Having It All (38 page)

She was deeply touched that Ginny should ask her to be a partner in what was very much her own venture. And she didn’t need to earn a fortune. Living at the cottage without a mortgage had
proved remarkably cheap compared with their lavish London lifestyle, and she’d worked out that they’d be all right providing they had some sort of income.

‘How much would you have in mind?’

God! The figure Ginny mentioned wouldn’t have even been offered to the lady who cleaned the loos at Metro. Still, this wasn’t Metro. Thank God. It was WomanPower, an idea she had
always believed in from the moment Ginny first told her about it. And even if it didn’t become a multinational, it would still be fascinating to meet all the women who, just like her, wanted
to get back to work and still see their kids.

Watching Liz’s face, Ginny could see she’d blown it. There was no way Liz was going to come and work for anyone who could only pay that sort of money. She could probably get ten
times that, more even, if she wanted to.

Liz took a deep breath and made up her mind. She’d always believed in following her instincts. Slipping off the ancient desk she brushed the dust from her tracksuit, snapped her bag shut
and walked to the door.

Ginny tried to hide her disappointment with a cheery smile. ‘Goodbye, Lizzie, no hard feelings. It was a nice idea.’

‘Yes it was.’ Liz put her arm round her friend’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘I’ll start as soon as I’ve found someone to look after the kids.’

Ginny looked up at her open-mouthed.

‘I like a challenge.’ Liz’s eyes crinkled with laughter.

‘Oh, Liz.’ Ginny threw her arms round her friend and held her. ‘You’ve certainly got one here!’

Smiling at her friend’s delight, Liz had no inkling of how right she was.

Britt lay in bed, absolutely still, with her face to the wall. She felt as though someone had picked her up and poured her whole being away, like a pint of spilt milk that no
one had cried over. Except her.

The doctor had come, pink-faced and embarrassed because he was the family doctor who’d delivered her and seen her through chicken pox as a little girl, and confirmed in a hushed voice that
she’d had a miscarriage.
Of course I’ve had a miscarriage
, she’d wanted to scream, throwing her blood-stained pyjamas in his face, but what was the point? It was all over
now.

All she felt now was a creeping deadness, a paralysing lethargy that didn’t even spark into anger when he asked her if she was single, and patted her tactlessly, saying it was all for the
best then, eh? And she remembered how it was still a social disgrace to fall for a baby before you were married in Rothwell.

And as she lay there she’d never felt so alone. She knew that her parents loved her and that they would do anything in their power to alleviate her pain. But there was nothing anyone could
do.

In its few short weeks of life the baby had opened a door inside her. A door to love, joy, closeness and now pain. And to her horror, Britt found she couldn’t close it again. She
couldn’t tell herself it didn’t matter, that she had her career, her flat, her well-ordered life.

As she turned her face to the wall to cut out both the doctor and her mother it occurred to Britt that there was one further truth she hadn’t faced. That losing the baby might just be a
punishment. She had broken up a perfectly good marriage and deprived Jamie and Daisy of their father and Liz of her husband. She had betrayed her best friend. And this was the result.

What was done, was done. But maybe it wasn’t too late to make amends. She could start today by ringing Conrad and turning down the job.

She turned her head back and smiled, a small tired smile at her mother and asked for a cup of tea.

‘So how’s your search for the perfect mother’s help coming on?’ Ginny asked hopefully. She was counting the days till Liz could start.

‘Terrible. Five responses to the ad and none of them can speak English! One ex-Israeli army, one into glamour photography and three who sounded like Miss World candidates!’ Liz threw
down her copy of the
Lady
in disgust. ‘I vant to vork with cheeldren because they’re so cute . . . und do you haf a car . . . und is there a vine-bar in the willage?
Aaaaaaagh!’

Ginny felt panic rising. If Liz couldn’t find someone good to look after the kids, she wouldn’t come to WomanPower at all.

And then she remembered. ‘Wait a minute . . . what was your neighbour Ruby on about the other day? . . . I know. The landlord of the Plough and Furrow’s daughter. Going to catering
college and needs a fill-in job.’

‘Sounds blissful.’ Liz closed her eyes, and imagined happy children and a freezer full of shepherd’s pies. ‘What’s her name?’

‘I think she said it was Minty.’

Liz reached for the phone. ‘Hello, is that the Plough and Furrow? Could I speak to Minty, please?’

‘What do you mean, you don’t want the job?’

Conrad had smiled contentedly when his PA had told him that Britt Williams was on the line. OK, so she’d kept him waiting nearly a week, but he admired that. Nerve and brinkmanship were
part of the package he was after. And now, a few days before the meeting with the Board, the stupid bitch was telling him she didn’t want the job!

Conrad dropped the relaxed, feet-on-the-desk pose he had been adopting and jumped up, pacing backwards and forwards on the thick black carpet like an angry wasp looking for someone to sting. The
greedy cow probably wanted more money. He could just picture her in one of her killer suits, behind her big dick office desk, thinking she was stringing
him
along.

‘Look, Britt, what’s behind all this? You want more money? Say so. Don’t give me this shit about not wanting the job.’

Britt, sitting in the hall of her parents’ semi, still in her nightie, wearing the fluffy bedroom slippers that looked like twin guinea pigs she’d borrowed from her mother because
she’d forgotten her own, wanted to laugh. The emptiness of the last few days had turned into a kind of Zen calm which lent unreality to even the most normal things, and made Conrad seem like
something out of Laurel and Hardy.

‘I don’t want the job, Conrad.’

Conrad thought for a moment. Over the years he had evolved a deadly technique using one part charm to two parts bullying. It had never failed yet. Today his instincts told him to skip the charm
and move straight on to the bullying.

‘Look Britt, we had a gentleman’s agreement.’

‘Bullshit! You told me to think about it and your secretary asked me to pencil in a meeting, that’s all.’

‘With the whole bloody Board of Metro Television! The day after tomorrow!’

‘Sorry, Conrad, but I don’t want the job.’

‘Then I’ll just have to put it about the industry that you’re unreliable,’ Conrad suggested silkily. ‘That you give your word one day, then break it. Indecisiveness
is a dirty word in this business, Britt, especially when you’re a woman.’

‘Are you threatening me, Conrad?’

Sensing that he was getting nowhere, and that Britt might actually mean what she said, he began to feel furiously angry. And when Conrad got angry he liked to have someone to blame. And he had
just thought of the perfect person: Liz bloody Ward.

Of course! This was her doing. When Britt had left his office on Christmas Eve, she would have killed for that job. He could see it in her eyes. She had tried to disguise it, of course. But
then, shouting ‘Whoopee I’d love the job, I accept here and now’ would have been a little uncool. All the same, she’d wanted it all right, they both knew that. And then Liz
must have nobbled her, put the screws on about betraying her friendship as well as stealing her husband. And the stupid bitch had gone for it.

‘Right, Britt, forget anything Liz Ward may have said to you. You wanted this job before Christmas and you want it still.’

‘Correction. I may have wanted it before Christmas but I don’t want it any more.’

‘And you’re telling me that this has absolutely nothing to do with Liz Ward?’

‘I didn’t say that, Conrad. But I can assure you I haven’t even mentioned the job offer to Liz and she certainly hasn’t persuaded me to refuse it.’

‘Then why the fuck are you turning it down?’

Britt sloped her toes inwards so that the two guinea pigs appeared to be kissing. Suddenly she found this very funny.

‘Because I don’t want the job. And maybe’ – she paused, remembering her conversation with her father –‘because I’ve taken enough of Liz’s
already.’

Picturing Conrad’s face and guessing that he’d finally run out of arguments, she started to laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Conrad. It’s only television!’

And she realized, with a start of surprise, that she actually meant it.

Conrad paced the room furiously. He’d given the job to Claudia on an acting basis and now she expected the appointment to be confirmed. But that wasn’t what he was
planning. He was damned if he was going to stay under Claudia’s thumb just because the muscles in her cunt were those of an athlete and she could go down better than any other woman in
London. He had even started having nightmares in which he ran away, sweating, chased by two huge fleshy lips. And he knew that they were Claudia’s labia.

He had another completely different scheme in mind. Given a free rein he would like to have got rid of Claudia altogether but she was party to certain of his more imaginative business
arrangements which Ben Morgan of the Independent Television Commission might not see as the simple temporary expedient they really were. So he’d just planned to kick Claudia upstairs. Call
her Executive in Charge of Programmes or some such crap and give the job to Britt. And bloody Liz Ward had put her bloody spanner in the works just because she was jealous. There was only one
solution. He was going to see that she persuaded her friend to change her mind.

If she didn’t he’d be lumbered with Claudia for ever.

Britt’s mother listened at the door of the bathroom until she could hear the gentle slap of water against the enamel and she knew that her daughter was safely in the
bath. Britt liked long baths, thank God, so she should have twenty minutes at least.

Then, very quietly, looking over her shoulder every few seconds as though she might suddenly find her daughter’s hand there demanding an explanation, she crept towards Britt’s
bedroom.

The door opened silently, thank God she’d rubbed a bit of lard into the hinges, and she slipped in. Looking round the room she stopped transfixed. Even when she was a teenager
Britt’s bedroom had been immaculate. No records scattered on the floor, no messy Outdoor Girl make-up, no forbidden but unmistakable odours of cigarette smoke drowned in air freshener, not
even any loud music. Instead her pale pink bed had always been made, the cushions neatly piled on top, her collection of Sindy dolls ranged on the window-sill.

The room she had just walked into didn’t feel like Britt’s room at all: suitcases spewed out jumpers, skirts and sweaters; jewellery and make-up littered the dressing table; tights
dripped from the drawers; and, in the corner, there was a pile of dirty laundry. For the first time her mother could ever remember, Britt had unpacked her spirit.

Feeling like a criminal, or a mother breaking the lock on her teenage daughter’s diary, ignoring all warnings to KEEP OUT! PRIVATE!, she fumbled in Britt’s handbag.

She hated doing this, hated feeling she was sneaking about, that she might be caught riffling through her daughter’s things. But love justified all in her book and she could tell that
something in her daughter’s life was going badly wrong.

Mary Williams was a sensible woman and she had not allowed herself to surrender to the tide of bitterness she had felt when Britt had had the miscarriage. It had indeed seemed unnecessarily
cruel that for more than thirty years they had learned to live with their remote daughter, if not to understand her, and just as her icy petals were unfurling in the warmth of their love, she had
lost the baby.

And now this strangeness. One moment laughing and happy, the next silent and withdrawn. Ever since her marriage, Mary had shared every secret with her husband. But not this one. Not her fears
for her daughter’s sanity. This she hugged to herself and looked for someone else who could bear it better to confide her fears to. A friend. A friend of Britt’s she could warn and ask
to keep an eye, to lend a steadying hand.

Finally she found what she was looking for, her daughter’s address book. She tucked it into the bib of her faded flowery apron and carried it to the privacy of her own bedroom.

The book was leather-bound and heavy, bulging with hundreds of names, addresses and phone numbers. She thought for a moment of their own address book, bought in Woolworth’s twenty years
ago, and almost never used. She could count on two hands the numbers she had put into it over the years. But then in this household the phone even ringing was an event that aroused surprise and,
sometimes, fear. In Rothwell people still knocked on your door, or sent their children with a message, or tapped you on the shoulder in the pub. They rarely used the phone.

As she thumbed through the book looking for a name she recognized, her heart went out to her daughter. She and Ted might not have many names in their address book, but each one meant something.
So many of Britt’s entries seemed to be what she called ‘contacts’. Names with a company in brackets after, businesses, tradesmen, doctors, dentists, health clubs, squash clubs.
She paused for a moment, smiling, when she got to ‘Mum & Dad’. But what about her friends? The people she knew so well that they were listed simply by their Christian names?

In the end there were three. Ginny, Mel and Liz.

She recalled that she had heard these names from time to time, thrown away in conversation. But it was only Liz that she had ever met, once, when she had come to London on a day-trip and had met
up with Britt and her friend in Selfridges coffee shop.

She had been longing to see her clever daughter, who had just started as secretary for a TV company, and had sat excitedly waiting to show her off to the other ladies in the party. But when they
finally arrived, it had been Britt who had looked continually at her watch, clearly wanting to get away, not wanting to waste her precious lunch hour on her mother and her dull provincial
friends.