He was tall, with dark curly hair, and thin curving lips always on the point of saying something which would either burn you into the ground or make you fall on your back and open your legs – though she didn’t feel herself a candidate for either fate. She rarely heard him talk, he just walked into the department, spoke to someone in the distance about schedules or book jackets – as if he owned the building and could manage the mortgage with no trouble at all, thank you very much – then went back to his office where, she imagined, a nice thick sheepskin rug lay in front of his desk.
His nicely shaped ears picked out every word within radius, that was for sure, and though she couldn’t tell what he had heard exactly, her vile language got him talking and, being too pissed to know what about, she listened in such a way as to make him think she wasn’t interested, which caused him to go on longer than he thought worthwhile to this pert office runabout from somewhere north of Potters Bar. Her look of glazed indifference offended yet intrigued him, for she was amazed at him wanting to flirt with her, while asking herself who the blinding hell he thought he was?
Knowing she was as good if not better than everybody else, she paid as much to have her hair cut before the party as her father earned for a fair week’s slog down the pit. The mirror showed how attractive she was on getting into her wine-dark dress, though she didn’t need a flattering glass to confirm it. Full lips and a small firm chin, straight slim nose, and sufficient expanse of forehead, gave the impression that she could be efficient and intelligent, which she knew she must be compared to most other girls at the firm. She’d had too much of a struggle getting there to act as conceited as them.
Lots of famous people were at the party, mostly writers the firm published, but she wasn’t good at picking them out, and anyway so what if they were famous? She supposed those who were there and didn’t work in the office must be writers, except that there were so many unknowns from other departments that as far as she was concerned a lot of them might be writers as well. You couldn’t tell. Writers, she found, dressed like everybody else, and other people got so togged up that they might also be writers.
A man in a three-piece gravy brown suit and a cravat for a tie, crinkly grey hair, and stinking of whisky and aftershave, pinned her against the door. He told her he was a novelist, with the sort of leer not beamed in her direction since living in Yorkshire.
‘My name’s Norman Bakewell. I’m sure you’ve heard of me.’
The titles he ran off reminded her of the names her mother used to read aloud before going up the street to put bets on them at the bookies. Glittering eyeballs winked through heavy glasses that must have cost a bomb but looked dirt cheap.
‘I’ve read every one of them,’ she lied.
His lips were too close. ‘I only came to this firm because they said I could go to bed with any lovely woman who worked here.’
‘Written in your contract, is it?’
‘I insisted: a fat advance, twelve free copies, and any girl I fancied.’
‘And what part of the world do you come from, crumb?’
He winced. ‘Norman, if you please. A place near Wakefield. The name’s on the jacket of my latest bestseller.’
The village wasn’t far from hers, so he didn’t need an interpreter to understand the argot telling him to put his head in a bucket of cold water and keep it there for fifteen minutes. He moved to another girl, who had been at the firm long enough not to shove him away so abruptly.
She was getting undressed for bed, and couldn’t understand why Tom had been so attracted as not only to blab for half an hour, though mostly about himself and what a big shot he was, but even to fetch her another drink and, later in the evening, ask if he could see her home. Her no to this bumped his self confidence into paralysis, but she couldn’t bear him to see the slummy house at 24 Dustbin Grove where she lived.
Her put-down hadn’t been unpleasant, though however well she behaved she was always aware that her inborn mannerisms might give her away. The split drained her, but now she could feel the beautiful all-powerful woman because even Tom was interested in her. While settling into bed she was sorry not to have come back in his car instead of by the packed Tube. He was sure to be good at making love, certainly better than the deadbeats she’d so far tried it with.
She had held him off for so long that he became dead set on marriage, though not more keenly than she. He had made as good a husband as he was capable of, and while that seemed all right most of the time for both, it didn’t entirely come up to par for her. Something was missing which he was incapable of giving, a limit he couldn’t pass, unless what she sensed lacking wasn’t really there. Perhaps it was something in herself, though she didn’t see how.
He thought the fact that he could fuck well covered a multitude of sins, and much of the time it did, but at her most discontented she wondered whether the deadness in him was what stopped the uxorious devotion she craved from coming out. Even so, she supposed she was as much in love with him as she could be with any man, his only fault being that he gave too much time to his work.
A year after marrying she had a miscarriage. No, they had a miscarriage. For no known reason, the great event of their lives never happened. Did he wish it on her because he wondered if he was the father? He had no reason to, but every insane notion came to mind, to such stony country had the loss driven her. All talk was loving while she was expecting: Saul for him and John for her, or Rebecca for her and Mary for him. They discussed the matter for days and weeks, filling a chest of drawers with clothes for either sex and any age up to ten.
Her laugh was acidic. Toys and trinkets, tuckers and bibs, cups and a silver spoon, stashed and no longer looked at, the trunk locked. Lavender was powdered between cot blankets and cot sheets, as her mother had shown. The stupefaction lasted months. Maybe it was still going on, when she thought about it. She’d had tests but nothing was wrong – fuck-nothing was her anguished cry. Tom’s ebullience reasserted itself, telling her they could only exist and let the pain evaporate, and that nothing could part two people who had suffered such a blow.
She sat on the bed, and the sad resonances of Elgar’s music put her in mind of a motor excursion up the Wye Valley and into the Malvern Hills. Tom had arranged the trip to divert her from the miscarriage, but it only expanded the wilderness of loss, for how could anything other than going deeper into yourself find a solution as to what had gone wrong?
Such music indicated that she had done well for herself since leaving Yorkshire with a cheap and overfull suitcase, all that time ago. She had often thought of slinging the case away – a treasured memento in the attic – but pictured the dustbin men footballing it into the van with a laugh, wondering how such a shoddy item came to be in her opulent house.
Tom soon had a firm of his own, and travelled the world for business, a big man in it, youngish though he still was. She gave up her job, since more money was available from his gaudy books than they could throw about on everyday expenses. Habits of thrift from Yorkshire made her unwilling to spend unless for something essential.
To be lavish with his money would make her feel unequal, parsimony a counterweight to remaining herself, and not being completely taken in by a man who could give himself more cash in a week than many earned in a year.
And what an efficient little wifey I’ve turned into, she thought, grooming and mooning, entertaining and chatelaining. She supposed she’d hoped for it on running away from home, because didn’t you always achieve what you dreamed of in your ignorance, and even get that bit of romantic extra you never quite admitted to wanting for fear it wouldn’t happen?
Twice a year she loaded the Volvo with whatever pressies her parents might like, and ferried them up to Yorkshire: a hamper from Selfridges, a video and some James Cagney movies for her father; a camcorder in case they felt like making a memento of them staring at each other and saying nothing week