Meeting the English (14 page)

‘The undersides,' said Mr Riley, waving his scraper. Struan folded the page over, and turned back to Phillip, but now the old man's eyes were tightly shut.

*   *   *

Shirin led Juliet confidently out the house. She had new sandals on, little gold strappy ones mounted on clear plastic heels. Her rapid, exquisite feet seemed to float above the pavement.

‘Lovely shoes,' said Juliet, as she clomped behind.

Shirin waved one: ‘So gorgeous!' she squeaked. ‘So uplifting! In the sale, but you know, since this country has turned tropical, one may as well!' Then she stopped, right outside Whistles. ‘Here we are,' she said.

‘No we're not,' said Juliet, ‘I can't fit in the door there. They wouldn't let me try anything on, I'd split it.'

‘Nonsense,' said Shirin, firmly, ‘come along.' And she shoved open the great glass door and sashayed along the silky aisles with their ranks of unlikely garments, and led Juliet to a rack of chocolate-coloured denim jackets with diamanté studs stamped into the collars. She pulled one out: it was tiny, barely bolero. ‘This,' she announced firmly, ‘is for you.'

‘Shirin,' said Juliet, ‘do you think it is important to be slim or is it your personality that counts?'

‘For men, do you mean?' said Shirin, cocking her little heart-shaped face, her mouth briefly narrowed.

‘Yes,' said Juliet.

‘It is important to be slim,' she said, ‘I have found this true. But look, Juliet, now you are not plump. See, this jacket will fit.'

It did. It lapped smoothly across Juliet's newly flat back. It straightened Juliet's round shoulders. Its stiff collar wrapped and narrowed Juliet's round neck. It smoothed Juliet's over-extensive bosom and made an elegant ‘v' in it. It invented for Juliet a waist—

‘And the colour is very good,' said Shirin, ‘excellent for you. Do you have something pink to put with it perhaps? A dress?'

Juliet couldn't breathe. She nodded. She said, ‘But I haven't got any money.' Shirin opened her tiny gold-chained bag, and waved a quilted chequebook.

‘How come?' said Juliet.

‘Well,' said Shirin, ‘did you know you have a trust, Juliet? For your school fees, your father set it up – each month some money goes in?'

‘Yes,' said Juliet, ‘but I won't be needing that any more, it's results tomorrow, you know, and I'll have failed the lot, I'll have to go to the comp.'

‘Yes,' said Shirin, ‘I know it is tomorrow, the results, that is why I wish to give you this information today. So you can report to your mother.'

‘So we can have a better fight?' asked Juliet. Shirin shook her head briefly.

‘I am telling you this,' she said, ‘I am giving you this information, to make it more fair.'

‘What information?' said Juliet, gulping.

‘This trust,' said Shirin. ‘The point of the money in this account is for you to be taught, Juliet, yes?'

Juliet nodded.

‘But,' continued Shirin, ‘today I found it has been used for other things. For instance, your mother she told me she paid your air fare to Italy and that it is cancelled too late for refund, and the trust must pay her, and I say fair enough, but today, I phone Celia's mother, she says the fare is never paid at all. And your school fees, they are not being paid, since Easter they are not paid, I have solicitor's letter come last week for Phillip, this started me on my investigation.'

‘Well,' said Juliet, ‘I wasn't going back there anyway. They kept trying to sack me, you know. I'm an awful skiver, Shirin, it's a fact.'

‘But,' said Shirin, ‘one pays the fees, all the same, Juliet. This is England. And, anyway, if the fees are not paid, this means there is extra money in the account. So I check, and there is no money in the account at all. So I rang your mother, she said, “Oh well this money it pays for Juliet's food and so on now she lives in Yewtree,” and I said, “I make omelettes what are you talking about,” and Myfanwy said, “No, she has Pot Noodles.” Absurd.' Shirin was as near to worked up as Juliet had ever seen her, her little nose wrinkled, her lovely eyes narrowed.

‘Struan eats the Pot Noodles,' said Juliet, suddenly worried for Myfanwy, ‘but she did buy some.'

‘And also,' said Shirin, actually starting to rabbit. ‘Also, in this very same phone call, I find out Mr Riley is paid from this account. Your account. She said to me, the account is now the House Account, the chequebook is in the house, in Phillip's drawer, you can check, maybe it is you, cashing the cheques, Giles signs some in advance, but this is not an agreement, and then there are a lot of payments made for cash, hundreds, I cannot believe Giles signs off these cheques, I am not happy at all with him.'

‘Oh,' said Juliet, ‘well, I did wonder why she was paying for Dad's house.'

‘Yes,' said Shirin, ‘so did I.' She pursed her lips, looked down at her chequebook.

‘Sorry,' said Juliet, desperately wanting the jacket, ‘that's really bad of her.'

‘No,' said Shirin, ‘it is not for you to be sorry.' And she turned her attention back to the jacket. ‘There is a stain, here, see?' she said, pointing to the collar. ‘I will have ten pounds off.' And Juliet and she proceeded to the till.

Where Shirin smiled, and said: ‘This jacket, it is educational, is it not?'

‘Yes,' said Juliet, ‘if I had this jacket, I could go to the comp.'

‘Yes,' said Shirin, ‘I should think you could. And so, I will buy it, and when I am on the telephone to Giles, I will say, Juliet's money, back in her account, and twenty-three pounds to me too for the jacket while you're at it, OK?'

‘Yes,' said Juliet, ‘that's OK.'

‘Besides,' said Shirin, ‘it is in the sale. Tremendously marked down. A bargain. We must not let it slip by!' And they didn't.

*   *   *

Phillip wouldn't open his eyes again, at all, not even when Struan begged him. He was keeping them shut, he was sure – he was still breathing quickly, still sweating. ‘Is it him?' he whispered, when Mr Riley left the room. ‘Is it the painter, bothering you?' But Phillip wouldn't respond.

So in the end, Struan heaved him out the door in the chair and walked him up to the High Street and back. He thought he might see Juliet and Shirin, and explain everything to them, get some help, but he didn't, of course. London was too big for that, even a wee bit of it, like Hampstead. The whole way Phillip's head stayed at its broken, lolling angle, and his eyes open, but fixed on the wheel.

Mebbe, thought Struan, turning into the bank, mebbe London had addled his brain – the heat and watching
Dallas
and the coffee and the rest of it. Fried it, like one of Shirin's omelettes. Struan took out ten pounds for the pub. He mustn't spend more than that. He looked down the High Street again for Shirin's glossy head. Nothing.

The problem, he thought as he pushed Phillip home, was that if he told Shirin all about the wink and so on, she might not believe him. He had no evidence. She might even think he was making it up because he was after something. Another nice pair of shorts, maybe, or a wee picture. Attention, that's what.

And so it was that when Shirin came into the study, flushed and shining in a tulle blouse, aerial in the gleaming sandals, saying Struan must go out, out, he worked too hard, out with him to the pub to see his friend, that his courage failed him entirely and he meekly agreed and went up to get a shower and his clean shirt on.

13

Juliet's hair really was falling out. Some more strands came out on the brush, long ones, and then dozens of others filled the plughole of the bath, and when she came to look in the mirror, there was actually a completely plucked patch just left of her ear, where the hair-clips pulled it. So Juliet rubbed in lots of mousse, so as to glue the rest of it in, turned her head upside down, and blew it dry into a vertical column. Hair falling out was the kind of thing that might happen to a kooky girl in a Lloyd Cole song.
On account of all the rattlesnakes.
Celia's hair was all wispy, after all.

And now, on this late August evening and for the first time in her new body, Juliet pulled the pink dress out of the drawer, the one that made her look thin from the side, and shook out its knitted silky folds, and put it on, and slowly and ceremonially approached the dressing-table mirror to see how it looked.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in the Finchley Road, Myfanwy Prys was preparing for a session of
reverie.
For Myfanwy might be a property developer now, but she also had trained for the theatre with the Polish avant-garde, in the days when you gave up your body and your blood for the craft. Intimate and daring experimentation in free association (guided by Zbigniew) had allowed her to find within her that fallen angel, Polly in
Milk Wood.
Later, profound inter-generational trance work permitted her to discard little Shirley Davies of Swansea, and to reconnect with Myfanwy of the Valleys, an actress fit to play Angharad in
The Pit.
And when, as a mature actor, she had played Lady Macbeth for a famous season in Aberystwyth, it was the ‘letting in' of certain childhood memories that had powered her performance: the strangling of chickens, for example, or the day she held little Tommy Jenkins in the pond till his body kicked like a starter motor.

Thirty-one years since she met Zbigniew, thirty since she had interrupted him making the beast with two arses with darling Cecil, a half-hour of free-associative thinking remained part of her daily routine. And because it was part of her practice to allow the thoughts to affect the body, to form what Zbigniew in his terrific spitty accent called
muscular vectors,
she was careful to seek out a relaxed, free-floating spot. The bath worked well; so did the floor, so did her large, well-sprung bed. Today, she was combining
reverie
with the application of anti-fungal creams to her intimate folds: the recent heat had brought on thrush.

*   *   *

Juliet surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror. The dress was loose. Where once her stomach had bulged like a balloon, now there was a neat drape. Where the sleeves had grabbed sausage-like arms, there were little silk puffs above slim pale limbs. You couldn't call Juliet's legs thin, not yet, but they had ankles now, they had knees, and the ankles were not bad. The dress flicked up and flattered the knees. She did look thin from the side.

And now, over the transformed dress, Juliet placed the new jacket. She didn't look, all at once. Instead, she shut her eyes, bent over, swished out her hair, then stood up and opened them. In the mirror, she watched the shining mass of hair settle slowly over the diamanté collar, snugly buttoned under her new, pointy chin. The brown of the jacket was such a good brown, the very colour of her eyebrows. The pink was such a good pink: it made her skin white and her cheeks glow. Juliet was sugar-pig coloured, not a sausage at all.

*   *   *

To begin a
reverie
one must first release troubling thoughts, physically expel them from the body. Myfanwy had suffered a series of unpleasant events that morning, and went through them, one by one, and released each, as she had been taught, with an exhalation of breath and a raising and opening of the buttocks. (Zbigniew believed that emotion lived
all along
the gut.)

Out: the call from Giles, telling her that he couldn't stall the Literary Giant beyond the end of the week; out: the fax from the estate agent, informing her that during the latest visit to the railway cottages, signs of recent occupation had been noticed
in the toilet;
out: the letter from the bank, insisting on an interim payment. And out, out, the call from Shirin Khorshidi (she was no longer using the name Prys, personally or professionally, you couldn't help noticing) about bank accounts and forgetting the sale of Yewtree. About Myfanwy's perfectly legitimate use of her daughter's trust to make the best possible investment in her daughter's future – but Myfanwy's body refused to let that one go. It was trapped in her intestine like wind. Myfanwy spread her legs, exhaled, probed deeper for the cause of her unhappiness.

Jake. Jake, of course. Rusticated! Not expelled. He could recover. His destiny was in any case in the theatre. That's why he had to go to Edinburgh. Because he had gone to Edinburgh. Myfanwy had decided that he had certainly gone to Edinburgh. She scanned the papers every morning, for the reviews. There was a
Two Gentlemen
show, with a tank, and that must be his. He had perhaps changed his name, to avoid the attention of his college. And at the thought of the college, Myfanwy became aware of tension across her shoulders: a vector, Zbigniew would say, of blame; and that her left hand had formed the vector of a fist; and that her right hand tensed and ceased its creamy ministering.

*   *   *

Yeah,
said Lloyd from the record player,
that is perfect skin.
Juliet was a real girl, in the real world, real like Celia, the kind of girl who might really get a boyfriend. She gave a little skip. It was unbelievable, how easy it all was, once you started, the journey from the non-being of fat to the being of thin. And when you got there, the minute you were even on your way, people fancied you. Like Mr Fox. Juliet clenched both her fists and promised herself she would never be fat again. She popped another pill, just in case she should be tempted to eat crisps in the pub. She wondered how thin she should get before she stopped the pills. She didn't want
all
her hair to fall out.

*   *   *

If Myfanwy could not rid herself of a particular thought, the correct path was to follow it to its source. Myfanwy reloaded her fingers with anti-fungal, remembered her seven years on the couch in a very full form of analysis with Ivan the experimental long-fingered Russian, and began again.