Hot Breath

by Sarah Harrison

  She leaned towards me, focusing this time. ‘ Pia will be down in a mo.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  I stared once more at the grandmother. There were innumerable photos of her travels. Here she was in New Guinea, sturdy and indomitable among grinning headhunters … here in a souk, beads dangling from her handlebars … here, apparently, in the Yukon, in a plaid jacket and earflaps …

  ‘Harriet Blair?’

  A whiff of expensive scent assailed my nostrils and I looked up to see a slender, doe-eyed beauty with a cloud of dark hair, dressed all in white.

  ‘I’m Pia,’ she told me. ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘Thank you.’ I rose from the banquette. My bare legs, on being parted from the vinyl, made a noise like elastoplast being stripped from a rhinoceros. Pia floated ahead of me like a wraith, or dryad, her hair seeming to float around her head, her white espadrilles to glide an inch or so above the floor.

  It was miles to the green room. Like some mythological adventurer being lured on by a will-o’-the-wisp I followed Pia through swing doors, up flights of stairs, into lifts and out again, across promising-looking outer-office areas, only to pass once more into the barren hinterland of corridors and echoing stone steps.

  ‘It’s such a silly building,’ she cast over her shoulder. ‘ There’s a new bit and an old bit but they didn’t seem to join them up properly!’

  ‘Too silly,’ I agreed.

  At last we reached a door which Pia opened, to reveal a group of people drinking, smoking, and apparently enjoying themselves. I at once spotted Arundel and Marilyn, and there were two others. One was a young woman whom I took to be Arundel’s nanny from his academic publishers, the Barford Press. The other was a tall caddish man in a bounder’s uniform of tight yellow shirt, electric-blue lightweight trews, and brothel-creepers. This was Torquil Bannister.

  ‘Ah, the long-awaited Mrs Blair,’ he said. ‘The lovely Pia has brought you to us. Pia, let me look at you. Harriet, let me shake you by the hand.’

  I clasped the nicotine-stained cod fillet which he extended to me, and then he asked whom I knew.

  ‘Well, I know Marilyn, of course,’ I said. I didn’t like to admit acquaintanceship with Arundel in case they threw us both out.

  ‘You got here all right then,’ said Marilyn. ‘How’s the family?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘as far as I know.’

  Marilyn shrieked with laughter. ‘Honestly, you are a scream.’

  The others looked blank, not having been initiated into the secrets of the Era/Blair byplay. Arundel lifted one eyebrow.

  ‘A drink,’ suggested Torquil. ‘White wine? Pia, vino, there’s a love.’

  Arundel’s nanny stepped forward, bringing her charge with her. She was a plump, plain, breathless girl, a first-class Eng Hons if ever I saw one.

  ‘How do you do,’ she gasped, ‘I’m Flavia Brayne.’

  ‘How do you do.’

  ‘And this is Arundel Potter, your fellow guest, but I believe you two may have come across each other. I know how parochial university towns can be.’

  ‘Good day, Mrs Blair,’ said Arundel, with admirable formality. ‘What a small world.’

  ‘So you two know each other?’ cried Torquil.

  ‘Scarcely at all—’—‘Not really—’ we both said together.

  ‘Not that it matters,’ said Torquil hastily. ‘But it can be inhibiting to have to criticise the work of a friend.’

  ‘Mrs Blair?’ Pia handed me a small glass of wine, the colour and temperature of recent urine. ‘And there are some snacks on the side if you’re hungry.’ I observed parsley-bedecked quiches on a side table.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t run here, Harriet,’ quipped Marilyn, assiduously buffing up my image. ‘It’s only fifty miles.’

  Amid polite laughter, Torquil said: ‘Oh, a runner, are you?’

  ‘Not exactly. Just a domestic jogger,’ I replied, with the becoming modesty so beloved of the Erans. Marilyn glanced round with pride. Flavia and Arundel began to chat, earnestly and quietly, and Pia started to cut a quiche into wedges.

  Marilyn came to my side. I felt initiative drain from me as the Force of the Erans emanated from her and held me in its insidious power.

  ‘Harriet,’ she said, in a confidential tone, ‘has Torquil explained what he has in mind?’

  ‘Not in detail,’ I said, turning politely to Torquil. As he began to invoke widened perceptions and extended parameters I conjectured, unkindly, that what he had in mind most of the time was sniffing ladies’ bicycle seats. Torquil Bannister would not see fifty again. His face, ruddy with frequent ingestion of green room chateau pissoir, was adorned with a thick moustache, handy no doubt for filtering oxygen from Mercia TV’s overused air, as a whale sifts plankton from the sea. His eyes, above a nose the shape of an inverted light bulb, were wet and blue like a couple of guppies swimming in skimmed milk. He was one of those men who made me inordinately glad that I had experienced Kostaki before I got too old to care.

  ‘… so you see,’ he concluded, ‘we’re really just after an entertaining show which deals with some of the questions the ordinary viewer would ask about art if he or she had the chance.’

  ‘Always supposing,’ I said, ‘that the ordinary viewer has any in the first place.’

  ‘Any what, Harriet?’

  ‘Questions.’

  Torquil slapped me on the back. ‘I like your style, Harriet. I like it very much. I think—’ he leaned round and addressed Marilyn—‘we shall have a very nice show in the bag a few hours from now.’

  Marilyn squeezed my arm affectionately, pleased that I had scored a hit with Torquil, though uncertain about my means of scoring it.

  Pia came over, having failed to interest anyone in quiche. ‘Torquil’s marvellous, isn’t he?’ she breathed, in all seriousness.

  ‘I should think so,’ I replied cautiously.

  ‘He’s just so amazing with people,’ she said. ‘He can just pull the best out of them.’ She made a gesture reminiscent of drawing a fowl. ‘And of course he is the creative man at MTV at the moment. The sad thing is,’ she sighed, weightily, ‘we shall almost certainly lose him after “ Imitating Life”. It’s just so innovative.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, joining in with gusto, now I understood that platitudes were the currency in which we dealt, ‘people have to move on, and up, and of course it does make way for new young talent.’

  ‘That,’ said Pia with feeling, ‘is so true, Harriet. Oh look, we’re going down.’

  Pia’s last remark to me in the green room seemed, in retrospect, to have been prophetic. And like the helmsman of the Titanic I experienced a shudder of the gravest foreboding as, with Torquil before and Pia behind, we made our way down flights of reverberating speckled stairs to the studio.

  ‘Now then, Arundel and Harriet,’ said Torquil, ‘Pia will take you to make-up.’

  Once more we followed where the lovely Pia led, and this time wound up beneath the contemptuous gaze of Zandra, who pronounced Arundel to be colourless and myself florid.

  ‘I’ll deal with you first,’ she said, tipping my head back. ‘We usually have this trouble with our female guests, they seem to think they have to put the make-up on with a trowel just because they’re going on telly. You have a naturally high colour, don’t you, so I’m going to quiet things down a bit, and dry off these greasy panels.’

  I squirmed inwardly, not least because Arundel, sitting next to me with a pink plastic bib round his neck, was listening with fascinated attention to this tirade.

  ‘The men,’ added Zandra, dusting, dabbing and tweaking, ‘are generally a whole lot easier.’

  ‘I’m bound to say,’ said Arundel smugly, ‘that I agree.’

  ‘Right,’ said Zandra, unimpressed. ‘Your turn now.’

  I did not wait for Arundel, but left him to Zandra’s tender mercies, and went out into the passage where Marilyn was waiting to escort me
to the studio.

  ‘Just be your own super self, Harriet,’ she advised as she ushered me along.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Plenty of emphasis on the sales of your books both here and abroad, all the letters you get from readers, the satisfaction you get from bringing enjoyment to literally millions of people—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘ I won’t let you down.’

  The set of ‘Imitating Life’comprised a group of cylindrical plinths, like assorted tinned goods. On top, as it were, of the baked beans, was a simulacrum of a film camera, on the tuna fish a pile of books, on the dog food theatrical masks, and so on. I deduced, from the presence of three anorexic tubular chairs and a rubber plant, that we were to be sited just off centre on the drinking chocolate.

  ‘So, Harriet,’ said Torquil, rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of good sport, ‘what do you think of our set?’

  ‘Very striking,’ I said.

  Arundel arrived and we stood, he gingered up and I toned down, on either side of Torquil as he ran over the outline once more for our benefit. He then introduced the show’s presenter who turned out to be a woman, Siobhan Flynn, tall, striking and American-designer-clad.

  ‘Right,’ said Torquil, ‘I’ll go on up and leave you to Siobhan. We’ll kick off in about fifteen minutes.’

  We settled ourselves gingerly on the drinking chocolate while people in headphones, cameramen and assorted Oxbridge camp-followers bustled about being Part of Things.

  Siobhan Flynn turned out to know a lot more about me than I did.

  ‘The great thing about your books, it seems to me, Harriet,’ she said, ‘and indeed about all good popular fiction, is its quality of honesty and innocence, and by that I don’t mean naivety. To work, a mass-market novel must be written with integrity, would you agree?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said dimly. ‘Although—’

  ‘And of course a genuine respect and affection for one’s readers, something which comes over very strongly in your work. You never shortchange your public and I respect that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Now Mr Potter—’ she turned to Arundel. I wondered why he merited a Mr but I was just matey old Harriet. ‘Mr Potter, broadly speaking I know your views, but may I ask, have you actually read any mass-market fiction?’

  ‘Only,’ said Arundel frostily, ‘in the interests of research for this programme.’

  ‘Fine. So you can, as they say, give examples to support any arguments you may have?’

  Arundel whitened beneath his blusher. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I do hope,’ said Siobhan, addressing both of us, ‘that we can have a really entertaining and mature discussion here, and perhaps try to establish some sort of universal standard that could be applied to all types of fiction, high and middlebrow, literary and popular … let’s dispel a few myths here today …’

  She continued, but I did not listen. It was perfectly plain that she was a four-star pain in the arse. As I sat there I caught Arundel’s eye and read there, astonishingly, exactly the same thought. We were destined to be, for perhaps the only time in our relationship, united in our profound and instinctive dislike of a third party. It was going to be all right.

  A couple of hours later, the first show in MTV’s new series ‘Imitating Life’ was in the can, and Arundel and I had successfully sabotaged the whole shooting match with an unprecedented display of mutual arse-licking which had left Siobhan Flynn twitching with frustration and everyone else redefining parameters like billyo.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Torquil over the tea and bikkies, at which Siobhan was not present, ‘really. Amazing. You two really made nonsense of so much received thinking out there.’

  ‘Glad you like it,’ I mumbled. Arundel and I were now like a couple of embarrassed lovers after an ill-advised one-night stand, quite unable to address each other, or even to meet each other’s eyes.

  ‘You were both just terrific,’ said Marilyn, spraying us with digestive crumbs. ‘Arundel, put it there. I think you’ve done more good for books generally this afternoon than all the hyping and sniping has done in years.’

  Arundel clasped her hand briefly, with an expression of his most falcon-like hauteur. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Marilyn ardently, ‘ I really do.’

  Arundel and I left soon after, scuttling away from the scene of our shameful betrayal of principles like a couple of rats leaving a sinking ship. Flavia Brayne suggested we all go the Coach House Hotel for a drink, but I made noises about catching the train and left Marilyn to maintain an Era presence at the gathering.

  I caught a cab to the Flag and Ferret, and as I got out the taxi driver, a rather jollier character than the one who had taken me to MTV, remarked: ‘What you going to this dump for, love? You don’t look like a spit and sawdust girl to me. I could show you some real nice boozers in this town.’

  ‘I’m meeting someone here,’ I said. ‘It’s on our way home.’

  ‘I should forget him, love,’ advised the cabbie with a wink. ‘Any bloke who brings a lady to the Ferret deserves to be stood up.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘ What’s the matter with it?’

  ‘It’s a right hole,’ he told me, ‘ that’s all. Cheers, love.’

  He was absolutely right. One glance at the public bar of the Flag and Ferret made me think quite wistfully of the Coach House Hotel. And the lounge bar, with its bleak and seedy pretensions to respectability, was if anything even worse. Except that there, alone at the bar (it was only just gone six) was Kostaki, wearing the elegant suit in which I had first seen him, looking every inch the disarming young country doctor and reminding me forcibly that my recent madness had not been without justification. His looks were enhanced by the extreme drabness of his surroundings. Our fling might be on the downward curve, but I was sure as hell going to enjoy the slide down.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said, in his dégagé way, ‘ what’ll it be?’

  ‘I’ll have a drink first,’ I replied, to show I’d learnt a thing or two under his tutelage, but he didn’t smile. ‘Everything all right?’

  He shrugged. ‘ So-so.’

  ‘Oh, that so.’ I tried again. But there was still no change.

  He settled his shoulders in an irritable gesture. ‘ Gin?’ He addressed the Ferret’s barmaid: ‘Gin and tonic. And another of these.’ It was Scotch. I eyed him charily.

  ‘Do you want to hear how it went?’ I asked tentatively, pouring tonic and taking a recuperative swig.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘It was fine! The interviewer was such a pseud that we effected a spontaneous outflanking movement. Me and Arundel, imagine, it was great!’

  ‘I haven’t met him.’

  ‘No, well, he’s a … look, what is the matter?’

  ‘Afternoon surgery was packed. Abso-bloody-lutely teeming. Some people needed more time, but of course it was the one day I had to rush them all through.’

  ‘I see.’ I took another swig, a consciousness-deadening one this time, to keep the sour whiff of incipient acrimony at bay. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was the suspicion of more shoulder-settling. It was aggravating, like Clara’s shrug. I stared glumly straight ahead, and thought that this was the bottom line where adultery was concerned: a grotty anonymous pub in a provincial suburb, chosen expressly for its lack of popularity with the rest of the human race; the two soi-distant lovers—it seemed a misnomer at present—sitting silent and reproachful over stiff drinks; guilt, resentment and irritation hovering over their heads like three vultures anticipating a meal.

  ‘Right then,’ said Kostaki, pushing his glass away from him with both hands, and getting up. ‘ If you’ve finished, we might as well go.’

  As I drained my gin and picked up my bag I realised, with something amazingly like satisfaction, that he sounded just like George.

  The Ghikasmobile was parked in an alley behind the Flag and Ferret, where ramparts of leaking bl
ack refuse bags attested to the unappetising nature of the pub’s bar snacks. We climbed in, still in silence; though with succour, so to speak, hard at hand, I could not be entirely gloomy.

  Kostaki reversed out of the alley at speed, dislodging a few of the refuse bags as he did so, ground the gears, stalled, leaped forward and snarled ill-temperedly out of Antwich. We proceeded as far along the Barford arterial road as was discreet, before turning through an open gateway into a field and screwing.

  Though the Fiat was small, its suspension was excellent, and the degree of discomfort, allied to our vague sense of mutual discontent, resulted in a more than usually explosive coupling.

  Unfortunately the earlier humidity had given way to a thundery shower during my sojourn at MTV, and the effect of our violent activity was to drive the Fiat’s tyres deep into the mud. We re-surfaced to find ourselves more or less rooted to the spot, with the gate now closed behind us and the car surrounded by a herd of silent and attentive cows, just back from milking. The herdsperson, rustic switch in one hand, personal stereo round his neck, brought up the rear, displaying considerably less interest than his charges in the spectacle of two adults struggling to uncouple and adjust their dress in the front of an ‘S’ registration Fiat. But I was all too familiar with the blank stare and syncopated walk of those wired for sound, and was consequently not surprised at this apparent sang-froid.

  Constantine, pretending to ignore our bovine audience, switched on the engine and pumped the accelerator. The wheels whirred ineffectually in the mud, spraying the impassive cows with their own mire.

  ‘You need a bit less throttle …’ I suggested.

  ‘Possibly,’ he replied. He was displaying once again his doctorly attitude towards the combustion engine, one of bravura detachment. He seemed to believe that if he activated the right parts often enough and with sufficient determination, the car would eventually move. It was, after all, the method he employed with regard to sex, and with signal success. Unfortunately I was not in the mood for sitting by while he totally loused up what was left of a long and trying day.