Street Symphony (24 page)

He managed a smile. She got that poetic touch of language from her Irish mother.

“You know me, Uncle Arthur. I get excited. The car was a dream for a moment. And you’re not to buy me a car. Our Jeep will last for ages. You could live to be a hundred and you’ll need your money, so let’s have another glass of wine and then,” she went on, “we’re going to buy you a pair of lovely, guilt-free shoes.”

Later, he walked home carrying his old sneakers in a bag, treading lightly and avoiding dirt, and considering his epitaph.
Arthur Brown, mourned by his niece, Jazzy, loved by his wife, Clary, died doing what he liked best: living. He leaves an only son and son-in-law, and will be missed for a week or two in the Caffè Italia.

4. Jazz Festival

As she manoeuvred the Honda out of the café parking lot
, Muriel was singing, “One fine day.” This, she hoped, she knew, was going to be her fine day, the first of many. The so-far legless Santa on the
window made her think of Scrooge after the third visitation: Christmas was going to be different this year. She drove by the hairdresser’s and wondered why she’d never patronized that small salon instead of letting Gilles charge the earth for what any other stylist could have done just as well for much less. Sheer snobbery.

She hadn’t expected to be made Financial Supervisor, Large Personal Accounts, before she was forty. The promotion, after only three years with the bank, had given her great pleasure, and she’d accepted the responsibility with humility and a promise to continue the good work done by her predecessor. (Only later had they discovered Amber’s habit of transferring little sums of various clients’ money to her own account.) The pleasure had worn off in the first six months, and now she was beginning to wonder whether she’d drunk from a poisoned cup. All right, so she wasn’t Chairman of the Board or even Provincial Manager but, given the size of her office, the blue-and-green wool carpeting on the floor, a second chair, the three computer screens, and access to the vaults, she surely had a right to a measurable amount of respect and esteem.

Lately, when she went to the communal printer, Muriel thought she heard Mahood, the junior investment advisor, refer to her as “Mu” or, as it came out, “moo”. Occasionally she thought she’d heard mooing when she walked through the open area to the manager’s office. True she was not small, but neither was she of a size that justified being called a cow.

I do my job well
, she assured herself. Just last week Hodgson told her that had it not been for Indira getting that client to invest his savings in their
Two4One
plan, she, Muriel, would have been employee of the month for a record third time. She put her briefcase down beside the desk, set her Thermos and muffin on the bookshelf and woke up the computers.

New York was into its day and the Dow was down. In London, the FTSE had closed on red. In Asia, the markets showed a similar trend. She stared at the figures. The graphs resembled her life, so what did she have to do to raise her own stock value? Her mother hinted almost daily that without Muriel, her loving, caring daughter, she would be leading a sad, lonely life. But her mother lived on irony and was possibly lying and, though not really mercenary, would like her loving, caring daughter to keep on paying her share of expenses.

She checked her hair in the mirror and quickly looked away. Eight years of being a blond had brought her neither a gentleman nor respect in the workplace. She shook the new dark strands on her head and hurried to the meeting set up to promote team spirit and enhance efficiency when the staff might have used the time more efficiently by preparing for the day ahead. She sat down beside Wayne and leaned forward as if she were taking in every one of Jack Hodgson’s words. It was a trick she’d perfected at school. When she looked back at those days, she saw the good pupil who appeared to pay attention. She saw a girl whose only friend, Thea, also won prizes, played no games and was thought to be well-behaved. They were false paragons, two of a kind, and few of their classmates invited them to parties.

“Are you with us, Muriel?”

“Of course.”

She heard sniggering.

“What I’m talking about this morning is positivity in these difficult financial times. People look to us for reassurance as if we are responsible for their well-being and in a sense perhaps…”

Here, when Muriel tuned out, there was no football field to gaze at beyond the window, no horizon, as there had been at Newbold High. Instead her thoughts bounced back off the brick wall of the building opposite. She returned to the meeting and sat up positively as she heard the words, “Even, or perhaps especially, our physical appearance, our stance, can re-inforce…”

Jack was looking straight at her. Did he mean that she or something
about her clothes, her makeup, was giving off negativity? Was her new hairdo a cause of market decline? He wasn’t married, Hodgson, and Muriel reckoned he spent his weekend reading literary books to prepare for his Monday morning homilies. She hoped he’d forgotten Friday evening. Had she really put her hand on his thigh when they were sitting in the bar? She had!

“Remember that the market will improve,” he said. “Say this to yourself: Money is like water, it finds its level.”

“If it doesn’t drain away or dry totally up,” Wayne said softly.

“There are doomsayers,” Hodgson went on. “But we don’t have to listen. Nor do we have to add our voice to theirs. Nothing causes a Depression like depression.”

Back in her own office, Muriel sat down to read the business sections of four newspapers online. At 8:45, her phone rang. She listened to the sad voice at the other end and then said, “I’ll just bring it up on the screen here, Mr. Alvarson. I transferred the funds on Wednesday and they should be in your account now. I can’t understand why they’re not. Hold on for one moment, please.”

The payment from the construction company had made him rich but no amount of money could compensate Edvard Alverson for the loss of his son. He moved sums around, bought and sold stocks, gave to charity. It passed the time, he’d told her. She mourned for the man and considered the shock of losing a child. Best perhaps not to have a child at all. She couldn’t let her thoughts go down that road. Time to check the figures from yesterday, respond to clients worried about the market’s continuing downturn and decipher the usual analysts’ reports.

At ten o’clock, she poured coffee from the Thermos into her china mug, a delicate hand-painted leaving gift from her colleagues at Imperion. She’d given up going to the little kitchen or
galley
as the CEO had christened it. (He owned a yacht.) It wasn’t simply because when, in a gesture of friendliness, she’d brought muffins to share and had heard, or thought she’d heard, Wayne call them
mooffins
that she ‘d made the change. She needed this time to think about her life. For weeks she’d felt that something was askew. At nights, listening to recorded sounds of the seashore before she fell asleep, she counted reasons for changing her way of life.

The muffin from the café had fallen apart. Usually she bought blueberry-bran but today she’d pointed to the cranberry, wanting a bitter flavour on her tongue. She threw the crumbly thing into the wastebasket and for several moments sat quite still, allowing her thoughts to wander as they would. The faces of the people she saw every morning in the café haunted her. They were like characters out of a morality play: The old man, the sick woman, the artist, the hockey guy, the quiet old lady in the corner reading the paper with a magnifying glass. How many years did she have before the best part of her day was an early morning trip to the Caffè Italia with its local art and stressed furniture? And then. And then! Truth, or something she feared was truth, seeped into her mind like gas from a leaky pipe, and it was frightening.

She could blame her boring life on her dear mother for calling her Muriel. It was a name for aunts, staid and solid. Muriels didn’t go out on the lam, whatever that meant. They worked in banks, read good books and took up with steady men who had regular jobs. But that was where her inner Tiffany had won out. Lance was an artist who was going to buy her all the diamonds in Africa, or at least in Birks’ store window, when he sold a major painting. He was also going to pay her back for the last three months’ rent of his apartment. He made love to her infrequently, saving his strength for his art. He called her his muse, his inspiration, his divine spring. Her mother knew nothing of his low financial worth, seeing only someone who carried out the garbage and had a way with squeaky doors and tight windows. He was only a more useful man than her previous two boyfriends: clever, decent men with weak eyes and a tendency to speak mainly in numbers whether the subject was finance or baseball.

If my life is in a rut, it’s not a bad rut. Many would envy it. It’s a dutiful rut, narrow and high-sided.
That was yesterday’s thinking. That was the blond speaking. Muriel allowed her inner devil’s advocate to continue:
You have a great deal of good in your life, a well-paid job, a man and a family in the shape of a mother as well as aunts, uncles and cousins in Alberta. You got over your father’s defection in grade twelve when you saw it was a common event. You are attached to life in many ways. Your volunteer work at the drop-in centre gives you brownie points for the next world too if you decide to believe in an afterlife. So what else do you want, Muriel?
I want respect! That’s what! And I am going to get it! Today! She held on to her desk as she allowed the props of her old life to fall around her in splinters.

The phone rang again. “Good morning,” she said, and listened.

“Let me take a look at your account, Mrs. Javez.” The figures danced on the screen. What a lot of lovely money this old woman possessed, in her eighties and here she was demanding to know why the interest rate on her savings account was only one point five percent.

Muriel could have yelled, “Because it is. Because the economy’s a mess. Think about the tragedy in Pakistan. Think about death.” Instead she said, “Give me a day, Mrs. Javez, and I’ll see
if we can get you something better. Have you thought about another annuity?”

When Hodgson had put his head round the door on Friday and asked if he could come in, Muriel would have liked to know whether he too thought of her as bovine. But he was always dignified, always polite. The rumour last spring that he was buying sexy underwear for the new girl at reception had been an unfounded story put about by Wayne, whose own frequent trips to Victoria’s Secret were no secret. She’d said, “Of course,” wondering why he bothered to ask, and offered him coffee. He’d declined and then asked if she would care to come for a drink with him at the Four Seasons after work.

Slowly, as if she had to consider numerous possible engagements, she’d replied, “Thank you. Yes. I’d like that.”

Jack had walked out before she could ask him about new invest
ments and the TFSA rules. And suddenly she didn’t care. Suddenly she cared about why, in that shy way, her boss had invited her out for a drink as if, like some genie, he had read her thoughts and was about to offer her a solution to the problems of her life.

In that moment, Muriel had begun to see that her life was not good. She did indeed have problems. Lance would never buy her diamonds or even a glass ring. Thea in her sly way had hinted as much, almost saying he was a con man. Muriel had put that down to jealousy. Thea’s husband was a virtuous, steady accountant. She knew too, in her heart – and for how long had she suppressed this knowledge? – that her mother blackmailed her into doing errands and chores that she could afford to pay someone else to do. And, most important, here, at her workplace, she was not esteemed. Truth is hard to bear. Suppressed truth is torture. Years of it. Years and years. She put her head down on the desk and cried. She cried for the schoolgirl who had always pretended to be good. She cried for the rare and not wonderful sex with Lance. She cried and mourned for the blond she had been. Tears marred the printout of
Today’s Best Buys
.

She heard someone step into her office and step out again. No doubt more fodder for office gossip:
She’s in there crying. The boss talked to her. She must’ve been fired.
And would they think, John, Amy, Mahood, Wayne, Bren, as they gathered to discuss it by the water cooler, that they should be kinder to her, treat her with some deference? Not damn likely! She decided to gain their respect in her own way. She wiped her face and combed her hair and walked out into the open area of the office. As she passed Amy’s desk, she managed to catch her foot in the cable of the woman’s computer and disconnect it. It was a small gesture but it was a start.

On Friday evening, Hodgson had explained why he’d invited her to a bar when in fact he didn’t drink alcohol. He liked to watch people having a good time, he said, and besides, she’d looked lately as though she needed pepping up. An odd expression! He bought her a manhattan and she wondered ungratefully whether the bank was paying for it. He was sipping a diet Coke through a bendy
straw. They were sitting side by side on a low couch opposite a cou
ple who were blithely fondling one another regardless of the audience. The place was full and the noise, the end-of-the-week sound of the free, was near intolerable. The woman playing the baby grand in the corner by the door fought to be heard.

Jack spoke into her right ear, “You’ve been with us now for nearly four years, Muriel.”