It all came to a head one afternoon when I was sorting through some rolls of linen for a remake on that season’s bestselling outfit: an oyster duster coat that would fall open to reveal a tight sheath in a pale pearly grey to match the coat’s luscious silk-satin lining. Even doughy-fleshed, big-boned County girls became simpering Audrey Hep-burns (such was the Penny Moss magic recipe). Suddenly I felt a presence. I turned round and Angel was close enough for me to smell the oil in his hair and pick out individual flecks of dandruff. He didn’t say anything: he just had a look of utter determination in his eyes, and I could see his jaw was rigid with fear or anxiety or lust.
‘Angel!’ I said breezily, determined to avoid a confrontation. ‘How about a hand with this stuff. It weighs a ton.’
But Angel still stood there, straining forwards, apparently unable to move his feet.
‘Angel, you’re being silly,’ I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. And then he reached out and put his hairy hand on my bottom, where it stuck clammily to the pale silk. Somehow I knew that this wasn’t intended as a gross sexual assault and I never felt my virtue was at stake: Angel simply couldn’t get the right, or indeed any, words out and his mute gesture was his only way of expressing his feelings. Had his pass been verbal, I would have been happy to parry verbally. But it wasn’t and so I felt that there was only one way to bring the incident to an end. And anyway, I suspected that Angel’s hand would leave the damp print of his palm and fingers on the skirt, and that annoyed me. So I slapped him.
I’d never slapped anyone before: it always seemed like such a pointlessly feminine gesture, an admission that you haven’t the wit to inflict a more serious injury. Almost as soon as I’d done it, I regretted the act (and I certainly had cause to regret it later). Angel took his hand off my bottom and put it slowly to his cheek. A fat, oily tear built in the corner of his eye and rolled down his face until its way was blocked by the broad fingers, whereupon it found some subterranean passage and disappeared. Still without saying a word, Angel turned and walked away.
Boys don’t understand how hard it is to break a heart. They think we have it easy, dispensing joy or misery with a nod or shake of the head, as they cavort around us, offering themselves for humiliation. But you really have to be a complete bitch to derive any pleasure out of kicking some hapless youth in the teeth. In fact the only thing worse than having to reject a boy is having no boy to reject at all.
Anyway, after a few minutes I went out to apologise to Angel. I liked him, and I didn’t want things to be awkward. I saw that he was in the office. Cavafy had his arm around him. He looked at me blankly, and made a slight shooing gesture when I began to walk towards them.
It was shortly after the Angel incident that it all began with Ludo, and for one reason or another it was a couple of months before I went back to the depot. On that first post-Ludo visit, Angel was nowhere to be seen, and Cavafy stood silent and stony faced in his office, staring icily through the plate glass. Even Doris sat aloof, and barely returned my smile. Penny must have told Cavafy. The two of them had known each other for decades. The old Greek had made her first collection. Although Penny had moved on to bigger and better things she would still send him the dockets for fifty or so skirts, or a couple of dozen jackets, for old time’s sake. I can imagine what kind of spin Penny put on it: Katie the gold digger; Katie the counter-jumper; Katie who thinks she’s too good for your son; Katie servant of Beelzebub; Katie mistress of the secret arts; Katie who suckles her cat familiar with her third teat; that sort of thing.
But I toughed it out (and in truth it wasn’t that tough, bearing in mind that everything else in my life was starting to go so well) and it seemed that things had blown over. After a couple of months you’d hardly have known about the crisis, except for the sullen yearning you sometimes saw in Angel’s eyes, and, if I’d been more perceptive, something colder in Cavafy’s.
I sensed the sullen yearning thing as I slipped by Doris and through the door into the depot. It didn’t take me long to sort out the interlining: it was hiding under a roll of wool crêpe. The depot has an exit out to the loading bay, and I didn’t fancy going back through the factory, with Angel moping at me. The exit leads on to a ramp, and, as you know, heels hate ramps, so I usually sat at the top with my legs dangling over the edge, and let myself down the few extra inches. I was just doing that when something emerged from the shadows.
‘Give you a hand there, Katie,’ came a voice, the type of gorgeous, Irish voice that just cries out to be called ‘lilting’, and bugger the clichés. I managed to feel both startled and soothed at the same time. A face followed the hand out of the shadows. It was vaguely familiar.
‘Do I know you?’ I asked, harshly, trying hard to mask the fact that I had been caught by surprise.
‘Sure you do. I’m Liam … Liam Callaghan. I drove for you last year at the London Designer Show.’
Thaaaat was it. Normally I’d go with the clothes, helping to set up the stand, arranging the stories – a story, by the way, for you fashion know-nothings out there, means that part of a collection made out of the same cloth – and all that, but last season I went in the car with Hugh, and he insisted on stopping off at his club for a G & T, which turned into about seven, and by the time we got to the stand all the work had been done. Penny was furious, but didn’t say much because it was all Hugh’s fault. I just managed to catch Liam as he was leaving, an empty clothes rail balanced on each shoulder. As he’d passed me he’d half turned and thrown me a wink, which was naughty.
‘Oh, hello, yes, Liam. Of course. What are you doing skulking back here?’
‘Skulking’s a little harsh now, isn’t it? What could be a more natural habitat for your common or garden van driver than a factory loading bay?’
He had a point, although the ‘common or garden’ bit was fooling nobody, as he well knew. Although I’d only come across him that one time, I knew that Liam Callaghan drove for almost every designer fashion company in London. He was reliable, hard-working, relatively honest, and heterosexual. In the fash biz any one of those would have set him apart: taken together it meant you had to book him weeks in advance. And yes, Liam was something of a looker, in an almost caricatured Irish-rogue kind of way: dark curly hair, blue eyes, a long face that had a suggestion of melancholy about it, you know, as if he’d just finished playing a piano concerto, until he wheeled out his smile. And that was some smile: a smile that could stop trains. And hearts. It was a smile he must have worked on in front of the mirror. It began, like all the great smiles, with the eyes: a barely perceptible widening, followed by an irresistible crinkling. And then the lips would purse for a moment before collapsing exuberantly into a lovely white roller coaster.
‘Well, are you going to give me a hand down or will I have to leap and sprain my ankle?’
He gave me a smile for that: not an all-guns-blazing, blow-your-knickers-off special – perhaps just a 7.5 on the Richter scale of smiles. But it made me want to bite him, for all that.
He was strong and lithe: not a pumped-up gym-fairy strong, but a lifting, shifting, working, strong. His hand stayed in mine for a second or two after I landed.
‘Are you going back into town?’ I asked.
‘I am that. Do you need a ride?’
‘Mmm. Anything’s better than the tube. Even a smelly old van cab, with fag ends on the floor and porno mags under the seat. I know what you drivers are like.’
‘Well, you know, you could always give it a wee tidy for me, if you’ve a mind.’
The van, of course, was spotless. He opened the door for me, and again offered me his hand, saying, ‘This is habit forming.’