Rich Deceiver

by Gillian White

Mrs Gilman’s carefully contrived accent slips with her face. ‘Look love, I honestly haven’t the time or the inclination…’

  ‘I said that I thought I’d have time to try it on.’

  ‘Well, really!’

  Ellie stands before the mirror with the fur wrapped round her. She swings a little to the right and then to the left. The luxurious feeling hangs from the shoulders and kind of spreads out from there like a bell. Ellie sways, trying to block Mrs Gilman’s cross face from the right-hand corner of the mirror. It’s like a smudge and she wants to walk forward and wipe it off.

  Wild and mysterious, sensual and erotic. Ellie tries for the right expression.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I think it might look better without the headscarf.’

  Ellie laughs. ‘I could buy this, you know,’ she says. ‘I could buy this, spend ten grand and I wouldn’t even miss it.’

  Mrs Gilman is wary now. She casts worried glances over her shoulder when she agrees with Ellie quickly. ‘I am sure you can, madam. And I must say it does look very nice.’

  A fur coat—expensive restaurants, theatres, high heels tapping along river-side pavilions, cities at night and limousines. How much of this would her money buy and what about afterwards?

  And Malc in a suit beside her, handing her the ballet programme with a rose and a kiss?

  Hardly.

  Ellie sags, takes off the coat and hands it back to Mrs Gilman. She watches it like you’d watch the departure of a friend at a station, staying until the train pulled out and only the sad vibrations were left. With little bits of fur on her fingers.

  ‘It’s just not me,’ she says. And then, ‘Is it? Be honest.’

  Mrs Gilman looks suddenly sad as if the make-up has cracked and they are women together, treading on a dream. Aching legs, tight shoes, the demoralisation of a job that’s depressing and the knowledge that somewhere out there the whole, rich panoply of life is going on without them. She does not believe that Ellie has any money at all.

  ‘You looked very lovely in that coat, madam. It suited you perfectly. I have never seen it sitting quite so right on anyone else before.’

  Neither admits to acting. Both keep very proud.

  ‘Well, maybe I will return when I have looked around a bit,’ says Ellie, dragging on her mac.

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ and then the store’s motto, ‘We are here expressly to please.’

  Haberdashery? No, and what a ridiculous word. And then Ellie gives a similar performance at the jewellery department, trying on diamond earrings and even a tiny tiara—well, she could take that home in her bag and hide it away in a drawer.

  She loiters before estate agents’ windows, she lingers on garage forecourts—she sees Malc’s car, the very one—until she is saturated, gorged, indulged to the point of nausea, with dreams dreams dreams.

  But all lonely dreams, because every time she wakes up and asks, like a frightened child, ‘Where’s Malc?’

  Maybe she should have told him immediately. This secret fortune is wearing her down and her handbag feels almost too heavy to carry.

  It is one o’clock and she walks about trying to absorb the stolid structure of Liverpool, the magnificent sadness, the pride, but all around her men in suits rush for their lunches, waving umbrellas importantly. They come out of buildings which have grand stone steps and columns, they swarm through arches… they are positive men who know where they’re going but look… Ellie has disappeared into the pavement and no one can see that she’s even there.

  Perhaps she should wave her handbag…

  Perhaps her dreams could come true with one of these men… Who are they? She tries to see them as individuals, tries to grab something from them as they march past but it is as impossible and as ridiculous as it would be to reach out and grab at their balls. Do they have balls? Do they dress to the right or the left? Ellie stares at their pin-striped crutches. They are a marching army and nothing will defeat them. Their suits and their newspapers, their briefcases and their rushing intentions seem to be all that they are.

  And if Malc was standing here with her, he would disappear into the pavement, too… in his working overall or his shower-proof brown mac. Even if Ellie and Malc stood here dressed in designer gear with the most up-to-the-minute hairstyles, even if they scurried and hurried along with the rest brandishing umbrellas, they would still feel they had disappeared.

  Pride!

  Purpose!

  Excellence!

  Money alone is not going to do it, thinks Ellie, close to despair.

  And yet she must spend it! She can’t keep it hidden away for ever—well, of course she can’t, she’s not that odd!

  She buys a packet of cigarettes from a kiosk in order to hear her own voice.

  Deep in a trance of confused thought Ellie disappears off the street and heads up the formal steps into one of the restaurants. She doesn’t make a choice but she seems to be swept there. It is like a hotel inside, and she is the only woman. There is a pause in the sipping of soup as she enters the room: hands poise over bread rolls and eyes appraise her. Never dreaming she’d feel quite so stark she makes for a table by the window but it is reserved. An elderly, stooping waiter hurries towards her and ushers her to a more suitable position tucked behind a column.

  Some men are smoking. It’ll probably be okay to light up a fag, so Ellie noisily opens the packet, cursing crackling cellophane.

  This is the first time that Ellie has been anywhere for lunch other than the Littlewoods canteen or the Woolies Serve Yourself. She should have stuck with the rest of the shoppers in Bold Street, but she seems to have lost her bearings because otherwise, how on earth could she have wandered in here and what is she doing in this very male place? What would Malc say if he could see her now? What would he say if he knew what was happening?

  Ellie doesn’t know who she is any more.

  Nobody stopped her coming in here, though, did they? Still, the waiter knows and he helps her with paternal condescension. Dressed in a black suit done up to the neck, and with his white hair in that straightest of fringes, he looks like an ancient Beatle. He suggests the set menu, which is soup and lamb chops, and she can have chocolate pudding afterwards if she wants to, with chocolate sauce or custard. Or both if she chooses, and she smiles like a child at a party. He brings her a glass of house wine.

  This is nice and peaceful. This is tasteful, thinks Ellie. No chips and greasy eggs, no sticky sauce bottles on the table, no, certainly not. There are no paper napkins, either, but white cotton pyramids and proper little minty-green bowls with tiny spoons for the sauce. No music, just sensible talking. What if she climbed on to one of those tables in the middle of the room and took off her knickers?

  She’d love to be here with Malc… with Malc fitting in, not different from everyone else and awkwardly demanding his chips. And he would know he was doing well if he came to have lunch in here. Everyone would know he was doing well, wouldn’t they just? But how can you buy your way into this and how can you enjoy the rest of a book when you haven’t read the beginning?

  They were going to pull Nelson Street down once, but they ran out of money just as the bulldozers began to move in. The contractors had to be paid compensation.

  When Ellie finally reaches home she feels as if she has woken up from a dream, bewildered and cold, as though her blanket has fallen off in the night. She ought to have braved the bank because she’s absolutely terrified of this cheque. At least if she’d stayed she could have deposited it and then it wouldn’t have preyed on her quite so intensively.

  One million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds.

  She washes up the breakfast dishes, pulls out the washing machine and fills it before she starts preparing the tea. She’s got to hurry and get it all done before Malc comes home or he might guess she’s been out. But that doesn’t matter, she tells herself again and again. He’s never complained about her going out, having a wander round the shops on her day off. Well,
why would he? It doesn’t matter to him.

  It is the lies she is so frightened of.

  It is the enormity of her deceit

  But she can right it, can’t she? Surely there is still time? She stands at the sink peeling the spuds and rehearsing what she might say.

  Ellie fixes her expression and finds she has barred her teeth. ‘I couldn’t tell you at once, Malc, because I was in shock.’

  She lifts her voice. ‘I didn’t tell you because I was too excited.’

  She is quiet and serious. ‘I wanted to keep the news to myself for a bit, you know, digest it.’

  ‘I wanted some time on my own to think.’

  And the truth—she tried that out to see what it would sound like. I wanted to keep control, Malc. I wanted to discover what my dreams were before you swamped me with yours.’

  And even worse than that, ‘I am terrified about what having money might do to us, Malc, as we are at the moment.’

  And then with desperation, as she pushes back the washing machine, ‘I am sorry I am sorry I am so very very sorry.’

  She hears the key in the lock and panics, feeling herself going bright red. Then the door closes and here she is holding her breath again—but why would he go and look behind the immersion? He’s got absolutely no reason in the world to go scratching about up there so the cheque is quite safe.

  Tiredly he comes to sit down at the table and grunts a muted greeting.

  ‘Malc,’ says Ellie, with her back to him, staring hard at the pink sink plug, ‘I got the jackpot on the pools this morning.’

  He shrugs off her words. ‘Oh Ellie, please, for God’s sake. I’ve only just got in and I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘It’s true.’ There is no expression at all in her voice and his is laden and weary.

  ‘You don’t even do the pools, you daft cow. Have I got time to have a bath before tea?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do with the money, Malc’

  He raises his eyebrows tiredly when he notices the basket of washing. ‘Have you used all the hot water? I wish you wouldn’t use all the water…’

  ‘There’ll be enough water, Malc,’ she tells him. ‘There always is.’

  I have been and looked and I have seen this other world today, Malc.

  She longs to put her trust in this human being, sometimes crying, sometimes drunk, sometimes a stranger, and she watches him dumbly with tears in her eyes.

  Malcolm Freeman picks up the newspaper and, pulling his shirt over his head with most of the buttons still done up, tramps up the stairs. And the indignation that Ellie feels on his behalf is so fierce it is hard to believe that her heart is capable of accommodating even half of it.

  4

  THREE TIMES—SOD IT!

  Three times now she has got this far, standing like a cretin at the door of the bank before backing out in a kind of confused exhaustion, but this time it is different. This time she has to go in or her new idea is going to explode inside her head and burst it right open.

  The cheque is a little dusty and crispy from its sojourn behind the immersion but that’s all right, that won’t matter, surely.

  Her fears turn out to be groundless. It’s just that silly old lack of self-confidence thing of hers again.

  She’s shocked by the youth of the manager. Yes, she’s going to see the manager himself—Beasely, E. R. she reads on the plaque—because this time the under-manager is busy. He is not much older than Kevin and wears the sort of suits Kevin chooses, smooth yet whiskery, with wide lapels and very few buttons. Not a trustworthy suit, she thinks as she perches herself on the edge of the chair, afraid to sink back into it. Not a moneyed suit. She undresses him because she is nervous and wants him naked and at his most vulnerable. She slips off his tie with her eyes, and pushes off his shirt. She unclips his belt and his trousers fall down, followed by the polka-dot boxer shorts.

  But he isn’t quite as ridiculous as she would have liked him to be.

  ‘Mrs… er… Freeman,’ he says, raising his eyebrows and pulling his chair nearer to the desk where a file is laid out with an empty foolscap page inside it. His voice is mannerly and friendly, the one used by the young men who come to the gift shop to buy cuddly toys for their wives, romantic cards, and jokes. He is a smooth-shaven man, round-faced and fair, with friendly blue eyes that twinkle. Disarming, she thinks, that’s what he’s being—disarming.

  And Ellie is grateful for that.

  She nods yes to her name, and he flicks back the file and writes it in blue on a label, in tidy writing, while Ellie glances at the peephole in the door behind her and wonders at the courage and desperation it would take to come in here with a sawn-off shotgun and hold up the bank. She thinks that if someone did come in here and do that, Beasely, E. R. would continue to be nice, to be calm and polite while he pressed his hidden button.

  ‘How can I help you, Mrs Freeman?’

  And he doesn’t seem bored to see her, distracted by other business or aloof, as the young girl had been.

  Ellie begins to feel better but she is very aware of her naked knees and the shortness of her skirt. Still what else had she got to wear for such a special occasion? What else could she find in her wardrobe that was remotely suitable? Nothing! So she covers her knees with her handbag and places her legs very close together. She keeps her scarf on.

  ‘I have won some money,’ she says, ‘on the pools. The cheque came in the post almost two weeks ago and I think I want to deposit it here in the bank.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Freeman, congratulations are obviously in order. I am absolutely delighted for you. You are not already a customer of ours, I take it?’

  ‘No, we never had anything to hand over before. If any money is left over we tend to keep it in the kitchen drawer, in an envelope wrapped in a rubber band. We had a post office account once but that never really worked very well. Malcolm likes to see the notes, you see. If he can touch them he knows they’re real. And he’s never trusted money people, banks and the like.’

  ‘But now Malcolm, your husband I take it, has changed his mind?’

  ‘Malcolm knows nothing about it. This is my win, entered in my name, and the cheque I have here is made out to me.’ And Ellie unclips her handbag, delves in the back silk pocket and stretches to put the cheque on the desk.

  He leans forward to read the amount, sits back and appraises her. ‘This is a very great deal of money,’ he says. ‘You must be over the moon. Why on earth did it take you so long to come in?’

  Mr Beasely carries on talking but Ellie does not hear him. She is being drenched by the joy of telling someone, sharing the cheque with someone, smiling broadly, unaware of anything else but the sharp shot of pleasure which trickles pure happiness into every vein in her body. She sits back in her chair, happy to be in that relaxed position, quite unaware of her knees any more, or her skirt, or her over-done make-up or the fierce perfume she has chosen this morning which is cloying the room.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mr Beasely, finishing off, ‘I can see that you are over the moon.’

  ‘Well, I am really, yes,’ says Ellie. She leans forward confidentially. ‘It is more money than I ever dreamed of…’

  ‘But it isn’t a dream, is it?’ he says. ‘It’s real. And it’s yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ellie.

  ‘And when you’ve got over all the celebrating and all the excitement you’re going to have to decide what you want to do with it,’ he says, seeming to share in her wild excitement, his pen long ago flung down.

  There is a little pause, a happy one, they are both happy with it. He looks into her eyes and she looks into his and they smile in that knowing way, in the pause, together. She puts his clothes back on for him because she doesn’t mind him being dressed any more. She is glad she waited and got to see this Mr Beasely and not his assistant. He might not have been so nice.

  ‘And when are you going to tell your husband?’ he asks her. ‘Are you saving it up as a surprise? Are you going to set up a sp
ecial occasion, dinner perhaps, or a family party? Or are you going to buy him a car and have it left outside the house?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ellie breathlessly, remembering Caroline Plunket-Kirby and slightly fearful. ‘Yes, that’s what happens, isn’t it? That’s what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t want to do it that way, Mr Beasely. I always thought that’s what I’d do, but the minute I opened that envelope and saw this cheque I knew it would have to be different. I have other ideas, other plans, that’s why it took me so long to come in. I was busy working things out—and I’m going to need someone to help me do them.’

  How can she possibly explain to this fresh-faced, enthusiastic young man how it really is? If she brought Malc into the bank to meet him Ellie knows what Mr Beasely would see… a gruff, slightly grumpy nobody who would deliberately clown around. He would make himself look like a clod and, if pushed, if threatened, would try to show off and only succeed in being rude and unpleasant. He’d start criticising everything around him, and everyone. Hiding every bit of his natural fun, his charm, he’d come over vulgar and crude.

  Oh yes.

  Caroline of the personnel department had assumed that Ellie was planning to leave him—and yes, if that was all Malc was, all he was capable of being, that would be easy. Now she has money, leaving him would be easy.

  But Ellie knows Malc. You can’t live with someone for twenty years and not know them. Young love, oh no, Ellie is not so naive as to believe they can go back to that. They’re not those two young people any more with the world at their feet and the wings of love on their heels. She doesn’t want that back, anyway—that is unrealistic and silly. Scrimping and scraping and hammering away at the same job, year after year, has turned Malc into what he is now, has humiliated and demeaned him. Hope has slowly dripped away until it is too far off to see any more, until it no longer exists. The way they lived their life… well, it was nothing like how they’d planned it.

  Heart beating hard, Ellie launches herself, knowing that Mr Beasely’s attitude to this is the only one that will matter. ‘As we are at the moment,’ she explains painfully, ‘we have no future. Even rich, we have no future. Years ago, when we began, we were going to save up and get a mortgage. We planned to buy one of those new bungalows on the estate up at Triptree. Malc was going to stay at Watt & Wyatt—they paid good money then—for a while and move on, work his way up to the top. He went to night-school, you know, Mr Beasely. Malc was never a stupid man. Just because he’s been a warehouseman all his life doesn’t mean to say he’s stupid.’ Ellie pauses for breath. What must she look like from behind, huddled here like this, being so fervent? A bit like a turtle in a headscarf in a choppy sea, frantically trying to bump its way over that barrier desk. She sits back slightly and puts down her hands. ‘We used to have such fun making plans. He had a motor bike then, Mr Beasely, and at weekends when he wasn’t working, we used to ride out to West Kirby, take a picnic up Caldy Hill by the beacon or go over to Hilbre Island if the tide was out. We’d have a bottle of wine and two glasses and sandwiches and angel cake, and we used to dream how it would be. We were determined to have a home of our own and get away from his mum and dad. We’d both grown up in Nelson Street, four doors away from each other you see, and we were determined not to bring up our kids there.’