‘Is that too strong?’
Gwen peered.
‘No. No, that will be fine.’
‘I’m very grateful to you for coming.’
He passed her the cup. It rattled in its saucer as she took it.
‘That’s all right,’ Gwen said.
Guy poured his own tea. He said, watching the steam, ‘I want to reassure you that Merrion is fine. I’m not here because there is anything—’ He paused and then he said, ‘Anything the matter with Merrion. Physically, I mean. Nothing for you to worry about.’
He put the teapot down.
‘I wouldn’t have come,’ Gwen said. ‘I wouldn’t have agreed to meet you, if I wasn’t worried. Would I?’
He looked down at his cup. She was such a disconcerting mixture of sharpness and shyness.
‘No,’ he said. He leaned his elbows on his knees and linked his fingers. ‘Mrs Palmer—’
‘Yes?’ Gwen said.
‘You remember when we last met—’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. Her voice had a little edge of triumph to it. ‘I remember that.’
‘And you remember what you said to me?’
He watched her add two lumps of sugar to her cup, and a generous amount of milk.
‘I do,’ she said. She was nodding.
He flexed his fingers. He said slowly, ‘You told me I was greedy and selfish. You told me that by persisting in my relationship with your daughter, I was depriving her of all the natural human joys of a traditional family life because, at my age, I already had all those things and would not want more of them.’
Gwen stirred her tea vigorously. She said with emphasis, ‘I’m sure I didn’t put it like that.’
‘No,’ Guy said. ‘No, you didn’t. But I think that is what you meant.’
Gwen gave her head a tiny toss.
‘I may have done—’
Guy leaned forward. He said, looking straight at her, ‘Mrs Palmer, you were probably right. You probably are right. There are other factors of course, but I never forgot what you said, I never wanted, never meant—’ He stopped, and bent his head. It was suddenly, physically, impossible to go on. He looked hard at his linked hands and fought with the obstruction in his throat. He could feel Gwen watching him, watching him intently.
‘What are you trying to say?’ she said.
He shook his head. He could not trust himself either to look up or to speak.
‘Mr Stockdale,’ Gwen said, in a voice sharp now with anxiety rather than reproof, ‘what are you trying to tell me?’
Guy swallowed hard. He made himself look up. She was gazing at him with the wide eyes of someone dreading to hear the worst.
‘I am not going to marry her,’ Guy said indistinctly.
‘What?’
‘I am not going to marry Merrion,’ Guy said. ‘It isn’t fair, I shouldn’t – I can’t ask her to—’
Gwen gave a little scream.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh no!’
Guy put out a hand towards her, almost involuntarily.
‘Mrs Palmer, I thought—’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh!’ She put her hands up to her face, holding her cheeks, staring at him now with eyes like saucers. ‘Oh!’ she cried in anguish. ‘What have you gone and done now?’
‘Just Mrs Akimbi left,’ Miriam said. She stood in the doorway of Simon’s office, holding a cardboard file by the very edges, as if it were distasteful to her. She had painted her fingernails ice blue. Ted said he couldn’t look at them: they turned his stomach, somehow.
‘Thanks,’ Simon said. He stood up and reached across his desk for the file. ‘Is she here?’
‘Yes,’ Miriam said. ‘She’s been here for ten minutes.’
Simon sat down again. He said, his head bent over the file, ‘Just give me a moment before you bring her in, will you?’
‘OK,’ Miriam said. She was perfectly used to people waiting. Sometimes there were three or four people waiting, on the shabby, polyester-tweed-covered chairs in the reception area, staring at the weeping fig tree she seldom watered, or the pamphlets and out-of-date magazines she seldom tidied, and she took no more notice of them than if they were the chairs themselves, rather than people sitting on them. ‘I’ll give you a couple of minutes.’
Simon opened Mrs Akimbi’s folder. Mrs Akimbi was forty-four. She had worked for fifteen years for the local council, through all the problems of being abandoned by her husband and bringing up their three children alone, and it had suddenly dawned upon her that, in all those fifteen years, she had never been promoted.
‘I’m conscientious,’ she said to Simon. ‘I’m a good worker. I’m never late, I never take days off sick. I’ve gone into those offices, regular as clockwork, since 1985.’
He looked at her. She wore metal-rimmed spectacles on her broad black face and earrings like tiny gold crucifixes.
‘Have you applied for promotion?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. She nodded emphatically and her earrings shook. ‘Oh yes. Every year. Every year I apply for promotion and I never get it. And I tell you what, I tell you something, Mr Stockdale, I’ve noticed something, I’ve noticed every year.’
‘Which is?’
‘It’s a man who gets it,’ Mrs Akimbi said. ‘Every time, it’s a man who gets the promotion I’ve asked for. It’s a man. And it’s always a white man. It’s white men who get my job.’
Simon looked up now. Mrs Akimbi stood in his office doorway. She wore a cream tunic and matching trousers and she had exchanged the gold crucifixes for silver ones. Simon rose and held his hand out.
‘Mrs Akimbi.’
She took his hand gravely.
He said, ‘I think I have a plan of action for you.’
‘Good,’ she said. She didn’t smile.
‘I’ve decided,’ Simon said, ‘that I can take your case to the London South Employment Tribunal in Croydon. I’m afraid you won’t get legal aid.’
‘I can’t pay,’ Mrs Akimbi said. ‘Out of the question.’
‘I know,’ Simon said, ‘I understand. I suggest a contingency fee.’
‘A what?’
‘No win, no fee. But if we do win, you pay me a third of what you get.’
Mrs Akimbi looked at him levelly.
‘Like what?’
‘Like if I win you ten thousand pounds compensation, you pay me one third of that.’
‘Ten thousand!’
‘I’m not promising,’ Simon said. ‘I can’t promise. All I can do is my best for you. I know your union people, I’ll have a word with them.’
‘OK,’ Mrs Akimbi said. She turned her head a little and looked at him sideways. ‘So what do we go for?’
Simon looked at her folder again.
‘I’m going to apply to the tribunal on two grounds, Mrs Akimbi. Racial and sexual discrimination.’
She nodded.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ll do the case myself, I won’t instruct counsel. It’ll be me representing you.’
‘That’s right,’ she said again. ‘Sex and race.’
‘I’ll prepare the application and then we’ll go through it together.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t get stressed out about it,’ Simon said. ‘It’ll only take a day.’
‘Stressed!’ Mrs Akimbi said. ‘Stressed! You have no idea. I am altogether stressed out already.’
Simon held his hand out again.
‘I’ll do my best for you.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She took his hand. ‘Sex and race. Discrimination.’
‘That’s it.’
She turned towards the door.
‘Ten thousand pounds!’
‘At best. If we win.’ He went round his desk in order to open the door for her. As he opened it, he saw that someone else was standing there, waiting, someone in a black suit with long hair tied back behind her head.
‘Merrion!’ Simon said.
She said, ‘I don’t want to interrup
t.’
‘You aren’t,’ Simon said. ‘My client was just going.’
‘We are finished,’ Mrs Akimbi said. She hardly looked at Merrion. ‘For now.’
‘Goodbye,’ Simon said.
Mrs Akimbi moved her head but said nothing. She went past them down the short corridor to the reception area.
‘I should have rung,’ Merrion said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He held the door. ‘Come in.’
She went past him and sat in the chair Mrs Akimbi had occupied.
‘Are you all right?’ Simon said.
She looked at her lap.
‘Not very.’
He propped himself on the desk edge, close to her. He said, ‘I’m quite surprised to see you, I have to say.’
She glanced up at him. She said, with a faint smile, ‘Lion’s den and all that?’
‘Sort of, I suppose—’
‘I just felt I ought to come. In person, I mean. There are some things you have to say face to face.’
‘Oh God,’ Simon said, trying to sound facetious. ‘What’s coming now?’
‘It would have been easier to go and see Carrie, I suppose,’ Merrion said, looking away from him. ‘Which is probably why I didn’t do it. As Guy would say, typical hair shirt. He thinks I was born in one.’ She stopped.
Simon looked at her partly averted profile. She didn’t look very well, very happy. He said gently, ‘What’s going on?’
She turned her head. She said, looking up at him, ‘We aren’t going to get married.’
He said nothing. He felt an extraordinary stillness settle on his mind, freezing it.
‘It’s sort of mutual,’ she said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t a great scene with one of us begging and pleading for a change of heart. We sort of knew. I suppose we’d known for ages.’
‘What had you known?’ Simon said, almost in a whisper.
‘That – that what we had, what we felt, might not survive being married. That – that the change would kill it. That we couldn’t bear what that – might do to us.’
‘Oh my God,’ Simon said.
‘We couldn’t,’ Merrion said, ‘bear to hurt each other. We couldn’t risk it. Not hurt like that.’ She looked down again and said in a voice so low he could hardly hear her, ‘Though at the moment I can’t imagine hurt worse than this. He’s been my whole life, my—’ She stopped again.
Simon moved a little against the desk. He looked down at her bent head, at her bowed shoulders.
‘So it’s over?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it has to be. You can’t go back ever, can you?’
‘No.’
‘Only on,’ Merrion said hardly audibly. Her shoulders shook a little.
‘Come here,’ Simon said.
She lifted her head.
‘What?’
‘Come here.’
She stood, uncertainly. He held his arms out.
‘Here,’ Simon said. He stood upright and pulled her towards him and then held her in his arms, his face against hers.
‘Poor girl,’ he said. ‘Poor, poor girl.’
He felt her lean against him; he felt her beginning to shake slightly, her body loosening. He gave her cheek a brief kiss.
‘You cry,’ Simon said. His own voice was far from steady. ‘If you want to, you cry.’ He moved his head so that his cheek was against her hair. ‘This is the place to do it, Merrion. This is the place. If you want to.’
Chapter Twenty
The shadows, Jack noticed, were getting longer. The most extensive one, belonging to the chimney pots on the roof, had now reached three-quarters of the way across the lawn, pulling the dark bulk of the house’s own shadow after it. When it reached right across the grass, Jack decided, he would get out of his deckchair and go in and find someone. Anyone, really.
He looked at his hands. They were earthy, especially his fingernails. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had earthy hands before: oily hands, grimy hands, paint-covered hands, yes, but not earthy ones. He ran the nail of the second finger of his right hand along under all the nails of his left hand and extracted satisfactory half moons of dried earth which then broke up dustily down the front of his T-shirt. He brushed at them, idly. His back hurt a bit, and his shoulders, but he quite liked that. He liked it in the same weird way he liked looking at the border he had weeded, the whole border that ran the length of the wooden fence that separated their garden from the one belonging to the house that backed on to theirs.
When Jack had said, that Saturday lunchtime, that he’d tidy up the garden a bit, Simon had stopped doing what he was doing (putting a new fuse in the vacuum cleaner plug) and said, incredulously, ‘What?’
Jack shifted from one foot to the other.
‘I don’t mind. I’ll do a bit out there if you want.’
‘In the garden?’ Simon said.
‘It’s a right mess—’
‘I know,’ Simon said. He put down the plug and the screwdriver. He said, a little awkwardly, ‘Do you mean do some gardening as – as a job?’
‘No,’ Jack said. He kicked at the nearest skirting board. ‘No. I’ll just do it. If you want.’
‘Thanks,’ Simon said. He sounded startled.
‘No big deal—’
‘No. Thank you. Thank you, Jack.’
They’d gone out into the garden together and looked at the border. It was, to Jack’s eye, just a huge green tangle.
‘Which are weeds?’
Simon scratched the back of his neck.
‘Not sure.’
‘That is,’ Jack said, nudging a clump with his toe. ‘That’s groundsel. I remember that, from primary school.’
‘Start with that, then,’ Simon said. ‘And just go on to things you don’t like the look of. Make a pile.’
‘OK.’
‘Grando’s coming later,’ Simon said.
‘Is he?’
‘He’s at a bit of a loose end—’
Jack ducked his head.
‘Yeah.’
‘I asked him round. Might take him out for a drink.’
Jack looked at a huge lilac bush still bearing the rusty bunches of its spent blossoms.
‘Can I cut stuff?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Will Mum mind?’
‘Mum will be ecstatic’
‘OK,’ Jack said.
He went across the grass to the shed where the tools were kept and where he’d once kept his bike, too, before he’d decided it was juvenile to ride a bike and sold it, for far too little, to Rich’s kid brother. He wished, rather, that he hadn’t sold it now, that he hadn’t been so impulsive. Rachel and Emma’s little bikes were still in there, baby bikes with transfer pictures on the mudguards and little girly baskets on the front. Emma’s had bells on. Jack remembered the hideous embarrassment of having to ride with Emma and her basket and her bells, and look after her. He couldn’t: of course he couldn’t. Nobody could look after Emma; she’d been born impossible.
Above the bikes was a crooked shelf laden with cobwebby tins of paint and mower oil and beside them was a heap of garden tools, thrown down against the shed wall. There were rusty nails banged into the wall, to hang the tools on, but nobody took any notice of them, and the tools just lay where they had been thrown, tangled up with stray lengths of wire and wood. Jack didn’t know much about garden tools. He turned the pile over gingerly and selected a spade and a fork and various blades and large scissor-like things and carried them out on to the grass. It was difficult to know where to begin. He stood back and looked at the green tangle. Front to back? Or left to right? He picked up a pair of secateurs and released the safety catch. Maybe he’d start with a bit of cutting; he had a feeling cutting would be satisfactory.
He wasn’t at all sure why he’d made this offer of gardening. He hadn’t really planned to, he had just found himself saying it, offering, and then, after he’d offered, bein
g sort of glad he had. Maybe it was something to do with the way things felt around the house now, the way the girls didn’t have their bedroom doors shut all the time and Carrie didn’t bang meals down on the table as if she were so fed up with getting them that she didn’t really care if anyone ate them or not. She’d had her hair streaked, too. Not much, just a few highlights in front, but it made a big difference. They’d all noticed. Rachel wanted to know how much it had cost and when Carrie wouldn’t tell her said, ‘Well, too much then.’ But you could see Rachel thought she looked OK, and that she knew it. There were a few new clothes, too, nothing major but definitely some new tops and a pair of sandals he’d seen Emma trying out, along the landing. Emma and Rachel never wore their own clothes if they could wear someone else’s.
And then Simon had said that they were going on this holiday. They’d all been completely amazed, stunned.
‘A holiday?’ Rachel said, as if she hardly understood the word.
‘Yes,’ Simon said. He was grinning. ‘I thought we’d go to Majorca.’
Jack wrenched off another branch of the lilac bush and threw it behind him on the lawn. They never had holidays. They never had had. They’d had school trips, sometimes, and once in a blue moon, Simon and Carrie went away for a night at a weekend, but Simon always said there wasn’t any money for holidays, that there was hardly enough money for ordinary days, let alone holidays, and then he dropped this bombshell. It was such a bombshell that Jack wasn’t even sure he wanted to go at first.
‘Course you bloody do,’ Adam said.
‘With my kid sisters? With my parents?’
‘Forget them,’ Adam said. ‘Think of the other things.’
‘Like?’
‘Sun,’ Adam said. ‘Booze.’
‘Girls,’ Rich said.
‘Girls!’
‘You can go out on the pull every night,’ Adam said.
Rich gave Jack a nudge.
‘You’ve got the knowledge now—’
‘You’ll score,’ Adam said. He closed his eyes. ‘Think of it. Sun and booze and scoring. All day, all night. What are you bloody waiting for?’
Jack stood back and looked at the lilac. There was much less of it, certainly, but rather unevenly less. It looked a bit naked and pathetic, like somebody caught half-dressed. Jack chucked the secateurs on to the grass and picked up the garden fork. He stuck it into the earth, trod it in and lifted. The earth was hard, baked solid. His forkful came up too suddenly, spraying grit and small stones and a long, uneven red worm. Jack peered at the worm. He thought of Majorca, and what Adam had said. He didn’t want to score every night, indiscriminately, after a skinful. But he’d like to score once, maybe, with somebody nice, somebody he liked, somebody he’d remember as a person and not just as a body.
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