The one that got away

There is no extract from the novel this week. The chapter I was hoping to post didn’t work out. (This usually means it’s not the right place for it and that it will come later in the novel.) I took a day out to reset my brain with a new chapter and fell ill with one of the dreaded migraines.

There may have been a connection as the chapter that got away deals with a painful subject. However I’m also doing a lot of clearing out of my psychical attic since my mother’s death (two years ago) with the help of the wonderful Louise Hay (and her book You Can Heal Your Life) and I’d got in a bit of a tizz about several things.

In the meantime, the weather here has been divine, with spring bursting out all over. On Friday Frog dragged me from my sick bed and we went for a (very slow – with lots of rests) walk by the sea. I hoped to take some pictures for you to make up for the lack of Novel but as most of my energy was occupied with keeping upright, the results were slightly low key. Here they are anyway.

The view from the cliffs.
The sea was glassy calm and several people were trying to swim
(standing with their swimmers on, in water up to their knees, egged on by their dogs).

Blue gromwell, a rare wildflower at its northernmost here by the sea in the south-west.
I'm always pleased to see it again each year. It's related to lungwort.

Blackthorn blossom and some very pregnant sheep.
'Enjoy the lambing experience' said a sign at the field gate. I wondered what that meant.

I hope to be back with Jane and co next week.

The Banker's Niece 21: Cupidity and lust

1974

Cupidity and lust are on the prowl

            In Princes Street and Moorgate, cheek by jowl;

            While on the Stock Exchange and other marts,

            The talk is partly money, partly tarts.

Mr Turner was different from the other men working at the Bank. His name was ‘Mr’ for a start, rather than Kelvin or Rob or Neil. He was older and quieter and only worked two days a week. He asked Jane about herself instead of whistling at her or ogling her or trying to grope her. So when he gave her a copy of a poem he’d written comparing the West Country and London it occurred to her that he might be trying to warn her.

    She had to look up the meaning of ‘cupidity’ and was surprised to find that, while it did derive from Cupid the god of love, it meant covetousness in general, or even avarice – the desire for money. She supposed that this was the meaning Mr Turner intended.

She’d arrived at the Bank after six months as a temporary secretary, trudging from one dingy basement to another, being bossed about by dingy depressed women and doing all the jobs that no one else wanted to do, like sorting out twenty years of dusty box-files or making three hundred photocopies of five-hundred-page documents.

    The building was so new that she could see workmen’s hobnailed footprints in the chalky dust outside the lifts and when she arrived at the Bank’s offices on the fourteenth floor she could hear drilling in the floors above. She almost expected the carpet to unroll in front of her.

    She walked into one big space painted white and flooded with light from floor to ceiling windows. From such a height London looked almost colourful: she could see dabs of brown and even green in amongst the grey. In any case, the metropolis didn’t need to concern her any more. It was a different world.

    A stick-thin woman with staring eyes, dressed like a man in charcoal pinstripes, marched up to her.

    ‘Are you the temp?’ she demanded.

    Jane nodded.

    ‘This way.’

    The woman weaved her tiny hips between desks and chairs, many of them still being shunted into position, and Jane scurried after her.

    ‘Here,’ she said, pointing to an empty desk pushed against two other desks at which sat two young men, one with long blond hair and the other with short dark hair.

    ‘Good luck,’ she said, and vanished.

    ‘Well hell-ohhh,’ said the men in unison.

The Bank kept asking her back, and she kept going back. And now they wanted to give her a permanent job as a Trainee Research Analyst.

    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she wailed to Fiona, gulping from a large glass of Dubonnet and bitter lemon.

    Alcohol and food kept her going these days. Chocolate punctuated her days at work. She went to winebars at lunchtime. She bought sticks of orange-wrapped smoked cheese to accompany her on the grisly walk back from Fulham Broadway tube station in the evening. As soon as she arrived at the house she dived for her bottles in the fridge. When she was at home in the evenings she couldn’t stop eating – toast, cereal, biscuits.

    The only time she didn’t eat was when she went to parties, so she tried to do that as often as possible. There was no shortage of invitations, given that she had relatives of all shapes and sizes living in the capital, as well as acquaintances from home (the children of friends of her parents whom she’d met at parties in the holidays), and even the occasional schoolfriend. Sometimes she managed three parties in one night. Men did ask her out on her own as well, but she tried to avoid accepting those sorts of invitations. They were too complicated.

    ‘Why’s that?’ asked Fiona.

    Fee, as Jane called her, was tackling a mound of washing-up left by the other tenants, Jane included. Because the house belonged to Fee’s parents, she occasionally took responsibility for it, which usually meant storming up and down the stairs shouting at them all that the place was a pigsty and they were a load of lazy slobs, both of which statements were true. It also meant that she did most of the housework.

    Jane was standing next to Fee holding a tea towel and making sure her glass was safe.

    She’d spent most of the night writing down all the arguments for and against the job. The lists had taken pages and pages of her reporters’ notebook. It was a good thing Fee knew her so well. She didn’t have to repeat everything to her

    ‘I know I should take it,’ she said. ‘I know my father would think it was an opportunity,’

    Even as she said the words, everything inside her was screaming ‘No!’ But what did she know? What sort of a success had she made of her life so far?

    She tipped her glass up and downed the second half of its contents.

    ‘OK,’ said Fee, hands in sink, scouring violently. ‘So why don’t you want to?’

    Fee wasn’t conventionally pretty but her features were always doing something and that made you want to look at her. Jane’s mother called her ‘jolie laide’. She certainly had a stream of boys telephoning her, visiting her and taking her out. But none of them lasted, and Jane knew why.

    Fee had fallen in love with a New Zealand businessman (how they’d met Jane didn’t know) with whom she spent mad weeks on his visits to London two or three times a year and to whom she then had to say goodbye each time he went home, back to his wife and children. She was plotting a visit to his country. He wasn’t going to get away.

    Because of that – because of the parallel with Jane’s life – and in spite of Fee being two years older than Jane, Jane could talk to her. She’d never had a close girlfriend before.

    Jane went to the fridge and sloshed more Dubonnet into her glass, topping it with a smidge of bitter lemon.

    ‘The people terrify me,’ she said.

    Fee looked up. A small wrinkle had appeared between her eyes. ‘How d’you mean?’

    Jane’s first thought was of daleks. She remembered nightmarish shots of the robots rolling through London – places she knew – in one of the Dr Who stories. Both she and Ollie as well as their mother had watched the television through their fingers. But daleks were too slow and not at all charming. She thought of ‘ravening hordes’, but they were too hairy and badly dressed. She thought of zombies, but they were too stupid.

    ‘All they think about is money,’ she said at last.

    ‘Well it is the City,’ said Fee, reaching for a black-encrusted frying-pan and dumping it in the greyish water.

    ‘I know,’ cried Jane, twisting her tea-towel, and thinking of her father who also worked in the capital’s financial district. ‘But it’s what they do with the money.’

    ‘What do they do with it?’ asked Fee.

    From what Jane had gathered over her year working there, the Bank lent money to businesses and most of those businesses ‘developed property’ and that appeared to mean building office blocks. But where did they build them? No one ever asked that, or any other question related to human health and happiness. All they ever asked was, ‘Will this project be profitable?’

    And she should know, seeing as Kelvin and Alan, the blond man and the dark one she’d met when she first arrived, were Research Analysts, writing reports about the companies to whom the Bank might lend money, and she typed their reports.

    ‘They build,’ wailed Jane, ‘and for all I know they could be building on the countryside. They could be destroying nature and I could be helping to make that happen.’

    She downed her drink in one.

    Fee took her hands out of the filthy water and dried them on Jane’s tea-towel. She took a few minutes to answer. Jane waited by the fridge.

    ‘I suppose’, said Fee slowly, as if thinking while she spoke, ‘if you’re already part of the system, it doesn’t really matter what part that is.’

    Relief washed over Jane. She didn’t quite understand what Fee meant, but somehow she saw that she didn’t need to take the whole weight of the world on her shoulders. Not everything was her fault.

    Sometimes she wondered if Fee was the only reason she stayed in London.

The trouble was, it wasn’t only her work at the Bank that made her feel bad about herself.

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The Banker's Niece 20: Leaving home

1972

‘Are you sure you won’t regret it?’ said Ollie.

    ‘God no,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t stand the thought of any more academic work. I want to get away. Live a bit. Be free.’

    ‘I suppose you could always go to university later,’ said Ollie.

    ‘Maybe,’ said Jane without enthusiasm.

    Jane and her younger brother were out walking, following a path that wound around the edge of the Downs. Jane had finished her A levels the day before and Ollie was home from school for the weekend. It was late June and baking hot.

    Jane wore the denim shorts with the frayed hem that she’d made herself by ripping the bottoms off a pair of jeans. On top she wore an old white shirt of her father’s with the sleeves rolled up, and on her feet her school plimsolls, now rather grubby. She was pretty pleased with the outfit.  Luckily she’d managed to get out of the house before her mother saw her and said something that made her crumple.

   ‘But you’re only sixteen,’ said Ollie. ‘How will you manage on your own in London?’

    For a moment she wavered but then she realised that being young was the reason for her plan.

    She’d been young for her class throughout her school career. It had started when she arrived at junior school already able to read and they’d immediately moved her up a year. She could read because she loved books, not – in her opinion - because she was clever. But once labelled clever, the teachers complained whenever she turned in a poor piece of work. She ‘wasn’t doing herself justice’, she was ‘resting on her laurels’. (She had to ask her mother what that meant.) She’d felt like she was always treading water. She could never float. She remembered waking up one morning and thinking, every day there’s something to dread.

    And now she’d had enough.

    ‘Seventeen next week,’ she retorted, ‘and I’ve arranged to rent a room in a house with four other people.’

    ‘That’s clever,’ said Ollie.

    Jane was pleased with herself too, even if the house belonged to friends of her parents, who’d bought it for their daughter Fiona when she moved to London to study physiotherapy. Jane hadn’t met Fiona yet but they’d spoken on the phone and she sounded all right – as far as someone related to friends of her parents could be.

    She was glad Ollie approved of the house at least. He’d always been the sensible one of the two of them. Even though he cried at the end of each holiday, he’d never complained about being sent away to boarding school. He’d always known that he wanted to be a doctor and was already gearing his school subject choices to that end. Sometimes she wished she could be more like him.

    ‘And what will you do?’ asked Ollie.

    ‘Oh anything,’ said Jane. ‘Secretarial work probably. A friend told me about a course that only takes six weeks so I might do that.’

    She hadn’t fancied any of the careers suggested by the school – teaching, the Civil Service, the Law. They all sounded like an extension of school or inundated with men like her father – which was the last thing she needed.

    How could she be expected to know what she wanted at this stage anyway? She had no experience of the world. It would be enough to earn some money.

    Jane wiped the sweat from her face with a sleeve. The morning sun blazed from a cloudless blue sky. There was no shade on the path and the ground, so black and squelchy in winter, was cooked to a hard pale-grey. Flinty stones poked out and dug into her feet through the soles of her plimsolls.

    To their left the slope fell away to fields and the village where they lived. Seeing it all so small made her realise just how much of the world there was to find out about and how impatient she was to do so.
    To their right the slope rose through grass nibbled flat by sheep and then through bushes and small trees to the tall silent beechwoods. These stretched for miles and were full of little footpaths only a fraction of which she and Ollie had explored. Jane had heard of plans to build a motorway through the woods, part of a ring around London. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

    ‘Phew,’ said Ollie. ‘It’s hot.’

    Jane shot him a glance. He did look a bit strange. She could see damp strips in his light-brown hair and his black eyes glittered like they did when he had a temperature. According to family lore, he’d been very ill as a baby (with what, she couldn’t remember) and he still came down with something every time he overdid things. Her mother called him ‘delicate’.

    ‘Shall we go in the woods?’ she said. ‘It might be cooler there.’

    ‘Good idea,’ said Ollie.

    They started climbing a path through the scrub and Ollie whistled to let Bunty know where they were.

    Bunty, the gardener’s plump sandy dog, always came with them on their walks. She’d vanished into the undergrowth soon after they reached the start of the Downs but they knew where she was because of her woofles and whimpers as she raced after small animals. She raised her head now from a clump of brambles, noted their presence and vanished again.

    Jane knew how the dog felt. She loved the scrub too. It was untidy and wild and full of life. In the autumn, berries festooned it like Christmas decorations. Now, in midsummer, it hummed with bees and everywhere Jane looked she could see wildflowers. Why grown-ups bothered with gardens she couldn't imagine.

    Since her Wildflower Diary, a project in the first year at senior school, she knew all their names. That had been one of her best summers ever. She’d been out every day walking the Downs with Bunty, looking for plants. She pretended she was one of those mad Victorian traveller-women in the big hats. She'd never wanted to come home. Each year since, the flowers have returned and each year she has greeted them like old friends. 
    The orchids in particular thrilled her as she knew how rare they were and how particular to the Downs. As she looked now she could see that the ground around the path was thickly dotted with the plump bright-pink blooms of pyramidal orchid. She hoped that when they reached the edge of the woods she would find the mysterious bee orchids again.

    Ollie was striding ahead, scrambling up the slope in front of her, so he couldn’t have been feeling too bad. These days his legs were almost as long as hers. She hurried to catch up with him. She could have a proper wildflower-spot another time.

    'What does the school think of your plans?' he asked.
    'Oh, they just think I'm taking a year out because of my age. After all some universities won't take you until you're eighteen.'
    Ollie nodded. ‘And what about Mum and Dad?’

    About two years ago they’d decided between them – well, Jane had come up with the idea and Ollie had agreed – that they were too old to carry on calling their parents ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Their parents didn’t seem to have noticed the change however and still used the old names when talking about each other to Jane and Ollie. It was slightly annoying but better, she supposed, than the usual disparaging remarks they made about things she said.

    ‘Oh you know,’ laughed Jane. ‘Dad said something like “I never went to university and it never did me any harm” and Mum said “I’m sure you’ll meet just as many nice people in London as you would at university”.’

    Ollie gave an unconvincing laugh and she wondered if he understood what she meant or whether he had any idea what it had been like for her left at home alone for five years with their parents. On the other hand, she’d never heard him say anything critical about anyone so maybe he thought she was being too harsh.

    Jane lifted her hair to let some air on to her scalp and neck.

    Little did any of them know, Ollie included, that her main aim in leaving home and heading for London was to find lots of ‘not-nice’ people, especially boys. She may have kept up with her older classmates on the academic front but on the social side she was way behind.

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The Banker's Niece 19: Jane has a bad day

Jane drums her fingers on Clio’s steering wheel. The road ahead of her is completely blocked by a small white pick-up and a vast black four-wheel-drive, parked side by side facing in opposite directions. The drivers, with their heads out of their windows, are deep in conversation. She’s been there for five minutes.

    Such behaviour is not unusual and when Jane first encountered it she found it quaint. She laughed about it with William over their evening drinks.

    ‘You realise that for many people who work in the countryside', he said, 'it’s the only social contact they have. Of course they’re going to take their time. And anyway it’s extremely rude to drive past somebody you know without stopping to talk to them.’

    Jane’s mind boggled not only at the isolation William’s words revealed but also that you might pass an acquaintance in a car in the middle of nowhere. How come, with all the people she knew in London – many hundreds probably if not thousands, she’d never once bumped into any of them by accident?

    ‘You should get out and introduce yourself,’ he said. ‘Join in. They probably know who you are already.’

    But she never has, and she certainly isn’t going to today.

    Rain is streaming down the car’s windscreen and wind is sending a hail of twigs on to its roof. Every so often an extra-strong gust shakes the vehicle like a dog who's making sure that the rabbit clamped in its teeth is properly dead.

    Both men look extremely dubious and as soon as she stopped she engaged the door locks. The one in the four-wheel-drive has long curly black hair and whenever he glances in Jane’s direction she gets the impression he’s laughing at her. All she can see of the one in the pick-up is the back of a bald pink head, rolls of neck fat and an arm bursting out of a red-checked shirt.

    Worst of all, it’s already ten to nine and if she doesn’t get a move on soon she’s going to be late for work again. No way does she want to encourage the conversation.

    She’s already encountered a flood which involved a long detour round unfamiliar lanes with only her new compass to guide her, and then she spent ten minutes crawling behind a vast brown and white horse and its vast female rider, her only amusement working out which bottom was bigger.

    What else is in store? Fallen trees? Hedge-cutting? Stray sheep? Cattle crossing? Bewildered rabbits refusing to get out of the way? She’s had them all at one time or another.

    Oh for those simple journeys to work in London. A twenty-minute walk if the weather was fine and a twenty-minute bus ride if it wasn’t. Totally predictable, totally anonymous, no animals of any kind.

She stops outside Henry’s office and checks her watch. Nine o’clock exactly. Phew. She’s managed to make it on time, even if on time wasn’t good enough for her father who served in the navy during the war. ‘If you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late,’ he used to say. Blow that. Why can’t he get out of her head?

    She’s run all the way from the carpark, waving a quick hello to Lauren in reception before taking the stairs two at a time. She hasn’t even stopped to leave her coat and bag in her office. She’s still panting as she pushes open the door.

    Sam is already there. She sits the opposite side of the pale oak table, her laptop open in front of her and a mug of coffee by her side. A brief interval of sun haloes her fluff of pink hair. She’s wearing a black polo-neck and black leather jacket, as ever making Jane feel dowdy even though she thought she looked quite chic first thing when she put on her navy cords and navy Shetland jumper.

    Henry has his back to her and is bending over some papers. He’s in butter-yellow moleskin trousers today, the exact same shade as his hair. She wonders if he chose them deliberately.

    The two of them appear to be sharing a joke.

    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ says Jane, as much to announce her presence as anything, seeing as neither of them has yet looked in her direction.

    ‘Oh for f--k’s sake,’ says Sam, raising her head a fraction. ‘She’s hardly through the door and already she’s apologising.’

    ‘Sorry,’ says Jane again before she can stop herself.

    Sam bursts into raucous laughter, opening her mouth so wide that Jane can see her rows of silver fillings.

    Jane pulls out a chair the near side of the table where she always sits. She may be the last in every time, but at least she gets the view.

    Henry, to one side of her, carries on shuffling papers.

    The offices take up the south-facing arm of Courtney Manor stables, with the editorial department on the first floor and everyone else underneath. Sam, Jane and the Editorial Manager squash into half the first floor while Henry has the other half. His plate-glass windows give on to a landscape that includes at least half of rural Devon and stretches all the way to the long curves of Dartmoor.

    Jane concentrates on the view in an effort to soothe her head. It was only yesterday, Tuesday, that she crawled out of her sick-bed, and even then she didn’t get dressed. She spent the day in her dressing-gown stuffing down food – scrambled eggs on toast, falafel and onion bhajis bought as nibbles for William, soup out of the freezer.

    The migraine, which started on Saturday in Muddicombe village shop at the end of her walk, turned out to be more vicious than any migraine she’s endured for years. It was like one from the old days, when she first began to suffer them, with both ‘upward vomit’ and ‘downward laxative’ as Chaucer so neatly put it. It’s amazing how these literary references return at appropriate times. Her old English teacher would be proud of her.

    Migraines are fickle things. They can vanish in a few hours or rumble on for days. From her current general yukkiness she fears this is one of the latter kind. She probably should have spent another day at home but she was worried about taking too much time off work as she doesn’t yet feel established. She supposes it’s the result of having a job that didn’t exist before. Not that it bothers Sam.

    It’s a pity she’s walked straight into one of the weekly meetings. She hoped to avoid this week’s as they’re supposed to take place on Mondays but unfortunately it was one of those times when Henry was ‘delayed’ in London. God knows what he gets up to there. He says he’s ‘networking’ – trawling for new authors, keeping up with publishing trends – but does he really need to do that now he’s employed her and Sam? It’s a bit annoying and she wonders how Mrs Henry (as she’s always known) puts up with it.

    ‘For f--k’s sake,’ says Sam again. ‘Take your coat off. Settle down. Let’s get on with this débâcle.’

    She pronounces the last word ‘debbackle’ and Jane wonders whether that’s deliberate. She sees Henry wince but it’s difficult to know which line Sam has stepped over this time. There are so many.

    ‘Excuse me,’ says Henry, straightening up at last. ‘I’m in charge.’

    She might have guessed. He lets Sam get away with homicide but some things are sacred: his family heritage, his three out-of-control wolfhounds and his authority.

    ‘No you’re not,’ says Sam. ‘You’re never here.’

    Too true, thinks Jane. Why couldn’t she have said that herself?

‘Roof leak gone?’ asks Lauren.

    Jane nods. She can’t speak at the moment, as migraines both interfere with her ability to process words and make her weepy, which is an awkward combination.

    ‘I knew Vinnie would sort you out,’ says Lauren, biting into a home-made white bread and ham sandwich. ‘He’s a good lad.’

    It’s lunchtime and they’re sitting under the eaves of the middle arm of the stables. Because the Manor is a long way from the nearest pub or shop, Henry has fitted the space out as a staff restroom, installing a kitchen at one end and furnishing the rest with low tables and armchairs.

    ‘How about that back door of yours?’ says Lauren, ripping the foil off a strawberry yoghurt. ‘Not sticking any longer?’

    Jane shakes her head. She’s clasping a packet of her own home-made sandwiches - tahini and cucumber in organic wholemeal spelt – but hasn’t managed to open it yet.

    ‘Excellent,’ nods Lauren. ‘Brad’s very busy so I’m glad he got out to you so quickly.’

    It was Jane’s domestic dramas that first drew the two of them together, in spite of Lauren being thirty-six years younger than Jane, eight inches shorter and three stone heavier.

    One morning Jane just happened to mention that there was an atrocious smell in her garden. She’d written it off as one of those inexplicable rural phenomena but Lauren interpreted it differently.

    ‘That’ll be your septic tank,’ she pronounced. ‘Probably needs emptying. I’ll get my cousin Nige out. He works for Shhhifters.’

    Jane had no idea she possessed a septic tank, let alone what they did. Come to think of it, she still doesn’t. It’s not something she wants to pry into.

    Lauren it turned out lives in Muddicombe like Jane, what’s more from a family that has lived in Muddicombe since before records began. She's therefore related to or knows everyone, and whatever Jane’s problem finds someone to deal with it. It’s like having an entrée to the local mafia.

    Jane tries to reciprocate by giving her small editorial jobs. Lauren has been in reception at Courtney Press ever since leaving school six years earlier and is desperate to move on.

    Yoghurt finished, Lauren pulls open a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and starts browsing on her phone.

    ‘Hey,’ she crunches. ‘This is interesting. You know that Rick Rockford? Rick the Rock. The lead singer of Minotaur. Quite hunky for someone that old.’

    Jane stares at her.

    Lauren, head down, carries on reading. ‘It says here that he’s retiring from life on the road and coming back to live in Devon. I must tell my gran that. I’m pretty certain she went to school with his mum. Did you know he came from Devon?’ She looks up.

    ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Are you all right?’

    Tears are streaming down Jane’s face. She doesn’t know where they come from or why they’re suddenly here.

    ‘I’m not sure,’ she quavers.

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