by Helen Smith
Harvey is wiggling his hips to the tunes from Jane’s Live at Pride CD as he inspects her fridge for something that isn’t low fat to pick at over coffee.
‘Harvey,’ Jane growls as his hand falls on a stale donut, ‘stop mincing around and coin a clever phrase for me that I can slip into this style piece I’m doing for The Sunday Times.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about how you can fit a beauty routine into your busy day as a housewife and mother. You just make face masks out of the kids’ food.’
Messy Mums?’
‘Nah, too negative.’
‘Stale donut?’
‘Hmm, doesn’t really make sense. Stale Donut. Messy Mum. Donut Mum. It still all sounds vaguely insulting. And it’s not exactly Generation X or the Beat Generation.’
‘Jane, honey, what are you talking about? I was asking if you wanted to share a piece of this donut with me. Still, if you’re looking for a metaphor in your article how about Donut Generation? Does that sound better? Sugary and yummy-looking on the outside, an empty space on the inside.’
‘Harvey, you’ve cracked it. That’s absolutely great. It’s too good to restrict it to an article about mango face packs. I’ll develop it and pitch it somewhere. Jane Memory writes wittily and pithily about the Donut Generation. Jane points out that we all look delicious but we are empty inside. Men purr, women purr, the standard of the literary style piece is raised to new heights, editors pay vast amounts of money. Stop pirouetting, Harvey.’
‘I wasn’t pirouetting.’
‘There’s a tea towel over there if you need to wipe the sugar off your trousers. I need to raise my profile in print journalism, and I’d like to get into TV.’ It is six months since Jane Memory gave her cold heart to TV docu-soap director Philippe Noir but so far he has failed to respond with a job offer. It is a sore point. ‘I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved in journalism but I want to go further. I’m terrified I’m not going to get the breaks.’
‘Terrified? What do you fear most in the world, Jane?’
‘Obscurity. At least it’s easier to fix than a fear of the unknown.’
Harvey watches Jane scratching her coccyx with the blunt end of a ballpoint pen through her trousers. ‘Jane, what colour is “oyster”, would you say?’
‘Red, orange, yellow … gained battle in vain… green, blue, indigo, violet. It isn’t a colour at all.’
‘When I was a student at art school I worked weekends in the carpet department of a large furniture store. I handled telephone complaints. “They’ve delivered the wrong colour carpet,” customers would say. “I ordered oyster but this is too dark, it doesn’t look oyster-coloured at all. This is more of a gun-metal grey.” Or dove grey or slate grey. “But that’s the carpet you chose from the sample you saw in the show room,” I’d tell them, “oyster is just a label we use.” It happened all the time. Doesn’t that surprise you? People expected the carpet to match the colour that the name painted in their head, rather than matching the sample they’d chosen with their own eyes. They would actually call me up and argue about the name we gave to the colour.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me at all Harv, people will do anything to get a discount.’
Mrs Fitzgerald sits on the top deck of a 159 bus as it waits at traffic lights at the square roundabout formed by Parliament Square in Westminster. The bus is in the one of the three lanes of traffic that is nearest to the Houses of Parliament. Mrs Fitzgerald looks down and to her right, where a policeman in a box with a pointed roof guards the entrance to the House of Commons car park.
Mrs Fitzgerald looks at the statue of the crusader king Richard I, Coeur de Lion, riding his horse in front of the Houses of Parliament, his rapier sword raised in his right hand. He never did much for this country, plundering the gold reserves to pay for his wars against the Muslims (or Infidels, as they were known then). However he cut a very dashing figure, and his aggressive foreign policy did no harm to his popularity at home.
A young man on the path catches Mrs Fitzgerald’s eye as the bus moves off slowly to the left. He is swinging his arms, taking long strides. The hem of his summer cotton dress brushes his knees as he walks. Mrs Fitzgerald turns completely around in her seat, rising up a little to catch a further sight of him but he has disappeared. If he was even there in the first place. She stares back through the rear window of the bus at Big Ben for a while, its façade familiar and reassuring, as the bus passes by Downing Street and Horse Guards Parade on its way up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square.
Big Ben is the name popularly given to the Gothic clock tower which stands 316 ft high at the north side of the Houses of Parliament, although that is properly the name of the biggest bell in the tower that chimes the Westminster chimes on the hour, every hour. The bell weighs 13½ tons, cast in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1858. Some sources say the bell was named after Sir Benjamin Hall who commissioned the building. Others, perhaps given its East End provenance, suggest the bell was named after boxing champion Big Ben Caul who went sixty rounds unbeaten.
Each of the four clock faces are 22½ ft in diameter. The individual numerals are nearly two ft tall. The minute hands are 14 ft long. Each one will have traced an arc of more than five feet in the five minutes since Mrs Fitzgerald first saw Jeremy making his way towards the clock tower.
Venetia Latimer looks at the kitchen clock. 11.30 p.m. She is worried about her husband. She has left him sitting in the next room, his elbows propped on the worn arms of his chair, his head held in his hands as if it has grown too heavy to be supported by his neck. What use are you? she thinks, not unkindly. He’s worrying about his job, she can tell. His new boss is giving him a hard time.
There is no point any longer in being a businessman, a technician or a tradesman, if you are a man. Women can learn the skills and perform those jobs as well as any man, or better, apparently, in the case of her husband’s new boss.
A man who joins a large company is provided with a pension plan, a swipe card to get in through the front door and a bushel so he can hide his light under it. It certainly isn’t the kind of work Mrs Latimer would have chosen for her son. She would rather he was a showman – a circus performer or an actor. Venetia suspects that men will be valued in the future only so long as they are frivolous; exotically and notably different from women.
Venetia puts a cup of milk in a large pan and boils it very rapidly, cutting the flame under it as it swells suddenly to twice its volume. She whisks two heaped teaspoons of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and a tablespoon of brandy into the frothy milk, moves the pan, re-lights the flame and holds a marshmallow over the flame on the end of a fork until it forms a blistered skin on the point of bursting and sputtering its liquefied centre. She stirs the marshmallow into the hot chocolate, pours it into his favourite cup, sprinkles some finely chopped almonds on the top and walks next door to where her husband still sits. The brandy has curdled the milk, slightly.
He looks so gloomy that she can’t think of any words that will make him feel better. She takes his hand, so he will take comfort from her presence. At times like these a very small part of Venetia is sorry she disapproves of his career in the City so strongly because it makes it so difficult to discuss things with him. She has a horror of mentioning his unhappiness in case he starts talking about business issues and bores her.
‘Stephen, I’ve brought you a cup of hot chocolate.’ Venetia hopes the drink will cheer him up. She’s really very fond of him. She has something she needs to ask him.
‘Stephen, how would I go about getting a private detective’s licence revoked?’
‘A licence? I don’t know how it works. If it’s anything like a trading licence in the City then exposing the detective for something like embezzlement or drug dealing would do it. Can you try to turn up any kind of irregularity in his behaviour or in his business accounts? That would probably get a suspension, at least. Shall I tell you how it works in the City?’
‘No. Tha
t’s quite enough. You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’
Chapter Eleven ~ Colours
Roy watches Sylvia harvesting winter firewood from yesterday’s pruning in the garden. Wearing gloves, she rubs one hand up and down the soft shoots on the branches to remove the leaves. She takes the very ends of the slimmest branches in her two hands and bends them until they break, the muscles tensing in her upper arms and her back under her tight pink T-shirt. Other, thicker branches are trimmed and cut to length with secateurs. Sylvia parcels them up using garden twine and places them lengthwise in a shoe-box shaped woven basket with a handle to take them to the wood store, which is actually a garden shed. The leaves and twigs that she can’t use for firewood in the kitchen and the living room are sorted into piles, the leaves going on to a compost heap and the twigs carried to a brazier in the back of the garden to be burned with the household rubbish.
There is something different about the orchard at the bottom of Sylvia’s garden this morning. Roy looks very carefully at it through the foliage of the rose bushes that frame the kitchen window. Something has changed. Spring is coming but it’s not that. He studies the view from the window. Soft shoots and hard buds are appearing on the flowers and trees, red and green among the grey. Clematis has wound itself through the rose branches, teardrop flower buds poking out at the top like little green vipers standing on their tails above a nest of prickles.
Roy looks through the sunlit space among the roses to where the sunlight reaches the apple trees. He watches two of the trees pick themselves up and move away, slowly. He looks again and sees they are Sorrel the elephant’s legs moving, not the apple trees. Roy loses sight of her among the trees, then catches the movement again as she walks down to the beach. He feels lonely, watching her unobserved.
Ella Fitzgerald is potting up the geranium cuttings that have over-wintered on the window ledge in her spare bedroom. The leaves are variegated; soft green with thin maroon lines traced in them. She touches the leaves and the contact intensifies the distinctive, spicy smell in the air. The flowers, when they come, will be shocking salmon pink and red pepper red.
Ella thinks about her husband, long since dead, who suffered from colour blindness. Men are more prone to the condition than women. Four per cent of men suffer from colour blindness, compared to one per cent of women. She pauses for a moment in sympathy for those who will never enjoy the garish clash of geranium colours when the flowers start to appear on the plants. How can such vibrant, different colours be indistinguishable? Her husband never liked to discuss it. He couldn’t explain whether he perceived the colours as a muddy mixture or whether he saw both red and green as some exotic extra colour that she didn’t have access to through normal vision. He only said that he couldn’t see the difference between them.
There is a very rare colour blindness in which everything appears as a shade of grey, like a black and white photograph, or a television advertisement for an expensive perfume. Also very rare is blue blindness, in which sufferers are unable to detect the colour blue. More common is green blindness, in which bright green is confused with dark red, and red blindness, in which dark green is confused with light red. Mrs Fitzgerald’s husband, whose disability would have disbarred him from taking a job as a signalman on the railways or a pilot on an aircraft, had chosen a career in the law and made a great success of it. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs a very tiny sigh, thinking about her lost husband.
She turns to the pots. She’s using a compost that doesn’t deplete the natural peat resources, emulating Geoff Hamilton, who until his death a few years ago was a stalwart in her life with his sensible advice on Gardener’s World on Friday evening television. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs again. She sometimes feels she goes on and on through life, carrying its burdens, as men fall away. The earthy smell of the compost connects her to deep thoughts. She brushes away the dirt that clings on her fingers up to the first joints where she has plunged them into the pots and she walks away from the plants.
In the kitchen, her hands scrubbed and smelling of rose soap, Mrs Fitzgerald takes up one of the biographies she has been reading lately. She is conducting private research into the behaviour of people whose start in life is outwardly normal, but who later descend into madness. She reads about troubled comedians, shamed politicians, drink and drug addicted footballers, power crazy businessmen. What is it that connects them? Are there any external contributory factors? She deduces the link in one of those flashes when the staringly obvious hits for the first time. Every single one of the people in the books she has been reading has been damaged by notoriety. To ensure she learns from their mistakes, Mrs Fitzgerald vows to avoid notoriety at all costs. She pours a cup of very strong black coffee and opens a packet of langue de chat biscuits to celebrate her decision.
‘There’s so much colour in my life,’ Alison tells Taron as the second shot of Tequila goes down. ‘Do you remember the first time you came here and everything in the house was white? The walls, the bed linen, the furniture? Now there are primary colours in every corner; toy trucks and post boxes and ABC books.’
‘Hey, keep up. That uptight white stuff was so early-nineties-single-woman. Things have moved on. You only had colour in your garden when I met you. It was symptomatic of your empty life. Now you’re enriched and fulfilled and there’s colour everywhere. I think we should celebrate that.’
They lick the backs of their hands, sprinkle some salt, lick it, pour the tequila, pour the champagne, swirl, swirl, cover the glass, bang, bang, bang, drink the liquid, suck the lime.
‘Aren’t Tequila Slammers a bit of an eighties drink?’
‘Alison, some things are evergreen. What’s it really like, then, bringing up the baby?
‘Say you buy a Volkswagen Golf,’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t expect to come home and find it’s extruded into a Volvo and you can’t park it anywhere.’
‘That would take a bit of getting used to.’
‘Exactly.’
Alison composes a poem to send to Jeff.
Colours
Colours are wrapping me up in my living room
Coming in from the garden
Climbing the walls of the nursery
Red trucks in the corners
Yellow plastic crockery in the sink
Green elephants in my bed
Taron says it’s a sign of my coming of age
But I’ve never believed
A single thing
She’s said
‘You’ll be sent to Poet Hell on judgement day to suffer eternal punishment,’ Taron tells her, and signals the end of the night by lighting up the last cigarette in the packet.
Chapter Twelve ~ Cherry Lip gloss
The psychic postman brings a small package in a brown Jiffy bag for Alison the next morning. It contains a present of cherry lip gloss from Jeff.
‘My sister-in-law had a baby last year. She stopped going out or taking an interest in herself. A visit to the hairdresser, a bit of lipstick, you’d be surprised how much better she felt when she made a bit of an effort with her appearance.’
A hand-written poem falls from the package as Alison opens it.
Cherry Lip gloss
Cloudy colour
Sticky flavour
Slicks your lips
Temporary
It slips away
With the first lick
Alison goes into the kitchen to make some lunch. A Sunday Times colour supplement feature on economical natural beauty techniques comes to mind. Standing at the hob, stir-frying things to a pulp in a wok, she slicks her fingers with olive oil and runs them through her hair and traces them over her dry lips. She mashes an avocado, spoons half the quantity into Phoebe’s mouth and smears the rest on her face. The postman is probably right. She needs to get out more.
Chapter Thirteen ~ Truly, Madly, Deeply
Sheila Travers had no idea how much she depended on Roy until she lost him. She was always the strong one, the one who spo
ke for both of them and made all the trivial decisions about their daily lives. He didn’t seem to care about anything much except her, which was one of the reasons she liked him. He fixed his brown eyes on her and watched her wherever she went in the house, like a faithful hound. Now that he has gone, her world is crumbling and she spends hours scouring the press and the TV and radio for clues to his disappearance.
The police haven’t found his body. The only explanation for his continued absence that Sheila can come up with is that Roy is alive but he isn’t free. Friends seem to feel that another explanation is much more likely.
‘A woman? Why would a woman want to keep Roy from coming home?’ Sheila asks them, puzzled. It’s considered old-fashioned to differentiate between the genders but surely people still concede that men are more likely than women to commit crimes against the person?
‘Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air?’ counter her friends, despairing.
Sheila, queuing in the newsagents to buy a newspaper, fire-lighters, bin liners and a packet of Twiglets, looks at the range of magazines with their incredible stories to tell. She has some understanding of the way that journalists work, having watched a docu-soap on the subject last year. Each one of the stories will have been carefully verified by the editor before going to print.
‘My mother stole my boyfriend.’ ‘I spent the night in a space ship.’ Are you saying he has simply been plucked from the air? The mist clears. Sheila, wearing her favourite earrings, receives another message. Roy has been taken away. He hasn’t come home because he can’t get back. He is being studied or held to ransom by aliens.
When Sheila telephones the police, they are willing to consider a wider spectrum of possible explanations. ‘An affair?’ They suggest. ‘Another woman? Another man? A mid-life crisis, a joke, a hoax, a fraud of some kind?’