by Rosie Thomas
Graham Chandler came into Harriet’s office. She was on the telephone but she looked up and smiled at him, and indicated the chair facing her desk.
‘Okay, Mr Field, we can do that for you. But we’ll be looking for some special support when we launch Alarm, the new game, in the autumn. Yes, yes, I know. You’re telling me.’ Harriet was laughing, but she stopped as soon as she replaced the receiver, and raised her eyebrows at Graham. ‘Promises, promises.’
Harriet, we need to make a decision about the premises. We have enough capacity for Meizu and about fifty per cent of the projection for Alarm. If it takes off we’ll need to look abroad, or alternatively if we’re manufacturing ourselves …’
Harriet held up her hand, forestalling him. ‘I know. I know what we need.’ She leant forward to her terminal and tapped the keys, glancing at the screen as she spoke. ‘Let’s make the decision. I think we should go for the Winwood site. It’s close at hand, offers the best access and by far the best facilities.’
Winwood was a small industrial building on the motorway corridor to the west of London, one of three possible factory sites the company was considering.
‘And it’s the most expensive.’
‘Not unreasonably so. The benefits in terms of transportation costs alone will outweigh that in the long run. Winwood’s my choice, Graham. Will you back it?’
Harriet was glad to be making a decision on a major issue. It made her feel properly focussed again.
Graham studied her. He was less sure than Harriet appeared to be, but from experience he knew that her decisions were trustworthy, and also that she got what she wanted, out of determination. He nodded. ‘I think Jeremy should go along with it too. Can you get Robin’s support?’
‘Oh yes,’ Harriet said. ‘That’s it, then. Winwood it is. Our own manufacturing set-up.’
Graham went away appeased. Harriet considered, and then decided that she would wait a day or so before discussing Winwood with Robin. There would have to be an interval to allow them both to retreat, and put on the impersonal armour of a business relationship. After that, she had no doubt, they would work together perfectly smoothly. It had been one of the bonds between them that they put business first.
With the major manufacturing decision made, the other problems facing Harriet seemed to fall into place. Alarm could be made more cheaply by eliminating the manufacturing contractor’s mark-up, and the retail price resistance that had worried her was no longer an issue because she could pitch the price lower and still maintain her level of profit. The gains would have to be offset against a big expansion loan that would need to be serviced, but Harriet knew that the loan would be readily forthcoming from the company’s bank, and an afternoon’s work on the figures convinced her that the benefits would comfortably outweigh the increased level of borrowing.
It was a satisfactory day.
At the end of the afternoon Karen said on the intercom, ‘Harriet? Your mother’s on the line for you.’
Harriet looked at her watch. ‘Um. Can you just say I’m busy at this minute and I’ll call her back at seven?’ She was immersed in her work, and didn’t like to have her train of thought interrupted. A chat with Kath could wait until the end of the day.
‘She sounds upset.’
‘Mum? Are you okay?’
As soon as Kath spoke Harriet knew that everything was wrong.
‘Harriet, thank God you’re there.’
‘I’m here, it’s all right. Tell me what’s happened.’
‘Simon. Simon’s dead.
Meizu, the old Shamshuipo Meizu that was the basis of all this structure of Peacocks, sat on the table across Harriet’s office. Her eyes rested on the silvery, flaking wood.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Mum, you know he …’ she was going to say, he was ill, and lonely, but Kath cut her short. Kath was crying, choking between the words.
‘It’s worse than that. He was killed by a train.’
‘Where? How?’
‘I should have stopped him,’ Kath sobbed. ‘He was here in London. At the house on Sunday night, like an old tramp, he was filthy and all his clothes – I had to give him Ken’s. He said that people were watching him again, following him, and he’d got away from them by coming to us. He made us close the curtains and lock up, at eight o’clock on Sunday night.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was here? I’d have come straight away.’
‘I tried to. I left the messages. Yesterday morning your secretary said you were away.’ Harriet thought of the red digit on her answering machine, winking at her. The telephone receiver slipped in her grasp now. Her palm was clammy.
‘He seemed better yesterday. We got the doctor and he gave him some pills. He said he’d find a psychiatric bed for him, and I said I could look after him at home until he was admitted. Only I didn’t, this morning when we got up he was gone. I waited all day and then I rang the police. They asked me what he was wearing when he went, I knew straight away. They told me an unidentified man had gone under a train, only it was Ken’s old coat he was wearing. He’d jumped off a bridge, Harriet. Miles away, he didn’t have a farthing on him, he must have walked.’
Harriet listened to her mother’s crying. She imagined Simon walking through the south London streets, towards the railway line.
‘The police asked Ken to identify the body. He’s gone there now. But it’s Simon, we know that.’
‘I’m coming home, Mum. Stay there, I’ll be there soon.’
‘Where would I go? I feel it’s my fault, Harriet, I let him go off, I didn’t know how bad he was …’
‘It’s no one’s fault. You couldn’t have known.’
Harriet drove home to Sunderland Avenue. As she drove, she thought how Simon had answered her question about whether he might be her father, when they first met, by saying, ‘I’m not your father. I wish I were.’ She had wanted to hear it again, Simon wishing that he really were her father, but he had never said it. Perhaps part of her ambition for Peacocks, for its success, had been to do with making Simon proud of her. But he had not even wanted to take the money that she had accumulated for him, guilty money as she now saw it. As far as she knew he had not touched a penny of it. All Simon had wanted was to be left alone, in peace.
She would never hear him say, ‘I wish you were my daughter.’
Harriet saw Ken’s car in the driveway when she reached Sunderland Avenue. He came out to meet her and Harriet asked, ‘Well?’ but without any hope. Ken shook his head. His broad face looked grey and flaccid with the shock of what he had seen.
‘It was him. I knew it more from my old coat than what was left of anything else.’
Harriet closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again on Kath’s begonias and hybrid teas, only what she saw was Simon, and the bridge, and the train.
‘Your mother’s inside.’
Kath and Lisa were sitting together on the sofa. Kath was still crying quietly, and Lisa’s arm was round her shoulders.
‘Lisa?’ Harriet said stupidly. ‘What are you dong here?’
Her sister said, ‘Taking care of Mum, of course.’ There was a subtle mixture of censure and self-righteousness and piety in the words and in her face that took Harriet back to their childhood dissonance. She wanted to snap, I’ll do that, but Lisa squeezed her mother’s hand and murmured, ‘You sit there, love. I’ll make you another cup of tea.’
Kath raised her swollen face. ‘We’re to blame, Harriet. We are.’
‘Don’t cry so much,’ Harriet answered. ‘It doesn’t help anything, you’ll make yourself ill.’ The words came out sounding sharper than she intended, and Ken frowned at her from behind Kath’s shoulder. ‘I’ll see to the tea,’ she said, and followed Lisa into the kitchen. Lisa was opening cupboards and moving flowery jars.
‘Where’re the tea-bags? She’s moved everything around.’
Harriet stood looking into the garden, making no move to find the tray or the teacups. The tea-bags were uncovered
and Lisa clattered with the kettle.
‘Leo says he would have died instantly. He wouldn’t have known anything, after he jumped.’
Harriet’s eyes moved. ‘Leo says?’
Lisa faltered, with the milk jug in her hand. Her cheeks reddened but she said distinctly.
‘Yes. Do you think he’s right?’
‘We can hope.’ The glazed, shocking afternoon seemed to have developed a slow-motion clarity. Harriet understood clearly and in total what she had not previously spared the time to examine. Her sister and her ex-husband were involved, an item as Lisa would describe it, imagining that it sounded slick.
‘How cosy,’ Harriet said. She was thinking back, beyond Christmas. Lisa and Leo had been in the wine bar together, how long ago? On the night she had gone to the Hilton with Robin. Then she thought, it doesn’t matter. Simon matters, I knew it but it wasn’t convenient, and now he’s gone.
‘It’s more than that,’ Lisa protested, but Harriet turned away.
‘I’ll take the tea through.’
They sat in the drawing room, the four of them, drinking it. No one said very much. Harriet felt the pointlessness of the family gathering. All they needed to complete the picture, she reflected, was Leo as the dutiful double son-in-law. Kath’s tears, heartfelt and abundant, began to irritate her. Lisa sat looking pensive, patting her mother’s hand.
Ken stood up. He made a small gesture to Harriet to follow him and she went gratefully, leaving Kath to Lisa’s ministrations. Ken and Harriet walked slowly down the garden together, to the shade of the tree of heaven. Ken put his hand on Harriet’s shoulder.
‘I think he was bound to do it, sooner or later. He was disturbed, no doubt about it.’ His blunt, kindly-meant words pierced Harriet’s defences. She pressed her lips together but tears still came and after a moment she let them, her shoulders shaking.
‘You’re not quite as strong as you’d like the world to think, my love, are you?’
‘No. Oh, Ken, poor Simon. What a terrible way to have to die.’
Ken was silent for a minute then he said, ‘I didn’t want your mother to see this. But the police gave me the contents of his pockets. Done up in a sealed polythene bag, like an exhibit. There wasn’t much. A couple of things of mine, that I’d forgotten were in there. There was this though.’
He held it out to her.
It was the cutting, the same as Robin’s, from the gossip column of the evening newspaper. It seemed to keep on appearing, like evidence of a crime that she was trying to cover up. Harriet looked down into her own face, with its dazzled startled, tipsy expression, nestling against Caspar’s shoulder.
Distaste filled her mouth, rising so that she had to swallow it down, like nausea. She knew exactly what had happened, what had driven Simon at last to the railway bridge and the oncoming train.
Some eager journalist had seen the story too, and in the glamorous light cast by Caspar Jensen had gone back to ‘Tragic PoW’ to ask what he thought of ‘Meizu Girl’ now. He would have gone to Simon’s sealed-up house and knocked too hard at the bolted door. Then he would have peered irritably into the windows, trying to see through the chinks in the pasted newspapers. He would have counted himself lucky when Simon crept to the door at last. He would have thrust Harriet’s picture at him, Harriet was sure that was how it had been, and Simon had blinked down at the coy, smiling, horrible photograph.
I wish you were my daughter. He would not have wished it then.
After that, whether they were real or not, Simon would have sensed the presence of the intruders closing in on the house, pressing against the bricks and the fragile glass. In the end they had driven him out, to Sunderland Avenue, somehow, like an old tramp as Kath had said. Then, from Sunderland Avenue, finally to the railway bridge.
Harriet folded the piece of paper, smaller and smaller, and then held it in the ball of her clenched fist.
‘Thank you for not showing it in front of Mum.’
If it could only have been kept from Simon, she thought, perhaps he would still be alive. She felt as surely as if she had pushed him that she was responsible. She stood with the ball of paper in her fist, feeling how all her pride and satisfaction withered in the face of that.
Ken touched her arm. ‘Your mother and I don’t see that paper.’ He seemed to be explaining the omission, as if they had failed to keep up with the proper developments in Harriet’s life. ‘He must have been proud of you, to have it in his pocket at the end like that.’
Harriet answered, ‘No. I don’t think Simon was proud of me.’
She had a sense of oppressive finality, that a huge mistake had been made and could never be undone.
‘Do you know him, then?’ Ken asked, with some curiosity.
‘Caspar Jensen? Yes. I met him because his daughter is a friend of mine. He took me out to lunch. There was a photographer there.’
Ken shook his head. ‘Must be difficult, for people like him. You can understand why they get nasty, some of them, can’t you? People always staring, and taking pictures.’
Only for Caspar there were compensations, of course.
Simon had suffered the invasion and had received nothing, except the inappropriate money that she had tried to give to him.
Harriet was silent.
‘Are you all right?’ Ken asked her. ‘It’s been a shock for you.’
Her tears had dried up. Her eyes burned instead, but Ken wouldn’t see that.
It was a grey afternoon that smelt of grass and rancid city earth. The air was humid. Harriet looked up at the back of the house, rising complacently over the lawn. She wanted to get away and to be on her own.
‘I’m perfectly all right. Shall we go back inside?’
By early evening Kath was composed again. She was clearly glad to have her daughters with her. Harriet stayed because she knew Kath wanted her to, although the house and Ken’s solid goodness and Lisa’s tiptoeing depressed and irritated her in equal proportions. Kath recovered enough to go into the kitchen and prepare a ham salad, with hard-boiled eggs sliced length-ways and Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
‘Let me do that,’ Ken and Lisa said together.
‘Kath and I will,’ Harriet retorted, with greater firmness. ‘I want to talk to her.’
In the kitchen she peeled the shells from the eggs and washed and dried the lettuce, while Kath laid cold meat on plates.
‘You mustn’t talk about fault, or blame,’ Harriet told her. ‘You were a good friend to him. You did everything you could.’
Kath raised her spectacularly swollen eyes. Harriet felt that they had just made the exchange that came at some point for every mother and daughter. She had become the protector, the one who told lies that she hoped were harmless and would fend off the guilt and the horrors for the protected one. Kath had become the child who needed to be comforted, while she was the mother who compromised. Harriet wondered why she had never realised that the exchange was inevitable; why, indeed, she never even so much as speculated about it. If Jane’s baby was a girl, she thought, the reversal would come for them too.
‘Do you think that? I joined Peacocks quite happily, didn’t I? I was glad to think of making some money for Ken and me out of Simon’s game. Out of him being in that terrible camp. Yet I saw what he was like, after those reporters, that day you had me up there. I should have thought harder, Harriet, before I let you talk me into all of this.’
A child, needing to be coaxed into or soothed out of its attitudes.
‘You did the right thing. If there is any blame due anywhere, and I don’t believe there is, I should accept it. I saw an opportunity with “Meizu” and I took it. None of us could have guessed that doing that might affect Simon. If it did, directly.’
There was the protectiveness, and the untruths could hurt no one now that Simon was dead. Kath appeared to be comforted. She began slicing into a loaf of bread.
‘The doctor said he was seriously ill.’
‘We both knew that.’
Harriet put down the plate she was holding and went to her. In her arms her mother felt small and light, childlike. ‘I wish I had seen him,’ she said, more to herself than to Kath. ‘Just the last time.’
Now there was only what Ken had seen.
Kath straightened up and patted Harriet’s arm, as if it was she who had been doing the comforting and now judged it time to turn their attention back to the needs of the living.
‘Let’s lay these trays up. Your Dad’ll be wanting something to eat by now.’
There was something else Harriet wanted to say. As they counted knives and side plates she asked, ‘How long have Lisa and Leo been seeing each other?’
‘Did Lisa tell you?’
‘She let something slip, rather than telling me.’
Kath’s more habitual, troubled and flustered expression came back. Harriet was glad to see it, as a sign of her mother’s recovery from the shock. ‘I don’t know how long. It was Lisa who asked him here for Christmas. He seems to make her happy, Harriet. Do you mind about it?’
‘You always liked him, didn’t you? Leo and I are divorced. We’ve no claims on each other. I’d rather have known than be kept in the dark for so long, that’s all.’ She was thinking that if Lisa was really what Leo wanted, then it was no wonder that her marriage had failed.
‘I don’t know why they didn’t tell you. They had their reasons, I expect. You can frighten people, Harriet, you know.’
‘Not my own sister and husband, surely?’
Kath regarded her. ‘Me, sometimes.’
‘Well, then,’ Harriet sighed, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.’ She felt her isolation, and was momentarily sorry for herself because of it. She took ironed, folded napkins out of a drawer and laid them on top of the pile of plates. Caspar was a long way away and even if he were close, she was shrewd enough to realise, he wasn’t and never would be a rock for her. She wanted to be a rock for him, rather. Harriet also realised that she would like Robin to be there, or at least to have the chance to talk to him. Robin had never been afraid of her.