Gifted and Talented (19 page)

Isabel’s whole body felt rigid with the promise in this smile: a sensual, silent promise. She felt she could not wait for Saturday.

Olly felt restless and worried. It was Isabel’s fault.

It was Saturday; he had expected to fix up a date with her by now, but she had not been in touch. Her failure to reply to any of his text messages was making him jumpy. She could be vague, of course – falling asleep and the rest of it – and the mostly likely explanation was that she had lost her mobile. But the possibility that she no longer wanted to see him could not be discounted either. She had form, after all, in that respect.

And yet, Olly told himself, she had seemed keen enough outside the Duchess of Cambridge. Would he have been quite so much of a gentleman had he known he would only get one chance?

The week wearing on without any contact wore down his confidence. He shelved his plans to surprise-visit her at Branston. She would have a supervision with David Stringer next week; she would come to the house. He would see her then, but he had not imagined having to wait that long.

He thought the same thoughts so often, he imagined their well-polished grooves in his brain. Was Isabel testing him? She had not seemed the tricksy sort. But, of course, you never knew with women. He tried to tell himself that, given his impecunious circumstances, there were advantages to the delay, if delay it was. He would have taken her somewhere smart, somewhere spoiling.

But now, instead, he would have to satisfy himself with a trip to the High Street. One or other of the posh men’s shops was sure to be having some sort of sale.

He needed a new shirt, desperately. His old ones were either worn out or bore the unmistakeable after-effects of Dotty’s attempts at laundry. In the unlikely event that he got asked to another interview, they would lose him the job before he opened his mouth and lost it himself – always supposing it hadn’t been lost before he got there, by another De Borchy platform-restructuring.

The employment outlook was truly dire. The few savings Olly had were by now almost exhausted and, as the bank of Mum and Dad had stepped up to the plate yet again in the past week, he dared not ask them for more. The hundred-pound cheque that had arrived, unexpectedly, from his father had touched Olly more than he could say, although he had tried to say it in his thank-you letter. ‘Got a few irons in the fire,’ he had also lied cheerily. It was, he knew, what they wanted to hear.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, going down the stairs, Olly spotted Hero drifting back to her room from the bathroom. As usual, and despite his low spirits, he felt the urge to laugh. There was, to him, something inherently comic about Hero’s teenage fierceness and the seriousness with which she took herself.

‘A rare sighting outside the natural habitat,’ Olly intoned now in a mock-David Attenborough voice.

Hero, outraged, whirled round and scowled at him. Outside the confines of her bedroom, in the more everyday surroundings of the landing, her eyes looked blacker and her face whiter than ever.

‘You could do with some fresh air,’ Olly told her. ‘Come into town and help me choose a shirt. You’re not doing anything else, are you?’ It was Saturday, so no school, not that that was usually a consideration with Hero of course.

It seemed to Olly that, since the parents’ evening, Dotty and David had given up on their daughter. They had stopped nagging her about her education and and had, it seemed, given up on the idea that she should eat with them even occasionally. Whenever they coincided in the kitchen these days, no-one spoke. A pall of despair seemed to hang over the house. Olly wished he could do something about it. He had tried. But his efforts always failed, as they were doing now.

‘Piss off,’ Hero said, consigning his latest diplomatic effort to the dust, ‘I don’t want to be your personal shopper, OK? I hate shopping. Retail’s a conspiracy to disempower the proletariat.’

Olly sighed. ‘Do you hate absolutely everything?’

Hero answered in the affirmative.

‘Even your parents?’

Hero’s eyes flashed. ‘
Especially
them.’

‘You quite like that dog, don’t you, though?’

Coco had been back and forth from the animal shelter to Station Road several times in the last few weeks. Hero now wanted to adopt it but Dotty – showing rare determination – had drawn the line, saying that a dog was the last thing the family needed, and why it was drawn to one as blighted as theirs, she could not imagine.

‘The dog’s all right,’ Hero conceded, twisting the handle of her door and stepping back into the dark.

The day outside was rich and golden. It seemed such a shame to miss it. At the very least Hero could do with the vitamin D. ‘Oh come on,’ Olly cajoled. ‘It’s cold, but it’s a nice day.’

‘Not for me, it isn’t,’ Hero snapped back. ‘Why are you so cheerful, anyway? The ecosystem’s fucked, the bankers have everyone by the balls, mad dictators are developing nuclear weapons. What’s good about anything?’

‘Love?’ Olly asked, intending to shock her by giving vent to the subject most on his mind. He had meant to sound ironic, or at best ambiguous, but it came out sounding incriminatingly sincere.

Hero stared at him in malicious delight. ‘Love!’ she repeated, her black lip a curl of contempt. ‘You mean
you’re
in love?’

‘I might be,’ Olly said, embarrassed at his outburst but sticking to his guns nonetheless. ‘And what if I was? At least it would be real, with an actual person, rather than just one out there in cyberspace.’

‘Think so, do you?’ Hero flashed back. ‘What’s so real about real people, anyway? You never really know someone, not their innermost thoughts. Why’s that so different from following some illusion on the internet?’

So amazed was Olly at this evidence of profundity that he could not, for a second, frame a reply. The reflection that eventually made it through the backwash of surprise was that love was the main reason Hero’s parents tolerated her appalling behaviour and there was nothing illusory about that. But it was all, Olly decided, getting a little heavy. He’d only asked her to go shopping, after all.

‘You know, Hero –’ he grinned as he continued down the stairs – ‘you’re quite pretty under all that black make-up and scowling. If you smiled, you’d make someone a lovely girlfriend.’

His answer was Hero slamming her bedroom door behind her.

Half an hour later, Olly was shopping in earnest. It was only November, still, but Christmas had well and truly arrived on the High Street. Tinsel and baubles coiled loosely round the packets of shirts in the windows, and the shirts themselves had a festive slant: horrid, shiny grey tight-fitting ones, with contrasting black collars, suitable for the office stud; crazy stripes for the firm’s clown. And, to go with them, novelty cufflinks featuring tiny enamel Minis, Union Jacks, pints of beer, even women’s breasts and bottoms. It was, Olly thought, the type of crass sexism the Bullinger Club thought amusing. He turned away. None of this was any use to him.

He wandered into the shopping centre where Slade was, somewhat inevitably, raucously inquiring of everybody whether they were hanging up their stockings on the wall. As always, and despite his efforts not to notice the lyrics, Olly was struck by the suggestion. As a child, he had left a rugby sock at the end of the bed on Christmas Eve. His father would have been furious if, as the song seemed to be suggesting, he’d hammered it into the wallpaper.

The shopping centre was festooned with lengths of pine needle-effect rope: fat, green, sprinkled with berries and sprayed with artificial snow. Dangling on it and among it were oversized gold and red baubles. The Tannoy music changed to the nervy, repetitive electric piano introducing Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’.

Beneath the shopping centre’s transept, the point at which its horizontal arms crossed with its vertical length, a number of living statues stood on polystyrene plinths of varying sizes. There was a centurion, a chicken, Queen Elizabeth II, Tutankhamun, Shakespeare and Elvis in sunglasses.

Olly had seen some of them around the town before, but all in separate places. Presumably they were all together under the shopping centre’s seventies glass roof because of the cold outside. They made an odd sight; like, Olly thought, a line-up from one of those ‘My Ideal Dinner Party’ articles in which barely literate stars of reality TV told magazines they’d love to eat with Einstein and Julius Caesar.

Even so, Olly felt sorry for the statues. You must have to be really desperate to do that, and he could identify with desperation at the moment. He decided, in a spirit of seasonal generosity, to slip a few quid to the one he considered the best.

Tutankhamun, it had to be said, did not enjoy this distinction. He was swathed in shiny gold nylon and topped with a spectacularly poor reproduction of the teenage Pharaoh’s famous death mask. Almost as bad was the Shakespeare ‘statue’. Its clothes were caked all over with cracked grey paint, to resemble stone presumably, and it wore a grey plastic mask. The Queen’s resemblance to her original, meanwhile, depended largely on a large white plastic handbag. Olly eventually decided to drop his two-pound coin into the terracotta dish at Elvis’s blue-suede-shod feet. He, at least, was still. The Shakespeare, by contrast, was twitching all over the place. In response, the King bowed gravely in his direction.

‘
Bastard
!’ Olly now heard. A snarled whisper, coming somewhere from behind: ‘
Bastard
!’

Were they talking to him? Olly looked round. The crowds were passing through the shopping centre: families, gangs of girls, pairs of women chuckling ruefully to each other as they staggered along with several bags on each arm. No one was looking at him.

‘
Bastard
!’ the voice said again.

Olly realised now that the Shakespeare figure was beckoning to him. He went over. The Bard had climbed down from his plinth and was stepping out of his paint-stiffened breeches in front of Costa Coffee. As the grey plastic mask was lifted, Olly recognised the flushed face in surprise. Sam Bradbourne had been one of the more talented of the student historians in his faculty group. Had Olly thought about it – which, until now, he hadn’t – he would have imagined Sam, after taking his first-class degree, waltzing straight into some well-paid academic position.

When, awkwardly, he said this, Sam snorted in an exasperated sort of way. He had thought that too, but it hadn’t worked out like that. Didn’t Olly know there was a recession on? Hadn’t he heard about education cuts? ‘And why didn’t you put your bloody money into my pot?’ he added crossly, emptying the plastic cup containing his takings into his hand. ‘Fifteen bloody pounds and twelve pence. For four hours’ work!’ He shook his head despairingly. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come in here. Too much competition from the others. That Elvis is a bastard. Whenever anyone’s looking at you he wiggles his hips and gets all the attention.’

Olly chortled, then realised Sam hadn’t meant to amuse. On the contrary, he was looking at him bleakly. ‘It’s not really how I imagined,’ Sam said. ‘I thought I’d be at Harvard or somewhere by now, but instead I’m in a shopping centre in a pair of second-hand breeches riddled with fleas. And when I’m not doing that . . .’

Olly now listened as Sam described his other job. He worked in a tiny café down one of the town’s more ancient and dark passageways. His area of responsibility was egg-mayonnaise sandwiches. Sam disliked eggs and his antipathy had only increased since being obliged to spend the mornings boiling enormous numbers of them and mashing up the results with a fork.

‘Oh dear,’ said Olly sympathetically. He wasn’t especially fond of egg mayo himself.

‘That’s not all,’ Sam said darkly. The café owner was a fanciful woman who believed that everyone was surrounded by different-coloured fairies, or auras. ‘They look like small balls which float around people’s heads. They’re coloured depending on what sort of person you are.
Apparently
,’ Sam added, heavily.

‘Coloured?’ Olly queried. He knew it was irrelevant but he had never seen that as a reason not to be interested in something. Perhaps that was where he had gone wrong.

‘Well, bad-tempered people have black ones and happy people have pink ones,’ Sam went on, with an ironic emphasis on the happy bit, as if this was never likely to apply in his case. ‘Sad people have blue ones.
Very
dark blue ones in my case, she says.’

‘Wow,’ said Olly. ‘That’s crazy.’

The other shrugged. ‘But it’s a port in a storm, admittedly a sulphurous one. And it’s better than working at a call centre.’

A flash of suspicion shot over Sam’s face as he looked Olly up and down. ‘Don’t tell me
you’re
a merchant banker or got a newspaper column or a part in a Hollywood film. I’ll bloody kill you.’

Olly swiftly confirmed that he wasn’t any of these, least of all the middle one. At the mention of the De Borchy family and its part in Olly’s downfall, Sam pulled a face. ‘Don’t tell me. I’ve just seen Jasper De Borchy drifting past.’

‘Caspar?’

‘Jasper. The younger one. De Borchy minor.’

‘I’ve never seen him,’ Olly remarked, although of course he had felt his influence; that of the whole family, squatting like toads on his future.

‘He’s not a sweaty, purple-faced hog like Caspar. He’s blond and sickeningly good-looking. Entertainments officer for the Bullinger, apparently.’

Olly pulled a face. ‘Strippers,’ he said. ‘Dwarves.’

‘And the rest,’ Sam said. ‘The word in the living-statue community is that things have gone up a gear under De Borchy minor. Nazis, dwarves, girls leaping out of cakes – you name it.’

‘How do you know?’ Olly was curious. Sam had been less gregarious than himself as a student. He had certainly not moved in the charmed and gilded circles of people like the De Borchys.

Sam waved a hand at his immobile colleagues. ‘They’re asked to do parties sometimes. There was a Bullinger one recently where they wanted the Queen in the nude.’ He nodded at Elizabeth II.

‘I was, how you say, not being amusing,’ Her Majesty remarked in a strong Eastern European accent.