As she got under the duvet, Grace remembered how she had lied about having a family crisis just to get out of going for a drink with Tate. And now here she was with a real family crisis. Her mother would say she’d tempted fate with that lie, and while she wasn’t buying into any of her mother’s pronouncements on how the universe was ordered, she couldn’t shake the idea that somehow the disruptive powers of Tate Jefferson had already begun to get to work.
CHAPTER 9
Alistair got off the train at Waterloo and tried to remember the last time he’d been up this early on a working day. Failing to manage that, he let himself be swept along by the other commuters as they surged up the platform, negotiated the ticket barriers and spewed out on to the concourse.
He imagined Emma still at home, probably only just getting into the shower. It had taken a lot of willpower to detach himself from her warm body in bed, but he needed that hour alone in the office to calm his thoughts before Grace arrived.
Over the weekend he’d decided that this thing with the other woman had to stop. He felt sick even thinking of losing her, but it was madness. A one-way ticket to … he stopped suddenly and got an elbow in his back and a snappy, ‘For God’s sake,’ from the guy behind him.
He wasn’t going to think about the destination of that one-way ticket. No need now anyway. He started walking again. He had cast-iron willpower and he was going to end it today. Finito. No messing around with locked cabinets, locked anything. He was going to go in now and think it through calmly and then just get on with growing the business. Throw himself into that and into Emma. That was where the future lay. No good would come of going back to the old ways.
He repeated these mantras to himself as he caught the tube to Leicester Square and then made his way to the office. He felt resolute, chirpy even.
And then he realised that he wasn’t heading to the office, he was veering away from it. He stopped in front of a jewellery shop. Not yet open, its window had been cleared of the most expensive pieces, but a pair of earrings caught his eye, each a cascade of silver feathers. He imagined them in her ears and his resolve had gone, replaced by a juddering pulse. He put the palm of one hand on the glass as if he could push through and gather up the earrings, and when he moved his hand again, it left a damp mark on the window. He walked to the door of the shop and checked the opening times.
Moving away, he passed a shop selling shoes; the grille was down but he could see the straps and heels, the pointed toes.
He forced himself to start walking again. It was hopeless. He knew he’d be back later. Everything beautiful reminded him of her. Why had he thought he could break away?
He speeded up, desperate to get to the office and lock himself in before Bernice from downstairs arrived and spotted him. Good, she wasn’t in yet. He unlocked the main door, disarmed the burglar alarm and sprinted up to the first floor, feeling strung out with anxiety. But there was excitement there too … he was going to see her again. And he’d get those earrings for her. For next time.
He was in the wrong; he knew it. And he was only storing up trouble, but everyone had their drug of choice – alcohol, cocaine, premier league football. She was his.
CHAPTER 10
In Far & Away, Grace watched as Bernice laid the chintz material over her arm, between the wrist and the elbow, then the pink elephant cord higher up and the hard-wearing cotton with swirly red pattern over her shoulder.
‘For the sofa,’ Bernice reminded Grace, screwing up her eyes and giving the fabrics a quick once-over. Her free hand disappeared back into the drawer and a square of shagpile was brought out. Grace sensed Bernice’s hesitation about where to place the carpet, short of balancing it on her head, before she trapped it in the crook of her arm, between chintz and elephant cord.
‘That help?’ she asked.
Bernice’s renovation of her and Sol’s house in Finchley had progressed as far as the breakfast room, so to make a proper decision regarding the curtains, Grace not only had to factor in the shagpile but also the colour scheme in the kitchen and hallway.
It was the least she could do seeing as Bernice had happily put up with her appearing just as she was unlocking the door and had listened as Grace explained about her father turning up in the middle of the night and not being able to get any sense out of either parent about what was going on. Bernice’s practical outlook on life made her the ideal person in whom to confide. She did not apportion blame; she was not interested in digging up motives or pawing over the possible emotions involved. Bernice simply helped you think of workable ways to deal with your current predicament so that you could return to where you had been. This often involved a level of honesty that wasn’t entirely welcome, and an absence of dithering and soul-searching that was.
Sitting here at this time of the morning, Grace was once again hopeful that things would get sorted out quickly. That hope had become tarnished over the weekend by her mother’s refusal to answer her phone and her father’s insistence that Grace was not to go and broker some kind of truce. Grace had ignored this and taken herself over to see her mother on Saturday, only to find she was not in. Having sat and waited for a couple of hours, she left her a note and came away. Grace had another go at tracking her down on the Sunday, spurred into action by the way her father’s possessions were stealthily migrating from the boxes and bags in the hallway and how Jack the Ripper and his mates were now in piles all over her bedroom floor. There was still no Felicity at Newham, but the fact that the note Grace had left now had a Not talking. Tell him to make his mouth work scrawled across it showed she’d been there at some point. Grace had waited again but finally had to concede defeat and had returned to her flat to find her father’s books on one of the worktops in her kitchen. They had been arranged neatly, and in alphabetical order, but they were there nonetheless. Her father had been apologetic and given Grace an assurance that his charts and plans would not find their way on to her walls, but she knew the longer he stayed, the more the flat would look like a series of police incident rooms.
She glanced out through Far & Away’s large plate-glass window, past the sales notices where she could read, in reverse, just how cheap it was to fly to any of the Swiss ski resorts and hire your ski gear. The street was quiet: London, or at least this particular bit of it, was only just shaking itself to life and venturing out, and this morning that felt vaguely uplifting too, as if she had a head start on everyone. When she went upstairs in a minute and unlocked Picture London’s door, she knew that there at least it would be calm and ordered until the phones started to ring. If she was lucky, Alistair wouldn’t appear until mid-morning.
Or perhaps the resurgence of her optimism was just the result of being faced with racks of brochures showing a permanently sunny world. She studied the notices in the window again and the word ‘only’ kept catching her eye, reinforcing the sense that the entire world was within quick and easy reach; freedom just a matter of a few pounds.
In fact, the only grey cloud in this bright scene was standing just to the left of Grace’s chair: Esther, the other person who worked in the travel agency.
Esther was a bleached-out version of Bernice – light and lank-haired where Bernice was dark and glossy; pallid where Bernice was rosy-cheeked; concave where there were mounds and rolls and dimples. Probably in her mid-forties, Esther very rarely said anything and, as far as Grace could see, didn’t seem to do an awful lot either. What role she played in the company, or whether she was from Sol’s side of the family or Bernice’s, Grace had no idea. She had a languid air about her and leaned a lot – against desks, filing cabinets, anything really that was more stationary than she was. The only explanation Bernice had ever given for Esther’s pathological lack of vitality, lack of conversation, lack of anything that approached a personality, had been a mouthed ‘tube trouble’ and a hurried nod at an area below Esther’s waist.
Grace presumed this meant some kind of gynaecological problem and not that something unpleasant had happened t
o her on the Underground.
For someone who was largely silent, Esther had a way of involving herself in any conversation that bordered on the intrusive. Standing too close to you, she would, by tiny movements of her head and the way she worried at her bottom lip with her teeth or fingers, convey her reactions to what was being discussed. It was impossible to resist the urge to look and see which particular lip–head combo she’d employed as the result of something you’d just said.
It was obvious to Grace that Esther and Bernice did not like each other much, but that they followed the long-established British procedure of never actually bringing that dislike into the open. Only now and then did it seep out in a too icily polite request from Bernice and feigned deafness on Esther’s part – deafness to add to her bouts of playing dumb.
Currently a frowning Esther had her bottom lip scrunched up into a cupid’s bow between her thumb and middle finger as she examined the various pieces of material and carpet.
‘Pink, do you think?’ Bernice prompted, giving Esther a hacky look.
‘Oh yes, I like the pink. Very much,’ Grace said hurriedly and caught Esther give her lip a particularly hard scrunch.
Bernice nodded. ‘Good choice, Grace. That’s what I told Sol. He liked the chintz, but I said modern’s the look we’re after here, Sol. Not your auntie in Camberwell’s front parlour.’ Bernice’s voice had got louder as her speech had progressed, leaving Grace to wonder if Sol and his wife had ever had that conversation or whether Bernice had made the whole thing up to put that scrunched mouth in its place.
When the pieces of material and carpet were whisked back into the drawer, Bernice started to rummage around in a plastic bag on the floor while still keeping up her conversation with Grace. This necessitated much swivelling and talking over her shoulder on Bernice’s part as her hands continued to search the bag. For anyone else this might have been problematic, but it was a doddle for Bernice, who could carry on two or three conversations and any number of tasks at the same time. As if to prove that, she suddenly said, ‘Worse than toddlers, parents. Here we are: paint.’ She hauled a litre tin up on to her desk, along with a small buff-coloured cardboard box, before reaching for the phone. ‘Hang about, need to make a call.’ The computer screen was nudged round to the right angle.
‘Shouldn’t be on the sofa, Grace,’ she said as she tapped in a number. ‘If your dad’s all cosy in your room, he’ll be in no rush to get things sorted with your mum.’ A pause. ‘Yeah, Mr King, yeah, Bernice here. No, not bad, going to rain later. So, stopover at Dubai, twenty-two hours and a four-star hotel …’ Bernice held the phone a little away from her mouth and whispered, ‘Got an air bed you could borrow.’ The phone went back to her mouth. ‘No … no, five star’s going to take you over budget … unless you miss out something when you get to Sydney.’ Her hand went over the mouthpiece of the phone. ‘Sol says it makes him feel queasy when he sleeps on it, but then he gets seasick walking over Blackfriars Bridge …’ The hand came off the mouthpiece. ‘Yeah, what about dropping the sky walk, just doing the champagne sunset harbour tour?’ Bernice was reaching for a calculator, tapping in numbers, squinting at the computer screen. ‘Enough for one night in a five star. Sending you over some recommendations … there they go. So, talk to your wife, get back to me. ’S’a really good price … can’t guarantee it past eleven.’
The phone was put down. ‘Takes no time to pump up,’ she said without missing a beat.
It was the kind of performance that drove Gilbert mad. Multi-tasking was a jarring concept to him that smacked too much of the modern world.
Bernice was patting the paint tin. ‘Four-leaf clover green, but it’s hard to see how deep the colour is just from the label.’ For one horrible moment Grace feared that meant Bernice was going to prise off the lid and daub some paint up her arm to display it to best advantage. No, the tin was simply turned so the label was facing Grace. Bernice then made a big flourish of opening the buff-coloured box and when it had been tilted forward, Grace saw two stencils, one of a B and one of an S. ‘Sol’s idea. Finishing touch,’ Bernice explained, her face radiating something that might have been pride.
Grace had never met a straight man so interested in home decorating as Sol.
She sensed she was meant to say something at this point, so she said, ‘Wonderful.’
She hoped visitors to the morning room would understand B and S were Bernice and Sol’s initials and not abbreviations for something else. A quick check on Esther confirmed she had moved her fingers and brought her top lip way down over her bottom one. It gave her the appearance of a duck and suggested that she too had wondered about the BS motif and might even be finding that funny if laughter were not too physically exhausting for her.
Bernice was watching Esther too and was obviously suspicious of that mouth. She raised her chin before stowing paint and stencils back under the desk.
There was a hiatus where Esther stopped leaning on a filing cabinet and went to lean against her desk, and Grace was so engrossed in wondering how you could move that slowly without actually going backwards that she was not aware until Bernice spoke that she had, in turn, been studying Grace.
‘Look tired, Grace. You need to show your dad how selfish he’s being, so that’s why an air bed’s ideal.’ Bernice nodded at her own wisdom. ‘You can’t just dump some pillows and a duvet on it and call it a bed like you can a sofa. You got to find room for it. Pump it up. You got to put a bottom sheet on it. Next day you got to unmake it. Deflate it. Stow it away.’ She pointed at Grace. ‘It all shows him how he’s putting you out. Makes him uncomfortable up here,’ she pointed at her forehead, ‘without making him uncomfortable here.’ Bernice seemed unsure what to tap so just pointed over her shoulder and down her back.
Esther was tapping her lip with a forefinger. Did that mean she agreed with Bernice or thought she was being too tough?
‘But he’s sixty, Bernice,’ Grace said, hesitantly, ‘I’m not—’
‘If that fails, make up a story about some visitors coming to stay … Oi!’
This last word didn’t seem to be addressed to either Grace or Esther. Who it was addressed to was clarified when Bernice got to her feet and rapped on the window. A man leaning against it, wearing what looked like an RAF greatcoat, exhaled a big feathering of cigarette smoke and turned round, his blond hair ruffling in the breeze.
He squinted at Bernice, who was now telling him to shove off and stop lowering the tone, and with the cigarette still in his mouth, lifted both hands in a ‘don’t shoot me’ gesture. Then he spotted Grace, took the cigarette out of his mouth and threw both arms wide. ‘Gracie, baby,’ he shouted, ‘no good hiding. I’ve fought a hangover to get here early, make a good impression on you.’
‘You know him?’ Bernice looked uncharacteristically confused.
Grace nodded, and just at the edge of her vision she saw Esther tilt her head and bite her bottom lip with her little pointy teeth.
CHAPTER 11
It was a good twenty minutes later that they climbed the stairs to the Picture London office, Grace seething quietly about what Tate had just done in Far & Away.
He’d started by bursting through the door to introduce himself before she’d been able to head him off because, as he said, ‘I bet Gracie hasn’t told you about me yet. Likes to keep me as her dirty secret, does Gracie.’
Esther had found the energy to shake his hand, limply, before retreating into lip-biting silence. What she was thinking either involved savaging Tate or nibbling him. Grace did not want to picture that second option, but would have quite happily bought tickets to watch the first.
Bernice’s opinion of him was easier to read. She had started off as outraged shop owner and stayed in that mode to lecture him about lolling against her window and tut at his smoking habit.
‘Gotta die of something,’ he had said earnestly and then undercut it with one of his laughs.
Bernice hadn’t liked that and she hadn’t liked his clothe
s either. Sol, whenever Grace saw him, was dressed in a manner that placed him neatly among the ranks of the safe and dull, where many thousands of men, even here in London, were happy to loiter. There had been a tie he’d once owned that had caught Grace’s eye, but other than that her overall impression was of grey and white; sharp creases at the start of the week and crumpled ones towards the end.
Tate, on the other hand, was today wearing black jeans with a white shirt tucked into them that might previously have been the property of a consumptive poet. It may have even been filched from his lifeless body. It had flounces and when he took off his coat it became obvious that it also had voluminous sleeves, the cuffs of which came down over his knuckles. The neckline, a flapping, deep V, would have shown a distracting amount of chest were it not for the black scarf wound round his neck, with the two ends left dangling.
Bernice couldn’t stop staring at the ensemble when she wasn’t staring at his eyes because, unmistakably, he was wearing a smudge of kohl on the outer corner of each one.
Bernice was clearly thinking dissolute and possibly also questionable sexual orientation. God knew what Esther was thinking.
Grace dared her brain to engage with how Tate looked or what he wore, although some part of it registered that despite the billowing and eyeliner and scarf, the reading coming off him was still resolutely, disconcertingly male. Perhaps it was the biker boots.
Grace was pleased at Bernice’s negative reaction – it confirmed that the Tate worship which had infected Picture London had not spread downstairs. And it made her feel as if she had an ally; they could talk about it later and reinforce each other’s views. If she was really lucky, Tate would call Bernice ‘Berni’ like he called her Gracie and blood might be spilled.
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