A Few of the Girls (28 page)

By autumn he couldn't live without her. And he told her so.

Miriam had advised playing a little hard to get, pretending that she didn't wish to be tied down.

“But I'll lose him!” Sara wailed.

“No, you won't, he'll want you more than ever. Believe me, I've studied the market, I know what's out there.”

She was right.

Peter bought a ring at Christmas, he wanted to come and ask her father's approval. And this was the man that one year back had been busy explaining that he didn't want to get involved.

Somehow it seemed too easy to Sara.

At Christmastime, in her old bedroom, she and Miriam talked it through again.

Miriam was an elegant thirty. Again it was impossible to imagine her looking better.

She listened sympathetically.

“I think you've outgrown him,” she said eventually.

That was exactly what Sara had done. It had been too simple and somehow unsatisfactory to win a man by ploys.

It had nothing to do with love and trust and wanting to share a life.

Sara was very despondent.

“It might just mean he's not the right one—there are others,” Miriam said.

Sara was thoughtful. “Is this what happened to you, Miriam? That you were so smart you didn't want them in the end because you had won them too easily?”

“No, I don't think so; if it was the right one it wouldn't matter how you won him,” Miriam said.

Peter was astounded.

There was no way that Sara could explain it to him; each attempt was less satisfactory than the one before it.

They parted amicably.

“You're too ambitious, you think only of your work,” he had said when they had their last dinner. It had been very civilized; she had brought him back his records and his books, two chunky sweaters and an alarm clock that played “Land of Hope and Glory.” She had collected her own things without drama and they were already in the boot of her car.

She realized that he didn't even know how to work the dishwasher she had made him buy, but she hardened her heart. He would learn: there was a book of instructions.

“I don't think only of my work,” she said and looked at his soft fair hair and kind face. He would have made a good father to their children. But she had got him too easily. She could have betrayed him as easily.

“But I will concentrate on work,” she added as an afterthought. “I will spend two or three years thinking of little else.”

Miriam hardly needed to help her rise and rise in the firm.

And she had learned about power dressing and how, under no circumstances must any woman at a meeting ever pour the coffee or clear up the cups.

When Sara was twenty-five she was a woman to be reckoned with.

Miriam, at thirty-three, looked dazzling. Her hair was now a wonderful red.

She was a full partner and director in the company. She had been written about in magazines and interviewed for the Sunday papers.

Sara met Miriam's partner Robert at the office Christmas party. Miriam's office parties were splendid: no paper cups, no silly groping over too much vodka, and, though it had all been planned months in advance, it seemed utterly casual.

Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and lots of good brown bread were served. It turned out to be what everyone thought they needed.

“Isn't Miriam quite wonderful?” Sara said, turning to Robert, and as she spoke she felt something extraordinary happen inside her chest, possibly near her heart. She felt something slip out of place like a zip fastener opening or a strap breaking, and though she caught her breath the feeling would not go away.

As she looked into the dark blue eyes of Robert Gray, the senior partner and managing director of Miriam's company, she knew she had fallen ridiculously in love.

They talked about it at Christmas.

“His wife?” Sara asked tremulously.

“What about her?” Miriam asked.

“Is she…I mean, I don't want to…Perhaps she's quite awful and doesn't love him. Perhaps?”

She looked pleadingly at Miriam.

Miriam shook her head. “We've never won anything by refusing to face facts. Susie is quite lovely in every way; she is charming, good fun, great company, a devoted mother and wife, and she adores Robert.”

“Well, that's it,” Sara said, tears of shock and rage coming to her eyes.

“Not necessarily,” said Miriam. And they sat and talked as they had so often sat and talked in this room while the sound of Christmas carols came up from the record player.

It was a busy three months. And Sara hated a lot of it. She hated the visit to Robert and Susie's home. She felt almost sick when Susie asked her to leave her coat in the bedroom and she saw the big bed with its patchwork quilt and lovely curtains. This room would be a different place at the end of the year. Would Susie Gray sit here and wonder where she had gone wrong and why it had to happen this way?

But Miriam had always said don't go into it unless you're going to go the distance.

Sara had hesitated, especially after visiting their home.

“Well, decide.” Miriam was brisk. “If it's no, then we drop it now, we find you someone else. But if you want him, Sara, then let's go get him.”

Three months after she had met Robert Gray at the Christmas office party, Sara was sitting in a small romantic restaurant with him. There had been a series of meetings in offices and business lunches before this, of course, on a series of excuses dreamed up by Miriam. Then they needed to talk longer and more privately about a company matter.

“I'd ask you home but there are children and wives running all over the place.” He had smiled.

“I'd ask you home too but we might be misunderstood; let's keep it neutral in a restaurant,” Sara had replied. And, with Miriam's help, had found the most impossibly attractive place with quiet tables, lots of flowers, and discreet music.

By summer they were lovers.

By autumn he said he couldn't live without her, but that he could not leave his wife. Under heavy coaching Sara said of course he mustn't dream of leaving Susie and the children. She forced herself to take business trips, to go on a holiday, to take a week at a health farm. It worked wonders. By winter he wanted her so desperately he said he would do anything.

Miriam said she should strike in the new year. Demand a Susie or Me situation.

“It's so hard to hurt someone good and trusting like that.” Sara still felt guilty.

“What do we do in business every day except take advantage of people more trusting and simple than we are? If we paused every moment where would we be today?”

It was a fact.

At Christmas they sat in Sara's old room. Miriam seemed feverish with excitement.

“You were quite right to say no phone calls, no letters, nothing at all. It will put him on his mettle. He will know he can't play fast and loose with you.”

“Are you
sure,
Miriam? It seems so cold not to talk to him at all over Christmas, especially if we think he's making up his mind to leave her.”

“But this is
precisely
the right way to firm up his decision,” Miriam said. Her eyes were almost too bright. Sara wondered was it healthy for her aunt to take such an interest in manipulating people's lives.

She stuck it out, no calls, no letters. She went back to her own comfortable flat just before New Year. He would have left letters; he would have left flowers, surely? There would be anguished messages on her answering machine. There were no messages. Sara's heart gave several unexpected little jumps. She reached for the phone to call Miriam. There was no reply. But nobody was working today.
Where
could Miriam be? She would ring Robert's house, just to hear his voice; she would hang up then. Susie answered the phone; her voice sounded choked as if she had a cold, or as if she had been crying. Sara hung up.

She went round to Miriam's flat. It had an empty look about it. That was odd; Miriam had come back here yesterday, she should be there. She called on Miriam's neighbor, a kind old man who often took in parcels when Miriam was not at home.

“Went off to the sun, she did. Three weeks. Oh, she's a lucky woman is Miriam.”

To the
sun.
It was beyond belief.

“And he was a nice man that came to fetch her. I've seen him with her, of course, but I thought he was just a business partner.”

Sara phoned Susie again. It was not a cold, she had been crying. Sara went round to the house. It had been like a bolt from the blue, Susie said.

Sara went to her office. She let herself in with her master key. As she had expected, the notes were there.

Robert wrote that he could not believe how cold she had been, how unloving and dismissive when he had been prepared to dismantle his marriage for her, when he had, in fact, destroyed his marriage, and then to find this heartless and inexplicable staying out of touch. He would make a new life, but first he would have a holiday. He had got these tickets for the West Indies. He was sorry things had turned out as they had, he would always remember the good times.

The note from her aunt was shorter. It was the kind of note that could have been shown in a court of law without revealing anything. It said that in business you always had to take advantage of those more trusting and simple than you. It said that unless you were prepared to go the distance there was no point in starting the journey.

It wished Sara well for the new year.

“Has nobody met Grace? I mean, is this what you are trying to tell me, that not one single person in the office has met her?” Mr. Street's eyebrows looked as if they were fired electrically from within, so violently did they agitate.

He was, as he always said, a very mild man. He was, as he also said fairly regularly, a man whom it was difficult to excite or annoy, but now the difficulty seemed to have been bypassed. Mr. Street was both excited and annoyed, and any element of mildness that remained was there by accident.

“For two years we have been having a correspondence with this woman,” he said, waving a thick file of letters, “and now, on the eve of the publication, it turns out that not one person in the company has even met her. It mightn't even be a her; it could be a him, it could be a them, it may be an established syndicate, or an elaborate leg-pull. But only now, when I ask to see what the publicity arrangements are, only
now,
three weeks before all the publicity has to be ready, two months before the book that will make our fortunes appears, we discover that
nobody
has met Grace.”

“I've spoken to her on the phone,” said a man from the accounts section. “So have I,” said the secretary to Mr. Evans.

“I've often telephoned her,” said Mr. Evans. “Her letters sound as if they come from a real person,” said Mr. Trader, foolishly. Mr. Street lowered his eyebrows; he looked with no confidence at the group around him. “I'm glad her letters do not have the stamp of a computer about them,” he said to Mr. Trader. “I'm glad you have, over two years, been connected with somebody called Grace each time you telephoned her,” he said to Mr. Evans. “I want her in this office tomorrow. I don't care who does it, or how, I don't care at what time or at what cost. She is to be
here.
”

Mr. Street went back with his eyebrows to his office, and the babble of excitement began at once, with everyone blaming everyone else, and then a flood of mutual reassurance. Of course, there is a person called Grace Smith, naturally everyone laughs at the name Smith, but obviously Grace Smith wrote this book. Didn't she? After all, this book was the book that was going to make Streets reach the big time. This was the book they had sold as a film, as a television series, as a Book-of-the-Month choice, as a magazine serial, and organized the translation to over a dozen languages; this was the prepublication best seller. How had it happened that nobody had met Grace? They worked it out; everybody thought that somebody else had. Grace herself must have been quite devious about it because she had implied, if not exactly stated, that she was in close personal contact with almost half the Street company.

Together, a dozen frightened employees went over what they knew of Grace Smith. She was in her thirties. How did they know? Well, she had sounded as if she were. The book, the great smoldering best-selling book, was about a woman in her thirties. That's why they thought that Grace might be…well…er. She was single. How on earth did they know that? Well, she had never mentioned a husband. That meant nothing these days, Mr. Trader said, wringing his hands sadly. Grace might have five husbands for all they knew. A woman who could deceive a good old family firm into believing that she had been in and out of it, while never darkening its door…there was no limit to the amount of undeclared husbands she might have.

Mr. Evans thought that Grace Smith sounded like a real lady. Any time he had telephoned her about contracts or rights, she had been very courteous, and intelligent too, he added as an afterthought. There was no fluffy handing over of all responsibility. He had congratulated her on her quick ability to grasp the finer points of publishing, especially since this was her first brush with it. “Oh, I knew nothing at all about it, Mr. Evans,” Grace had said cheerfully. “I just bought myself a book about it so that I wouldn't be a complete fool.”

Mr. Evans's secretary wondered whether Grace might be an invalid. “She always had a very pleasant way of talking on the phone, you know, the way people who have been housebound for years and years have. And she remembered my name, I think that's a sign she might have been an invalid.” Since none of the so-called healthy members of staff could remember Mr. Evans's secretary's name, they were prepared to think that this could indeed be true.

Mr. Trader said he would undertake to ask Miss Smith to present herself the next day, and he went to his own office and had two cups of tea before he made the call.

“Ah, Miss Smith, Trader of Streets here,” he said with a nightmarish bonhomie.

“Hello, Mr. Trader, isn't it a lovely day?” said Grace.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Mr. Trader, doubtfully. He had no idea what kind of day it was, but he didn't want to alienate her. “Yes, it's a very good day really. Could you come in to our office tomorrow, please, Miss Smith, any time you like, any way you like, it doesn't matter how much it costs…” he said desperately.

“Well, how much should it cost?” asked Grace anxiously. “I mean, will the bus fares go up tonight or something? I suppose it will cost what it always costs.”

“Ha!” roared Mr. Trader. “Ha! Miss Smith, you have no idea how much it costs, you have never been here.”

He paused, thinking that he had her nicely with that one. Grace paused too, perplexed. “Well, I suppose it costs about twenty pence by bus, or if you took a taxi about a pound and, say, fifteen pence. No, of course I've never been there, but I know where it is. I've often seen it from buses when I've been going into town.”

This was a bad turn of affairs, Mr. Trader thought. She seemed to be admitting quite frankly that she hadn't been in the place. “So, will you be here tomorrow at…at eleven o'clock?” he asked.

“Why?” asked Grace.

“Mr. Street insists on it,” said Mr. Trader. “He said he didn't care how, or how much it cost, but he wanted you there, here, tomorrow.”

“You all seem very obsessed with the cost of getting there and I don't know why,” said Grace, but she agreed to come in at eleven. Just as Mr. Trader was beginning to loosen his collar, and even to entertain a disrespectful thought or two about how Mr. Street had frightened them all, Grace said, “Oh, tomorrow's Tuesday. No, I'm sorry. I forgot altogether that it's Tuesday. I can't possibly come in on a Tuesday morning. I've got to go to the clinic each Tuesday morning at ten-thirty. No, not a chance, it usually takes the whole morning.” Mr. Trader sweated a bit as he suggested Wednesday.

“But what does Mr. Street want to see me for? Really, Mr. Trader, you have always been so helpful about everything—and you know I'm a busy woman. Well, I've nearly finished the next book, and that takes four hours' work a day. I never mind doing anything for anybody, but I do like to know why. Listen, ask Mr. Street to ring me himself. I'm at home all day, and then we can sort out, Mr. Street and myself, what he wants. Perhaps there's no need to come in at all; it could be something that could be solved on the telephone, without anyone dragging in all this expensive bus journey that you keep going on about.”

Grace hung up and Mr. Trader felt that he was a failure at almost everything in life, and he sadly asked his nice, worried-looking secretary if she would make him another cup of tea and buy him a sticky bun. It was twenty minutes before he heard from Mr. Street's office.

“Can't say you did a very good job on Miss Smith,” said Mr. Street.

“It's very hard to pin the lady down, Mr. Street, if indeed lady she is,” said Mr. Trader, with a hopeless attempt at a little joke.

“Well, I was very put out when I got your note saying that she wished me to call her, but since I appear to run a company that doesn't even bother to meet its most successful author in decades, I thought I should at least make some kind of gesture.”

“Very good of you, Mr. Street, and when is she coming in to see you?” asked Mr. Trader.

“Well, she's not…at the moment, that is. She's not coming in,” said Mr. Street. “Quite obviously things have reached such a ridiculous level of nonsense here that the woman thinks we are all mad. Anyway, tomorrow's Tuesday.” He glowered at Mr. Trader.

“It's what?” said Mr. Trader.

“Tuesday, the day she goes to the clinic,” said Mr. Street impatiently, as if everyone should have known this always. “The clinic, from ten-thirty on, and it will take the whole morning.”

Mr. Trader wondered for the millionth time about the nature of Power and Authority. If he, the unfortunate and powerless Terence Trader, had repeated Grace's idiotic nonexplanations in that tone, everyone would have said he was burbling and rambling, but Mr. Street could repeat them in a trusty way as if he were saying something utterly self-evident, and, because Mr. Street was who he was, everyone nodded respectfully. Well, damn it! Mr. Trader wasn't going to nod respectfully. Just once, he was going to answer life back.

“So have you made any arrangement to meet Miss Smith, sir?” he asked courteously enough, but with a little hint of “let's see how you'll get out of this one, smarty-pants.”

“I'm going to see
her,
” said Mr. Street.

Ah, that's what power was—it was changing the whole game. An hour ago it had been a matter of
Get that woman in here. I don't care how much it costs.
Now Mr. Street was going to see her.

“At her house?” probed Mr. Trader.

“At the clinic,” snapped Mr. Street. “The obesity clinic.”

Mr. Trader had another bun in order to get this piece of information programmed into his subconscious. He wanted it down in the subsection because he couldn't bear to consider it on an ordinary, conscious level.

Now Mr. Trader had never been really stretched in what they liked to call the “publicity” side of his work. There was never any great publicity about anything Streets did. It was a matter of writing to various educational correspondents in the newspapers by name when some sociologist was producing yet one more volume about trends or thinking or spending. It was a question of gently pointing the various Streets publications in the right direction. It had always been that way. A few months ago, when Grace Smith's extraordinary story about a bored woman who took on unlikely lovers to prevent herself from going mad suddenly looked like being a book which would get a great deal of publicity, Mr. Trader wasn't even challenged. Because at that stage, outside people, and salespeople, and almost everyone got involved and the amount of money that seemed to be going through the various books and files was enormous.

Mr. Trader wondered sadly as he thought of big, fat Grace waddling in and out of her obesity clinic on Tuesdays. Life was very peculiar. A woman so sensitive and, indeed, passionate…that she could write a book like that! A book that made it seem totally reasonable for a woman to have a voracious sexual appetite because otherwise her dreary social life, a half life imposed on her by a rich, selfish, narrow-minded husband, would have made her go technically mad. Imagine that it had been written by a poor woman between visits to an obesity clinic! Mr. Trader wasn't sure whether this was going to be an embarrassing fact that people would not like to mention, or whether the media would literally grab such a story with both hands and put it in every part of their papers. Mr. Trader was old-fashioned: he wouldn't like to see it widely publicized, but he knew that other people did not necessarily think as he did.

Mr. Trader's secretary was a nice, kind girl called Hope, who was always rushing out to buy him soothing buns or antacid pills in the little row of shops nearby. Hope worried about him, and even though she was possibly twenty years younger than he was, she mothered Mr. Trader in a way he found very pleasant.

Sometimes he deliberately went out without his coat or scarf so that Hope could run after him and fuss a little. Mr. Trader hadn't enough fussing about him in his private life. He rarely consulted Hope about anything, treating her more like a favored domestic or an intelligent animal than another human being of his own kind, but today was different.