by Rosie Thomas
Harriet was in a cheerful mood at the end of the meeting. As soon as her office was empty, Jeremy Crichton put his head round the door. Harriet smiled at him.
‘Come in, Jeremy. I’m sorry, I’ve been tied up all morning.’
The figures that Jeremy wanted to discuss occupied them for half an hour. When Jeremy stood up to go he hesitated with his hand on the back of his chair, and said almost as an afterthought, ‘Robin asked me to have dinner with him.’
Harriet looked up, clear-eyed. ‘How nice. You’ll go, I assume?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Jeremy was not gregarious, preferring to get home in the evenings to his wife and the garden, and did not particularly look forward to a social encounter with Robin Landwith.
‘Good,’ Harriet said, raising her eyebrows by a millimetre to indicate, is there anything else?
‘Right, then,’ Jeremy murmured. He left her to get on with her work.
Harriet didn’t think any further. It was useful that Robin should want to maintain social links with the other Peacocks’ directors, even if their own were severed. She had no doubt that Jeremy would pass on to her anything that she needed to know. She bent her head over her desk again, telling herself in passing that she should speak to Robin too.
Several days passed before she did so, although she wouldn’t have admitted that she put off making the call. She was going to tell him that she would be away from the office for a few days, that was all. It was no concern of Robin Landwith’s, beyond the requirements of business.
At length she did put through the call, dialling direct instead of asking her secretary to get the number for her. She swivelled in her chair while she waited, looking around her office, imagining Robin in his. When he answered, they exchanged neutral phrases for a moment. Their dealings were strictly limited to business now. They talked infrequently on the telephone and they met at board meetings. Robin was businesslike, as always. She had no criticism of him in that direction. He had even been surprisingly accommodating over the question of Winwood, and had been as helpful as he could be over the problems that had followed. But his manner was distant, opaque rather than hostile, so that she could not begin to gauge what he was thinking.
Harriet came to the point, the scheduling of the next board meeting.
‘Can we change the date of this month’s meeting, Robin, please? I’m going to be away on the 28th.’
‘Of course. Are you going somewhere nice?’
Harriet waited for one second. She wouldn’t lie, there was no need to descend to that. Her private life was nothing to do with Robin now, she had nothing to hide or disclose. Briefly, she told him about the plan she had made. She had laid her plans with Caspar, full of happy anticipation, but she didn’t mention Caspar’s name or the excitement she felt.
‘You’re going to Los Angeles?’ Robin’s voice was silky in a way that Harriet did not much like, but there were a number of things that Harriet did not much like about him, these days. Harriet wished that she could see his face. She sat forward in her chair, looking across at the portrait of herself on the opposite wall.
‘That’s right. Just for a few days.’
‘Business, or holiday?’
A reward, Harriet thought. There should be rewards, shouldn’t there? She didn’t allow herself all that many. Probably not nearly enough, that was something she was learning from Caspar. He drank too much, and he wasted his time and his startling talent, but he enjoyed himself where he could. Caspar liked excess, whereas she herself was frightened of it.
‘I’ll be having some meetings.’ Meizu in its various forms sold well in the States. Its successors, Alarm among them, needed a boost. But she would be better to aim for that in New York, as Robin was perfectly aware.
‘Well-timed to coincide with the Academy Awards, then,’ Robin drawled.
‘I want to be there, of course,’ Harriet said. She was unable to keep the pride out of her voice. Caspar had been nominated for his performance in Open Secret, as Best Supporting Actor. She wanted to see him going up to collect his Oscar.
‘Congratulate him for me, won’t you? You haven’t been out to the Coast before?’
‘No.’
‘When are you going, and when will you be back?’
Harriet told him.
‘Enjoy,’ Robin murmured, and hung up.
‘It’s just family,’ Harriet told Jenny and Charlie when she opened the door to them in Hampstead that evening. ‘Just us, and Jane.’
It had been a long time since she had made the space to cook dinner for her friends. She had been determined to do it before she left for the States.
‘Oh, good,’ Jenny said. ‘We can relax. I thought it might be all brokers and bankers, and me disgracing myself by falling asleep. It’s not my fault, I can’t stay awake in the first three months however hard I try.’
Jenny was pregnant again. Charlie followed her in, depositing two bottles of wine in Harriet’s arms. He kissed Harriet on both cheeks, as Harriet thought, a shade guiltily, how unlikely it was that Jenny might encounter anyone from the other compartments of her life over the dinner-table in Hampstead. She had learned the lesson that they were best kept apart quite a long time ago.
‘Is Jane here yet?’
‘No. It seems to take her a bit of time to get to and fro.’
‘I know how it is,’ Jenny sighed. ‘It must be even harder doing it alone.’
Jane’s baby daughter was three weeks old. Harriet had only seen her twice, briefly. She had a thatch of dark hair and a round, red face, and Harriet had been struck by her physical unlikeness to her mother. Jane appeared to have adapted to motherhood exactly as Harriet had imagined she would do, with her usual competence and assurance. But it was noticeable that the baby took all her attention. She was not over-anxious or even particularly joyful; she was simply intent on the baby Imogen.
Jenny and Charlie and Harriet went into the kitchen, and Harriet offered drinks. Jenny shook her head, asking for orange juice, and eyed the champagne that Harriet poured for herself and Charlie.
‘What are we celebrating?
Harriet had laid the table carefully, with flowers and candles and polished glasses. She enjoyed the business of preparation, once she had decided to make time for it. Tonight she had laid out her best blue and white plates on the linen cloth, and crammed bright spring flowers into glass bowls, searching for colour to offset the tasteful neutrality of the flat, as she had glimpsed it through Caspar’s eyes. Her cooking was no better than it had ever been, but she was good at buying the best ingredients and serving them simply, and at chopping and slicing and garnishing to make decorations of the plates.
The plain food and the exotic presentation had amused Caspar on the few occasions when she had cooked for him. Once, at Little Shelley, he had made a meal for her and had surprised her by his familiarity with onions and thick stock and braising beef. It reminded her that he had been married for fifteen years before the advent of Clare, and made her think of a family life about which she knew nothing. Odd jealousies pricked her, as they often did about Caspar, and she told herself that there was no point in giving attention to them.
With Robin, she had almost never cooked. They had eaten in the newest restaurants, carefully evaluating the food. That period seemed a long time ago, now.
‘Celebrating?’ Harriet answered. ‘Imogen, and Jane. And us all, being here.’
They sipped their drinks and Jenny looked around the pale, light, tidy kitchen as if it was her first visit. ‘It’s nice to be here,’ she murmured, leaving Harriet to wonder if there was a criticism in that because it had happened so rarely.
‘Here’s to your trip,’ Charlie added, emptying his glass and holding it out for a refill.
‘Is your boyfriend going to win the Oscar?
‘I don’t know,’ Harriet smiled at him. ‘I want to see him there, if he does.’
After a few minutes, Jane arrived. It took several trips to and from her
Citröen before the baby and its necessities were installed as the focal point in the middle of Harriet’s drawing-room floor. Harriet surveyed the wicker cot basket, the bottle for boiled water and its carrier, the pink bag bulging with nappies and creams and spare blankets and shawls, and the string of bright plastic shapes that Jane would suspend over the cot to provide visual stimulation when the baby woke up. Imogen looked very small in the midst of it all.
‘Made it at last,’ Jane sighed, and sank down on to the sofa.
Jenny knelt and peered into the basket. ‘She’s so pretty. How’s the feeding now? Did the spray help?’
Imogen was a demanding feeder and Jane had begun to suffer from cracked nipples. From experience, Jenny had been able to recommend the best remedy.
‘Still every two to three hours but yeah, it helps. But how are you? Still got the pukes?’
Harriet picked up one of her pretty French plates with its extravagant titbits of bresaola and mascarpone and offered it to her guests. Jenny shook her head and sighed again, but Jane scooped up a generous helping.
‘I’m so hungry all the time. I’m never going to lose this two stone I seem to have acquired.’ She was wearing a voluminous flowered overall which was, as she described it herself while waving one hand over breasts that were twice their old size, ‘front loading’.
‘I’m always ravenous too, when I’m breast-feeding,’ Jenny said.
Charlie held out his glass for more champagne.
Steamed tiny vegetables to go with the moist cold duck were the only proper cooking that needed to be done, but at the al dente instant they were ready Imogen woke up and needed to be fed at once. Jane brought her to the table, thoughtfully recognising that Harriet did not want to keep her embryonic carrots and baby beans waiting. She unloaded the front of her overall, baring a blue-white breast seemingly bigger than the baby’s head. In response to Imogen’s full-throated crying a tiny jet of translucent milk sprang from the nipple.
‘Ow, ouch,’ Jane said. ‘Here, baby.’
The baby latched on, with a series of little snorts and gulps. Jenny smiled fondly, the first time since the evening had started.
Harriet was remembering the almost identical scene, across Jane’s own table, the Christmas before last. Only then it had been Jane gazing longingly at another woman’s baby, and Harriet had felt a contraction like cramp in her bowels. She felt it now, watching Jane’s baby feeding, and she ignored it.
‘How’s the business, Harriet?’ Charlie asked.
‘Fine. Pretty good, in fact,’ she lied. ‘Some teething troubles at Winwood, but nothing serious.’
They had finished the champagne. Harriet had two bottles of white Rioja waiting, but Charlie expressed a preference for red. She opened a Bourgeuil instead and poured into three glasses. Jane lifted hers at once.
‘If I drink, she sleeps,’ she explained.
That was how the evening was. Whatever topic Harriet or Charlie introduced, the conversation seemed to turn irrevocably back to babies. Charlie’s thick eyebrows drew together in a straight line, and Harriet grew irritable. It wasn’t particularly that she wanted to talk about her own life, which mostly meant her work, or even to hear it acknowledged as important, as important as these sacred and exclusive rites of motherhood. In fact she had been looking forward to forgetting Peacocks for an evening and enjoying some of the old talk. In the past, Jane had been the one who was always ready for discussion, an argument on any topic, leaning across the table at midnight with her eyes gleaming with conviction.
But Jane had turned into this floral mountain, who seemed capable of talking about nothing but birth and breasts. All her first ambivalence about having a baby seemed to have disappeared with Imogen’s triumphant emergence. She was riveted, hypnotised. She had become, Harriet thought, bovine. And she suddenly missed the old Jane, as she had not done in all the time before while she had been immersed in Peacocks.
After the three exotic fruit sorbets with tuiles amandes, Harriet settled Jane and Jenny side by side on her sofa with a pot of peppermint tea in front of them. She closed the kitchen door and left them to their arcane talk. She wanted strong coffee, and so did Charlie. Charlie was leaning against the kitchen sink, rolling a glass of armagnac between the palms of his hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Sorry for what?’ Harriet pretended.
‘The mumsy phase does pass, you know. It tends to be most emphatic just after they’ve conceived and just after they’ve dropped it. You’ll find out.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Harriet answered, recognising a truth. Her body, all those pouches and coiled tubes down there, might tell her one thing, but her mind’s inclination was quite opposite. Charlie only laughed.
‘So what’s new and interesting?’
Harriet hesitated. She was torn between an urge to talk, after an evening of bored listening, and the awareness that Charlie was an astute City commentator who would not be doing his job if he didn’t fasten on to the smallest hint of problems at Peacocks. It was a contradiction that was always with her when she saw Charlie nowadays, but she usually ignored it because she liked him, and she trusted him. Tonight she settled for a light-hearted shrug. ‘Nothing much. We’ve got this new German miracle machine but so far it does less rather than more …’
‘For God’s sake,’ Charlie interrupted her. ‘Don’t you think about anything else, ever? After a good dinner? In bed? When you’re asleep?’
Involuntarily, Harriet glanced at the door that separated them from Jenny and Jane. The comparison was obvious. Her own baby, Peacocks …
Charlie was, she saw, by now rather drunk. He was scowling at her from under his eyebrows, and she grinned at him, full of affection.
‘Sorry,’ she apologised in her turn. Charlie left the support of the sink and came closer to her. She was leaning against the white counter, half-turned to watch the coffee drip into its glass jug. Charlie came closer still. His hips touched hers. He put his hands on her waist, swivelling her to face him.
‘Mmm,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s better.’
Experimentally, he moved against her. His hands moved upwards, spanning her ribcage and then settling over her breasts. Charlie had big hands, they swallowed everything. Harriet could not help but feel thin, and taut and springy, after so much spreading and dripping maternity.
He murmured, ‘Nice.’ And then prompted, ‘Nice?’
His fingers moved, rubbing a little. Harriet thought, a little dreamily, that it was nice. There had been another time, also at Jane’s, when he had reached up and rather pensively put his hand inside her shirt. She supposed they were both remembering it now, although she was certain that neither of them had given it a thought in the meantime. It had also been, she recalled, the evening of the man in the blue shirt. For some reason she had thought of him, once or twice, since she had last seen him.
Charlie’s caress became more insistent. It wasn’t as if they had been nurturing a long-standing passion for one another, Harriet was sure of that. She had never been particularly attracted, in the physical sense, to Charlie Thimbell. And now she only wanted Caspar, to get to Caspar in Los Angeles. She could feel Charlie’s erection, prodding against her thigh. His mouth slid from her ear to her neck, nuzzling under the angle of her jaw.
Harriet took a deep breath. It was nice, defiantly and mischievously nice after a dull evening, but that was its only significance. She lifted her hand to Charlie’s and removed it, letting it drop by his side.
‘What have you got in mind, anyway, Charlie? A quick one on the kitchen floor while Jenny and Jane rehearse episiotomies they have known?’
Charlie stood upright. ‘I have nothing in mind. Nothing whatsoever.’ He winced as he spoke, then reached inside the waistband of his trousers and adjusted himself. Harriet laughed, still in affection.
‘You’re pissed, Charlie.’
‘You are exactly right.’
Oddly, he reminded her of Caspar now. At a certain s
tage of drunkenness they both displayed a sort of amiable male lechery, a quality that she could describe to herself as chappiness. She knew from her experience with Caspar that the stage didn’t last long, and as she thought it she saw Charlie’s face change.
‘It isn’t easy, the hands-off time, you know,’ he announced. ‘The beginning, and the end, and just afterwards. And it’s always then that Jenny seems her very softest and juiciest.’
So much, Harriet thought with amusement, for her own skinny tautness.
‘I haven’t forgotten what it was like when we lost James, you know. I’ll never, never forget that. But I feel just a little bit now, just a tiny bit, Harriet darling, as though I’m being bombed with milky babies. With milk, and pee, and baby shit. While you, lovely, delicious Harriet, with your head full of the money market and your PE ratio, are sheathed in silk and scented with Chloë. You’ve got little hard breasts and a lovely flat belly and long legs, so can you blame me, could you blame any man, for wanting to lie down with you and wrap the whole lot around him?’
Drily Harriet said, ‘Put like that, not really. Not that I was about to do any blaming, in any case. Here you are, Charlie. Drink your coffee. Strong and black.’
Was that what Caspar thought, she wondered, in the same condition? That she was a collection of bodily bits and pieces, in which to wrap himself? Robin had never thought as little, she was sure of that. Nor Leo, even at the end.
Charlie drank his coffee. It sobered him noticeably.
‘Sorry,’ he grimaced again.
‘Let’s stop apologising.’ She held out one arm, mocking him a little. ‘Shall we rejoin the ladies?’
Charlie laughed. ‘You’re all right, Harriet, you know. No wonder you’re a success in business. You think like a man.’
Harriet didn’t bother to take him up on that.
‘Still at it?’ Charlie enquired, when they returned to Harriet’s drawing room. Jenny and Jane looked up, guiltily. Imogen was at her mother’s breast again. But Harriet found that her own mood had altered. She understood that of course Jane needed to talk to Jenny at length about feeds and schedules and weight-gains. She was alone, a new mother, she had no one else except the professionals to turn to. Contrite, she went across the room to her and hugged her, including the baby in the embrace. Jane smelt of milk and baby sick. She found that she understood a little of Charlie, too.