The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never felt at home anywhere. It was as if some part of me was missing and I was always searching for answers which I was never able to find.”

  “What answers? What were the questions?”

  “It doesn’t matter, not any more. This is home, isn’t it? You’re the missing part of me, and this is where I fit in, here with you.”

  Pulling him on top of me I said: “I think you fit in here very well.”

  A satisfying interval passed.

  Some time later he said suddenly: “I want to show you the photograph now,” and began to scramble out of bed.

  As he had told me all his old photographs had been lost during the move to Oakshott many years before, I assumed he was talking of a more recent picture, but the black-and-white snapshot which he pulled from its special place in his wallet was yellow at the edges inside the plastic folder which protected it. “I couldn’t show you this before,” he said, “because the past seemed so disconnected with the present that I felt there was no way of sharing it, but now that I’m more all of a piece . . .” Leaving the sentence unfinished he pulled aside the plastic folder and mutely handed me the photograph.

  I saw a small boy of perhaps three or four, with dark hair, bright eyes and a radiant, trustful smile. He was wearing long trousers and a shortsleeved shirt. Standing beside him was a large dog, an Alsatian, tail in the middle of a wag, and in the background was a motherly woman with an indulgent expression. All three figures were standing on a lawn by a stone urn planted with flowers.

  “That was my nurse who got sacked,” said Kim, “and that was my dog which got lost. I still think of them.”

  After a pause I said: “When I was small I had a cat which got lost. I still think of him too.” There was a silence while I wondered whether this response was adequate, but Kim seemed satisfied by the implied message that I could understand his feelings of bereavement. I wanted to ask questions but was afraid of mishandling the subject when it was still clearly so painful. I merely noted the absence of any equally cherished photograph of his parents.

  “I wish I had photos to show you of my own past,” I said at last, “but I’ve never made a hobby of photography.”

  “Well, I don’t need to see pictures of your family, do I? I’ll soon be meeting them in person.”

  “Right.” Not for the first time I tried to visualise taking Kim to meet my father, but yet again the scene proved unimaginable.

  Meanwhile Kim was saying tentatively: “Will you tell me some day what happened?”

  “What happened when?”

  “When your parents split up.”

  “Oh, that! Well, I’ll tell you now—it’s no big deal. The bailiffs came again and my mother decided that was one visit too many, so she and I took a bus across Glasgow to stay with her sister. In the flat next door lived this old man, and the old man’s son used to come up from England twice a month to visit him—the son had gone to Newcastle to find work and he’d actually found it, he was employed. Better still, he was respectable and decent and never went near a gambling shop. The next thing I knew I was being shovelled off to primary school in Newcastle and all the bloody awful little Geordie kids were trying to use me as a football because I spoke broad Glaswegian.”

  Kim silently slipped his arms around me and pulled me close to him. As I pressed my face against his chest I heard myself add in a rapid voice: “I just wish I’d been allowed to take my cat but my mother said no, she couldn’t cope. So I made my father promise to look after it but of course he didn’t and it disappeared. He never kept a single promise he ever made. End of story.” Raising my face from Kim’s chest again I managed to say: “We don’t have to talk about the past any more, do we? After all, it’s only the present and future which matter now.”

  But unfortunately this statement proved to be mere wishful thinking.

  Less than two months after our return from the honeymoon Sophie’s phone calls began again.

  VII

  I did not tell Kim the trouble had restarted. He was in the midst of a high-powered deal and working morning, noon and night. He did not need any more stress. I was working hard too but I did not find Sophie as upsetting as he did because by this time my prime emotion was neither rage nor nausea but bewilderment. Why was she still calling me even now I was married? Was the woman so obsessed that she had no idea when to stop emoting and face reality? At this point I considered the possibility of labelling her a stalker.

  The first time she phoned she said: “This is Sophie Betz. Forgive me for calling again, but—”

  I had no intention of forgiving her, not after her feet-dragging over the divorce. Both my sympathy and my patience had long since been exhausted.

  The second time she called she did not announce her name but said in a rush: “I really do think it’s my moral duty to—”

  I hung up. I was not about to listen to yet another attempt to deliver religious nutterguff.

  The third time she said: “Look, I must see you!” and the fourth time she said simply: “Listen!” but I managed to slam down the receiver before she could utter another syllable. After that she rang several times but did not speak; it was as if she hoped to lure me into a conversation by arousing my curiosity. How did I know it was her? Well, who else would it have been? It was hardly likely that a second nutter had started to pester someone who had an ex-directory number.

  Naturally I considered the possibilities of either changing my number or having a second line installed, but I did not see how either of these plans could be accomplished without telling Kim the whole story, and I was not yet so desperate that I felt driven to share the bad news with him. Anyway if Sophie’s PI could find out unlisted numbers, any changes I might make to my telephone line would be pointless. I did toy once more with the idea of getting an answering machine, a move I could explain merely by saying I wanted to be up to date, but I felt unwilling to risk the chance of Kim pushing the playback button and hearing loony messages from his ex-wife.

  By this time we were well into 1990 and my irritation was greatly increased when my much younger half-sisters wrote a joint letter criticising me for not trekking north at Easter to check the pulses and display my husband. What impertinence! I was hardly about to remain soft as Andrex tissues while being lectured by two girls who thought London was some kind of gold-plated cesspit, so I phoned each one up and bawled them both out. Of course I knew I should have trekked north, but I had felt compelled to insist to Kim that we should spend the Easter holiday in Paris.

  The basic problem, as I well knew, was that if I took him as far as Newcastle I would be unable to invent a plausible reason for not taking him on to Glasgow and by that time I had realised I could not display him in Glasgow until my father’s current situation had improved. On my forward-planning calendar I made a note to sort out the whole mess in September. Then I returned with relief to concentrate on my new life as Mrs. Betz.

  After our wedding we had held a reception for a hundred of our better-known acquaintances at the Savoy, and as soon as 1990 dawned many of these people started inviting us out to dinner. It was difficult to fit this active social life into our schedules but we both knew the effort had to be made; all these people were connected in some way with our careers. Neither Kim nor I had close friends—I suppose outsiders often have a chronic difficulty in dropping their masks and being themselves— but we had innumerable acquaintances, some of whom I liked very much and who appeared to like me. I was interested to note that Kim’s Jewish acquaintances held him in high esteem. From them I learned that he regularly gave to Jewish charities, and this impressed me, particularly as he had never mentioned making any donations to good causes. It also became clear that he must have studied the Jewish culture in depth; in fact one of his Jewish acquaintances remarked to me how commendable it was that Kim had chosen to honour his father’s Jewishness instead of denying it, even though his father had apparently shown no interest in observing h
is religion.

  “But how much of this interest of yours is real,” I said unwisely to Kim after this conversation, “and how much is just the result of you playing the system in your usual fashion?” I knew he had always worked for Jewish firms and would have been more than capable of zeroing in on the best ways of demonstrating his solidarity with them.

  To my horror Kim took deep offence and became very upset. “If you think for one moment that I’m not a hundred per cent sincere in my commitment to the Jews—”

  Secretly cursing myself for such a stupid blunder, I rushed to apologise and swore I admired both his commitment and his sincerity.

  That was when I decided that the subject of his Jewish connections was almost as tricky as the subject of what Germany had got up to between 1939 and 1945. Kim himself never talked of the war if he could avoid doing so, and I had only once heard him volunteer a comment on Hitler. He had said: “Too bad no one gassed that shit at birth,” and his tone of voice had indicated that the subject of the Third Reich was hardly likely to surface frequently in our conversations.

  Anyway, there we were, slaving away at our jobs in the May of 1990 and shimmering away in our social life with our backs firmly turned on the past, when Sophie suddenly abandoned the phone calls to the flat and decided to harass me at work. She could hardly have picked a time which suited me worse. Jacqui, my secretary, had departed for a fortnight’s holiday in Greece, PersonPower International had had the nerve to send me a heterosexual male called Eric Tucker to take her place, my chief clients were whingeing, the dinosaurs were stamping, the whippets were breast-brushing, the fluffettes were nicknaming me Slaughter instead of calling me Carter, the crises were constant—and to cap it all my first post-nuptial attempt to host a dinner-party was looming on the horizon. In short, my stress levels were mounting at an alarming rate and I definitely did not need my life to be further complicated by a reappearance of Ms. Fruity-Loops spouting nutterguff. When Tucker the Temp buzzed me with the bad news I wanted to shatter my oak desk with a karate chop.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Graham,” he said over the intercom, “but there’s a call for you from a Mrs. Sophie Betz. I remembered you said Betz was your married name so I figured this could be someone you might want to talk to, but I did say to her that I thought you’d just left for a meeting, so—”

  “Terminate her,” I said, and severed the connection.

  VIII

  I sat there, examining the fingernail I had broken by clenching my fists too hard, and thought idly how wonderful it would be to have Tucker as a permanent personal assistant, almost a pseudo-spouse, a male equivalent of Kim’s doting long-time PA Mary Waters who had followed him to Graf-Rosen just as Jacqui had followed me to Curtis, Towers. But could I really trust a heterosexual male not to make a sex-mess if he were put in the position of being my chief pamperer, crisis-fixer, gofer and hitman? Probably not. Yet it was becoming increasingly tempting to massage Jacqui out of my life and try.

  I hit the intercom. “Hey, Tucker! Get in here.”

  He was planted on the carpet in front of me in less than ten seconds, white shirt glistening, black shoes gleaming, terminally dull tie toning with his irreproachable charcoal-grey suit. The office serf as male slave, obedient to his lady’s every whim—this glorious pipe-dream of every stressed-out female high flyer was now miraculously incarnate in my office. At least something in my life was currently going right.

  In a voice mild enough to signal my appreciation I said: “Thank you for handling that call. Mrs. Sophie Betz is my husband’s ex-wife and she’s been harassing me for some time. If she calls again you can say straight away that I’m not available.”

  “Right.” He thought for a moment. “Is she likely to try to storm your office?”

  I respected him for having the intelligence to ask this horrible but necessary question. “Probably not,” I said. “I suspect she’d be reluctant to make such a public exhibition of herself, but on the other hand if she’s nuts anything’s possible.”

  “Maybe I should know what she looks like so that I can repel any invasion.”

  “Well, I’ve never met the woman, but I understand she’s fat, fiftyish and frumpish with tightly waved grey hair.”

  “In that case she’ll be easy to spot once she crosses the threshold of Curtis, Towers.”

  We exchanged poker-faced looks but I knew at once that we were both silently making the same observation. The dinosaurs at Curtis, Towers, unfettered by laws forbidding age discrimination, tended to pressure any female into resigning at the first sign of a varicose vein. No wonder pantsuits were becoming so fashionable.

  “Anything else, ma’am?”

  “No. Wait a moment—yes. Could you get Mrs. Lake of Blue Lake Catering on the phone? She’s booked to do a dinner-party for me on Friday night and as it’s now Wednesday afternoon I think it’s time I made sure she’s not planning to serve mad cow.”

  He vanished.

  By this time Tucker had woven himself seamlessly into his new environment and was proving to be an object of considerable interest to the fluffettes. Later I was to overhear him being discussed passionately in the ladies’ loo when an argument broke out about whether his hair should be classified as chestnut brown or darkest red. The freckles visible across the bridge of his nose favoured the darkest-red party, but this faint spattering of pigment was reckoned by the chestnut-brown crowd not to indicate the presence of the red-hair gene unless his forearms were similarly mottled. Speculation then took place about how Tucker could be persuaded to expose his forearms, and Shana, the office shag-queen, was driven to declare rashly that she would discover the colour of his pubic hair, but pride went before a fall and Tucker remained chastely veiled in his white shirts and dark suits. I heard Shana’s excuse for her uncharacteristic failure was that “Slaughter” Graham kept her lad on a tight leash, no doubt to satisfy a craving for sado-masochistic sex-games.

  However, these ladies’-loo vignettes took place during the second week of his assignment, and on the day that Sophie called me at work I was still savouring his first week as my pipe-dream incarnate.

  I had just finished attending to my broken nail when Tucker slipped back into my room.

  “Bad news, Ms. Graham.”

  “It’s the Lake Lady.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “No, departed.”

  I was outraged. “But that’s impossible! She was recommended by two clothes-horses in my building who do nothing but give dinner-parties!”

  “I gather the bank manager switched off the business’s life-support machine. I just spoke to the bailiff.”

  “Bloody hell, I don’t need this crisis!” I yelled, deciding it was time to do some therapeutic emoting. “For Christ’s sake, why didn’t the woman let me know she’d be off the map by Friday? This disaster can’t have happened overnight!”

  “It could be you were low on her list of priorities. She’s currently being reassembled in a South London clinic after overgrazing on Valium.”

  “Okay, that’s sad, I’ll stop wanting to kill her, but what am I going to do about my dinner-party?”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Yes, but make damn sure it’s brilliant.”

  “I know a cook, cordon bleu, freelance, clean, sober, respectable and reliable. She lives in Clerkenwell, she’s worked for the aristocracy in Belgravia, and she often does Barbican dinner-parties. Shall I call her?”

  “Okay, that is brilliant—but no, hold it, that type of wonder woman’s bound to be booked up for at least six months—”

  “Not on Friday nights, not for formal dinner-parties. That’s when she cooks dinner for her cher ami.”

  “You?”

  “I’m not that lucky. Shall I—”

  “Yes, for God’s sake eliminate the boyfriend and kidnap her.”

  An interval followed during which I drew pictures of vodka martinis on my scratchpad, overcame the urge to gna
w my mutilated fingernail and silently reviewed in my mind’s eye all the major chill-food lines in Marks and Spencer’s food department.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Good news?”

  “The best. I’ve fixed it. She’s happy to help you out.”

  I sagged in my chair, wiped my memory of the chill-food cabinets and said: “Tucker, you should be garlanded with flowers and led through the cheering crowds of the City of London on an elephant. What’s this heroine’s name and where can I reach her?”

  “She’s on the line right now and her name’s Alice Fletcher. I’ll put her through.”

  I instantly resolved to offer him a permanent job at a salary he would be unable to refuse.

  IX

  Ms. Fletcher spoke courteously, displaying an effortless mastery of the accent which I called Home Counties and which she probably still called BBC, even though nowadays the BBC prided itself on flaunting regional dialects. She suggested that she call at my flat after work on the following day, Thursday, to inspect the kitchen and discuss the menu. She then said she would do all the shopping afterwards, but when I proved to be too much of a control-freak to let her shop alone she seemed delighted that I was willing to take an interest in the preparations.

  At five-thirty on the following evening after a diabolical day which included a fraught partners’ meeting, a furious clash with a snooty barrister over his “counsel’s opinion,” and a ferocious conference with a snotty client who refused to see the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, I arrived home to find Alice Fletcher waiting for me in the lobby of Harvey Tower. I eyed her warily but found nothing which set my teeth on edge. She was about my age, dark-eyed with a square, friendly face and brown hair tucked up in a French pleat. She was about twenty pounds overweight but I knew no man would dream of calling her fat; he would be too busy noting that the surplus flesh was distributed in all the right places. As if to play down the voluptuousness and enhance her respectability, she was wearing a decorous black blouse and black skirt beneath her unbuttoned, drab raincoat.