Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

  And Malc, who has hardly any grey in his, either, tells them, ‘What’s she ever had to worry about?’

  Her hands still shake, her breath halts and quickens and she feels a hunger in her throat that is almost a sickness. Something has happened, as she’d always known, had always believed that it would! Is it possible that all she has ever wanted is going to be granted? Is it possible that she can take time back, and change it? She feels young again, and powerful, and all swelled up with hope. She sprays away the smell of herself. She brings her lips down on her lipstick. Between every blusher stroke she glances at the cheque. She puts it on the unmade bed then takes her navy suit from the wardrobe and picks off the old dandruff. She doesn’t have grey in her hair and she doesn’t have veiny legs but she is getting plump, she is sagging. She takes out a pair of new tights and carefully pulls them on—such wild extravagance!

  When she’s finished with herself she stands back and stares at her image in the full-length wardrobe mirror. She shares the wardrobe with Malc and her husband’s slightly woody body smell comes off his two suits and sturdy brown shoes, breathing on the mirror with its aroma and fading her. Well, she looks like everyone else, of course she does. She’s spent a lifetime trying to do that, hasn’t she? Ellie smiles, steps back and picks up the cheque. Before she ties on her headscarf and pulls on her clear plastic mac, she checks in her handbag for change, because she’ll be needing to make a longish telephone call.

  And she needs the bus-fare to get to the bank… the exact bus-fare, if possible, if she doesn’t want the driver to moan at her. And she doesn’t. Ellie Freeman is a woman who can’t bear anything like that.

  2

  SHE HESITATES AT THE door of the bank and allows annoyed people to push past her. She has never been in a bank in her life, for when she and Malc had savings they put them in the post office. Now, from where she stands gazing in, the bank looks like the foyer of the public baths… all rubber plants and plush, baggy seating in soft brown leather—the sort of seats you have to fall back on, briefly losing control—and the low, square tables are covered in forms. Perhaps she ought to have made an appointment? Perhaps no one will be available to see her? Someone has been busy polishing the glass because the whole place smells of Windolene.

  She edges her way over the smooth beige carpet and sidles up to the nearest counter. She waits. She keeps her head down and she waits.

  She’d rung the pools people on the way over. The woman who answered had been sternly helpful, and had put her straight through to someone who knew all about it… Caroline Plunket-Kirby. Ellie had launched straight in. ‘Is it true?’ She’d gone red in the face holding her breath, waiting for the reply, wanting it to be yes so badly.

  ‘I am extremely pleased to be able to tell you that yes, it is true, Mrs Freeman. I have been trying to trace your telephone number to confirm the good news for two days without success. Of course arrangements have already been made for you and your husband to come down here as soon as possible to discuss the practicalities…’

  ‘I don’t want him to know.’

  There was a brief pause, then, ‘That has to be your decision.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and I’ve already taken it.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be wise to talk this over first with someone who has experience…’

  ‘It’s too late now. I have already decided.’

  ‘There might well be difficulties.’

  ‘I know there will be difficulties, but I’ll just have to cope with them as they arise.’

  ‘How long have you been married, Mrs Freeman?’

  ‘Twenty years,’ Ellie shouted into the phone, to reach smooth-speaking Ms Plunket-Kirby above the rumble of throbbing traffic. She prodded her bag to keep it from slipping off the tiny, metallic shelf.

  ‘Twenty years is a long time to suddenly squeeze somebody out. I really do feel that this is a matter which should be discussed face to face, far better than like this… two strangers in a hurry. Won’t you give me your number, Mrs Freeman, so that when we’re cut off I can call you back?’

  And Ellie defiantly gave the number, rammed up hard as she was against the phone booth door to avoid the dark puddle of water in the concrete centre. ‘And I don’t want publicity, or flowers, or any kind of interviews. I don’t want anything like that.’

  It sounded like a funeral, but what a relief it was to be talking about it with someone who knew.

  ‘Well, I can see that that would be unwise, given the circumstances. And when do you intend to leave your husband, Mrs Freeman, or have you already left? We can help you in all areas of your life, you know, not just the financial aspects of it. In fact we like to help, we prefer to be involved. We are not merely money distributing machines, you see.’

  For goodness sake, this was extremely personal stuff! Ellie had never before in her life spoken so freely to a stranger like this. ‘Leave him?’ She was shocked. The thought had never occurred to her. ‘Who said anything about leaving him? I’ve been married to Malcolm for twenty years and I wouldn’t dream of leaving him.’

  ‘I see. Then it’s just the money you’re keen to keep secret?’

  ‘I can do that if I want to, can’t I?’ She thought she’d feel different with her money behind her but she didn’t.

  ‘It’s your money, my dear. And most certainly you can do what you like with it, but sound financial advice is urgently necessary.’

  My dear?

  Ellie said, ‘I’m on my way to the bank now, with the cheque. I’ve got the cheque with me now, in my bag, on the side here. It’s not too soon, is it? I’m not too early?’ She prodded at the softness of her handbag once again, annoyed at being made to feel like a mutinous child.

  ‘Can I be of any help by ringing your bank first, discussing the situation with the manager, maybe… paving the way, as it were?’

  She might as well be frank. ‘I’m not sure yet which bank I’m taking it to. I don’t want to use the one in the Arcade near my house because I don’t want to be spotted going in, all dolled up to the nines like this on a Wednesday.’

  There was another slight pause. Anyone would think that Ellie was about to cash the whole lot in and dash off and spend it—and what if she was, eh? That was her business, wasn’t it? And then Ms Plunket-Kirby said smoothly, ‘Of course, but may I suggest that you give the manager my number when you do get to see him, as it does tend to make things easier.’

  You can suggest what you jolly well like, my dear. Ellie feared they might gang up together to try and influence her decision. Money people… huh, she knew what Malc used to say about them. It was beginning to sound as if he might have been right.

  Ellie imagined exactly what Caroline must look like and what car she drove and what house she probably lived in. Even what programmes she watched on the telly. Ellie felt squashed, but was that her own fault she wondered quickly as she stood there trying to hold her ground, wobbling dangerously on those heels, terrified of manipulation at so early a stage in her newly-found independence. Her skirt was too tight and it made her arse stick out. Malc always said so, and she knew it. She could stand up to the women round here all right, she’d never had any trouble doing that, but Caroline Plunket-Kirby made her feel ignorant and small. She’d never been able to handle women like that, women of power, not since school when such women went into teaching. Slow, silly old Ellie, riddled with uneasy emotions and not too good at anything, only cookery. At Nelson Street School, whenever one of those quick-witted women turned to speak to her she always seemed to have one finger up her nose, or be cheating or something. But she was the one with the money, wasn’t she? She was the one with the riches! Sod Caroline Plunket-Kirby and everyone else with plums in their mouths.

  Bloody snobs.

  If she had a fag on her she’d light it, just like she used to sneak behind the bike sheds waving two fingers in the air and wishing she wasn’t so dim as she was. Wishing she could be a star pupil, and liked. But she had run out of fags and she
was nearly forty.

  ‘I will give the manager your telephone number, if and when I get to see one, but my decision is made and it’s too late to go back on it now,’ said Ellie rather shortly, pulling at her headscarf. It was then that she suddenly realised exactly why it was she felt small, because to Caroline Plunket-Kirby a million pounds was probably nothing at all. Her house probably cost more than that… and Ellie’s over-excitement and her little bit of rebellion possibly sounded quite pitiful. Why, the director of the pools personnel department even considered she was qualified to delve into Ellie’s private life in her well-meaning efforts to guide her!

  So here she is inside Barclays, the Avery Road branch. And it is stripped of her new feelings of powerful size that Ellie stands at the chequebook counter, still a pawn in a life-sized game, waiting for attention with a million pounds in her hand but unable to attract it, and her mettle is up. Malc’s views are quite right. She fidgets, moving her handbag from one hand to the other, bending to ease her ankle from the ungiving heel. She can already feel the blister forming; it is at the burning, itchy stage. It will sting like hell in the bath tonight.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  She stares directly at the girl. ‘I would like to see the manager.’

  ‘Let me check. Have you made an appointment?’

  ‘No,’ says Ellie, ‘this is an emergency.’ She should take her rayon scarf off. She is the only customer wearing one, and it is snagged, and why has she put on her mac when it isn’t even raining? Habit, really, for wearing it saves carrying it. Her suit is meant for club nights out, frilled as it is round the waist like this, and no one wears such high heels in the daytime. She’s overdone the make-up, too; in her excited exuberance she’s overdone it completely. She looks like an ancient tart, a woman of the streets. You see people like her in shadows tottering across pavements towards kerb-crawlers. If she had a voice like Caroline Plunket-Kirby this girl would not be looking her up and down… nor if she was got up like Caroline Plunket-Kirby with silky hair, not penned, and wore a man’s jacket and trousers and a long silk scarf and a big belt with a buckle.

  Or at her age, probably a camel hair jacket would be more appropriate, and flat shoes with holes in the sides and flaps. Well, Ellie reminds herself, she can afford to dress like that now. She can afford to, but she won’t. Not just yet.

  The girl goes to check in a book which has a pen on a chain on a crystal pyramid beside it. ‘Mr Bradshaw, the under-manager, can see you in half an hour if you’d care to wait.’ She pushes back a fetlock of hair which is as smooth and beige as the carpet she treads on, tucking it behind one jewelled ear that looks intricate as an ivory carving.

  Ellie sniffs. The road to riches is not at all as she’d dreamed it would be, but then she had never dreamed this part of it.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she says, patting her headscarf, and the girl eyes one of the clumps of chairs beside which a percolator bubbles.

  Ellie doesn’t think, ‘Wait till they know what I’ve got in my bag!’ any more, because she now realises it isn’t very much… not to them, anyhow. She’s not about to impress anyone here. They’ll smile and congratulate her and pat her on the back but all they’ll want to do is get it out of her stupid hands, and control it. And they’ll all insist that she shares it with her husband.

  She’s not the sort of woman to be trusted on her own with it… well, look at her eye-shadow! She is ignorant, and she lives in a rented back-to-back down Nelson Street. No phone, no car. Very wobbly in the monetary sense—very wobbly in every sense. Her hands shake when she pours her coffee and then she sits too far back to reach it. She is yards away from it, trying to wrench down her skirt because her knees look knobbly when she sits like this, holding a glossy magazine on her lap.

  Never has Ellie Freeman felt so foolish or inadequate.

  She’s never given money a thought before, but already she knows that a million pounds is a long, long way from real riches. It’s beginning to feel all spoilt, and she hasn’t even been able to tell anyone yet.

  Staring around her guiltily she puts her coffee cup down, replaces the magazine neatly and then, fighting down panic, leaps up and runs out of the bank before she can be spotted, before anyone can call out and stop her.

  3

  OH, MALC!

  The bus nudges its way towards the city centre and Ellie feels every shudder of it, every roll and every sigh of it because her face is pressed hard against the grimy window. Leaving the bank in a hurry like that, in despair, defeated… she had felt as though she had committed a crime and that everyone who’d seen her hastening away would think so, too.

  Ellie wants to know just how rich she is. All my life, she thinks, I have waited for something like this to happen. The chance to be happy, the chance to make a new start! But what if somebody stole her handbag? They couldn’t go and cash the cheque, could they? It is just a piece of paper, and worthless until she makes a decision. Presumably, if that’s what she wanted, she could leave it dormant for ever… like those boring bits of bark they sell as plants which will never do anything unless they are tended and watered. Ellie must keep her money dry, or water it. Kill it, or let it live. She cannot give it back… she can’t possibly do that. She has to keep it, even if she never touches a penny of it.

  But she doesn’t want to do that, either.

  It is only a piece of paper. She feels an urge to thrust her handbag under her mac in case there’s an aura coming off it which people might see and recognise… people who know about money and what it smells like. Her eyes flicker round the bus, suspiciously seeking, but her fellow passengers stare straight ahead, letting themselves flop about with the movement… bored, listless, pulling themselves in as tight as they can so as not to touch their bus-fellows.

  She peels her ticket to shreds. What colour is the aura of money… what colour would she see if it sweated as she suspects that it might? She turns her troubled eyes towards her handbag and rests them there for a moment before replacing her forehead on the window. Was it blue or gold? What about red? Or maybe all the colours of the rainbow mixed up together to make a fuming, raging purple.

  Or the dull brown of a child’s badly-used paintbox.

  ‘Ta, love.’ Ellie hops off the bus. She is going to do her secret thing… a thing she never tells Malc, has never confessed even to Di and Margot. Perhaps Ellie is a more secretive person than she herself supposes.

  She is going to finger the furs.

  Oh, she disapproves of fur coats just as much as anyone else. Of course wild animals should not be killed in order to make women feel better but even so… it’s not just the furs themselves, it is the thick carpeting and the silence in there. The fur department at Lendels gives Ellie exactly the opposite feeling from the one she gets when she goes to sit in the Cathedral. The Cathedral is full of space and magnificence and she goes there to absorb the sense of wonder and of her own goodness, while the fur department at Lendels smacks of sensual wickedness and unhealthy eroticism, of the ways you could be if you wanted to be, if you had the money to be, if you were wild enough to be…

  The only thing that spoils the fur department for Ellie is the way the assistants sidle up and watch her.

  ‘Can I be of any help to you, madam?’

  Normally, at this point, Ellie Freeman would snivel and slink away. It is always so hot in here, how can people work in this heat? Ellie looks round. The assistant is dressed all in black and her lips pout into a cartoon kiss, stickily. Ellie turns back to the black sable which is under wraps but there is enough of the hem showing for her to bend down and feel it. With her face turned away from the anxious assistant, Ellie says, ‘I was just wondering about the price. I have looked, but I cannot find it.’

  ‘Well you won’t find it, I’m afraid madam, because here at Lendels we do not staple prices on to our furs.’

  Ellie reads the woman’s little label. ‘Well, Mrs Gilman, would you mind telling me how much this coat costs?’

  Wh
at a bore, says Mrs Gilman’s attitude, wearily forbearing, and her voice is laden with sarcasm when she tells Ellie, ‘If you would mind coming to the desk.’

  Ellie doesn’t mind.

  ‘Now that particular coat…’

  Ellie can tell that this Mrs Gilman is savouring the bombshell she’s about to drop while she flicks through her dockets and chitties. In effect, she is going to be able to say to this person, ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Now let me see, that particular coat…’

  The cheque burns. Funnily enough it is bright green.

  ‘The sable you were looking at…’

  They are both enjoying this. Mrs Gilman is going to flatten this jumped-up creature in the tatty headscarf and the plastic mac—it ruins the whole charisma of the department for women like this to be seen wandering about—and the figures she is about to squeeze through her lips will soften them for just a moment. And Ellie is going to know… or she hopes she is… that if she wanted to she could reserve this sable and probably come back to pick it up this afternoon. Hah!

  Mrs Gilman’s hard blue eyes focus on Ellie. ‘Ten thousand five hundred and twenty-five pounds.’ And her lips relax into the smallest of smiles.

  Ellie beams. It is hers if she wants it and everything that that wicked black sable promises is hers… if she wants it. Ellie is the slinky black cat with the power of the vanquisher, while Mrs Gilman is the slow old warthog wandering about piggily in the watering hole.

  Ellie pounces. She looks at her watch. ‘I think I have time to try it on.’