Читать книгу The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle - Rebecca Campbell - Страница 8

chapter three

cavafy, angel, and the loading bay of doom

The tube was full of the usual freaks, psychopaths, and mutants. It really annoyed me that Penny would never pay for a taxi out to Mile End. She always said, ‘but Katie, darling, the tube’s so much quicker. And think of the environment, you know, the hole in the rain forest, and whatever it is that’s wrong with the ozone layer. Save the whale, and the pandas and things.’ She hasn’t set foot on public transport since they put the electronic gates in the tube stations, the operation of which proved to be completely beyond her mechanical capabilities.

I say the usual freaks and psychos, but there were actually two rather good ones. One was a woman, normal looking, prim even, but about once a minute her face would convulse and contort into a hideous grimace, as though she’d just found half a worm in her apple. The awful thing is that she obviously knew it was going to happen, and she would try to cover her face with a newspaper, but she was always a split second too late. It was impossible not to stare, not to wait, breath held, trembling with expectancy, for the next fit.

Because of the convulsion lady, I didn’t notice Rasputin until a few moments before my stop. Everything about him was long and filthy: his hair, his nails, his smock, his teeth. He had a big rubber torch in his hand, that he kept switching on and off. And he was staring at me. He’d been staring, I guessed, for the whole journey. I felt myself blushing. ‘Please God, let him not speak to me,’ I prayed. You see, nutters on the tube are bearable until they speak to you. If they speak to you, you enter a whole new world of pain.

‘He’s dead. We’ve killed him.’

That was enough. I got up and walked down to the other end of the carriage. Mercifully we were just coming into the station. I’d never been so pleased to reach Mile End. As I hurried along the platform I glanced back. Rasputin was staring at me through the window, his face pressed to the glass. Over his shoulder I saw, for one last time, the woman’s face contort.

It’s only a ten minute walk up the Mile End Road to the depot, but it always manages to get me down. People outside fashion think it’s all about Milan and catwalks and supermodels. It’s only when you find yourself on the inside that you see the sweatshops and the depots, and the dodgy deals, and Mile End.

I hate Mile End. I hate its dreary streets, its horrid little houses, its crappy shops. I hate the people with their cheap clothes and bad hair. I hate the buses in the high street, and the fish and chip shops offering special deals for pensioners. I hate the way it always rains. I hate it because it reminds me of home. I hate it because I know it wants me back.

It’s okay – I’ve stopped now. I promise no more whining about Mile End, which I don’t doubt is a fine and noble place, beloved of its denizens, admired by urban historians for its fascinatingly derelict music halls and art deco cinemas, and seen as Mecca by those who worship the Great White Transit Van. The Mile End I rage against is a Mile End of the mind, a metaphor, a symbol. And what is it a symbol for? Well, you’ll know when we get to East Grinstead in, oh, I don’t know, about another hundred pages.

Back to the depot. The depot is where we store our cloth. ‘Depot’, believe it or not, is actually too grand a word for what we have. Who would have thought that depot could be too grand a word for anything? And what we have is a room, about the size of your average two-bedroom London flat, stuck onto the side of Cavafy’s Couture. Cavafy’s is a big shed, in which toil four rows of six machinists, middle-aged women with fat ankles and furious fingers. I always make a point of chatting to the machinists as I walk through to our depot. They make jokes about me being a princess, and I suppose I must look like some exotic bird of paradise dropped down into a suburban back garden. I always pause by the woman who sits nearest the door that leads off into our depot. She’s probably the last woman in the country to have been called Doris. She must have been born right on the boundary between ‘Doris’ signifying something sophisticated and classy, cigarette holders and champagne flutes, and it meaning ‘look at me, I clean other people’s houses for a living, and I wear special stockings to support my varicose veins, and my hair will always smell of chip fat, and I will never be happy, or fulfilled, or loved’.

‘How’s that chap of yours then, my love?’ she said, her fingers never pausing as she worked her way along a seam.

‘Oh, you know men,’ I replied, smiling and shrugging.

Doris shrieked with laughter, as if I’d just come out with the joke of the century. As she laughed her fibrous hair, the texture of asbestos, moved as a piece. Her dress, a grey-white polyester, sprayed with pink flowers of no particular species, picked up I guessed from the local market, having failed C&A quality control, would have looked almost fashionable draped over a girl half her age and weight.

‘Men! Oooo men!’ she cooed, as if she’d sampled them all, from lord to serf, and not just the abusive, hunchbacked railway engineer who’d stolen away her, in truth rather easy, virtue, twenty-six long years ago, and left her with the baby and no teeth. ‘But you’ve a good un there you know. And I says when you’ve a good un, you ang on in there.’

I blushed a little and looked around. Cavafy was in his office – a glass-fronted lean-to affair at the other end of the factory. Angel was there too. Angel was, is, Cavafy’s son. He loves me.

Everybody loved Cavafy. He’s one of those tiny old men you just want to hug. I’d never seen him without his brown lab coat, with at least six pens crammed into the breast pocket. I think he rather hoped something would happen between Angel and me. He’d invite me into the office for a coffee, and embarrass the poor boy by listing his many accomplishments ‘… and the high jump … only a small one, but the jumping, the jumping he could do.… And the running. And the GCSEs, look, we have them all on the wall, see, in frames: geographia, historia, mathematica, only a D, but a D is a pass.’

But Angel, Angel. Years ago, when I was still in the shop, I’d come up here to the depot to help schlep stuff around. Angel had just started working for his father. He’d trained as an accountant, without quite passing his exams. I shouldn’t really have called him Cavafy’s idiot son. That was ungracious and unnecessary. In fact we used to have a bit of a laugh together: he’d make fun of Cavafy, and I’d make fun of Penny. Tight curly hair, fleshy lips, really rather good-looking, except for the height thing. Angel, you see, was a good three inches shorter than me. And that really wouldn’t do.

It all came to a head one afternoon when I was sorting through some rolls of linen for a remake on that season’s bestselling outfit: an oyster duster coat that would fall open to reveal a tight sheath in a pale pearly grey to match the coat’s luscious silk-satin lining. Even doughy-fleshed, big-boned County girls became simpering Audrey Hep-burns (such was the Penny Moss magic recipe). Suddenly I felt a presence. I turned round and Angel was close enough for me to smell the oil in his hair and pick out individual flecks of dandruff. He didn’t say anything: he just had a look of utter determination in his eyes, and I could see his jaw was rigid with fear or anxiety or lust.

‘Angel!’ I said breezily, determined to avoid a confrontation. ‘How about a hand with this stuff. It weighs a ton.’

But Angel still stood there, straining forwards, apparently unable to move his feet.

‘Angel, you’re being silly,’ I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. And then he reached out and put his hairy hand on my bottom, where it stuck clammily to the pale silk. Somehow I knew that this wasn’t intended as a gross sexual assault and I never felt my virtue was at stake: Angel simply couldn’t get the right, or indeed any, words out and his mute gesture was his only way of expressing his feelings. Had his pass been verbal, I would have been happy to parry verbally. But it wasn’t and so I felt that there was only one way to bring the incident to an end. And anyway, I suspected that Angel’s hand would leave the damp print of his palm and fingers on the skirt, and that annoyed me. So I slapped him.

I’d never slapped anyone before: it always seemed like such a pointlessly feminine gesture, an admission that you haven’t the wit to inflict a more serious injury. Almost as soon as I’d done it, I regretted the act (and I certainly had cause to regret it later). Angel took his hand off my bottom and put it slowly to his cheek. A fat, oily tear built in the corner of his eye and rolled down his face until its way was blocked by the broad fingers, whereupon it found some subterranean passage and disappeared. Still without saying a word, Angel turned and walked away.

Boys don’t understand how hard it is to break a heart. They think we have it easy, dispensing joy or misery with a nod or shake of the head, as they cavort around us, offering themselves for humiliation. But you really have to be a complete bitch to derive any pleasure out of kicking some hapless youth in the teeth. In fact the only thing worse than having to reject a boy is having no boy to reject at all.

Anyway, after a few minutes I went out to apologise to Angel. I liked him, and I didn’t want things to be awkward. I saw that he was in the office. Cavafy had his arm around him. He looked at me blankly, and made a slight shooing gesture when I began to walk towards them.

It was shortly after the Angel incident that it all began with Ludo, and for one reason or another it was a couple of months before I went back to the depot. On that first post-Ludo visit, Angel was nowhere to be seen, and Cavafy stood silent and stony faced in his office, staring icily through the plate glass. Even Doris sat aloof, and barely returned my smile. Penny must have told Cavafy. The two of them had known each other for decades. The old Greek had made her first collection. Although Penny had moved on to bigger and better things she would still send him the dockets for fifty or so skirts, or a couple of dozen jackets, for old time’s sake. I can imagine what kind of spin Penny put on it: Katie the gold digger; Katie the counter-jumper; Katie who thinks she’s too good for your son; Katie servant of Beelzebub; Katie mistress of the secret arts; Katie who suckles her cat familiar with her third teat; that sort of thing.

But I toughed it out (and in truth it wasn’t that tough, bearing in mind that everything else in my life was starting to go so well) and it seemed that things had blown over. After a couple of months you’d hardly have known about the crisis, except for the sullen yearning you sometimes saw in Angel’s eyes, and, if I’d been more perceptive, something colder in Cavafy’s.

I sensed the sullen yearning thing as I slipped by Doris and through the door into the depot. It didn’t take me long to sort out the interlining: it was hiding under a roll of wool crêpe. The depot has an exit out to the loading bay, and I didn’t fancy going back through the factory, with Angel moping at me. The exit leads on to a ramp, and, as you know, heels hate ramps, so I usually sat at the top with my legs dangling over the edge, and let myself down the few extra inches. I was just doing that when something emerged from the shadows.

‘Give you a hand there, Katie,’ came a voice, the type of gorgeous, Irish voice that just cries out to be called ‘lilting’, and bugger the clichés. I managed to feel both startled and soothed at the same time. A face followed the hand out of the shadows. It was vaguely familiar.

‘Do I know you?’ I asked, harshly, trying hard to mask the fact that I had been caught by surprise.

‘Sure you do. I’m Liam … Liam Callaghan. I drove for you last year at the London Designer Show.’

Thaaaat was it. Normally I’d go with the clothes, helping to set up the stand, arranging the stories – a story, by the way, for you fashion know-nothings out there, means that part of a collection made out of the same cloth – and all that, but last season I went in the car with Hugh, and he insisted on stopping off at his club for a G & T, which turned into about seven, and by the time we got to the stand all the work had been done. Penny was furious, but didn’t say much because it was all Hugh’s fault. I just managed to catch Liam as he was leaving, an empty clothes rail balanced on each shoulder. As he’d passed me he’d half turned and thrown me a wink, which was naughty.

‘Oh, hello, yes, Liam. Of course. What are you doing skulking back here?’

‘Skulking’s a little harsh now, isn’t it? What could be a more natural habitat for your common or garden van driver than a factory loading bay?’

He had a point, although the ‘common or garden’ bit was fooling nobody, as he well knew. Although I’d only come across him that one time, I knew that Liam Callaghan drove for almost every designer fashion company in London. He was reliable, hard-working, relatively honest, and heterosexual. In the fash biz any one of those would have set him apart: taken together it meant you had to book him weeks in advance. And yes, Liam was something of a looker, in an almost caricatured Irish-rogue kind of way: dark curly hair, blue eyes, a long face that had a suggestion of melancholy about it, you know, as if he’d just finished playing a piano concerto, until he wheeled out his smile. And that was some smile: a smile that could stop trains. And hearts. It was a smile he must have worked on in front of the mirror. It began, like all the great smiles, with the eyes: a barely perceptible widening, followed by an irresistible crinkling. And then the lips would purse for a moment before collapsing exuberantly into a lovely white roller coaster.

‘Well, are you going to give me a hand down or will I have to leap and sprain my ankle?’

He gave me a smile for that: not an all-guns-blazing, blow-your-knickers-off special – perhaps just a 7.5 on the Richter scale of smiles. But it made me want to bite him, for all that.

He was strong and lithe: not a pumped-up gym-fairy strong, but a lifting, shifting, working, strong. His hand stayed in mine for a second or two after I landed.

‘Are you going back into town?’ I asked.

‘I am that. Do you need a ride?’

‘Mmm. Anything’s better than the tube. Even a smelly old van cab, with fag ends on the floor and porno mags under the seat. I know what you drivers are like.’

‘Well, you know, you could always give it a wee tidy for me, if you’ve a mind.’

The van, of course, was spotless. He opened the door for me, and again offered me his hand, saying, ‘This is habit forming.’

Despite the traffic, the drive back into town was fun. We joked about all the appalling old dragons he had to work for: the cranky, tight-fisted Elland sisters, who’d always make him show his hands were clean before he was allowed to touch any of their precious hats; Emelia Edwards, who’d once actually pinched him for eating an orange, for which fruit she had a notorious aversion; Kathryn Trotter, who wouldn’t let any of her actual employees carry Kathryn Trotter bags, as they simply could not convey the right image.

‘And Penny Moss?’ I asked.

‘Wouldn’t say a word against the lady. Fierce as two ferrets in a bag, but never rude unless provoked. And always pays her bills on time. And I’d hardly say otherwise when you’re set to marry the precious boy now, would I?’

‘I wouldn’t tell.’

‘Well maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. And how do you feel about getting wed? All a-tingle?’

‘I’m slightly past the tingle stage.’

‘Second thoughts?’

‘I can’t quite see how that’s any of your business.’

‘I’m only making polite conversation, am I not?’

‘Of course I haven’t got second thoughts. Everybody loves Ludo. He’s a honey.’

‘And you’re the bee.’

When you thought about it, that was really rather a horrid thing to say. But he said it with such a charming twinkle that I didn’t mind.

‘Won’t you miss all the parties and suchlike, when you’re wed?’ he continued.

‘What do you mean, miss them? Why should I stop going to parties?’

‘Ah, there’s no reason under the sun. But when did you last meet a married couple at a fashion shindig? Isn’t it all single people, or boyfriends and girlfriends. There’s something about the married state that leads you on to quiet nights by the telly, and Ovaltine before bed. And that’s before we even start talking about the kids. No, let’s give you a couple of quiet years first, then the time of chaos with the children – let’s say you have two, a couple of years apart, and they stay like millstones round your neck till they’re eighteen and they go off to college. Well that’s twenty-two years before you’re clear of the last of them. And then you might be in the mood for a party, but who the hell’s going to invite you then?’

I laughed, but it sounded hollow even to me.

‘If you knew me better you’d realise that nothing could stop me going to parties. Anyway, it’s my job. How else could I know who was wearing what, or who was wearing who? How could I keep up with the scandal and gossip? My life isn’t going to end when I get married.’

‘But some things will have to stop now, won’t they, Katie?’ He unfurled a smile. It was simply impossible not to smile back.

There was no way he could have known about my one or two little flirtations. And you’re not going to like this, but I had, it’s true, been thinking about one, last, final, meaningless, harmless little fling before settling down in utter and complete faithfulness with Ludo. The idea had half formed itself in my mind. I knew it was there. It nudged and winked at me. And without explicitly acknowledging its presence, it became part of me, and I knew that I was going to do it.

But who with? No one in my circle. The best looking men were, naturally, gay. The sexiest men were married – and I may be naughty, but I’m not bad. No, it had to be an outsider. There was the aforementioned Divine Dante, who always put chocolate on my morning latte, (which I always spooned off with a shudder back in the office). Handsome, in that baby-Vespa way that Italians have. But really, no. I thought about Max from Turbo Sports next door but one. I once saw him, glistening with sweat, at the gym. Body hard as a pit bull terrier. He had the cold eyes of a serial cat-strangler, which I rather liked. So different from lovely, helpless Ludo. But again, no: his head was too small, and he conversed principally in grunts and lewd gestures. There was always the queer little man who came in to fix our Mac whenever it crashed. He once gave me a big, embarrassing sunflower. But beware geeks bearing gifts, as I always say.

So it went with all of the men I met: too old, too silly, too ugly, too gay, too small, too close, too far.

‘What does your girlfriend think about you working with all these glamorous fashion women?’ I asked, shamelessly.

‘And what makes you think I’ve got a girlfriend? Could I not be a sad, melancholy soul, drifting forlorn and loveless through life?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘As it happens I am between girlfriends at the moment, which is saving me a fortune in roses, but costing me one in Guinness.’

‘I hate Guinness,’ I said. ‘Tastes like old-man’s bile to me.’

‘Well, you see it all depends on where you drink it and …’

‘Who you drink it with?’

‘I was going to say how it’s poured. But now you mention it …’

‘There’s a rather good Irish word I’ve heard occasionally.’ I said, sweetly, ‘Gobshite.’ For the first time he laughed. The laugh was less studied than the fabulous smile, but lovelier for it.

‘Gobshite is it? Will you look at the tongue on her! She’ll be calling me an auld bollix soon.’

‘So where should I be drinking Guinness?’

‘The only place for a pint of slow-poured black stuff, amid convivial company, with your ears caressed by the finest fiddle playing, is the Black Lamb in Kilburn.’

‘Kilburn. Is that where you live then?’

‘Not every Irishman lives in Kilburn, you know.’

I did know. About half the people you meet at parties are Irish: Emerald Tiger types, fresh out of Harvard Business School or journalism college, sleek, clever, ambitious. The girls are all beautiful, if a touch wholesome and buttery, and the boys are all puppy-faced and eager. They’d no more live in Kilburn than I would. Of course I’d been to the Tricycle Theatre a couple of times, dragged by Ludo. Once we saw a version of some Brecht play performed by Eskimos. The second time was less commercial. The whole show consisted of a man buried up to his neck in a heap of broken watches, screaming, ‘It’s later than you think! It’s later than you think!’ Give me Cats any day. Even Ludo agreed we shouldn’t go back after the interval.

I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of myself in the wing mirror. I’d just had my highlights done at Daniel Galvin’s. I always think I look better in bad mirrors, caught in movement or glanced at an angle. Unless you’re obviously at one end or the other of the spectrum, it’s impossible to really know how attractive you are. Models know they’re gorgeous. They might pretend to be riddled with doubt, but that’s just them trying to seem cleverer than they are. And people with hare-lips and things. I suppose they must know that they’re ugly. Sorry, sorry – beautiful on the inside, I’m sure, but, whatever you might say, ugly on the outside. Actually, in my experience ugliness does something horrid to the soul. Knowing that whoever you’re talking to can only think ‘God, but she’s ugly’, must burn into you like acid. Unless you’re especially stupid. Which makes it all the sadder that pretty people are so often dim, and ugly ones clever. (I know it’s a cliché, but clichés get to be clichés because they’re true. Sometimes, anyway.) Hugh once gave me a very good piece of advice. I don’t know where he got it from. ‘Katie,’ he said, ‘always tell pretty girls that they’re clever, and clever girls that they’re pretty. They’ll love you forever.’

‘And what do you say if they’re pretty and clever?’ I asked.

He smiled and patted me on the bottom. ‘You say yes, Katie. You say yes.’ Naughty man.

But I’m drifting off my point. Which was, unless you’re at the extremes, you really don’t know where you are. And I thought, as I looked at myself in that wing mirror, ‘Are you pretty, Katie? Or are you plain? If you’re pretty, how pretty? If plain, how plain?’ I’d always had boyfriends, and men to tell me that I was pretty, or better than pretty. But men lie. And even the ones that didn’t lie, who believed it, did they know, were they right? If you get the devotion of some poor simpleton who thinks that because you don’t buy your clothes from a shop with two letters with an ‘&’ in the middle you must be pure class, does that count? Any man will say he loves you, any man will say you’re beautiful when he has a fistful of your knickers and his nose in your Wonderbra. Girls know, of course. We can cast our cold eye over each other. But knowing that girls think you’re pretty is like drinking alcohol-free wine, or decaffeinated coffee: it just doesn’t hit the spot. No, what we want or at least what I want, is for men to find us, me, beautiful, and for them to be right.

But after all that I think I know what the truth is. The truth is that I am quite (a lovely word that can mean ‘really quite a lot’ or ‘not really very much at all’) pretty. I’m not very tall, perhaps about five six. I’m slim, but not, by anyone’s reckoning, skinny. My hair is naturally a dark browny-yellow, the colour, as Ludo once said, not meaning to be horrid, of a nicotine-stained finger. Hence the highlights. My eyes are grey, which is good. I have no eyebrows, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. My eyelashes are too pale to be of any use, and so I have them dyed. The second time we slept together, Ludo lay gazing into my face. ‘your eyelashes,’ he said, his breath heavy with wine and cigarettes, ‘they’re amazing. They’re so dark and long! I love them, and your eyelids and your eyes and your face and your head and your everything.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I still haven’t. It’s one of the things Penny thinks she has over me. My breasts are small enough not to embarrass me in the world of fashion, and big enough not to embarrass me in the world of men. And all the bits in between? O God! Who knows?

My point is, and I know I’ve come the long way round, that I’m a good-looking girl, but not good-looking enough to be blasé, not good-looking enough not to need the glances, the praises, the presents, the adulation, the worship, the flattery, the fawning of men. You see, what makes me interesting is that I’m close enough to be able to reach out and grab these things, these meaningless, gaudy, pointless baubles, but too far away for them to drop into my lap.

And now I was reaching, foolish, foolish, girl, for the bauble that was Liam Callaghan, van driver, Irish blarney-merchant, borderline beautiful boy.

‘Your Black Lamb doesn’t sound like the kind of place a girl could just wander into on her own.’

‘Ah Jesus there’s plenty of girls come into the Lamb, but it’s true enough none at all like you. A good-looking lady by herself might attract a bit of attention, but then you wouldn’t have to be by yourself.’ It was coming. ‘You know if ever you wanted a taste of the dark stuff – the real thing mind you – then I could show you the place. It might be the making of you.’

I have no idea how serious he was up to this point. Was he just playing the Irish rogue to pass the time on our way into town, his mind in neutral? Was this just a diversion? The bluff, if bluff it was, about to be called.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay what?’ I noted with pleasure that he was a little taken aback.

‘Okay, why don’t you show me what a good pint of Guinness looks like.’

Now there was no smile at all.

‘When can you come?’

‘Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? I’m in Paris from Thursday through till Sunday. How about a week tomorrow?’

That ‘I’m in Paris’ was precious. Thank heavens for Premiére Vision.

‘Thursday week it is then. What if I meet you in the pub at, say, eight o’clock?’

I suddenly felt giddy. Was I in control? I thought I had been. But here I was, agreeing to meet an almost complete stranger, in a desperate pub in Kilburn, a part of London I knew about as well as I knew the courtship rituals of the white-tailed sea eagle.

‘Jesus, look it’s Regent Street,’ said Liam. ‘Why don’t you leap out here?’

‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.

He said nothing, but looked at me and smiled. It was like being overwhelmed by a warm Caribbean wave: giddy, intoxicating, engulfing, fatal.