Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Work, she told herself. This was work. Nothing to be frightened of. Jack Valentine had been absolutely right, of course, and the evidence was now sitting on her desk. She picked it up. Yet another letter from yet another agent, explaining that yet another big-shot celebrity would, regrettably, not be available to support their worthy cause. That he got requests all the time and that sadly it was impossible to support all of them. But at least this one had a cheque in it. For fifty pounds. And now she had someone anyway, even if she hadn’t known who he was.

  She put the letter down and kicked her boots under her chair. Her head might feel like the middle of a pavlova, but her feet felt like balls of angry wasps.

  ‘Ah!’ said Madeleine, coming in and parking her bottom on the corner of Hope’s desk. ‘The wanderer returns! So. Tell all. What’s he like? Is he nice? Is he on side?’

  ‘He’s going to speak to someone,’ she told her. ‘He said he’s very happy to give us a quote and do a photo – and do the race itself, if it fits in with his schedule – and he’s going to speak to someone at work about the rest. He’s going to ring me next week.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Madeleine. ‘Pity he isn’t in television, but there you go. I expect he’s well-connected. And, besides, the trainer connection is eminently exploitable too. I was talking to George from the sports shop this morning and he thinks we might be able to wheedle some freebies out of Reebok, so, all in all, it’s looking like we might have some serious progress on our hands.’ She clapped Hope on the back. ‘Well done, sweetie. Great work.’

  ‘I enjoyed it. He’s nice.’

  ‘As in “nice” or as in nice?’

  Hope coloured. ‘As in nice. As in helpful. As in pleasant. As in –’

  ‘Rubbish! Come on. Come clean. As in nice.’

  So, Maddie could tell. And this, therefore, was a conversation that would have gone the way of all such conversations with her (and therefore straight to Hope’s soul without stopping at the services) were it not for the fact that the phone on her desk was now ringing.

  Madeleine plucked it up, and listened for a moment.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, grinning at Hope, ‘no, it isn’t. But she’s right here beside me, so if you’ll just hold the line –’

  She pulled the receiver from her ear, and then cupped her hand over it.

  ‘Cinderella, guess what? It looks like you’ve pulled.’ She winked again, and held the phone out to Hope. ‘For you. It’s that nice Mr Charming.’

  That was the tricky thing about getting some sex, Jack decided. You had to find someone to have sex with. Up till now, this had proved an intractable problem. There had been Allegra, of course. (When had there not been Allegra?) He could have had sex with Allegra aeons ago. Before the divorce even, if he’d instigated it. But he hadn’t. Still hadn’t. Though having sex with Allegra was in no way an undesirable thing to contemplate on a rainy night when there was no football on the telly, Jack didn’t think it would be too clever. This was the woman charged with making him a television celebrity. This was the woman in whose hands his new career rested. No. It wouldn’t be too clever to make a move in that direction. The complications were altogether too obvious.

  But then – hello? – there was the rest of the world. All the other available women who must be out there. But where did you find them? Jack had never been much of a one for lads’ nights out, except those that his five-a-side team sporadically semi-organised, and as these mainly consisted of a lot of drinking followed by a lot of dancing, followed by a lot of swearing, followed by a lot of pretending to be something other than a bunch of ageing married blokes with night-passes, followed by chips and curry sauce eaten at a cab rank (with a wooden fork) there was little prospect that such evenings were likely to prove productive on the sex front.

  But he had made an effort. He had been to two dinner parties – reluctantly, and rightly so. They had both proved the point that friends – and almost all his were still married – only invited single men to dinner parties if they had newly flayed and disembowelled female friends to take care of, because that way they got a break. Got to shriek and guffaw in their kitchens while you – OK, he – had to sit at the table while said disembowelled females spent hour upon hour telling you how much they felt raped by the experience and what draconian maintenance agreements they had. He’d been to town, too. Twice. Where else did you go, frankly? Once with Danny, and once with a sometime journalist friend from the Echo, and both times had been pretty grim. Unexpectedly so. Where had he been all his life? Had it always been this way? He’d had no idea that so many married women went out in the evenings, en masse, wearing sparkly tops, swigging fluorescent drinks out of bottles, and pretending they wanted to have sex with you. And if this had been a revelation (and it had), then even more so had been the realisation that he didn’t actually want to have sex with the sort of women who prowled dance floors in town, in push-up bras (yes, he knew about those – the type that stood up by themselves in the washing pile) and too much make-up, whether they were married or not. He wanted to have sex with girls who didn’t need to do that. But where on earth did you go to find them?

  Most depressing of all was that he didn’t actually seem to fancy anyone any more. Well, he did, but not anyone to whom he wasn’t invisible. He cherished the fanciful, if unrealistic notion that one day someone would just walk up and want to have sex with him who wasn’t in a sparkly top thing and didn’t feel the need to leap up and whoop when anything by Shania Twain came on. Perhaps an evening class in Bikram Yoga, which Patti had suggested, wasn’t so way off-beam after all. At least there’d be the benefit of spiritual replenishment while he ogled the flesh on display.

  But now it had happened. He had met someone with whom it was not wholly unrealistic to suppose he might be able to have sex. She might not be exactly the siren of his dreams, but when he recalled the way her breasts sat so unassumingly in her dress-thing, he decided that he hadn’t the least reservation about inventing a new category specifically for her. And he still had her trainer, so he had a reason to phone her.

  ‘Did you get back all right?’ he asked her now.

  ‘I seem to have done,’ she said jauntily. ‘Didn’t lose any footwear, at least.’

  ‘But I still have your trainer.’

  ‘Indeed you do,’ she answered. ‘And a bottle of champagne, for that matter. I meant to mention it over lunch, but I completely forgot.’

  ‘So I should get them to you, perhaps.’

  ‘The trainer would certainly be helpful. I don’t know why I didn’t think to ask for it when I came on your radio show. Just – poof! – went straight out of my head.’

  ‘I know what you mean. It can be nerve-racking, the first time.’ Why had he said that? In that way? He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway.’

  ‘Anyway.’

  ‘Anyway, I was thinking.’

  ‘And what were you thinking?’

  ‘I was thinking that I owe you a meal.’

  This was entirely true. There had been a bit of a tussle over the lunch bill. She had upped and paid it while he’d been in the men’s room, leaving him with little choice but to tick her off politely and accept defeat. Now he waited.

  ‘No, really,’ she said. ‘Please don’t worry about that.’

  She wasn’t supposed to say that. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No. What I mean is, that I’d like to take you out to dinner. I’ve bent a few ears here, and we’ve lots to discuss. About your fun run.’

  ‘We do? That’s marvellous! It’s looking hopeful, then, is it?’

  Yes, Jack decided. It’s looking very hopeful. Looking very hopeful indeed.

  When he got home from work Ollie was already there, installed in front of his computer and playing something that seemed to involve the random slaughter of a lot of multi-horned beasts. He looked like he’d been there some time. He looked, moreover, like he’d be there some time. An open carton of orange juice was stationed beside him, with a half-empty pint glass parked along
side. Jack peered over his fourteen year old son’s newly shorn head and tried to make sense of the row of icons at the top of the screen. He ruffled Ollie’s scalp. It was warm and hedgehoggy. He always used to be the one who took Ollie for haircuts. But no more. He wished he still did.

  ‘Hello,’ he said cheerfully, because despite that small caveat, he felt very cheerful. ‘How was school? Did you have a good day?’

  Ollie killed something, and glanced up only very briefly, as if busy piloting a jumbo jet through a storm.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said.

  ‘Any homework?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Jack picked up the juice carton and closed the flap at the top. ‘I thought we might go out for supper this evening.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You know. For a pizza or something. Or the Hard Rock, maybe. What do you think?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘About supper. We could get a take-away in, but I thought perhaps it would be nice if –’ The speaker interrupted with a violent squawk. ‘Ollie?’

  Ollie’s head snapped round. ‘What?’

  ‘Supper. I thought we might –’

  ‘Look, Dad. Could you, like, you know, hang on a minute?’ He gestured to the screen. Skeletons and Viking-things were loping around a cluster of huts in a clearing.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Because I’m, like, in the middle of something?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And it’s, like, a pretty crucial bit?’

  ‘Oh.’ Jack pointed at one of the skeletons. It had an oscillating red halo thing round it. And cross hairs. And a long bow.

  ‘This one’s you, then, is it?’

  Ollie’s expression was one of derision. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ He pointed again. ‘That one over there, then?’

  ‘NO.’ Ollie stopped stabbing at the keyboard and turned to face Jack. ‘Look, Dad, can we, like, just leave this? Like, you know, leave me alone?’

  For a second or two Jack considered bringing to bear the absolute and unquestioning authority he’d enjoyed over Oliver this time last year, but which seemed, by some process that had occurred entirely without him realising, to have evaporated quicker than the bone-men Ollie was now so busy vaporising. At about the time when their time together became finite. Too precious to be spent in acrimony and sulks. So he didn’t.

  ‘Oh, OK. When you’ve finished, then,’ he said.

  It was a cloud, this thing with Ollie. This fact that some mindless technological blood-fest was so much more alluring than talking to him. He’d come to the flat, he’d grunt, he’d go to bed, he’d get up, he’d grunt a bit more, he’d go off to school. But not a heavy cloud today. Just a mere wisp of cirrus. In what was, for the first time since he’d taken to noticing again, a decidedly sunny blue sky.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Well, I think it’s absolutely lovely,’ said Hope’s mother, as she blanket-bombed the kitchen table with germ-busting spray.

  Hope sidestepped the mist, frowning. ‘I do wish you’d shut up, Mum. It’s just work. That’s all.’

  Her mother paused to scrutinise her, which made her feel self-conscious and therefore cross with herself. She really had no business with all this make-up and frock lark. She was not seventeen. And tonight was not a date.

  ‘Nonsense. He’s taking you out to dinner, which means it’s a date.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. People do have meetings over dinner, you know. And breakfast, come to that.’ Which was entirely the wrong thing to say. Why had she said that? She was thirty-nine. Was it really necessary to justify herself to her mother? Or anyone else for that matter? No. Yet this was what she did all the time these days: let people dispense wisdom and advice like prescriptions, as if anxious to fill the gaping hole in guidance that had opened now Iain wasn’t around to provide it. As if she had an L plate affixed to her bosom. Or ‘PDP’ plate perhaps. Post-Divorce-Person. In need of help. Dozy. Still a great deal to learn.

  Yet she had got a great deal to learn. Like not daydreaming. Therein lay demons. But she had been daydreaming. Endlessly. Compulsively. Madly. And as her daydreams gained clarity and substance, so did the anxiety, the ever-present, unbidden, unsettling anxiety, like a sprouting of strong weeds around a newly planted shrub.

  ‘Everyone feels like that starting out again,’ Madeleine had told her. Hope had believed her. Of course they did. But everyone feeling like that – like this – lent no practical support, and offered no comfort. She just wished she didn’t. It wasn’t her.

  ‘Pssh! You read the wrong sorts of magazines,’ her mother said now. But didn’t qualify as to which wrong sort she meant. Essentials? Marie Claire? The Cefn Melin Newsletter? ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you choose to call it,’ her mother added, returning to her labours, circling the table with an aggressively wielded J-cloth. ‘Work or date. It’s high time you got yourself out and about a bit more. Where is he taking you? Somewhere nice, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘I don’t know. A restaurant I haven’t heard of. I’m meeting him outside the Hilton again.’

  Her mother sniffed. ‘He could have picked you up.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not a date. Do you think Tony Blair offers to pick Gordon Brown up when they get together to discuss the Trade Deficit?’

  He had offered to pick her up, in fact, but she had declined. Way too date-like. Her mother tutted now. ‘That’s different. They live next door to each other. Anyway, there’s no point you taking your car, now, is there?’ There was a gleam of salacious excitement in her eyes. ‘I can drop you.’

  Hope grimaced. ‘There’s really no need, Mum. Anyway, you’ll be here, won’t you?’

  ‘Nonsense. I’ll drop you off and there’s an end to it. I’m quite sure Tom and Chloe can cope for twenty minutes. Goodness me, I used to leave you in your cot every day when I went to collect your brother from school. Or Chloe can come with us, can’t she?’ She finished wiping the table and went to wring the cloth out. ‘There,’ she said. ‘So.’ She plucked fluff from Hope’s shoulder. ‘What time do you want to leave for this non-date of yours?’

  There was no point arguing with her, so Hope didn’t bother. But it wasn’t a date, even so. She wouldn’t let it be.

  There was a thin drizzle falling when they pulled up outside the Hilton, and this time Jack Valentine was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘I’ll get out here, Mum,’ Hope said, with some relief. At least she would be spared the embarrassment of her mother leaping from the car and making screechy small talk at him. She pulled over to the side of the road.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother responded quickly. ‘It’s raining. And what if he’s late?’

  ‘Mother, I am quite capable of being out in the rain on my own.’ Hope slid from the driver’s seat, leaving the engine running. ‘Go on. You get off home.’

  ‘Best I stay a bit. There’s no rush, is there?’

  ‘Yes, there is, Gran,’ reminded Chloe from the back seat. ‘Casualty’s on in ten minutes. Mum, can I stay up and watch Emergency Nine One One tonight?’

  Hope had by now jogged around the car and opened her mother’s door to let her out.

  ‘Certainly not, Chloe. You’ve got school in the morning.’

  ‘Mu-um… ’

  ‘Well now. Here we are again!’

  It wasn’t a date, but, even so, Hope felt herself go a very mild shade of tingle upon hearing Jack’s voice behind her. So much so that when she finally managed to extricate him from her mother’s conversational clutches – Jack had been so sweet with her, Hope didn’t like to seem short – she determined to reign in her febrile imaginings and concentrate wholly on the job in hand.

  Though he, clearly, had other ideas. They set off down the street under the ample cover of his golf umbrella which, being blue, made it feel vaguely subterranean inside. ‘Elbow?’ he said, once the car had puttered off. And there was his, suddenly, stuck out at right angles beside her. ‘Two people,’ he added. ‘One umbrella. It’s easier.�
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  Out-manoeuvred, she slipped her arm self-consciously into the crook of it, and he tucked it back in with a grin.

  ‘There,’ he said happily. ‘That’s much better, isn’t it?’

  Was it? Hope swallowed. She wasn’t so sure. She must, at all costs, keep her eye on the ball.

  ‘Right,’ said Jack, whose confidence and merriment and general air of jollity seemingly knew no bounds. ‘I imagine the lady’ll probably be wanting a wallpaper of lightly poached paperclip goujons set on a bed of mixed watering cans and drizzled with an emulsion of lampshades, please.’

  Hope, like the waiter, who was writing it all down, took a moment or two to digest this. She laughed. Jack laughed. The waiter laughed too. Though in his case the laugh was obviously a cover, because he looked for all the world like he was chewing on a cockroach.

  ‘Not really,’ said Jack, who didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe didn’t care. He was in the media, after all. He gestured, and asked Hope what she actually wanted. Once she’d told him, he raised his menu and pointed to an item. Hope was still laughing behind hers.

  ‘And I’ll have that.’ He grinned at her.

  ‘That?’ asked the waiter.

  ‘Yes, that.’ Jack closed the menu and handed it back.

  ‘What’s “that”?’ asked Hope.

  ‘The mushroom thing.’ He leaned across the table and whispered. ‘Only I can’t say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Mille Feuille.’

  ‘You just did.’

  ‘Yes, but appallingly. And not to him.’

  ‘You said it just fine.’

  ‘I said it like a dork. Doesn’t matter how hard I try to say “me foo-ee” in a restaurant situation it always comes out all wrong. I’m no better with rognon. You’d think a writer would have a better handle on pronunciation, wouldn’t you? But there you go.’