by Rosie Thomas
‘That sounds extremely straightforward.’
They were both laughing now.
‘You can do it, you know.’
‘It?’
‘Whatever you want. You are single-minded. You don’t dissipate your energies, like most of us. When I came to interview you you were about to leave for Los Angeles. But still you gave your entire attention to answering the questions. You were savage in your determination to say what you wanted, in the way you thought was best. It made a very good interview for me. If only you’d let us do a coda …’
‘No coda.’
‘OK.’ Alison held up her hands in defence. ‘But me, I make a programme, probably quite a decent programme, then I come down here and move the shrubs I put in last springtime, and I cook lunch for people and get involved in an argument about public spending, one of those fruitiess arguments that only starts when everyone’s drunk too much Rioja. It’s not a path that leads straight to the Director General’s office, is it? But you, Harriet, you are formidable.’
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said drily. ‘And are you happy with the path, even if it doesn’t lead to the right office?’
Alison thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘Yes.’
‘I can see you are. Whereas I haven’t given any consideration to happiness since, I can’t remember when.’
‘Perhaps you should.’
‘I’m sure I should. I’ve got plenty of time, now.’ Harriet got up from where she had been sitting and went over to where Alison stood surrounded by the detritus of cookery. She rested her elbows on the back of a Windsor chair and examined Alison’s face. ‘Given our different characteristics, it’s simple to work out which of us is the nicer person.’
Alison shrugged volcanically. ‘Oh, nicer. If you’re going to use bland notions like niceness then I don’t think either of us qualifies. We aren’t nice because we’re busy, greedy, preoccupied, inquisitive and exacting. And why do you have to quantify which of us is more something than the other, in any case? Shows your competitiveness, doesn’t it? You must have been one bloody awful sister.’
‘Poor Lisa,’ Harriet said penitently. ‘I think I was. No wonder she decided to vote against me.’
The realisation, belated as it was, salved the affront. Harriet smiled. She found herself hoping that Leo was, at least, making her sister happy.
Alison held up the white china terrine that she had been decorating with bay leaves. ‘Finished. It needs to set now.’ She opened the door of the fridge that was adorned with half a dozen jokey magnets, and put the dish inside. ‘There’s a chunk of beef that just wants to go in the oven. We can go to the pub while it’s cooking.’
‘I haven’t been into a pub for ages.’
‘You haven’t missed much,’ Alison grinned at her.
They put on their jackets and walked down the dark lane together.
The air smelt of cold earth and animals, and their exhaled breath hung in faint, gloomy clouds in front of them. Harriet kept her eyes fixed on the single street lamp that had come on at the end of Alison’s lane. The halo of chilly mist enveloping it reminded her of the light at the margin of Hampstead Heath, beyond which she had never passed in the darkness. The attack had come in the full glare of light, under the traffic of the main road, instead. As she walked, feeling the satisfactory slither of mud beneath her boots, Harriet discovered that the shivers had left her. She was out in the night, remembering what had happened to her, and she wasn’t afraid.
She held her head up, walking faster so that Alison had to quicken her pace to keep up with her. She felt better, as if some sickness was at last responding to treatment.
They walked under the light at the corner, past a telephone kiosk with two teenage girls giggling outside it, and on down the village’s single street to the pub. Alison pushed open the door of the saloon bar. The lights were yellow-bright, reflected from bottles and horse-brasses, making them both blink. There was a coal fire in a tiled grate, a dartboard in one corner, two or three huddles of incurious people and a fat man polishing glasses behind the bar.
It was very cosy and ordinary-seeming. The smell of beer and chalk and carbolic was familiar and reassuring. The publican greeted Alison cheerfully.
They sat down near the fire with their drinks. ‘It’s nice here,’ Harriet said, looking around her. Darts plopped into the cork board behind them.
‘Nice, again?’ Alison demanded.
Harriet drank some of her scotch. ‘Exactly. Safe and comfortable. I like it.’ From being a foreign land, the country seemed suddenly homely. They seemed to be much further from London than the two hours it had taken them to drive through the Friday evening traffic. They were sitting with their second drinks when one of the darts players came across and leaned over Alison’s shoulder.
‘You playing tonight, Alison?’
‘Yes, I’ll give you a game.’
Harriet looked at her in disbelief.
‘Harriet? Do you want to play?’
‘I haven’t played darts in a pub since I was a student.’
‘Dear me. Come on, we’ll play doubles.’
They followed the young man across the bar. He had straw-coloured hair and meaty hands. ‘You haven’t got a whole crowd down this weekend, then, Al?’ somebody said.
‘Not this weekend. This is Harriet,’ Alison said. Harriet shook hands with Geoff, and Ron, and Kenny and Liz. None of them stared at her. Ron, or perhaps it was Geoff, put his own darts into her hands.
Harriet put her toes to the line on the rubber mat, took careful aim. ‘I do warn you …’ she murmured.
The dart missed the board altogether and hung at an angle from the cork shell.
‘You’re short of practice,’ Alison told her.
They lost the game, although Harriet was fired by the challenge and managed to hit the board thereafter.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Alison said. ‘Dinner’s in the oven.’
‘I was just getting into my stride.’
‘She was, too,’ Geoff or Ron encouraged her. ‘You should have your tea before you get down here, Al.’
‘You could be right.’
A chorus of good-nights followed them to the door. Harriet was smiling so widely her jaw began to hurt again. They set off back up the street, past the single shop and the bus shelter. The teenage girls had migrated there out of the drizzle.
‘Last week it was LA and the Academy Awards,’ Harriet said. ‘Lord Olivier, Jack Nicholson, Cher.’ She was thinking of Caspar’s diamond pool, the palm trees and the carpet of lights under the Hollywood Hills.
‘Doesn’t really compare with the Wheatsheaf on darts night, does it?’ Alison answered.
They began to laugh, and found themselves laughing so much that they bumped together and stumbled in the darkness. The laughter made Harriet more light-headed than whisky had ever done. ‘I like the Wheatsheaf a lot.’
‘It’s very important to have contrasts,’ Alison told her portentously. ‘You might not like it so much if the Wheatsheaf was all you’d ever known.’
‘I think I may have erred in the other direction.’ Harriet contemplated the years of meetings, hotels and aeroplanes, and the infrequent holidays that involved more aeroplanes, different hotels.
‘Lucky you’ve got me to put you straight with a game of darts.’
‘It is lucky.’ Harriet was serious, even though Alison was not. ‘I’m grateful. I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t come here with you this weekend. I think I might have gone slightly off the rails.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, thank you.’
‘Thank you for coming.’ They glanced at each other. Alison opened the front door of the cottage and the smell of roast beef came to meet them.
When they sat down at the refectory table Harriet looked at the length of it and the assortment of different chairs drawn up against it. She remembered what the man in the pub had said.
‘Do you usually have a lot of people down
here to stay the weekend?’ She felt a touch of unwarranted jealousy.
‘It varies. Sometimes I do, if I feel gregarious. Other times I’d rather be by myself. Or with just one person.’
Harriet suppressed her curiosity. ‘And the people in the pub all know you? Call you Al?’
‘Don’t you? What if Head of Documentaries heard? I told you, I grew up here. I went to school in Tenterden. It’s my home, I’ve known most of those people since I was small. Where do you come from? It’s probably in the research notes, but I forgot.’
Harriet told her about Sunderland Avenue and the perspective lines of the houses preceding it, dwindling to the vanishing point before Ken, and the memories of it that Kath tried to discourage.
‘I don’t come from anywhere, really. I always thought of home simply as London. Only now I’ve been dispossessed.’ Unthinkingly, she put her hands up to her face. The unshelled crustacean image came back to her, and she realised that she had felt safely housed since she had come to Alison’s cottage. ‘What’s it like, still belonging to the place you grew up in?’
Alison wrapped her hands round her wineglass. Her face was rosy. ‘Irritating sometimes. But secure.’
‘I envy you,’ Harriet said truthfully.
They ate their meal, and Harriet did the washing up. Alison retreated into the television-study to watch another programme, and when she emerged again they sat on opposite sofas to finish their bottle of wine. Alison read a book, and Harriet listened to some music with her hands clasped behind her head.
‘The picture of harmony,’ Alison remarked at last, closing her book. She yawned. ‘Time for bed, I think.’
Harriet’s curiosity got the better of her. The question popped out. ‘When you come down here with just one person, is it a man?’
‘When I tried to ask you about Caspar Jensen, you froze me solid with a glance.’
‘That was on camera. This is between these four walls. I’ll tell you about Caspar, if you like.’
‘Fair exchange. Or not very fair, because my history isn’t nearly as interesting.’ She drew her feet up beneath her, settling down. ‘Isn’t this girly? Yes, sometimes there’s a man. Not invariably the same one. There isn’t one at all at present. I used to worry when there wasn’t; lately I’ve started to accept that I feel just as comfortable on my own. I like my own company, and when I don’t there’s always the company of friends. I like my work, and it takes a lot of time. I don’t need a man to complete me.’ She lifted her eyes to meet Harriet’s. And Harriet, who on first meeting had decided that she was dumpy and plain, now realised that she was original, and, more than enviable, she was admirable. She began to wonder about all the principles that governed her own judgement.
‘Don’t you want to marry and have children?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Alison said calmly. She didn’t turn the question back to Harriet. ‘Tell me about Caspar.’
Harriet thought for a moment. ‘I thought I could reform him. I thought I could help him off the booze. The love of a good woman.’ After the awards, she had thought, she would claim him. The wilful optimism of it almost made her laugh now. ‘Every woman he’s ever been involved with must have believed the same. Caspar doesn’t want to be helped off the booze. Caspar likes himself the way he is. To imagine anything else is a conceit.’ She remembered Mulholland Drive, and the girl dead in the car. Anger and sadness fell around her like a curtain. She stared hard at the nap on a velvet cushion to hold back repetitive tears. ‘I loved him and then I stopped loving him.’ And then she added, ‘He’s got a ten-year-old daughter, did you know? Her name’s Linda.’
Alison listened, and Harriet told her about Linda Jensen.
When she had finished Alison said, ‘You would like to have children.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Not on my own, I wouldn’t.’ Harriet was thinking of Jane and Imogen. And then of Jenny and Charlie. ‘I’m not even sure about with a husband, a partner. If I could find one. If I wanted one.’
Alison slowly lifted her almost-empty glass. They drank a toast to each other. The salute was ironic, but they recognised the links of commonality, the beginnings of real friendship.
‘Bedtime, I think,’ Alison repeated.
As she went up the narrow stairs Harriet knew that she had much to think about. She propped herself up on pillows in the plain white-walled bedroom, in which someone at some stage, probably long ago, had painted all the wooden furniture in shiny, harebell-blue paint. Harriet imagined Alison as a teenager, painting intently with her tongue between her teeth.
She had been intending to think, but for the second night in succession she fell asleep as soon as she closed her eyes.
In the morning Alison read all the Sunday papers with unswerving concentration. Harriet made a series of cups of coffee and wandered in the garden. There was, at last, a breath of mildness in the air. The low grey sky had softened, and there was a noise of birds in the elms that marked the garden’s edge. A thin coat of fragile green seemed to have descended overnight, masking the black outlines of Alison’s border shrubs. Harriet walked slowly, examining the moss that blurred the paving stones of the path, the sticky knobs of buds and the unravelling new shoots. The threat of rain in the still air made the morning seem all the more beneficent.
Harriet listened to the noises from the next garden beyond the beech hedge. A small child was riding what sounded like a tricycle on a concrete path. From time to time he called out, ‘Look!’ and a woman’s voice from further away praised and reassured him. Cooking smells mingled with the scents of earth and smoke and agriculture.
‘Your garden’s very pretty,’ Harriet said when she went inside again. ‘Cultivated but natural. I wish I knew what half the plants are.’
‘It’s a mess at the moment,’ Alison sighed, without looking up from her paper. ‘Don’t get interested in gardening, that’s my advice. It’s a tyranny as much as a pleasure. Look, there’s a bit about Peacocks here.’ Harriet leant over her shoulder to read it.
She learned that her company was making a smooth recovery under the new leadership of David Daventry, following the departure of charismatic entrepreneur Harriet Peacock, and that the confidence of the City in the high-performing Meizu outfit appeared to be unshaken.
‘Who is this Daventry?’ Alison asked.
‘Robin’s man. A capable administrator, I think. Rather grey, from what I remember.’ Harriet answered automatically. Realisation left her winded, as if someone had hit her. Peacocks wasn’t her company. It was Robin’s and David Daventry’s. The limb no longer twitched, her blood no longer flowed through it. It had been cut off.
After a moment she turned away from Alison’s scrutiny. She supposed that she would sometimes forget what had happened, and that remembrance would come with the same shock. All that would happen was that she would forget for longer intervals, and the shocks would lessen. She felt her body jumping with adrenalin. She wanted to run, to telephone, to launch herself into attack or defence, and it was much too late. Her hip caught the corner of the table, rattling the crockery that stood on it.
Alison said, ‘We need some mustard, if we’re having cold beef for lunch. We finished the jar last night. The village shop will have some, it opens on Sunday mornings.’
‘Am I in the way?’
Alison refolded her Business Section. ‘Nope. We just need some mustard.’
Harriet put on her coat. She walked down the lane very fast, so that her body might take up the adrenalin once more, and let her heart stop knocking. Curls of woodsmoke hung over the roofs of the neat double row of houses. Women in green padded jerkins walked dogs past gardens lined with scarlet tulips and sheets of grape hyacinths. One of the dogs carried a rolled newspaper in its jaws.
In the shop Harriet found the mustard and waited in a line of other shoppers who greeted one another and gossiped with the woman behind the till. The pace of the various transactions was noticeably slow, and Harriet shifted from one foot to t
he other. When her turn came at last, she was not excluded from the routine exchange of pleasantries. The shopkeeper swathed the mustard in a paper bag with minutely serrated edges and examined Harriet’s face with concern as she handed over the package.
‘Oh, dear. What was it, a car accident?’
‘An accident, yes,’ Harriet agreed. Behind the woman’s nylon-overalled shoulder she saw a small poster, roneoed on pulpy pink paper, sellotaped to the wall between district council notices of proposed building works. The paper showed a hand, held palm upright, and the hand-lettered message, STOP BOTTRILL. For some reason, the name struck a faint association in Harriet’s head.
She nodded pleasantly at the pink poster, mostly to divert the attention from her face.
‘What’s STOP BOTIRILL?’
The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Not local, are you?’
‘No. Just staying a few days.’
‘Well, he’s one of these big London men, isn’t he? Bought a whole lot of land over to one side of the village there. There’s a plan to build a dormitory town, or a new town, or whatever they call it. A lot of little boxes, anyhow. It’s not right, is it? Not stuck on the side of a little place like this.’
Harriet tracked down the association then, BOTTRILL must be Keith Bottrill, building magnate and property mogul. From what she had read about him, she gathered that his methods were not always admirable but he invariably achieved results.
‘Who is organising the opposition?’
‘The Everden Association. Locals, again.’
‘I see.’
Behind Harriet the remainder of the queue was growing restive in its turn. She tucked the mustard into her pocket and went back into the quiet street. On her way past the Wheatsheaf, she noticed that the car park was full to capacity.
At the cottage she found Alison laying the table. If Harriet had been eating a quick cold lunch she would have assembled the elements at random and consumed them standing up or walking around, if she had bothered to eat anything at all. But for Alison every meal was an occasion, even if she was sitting down to it alone. She had taken pretty plates down from the dresser and arranged the food on them, and placed a glass tumbler of dwarf narcissi in the centre of the table. She took the mustard from Harriet, thanking her, and dropped a dollop of it into a tiny blue glass salt liner.
