loss and failure.
She picked up the telephone and dialled the BBC. At length, she located Alison Shaw.
‘Did you mean what you said about your place in Kent?’
‘Of course.’
‘I can come and stay with you?’
‘Of course. I’m going down there this evening. Can you be ready? Shall I come and pick you up?’
It was a Friday. ‘I’ll be ready,’ Harriet said.
‘Fine. I’ll have to come back on Sunday evening, but you can stay down there for as long as you like.’
Harriet packed a bag. It was a relief to put into it nothing but jeans and jumpers. No city suits, no silk shirts, no high-heeled shoes.
She hesitated over Meizu, but in the end she put it away on a shelf in the same cupboard as her portrait. If the conclusion was indeed the same, she reckoned, then the route was everything. She was not covering any new ground by hiding within her own four walls. And if London made her feel sick and afraid, well then, she would try out some country roads.
Alison was cooking. The ground floor of her cottage was almost all kitchen. The tiny rooms of the original layout had been opened out to make one big one, a place of mountainous sofas, old pine cupboards, rag rugs and stone jars. The only other downstairs room was a small study that housed the television set and the video recorder. Alison kept the door to it firmly closed.
‘I don’t want the thing staring at me all the weekend,’ she told Harriet.
Once or twice she retreated into the study to watch a programme. Some of the rest of her time she spent working at a corner of the refectory table in the middle of the kitchen, books and notes and a dictaphone spread out around her. Observing her from one of the sofas, over the top of a newspaper, Harriet was reminded of her own days at Belsize Park, when she had worked hungrily and obsessively to start up Peacocks.
It was bewildering to find herself without work, without responsibilities. From time to time she would give a start, as if to shake herself out of a lazy reverie and back into full concentration. She had read somewhere that amputees experienced a similar conviction, that the missing limb was still a living part of them.
Now, watching Alison assembling a complicated terrine of fish and tiny vegetables, she was aware that Alison possessed the enviable ability to do her work and then put it aside, in order to give her full attention to something else. She was absorbed, as she prepared their meal, in the rhythms of slicing and chopping and the manipulation of copper pans. She had spent the afternoon outside in the cottage’s garden, clearing the winter’s dead growth and freeing the new, green shoots of spring. Harriet had walked up and down the mossy paths, admiring the saffron and gold of daffodils and forsythia.
On her way to the compost heap with a barrowload of debris Alison had asked, ‘Are you bored? We could go to the pub, if you like. Or over to Canterbury, or something.’
Guilty in the face of Alison’s industry and evident contentment. Harriet had answered, ‘No, I’m not bored. I don’t want to do anything, except exactly what we are doing.’ Nor did she, except that it was difficult to forget the insistent twitching of her amputated limb.
If she had Alison’s reserves of interest and self-reliance, she thought, she might deal better with the alarming spaces around her.
‘You’re very good at everything,’ Harriet told her in genuine admiration. ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’
Alison looked up from her leaf gelatine and green peppercorns. She waved one hand at the kitchen with its accretions of junk-shop finds, yellowing herb and wildflower posters, dresser crowded with unmatched china and propped-up postcards.
‘I’m not noticeably talented at making money, for example. I only have th
is place because it belonged to my parents.’
Harriet frowned. ‘Perhaps you’re lucky,’ she said contentiously.
Alison raised her eyebrow. ‘What are you saying? That you wish you didn’t have yours?’
After a pause Harriet said, ‘I’d rather have my company. You have your job, and your garden, and this. A variety of other things too, I imagine. The pursuit of wealth, although I didn’t recognise it as such, precludes most other activities. Friendship. Love. As well as cookery and gardening and crossword puzzles.’
‘You don’t seem to have done noticeably badly for love or friendship.’ Alison’s tone was severe. ‘And perhaps you’re just not interested in astilbes or anagrams? I think you’d fight like hell if anyone tried to take your fortune away from you.’
‘Do you think wealth corrupts?’
The atmosphere changed at once. Alison laughed, leaning against the table and wiping the corner of her eye with a tea-towel. ‘You think you’re corrupt? Listen, you’re an intelligent woman assailed by guilt. You worked hard, you made a fortune on paper, then it turned into a real fortune because someone worked a slick deal. Then you went out late at night to buy some tea-bags and Ryvita, and you got mugged and beaten up. Those are the facts. You can assemble them into any scenario of exploitation and retribution that suits your need to castigate yourself. You’re rich. Your friends and relatives are smitten with jealousy, naturally enough. You’ll have to learn to deal with that, just as they will.
‘Do you think that if every possible cause of jealousy were removed, any of us would be any happier? Do you think that if all the wealth were removed from the world, all the corruption would disappear as well? Or would it simply be corruption of a more squalid and desperate variety? Come on, Harriet.’
‘As I keep exhorting myself,’ Harriet remarked.
‘Good. You have to work out how to use your money and yourself. Decide how to use what you’ve got. If you’re worried about unfashionable absolutes like goodness, or morality, you could tell yourself that it is probably easier to be a good rich person than a good destitute one. And work out the practicalities thereafter.’
