Wait Till I Tell You (23 page)

Her name was Louella and she was a doll. No one didn’t like her. Right then in the personnel room of Drive, Torque, MacIsmo, the cream of the firm’s team was busy liking her a lot. Patrick couldn’t think for the moment why she was there, but they often got visitors at Drive, Torque. It was the coming agency.

Several of the men in the room were plotting. They were people people, after all. How to get rid of the evening’s domestic arrangements and insinuate this toasty, sugary young woman into those valued leisure hours? Work hard, play hard, that was the form. And they believed women were people, these men; certainly did. One or two of them had even learnt the lingo necessary to trap the new people women; there were certain key lines to put forth which would almost guarantee a lady’d put out. A bit of jaw about freedom, space, quality time, and the figgy treat was on the table, all but.

The biggest account held by Drive, Torque was a confectionery bar aimed at the homebound housewife; like her, Jeremy Drive was fond of saying, it was soft with little hard bits, sweet but with only natural sweetness, and could be eaten at any time when nothing more leisurely was possible. The bar’s shape was that of many of the bottles to be found in any household cupboard, straight-sided with a neatly rounded swelling at the top. The product developers have long known this shape is specially congenial to the female grip. In the case of the bar the swelling was coated with chocolate over a bullet of vanilla cream, which tipped a core of honeycomb. As the marketing director said, ‘Show me the bird who didn’t learn French kissing on a Crunchie bar and I’ll show you a nun in the Rasputin.’ The Rasputin was a club where advertising men met up with each other in a leisure situation. It stayed in the swim with a total makeover every couple of years. Last time it was done over had been when the promotion for a kind of dogfood had got out of hand. It was like the dogs hadn’t known how to behave at a big do.

The ice-cream at the Rasputin was said to be made by a deaf mute from the Bombay Taj. (‘What other Taj is there?’, the club’s manager asked.) None of the members had seen the subcontinental icecream man and his legend grew. Jeremy Drive said it stood to reason, ‘The deprived are the best at luxury goods, take it from me.’

The confectionery bar was called Goldenrod; its tag was ‘the molten gold bar’. The teaser slots on TV, between long stories for washing powder and baby alarms, ran ‘The at-home bar – guilt-free gold, in
your
mouth
now
’. The direct reference to the act of eating had been thought a bit near the edge by one of the girl juniors in media, but the client had explained matters to her. After all, the bar contained not less than 20 per cent full farm yoghurt, the only food known to peel off pounds whether you slap it on or slurp it down. She was a big girl, and that stopped her mouth.

Late at night in the Rasputin (some tyros called it the Raz of course, but this did them no good at all among the real helium warriors who called it the Monk), the Goldenrod bar was referred to as the choc cock and the men felt they had isolated a great truth not merely about the advertising business but about women.

Drive, Torque, MacIsmo had a considerable number of accounts, but the big one at the moment was definitely Goldenrod. There was a Goldenrod guy, a man whose career was not in modelling, so he had the right homey feel. His parents had come from a small part of what was now East Germany; his name was Axel and he needed the money badly. It was good money. He wore specs and didn’t look like a woman when wardrobe put him in a cardigan for C2 credibility at personal appearances.

Patrick’s brief at the moment was to find a Goldenrod girl. Axel’s own girlfriend, who was in fact his wife, would not do. She had to be, excuse the double meaning, kept pretty dark. Patrick liked her fine and she was beautiful, but she was black as your hat and incredibly serious. Like a lot of Senegalese, she was a catwalk model, which left her quite a lot of time for Axel. Most of the girls who lasted, she’d explained to Patrick, just looked extraordinary. Most of them simply lived their lives; it was the minority who changed racing drivers every season. Anyhow, catch Roxanne eating a Goldenrod, all those refined sugars.

Those executives of Drive, Torque who had seen Roxanne talked about her as though she were a bit alarming, like a big cat with good manners. After a few bevvies, they’d discuss her, in depth; last thing she needed was a choc cock. Axel was completing his doctorate in insects’ nervous systems; mayflies were his special interest. Did the shortness of their lives make for speeded-up messages between neurones? Axel worried that his own time would run out before he found an answer.

The meeting in the personnel room had been on Goldenrod. For the first time since Frances’s departure, Patrick felt sentimental as well as physiological lust, something less itchy than simple appetite. He was determined to win the nut-brown girl. It was the end of a long day and he felt he owed himself a reward, something soft and creamy and delicious.

‘Meeting adjourned,’ said the person at the head of the long white table, ‘I’ll be interested to see what you can come up with.’ Patrick could not remember how the last hour or so had been spent. The words had been the same as ever, maybe in a different order, that’s all. There was a shuffling and dealing of bits of paper; the secretaries left the personnel room, followed by the girl. Who would be the first to reach her without seeming uncool? Patrick hung back, and, once the room had emptied, took the chairman’s private lift down, intending to catch her at the door of the mirrored building – it was worth the risk. He looked at his own face in the walls of the lift. He was satisfactorily reflected back to himself on all sides. He wouldn’t take her to the Monk, he decided, careful even in his private thoughts to use the most exclusive slang. Strive to belong, behave as though you belong, and you will belong, he told himself regularly throughout each day. Act as though you are one of them and you will become one of them. It was not that hard, mostly just a matter of not speaking first, laughing in the right place, and copying their gestures and phrases. If you wanted something enough, you generally got it, and Patrick wanted to be one of them. They were sleek. They knew what to do. They weren’t losers.

Not the Monk, then, but somewhere he could receive her undivided attention. He allowed his thoughts to soften. He might even have begun to feel a stirring in his imagination had he not gained the revolving glass door just as she did. There she miraculously was, in deep brown fur and pale leather boots. No one else seemed to be about.

‘How do you do? I noticed you in that meeting. Where do you fit into the campaign? I’m Patrick Hunter, by the way.’ He was keeping things light, important with really pretty ones. The better looking they were, the more offhand you’d to be or they thought you were a woman. Peter Torque slipped him that tip one night they’d been working late on a flowchart.

‘Hello, I’m Louella Drummond, and I’m in market research.’ She had quite a deep voice and white teeth without ridges. Rich girl’s teeth. No sugar abuse there. There was a candied scent from her hair and skin. Her gaze had an interesting blankness. Patrick gained confidence.

‘I was wondering if you were free for a bite of supper?’ he heard himself asking in an almost perfect imitation of the tones he knew got results, because he’d heard them time and again in the Monk. He sounded offhand but full of potential.

‘Oh, that would be really nice, Patrick,’ said this delicious girl, with her fresh hair and small brown gloves.

‘Shall we go then? How do you like to eat? Korean? Thai? Japanese?’ First time he’d been asked how he liked to eat, Patrick had said, ‘Sitting down.’ That had torn them up laughing. ‘God, you kill me, Paddy,’ Jeremy said, hitting him repeatedly in the chest.

Patrick had not been brought up in the knowledge of foreign food and he found its demands confusing. If pushed, he could do that hairstyling thing with a fork and spaghetti.

‘Actually,’ she replied, ‘I’m not good at fancy food. I’d really like something simple.’

They ate at a restaurant he’d picked up on from his colleagues. The cost legitimised the simplicity of the food.

All about sat refugees from complicated foodstuffs. Patrick ordered tomato soup, mixed grill, and crumble with cream for both of them. She was quite happy to eat what he ate; she drank water. Patrick had a beer. He didn’t, frankly, like wines. He’d said as much once at a business lunch and there was a bit of a hush.

‘Prefer a milky drink, do you?’ Jeremy asked, which was quite nice of him really, to make a joke of something people like him clearly held to be serious.

Patrick was soon absorbed. She was an amazing listener. Not seeming to say, let alone tell, much, she soon had it all out of him about his mum and the house in Weston. Then she had it out of him like a tooth he was happy to lose about Frances and her stuck-up parents with their indoor pool and gins you could do backstroke in. Then it came out about Frances’s ideas on women. He did not go so far as to tell this soft creature about Frances’s active role in the Anti-Infibulation Association. Frances had been quite unfeminine in that way. Even to talk about those sort of matters would surely offend and confuse Louella, never mind the problem of defining infibulation for her over the mixed grill’s selected inner parts and their modest parsley leaf.

He began to feel that his sensation on Frances’s departure had been relief, with a dash of self-pity. She had known how to iron and Patrick, with all his shirts, had appreciated that. He missed it still.

‘Not that I don’t want a girl to be independent,’ he was saying. This was a line which had led him more than once through feint and skirmish to surrender. He spoke to girls in this mode as though he were handing them a bag of sweeties.

‘Oh, I just don’t want independence,’ she responded, making wide eyes and drawing her spoon out of her mouth upwards, so that he could see part of her tongue and the silver bowl tipped to reflect, upside down, his own face, made paler by the patina of the silver.

‘I really just want to make someone happy.’ An emotion more often felt than heard, Patrick thought. It was the sort of thing his mother believed in.

‘But how does that fit in with your work commitments, Louella?’ He enunciated her name as though it were a new way of twisting her for her own pleasure.

‘I don’t find it hard,’ she confessed, and he had a great rush of simplification such as can accompany the birth of love. Worry and fret were shelved, and he saw with the flat clarity of comprehensive benevolence. He felt the complications of which Frances had forced him to be aware melt and fuse and he was home, safe, a whole man again, feeling one direct emotion towards each thing which presented itself to him. He was freed from the multiple apprehensions he had endured since Frances’s first eruption into his life, and even more acutely since her disappearance from it.

At once nothing vibrated with unpleasant implications beyond itself. Everything felt fat, replete with simple happy meaning. Life seemed plotless but pointful. Everything was extra real. Patrick’s senses were a child’s. It was this girl.

They didn’t take coffee. She admitted that she’d never got used to the taste, and he was happy to agree. He helped her into her fur coat. Its biscuit-coloured silk lining shone and the fur itself seemed to promise something about Louella. Frances’s mother’s fur had been a solid bank reference, Frances’s own had been ‘hocked’ – her word, horsy cow – long ago. Patrick imagined Louella saving for her fur; what could be more natural, more feminine, than to want a soft, warm, outer wrapping? How sweet that she had earned it.

Drunk at heart, sober at head, he drove her home. Though she must at least have guessed something of what might be to come, there was a coating of innocence to her. She kept her eyes down. They chatted lightly of routes through central London. Frances had judged this topic as dull as swapping inflation stories. But things
had
been dull before, Patrick now saw, until he’d found the one, the only, the golden girl.

To his own surprise, he did not worry about his flat and the messages the girl might read in its bottles, its posters, coffee table and rowing machine. He kicked the bullworker under his new leather-jacketed sofa, tooled, the salesman crooned at him, by the very suppliers who fitted out the classic motors, your Jag, your Rolls, your Aston.

He went to the kitchen to make tea and turned to look through the hatch into his walkthrough diner/rec room. One asset the agent hadn’t drawn to his attention on the guided tour. You could see your date even when you were coming on domestic.

There she sat, nice as sugar pie, knees together, hands on them, head on one side, hair touching each shoulder, just. She was pale brown all over, dipped in pale brown. He did not allow her nakedness to hurry his teamaking. You had to be cool.

He laid a pretty tray, two white cups, white sugar lumps in a bowl with beige roses and a brown jug of milk. He also laid a small white dish of chocolates, dusty truffles and a few dragées. He had some white chocs too, from when his mother visited. Jeremy had told him white chocolate was women’s chocolate – feminine and not too strong. The brown teapot was from his mother. Heat came out of the tiny hole in its lid, an aromatic breath of home.

He took his tray in to the brown waiting girl. They passed chocolates from mouth to mouth for a while. He laid her down and put one dragée beneath each ear. Her ears were not pierced. He journeyed in her hair and neck. He fed her. He lifted her up and gave her tea, very milky and sweet, from a spoon. When the chocolates were done, he licked each of her fingers and dried them. He put his own fingers, one by one, into her sweet mouth. There was no bit of her which was not brown. Her irises were the darkest brown, and shining, shining.