“Look,” said Jess, putting the vodka on the table. “Got any mixers?” She got up and started to prowl about, looking. She called back from the kitchenette, “I don’t know about a nervous breakdown, but there’s a lot of talk about a financial breakdown.”
“I know things are tight,” Fleur admitted.
Jess came back carrying two vodkas and orange and handed Fleur one, which she took automatically.
“Jess, what is this? Have you come here for a reason?”
“Yes,” Jess told her. She paused. “OK. I feel guilty. And also – someone’s got to warn you. Ben’s in big trouble. The first thing you ought to do is go and see Gerry Sullivan.”
“But Ben handles all that side of things.”
Jess ignored this. “You’ve got a joint bank account for the business. You’ve signed stuff – right?”
Fleur nodded.
“And your flat’s collateral?”
“How do you know?” Fleur demanded.
“I know a lot,” Jess said. “That’s – well – look, Fleur, it’s complicated.”
Fleur had a bad feeling about Jess’s sudden inarticulacy and was apprehensive about what she was going to hear when Jess found her tongue again. She took a big swig of vodka. “Come on, Jess, tell me.”
And Jess did, confessing to a three-day affair with Ben at her house in Highgate while Ben was supposed to be up at Hadrian’s Wall, filming. As she spoke Fleur stared at the carpet. She and Jess had been friends at school. They’d got jobs at the BBC practically simultaneously. Ben and Jess’s husband had twice gone off together for a week’s sailing, leaving Jess and Fleur to luxuriate in the facilities of a country house hotel.
Jess concluded, “I don’t normally worry about these things – a bit of fun and no harm done is my motto. I’m not a homewrecker, I don’t let it get out of hand—”
This was when the information sunk in and hard-pressed Fleur let out a yell, like an animal.
“Oh Christ,” said Jess. “Shut up, Fleur. Don’t make it any worse than it is. Look – I wouldn’t even have told you—”
Fleur stood up and threw her vodka right in Jess’s face. “Get out, you bloody bitch. What a filthy thing to do. I really hate you, Jess. Just get out” – she picked up the vodka bottle – “or I’ll throw the rest of this over you and that nice suit you’re wearing. Then I might bash you with it. You’re horrible, you tart. I could murder you.”
Jess, now up on her feet with vodka dribbling down her face, flinched but stood her ground. She put both hands up in a placatory gesture, warding Fleur off. “OK, OK – but listen to me – just this – Ben’s gone. He may not come back, Fleur. He’s in a very messy situation—”
Fleur advanced towards her, holding the bottle. “Right – right,” Jess said hastily, and left the office at speed.
Fleur gazed at the door, which had just slammed. For a moment she thought of running after Jess and hitting her with the bottle. Then she sat down with a bump on the couch Jess had just vacated, put her head in her hands and groaned.
Later she began to piece together the events surrounding the days Jess and Ben had spent together. It must have been just after New Year when Ben was theoretically filming a documentary about the tourist trade in Britain during the inhospitable North-East winter. They’d been in co-production with French and German companies. The theory had been that this would sell throughout Europe, though it hadn’t. Ben had been rushing up and down for a month while things went wrong, especially the weather. Fleur had tried to schedule the filming for later on in the year when there’d be more light, but Ben had gone ahead anyway, not wanting to provide any reason for the other two companies to back out. He must have gone to the North-East six or seven times – only once he’d gone to North London instead, and tucked himself up in Jess’s comfortable bedroom. Her lover – her best friend, more or less – and no one had let on. Only a few months later they’d all four, she and Ben and Jess and Adrian, gone off to Pamplona together on a break.
That January she’d been the one who’d had to drive up to be with Ben and sort things out all the time. She made five trips up the motorway, one in a snowstorm and one where she’d broken down and been boxed into a lay-by by two big lorries. She’d sat there with the windows up and a mobile phone in her hand until a police car had turned up and the two trucks had eased away.
“Oh God, oh God,” she groaned aloud.
She’d wondered if Jess had been lying. Hope had flared up, then subsided again until, finally, she’d had to recognise that she knew Jess had been telling the truth. She’d sat on in the office in silence broken only by traffic noise and the ever-grinding fax. She recalled Jess trying to tell her why she had confessed to the affair – because she knew something about Ben. But Jess hadn’t told her what it was – hardly could have, while Fleur was menacing her with a bottle of vodka.
Fleur sat on. Jess had said, just before Fleur chased her away, that Ben might not come back. On top of the sick feeling and the pain of hearing Ben had betrayed her with Jess Fleur felt another, horrible sensation. Jess’s visit had confirmed that the business was in a bad, bad mess, worse than she’d imagined.
Stooping over like an old woman, Fleur made her way to the desk, plugged the phones in and picked up the pile of fax paper which had flooded out over the floor. She sat in the office until one in the morning making notes and came in at nine sharp to start phoning.
Late that afternoon she’d called Jess and said, “You’re a treacherous bitch, Jess, but at least you came round to warn me. I want you to help me.”
Jess and she had met in a quiet pub near the British Museum, where no Soho gossips could see or hear them. There Jess told her that back in January Ben had said the business was going down the drain. They worked out what Fleur should do, and Fleur did it.
Now, as she headed towards the café where she and Jess were to meet, she remembered Ben vividly, as if he were beside her in the street. She’d met him six years earlier, chucked up the traineeship at the BBC because he, twelve years older, could teach her, he had said, more than she would learn there.
And he had: Ben was tall and wiry and very clever, capable of putting ten ideas together in a second, holding a room silent for five, ten minutes at a time as he spoke, joking, producing notions, quoting from poets, philosophers, films. He could write, edit scripts, run a camera as well as any cameraman. He could cut film. He could persuade, cook up budgets, put deals together. Over six years he and Fleur had made a dozen documentaries, won prizes in France and Canada and earned a reputation and a lot of money – which they’d put back, mostly, into the business.
When they met Ben had been living apart from his wife. When their affair began Fleur thought she was the luckiest woman in the world, so lucky it was unfair, so lucky it couldn’t last.
It hadn’t, Fleur thought. Sick at heart, she remembered Ben had left school at sixteen before taking A levels, joined the army and left when they suggested he do officer training, gone on a scholarship to Oxford – and not taken his degree. He’d worked for three companies and as an independent producer by the time she met him. Everyone knew he was brilliant. Everyone he knew was brilliant. Life with him had been brilliant.
Now, as she went to meet Jess, friend and betrayer, it was dust and bills, and more bills and a lonely bed.
Jess dashed into the café with nine hundred pounds’ worth of buff coat swirling round her and a hundred pounds of red hairdo corkscrewing round her head. She plonked herself down.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said enviously to Fleur.
“It’s known as stress and living on the dole,” Fleur said. “Try it – it works.”
“No thanks,” Jess said.
“I’ve got a job, anyway,” Fleur said, and told her about it.
Jess’s face fell. “Couldn’t you find anything better than that?”
“I don’t think I could handle anything better than that,” Fleur said. “Not at the moment. I’m even worried I�
�ll mess this up …”
“Well,” said Jess, “let’s face it, we’re all on a bit of an edge here. That second series of Edmond’s Charm is doing very, very badly and my name’s on that one. Then there’s that series about a North Country GP in the twenties which is being wiped out by something on Channel Four – Channel Four, I ask you. Well set up, Nicole Farhi-ed and ever-so-lightly tanned as we all are, none of us is any better than our last performance. I’m pissed off with it, I honestly am. How many women actually own the jobs we’ve got? Not too many. Most of us are so thrilled by the job and the glamour and slipping in and out of the Groucho that we forget, when the axe drops, the owners are nine-tenths fellows.”
“Debs is a woman,” Fleur pointed out. Debs Smith, nicknamed the ‘Wolverine’, owned Camera Shake and was Jess’s employer.
“One of the few,” Jess said.
“Well, then – go independent,” Fleur said.
Jess looked at her, raised an eyebrow. “On what?” she enquired.
Fleur said, “Don’t spread it around, but Gerry’s been sending money to Ben in Miami.”
“Miami – oh my,” Jess said. “I don’t want to spoil your appetite, but have you heard anything from Helena?”
Helena was Ben’s wife. She lived in the country with their two children and was not someone Fleur thought about unless she had to.
“I haven’t, no. Why would I?”
“She’s pretty badly off, I hear. Ben hasn’t been in touch since he disappeared.”
“I can’t do anything about that. She’d better see Gerry.”
“Do you want a better job, though, Fleur? I could ask around.”
“No,” said Fleur. “Nothing like that. I’m stitched together with very light thread. I could fall apart at any moment. But cheer me up – tell me all the gossip.”
Jess fixed her with a wide-eyed gaze, leaned forward and said, “Don’t tell anyone this, but…”
At four on the dot, Fleur, in jeans and a sweatshirt, crossed the road to McCarthy’s.
The bar was empty except for a woman in a business suit sitting at a table doing the crossword and a man of about forty in a more casual suit who was sitting at one of the tables smoking a roll-up.
Fleur hesitated, went over and asked, “Are you the manager?”
He nodded. “You the new girl?”
When she nodded he stood up and said, “I’m Geoff – and you’re …?”
“Fleur.”
“Follow me. You’d better get straight into the kitchen. Do what the chef says till five thirty. Then you do the waitressing while I’m behind the bar. Luckily today’s a slow day so it’ll give you a chance to work your way in.” Flinging open the kitchen door to reveal a steel kitchen counter at which a tall, thin young man with a black ponytail stood, cutting courgettes at speed, he added, “Let me fill you in on the ethic here – this isn’t a happy ship and we don’t all pull together. That right, Al?”
“Exactly right, Geoff,” the man responded colourlessly.
“So here’s the new girl. She can give you a hand till five thirty, then I want her back. In good condition.”
“Right, Geoff,” Al said. When the door closed behind Geoff he looked up and said, “The storeroom’s next door. There’s some overalls on a shelf. Hopefully they’re clean.”
In what she perceived to be a sparsely supplied and under-clean storeroom she found a pile of white aprons and put one on. She went back into the kitchen pondering, Wouldn’t a restaurant’s stores usually have catering packs of flour, sugar, rice and the like, and big tins of this and that?
The kitchen was in fact very clean. A big sink and a massive cooker stood against the back wall and there were a giant fridge and freezer. Fleur stood on the black and white tiled floor and asked, “What shall I do?”
“You’d better get these,” he said and pushed the huge chopping block covered with courgettes towards her. “Then do the rest of the veg. I’ve had to change the menu – the supplier’s not delivered for two days. I’m having to improvise with what I can get at Tesco’s.” Fleur had observed six bulging Tesco bags on the floor by the large stove. “When that’s done get all the onions from one of the bags and put them through the food processor.”
As he spoke he was walking to the kitchen door. He pushed it open and shouted, “Geoff! I want the money for the shopping now!”
Geoff called back, “When I’ve looked in the till.”
“Geoff – I’m a cook, not a fucking investor! Ring fucking Housman again.”
He came back into the kitchen where he knelt down and began to go through the bags. “Don’t ask what’s happening here,” he said from the floor.
Fleur did not comment. “Where shall I put these?” she asked, pointing at the sliced courgettes.
He responded, “In a bowl, dear, where else? Get the bloody onions done, love. I need a lot.”
For an hour and a half Fleur chopped, sliced, mixed the ingredients for pastry in the mixer, stirred and minded the frying pan when Al went out into the yard for a cigarette. During this time he kept up a running monologue, chiefly about politics. His views were much like her dedicated-carpenter-and-Guardian-reading stepfather’s, only a lot less mild.
Finally, when Fleur’s feet were beginning to ache from standing in the same spot, Al sent her into the dark yard for a cigarette which he kindly gave her. The light from the open doorway fell on weeds and straggling grass and piled-up boxes.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he called out to her.
“I used to work in films but it went wrong,” she called back. “What about you?”
“I can’t deal with normal life,” he explained unhelpfully, “or what passes for it.” Evidently he then looked at his watch. “Oi, you’d better run now – Geoff said he wanted you in the bar.”
“I’d better go home and change,” she said, alarmed, coming back into the kitchen.
“You’ll have to look sharp,” he said. “Thing is, after the bar opens at six Geoff disappears. I don’t know where he goes. So you’ll be on your own until he ambles in again about eight.”
“I only live opposite,” Fleur said, taking off her apron. “Where shall I put this?”
“Take it with you – wash it yourself. The laundry never calls these days.”
“All right,” Fleur said, thinking that all the evidence was pointing to a job loss in the near future. She should know.
Having told Geoff she was coming back shortly she went across to Adelaide House and ran up the concrete steps to the floor she lived on. Outside the Morgans’ flat next door to hers she saw Mrs Morgan and Mrs Simmons in grave conversation.
They all nodded at each other and, as Fleur let herself in to her flat, she heard the two women continue their conversation.
“So it’s Christmas at the latest,” Mrs Morgan was saying, regret in her voice.
“Well, it’ll be nice for you,” came Mrs Simmons’ voice, no less upset.
Fleur had a quick shower, put on a black skirt and top, combed her hair, put on minimal eye make-up and lip gloss and dashed back to McCarthy’s. To her horror, Geoff was gone. There were two men in business suits sitting at a table, though, and as she came in, took off her coat and bundled it under the bar, one said to the other, “That’s a relief – I thought we’d have to go to the Findhorn Star.”
Fleur didn’t know where anything was and after serving one of the men with a beer and the other with a gin and tonic she realised she had no idea how to work the till. However, the bar prices were pinned up near it and, pleading for exact change, she began a mini-till in a cardboard box below the bar and hoped she could last out until Geoff returned.
Three young women from a nearby office arrived and bought glasses of wine, and an elderly man came in and took what she assumed was his normal seat on a stool at the bar. “New here?” he asked.
Fleur smiled and nodded, trying to memorise the bar prices.
“You’ll get used to
me,” he told her. “Are you married?”
“That’s right,” said Fleur, “to a professional wrestler.”
A man and woman came in with a small child and sat down. Though Fleur evaded their eyes they started looking at her expectantly.
The elderly man told her helpfully, “The menus ought to be under the bar.”
“Thanks,” said Fleur. The family ordered and she left the bar for the kitchen. She put her head round the door and said, “Three burgers, two baked potatoes, one fries, one salad and where’s the red wine?”
“In a box on the stairs,” Al told her. “How do they want the burgers?”
Fleur hadn’t asked. “All medium,” she told him firmly. She found the wine in the box on the stairs. There were only five bottles left. She raced back to the bar.
“All right,” said one of the men in business suits to the other. “You’ve twisted my arm – I’ll have a whisky.”
Go home to your wives and families, Fleur silently urged them. The place was filling up.
Geoff strolled in at eight fifteen, a quarter of an hour after Fleur had decided that if any more customers arrived, she’d go home. Only one bottle of red wine and two of white were left.
Geoff nodded approvingly at Fleur and said, “Well done.” He opened the till.
“I didn’t know how to work it,” Fleur said. “The money’s all under here. There’s hardly any wine.”
“Got it in the boot outside,” he said. “It’s unlocked. Can you nip out and fetch it in? White Merc. You can see it from here. Do it now, or they’ll have me.”
Swearing under her breath, as Geoff put the profits in the till and served some drinks, Fleur carried six boxes of wine into the bar.
“Couple over there waiting for dessert,” Geoff pointed out. “Hold the fort while I move the car.” He was gone again.
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