Peckhams’ annual outing to Newmarket fell that year on a particularly fine August day. Only heads of department went, of course, and a few major local customers; other guests were transported in limousines which picked up in Central London, or found their own way to the Race Course. A big marquee had been hired especially for Peckhams; a buffet lunch was to be served: a special in-marquee tote was set up, and the races could be watched on Anglia TV if the spirit or the legs failed. Shanty Cotton had urged everyone to dress up, and the group which gathered in Peckhams’ forecourt was, as Carmen described it to me, on the gaudy side. The women wore large hats and bright floral prints, as if for Ascot, and Shanty’s tie was more brilliant than his face: scarlet and purple. Only Henrietta Cotton, his gentle, peaceable wife, was dressed in modest grey, and wore a simple straw hat. She looked as if she’d prefer to be working in her garden back home. As for Carmen, she’d woken up that morning with long legs and a small waist, though with her bosom still its ordinary self, so she knew something was up. Perhaps it was just that her suffering for the loss of Ronnie Cartwright was to be stepped up – she had almost forgotten about him, so busy was she at work, making doubly sure she was not demoted, sent back to the factory floor, for Shanty liked to keep everyone on their toes, and at home, arguing with the mortgage company as to whether or not subsidence of the ground beneath her house was her responsibility, the Council’s or the mortgage company’s insurers. The ownership of property, she began to see, could be an anxious and onerous business. The lorries which passed under her bedroom night and day disturbed her sleep, as well as shaking her house to its foundations. But these things, she understood well enough, had been sent to try her: she would not give way to despair or complaint. And she was looking forward to the trip to Newmarket. Her father Andy had once taken her to the races before being barred the track, for some reason or another never made clear to her but bitter enough at the time. He’d promised to take her every birthday, but she only went the once, when she was nine. After the arrival of the cheque her parents had fallen silent, apart from a postcard from Monte Carlo, which said nothing about their returning home. Andy’s run of gambling good luck still held, apparently.
So here was Shanty, trying to get sixteen people into five Rolls-Royces, all parked in Peckhams’ forecourt and holding up a string of Peckhams vans with deliveries or collections to do, and changing his mind faster than he could make it up, in spite of the list in his hand, carefully thought out by his office administrator Janice and approved only the day before yesterday by Shanty himself. But he and Janice had quarrelled yesterday, it seems; she has been demoted to the office administration pool and he no longer trusts her judgement. Office rumour has it that she revealed a boyfriend he didn’t know about. And he is probably flustered by the presence of his wife Hen, who always manages to make him feel like a naughty little boy and behave like a bully.
‘Pay attention,’ says Shanty. ‘Let’s have a little organisation here, shall we! Four to each car: ladies, take your hats off once you’re in place. Nothing worse than a poke in the eye. Henrietta, I want you in the second car with Tony, and Mr and Mrs Snape. Everyone’s hat in the boot of car number one, please.’ But the ladies decline to be so far removed from their hats, and the chauffeurs have already got out to open the boots when it turns out the hats won’t fit in without crushing anyway, so the seating has to be arranged according to size of hat.
‘Carmen, not in car number two, after all; you’d better be in car number one with me and Henry and when Ronnie Cartwright has the courtesy to turn up he can be in car number one too.’ Carmen’s heart lurches. She hasn’t known Ronnie is coming. She is wearing a pink confection of a dress she happened to find in Oxfam − it says on the label Zandra Rhodes, but she can hardly believe that − and a white cartwheel hat, and looks, as Mr Snape says when Mrs Snape isn’t in earshot, a million dollars. She’s glad about the length of her legs, and her feet are comfortable once more in her best shoes, seventy-two pounds’ worth, which she hasn’t worn since her escape from Bellamy House. And not a zit anywhere in sight! She looks wonderful; a little flouncy and wispy for her own taste, but it seems to suit everyone else okay. Even Shanty, who seems to have gone off her lately, and shuts her up rather cruelly at Board meetings whenever she ventures an opinion on staff morale or the profit-sharing scheme which never materialises, is attentive, and Hen bites her lip a little, so Carmen distances herself from Hen’s husband as much as she can. Shanty is feeling the loss of Janice and is looking for a replacement. So much is clear.
Carmen murmurs in defence of Ronnie, ‘I suppose major clients are allowed to be late. That’s the whole point of being a major client,’ and Shanty just smiles and says, ‘Discourtesy is discourtesy, no matter what you say, Carmen. And profit is the point, the whole point, and the only point, and don’t you forget it, my dear. Remember that and you’ll go far. Mr and Mrs Snape, I need you in car two, not three. Philip, what are you doing in car four? This list is hopeless.’
Hen says mildly, ‘Couldn’t I sit next to you, Shanty? I was so looking forward to today,’ and Shanty replies, ‘Mr Snape will think you’re being rude to him, dear, and please remember this isn’t a party, it’s a window of opportunity. Mrs Abhill, if you can’t manage your hat on your lap there is no point in you getting in next to Philip –’ and so on and so forth, until they are all packed in, and still Ronnie Cartwright has not arrived, though there is just the one place vacant next to Carmen in car number one.
Then the BMW nosed in front of the line of waiting vans. Driver was at the wheel. In the back were Ronnie Cartwright and Poppy. Poppy was wearing a smooth green silk suit and a little black pillbox hat with a veil, and looked soignée and well defined: almost as if a black line had been drawn around her to make sure she got proper attention. Driver opened the door for Poppy with a flourish. Out she stepped, with Ronnie close behind her.
‘Are we late?’ asked Poppy. ‘I hope we haven’t held people up? Ronnie had a puncture. I told him he would but he wouldn’t listen. This nice gentleman passed and gave us a lift. Which car are we in?’
‘Oh dear, one extra,’ said Shanty.
‘Ronnie never goes anywhere without me,’ said Poppy. ‘Do you, Ronnie? He can’t cope. He’s hopeless. I even have to do his Head Office reports. Come on, Ronnie, everyone’s waiting.’
Shanty said to Carmen, ‘Sorry about this, Carmen, we’ll have to leave you behind.’
And Carmen had to get out and let Ronnie and Poppy in, and off the procession of cars went, leaving her standing in her Zandra Rhodes dress and the cartwheel hat in the middle of Peckhams Poultry’s forecourt.
‘Well?’ said Driver.
‘Well what?’ enquired Carmen.
‘Would you like a lift to Newmarket?’
‘No thanks,’ she said.
‘If you’re still set against Sir Bernard,’ said Driver, ‘I have one or two others to offer.’
‘You mean others you’ve made promises to you can’t keep, for shortage of virgins.’
‘Virgins schmirgins,’ he said.
Now this conversation comes out of my head, not Carmen’s. I can tell you she was pretty stunned, standing there in her gauzy dress, the hot August sun beginning to mount in the sky, and the lines of van and truck drivers hooting and hooting, wanting to offload and load – for their cargoes, living and dead, were beginning to suffer from creeping warmth – but unable to do so until Driver moved his BMW.
‘Since you’ve taken away from me the only man I ever wanted,’ said Carmen, stamping her pretty foot, as heroines are meant to do – she found herself doing it in spite of herself: thus rejection, outrage and anger were turned to a mere charming petulance – ‘I’ll stay single for the rest of my days.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ he said. ‘That is a nice dress you’re wearing.’
‘Oxfam,’ she said. ‘My own money, my own choice!’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Just happened to be on the rail, never worn, fitting perfectly, twenty-five pence, just the thing for Newmarket. Happens all the time, doesn’t it, or is it the Devil’s own luck?’
She had to agree it was the Devil’s own luck, and got in beside him, if only to stop the van drivers hooting, and to keep Peckhams’ production line going, in spite of the absence of managers.
Inside the car everything was dark green, and cool, and quiet, as if she were in the middle of a very, very old wood.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Wherever you like,’ he said.
‘Then take me to Laura’s,’ she said.
‘How boring,’ he said, but he changed direction: Traffic lights − as roadworks continued in the area, red lights abounded − always turned green at his approach.
‘How about royalty?’ asked Driver, and a male hand with a massive gold Gothic ring on its middle finger crept up from behind and laid itself on Carmen’s knee. She looked behind her and saw a suave and smiling face, and written on it all the petulance of those born to power. ‘Red carpets wherever you go?’
‘I’m a republican,’ she said, and the hand seemed to melt away.
‘I could offer you a diplomat,’ said Driver. ‘Speaks eight languages.’ Carmen turned to see who was sitting behind her and there sat Sergei Moscowitch, whom she had seen many a time on TV, speaking to his tormented nation, though she couldn’t remember which one, with his pale intelligent face and dark eyes set in deep sockets, and bags under the eyes the like of which she had never seen. On TV make-up had made little of them. ‘And the gift of tongues for you thrown in,’ said Driver.
‘Everyone speaks English anyway,’ said Carmen. ‘Why should I bother?’ And Sergei vanished, to be replaced by Rollo Hopper from Hollywood, laid back, bronzed, amazingly handsome in a white-toothed, gold-embossed kind of way. And he too she had seen many a time on TV and at the cinema.
‘How about Hollywood?’ asked Driver. ‘You could be a star.’
‘It all ends up with drink and drugs,’ said Carmen, and she thought she heard Rollo snarl, except there were all three of them now in the back seat, smiling: royalty, the diplomat and the star.
‘Forget the judgement of Paris,’ said Driver, ‘this is the judgement of Carmen. The woman’s turn.’
‘In that case,’ said Carmen, ‘I choose none of them.’
There was a flash of light to end all flashes of light and the car door flew open.
‘You and your flashes of light!’ said Carmen.
‘You haven’t seen trouble yet,’ he said. ‘You and your precious friends.’
‘Look into my eyes,’ she sang, in her newly melodious voice. ‘Look into my heart. When I look inside you all I see is the freezer a week after the power’s gone off. Everything soggy and rotten and putrid!’
The door slammed behind her, and off Driver roared. Oddly, he was driving a sports coupé – one of those anti-children vehicles in which the back-seat passengers (two’s company, three’s a crowd) can only sit with their knees to their chin — and how Royalty, Diplomacy and Hollywood could have sat so comfortably there was no explaining.
Carmen marched up the path – there’d been a particularly nasty fall of dust that day as some gentle hill, a rarity in those parts, to windward, had been exploded the quicker to level the ground – and banged on Laura’s front door. A cacophony arose inside – the noise of startled and excited children. Laura opened the door. Carmen kicked off her dusty shoes and made for the telephone. Laura tried on the shoes, but her feet were far too wide. She wore a flowered smock, and the baby had been sick down her back. ‘I say, Carmen,’ Laura said. ‘Just look at you! All dressed up and nowhere to go!’
‘I want a taxi,’ said Carmen to the phone. ‘I want it now. Newmarket − yes, Newmarket. Is that a problem? I know it’s a long drive. No, I can’t go by train. What kind of taxi outfit are you, suggesting people go by train? God,’ she said to Laura, ‘this place is the pits and getting worse.’
‘It’s Dullsville,’ said Laura sadly. ‘Let’s-get-out-of-here-ville. Always was. What about me?’
‘You just get on changing the nappies, Laura,’ said Carmen. ‘You wanted kids, you got them. I wanted true love and I see no sign of it arriving… Oh, and I don’t want a driver who smokes… Okay, you win, if he’s the only one, so what the hell!’
She gave Laura’s address and put the phone down.
‘Newmarket!’ said Laura, awed.
‘It isn’t what it was,’ said Carmen. ‘Anyone can go these days, even Peckhams. It’s all PR. Except I want to go and I mean to go and I’d be on my way now if it wasn’t for Poison Poppy.’
‘At least she’s in your life now,’ said Laura, ‘not in mine, and just you make sure you keep her there. She ruined my father. She killed my mother.’
‘Don’t exaggerate. And stop blaming other people.’
But Laura was peering inside Carmen’s dress for the label.
‘Zandra Rhodes!’ she marvelled.
‘Oxfam,’ disclaimed Carmen.
‘You’re winding me up,’ said Laura. ‘So, who paid for it?’
‘I did.’
Laura was trying to feed Baby Sara with cereal with one hand and keep Alexandra on the breast with the other, and making a bad job of both.
‘Rachel,’ said Carmen, ‘you’re old enough to feed Sara. Help your mother, for God’s sake.’
Rachel took the spoon and started delivering mouthfuls into Sara’s mouth. Sara, enchanted, stopped wheezing and swallowed obligingly.
‘Thank you, Carmen,’ said Laura humbly.
‘I just can’t bear inefficiency,’ said Carmen.
‘God knows what the fare to Newmarket will be,’ said Laura. ‘But enough to keep us in disposable nappies for a month.’
– At which point there was a bang on the door. It wasn’t the taxi driver but Mavis and Alan, and they were waving a wedding invitation on embossed white paper with silver edging. It named the day, three months hence, of Annie’s wedding.
‘We won’t come in,’ said Mavis. ‘We know how busy you are. Though time for guests, I see. How nice! The postman delivered yours to us by mistake, but now I’ve forgotten to bring it over. This one’s ours. But what’s the odds? You won’t be able to go, Laura, all that way − far too expensive. Or you either, I suppose, Carmen. You’ll be far too busy. She’s sent us return tickets. Club Class, of course. Well, she’s in the money now. There’s to be a marquee, two hundred and fifty guests.’
‘She didn’t write?’ asked Laura. ‘Just the invitation?’
‘I don’t think she’ll be writing to you much from now on,’ said Mavis. ‘People’s ways in life separate. Some reach up to the clouds (she meant Annie), others just drudge along (did she mean Laura?) and some coil down to the pit (she most certainly meant Carmen). But this we must accept – paths divide.’
Carmen had no time to retort, perhaps fortunately, for at this moment the taxi turned up, hooting his horn, smoking his fag out of the open window, and she had to leave.
Laura, Mavis and Alan watched her go in silence. Mavis said, ‘I never thought she was a proper friend for our Annie. She was bound to end up in trouble. What did they expect when they named her? Some people have no imagination.’
Alan said, ‘That girl is spoiled goods, there’s no mistaking it.’
Mavis said, ‘Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil, Alan.’
Alan said, ‘All I meant was, being spoiled goods, she might not find a husband so easily.’
Laura said, ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want a husband.’
Mavis said, quite startled, ‘Every woman wants a husband, that goes without saying. My surgery’s full to overflowing with widows wanting theirs back.’
‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘anyway, if Alan can just find the time, I’d love to have Annie’s wedding invitation. It can go on the mantelpiece and I can look at it and dream.’
The date of the wedding, Mavis told me, had finally been settled while Tim and Annie were enjoying a ski-plane ride up the Tasman Glacier in the Mount Cook district. I could imagine.
‘Don’t you just love this?’ asked Tim. The plane had flown up a wide desolate river valley between icy crags; it seemed to Annie an unnatural place; she had expected the glacier to provide some glittering spectacle of ice facets and frosted spears, the kind of landscape into which Superman in the film threw his learning module to make his crystal palace spring to life, but here was just a creeping valley – creeping backwards, she was told, as the glacier receded – made of blackish ice, a hundred and twenty metres thick, coated with gravel, everything so dead that to be alive seemed the offence. It made you feel too noisy yourself, and the sound of the plane was like the buzz of an insect which pesters you at night.
‘I just love this,’ she said, and beneath them, as if in response, the great river of ice turned white as they advanced, narrowed, became frosted, cut by crevasses which were the same blue as the wings of the teal on the estuaries back home, and the crags on the further side came closer, and ahead, towering above, was the Matte Brun peak (3,176 metres).
I know the depth of the ice and the height of the mountains because in the leaflet ‘Adventures for the Disabled’ ski-plane rides in the Mount Cook (3,764 metres) area are recommended. The invigorating effect of the mountain air and the thrill of the ride will do us good. So they say. Mount Cook’s Maori name is Aorangi or Cloud Piercer. Rangi the Sky Father and Papa the Earth Mother brought forth four Children of the Sky, all sons. Aorangi was the eldest; then came Rangiroa (Mount Dampier), Rangirua (Mount Teichelmann) and Rarangi-rua (Mount Silberhorn). The people of the earth live around the feet of what the white man called in his patronising way ‘The Southern Alps’, and the children of the clouds dwell around their heads or, as Annie discovered, rush straight into their rock walls in aircraft and then, this being the fun of it, bank steeply away with an inch or so to spare so there is nothing to be seen through their camera lens but jagged rock, should they still have their eyes open.
‘He’s gone mad,’ she cried to Tim. ‘Stop him!’ as the pilot, the plane still juddering from this first manoeuvre, dived headlong into a huge tonnage of snow which seemed to hang by a thread from a vertiginous wall and dislodged it so that it crashed a thousand feet below – she could hear its rumble above the sound of the engine and snow plastered the windscreen so the pilot was blind, but he didn’t care: now he was aiming upwards for the sky: he must be, for she was pressed far back in her seat, her mouth folded in against her teeth – but not open sky, oh no, for she could see crags on either side of them as the window cleared, jagged and seamed, so close she could touch them if she could move her arms, which gravity or fear kept pinioned to her sides. Not that she wanted to do either. She thought she passed out for a second or so.
‘Don’t be a scaredy-cat,’ Tim was saying. ‘This is a ski-plane ride. The pilot knows what he’s doing.’
‘Why?’ she thought. ‘But why is he doing it?’
‘The mountain of the Gods,’ said Tim. ‘These are the thrills of the Gods.’ He held her hand. His eyes were very bright; his nostrils were flared. He looked like this sometimes when they made love.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘I’m just fine,’ she said. Better to die with Tim than live without Tim, and the pilot banked and dived so the wing tips all but caught the jagged ice facets of the glacier and she found herself staring down into the blue-black depths of a crevasse, and she thought, well no, actually I want to live. If I have to live without Tim, still I want to live. An updraft of air caught the plane and tossed it up, out of control, and she screamed before she could say so.
‘Lucky that wasn’t a downdraft,’ said Tim to the pilot, and the pilot laughed.
‘You’re not nearly so close as you think,’ said Tim to Annie. ‘No worries. It’s a matter of perspective. The mountains are so vast up here metres always look like inches.’
‘Oh yes,’ she thought. ‘Oh yes,’ but aloud she said, ‘This is a million times better than a rollercoaster!’
Oh yes, thought I, reading my ‘Adventures for the Disabled’, what’s a thrill for some is a nightmare for others. No thanks.
The plane landed on its skis on the névé of the Franz Joseph Glacier: that is to say, the snowy flatlands from whence the glacier is sent creeping to the sea, a frozen river, or drawn back as the supply of snow diminishes. Tim and Annie had their photograph taken by the pilot. She was still trembling but was careful not to touch him so that he didn’t notice. Tim kissed her: her lips were steady enough.
‘Let’s set a date for the wedding,’ he said. She felt she had passed the last of the initiation tests. Her credentials for becoming a McLean wife had finally been established. The pilot offered them scones and tea from a hamper. She refused the scones. She was worrying that she might not fit into the McLean wedding dress. ‘Tell you what,’ said Tim, ‘for our honeymoon we’ll do a proper transalpine tramp. Up the Fox Glacier, across the Franz Joseph névé, over the Graham Saddle to Mount Cook village. It’s eight or nine days. Sometimes ten if the weather’s grungy. Mind you, you’ve got to be fit.’
‘How fit?’
‘The usual. Jog five kilometres without stopping, humping a fifteen-kilogram pack for an eight-hour day over rough terrain.’
‘I expect I could do that,’ she said.
‘Well, go into training,’ said Tim, ‘and make sure. If Mum and Dad can spare us as long as that. Otherwise we could just go up to Glencoe for a couple of days. You meet a lot of outdoor types up there. A real kiwi holiday, that would be. Or we could do the MacKenzie High Country Walk. Three days of easy walking; not much to that. Five or six hours a day, with only personal gear to hump. Or we could do the Arthuis Pass Scramble. You’re surefooted enough for that by now, I guess.’
On the way back he said, ‘You’ve finally learnt not to whinge, Annie. I’m really proud of you.’