Читать книгу My Fair Man - Jane Gordon - Страница 6

It was raining when they came out of the Opera House. A misty but insistent drizzle that soaked through Hattie’s clothes. She shivered and Toby took pity, ordering her to wait with the others beneath the protective canopy of the theatre whilst he went in search of a cab.

Hattie hated opera. She had never understood why so many of her friends regarded it with such reverence. Try as she might she had never managed to progress beyond the Opera Made Easy CD that Toby had bought for her at the beginning of their relationship. It seemed to her that most of the three-and-a-half-hour so-called great works could be condensed into one memorable three-and-a-half-minute track (Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun dorma’ was her favourite). But this particular evening’s epic – Aida – didn’t contain a single moment that could move her.

In the interval, as she and Toby had stood sipping drinks with Jon and Claire in the opulent bar, Hattie’s mind kept slipping back to the child she had seen at work that day. Opera, she had long since concluded, had no place in the real world.

‘It’s all so élitist,’ she complained, ‘and I don’t just mean the £100 seats and Princess Michael in the royal box and all these awful Radio 4 types pushing and shoving their way to the white wine. I mean the storylines. Why do operas fall for the same old class clichés? Why is there always some peasant love interest who will eventually be exposed as an aristocrat? Why can’t a peasant be a peasant and not the noble son or daughter of some exiled king?’

‘Because, Hattie,’ Jon had replied in that tone that made her want to slap him, ‘despite all your fantastic socialist theories the truth is that life is like that. If Aida had been a real slave girl no one would have cared what happened to her.’

‘Why should where she came from – who she was – matter?’ said Hattie, rising, as usual, to Jon’s taunts.

‘Class, Hattie,’ said Toby. ‘It wouldn’t have worked, would it, if they had been from different social classes?’

Class had always been a great divide between Hattie and Toby, the subject of some vehement arguments. She had always managed to hang on to the notion that all men were equal. What separated them, she passionately believed, was not their DNA make-up, or their genetic heritage, but the place and the circumstances in which they were born. And the way in which, during their developmental years, they were nurtured and cultivated by those closest to them. Lord knows, she had seen enough evidence of the damage done to the human pysche by neglect, cruelty and irresponsibility. In her work she had come to understand that what really mattered was not money, or privilege, or the cultural claptrap that Toby so revered, but love. Although of course Verdi – and the rest of tonight’s enraptured audience – didn’t see it like that.

Even now, as they fought for territory outside the Opera House amidst the teeming crowds and the relentless rain, she still felt angry about their interval discussion.

‘Let’s shelter over there,’ said Jon. ‘We’ll never see Toby through all these people …’

They moved across the street and huddled in the deep doorway of a branch of the Halifax. While they waited, the constant fine rain spraying onto them as cars and cabs swept past, Claire turned to Hattie.

‘You’re too sensitive,’ she said gently. ‘You always want to see the best in people. I mean, I understand what you are trying to say about opera – it has become a kind of symbol of cultural and social superiority. But Toby and Jon are right – you take things too seriously. It’s not real, it’s just a silly musical fairy tale. Besides, I don’t think that even you – with your high moral principles – really believe all that nonsense about nurture ruling over nature …’

‘Of course I do, Claire,’ Hattie protested. ‘I don’t just believe it, it’s what I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to do, I don’t want to be boring, I know I take things too seriously, but I do wish that sometimes you would listen to me. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the way in which kindness and consideration can made an abused, tortured child blossom—’

‘What the hell has that got to do with a night at the opera, Hattie?’ said Jon, glancing over at Claire and raising his eyebrows. ‘Why don’t we leave the discussion for dinner? That’s if they hold on to our table. If Toby doesn’t hurry up and find a cab we’re going to be half an hour late.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hattie said contritely, ‘but I’ve had a terrible day …’

She knew – because of patient confidentiality – that she couldn’t tell her friends the distressing details of her day or attempt in any way to justify her mood this evening. Instead she smiled at them and tried to swallow her pride – and her principles.

Then, as the three of them backed further into the darkened doorway, a piercing yelp erupted behind them.

‘Christ Almighty, I’ve trodden on something!’ shouted Jon.

‘What was it?’ said Claire, clearly alarmed.

‘A bloody dog.’ Jon jumped clear of the doorway.

Seconds later they heard another noise – a gutteral explosion that was definitely human – from behind them.

‘Haddaway, man …’

‘Pardon?’ enquired Jon.

‘Haddawayanshite,’ came the reply in what Hattie thought might be some northern provincial accent.

‘I think,’ said Hattie in her clipped, cut-glass English, ‘he is telling us to shut up and leave him and his dog alone.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Jon irritably as his eyes made contact with the shape that had emerged from a pile of old bags and clothing behind them. ‘Why doesn’t he move on?’

There was, Hattie noticed as the man came closer to them, a horrible smell in the air that she sincerely hoped came from the dog skulking beside him. The figure’s hair hung in dreadlocked clumps around his face, obscuring his features and making it difficult to discern his age, though Hattie suspected he was very young.

‘For heaven’s sake, Jon, have you no compassion?’ she whispered, anxious not to offend the poor misfit before them. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to be homeless?’

‘Oh spare me any more social comment this evening, please, Hattie.’

The man seemed unconcerned by their presence. In fact, Hattie realised as he slumped back against the cash-dispensing machine, he seemed oblivious to everything but the mongrel dog he was now comforting.

‘Perhaps, Hattie, he can’t get his card in the machine. Maybe his swipe’s gone,’ Jon whispered.

Hattie was incensed by Jon’s sarcasm. Moreover, the contrast between this sad, stinking stranger and the splendour of the Opera House over the road heightened her feeling of alienation from this whole evening.

‘Maybe he is trying to tell us something about ourselves,’ she muttered, bending down to stroke the whimpering dog but recoiling quickly when it snapped angrily at her.

‘Are you trying to imply that he’s making some kind of political statement, Hattie? Homeless man living in the doorway of a building society?’ said Jon.

‘For God’s sake, you two, stop arguing. Here’s Toby with the cab,’ said Claire impatiently.

Hattie held back as the others ran towards the taxi, unsure now whether she could bear to sit through dinner this evening.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said plaintively to the figure propped up against the wall. ‘I wish I could do something to help you …’

‘Bugger off,’ he spat back at her.

‘Here,’ said Hattie, searching in her bag for some money to give him, ‘take this …’

She was aware of his surprise at the generosity of her offering. He looked closely and steadily at her from large, unusually bright, blue eyes and then began hunting through a series of carrier bags that were situated, she could now make out, beside his sleeping bag.

‘Ha this, hinny,’ he said, thrusting a dog-eared copy of the Big Issue at her.

‘Hattie!’ screamed Toby from the cab. ‘Will you hurry up? We’re late enough as it is.’

She jumped in the back of the cab and pulled down one of the little seats. As the taxi moved away from the kerb she glanced back at the man, crouched down and gently stroking his dog, and wondered what tragedies in his life had led him to that doorway.

Even Hattie was cheered by their arrival at the restaurant. She wasn’t sure what had chilled her more this evening – the relentless rain, the pathos of the homeless boy or Jon’s behaviour. But warmed by the bright lights and the prospect of food she determined to forget about the incident in the doorway.

It was the kind of place that Toby loved, not for its food, but for its fashionableness. On the way to their table he had been acknowledged by several people – fellow lawyers, and political contacts Hattie presumed – whom he knew.

As they sat down Jon turned to Hattie and smiled in a placatory way. ‘Hattie, let’s forget our differences for the rest of the evening.’

She smiled back at him even though, however amusing he might be, she knew she could never forget their differences. Jon was a partner in one of the most successful advertising agencies of the moment – Riley, Toppingham and Futura – with a reputation as one of the best creative brains in the country. But despite his apparent political affiliations – he had been responsible for a recent highly praised campaign for the Labour Party – Hattie was wary of him. She disapproved of his professional devotion to what she saw as the brutal business of manipulating the public and she found his bleak cynicism depressing. But as he was Toby’s oldest – and probably only – friend she made an effort to tolerate him.

Hattie was rather fond of Claire, Jon’s companion this evening, despite the fact that she too made her living out of hype – or at any rate out of securing good publicity for a series of rather dubious clients. She was far preferable to any of the other empty women that Jon usually had in tow. Claire – an ex-girlfriend whom he had somehow managed to turn into a friend – had only joined them this evening because the latest woman in Jon’s life was, somewhat typically, married.

Hattie was very hungry, and eager to see the menu and order. There had been no time for lunch that day and she was not even sure that she had eaten breakfast, but her companions were more intrigued by the other diners and the décor.

Hattie, who had no curiosity about the famous, or infamous, was becoming aware of the dampness of her hair and the rain-spattered state of her clothes. Muttering her excuses she made her way down the brightly lit steel stairs to the loos.

She stood and looked at her reflection in the mirror for a second and pondered on the differences between herself and the sleek females who surrounded her. She didn’t really belong in this chic place, or rather she didn’t really want to belong. She was as uncomfortable here as she had been in the Opera House. And as much an outsider as the man camped in the Halifax doorway.

Not that Hattie wasn’t vain, in her own way. It was just that it wasn’t the way of these women. She didn’t really care about clothes or make-up, and she certainly wouldn’t put herself through the agony of wearing the kind of shoes – curious spike-heeled mules – that she had noticed a number of the women struggling to walk on.

Pushing a comb through her hair and putting a touch of Lipsyl on her dry mouth, she straightened her dress, sprayed herself with scent and made her way back up the slippery steel stairs. As she moved towards the table several other diners nodded in recognition.

‘Hattie spends so much of her time worrying about life’s underdogs that I always forget she has such a splendid pedigree herself,’ Jon said as he watched her dodging between tables.

‘Give her a break, Jon. It’s not as if she has ever really bothered with all her good contacts,’ said Claire equitably, ‘and nor has she profited by them.’

‘But Hattie doesn’t need to profit by them, does she? What with the trust fund and—’

‘Jon!’ said Claire, darting him a warning look as Hattie sat back down at the table.

At this point the food arrived and the distribution of the various designer dishes (‘French Vietnamese,’ declared Toby in an authoritative manner) prevented further argument. Hattie ate hungrily as Claire attempted to lighten the atmosphere with the kind of gossip that she loved.

‘Did you see Nigella’s review of this place in Vogue?’

‘I am sure that Hattie doesn’t read Vogue,’ interjected Jon with a wicked little smile. ‘In fact I’d say that the copy of the Big Issue that Hattie has peeping out of the top of her bag is much more to her taste. While all the other women here spend most of their lives searching out things that will confer on them the kind of exclusivity that Hattie was born with, she chooses to carry – not, what is it now, a Prada handbag? – but a battered old briefcase and a magazine that clearly signals to the world that here is a woman with a social conscience.’

‘That man gave it to me. The man we disturbed when we were waiting for Toby,’ said Hattie a little defensively.

‘I bet he bloody did. It’s my own personal belief that there are more people selling the Big Issue than there are homeless. There must be two dozen in Kensington High Street alone just waiting to trip you up. It’s brilliant marketing, though. You have to admire the way you can package guilt …’

Claire, in an effort to deflect Jon’s comments, continued to give them a potted version of what Nigella had thought about the food at Vong. Undeterred, Jon continued with his diatribe against the Big Issue.

Hattie shifted uncomfortably in her seat, determined this time not to rise to the bait. She had often wondered if Jon’s shocking comments and his black sense of humour were something of an act, designed to cover up a deeper sensitivity. Part of her suspected that he was as bored as she by Nigella and Vogue and all the idle chatter that seemed to fascinate Toby and Claire. Then, perhaps unaware of just how much the incident in the doorway had upset her, Jon began a diatribe on homelessness and the ‘underclass’, many of whom, he said with a provocative glance at Hattie, somehow ‘defied Darwin’s theory of evolution’.

‘Do you know, Jon,’ said Claire quickly, ‘just for a minute I thought you were talking about your ex-girlfriend before last – you know, the blonde with the frontal lobotomy …’

‘You’ll have to remind me which one you mean,’ said Hattie, grinning. ‘I thought all Jon’s girlfriends shared those characteristics – lots of blonde hair and one brain cell. Apart from you, Claire.’

‘You know I’m the only intelligent woman Jon ever went out with. Nowadays he’s hopelessly drawn to women whose vital statistics add up to more than their IQs,’ said Claire, exchanging a smile with Hattie.

‘Anyway, Jon,’ said Hattie with gathering courage, ‘I don’t go along with all this business about an underclass. If there is a growing number of people who are slipping through the net educationally and socially it’s because of lack of opportunity and poverty. If any of us around this table had been born into different circumstances we too might have become a part of your underclass.’

‘Not with our genetic advantages,’ said Jon, smiling patronisingly at Hattie. ‘All those things we have got – our intelligence, for example – are locked into our genetic make-up waiting to be passed on to the next generation.’

‘No, Jon. Let me quote Professor Steve Jones, the man on genetics, on this one. “The single most important thing that a child can inherit from its parents is money,” he says. You might like to think that you have the kind of genes that could triumph over poverty but in fact I doubt that they are any more interesting – let alone superior – to those of that man we stumbled across tonight. All men are born equal,’ said Hattie.

‘But some, thanks to their genes, are born more equal than others,’ said Jon with another one of his infuriatingly patronising grins. ‘People are either born with good genes, like mine and like yours, Hattie – if, of course, yours aren’t too inbred – or with a DNA of doom. Why do you think that man’s on the streets while we are in this restaurant?’

‘Money,’ Claire said. ‘Your parents bought you the privileges you enjoy. The best education that money can buy. And the right contacts.’

‘Meanwhile,’ continued Hattie, ‘his parents were probably living on Government handouts and threw him out when he was no longer eligible for child benefit. If he had been given your advantages I dare say he’d be doing something more intelligent than you are now – attacking the defenceless—’

‘Here we go again, back to Hattie’s charitable mission. Do you really believe that that vagrant in the doorway could, in any circumstances, be transformed into a useful member of society?’ Jon asked.

‘Why not?’ Claire and Hattie said in unison.

‘In my work, Jon, I am only too aware that it is perfectly possible to take even the most desperate, desolate and destitute being and help them to achieve their potential,’ said Hattie earnestly, thinking of the little girl she had encountered that day.

There was an uneasy silence, during which Jon looked intently at Hattie.

‘If you really want to impress me, prove me wrong. I bet that you couldn’t redeem that man we tripped over tonight,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Hattie, sitting up in her seat.

‘What I say. I bet you couldn’t redeem that man – as a kind of wager. You can walk into a betting shop and put money on anything from man walking on Mars to England winning the World Cup. I’m prepared to bet you that you cannot change that man. That it wouldn’t be possible to take him off the streets and turn him into someone who could join us at this table for dinner. That it wouldn’t be possible to transform him into a man of worth.’

‘A real bet? A financial bet?’ Claire asked, as suddenly interested as Hattie.

‘Well, I know money’s not important to Hattie – or you really, Claire – but I’m sure it’s bloody important to that man. So yes, let’s do this properly. Let’s put some money on it. Prove to me that I am wrong about him in – let me see – three months from today, and I’ll pay him £5000. If you don’t then I’ll have this month’s interest from your trust fund,’ he said to Hattie with another of those grins that made her want to hit him.

Hattie glanced at Claire, unsure whether Jon was sober enough to be serious.

‘What is your definition of worth, Jon?’ asked Claire.

‘Someone you could pass off in polite society.’

‘You mean at the Royal Opera House and a pretentious restaurant? Someone that the chattering classes would perceive as one of their own?’ said Hattie sneeringly.

‘Yes. But more than that. He’d have to be employed, or at any rate employable. He’d have to be able to carry out a civilised conversation. He’d have to have an appreciation of the finer things of life and be able to satisfy me that he is intelligent. He would have to look, behave and react as if all this were natural to him. And he would have to pass a test that I would devise,’ said Jon, swinging back confidently in his chair.

‘God, you are so arrogant,’ said Claire sharply. ‘It would give me so much pleasure to prove you wrong that I would happily risk losing any amount of money. What kind of test would it be?’

‘He’d have to be able to prove to a room full of people like this – the chattering classes if that’s what you insist on calling them, Hattie – that he was the genuine article. A man of worth.’

‘Three months?’ mused Claire

‘Your chance, Hattie,’ said Jon with a slight sneer, ‘to put into practice all your wonderful theories of nurture ruling over nature. And your chance, Claire, to get back at me …’

‘Just twelve weeks,’ said Hattie doubtfully.

‘So you don’t believe it’s possible either?’ said Jon with glee.

‘Of course it’s possible!’ Hattie exclaimed, glancing at Claire for confirmation that she was still on her side.

Oh the back of a menu Jon began to write out, in fountain pen, his version of a betting slip.

‘I promise to pay £5000 if in three months from this day, 16 May, Claire Martin and Hattie George can transform a tramp into the talk of the chattering classes, signed Jon Riley.’

‘Take it or leave it,’ he said.

‘We’ll take it,’ said Hattie.

‘Then write out your response,’ he said, passing the pen across to Claire.

‘Claire Martin and Hattie George promise to pay Jon Riley £5000 if, in three months’ time, they have failed to prove him wrong …’ she said aloud as she wrote the words beneath those of Jon. ‘Here, Hattie, now you sign.’

Hattie took the menu from Claire and signed it. Then, very carefully, she placed it inside her battered briefcase where it lay nestled against her still damp copy of the Big Issue.