The Weeping Women Hotel (26 page)

The
door of her shop opened and one of her next-door neighbours entered. He stood
in front of her and gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb said, ‘The old
man wants to see you.’

‘What,
now? I’m busy,’ Harriet grumbled.

‘Yeah.
You don’t look busy.’

‘I
can’t repair those inflammable tracksuits you lot wear,’ she said, rising.

She
locked the shop door behind her, then they entered the adjacent building.

The
stocky young man tried to sit down on the stairlift but she placed a hand on
his arm and said, ‘Let’s just walk up the stairs, eh?’

Grumpily
he acceded and rose, and together they climbed the stairs to enter the big
upstairs room. As before the older man sat at the centre of the room on his
reclining chair. When she came in his face burst into a big, seemingly genuine,
smile and he spread his arms. ‘Ah, our beautiful neighbour! Please do sit down.’

Once
Harriet had perched herself on one of the velour council-supplied couches
arranged round the walls he said, ‘You know I have been so longing to have a
decent chat with someone intelligent such as yourself, these young men while
they have their uses are not strong on conversational skills. So, Harriet, tell
me what do you think of this Damien Hirst I read about in all the newspapers: a
great artist or merely a dwarf for dwarfish times?’

‘Well,
I dunno really,’ she said. ‘Collectors certainly pay a lot of money for his
work.’

‘Yes, I
see what you’re saying, Harriet — that the avatars of society have given him
and his ilk their imprimatur. But I still ask myself, where is the joy, the
striving for magnificence? Hasn’t art these days simply replaced the carnival
freak shows of the 1930s? Instead of a two-headed calf, the curious go and see
a pickled shark, a painting made from elephant poo or an unmade bed.’

‘Yeah,
I suppose, yeah … you might be right about that.’

‘Ah, it
is good to have such conversations,’ Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said. For
a while he sat in silence as if mulling over the interesting things that had
been said, then, adopting a less declamatory style, he asked, pointing towards
her, ‘Tell me, Harriet, what is that top you’re wearing?’

‘It’s a
T-shirt.’

‘And
who might that be who is on it?’

She had
owned the shirt for so long that to her what was on it had become a collection
of random abstract shapes without any meaning. She looked down at her T-shirt,
pulling it out to see the figure printed in fading colours across her chest.
‘Oh yeah, she said. ‘It’s actually a man made out of cheese kicking a football,
his name’s Señor Padano. I think Grana Padano is a brand of Italian cheese and
it was the official hard cheese of Italia ‘90.’

‘Ah,
Italia ‘90. Gazza, Gary Lineker, Diego Maradona. I was in
Canada
then but we were all entranced. But
excuse me for saying this, don’t you think a beautiful woman such as yourself
should be dressed in something, I don’t know … more modern?’

‘I
guess …‘

‘Maybe
you are wearing the T-shirt as some kind of retro fashion statement?’

‘No, it
was all I had that was clean.’

‘Oh,
that is not right, not right at all. A woman who looks as you do should have
some handsome clothes. Coincidentally I might be able to help with that. I was
wondering whether you might not do me the enormous favour of coming to a party
with myself and my associates one evening.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes,
in the course of our business ventures we occasionally need to throw little
get-togethers or visit nightclubs and such and the women we know are either too
one way or the other if you know what I mean. To be frank, if we were
accompanied by someone such as yourself it would boost our status.’

‘You
want me to go on a night out with you. Nothing else?’

‘My
goodness, certainly nothing else! But we would be happy to dress you in
beautiful clothes that you could keep afterwards.’

Harriet
knew that if she agreed and Patrick found out that she was staying out late at
parties and wearing sexy dresses and hanging out with dubious Namibians he
would accuse her of diluting her Shen or some such nonsense so she said, ‘Yeah,
sure, why not?’

Mr
Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro made a gesture with his hands and one of the young
men went into a back room. He re-emerged carrying a dress in a transparent
cover. Without looking at it, Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said, ‘This is a
dress by Stella McCartney which, I think, though tight, will fit you perfectly;
it is made out of oyster satin apparently. The matching shoes are suede and by Gill
Wing — apparently Stella McCartney being a vegetarian only makes footwear out
of plastic which seems odd to me. I always thought only poor people wore shoes
of plastic but there you are. We would like you to have them to keep, of
course, but also to wear when you come out with us.’

‘That’s
very kind of you.’

‘It is
a transaction but I hope a happy one for all concerned.’

Toby and Helen had been
getting ready to go out to the launch party for the Penrith Fairground Disaster
memorial crafted by a famous sculptor. It wasn’t in Penrith and didn’t look
much like a memorial, rather it resembled a Second World War tank trap that’s
been dipped in breadcrumbs and it had been built in a private square in
Mayfair
that you could only enter with a
key. Of course nobody actually involved in the Penrith Fairground Disaster was
invited since they would upset everyone with their horrible injuries and their
constant crying.

However,
just as they were going out there’d been a hysterical phone call from Katya;
apparently two days before, their builder had removed the entire back wall of
the house with a JCB and then vanished without a word so now they couldn’t
leave their home for fear of looters. They wanted Toby and Helen to go round to
their place right away for an emergency dinner party.

‘I had
to drive the JCB back to the hire place,’ Oscar said. ‘I felt awfully butch.
It’s surprising how fast they can go, those things, and people certainly get
out of your way.’

Katya
gave her husband an annoyed look and said, referring to the builder while
wringing her hands, ‘I’m terribly worried about him.’

‘Yes,’
added Oscar, ‘we’ve been round to his house with a Thermos of soup …’

‘Soup,
swoop, loop de loop!’ Toby shouted.

‘… in
case he’s ill in bed but there was no reply.’

If everybody
in Toby and Helen’s circle was feeling calm then the talk would be all furious
anger about speed cameras, parking fines and getting clamped, but if there had
been a disturbance of some kind in their little pond then to calm themselves
down and reassure themselves that all was well in their world, for the whole
dinner they would talk about the mini breaks, weekends away, skiing holidays,
diving holidays and lust plain holidays that they had planned in the next year
or so. Harriet once said it was as if they thought if they moved around a lot
from place to place then sadness wouldn’t be able to find them. That was just
Harriet being her usual life-denying snippy self, Helen thought. She liked that
their friends had the money to go on holiday all the time.

One
secret she’d always hidden from the crowd was that she, Toby and Harriet had
had to find the money to pay for their own houses, whereas their friends all
had their first flats or houses bought for them by their parents or via trust
funds or with a ‘little legacy from Granny’. Helen had always longed to be that
sort of person. Of course Harriet didn’t agree, she said that they were all
just big grown-up children for whom a loft-style apartment on the river is
another Christmas present like a Scalextrix set or a carved rocking horse but
Helen had always found it sophisticated to be free of that kind of financial
worry. She liked stability and order and certainty — was there anything wrong
with that? Harriet might want to go transforming herself but it would all end
in tears, of that she was sure. She tried to ask Julio in her mind what he
thought about her sister’s change of appearance but for once she couldn’t get
him to say anything at all: he just sat in a plastic bucket seat sipping a cup
of bad coffee. Instead she found herself thinking about the real Julio, the one
that she’d met in the park. “Ello, ‘Oolio,’ the woman in the café had called to
him, “Ello, ‘Oolio.’ Helen wondered what he was doing, where he was going,
whether he was thinking about her.

One afternoon after
practice at Harriet’s flat Patrick asked her, ‘You know sometimes in a film
they have a photo that was supposed to have been taken in the past?’

‘Oh
yeah?’

‘Well,
I always feel I know when a photograph was taken, not the exact moment or
anything but the period, y’know? Like I say, sometimes in a TV programme or
movie you see a picture that was meant to have been taken a hundred years ago
or something. The film people have got the clothes of the people perfect and
the haircuts and the pose and all that, the negative might be artificially
scratched and faded, and yet to me there’s always something of the modern world
that gets into the photo; it’s sort of as if the knowledge of all the things
that have happened since Victorian times — jet travel, the war in Vietnam, a
sex-change woman winning
Big Brother Five
— kinda seeps into a person’s
skin so that they can never look like they didn’t know these things. I think I
can even do the same for the backgrounds in these faked pictures. To me even
the trees and the bushes in the false photo look kind of up to date, like the
plants know all about jet travel and the sex-change woman winning
Big
Brother Five
and all that too.’

When
he’d told Harriet his thing about
Film
2006 that first time up in her
flat Patrick remembered how fascinated she’d been but when he finished telling
her about the photos she just said, ‘Oh yeah?’ again.’

Harriet sat on the bed
naked except for a vest and white pants while Lulu and Rose applied the last of
her make-up. One of Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro’s young men had called into
the shop that morning.

‘The
party’s tonight,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Next
door,’ he replied, as if she’d be an idiot to think it would be anywhere else.

‘Oh,
right.’

When
Harriet told Lulu and Rose about her date with the people next door her two
friends had got really excited and insisted on taking her appearance in hand.

‘It’ll
be like playing with our dollies when we were kids,’ Rose said.

‘Yeah,
you’ll be our Harriet Whore Dolly,’ Lulu added.

‘I’m
not being a whore, they bought me a nice dress and I’m going to a party with
them.’

‘We’re
not judging you, darling,’ Rose said.

‘But
you can’t go around looking so scruffy, it’s like keeping a Rembrandt in a
shopping trolley — your beauty needs framing.’

Immediately
they’d both cancelled all their work for the day. Earlier on in the afternoon
Lulu and Rose had accompanied her to the hairdresser’s where they had bullied
the owner into taking care of Harriet personally. Urged on by the two women, he
cur her long unruly hair and straightened it into a sharp and glossy bob
through which he streaked red lowlights to enhance the natural sleekness that
had been there since she’d got fir. Then they had a couple of glasses of
champagne in a hotel bar where some businessmen in suits tried to chat them up
so they let the men pay for the drinks then went to the toilet and left by
another exit.

They
took a taxi back to Harriet’s flat where Lulu and Rose rook her into the
bedroom and emptied their make-up bags on to the duvet and began to paint her
face. Rose took a grubby sponge that had been lying at the bottom of her bag
and used it to spread tinted moisturiser all over Harriet’s face as a base,
then the two of them started to describe what they were doing as if cooking ‘an
elaborate meal on television for a small child. Lulu said, ‘I’m rubbing some Touche
Eclat concealer by Yves Saint Laurent under your eyes to hide any bags and to
make the area shine.’

Rose
added, ‘And I’ve been mixing up colours on my eye-shadow palette. I’m. taking a
pearlised pale pink eyeshadow which I am applying to your eyelids starting next
to the edge of the lashes and blending to the outer corner of your eyes.’

Next
Lulu said, ‘I’m blending and smudging a brown colour with my finger underneath
your eyes to give a sexy smoky effect.’

Together
the two of them applied double-lash, full-volume mascara which automatically
curled her lashes. Then, taking a side each, they rubbed liquid tinted cheek
colour blended into the apples of her cheeks and brought up to highlight her
recently revealed sharp cheekbones. With one finger Rose rubbed Clinique one
hundred per cent red lipstick on to her lips, making them appear full, moist
and luscious. Finally Harriet’s two friends dusted her cleavage and arms with
Guerlain gold powder, making her skin sparkle.

‘There
you go,’ Lulu said, stepping back ‘you don’t look like a whore at all.’