FOUR
Pamela was pampering. And the bath was almost too full for her to move without splashing scented water over the sides. It was that Zen moment of rightness. The silent emptiness of the house was real and in many ways beneficial. Even down to the freedom to leave the bathroom door open without fear of shocking Daniel or his friends. It was more than a month since she had stood at Euston waving. And she was just beginning to feel the benefits of liberation. There were sad moments, of course, but she did not want to think about those now.
She surprised herself by not going into the shop that morning. It was such a rare event that Jennifer, her partner, assumed she was ill. Pamela smiled to herself and decided that youth was wasted on the young. If she had said, ‘It is because I feel liberated . . .’ Jennifer would have told everyone she was being brave, and privately put it down to the menopause. Jennifer, at thirty-six, had done all her research in readiness. Terms such as natural progesterone and yam extract fell from her youthful lips and she was fond of saying that the future held no fear. Pamela wanted to say that she felt the same way but she would not have believed her. Jenny would get a nanny for her own children when the time came. Jenny had made up her mind that Pamela was a brave, determined, successful role model of a woman in business, but sadly domestically downtrodden out of it. You wait, Pamela said, lying there luxuriating. You wait until you have children. Nannies won’t be armour enough against them. One day, Jennifer my girl, you’ll know.
She pushed herself right under the water, leaving only her eyes and nose free. The telephone rang. Indistinctly she heard her partner’s voice leaving a message on the answer-phone. Something about the Wilkinsons’ curtains not being ready. ‘I wouldn’t bother you but she says it is terribly urgent. Her daughter’s wedding is at the weekend and she needs to get them hung. Could you ring back?’
‘Urgent?’ mouthed Paula, reimmersing herself. ‘How can curtains be urgent?’
It was not exactly the right approach for a woman whose business depended upon people thinking soft furnishings were vital.
She resurfaced with a sudden memory. Of Peter saying to her after they separated, more in sorrowful conviction than in anger, that she was far too slipshod to run a business efficiently. She laughed at the arrogance. But she nearly proved him right. It still made her shiver. She met Douglas, he of the stockings and suspender school, a couple of years after she opened the shop. It was called Love and she fell for him. Fell was putting it mildly. An avalanche on K2 would have been nearer the mark. It was Jenny who held the business together during the Douglas years. While Pamela went foolish and haywire, Jenny held on.
Ever since Euston and the holed stocking, she found herself thinking about Douglas. Just wondering how he was. Recalling the odd moment. Passion remembered in tranquility. She was over him now, of course, of that she was sure. She shivered again. She needed to be over him, remembering those final months together. She won, and nearly lost, the biggest contract of the shop’s life, the big break, out of the domestic into the public arena. Pamela, in love, failed it. Peter’s voice of doom was nearly proved right. The most valuable job of her designer’s life would never have been successful without Jenny’s tireless scouring for the right stuffs, the right tones, the right decorators. Pamela swanning around the shell of the Regency, and therefore site-sensitive, Boxwood Manor after its conversion into an hotel and restaurant, with stars in her eyes, saying airily, ‘We’ll have gold there, indigo there, and goose green in the foyers . . .’ and then dashing off to spend a weekend away somewhere with Douglas – it could only have created mayhem and failure without Jenny’s dedication.
And it had come to nought, the dashing hither and thither. She and Douglas finally parted company about the time Boxwood Manor was finished. Amid all the accolades and attention she was practically crawling up the wall with self-pity and self-loathing. Jenny and her new husband Howard spent a lot of time with her. A lot. At the end of it she made three decisions. That she would never expand the business beyond what the two of them, a couple of assistants and outworkers could handle. That she would make Jenny a full partner. And that she would never let her down again. Or Daniel. He suffered during the blackness, too.
Remembering all this, she got out of the bath and padded guiltily to the telephone. The bloody Wilkinson woman had changed her mind three times about the trimmings she wanted, which accounted for the delay, and the bloody woman knew that. Pamela had it in black and white that it was not the shop’s responsibility. If they were not ready in time Pamela had agreed to provide some muslin drapes. It was all under control. Dull old people wanting dull old perfections. Sometimes, just recently, it all felt very dull indeed.
Jenny was grateful and apologetic for disturbing her, which made Pam feel even guiltier as she returned to the bath.
She topped up the water. Danny, on the other hand, could wait. His message, left on the answerphone, was a demand for her to pack up some forgotten things and send them on. No little endearments, no gratitude, just Do It. It was therefore not so high on her list of priorities. Once, yes. But not now. He was a big boy and he could wait. She plunged back under the surface hurriedly, a little shaken. Such a change in her outlook was disturbing. She hardly recognized this woman. How easy it was. The world did not fall apart because she put herself first for a change.
But dwelling on the past disturbed her equilibrium. God knows it had taken her long enough after Douglas to build it up again. Crossly she got out of the bath, weighed herself, felt it had spoiled things even more, and promptly went on a diet. Downstairs she found the old aerobics video that Danny banned, and tried it again. She went at it with gusto. And no Daniel to come in and laugh. She did the whole thing and felt very faint.
Then she sat down at her table and worked on a plan for transforming his old bedroom into a study. The spare room had a double bed for their future visits and she could give it a new look in time for Christmas. She enjoyed the exercise. With a proper study of her own at last, she could do more work at home. She chewed her pencil. Best not think about the implications of that. It didn’t have to be more work. She could do anything in there. Even study. But first she must design it exactly to her requirements. She chewed her pencil some more.
She sat there happily absorbed for hours, conscious that she no longer needed to think about Daniel and feeding time. She could make a sandwich whenever she liked. Or not. She could probably lose half a stone like this. Just ducking the odd meal. And that pleased her, too. It was only when she got up from the table that she felt a strange new painful stiffness in her joints. Oh, my God, she thought, I have contracted some terrible disease, now, here, on the brink of my new life.
She stood still, hoping it was temporary and would pass, but it did not. Bloody Fate, she thought. Gives you freedom for one month just so you can appreciate the pleasure, then whips it away and bangs you into a wheelchair for the rest of your life. She prodded and poked at the offending joints – the pain of it – even her elbows were going. If only she had gone to church. Too late now. She always knew that God, whoever he was, was an unforgiving Deity.
She hobbled out of the dining room into the hall and tottered down the passageway towards the kitchen. Tea or gin, it was all the same to her now. It was probably the worst kind of wasting disease. Didn’t Fate always wait until it could make a real entrance? It was so bad she was clinging to the walls. Only when she passed the back room and saw the empty video box lying on the floor with the mid-star-jump Green Goddess staring up at her from the box cover did she remember. Aerobics. Oh, thank God, thank God. She was so grateful that she laughed aloud. It echoed around her and she was brought up short by the sad little thought that there was no one at home, now, to share the joke with.
When she returned to the shop the next day she could barely crawl. Jenny looked at her sympathetically. She obviously thought she was seeing a new phenomenon: menopausal knees.