by Rosie Thomas
The dishmop made a satisfied twirl in the water. The situation was a little tricky for Leo, but he was confident that it would sort itself out in good time.
Harriet went home to Hampstead on the morning of Boxing Day. Ken carried her overnight bag out to her car for her, opening his blue gates as if they enclosed acres of parkland. Harriet felt a surge of uncomplicated affection for him.
‘Ken,’ she asked on impulse, ‘are you happy, you and Kath?’
‘Of course we are,’ he answered sturdily. ‘We’ve got everything we want, haven’t we?’
Harriet wasn’t sure that that was quite the same thing as being happy, but she didn’t press him.
‘Are you?’ he demanded, startling her.
‘I’m interested. I’m excited.’ Those were not the same things either. Hastily she said, ‘Yes, I am. Everything’s going very well for me, isn’t it?’
‘You be careful,’ Ken said enigmatically.
‘I will. Thank you for a lovely Christmas.’
Kath waved from the storm porch, Ken waved from beside his gates. Lisa was still in bed.
The next day Harriet and Robin went to Jane’s.
The little house was crowded on two levels. At the higher level people were talking and laughing and drinking, their mouths opening and closing on glasses of wine or ragged cuts of French bread or baked potato. And at the lower, children lurched and tottered between the adult legs, or sat placidly on the floor where they had been parked, poking fragments of food between the cracks in the pine boards with fat, sticky fingers. This company of teachers and social workers, journalists and academics had spawned a secondary race of toddlers, seemingly overnight.
Harriet saw Jenny’s fourteen-month-old amongst them. He was absorbed in running a toy truck along the line of a floorboard, but he turned every few seconds to make sure that his mother’s ankles were still in sight. Jenny was nearby, half-leaning against Jane’s upright piano. She was enormously pregnant, the bulge looking not quite part of the rest of her body. She was wearing a dress of thin Indian cotton, and her everted navel made a tiny, secondary bump on the summit of the first.
Harriet kissed her, patted the trophy. ‘How much longer is it?’
Jenny’s hair was parted in the middle, falling in straight curtains beside each cheek. She pushed one curtain back behind each ear, made a weary face. ‘Another month, would you believe? I don’t think I’ll be able to walk if it gets any bigger.’
Harriet looked down at a pair of matted-curled heads, pushing at knee-height. ‘There are such a lot of them, all of a sudden.’
Jenny smiled her new, tranquil, maternal smile. ‘It’s the age we’re at.’
Making connections, Harriet asked, ‘Where’s Jane?’
‘In the kitchen, I think.’
‘You remember Robin, don’t you?’ They had met, at some similar gathering.
‘Of course I do.’ Her smile was just as warm. Robin manoeuvred politely beside her; his lean height and dove-grey cashmere sweater looked incongruous beside such uncontrived fecundity.
Jane bore down on them, brandishing a bottle. ‘You haven’t got any drinks. Harriet, you look amazing.’ Harriet was wearing her diamond, because she knew that Robin would have wanted her to. Jane saw it, and her eyes widened a little, but she only said, ‘Is that thing you’re wearing silk? We’d better try and keep the babies at bay.’
Harriet had dressed to please Robin. He had come up behind her and fastened her bra, then looked over her shoulder into the mirror. Harriet let her head drop back against his shoulder, his hands fitted over her breasts. She had wanted to get undressed again, but they had smiled conspiratorially at each other and he had taken her shirt off the hanger. He had done up the buttons, with regret. Now Harriet felt she was faced with a choice of saying, ‘No, I’d love to cuddle all of them,’ or ‘Yes, do, I don’t want fingermarks on my St Laurent.’ She did say, crisply, ‘They’re only clothes.’
‘Hello, Robin.’ Robin and Jane exchanged the coollest of kisses, and Harriet was struck again by an awareness of incongruity. But it was hardly Robin’s fault, she thought, if he stood out amongst the beards and corduroys and Marks & Spencer jumpers.
It was her own fault for trying to mix the immiscible. She wouldn’t attempt it again.
‘There’s Charlie,’ Robin said, with relief.
Robin and Charlie Thimbell liked one another. ‘He’s a bit of a prat,’ Charlie had said, ‘but quite a clever one. Are you two giving each other a little whirl, Harriet?’
Harriet had laughed in spite of herself. ‘Not very elegantly expressed, Charlie. But I suppose that’s what it amounts to. I like him, I enjoy his company.’
‘And why not?’ Charlie had agreed cheerfully.
The two men converged now and immediately began a conversation about some uproarious Liffe pre-Christmas party they had both been to. Harriet left them to it, and followed Jane through towards the kitchen. At the end of the hallway, in a niche beneath the stairs, they found a corner empty of both levels of guests. Jane drew Harriet into it.
‘Hattie, I’m sorry.’ She only called Harriet ‘Hattie’ in moments of vulnerable friendliness. Harriet was startled. ‘What for?’
‘I’m not very nice to your lover-boy. I can’t bring myself to be. He looks so bloody superior all the time, and so stiff and proper.’
‘He isn’t any of those. He’s a nice man. He’s just not much like …’ Harriet gestured.
‘Us?’
‘Us, then, if you like.’ Which was she, herself, more like now, Harriet wondered? ‘But he is amusing and lively, and rather clever.’
‘Generous, as well.’ Jane touched the diamond, and Harriet felt herself blush.
‘Yes.’
Jane looked doubtfully at her. ‘Is that what it’s about?’
‘Of course not. I don’t want to have to defend him, or it, to you.’
It was Jane’s turn to be startled. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to.’
Harriet knew there was no point in being angry with her. Unlike Harriet herself, Jane said what she thought as a matter of honour. She was also her oldest friend. Harriet exhaled a long breath. ‘We have dinner, go to the opera, go to bed together. He’s not at all pompous, and if he acts superior I don’t notice it.’ She laughed then, almost a giggle. ‘Not in bed, anyway. If you want to know, the sex is amazing.’
‘A-ha.’ Jane laughed too, her face collapsing into creases, reminding Harriet of all the conspiracies they had shared. ‘I can relate to that better than to Porsches or diamonds or Thatcherism.’
‘We don’t discuss politics much. Deliberately.’
‘Too busy, eh? What exactly does he do that’s so amazing?’
‘Mmm. It’s not so much what he does, as how he does it. With great conviction, and an exemplary attention to detail.’
Jane sighed. ‘I can see it, now I look closely at you. You look as though you’ve had a few collagen treatments, an unmistakeable sign. I envy you, God, I envy you. I think for conviction and attention to detail where it counts, I could even overlook possession of a gold American Express card.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a bit too much of a compromise?’
They emerged from their niche, relieved to have found grounds for laughter, and went on into the kitchen.
A dozen people were sitting at the kitchen table. Harriet and Jane edged behind them until they found empty chairs, then squeezed into the group. When she looked around the circle of faces Harriet stopped at a woman she didn’t know, sitting beyond Jane. The woman was breastfeeding her baby. The baby sucked, and the curve of its cheek mirrored the white, blue-veined curve of the breast. The woman unconcernedly forked up her own food, and talked across the table. At the rim of the baby’s mouth there was a whitish, glistening bubble of milk.
Harriet felt a sharp contraction within herself. It was as if a thread knotted between her two ovaries and running through her womb was drawn tight, and then sharply tugged.
Besi
de her, Jane seemed to be frozen into stillness. Harriet was going to murmur something to her, but Jane stopped her. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she whispered. ‘Please, don’t say anything.’
At a loss, Harriet turned to her other side and looked straight into a face she knew and had forgotten.
It was a prize-fighter’s face, marked but handsome, of the kind that stood out from a crowd. Harriet remembered the man in the blue shirt, who had tried to kiss her at another of Jane’s parties, and from whom she had hidden in Jane’s bathroom. David, that was his name.
‘I keep reading about you in the papers,’ he said in his northern accent, as if their last conversation had been half an hour before.
‘Not much of what you read is true. It’s just publicity.’
‘What do you want publicity for?’ His tone was abrasive. ‘Because I can spend money on advertising my product range in the press and on television, or on posters stuck all over the country, but I’ll get twice the response from editorial promotion which is also free. I just have to think of the right angle, and push it for all I’m worth.’
He shook his head in mock amazement. ‘And do you think it’s all worthwhile?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said shortly. ‘Tell me, how’s the building business?’
He grinned at her. ‘Booming. In the south-east, that is. I’m working on an interesting project now. Would you like to come and see it? It’s not far from here.’
Harriet glanced away. The woman had finished feeding her baby. She held it loosely in the crook of her arm and did up the front of her bra. Her breasts looked huge, the nipples dark brown and distended. Harriet’s pain had disappeared. She wondered if Jane felt that temporary ache permanently, if that was what shadowed her face when she looked into other women’s prams.
‘I … I’m very busy,’ she said to David. She turned away again and found that Jane was still sitting motionless beside her.
Jane didn’t look up to meet her eyes but she said in a low voice, ‘I’m going to try to have a baby. I’m going to throw my bloody cap away and grow a baby, and the two of us will manage because we’ll have to.’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘Yes. If you want it so much, you must do it. I told you I’d never felt it, didn’t I? But I did, then. Like a string pulling.’
‘It never goes away,’ Jane said.
Harriet was going to ask, why didn’t I know, we never talked about this, did we? Then she saw Robin in the doorway, seeming too tall for the low-ceilinged kitchen.
‘Why are you so busy?’ David persisted, as if he wanted to draw her attention away from Robin.
‘Because I run a business.’
David was calmly studying her face. She remembered how she had hidden from him, and then when he had gone she had been tempted to run after him. She had even imagined how it would be if they had gone home together, and then dismissed her attraction to him as a dangerous weakness.
The recollections irritated her now.
She had decided at the time that she couldn’t allow herself the intricate distractions of a love affair, and she was sure that she had been right. At the same moment she knew that whatever she was doing with Robin now it wasn’t falling in love with him.
‘I thought you didn’t know Jane. But you’re here at another of her parties.’
Jane stood up abruptly. She gathered up some dirty plates and glasses, making a small unnecessary clatter. David watched her, and then asked, ‘Can I help you with that?’
‘No, thanks,’ Jane said. ‘You talk to Harriet.’
She left her place and went away with her hands full of washing-up.
‘I didn’t know Jane then, but I do now,’ David said. ‘I moved to London, not very far from here. It’s a good house, Georgian. You should come and see it.’ Harriet opened her mouth. ‘… But you’re very busy,’ he supplied for her.
Robin came and put his hand lightly on Harriet’s shoulder. It seemed a mark of possession.
‘Shall I bring you a plate of something to eat?’
‘No, thank you,’ she said with a touch of sharpness. ‘I’ll go and get my own.’
When Robin had moved away again David raised his eyebrows. ‘Who was that?’
‘My lover,’ Harriet said. She noticed amused lines deepening beside the man’s mouth, and she suspected that he had taken sharp-eyed note of Robin’s handmade shoes and forty-pound haircut. He had already scrutinised her diamond teardrop. But he ignored her bald statement and looked at his watch.
‘I’ve got a business to run, too. And how is it that you can manage long lunches like this?’ Before Harriet could answer It’s the Christmas holidays, he added pleasantly, ‘I must go. I’ll give you a call. Perhaps the pressure of business will ease off, one of these days.’
Harriet stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured.
Robin was at the counter where the food was laid out, prodding at a bowl of lettuce. They both watched David on his way out, moving with outdoor clumsiness in the confined space.
‘Who was that?’
‘A friend of Jane’s. I met him here once before. He’s a builder of some sort.’
‘A builder? I wonder if he’s any good? Perhaps he’d like to come and take a look at the damp in my chimney breast.’
Harriet laughed. ‘I don’t think he would, somehow.’
In the car on the way home, Robin asked her, ‘What was the matter today?’
She sighed and closed her eyes. ‘I felt scratchy, that’s all. I’m sorry if you didn’t enjoy yourself.’
‘I did enjoy myself,’ he said smoothly.
The trouble was, Harriet thought, that Robin Landwith didn’t mix with Jane, and Jenny and Charlie, and all the rest of her old friends. He didn’t now, nor would he ever, the sight of him in Jane’s house today had convinced her of that. She would have to keep the two halves of her life apart, although the notion displeased her. She had, once, enjoyed the idea of friends as separate individuals securely joined by the webs of common experience and understanding. But her life had changed. From now on there would be Robin and Peacocks in one compartment, her old friends and her family in another. She would also trap the moment of sharp maternal desire that she had shared with Jane in the second compartment. It wouldn’t, and couldn’t, so much as touch the first. They drew up outside the tall Hampstead house, fresh with white paintwork and newly-restored brick and stone.
‘Home,’ Robin said with satisfaction.
The next day, they both went back to work. Because of their separate commitments they didn’t meet again until New Year’s Eve, the day of their visit to the senior Landwiths.
Robin’s father and mother lived in a village on the London side of Oxford, less than an hour’s drive from Hampstead. It was a cold, clear morning and Harriet stared out at the scraped brown fields and black patches of sombre woodland as Robin drove. She was a city girl, and thought of the countryside as a faintly mysterious environment that existed for other people, with no relevance to her own life.
‘Have you always lived in the same place?’ she asked now.
‘Little Shelley?’
‘If that’s where we’re going.’ To Harriet, civilisation in a westerly direction didn’t extend much beyond Hammersmith.
Robin smiled. ‘No. They’ve had the present house for ten years. It’s the furthest they’ve ever been from town. Before that it was near Henley, and Maidenhead before that. When I was born they lived in Surrey.’
‘Why did they keep moving?’
‘Why do you think? Martin is interested in property, my mother liked doing up houses.’
‘I’ve tried to imagine what it’s going to be like, and I can’t. I can think of lots of details but no overall picture.’
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Robin said tranquilly.
The road swept through the great V of a hill cutting, and dropped away to a wide, cold, bleached landscape. The light was sharp and bright, and Harriet shaded her eyes. In spite of the traffic all around them, t
he world seemed empty out here.
Robin pointed down into the middle distance, into space. ‘Little Shelley is there, not far away now.’
A little distance further on they left the motorway for a small road, then turned into an even narrower one. Flocks of birds rose from the bare trees and wheeled in arcs over the ploughed fields. Robin slowed the car to overtake an olive-coated rider on a big white horse; as they slid past his boot in the shiny stirrup was at Harriet’s eye level. She saw the milky cloud of the horse’s breath, then they passed a road sign announcing Little Shelley.
There was a church with a square grey tower and a pretty lychgate, and a row of cars parked beyond a pair of imposing stone gateposts.
‘They can’t be at church today, can they?’
‘That was the old vicarage. It’s a restaurant now, rather a grand one. People are lunching, not praying.’
That gave Harriet the key to Little Shelley. As they drove into the village she realised that there was going to be no village green with a cluster of shops and a picturesque pub. Little Shelley seemed to be mostly very high, very well-kept walls, over the tops of which she could just glimpse majestic trees and clusters of tall chimneys. Every few hundred yards the walls gave way to high gates, with speaking grilles and remote control buttons set into the gateposts beside them. By craning her neck as they swept by she could sometimes see up a short driveway to a handsome house. Each house, as they passed it, seemed to be larger than the last.
They had arrived in rich country, Harriet realised.
‘Where are the shops?’ she asked.
‘Oxford.’
‘Where does your mother’s cleaning lady live, then?’ she persisted.
‘On one of the new estates in Great Shelley, I think. Why?’