26

Meetings

‘Unfortunately,’ Ron Hitchcock rolls his pen between thumb and forefinger, ‘there’s nothing I can do, Mrs Perry.’

Ron is representing the council’s Your Community division, but despite the fact we’ve met twice before, he refuses to call me by my Christian name. Deciding to hold the meeting here in our cramped office was a mistake, especially on such a hot afternoon, and while we’ve been talking two dark patches have blossomed in the armpits of his blue shirt. Turning on the fan will create a paperwork tornado. If only he’d at least loosen his tie.

‘Even if we had the resources to re-fund this project, I’m afraid you’re not grant ready,’ he says, moving his gaze to Frieda.

My heart sinks. Grant ready, like market facing and measurable outcomes, is part of the synthetic pseudo business language which gets trotted out at these meetings.

I refill his water glass. ‘But we’re running smoothly,’ says Frieda, edging our year-end accounts over the desk. ‘And we’ve had so much good feedback,’ I add, gesturing to the corkboard. He’s barely noticed the display we’ve created around the office walls. The thank-you notes, the photos of happy pensioners and school children.

‘I can see you’ve done good things.’ He sighs and sits back with an expression of weary patience. ‘Nevertheless there was some reservation expressed about your pedagogic practice.’

Pedagogic practice? I think for a moment and recall Oak Lane, the Head of Year stalking towards me at the end of a workshop, I thought you were going to discuss recycling, she snapped.

‘Do you mean Oak Lane Academy?’ I ask. Ron makes no comment. ‘The thing is, with older students, bright students, conversations tend to open out.’ She’d reprimanded one of the kids for asking what she called an inappropriate question, and I’d let him ask it anyway.

Ron glances at his notepad. ‘As well as nuclear energy, it seems you were facilitating a debate about direct action…’

‘No, I wouldn’t say facilitating.’ The power of official language. ‘There was a discussion, one of the students mentioned the coal-fired power station in Kingsnorth.’

‘And there was also reference to…’ He glances at his notepad, the squiggles unreadable from upside down, ‘…nuclear missiles.’

I scroll back in my memory. Occasionally someone asks how I got involved with campaigning.

‘It’s not your responsibility to lecture students about the whys and wherefores of nuclear disarmament, Mrs Perry.’ A strand of hair is curled damply on his forehead and I feel a huge temptation to reach across the table and give that pink head a good hard slap. Not to hurt him, just to wake him up.

‘We carried out nearly seventy workshops last year, some were more spirited than others, but there shouldn’t be a remit against debate? Not in a school.’ His expression tells me that whatever suspicions he had are now confirmed. I press on, ‘We certainly wouldn’t want to prejudice students in one direction or the other… our purpose is to…’ I reach for a word, ‘…empower them.’

Empower. I realise the word has come to mean nothing, it’s another entry on the list of jargon, the word Pippa used as she stood in the kitchen after our argument, her reason for taking part in the beauty pageant.

Ron touches a thumb to his brow. ‘These are funds from central government. We’re compelled to make efficiency savings. You understand.’

A sheen of perspiration glitters his forehead. I look to Frieda.

‘We’ve been working very hard to develop our connections with the local community,’ she says, reminding him of the community gardening scheme we’ve piloted. After drama school she appeared in a high-profile advert for washing-up liquid, and now she gives Ron the full beam of her Sunshine Rinse smile. I run my eyes down the pro-active verbs pencilled along the margin of my notebook: foster, harness, maximise, engage, enthuse, ready to seize on anything which might be of help.

Ron is not impervious to Frieda’s smile, and his gaze lingers on her curiously, like a man in a boring shop who’s found something of interest.

‘You’ve evidently put in a lot of energy,’ he says. ‘And that’s commendable.’ He stops browsing and returns his eyes to me, where they settle with businesslike regard. ‘But as you know, these are challenging times. Our resources are diminished and the green market is extremely competitive.’ Green market? We’re not looking to produce the next generation of happy shoppers. I say nothing. He clicks his ballpoint and tucks it into the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘I’m sorry Mrs Perry, but there are other organisations tendering for similar education work.’

Frieda is making one last attempt to talk him around, but no amount of Sunshine Rinse is going to save us now. The meeting is over. That’s it. Without our schools and community contract we’ve lost sixty percent of our funding; we’ve no reserves to speak of and we can’t compete with charities who have actual advertising budgets. But this isn’t Ron’s problem and already he’s buckling his briefcase.

‘Oh, Mrs Perry,’ he says when we’ve shaken hands at the door. My heart skips: a sudden idea – he’s remembered a source of revenue reserved for small environmental charities in Cambridgeshire. I give him my full attention. He smiles, a genuine smile, slightly shy. ‘I wanted to ask… it was you on that make-over programme, wasn’t it?’ The dream dissolves. ‘Only my wife’s a big fan. She was wondering, what’s Jude like in real life?’

Frieda leaves the door to the street open so a breeze can blow through, and now that its clatter won’t disturb our conversation, I switch the fan up high.

‘Do you think they’d give me a part in Me and My Girl?’ I ask.

She smiles, and I do too, because it’s better than succumbing to a long despairing wail.

‘We could always get the collecting tins out,’ she suggests.

We attempt a few more ideas for funding, but our hearts aren’t in it. Soon Frieda will be gone, tap dancing her way around the regional theatres of Britain and I’ll be sitting here scratching my head alone because there’s no money to replace her. We finish off the day’s work and I complete the workshop plan for the rest of the week.

At five-thirty Frieda reaches for her shoulder bag.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll come up with something,’ she says, gliding a comb through the fine wings of her blonde hair. ‘You always do.’

‘Do I?’

‘Absolutely. You’re the most resourceful person I know,’ she says, applying tinted lip gloss. Resourcefulness was a habit we developed at the common – rain-capes made from dustbin liners, earth ovens dug under the firepit, the mug tree made from a real tree. But I don’t have any good ideas for magicking up cash.

Frieda smacks her lips together. ‘That should do it.’

She’s seeing a film, and as she tells me about it the thought arrives that I would happily swap lives with her, pop the lip gloss into my bag and whiz off into the evening sunshine. She snaps the compact shut. ‘How about you, any plans?’

‘Just a quiet night.’

My mind travels the route home, enters our house and there we are, the Perry family, Dom upstairs strumming his bass guitar while me and Pete occupy separate ends of the living room, trying to make it to bed time without inflicting or experiencing fresh pain. Our communication has gone down to the bare minimum, and though we’re still sleeping in the same bed to keep up appearances – Dom’s brown eyes monitor us over the dinner table – we’re only clinging on. Our marriage is crumbling. All day I carry traces of it underneath my fingernails like soil from the garden.

Five minutes later Frieda’s gone, leaving a cloud of scent behind her. I sit for a while, watching the multicoloured pipes of the screensaver making and remaking themselves, thoughts whirring with the fan. Something she said gives me an idea.

The collection tins are in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, and with my heart beating, I dig one out, drop it into my backpack and lock the office door behind me.

*

The wheels of my bike slice through shapes of bright light and shadow, following the commuter traffic out of Cambridge, past the cream stone of college buildings as they gradually give way to featureless road, a petrol station, a row of shops and then the junction I’m seeking. Two more turns and I’ve found the cul-de-sac, a slope of compact houses; first homes for new families or last homes for the retired. A little boy in a Thomas the Tank Engine t-shirt runs through a sprinkler and his mother smiles as I pass with my collecting tin.

Number 78 is a well-kept semi-detached with a neat front garden and two terracotta pots of marigolds balanced on the white exterior windowsills. I fumble the gate latch. Lavender bunches haphazardly along the path and three foxgloves bend towards the front door, which is half panelled with smoky glass. On the letterbox a discreet handwritten sign reads No Junk Mail Please. The sun has dipped behind the house and my arms feel weak, as if they’re carrying something much heavier than a plastic box with Easy Green stickered across the front.

The doorbell’s three harmonic notes are loud, they send a chime of alarm through my arm and into my chest and all at once I have an urge to flee. In a bid for distraction I begin to count the petals of a marigold. Fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-two, and no one comes. Better not to know, to turn back and get on the bike in the low evening sunshine and cycle away. But then a blurred shape appears behind the glass like the shadow of a fish underwater and the shadow swells until the door swings open.

She wipes her hands on the tea towel slung over her shoulder and wary regard softens as she sees the tin, the tin which explains my presence on her doorstep. I press it forward. ‘I’m collecting for a charity. We’re called Easy Green.’ If it is her, has Pete told her any of this? Along with a denim skirt, she’s wearing a washed-out pink vest, and without a bra her breasts make the shape of two shallow bells. She’s what, five years younger than me? This knowledge pulses through my head followed by Perhaps it isn’t her at all, perhaps it’s her mother.

If she knows who I am there’s no indication because she’s looking at me with something that borders on sympathy, encouraging me to speak, the way people encourage the shy or the afflicted, trying to draw them out. She nods. ‘Oh yes?’ An Irish accent. She’s Irish. Why is this surprising? I begin to recite some information about the charity, an automatic spiel. Her skin is Celtic, naturally fair, but she’s trained it to withstand the sun and a spray of freckles decorate her shoulders. There are whispers of grey coming through her dark brown hair. Her face, although pleasant, is unremarkable, nothing like the face I’ve imagined with its soft pout and coltish eyelashes.

‘So you visit local schools? I’ve taught at quite a few in this area.’ She says this brightly because it links us; it gives us something in common. That immediate intimacy so often found in female conversation with its undertone of Like me, I’m no threat.

Then it is her. It is almost funny, so far removed is she from the woman who’s been sashaying through my head. Her eyes are a greenish grey. Her mouth… what is this mouth like, the mouth that’s been pressed to my husband’s, the mouth that’s tasted his skin? It is a mouth. It is an ordinary mouth, the lips a little thin.

My thoughts are escaping in all directions, I’d gathered them tightly but now they’re a clutch of balloons rising and separating, and she gives me that sympathetic smile again.

‘Hang on a tick. I’ll get my purse.’ She dips back into the house. Her feet are bare and the toenails painted with a polish the colour of aubergines. She returns and drops a pound coin into the box. The money makes a hollow rattle. ‘Are the neighbours not feeling generous today?’

‘I’ve only just started.’

‘Oh right.’ She nods, puzzled by my method of beginning a collection in the middle of the street.

‘It’s a nice road. Have you lived here long?’ I ask wondering if she has cooked for Pete, that tea towel slung over the shoulder.

‘Um… about four years now.’

‘And you like it?’

‘Sure.’ She is holding the purse. ‘It’s very friendly. You’ll find that as you go around.’ She checks behind her, as if her name has been called. Where is the kitchen? I would like to go inside and lift the lids of her pans, investigate her fridge to discover her tastes, make my way through the rest of the house to pick up the photographs in their frames, read the spines of her books, sort through her wardrobe, her bedside table, examine the contents of her bathroom cabinet. And I want to tell her I have a right. I need to know. And she needs to know too, about the insomnia, the effort it takes to drag through each day, to get out of bed and into the shower and into the office and the panicky feeling which never quite disappears, which follows you everywhere, as if you’re about to speak to a thousand people.

She’s taken half a step back.

‘Where do you teach?’

‘I’m private tutoring just now,’ she says. ‘Exam season. All those anxious parents.’

Does she have children of her own? She shifts her weight from one hip to the other and now her face is guarded – she wants to go, to step back into that calm life she has for herself behind the front door, where other men’s wives do not turn up unexpectedly, she wants to slip back there free as a fish. She has a hand on the door, swinging it ever so gently when a black cat appears and winds around her legs. ‘Oh,’ she half laughs, the sudden flash of velvet against bare skin.

‘He probably wants feeding,’ she says, stooping to run a hand along the animal’s body. ‘Eat eat eat, that’s all you do,’ she says fondly. This is my cue to go.

My heart speeds. I part my lips. All I have to do is open my mouth and out it will come, the inconvenient truth, those words which will alter the course of her evening and the course of mine, and whatever is cooking inside that mysterious kitchen will burn. I’m Pete’s wife. The roses on the wallpaper at daybreak. Our shoes still muddled in a heap by the wardrobe, just as they were a month ago when I didn’t know she existed, when her naked body wasn’t settled between us. She straightens up and we make eye contact. Her face is expectant. And I want to ask her Do you know what this is like? Do you know what you’ve done?

I begin, ‘Do you…?’

She leans forwards, the better to express her empathy.

‘Do you want us to put you on our mailing list?’

She holds her hand up in refusal. ‘No. If you don’t mind. I can hardly keep up with the mail I receive.’ She smiles for the last time, wishes me a good evening and closes the door.