She started to cry. Jo reached out and took Caroline’s hand, and held it in silence. She caressed it, gently, and her touch was warm and reassuring.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. That’s bad luck, Caroline. Rotten luck. But that’s the problem with men. They’re not really interested in us – not really. They use us. But that’s all.”
Caroline sniffed. Jo handed her a tissue, which she used to blow her nose. “I don’t know if all of them do. Some, maybe. Not all.”
Jo shook her head. “No,” she said. “All of them, Caroline. All of them use us.”
“But how has he used me? I don’t see how you can say James has used me? If anybody’s used anybody here, it’s … it’s me. I’ve used him.”
“He’s used you subtly,” said Jo. “And that’s often the worst way of being used. You don’t know it, you see, and then you realise later that you’ve been used. And that hurts – it really hurts.”
Chapter 59: The Reassurances of Home
“So what do I do?” Caroline asked. “What do I say to him?”
Jo shrugged. “I don’t see that you need to say anything to him. I thought you had gone over that ground. He’s told you what he feels – or doesn’t feel, in his case. So now you both know and you can move on.”
“Move on?” People always talked about moving on, but Caroline wondered precisely what was involved in moving on. She assumed that you had to have somewhere to move to before you actually moved on; where did she have to move on to?
There was a faint smile on Jo’s lips as she said, “I take it that you’re sure about yourself?”
Again Caroline was puzzled. “Look, I’m sorry, you must think me really stupid, but I’m not sure what you mean.”
“What I mean,” said Jo, “is this: are you sure that men are where you’re at?”
“That men are where I’m at?”
“Yes. Do you like men? Are you sure?”
Caroline looked at Jo. “What about you?”
“This isn’t about me,” said Jo quickly. “It’s about you. I’ve already moved on. You’re the one who’s to decide whether to move on or …”
“Or stay where I am?” Was that the alternative to moving on? she wondered.
“Yes, that’s about it.” Jo paused. She was watching Caroline closely. “There are alternatives, you know. You don’t have to stay in the place you’re at.”
Caroline thought quickly. No. Female solidarity was important, and sustained a lot of women – but she did not want to be too solid.
“I don’t think so, Jo,” she said quietly. “I know that for lots of people, that’s … well, that’s where they’re at. But I don’t think so. Not in my case.”
Jo looked down. “Fair enough. In that case, just give it time. Move on, and wait.”
Caroline was intrigued. Moving on and waiting seemed to be a new option.
Jo explained. “Be single. There’s no pressure. Enjoy your life. Wait for somebody else to come along. He will. Eventually.” She paused. “Does that make sense to you?”
Caroline nodded.
“And here’s another bit of advice,” she said. “You’ve got a home, haven’t you?”
“You mean parents? All of that?”
“Yes, all of that. Your olds. People forget about them, but they’re always there, aren’t they? Go and chill with them.”
Caroline resisted an urge to laugh. The idea of chilling with her parents in Cheltenham … And yet, and yet …
“I’m not sure if they do chilling,” she said. The picture came to her of her mother, with her pearls and her county attitudes. And her poor father, with his utter certainties and his tendency to talk in platitudes. There was a vague sense of failure there, which was strange, as in many terms he had succeeded, certainly by the standards of those with whom he mixed. Neither of her parents had moved on, she decided. They were both still in the place they were at.
“It’s hard for me to get back home,” said Jo. “When I was at uni over in Melbourne and my folks were back in Perth, you couldn’t go back for the weekend. But sometimes you could go for a week, maybe. I remember feeling really bad once. Something had happened. Something messy and I felt all raw inside. You know that feeling, when everything is just pointless and you feel that you’re on the edge of a void – a void of meaninglessness? That feeling?”
Caroline nodded.
“I went and bought a cheap flight back to Perth. I didn’t even tell my folks that I was coming back – I just got on the plane, and when I reached Perth I jumped in a taxi at the airport. Coming into Perth is fabulous, you know. Suddenly there are the hills – we’ve got these low hills just outside the city, you know – and there they were with all their trees, and there were the houses, with their large yards and gardens. And the smell of it. The eucalyptus. The dryness, which has a smell, you know. The taxi driver in his blue shorts. And I started to cry, there in the taxi, and he was really sympathetic, in the way that these guys sometimes can be. Like a father. And I said that he shouldn’t worry, that I was just pleased to be home, which of course was exactly how I felt.
“And then I went in and surprised my mother in the kitchen. She gave a shriek – a really loud shriek, a scream even. She was making scones – she makes these really good cheese scones for my old man – and her hands were sticky with the mixture. She screamed and ran to put her arms around me, flour and all that stuff, and it was all over my shoulders.
“And then my dad came in to find out what the fuss was. He was wearing shorts and a singlet. That’s what he wears when it’s hot – it was the hot season then. He looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Strewth!’ That’s all he said. He just smiled. I tell you, Caroline, it was all I could do to stop myself bawling my eyes out.
“Because, you see, that’s what home’s all about, isn’t it? Scones and singlets and everything the same as it always was. And if you get a dose of that – of all that familiar stuff that you thought you never wanted to see again – then it sorts everything out, it really does.”
Jo had more to say. “I went over the road. We have these neighbours who are really good friends, you see, and they were all in the house. They have a daughter who’s my age and she was at uni in Perth. She was there with a friend of hers I knew a bit, and we sat and talked about people we all knew and hadn’t seen for a while. And I asked them what was going on in Perth and they said nothing. So I laughed. Because that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want anything to have changed.”
She paused now, and looked enquiringly at Caroline. “Can you go home for the weekend?”
Caroline said that she could. Cheltenham was a couple of hours in the train. Then, on impulse, she said, “Come with me, Jo. Why don’t you come home with me?”
Jo did not reply immediately. But then she accepted. She had nothing planned, she said – or nothing she could not cancel.
“There’s nothing to do there,” warned Caroline.
“That’s why you’re going,” said Jo. “Remember?”
“And I’m not sure what you’ll make of my folks.”
“Or what they’ll make of me?”
Caroline looked out of the window. “They’re not too bad,” she said. “In their way.” Her father would not wear a singlet. And her mother bought her scones.
Jo looked at Caroline with concern. “Feeling better?” she asked.
Caroline nodded. “Yes. And thanks for … for helping. Thanks a lot.”
“It’s what flatmates are for,” said Jo. “That, and making dinner for their flatmate when she’s feeling a bit low. Like now.”
“Really?”
“Yes, why not? I’m going to open a bottle of wine and pour us a glass. Then I’ll make dinner.”
Caroline smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. What’ll you make?”
“Risotto, I think,” said Jo.
Chapter 60: Outside Fortnum & Mason
Rupert Porter walked back down the corridor in the Ragg Porter Literary Agency in a state of mild asto
nishment. He was normally not one to allow another to have the last word, but he had found himself completely at a loss when Andrea, the agency’s receptionist, had casually referred to her conversation with the person – if it was really a person – who had been sitting in the waiting room. It was a thoroughly ridiculous situation, and as he returned to his office, he went over in his mind each absurd development.
At the heart of it all was Errol Greatorex, Barbara Ragg’s American author, who claimed – and it was an utterly risible claim – to be writing the biography of the yeti, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. But Greatorex was no random crank; he had a significant body of publications behind him, including two travel books that had won awards in Canada and the United States, and had been published in London too, by a reputable publisher. He had also written for popular geographical magazines and the Melbourne Age, all of which amounted to a perfectly respectable set of credentials.
Greatorex’s career suggested that he must have developed a healthy degree of intellectual caution. How, then, Rupert wondered, could somebody like him swallow the claim of some fakir that he was a yeti, of all things? Surely the whole point about yetis was that they were an intermediate primate – not quite homo sapiens, even if given to walking erect and leaving intriguing footprints in the snow. That was the legend, but, like all legends, it could hardly stand up to the investigative standards of our times. There were no mysteries left, none at all; not in an age of satellite photography, when the remotest corners of the globe were laid bare by unsleeping, all-seeing cameras. The Loch Ness monster, the yeti, Lord Lucan – all of these would have been seen if they really existed.
Yet many people were gullible, and when you combined this inherent gullibility with a wish to believe in things beyond the ordinary you ended up with a whole raft of myth. Errol Greatorex was either a charlatan, cynically prepared to exploit his credulous readers, or he was himself the victim of an even greater charlatan – this Himalayan type pretending to be the yeti. And it might not be all that difficult; one had only to be tall – yetis had always been thought to be on the tall side – and markedly hirsute. There were plenty of hairy people around, and one might expect that some of them were tall. So if a tall, hairy person, although homo sapiens, were to come up with a story of being taken from a remote valley and put in some mission school, there to be educated by … by Jesuits, perhaps, who had always claimed, “Give us the boy until the age of seven and we will give you the man”, might one not say the same thing of a yeti? “Give us the yeti until the age of seven …” Rupert frowned. He was not sure whether the Jesuits ever actually said that. Perhaps it was one of those chance remarks, dropped as an aside, that were seized upon and magnified out of all proportion. Had Margaret Thatcher ever really said, “There’s no such thing as society”? That statement had gone on to haunt her, although what she had in fact said – and Rupert had this on good authority, although very few people knew it – was, “There’s no such thing as hockey”. It was a curious remark to make, and she certainly should not have made it, but it was not the same as saying that there was no such thing as society. Had people heard her correctly and understood that she was talking about hockey, they might have been forewarned that she would go on to say a number of other very peculiar things.
He reached his office, and stopped. Thinking on these matters had made him momentarily forget about what Andrea had said to Errol Greatorex in the reception. She had said that the tall hairy person had gone off to do some shopping and would meet him in front of Fortnum & Mason at twelve. He looked at his watch. It was now ten o’clock, which meant that in two hours anybody who just happened to be walking along that particular section of Piccadilly would actually see this person who claimed to be the yeti. Even if there were other people waiting outside the shop – and there were many, he imagined, who met friends at midday outside Fortnum & Mason – it would not require a great deal of skill to identify a yeti, or a soi-disant yeti, among them.
Rupert smirked. If he went there himself, he could see this impostor. He could then tackle la Ragg when she came back from her jaunt to Scotland and reveal to her that he had investigated her so-called literary scoop and discovered it to be a squalid fraud – like so many much-vaunted publishing sensations.
Shortly before twelve, he left the office. As he walked past Andrea’s desk, he stopped, on impulse, and told her where he was going.
“I’m just off to Fortnum & Mason,” he said. “I might bump into that … person who was here with Errol Greatorex.”
Andrea nodded. “All right.”
“If anything happens to me, Andrea,” he said quietly, “you will remember what I said, won’t you? Fortnum & Mason. Greatorex.”
Andrea nodded again. Why was he making such a fuss? What did he imagine could possibly happen to him at Fortnum & Mason? He’s very peculiar, she thought. I won’t be surprised if they cart him off one of these days – not in the least surprised.
Chapter 61: In Fortnum & Mason
It did not take half an hour to walk from the Ragg Porter offices to Fortnum & Mason. In normal conditions, when the throngs of visitors milling about Piccadilly Circus were not too thick, it would take barely ten minutes to make the journey; when the streets were crowded, one might need a little longer. It depended, too, on how quickly one walked –Rupert was a quick walker, especially now, when he was keenly impatient to see whether there really would be a yeti outside the famous store. And understandably so: who would not find their pace quickening with the knowledge that there lay before them the chance of seeing that most elusive of creatures, the Abominable Snowman?
Of course Rupert knew full well – and reminded himself as he made his way – that whatever he was going to see outside Fortnum & Mason, it was not going to be a yeti. If a mysterious tall figure did indeed turn up, then that was all he would be – a mysterious tall figure. And if Rupert had the chance to see him at close quarters, and he intended to ensure exactly that, he was certain that his suspicions would be confirmed. Fraudsters and tricksters were usually rather banal types, he told himself, and this tall figure would probably be revealed as coming from Croydon, or Tooting, or somewhere like that. He would definitely not be Himalayan.
At a quarter to twelve, Rupert found himself opposite Fortnum & Mason. Ahead of him, hanging from the façade of the Royal Academy, were great banners, fluttering in the breeze, advertising the current show. Rupert was a member of the Friends of the Royal Academy and made a point of going to all the exhibitions. He had not seen this one and for a moment, forgetting his mission, he wondered whether he should wander in and see The Later Bonnard. But then he reminded himself why he was there, and looked back over the road to the stately grocery shop with its copper-green windows and elaborate chiming clock. His eye moved upwards to the warrant-holder’s display of royal arms between the third and fourth floors. He could not make out any legend below the device: perhaps they provided fruitcake to the palace, or chocolate, or even something prosaic like butter. It would be something like that, he thought –something needed for the thousands of sandwiches that the palace served each year at the garden parties. Rupert had read that the official figure for sandwiches fed to guests each year was eighty thousand, with the same number of slices of cake being served. It was profoundly inspiring: eighty thousand sandwiches – what other country, he wondered, came even near that?
He looked at his watch. He could hardly loiter on the pavement for fifteen minutes; apart from anything else, he wanted to be inconspicuous so as to get a good look at the stranger. Yetis were notoriously shy creatures, and if one were to appear in front of Fortnum & Mason and see somebody loitering on the pavement opposite, he would be bound to take fright. But then this was not a yeti, Rupert reminded himself. Even so, he did not want to be spotted by Errol Greatorex, who he knew was due to arrive there at midday, and accordingly he decided to cross the road and enter the shop. He could easily spend fifteen minutes looking at the displays of olive oil or some such; th
ere was a lot to see in Fortnum & Mason. Then, when the time was ripe, he would sidle towards the front door to see whether Greatorex’s mysterious companion had arrived.
Although the shop would be busy at lunchtime, when people from nearby offices took the opportunity to buy something in their lunch hour, it was still a little early for lunchtime crowds when Rupert went in, and there was no more than a handful of people walking along the aisles of the spacious food hall. He did not have a sweet tooth, and so the shelves of chocolates and sugared almonds held no charms for him. He was drawn instead to a display of china bowls of Patum Peperium; that was much more to his taste. These bowls, with their lids decorated with Victorian hunting scenes, were considerably larger than the normal white plastic containers of the famous anchovy paste. Rupert picked one up to admire it and found that it was surprisingly heavy. He replaced it carefully, but as he did so his sleeve caught a neighbouring bowl and sent it crashing to the floor. The heavy china container shattered with an astonishingly loud report – rather like that of a gun being fired. Rupert gasped as he saw what he had inadvertently done.