Wait Till I Tell You

by Candia McWilliam

  Christy had foreseen everything. He’d even sorted in his mind the big thing, which was the children. With great care, he had not sucked up to them, nor let them know that he was in their power, in a way they could not understand. He had not even let on that he was familiar with their preferences as to meat – white or brown, skin or no skin, sloppy or dry – when it came to carving the turkey which he had taken care not to carve like a man with domestic rights over the woman who had stuffed and smoothed, dried, basted, lifted and adorned it. He had restrained his impulse to fold and retain any paper that would do for another year, for in another year, who knew if he would be there? He had foreseen everything, made his plans accordingly; and now this.

  He snapped off dead branches when he saw them and broke them into lengths for kindling. There was no need for this, but Christy was a man who did several things at the one time with pleasure. Because it was his habit, established over the years of living well alone, he was not distracted. He could think about one thing and do another to a more developed extent than men who had been married. In this he was self-sufficient like a soldier.

  When he and Nella were children, their names had been different. In those formal years, they had been Christian and Eleanor. He had liked her and of course they had agreed to marry. At eight and ten they were parted. She had been the more wretched, or made more fuss, he remembered, perhaps because, as the elder, she was nearer the confusion to come.

  Their parents had made the usual careless and public allusions to the parting. Eleanor’s mother used it as a topic to entertain her friends in the street; Christy’s mother to inform her new neighbours halfway up a hill in Ayrshire that there had been close friendships down in England, that there was no sinister reason for returning North beyond the coming back home. As fast as she knitted this frail web, Christy’s father undid it with false promisings and borrowings and gluey stories of expectations, until he one night tore up the whole caper and did a flit. It took Christy the years between growing up and turning thirty-two to make that lot good, and see to it that his mother was sorted. Her success in novelty wools and rare yarns quite took him by surprise. He thought it must be the profitable outcome of her years of talking with other quiet women in rooms, more used to changing things with their hands than with their voices. All at once she was the woman to talk to about angora or welterweight synthetics, the tensile strength of two-ply or the incompatibility of certain silks. She sold east and west, not only the two Scots coasts, but over the world, travelling light and owing not a penny.

  There had been no plan to Christy’s life but pleasing himself and his mother. On hearing of Eleanor’s marriage, long after it had taken place, he felt simultaneously the disappointment of an eight-year-old and the pique of a grown man. When, five years later, he heard of the departure of her husband, he sympathised for a moment with the man, remembering how maddening Eleanor was at board games, competitive one moment and uninterested the next.

  He sympathised too with any man who had to deal with a woman with so furious a passion for digging. Then he remembered that it was more than twenty years since they had spent the afternoons trying to get to the centre of the earth, ‘where it is hot’, said Eleanor, ‘and only apparently unmoving’. They had found the phrase in a book about science. It was the pomposity to the words and their suggestiveness that got the two of them.

  After meeting Eleanor again at an event thrown for his mother by a yarn king or somesuch, he had concentrated his suit upon her for those last London days before normal life put itself away for Christmas. She’d not noticed a blind thing. He was delighted when Eleanor’s father, who’d lived with her since her mother’s death, suggested that both families get together, for the new year. For that most dangerous sake, of old time.

  Keeping in store, as he was, his great news.

  The sky was harder now to find between the branches.

  What had been white was a blue that was as soft as fur. In the dusk the needles underfoot were more treacherous.

  Christy stopped and listened, the bundle of kindling held stiffly in front of him, his dues to improving the shining hour, like his mother’s knitting. He was tired.

  He turned to look down the many paths for Nella. He tried to sense, almost to smell, down which path she would come. He made her out of the dusk, element by element, gold hair, white coat, cold hands. She materialised not like smoke as he, conjuring her out of the approaching night, had imagined, but short and warm, lost, furious and there. She hit at him with relief as he held on to her, the kindling snapping between them. She asked him the question he had not dared ask: ‘What will it do to us when our parents marry each other?’

  Christy pulled the burry kindling off her white coat. ‘There’s enough of what we have to go round,’ he said. They stood there till the darkness was decided, and the kindling which Christy slowly let drop made the ground under them the only rough ground in all the slipping wood.

  Being a People Person

  As will be clear, this story was written

  before the reunification of Germany.

  ‘And, above all, you’ve got to be a people person,’ finished the person, addressing a number of people in the personnel room. As though, thought Patrick, one could ever get away from being so. Since the last tangle with a person, I don’t care if I become a louse-person, or a concrete-person, anything at all in fact but a people person.

  A person laughed in a most unseemly way and Patrick followed the sound in case it was he himself who had made the noise. Since Frances had gone, leaving the teapot warm and the paper folded at the ‘How to Spend It’ page of the Financial Times, he had suffered from bouts of disembodiment. One time he had seen a very drunk man fall down in the distant purple mirror behind a cocktail bar. Red cherries and tall cocktail spoons made a Miró of the mirror. Only in the morning did he realise that it had been himself, Patrick, who could wash in rye and stay dry behind the ears. Corny jokes come easily to admen, he thought. I think in phrases which would fit on a bus-side. Was his id riddled with quick quips and reflex associations too? He admired the notion that he might be a perfectly functioning phenomenon, a faultless free-market capitalist. A credit to any mother, though in fact considered a debit by his own, since taking up this job. She’d sooner he were a teacher or a preacher. Or anything but what he was.

  Patrick was twenty-nine and he was going to live for ever. Or he had been until Frances went. In actual fact, maybe he’d live for ever anyway. That would spite her.

  Now, where was that laugh coming from? Patrick minded people looking instantly towards the source of some irregularity, a lunatic on the tube, or a raving prophet on the bus, so he dropped something behind himself in order to pick it up in the most natural way in the world and lift his head, at the same moment darting his eyes to the source of the laugh.

  His glance struck and stuck. If that was a person, he certainly was a people person. ‘Certainly am,’ the other guys in the office would say if you asked them if they were going out that night. Was Patrick a people person? Certainly was.

  Catch a load of her. She resembled everyone’s sweetest fantasy. Sisterly sexiness shone from her, asking to be licked off like butterscotch sauce. She had that kind of French colouring which looks good with lace and an old bike in some campaign shot in an attic for five hundred grand. Dipped in water, she’d just get shiny, and deepen fractionally in colour, like damp sand. Twenty-four-ish, he supposed, just turning the corner from legwear to food products. None the worse for that, though. Older is bolder, thought Patrick. It was not his own phrase, though he prided himself on learning fast.

  But she didn’t look bold, he thought, in relief. Demure was the word, which was how you wanted them when it came down to it, to look at at any rate. That folksy old saying about the perfect chick being a maid in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom was the one Patrick intended sticking to from here on in; he preferred the old ways, the good ways, tried and trusted, passed down from father to son, or was it
from hand to mouth?

  Her name was Louella and she was a doll. No one didn’t like her. Right then in the personnel room of Drive, Torque, MacIsmo, the cream of the firm’s team was busy liking her a lot. Patrick couldn’t think for the moment why she was there, but they often got visitors at Drive, Torque. It was the coming agency.

  Several of the men in the room were plotting. They were people people, after all. How to get rid of the evening’s domestic arrangements and insinuate this toasty, sugary young woman into those valued leisure hours? Work hard, play hard, that was the form. And they believed women were people, these men; certainly did. One or two of them had even learnt the lingo necessary to trap the new people women; there were certain key lines to put forth which would almost guarantee a lady’d put out. A bit of jaw about freedom, space, quality time, and the figgy treat was on the table, all but.

  The biggest account held by Drive, Torque was a confectionery bar aimed at the homebound housewife; like her, Jeremy Drive was fond of saying, it was soft with little hard bits, sweet but with only natural sweetness, and could be eaten at any time when nothing more leisurely was possible. The bar’s shape was that of many of the bottles to be found in any household cupboard, straight-sided with a neatly rounded swelling at the top. The product developers have long known this shape is specially congenial to the female grip. In the case of the bar the swelling was coated with chocolate over a bullet of vanilla cream, which tipped a core of honeycomb. As the marketing director said, ‘Show me the bird who didn’t learn French kissing on a Crunchie bar and I’ll show you a nun in the Rasputin.’ The Rasputin was a club where advertising men met up with each other in a leisure situation. It stayed in the swim with a total makeover every couple of years. Last time it was done over had been when the promotion for a kind of dogfood had got out of hand. It was like the dogs hadn’t known how to behave at a big do.

  The ice-cream at the Rasputin was said to be made by a deaf mute from the Bombay Taj. (‘What other Taj is there?’, the club’s manager asked.) None of the members had seen the subcontinental icecream man and his legend grew. Jeremy Drive said it stood to reason, ‘The deprived are the best at luxury goods, take it from me.’

  The confectionery bar was called Goldenrod; its tag was ‘the molten gold bar’. The teaser slots on TV, between long stories for washing powder and baby alarms, ran ‘The at-home bar – guilt-free gold, in your mouth now’. The direct reference to the act of eating had been thought a bit near the edge by one of the girl juniors in media, but the client had explained matters to her. After all, the bar contained not less than 20 per cent full farm yoghurt, the only food known to peel off pounds whether you slap it on or slurp it down. She was a big girl, and that stopped her mouth.

  Late at night in the Rasputin (some tyros called it the Raz of course, but this did them no good at all among the real helium warriors who called it the Monk), the Goldenrod bar was referred to as the choc cock and the men felt they had isolated a great truth not merely about the advertising business but about women.

  Drive, Torque, MacIsmo had a considerable number of accounts, but the big one at the moment was definitely Goldenrod. There was a Goldenrod guy, a man whose career was not in modelling, so he had the right homey feel. His parents had come from a small part of what was now East Germany; his name was Axel and he needed the money badly. It was good money. He wore specs and didn’t look like a woman when wardrobe put him in a cardigan for C2 credibility at personal appearances.

  Patrick’s brief at the moment was to find a Goldenrod girl. Axel’s own girlfriend, who was in fact his wife, would not do. She had to be, excuse the double meaning, kept pretty dark. Patrick liked her fine and she was beautiful, but she was black as your hat and incredibly serious. Like a lot of Senegalese, she was a catwalk model, which left her quite a lot of time for Axel. Most of the girls who lasted, she’d explained to Patrick, just looked extraordinary. Most of them simply lived their lives; it was the minority who changed racing drivers every season. Anyhow, catch Roxanne eating a Goldenrod, all those refined sugars.

  Those executives of Drive, Torque who had seen Roxanne talked about her as though she were a bit alarming, like a big cat with good manners. After a few bevvies, they’d discuss her, in depth; last thing she needed was a choc cock. Axel was completing his doctorate in insects’ nervous systems; mayflies were his special interest. Did the shortness of their lives make for speeded-up messages between neurones? Axel worried that his own time would run out before he found an answer.

  The meeting in the personnel room had been on Goldenrod. For the first time since Frances’s departure, Patrick felt sentimental as well as physiological lust, something less itchy than simple appetite. He was determined to win the nut-brown girl. It was the end of a long day and he felt he owed himself a reward, something soft and creamy and delicious.

  ‘Meeting adjourned,’ said the person at the head of the long white table, ‘I’ll be interested to see what you can come up with.’ Patrick could not remember how the last hour or so had been spent. The words had been the same as ever, maybe in a different order, that’s all. There was a shuffling and dealing of bits of paper; the secretaries left the personnel room, followed by the girl. Who would be the first to reach her without seeming uncool? Patrick hung back, and, once the room had emptied, took the chairman’s private lift down, intending to catch her at the door of the mirrored building – it was worth the risk. He looked at his own face in the walls of the lift. He was satisfactorily reflected back to himself on all sides. He wouldn’t take her to the Monk, he decided, careful even in his private thoughts to use the most exclusive slang. Strive to belong, behave as though you belong, and you will belong, he told himself regularly throughout each day. Act as though you are one of them and you will become one of them. It was not that hard, mostly just a matter of not speaking first, laughing in the right place, and copying their gestures and phrases. If you wanted something enough, you generally got it, and Patrick wanted to be one of them. They were sleek. They knew what to do. They weren’t losers.

  Not the Monk, then, but somewhere he could receive her undivided attention. He allowed his thoughts to soften. He might even have begun to feel a stirring in his imagination had he not gained the revolving glass door just as she did. There she miraculously was, in deep brown fur and pale leather boots. No one else seemed to be about.

  ‘How do you do? I noticed you in that meeting. Where do you fit into the campaign? I’m Patrick Hunter, by the way.’ He was keeping things light, important with really pretty ones. The better looking they were, the more offhand you’d to be or they thought you were a woman. Peter Torque slipped him that tip one night they’d been working late on a flowchart.

  ‘Hello, I’m Louella Drummond, and I’m in market research.’ She had quite a deep voice and white teeth without ridges. Rich girl’s teeth. No sugar abuse there. There was a candied scent from her hair and skin. Her gaze had an interesting blankness. Patrick gained confidence.

  ‘I was wondering if you were free for a bite of supper?’ he heard himself asking in an almost perfect imitation of the tones he knew got results, because he’d heard them time and again in the Monk. He sounded offhand but full of potential.

  ‘Oh, that would be really nice, Patrick,’ said this delicious girl, with her fresh hair and small brown gloves.

  ‘Shall we go then? How do you like to eat? Korean? Thai? Japanese?’ First time he’d been asked how he liked to eat, Patrick had said, ‘Sitting down.’ That had torn them up laughing. ‘God, you kill me, Paddy,’ Jeremy said, hitting him repeatedly in the chest.

  Patrick had not been brought up in the knowledge of foreign food and he found its demands confusing. If pushed, he could do that hairstyling thing with a fork and spaghetti.

  ‘Actually,’ she replied, ‘I’m not good at fancy food. I’d really like something simple.’

  They ate at a restaurant he’d picked up on from his colleagues. The cost legitimised the simplicity of the food.


  All about sat refugees from complicated foodstuffs. Patrick ordered tomato soup, mixed grill, and crumble with cream for both of them. She was quite happy to eat what he ate; she drank water. Patrick had a beer. He didn’t, frankly, like wines. He’d said as much once at a business lunch and there was a bit of a hush.

  ‘Prefer a milky drink, do you?’ Jeremy asked, which was quite nice of him really, to make a joke of something people like him clearly held to be serious.

  Patrick was soon absorbed. She was an amazing listener. Not seeming to say, let alone tell, much, she soon had it all out of him about his mum and the house in Weston. Then she had it out of him like a tooth he was happy to lose about Frances and her stuck-up parents with their indoor pool and gins you could do backstroke in. Then it came out about Frances’s ideas on women. He did not go so far as to tell this soft creature about Frances’s active role in the Anti-Infibulation Association. Frances had been quite unfeminine in that way. Even to talk about those sort of matters would surely offend and confuse Louella, never mind the problem of defining infibulation for her over the mixed grill’s selected inner parts and their modest parsley leaf.

  He began to feel that his sensation on Frances’s departure had been relief, with a dash of self-pity. She had known how to iron and Patrick, with all his shirts, had appreciated that. He missed it still.

  ‘Not that I don’t want a girl to be independent,’ he was saying. This was a line which had led him more than once through feint and skirmish to surrender. He spoke to girls in this mode as though he were handing them a bag of sweeties.

  ‘Oh, I just don’t want independence,’ she responded, making wide eyes and drawing her spoon out of her mouth upwards, so that he could see part of her tongue and the silver bowl tipped to reflect, upside down, his own face, made paler by the patina of the silver.