Chapter Twelve

Chris and I felt hugely sorry for Constance, running into her ex-husband in an off-licence.

‘Working there,’  Chris said, her eyes wide. ‘He’s the guy you ask for cigarettes or a Thunderball ticket.’ She thought again. ‘Although she’d always know where he was.’

I’d run into ex-boyfriends in the street, lost the use of my legs, needed to be sat down and poured a stiff drink before I could speak coherently. We were impressed with her sang-froid in being able to ask for a Radio Times.

We then spent twenty minutes talking about who still buys the Radio Times, will radio factories all close down, are there radio factories? If so, where are they? before we realised Constance made for much better conversation.

The next entry was made two days after running into Malcolm.

27 June 2010

I write overlooking fields and sheep and listening to someone play Mozart, quite well, on a piano two floors down. I am in my darling, huge-hearted, easily-manipulated best-friend Fiona’s second best spare room, Jennifer McIntyre is in the best room across the hall and we are here, filming for our series.

I have two nights off from Nora. I feel like I’m on day release.

I know it’s mad and will probably go nowhere but I’m actually very excited. Fiona has kept wardrobes of costumes from her decades of designing and building. The workmanship is exquisite and I marvel at how even the lure of children and country life could keep her from exercising her gift. Her costumes are works of art.

She threw a pile of brocade and satin on the futon in the attic. Jennifer, arms draped with three other hermetically-sealed wardrobe bags, gasped. Fiona unzipped a cocoon and revealed two decades of 19^th century fashion: corsets, panniers, bustles. Fiona treated them casually but with affection. Like dogs.

‘This one, look at this, industrial support. Our heroine was very well-endowed. We had to keep her assets from escaping during the ‘Song of Revolutionary Fervour’. Ah, this. This was Jane Bennet’s cloak, for getting sick on her way to Netherfield.  Look at the seaming on the bottom edge.  Fabric is a half-circle, we wanted it full; very full cloak.’

She peered intently down at the neat row of perfect stitches. I saw Jennifer drool.

I looked about the converted loft, at the half-dozen wardrobes stuffed with garment bags, all labeled like specimens in a laboratory.

‘Isn’t this illegal? Have you stolen these?’

Fiona laughed.

‘They get left behind. Some I bought back. They are always more value to me than the company. They move onto Pinter. No corsets in Pinter. Right, here we are. 18^th century. That’s what we want.’

She relieved Jennifer of the third and heaviest bag. The zip undid slowly, liberating a pearly-pink gown, ruffled and petticoat-ed and, beneath it, a deep red riding coat-dress. I fingered the cloth. Fiona put on her glasses.

‘There’s a light gown underneath, you can see the boning, lovely work, I had marvelous help and - ah, yes, she spilled her coffee, just here. She was very talented but clumsy as a mule.’

Jennifer had taken the riding coat over to a mirror. I could see her reflection. Her face softened and I noticed for the first time that she might be seen as attractive. Her eyes are a bit close together and she has the hair of a stenographer but her face has quite a good shape and her smile is lovely. Beautiful, even, if she’s in the right mood. Which she was now.

‘My mom will just - die,’ she said with difficulty.

Fiona turned, beaming, pleased to see the effects of her artistry.

‘Well let’s get you in it,’ she said.

 ‘And knock her dead’ I said, standing up and clapping Jennifer on the back.

Sometimes it’s good to have an inner-American to channel.

 ***

I hadn’t thought that Jennifer was taking time off from being an abused secretary to help costume and film me but when I saw a call coming through from Agent John Wood I remembered that we were both working for him now. Or supposed to be.

I was being laced up into the pink froth by Calla, Fiona’s eldest, when I answered, and was deafened by the sound of John shouting at 180 decibels ‘Where the fuck are you?’

I excused myself from Calla, pulled up my panniers, and shuffled into the hallway.

‘I’m in Wiltshire,’ I said, glancing out at the sheep, spreading across the grass, forming and re-forming like flocks of birds. Or  - roaches, actually.  I’ve spent some time in New York and I once saw a wall go black with stampeding cockroaches. That’s when I decided never to live on the east coast. I was wondering if there was some universal force that shaped the wild kingdom into predictable stampeding patterns when I was yanked back into the present by John yelling  -

‘What the fuck are you doing in Wiltshire? You have an interview.’

I panicked.

‘With whom? When?’

‘With me, now.’

I swallowed. John had mentioned he wanted me to do some promotion on his web site but it was – just his web site. It wasn’t real promotion. It wasn’t Friday Night with You Know Whom. Which I’ve done. Half a dozen times. At least. I was thinking of You Know Who, how he is completely, wholly and utterly charming  and adores his children when John bellowed

‘Are you listening??’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘With me, now so that I can post it tomorrow morning when I have said I will post it. An exclusive interview with Constance Hill, live at JohnWood dot com. People have signed up. There are members waiting. You are not going to let me, or them, down.’

I felt tears rise up and I don’t know if it was the fact that, like Desdemona, I am a child to chiding or that there were actually people, wonderful, lovable, glorious people who wanted to hear me and whom I didn’t want to let down so I said ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, what can I do?’ and didn’t even mind when John Wood said he was driving up to see me that very minute and we’d interview this evening.

 

 ~

From the next instalment:

 

28 June 2010

Hilarious! Hilarious! John Wood arrived and was thrust into the costume of a naval hero (had to admit he looked very fetching) but only after he spent the afternoon making up cod-period-speeches for me to deliver to him, as Jennifer films.

It is too, too divine. And ridiculous. But we are all loving it.

Chapter Eleven

25 June 2010

I need a drink. Whisky. That's what people drink. Do we have whisky? Where would we keep whisky?

Why do I say we?

**

It was in the lower kitchen cupboard, behind a faulty salad spinner and a macramé plant-hanger my Auntie Betty had given Malcolm when he was on parole. We called it his Better Homes and Gardens period. He was improving everything, not just his relationship with roulette. All the spider plants died, nicely suspended, in our kitchen window.

Funnily enough, it’s because of Malcolm I need the drink. I am writing while holding the glass in my other hand. Like Hemingway. I assume.

I was driving home from the gym in Cricklewood – now that I’m working I can afford yoga again, thank god – and stopped on a side-street to get a paper from a news agent. I haven’t been in before but I’ve always clocked the shop and thought ‘Ah, if I remember I can park on that street, jump out and get the paper’ and felt it was testimony to my new-found clarity, the self-reliant and organised life that doesn’t depend on agents or managers to buy things like papers and – food.

I found a space just outside the shop. I leapt out, feeling more like Mallory Queen, Girl P.I. than I had in twenty years. I liked the sound my boots made as I strode across the pavement. A woman in control.

I picked up the weekend Guardian from the display just inside the door and peered about, recklessly, to see if there was anything else that caught my eye. Now that I’m working again, I impulse shop. Which usually means an extra packet of biscuits to go with my pint of milk.

There were fig bars on sale, two for one, and I grabbed them both, anticipating the pleasure of the Weekend Magazine with my tea, made my confident way to the counter and looked into my bag for change as I heard a familiar voice say

‘Connie.’

I looked up. It was Malcolm. I recognised him immediately. And why wouldn’t I? We were married for over twenty years, companions, lovers, friends. I’d seen him only seven weeks ago, there had been no drastic change in his appearance since then.

This did not keep me from staring at him as though he were an envoy from another planet with purple skin and a round, hairless head.

He was in the shop. Obviously. As I was in the shop. But with one significant difference.

He was working. In the shop.

It was no mistake. He wore a name tag and a green polo shirt like the pale-faced, black-haired girl behind him pricing stock. She didn’t ask him to return to the other side of the counter and stand in the queue with the other customers – well, customer, I was it - as she would undoubtedly have done if he wasn’t an employee.

Our eyes locked. I lost the power of speech. He seemed to colour slightly but recovered, grabbed my fig bars and lit them up with the sensor. Then the Guardian. Then the milk. The total flashed up on the cash register. He put everything into a bag and I handed him a five pound note.

‘Hello, Malcolm’ I gargled, eventually.

‘Here’s your change,’ he said smiling. Rather unpleasantly.

‘What – what are you doing?’ I said.

He put his hands square in front of him on the counter. He looked like a cowboy ordering a double bourbon in a dodgy saloon.

‘I’m work-ing.’

He said it in two syllables. As to a child. And I reacted like a child. I think I batted my eyes.

‘But why?’

‘Why do most people work, Constance? Bit of dosh, kids need food.’

He was speaking through gritted teeth. His colleague glanced up at what felt like a sudden scrum of customers behind me.  I kept my eyes glued to Malcolm. In case he vanished.

‘But – but you work at the bank.’

‘No. I did work at a bank. Then I embezzled funds, remember?’

The crowd behind us became quiet.

‘For the gambling. You remember. The gambling.’

‘Malcolm, don’t – I’m sorry – let’s  – ‘

But he was warming to the topic. It was as though he’d prepared the speech and had been waiting for his audience, who turned out to be me, an elderly couple with a bag of white bread, a young man in shorts clutching a bottle of Lucozade and a Jack Russell at the back of the shop that had wandered in off the street.

Malcolm’s voice was clear. He was projecting to the dog.

‘Someone caught embezzling funds is never able to work in the financial industry again.’

He reached for the couple’s loaf of bread.

‘Having a criminal record bars you from any position of responsibility or role that requires regulatory sanction.’

The woman hung onto her Kingsmill. Malcolm waited, leaning one elbow on the counter.

 ‘In addition, regulators have a high standard of permissible conduct that extends far beyond being found guilty of such charges. They perform background checks and investigate people very conscientiously.’

He extended his hand to the couple again and it was obvious she didn’t want to release even the food she hadn’t bought to someone confessing a criminal past.

‘Luckily, they are not so discriminating at You Go Mart.’ He wrestled the bread from the woman, beamed its price into the cash register and finished his oration with ‘That’s £1.25’, holding out his hand for the change.

‘For a bloody loaf of bread,’ her husband muttered. ‘Talk about embezzling, we’re being embezzled.’

Malcolm took the money and handed the bread to the couple who seemed rooted to the spot, watching him as though he were a good episode of reality television. He asked ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’

There were a thousand things I wanted to know. How long had he been doing this? Had he never gone to the bank when I had thought he was leaving every morning to go to the bank for the past two years? Was this enough to support him in his new way of life? Had he started gambling again?

Instead I said ‘Do you have the Radio Times?’ he said ‘No’ and I left the shop.