by Unknown
The next morning, when I arrived at the office, Frances was talking on the phone. She was preparing a party for a firm of City lawyers that was being held in an old warehouse by the river. As I switched on Milena’s computer, she slammed down the phone and strode over to me. ‘They want a Shakespearean theme,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘Can’t you just hire some young actors?’ I said. ‘They can walk round with the canapés and say lines from Shakespeare. About cakes and ale and, well, there must be some other references to food.’
‘And they want Elizabethan food. I mean, honestly! I had this ridiculous woman on the line just now and I said, “What do you mean by Elizabethan food? Carp? Pike? Capon?” She said, “Oh, no. They just want normal food with an Elizabethan twist.”’
There were shelves of books and magazines in the office for just such a crisis and Frances started to rummage through them, speaking half to herself and half to me. I went to my new account. My new email address and password were impossible to remember. I had to copy them painstakingly from the piece of paper on which I’d written them.
‘What exactly are sweetbreads?’ said Frances. ‘Some kind of gland, aren’t they?’
‘I’m not sure if they’re right for finger food,’ I said. I had to make an effort to keep my voice level because I had noticed there were two messages for me. The first was welcoming me as a new account holder. The second was from ‘gonefishing’.
Frances walked across the room towards me, reading aloud as she did so.
‘Jugged hare,’ she said. ‘Lobster. This is hopeless. We might as well be cooking larks’ tongues.’
‘You just want little things that have an old-fashioned look to them,’ I said. ‘Quail’s eggs. Bits of bacon. Dumplings. Scallops.’
I clicked on the message.
‘Who are you?’ it read.
I clicked ‘reply’ and quickly typed. ‘I’m Jackie, as you can see. Have I got the wrong address? Who are you?’
I highlighted and underlined the last word: ‘Who are you?’ I pressed send.
‘That sounds right,’ said Frances. ‘We can just put Ye Olde English garnishes on the plates. Bits of parchment. Branches of rosemary. Little ruffs. We can hang some tapestries and garlands on the wall. Pickled walnuts,’ she added, warming to the subject. ‘Medlars. Quinces. The problem is, people won’t know what they are.’
‘It’ll give the staff something to talk about,’ I said. ‘In fake Elizabethan language, of course. “Odds bodkins”. You know.’
There was a ping from Milena’s computer. A message from ‘gonefishing’.
‘Who are you?’ it said, same as before. I pressed reply again.
‘Don’t understand,’ I typed. ‘Did you get my last message? Have I got the wrong address? Could you give me your name?’ I pressed send.
I waited one minute, two, but there was no response.
Meanwhile Frances was flicking through another book. ‘Did they have oysters in Elizabethan times?’ she asked.
‘I think so.’
‘I’m a bit wary of shellfish. You don’t want to poison a roomful of lawyers.’
My attention drifted away and I suddenly heard Frances’s voice raised, as if she was trying to rouse me from sleep.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was trying to sort something out in my head.’
She looked at me with concern. ‘Are you all right? You’re rather pale.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe a bit tired.’
Frances fussed over me as if she was my granny. She felt my brow with her thin, cool hand. She made me coffee and even asked if I’d like a touch of brandy in it. ‘Now, that might be the thing for the end of the party,’ she said. ‘Did they have coffee in Elizabethan times? They must have had brandy.’
Reluctantly I left my desk and we thumbed through the cookbooks for ideas. We discussed goujons of sole, devilled whitebait, creamed mushrooms and smoked eel, baby tomatoes stuffed with crab, and new potatoes stuffed with caviar. Frances was doubtful about the last. ‘I’ll need to run this past the wretched Daisy at G and C’s,’ she said. ‘This might be a bit steep even for them. I saw some caviar at Fortnum’s the other day. It was about a million pounds a thimbleful.’
As she was talking, I heard a ping from Milena’s computer and suddenly it was as if I was in a dream and Frances’s words were meaningless background noise. I had to force myself to talk normally as she put the cookbooks down and wandered across to the shelves for an exhibition catalogue.
‘Can you give me a moment?’ I said, and walked across to Milena’s computer. I clicked on the new message. ‘Nobody has this address,’ it said. ‘How did you get it?’
I collected my thoughts and made myself take on the character of Jackie, a non-existent person conjured up by another non-existent person. ‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I wrote. ‘I just wanted your name to see if I’ve mixed it up with someone else. But if it’s a problem, don’t worry about it.’
I sent it and returned to Frances, who had found an old catalogue for an exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures. She smiled and pointed at an exquisitely delicate oval image of a woman wearing a tall hat with a white ostrich feather, a lace ruff, sleeves bunched and embroidered with gold thread and a rigid, richly decorated bodice. ‘She looks like you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you in that.’
‘I haven’t the waistline for it,’ I said.
Frances looked at me appraisingly, as if I was a pig she was considering buying. ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ she said. ‘How do you do it? Exercise and good living?’
Not eating, not sleeping, constant anxiety, I thought, but just smiled with what I hoped was rueful modesty. We leafed through the gorgeous catalogue, pausing over men in doublets and ruffs, stockings and breeches; women in cloaks and petticoats, corsets and farthingales.
‘If we can dress some of our young actors in these,’ said Frances, ‘and get them to learn a few lines, it should be magnificent. If we want to be really authentic, we should probably have the women played by men as well.’
‘I don’t think the lawyers would like that,’ I said. ‘When they asked for Elizabethan they were probably thinking of wenches dispensing flagons of ale and behaving bawdily. It might be a gruelling evening for some of them.’
Frances grunted. ‘The drama-school girls we employ are pretty unshockable,’ she said. ‘You know, if they were laid end to end in the garden, et cetera et cetera.’
I heard another ping from the computer and got distracted again. ‘Et cetera what?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t be the least surprised.’
‘What?’
‘It’s an old joke. I’ve ruined it now. If the girls were laid end to end in the garden. You know. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve heard it.’
‘Dorothy Parker, I think.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Excuse me a moment. Someone’s sent me a message.’ I couldn’t pretend to continue a conversation. I walked over to the computer and clicked on the new message.
‘Sorry for being paranoid,’ the message read. ‘It’s a security issue. Just give me your phone number and I’ll give you a ring and tell you my name.’
As I read the message, I felt as if I had immediately, and without warning, become immensely more stupid. I was like a person in a foreign country who just about understood what basic words meant but couldn’t make out what lay behind them, what was implied, what were the customs everybody took for granted. I found it impossibly difficult to assess what the message meant, its implications. Was there any possible way I could give some phone number or other to this person? Was it conceivable that they would ring and tell me who they were and I would know who this lover of Milena’s was?
Suddenly everything was made up of puzzles I wasn’t equipped to solve.
Was it possible that whoever it was believed my message had been a mistake?
Could that be a security issue? Was it likely they would go to the trouble of phoning to clear the matter up? My thoughts were slow, trapped in sludge, but in the end, with Frances hemming and hawing and waiting for me on the other side of the room, I decided, no, it was not possible. I had gone too far. I had laid myself open.
My password seemed safe. Certainly it was safe from me, as there was no chance I would ever remember it. But just to be absolutely safe I deleted all of the messages, both those I had received and those I had saved, and then deleted the deletions. If I could have, I would have deleted those as well, but as far as I could tell, they were as pulverized as anything can be in cyberspace.
I rejoined Frances and we made more Elizabethan plans, then went out to lunch where we ate a meal that seemed as far from Elizabethan cuisine as it could have been, all tiny slices of tuna carpaccio and miniature heaps of spicy noodles. But, then, I know nothing about Elizabethan cuisine apart from what I’ve seen in historical dramas on TV. For all I know, Elizabethans might have had delicate side orders of beansprouts with their haunches of venison. We also had a small jug of warm sake which Frances drank quickly and greedily, barely looking at her food before ordering a second. I remembered the vodka bottles in her desk drawer. She talked about whether we could hire a jester from the Comedy Store and wondered whether health and safety regulations would allow flaming torches on the walls, whether we could hire Elizabethan musicians – and what was Elizabethan music like? What about morris dancers? Were they Elizabethan?
‘It’s all about money,’ Frances said thoughtfully, as we lingered over the coffee. ‘If you’re in London and you’ve got money, you can have anything.’ And then she pushed her food, barely touched, away from her and said, ‘Except happiness, of course. That’s a whole different story.’
I didn’t know what to say. In normal circumstances I would have reached across the table and touched her arm, asked what she meant, tried to draw her out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. If she turned to me for support, she would be turning to someone who didn’t exist and, what was more, someone who would leave her before long. So I wrinkled my brow and murmured something meaningless.
‘Would you say you were happy, Gwen?’ she asked, raising her pale, delicate face to me.
‘Oh, well.’ I stabbed my fork into the final sliver of tuna. ‘That’s hard to say. I mean, what’s happiness?’
‘I used to be,’ she continued. ‘It seemed easy once. Or maybe I wasn’t really happy. Maybe I was just having fun. That’s different, isn’t it? I think I used to be very selfish. I didn’t understand that actions had consequences. When Milena and I first met, before we were married, we were a bit like Beth, I suppose – out every night, lots of men, lots of parties, lots of drink. But then it all changed. You reap what you sow, that’s what they say. But I wish I’d understood then what I was sowing. Shall we have a dessert wine?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘If I drink during the day I fall asleep. But go ahead if you feel like one.’
‘No, you’re probably right, and we should get back to work, I suppose. Sorry to ramble on. Sometimes I feel so…’ But she stopped, shook her head as if to clear it, put her spectacles back on, gave me a wry smile. ‘Right. Let’s go and talk doublets and hose.’
When we returned to the office, I felt Milena’s computer drawing me as if I was attached to it with invisible cords. But I didn’t work on the computer that afternoon. I sketched our thoughts for the party into a coherent proposal. It was so trivial and so interesting that I felt regret that this would surely be my farewell to working with Frances. I finished the proposal and had almost cleared my desk when David arrived to collect her. He was in a bad mood and scarcely glanced in my direction. Frances made an apologetic grimace. I muttered an excuse and left.
When I got home, I ran up to the computer without even taking off my jacket. I went through the tiresome business of typing in my new email address and password, copying each character one by one. There was a new message and I clicked on it.
The previous messages had been written above the one before but now the old ones had been deleted. The subject line said, ‘Who are you?’ and the message repeated, ‘Who are you?’
Chapter Twenty-one
Against my better judgement, I had promised to be at the latest Party Animals happening because Beth was away for the long weekend she’d been planning. A very long weekend that was actually one day short of a week. ‘Just to give you a better feel for what we do,’ Frances had said, the afternoon before. ‘You don’t need to do anything, really. Just be in the background and keep an eye on things.’ She had examined me dubiously. ‘It’s that women-in-commerce thing you costed,’ she said. ‘You know, dozens of high-powered women networking and complaining about men. So if you could…’ She faltered.
‘Wear a suit?’
‘Yes. Something like that. Thanks, Gwen.’
I didn’t own a suit, or even anything that could be put together to look like a version of one. I hauled myself out of bed and showered under tepid water because the boiler operated in a mysterious and sporadic way and I didn’t have the money to get it adjusted – I didn’t have the money, as it happened, even for food, but I couldn’t think about my bank balance now. It would have to wait, just as everything else would have to wait: friends, a job, real life.
Sure enough, there was nothing in the cupboard that Frances might possibly approve of. The only suit there was Greg’s green-grey one that he had worn when we married and that, even in my rage-filled binge, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to burn. I took it out and examined it. It was lovely, simple and lightweight. I’d helped him choose it and it was the most expensive item of clothing either of us had ever bought. I held it against myself: it was a bit long but I could roll up the legs and put a belt round the waist. When I tried it on, I was startled by how different I looked, how jauntily androgynous. I put on a white shirt and tied an old bootlace round my neck in imitation of a tie. A trilby would have completed the effect, but I didn’t own one, so I put on a corduroy newspaper-boy’s cap that we’d found in Brick Lane one spring morning, tucking my hair underneath it, and putting studs in my ears. Now I didn’t look like Ellie or Gwen, but someone entirely new.
I had time before I needed to leave for the City, so I made myself instant coffee and had the last fragments of the now-soft cornflakes that Greg used to eat sometimes. The light was flashing on my answering-machine but I decided not to listen to the messages. I already knew that half of them would be from Gwen and Mary and they would say, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Ring me back as soon as you can,’ and ‘What’s going on?’ Then, like a crack addict, I went back to the computer and looked at the email I’d received last night. I didn’t need to, of course. There were still only those three words: ‘Who are you?’ I had no idea what to do next, and although common sense insisted that I leave well alone – leave Frances and Party Animals, leave my snooping and prying, leave my hapless pretence at being someone else, return to the life I’d left behind and try to build a sustainable future – I knew very well that I wasn’t going to. Not yet, anyway. But I couldn’t think of a way to find out the identity of ‘gonefishing’. Obviously, I couldn’t give him my number, home or mobile. I didn’t want to speak to him, to have him hear my voice. But I had to give him some number to ring me on.
Perhaps I could ask Gwen to talk to him, while pretending not to be Gwen, of course, because I was Gwen. But I dismissed the idea, because I didn’t want to be told – as I most definitely would be – that what I was doing was misguided and wrong, and I should stop at once. I already knew that.
I stared at the screen until the words blurred. I stared at my new hotmail address: [email protected]. And it came to me: what I should do was simply repeat what I’d already done with my email and get myself a new mobile, whose number I wouldn’t give to anyone except ‘gonefishing’. When he rang, I wouldn’t answer, but I would have his number on my phone. That was a step forward
, at least.
I had time to buy the pay-as-you-go phone and still be early at the women-in-commerce lunch, which took place in a vaulted basement in the heart of the City, a dimly lit, handsome space of ancient brick, cold stone and muted echoes. A fire blazed in the hearth at one end of the room, and vases holding velvety red roses stood at intervals on the long table. Slender wine glasses – which nobody used because they drank sparkling water – and silver cutlery glinted. It all felt very old-fashioned and masculine, which, as Frances had explained to me, was the point: this was to be like a stereotypical gentlemen’s club taken over by the ladies. It was typical of Frances to make something so establishment simultaneously ironic.
Sure enough, the women, when they arrived, had on the club uniform. They all wore beautiful skirts and jackets and dresses, in black and grey and dark brown, with white shirts, elegant shoes, sheer tights, discreet flashes of gold at their ears and on their fingers. They flowed down the stairs, handing cashmere coats, leather gloves, slender briefcases and furled umbrellas to the staff, and stood in their massed, discreetly ostentatious wealth. I felt shabby, angry, out of place – like a court jester. I wanted to go home, put on my oldest jeans and plane curls off pale, seasoned wood.
But when Frances saw me she raised her eyebrows. ‘You look very fetching,’ she said, smiling. ‘You certainly have your own style, Gwen.’ I didn’t know if that was a compliment or a veiled insult.
It hardly felt like work: I drifted from kitchen to cloakroom and back to the dining room, keeping an eye on things, making sure the lunch ran smoothly and courses were delivered at the right time. Yet by the end I felt weary and stale, in need of fresh air, natural light. When I stepped out on to the street, I gasped and shrank back into the doorway. Joe was walking along the pavement towards me, his coat billowing round his solid figure. He was carrying his bag and seemed deep in thought; there was an angry frown on his face. I felt as though someone had struck me. My mouth was dry and my heart pressed against my ribs. He mustn’t see me, not when I was dressed in Greg’s wedding suit and being Gwen, not when, in a few moments, Frances would come up the stairs behind me and witness him greeting me as Ellie. I bent double, pretending to tie up the laces of my shoes, which didn’t possess laces, and when I glanced up, he had passed by on the other side of the road, although I could still see his familiar figure striding away, towards some banking client perhaps. I stood upright and tried to collect myself, although I felt slightly sick with shock. How easy it would be for my two worlds to collide and shatter.