Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

  We watched Graham Groton raise his glass to her. He is rather short, Graham, and she was having to talk down to him.

  “I only like tall men,” I said flippantly.

  I’d been working like a maniac towards the CGGI deal that the board kept insisting should go ahead despite all the counterindications of shadiness I had been urging them to consider. My integrity was on the line. The man I had met earlier that year and whom I might, given time, have grown to love, had understandably grown tired during this CGGI case of waiting until ten or eleven at night for my work-weary self to grace him with an hour or two, and had gone.

  “I like to look up at a man,” I explained.

  “To,” said Keith Mannion, with a startled roll of the eye. I realized he was several inches taller than me.

  “No, at,” I said, and smiled.

  “Ah,” he said. “Got you. But let me introduce you to Isobel. You must meet her.”

  Isobel Marley had been listening for long enough to Graham Groton’s gung-ho line on the merger and how we were all now part of one big European family for her face to register as we approached a flash almost of joy. Only almost, for her face was singularly serious, impressively so, and, except for the odd luxury of a frown, impassive.

  “But how can Europe be one big happy family,” I launched in, unable to let this go; it was Europe’s various madly conflicting regulatory regimes which had kept me on fifteen-hour days these last two months. A deal which was whiter than white in one country could be distinctly off-color in another and downright criminal in a third. The euro wasn’t the half of it.

  “You must feel like the Lone Ranger,” chuckled Keith Mannion. “You and the other compliance guys. Galloping around after the outlaws. Them thar traders.”

  “Hi-ho Silver,” I said. “Someone’s got to do it.”

  “Not exactly bad news for law firms,” said Isobel, but her heart wasn’t in it. She had been distracted; she had noticed what no man would ever notice.

  At this point, Keith Mannion and Graham Groton were drawn away by another Iddon Featherstone partner to meet the grauen eminenz from Marbeiter Rotenhart, who was over in London on a rare dynastic visit.

  Isobel paused, then allowed herself to comment, “That’s a nice shirt.”

  I was wearing a white shirt with my gray suit, boringly meek and plain. Only a member of the unofficial ocular freemasonry would have noticed that it was made of nun’s veiling, with a faint gray stripe the width of a pencil lead.

  “Why,” I remembered asking the sales assistant at Wurstigkeit that time, staring hard at the beautiful but after all plain shirt, “why, um, is it so much money, this one?”

  “Ah, this one,” he had replied. “Look, there, the stripe, you see? It is because the line is broken.”

  Sure enough, there were minute sugar-grain-sized gaps in the fine stripe.

  “Of course,” I’d said. And bought it.

  “Thank you,” I now said to Isobel.

  I saw her struggling with herself. She was an intensely competitive type, that much was obvious, and she would not be able to bear not to ask.

  “It’s nice cloth,” I taunted, almost laughing. “Like down against the skin. And see, the line is broken.” I held out my cuff for inspection.

  “So it is,” she said. “Yes.”

  She paused again, poker-faced, then could not help herself and asked, “It’s not from that shop, is it? That mad shop with the password where they won’t give out their address? What’s it called?”

  “Wurstigkeit,” I said, blushing slightly.

  “What a ludicrous idea, a shop with a password,” she scoffed.

  She couldn’t bear to feel excluded, it was obvious. She was used to being on every list, right at the top.

  “It’s eccentric,” I agreed, blithely.

  “Isn’t it ridiculously expensive?” she sniffed.

  “Not to someone in the updraught,” I said. “Surely.”

  It was far too expensive for me now, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Since I first visited, Wurstigkeit’s prices had quintupled, sextupled, rising by at least 100 percent each year. Market forces!

  Five years ago I had met a man from Shibui Investments for lunch in a restaurant near Liverpool Street. He had been summoned by his mobile to an emergency deal-breaker before we had finished the amuse-gueules, and so, finding myself with a rare uncharted hour, I had allowed myself to drift outside map-less into the dusty sun. It was at a point in my life when I could not sleep for worrying. I was starting to experience low-level panic attacks at night when I could hear my jumpy heart and ragged breathing as myriad horrors, regrets, fears and rawheads hurtled towards me (lying doggo beside my now ex-husband pretending to sleep) in a shower of meteorites. I had taken to carrying with me in my briefcase a collection of small bottles of flower-dew remedies, each claiming to protect against a specific misery. The ones I used most were Rock Water, labeled “For the self-repressed who overwork and deny themselves any relaxation,” and Wood Betony, “For those who find it difficult to love themselves.”

  Anyway, it was during this windowlike hour at a less than euphoric stage in my life that, by chance, I stumbled into Wurstigkeit, which had opened only that week. It was like stepping into the fabled wardrobe and finding yourself in another country. The point was, it was an experience in weightlessness. It subtracted your center of gravity.

  “Wurstigkeit,” said Isobel. “I wonder what that means. Sausage something, it sounds like.”

  “Laura,” said Keith Mannion, waltzing up with an older man in tow. “Laura, I’d like you to meet Günter Mangelkammer. Herr Mangelkammer is head of commercial litigation over in Frankfurt. Herr Mangelkammer, this is Laura Collinson, head of compliance at Leviathan International. And this, this is the distinguished Q.C. Isobel Marley.”

  “How fortunate,” said Isobel, smiling at Herr Mangelkammer. “We were just puzzling over the meaning of a German word. Perhaps you will be able to help us.”

  “I might be delighted,” said Herr Mangelkammer warily.

  “What was it, Laura?” Isobel asked.

  “Wurstigkeit,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” said Herr Mangelkammer, visibly relieved. “I know this. It is an expression introduced by Bismarck. It describes a mental state. How must I say? To do with sausages.”

  “Sausages?” said Keith Mannion, his eyebrows in his hair.

  “A state of sausagelike behavior,” persisted Herr Mangelkammer.

  “Sausageness,” I put forward.

  “Sausageness is good,” he agreed. “Meaning, people don’t care. They don’t care a sausage’s worth.”

  “They don’t give a fig?” I offered.

  “They don’t give a fuck!” cried Keith Mannion, laughing heartily. “They don’t give a flying fuck!”

  “Your way is better, I think,” said Herr Mangelkammer, honoring me with a nod.

  We turned from Chicksand Street into Frostric Walk, then down a villainous, urinous alley so narrow that where a moment before there had been enough blue sky above to cut out a pair of sailor’s trousers, now there was nothing but a forget-me-not ribbon.

  “Are you quite sure you know where we’re going?” asked Isobel with some asperity as she picked her well-shod way between various noisome puddles.

  We took a twist at the end here, then on to one last dark paved lane, and we had arrived.

  “You must be joking,” said Isobel flatly, staring at the scuffed and numberless portal with the blacked-out picture window beside it.

  She glanced at her watch with irritation, then at me.

  “Wait a moment,” I said.

  On the wall at the level where a doorbell should have been was the bas-relief head of a satyr, and into the ancient whorled ear of this creature I whispered the password. Then I stepped back and waited.

  The door opened slowly on backward hinges, and we followed. Inside, it was the hall of the Mountain King filled with the trousseau of his robber bride. I caug
ht my breath, and started to feel bouncy and oxygenated, airy and greedy. My eyes lusted around all over the place. The colors teased and tingled and clashed like music, while the walls receded into velvety darkness. I tried to keep some semblance of indifference but the smiles kept crossing my lips, and soon I was cooing and clucking and gasping as I moved from rail to rail. Isobel narrowed her eyes, riffled through this rack and that, pursed her lips. I saw the stuff through her eyes, as when I’d looked in for the first time five years ago. What a load of tat, I’d thought. What a heap of magpie rubbish, little bright bits of rubbish.

  Then I’d suddenly got caught. Was it a zany corsair’s slanted stripes down the front of a structured cardigan? I’d thought, How can they charge more than a fiver for this nonsense; and a second later, the scales had fallen from my eyes. I’d understood that here was something indefensible at work, and had reached for my checkbook. It was the story of the emperor’s new clothes, but backwards.

  Now Isobel was reaching for the price tags and huffing and puffing and casting stuff aside with a curled lip.

  “Don’t look at the price tags,” I advised. “Look at the clothes.”

  I slid a long viridian garment from its hanger and held it out behind her. Instinctively she slid her arms back into the sleeves and shrugged it on. We looked at her guarded face in the long mirror, and at the grande dame opera coat whose plaited puffy serpentine collar she had drawn superbly up to her chin.

  “No,” she said, casting it aside. “I’d never wear it. When would I wear it.”

  That’s not the point, I started to say, but decided to wait.

  Perhaps after all she was merely status-seeking, an acquisitive label-conscious shopper. If so, I had misjudged, and this was a waste of time.

  I remembered that Financial Times interview with Isobel Marley. A blur of phrases came back at me, things like, 120 percent, superleague, total commitment, that sort of stuff. She had been quoted as saying, “I’m a workaholic, I’m fantastically good at what I do,” and had rejected the sobriquet of fat cat with talk of freedom and markets. That was all distinctly unpromising. Surely she had no time for anything else.

  On the other hand, she had been the one to fall in love with a shirt, I reminded myself; so she must have something.

  “There is nothing here that I could wear to work,” she said. “There is nothing here that I could wear at home. Family life. What’s the point?”

  “But it’s you, that coat. You can see that,” I declared. “Apotheosis clothes, that’s what this place is for.”

  You would never look at me and think, There goes a well-dressed woman. Outside work I do not dress to please anyone except myself. The concept of rational dress has always appealed strongly: useful pockets and plimsolls and William Morris’s thoughts on vegetable dyes. If I want to look like a happy mad-woman, I can. I’m paying for these clothes, I’m having fun. All this goes against the revered French approach: the top two buttons undone; the neat waist cinched; the short short skirt. The French wouldn’t like this shop—it’s too eccentric, there’s too much color. And as for that vile cynical Gallic maxim which holds that clothes should be chosen expressly pour mettre en valeur various good bits of the body! Leg or breast, sir? Bah, I say to this; à bas les vêtements pimpants; pimp clothes I call them. And for your information, no, I am not fat. Nor am I thin. I’m just right.

  Then Isobel caved in. Her defenses crumbled, reason fled. She didn’t care about the money anymore, she stopped looking at the ridiculous little tickets and their ludicrous prices. Instead she narrowed her eyes and started to hunt down the most fantastical, the most artfully bizarre. I knew I hadn’t been mistaken. I knew she had an eye. We were two of a kind when it came to this. She’d caught on. She was caught in. From now on she was a driven woman.

  Soon we had amassed enough between us to start trying on. In the little side lavatory off the showroom—Wurstigkeit had nothing as utilitarian as a changing room—with silks and velvets over the rusted old washbasin, elbows in each other’s faces, we struggled into mad dresses, lunatic ensembles. I barely knew this woman, I’d only met her once before, yet here we were taking off our clothes together in a rusty cubicle.

  I tried on a cotton shirt first, raspberry colored and almost raspberry scented as I pulled it over my head. I could smell the cleanness of the cotton, and the pleasant smell of our sweat, recent, slight and grassy, then wafting stronger from under our arms. Touching the cotton to my face, my cheek, I found it fine as a baby’s skin, and sighed.

  She’s much taller than me, Isobel. I’m not short, but my eyes were level with the great mamelonated nipples of pregnancy spread out by the gauze of her bra. I looked away. I hoped she wouldn’t appraise what she saw of me with that merciless female regard which is so chilling. You must have seen the way women commonly look at each other in dressing rooms or at the gym— furtive, assessing, without lust or kindness, hypercritically alert to any sign of age or deterioration. No wonder there is so little nakedness in British life. We live under a cloud inside our clothes, blue veined as cheese, bluish white as milk.

  “I would love to hold a baby again,” I said, thinking back to that good dense beanbag weight.

  “For half an hour,” she said shortly, struggling inside a hiss of silk. “I’m not that keen on babies per se.” Her head surfaced above the glinting tussore and she scowled. She really did look impressive when she scowled, her features baroque and curly round the long straight nose.

  “All those vile Health Visitors in hospital moralizing about breast-feeding,” she shuddered.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to mention antibodies, just for fun, but I thought she might punch me in the face.

  When I had my daughter, I expressed my milk at home and at work; the freezer hoarded those precious cubes for the nanny to defrost; I carried the agonizing breast pump round in my handbag as reverently as if it were a holy relic. The milk I managed to collect in the ladies’ at work I stored at the back of the office fridge in a clearly marked bottle until I could take it home. I stopped all that rather abruptly when my secretary one day came and whispered to me that there was a rumor that the boys in Sales were adding vodka. To the milk. Which is the sort of thing that seems mere infantile fun before you have a baby, but cruelty itself afterwards. I could see I might have seemed too earnest to them about the baby-feeding business. They simply couldn’t begin to imagine. That was almost seven years ago, though.

  “Have you got a good nanny?” I asked as I pulled on a stretchy velvet skirt like pliable moss.

  “I loathe her with a passion,” she said, her voice muffled as she drew the dress back up. “So do the children. But she’s excellent, she runs the entire domestic show, I couldn’t do without her. Anyway, it’s good for them to realize that life isn’t just about what they want all the time. It’s not a picnic.”

  Whenever I ache for another baby, I think about the whole nanny business and think again. One child was fine. I mean, it was too much for my husband. In the year after she was born, he said he was wilting, he no longer felt free. (Do you know, that’s exactly how I felt.) Then in the second year he said, “I don’t feel I can grow unless I leave,” and, dashing a manly tear from his eye, he left. I’ve kept the same nanny, for whom it is an ideal job. Nannies tend to jump ship at new babies, but I didn’t rock the boat and now she’s like my wife.

  I looked at the glamorous velvet against my thighs, its pile as close as sheep-nibbled grass, soaking up light and sound.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to be covered with this all over,” I said dreamily. “Like a cat.”

  “What,” she said, frowning. “A catsuit?”

  “What’s a catsuit?”

  For an instant I saw a cat unzip its fur and step out naked into the sun. I caught my eye in the mirror above the basin. Some days I look at my face, I might be a bit tired, and find myself thinking, That could do with a press with a damp cloth. Time marches on. Recently a graininess like slub silk has appeared i
n the valley between my breasts, where a few months ago all was perfectly smooth and unmarked. It’s more obvious after sleep, and rather fascinating to see age approaching in leaps and bounds. The man for whom I had not been able to spare the time was suddenly upon me, an excellent weight, for those few ideal moments when my knees had been drawn up into the made-to-measure hollows of his armpits.

  “It’s hot in here,” I said, and heaved another sigh.

  In that cramped washroom space, trying not to catch each other’s elbows or noses as we pulled garments over our heads, tugged others along our thighs, eyes averted, up in the air, musing apparently on other things, I caught glimpses of Isobel’s baby-packed belly and of her extralong limbs, more bone and health than is usually a woman’s share, and wondered for a moment how she and her husband had sex together. Did she go up and catch him by the lapel like a judo wrestler? Did he rugby tackle her from behind and bring her down like that? Or did she collapse elegantly onto a chaise longue, a giraffe, a folding ruler, gradually succumbing? Perhaps there was no surrender; possibly she was proactive in her rapprochement with her husband, chucking him under the chin, bear-hugging him, exchanging sportive punches. Hard to imagine how a very tall strong woman comports herself here. Shrinking and passivity would look ridiculous, like a mountain trying to be a mouse. You’d have to live up to your stature, be somehow splendid, remote, brave, ungirlish. To be big and tall and spiritless would be worse than being little and short and spiritless: somehow more of a waste, like an uninhabited tenement building. I reflected on the spite tall women endure, as though they’re not entitled to that extra length of bone, as though there’s something risible about it; and, frequently, their woundedness in the face of this, the huddled quality which makes them the diametrical opposite of so many short men who go round causing trouble, demanding more space and attention than they were born with. Than their mothers could give them.

  Anyway, there was nothing passive or spiritless about Isobel. She was full of power. Back in the shop where we went to stand in front of the long mirror, a sweet-faced young salesgirl had attached herself to her splendor, eyeing her with the shrewdness of a lover, pulling out this, then this, then that for her to try. Despite herself, Isobel was impressed.