Venus Envy (41 page)

I stopped for fish and chips in the local pub. Everything felt much better once I got my chips. At

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least as far as my physical body went. I’d like to say my heart was so shattered I just pined away, but if it was, it didn’t stop me eating the chips. Despite the obnoxious presence of some likely local lads who obviously fancied their chances.

‘Tuck in, lass.’

. ‘Yer nobbut skin and bones, I reckon she’s enjoying that, Peter.’

‘Aye, Jack, aye, she is that.’

The sad thing was they were in their forties and fat as houses, and they obviously thought they could pull me if they were only loud enough.

Was I so sodding ghastly that Jack and Peter reckoned they were in with a chance?

, Apparently so. I finished my chips, smacking off the last of the vinegar. It was great vinegar too, real gut rot, not that wussy crap you get with balsam and white wine and herbs. Then I got up and decided to call the cottage and see if the phone was working.

It was. Then I just thought I’d call the fiat’s machine,

to. see if anyone had left a message. Anyone had not left a message. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.

‘Don’t look so sad, love,’ Peter told me with a fragrant belch, ‘might never ‘appen.’

But the fact was, it already had..

The last part of the journey took less than twenty minutes, which was just as well, since it was getting dark and bloody freezing. In my break for freedom I realised I’d forgotten to pack any thermal underwear. Oh well, maybe my misery would be over when I died of hypothermia.

Rosedale is a tiny village in the North Yorkshire moors, if you can count it as a village when it only has one pub and a sub-post office. The reason I was scarpering there was that my family owned a tiny

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cottage on the hill. It used to be a miner’s hovel, and Mum thought it was ‘picturesque’, then discovered that there was no golf to be had for miles and never came back there. Twice a year we paid a cleaning lady to come round and ‘do’ the place for filth, thus allowing my parents to keep up the fiction that they were going to rent it out as a holiday cottage. The point of it was, I think, so Mum and Dad could bang on at dinner parties about their ‘country hideaway’.

It was so well hidden they’d probably forgotten where it was.

But I knew where we’d buried the keys, and also that we paid our minimal phone/electric charges by direct debit.

I planned to use it as a base. I was going to job-hunt around here; get work as a turkey plucker for Bernard Matthew.s, or a boot cleaner for Leeds United, or something. After all, up here nobody would recognise me. Nobody would know of my utter disgrace and idiocy and lack of romantic success. Maybe I could marry a rugby player and farm whippets.

I found the key under the mat, rusting (no one can say the Wildes lack imagination), then I let myself into the cottage. It was thick with dust, really filthy, I felt quite at home.

First thing I did was phone the flat and fend off Bronwen’s questions.

‘I’m in a secret hidden location,’ I said mysteriously. ‘Anyway, has anyone called for me?’

‘Yes,’ Bronwen said. ‘Tom Drummond called five minutes ago.’

‘He did?’ I gasped.

-‘Yeah,’ said Bronwen. ‘He says he needs to talk to you about Gail - could you give him a call?’

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I had a brilliant supper of peanut butter on Ritz crackers, then tried to fix the heating. Nothing doing, I’d have to work on it tomorrow. For tonight, I could crawl under eight layers of blankets. It was so heavy I could hardly breathe, but at least it’d keep the cold out.

The sooner I could get to sleep, the sooner I could start in on my new life.

‘Don’t you want me to give him your number?’ Bronwen had asked breathlessly.

‘No. I don’t want to talk to Tom Drummond,’ I said, a big tear splashing on to my nose. ‘Really. I’ll call and tell you everything once I’ve got a new job.’

‘Can’t you tell me now?’ Bronwen begged. ‘Oh

please, Alex, you know I can keep a secret.’

‘Later,’ I promised and hung up.

Keep a secret? Yeah, right, talking to Bronwen was

as good as baring your soul for the News of the World. Why advertise when you could simply talk to Brono wen, and she would do it for you, free of charge?

So I crawled into my heavy bed, and cried, and tried

to be upbeat, but I was about as upbeat as a Leonard Cohen single played at 33rpm in a funeral home. At first I couldn’t get to sleep because there was no noise. No gentle honking of horns. No police sirens duhoduhing smoothly in the distance. Not even drunk revellers to lull me off to dreamland.

Nothing but the chill silence over the vast stretches

of heather, and the faint bleating of a stranded sheep.

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Totally unnatural, a sort of lack of noise pollution. But eventually the crying did wear me out, and I slept very soundly and had no dreams. Probably just as well.

Next morning I scrubbed my teeth and tried to get clean with kettle water. Have to ring the cleaner, I thought to myself. But the first thing was to find a Job Centre and see what they had going. I’m not proud, I told myself as I jumped in the car, I’ll take anything.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ the woman - sorry, Career

Realignment Operative asked at the Job Centre. ‘No,’ I said defensively. ‘Why?’

She regarded me as if I were.something unpleasant she’d found on the sole of her shoe. Her name was Mrs Donaldson, she couldn’t have been more than thirty odd, but she was already dressing in a way my mum would have been proud of. A ghastly floral frock with front pleating was crowned by a necklace of fake pearls and a scary hairdo that must have ripped a hole in the ozone layer all by itself. Man, it looked as though it would chime if you tapped a spoon against it.

‘You come in here, all fancy-like, and you say you want a job?’

I realised I was wearing my Donna Karan. It was true, I hadn’t actually packed any casual clothes. Er .. maybe a mistake.

‘But I really do,’ I protested. ‘I’ll take anything,’ ‘Hmm.’ Her face relaxed just a minute touch. ‘Well, there’s not much round here. This is Yorkshire, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘And the moors towns are a high unemployment region.”

‘I’m sure,’ I said humbly.

‘There are sixteen applicants here for every job going,’ she continued balefully.

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My heart sank a bit. That didn’t sound good. I couldn’t live off Tom’s eighteen hundred for ever.

‘Aah,’ I muttered. Oh God. I was going to become a homeless person, and wind up frozen to death in the streets of Pickering with my meths bottle and a dog on a string. I wondered where I could get the dog on the string? Hmm - maybe I would run into Crispin in a chronic alcoholism centre somewhere, and I could borrow one of his? And I could nick a trolley outside Safeways for my baglady must-have, then I could go round to all the hotels very early and nick their deliveries of papers and eggs and milk …

I was cruelly interrupted from my successful baglady fantasy by Mrs Donaldson waving a sheet of paper in , my face.

‘Maybe this would suit you, though. Seeing as you got a fancy degree from Oxford.’

An art degree, I almost said, but stopped myself just in time. If she didn’t know I was thick, why burden her with the knowledge?

.’It’s just down the road from Rosedale,’ she said, ‘in Kidlington. The Christian Library of North Yorkshire, run by Dr Barry Gallagher. They have a position for a reputable librarian, with good morals, a single woman preferred. Could you be a librarian?’

The? Oh yes. Love to read. Er, Jane Austen. Vikram what’s his name. Er… Agatha Christie,’ I floundered, Then Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.’ She looked doubtful. ‘Are yoia a single woman?’

‘Well, I’m not a single man,’ I said, which went down like a lead balloon. ‘Of good morals? You’re from London, aren’t you?’ Clearly Mrs Donaldson thought London was on a par with Sodom and Gomorrah. And who could say she wasn’t correct? It would be right up there if I’d ever had a chance.

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‘Oh, I never miss Mass on a Sunday morning,’ I told her eagerly, cowering only very slightly in case God had a thunderbolt handy.

‘Well, we don’t get too many in ‘ere from Oxford, so I suppose I can put you forward for it,’ she said

slowly. ‘You can go along there now.’

‘What, right now?’

‘Why?’ she said, looking at me scornfully. “Ave you gorranything better to do?’

You could say one thing for her, beehive or no: she was sharp as a brass tack. As they probably say round this neck of the woods.

I picked up the car, reluctantly put some petrol into it - God, it’s a bloody scandal what petrol costs, we should have killed Saddam while we had the chance and boug a few groceries and essentials. The price of everything seemed ludicrously high. I kept imagining my money dropping down, like the life force bar on Sonic the Hedgehog or something. I was so depressed about Tom that it almost didn’t matter, but not quite. I knew I had to get this job.

The afternoon was crisp and cold as I drove down to Kidlington, great swathes of heather blazing purple and gold across the moors. A couple of birds plunged across the sky in long, looping arcs. It was beautiful but desolate, a bit like. me, if you take away the beautiful.

The Christian Library of North Yorkshire was a crummy little brick building co˘ered with faded posters of soppyqooking American boys With those annoying pudding-bowl haircuts. The kind of kids I sincerely hope, in the unlikely event of my ever having a child, my kid will beat up in the playground. They were wearing white socks and knickerbockers and grinning at the camera under a curly text, ‘Let the Little Children Come Unto Me’. There were also a couple of “

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balloons that had seen better days, with ‘Kumbaya, My Lord’ printed across them.

Alex Wilde, welcome to your future, I thought.

I pushed open the door and walked up to the reception desk. Well, at least there wouldn’t be much

to do here. The place was deader than Queen Anne. ‘Hello, I’m Dr Gallagher,’ said a voice.

I looked up to see a podgy little man with ginger hair and a wet bottom lip. Little bubbles of spit blossomed on it as he spoke. He stared at me through glasses thick enough to light a fire with.

‘You must be Miss Wilde. I hope it is Miss, none of that feminist “Ms” nonsense.’

‘Umm, right.’

, ‘Because that’s really why I’m looking for a single woman,’ Dr Barry went on. ‘None of this “working wives” nonsense.’

I bit my lip and smiled like Aunt Sally on Worzel Gummidge.

‘I think working wives are responsible for so much divorce and misery. They orphan their children,’ he said, little bubbles of spit blowing up everywhere like he was a toad.

‘ “The husband shall be head of the wife like Christ is the head of the Church. Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.” That’s St Paul, the great apostle.’

‘Are you married, Dr Gallagher?’ I asked, treading

on my own foot to remind myself not to say anything. ‘No,’ he said bitterly. ‘I was.’ ‘I see.’

‘She ran off and left me. She left me for a deaconess.’ I stifled a choking laugh.

‘Did you say anything?’ he demanded’ glaring.

‘Dreadful cough,’ I said, hacking one out to cover my back.

‘Yes, well, a woman should not raise her voice in

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church. I do not suffer a woman to teach men! That’s St Paul too. What do you think of priestesses? That’s what I call them, priestesses. Pagans.’

‘Well, I’ve never wanted to be a woman priest,’ I said truthfully.

Dr Barry’s wet smile broadened. Aah, I understood now, he was a toad, that explained it.

‘I can see you’re a good Christian woman, and you

went to Oxford, hmm, how soon can you start?’ ‘Er - what’s the pay?’ I asked timidly.

The smile dimmed a little. ‘It’s eleven thousand a year - but your reward will mostly be the modest, decent service of God.’

Great - that was a new one for the bank manager. ‘I know I’m three hundred quid overdrawn, but you see, I do have the modest, decent service of God.’

But let face it, that was eleven grand more than I was getting at the moment. I took a good hard look at fat, woman-hating Barry, at the dingy little library stuffed full of crappy books nobody wanted to read, in this tiny little hamlet in the middle of nowhere, where I

was being offered a rubbish job for rubbish pay.

‘I can start this afternoon,’ I said.

Barry told me I had a very good attitude. It was with great reluctance he agreed to let me drop off my shopping first.

‘And maybe grab some lunch,’ I suggested.

Barry gace a disapproving stare. ‘Come now, Miss Wilde. You can have a sandwich at your desk. Lunch is for wimps! Ha ha ha!’

Back at the cottage I tried to be pleased. It was a job, right? It was a job. Hoofucking-ray.

I put away my stuff and then sat there and stared at the phone.

Obviously, I shouldn’t call Tom. It would be

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madness to call him. Just so I could hear him tell me he

and Gail were getting married?

No, it would be silly to call. Just because I was desperate for some contact, any contact. Just so I could kid myself that there was a hope in hell I could have him in my life as a friend.

It would be far more dignified not to call.

I asked myself if I had any self-respect. Well, the answer to that one was no, so I picked up the receiver and dialled his London flat from memory.

Oh my God, I thought panicking, what if Gail answers, I’ll have to slam the phone down, but I forgot to dial x4, oh shit, hang up right now and dial x4r and redial, but then won’t Tom hear me making two

, calls and think I’m a real pathetic weirdo and

‘Tom Drummond,’ said a voice at the end of the phone.

Somehow I’d forgotten how sexy, how rich and deep