That evening the client turned up to collect the costume he’d forgotten, or I had. I showed him in, he shook his umbrella, and when he was standing in the front room I told him the costume wasn’t ready. He was, I have to say, speechless. Instead he turned one palm outward. I noticed it was pinkish, as if he stored a lot of blood there, more than usual. In the other hand he held a dripping briefcase. His dark, rectangular suit made him look a different person from the one in the new jeans, but still dishevelled. The suit behaved as if there was a wind in the front room. We stood in silence, flanking the table, me in my Mabel skirt, him in his means-business suit. The ball was in my court; I needed to tell him when to come back, that was the way the transaction should proceed.
I’m a terrible blusher. I don’t need blusher, I can do it for myself, thanks very much. I could feel myself steaming and smiling stupidly, I didn’t know why. Well, I did know. Rain was battering the iron roof, as it had the day before.
‘I thought it was ready yesterday,’ he said.
His high forehead had the look of a terrace house. People with foreheads are meant to be brainy, but that’s a bit unfair on people with low foreheads.
‘Yesterday?’ My cheeks raving like a lava lamp.
‘Or whenever it was.’ Quickly, to get on with it.
‘The day your’—I had to think—‘wife was here?’
He half smiled, half pursed his lips. ‘Yeah. That day.’
This is how he looked: like Mr Rochester. Read Jane Eyre. Like that. Craggy. What anyone would see in him, let alone two women.
‘It wasn’t ready,’ I said.
His face went squarer. ‘But it was. You wrapped it, remember?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘But when I looked at it again, I saw that in fact it wasn’t ready. After all.’
I was being an idiot, a clown. I should give him his fucking costume and book in for therapy. I don’t even swear. But there was something about the situation made me twitchy. I mean, I’d met the mistress and the wife. It was suddenly so transparent. I’d been doing this very thing, on and off, for three years, counting New York, but, well, maybe I shouldn’t.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I mean, why not?’
I blundered on. ‘Because I didn’t do a good-enough job on it. I can make it better.’
‘Look, I’ve come from work,’ he said. He looked tired, come to mention it; the eyes. ‘It’ll be fine as it is. Didn’t you say it was invisible?’
I hesitated. I suppose we’d had the invisibility conversation—I did with most clients. It was all relative, it depended on circumstance. ‘Almost invisible,’ I said.
‘Okay, almost.’
‘But not to someone looking closely.’
He shook his head, which was a little shaggier than you’d expect with a suit. ‘It looked fine to me. I’ll just take it anyway.’
Something occurred to me. ‘But you didn’t look at it yesterday.’
He looked slightly taken aback. I smiled, but put it out like a small fire. He propped his briefcase against a chair. His hand looked stiff from it. ‘I don’t know anything about this sort of stuff.’
I said to myself, GoGo, just give him the costume. ‘It’s the Blackout,’ I said. ‘I don’t have my electric light. I did this job under the kerosene lamp, but I should’ve done it in daylight.’
He followed my logic, looking from table to window.
‘That’s what I’ll do next time,’ I apologised, if not profusely.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll just come back.’
I hadn’t planned this. I’d give him the thing the next day, untouched of course. But if I had planned it (and I don’t know why the hell I would), I would’ve expected him to put up more of a fight.
‘Tell me when,’ he said.
He was a pushover. A tower of jelly, or jello as they say in America.
‘I’ll look in my book.’
Oh, I’d look in my book.
I ran my finger down the columns of the workbook, over the garments. The subtitles in my head, like the subtitles of the essays I used to write, the bits that told you what it was actually about. Coat, brown, woman’s: desperate hurry, sex. Trousers, black, man’s: drunk, sex. My finger came to the end of the list. Ah. I didn’t tell him the jobs before the costume had all been done and that there were no new ones apart from the aprons. I could see him out of the corner of my eye squinting at the page. ‘But it must’ve been,’ he began, and stopped. I knew he wouldn’t ask why the costume seemed to have slipped down the queue. He was like a man in a clothes shop, helpless—only worse, because this wasn’t menswear, it was a fucking dress! Stop swearing, GoGo. I don’t know where I got this habit. I’m really a polite person. Despite the pole house. I never wanted to be a raving lunatic. That’s what I’ve always admired about Art. Nothing of the nutcase about him.
I told the client not to worry, that it wouldn’t take long.
He nodded. ‘When?’
‘Couple of days. That wouldn’t be too late to’—I took my finger off the page and looked up at him—‘trick her, would it?’ I was waiting for him to tell me to back off. He said nothing. I continued: ‘What I mean is, are you still thinking you can . . . hide all this from her?’ I could hear a lightness oozing out of my voice: contempt. The truth was, I was having a blast toying with the investment banker. I was a cat with a mouse.
‘Hide the costume?’ He was playing dead.
‘Well, the lack of a costume was more what I was thinking.’
After a second he decided this was funny, and gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m still thinking that.’
‘That you can just put it back, and she’ll never know the difference?’
‘Yup, that’s what I’m thinking.’ He picked up his briefcase. His tight hand.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s positive thinking. I was thinking it might be too late already.’ GoGo, shut up, I was saying to myself, like a subtitle. Shut Up.
‘No, it’s not too late. She’s in Wellington for a few days. Her firm relocated because of the Blackout. She’s an accountant.’
Oh. This was a new development. Since yesterday. This was a bit unfair. ‘I’m sure we can have it done by the time she gets back.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’ Polite. Formal. Slightly nervous.
I closed my book, formal too, prim. I was Jane blinking Eyre. He was moving across the room. I told him he’d have it back in time. ‘That would please both of them, wouldn’t it?’ I could barely contain my distaste for him. ‘Your wife, and Trisha?’
He shot a look from the doorway, the name of the other woman seemingly jarred from his mouth. ‘Trisha?’
‘Trisha. She’d be off the hook.’
‘It won’t “please her,”’ he said tightly.
‘Oh.’ I was following him out into the mandolin, i.e. passage. The rain was fading away, some handfuls on the iron roof. ‘She seemed to be, you know, keen to see it all fixed.’ A lie, of course. She hadn’t given a rat’s arse about it. She was just going through the motions. If I remembered rightly.
He said over his shoulder, ‘She’s gone.’
I had a new, odd sensation in my cheeks: buzzing. ‘Gone?’
He turned but I couldn’t see his face in the dark passage, which was made so much darker by the low cloud. I’d never asked questions of my clients, not once. They offered me information, too much, about their complicated lives. Their eyes would start out of their head with the need to tell. It was gory. They told me so much I sometimes wanted to put my hands up to their mouths, crisscrossed like a bandage, and stop their no choice, out of my hands. But a man standing in the half-dark of the Blackout, he was hard to see, and it was just possible to ask a question of someone almost invisible.
‘Gone where? Back to Ireland?’
I thought he cocked his head, its shape, in the dark. ‘No idea. Why?’
‘No reason. She seemed like a nice person.’ Another lie. She was ghastly.
He ignored this, and peered back into the nothingness of the passage. ‘Did you get all the beads up the other day, yesterday?’
I followed his gaze to the place where the beads had run under the door. Like honey. ‘Yeah I did, most of them.’
In the grey light from the front door he looked blank. He didn’t want to know about the beads, of course, it was just something to say.
‘Tomorrow then,’ I said.
‘Tomorrow?’ He seemed surprised, pleased. I suppose her nibs might be home for the weekend. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ I might be able to manage, seeing it was already finished. This was hilarious.
‘Okay, tomorrow.’
He stomped down the overgrown steps, the slightly shambolic walk, and I watched him flicker away across the street. He had a car parked somewhere. The rain had gone off and the atmosphere was whitish, washed clean. The bougainvillea daubed its drenched magenta petals over the picket fence. Wildflowers and weeds poked at the dusk. That banker’s wife—or whoever she was, in 1900—must have gone crazy with her forget-me-nots and daisies, her dandelions and lavender, in the unaccustomed heat while her husband was down in the city. Perhaps even during her lifetime she regretted planting so many English flowers in the semi-tropical hothouse of Auckland.