Wait Till I Tell You (24 page)

They gorged on each other. When they woke up he wanted more. She was pepperminty, still with that slight warm-sugar smell he now knew to be her most intimate flavour.

‘When can I see you again?’ he asked.

‘Whenever you want,’ said Louella, ‘but for now I really must be off.’

‘Well, pulled her, did you?’ asked Doug MacIsmo in the executive car-park. Another of the guys was there too.

‘We had dinner,’ Patrick replied.

‘Stand her a spot of savoury, did you?’ roared Doug.

Patrick did not really mind that he was blushing. So, they knew. They’d have to know sometime, and he didn’t want any of them going after his baby. Doug and the other bloke exchanged gestures of lewd envy and looks of something else which Patrick couldn’t place.

All day enquiries about his night irked and elated him, reminding him of the hoard of beauty now his.

‘Pat, a word,’ said the person who had been giving – was it yesterday? – the talk on people people, and beckoned him with an arch finger into the personnel room.

‘Do sit down, there’s a good man, have a
cappuccino
, the choc dust sprayer’s been replaced. It really is something of a winning little gadget . . .’

The person stretched out his legs before him; he appeared to be burdened with a codpiece, which he adjusted. Could
that
be cavalry twill, too? The legs were about the length of the front bit of a Porsche, which was just as well. These legs terminated in strangely orange suede brogues, all the nap smoothed one way.

‘About the Goldenrod girl, Pat, we’ve decided to pull the chain on that, but the creative boys came up with a big one a couple of weeks ago and we’ve been giving it a good kick around. I really wanted to ask you a few to-the-point thrusters, your views and so on.’

‘A couple of weeks,’ thought Patrick, ‘that’s how knocked back I was about Frances. I never took a new campaign on board.’ He said nothing. He’d thought yesterday afternoon’s meeting had been about the Goldenrod girl. He knew keeping quiet was the best thing.

‘Now, Pat, I’m not sure what your thinking is here, but if we’re talking a hard yet soft, get my meaning, product for the ladies, I hazard’ (the diffidence was so utter as to be implausible) ‘I hazard the guys want something soft all through, but easy to handle. Am I right here would you say or am I right?’ The codpiece was shifted.

‘Um . . .’

‘I mean, while the ladies want something that’s never going to get confectioner’s droop, if you take me, we want something here that’s never going to say no, a really soft, yielding unit, but not one that’s going to embarrass us in a public place, something you can eat out of doors without feeling you’re out of tune with Mother Nature, yet something you can browse from your briefcase without the other chaps thinking you’re a lady. The pack’s got to be virile without being so butch it’s fetishy, and I think we’re looking to a non-design on this, a kind of street-naturalness, you have me?’

‘What’s its name to be?’ Patrick asked. It was awesome that a chocolate bar could have all this meaning. What had people been doing without it all these years?

‘I’m wanting something with overtones of Adam’s rib if you know your Good Book at all, Pat, but eventually we decided we’d open the name question pretty well up to you.’

‘Me?’ The creative side of the biz were pretty aloof as a rule, being creative.

‘Yup. Well, Pat, you see, you are pretty much the only guy who’s had the ultimate experience of all we feel our target group wants from a choc bar.’

‘Me?’ asked Patrick again. He was silly with new love. The person before him had very likely gone mad; perhaps he’d fallen in love overnight, too. Stranger things happen, truth stranger than fiction, all that . . .

‘Pat, old thing, am I right in thinking you gave one to that little pot of honey who by chance cropped up at our yesterday meeting?’ The words ‘by chance’ had a cheesy tone.

Of course he was disgusted, but he couldn’t deny it. Nor could he see the harm in admitting to love. He loved her, would marry her, keep her always, cherish her.

‘Wake up, Patrick, did you or did you not? Ah, I see you did; one better you’ll agree than the boss’s daughter type you were porking, all opinions and poncho?’

Patrick made as if to look outraged. He knew that a man’s private life was fair game, being as it was closely related to his image. But still . . .

‘Never mind, Pat, old thing, I see from your face you did get some joy from Louella.’

How did this person know her name?

‘Surprised, Pat? You are an old love, really. Didn’t you even whiff a wolverine when none of the other guys went for the little box of tricks?’

‘I beat them to it.’ He was startled into openness.

‘That gag with the chairman’s lift is as old as the proverbials, and you must know it. Wilful suspension of disbelief in the grip of hunger, like a man forgetting he’ll get fat on cocoa butter and nougat and caramel and Uncle Tom Chocco and all.’

Patrick was just about following.

The person resumed. The codpiece seemed to be giving him a disposition problem. He moved it decisively in one cupped palm, to the left, and settled it as though for a sleep. In vain. It flexed, with assertion.

‘Truth is, Louella’s by way of being quite a pal of mine, been modelling since she was doing teething rusks. I thought we could put this bit of business her way.’

‘Business?’ Patrick’s stomach moved as though he had seen into the secrets of pouch and knot and gloss inside the horrible twill codpiece. He was going to be sick, unless it wasn’t true.

‘Nothing nasty, dear old thing, just that I, that is the whole team, thought that she’d be the perfect peg for this new bar. You’ve got to agree.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, you know the market for Goldenrod; even though Axel’s so very dandy, it’s the female C2s, the gross confectionery purchasers, the checkout punters and afternoon timekillers and old bags with Hoover hangovers. And we feel the new bar has got to be for . . .’

‘The male equivalent.’ Patrick tasted bile as he spoke. This was their punishment of him for trying to be one of them.

‘In a nutshell, that’s broadly it, old son. The thing of it was, when we were all around the table, we realised (it was the day after you’d tied one on when that girl dumped you) that we were going to have to do a touch of product testing. We wanted the name for the bar to come from the experience we wanted the bar to reflect, soft, sweet, you know the sort of thing. And if possible firing a bloke up to want another about every eight hours. Not just one a day helping work rest and play, but three a day, Pat, assisting slog, sleep and shag. The long and the short of it was that we needed you, you, Patrick, because you may earn like an alpha but you’re the only man in the office with the distinction of having known life as a C2. Now, do tell, what would you dub the bar, never forgetting this could carry a hefty slice of the sweet folding stuff when the product hits the shelves? How would you describe last night?’

He leered, but his real expression was one of attentive pecuniary acumen.

‘Melted Dreams,’ answered Patrick, knowing bitterness for the true opposite of sweetness.

With Every Tick of the Heart

The afternoon would not be moved. He smoked, she did her knitting, the cat sat waving his tail on top of the television, but nothing made the time pass. It was as though the air had braked, a great breath of afternoon had been taken and held. No person passed, either, outside the window of Denise and Norman’s retirement apartment, on the corner of the busy shopping street and a quiet road full of dental surgeries. Denise and Norman rested in the still of the afternoon.

Their room was warmer than he liked it, but she suffered with cold hands and Petal liked the heat, too. Petal was a cat that would not go outside. His litter tray sat on the plastic drugget in the tiny hall and reeked. Norman emptied it once a week. Denise said she did it on the other days. He knew not to believe her, but it was easier to leave it. He indulged her like that, enjoying this late carelessness in their lives. From time to time he did not tidy the ashtray and his pipe of the night before, or they got silly together over gin and a box of Good News and as much Schubert as they could cram in, and failed to pick up the telephone if it rang, and slept in the next day. The days were brimming with a new timid freedom for the couple that made them unlike the other residents of these apartments. When time stood still they did not fret about it but admired the pose it struck. They were luxuriously idle, idle as teenagers with a meal of hours before them.

Norman was born to young parents, who raised him with the casualness of confidence. His mother would eat off his plate and expected him to do the same to her. Neither parent was jealous of the kindness Norman showed to the other. Not counting up the favours bestowed by the baby, they took them for granted. Later Norman climbed up and down the kitchen dresser by the shelves, made jam tarts with his mother in sharp metal patty pans, and potty trained himself throughout the summer of 1923, in the back garden of their cottage in Lancaster.

After the War, his father came home with a plate in his head and a limp. He couldn’t settle but roamed around like a man hearing a fly and never coming upon it. He had a job in the bottle factory and Norman’s mother worked in the haberdasher’s further up the town, next door to the refreshment and tea shop. After her work was over, Norman sometimes went to collect her at the end of his day with the piano tuner and they might go in to the tea shop.

‘These aren’t Stan’s bottles,’ she often said, screwing the stony stopper into the dimpled glass of the lemonade bottle. ‘Stan’s are for something stronger than the pop.’ They might have cold pie or they might have railway pudding, a big cube of dry yellow sponge in a bowl of custard whose level sank as the pudding fattened up.

‘Just drinking up the custard,’ Peggy would say. ‘Listen to that pudding sup.’

‘She’s a wise woman. Wise and good-looking.’

An old man was talking to them. He sat down. He had on a tie and braces, buttoned to the trousers with leather ears. How did he get those trousers off? How could he pull them down without pulling his shoulders down too? Norman did not care to think about these things, but they just came to him, like the passing need he had had as a boy to say something rude about Jesus in Sunday School.

Not like Jesus, this man, as far as you could tell, though he seemed to have been there when the five thousand had been fed. Or he seemed to have stopped the poor five thousand getting a look in.

Now there was a lot of trifle on the table. In a bowl, on the table it glowed, covered with cream and sugar strands.

‘No carrageen in that cream at all. All comes out of my girls,’ said the old man.

Norman’s mother asked first. Luckily Norman had not got the picture in his mind fully in focus before his mother said, ‘Girls?’

‘Gorgeous heifers. Just two. High-yielding girls. They come in to be milked rolling full. Udders rocking with cream.’ He looked at Norman’s mother most particularly pleasantly as he said it. She snapped her beads between the first two fingers of her right hand and said, ‘Perhaps for Norman’s sake, I’ll say yes. He never gets all that goodness.’

‘I am sure that’s not so. I’ve particularly noticed you and young Norman here. You take care to feed him wholesome, and you must have eaten wholesome, to have kept yourself so.’

Not vain about how she looked any more, Peggy was easy to flatter about her son. The move from vanity about one’s own looks to those of one’s children is biological, the first burning out and the second kindling with the first birth. Although Norman was by now a full-grown young man, his mother took the credit for his shining health just as though she still soaked his rusk for him each morning.

‘I’m Ernest Cargill. Proprietor here. And at the garages on the road out of town. By the Maiden Hotel, where I also preside.’ He made himself sound like an enormous hen, crouching low over his eggs.

‘Interested in motors?’ Ernest Cargill asked Norman.

‘I hope to be a piano tuner. I’m apprenticed.’

‘There’s one thing you need for that job, son,’ said Ernest Cargill, dishing out another sod of trifle.

‘What’s that, Mr Cargill?’ Peggy asked.

‘Ernest, Ernest. Everybody does. Everybody nice as you.’

Does he mean to insult her, Norman wondered, but his mother was moving around in her chair in a pleased way and he could tell her mind was not on his father’s evening meal as it regularly was at this time.

‘What do you need to be a piano tuner, Mr Cargill?’ asked Norman.

‘I should have thought you’d know that.’ Mr Cargill spoke in a dismissive voice. The change was as between an open and a closed door into a welcoming shop, overspilling bags and colour one moment, the bell and the shutters the next.

Peggy was quick to notice affront to her son and picked in her bag for her purse. Cargill saw that he had lost some purchase over her although he could not place the cause.

‘Real solid-gold copper-bottomed talent. That’s what you need. And I’ll undertake that’s what you’ve got.’ He stretched back on the wooden chair that was like a school chair, and rolled his body at Peggy and Norman. It was perfectly egg-shaped, the little shoulders giving on to a dome of stomach and curving down to the start of the insectlike legs, the long fly of the trousers threateningly flat.