by Nicci French
A tall, gangly man with a hooked nose, slightly close-together eyes and a flop of fair, greying hair. White shirt, black-leather jacket, grey cords, laced, high-ankled suede shoes. Stuart from the weekend. The premature-ejaculation man, who felt invisible with his sons. I smiled at him. For once I was pleased to meet a client out of office hours. ‘I bet I know where all your items of furniture come from,’ I said, and gave a giggle that even I recognized as a bit mad.
‘Furniture?’
‘Gap. That’s definitely a classic Gap shirt, anyway. And, yes, since you asked, you can help. You can ask Deborah – this is Deborah, by the way – to buy me another tomato juice. I’ll waive the cleaning bill.’
‘Is this another of your lovers?’ asked Deborah. ‘Another of the men you string along? Watch it,’ she said, turning to Stuart. ‘She’ll kick you out as soon as she has no more use for you.’
‘We’re late for the exhibition,’ said Stuart to me, though he was staring at Deborah with fascination. ‘Put your coat on and we’ll go.’
‘I’m not done with you,’ said Deborah, as I slid into my coat. ‘You wait and see. You don’t go wrecking people’s lives on a whim and then just walk away.’
I took Stuart’s arm. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said to Deborah, with curiously chivalric formality. ‘I’m sorry we met in these circumstances.’
‘Oh, come on.’
He hesitated, gazing into Deborah’s furious, beautiful face, then turned away.
‘I’ll ruin you,’ she called after us. ‘Don’t think I won’t. Bitch.’
‘Thanks so much for that,’ I said, dropping Stuart’s arm as we reached the street. ‘I dread to think what you made of it.’
‘It was fun. I felt like your knight in shining armour. What did you do to her?’
‘Just a problem in the office.’
‘Hmm. It looks like a problem that’s got out of hand.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. My legs were shaking. ‘You’re probably right. Maybe she was right to call me a bitch. I don’t know.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Fired her, basically. I had to. We’re only a little company, a bit like a family. We’ve all got to trust each other or the whole thing collapses. But I know I can be confrontational. Compromise isn’t my strong suit. Charlie always says that in an argument I miss out all the build-up part and go nuclear at once. But I guess we should try to come to some agreement. We’ll all lose out if we spend months with solicitors involved. I know that’s what Meg and Trish think, anyway.’
‘Can I do anything for you? I could be your middle man, no legal fee involved.’
‘No, don’t be daft. It’s sweet of you but it’s my fault and my problem, and if anyone’s going to sort it out it’s me.’
‘You’re the one person who can’t, I’d say. Anyway, this is what I do in my job. I sort out personnel problems. Let me do it as a favour.’
‘It wouldn’t work. You saw what she was like.’
‘Very fiery,’ agreed Stuart. ‘Let me give it a go at least. What’s her phone number?’
‘I don’t know. Trish would have it.’
‘Trish?’
‘In the office. You could ask her. Or look her up in the directory – her name’s Deborah Trickett and she lives in Kennington, I know that. Willow Lane, I think.’
‘Deborah Trickett, Willow Lane,’ he repeated.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’
‘It’s a challenge.’
‘Listen, Stuart, I ought to be getting home.’
‘But you’re coming to the exhibition. That wasn’t a brilliant improvisation. I really am going to a friend’s opening, just down the road from here. Come along. It might be fun.’
‘That’s very kind of you, and on another day maybe, but it’s been a busy time and I don’t think I’m up to it this evening. I’ve kind of run out of energy.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Running out of energy. That was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. That weekend, there was something extraordinary about it. It wasn’t what we did. I guess everybody does that stupid raft stuff. But the people in the office, they’re really excited. You did that.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come for a bit.’ I stood up straight and hitched my shoulder-bag higher. My knuckles had started to throb, and I had blisters on my heels. My face was tingling a bit, as if it had pins and needles, but I don’t think you can get pins and needles in your face. I put up a hand to rub my cheek but missed and jabbed my nose.
‘What kind of friend is it?’
‘What kind of friend? Well, he’s…’
‘No, I mean, what kind of exhibition?’
‘Oh, sort of art. Objects made out of, you know, things. It’s a bit difficult to describe. Some of it’s beautiful, in a weird kind of way.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, then.’
I stumbled on the pavement. He put out an arm to steady me and looked at me intently. ‘Maybe you are a bit tired.’
‘I’m fine. I’ve decided.’ My enthusiasm felt forced, obviously fake.
‘It’s this way, to the left. The Oryx Gallery.’
‘I know the one. It had shoes made of food in it a few weeks ago.’
‘Do you always walk this fast?’
‘Is this fast?’
‘We’re not in a race, Holly.’
‘A race against time. We can win. Here we are, do we need an invitation to get in?’
‘I’ve got one, admits two.’
‘Two. So, did someone let you down?’
‘I let someone down.’
‘Ah.’
He pushed open the door, and all at once the crowd and the wind and the rain and the vague, pulsing stars were gone, and we had stepped into a bright cocoon of space, glowing white walls, polished floorboards, lights strung along the ceiling and shining off the puddles of wood below, a soft babble of voices. I took a fluted glass, full to the brim with cool yellow wine, from a tray that was held out to me and edged into the crowd.
‘Cheers,’ said Stuart, in an ironic tone that seemed habitual to him.
‘Cheers,’ I said. I raised it so it glinted under the spotlights then took a deep swallow. ‘Let’s look at your friend’s work, then. Is he here? Which one is he? What’s his name?’
‘Laurie. He’s probably in the next room, or in the pub down the road, hiding.’
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I do. I’d like to have that on my mantelpiece. I’m not going to sleep with you, you know.’
Stuart’s drink seemed to go down the wrong way and he coughed helplessly so that I had to pat him on his back.
‘I’m married to someone called Charlie Carter,’ I continued, when he’d stopped spluttering. ‘I think I told you that before. He’s an artist, though I think he should be a plumber. Look, I’m wearing a ring.’
‘So I see.’
‘Though sometimes I take it off. Perhaps I shouldn’t do that.’
‘You don’t seem like a married woman.’
‘What does that mean? A married woman. There are probably lots of Victorian novels with titles like that. I don’t know what it means, anyway. Does it mean I should bake sponges with – with jam and cream in the middle? And wear an apron in the kitchen? And go around saying, “I’m Holly-and-Charlie”? And ring him up to ask permission, like right now?’ I pulled my mobile phone out of my pocket and brandished it. Little splashes of wine jolted out of my glass. ‘I should ring him and ask if he will kindly allow his wife to go to an art gallery with a middle-aged man from Gap called Stuart. Look, I like that one there, with the burnished metal. Kind of soft and dazzling all at once. It makes you want to touch it, doesn’t it?’
Stuart glared at me, emptied his glass in a single gulp and set it down with a sharp clink on a passing tray. ‘Are you always so rude?’
‘Am I being rude?’ I put my phone back int
o my pocket, where it immediately started to vibrate, but I ignored it. ‘I’m sorry. I really, really don’t want to be rude to you. I told you I was a bit tired, that’s all it is. I’m just an idiot, a fool. I like you. Don’t you think you meet some people and know at once whether or not you could be friends? It’s like a click between you. Or maybe it’s more a gulp, if you know what I mean. They say the most important time in any relationship is the first second or something – or maybe that’s just with lovers. I don’t even know if that’s a glorious thought or a completely terrifying one. It doesn’t make you feel you’re in control, though, does it? Probably not. Is that your artist, waving at us? God, he’s tall. He’s nearly a giant. Does he look ridiculous, or does he make everyone else look ridiculous?’
‘Yes, that’s Laurie.’
As we made our way towards him, we edged past a tall woman with a magnificent mane of red hair who was contemplating one of the sculptures. She was speaking to her companion in a loud, clear voice: ‘Rather trashy, don’t you think?’
I saw Laurie’s smiling, benign face become blank, as if someone had taken a sponge and wiped away the last traces of expression. Even his eyes seemed to become deep, meaningless holes. I stepped forward and stared up at him. ‘I love your things,’ I said, even more loudly. ‘Really love them. Probably some people don’t get them, but I love them so much I’ve got to buy one. That one there.’ I waved a hand towards it.
‘I’m so glad,’ he said, the warmth returning to his features. ‘You should meet my agent. She’s coming our way now.’
Behind me, Stuart was saying something in an urgent hiss about how expensive his things were, but I ignored him.
‘I can write a cheque,’ I said. My phone was buzzing in my pocket again, like a huge bluebottle. ‘A deposit. Whatever. Shall I settle things with your agent, then?’
‘Holly?’ said Stuart again. He’d managed to acquire two more glasses of wine, one red and one white, and took a huge gulp from each in turn. ‘Are you sure–’
‘Absolutely. What’s the point of earning money if you can’t spend it?’
Half an hour later, I made my way to the ladies’. My head felt oddly hollow and an annoying little tic was bouncing in my left cheek. Someone was in the toilet already and they had left their brocaded shawl and their expensive leather gloves on the side. I recognized them as belonging to the red-haired, loud-voiced monster who’d insulted Laurie. My heart started to beat erratically; my throat closed. Beads of sweat stood out on my forehead. I gave a little snort of mirth, then another, picked up the shawl and gloves and slid them into my bag, leaving hurriedly as the lavatory flushed in the cubicle.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, as soon as I had rejoined Stuart.
‘But we–’
‘Sorry, an emergency. I’ll call you, or you can call me at work. Tomorrow or the next day. It’d be nice to see you again. ’Bye.’
I barged out of the art gallery and ran down the road, clutching my bulging bag to me, little laughs shaking me. I darted down the narrow streets, avoiding bikes and taxis. Horns blared at me. My phone buzzed once more and this time I snatched it out. It was Charlie. He was furious. ‘Holly, I’ve been calling and calling. Where the fuck are you?’
‘I’m in Soho somewhere. Why?’
‘We had a date. Remember?’
‘Oh, God.’ Wretchedness grabbed me by the throat and shook. I stopped dead and stared around me at the dark, littered road, the puddles of sulphurous light where strange men loitered. ‘Oh, no.’
‘You forgot.’
‘No! Yes. Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I’m on my way now. What time is it?’
‘Nearly nine. I’ve been sitting here for forty-five minutes.’
I stayed on the phone all the way there, apologizing and apologizing.
11
‘What we need to do,’ said Charlie, ‘is make a plan.’
‘A plan?’
‘This hasn’t exactly been a productive day.’
My first thought was that if we had got to the stage where I was relying on Charlie to make plans, I must really be in trouble. My second thought was that he was probably right. It was Saturday, the day after I had met Stuart, gone to that awful exhibition and forgotten to meet Charlie. Another evening of fun. Now it was ten past four in the afternoon. When I was nine years old my school used to finish at quarter past four so by this time I would have sung a couple of hymns, had two playtimes, learned maths, written a story, drunk a carton of milk, eaten lunch, made a clay model. What did I, aged twenty-seven, have to show for the day?
Not very much. I’d had a dream where I was meant to be going away. I don’t know if I was emigrating or just going on holiday, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t find my ticket or my passport and I couldn’t remember where I was meant to be going. And then I realized I hadn’t packed, although I thought I had, so I started again. I couldn’t find a bag to put my things in and there was a further problem in that the floor was covered with porridge, which slowed me down. I kept looking at my watch to see if I was late but couldn’t read the time on the dial. Then I woke up and the failed packing in my dreams was about as constructively busy as I got all day.
There was cold tea by the side of the bed. I had a distant memory of Charlie bringing it to me hours before. I’d meant to get up and get busy but hadn’t. I didn’t feel as bad as I had expected. I wasn’t exactly ill. There was a nasty taste in my mouth and a slightly hot feeling on my skin, which usually signals that I’m about to get flu. I couldn’t get out of bed. I needed a bit more time. As I lay there I discovered more symptoms. The inside of my chest was aching and I found it difficult to breathe, as if the oxygen had been sucked from the room. In a panic I fought for breath and then my lungs felt too small for the air I needed. Suddenly I knew what it must be like to drown, resisting and resisting and resisting, flexing in spasms, then, almost with relief, breathing the water into your lungs. I choked and coughed and felt myself breathe.
I took a gulp of the cold tea, then pulled the duvet over my head. Wasn’t this what I had been dreaming of for days? Retreating to bed and safety? My skin felt clammy and I was shivering. I reached out and pulled the cover more securely over me but I couldn’t get it straight. We’d always had this problem. Always. I mean for months and months. We’d made a mistake when we bought our duvet and the cover was bigger than the duvet itself. That may be better than the cover being smaller than the duvet, but in that case it wouldn’t work at all and you’d have to do something about it. The problem, as it stood, was that the duvet rattled around in the cover like a pea in an oversize pod, leaving flapping bits that looked like duvet but didn’t provide warmth. Worse, it kept getting twisted out of shape inside the cover. At that moment it was particularly fucked up and my efforts to sort it out just made it worse. I felt as if someone was dragging me through dog shit while I was scraping my fingernails down a blackboard and being fed marzipan. I found myself ripping the seam of the duvet in frustration. What I would really have liked to do was rip it into small pieces and set fire to them so that it could never again cause me suffering, but I just wrapped it tight round myself. It felt unsatisfactory because I could feel the hard bits where it had folded in on itself.
What I normally do when I’m lying in bed and not sleeping is make plans, but this Saturday morning my brain wouldn’t work. I kept going over and over things in a way that felt unproductive. When I was about twelve I ate artichoke for the one and only time in my life. As it happens, most of my memories of family meals when I was a child are pretty farcical. Frequently my father would be lying in a dark room somewhere, reeking of something mysteriously medicinal, being ‘ill’. Then, later, he wasn’t there at all. That particular time he wasn’t there and we had this strange vegetable my mother had brought back from the market. I was so excited by my artichoke, by the whole ritual of peeling it and dipping it in melted butter, that I gorged myself. I scraped the flesh off the leaves with my front teeth. I even have a blurred me
mory of myself at the end of it, with a shiny, greasy face, but I see it through the lens of what happened next. I woke in the night and threw up and threw up as if I wanted to turn myself inside out. My mother lay with me, her cool hand on my hot forehead and I asked her if I was going to die. The funny thing is that I remember what she said. She didn’t say, ‘No,’ as any normal mother would. She said, ‘Of course, Holly, we’re all going to die. But not for a very, very long time.’ That’s always made me laugh as a hilariously rubbish bit of parenting.
Ever since that awful meal, which was so wonderful while I was eating it, even the thought of artichoke makes me feel queasy. If I see one in a shop, a wave of nausea ripples through me. I went through the events of the previous weeks and felt as if I was plunging my arms into something disgusting, something reeking, maggoty, going off. Lying in bed, shivering in a useless duvet, it felt like that artichoke all over again. I had been running around gorging on everything as if I couldn’t get enough, and now I felt it had made me sick and squeezed me out. Everything seemed bad, from every angle. My seedy encounter with… him. I tried not to think of his name or his face and then I made myself do it, as a form of punishment. I couldn’t think how I had let someone do that to me. The knowledge that this man was in my life, stalking me, sending me my knickers filled me with a ghastly apprehension. I knew it would get worse.
The rest of my recent past wasn’t on that level but maybe it had been contaminated by it. I seemed to have rushed through the days without thinking, like someone running along the edge of a precipice and now, finally, I was looking down. Everything seemed different from the way it had at the time. There were the obviously awful bits: the brick through the window, hitting that man. I seemed to have spent about half my time shouting at people or getting into arguments or just talking too loudly, like the scary people you see in the street and feel grateful you don’t know. Or what about firing the wretched Deborah? What was that about? I hadn’t investigated the situation properly. I just wanted to put on an act for Meg to show that I could do something she couldn’t. Basically I had sacked an employee as a way of showing off and now I was being punished for it.
