‘Is that the lovely Jenny?’
‘It’s Jenny, Mr Floyd, yes. I don’t know if—’
‘And is the equally lovely Louise there?’
‘I’ll just enquire, Mr Floyd, would you mind holding?’
‘I wouldn’t mind holding anything at all, and certainly not you, my darling, no.’
‘It’s Mr Floyd, Miss Mullan,’ said Jenny. ‘He sounds very cheerful. Do you want to speak to him?’
‘Well, since he’s cheerful, yes, Jenny, I will. Put him through. Barry, hello.’
‘Good morning, my darling Louise. And how are you this beautiful morning?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said Louise, ‘but I don’t know where you are. It’s pouring with rain in London.’
‘I’m in London and it looks beautiful to me. Now then. Could I interest you in a tenant today?’
‘I daresay you could, yes. What sort of tenant and for where? That building in Holborn?’
‘No, not Holborn. This is about Slough. Someone who just might be moving in … that direction, just so long as he can find premises.’
‘Oh, my God. Barry, that’s amazing. Who is he?’
‘It’s a little outfit – you may not even have heard of them—’
‘Oh,’ Louise’s voice echoed her disappointment. They needed a big one for Slough: a really big one. They would be losing thousands a year in interest alone once the final payments had all been made.
‘Still – worth pursuing, I think. Could you see him for a meeting this afternoon on site, do you think? At around 3 p.m. And bring those two boys of yours with you.’
He always referred to Matt and Jimbo as Louise’s boys; she liked it, it diminished them rather satisfactorily.
‘I’ll try. But it’s quite a trek out to Slough. And – well, if he’s really small, is he the sort of tenant we want anyway?’
‘Oh, I think so. Could be. You know how one thing leads to another in this game.’
‘Well – all right then. I’ll be there.’
‘Good girl. You’ll like him, he’s a real charmer.’
‘That always helps,’ said Louise.
She asked Matt and Jimbo if they wanted to come; they both said they had far more important things to do, and that a small tenant for Slough would be worse than useless.
‘Barry said he was worth pursuing. And it is very important to us, that site.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Matt irritably, ‘I think I know that without being told, Louise. And of course someone should go, but that’s fine, you’ll do.’
‘Well, thanks for that vote of confidence. And you can jolly well wait till I get back, so we can discuss his feasibility. Barry said he’d want a quick decision if he liked the place.’
‘Barry always talks like that. There’s no way I’m going to be rushed into letting some wanker take half that space or less, and you can tell Barry that first off.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Louise. She went into her own office and slammed the door, saying she didn’t want to be disturbed; and got into her car after lunch and set off on the long crawl to Slough.
She had still not returned by half past six; Matt and Jimbo were beginning to grow irritable. Jimbo was expected at his fiancée’s home for a family conference about the wedding, now rivalling the D-Day landings in its complexity, as Louise had remarked, and Matt wanted to go and look at a car-park site in the City.
‘Give her another half an hour, then we’ll lock up and she can tell us about it in the morning.’
At 6.59 precisely they heard the reception door open and Louise came in.
She had what they both called her look on. It was a look that transformed her from sexy, sassy girl to sleek, successful woman; and it settled on her whenever she had pulled off some deal, made some new contact, embarked on some new project. It was hard to define exactly, but it was partly the way she moved, rather more slowly than usual, partly the expression in her eyes, partly a just-supercilious curve to her mouth.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘hello.’
‘Hello, Louise. Bit late, you could have called.’
‘Yes, well, unfortunately there aren’t any telephones set into the foundations at Slough and the two boxes I passed were out of order. Anyway, it’s only seven for Christ’s sake.’
‘Yes, OK, OK. What was this mysterious client then and is there any hope of a deal?’
‘I – think there might be, yes.’
She sat down on Matt’s desk, her long legs swinging, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and the small tortoiseshell lighter they had given her for her last birthday and lit one, inhaling hard and then blowing out a great cloud of smoke.
‘Quite a lot of hope. Good thing I went, he’s going to need quite a bit of stroking. He was obviously a bit disappointed we weren’t all there, he’d brought his PR along.’
‘His PR!’ Jimbo and Matt looked at each other. Small firms didn’t usually have PRs and certainly not ones they brought to meetings.
‘Yes. She was great. I really liked her.’
‘She!’
‘Yes. Nothing wrong with that, I trust. Or do you not approve of female PRs?’
‘Of course we do,’ said Jimbo hastily. ‘We approve of female everything. Even developers.’
‘Yes. Anyway, her boss, he liked the development, very much, liked the landscaping particularly, and the location of course. Matt, I made sure you got the credit for that at least—’
‘What do you mean, at least?’
‘Well, even though you were too busy to come.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Louise,’ said Matt, ‘who the fu—, who was this client?’
‘Have you heard of WireHire?’
‘WireHire?’
There was a silence; Matt and Jimbo looked at one another and then at Louise, Jimbo’s face red, Matt’s white.
‘WireHire? You mean – the company that’s hot on the heels of Radio Rentals?’
‘Yeah, well done. They’re very big mostly in TV now, and especially the new colour sets. Which they say are the next big thing. No one’s going to want to buy them at the moment, they’ll be terribly expensive, but everyone’ll want one, so—’
‘Shit,’ said Jimbo.
Louise smiled at him sweetly.
‘Yes, indeed. Well, they want to rationalise their offices, as they put it. As you can imagine, the set-up is huge, nationwide. Having all their clerical staff under one roof will save them zillions. So – they’re really keen. Said it would be perfect for them. We’ll have to hurry the completion along, of course, and of course you did say you weren’t going to be rushed into letting some wanker have it, so as I said to them—’
‘Louise, we must have a meeting with them asap. Obviously. Er – who came then, apart from the PR?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, obviously Bill Laurence wouldn’t have come himself.’
‘Now why do you think that?’ said Louise.
‘Well, he’s the big boss. He wouldn’t have time to visit sites, for God’s sake.’
‘Do you know, he does. He thinks it’s crucial that the head of a company is involved in decisions over where his workforce is to spend its days – its habitat, as he put it; and to meet the people who are creating that habitat. He didn’t seem too much of a – what did you call him? Oh, yes, a wanker – to me. Anyway there’s no need for you to meet him yet.’
‘What? Of course there is.’
‘No, no, really there isn’t. I explained to him I was a partner in the company and that Barry and I had actually been present at its birth, so to speak, and he was perfectly happy to shake hands on it. Felicity made sure there were some photographs of that.’
‘Who’s Felicity?’ said Matt irritably.
‘The PR. Felicity Bristow she’s called, jolly posh, Matt, she could have gone to school with Eliza. Anyway, she said the pictures would go into the company magazine and then later on, when contracts had been exchanged, she’d circulate them to th
e press. So all you have to do for now is sit tight and wait for further developments.’
She stood up, smiled at them sweetly, stubbed out her cigarette in Matt’s ashtray and walked to the door. ‘Night, chaps. See you in the morning. Haven’t you got homes to go to?’
Chapter 28
‘I just can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. Come on, you have to concentrate.’
‘No, no, I can’t, I’m so tired, oh, God, here comes another one, oh, my God—’
‘Come on, hang on to me. That’s it. You can’t give up now. You’re nearly there—’
‘It’s all right for you, you bastard, you’ve no idea what I’m going through. Will you just fuck off, go away.’ Tears streamed down Eliza’s face; she threw back her head and shut her eyes.
‘That’s good,’ said Professor Collins, ‘that’s very good. She’s getting upset, means she’s in transition, any minute now she’s going to want to push.’
He had only popped in, as he put it, an hour earlier, to see how Eliza was getting on; he’d become interested in her, having met her in the clinic once or twice, his wife was an avid reader of Charisma, and he’d promised that if he could visit her while she was in labour he would.
‘Can’t guarantee it, I’m not one of your smooth, suited obstetricians, this is an NHS hospital, but I like to see my mothers putting all the theory into practice.’
‘Your theories stink,’ said Eliza, glaring at him as he walked into the delivery room. ‘The breathing doesn’t help much at all, I’m completely exhausted, I want some more pethidine, and the only thing that’s made me feel better so far is screaming.’
He grinned and patted her shoulder.
‘The midwife tells me you’ve been wonderful. And what about the father, how’s he doing?’
‘Oh, I kicked him last time he tried to calm me down.’
‘Excellent. We men need a lot of that. Bet you wouldn’t like to be doing it without him though, would you?’
‘No,’ said Eliza, ‘no I wouldn’t and I don’t know how people do. Oh, my God, here it comes again—’
‘Right. Off we go. One more push and – yes, good, very good, there’s the head, now wait, try to relax and again – yes, come on Eliza, now, now, now, yes – yes, there we are – good, good, very good, yes – and – yes! Good girl, well done, well done—’
As Eliza said afterwards, it was a bit like being told how to have an orgasm.
A moment’s silence then; the pain gone; the room back in focus; Matt smiling at her, tears streaming down his face; and then, the cry, the raw, triumphant, newborn cry; and then, ‘Well done, Eliza. Congratulations. Must dash,’ from Professor Collins. And then ‘seven and a half pounds, very good, she’s beautiful, here, hold your baby, Eliza. That’s right,’ from the huge smiling black midwife who had cajoled and bullied and encouraged her and cared for her through the long, long night, and she was crying and Matt was kissing her and kissing the baby’s head and crying too, and telling her he loved her and then – then –
‘Better start saving for the wedding,’ the midwife said.
‘Wedding?’ Eliza peered into the towel that was wrapped round her daughter, her screaming, amazingly beautiful, astonishingly wonderful daughter. ‘Oh, my God! It’s a girl. Nobody told me.’
‘We told you, honey,’ said the midwife, ‘you just weren’t paying attention.’
‘Matt, did you realise, it’s – she’s a girl.’
‘I did, yeah. Bit different from a boy in certain departments, I noticed. I’m quick like that.’
‘So – is that all right?’
‘Course it’s all right.’ He was bent over the baby, smiling at her, stroking her cheek. ‘She’s amazing. Beautiful. Can’t believe it.’
‘But – you don’t mind it’s not a boy?’
‘Mind? Why should I mind? Girls are much more fun. We can have a boy next time.’
‘What next time?’ said Eliza.
She looked down at the baby in her arms, and the baby looked up at her, and love took hold of her heart and turned and twisted it into a completely different shape. She stroked her daughter’s small, dark head and her soft, limp little legs, and tangled her tiny starfish fingers round her own giant one, and the whole world was changed.
They called her Emmeline (‘No, not because of Mrs Pankhurst,’ Eliza said that day, for the first of a thousand times, ‘we just like it’). Emmie for short. Their blue-eyed, dark-haired, strong-willed, difficult little daughter. Who had them wrapped around her tiny fingers from day one, who defied routine, who screamed from one feed to the next, who seemed to need far less sleep than they did. Whose father doted on her, whose mother adored her, whose two grandmothers, bonding most happily over the small head, agreed that she looked like both her parents, while each privately knowing that she actually looked exactly like only one of them, and whose two grandfathers, the one wheeled into the ward in a wheelchair, the other swaggering with second-hand pride, shook hands over her, smiling bashfully, and became friends. Pete took charge of Adrian for the rest of his visit, wheeling him out of the hospital and into the pub – ‘well, we can’t sit there all day can we?’ – plied him with the beer he was forbidden and promised to sort out a series of ramps for him at home, so that he could be moved about more easily.
Charles, Jimbo and Maddy were all asked to be godparents, and were all duly moved to tears by the request; friends flocked to Eliza’s bedside for the entire seven days she was in hospital, in larger groups every day until Sister said she really must insist Mrs Shaw respect visiting hours and the rule of three visitors at a time – although some of them were so exotic, men in brocaded frock coats, worn over faded blue jeans, or velvet suits in purple or black, and girls in knicker-skimming dresses, thigh-high boots and brilliantly coloured fur coats, that she was reluctant to halt the flow, although she did have to put a stop to the flowers which threatened to engulf the entire ward.
‘It’s always the same with these bohemians,’ she said to the Staff Nurse, ‘they don’t know when to stop.’
‘Just like children, I always think,’ said Staff Nurse darkly. ‘Spoilt children at that.’
Eliza recovered quickly, and begged to be allowed home early. Sister said she was to do nothing of the sort; ‘you feel all right here, I know, but you wait till you get home to the housework and the washing and no one to help with the baby.’
Eliza said rather sheepishly that she was going to have help with all that (a cleaner, a present from her godmother, who had actually wanted to pay for a maternity nurse for a month but Matt had forbidden that – ‘I’m not having some starched harridan taking over our baby’), but Sister then pointed out rather sharply that she hadn’t actually resolved Emmie’s feeding yet and it was a good idea to have that established before getting home.
‘And besides, Professor Collins likes his mothers in for a week, building up their strength, and getting some proper rest.’
‘I don’t want to rest,’ said Eliza crossly, ‘I want to go home with my baby.’
Four sleep-deprived weeks later, she remembered that conversation and thought she would have paid the hospital to have her and Emmie back.
She wasn’t very good at the breast-feeding; Emmie was very slow at latching on, as the nurses called it, and when she finally managed it, it hurt so much that Eliza yelped aloud with pain every time. She longed to put Emmie onto the bottle, but Matt wouldn’t hear of it; he had taken in, along with his other pre-natal reading, the fact that babies not only thrived better on breast milk, but it protected them from all manner and kinds of infections and illnesses.
‘My mum says you’ve just got to persevere,’ he said, coming home to find Eliza weeping one night over the screaming Emmie, ‘and the more you do it, the more the milk flows.’
Eliza said irritably that was all very well, but at the rate she was going, Emmie would probably starve to death while she was persevering, and before the flow ever got going.<
br />
Most of the time though, she felt too exhausted even to be irritable; day had blurred into night, one feed into the next. She was frequently still in her nightie at teatime. When she did finally get dressed it was into her maternity clothes; the huge leaky breasts that so totally failed to satisfy her daughter were not to be suppressed under any T-shirt or sweater, her waist still went out rather than in, and her stomach still protruded soggily beneath it. ‘Even my thighs are twice the size,’ she wailed to Maddy, ‘I can’t bear to look at them.’
She longed for Matt to come home each evening and then within ten minutes was quarrelling with him; he too was tiring of the noise, the lack of sleep, her exhaustion and the apparent end of life as they knew it.
The cleaner left after the first week, when Eliza lost her temper with her and told her to stop polishing the bloody floor and wash up last night’s supper things instead; she thought she might spend the money on hiring a maternity nurse at least one night a week, but it turned out that it was a whole month or nothing, and when she mentioned it to Matt he told her he was simply not prepared to even consider it.
They rowed a great deal; Matt simply couldn’t see why Eliza was failing so spectacularly at what seemed to him a fairly simple set of demands. ‘All I’m asking,’ he said in exasperation as they went into week three, ‘is that you’ll have a meal ready for me when I get in, and maybe the baby in bed for a bit. What the hell have you got to do all day? And where the fuck have you put my clean shirts?’
That was the night when Eliza discovered there was not a clean or even a dry nappy in the place. Every single one of the two dozen were in the disagreeable-looking and worse-smelling pails in the bathroom.
That was the night when she told him to piss off when he tried to make her smile, told her it didn’t matter and they could rip up a towel and use that for a nappy; that was the night when he said he didn’t mind any of it, except her being so bloody miserable; that was the night when she told him if he didn’t give her a break and look after Emmie one night a week, she couldn’t answer for the consequences; that was the night when he told her to pull herself together and that he was going back to the office.
The Decision Page 34