She stayed on after sixteen, because she didn’t know what she would do or where she would go once she left the classroom; but once her virginity was lost, and her elder sister moved out, leaving her with a room and a mirror of her own, she felt more definite, more visible, more of a presence in the world. She left school with two indifferent A-levels, didn’t think of university. Her mind was quick, shallow, and literal, her character assertive.
She went to a secretarial college—there were still secretaries then—and became competent in shorthand, typing, and simple bookkeeping. When the PC came along, she adjusted without difficulty, assimilating successively WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word. To her second job, in marketing, she brought her spreadsheet skills (Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3), together with PowerPoint for her presentation packages. Her third job was with a large charity, as an administrator in the fund-raising section. Her mail-merging was beyond reproach; it was indifferent to her whether she used dBase or Access, for she had mastered both. But though she had all the e-skills necessary, her telephone manner was cold and faintly satirical. It was more appropriate, her supervisor noted in her annual review, for someone selling time-shares. She was hurt; she had meant to do some good in the world. She left the charity with excellent references, and took a post with a firm of event organizers. Travel was involved, usually at the back of the plane, and fourteen-hour days in cities she never got to see. Sometimes she had to think hard: had she been to Geneva? Was Barcelona the place where her travel iron blew up, or was that Dundee?
It was at an event she met Gavin. He was an itinerant software developer whose key card wouldn’t work, standing at the reception desk of a hotel in La Défense, entertaining the staff by his sad efforts in Franglais. His tie was in his pocket; his suit hanger, slung over his left shoulder, skewed his jacket away from his shirt and tugged his shirt away from his skin. She noticed the black chest hairs creeping out of the open top button, and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He seemed the very model of a man. She stood at his elbow and chipped in, sorting out the problem. At the time he seemed grateful. Only later did she realize it was the worst thing she could have done: introducing herself at the moment of his humiliation. He would rather have slept in the corridor than be rescued by some bint wearing a photograph of herself pinned over her left tit. All the same, he asked her to meet him after he’d showered and have a drink in the bar. “Well, Colette”—he read her name off her badge. “Well, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl.”
Gavin had no sense of humour about himself, and neither did she. So there was a thing, a thing they had in common. He had relatives in Uxbridge, it turned out, and like her he had no interest in getting beyond the hotel bar and into the city. She didn’t sleep with him till the final night of the conference, because she didn’t want to seem cheap; but she walked back in a daze to her own room, and stared at herself in the full-length mirror, and said, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl. Her skin was a matt beige. Her beige hair flipped cheekily at chin level, giving her a surrogate smile. Her teeth were sound. Her limbs were straight. Her hips were small. Straight-cut silk trousers covered her tough cyclist’s legs. Her bosom was created by a garment with two curved underwires, and boosted by padding that slid into a pocket so you could remove it; but why would anyone want to do that? Without taking her eyes from her own image, she cupped her hands beneath her breasts. Gavin would have the whole of her: all that was hers to give.
They saw a converted flat in Whitton, and thought it might be a good investment. It was leasehold, of course; otherwise, Colette would have done the conveyancing herself, from a DIY guide. As it was, she rang around the solicitors and beat them down to a price, making sure she got their best offers in writing. Once they had moved into the flat, Gavin said, let’s split the bills. Kids, he said, were not his priority at this time in his life. She got an IUD fitted, as she didn’t trust the Pill; against the workings of nature, some mechanical contrivance seemed called for. Later he would say, you’re unnatural, you’re cold, I wanted kids but you went off and got this lump of poisoned plastic stuck up you, and you didn’t tell me. This was not strictly true; she had cut out an article about the topic from a trade mag passed to her by an ex-colleague who worked for a medical supplies company, and she had put it in the back pocket of his briefcase, where she had thought he might see it.
They got married. People did. It was the tag end of the Thatcher/Major years and people held a wedding to show off. They didn’t have friends, so they invited everybody they knew. The wedding took six months to plan. When she woke up on the day, she had an urge to run downstairs, and howl in the streets of Whitton. Instead she pressed her frock and climbed into it. She was alone in the flat; Gavin was on his stag night, and she wondered what she would do if he didn’t turn up: marry herself? The wedding was designed to be exhausting, to wring value from each moment they had paid for. So they could recover, she had booked ten days in the Seychelles: sea view, balcony, private taxi transfer, and fruit in room on arrival.
Gavin turned up just in time, his eyes pouched and his skin grey. After the registrar, they went out to a hotel in Berkshire with a trout steam running through the grounds and fishing flies in glass cases on the walls of the bar, and French windows leading onto a stone terrace. She was photographed against the stone balustrade, with Gavin’s little nieces pawing her skirts. They had a marquee, and a band. They had gravlax with dill sauce, served on black plates, and a chicken dish that tasted, Gavin said, like an airline dinner. The Uxbridge people on both sides came, and never spoke to each other. Gavin kept belching. A niece was sick, luckily not on Colette’s dress, which was hired. Her tiara, though, was bought: a special order to fit her narrow skull. Later she didn’t know what to do with it. Space was tight in the flat in Whitton, and her drawers were crammed with packets of tights, which she bought by the dozen, and with sachets and scent balls to perfume her knickers. When she reached in amongst her underwear, the faux pearls of the tiara would roll beneath her fingers, and its gilt lattices and scrolls would remind her that her life was open, unfolding. It seemed mercenary to advertise it in the local paper. Besides, Gavin said, there can’t be two people with a head shaped like yours.
The pudding at their wedding breakfast was strawberries and meringue stacked up in a tower, served on frosted glass platters sprinkled with little green flecks, which proved to be not chopped mint leaves but finely snipped chives. Uxbridge ate it with a stout appetite; after all, they’d already done raw fish. But Colette—once her suspicion was verified by a tiny taste at the tip of her tongue—had flown out in her tiara, cornered the duty manager, and told him she proposed to sue the hotel in the small claims court. They paid her off, as she knew they would, being afraid of the publicity; she and Gavin went back there gratis for their anniversary dinner, and enjoyed a bottle of house champagne. It was too wet that night to walk by the trout stream: a lowering, misty evening in June. Gavin said it was too hot, and walked out onto the terrace as she was finishing her main course. By then the marriage was over, anyway.
It was no particular sexual incompatibility that had broken up her marriage: Gavin liked it on Sunday mornings, and she had no objection. Neither was there, as she learned later, any particular planetary incompatibility. It was just that the time had come in her relationship with Gavin when, as people said, she could see no future in it.
When she arrived at this point, she bought a large-format softback called What Your Handwriting Reveals. She was disappointed to find that your hand-writing can’t shed any light on your future. It only tells of character, and your present and your past, and her present and her past she was clear about. As for her character, she didn’t seem to have any. It was because of her character that she was reduced to going to bookshops.
The following week she returned the handwriting book to the shop. They were having a promotional offer—bring it back if it doesn’t thrill. She had to tell the boy behind the counter why, exactly, it didn’t;
I suppose, she said, after so many years of word processing, I have no handwriting left. Her eyes flickered over him, from his head downwards, to where the counter cut off the view; she was already, she realized, looking for a man she could move on to. “Can I see the manager?” she asked, and amiably, scratching his barnet, the boy replied, “You’re looking at him.” “Really?” she said. She had never seen it before: a manager who dressed out of a dumpster. He gave her back her money, and she browsed the shelves, and picked up a book about tarot cards. “You’ll need a pack to go with that,” the boy said, when she got to the cash desk. “Otherwise you won’t get the idea. There are different sorts, shall I show you? There’s Egyptian tarot. There’s Shakespeare tarot. Do you like Shakespeare?”
As if, she thought. She was the last customer of the evening. He closed up the shop and they went to the pub. He had a room in a shared flat. In bed he kept pressing her clit with his finger, as if he were inputting a sale on the cash machine: saying, Helen, is that all right for you? She’d given him a wrong name, and she hated it, that he couldn’t see through to what she was really called. She’d thought Gavin was useless: but honestly! In the end she faked it, because she was bored and she was getting cramp. The Shakespeare boy said, Helen, that was great for me too.
It was the tarot that started her off. Before that she had been just like everybody, reading her horoscope in the morning paper. She wouldn’t have described herself as superstitious or interested in the occult in any way. The next book she bought—from a different bookshop—was An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts. Occult, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don’t, for example, look in trousers.
She had left that original tarot pack in the boy’s room, inadvertently. She wondered if he had ever taken it out and looked at the pictures; whether he ever thought of her, a mysterious stranger, a passing Queen of Hearts. She thought of buying another set, but what she read in the handbook baffled and bored her. Seventy-eight cards! Better employ someone qualified to read them for you. She began to visit a woman in Isleworth, but it turned out that her specialty was the crystal ball. The object sat between them on a black velvet cloth; she had expected it to be clear, because that’s what they said, crystal-clear, but to look into it was like looking into a cloud bank or into drifting fog.
“The clear ones are glass, dear,” the Sensitive explained. “You won’t get anything from those.” She rested her veined hands on the black velvet. “It’s the flaws that are vital,” she said. “The flaws are what you pay for. You will find some readers who prefer the black mirror. That is an option, of course.”
Colette raised her eyebrows.
“Onyx,” the woman said. “The best are beyond price. The more you look—but you have to know how to look—the more you see stirring in the depths.”
Colette asked straight out and heard that her crystal ball had set her back 500 pounds. “And then only because I have a special friend.” The psychic gained, in Colette’s eyes, a deal of prestige. She was avid to part with her 20 pounds for the reading. She drank in everything the woman said, and when she hit the Isleworth pavement, moss growing between its cracks, she was unable to remember a word of it.
She consulted a palmist a few times, and had her horoscope cast. Then she had Gavin’s done. She wasn’t sure that his chart was valid, because she couldn’t specify the time of his birth. “What do you want to know that for?” he’d said, when she asked him. She said it was of general interest to her, and he glared at her with extreme suspicion.
“I suppose you don’t know, do you?” she said. “I could ring your mum.”
“I very much doubt,” he’d said, “that my mother would have retained that piece of useless information, her brain being somewhat overburdened in my opinion with things like where is my plastic washball for my Persil, and what is the latest development in bloody EastEnders.”
The astrologer was unfazed by her ignorance. “Round it up,” he said, “round it down. Twelve noon is what we use. We always do it for animals.”
“For animals?” she’d said. “They have their horoscope done, do they?”
“Oh, certainly. It’s a valuable service, you see, for the caring owner who has a problem with a pet. Imagine, for instance, if you kept falling off your horse. You’d need to know, is this an ideal pairing? It could be a matter of life or death.”
“And do people know when their horse was born?”
“Frankly, no. That’s why we have a strategy to approximate. And as for your partner—if we say noon that’s fine, but we then need latitude and longitude—so where do we imagine Hubby first saw the light of day?”
Colette sniffed. “He won’t say.”
“Probably a Scorpio ascendant there. Controls by disinformation. Or could be Pisces. Makes mysteries where none needed. Just joking! Relax and think back for me. His mummy must have dropped a hint at some point. Where exactly did the dear chap pop out, into this breathing world scarce half made up?”
“He grew up in Uxbridge. But you know, she might have had him in hospital.”
“So it could have been anywhere along the A40?”
“Could we just say, London?”
“We’ll put him on the meridian. Always a wise choice.”
After this incident, she found it difficult to regard Gavin as fully human. He was standardized on zero degrees longitude and twelve noon, like some bucking bronco, or a sad mutt with no pedigree. She did call his mum, one evening when she’d had a half bottle of wine and was feeling perverse.
“Renee, is that you?” she said.
Renee said, “How did you get my name?”
“It’s me,” she said, and Renee replied. “I’ve got replacement windows, and replacement doors. I’ve got a conservatory and the loft conversion’s coming next week. I never give to charity, thank you, and I’ve planned my holiday for this year, and I had a new kitchen when you were last in my area.”
“It’s about Gavin,” she said. “It’s me, Colette. I need to know when he was born.”
“Take my name off your list,” her mother-in-law said. “And if you must call me, could you not call during my programme? It’s one of my few remaining pleasures.” There was a pause, as if she were going to put the receiver down. Then she spoke again. “Not that I need any others. I’ve had my suite recovered. I have a spa bath already. And a case of vintage wine. And a stair lift to help me keep my independence. Have you got that? Are you taking notice? Bugger off.”
Click.
Colette held the phone. Daughter-in-law of fourteen months, spurned by his mother. She replaced the receiver, and walked into the kitchen. She stood by the double sink, mastering herself. “Gavin,” she called, “do you want peas or green beans?”
There was no answer. She stalked into the sitting room. Gavin, his bare feet on the sofa arm, was reading What Car?
“Peas or green beans?” she asked.
No reply.
“Gavin!” she said.
“With wot?”
“Cutlets.”
“What’s that?”
“Lamb. Lamb chops.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. Both.”
“You can’t.” Her voice shook. “Two green veg, you can’t.”
“Who says?”
“Your mother,” she said; she felt she could say anything, as he never listened.
“When?”
“Just now on the phone.”
“My mother was on the phone?”
“Just now.”
“Bloody amazing.” He shook his head and flicked over a page.
“Why? Why should it be?”
“Because she’s dead.”
“What? Renee?” Colette sat down on the sofa arm: later, when she told the story, she would say, well, at that point, my legs went from under me. But she would never be able to recapture the sudden fright, the weakness that ran through her body, her anger, her i
ndignation, the violent exasperation that possessed her. She said, “What the hell do you mean, she’s dead?”
“It happened this morning. My sis rang. Carole.”
“Is this a joke? I need to know. Is this a joke? Because if it is, Gavin, I’ll kneecap you.”
Gavin raised his eyebrows, as if to say, why would it be funny?
“I didn’t suggest it was,” she said at once: why wait for him to speak? “I asked if it was your idea of a joke.”
“God help anybody who made a joke around here.”
Colette laid her hand on her rib cage, behind which something persistently fluttered. She stood up. She walked into the kitchen. She stared at the ceiling. She took a deep breath. She came back. “Gavin?”
“Mm?”
“She’s really dead?”
“Mm.”
She wanted to hit him. “How?”
“Heart.”
“Oh, God! Have you no feeling? You can sit there, going peas or beans—”
“You went that,” he said reasonably.
“Weren’t you going to tell me? If I hadn’t said, your mother was on the phone—”
Gavin yawned. “What’s the hurry? I’d have told you.”
“You mean you might just have mentioned it? When you got around to it? When would that have been?”
“After the food.” She gaped at him. He said, with some dignity, “I can’t mention when I’m hungry.”
Colette bunched her fingers into fists, and held them at chest height. She was short of breath, and the flutter inside her chest had subdued to a steady thump. At the same time an uneasy feeling filled her, that anything she could do was inadequate; she was performing someone else’s gestures, perhaps from an equivalent TV moment where news of a sudden death is received. But what are the proper gestures when a ghost’s been on the phone? She didn’t know. “Please. Gavin,” she said. “Put down What Car? Just … look at me, will you? Now tell me what happened.”