Perfect (26 page)

‘More orange hats?’ says Paula doubtfully.

‘More joie de vivre,’ says Mr Meade.

‘More what de what?’ says Moira.

‘You could hand out free drinks and stuff,’ says Darren, who keeps forgetting he is a customer.

‘That would upset Health and Safety,’ says Mr Meade gravely. It is clear that he has an alternative idea up his sleeve. ‘What we are going to do, team, is huddle.’

‘Huddle?’ repeats Paula flatly.

Mr Meade is so excited he skips his weight from one foot to the other. He opens his arms wide and wriggles his fingers, beckoning his few staff to draw close. Paula drifts towards him, followed by Darren. Moira twiddles her hair and takes one small step at a time. Jim limps but actually the movement is more like treading water.

‘Closer, closer!’ laughs Mr Meade. ‘I won’t bite!’

Moira and Paula shuffle forward. Jim wonders if anyone would notice if he disappeared. Not immediately. Just in a shuffling backwards sort of way.

Mr Meade throws his arms wide enough to reach their shoulders.
Around him stands his band of staff, stiff as boards. ‘Huddle!’ cries Mr. Meade. ‘Come along, Jim! Huddle!’ He waves at them to come closer. He does it with little hand movements the way he helps female customers to park their Range Rovers.

Says Paula, ‘What about Darren?’

‘What about him?’ says Mr Meade.

‘Is he supposed to huddle as well?’

Mr Meade looks at his three members of staff, one of whom is ripping out her split ends, another who is scowling like a thundercloud, and the last of whom appears to be moving imperceptibly backwards. Mr Meade makes a face that suggests compromise. ‘Huddle, Darren!’ he calls.

Eagerly Darren darts forward and weaves one arm round Paula’s waist. The other arm, the one nearest to Mr Meade, wafts mid-air as if it doesn’t quite belong to anyone.

‘Make room for Jim!’ says Mr Meade.

Paula extends her hand to welcome Jim. He has no choice. He is suddenly hot, congested with the claustrophobia of it. He wonders if he will scream. Paula’s left hand is on his right shoulder, resting there like a tiny bird. Mr Meade’s right hand thumps Jim’s left shoulder.

‘Huddle, huddle!’ sings Mr Meade. There is an overpowering smell of fabric conditioner. For an aroma that is supposed to be fragrant as a summer morning, it suggests something surprisingly unpleasant. ‘Closer, closer!’

In silence the group shuffles closer, closer. Their reluctant feet make small scraping sounds on the lino. They are so close, closer, the faces in front of Jim’s swim. He is overwhelmed by the intimacy of it, by the feeling of them sucking him in like a vacuum cleaner. He towers over the group. ‘Hug me, Jim!’ says Mr Meade.

Jim lifts his hand to Mr Meade’s shoulder. There it stays, aching up and down the muscles. ‘Isn’t this good?’ says Mr Meade.

No one answers.

‘Of course there were about twenty of us at the conference,’ says Mr Meade. ‘Senior management and personnel. And the actors were professional, of course. It was a bit different.’

‘Have we finished yet?’ says Paula.

Mr Meade again laughs. ‘Finished? This is only stage one. What I want you to do now, team, is think about the person beside you.’

‘What, Darren?’ says Paula.

‘And Jim too,’ says Mr Meade. ‘Think something positive. Think what you would really like to say about them.’

There is a constipated silence. ‘Supposing we can’t?’ says Moira at last. Her hand is on Mr Meade’s shoulder.

But the manager fails to answer. He closes his eyes, his lips twitching as if there are words hatching in his mouth and getting ready to burst free. Jim closes his eyes too but the room lurches so fast he has to open them again. Darren has screwed up his face like a piece of paper.

‘I’ve done that,’ says Paula.

‘Now can we stop?’ says Moira.

‘No, no. We have to say it.’

‘Say what we were thinking?’ repeats Moira. She looks stricken.

But Mr Meade laughs as if this is tremendous fun. ‘I’ll go first, so you get the hang of it.’ He turns first to Paula. ‘Paula, I admire you. You are a very strong young lady. When I first interviewed you, I had my worries. It was because you had a nose ring and all those studs in your ears. I worried about Health and Safety issues. But you taught me not to be prejudiced.’

Paula turns the colour of her hair. Mr Meade continues: ‘Jim, you are never late. You are a very reliable worker. Moira, you bring an air of creativity to the workplace and I hope your mother’s rash clears up soon. And Darren, I have come to like you.’

‘Aw, that’s nice,’ croons Paula. ‘I knew this woman once. She wrote to all her friends to tell them she loved them, and next day, guess what?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Darren. He is the only one who still has his eyes closed.

‘She had a heart attack.’

‘Back to the huddle,’ says Mr Meade. ‘Who would like to go next?’

There is an uncomfortable silence as if all four are not in fact present. Moira is glued to a particularly interesting strand of her hair. Paula blows out her mouth although she has no bubblegum in there. Jim makes a series of small popping noises. Darren might be asleep. Mr Meade sighs, a little disappointed but not yet downhearted.

‘Come on, team,’ he laughs. ‘Someone must have something positive to say.’

A voice nudges its way into the silence. ‘Jim, you’re a good man. You spray all the tables and you never miss one out. Mr Meade, you have some weird ideas but you kind of want the world to be a better place, and I like your car. Moira, you have nice breasts.’

‘Thank you, Darren,’ says Mr Meade, only Darren clearly hasn’t finished.

‘But Paula, oh Paula. I love the way you sort of chew your fingers when you are thinking. I love the way your skin is like honey. I love the soft little bit of skin behind your ears. When you talk I just want to sit and watch you for ever. You wear really nice skirts. You have eyes like Christmas nuts.’

For a while no one speaks. But this is a different silence from the beginning. It is a childlike silence, where the lack of words is to do with wonder, as opposed to judgement.

‘It’s just as well that Eileen woman isn’t here,’ says Paula. ‘There’s some stuff I’d like to say to her.’ The group silence becomes a group laugh.

‘Jim?’ says Mr Meade. ‘Your turn?’

But Jim is stunned. In his mind there is nothing but a woman with flaming hair, the smallest feet, and a coat that rucks in the effort to fit round her. He understands the truth with the wildness and urgency of an accident. The psychic counsellor was right after all. He must come clean. He must own the past, whatever that means. And the sole place, he sees this so clearly it is like shouting in his head, the sole place that is big enough to contain his chaos is the one that is Eileen. She is his last and only chance.

‘Excuse me?’ calls a voice from the café floor.

The huddle springs open, like a multi-headed, orange-hatted beast. A customer watches from the servery with a look of fear.

She says, ‘Is it too late to order the festive sandwich special?’

I
N THE SECOND
week of the summer holidays, Beverley spent every day at Cranham House. She was there from morning to evening. Sometimes when Byron went to bed, he could still hear the women talking on the terrace. Their voices filled the evening air like the thick, sweet perfume of night-scented stocks and white nicotiana. ‘You’re right! You’re right!’ his mother would howl as Beverley did one of her impressions or told a story. One morning he opened his bedroom curtains and she was already sunbathing in her purple hat with a drink in a glass tumbler. It was only the addition of Jeanie and a pair of white plastic boots that made it clear she had not been there all night. Jeanie stood balanced on the garden table. The stitches were gone from her knee. There was no need for a plaster. Nevertheless he preferred to avoid Jeanie.

Lucy refused point blank to play with her. Jeanie smelt, she said. She had also ripped the heads from Lucy’s Sindy dolls. Byron tried to snap them back but it
was tricky to fit the cavity of their necks over the bump of plastic that was at the top of their spines. He put the dismantled parts in a shoebox with a lid. It alarmed him to see all those smiling faces without bodies.

Meanwhile Byron continued to record observations in the notebook about the meetings between Beverley and his mother. James posted him a secret code, involving swapping letters of the alphabet, as well as new codenames for Beverley and Diana (‘Mrs X’ and ‘Mrs Y’) but it was complicated and Byron frequently made mistakes.

The two women listened to music. They opened the French windows and set up the gramophone on the table so that they could dance on the terrace. His father’s selection of records was sober – (‘What century was he born in?’ said Beverley) – and she brought a box of her own albums. They listened to the Carpenters and Bread. Her favourites were two singles by Harry Nilsson and Donny Osmond. Byron stood at the drawing-room window and watched. Beverley’s movements were jerky and involved shaking her hair a lot, whereas Diana glided round the terrace as if she were carried on a current. When Diana offered to show her a step, they moved arm in arm, Diana’s neck held high, her arms poised on air, while Beverley studied her feet so that, even though they were the same height, Diana looked taller. He heard his mother offer to teach Beverley all she knew but when Beverley asked what that was exactly, his mother broke away and said it was nothing. If ‘Puppy Love’ came on, or a song by Gilbert O’Sullivan, Beverley clung to his mother and they moved in a slow shuffle round and round on the spot. At the end, she would return to her drink, staring from beneath her floppy hat.

‘You’re so lucky, Diana,’ she would say. ‘You were just born beautiful.’

Beverley said that it was in your name, your future. It was your ticket to success. How could a girl ever become someone, if she was called Beverley? If only she’d been given a classy name, like Diana or Byron or Seymour, things would have been different.

That week Beverley began to borrow clothes of Diana’s. It was only a small thing to begin with, a pair of lace gloves to protect her hands from the sun. Then the outfits became more sizeable. When, for instance, she spilt a glass of yellow drink down her front, Diana rushed to fetch her a blouse and pencil skirt. Beverley asked if she could borrow a pair of heels because she couldn’t exactly wear sandals with a skirt like that. She wore all these items to go home. The next day, Byron reported in his notebook that they were still missing.

‘Those clothes are out of date,’ said Beverley. ‘You should get something more fashionable.’

‘
Between you and me
,’ Byron wrote, ‘
I believe she has stolen them. I also now believe she had the lighter in her handbag all along
.’

The shopping trip was Beverley’s idea. Diana drove them into town and they parked near the department store. They tried on matching dresses while Jeanie swung between the rails and Lucy scowled. They stopped for more advocaat at the off-licence and a bottle of cherry cola for the children. When Lucy said they were not allowed sugary drinks, on account of their teeth, Beverley laughed heartily. ‘You lot need to live more,’ she said. The women paraded their new kaftan dresses on the terrace and it was like watching two contrasting halves of the same thing. Diana, blonde and slim and graceful; Beverley, black-haired and undernourished, and altogether more glued to the spot.

After lunch, Byron was bringing lemonade for his mother and Beverley when he interrupted a conversation. He could tell it was important because his mother and Beverley had their heads so close that Diana’s blonde hair appeared to grow out of Beverley’s black parting. Beverley was painting his mother’s nails. They didn’t even look up as he tiptoed across the carpet. Carefully he removed the glasses from the tray and set them on coasters. And that was when he heard his mother say, ‘Of course I wasn’t in love with him. I just thought I was.’

He edged from the room as quietly as he had entered. He couldn’t think what his mother was talking about. He was aware of not wanting to hear any more while also not being able to move away. Then Jeanie gave a wild laugh from the garden, and he hid on his knees, cramming himself against the hall side of the drawing-room door, because he didn’t want to play with Jeanie again. Now that her leg was healing, she seemed to like hiding in bushes and running out at him when he least expected her. It was dreadful. Crushing his eye to the crack between the door and its frame, he could see the two women as if caught in a shard of light. He reached for his notebook and even as he opened it, the binding creaked and his mother glanced up. ‘I heard something.’

It was nothing, said Beverley. She told Diana to go on. She placed her hand on Diana’s and he didn’t know why but the longer it stayed there the more he wished she would take it away. He wished it very much.

His mother began to speak. Her voice was soft and he caught only unconnected phrases, words that at first made no sense. He had to flatten his ear to the crack. She was saying, ‘… an old friend. We bumped into—I didn’t mean any harm. And one day—It all grew from there.’