by Rosie Thomas
Caspar said, ‘I wish …, but he didn’t finish. Harriet knew that wishing belonged with the infinite optimism of the bright world outside, not here with Caspar in the hospital. She sat with her head bent, uselessly holding on to his hand.
Caspar broke the silence, saying, ‘I didn’t mean you to have to come over here in the middle of the night. I gave them my own number. It was the only one I could think of.’
‘Vernon brought me. I’d have come anyway, whether you wanted it or not.’
‘Will you go and see Linda?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve got to go back to London, but if you could just see Linda first.’
Harriet understood that she was being discharged. She was to feel no responsibility to Caspar, for all the months they had shared. He would not let her stand close enough to suffer with him, and in that moment she realised that he never had done. Their relationship had been more truly Hollywood than she had properly seen. The peak of the wave was to be ridden in glory, and the trough was to be turned away from, in the pretence that it did not exist.
Caspar’s lawyers and his agents and the rest would close their professional ranks around him. There was nothing for Harriet to do here, now. There was no window in the hospital room but Harriet knew that it was full daylight outside. Last night was long over.
Caspar’s face was the colour of stone, except for the livid bruise marks.
‘Go and see Linda before you go home,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t let her know I killed someone, will you?’
She would have to know, soon enough, Harriet thought.
‘I’ll tell her you’re hurt, but not badly. She’ll want to come and see you. What shall I say?’
Caspar lifted their joined hands, but the weight defeated him and they dropped again. It was to say, When she looks at me, what will she see?
‘Is there anything else I can do, Caspar?’
‘Just ask Vernon to come in.’
Harriet stood up, then leant over him to kiss the undamaged side of his face. She hesitated, needing to give more, but Caspar was looking away, trying to excuse her even this negligible duty. Harriet could only let her cheek rest against his forehead.
‘If you need me,’ she whispered.
Caspar didn’t answer.
Harriet straightened up again and went to the door. Caspar lay against the pillows. He was diminished, smaller than life. She remembered how, when she first saw him back in Little Shelley, he had seemed to dwarf Martin Landwith.
‘If you need me,’ Harriet repeated, but now it was a formula.
She went out and nodded to Vernon, who was leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor. As she waited, she heard Caspar issuing instructions for the marshalling of lawyers, and agents.
Harriet and Vernon retraced their steps down the corridor and across the waiting area. As they approached the glass doors that opened on to the early light, Harriet became aware of a couple walking to one side of them. They moved very slowly, and Harriet saw it was because the woman was crying, her mouth open in a square, and the man was supporting her. He was overweight, in a sports shirt that was too tight for him. The woman’s tears fell unnoticed on to her pink blouse. There was no reason for her to assume it, but Harriet was sure that they were Mr and Mrs Getz.
Ahead of them the automatic doors hissed open, and Harriet and Vernon walked out into another bright day.
‘Linda will be down in a moment,’ Clare’s secretary told Harriet. Harriet sat amongst pleated cushions in the marble chill, and waited. Linda came slowly down the stairs. Her eyes were dark in her white face. Harriet went to hug her, but she submitted to the embrace without returning it.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Linda said.
It was late morning, because Harriet had had to undertake more negotiation with the secretary for permission to see Linda. The sun was hot on their heads and they walked across the immaculate lawn, past the glassy pool and banks of flowers punctuated with dark columns of cypresses.
Someone, either her mother or the secretary, had already given Linda the news.
‘Tell me how he looked,’ she ordered, in a small uninflected voice.
Harriet told her, with as much optimism as she could command. Linda considered, looking away, with seeming concentration, towards the tennis court.
‘He won’t die, then?’
Harriet stopped walking, moved round to stand in front of her and took her hands. ‘No, I promise he won’t die.’
Linda looked at her at last, without blinking. ‘Was he drunk, in the car?’
Lies and half-truths counter-asserted themselves in Harriet’s mouth before she answered, ‘Yes, he was.’
‘Why weren’t you with him?’
‘I was going back to London this morning. I went home early. Perhaps I should have stayed with him.’
‘The other girl did,’ Linda said, in the same small voice.
Clare must have told her. It was better that she should know, Harriet thought, rather than pick up distortions of the truth.
‘It was a car crash, Linda. A terrible accident. Probably we won’t ever know exactly what happened.’
‘Probably,’ Linda agreed politely. They walked on, in the sunlight, through the lush garden.
‘Are you going today after all?’
‘I have to.’ Harriet was booked on the evening flight. She would reach London late, with only hours in hand before the meeting. She pushed the thought away from her for now. They were at the furthest point of the gardens when the Spanish housekeeper came out to tell Linda that her lunch was ready. She was a big woman who smiled at Linda, and called her honey in her Latin accent. Linda and Harriet walked back towards the house, and Harriet was reminded again of how they had played truant together from Annunziata’s New Year’s party.
Beside the open door Linda hesitated, pointing the toe of her sneaker at a pebble on the path.
‘I thought at first it was you,’ she said. ‘In the car with Caspar.’
Harriet put her arms around her, careless of whether Clare might be watching.
‘It wasn’t me. I’m here with you. I’m always here if you need me.’ The words she had offered to Caspar, but no formula now. They were the simple truth.
Linda nodded. Almost inaudibly she said, ‘I love you.’
Harriet smiled, looking down at the top of Linda’s head. Incongruous but perfectly sharp happiness descended on her. ‘I love you too.’
‘Harriet? Is it wrong to be glad that someone else died, because it meant you didn’t?’
Harriet told her, ‘You have nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, Linda. Remember that, if you can. Don’t take a load of guilt that doesn’t belong to you. You’ll get your share in the end.’ Harriet tried to make her voice light, but Linda would not be deflected.
‘Does it belong to Caspar?’
Harriet held her for a moment longer, before she tried to answer, and then she let her go. She wanted to go on, hugging the breath out of her, but she stepped back and stood with her arms at her sides.
‘I think the only person who can talk to you about that is Caspar himself.’
She could see that there were tears in Linda’s eyes, but she was staring hard to keep them back. From inside the house the housekeeper was calling.
‘Go on,’ Harriet whispered. ‘Remember what I said, I’ll see you in London.’
‘Remember what I said, too,’ Linda said fiercely. She turned and ran into the house.
At seven o’clock, Harriet’s plane climbed up, heading directly into the fire of the Los Angeles sunset. Then, as if the spectacle was overdone, it banked in a slow turn and circled back over the curve of the bay. It straightened again and headed eastwards, into the thickening darkness, for London.
Seventeen
Harriet reached home at ten o’clock on the last evening. She left her two suitcases in the middle of the floor and went to the telephone.
‘Charlie? What did you get?’
From h
is armchair Charlie pointed the remote controller at the television screen, suppressing the News. Jenny raised her eyebrows, letting her mending drop in her lap.
‘Nothing.’
‘What? There must be something.’
‘Exactly. The silence itself is ominous. But I couldn’t get a whisper. He’s covered his tracks, wherever they lead. I spoke to the PR again, too. All she’d heard was the one story she told me. Listen, Harriet, perhaps it’s all quite innocent.’
Harriet leaned wearily against her marble mantelpiece. Her eyes and mouth were gritty with dehydration after the long flight and her head felt heavy and thick. She frowned, massaging the bridge of her nose as she spoke.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What’s your guess then?’
She hesitated and then shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’ll be wanting to change the board structure somehow, gaining control of it for himself, putting in some sort of figurehead MD in my place to stop me calling the shots, perhaps. Whether he can do it depends on how much shareholder support he can call on, of course.’
He would need a big slice, to set against her own and the family’s. She clung to that comfort.
‘Has there been trouble, Harriet? What ammunition has he got?’
Harriet reviewed the dissonance at Winwood and the expensive malfunctioning of its machinery, the sales performance of Alarm, the new lines in the production pipeline. The problems were out of focus, seen through the distorting lens of Los Angeles and diminished by her anxiety for Linda and her sadness for Caspar. She wished her head would clear, but she was still sure that there was nothing wrong at Peacocks that she could not solve. She described some of it to Charlie, briefly, needing a friend and forgetting that he was a journalist.
‘He can’t shoot me down with that much. But he can try, if he wants to.’
‘That’s the girl.’ Charlie felt a surge of admiration, but he possessed none of Harriet’s apparent confidence.
‘I’m going to bed now, Charlie. I didn’t sleep on the plane, and I only got about two hours the night before.’
She heard Charlie’s loud, short laugh. ‘Go on then, party girl.’
Harriet thought of Caspar’s darkened face, and Mr and Mrs Getz. She was too weary to dispel Charlie’s illusions.
‘Good-night,’ she said tonelessly and hung up.
Jenny had readdressed herself to the buttons on Harry’s dungarees, but she glanced sideways at Charlie as she bit off her thread. ‘Did she have a good time?’
‘Sounds like it.’ Charlie was gloomy as he settled back in his chair, pressed the button and resuscitated the News once more.
Harriet looked at the clock. It was late to be ringing Kath, who kept regular hours, but not impossibly so. Harriet herself had lost track of time. She knew that she was exhausted, but her body gave her no indication that it was day or night. She seemed to have entered a grey zone of perpetual anxious wakefulness.
Ken answered the call. It seemed to take a very long time for Kath to come to the telephone.
At length Harriet heard, ‘Is that you, Harriet?’
She smiled. ‘Who else?’
‘You’re back safely, then.’
‘Yes. Mum, we need to talk about tomorrow.’
And then, at once, Harriet heard the silence. She talked into it, telling Kath that she would be needing her support, counting her holding in with Ken’s and Lisa’s. Kath said nothing, and Harriet’s voice sharpened.
‘You’ll be there?’
Kath answered, ‘Yes, I have to be there, don’t I?’
Harriet listened, trying to marshal her thoughts, wondering if tiredness was playing tricks on her. It was impossible that any of this was to do with Kath. She realised that her heart was thumping unpleasantly, but she made her voice as calm and easy as she could. ‘Have you seen Robin?’
‘He paid us a visit, just for a chat, he said.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, Harriet. You know I don’t understand any of it, really.’
Her vagueness kindled irritation like a flame in Harriet. She snapped, ‘Why don’t you? Don’t you have any idea how important it is?’ She knew as soon as she had said it that it was the wrong time, she was too fatigued after all that had happened to be having this conversation.
‘Don’t talk like that,’ Kath’s voice came back thinly. ‘You do it too much. You have, ever since you started this business. No wonder you’re there on your own, you’ll end up alone, is that what you want?’
‘I want,’ Harriet answered, carefully spacing the words, ‘to know what has been happening while I have been away, in connection with my company. Is that too much to ask?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Kath murmured. There was a familiar plaintive note now, that Harriet knew of old. Kath could draw a wilful opacity around her when she wanted to, shielding herself from one of the scenes she dreaded by deflecting every challenge with resigned bewilderment. Harriet knew quite well that she would learn nothing now.
‘You do know,’ she said softly, but she only found herself listening to the bruised silence. Fear and anger beat together in her chest. ‘It’s me, Harriet,’ she tried.
‘I know it is,’ Kath answered, all sadness, but Harriet was too far off balance to take her chance. She saw that it was almost 11 p.m., and that there was only twelve hours until the board meeting.
‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ she said abruptly.
It was Kath who was left listening to the silence behind the dialling tone.
Harriet went to bed, but she could not sleep. Jet engines still vibrated beside her and her limbs curled stiffly in the contours of the plane seat. She turned and lay flat, trying to suppress the chains of thoughts that looped together fears and speculations and fraying hopes. Figures and prices made processions in her head, and she tried to harness them to form speeches to the board, to her shareholders, but they wheeled and turned in the wrong direction and outflanked her.
Her body began to vibrate with her anxiety for sleep, and sleep receded further. She could only think about the meeting, and whatever it was that Robin had plotted against her. In the darkness she grew more fearful, and Peacocks began to seem a real baby, bonded to her and about to be torn away. The images became confused with Linda, riding the carousel, and Miss Getz in her ribbons, and then blood and dismemberment.
Harriet sat upright to chase away the horrors. She pushed the bedclothes aside, and got out of bed. She couldn’t sleep, so she would walk instead.
It was cold outside. London’s spring was still weeks away. The pavements that led from Harriet’s front gate were black and slick with frost. She put her hands into her coat pockets and bent her head, walking quickly, directionlessly. After the mild, scented air of the West Coast the chilled London smoke bit into her lungs, making her cough and gasp.
The night walk did not help her to unravel any of the coils in her head, but the icy air did damp the heat of her anxiety, and the rhythm of her footsteps overcame the vibrating tension that had stopped her from falling asleep. She walked until she was warm and no longer needed to huddle in her heavy coat. She put her head back, and turned at the far corner where the Heath stretched away in blackness beyond the nimbus of a street lamp. She retraced her steps to her own gate.
She did sleep, then.
Her alarm woke her again at six, precipitating her from a dream into a disorientated groping, through the fog of which she quickly distinguished the threatening contours of the day. She got up at once, turning her face to meet what was coming.
She dressed in the navy-blue Chanel suit that she had worn for her impact breakfast. It had brought her good luck then. She fastened the monogrammed buttons with deliberate care and smoothed the braided lapels. When she stopped to examine her reflection in the full-length mirror she saw that she hadn’t changed. She still looked what she was, a successful woman, Meizu Girl.
Harriet was the first to reach Peacocks’ offices. The week’s paperwork wa
s neatly laid on her desk, sorted into the categories she preferred. There was a list of less urgent callers; Harriet saw Alison Shaw’s name amongst them. She looked up at her own portrait, noting its serene expression. Everything was so much as it always was that it was hard to believe Robin could assail any of it. Harriet got up from her desk and went to the kitchen to make a cup of instant coffee. She came back and began to go through the correspondence, concentrating on details to keep the larger anxiety at bay.
At nine, the staff began to arrive. Harriet had not announced her early return and their surprise seemed genuine. But even as Harriet asked herself, who knows? the atmosphere seemed to grow cooler. She rang through to Graham Chandler’s office, but his secretary told her that Graham would not be in until eleven, for the board meeting. Everyone knew about the meeting, then. Harriet opened her own diary and saw that the day was blank.
She could keep up the pretence of routine working no longer. She stood up and walked slowly to and fro. She began to understand that in her brief absence Robin had made her a suspect in her own stronghold. On an ordinary day there would already have been a stream of people in her office, wanting to talk and plan, eager to tell her what had been achieved in her absence. The door that remained closed and the silent telephone gave her a clearer warning than any coldly-worded official letter.
At half past nine exactly she rang Allardyce’s, the company’s bankers. There was some prevarication, but Harriet was insistent and at last she was put through to James Hamilton. He listened to what she had to say, Harriet all the time aware that she was not expressing her anxiety very cogently. Jet lag confused her thinking.
Hamilton’s response to Harriet’s incoherence was impeccable, but stony, politeness. ‘Allardyce’s have not been approached to deal with any business in connection with this,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid that at this time we are now wiser than you as to any possible restructuring within Peacocks. We are here to help in so far as we can, of course, at any time …’