But I recall little of what he said after that. I will confess that even at this early stage I was so distracted by the strange sensation that had come over me as a consequence of meeting Nick Brown again, that I took no notice whatsoever of anything that was said and had to have Ruth fill me in via whispers. I didn’t see it like that then of course. But it’s all too obvious now.
He caught up with me again back in reception.
‘Everything OK with your car, then?’ he asked me.
I nodded, feeling shy. ‘The car is fine.’
‘And you too?’
‘Yes. Quite OK, thanks.’
‘And here you are again.’ His eyes narrowed as he smiled. ‘And you work for Sandals. Your friend is right. What a turn up.’
I gestured at his pink badge. ‘And you work for Drug U Like.’
‘Hmm. Guilty again.’
‘Guilty?’
He cast an eye over the sea of heads. ‘I’m not getting a terrifically good vibe here this evening. I’m not sure the UK is quite ready for the Drug U Like approach to retail.’
‘It’s just the uncertainty, I suppose. No one’s really sure what’s going to happen. What is going to happen? Is it true about there being redundancies?’
He narrowed his eyes further. His suit, I noticed, was of some soft floppy fabric, and his tie wasn’t pink, but the colour of his eyes . ‘I probably know no more than you do,’ he said. ‘A lot will depend on what happens with the pilot stores. There’ll be some relocations, no doubt. But that’s not my primary remit. ’
Corporate speak. More of those R-words. Good. I felt a whole lot less flustered talking shop. ‘And your remit is what?’
‘To set up the new optom division here, initially. Rationalise our resources. Team-build. Put systems in place. Bring a little good ol’ Drug U Like magic to the unsuspecting people of Sussex.’ He grinned. ‘That kind of thing.’
His tone, I noticed, was ironic. ‘So. Rollerblades it is, then,’ I said, draining my drink.
‘Rollerblades?’
‘My friend Ruth seems to think the Drug U Like culture will involve spectacle sales on wheels. Please tell me it isn’t true.’
‘Ah,’ he said, frowning. ‘No can do, I’m afraid. We set a lot of store by innovation. It’s what keeps us one step ahead.’ I wondered if this might be a good moment to ask where he stood on the business of our role in delivering a healthcare service, and quite where he felt aggressive sales initiatives might play a part in the nation’s optical health. ‘It’s a tight market,’ he went on, answering my question. ‘Complacency is not a sound business strategy.’
I twiddled my glass, unsure whether he was teasing me or not. ‘So it’s not as outlandish a suggestion as I thought, then?’
‘Not at all.’ He sounded like he meant it. ‘Which is not to say I’m about to put it to committee. But believe me, I’ve seen way more radical initiatives. And where’s the problem anyway? I mean, not roller blades specifically, but where’s the problem with providing a first rate service at a competitive price? That’s all we’re about really, you know.’
‘Not multi-million dollar profits, then?’
He looked entirely unfazed. Even a little amused. He waved an arm expansively. ‘Sure, profits. We’re a business. But I don’t see why that has to be at odds with a public service ethos. And, hey, let’s not be disingenuous here. Sandals are a profit making concern too, you know. And you work for a salary, don’t you?’
‘Yes of course I do. But I also think there’s a danger of people like myself becoming ever more compromised by commercial imperatives. It’s already happening as it is.’ I stopped then, because I was beginning to sound like a crusty old bag. He was nodding politely and waiting for me to say more. I couldn’t think of anything. I was suddenly all at sea again.
‘Absolutely,’ he said helpfully. ‘I see what you say. Though I have to tell you, I’m sure you’ll like the uniform. It’s shocking pink of course, and perhaps a little on the short side, but eye-catching certainly, and it comes with this little embroidered name badge on the pocket, and –’
‘Uniform?’ I spluttered. ‘But I’m an optometrist! I don’t wear a uniform!’
‘Ah,’ he said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. ‘Ah. So they didn’t tell you about that?’
‘You’re kidding!’ I said. ‘You can’t seriously expect –’
He looked at me gravely. ‘Do I look like I’m kidding?’ He frowned again. ‘Oh, forgive me, Sally. Can I get you another drink? Something to eat?’
‘Um…yes. Yes, OK. A drink. Some more juice.’ I handed him my glass. ‘But you are kidding, aren’t you?’
‘Of course,’ he said, winking. ‘Don’t move. Be right back.’
I watched him weave smoothly through all the bodies to the bar.
A strange tingle passed through me. The hand of destiny, maybe? No. That was rubbish. It was simple coincidence. But rather nice, rather thrilling, for all that.
Chapter 4
‘So your maniac motorist’s an optometrist too, is he?’ asked Ruth, as we hurtled over the Gatwick flyover and surged down to join the traffic on the road back towards East Grinstead . It was just beginning to get dark and the street lamps were burning salmon against the greying sky.
‘I don’t know, as it happens. I suppose he might be. But I don’t think so. He’s Human Resources, isn’t he? Which I suppose means personnel.’
‘Well, whoopy-do! Our lucky day then, methinks. My lucky day, at any rate. He can push me off the straight and narrow any old time he likes.’ She screeched to a halt at the traffic lights and stretched her neck to check her lipstick in the rear view mirror. ‘So what else did he say? Married? Kids? Significant other?’
I’d already wondered that, which addled me somewhat. Dolly Daydream, I thought. Time to rein myself in. ‘Significant excess of commercial zeal,’ I said firmly. ‘And I’m not sure I much like being considered a human resource.’
‘But is he married?’ she persisted.
‘God! I don’t know, Ruth! It’s hardly the sort of thing I’m going to be asking him, is it?’
‘First thing I would have. Did you get a look at the size of those shoulders? And what an amazing co-incidence that he should be the guy who nearly hit you!’
Yes. I thought. That was all it was. Thrown together by fact. Not fate. ‘Not specially,’ I said. ‘He’s staying at the Meridien at the moment. He’d only flown in that morning, apparently, and he’d been to some meeting somewhere. Jet-lagged, I suppose.’
‘But even so. Anyway, hope you told him what a whiz I am in the stock room. Hmm. Things are looking up. I can feel a conquest coming on. When’s he start, then?’
‘I don’t think it works like that. I think he moves between branches. But I think he’s coming in on Friday, isn’t he? There’s some Drug U Like lunch meeting or something, isn’t there?’
She checked the mirror again.
‘Yum yum! Better get my hair done, then.’
*
When I got home, Kate was already there, and the kitchen, as ever, was strewn with mess I hadn’t made. She was sitting in her usual slumped position at the kitchen table, engrossed in some reading. Her empty plate was perched on a stack of magazines, half a dozen wizened disks of pepperoni from a microwave pizza fanned neatly around the rim.
‘Good rehearsal?’ I asked her.
‘Nope. Good meeting?’
‘Instructive, I suppose. You’ve eaten, then?’
In answer, she nodded and shunted the plate a little further away from her. I picked it up, scraped it and deposited it by the sink. She grunted an acknowledgement. Grunted, at any rate.
‘Oh, there’s some messages, by the way. Dad called to say Morgan’s got a couple of days off and is coming down with him tomorrow to talk to you about the dresses.’ She pulled a face. ‘You have told her how I felt about the lilac, haven’t you?’
I hadn’t, i
n fact. Because there was little point. There were all sorts of colours that looked good on bridesmaids. But sadly, for Kate, none of them were black. ‘Oh, and Gran called as well,’ she added. ‘Wanted you to ring her back when she gets in from t’ai chi.’
I looked at the time. It was almost ten. ‘Right,’ I said, pulling down the front of the still-full dishwasher and frowning. ‘I’d better get on and do that, then. Did she say what about?’
Kate shook her head and returned to studying the thick clump of A4 sheets she had on the table in front of her.
‘What’s that?’
‘Bah!’ she said. ‘Don’t ask, OK? Just don’t ask.’
I didn’t ask. She followed me out into the hall.
‘God! I mean, Mum, tell me honestly. Do I look like a dining car to you?’
This was a perfectly normal exchange in the Matthews household so I plopped myself down on the chair by the phone and raised my eyebrows enquiringly. ‘A dining car?’
‘Yes!’ she looked at me with disdain and flapped the papers she still had in her hand. ‘I should have been Diesel. Lynsey knew I wanted to be Diesel. It’s all because that cow Athena’s turned up. “Oh, I know the part!”’ she screeched, ‘” I was Diesel in the Whyteleafe Hotsteppers production, of course! I could do it blindfold blah blah blah”. She thinks she’s so good, but she dances like a duck. I should have been diesel. I‘ve a good mind to quit altogether. Dinah indeed!’
‘Dinah?’
‘Dinah the dining car, of course! It’s a crap part. Crap. Oh, I’m so mad.’
‘Part in what?’
‘God, Mum! Starlight Express, of course. God! Don’t you know anything?’
I had always thought Starlight Express was done on skates. But not in this town, obviously. Kate’s boots banged seven bells out of the stair treads and I dialled my mother’s number in the faint hope of slightly less strenuous conversation.
But didn’t get it.
I wondered what I would do once I retired. Would I opt for t’ai chi classes? Go to bingo on Thursdays? Collect limited edition decorative plates?
‘How was it?’ I asked my mother, who did all of these things and who, though abysmal at bingo, seemed to get a great amount of fulfilment and pleasure from being in permanent angry correspondence with the Franklin Mint. Among other things. ‘Pah,’ she answered.
‘I thought you decided you were going to stick with the yoga.’
‘Yoga? I gave that up yonks ago.’
‘I thought you enjoyed your yoga classes.’ More than she seemed to enjoy t’ai chi, at any rate.
‘Initially,’ she corrected me. ‘But it went off a bit.’
‘Went off?’
‘Went off. It may suit Dorah Bryan, but there comes a time in a woman’s life when the prospect of being able to bend over far enough to view your own undercarriage holds more dread than appeal, quite frankly.’
‘And what’s in prospect if you stick with the t’ai chi then?’
‘Mental stillness, of course!’
I wondered if, in my mother, the teacher had taken on more than they could chew.
‘In theory, at any rate,’ she sniffed. ‘A lot of my meridians are still pretty blocked up, but Cos thinks I’m showing great potential.
‘Cos?’
‘As in lettuce. He’s from Bognor, but I think he’s a Buddhist. Anyway, dear. I didn’t want to talk about t’ai chi. I was ringing about the refuge. Did you have any luck with your MP?’
Ah. Her other current project.
My mother, like many of her age and situation, lived in quiet gentility in a well maintained Victorian house in Eastbourne. One that had been converted into retired women’s flats. She had a perm, a lot of ornaments, and a stand on French apples, but there was where her similarity to most other people’s mums ended. Next door to my mum’s place was a women’s refuge, which was run by a scary ex-hippy called Polly, and filled with an itinerant and unhappy population of women and children who’d escaped violence at home. That they had nowhere else to go was an ironic kind of juxtaposition, really, because the lease was running out and the landlords were being difficult. They wanted the refuge out so that the house could be sold. And then, no doubt, converted into a whole bunch of new flats, for people who didn’t get in punch ups.
The sort of situation my mother excelled in. My mother always enjoyed a good protest.
The note in my diary made sense: I was supposed to ring my MP and hound him about it.
‘Mum, look, I’m sorry, but I really didn’t get a moment to do anything about it today. It’s been really busy, what with –’
‘No matter,’ she said gleefully. ‘Because I did.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. I’ve not heard back from my MP yet, but I spoke to this ever so nice man at the Evening Argus and he’s going to come round and talk to us about it on Friday. I was talking to Polly earlier and she thinks we’re definitely on the right track. Media Exposure is what we need.’
‘But what about the council? Wasn’t Polly going to see if she could get the council to fund things temporarily? I thought there was some talk of them getting an extension on the lease.’
My mother clucked down the phone at me. ‘Hmmph! And pigs might fly. They’re a useless bunch the lot of them. I’ve told them, you know. On their own heads be it. They won’t find themselves so dismissive when they have half a dozen homeless families on their hands, will they? Anyway, we’re getting up a petition, and hopefully that piece in the paper, and then perhaps someone will sit up and take some notice. Anyway, the main thing is to keep bashing away at it, isn’t it? So I’ve written a letter outlining the situation and popped it in the post to you.’
‘To me?’
‘Of course! I thought you could type it up on your computer for me. Then we can send it out to everyone influential we can think of and start making some serious waves.’
I noted the ‘we’. Another thing for the list in my diary.
I would have to get a bigger one, I thought.
Chapter 5
I got into work on Monday morning to find Ruth on her knees in the middle of the shop floor, pulling all our own-brand sunglasses from their holes in the carousel racks. ‘No longer wanted on voyage,’ she said, sliding a pair into a bubble-wrap bag and dropping it into a box on the floor. ‘I’ve got crate loads of Drug U Like shades out the back. This lot are bound for the depot.’
‘Goodness,’ I said, privately wondering whether the racy wrap-around pair I’d rather fancied would now be subject to a substantial price reduction. ‘They don’t let the grass grow, do they?’
She hauled herself upright and smoothed the front of her skirt. ‘This,’ she said gravely, ‘is simply the tip of the iceberg, let me tell you. Go and check out the pink carpet sample in the office.’
I had to concede that since the Drug U Like lunch meeting with Nick Brown, the idea of shaking off our rather staid suburban image was at least injecting a little frisson of novelty into the working day. At least, I told myself it was the meeting. Nothing whatsoever with him. Not at all.
Ruth picked up the box of sunglasses and followed me through to the office. ‘And guess what else?’
I flipped through the ridiculously long list of tests that had been booked in, and noticed a couple of familiar heart-sink names. ‘What else?’
‘Training.’
‘Training? Training in what?’
‘Well, not so much training, as retraining.’ She fanned her fingers and jiggled them about a bit. ‘Retraining The Drug U Like way.’
Ruth invariably got in before me in the morning. It was, she said, the best way to maximise her social life and still keep her novel on track. I often thought of her when awake in the small hours. Perhaps I should start a novel. A page a night. God knew, I spent enough of it awake these days. It also meant she was generally more privy than most to the machinations of the store’s assistant manager, with whom the
se days she often shared the early riser staff breakfast and had not so long ago shared a bed for a while. Though, thankfully, he was now back with his wife.
‘I was talking to Michael earlier, and he said there’s a memo going round today about it. There’s to be a series of training camps coming up –’
‘Camps?’
‘Yes, you heard me right. Camps. With a capital C. Or no – with a capital B and S. As in bloody great bug-fest and squelch. They’ve organised a programme of team-building induction weekends, apparently, in order to better, well…induct us, I suppose. Whatever that means.’
Being inducted sounded somewhat sinister. I had a vision of fat pinstripe-suited American gangsters, engaged in the business of coercive practices on unsuspecting pharmacists in remote shacks. Or indeed, thin ones. With toffee suede jackets and forget-me-not eyes. Could it be? I plucked some shades from the rack.
‘Er, camps where, exactly?’
She split the tape from another Drug U Like box with her ball point and tutted at the contents.
‘Look at this crap,’ she said, poking the pen back into her hair. ‘Who on earth is going to buy these? Eighty-nine pounds ninety-nine! Jesus! Oh, he wasn’t sure. Wales, somewhere, he thought. Somewhere wild and unsavoury, at any rate. He thinks we’re in the first cohort, too, so better get your billy can scrubbed up.’
‘Billy can?’ I said. ‘That sounds exciting.’
‘Exciting?’ she snorted. ‘I think not, Sal. Sounds much more like something we should be worrying about.’
My worries, generally, are nebulous confections. Like things that you see from the corner of your eye but can’t quite get into focus. Ruth’s however, were entirely tangible. She plonked herself down in our usual corner of the pub and groaned. ‘Look at me!’ she said. ‘An hour on my knees on the floor and my back is killing me! So sod this bloody Scouts lark.’
Straight on Till Morning Page 4