by Claire Sandy
‘The ball and chain!’ said the new cosmetics buyer, who was straightforwardly beautiful and was fancied by all the men and distrusted by all the women.
‘Settle down, guys.’ Magda, Chief Buyer and Empress of All (not her official job title, but clearly how she saw herself), tapped on the long, pale table with her pencil. ‘Let’s get down to business.’
The chirrup of a mobile phone broke the respectful silence. ‘Sorry!’ Robert silenced it and read: Forgive me for asking but just WHAT is Caroline sucking? His giggle earned one of the Empress’s glares.
‘Perhaps you can start, Robert. How’s the new Danish line doing?’
Relieved to have good news to share, Robert launched into the facts and figures of his recently launched cutlery range. The reputable, established chain of department stores they all worked for was well loved, but suffering an image crisis: consumers saw Campbell & Carle as ‘fuddy-duddy’. As silverware buyer, commissioning a new cutlery design from a ‘happening’ Danish design firm was Robert’s baby; had it bombed, it would have been his fault. He knew Magda well enough to realise that she’d take the lion’s share of his success, but that went with the territory. Concluding his spiel with ‘And of course we’ve had plenty of press and mentions in the style mags’, he nodded to the junior in charge of the PowerPoint slide show, who clicked through an impressive number of articles featuring the sinuous new cutlery.
‘Nice,’ murmured Magda. From the Empress, this was high praise; she would describe a shrieking orgasm as ‘acceptable’.
As the childrenswear buyer riffed on dungarees, Robert relaxed, sinking a little in his seat, looking around and wondering, as he often did these days, just how he came to be here.
The 1993 version of Robert Dunwoody had arrived in London wearing ripped jeans, fresh from wild years in college (well, he’d once ridden a supermarket trolley down a hill) and on the brink of a bohemian free-spirited romance with a clever brunette named Marie (well, they rode a train to the South of France and he was sick out of the window). That young gun was light years away from the sober-suited gent smelling gently of citrus aftershave with blinding-white collar and cuffs who was presently nodding with faux interest as the discussion moved on to the future of table mats.
The room, like Magda – like the stores’ new advertising campaign – was modern, bland, clean. White walls bounced the sunlight off blond wood and nude leather. Robert recalled this room pre-refurbishment: dark panelling, a dented kettle balanced on a filing cabinet, squeaky chairs with missing wheels.
The new look boiled down to modern fabric thrown over the scarred and pitted old structure; the same was true of the staff. Despite Campbell & Carle’s politically correct openness and accountability, the bosses still called the shots; despite the open-plan layout and the team-building weekends, the staff still formed gossipy cliques. Robert indulged in tittle-tattle now and then, but he never sharpened his elbows to compete. It wasn’t his style; he had no killer instinct.
It was hard to admit that he felt out of step. There was no room for negativity under Magda’s rule; she rooted out non-team-players and moved them on.
‘Robert!’
For a millisecond he panicked that Magda could read his mind. ‘Yes?’ From the corner of his eye he saw Caroline slip out of the room: she’d be in trouble if Magda noticed her absence.
‘There was a dip in silver frames last quarter? What do you attribute that to?’
Surfing confidently through his analysis of the problem with the old stock, and the steps he’d taken to source new products, Robert felt properly engaged at last. He knew his stuff. He loved working with silver – the feel of it, its weighty presence, the timeless processes that went into the making of it. He loved collaborating with venerable old firms such as Godley & Sons, their main supplier and his collaborators on the new range. A career history going back fifteen years with the store meant that Robert knew his job backwards and, despite his hankerings for his ripped-jean younger self with a guitar and no responsibilities, he would enjoy his work, if he wasn’t so bored by office politics.
Or, it occurred to him, as Caroline returned with a trolley laden high with cupcakes, might it be truer to say that office politics scared him because he was so inept at them?
‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!’ Caroline’s vibrato started the room singing.
Oh, shitty-shit shitsville.
As they sang, the other buyers produced cards and fussily wrapped little somethings from beneath the table. Magda, hands to her flushed face, looked delighted.
Who’d have thought, marvelled Robert, singing along limply, that such a ball-breaker could be reduced to teary-eyed Disney-style euphoria by friggin’ cupcakes?
‘Wow!’
‘Amazing!’
‘Look at them!’
The staff, each one a graduate, were jumping up and down over cupcakes.
Cup. Cakes.
The toiletries buyer, who spoke four languages, clapped her hands excitedly and squeaked, ‘Glitter!’
The glitter baffled Robert. Was that a thing now? Wouldn’t it choke him?
‘Caroline made them herself,’ said the lighting buyer, with a degree of awe Robert would have considered appropriate if Caroline had also made the plate and the trolley and the napkins. ‘Right down to the little number thirty on each cake!’
Robert accepted a pink, glittery dollop, and for the first time it occurred to him that he was twelve years older than his boss.
Once more elbow-deep in flour – Prinny sported a continual fine coating of the stuff these days, like a ghost dog in a low-budget horror film – Marie irritated Robert when her only reaction to his tale of The Worst Staff Meeting of All Time was to ask ‘How did the cupcakes taste?’
She in turn was irritated when Robert had no answer to this, or to ‘What kind of icing did Caroline use?’
‘Hang on,’ said Robert, opening a beer, with what he realised was a touch too much enthusiasm. ‘Are you rolling your eyes at me because I can’t tell fondant icing from royal icing? I’m still a bloke, you know. I do have balls and stuff. It’s a medical fact – you can’t differentiate between icings if you own a willy.’ He scowled and stuck his head in the fridge. ‘Dare I ask if there’ll be any actual dinner tonight?’
Biting her lip, Marie held back a smart retort. This was so unlike Robert that it had to be a reaction to his bad day. She counted to ten and said, ‘So. Magda?’
‘Yeah.’ Robert sat heavily at the kitchen table, sweeping aside the twins’ drawings, Angus’s photography magazines, Marie’s glasses and some week-old unopened bills. ‘Sorry, love.’ He watched his wife’s back as she stirred – very vigorously – whatever was in the mixing bowl. It was a little fatter than the back he’d married, and the bottom beneath it sat a little lower. But he loved that back very much. He loved how well he knew it; how he would be able to pick it out in a crowd of a thousand backs, just by the way her heavy hair fell onto her shoulders and by the shape of her head. ‘Actually . . .’ He’d been reluctant to verbalise his conflicted new feelings about life, work, the universe. Saying it out loud would make them real: cats let out of bags are infamously hard to force back in. But Marie would understand. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking and—’
The gormless sing-song of the doorbell intruded.
Marie ushered Chloe into the kitchen, applauding the girl’s latest inventive ruse for insinuating herself into Angus’s presence. ‘A sponsored silence? Of course we’ll sponsor you.’ She signed up for fifty pence an hour. ‘Angus should try it. Somebody may as well make money out of his natural talent. Which charity is it for? ANGUS!’ Marie’s sudden roar, employing the trademark change in volume common to all mums, made Chloe jump in her black jeans, black top, black make-up and black glittery scarf, wound round her slender neck like a bandage.
‘PeTA.’ Chloe produced a poster. ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.’
Materialising wherever there was a sniff of brother-based r
omantic embarrassment, the twins gaped at the mutilated mink and the rabbits with ulcerated eyes. In their pastel-striped sundresses they were the polar fashion opposite to Chloe.
‘No!’ gasped Iris.
‘Oh, look at that poor bear!’ screamed Rose.
Anticipating nightmares, Marie deftly folded the poster and handed it back to Chloe. ‘ANG— Oh, there you are. Make our visitor a drink, love.’ She turned to Robert. ‘What was that you were saying?’
But he was gone, out on the patio with his beer, sharing a bag of crisps with Prinny.
Accepting a mug of warm Coke from Angus, Chloe settled down on a stool and so, reluctantly, did he.
‘My mother sent this over for you.’ Chloe fished in her huge (black) bag and handed over a beribboned jar of marshmallows. In curly lettering the label proclaimed them to be Hand-made with love in Lucy’s kitchen.
‘They look professional,’ said Marie, impressed that her teeth barely sounded gritted at all. ‘Do thank her for me.’ She’d been unaware that marshmallows were makeable; she assumed they were put together in factory vats using chemicals and voodoo.
‘Wow! Your mum’s brilliant,’ said Iris, who presumably had been taking lessons in How to Annoy Your Own Mother.
‘You’re so lucky,’ breathed Rose, as if she and her siblings were thrashed nightly and fed only dust.
‘So, Angus,’ said Chloe, eyeing him sideways from beneath her flicked eyeliner and coloured-in brows. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ said Angus. He lifted his camera. ‘Doing this. And stuff.’
‘He’s making a film about . . . What is it about, darling?’ Marie knew she sounded like an overbearing, interfering mother, but couldn’t stop herself.
‘Life – you know,’ said Angus.
‘Yeah,’ nodded Chloe.
‘That kind of thing,’ said Angus.
Rose, already on her third marshmallow, asked, ‘Is there a proper dinner tonight? Or are we just having bits again, because you’re too busy making stupid cakes?’
This was Dunwoody code for leftovers: ‘bits’ could be wonderful (leftover roast chicken with leftover potato salad); and ‘bits’ could be not so wonderful (leftover sardines with leftover other sardines).
‘You like bits,’ said Marie, wounded.
‘Not every day,’ replied Rose.
‘It’s not bits tonight.’ Marie reached for the Dragon Paradise menu on top of the fridge. Shamefaced in front of Chloe, who came from a family who never ever ate takeaways, she said, ‘We don’t do this often,’ while fixing each twin with a Say nothing! glare.
‘Can I stay for dinner?’ Chloe bounced on her seat. ‘I love Chinese food, but my mother makes it herself and it’s just not the same.’
There is, thought Marie, with a quickly suppressed pang of empathy for Lucy, no pleasing teenagers.
‘She’s doing steaks tonight.’
Robert, wandering through en route to watch the news, muttered, ‘Wonder if she wants a lodger?’
‘But, Chloe, you support PeTA,’ said Angus.
‘Yeah. Exactly. I’ll text her.’
The light was on across the way in Lucy’s kitchen and, as Marie continued to cream her mix, she saw Lucy pick up the phone. The woman’s shoulders slumped a little, before she looked over at the Dunwoody house. For a moment something flashed across her indistinct face, then she waved, and Marie made out a wide smile.
No probs! Enjoy yourself and be good, darling, read Marie over Chloe’s shoulder.
August was in a good mood.
Even at 10 p.m. it was warm enough to sit out on the patio. The twins, sharing a deckchair, were being very, very quiet, under the mistaken impression that their parents hadn’t noticed how much past their bedtime it was.
In fact their father was too tipsy and their mother too tired to care.
‘Oh, Prinny,’ said Marie sadly, as the dog turned up its nose at a wedge of freshly baked sponge. ‘Seriously?’ When a creature that licks its lips at a snotty tissue refuses your cooking, it hurts. ‘Look at those two,’ she whispered to Robert, beside her on the bench.
‘Chloe’s giving it her all.’ Robert smiled at Angus and their guest, sitting on a blanket on the scrappy grass, outlined in the violet twilight. ‘But himself’s not having any of it.’
Angus’s body language – cross-legged, hunched over, head down – screamed Leave me alone; Chloe’s – legs stretched out, head back, leaning on her splayed hands, – screamed Come and get me.
Marie laid her head on Robert’s shoulder. It fitted and felt comfortable there. It always had. It was one of the reasons she’d married him. ‘Are we relying on our boy too much?’ Since the start of the summer break, Marie had happened upon another maternal worry. This was the first year that she (Marie could have said ‘they’, but in truth this was her domain) hadn’t arranged a complex network of other mums, family members and childminders. At fifteen, Angus was deemed old enough to be in charge of two nine-year-olds, and it was working out just fine in some ways: the girls were happy, fed, safe from prowling mass murderers. And yet . . . Marie wondered if it was too much to demand of a young man. ‘Are we clipping his wings?’
‘What’s the alternative, love?’ Robert was practical.
Like so many parental problems, there seemed no perfect solution. Marie was already taking Mondays off; another day was unthinkable. Patients disliked being treated by a locum, and every Tuesday Lynda and Aileen were a-twitter, like doves after a fox has been in the coop, full of tales of the locum disrespecting the instruments, or dropping a Pot Noodle in reception. The current arrangement would have to do, but Marie was keeping a closer eye on Angus than usual. All the while, of course, pretending not to keep an eye on him at all.
‘Is it me, or is our son even quieter than normal these past couple of weeks?’
‘Maybe.’ Robert nodded. ‘It’s since the party. Definitely a girl involved.’
‘Not drugs?’
‘Darling, I think he’d have to occasionally leave his room to work up a drug habit.’
‘He’d have to leave his room to have a girlfriend.’
‘I think it’s girl trouble. That’s why he groans when his phone rings and refuses the call. Some poor girl can’t read the signals, and he’s avoiding her.’
‘Another Chloe, in other words?’ Marie looked fondly at Angus, destined to be pursued by women who liked him more than he liked them. Not the worst fate in the world. ‘I feel for Chloe. She tries so hard.’
‘I used to think she was shy.’ Robert shifted and put his arm around Marie. ‘Not any more. She hardly stopped talking over dinner.’
‘Maybe Lucy doesn’t listen to her at home.’
‘Claws in, Kitty,’ said Robert. ‘We’ve no way of knowing that.’
It was a hunch, and Marie trusted her hunches (even though they sometimes let her down; she’d had a hunch that she still looked good in shorts, and that had been memorably disproved on their last trip to the coast).
A nosy question from Iris over the crispy duck had loosened Chloe’s tongue, despite Marie’s hasty ‘You don’t have to answer that’.
‘No, I don’t mind talking about my real mum,’ Chloe had said, ferrying rice greedily to her mouth. ‘She and Dad split up when I was small – about two. Dad was brilliant. He fought for me. It’s really unusual for a man to get custody of a child, but he was so passionate that the judge agreed.’
‘Your poor mum.’ That had slipped out; Marie couldn’t help herself.
‘Well, no, not really.’ Chloe’s unlined face had creased in puzzlement. ‘She can’t have been that bothered. She visited a few times and then . . .’ Her hands, with their pale, tapering fingers that ended in bitten, black-varnished nails, had spread to illustrate her bewilderment. ‘I get a birthday card some years. She was in Scotland for a while. Dad reckons she’s in the States.’
‘I want to go to America,’ Rose had said, with the flinty self-absorption of childhood.
�
��Sshh,’ Angus had chided his sister. ‘God, Chloe . . .’ He’d used up all his words then and had said no more, but Marie had been proud of his obvious compassion.
‘Dad’s brilliant about it.’
‘You’re close to him, aren’t you?’ Marie had smiled.
‘Yeah. He’s like a friend. He’s so . . . you know?’ Chloe had shrugged happily, with the same enraptured glow of the twins talking about their latest pop-star crush, or Robert whenever Carol Vorderman won an award for her bottom.
Tod Gray was obviously quite a guy. He was a hardworking man (and a successful one, judging by the cars on the Gray drive and the oak-framed conservatory that Marie had watched grow on the side of their house) and handsome with it.
She’d mentioned Tod’s good looks once to Robert and had tried not to smile when he’d replied, ‘Yeah, I suppose he’s good-looking, if you like that sort of thing.’ When that sort of thing was a cared-for bod, thick blond hair, sea-green eyes and a chin copyrighted to Mills & Boon, it was hard not to like it. With foolish prejudice, Marie had assumed that a man that attractive couldn’t also be nice. Ashamed now, she revised her opinion: if Chloe loved him so passionately, Tod must be a good egg.
‘It was just me and Dad until I was eight,’ Chloe had gone on, the rate of rice-to-mouth traffic slowing as she said, ‘then Lucy came along. And everything sort of changed.’
Subject closed.
Now Chloe reluctantly clambered up from the blanket on the grass, after a chivvying text from Lucy. Robert whispered in Marie’s ear, ‘No taking Chloe under your wing, OK? I know what you’re like with lame ducks. We shouldn’t get involved.’
‘I know.’ Nicely non-committal, that, thought Marie, as she shook the twins awake. ‘One each?’ she said to Robert, heaving Iris from the deckchair into her arms.
Angus’s phone lit up as he and Chloe reached them on the terrace.
‘You’ve got a text,’ said Chloe.
‘Whatever!’ Angus deleted it with a jab of his thumb.
See? mouthed Robert at his wife, as he made for the house with Rose slumped over his shoulder. Girl trouble.