Connections (5 page)

The landlord, fat, sharp-eyed Patrick, looked at her as he drew the lagers. “Slumming?” he asked, with a glance at Dominic.

Fleur saw that living in Adelaide House and drudging next door in the wine bar had not wiped out the traces of a Home Counties and boarding-school upbringing. “He's my next door neighbour,” she said.

“Lucky you,” he said, as she paid for the drinks.

“Where do you come from originally?” she asked Dominic.

“Liverpool,” he said. “But I ran away.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen,” he told her. “Old enough.” He added, “I expect at that age you were still playing hockey.”

“More or less,” she said. She wasn't planning to tell him the story of her life.

Patrick was calling for last orders. She stood up. “Well, thanks for the drink, Dominic. It's been great.”

“Do it again some time,” he said, also standing.

Halfway across the road Dominic took off with a cry. “Shit! That's my phone.” He dashed to the gate, veered left through it and began to leap up the steps to the balcony two at a time.

Fleur, watching the flying figure, realised that she was attracted to Dominic. This gave her a shock because for a long time now she had been attracted to no one, and she never wanted to be again after Ben. Still less to a virtual squatter, with a way of life she didn't want to look at too closely and nothing going for him but a dog with a bandaged paw, now limping after him.

As she felt the horror of fancying Dominic, she asked herself: what kind of person with a big roll of cash pelts five hundred yards and up a flight of stairs to get to a phone call? And she answered herself easily: a person setting up a deal, that's who, a person who is probably doing drugs, or selling them, or both.

When she got into her own flat there was another message on her answering machine: a long pause, where no one spoke and then the phone went down. Fleur groaned, “Ben – you stupid sod.” She was beginning to feel paranoid. Her number was ex-directory. She didn't want any creditors to find her at present. Only her mother, Jess, Gerry Sullivan and the people at the wine bar knew what it was. She had given up calling 1471 to find out the number of the caller because she was sick of the polite voice saying, “We do not have the caller's number.” Was it really Ben – or someone else?

Fleur got a day off and went to see her mother and stepfather at Bucknells, their roomy house in Kent. They had lived there since Fleur was eight, when her mother had married Robin Carew-Stockley.

She took a train, then a bus through lanes where leaves were falling from trees and hedges, and past ploughed fields where crows hopped. There were well-tended houses and large gardens, orchards and lawns, for this was an area part rural, part commuter territory. The atmosphere was peaceful, the air seemed very clean.

She walked past the big yew on the lawn up the old brick path and knocked on the door with its big brass knocker. The window beside her had in it two posters,
Stop the Bypass
and
Save St Christopher's Children's Ward.
Her mother was active in local issues.

Small and pretty, with softly waving, just-greying brown hair, Grace opened the door. She wore a grey-blue jersey and matching skirt, which swirled round shapely calves. “Darling!” she said. “At last – we'd practically given you up! Come in – lunch is nearly on the table.”

Fleur followed her mother into a large kitchen which overlooked the long lawn running around the house. There were flower beds and shrubs and behind a cloak of cypress was her stepfather's workshop. She saw him come through the trees and down the path, a tall man with a shock of grey hair dressed in a sweater and corduroys, his working clothes. He embraced Fleur, then moved to the sink and washed his hands thoroughly. As he did so he said, “So glad you're here at last.”

“So am I,” said Fleur, happy, relaxed in the atmosphere she had known so well for so long.

“What kept you?” he asked.

“Everything,” Fleur told him. “How's trade?”

He told her he was on the fourth chair of an elaborately carved set of eight he was making for a local resident, a City businessman. “I don't like the design very much,” he said. “And then he wants them gilded, which will make it worse, in my opinion. But I'm just a humble craftsman, and I works for them as pays me.”

“And has the money,” Grace added. “Robin's taken on Mrs Armitage's son – you know, Les – as an apprentice.” Mrs Armitage had been Grace's daily woman for ten years.

“That's very good,” said Fleur. “There's not much work round here.”

“They all get into trouble,” Grace said. “Bored – jobless – next thing is car theft, burglary … But, Fleur, tell me, what's it like where you live? Is it all right? What is it? Where? Have you thought, darling, of coming back here for a little while? You could look for a job just as easily from here.”

“No, honestly, Grace, I'm fine. The flat's fine. The wine bar job's OK. It pays the bills, more or less.”

“Yes, but Fleur—” her mother said helplessly, summoning up without words the carefree childhood, the good school, O levels, A levels, the film course.

“I suppose it's not leading anywhere,” Robin said easily. “A stopgap. Look, Fleur, we don't want to pry, but where's Ben?”

“Last heard of in Miami,” Fleur told him flatly.

“Miami – good God,” Robin said. “Got in over his head, I imagine. I know running a small business can be difficult – worse when it's films, I suppose.”

“That's the charitable way of looking at it,” Fleur told him.

Grace would have no truck with bitterness or blame. “Perhaps it's better to wait for his own explanation,” she said. “Can you get out the knives and forks, Fleur?”

“It's obviously been an unhappy episode for everyone,” Robin added.

Yes, thought Fleur, laying the table. Ben got me to back the business with my flat, slept with my best friend, told her but not me he was worried about going bust, went bust, disappeared leaving me to deal with the creditors and on top of that his wife's in the country with children and no money. His explanation of the unhappy episode will be interesting, if it ever comes. She did not say any of this. Grace and Robin had always disliked ugly conflicts and accusations and believed as an article of faith that difficulties could be resolved reasonably and without rancour.

Grace drained vegetables. “I've made that apple pudding you like – so wicked, so many eggs, so much cream. There's a casserole to start, a bit of lamb, mostly veg. All from Jim Gates – he's gone organic.” She put on oven gloves and started pulling dishes from the oven.

“Baked potatoes – oh, wonderful,” sighed Fleur.

“London's a terrible place but surely you can't be deprived of the humble baked spud?” Robin enquired.

“We serve them at the wine bar, but they're all microwaved.”

“Ugh,” said Grace with distaste, putting the casserole on the table.

Over lunch they talked about Robin's work, the campaigns to keep open the children's ward of the local hospital and to prevent the building of a bypass.

Later Fleur and Robin walked through a strong wind down the lane beside the house to the tree-ringed clearing on the common. Children were picking up conkers under the big horse chestnut. Further on, by the pond, a boy and his father were sailing a boat. There came a cry from the boy. The yacht had been caught and taken out towards the middle of the water and the string holding it appeared to have been caught somewhere. Father and son stood looking at the white sail bobbing out on the ruffled grey surface of the lake.

“Jim,” Robin called and joined them. He took the string and began to make some complicated passes with it. The boat freed and he gave the string to the boy, who pulled the boat in gloomily, muttering, “If we had a proper remote control boat this wouldn't have happened.”

“You want to grow up where I did,” his father told him. “Fishing in the canal beside the gas works.” To Fleur, Jim in his tweed coat and expensive country shoes looked like the kind of man who never looked at a gas works he wasn't planning to buy.

The boy landed the yacht and picked it up. “It's all wet,” he said.

“He won't make a sailor,” his father remarked.

“I'd
rather
fish in the canal.”

Robin introduced Jim Harrison, a comparative newcomer to the neighbourhood. “My accountant, I call him.”

Fleur smiled and thought, Not another one. They went back to tea with the Harrisons, who lived in half of what had formerly been an almshouse. The other half they left empty for guests. Mimi was a tired, humorous woman in her early forties, very different from her big, ruddy husband. Grace, summoned by phone, came in not long after they arrived and they all sat down in the large, comfortable drawing-room. They talked of the hospital campaign. Jim was working to prove the children's ward was viable. “It looks as if the indirect costs would make it more expensive to close than keep open,” he told them. “Not that they'll ever admit it.”

“This is small stuff for Jim,” his wife confided to Fleur. “He spent twenty years with a big City bank.”

“They sold out to Strauss Jethro Smith,” Jim remarked easily. “Good news for me – got paid off, pensioned off and sent out of the rat race. That was when we came down here. Honestly, I don't think we've ever been happier.”

Fleur glanced at Robin, standing by the window, and at her mother in an easy chair and said, “Ah.”

“Time for tea?” asked Mimi Harrison and got up.

“Let me help,” said Fleur's mother, also rising.

“So what do you do?” Jim asked her when they had gone.

“I was in films,” she told him. “I and a partner had a small production company. That stopped. Now I'm in wine bars. Well, one wine bar in particular. I work there.”

“So what happened to the career in film?”

“The firm went under,” said Fleur, “and I found myself unexpectedly at liberty.” It was easier, she found, to talk to Jim about this than to her own parents. They seemed upset and embarrassed by what had happened to her, which was why she had not confided in them in the first place. But Jim Harrison had evidently spent his life dealing with commercial ups and downs, people on the edge, people falling over it. “Plenty of time to start again, at your age,” he remarked with assurance. “It'll work out.”

After tea Fleur, on an impulse, said that she must get back to London because she had arranged to do part of the evening at the wine bar. This was untrue and quite why she said it she simply did not know. News of her abrupt departure discomfited Robin and Grace. Expressions of uncertainty and anxiety crossed their faces when Fleur told them she was going, though possibly no one but she, who knew them so well, would have guessed what they were feeling.

In the train, heading back to the dirty, noisy and overcrowded city, she wondered about this impulse to leave. Had her failure, professional and emotional, made her feel an alien in the careful, caring world of her mother and stepfather, out of place in the good home with the good causes and the good people? Did she feel she had disappointed them, they who had been so careful to undemandingly help her on the path to a career they were not enthusiastic about? And they'd loved Ben, whose work was so often allied with causes they both supported. They'd appreciated his intelligence, his sensitivity, his care for her. Plainly, even now, they found it hard to believe he had done anything wrong. So, Fleur thought gloomily, if Ben had been blameless then it followed someone else might have been at fault – herself. Resentfully, she guessed that they were already saying things like “faults on both sides”. That was the trouble with people like her parents who preferred not to accuse and blame – bad situations ended up being nobody's fault, or everybody's. Disloyally she wondered if in this situation she might not have been better off with parents who asked nasty, searching questions, made unpleasant assertions, started rows.

As the train whisked through a darkening landscape of fields, trees and hedges, the twinkle of little towns and villages, Fleur fought a sensation of guilt. Grace and Robin had looked after her together for the last twenty years, before which she and her mother had lived with her grandmother in her grandmother's house on the outskirts of a small North Yorkshire town. Grace had found Robin, who was working at a small carpentry firm nearby, making furniture and fitting out houses and shops. He was in a partnership with two friends, both dope-smoking sixties survivors who had retreated from the city to find a useful, plain way of living. Grace and Robin had fallen in love, searched and found the house they now had in Yarrow St Mary, the area in which Robin had grown up. And there she – they – had lived contentedly; there Fleur had attended the local school, roaming the countryside with her gang of friends.

Later she had been sent to the excellent liberal boarding school her mother had once attended. At school she met Jess and after that had spent time with the Stadlens in the big house in Birmingham they occupied. At first the sheer noise Jess, her brothers and her parents made had shattered her, then, when she was more used to that, it was just their attitudes that surprised her. Jess's father had clothing factories making not only his own brand of skirts, dresses and suits but supplying a major chain store, who put their own label on his garments. The house talk was of trade and contracts, allies and rivals. Sometimes, during emergencies, the boys were dispatched from their commodious home to fill gaps in the factory workforce. “Study for your exams late at night, early in the morning,” Jess's father would tell his protesting sons. “Daytime, while it needs you, you work for the company which keeps you at college and feeds and clothes you.” It was all very different from Bucknells.