Читать книгу A Woman of Our Times - Rosie Thomas - Страница 9

A collection of packing cases stood in the middle of the living room; pale rectangles framed with cobwebby dust showed where pictures had hung on the cream walls. Harriet and Leo were dismantling their four years.

Leo abruptly stopped packing books into a box and sat down on the sofa. He was listening to Harriet opening and closing drawers in the kitchen. Goaded by the sound he shouted at her, ‘Your mixer, my toaster, is this what everything’s come to between us?’

Harriet appeared in the doorway. She looked tired.

‘This is the nasty but inevitable aftermath of something that has already happened, don’t you understand? Who owns what isn’t significant. You can have the whole lot, if you want. But the flat has to be cleared because we’re selling it, and all this stuff has to go somewhere. Why don’t you help instead of sitting there?’

‘I don’t want to help. I don’t want us to do it. Can’t we stop, and forget about it?’

Wearily, because they had travelled this ground a dozen times already, Harriet said, ‘It isn’t forgettable. You know it, and I know it.’

They had fenced with each other, like this, for weeks. They had met only a handful of times but each time they had trodden the same exhausting paths.

Leo wanted to go back to where they had been, before Harriet had seen the play of light and shadow over the girl’s body in his studio. He wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, obliterating by denying, and he wanted to compound the deception by pretending that they had been happy except for his own insignificant lapse. He talked about babies, fantasising himself into fatherhood, reproaching Harriet for her refusal.

Yet Harriet knew that his insistence on all these things grew out of his need to oppose her, on any grounds. Bitterness had driven between them. If she had wanted to stay, she thought, to cling to the debris, it would have been Leo demanding brutal severance. There is no such thing, Harriet reminded herself, as an amicable separation. She clung to her decision with a steeliness that surprised her. She remembered, too, that her husband had accused her of coldness and rigidity. Well then, she was only behaving in character. And she was glad, with chilly relief, that there were no children to witness or to be hurt by this disengagement.

Leo looked up at her. She thought he was going to take her arm and pull her down beside him, and stepped instinctively backwards.

‘Don’t do that,’ Leo whispered. ‘Don’t act as if I’m going to hurt you.’

You have, Harriet answered silently. You won’t, any more.

‘Harriet.’ Leo had never had to beg for anything before. It was clear that he was making his last bid. ‘Stay with me.’

She knew his insistence was based on a false premise, because she didn’t love him any longer. Nor did she believe, although his obstinacy prevented him from seeing it for himself, that Leo loved her either. The finality of it was sad, the insignificance of what was left was pathetic.

‘I can’t.’

Leo scowled. He looked like a small boy who had unexpectedly been denied a treat. That was it, Harriet realised. She had spent four years of her life married to a twelve-year-old boy. A twelve-year-old, tricked out with broad shoulders, a rakishly tumbled mop of black hair, and a well-developed libido. Unbidden, but as sharp as one of his own photographs, her last sight of his most prominent feature came back to her. And the vision of her husband trying to hide it behind his shirt.

A tremor passed through Harriet. It rose from her chest and concentrated at the back of her throat, and then escaped as a short burst of guilty laughter. Her hands flew up to her cheeks as she tried to suppress it.

Leo stared at her, dislike clearly visible in his face. ‘I think you’ve gone mad.’

‘Just the opposite, I think,’ Harriet said. ‘If you really won’t help, I’ll have to divide things without you.’

She turned away from him and went back into the kitchen. Sabatier knives, maple chopping board, Le Creuset casserole dishes. Harriet felt faintly shocked herself as she laid them out. There was nothing to laugh at, Leo was right. In truth she found this dismemberment of their domestic life, the lifting of utensils from hooks and extraction of cutlery from snugly shaped trays, as painful and difficult as anything she had ever known.

As suddenly as the laughter had come, she felt the weight of tears in her eyes. To hold them back she stopped work and went across to stare out of the kitchen window. The view was familiar in every detail from married hours spent at the sink, filling kettles, washing dishes, preparing vegetables. The dingy curtains in the opposite windows would be taken down, and fresh ones put up by new owners. The flowering cherry on the corner would blossom and shed its leaves, but Leo and she would not be here to see it. She turned her back on the view. She hadn’t cried, and she wouldn’t cry now.

It would be easier to stay, of course.

She knew their life, and the patterns of it. Leo provided a husbandly shelter for her, for all his faults. She was used to being a couple, to parties and holidays and Christmases spent as one half of a whole. It would be simpler to stay in the shelter and look out on the world, believing her husband’s assurances.

Only it would be wrong.

It would be a capitulation, and Harriet in her controlled and decisive way hated capitulation.

She bent to the job again. She took up a melon baller that had been a Christmas present from Averil, never used, and hovered with it between Leo’s packing case and the one intended for herself. After a moment she put it with her own things. There came another irrational urge to laugh. She was sending back the son, but she didn’t want to give offence by rejecting the melon baller as well.

When she looked up again she saw that Leo was watching her from the doorway.

‘You’ve made a terrible mess.’

‘Completion of the sale is in ten days’ time. We have to empty the place by then. There isn’t any point in maintaining the House Beautiful, Leo. It’s all over.’

Seeing his face, she thought for a moment that he too might be going to cry. They faced each other awkwardly, and then Harriet picked her way through the coils of newspaper packing. They put their arms around each other and then stood still, looking in different directions, saying nothing.

At length Leo let her go. He picked up a coffee-pot, asking ‘Where’s this going?’

‘With you, if you like. If you’ve got room.’

Leo was partly living in his studio, partly still at the flat, and spending an occasioned regressive night at his parents’ house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Harriet had rented a basement flat in Belsize Park. It wasn’t convenient for the shop, and north London felt like foreign territory after the west, but it belonged to a friend of hers who had gone to Paris for a year, and it was cheap because two cats came with it.

‘I don’t want it,’ Leo answered. ‘I’ve got one at the studio.’

He hovered beside her, getting in the way, taking out utensils that she had already packed and staring at them as if he had never seen them before. She worked on a few minutes, controlling her irritation, then gave up.

‘I’ve got to go soon. There must be a carload here anyway.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home.’ She meant Belsize Park, said it defiantly. ‘To drop this off and change, then I’m going to Jane’s. She’s having a party.’

In the past, of course, Leo would have been coming as well, even though he and Jane had never felt much affection for one another.

‘Yeah. Well, I might have a night out too.’

‘Good idea.’

They were defending themselves, and masking the defence with cheerfulness. Harriet wanted to get away.

Leo helped her to carry her plants and cardboard boxes down the stairs to the street. Harriet felt humiliated by this public admission of their mutual failure. She wished she could have removed herself in the middle of the night, and willed the door of each of the other flats to stay closed as they passed. Once safely outside they heaved the boxes into her hatchback, piling the things up almost to the roof. The last box was squeezed in and Harriet slammed the tailgate. Leo stood looking at the loaded car with an expression of baffled misery.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she repeated, wishing that this was over, that it had already subsided into history.

‘Shit,’ Leo said. He drew back his foot and gave the nearside rear tyre a vicious kick. ‘Oh, shit.’

Harriet scrambled into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry about it all.’ And then she drove away.

She reached her Belsize Park basement and staggered to and fro on her own with her arms full of possessions. She left her houseplants in a drooping thicket inside the front door and the other things stacked in the middle of the living room floor. She was already late, so she showered quickly in the bathroom that still smelt of another woman’s perfume, and wrapped herself in a bath towel to survey her limited choice of unpacked clothes. Without wasting any time on deliberations she pulled on a bright red shirt and a pair of tight black trousers with black suede ankle boots. She ran a comb through her short hair and rubbed gloss from the same tube on to her mouth and cheekbones. Then she picked up a bottle of red wine from Oddbins still wrapped in its paper, and a bunch of daisies she had bought from the florist’s on the corner. With her hands full and her pouch bag swinging from her shoulder, she stepped in front of the living room mantelpiece.

Leaning against the chimney breast, from which she had removed the owner’s Saul Steinberg print to make room for it, was Simon Archer’s game.

Harriet had spent hours sitting on the sofa opposite, knees drawn up to her chest, studying it. She knew the gates and their numbers, the faded markings, even the cracks in the wood.

All the time she looked at it, sitting on her own in the silent room, she was thinking and wondering. And each time she looked, she felt the same shiver travel the length of her spine.

The friendlier of the pair of cats, a black one with white paws, wound between her legs and rubbed itself against her ankles. Harriet glanced down. ‘That’s enough thinking, for now,’ she told it. ‘Time to do something. Definitely time.’

She left the flat once more, locking her stronghold carefully behind her.

Harriet liked driving in London. Today’s journeys, from the home she had given up with Leo to the party, would criss-cross it from west to east and back to the north again. Jane lived in Hackney, in a tiny house in a terrace pinned between tall warehouses and a rundown shopping street. But Harriet had barely noticed the first leg of her drive. Normally she enjoyed the stirring sweep of the Westway that carried her along level with the rooftops. She liked to drive a little too fast, with music playing. Today, with the unaccustomed weight dragging the tail of the car, there had been no music or display of speed. She had been oppressed by a sense of failure, by loneliness, and by a sudden desire to turn round, to capitulate after all, and go back to Leo. Yet she had driven doggedly onwards, in the press of taxis and delivery vans that she felt too miserable to try to overtake.

This evening, with her thoughts focussed on what lay ahead and on her germ of a plan, her spirits rose.

Instead of following the bold curves of the urban motorway, this second part of the route led her through a net of streets, now up the big road that had once been the old coaching route northwards from the City, now veering sharply to the right to short-cut through residential streets where the pavements shone under a film of drizzle. She passed corner pubs done up Victorian-style, lit up for Saturday night’s business, little late-opening mini-markets, and big, darker, windy spaces that opened around railway embankments or factory buildings. She knew the route well, but she watched it unfold with satisfaction, whistling softly as she drove.

When she reached Jane’s neighbourhood there were fewer people out on the streets, and those that she did pass were mostly groups of spindly black youths with huge knitted caps on their heads. The shops were nearly all barred with metal grilles, although their haphazard, neon-lit windows piled with dusty toys and bleached packets seemed to offer minimal temptation. It wasn’t a comfortable-looking landscape, but Harriet never felt threatened by it. She often came to see Jane and had spent part of the last three weeks staying in her house. Jane liked the area for its busy mixture of West Indians, Greeks and Turks, and Harriet shared her affection for it.

Harriet turned, at length, into Jane’s street. It was lined with parked cars and the first one she saw was the Thimbells’ battered Citröen. That was good. She was happy that Jenny had felt like a party; Charlie would not have come without her. And she wanted to talk to Charlie. She needed his advice.

The door was opened by a man Harriet didn’t know. He had thick hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and he was wearing a kind of artist’s smock.

‘Hi,’ he greeted her.

‘Hi,’ Harriet answered. She held up her Oddbins bottle and the daisies, as if to establish her credentials.

‘Come in, if you can.’ The hallway was so narrow that as she squeezed in Harriet found herself momentarily wedged against the man, hip to hip. Then they both laughed, and she broke free. There were more people further in the hall and sitting on the haircord carpet that ran up the stairs.

Seeing that the press of people was thicker still in the kitchen, Harriet left her offerings on the bevel mirrored and be-hooked piece of shiny brown Victoriana that Jane used as a hallstand, and pushed her way into the living room. It had been created by knocking two tiny rooms together to make one medium-sized one. The floorboards had been sanded and sealed, and Jane had prudently rolled her Flokati rugs back for the evening. The furniture consisted of a pair of Victorian plush-covered sofas, one at each end of the room, and intermediate heaps of outsize cushions covered in Indian cotton. The alcoves beside the chimney breasts were lined with books. The stripped pine shutters at the windows enclosed the conviviality of talk, laughter and music.

The party was clearly well under way, but there were fewer people in here. Harriet wondered why people always did cram themselves into the kitchen at parties. She looked around, and saw that she knew most of the faces.

‘Harriet! Have a drink, where have you been all evening?’

The man who greeted her was a teacher, one of Jane’s colleagues from the comprehensive school. Harriet smiled at him and accepted a glass of Bulgarian Cabernet.

‘I’ve only just arrived. Late, as usual.’

‘Where’s Leo?’

She had met this teacher at dinners and at parties, but she didn’t know him well.

‘Not here tonight.’

‘Watch out, then.’ He grinned at her.

She nodded back, as neutrally as she could. Over by the bookshelves she saw Jenny. Jenny’s madonna face had developed hollows and her hair was pulled tightly back as if to punish it for unruliness. But she welcomed Harriet with her smile.

‘I’m glad you’re here.’

Jenny. You look fine.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Everything back to normal. All over and forgotten about.’

Harriet hesitated. ‘Is that what you want to feel?’

‘It’s what my mother wants me to feel. Even Charlie, most of the time. But I can’t forget I had a baby. I shouldn’t, should I?’

‘No, I don’t think you should,’ Harriet said softly.

‘I want to remember him. We only had him for a few hours, but that doesn’t make him any less important, does it? It seems like another … yet another hurt to him, to go about as if he never existed.’

Harriet listened, believing that that was what was needed.

‘I like to talk about him. Charlie doesn’t, you know. Charlie believes in looking to the future, and being realistic. Losing James hurt him as much as it hurt me, but he can’t admit it. It hasn’t been very easy for us to live together, since I came home.’

Harriet put her arm around her. ‘It will be all right,’ she said, believing that it would be. For Jenny as well as for herself she wished that time would speed up.

Jenny sniffed. ‘Yes. Sorry, Harriet. Not very festive. This is supposed to be a party.’ They held on to each other.

‘That’s what parties are for. Seeing your friends. Talk all you like, and I’ll listen all evening.’

‘No, that’s enough. I haven’t asked how you are, even.’

Harriet acknowledged her concern. ‘I’m all right,’ she said briefly, knowing that she would be. ‘Here’s Jane.’

Jane drank hardly anything herself, claiming that it disagreed with her, but she poured out liberally for everyone else. She was carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. Tonight she had exchanged her combat trousers for an all-in-one made of some plum-coloured, silky material, with a wide belt that bunched the shimmery fabric over her hips and breasts. She was wearing a liberal amount of plum-coloured lipstick too, and eyeshadow in a slightly lighter tone, but the effect was not in the least voluptuous. She looked exactly what she was — matter-of-fact and uncompromising. Harriet was pleased to see her.

‘You know, I miss you, now you’ve moved out,’ Jane said. ‘I was beginning to get used to having you around. Perhaps I should stop looking for a husband, and hunt for a wife instead?’

‘I don’t think I’m your type,’ Harriet answered. ‘Get one who can cook.’

‘Of course.’

The three of them laughed. Harriet felt the weight and the warmth of friendship. Its fuel was the interlinking of their ordinary lives, and their trust in one another. They never spoke of its significance, but her awareness of it buoyed her up. She felt happy, and wealthy, because she possessed it.

‘What have you been doing since you left me?’ Jane asked. ‘She looks OK on it, Jen, doesn’t she?’

‘She looks great.’

‘I’ve been packing, clearing the flat. Leo was there this afternoon.’

‘Was it grim?’

‘It was, rather,’ Harriet admitted.

‘It will be better when you’ve sorted out the domestic details,’ Jane said decisively. ‘What you need now, what we all need, is a drink followed by some food followed by some dancing and more drink.’ She called out to the room, ‘Come on, everybody.’

In entertaining, as in everything else, Jane believed in leading from the front. Jenny and Harriet smiled covertly at each other, but Jane intercepted the look.

‘Could you two please mingle a little?’

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ Harriet protested. ‘I’m going into the kitchen to find Charlie.’

She eased herself across the room and into the hall, and down the two steps to the kitchen at the back. From this room french windows opened on to Jane’s sunny patio garden where she grew herbs and Alpine strawberries in pots. Tonight the dining table had been pushed right up against the doors, and it was laid with baskets of French bread, brown earthenware dishes of guacamole and aubergine dip and garlic pâté, and dimple beer glasses filled with sheaves of celery. There were quiches, already half-eaten and spreading freckles of wholemeal pastry crumbs, and a whole uncut Brie. On the back burner of the gas stove there was a big pan of hot soup, probably carrot and coriander. Harriet had helped Jane prepare for parties in the past.

The tiled worktop along one wall was a jungle of bottles, all different colours and shapes, interspersed with glasses, plates, and party tins of beer. Charlie Thimbell leaned against the worktop, with a full glass of the Bulgarian Cabernet in his hand. He was talking vehemently to a nervous-looking girl in an embroidered blouse. They were pinned in place by more groups of chattering, laughing people. The girl looked to be in two minds about their tête-à-tête.

Charlie was only about the same height as Harriet, but his broad shoulders and thickset figure made him seem a much bigger man. Beneath the bluster, he was a shrewd financial journalist.

‘Totalitarianism,’ Harriet heard him shouting. The girl shrank beside him.

Harriet reached them and touched his elbow. ‘Charlie?’

He stopped in mid-tirade. ‘Hello, darling.’ He kissed her noisily and then glanced over her shoulder. Harriet realised that he was looking for Leo. In the same instant Charlie remembered that Leo would not be there. His face turned a shade redder.

‘It’s all right,’ Harriet said mildly. ‘I forget, too, and turn round to ask him something. Force of habit is surprisingly strong.’ She turned to the embroidered girl, intending to introduce herself, but the girl was already backing away.

‘What did I say?’ Charlie demanded, when she had gone. ‘Or was it you?’

‘It was you. When did she last get a chance to say anything?’

‘I gave her plenty of chances. She just didn’t take them.’

Harriet put her arm through his. ‘Charlie, I want to ask you something. Can we go somewhere quieter than in here?’

He looked alarmed. ‘About you and Leo? Not my strong point, all that sort of thing. Ask Jenny.’

His unwillingness was a pose, Harriet understood that, but she also knew that like most poses it exposed more truths than the poseur might wish. Charlie could talk all night about the money supply, or Arsenal’s prospects, or the Booker prize, but he didn’t like to talk about what he felt, or feared. As if to do so was to become vulnerable, in some way less than entirely masculine. Harriet remembered what Jenny had said. At least Jenny had her and Jane, the network of women, to talk to. It was probably harder for Charlie.

‘Business advice,’ Harriet said carefully.

‘In that case,’ he winked at her, ‘come upstairs.’

In the end they perched at the top of the stairs, looking down on the heads below. The man in the smock was still doing door duty. Harriet took the first mouthful of her wine.

‘How are you, Charlie?’

‘I’m fine. What is it you want advice about?’ Deflecting her from his own concerns, of course. What was it Jenny had said? It hasn’t been very easy for us to live together. Harriet thought of Leo, and then of the spectacular strength of women’s friendships.

‘Are you sure you don’t really need a solicitor?’ Charlie prompted her.

Harriet smiled. ‘I’ve got a solicitor.’

Her plan had become important to her. More than important, almost a lifeline. Charlie would be the first person she had shared it with and she didn’t want him to laugh at it or dismiss it, because she valued his judgement. She took a breath, launched herself.

‘Listen.’

‘I’ve been given a game, a game of skill and calculation, by a friend of mine. He invented it, and it’s very clever, very original. I want to develop the game, market it commercially. I think it will sell.’

She glanced sideways and saw that Charlie was staring gloomily down the stairs.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it.’

To her relief, Charlie’s face cleared. ‘That encourages me a little. Originality is the first requirement.’

‘What’s the next?’

Behind them, on the landing, someone stumbled against the bathroom door. Downstairs the music suddenly boomed out at double volume. The party was warming up.

‘If you’ve really no idea, then you should abandon this scheme at once. Go and ask that man in the blouse to dance with you, to take your mind off it. I’ll dance with you, if it will help.’ He looked at her face then, and changed his tone. ‘You work in retailing. You own a shop selling fashion goods, don’t you? You tell me what your first step should be.’

‘I do know,’ Harriet said. ‘I just wanted to … rehearse it with you. When you’re married you get used to someone being there, don’t you? To listen to you thinking aloud, setting your ideas straight? You notice the loss.’

She had told Simon, she remembered, that to listen was one of the duties of friendship.

Charlie was contrite. He took hold of her hand. ‘I’m sorry. Go on then, rehearse.’

‘Research.’ She began ticking off points on their linked fingers. ‘Look at the market, establish what the competition is, study their figures. Define my own market. Get a prototype made, establish manufacturing costs. Figure out how to sell. Make a business plan, taking a best-possible and a worst-possible set of results. Get into the City and raise the capital. Or something like that.’ She made a sound that was half a nervous laugh, half a groan of dismay.

Charlie nursed his drink in his free hand. ‘Do you want to do all this?’

‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘Oh yes, I want to. I need to do it.’

Charlie looked at her again. It seemed incongruous to hear this talk of business plans and market research in Jane Hunter’s impeccably homespun house. To Charlie, Harriet looked hungry and just a little driven. Need, he thought, was probably just the right word. And if she was to make her scheme work, it would take all the drive she could muster.

‘There will be a heap of work to do,’ he told her, ‘even before you’re ready to go out and get your requests for investment turned down.’

‘I’m not afraid of work.’ A shrug of Harriet’s shoulders told him, eloquently, that she had nothing else to focus on. He felt the vibration of sympathy. Work was a useful palliative.

‘Have you got any capital of your own?’

‘My half of the flat, once the sale goes through. Twenty thousand. I’ve rented somewhere cheap for a year.’

‘Yes. Harriet, do you know about the risk/reward ratio?’

‘Not exactly.’ She was reluctant to admit not knowing anything that might be relevant to her plan.

‘You have to ask yourself whether all the effort and energy and time that you will have to put into developing this business will pay off for you in the end. Will you get enough out of it to make it worthwhile?’

Harriet didn’t hesitate. ‘I want to do it. The game exists, I want to go with it. And I could make a lot of money, couldn’t I?’ Charlie laughed, looking cheerful again. ‘There would be no point otherwise. You’d better let me have a look at this wonderful game of yours. Are you sure there’s no problem over the rights?’

‘I was told that I could do what I like with it. But I’ll make sure, don’t worry.’ For a moment, in place of Jane’s cream-painted stairwell with its framed prints and hanging plants, and the rising scent of carrot soup, she saw Simon’s dim house and smelt the damp and decay. She shivered a little and, mistaking the reason for it, Charlie put his arm around her.

‘Do you remember Crete, Harriet?’

‘Yes, I remember Crete.’

They had been travelling in Greece, half a dozen of them, in their last student vacation. Charlie and Jane and Harriet had all been there; Jenny had been doing something else that summer.

They had reached Vai on the eastern coast, finding a crescent of white sand and a fringe of palm trees, and underneath the palms there were the painted camper vans and orange tents of other travellers. They pitched their tents beside this company, hung up their travel-dirty clothes, and ran down to the sea to swim.

The days were hot, and the hours stretched or telescoped under the eye of the sun. They basked in the sunshine, swam in the iridescent water and read their paperbacks in the shade of the palms. They exchanged travel stories with bearded German boys, although their fund was meagre compared with the Germans who had quartered Europe in their Volkswagen campers. In the red light of beach barbecues they talked to the blonde, beautiful Scandinavians and smoked joints and listened to guitars with the friendly Dutch.

‘It’s perfect,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s Utopia.’

Jane sat cross-legged, with her hair crinkled by sun and salt loose over her shoulders. Even the soles of her feet looked tanned.

‘No violence, no greed, no theft.’ The sun had hypnotised them all, they had few possessions and less money. ‘No vanity, no competition, no racism.’

‘No prudery, nothing to hide.’

A few yards away, on a blanket, Geza and Inge the Swedes were making love. They took a long time over it, and appeared to have endlessly healthy appetites for the banquet of one another. Charlie opened his eyes.

‘Are they still at it? Would you really be happy to go on living like this?’

‘For ever,’ Jane murmured.

‘And the work ethic?’

‘I could subliminate it.’

‘Man lives to work as well as to love,’ Charlie reminded them. ‘One could point out as much to our friend Geza.’

At night, under the formidable stars, they sat around their driftwood fires and set about changing the world. For all the differences in shades of opinion, they were all certain that when they had drunk enough retsina and when the angle of the sun in the sky had declined enough to suggest autumn instead of high summer, they would return home to inherit systems that could be altered to suit their visions. They were full of innocent optimism and zeal.

One evening, as the talk eddied in circles, someone had asked, ‘What do you want, then, Harriet?’

Someone else had responded, ‘Harriet wants to be rich and famous.’

Defending herself with a quick retort she had answered, ‘Just rich will do.’

It was such an unfashionable response, such a bathetic contrast to the house of high-minded talk that had preceded it, that just as she had intended everyone laughed. In the days afterwards she was teased about her bourgeois ideals and exploitative intentions.

And then not long after that, as if governed by the same impulses as swallows gathering on telephone wires in English villages, the campers began to put on their tattered clothes once more and to talk about the long trek homewards to Munich and Amsterdam and Manchester. Harriet’s remark was forgotten as sleeping bags were rolled up and stored in the camper vans, and the tents were collapsed and folded away. A cold wind had started to blow from the east, whipping the sand up the beach. They slung their guitars from their shoulders and tied on their headbands, then set off in twos and threes down the rutted track that led away from the beach.

Utopia seemed a long way behind them even before they reached Heraklion.

‘Yes, I remember Crete.’ Sun and salt water, retsina and talk, endless talk. Harriet no longer felt young or innocent, and she knew that it was illogical to feel a shiver of regret for ten years ago. But she felt the shiver just the same.

‘I remember that I said I wanted to be rich.’

‘Have you been nursing entrepreneurial ambitions all this time?’

But Charlie had misunderstood her. They were not entrepreneurial ambitions, but ambitions for Simon’s game.

‘I said what I said, all that time ago, as a kind of joke. A joke that was forced on me.’

‘There’s no need to excuse it, then or now. I admire you Harriet. If you want to do it, go ahead. The financial climate is good, as you know, this government approves of enterprise, as you also know. I wish you the best of luck, if that’s what you want to hear. If there’s anything I can do to help you, you know I will.’

Harriet stood up, as if he had given her his blessing. She kissed Charlie’s cheek, finding it solid and warm. At the same moment she felt the blood in her own veins, and the bones under her skin. There was no husband downstairs. There was nothing, except her plan. She felt weightless, intoxicated with excitement all over again.

Charlie looked up. ‘I’m sorry about Leo,’ he said, surprising her.

‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Harriet answered. ‘We didn’t make each other happy. Someone, or something, else will.’ She didn’t think he heard the qualification. It was for herself, in any case, not for Charlie. ‘Thanks for your advice. I think I’ll take the rest of it, and go and dance with the man in the blouse.’

Harriet was leaning over him. Without thinking, Charlie reached up and slid his hand inside her red shirt. He held one warm, bare breast in the cup of his palm. The weight of it felt nice, comforting.

Harriet smiled and gently removed his hand. She had lived naked for a month on a Greek beach with Charlie Thimbell; it would be prudish to object to his touch. And it gave her a small shock of pleasure that was not particularly sexual. It was more a thrill of novelty, of freedom.

‘Thanks,’ she said again. Charlie watched her as she retreated down the stairs. It was years since he had asked himself whether or not he found Harriet physically attractive. He supposed that at some stage he had decided not, because he preferred women who were pretty, and seemingly pliant, like Jenny. Yet tonight he had felt some charge in Harriet that was definitely stimulating. It was probably a good thing, he reflected, that she had separated from Leo Gold. He was afraid that it would be less of a good thing for her to divert her energies into marketing some game.

Charlie’s thoughts completed a circle and returned to Jenny. He felt a mixture of tenderness, exasperation, and the chafing of his own grief. He wanted to find a way to assuage Jenny’s sorrow, but the extent of it seemed as daunting as the sea. She had retreated into the depths of it. They had not made love since the baby had died. The brief flicker of desire that Charlie had felt for Harriet transferred itself to Jenny, and steadied.

Charlie stood up. It was time to take Jenny away from this party, away home to bed.

Downstairs again, Harriet was drawn into the party. There were other friends to see, some who were close and others she was glad to catch up with. She drank some wine, found herself laughing, and talking over the music as the circles formed and reformed. It was a good party. Harriet caught a glimpse of Jane dancing with a man in a blue shirt, and was pleased that she was enjoying herself too.

Charlie and Jenny looked in at the door, both wearing their coats. Harriet waved, and blew a kiss.

The dancing started seriously. Jane’s teacher colleague found Harriet and drew her into it. He was quite drunk, and he wound his arms around her as if without her support he might fall down. He mumbled hotly in her ear, ‘You’re asking for trouble, coming without your husband.’ Harriet removed his hands, less affectionately than Charlie’s.

As soon as she could she disengaged herself and wandered through to the kitchen. The smock and ponytail man was noisily drinking soup from a Royal Wedding mug. Harriet introduced herself and discovered in quick succession, that his name was Bernard, that he was a vegan and an amateur astrologer, and that he wasn’t the kind of man to whom she wanted to talk for a second longer than was necessary. To her relief, the girl in the embroidered blouse came to claim him.

Harriet turned away and with automatic energy began to clear the empty bottles from Jane’s tiled work-top. When that was done she emptied the sink of dirty plates and glasses, and stacked them neatly on the draining board ready to be washed. As she worked she was reflecting that she had come to the party in search of something, and that she had failed to find it. It wasn’t as a replacement for what she had lost with Leo, not love, of course, and equally certainly not sex.

She picked up a tea-towel and began to dry some plates, wiping carefully and then stopping to stare into the black glass of the window that reflected the room behind her. She saw Jane’s plum-coloured outfit move in a blur of other people. Jane had given up hostessing in favour of having a good time. Harriet smiled. What she had found at the party was the company of friends. The warmth that had greeted her stayed with her, buoying her up.

When she looked into the window again, she saw the reflection of a man behind her. He was wearing a bright blue shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. She had seen the same man earlier, dancing with Jane.

Then from behind her shoulder he asked, ‘Is that more interesting than mingling with your fellow-guests?’

He spoke with an accent, Yorkshire or perhaps even further north. Harriet turned round. She was irritated by his suggestion, but at the same time she saw how she must have looked, back turned to the room and arms plunged in the sink.

‘I have mingled,’ she said. The man was very good-looking. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed him before, then tried briefly to work out how much wine she had drunk before abandoning the calculation. ‘Then I saw that this needed doing. I thought I’d help Jane out a bit.’ There was no need to justify herself; she hoped she wasn’t doing it because he had black curly hair and a face that made her think of a prize-fighter’s before the puffy disfigurement.

‘Jane?’

Harriet was startled. ‘This is Jane’s party. Jane’s house. You were dancing with her an hour ago.’ She felt lighthearted. She didn’t immediately connect the lightheartedness with relief at finding that he didn’t know who Jane was.

‘That Jane. I’ve just met her. I’m staying with some people and they brought me along. I didn’t know anyone when I arrived, including Jane.’

He shrugged, an attractive, apologetic shrug, and Harriet smiled at him.

‘I’ll stop washing up if you can find me a drink.’

He rummaged amongst the half-full bottles and poured out two glasses of wine. They stood in the corner by the fridge, where Harriet had found Charlie at the beginning of the evening, and made the conversation of strangers meeting at a party. The man’s name was David. The more Harriet looked at him, the more attractive he appeared.

‘Are you married, Harriet?’ David was looking down at her hands.

‘I was,’ she said neutrally.

‘So was I.’

A moment ago they had been talking about restoring houses. The mutual admission seemed at once to put them on a different footing. Harriet felt breathless and then surprised. The music from the other room had stopped for a while, but now it suddenly began again. The party was in its last, noisy throes. David took her glass out of her hand.

‘Come and dance with me.’

The living room was darkened, almost empty now. One other couple was dancing, with the music booming around them. David took her hand and they began to dance. He held her differently from the drunk teacher. The difference was that he did it right. Harriet closed her eyes, letting the music take her over. David was humming under his breath, his face close to hers. She thought how good it was to be held. How good, and how easy. They danced for quite a long time, and then something happened. David shifted his position slightly, moving from one side to squarely in front of her. He put his hands round her waist, and she knew that he was going to draw her hips against his. Then he would kiss her.

Harriet opened her eyes. The music became just a noise, although The Police were singing the same song. She didn’t want anyone to kiss her. It was a long time since anyone but Leo had done so, and she didn’t want this now. But all the time she was thinking don’t, Harriet also knew that it would be exciting to take this man home with her, and let him warm her bed and her body. It was a long time since she had done anything of the kind, but she hadn’t forgotten. They would steal into a dark room, and then blink at each other in the unwelcome light. They would take hold of each other, and their clothes would drop in tangled heaps as the two of them fastened together.

She remembered how imperative it was, and all the myriad welcome demands that came afterwards. Not just for a night and a day, something told her, but for a long time afterwards.

Only Harriet was impatient. She didn’t have any time, now, to give to the absorbing conspiracies of love.

She looked carefully at David’s face. It was a good face, one that would have stared out of a crowd at her. And behind David she saw two more of her friends, preparing to leave. Harriet slipped neatly and definitively out of the grasp of his hands.

‘I must go and say good-night.’

In the good face, the undamaged pugilist’s face, she saw a shadow of irritation. It was like a man, Harriet thought. At the same rebuff a woman might have revealed hurt, or anger, or anxiety. In a man, it was simply annoyance. She crossed the room quickly and rather unsteadily. She told herself that she had had a lot to drink, that she mustn’t drink any more.

After she had said goodnight to the couple who were leaving, Harriet went upstairs. She locked herself into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath. She studied Jane’s asparagus and spider plants grouped in their wicker basket, the bowls of soap and jars of cosmetics and creams, and the moon-face of the bathroom scales. She breathed deeply and evenly, remembering that she had felt breathless, like a silly girl. She decided that she had had a fortunate escape, and ignored the steady impulse to run downstairs and find the man again. That would be the first of the inevitable steps that would lead them back to her borrowed flat. When they reached it she would unbutton the blue shirt and wind her fingers in the black curls. It would be good and it would hurt nobody.

‘Shit,’ Harriet said aloud.

She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror over Jane’s washbasin. Then she rummaged in Jane’s quilted make-up bag and found the plum-coloured lipstick. She applied it to her own mouth, and found that it didn’t suit her either.

She didn’t know how long she had been locked in the bathroom; it was absurd to cower in there any longer. She flushed the lavatory unnecessarily and unlocked the door.

In the kitchen Jane and the last stragglers were drinking coffee.

‘I’d love some,’ Harriet said. She took the wedding mug that Bernard the vegan had used earlier and tried to interest herself in a conversation about gender bias in nursery education. She was looking out of the corner of her eye for the blue shirt, hoping that it wouldn’t reappear. When it did, there was a thick, dark sweater over it. David had come, with the couple who had brought him, to say good-night to Jane. He kissed Jane on the cheek and thanked her, but he held out his hand to Harriet. She shook it, with the certainty that he was laughing at her.

‘Perhaps we’ll meet again,’ David said. The northern accent seemed pronounced now.

‘Perhaps.’ Perfectly straightforward, neither encouraging nor unnecessarily chilly. Harriet was proud of herself but although she couldn’t see his grin, she knew it was there. She formed some words experimentally in her head, smug and arrogant amongst them.

As she watched him go, ducking his head in the doorway, she discovered that she was quite strongly tempted to run after him. She stood absolutely still, and heard the front door open and close.

Then she let her shoulders drop. It had indeed been a narrow escape. Was this going to happen, then, this knock-kneed surge of barely focussed lust, whenever she met a new man, just because Leo was no longer glowering at her side? Harriet smiled at the thought. She didn’t have time to indulge herself with anything of the kind. Tonight was an aberration, and the man’s impact was fading already. She couldn’t even remember the configuration of his boxer’s features.

‘I’ll make another pot of coffee, shall I?’ Harriet volunteered to Jane.

At last, the stayers drifted away. They engaged themselves, as late guests always did, in vehement conversations held half in and half out of the front door. But finally only Jane and Harriet herself were left to survey the damage in the kitchen.

Jane shoved a line of dirty glasses to one side and sank down on one of her pine chairs.

‘I’m not doing anything with any of this until tomorrow,’ she announced. Her hair had half-freed itself from its plait, and the last vestiges of the plum-coloured maquillage had disappeared. She looked as if she was relieved. She rested her chin in her hands and beamed across the table at Harriet. ‘Isn’t this always the best bit of a party? When everyone’s gone, and you can sit back and talk about them?’

‘I had a good time. Did you?’

Jane gave a long sigh. ‘I don’t, usually, not at my own parties. All that scurrying about with drinks and dips. Husbands are useful for that, at least.’

Harriet grinned. ‘Leo was never much good at it. You’d do better to hire a butler.’

Jane wasn’t listening. ‘But I did enjoy tonight. Did you see him, in the blue shirt? Yes, of course you did. You danced with him, didn’t you? What did you think of him?’

Harriet opened her mouth but she heard the warning bells. She had felt relief that Jane didn’t know him a little prematurely, it seemed.

‘About who? Oh, yes. Him. Quite nice, I suppose.’ Harriet stretched her feet out on the chair next to her. She saw that someone had neatly dropped ash in the suede folds of her boots.

Jane was listening carefully enough now. She looked narrowly at Harriet. ‘Did you fancy him?’

‘What? No. Or only from afar.’ She had locked herself in Jane’s bathroom, run through the entire future sequence of events, and decided that she couldn’t spare the time. That was all. ‘I’m too busy for that sort of thing.’

‘Hmm. He’s staying with the Greens. He’s some sort of a builder.’

‘So I gather.’

‘You talked to him as well?’

Harriet held up her hands, laughing, defending herself. ‘Only for five minutes. He’s yours, take him.’

Jane sighed again. ‘I’d welcome the chance. Well, he knows where to find me.’ She frowned at Harriet, not quite soberly. ‘What do you mean, you’re too busy for that sort of thing? Perhaps a short sharp affair is just what you needed at this point?’

‘I don’t think so. I haven’t told you what I’m going to do. Can we forget the builder for a minute?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I’m going to start a business.’ Harriet jumped to her feet, unable to keep still while she talked. She began to clear up, cutting a swathe through the debris. Jane watched her, blinking, her chin still resting on her hand.

At the end, Harriet leaned back against the sink and folded her arms. ‘So what do you think?’

Jane pondered. ‘I think …’

Harriet waited, knowing that Jane’s approval was as important, in its different way, as Charlie’s had been, and also knowing that she would go ahead with her plan whatever Jane said.

‘I think it sounds a fine idea.’

‘Thank you.’ Harriet bent down and hugged her, and the fraying plait tickled her cheek.

‘So put that bloody tea towel down, and tell me how you’re going to get started.’

‘Homework. Lots of homework, and then trying to raise the money. Charlie made it quite clear that it wouldn’t be easy.’

Jane thought for a moment. ‘I’ve got some money saved. A couple of thousand, that’s all, but you could have that if it would help.’

Harriet was amazed. Jane’s generosity was on a far grander scale than her embryo plan called for, and she was touched by it. To hide her feelings she teased, ‘It might be a good investment. You’ll get a healthy return on your money, I promise.’

Jane was scandalised. ‘I offered it for you, not because I want to make money out of you.’

‘I know that,’ Harriet told her. ‘And I’m grateful.’

‘I hope so. Oh God, look at the time. It’s nearly four o’clock.’

‘I’m going home alone to Belsize Park.’

‘To slip between the balance sheets.’

Their laughter acknowledged their singleness, and their affection for each other.

‘Won’t you stay the night?’

‘I’d rather go home. I’ll come back and help with this in the morning.’

Harriet was thinking about the game, propped up against the wall in the empty flat. It drew her back, as if they needed one another’s protection.

‘You’ve done more than half already. Call me.’

Jane stood in the circle of light from her porch to watch her go.

The streets were empty as Harriet reversed her zigzag journey. The gangs of youths had filtered away and even the few cars that swept past her seemed to travel without human intervention. It was as if she was alone in the world. It was pleasant to be warm and safe and isolated in the darkness. Harriet smiled. She wasn’t thinking about Charlie Thimbell reaching up to touch her breast, or about the man in the blue shirt. She was thinking about friendship, and the evening’s confirmation of it. She hummed as she drove.