The High Flyer (13 page)

I

I can now see how strange it was that Kim and I had never previously discussed the possibility of having children, but I can also see exactly how this non-communication occurred. He had told me early on in our acquaintance that Sophie’s childlessness had been a disappointment, and so I had assumed, in my opinion not unreasonably, that he had been sorry not to become a father. This had also led me to assume, again in my opinion not unreasonably, that one of his motives for marrying a much younger woman was to give himself a second opportunity to father a family. Many middle-aged men did this; it was not an unusual situation.

Similarly, I had made no secret to Kim in the early stages of our affair that I was a modern woman with modern aspirations. It was true that I had avoided a detailed discussion of my life-plan, since experience had taught me that women waving life-plans were a sexual turn-off, but I had hardly thought it necessary to spell out the aspirations of the dedicated female high flyer, determined to “have it all.”

The whole matter might have surfaced earlier if we had not been in such a transitional stage of our lives, but because we were not yet established in a more permanent home I had never been tempted to bring up the subject of children; I had always felt that this was a topic best discussed when pregnancy was finally a viable option and my contraceptive routine could be abandoned. Certainly waiting had been made easier by my belief that Kim would welcome the chance for a family when the time was right. The knowledge that not only had I utterly misread him but that he had utterly failed to understand me came as such a shock that for a long moment I was speechless, unable to express any emotion whatsoever. I merely sat there on my stool by the telescope as dawn broke over the City, and as I stared at him he stared back, equally shocked, equally unable to express his feelings.

He was the first to attempt a sentence. It was: “But you’re a career woman.”

I could make neither head nor tail of this. “So?”

“You’re not interested in domesticity.”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“But . . . I’m sorry, I seem to have missed a trick somewhere, let me start again. Carter, how was I supposed to know you wanted children?”

“Because I’m a woman. Women have babies.”

“But you have this completely masculine lifestyle!”

“Well, I have to, don’t I? How else am I supposed to keep my career in order?”

“But—”

“Wasn’t it obvious that I wanted children? I mean, I only want to do what all successful women do nowadays! You do the career number, you reach a certain stage, you move sideways in your life to do the domestic number, you produce the children, you move sideways back again after each pregnancy and finally you have both your lives, professional and private, absolutely in order by the time you’re forty. It’s the current creed for women like me.”

Kim ran his hand distractedly through his hair. “I hardly know whether to laugh or cry! Sweetheart, how many female high flyers do you know who can actually achieve these ridiculously demanding goals without neglecting their husbands, short-changing their children and teetering on the brink of a major nervous breakdown?”

I did not answer. The shock was reaching me afresh. I tried to refocus the telescope but the lens seemed to be permanently blurred.

“Carter, I don’t think you know the first thing about yourself, I really don’t. You’re not in the least interested in domesticity and you’re not truly interested in motherhood either. If you were you would have brought up both subjects long ago.”

“But you see, I thought—”

“You’re just taking this line because it’s fashionable, but, sweetheart, you don’t have to pretend to be what you’re not—at least, you don’t have to pretend to me! I love you for what you are, not for what the spirit of the age says you ought to be, and when I married you I quite accepted that we would be a childless couple.”

“Ah.”

“I admit that long ago when Sophie and I were first married I did want a family, but when that didn’t happen I discovered I was relieved. I was far from sure that I would have made a good parent. No one ever set me much of an example.”

“I see.” I gave up trying to focus the telescope and sat looking at my neatly folded hands.

“I’m sorry,” I heard Kim say, his voice genuinely kind, “I’m making a hash of this conversation, aren’t I? Let me try and do better. You want kids? Fine. I’m not saying no. But I’d like time to get used to the idea, and forgive me, but I think you too need time to take a cool, tough look at exactly who you are and what you want. You don’t want to make a big mistake just because you’ve failed to face up to reality.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, I wasn’t planning to get pregnant anyway until we were settled in our new home.”

“Wise decision! Once we’re settled we’ll discuss the subject again.” He stooped to kiss the top of my head. “Come back to bed—you’ll feel like hell later unless you get some more sleep.”

“I want to watch the dawn for a bit longer.”

“It’s wonderful how you can keep your eyes open . . .” He kissed me again and drifted away.

As soon as I was alone I rubbed the tears from my eyes and succeeded in focusing the telescope. St. Paul’s was radiant now, bathed in a brilliant golden light, and when I looked up from the lens I saw that all over the City the towers and spires of the churches were shining beneath a cloudless sky of duck-egg blue. I thought: why am I seeing only the churches? Why am I no longer seeing the City’s glittering, gutsy modernism but only the beautiful relics of its vibrant, haunting past? And as my eyes filled again with tears which distorted my vision, I seemed to see all those spires bend towards me, as if I were recognised and cherished and yearned for by a stranger whose name I did not know.

I went to the kitchen to tear off a strip of paper towel which I could use as a handkerchief. Then I lay down on the sofa with my eyes squeezed shut and wondered when the world had last seemed so disordered, so utterly beyond my control.

II

I recovered from that moment of despair. It took an enormous effort but I blotted out all thought of the future and willed myself to escape into unconsciousness. I was woken by Kim an hour later at seven.

“How are you feeling?”

“Don’t ask.” The last thing I wanted was a day which had begun at two in the morning.

On arrival at the office I managed to focus solely on my work. Never had the rubbishy meetings and the routine melt-downs been more welcome. It was not until I came up for air after a morning of total immersion in my clients’ problems that I remembered a decision I had made earlier to phone Alice Fletcher.

An answering machine picked up the call at her flat in Clerkenwell. Maybe she was cooking lunch somewhere. Unable to accept being thwarted in my quest I grabbed the phone book, looked up St. Benet’sby-the-Wall and discovered to my surprise that there were three listings, one for the Rectory, one for the vestry and one for something called a Healing Centre, a designation which drummed up unpleasant images of charlatans like Mrs. Mayfield. With a shudder I dialled the first number, and after the third ring a man’s voice said briskly: “Rectory.”

“Is that Nicholas Darrow?”

“No, it’s Lewis Hall. Can I help you?”

“I’m trying to track down Alice Fletcher. Do you have any idea where she is?”

“She’s ten feet away and dishing up lunch. Give me your number and she’ll call you back.”

“I’ll wait,” I said, interested to discover how this bossy specimen would react to a woman who refused to be ordered around.

“Who’s this calling?” Mr. Macho was turning shirty.

“Carter Graham, Carter as in—”

“—President Jimmy. Hold on,” said the stranger, ordering me around again, and plonked down the receiver on a hard surface.

I was astonished that he had used the reference to President Carter which I always produced when clarifying my name, but before I could speculate whether this was the result of chance or of Alice meditating to him on the odd names of her clients, Alice herself picked up the receiver.

“Carter?”

“Alice, I know this is a bad time and I apologise, but I need to see you urgently on a confidential matter. Do you have a fifteen-minute slot which you can give me later today?”

Alice seemed bemused, perhaps by the thought of her day being divided into fifteen-minute slots. “After work?” she suggested tentatively. “About six-thirty?”

“Fine. Can I buy you a drink somewhere?”

“Oh!” She seemed amazed by this suggestion, as if no one had ever come up with such an idea before. “How very nice of you but I’ve two people coming over for dinner at seven, and—”

“Never mind, I’ll be at your flat at six-thirty and be gone by six-forty-five,” I said, concluding the call.

At that point I might have started thinking of Kim again, but fortunately there was no time as I was due to attend a business lunch upstairs in one of the private dining-rooms. Willing myself to ignore my increasing tiredness I checked my appearance to reassure myself my resemblance to a hag in need of a face-lift was still minimal, and hurried off to keep my next appointment on time.

III

“It’s about that scene in the supermarket,” I said as I accepted the glass of sherry Alice handed me. I had left the office early and stopped off for a quick flip of champagne to keep my eyes open, so I was able to face the sherry without wincing. Alice’s basement flat was surprisingly light, the walls a bright cream, the wood floor lacquered and glowing, the windows curtained by a material in which earth-brown mingled with sunshine-yellow. In the living-room were parked some items of furniture which looked like genuine antiques. I guessed these had been inherited, and for a moment I envied Alice that stable, middle-class background from which she obviously came.

“I really appreciated your tact at the time,” I was saying as I explained the purpose of our meeting, “but for various reasons I now want to hear exactly what you thought of the scene—and please be quite frank. I need to have the honest opinion of an independent witness.”

Alice seemed untroubled by this challenge and only asked: “Where shall I start?” As she spoke, a ginger cat came through the cat-flap from the garden.

“Begin: ‘We were standing by the meat cabinets.’ ”

Alice launched herself into her narrative. As she talked the ginger cat leaped onto her lap and made a great business of revolving on it as if he hoped to knead the flesh into an orthopaedic mattress. He made me think of lost Hamish. My mother had meanly refused to acquire another cat for me, but later she had given a cat to her other daughters and told me I could share it with them. I had never bothered. I had been too old by that time to want to share anything with my half-sisters, and anyway the cat had been a slobbish creature, spoiled and overfed almost to death in that dull home where nothing ever happened. I had never liked it.

“. . . and so the scene made quite an impression on me,” Alice was saying, summing up. “One doesn’t usually see such high drama in the supermarket.”

“One certainly doesn’t. Now, Alice, how did this woman seem to you? What kind of a person do you think she was?”

“Rich,” said Alice promptly. “I’m sure her clothes were custom-made because they fitted so beautifully. And she was upper class—there was no mistaking that accent. She also struck me as a confident person, someone who would organise charity events or sit on the local hospital committee.”

“And how would you describe her mood?”

“Agitated. Deeply concerned. But in control.”

“In control?”

“Well, I mean she didn’t grab you by the lapels of your jacket or hiss in your face or scream or shriek or give any indication that she was in urgent need of a psychiatrist. I once saw someone undergo a psychotic episode,” said Alice helpfully, “and I can tell you that Sophie’s behaviour in the supermarket wasn’t remotely in that category . . . Are you still wedded to the idea that she’s nuts?”

Having extracted the vital evidence I decided that the interrogation could now drift into a chat. “It’s tempting for me to assume she’s nuts,” I said, “but the trouble is I’m not an unbiased witness here. Sophie gave us a lot of trouble over the divorce after assuring Kim she wouldn’t make trouble at all.” This statement did not explain why I was now so keen to establish whether or not Sophie was unbalanced, but I was hoping Alice would be sufficiently diverted by the word “divorce.”

She was. “Oh, I do sympathise!” she exclaimed. “We’re currently battling with just that problem—the wife who first said she wanted a divorce but who’s now clinging on and causing chaos!”

“Your fiancé’s in the throes of divorce? But I thought clergymen didn’t do that kind of thing!”

“Mostly they don’t but it does happen nowadays and it’s so difficult for Nicholas because the Healing Centre’s trustees disapprove and that’s why our engagement has to be a secret—that’s why I never refer to him as my fiancé—that’s why—”

“—that’s why your life’s currently damn tough. But why’s the wife playing the limpet?”

“Well, their elder son got involved in a drug-bust, and Rosalind feels she can’t cope on her own, so—”

“The situation’s obviously a nightmare. Are you sure you want to marry this man? After all, you’ve got plenty of sex-appeal—you can’t be short of admirers.”

Alice boggled. “
Me?
”

I suddenly saw the problem. I never cease to be amazed how many attractive women have such low self-esteem that they crucify themselves over unsuitable men. “Yes, you!” I barked, unable to resist trying to drill some sense into her. “Hey, don’t waste time over this man if he’s too much of a wimp over the wife to give you a square deal!”

“Oh, Nicholas could never be described as a wimp! I know he loves me and I know he wants to marry me, but—”

“Listen, sister, you’ve got to take a much tougher line with this ditherer if you don’t want to wind up trashed! Abandon the stiff upper lip, stop being so damned nice and kick in a door or two to let him know you’re getting restless!”

“Oh, but—”

“Is he one of your dinner-party guests tonight?”

“No, he’s gone down to Surrey to see his wife.”

“Well, all I can say is it’s damned lucky it’s not me he’s engaged to! I’d smash his teeth in!”

The doorbell rang.

“I’ve outstayed my welcome,” I said, rising to my feet, “and been bloody rude into the bargain, but I like you, Alice, and I think you deserve all the support you can get.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I do appreciate the sympathy. I’ve been feeling a bit down lately, and—”

“
A bit?
God, you’re brave! Most women would be in a depression as deep as the Grand Canyon by this time and pigging out on Prozac!”

The doorbell rang a second time.

“Wait there,” said Alice, who was now looking not merely dazed by my volubility but enthralled. “Just wait. Don’t go away.” She darted from the room.

I poured myself another finger of sherry to keep my brain synapses firing and knocked it back while she was opening the front door.

“Hullo, my dear . . .” I instantly recognised the voice I had heard during my lunchtime call to the Rectory; there was no mistaking those crisp, bossy tones coupled with that old-fashioned public-school accent. Realising I was about to meet a tiger-thumper I checked my appearance in the mirror above the fireplace and prepared to give him a memory which would make his flesh creep.

“Carter Graham’s here,” Alice was saying to him over her shoulder as she led the way into the living-room, and added to me: “Carter, this is Lewis Hall who works with Nicholas at St. Benet’s.”

Shattered to see that the tiger-thumper was yet another clergyman, I took a moment to absorb the fact that he was very different from Nicholas Darrow. For a start he was old. He had silver hair, black eyes with bags underneath, a hawkish nose and a streetwise look, as if he had seen everything there was to see and done everything there was to do not just once but at least three times. His thuggish build was incongruously encased in the traditional clerical gear which was topped off by a thick white collar and garnished with a glitzy little pectoral cross.

“How do you do, Miss Graham,” he said, holding out his hand with professional ease. “I’ve been hearing about you.”

“It’s Ms. Graham,” I said, certain this would infuriate him. “How do you do, Mr. Hall.”

“It’s Father Hall,” he said without missing a beat, “and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”

What a tiger-thumper, immediately trying to chop me down to size by flaunting a paternalistic authority! But I always respected the thumpers who kept their cool.

“Carter,” Alice was saying, “I don’t have to introduce my second guest, do I?”

I looked past her and saw Eric Tucker.