But after all that I think I know what the truth is. The truth is that I am quite (a lovely word that can mean ‘really quite a lot’ or ‘not really very much at all’) pretty. I’m not very tall, perhaps about five six. I’m slim, but not, by anyone’s reckoning, skinny. My hair is naturally a dark browny-yellow, the colour, as Ludo once said, not meaning to be horrid, of a nicotine-stained finger. Hence the highlights. My eyes are grey, which is good. I have no eyebrows, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. My eyelashes are too pale to be of any use, and so I have them dyed. The second time we slept together, Ludo lay gazing into my face. ‘your eyelashes,’ he said, his breath heavy with wine and cigarettes, ‘they’re amazing. They’re so dark and long! I love them, and your eyelids and your eyes and your face and your head and your everything.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I still haven’t. It’s one of the things Penny thinks she has over me. My breasts are small enough not to embarrass me in the world of fashion, and big enough not to embarrass me in the world of men. And all the bits in between? O God! Who knows?
My point is, and I know I’ve come the long way round, that I’m a good-looking girl, but not good-looking enough to be blasé, not good-looking enough not to need the glances, the praises, the presents, the adulation, the worship, the flattery, the fawning of men. You see, what makes me interesting is that I’m close enough to be able to reach out and grab these things, these meaningless, gaudy, pointless baubles, but too far away for them to drop into my lap.
And now I was reaching, foolish, foolish, girl, for the bauble that was Liam Callaghan, van driver, Irish blarney-merchant, borderline beautiful boy.
‘Your Black Lamb doesn’t sound like the kind of place a girl could just wander into on her own.’
‘Ah Jesus there’s plenty of girls come into the Lamb, but it’s true enough none at all like you. A good-looking lady by herself might attract a bit of attention, but then you wouldn’t have to be by yourself.’ It was coming. ‘You know if ever you wanted a taste of the dark stuff – the real thing mind you – then I could show you the place. It might be the making of you.’
I have no idea how serious he was up to this point. Was he just playing the Irish rogue to pass the time on our way into town, his mind in neutral? Was this just a diversion? The bluff, if bluff it was, about to be called.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay what?’ I noted with pleasure that he was a little taken aback.
‘Okay, why don’t you show me what a good pint of Guinness looks like.’
Now there was no smile at all.
‘When can you come?’
‘Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? I’m in Paris from Thursday through till Sunday. How about a week tomorrow?’
That ‘I’m in Paris’ was precious. Thank heavens for Premiére Vision.
‘Thursday week it is then. What if I meet you in the pub at, say, eight o’clock?’
I suddenly felt giddy. Was I in control? I thought I had been. But here I was, agreeing to meet an almost complete stranger, in a desperate pub in Kilburn, a part of London I knew about as well as I knew the courtship rituals of the white-tailed sea eagle.
‘Jesus, look it’s Regent Street,’ said Liam. ‘Why don’t you leap out here?’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.
He said nothing, but looked at me and smiled. It was like being overwhelmed by a warm Caribbean wave: giddy, intoxicating, engulfing, fatal.
a technical interlude, concerning leases, and the provenance of penny
I cannot say that my endeavours that afternoon represented the triumph of the production manager’s art. Whatever Penny might think about me, she knows that I work hard and efficiently. Being good at anything is all about focus, filtering out the white noise. Ludo told me once that some scientists had done an experiment where they monitored the eye movements of different types of chess players, you know, Grand Masters or whatever they’re called, and ordinary chess-club hopefuls, with tank tops and dirty cuffs. The really great players, it turned out, spent all of their time scrutinising just a couple of squares – the ones that really mattered. The eager amateurs, on the other hand, roamed busily over the whole board, eyes feverishly darting from square to square, in search of the secret, the code that they would never crack.
Ludo, of course, was useless at chess. He was too soft-hearted; he could never bear to lose a piece, and could no more sacrifice a pawn than he could drown a puppy in a sack. Not that I used to play him. His chum, Tom would come round, and they’d disappear into the Smelly Room with the board and a bottle of whiskey.
No, that afternoon I couldn’t focus at all. My eyes were all over the board. Or off it altogether. I oscillated wildly between the fear of what I was getting myself into, and a bubbling, uncontrollable excitement. Sitting at my desk I found myself, amazingly, turned on. I crossed my legs and thought of Ireland.
I could tell Penny was getting annoyed: she kept making a little noise, that began as a tut and ended in a grunt. Her mind was turning slowly as she tried to find something to throw at me. I pictured an ox tied to one of those big grindy things they have in Biblical epics.
‘Katie,’ she called, slyly from her place under the skylight, ‘have you spoken to Liberty yet about the reorder? We have to let them know today.’
‘You know I haven’t. Couldn’t you have done it while I was at the depot?’ I didn’t normally bite back at Penny but, as I say, I was elsewhere.
‘No, Katie you dear thing.’ Ouch! One of the things I remember from ‘A’ level English was that in Restoration comedies whenever the level of explicit courtesy rises you know a sword is being drawn somewhere beneath a frock coat. Penny was like that. ‘Lady Frottager came in drunk and peed on the ottoman.’
‘What, again?’
‘Yes, again.’
‘Someone,’ I said in a half-conscious echo of Penny’s own grande dame manner, ‘ought to tell that woman our ottoman is not a public convenience.’
‘Well anyway, she was terribly distressed, and I had to comfort her until the taxi came.’
‘Did she buy anything?’
‘I coaxed her into one of the pashminas but that’s hardly the point. And then that ugly brute Kuyper came a-calling.’
‘Still banging on about the rent rise?’
‘Without a … a … bazooka, there is simply no stopping that man.’
Kuyper, a South African who’d learnt his social skills as a torturer under apartheid (well, he might have), really was a brute. His company, Kuyper and Furtz, had bought the freehold on our shop, and three other units in the lane, one of which was empty and officially cursed after a string of businesses had tried, and failed, to sell, in order, posh bras, camping equipment, cameras and, inevitably, candles.
The first thing Kuyper and Furtz did was to invite the utterly pointless Anita Zither, who was currently between retail outlets, into the empty unit. Pointless, because despite being the press’s darling, and the establishment’s pet English designer, she’s never managed