Читать книгу A Woman of Our Times - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

The shop was empty, at the end of a rainy Monday afternoon, except for two girls trying on leotards in the mirrored cubicles at the far end. Harriet knew that they might end up buying headbands, or leg-warmers at the very most, most probably nothing at all, but she left them in peace because that was the shop’s policy. They would come back, perhaps, when they did have money to spend. Besides that, she liked the look of them. They were young and skinny, with their hair done up in asymmetric tufts like plumes on the tops of their heads. They admired the diminishing perspectives of their own back views in the mirrors, then collapsed into choking giggles.

One of them emerged from behind the curtains in a shimmering tube of bright pink Lycra. She made a few stiff movements at the barre that ran around the shop, the plume of hair nodding in a dozen mirrored reflections.

‘Makes me look like a horrible ice-cream,’ she sniffed.

‘The leopardskin one would be better,’ Harriet encouraged her. ‘Go on, try it on.’ It was the first time she had spoken to them, and at once they looked startled and guilty. Harriet went to the rack where the folds of leopardskin print lay and shook one out.

‘Go on,’ she repeated. ‘I’d like to see you in it.’

The girl was thin. Her spine was a chain of knobs, and her hipbones jutted out. When she put the leopardskin on and sidled out between the curtains, she was transformed into a cat. A small, hungry but confident cat. The girl pirouetted and her friend whistled between her teeth. Harriet tried to remember what it felt like, to be just their age, not a woman nor quite a girl any longer. It seemed a long time ago.

‘It suits you, she told her.

Without making any more suggestions, Harriet went back to her place behind the counter. She looked out of the tall shopwindow at the rain. The street lights were just coming on, and the light refracted off the raindrops on the glass in tiny, optimistic sparkles.

‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ Harriet thought. ‘This time.’

There were dozens of boxes of soft leather dance shoes waiting to be unpacked and checked in the stockroom, as well as a delivery of new Italian body creams and oils. Harriet knew that the cosmetics would sell well, and she was looking forward to displaying them. But on Mondays she was alone in the shop, without one of her three part-time sales assistants. She couldn’t leave the till, and there was nothing that needed doing within reach of it. The clothes lay in colourful folds in their pigeon-holes or hung tidily on the chrome rails. The boxes and bottles and packets of the other stock were neatly arranged; the whole shop was a warm, shining cavern of mirrors.

At the far end, the girls were whispering together. Harriet reached under the counter, and took out the new game.

One of her tasks in the last four hard months had been to seek out a manufacturer who would do what she wanted. At length, not very many miles from where Simon lived, she had found a small plastics factory. By travelling up to work alongside the owner, Mr Jepson, cajoling him and chivvying him and making promises that she had no certainty of being able to keep, she had encouraged him enough to produce a prototype that very nearly satisfied her.

It was smaller than Simon’s original, made in heavy, glossy black plastic that looked almost like lacquered wood. The gates were Y-shapes in glistening white plastic, and how bitterly Mr Jepson had complained about the difficulties of getting those just right. The four balls and their matching discs were brilliant blobs of colour against the stark black and white.

Harriet dropped the discs at random into the slots, and fed the balls into their groove, ready to roll. She made a quick calculation and flipped the gates.

Because the board was smaller, the balls didn’t make quite the same musical cadence as they dropped. Harriet frowned, listening and watching. The bright spots of colour zigzagged down the path she had chosen for them, and fell one by one to their predestined places. Automatically Harriet scooped them up, and scattered the counters again.

‘Excuse me.’

The two girls were standing at the counter. They were clutching the scrap of leopardskin fabric between them, offering it to her.

‘Can we take this, please?’

‘Of course you can.’

Harriet took it and wrapped it in tissue, and put it in one of the silver Stepping carrier bags. The girls’ heads were bent over their purses. Harriet saw that they were coloured plastic ones, reminding her of the kind Lisa had hoarded in Kath’s old handbags, playing shopping. They were pooling their resources. After counting and recounting the money, most of it coins, they pushed it across the counter to Harriet. She found that it was right to the penny.

‘Have you left yourselves enough to get home?’ Harriet asked.

‘Yeah, it’s expensive, isn’t it? But we had to get it, once we’d seen it on, didn’t we? We’re going to take it in turns wearing it.’

Harriet felt the glow of pleasure that selling always gave her. There was a positive satisfaction in fitting customer and merchandise together, as she had just done, and the recognition that the girls could hardly afford their purchase increased rather than diminished it. She knew from her own experience that she always loved most the things that she didn’t really have the money for, and she imagined the girls taking turns to appear at parties with the leotard swathed under a black skirt, their hair in ever more exotic dressings. They would get their money’s worth from it.

Earlier in the day she had sold the same leotard in the biggest size to a fat woman who could clearly afford to buy it fifty times over. The only pleasure she had derived from that had been in an efficient transaction.

‘Enjoy wearing it,’ Harriet said.

‘What’s this, then?’

One of the girls ran her fingers over the inclined tracks of the game. She picked out the gates, like white bones, and jiggled them. She dropped one, and it slid across the polished floor.

‘Sarufy!’ her less confident friend remonstrated.

‘It’s all right,’ Harriet said, as the little wishbone was retrieved, ‘it’s mine, it doesn’t belong to the shop. Have a try.’

Harriet showed them. Sandy rattled the counters in her fist as if they were dice, kissed her knuckles as she must have seen in the films, and cast the discs into the slots. The two of them hung over the shiny board, contradicting each other and pushing one another’s hands out of the way.

‘You’re daft, Nicky.’

‘Daft yourself. If you open this one it’ll only go like this, see?’

Harriet watched their faces. The spring was released and the musical rattle came again.

The girls’ eyes and mouths were fascinated circles as they watched the balls follow their paths. They dropped, with finality, into the wrong slots.

‘Bugger.’

‘Give us another go. That was your fault.’

There was more jostling, more contradicting.

Good, Harriet thought. She had tried the game on everyone she knew, but she was always afraid that the responses reflected an urge to be kind and encouraging, or to play devil’s advocate for her own good. She liked it best when strangers became instantly engrossed, as Sandy and Nicky had done. Their bony shoulders were hunched over it, and the plumes of hair sparred with a life of their own. There was a yodel of triumph as their second attempt was successful.

‘But your score’s too high,’ Harriet said. There was another outcry, and then they set to work again. The reaction was beginning to be familiar.

Harriet had done her research. She had spent two entire Sundays riding on the top deck of a 73 bus, north to south London and back again, through the dim streets at either end of the route and along the great channel of Oxford Street in the middle. Sunday was a good day for the buses. They weren’t too crowded, the passengers were bored by the slow journey and glad to be distracted. They only bothered to climb up to the top deck, Harriet discovered, if they were travelling some distance. She attracted their attention with the rattle and plop of the balls.

It took some courage, at first, to approach people and ask if they wanted to play. But they almost always agreed. Soon she had developed a professional patter. I’m doing some informal market research. Do you mind if …? Harriet enjoyed her encounters on the isolated, swaying top deck. She played with gangs of teenage boys, with pairs of old ladies, mothers and children and solitary middle-aged men. Once, on the last leg of her last journey on an empty bus, she played with the West Indian bus conductor. She thought that in a fairer world he would have been a professor of logic. He set the paths unhesitatingly, even for the hardest of all the permutations.

‘It’s good,’ he told her. ‘It’s fun. My children would like this.’

‘Would you buy it?’ Harriet asked, as she always did.

‘Maybe.’ He patted his ticket machine on its worn leather strap. ‘We’ve all got a path to follow, haven’t we?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harriet answered quickly, thinking of Simon’s path. All the gates closed. Or were they?

‘Would you buy it?’ she asked Nicky and Sandy.

‘Might do, for Christmas or something,’ one said, relinquishing the smooth discs.

The other added, ‘If it was cheap. We’ve got to go, Sand. You promised your Mum.’

They scuttled out of the shop with their silver bag, promising Harriet that they would come back another time. When they were gone she packed the game away in its box.

She knew it was good. Sometimes her earliest conviction of how good it was came back to her, and she shivered down the length of her spine. She had only to convince the cold men who had money to lend of the same thing. She had to show them how the game had been enjoyed on the juddering buses. And she had to convince the money men that she could sell it to the bus passengers, and those people multiplied by thousands. Perhaps tomorrow, Harriet encouraged herself. She felt the bite of adrenalin in her blood.

Harriet locked the shop and began to walk towards the tube station, turning the familiar equations over in her head as she went. When she was buying into Stepping, Harriet had found the shop and Ken had bought the lease for her. She was paying him back but the property still did not belong to her, and so she couldn’t offer it as collateral for a bigger loan. She would have done so if it had been possible; as she felt now she would have done anything, she wanted the money so badly. But the lease belonged to Ken, and although he had listened sympathetically to her proposal he was too careful to advance her the money for a second, much riskier enterprise. She needed too much money, in any case.

She wanted to launch her game in the way it deserved. With a splash, with sumptuous packaging, with advertising, and with piles of it in every window, in every outlet. The figures were set out, with the rest of her calculations, in the proposals she had spent the last four months poring over. The equations had become very familiar, but the size of them still daunted her.

Harriet had just under twenty thousand pounds of her own, her share of the proceeds from the sale of the flat she had owned with Leo. She had managed to add to her capital another pitifully small amount, by living on air in Belsize Park.

Almost as soon as she reached her rented flat and unpacked the prototype once more, the telephone rang. It was Charlie Thimbell.

‘Harriet? Jenny’s up in Newcastle for a publication party tonight, and I’m not going home to cook for myself. Let me come over and take you out to eat. We can go to the Chinese place.’

Jenny was back at her job as a publisher’s editor. From time to time she had to spend a night away, and Charlie was famous for his unwillingness to fend for himself. Harriet knew that there was nothing in her own fridge, and that even if there had been she probably wouldn’t get around to eating anything. She thought longingly of the little Chinese restaurant that Charlie was fond of, with its tasselled lanterns and kitsch mural.

‘Charlie, I can’t tonight.’

He made a disgusted noise. ‘Why not this time?’

‘I’m working. I just want to go through it all one more time. I’m seeing the venture capital division at Morton’s in the morning.’

‘Are you, now.’ Charlie was professionally interested. ‘What d’you reckon?’

‘I’ve got a feeling this could be just the right connection, at long last. They’re funding a lot of other small ventures, some of them just as much long-shots as mine.’

The notion of small amused Harriet now as it had done before. Small in the vocabulary of a big merchant bank like Morton’s meant a loan of less than a quarter of a million pounds. In her fruitless rounds of the banks and other funding institutions Harriet had been told more than once that she would find it easier to raise money if she was looking for a million or more. And yet she was shaking at the notion of a hundred thousand. She caught herself wondering if she had the right entrepreneurial qualities.

Firmly, she told Charlie, ‘I want to be word-perfect.’

‘You can over-prepare, you know. Come on, let me take your mind off it.’

‘Thanks. But not tonight, honestly. You can take me out to celebrate when they agree to fund me.’

‘OK, OK,’ Charlie said, and rang off. When Harriet refused, he knew that she meant it. He left his office and went to the newspaper’s pub instead, where he had several drinks with two sports writers.

Harriet made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the table she used as a desk. She set out the glossy black board beside the cracked packing case, and sat looking at the two of them for a moment. She had studied them so hard and for so long that she wasn’t even sure that she saw them clearly any longer. The numbers, the patterns and permutations, made long chains in her head.

Impatiently, she drew a sheaf of papers towards her. Everything was there.

The production estimates came first. Working with Mr Jepson, she had established the unit cost of each game, based on a first production run of thirty thousand. Thirty thousand was ambitious, but Harriet was convinced that to aim high was the only way. It would be cheaper to manufacture in the Far East, but from the other companies whom she had persuaded to talk to her, through a mixture of bluff and guile, Harriet had gathered that these sources were not all reliable. She calculated that it would be better, in the beginning at least, to pay for reliability and proximity. She could always drive up the motorway to see Mr Jepson at Midland Plastics. And she was sure that, on the spot, she could get what she wanted.

In fact the board itself had been the least of her problems. The balls and counters could be bought in from another company who specialised in such things, and the spring mechanism that released the balls would come from yet another source. It was the packaging that had troubled her most. During her four-month crash course in manufacturing methods, Harriet had learned that all her game components must be assembled for sale in a moulded plastic tray. An injection moulding machine would have to be specially built to produce it, and that alone would cost her nearly twenty thousand pounds. And after that came the cardboard box to enclose everything else, with the colour artwork to decorate it, that must be designed and proofed and then printed. The cost of quality colour printing had startled her more than anything else.

At last, when the components were all ready in their plastic trays, the instructions, and the bright, beautiful boxes must all be brought together and shrink-wrapped ready to be sold.

But none of this could be done until she had orders from wholesale and retail buyers, and perhaps only firm orders would enable her to raise the money to start a production run that would allow her to meet those orders.

It was like a shivering house of cards, in which the collapse of one corner would bring down the whole shaky structure. Wearily, Harriet rubbed her eyes.

She had come this far. She was going to show Morton’s that, if only they would back her, she would go much further. There would have to be no shaky corners, that was all. She returned her attention to her papers. The manufacturing details wouldn’t interest the money men, only the figures at the bottom of the neatly typed pages. At the wholesale price she had established, not quite as low as she could have pitched it because she wanted her game to appear a quality product, and assuming that she could get all her thirty thousand units into the shops in time for Christmas, she could accommodate a start-up loan of one hundred thousand pounds, and clear another hundred thousand for reinvestment, expansion, overseas sales. Break-even point was fifteen thousand units.

The prospect glittered at her.

But again, her card house trembled. To get the games into the shops in time for Christmas selling, the manufacturing must be completed by July, August at the latest. The buyers would place their basic orders at the Toy Fair in London at the end of February, and reorder later when selling got under way. Harriet had booked a stand at the Fair without any certainty that she would have anything to display on it except a split packing case and a lonely slab of black plastic adorned with white wishbones. And it was already mid-January.

The urgency of her need to raise capital gnawed at her all day, every day, but now it gripped her like a physical spasm. Harriet got up from the table, stretching her stiff limbs, and went over to the window. She hadn’t bothered to close the curtains before sitting down and she looked out at the dingy basement area and the railings above that separated it from the street. She rested her forehead against the cold glass and breathed slowly, reassuring herself. She would get the money. She would get the orders at the Fair. The game would be in the shops by the autumn. And her own efforts would make sure that it sold out of the shops again.

Harriet looked up and saw the two cats winding in and out of the railings, mewing at her. She had forgotten to let them in, forgotten to feed them. Stricken with guilt she went to the door and opened it. The cats bounded down the steps and streaked between her legs and into the kitchen. Harriet followed them and spooned meat out of a tin into two bowls. The yelping subsided at once into satisfied chewing, punctuated by bursts of purring. Harriet absent-mindedly cut herself a slice of bread and ate it leaning against the kitchen table, watching the cats’ complete absorption in their food. If she could only bring the same attention to setting up her company, she thought, the obstacles would probably melt away.

The tea had gone cold in the pot, but she poured herself another cup anyway and settled down to her figures again. Replete, the cats followed her to her seat. One settled itself like a hot cushion against her feet, and the other launched itself into her lap. Harriet stroked the soft fur. She was glad of the company of the cats. They didn’t distract her, as Charlie Thimbell would have done.

Beyond the practical details of manufacturing and sales, the bank would want to know about the structure of the company they were being asked to invest in. Weighing up her requirements very carefully, Harriet had concluded that it would be best kept very small. She calculated that at the beginning she could run it herself, as the sole proprietor. She would need a secretarial assistant, and a part-time book-keeper. She would also need an accountant, the best possible accountant. But in her card-house world she would need to raise the capital before she could appoint one.

With clear sight, Harriet knew that she was really asking for investment in herself. It was her own energy, her own selling skills, that would make her venture work. From careful analysis of her market – not at all scientifically done, but with the intuition that she would have to let herself rely on – she believed even a bad game could be made to sell well. If it was packaged right, and cleverly marketed, and if it was enough talked and written about where people noticed such things, then it would sell. It might only be played once or twice, but the price would still have been paid for it.

Harriet was convinced that she could package and sell and promote as well as anyone else; better, even, because it was all she had to concentrate on. There were no other demands on her, she had nothing else to give herself to. She would present herself to Morton’s.

And she had the added satisfaction, the added insurance, of knowing that her game – Simon’s game – was good. It was better than anything else she had seen or could remember.

The rain cleared overnight. Harriet reached the bank’s new black-glass building in thin sunlight, seven minutes early. She stood looking at the City edifices rearing up around her, at sooty stone and concrete and glass, feeling her irrelevance in their weighty shadows.

Of course, she told herself. What else should you feel?

At exactly two minutes before the appointed time, she presented herself to the receptionist at a desk in the marble lobby. Behind Harriet’s back a fountain expensively trickled amongst green fronds. As the receptionist telephoned to announce her, Harriet thought about the different languages that money spoke. This soft one, of quiet voices in harmony with polite water and smooth, cold stone, was becoming familiar to her. She was aware that if she penetrated further she would have to learn to interpret other, coarser tongues.

Following the receptionist’s instructions she took the polished box of the lift to a lofty floor. Up here there was a long carpeted vista and a plate-glass sweep at the end that gave a further vista of towers and blind eyes of glass. It was quiet, like being in the nave of a church, looking towards some vast altarpiece. In the distance, yet all around her, Harriet could hear a low humming. She knew that it was machinery, the bank’s electronic heart, but it reminded her irresistibly of the murmur of prayer.

A man came out of one of the doors that opened, like pew-ends, into the nave. In his dark clothes against the bright glass he seemed featureless, an acolyte.

‘Mrs Gold? Would you come this way, please?’

Obediently she went with him. Beyond the door there was a conference room. It was so ordinary, with its empty oval table and glass ashtrays and unmemorable pictures, that Harriet felt momentarily disorientated. The acolyte had become a middle-aged man in a conservative suit. There were two other men waiting in the room, surprisingly young, in just the same clothes. All three of them had pink, smooth, pleasant faces, as indistinguishable one from the other as the pictures on the walls.

Harriet made an effort to collect herself. Unthinkingly, she smoothed the hem of her own plain, dark jacket. The skirt of her suit was narrow, but not too narrow, to the knee. Her shoes were plain, dark and low-heeled. She was dressed right, reflecting the bank men exactly.

‘Won’t you sit down?’

The youngest of the trio held out a chair. Harriet sat. She smiled at each of them but she refused the formal offer of coffee.

‘Well, Mrs Gold. Won’t you tell us about your project?’ The invitation came from the oldest one. He rested his wrists on the table, hands clasped, ready to give her his full attention. The other two, on either side of him, adopted almost the same position. Harriet looked at each of them in turn, remembering the names by which they had introduced themselves, and then she began.

Softly, without emphasis, she told them, ‘The game is called Conundrum.’

It had taken her a long time to fix on a name. Simon had never called it anything. For a long time, in her own head, it had just been Simon’s game. After meeting the logician bus conductor she had thought about his pathways, and his theory of predestination, and also of Simon’s words, It’s a wonderful game if you can play it right. Like life. But Harriet had rejected all the portentous names that went with such ideas. They would make the game seem too serious to be played with.

‘Conundrum’ sounded light, with the right element of mystery. People could read their own further significance into the shiny tracks if they so wished. Harriet just wanted them to give it to each other for Christmas.

In the conference room of the venture capital division of Moreton’s Bank, Harriet opened a small suitcase. As she had done on each of the previous similar occasions, she felt like a pedlar displaying her wares.

Inside the suitcase was a box, only a dummy as yet, but still looking enough like the box that Harriet wanted for the final Conundrum. The artwork for the design, bold Deco lettering backed by a sunray motif in brilliant colours, had been produced, after a dozen other attempts had been rejected, by a design studio recommended to Harriet by Jenny. The artwork had been proofed, using a five-colour run to give depth and richness, by an East End printer recommended by the design studio. Harriet had found her own manufacturer of boxes, and had a sample made up to her own specifications. All the experiments had been expensive. Harriet had paid out of her capital, knowing that she must practise no economies yet.

When the time came the design would be printed on to the packaging, and then laminated to give it sparkle. For now, Harriet could do no better than stick a laminated proof to the sample box.

Even so, she was delighted with the fresh impact of it.

The bankers inspected the packaging carefully. Harriet opened the lid to reveal the game itself. There were printed instructions, but as yet the sheet was only pasted inside the lid. There was no moulding to cradle the board or to offer little cups in which the counters and balls would neatly rest. That could come only when Harriet had raised the money for it.

Please, she wanted to implore the three pink faces. Instead she lifted out the black shiny board, fitted the white wings in their slots.

‘This is how it works.’

The three men gave their attention to playing Conundrum. Two of them were good at it. The third was not, although he was clever at concealing it by deferring to the others when his turn came, and by masking his deliberations with a knowing smile. Harriet thought that probably she was the only one who noticed his shortcoming.

Rather noisily, the other two challenged each other to produce the lowest score over three games. The atmosphere in the conference room became frivolous. Harriet kept the score, and declared the senior man the fair and square winner at the end. She thought that was probably important. The third man slipped out of the room, and came back again with a sheaf of papers as the game finished.

‘Quite intriguing,’ was the senior man’s verdict, and his assistants nodded. ‘And most strikingly presented.’ More nods followed.

Harriet allowed herself to begin to hope.

‘Now, shall we take a look at your plans for the business?’

All frivolity ebbed away at once.

Harriet took out her projections, one copy for each of the three pairs of fleshy pink hands, and she began to talk. She had rehearsed her pitch so thoroughly that the points came fluently one after another, in logical and convincing sequence. The dates and the figures and the estimates fitted together, as neatly as the wishbone gates into their slots. Harriet convinced herself as she talked. She could have sung, although she kept her voice dispassionate and level. They couldn’t refuse her now.

A hundred thousand pounds. In this financial cathedral, it was so very little.

As soon as she finished her pitch and answered their questions, she knew that they would indeed refuse her. She barely heard the formulae as they were reeled off, but the meaning was quite clear.

‘This is a fashion product, Mrs Gold, of course.’

‘The most unpredictable market of all. If only we could predict …’

‘The high risk attached to small ventures of this kind …’

The third one, the one who had failed to solve the game’s riddle, read from his sheaf of papers. It contained the financial histories of other companies, the proprietors of games and toys and fashion products that had failed to capture the market’s imagination. As they were afraid Conundrum would also fail.

Harriet rallied herself. ‘I believe you are misjudging. Conundrum is nothing to do with fashion. Its appeal is timeless. I know the market will respond to that appeal.’

They were shaking their heads, each with his own interpretation of polite regret. Harriet thought savagely that they looked like the three wise monkeys, possessed of the wrong kind of wisdom. The senior man stood up, and held out his hand.

‘You may well prove us wrong, Mrs Gold. I wish I could be sure that you won’t, and at the same time I wish you the best of luck.’

Harriet shook his hand, although she would rather have bitten it. She listened to his thanks for her kindness in letting them see her proposal, and his repeated regret that it appeared not to be quite the right investment for Morton’s, whilst many of their rivals might well take quite a different view of it. The one who couldn’t play the game held open the door for her, and then escorted her to the lift. She wondered if it might have been different had he been as good at it as her bus conductor.

She found herself in the street again, under the tall towers. All she knew for sure was that she had failed again. The game was good, she reasoned, so the fault must be her own. Her awareness of that, and the optimism she had felt about this meeting, made the disappointment harder to bear. She tried to think back over everything she had said, and to pin-point the moment when the tide had turned against her. But it was no use. She couldn’t work out exactly where she had gone wrong. They had given her a fair hearing, a long one she saw now, when she looked at her watch. And at the end of it they had simply decided not to back her.

Harriet hurried on. She was due back at Stepping, where Karen would be needing help. Tuesday afternoons were often busy, for no particularly obvious reason.

She was already recovering her balance. There wouldn’t be any failure if she refused to acknowledge it. This connection had been one possibility, and she had been wrong to place too much faith in it. There would be other connections, and one of them would hold. If she couldn’t believe that, she told herself, then it would be better to give up right away.

By the evening, when she let herself into the basement flat again, she had decided what she was going to do. She would get Mr Jepson to make up more samples of the game, a dozen at least, and she would have boxes printed and the best packaging she could manage. She would print posters and leaflets and lots of powerful, bright promotion material. She would take a bigger stand at the Toy Fair, instead of a modest one, and she would staff it with her own sales people, and she would give Conundrum the showiest splash she could possibly devise.

She had enough capital to do it. Just enough.

Then, when the buyers had seen and ordered, she could go out and borrow the money for the production run ten times over.

Harriet fed the cats, and they subsided into a purring dome of bicoloured fur in the only comfortable chair. She opened the small suitcase that she had taken to Morton’s with such misplaced optimism, and placed Conundrum and its bright box beside Simon’s original on the mantelpiece. She was standing back to look at it when she heard people coming down the steps to her basement door.

The visitors were Charlie Thimbell and a man called Henry Orde. Henry was an old friend of Charlie’s. Harriet knew him a little, and liked him. But she sighed inwardly at the sight of the two of them. She wanted to think about the day’s defeat, and to marshal her reserves of confidence once more, and now she would have to descend into the realm of sociability’.

‘Come in,’ she invited, not opening the door very wide.

The men came in anyway, in their bulky overcoats, bringing cold air with them and making the room seem tiny. Harriet blinked at seeing the place so unfamiliarly crowded, and Charlie stared around him.

‘We were having a drink around the corner,’ he announced, ‘so we came on to see you. Harriet, what is this place? I’m worried about you. Jenny is as well, she says she hasn’t seen you for weeks.’

‘We’ve talked on the phone,’ Harriet automatically defended herself. ‘Thanks for being concerned, but there’s no need, really. Hello, Henry.’

She knew that she sounded stiff, and wondered if she had been so absorbed in her scheme that she had forgotten how to talk normally. She knew too that her visitors had come out of friendship, but she felt the intrusion even more strongly. Conundrum was hers, succeed or fail, and until it had succeeded her protective instinct towards it was as strong as a mother’s. But still she took the men’s coats, and pitched the cats off the chair, and brought a bottle of wine and glasses from the kitchen.

They settled themselves as comfortably as they could in the small space.

‘It’s fine for me,’ Harriet said quickly. ‘I don’t need a lot of room, and it’s cheap because I take care of the cats. Sort of take care of them.’

‘How did it go today?’ Charlie asked, dismissing the flat.

‘Today? Yes. Well, it didn’t go, exactly.’

She told them, briefly, and they listened, nodding their heads with their accumulated financial expertise. Suddenly they reminded her of the three wise monkeys at Morton’s, and she felt a flash of anger.

It strengthened her determination to launch Conundrum in her own way, with her own money.

She took her sample down from the mantelpiece again and gave it to Henry to play with. She walked up and down the cramped room, talking about her plans for the fair and the compelling promotion that would bring the buyers flocking. She made ideas up as she went along. She would have the box’s sunray motif made up in three dimensions to back the stand. She would have her sales team in black and white shiny outfits, she would invite celebrities to play. With the force of her enthusiasm alone, if necessary, she would get the buzz going. As she talked Henry Orde flicked the release spring. The rattle and roll of Conundrum’s balls counterpointed her words.

‘When I’ve got the orders I can go back and choose who’s going to lend me the money,’ Harriet finished triumphantly. ‘It’s the best way to do it. I know it’s the best way.’

There was a little silence.

‘Well?’ Harriet demanded.

Charlie sucked at his wine, and Henry appeared to be intent on rearranging the coloured counters in the slots.

‘Don’t you think I can do it?’

Charlie looked up at her at last. She felt like a termagant standing over him, but she stood her ground.

‘You could lose everything you’ve got,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it happen. So has Henry.’ Henry was a solicitor.

‘And equally, I’ve got everything to gain. I can only go bankrupt, can’t I?’

Henry looked at her then, too.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. He had a nice, bashful smile that Harriet had always liked. ‘You could just be right. I think it’s worth going for. They’re a very conservative bunch at Morton’s. And this isn’t their field. They prefer telecommunications, electronics, the heavy stuff. I know someone you could try.’

Henry took a business card from his wallet and scribbled on the back of it. When Harriet looked at what he had written she saw the words Landwith Associates, and an address in SW1.

‘They’re a small firm of venture capitalists. With a reputation for risking long shots.’

Harriet returned his smile, and put the card away. ‘Thanks. I think I’m going to do it my own way, just the same.’

‘Good luck.’

Twice in one day she had been wished it. It would do her no harm, Harriet thought.

‘I saw Leo the other night,’ Henry said, interrupting her reverie.

Harriet had not seen Leo for weeks, since the completion of the sale of the flat. She felt a twinge of guilt when she realised that he was fading out of her life, and then reminded herself that she had no reason to feel guilty about Leo.

‘How was he?’

Harriet saw the two men exchange a half-glance. She guessed what it meant. Henry and Charlie thought that if she wasn’t alone, stranded here as they imagined in a poky flat, then she wouldn’t need to chase after entrepreneurial rainbows and risk losing the little security she had.

They didn’t believe that she could make it, and they were old friends. No wonder Morton’s had turned her down.

The realisation was comforting. It might just be that the fault was not hers after all, but only the shortsightedness of the huge, hermetic, male-dominated business world.

‘He asked about you,’ Henry told her. ‘Not that I could tell him anything.’

‘I’ll have to give him a call,’ Harriet said mildly.

They sat for a little longer, talking and drinking wine, until Charlie looked at his watch.

‘Time for home.’

‘Is Jenny back?’

‘Yes. I must go, or I’ll be late for supper.’

Henry’ stood up too. Harriet wasn’t sure what his current domestic arrangements were, but he clearly also had somewhere to go. Yet they both hesitated, and it struck Harriet that they felt badly about leaving her. They were sorry for her, abandoned in reduced circumstances with the cats and the balance sheets for company.

‘I’ll come out with you. I need some fresh air.’

‘Listen, Harriet, why don’t you come too? Jenny’d like to see you. I’ll just give her a call and tell her we’re on our way …’

Harriet shook her head. ‘Not tonight, thanks, Charlie. I want to do some things. Just give Jenny my love, and tell her I’ll see her soon.’

‘You can’t work all the time, Harriet.’

‘I don’t.’

It wasn’t the truth, but there was no need for anyone to know that. Harriet opened the basement door and almost shepherded the two of them up the iron stairs to the street level. A taxi came by, and Charlie flagged it. It pulled in to the kerb and the driver opened the window, his breath visible in cumulus clouds in the January murk. Henry paused before he climbed into the back, his hand on Harriet’s arm.

‘Do one thing for me. The rights in this game, whoever they belong to. Secure them, before you do anything else.’

‘I will,’ she promised. ‘I’m going to do that next.’

Harriet didn’t know why she had procrastinated. Only that the cathedral of Morton’s, and everything else that she had been pursuing in the months since she had left Leo, seemed far removed from Simon amongst the flotsam in his cold house. She was afraid, perhaps, of being unable to find a language that would bring them together. Henry and Charlie were right, however. This was just one of the new languages that she must learn.

The taxi drove away. Harriet stood for a moment looking down the street at the lights behind drawn curtains. The thin fog blurred the yellow squares, so that the light seemed to spill beyond the window frame. Then she shivered in the cold air, and turned back down the iron steps.

This time, Harriet drove up to see Simon. She went first to visit Mr Jepson at Midland Plastics, and ordered a dozen more Conundrum samples. She sat in his office with its chipped metal filing cabinets and girlie calendar, drinking thick tea and listening to the subterranean pounding of machinery down on the shop floor.

Mr Jepson wanted to be paid in advance. Harriet leaned forward over his desk.

‘Can I have everything by February the twentieth? Without fail? With a written undertaking?’ Mr Jepson appeared to be offended that she would not accept his word as his bond. Harriet opened her chequebook and wrote out a cheque for the full amount that he had quoted. She held it out to him.

‘My written undertaking,’ she said, ‘in return for yours.’ He buzzed his secretary, and dictated the brief letter to Harriet’s satisfaction.

‘And then there’s the production run. Thirty thousand units, price quoted, for delivery at the end of May. Can you guarantee that, too?’

‘Those wishbones are the devil’s job.’

‘Can you guarantee it?’

‘Aye. If it gets to that.’

Mr Jepson was a Northerner. His voice reminded Harriet of the man in the blue shirt.

‘It will,’ she said grimly. ‘It will, I assure you.’

They shook hands. Mr Jepson was a small man. Over his head the January girl winked out of the calendar at Harriet. She was wearing a white fur tippet and mittens, and long white boots. Nothing else. Harriet’s jaw and neck ached with the wire-tightness of her determination to pin Jepson down. She thought, suddenly, how comforting it would be to have a good cry.

‘Goodbye, Mr Jepson,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we can do business together, now we understand each other.’

Harriet had written to Simon, announcing her visit. He had no telephone, of course. But she had to stand for a long time in rain driven horizontally by the wind, before she heard his steps on the other side of the door. Still the door didn’t open. The movements stopped, replaced by interrogative silence.

‘It’s Harriet.’ And more emphatically, into the blanket of it, ‘Kath’s Harriet. Do you remember?’

At last the bolts were being drawn back. A moment later, Simon confronted her. She had forgotten his height, and the milky, frosty eyes. ‘I did write,’ she reminded him lamely. ‘I thought you’d write back and tell me not to come, if you really didn’t want to see me.’

‘You’d better come in,’ was all he said. The door opened another frugal slice. Harriet followed him down the passageway. She hadn’t forgotten the smell, or the gnawing cold, much worse in January than it had been in the mild autumn. The kitchen seemed even more forlornly lumbered.

‘Would you like some tea?’

Harriet would not, but she said cheerfully, ‘Let me make it for you this time.’

She went to the sink and tried to clear some of the slime of crusts and potato peelings and tea leaves before rinsing and filling the kettle. Behind her she could hear Simon moving busily. She had the impression that he was putting things away, out of her sight. The notion that her visit was an unwelcome intrusion stabbed a little dart inside her. She had allowed herself to imagine that he might have been looking forward to it. Harriet brushed aside her own disappointment and began to tell him little, inconsequential snippets of news, mostly about Kath and Ken and the house, or about Lisa and her boyfriend. At length it sounded as though Simon had finished his rites of concealment. She could hear him breathing now, noisily, as if with a degree of difficulty. She plugged in the kettle and washed and dried two cups before turning unhurriedly around.

‘Have you got a bad chest?’

‘It’s winter.’

The economy of the response made her smile, in spite of her discomfort. ‘You think I sound like a busybody from the Council or somewhere.’

‘That’s right.’ A smile, but as wintry as the weather. Gratefully Harriet accepted the moment of rapport. She put his cup of tea down at his elbow and bent down to open her case, placed on the floor for lack of a clear space anywhere else. She took out Conundrum, Mr Jepson’s expensive Conundrum, with the ritual incantations of the three wise monkeys somehow still clouding its polished flanks. She put it into Simon’s hands like an offering and laid its box beside it, its resonant colours almost too bright for the meagre room.

‘You’ve done this?’

‘I brought it to show you. I want to tell you all about it.’

In his eyes Harriet saw a dark spectrum of responses, from disgust to fear, quickly shuttered, and wished that she had not. She stooped on her haunches, to bring herself to his sitting level.

‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. She did not know exactly what she was trying to reassure him about.

‘What do you mean?’ He wouldn’t admit her through the smallest chink in his armour. Harriet wished for the disarming surprise of her last visit, or for the levelling of whisky. There was no excuse for whisky at three o’clock in the afternoon.

‘Where is my game? My packing case game?’

‘It’s safe. It’s at home, but I can bring it straight back for you, if you want that.’

‘No. It’s funny, I’ve kept it with me all these years. But I feel better with it out of the house.’ He picked the gates out of the slots and shook the white bones in his cupped hands. Then he swept a clearing in the table’s litter and laid out the bones in a line, a series of Ys, two narrow paths diverging from each broad central one, offering choices. ‘You’d better sit down properly,’ he told her. ‘And say what it is you’ve come for.’

Harriet described everything, from the first tentative plans she had made alone in the rented basement to this morning’s confrontation with Mr Jepson. Her words came out in a rush. She didn’t weigh them or try to modulate them. She simply told Simon what had happened, in a rapid, fervent, breathless outpouring. And when she had finished, there was silence. It was a particularly cold and weighty silence after the heat of her delivery.

‘You told me I could do what I like with it,’ she said, very humbly.

‘I know I did. I meant it.’ Simon studied her face. He was realising that, in the time that had passed since her last visit, he had been recalling Harriet as prettier than she really was. Somehow he had superimposed Kath’s soft, bloomy features on the daughter’s thinner, sharper ones. Kath had never looked threateningly famished, as this girl did.

‘Simon?’ she was prompting him, in a voice that carried the echo of her mother’s, just as her face carried the print of the other one.

‘What is it?’

‘I …’ Harriet’s words dried. Glancing at it she saw that Conundrum looked meaningless, and its box garish. She had been wrong to come bearing her bits and pieces to Simon in search of approval and praise for her industry and cleverness. His game, to him, was Shamshuipo camp and so it was nothing to do with this shameless, glossy reflection of it.

There was another thing to remember, also. Simon was not her father. She had no right of filial expectation, no right to resent his lack of paternal pride. He could not be her father, however much she might wish him to be.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not very appropriate, this, is it?’

Simon gave a cough of laughter. ‘I hadn’t tried to gauge the appropriateness. What exactly is it that you want, Harriet?’

She would be businesslike, then. ‘I want to launch your game commercially, under the name Conundrum.’ She went on, spelling out her plans. She couldn’t tell if Simon was listening or not, but at the end he said, ‘I see.’

‘Before I can do any of this, I have to establish who owns the rights in the game. As we stand, they are yours. You could lease them to me for an agreed period. You could make them over to me. Or we could come to some other arrangement. But we must do it legally. Do you understand?’

‘I’m old, but I’m not a fool. What will I have to do? Because I don’t want to have to do anything, anything at all outside what I do here. Do you understand that?’

They regarded each other. Simon had reared up in his seat, as if to protect his narrow territory.

Harriet said, ‘Yes. You only have to sign something, a simple document, if you’re willing to make over the rights completely. If we make a more complicated arrangement it might mean a visit to a solicitor together.’ She was trying to be impartial. She wanted to do what was right, but she needed the simplest solution that would leave no loopholes.

Simon sighed. ‘You can have it. I told you the first time. Give me what I have to sign.’ He read her intentions. He was shrewd enough to know that she wouldn’t have made the journey unprepared. Harriet felt grubby as she took out her papers. She had taken legal advice, not Henry’s but specialist advice. She held out her simple, watertight contract. There was an interval in which Simon shuffled in search of his spectacles, another in which he read the words she had presented him with.

At length he looked up. ‘That seems very thorough,’ he said. He took up a pen, and signed.

‘It should be witnessed.’

‘Do you think I will renege?’

She bent her head. ‘No.’

‘No other intrusion?’

‘None, I promise. Only we must decide between us what your share of the profits will be.’

There was another dry sound, neither a cough nor quite a laugh. ‘What will I do with profits, Harriet?’

She held her ground. ‘Heat your house adequately. Repair the roof.’

‘And if I told you that I am happy as I am?’

‘Are you?’ But as she said it she felt her impudence. He would share no whisky-confidence with her today. ‘Money never hurt anyone,’ she defended.

Simon swept the Y-shaped gates together into a heap, and funnelled them from his cupped hands into the mocked-up box. He put all the components neatly together, fitting the lid in place, and held it out to Harriet. ‘Here. Take your game.’

She was being dismissed. Well, she would make the division of the money between the two of them as and when the time came. The time seemed a long way off. Harriet was afraid of everything she must do before it could come.

‘Thank you for giving me the game,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m grateful.’

This time the desiccated laugh did turn into a cough. ‘You should get some medicine for that,’ she told him. Simon’s face altered. He fell against the back of his chair. ‘You sounded like your mother, saying that. Here.’

She went to him. He lifted her hand and held it, very briefly, against his cheek. A moment later he had disengaged himself, impatient, unfolded his height from the chair. ‘You’ll want to be on your way.’

The touch had been a father’s gesture, Harriet thought. She felt lighter, happy now. He came with her to the front door, peered briefly into the rain before retreating into the shell of his house. Harriet left him, and drove back down the motorway to London.

In the next month, Harriet worked harder than she had ever done in her life before. By the last week of February, using the Toy Fair Directory, she had mailed five hundred publicity kits to every buyer, every store representative who might have the remotest interest in Conundrum. She had designed the dressing for the bigger stand, in white parachute silk and black PVC, and supervised its making-up. She wanted black, shiny curves and cloudy white billows to back her sunray trade-mark. She had found a team of props designers who had made the huge, polystyrene sunray itself, and painted it in the rainbow colours of the boxes. She had dozens more boxes made, ready to be heaped in apparent profusion on the ledges of the sunray. Through an agency, she had booked two girls to man the stand with her. Remembering Sandy and her friend, Harriet had chosen young students, part-timers, whose hair could be dressed in the same nodding plumes.

She had bought three black-and-white outfits, and replaced the buttons with penny-sized ones in rainbow colours. Through Jenny, who knew his agent, she had cajoled a television personality to be on the stand for the busiest day, to challenge buyers to solve Conundrum. His fee was enormous. Jane and Jenny and the others helped her to stuff envelopes for the mail shots, and Jenny machined yards of parachute silk. Her friends worried gently about her, and tried to persuade her to slow down, but she was driven beyond the ability to rest. Only Charlie Thimbell told her that if she was going to do it at all, she might as well give it all she had.

Harriet did everything she possibly could, and she neglected Stepping. There was very little left of her fifteen thousand pounds.

Three nights before the fair opened, Harriet had a nightmare. When she woke up, sweaty and disorientated, she couldn’t remember the details of it. But an oppressive fear made her head and limbs heavy. She felt deathly tired but she couldn’t go back to sleep again; in the morning the weight of it was still with her. She felt drained of all her strength, ill without any symptoms.

The feeling was the exact opposite of the euphoria she had experienced after the strange, waking dream in her old bedroom at home. It was as if all the anxieties and weaknesses she had suppressed had surfaced at once to cripple her. She was afraid of everything she was doing, of the ballooning enterprise she was trying to launch on such shaky foundations. Harriet lay in bed, with her knees drawn up, her arms folded around her head.

The thought came to her, effortfully, I need help. I can’t do this alone.

After a time she got up, and groped painfully around the flat. She found the card that Henry Orde had given her.

As soon as she judged the working day to have started, she telephoned Landwith Associates.