Harriet (8 page)

    ‘Tambourine,’ said Cory. ‘And don’t sneak.’

    Chattie ran to the window.

    ‘Look how deep the snow is! Can’t I stay up for supper?’

    ‘No,’ said Cory. ‘You can show me Ambrose’s kittens, and then you’re going to bed.’

    ‘How are you getting on at school?’ he went on. ‘Have you got a best friend yet?’

    ‘Everyone wants to be my best friend,’ said Chattie. ‘But they’ve got to learn to share me.’

    At that moment Mrs. Bottomley walked in from her day off, weighed down with carrier bags, her maroon wool coat and felt hat trimmed with a bird’s body covered in snowflakes.

    ‘Mr. Cory,’ she squawked. ‘You ‘ave given me a turn; you should ‘ave warned us. If I’d known, I’d ‘ave opened up the front room. Still it’s very nice to see you.’

    And he really was nice to her thought Harriet, taking her parcels, and teasing her about buying up the whole of Marshalls and Snelgrove, asking after her rheumatism.

    ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ said Mrs. Bottomley. ‘Having Harriet here’s made a difference. Saves me a lot of work, ‘aving a young pair of legs running about the house.’

    Cory glanced at Harriet’s legs.

    ‘Pleased with her, are you?’ he said.

    ‘Well I’m not saying she isn’t a bit dreamy at times, but we’ve had some laughs, and she’s a hard worker,’ said Mrs. Bottomley, unpinning her hat. ‘Which is more than I can say for some of those hoighty toighty misses in the past. And how was Antibes?’ she added, pronouncing it Anti-bees.

    For a second Cory’s eyes met Harriet’s.

    Then he said gravely, ‘Anti-bees was very exhausting.’

    ‘You look peaky, I must say,’ said Mrs. Bottomley, ‘as though you’d walked all the way home. Must be all that foreign food - frogs legs and ratty twee - you need feeding up.

    Harriet was determined to redeem the morning’s disastrous homecoming by cooking Cory a magnificent dinner, but it was not to be. She went into the garden to shake the water out of a lettuce, and stood transfixed. The pine trees now carried armfuls of gleaming white blossom, urns filled with snow were casting long blue shadows across the lawn, flakes soft as tiny feathers poured out of the sky.

    Memories of the first time she’d met Simon came flooding back. Oh, God, she thought, in an agony of despair, when will I ever see him? She didn’t know how long she stood there - five, ten minutes - but, suddenly, she realized she was frozen.

    When she got back to the kitchen she gave a shriek. Tadpole, Cory’s labrador, had the steak on the floor, Ambrose was sitting unrepentant on the kitchen table, tabby cheeks bulging with the last of the prawns and the sauce had curdled past redemption on the stove.

    At that moment, Cory walked in. ‘For Christ sake, what’s the matter now?’

    Trembling, Harriet pointed at Ambrose and Tadpole. ‘The snow was so beautiful, I forgot I’d left the steak and the prawns on the table.’

    Again Cory surprised her. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh and, after a few seconds, she began to giggle. ‘There’s nothing in here,’ he said, looking in the fridge.

    ‘We’d better go out.’

    ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’

    ‘Stop apologizing and go and do your face.’

    ‘But you can’t take me!’

    ‘Why not? Mrs. Bottomley’ll baby-sit.’

    ‘But, but…’ Harriet began a stream of feverish excuses.

    Cory interrupted her. ‘I don’t mind hysterics, nor having my dinner ruined, but I can’t stand being argued with. Go and get ready.’

    He took her to a restaurant down the valley. Harriet, ap- palled by the prices on the menu, chose an omelette.

    ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said irritably. ‘What do you really want to eat?’

    ‘It’s all so expensive!’

    ‘You should see the prices in Paris. Anyway I’ve just had a large advance so you might as well take advantage of it.’

    At first, he kept the conversation on a strictly impersonal level, telling her about his trip to France, and the black mare, Python, he had just bought on Kit’s recommendation, who was being flown over next week. ‘If she’s any good I’ll just have time to get her fit for the point-to-point in April.’

    By the time coffee arrived, wine had considerably loosened Harriet’s tongue.

    ‘Well,’ said Cory, re-filling her glass, ‘how’s it working out, looking after the children?’

    Harriet smiled nervously. ‘Fine, I’m awfully happy here.’

    He didn’t smile back. ‘I’ve been watching you for the past two hours. You still give the impression of a girl who cries herself to sleep every night.’

    ‘Black or white coffee?’ asked Harriet, confused.

    ‘Black, please, and don’t change the subject. Sure, you think you’re fine. You’ve filled out, you’ve got some colour in your cheeks, but your eyes are still haunted; you get flustered far too quickly. And you’ve torn that paper napkin you’ve been clutching into shreds.’

    ‘I’m okay,’ she muttered. Then added in a trembling voice, ‘Are you trying to say you want me to go?’

    If she had looked up then she would have seen his face soften.

    ‘You don’t know me very well yet,’ he said gently.

    ‘If I wanted you to go, I’d tell you straight. Tomorrow you’re going to see my doctor for some tranquillizers and sleeping pills. You’ll only need them for a few weeks. I don’t want you cracking up, that’s all. Now, I suppose you’d prefer I talked on impersonal subjects. How did you meet Simon Villiers?’

    Harriet choked over her coffee, then shrugged her shoulders. She so badly needed to talk to someone.

    ‘I met him at Oxford. It was snowing like today. Simon drove round a corner and knocked me off my bicycle. Of course, I knew who he was. Everyone knew about the Villiers set - all night parties, fast cars, models down from London. I wasn’t hurt, but he insisted on my going back to his rooms. There was a party on. Later he kicked everyone out. When we woke up next morning, he asked me what my name was. You’re not shocked?’

    Cory lit a cigar. ‘Not unduly.’

    ‘It was the first time I’d been to bed with anyone. It was like stumbling into Paradise.’ She looked at her hands. ‘I thought it would last for ever. Then one morning we were drinking coffee and he suddenly announced I’d have to move out as his regular girlfriend was coming back that day. I was so stunned, when I found I was pregnant, it seemed un-important compared with losing Simon. The reason I kept William really was because he was the only thing of Simon’s I had.’

    She looked at Cory with huge, troubled, slate-grey eyes. He smiled. ‘Do you think Jonah’s happy at school?’

    She was intensely grateful that he realized she didn’t want to talk about herself any more.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    LIFE became much easier for Harriet after Cory Erskine arrived. It was having a man to make decisions, to shoulder responsibilities, to shut up the children when they became too obstreperous and, most of all, to talk to.

    Cory was, in fact, not easy to live with - aloof, peremptory, exacting, often extremely bad-tempered. But in a good mood, Harriet found him lovely company, amusing, never pulling intellectual rank on her, an inspired listener. Yet as weeks passed, she didn’t feel she knew him any better.

    He was very unpredictable. Some days he would bombard her with questions, what did she feel about this, how would she react to that. On other days he was so abstracted she might not have been there, or he would suddenly get bored with a conversation and walk out leaving her mouthing like a goldfish in mid-sentence.

    He also kept the most erratic hours, working most of the night. Often when she got up because William was crying she would hear the faint clack of the typewriter against the gramophone pouring out Verdi or Wagner. Then he would appear at breakfast looking terrible, read the paper, drink several cups of impossibly strong black coffee, and go out and ride across the moors for a couple of hours.

    After that he generally snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in his study (Harriet had a feeling he couldn’t bear sleeping alone in the huge mausoleum of a double bed), and emerged at teatime absolutely ravenous, and often as not wolf all the sandwiches Harriet had made for the children’s tea.

    He was also drinking too much. Every day Mrs. Bottomley, her mouth disappearing with disapproval, would come out of his room with an empty whisky bottle.

    He was obviously miserably unhappy. The drinking to drive out the despair would plunge him next day into black depression, which made him irritable and arbitrary. While he was working he hated interruptions. The children had to be kept out of his way. The telephone rang all the time for him, and he went spare if Harriet didn’t catch it on the third or fourth ring. Always she had to make the same excuse: ‘I’m afraid Mr. Erskine’s working. If you leave your number I’ll ask him to ring you back,’ which he so seldom did that Harriet was on the end of a lot of abuse from people - mostly women - who rang a second and third time and were convinced Harriet hadn’t passed on the message. He also made notes, as thoughts struck him, on bits of paper and telephone directories all over the house; and after the day, when she had to go through four dustbins to find the magazine Cory had scribbled a few lines of script on the back of, she learnt not to throw anything away again without asking him.

    One afternoon in early March, however, Cory was sitting in the kitchen eating raisins absent-mindedly out of a packet and reading one of Jonah’s comics. William sat propped up on a red rug spread out on the flagstone floor, beating a saucepan aimlessly with a wooden spoon, gurgling happily and gazing at the gleaming copper pans that hung from the walls. Harriet, who’d that morning read an article in a magazine about the dangers of an all-tinned-food diet for babies, was rather dispiritedly sieving cabbage and carrots, when the telephone rang. Glad of any diversion, Harriet crossed the room to answer it, but it stopped on the third ring, then just as she got back to her carrots, it started again, rang three times and stopped. Then it started again and this time kept on ringing: Sighing, Harriet put down the sieve again.

    ‘Don’t answer it,’ snapped Cory. He had gone very pale. It’s only someone playing silly games.’

    Then it stopped, then started the three rings stop, three rings stop formula again. Then kept on ringing for about three minutes. Harriet noticed the way his hands gripped that comic.

    ‘I’m going out,’ said Cory. ‘And don’t answer the telephone.’

    Next minute she heard the front door slam.

    The ringing kept on. It must be the secret code of someone he doesn’t want to talk to, thought Harriet. It was getting on her nerves. She’d run out of bread, so she decided to walk William in his pram down to the village and get some. She enjoyed shopping; she was beginning to know all the shop people who made a tremendous fuss of William.

    It was a cold, cheerless day. The only colour came from the rusty bracken and even that lay flattened by the recent snow. The village was deserted except for a few scuttling, purple-faced women in head scarves. Harriet came out of the bakers, warming her hands on a hot french loaf, and went into the supermarket opposite. She immediately noticed one customer, a girl with bright orange curls, wearing an emerald green coat with a mock fur collar and cuffs, stiletto-heeled green boots, and huge dark glasses. Taking tins down from the shelves she was attempting to lob them into the wire basket she had placed in the middle of the floor.

    ‘Loves me,’ she muttered as a tin of lemon meringue pie filling reached its destination safely, ‘Loves me not,’ as she missed with a bag of lentils, ‘Loves me not, oh hell,’ she added as she also missed with a tin of dog food. A child with very dissipated blue eyes, and a pudding basin hair-cut was systematically filling the pockets of his waisted blue coat with packets of fruit gums. The shopkeeper, who was trying to find a packet of washing-up-machine powder for another customer, was looking extremely disapproving.

    The girl in dark glasses looked up and peered at Harriet.

    ‘Hullo!’ she said to Harriet, ‘You must be Cory Erskine’s nanny. I’m Sammy Sutcliffe; I look after Elizabeth Pemberton’s kids across the valley; they’re more or less the same age as Chattie and Jonah; we ought to get them together.’

    ‘Oh that would be lovely,’ said Harriet, suddenly craving companionship her own age.

    ‘We’ve been skiing, or I’d have come over before,’ said the girl.

    ‘You look terribly brown,’ said Harriet.

    ‘Yes,’ said the girl, ‘but it only goes down to my collar bones. Stripped off, I look like a toffee apple.’

    She giggled and took off her glasses to show large, rather bloodshot, green eyes framed by heavily blacked lashes.

    ‘They’re to hide my hangover, not to keep out the sun,’ she said. ‘You never see the sun in this backwater.’

    She put the lentils, which were spilling out of their packet, back on the shelf, took another packet and moved towards the cash desk.

    ‘And put those sweets back, you little monster,’ she screeched at the small boy, who was busy now appropriating tubes of Smarties. ‘You’ve got the morals of an alley cat. He’s a little bugger our Georgie,’ she added to Harriet. ‘Just like his Dad, except his Dad pinches bottoms rather than sweets.’

    Outside she admired William.

    ‘What a little duck,’ she said. ‘You must be knackered looking after three of them. Why don’t you bring Chattie and William over to tea tomorrow and I’ll fill you in on all the local scandal?’

    ‘Gosh, thanks awfully,’ said Harriet.

    ‘Ours is the big house stood back from the river on the Skipton Road, just beyond the village,’ said Sammy. ‘You’ll recognize it by the sound of crashing crockery. Don’t be alarmed. It’ll only be my boss hurling the Spode at her hubby. Actually I think Cory’s coming to dinner tonight. She rather fancies him, my boss. Can’t say I blame her. I think he’s lovely too - looks straight through one in such a god-damned sexy way.’

    Cory got home about eight. He looked terrible. He’s been in the pub, thought Harriet. She accosted him with a list of telephone messages.

    ‘Mrs. Kent-Wright rang. Could you open a fęte in May, and if not could you find one of your show business friends to do it?’

    ‘No,’ said Cory. ‘I couldn’t.’

    ‘A lady from Woman’s Monthly wants to come and interview you next Wednesday at seven.’

    ‘No,’ said Cory, ‘ring and say I can’t.’

    ‘And Elizabeth Pemberton rang to say they’re wearing black ties this evening.’

    ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Cory bounding upstairs. ‘I’d forgotten. Bring me a drink up in my dressing-room, would you?’

    In twenty minutes he was gone, leaving the bathroom awash, five towels at high tide, and his five o’clock shadow n the basin.

    Through her two-Mogadon-induced slumber Harriet heard ringing and ringing. Don’t answer she thought, it’s someone trying to get through with a secret code. She pulled the blanket over her head. The ringing went on. It was the door-bell. Cory had a key. Who the hell could it be calling at that hour? Burglars, she thought in terror, then realized they’d hardly be ringing the bell. It must be some maniac off the moor, bent on rape. Wearing only her short scarlet nightgown, her hair falling in tangled curls down her back, she turned on all the lights, and nervously crept downstairs. Tadpole emerged, frowsty and bug-eyed, from the kitchen, and thumped his tail.

    ‘You’re a fine watch dog,’ she said. The ringing went on. The chain was on the door. She opened it an inch.

    ‘Who is it?’ she said nervously.

    ‘It’s me, Cory.’

    ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she said undoing the chain. ‘I thought you had a key.’

    He stood in the doorway, swaying slightly. He was deathly pale; there was a cut on his forehead where the blood had dried; his tie was crooked, his hair ruffled. He looked at her intently, trying to focus but squinting slightly like a Siamese cat.

    ‘What have you done to your head?’ she said, thinking irrationally of Elizabeth Pemberton’s flying Spode saucers. ‘Are you all right?’

    ‘I am,’ he said in a blurred voice. ‘The car’s a write off.’ He walked into the house unsteadily, heading towards the drawing-room.

    ‘Oh my God,’ said Harriet running after him. ‘You poor thing, sit down at once.’ She dived under the table, pulling her nightgown as far as it would go over her bottom, to put on the lights by the fire. ‘I’m so terribly sorry. Shall I ring for the doctor?’

    ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Cory. ‘I ran out of fags on the way home, which didn’t help.’ He took a cigarette with a shaking hand out of the green jade box on the table. Harriet found a match and lit it for him.

    ‘I’ll get you a cup of strong, sweet tea,’ she said. ‘You can fix me a drink,’ said Cory.

    ‘He’s had far too much,’ thought Harriet. ‘You might be concussed,’ she said aloud.

    ‘I’m O.K.,’ he said irritably. "I walked all the way home from the other side of the village, following the white lines in the middle of the road admittedly; so I’ve had plenty of time to work up a thirst. So if you please…’

    Harriet poured him a large whisky and soda. He drained half of it in one gulp.

    ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ said Harriet, ‘I’d have come and collected you.’

    ‘I’d spent my last 1Op in the pub this afternoon,’ he said. ‘And that reminds me, I took a quid out of the house-keeping. Do you want a drink?’

    Harriet looked at the clock. It was three in the morning. She’d have to get William up in three and a half hours. ‘Go on,’ said Cory.

    She poured herself a small glass of white wine.

    Tadpole scratched at the fur rug in front of the fire, circled twice, then sat down as near the dying embers as possible.

    ‘Are you sure you don’t want a cup of tea?’

    ‘I just want someone to talk to for a few minutes.’

    Harriet curled up on the sofa, trying not to yawn, tucking her long legs under her. She hadn’t shaved them for months, not that Cory would notice in the state he. was in.

    ‘Was it a good evening?’ she said politely.

    ‘Bloody awful. "Just a few friends", said Elizabeth, and I arrive an hour late to find three couples and a battle-scarred thirty-five-year-old with a "for hire" sign on her forehead lined up specifically for me. She was called Geraldine or Jennifer or something. We were put next door to each other at dinner, with everyone surreptitiously watching to see how we were hitting it off, just like mating dogs.’

    ‘Was she very beautiful?’ said Harriet.

    ‘Very - but she laughed too much, and asked too many questions about the ages of my children, and the script I’m writing at the moment, and didn’t I adore ballet, because she simply adores it. I was lumbered with her after dinner too, and out of the back of my head, I could see Elizabeth mouthing to all her friends, "It’s going frightfully well." "Frightful" just about summed it up. Then at midnight she asked me if I’d terribly mind running Jennifer or Geraldine back to her cottage in Gargrave.’

    The pale mask of his face was expressionless. He finished his drink and put his glass very carefully down on the table.

    ‘So I ran her home, and she gave me all the old crap about dropping out of London and leaving her stockbroker husband because he didn’t want children, and anyway he was knocking off his secretary, and how much more genuine and sincere people are in the North. And tomorrow I shall get a bollocking.’

    ‘Who from?’ said Harriet.

    ‘Elizabeth. For behaving badly.’

    ‘What ever did you do?’

    ‘Didn’t try and pull Geraldine or Jennifer.’

    ‘Mary Whitehouse would have been proud of you,’ said Harriet.

    ‘I know,’ said Cory, ‘it’s a great source of consolation to me. Fix me another drink, there’s a good girl.’

    ‘Did she terribly want you to?’

    ‘She wanted me to try. She’s frightened of the future and she wants someone to blot out the loneliness and to describe as "the man in her life". She even put more scent on in the car going home, very secretively so I wasn’t supposed to notice. She waited when we got to the house, wriggling down in the seat with her head tilted back but I need that sort of complication like a hole in the head, so I got out and opened the door for her, and she started to cry and fled up the path, and then the poor cow couldn’t find her latch key until she’d turned her bag out. And I felt such a sod. Some sort of instinct of self-preservation made me put on a safety belt for the first time in years, and I drove off down the Fairmile slap into a tree. Hostesses can’t resist a spare man.’ He was rambling now. ‘They’re gold dust round here, a going spare man, a going-to-sleep-in-the-spare-room-every-night man. I got very used to spare rooms when I was married to Noel.’