by Anna Raverat
“How about one of these?” Linda said, leafing through Modern Classic Songs for Our Time. She stopped at a page. “How about ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’—something you can sing along to?”
“I’m not keen on Judy Garland,” I said. We settled on an easy waltz and an extremely simplified version of Bach’s Siciliana in G minor, which I loved.
60
There were various legalities that still had to be ironed out to do with the Chicago Hotel Village and since she’d put it under the “innovation” banner, Trish appointed me to work on these with Branton. At his suggestion, we met for lunch at a brasserie near the office. I ordered salmon and spinach, but when our food arrived, Branton looked at mine and said, “You need chips.” Without waiting for an answer, he flagged down a passing waiter.
Perhaps it’s you who needs the chips, I thought.
When the basket of French fries came, he tipped the whole lot onto my plate and shook salt over them. “They’re good for you,” he said. Throughout lunch, he helped himself to chips from my plate. The assumed intimacy surprised me, but even more surprising was that I didn’t mind.
That afternoon Branton sent a text to say he’d enjoyed lunch and the text had a kiss.
* * *
I didn’t mention the chips, but I did tell Jo about the slightly awkward dinner with Stephan and the text-kiss from Branton; she told me it was time to buy new underwear and wrote down where I should go. The next day I walked into Rigby & Peller on the King’s Road, supplier of brassieres to the Queen.
“Lean forward,” said the sales assistant. “That’s right, bend forward. You don’t put the bra on; you put yourself into the bra.” With two expert motions she smoothed round from my shoulder blades up into the cups.
“You mean the fat on my back can make me have bigger boobs?” I said.
“You just want everything you’ve got out in front.” She tucked me in and tightened the straps. “There,” she said. “See?”
61
I went back to the doctor to get more sleeping pills. Jo instructed me to use an upcoming flight as an excuse to get temazepam and diazepam.
“I don’t know if I need them,” I told her, though I still wasn’t sleeping properly.
“Well, can you get them anyway? I know loads of people who want them—you’re not the only one who doesn’t sleep, you know. They’ll pay you.”
“Jo! I’m not a drug dealer!”
“OK, just give them free then,” she said. “Keep what you want for yourself, obviously, and I’ll take the rest.”
“Don’t they have doctors in Primrose Hill?” I said.
“The ones here are wise to all the tricks,” said Jo. “They ask to see the flight confirmation.”
* * *
The waiting room was crowded, people bent over in stained chairs wheezing, coughing, sneezing, more limping in every few minutes. If you weren’t sick already, you soon would be. I’d been waiting for twenty minutes when a seat came free by the doctor’s door. There was no phone signal in the surgery and I had already exhausted all of the available reading material—dog-eared magazines, months old—and wished I’d brought a book. My eyes happened upon the fire extinguisher. The instructions read, Stand against wall, undo hooks, hold firmly, point at fire, press hard, which for some reason made me think about sex—it had been almost a year since I’d had any. I suddenly realized I was ravenous. I left the surgery without waiting to see the doctor and went out for a second breakfast feeling jubilant: my appetites had started to come back.
* * *
They’d had a bit of a reorganization at the bookshop, changed the name of my favorite bookcase. It used to be called “Philosophy and Self-Help,” but now the books were separated into two sections: “Philosophy and Psychology” and “Self-Help/Motivational.” Paul McKenna was here.
I said hello to Ben and looked at the “Philosophy and Psychology” shelves: Aristotle, Plato, Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard. A title by Jürgen Habermas caught my eye, An Awareness of What Is Missing. I ordered the books I’d come in for and bought the Habermas because the title evoked something in me, like a lyric to a long-forgotten song.
* * *
The next day, I received a phone call.
“Hello, it’s Ben. From the bookshop.”
“Oh! Hello!”
“Your books arrived today.”
He only called about the books, I reasoned, but then again one of the others could have called, and he did, so maybe he does like me.
* * *
When I went to collect my books—Wide Sargasso Sea, The Age of Innocence, and The Portrait of a Lady—Ben said, “You read a lot, don’t you?”
“Oh! I don’t read them—I just put them in a pile,” I said.
Ben laughed, but I wasn’t joking, I really did put all my new books into a pile. It gave me pleasure to look at them and open them, but actually reading them was something I seldom got around to. This habit didn’t seem at all strange to me; it didn’t even seem like a habit until Ben said that. I remembered that there used to be almost nothing I liked better than to read in bed with a cup of tea. I remembered the agony of finishing a book that I was in love with. The first time this happened was when I was seven with Ballet Shoes. I read that book three times in a row and afterward I still didn’t know who I wanted to be most—Pauline, Petrova, or Posy. It was rarer, as an adult, to find books I loved completely—but surely, I thought, looking at the three books in my hand, surely I will love at least one of these. Jean Rhys. Edith Wharton. Henry James, for goodness’ sake! I put the books in my bag.
Ben had left the till and was now coming back. He was trying not to smile.
“We wanted to give you a gift, since you spend so much in here.”
“Oh!”
He handed me a book. It was Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Rumbled.”
“I noticed you looking at it quite a lot.”
“How embarrassing,” I said.
“Not at all, it’s like flicking through Hello! magazine. Everybody does it. I read Quit Smoking Today cover to cover.”
“And did you?” I asked.
“No. Well, not because of the book, anyway.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking down at the four titles I was holding. “I think I’ll go and start reading one of them.”
“You’re not going to put them in a pile, then?”
“I’ll read one and put the rest in the pile,” I said.
“Which one are you going to read?”
“I don’t know yet.”
* * *
At home, I made tea and went to my pile of new books. It was like looking at treasure. I laid them out on my bed, so that I could appreciate them one by one, feeling the weight and the quality of the paper. I felt excited and a little bit frightened. Reading would be like paradise regained; how could I have forsaken it for so long? I got the self-help books out from under the bed and laid them out in the gaps. I wasn’t sure what I should read first. A parenting book, perhaps? But I was getting on quite well with the kids now. Relationship book? God, no. I didn’t even want to know what codependency was. There were five books on surviving infidelity, which I shoved back under the bed—I thought I was surviving pretty well. Paul McKenna? But I’d already read that in my not-so-sneaky bouts in the bookshop, and actually I was happy with my weight now. High literature, maybe? I was tempted to go for Henry James with some poetry alongside. I remembered my practice of having two or three books on the go; I’d have a main book and one or two others to dip into for different moods or weather. I decided on Henry James and Sylvia Plath, an old friend I wanted to look up again—these could make a great pair, although a bit heavy perhaps. I looked again at the books spread over the bed; lovely rectangles of varying color and size like a patchwork quilt. My eye happened upon something I’d bought on Amazon months ago, a book by Gok Wan, and I knew it had to make the trio. So here it was, my reading rec
ipe: The Portrait of a Lady, Ariel, and How to Look Good Naked.
62
The Ideas Derby finally took off. I received an alert every time an idea came in, and not long after it became anonymous, I started to get three or four a day, then double, then triple. Pretty soon it was clear that it had gone in-house viral, but I didn’t tell Trish because it wasn’t only ideas and suggestions that were coming in, though there were plenty of those, but also an outpouring of complaints and concerns. Many in languages I couldn’t understand. I tried Google Translate and when that didn’t work I found people I could trust not to report; Carlo from the dry cleaner helped me with the Italian, Ana the cleaner with Portuguese, Tyler found people in IT and accounts who could read German, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and I could manage the French.
Many of the comments were about the way Trish and Don were ruining the company.
“They’re factory farmers, not hoteliers,” said one.
“The duty of the host is to make his guest feel at home; the duty of the guest is to remember that they are not,” said another. “Respect on both sides, consideration on both sides.” I thought that was a good description of any proper relationship, including employer–employee. But that was not the model Trish and Don used.
As the deluge continued, I began to feel like an unofficial agony aunt, or a doctor listening to a very long list of symptoms, or a priest in a digital confessional, only there were no sins. Except maybe one.
* * *
A tip-off arrived in the Ideas Derby inbox: Don and Trish had secretly instigated a time-and-motion study using CCTV to film in random hotels to see how often the workforce sat down on the job, and they were using the data to sack people or get them on zero-hours contracts. I was appalled, but not surprised. This was exactly what they’d done to Jean.
I researched the “gray area” Don had quoted. It’s important to be clear and it’s important to call things correctly. As far as I could tell, this practice was at best dodgy; and at worst, immoral and illegal.
I made a list of options:
1. Do nothing
2. Confront them
3. Leave the company
4. Report it, then leave
5. Report it, and stay
Doing nothing was the same as agreeing with Trish and Don, so I ruled that out. I’d already tried confronting them on various matters—that hadn’t worked and I didn’t fancy my chances issuing ultimatums. Leaving the company without taking any action was the same as doing nothing, so that was out too.
I started a job search and found out where to take it. The case officer at the Information Commissioner’s Office was sympathetic, but not much help. “I’m afraid your employer is right,” he said. “It is a legal gray area, and even though you and I may find the practice distasteful, companies are allowed to monitor the workforce and find ways to make them more efficient.”
“Even at the expense of values?” I protested. “What about human dignity and respect?”
“I’m sorry,” said the case officer. “It’s just not serious enough.”
63
The first Christmas was always going to be weird. I wanted to lie low, fold in on myself, acquiesce to a deep winter, but it was mild that year. We saw on the news that the hibernation of bears was disturbed. Berries were gone from the bushes but fish were not below ice so the bears got confused; some died due to lack of food and many did not sleep all winter.
Mid-December I bought a Christmas tree and dragged it home feeling incredibly male, like a lumberjack. With some difficulty, I maneuvered the tree into the stand, crawled underneath to fix it, and after much swearing crawled back out, pine needles sticking into my knees, back, and hair. The tree was tilted. We decorated it anyway.
* * *
I bought myself some perfume while Christmas shopping.
“Would you like it gift-wrapped?” asked the young shop assistant.
“No, thanks, it’s for me,” I answered.
“You’re so lucky—treating yourself to perfume!” she said.
“If I don’t, no one else will,” I said, trying to sound cheery, but I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice and the other shop assistant, a woman in her mid- to late forties, flinched as if an old wound had been touched. She was wrapping perfume in pink crepe paper for another customer, a man. Her eyes found mine for a moment and she smiled. Nothing was said, but something was communicated. I wondered if something similar had happened in her life.
* * *
Next time he came round, Adam commented on the angle of the tree and said, “I’d have put that up for you. You should have asked me.”
My parents came for the Christmas holidays.
“The tree’s a bit wonky,” said my mother when they arrived, pressing her cheek against mine. “But it still looks nice.”
“I could have done that for you,” said Dad.
* * *
The emergency crush on Ben had gone on too long and I needed to wean myself off. This I knew because he had mentioned his girlfriend. Just casually, in passing, but it was like having a bucket of ice water tipped over my head: I woke up extremely quickly to the fact that I’d been trailing around that bookshop for months with big eyes, perfumed, and wearing a little too much lip gloss.
I almost groaned with embarrassment right there in the shop. Instead I said, “I’ve been having a really weird time over the last year.”
“Yeah, I thought so,” said Ben, nodding.
“And I’ve been coming into the bookshop an awful lot,” I said, feeling my face redden. This was my confession.
“It’s always nice to see you,” said Ben. I blushed deeper, aware that I’d seen him more as life raft than as man and now here he was being even better in real life.
“You’ve been very kind,” I said.
And I think he knew what I meant because he said, “Not at all. I hope it all works out.”
* * *
A few days before Christmas Adam called by with presents—he was going to his parents’ house. He handed over a bag of brightly wrapped gifts and took something out of his jacket pocket; a small box from the fine jewelers in Soho and an envelope.
“Open it later,” he said. “You don’t have to wait for Christmas.”
“Adam, do you know what day it is?” I said.
“Er … should I?” he asked, sensing he’d put his foot in something.
“It’s a year ago today that I found those emails from Louise. Prince Charming, remember?”
That jolted him but he rallied quickly: “Right, well, maybe you should open it on Christmas Day then,” he said, attempting a rakish smile, pulling it off completely.
* * *
On Christmas morning when the girls were playing with new toys in front of the fire, Mum watching them from the armchair with a glass of champagne, Dad in the kitchen peeling potatoes, I went up to my room and opened the pale blue envelope. The card showed a picture of two gray geese flying together across a snowy-white sky.
I love you, Adam had written inside. I never stopped loving you and I never will.
“But that’s the problem, Adam—you didn’t,” I said, to the card. “You didn’t love me enough not to start; you didn’t love me enough to stop; and you didn’t love me enough to tell me the truth afterward—I had to find it out for myself.”
Inside the box was a beautiful silver bracelet—an elegant oval with a gap to slide it onto your wrist. I tried it on quite carefully because it looked delicate even though the silver was solid and wouldn’t have bent easily. Adam didn’t know the fate of the other pieces of jewelry he’d given me. It seemed too mean to tell him, and besides, the drain-drops were private acts, personal remedies I’d chosen to help myself. The new bracelet fitted closely, perfectly, the kind of thing I’d have chosen for myself.
64
What do you call it when you realize something bit by bit? It’s an epiphany if it comes all at once in a rush, but what do you call it when you work somethi
ng out over a period of time? There was no single deciding moment, no flash of realization; it was more like an archaeological dig—months and months of repetitive work, down in the dirt with a toothbrush, not sure if I would find anything and if I did, whether it would be worth it. Maybe at the beginning, or even before, I had seen a corner of something—or not seen it but other-sensed it, like a water diviner with a twitching rod. It took months and months of hard work to unearth it. But it was—worth it, I mean. Once I began to uncover this thing, I carried on the excavation, unswerving, because I knew this was it: the gold, long buried; the oasis; the lost river. It’s what they were all on about—Gérard, the woman who sailed across the Atlantic, Henri ice-skating, the man who embroidered shoes high above the Hudson. Your own place, somewhere inside to think, to dream. A room of one’s own but internal, as vital to life as your beating heart.
* * *
Just after Christmas it turned colder—on the day after Boxing Day the weatherman said there was a good chance of snow. In the afternoon, there were films for family viewing. “I hate this sort of thing,” said my mother, and went off to another room with a box of chocolates and the crossword. I settled the girls with my dad on the sofa, one on either side of him, tucked them up with a blanket and some Quality Street, and put the box with the silver bracelet and my wedding ring into my bag.
As I walked toward the common I saw a taxi and hailed it—the Thames was more fitting than a drain for this last drop. I had the cab take me to the South Bank. It was surprisingly busy by the river. Families meandered by—bobble hats, mittens, and scooters; couples walking off Christmas dinners; dogged joggers, thighs red from the cold. I found a bench and waited for a lull. I took the box out of my pocket and looked at the silver bracelet lying in the cotton wool, the gold wedding ring nestling inside.
* * *
If you are betrayed and you really want to understand why, eventually you’ll find the ways in which you betrayed yourself. I had blamed Adam for everything and that was wrong. It was true that I’d been blindsided, but it was also true that I’d seen signs and ignored them—I chose the blindness; I chose to trust him.