The Weeping Women Hotel (9 page)

‘Well,
no …‘ His probing made her even more determined to end it now. ‘It’s such a
big job. I have no idea when it’ll end but I’ll certainly call the minute I’ve
got further information and we’ll start training again like before.’

‘Well,
I suppose so,’ Patrick said, ‘but you need to do your exercises every day on
your own, or you’ll lose all the progress we’ve made, you understand that,
doncha?’

‘Oh,.
I’ll do it, don’t you worry.’

There was one of the
biggest film premieres of the year being held in
Leicester
Square
: searchlights lit up clouds of starlings that
circled in the orange night air and stretch limousines slid sinuously along the
narrow side streets clipping pedestrians on the elbows with their wing mirrors.
The movie
The Laughter of Eggs
was the first of Brazilian writer Paulho
Puoncho’s many successful novels to be filmed. Like a lot of Latin American
fiction it heavily featured a talking bird that uttered all manner of wise and
deep statements. Warbird had supervised the humane treatment of the talking
bird while it was on set and during the promotional tour (during location
filming the rumour was the bird had had a bigger trailer than Jeremy Irons),
and now the European premiere was being held in aid of Helen’s charity.

Toby
and Helen had given their taxi driver a pass which allowed him to drive into
Leicester Square
right up to the entrance
of the cinema down a high lane that had been carved out of yelling people. The
cameras did not explode for them in a waterfall of light as they stepped from
the cab, though a couple of freelancers penned outside behind barriers took a
few shots of Helen since she was very pretty and might have an affair with
somebody famous one day.

In
front of the couple, capering in the entrance to the cinema, was someone they
knew, an actor called Roland Malone who had co-starred in the early nineties
with Lulu in her one hit, a TV detective series called
Bold As Bacon
about
a father and son team who ran a bacon stall round the markets of the northwest
and also solved crimes. The photographers called out to him, ‘Roland! Roland!
This way, Roland!’ and he pranced and cavorted for them.

Toby
and Helen, skirting Roland’s flailing arms, mounted the stairs and entering the
auditorium were shown to their seats; in the arm of each there was a free bag
of popcorn and a bottle of flavoured mineral water of a new kind — carrot or
something. The Odeon was separated into two halves by a long curving aisle that
ran the width of the cinema. In front of this aisle towards the screen was the
place where local radio competition winners and office staff from the companies
who supplied bottled water and sticky labels to the film’s producers were
seated, overdressed in their ballgowns and rented tuxedos with red bow ties; a
cloud of excitement and anticipation hung over this southern hemisphere of the
cinema.

In the
uphill part where Helen and Toby sat were the film’s producers themselves, its
distributors, various low-grade stars of television and radio and the senior
executives of Warbird: there was no excitement here. Inside her head Helen
explained all this to Julio Spuciek.

The
couple had invited their friends Oscar and Katya to the premiere and they were
waiting for them in the four-seater box that fronted the aisle. Oscar had once
worked with Toby at the Percussionists Licensing Society, while Katya was a
food writer and critic: at the moment she was working on a book of recipes for
meals that were mentioned in the Bible; she reckoned this would be a huge hit
with fundamentalist Christians who wished to eat only holy food.

Roland
Malone, having been told by the photographers that they had enough shots of him
now, thank you very much, had wandered into the auditorium; spying Toby and
Helen he waved energetically and came over to stand in front of their seats in
the aisle.

‘Hi,
Roland,’ said Toby. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Great,’
the actor replied. ‘I’ve just been speaking to my agent, he’s got something
really exciting for me.’

‘What,
the National job?’

‘No,
it’s a memorial service at the actors’ church for Tony Walker, big-time drama
producer. Rumour is he died of a heart attack in the arms of a very
good-looking
Labrador
.’

‘I didn’t
know he was a big mate of yours,’ Helen said.

‘Me? I
hated the bastard.’

‘So why
are you doing it?’

He
looked at her like she was retarded. ‘I’m top of the bill! If you do a telly or
a play only the public see-it, but if you give a good performance at a memorial
service for somebody really important then every bastard in the business is
there to watch you breaking down in tears at the power of your own acting;
can’t fail.’

Helen
said to Julio Spuciek in her mind, ‘Roland! What a self-involved arse. Of
course, Julio, you remember he was exactly the type I would have once fallen
for, before I married Toby — handsome, creative, highly strung and a complete
prick.’

‘Pajero
is the Argentinian slang for prick,’ Julio said.

‘Really,
and isn’t a Pajero a type of four-wheel-drive car?’

‘Exactly,
all these pricks are driving around with “prick” written on their car.’

‘Oh,
Julio,’ she said, ‘you’re so funny.’

‘And
you are looking particularly beautiful tonight.’

Just about completing the
fashion course, Harriet left college with an indifferent degree and none of her
tutors, unsurprisingly, seemed willing to recommend an overweight girl who
didn’t look after herself as an intern at any fashion house. So, more or less
at random, she took a job as a dresser on
Miss Saigon
at the Theatre
Royal,
Drury Lane
. With her
meagre wages she was able to move to a bedsit in the place that nobody calls
Pointless
Park
.

When
Helen left college she liked to think it was a complete coincidence that she
moved there too, except she lived in a big house with the family of a lecturer
from the college whom she was having an affair with. Helen gave dinner parties,
she went to plays and the cinema and had lots and lots of boyfriends. If she
fell out with one boyfriend there was always another waiting: one took an
overdose because she chucked him, another became gay; one tried to join the
French Foreign Legion but was turned down and settled for a fast-track
management career at Waterstones. Sex was everywhere: in the same week as Cindy
Crawford and k.d. lang were pictured kissing on the front cover of
Vogue
Lulu
and Rose put their hands down each other’s-pants at a party and rummaged around
as if they were looking for something. Even Harriet had a married man who slunk
up to her little bedsit in the late afternoon.

Always
in the background, almost unnoticed, there was Toby, hanging around without
making any great impression except that he was generally drunk and there was
often a crowd grouped around him looking down and asking, ‘Are you all right,
Toby?’

In 1998
the sisters’ mother, who had suffered from ill health for years, suddenly
became very sick. Helen was twenty-seven when this happened, Harriet thirty.
Later on when they were in their mid-forties and they’d all begun to look like
their own deranged elderly relatives, there would always seem to be somebody
who was having to fly up to Scotland every weekend to comfort their father in a
hospice or who was forced into making eight-hour train journeys to obscure
mental institutions in Cumbria in order to visit their suicidal sister, but
back then they seemed to be the only ones who had to endure this kind of
crisis. When Helen told all her exciting lovers that she needed their help and
support at a difficult time in her and her sister’s life they all acted as if
it was they who were having some huge crisis.

The men
said, ‘But I’ve got this meeting with a guy who might buy one of my pastry
sculptures,’ or ‘My allergies don’t allow me to go into or through the
countryside,’ or ‘If I’m away who’ll feed my iguana?’ One particular boyfriend
actually managed to develop all the symptoms of her mother’s throat cancer
including rapid weight loss, muscle weakness and coughing up blood whenever she
saw him.

Only
Toby emerged from the mist and would drive them up and down the motorway in the
middle of the night, then wait patiently outside the hospital, would shop for
them and cook their meals when they were too tired and upset to do anything for
themselves.

All of the next week
Harriet kept the lights turned off in the shop just in case Patrick was passing
and happened to glance inside and see she wasn’t in
Cardiff
. Unfortunately the door had to remain unlocked since she couldn’t
afford to be turning away customers. Just to be on the safe side though, her
worktable was dragged out of the shop window and into the space behind the
counter where it was mostly hidden from the street; the disadvantage of this
was that there was less light back there so she needed to keep her work lamp
burning simply to be able to do the repairs. On the day, at the hour when
Harriet should have been having her sixth lesson with Patrick the sky was grey
and clouded. Every few minutes, while working at her table in a pool of yellow
light repairing moth holes in a tweed jacket, she would glance up at the window
just in case he was there; in as much as she had a plan her thinking was that
before Patrick saw her she could quickly turn the lamp off and hide motionless
behind the hanging ranks of clothes. Though she told herself really she was
being ridiculous even worrying about it.

When
she looked up and he was standing right in front of her she didn’t for a second
take it in; Harriet thought a grey cloud had somehow come into the shop and was
blocking her view. Once she realised it was him her heart gave such a lurch of
fear it was as if a buffalo was loose inside her, careening around madly trying
to smash its way out of her skin.

‘You
told me you were in
Cardiff
,’
Patrick said.

She saw
that his skin was completely white, even paler than it usually was. Harriet
seemed to remember a medical student saying you shouldn’t fear an aggressive
person who was red in the face because they weren’t going to harm you, all
their blood was in their head thinking angry thoughts. You should really fear
the white-faced since all their blood had gone to the extremities, their hands
and feet, ready to do terrible damage.

‘Oh
well, yes but … they told me it …‘ she trailed off unable to think of a
lie.

‘But
you’re here.’, ‘Yes.’

‘So as
it turns out we can do our lesson.’

‘Yes.’

‘Lock
the door and get up the stairs then.’

With
uncertain legs Harriet rose, put the shop sign to ‘Closed’ and turned the lock
on the door. She thought fleetingly of fleeing into the street but what
would-she say to people? ‘There’s a man in my shop and I’m afraid that he wants
to give me a fitness lesson.’ So instead she turned off the lights and walked
into the hall. He followed close behind as they mounted the stairs up to the
empty room.

Outside
the big windows the sky was now a single shade of grey the colour of the
sugarpaper that Harriet remembered they used to draw on in art class at school.
Somewhere over Hackney lightning crackled.

Standing in the centre of
the room she waited to be told what to do.

Patrick
walked in tight circles around her and she tried to follow him with her eyes
until he hissed, ‘Look straight ahead.’

After
some more pacing, out of her vision, he spoke again. ‘We’re going to try
something different today. You’re to stand as if you’re riding a horse, do you
know how to do that? Legs apart, knees bent.’

‘Like
I’m riding a horse?’

Suddenly
he was right in front of her face. ‘Yes, like you’re riding a fucking horse,
playing fucking horsey, do you know how to fucking do that?’

She
thought to herself that she’d never seen her plumber angry, the postman had
never sworn at her, Mr Sargassian, the old man from next door who came in to
water her plants while she was away, had never stood in front of her, his spit
flying into her eyes, telling her to play fucking horsey, so how had she got
into this situation? This man who’d come to her house six times was now yelling
at her to do weird stuff and she couldn’t think of anything to do but to obey.

Slowly
Harriet settled into the shape remembered from childhood, her legs apart, her
bottom sticking out at a stupid angle. She felt the fat of her stomach creasing
over itself and a single rivulet of sweat trickled down her back, suddenly
making her want to giggle..

‘Arms
by your side, fists clenched …‘ He was directly behind her now as he spoke
and though she desperately wanted to she was afraid to turn her head.

Then,
more frightening than any angry words, there was nothing; for what must have
been ten minutes Harriet stood in this posture; occasionally she thought she
heard him, move behind her, sometimes sensing he was somewhere at the back of
the room, at other times feeling that he was right behind her, feeling his
breath only a few inches from her spine. Soon her legs began to shake and she
was considering asking if she might move when suddenly from somewhere out of
the darkness he walked up and kicked her hard in the shins. Over the next few
months Harriet would learn that each part of the body has its own kind of pain:
head pain is like a bad fog, arm pain is like a stale sandwich, but she would
always say that shin pain is one of the worst.