Two boys were coming towards us. I hardly took them in, aware only that they were about fourteen and relatively well dressed. As they passed, one leaped at Mum and snatched the chain with K for Kate from around her neck.
Mum screamed, the boys ran only a short distance, then turned. The one who’d snatched the chain dangled it at us tauntingly, before they skipped away, laughing, almost dancing in their triumph.
“It could have happened anywhere,” Mum said later, when we were back at Flo’s and she’d calmed down after I’d made us tea. it’s not just Liverpool. It could have happened anywhere in the world.”
Something funny was going on between George and Diana—or perhaps there was nothing going on at all.
Everyone managed to glean little pieces of information and put them together to make a whole. It appeared that George had suggested Diana return home when it became obvious that she and the children weren’t getting on, but had made no suggestion that she come back now that the children had gone. She’d spent Christmas alone in the house where she’d lived with her father. Even Oliver had to concede he felt sorry for the haggard little woman who stumbled round the office as if she were drunk, ignored by George. It wasn’t that George was being deliberately cruel, he was taken up with the new office, which was opening in a few days’ time. He appeared to have forgotten that Diana existed.
Like Oliver, I was sorry for Diana. If I’d been gutted by my demotion, she must have been feeling as if the bottom had dropped out of her world. But I was terrified that I was seeing myself in another five or ten years time.
Might I one day find myself waiting for a kind word from a man I’d been hoping would rescue me from a life of loneliness?
“Is this the girl who’s just dumped a guy who runs an Aston Martin speaking?” Peter Maxwell chuckled when I phoned him. Then are terrified of loneliness, not just women. Sit back, have a good time, and see what happens. Don’t wait for things, don’t expect them, they won’t come any sooner. It’s like that song Flo used to play all the time. We’re all dancing in the dark.”
“You’re very clever,” I said admiringly. We rang off, deciding that if we were still single at forty we would live next door to each other.
I thought of James, who was going through the same experience as Diana, and wondered if I’d been too cruel, too abrupt. If he hadn’t followed me to the bathroom, I would have told him tactfully in a more appropriate place. I recalled the way he’d been outside the nightclub it seemed like years ago, but it was only a few months -when he’d said he was sick of selling cars to idiots like himself. He wanted to do something more worthwhile with his life. And the time by the Pier Head when he told me how much he loved me. He’d joined the Socialist Workers’ Party to prove he wasn’t shallow. We’d got on well until he decided he was in love with me; from then on, he began to fall apart. I felt sure that one day James would marry someone who didn’t play such havoc with his emotions. They would have several children, and he would be back in the Conservative Party, still running his father’s garage—perhaps all three—having forgotten he’d ever wanted to do anything else.
On New Year’s Eve, I woke up with that aching feeling of loss again, a haunting sensation that something was missing from my life. I’d never been able to identify what it was, but in the darkness of my bedroom on the final day of the year, the knowledge came washing over me so forcefully that my body froze.
I was mourning the father I’d never known!
After a while, I made myself get up, convinced I might freeze altogether, die, if I stayed in bed any longer. I felt heavy and lethargic as I made myself a cup of tea. After I’d drunk it, I fetched the photo of my father, the one I’d found at Flo’s, and stared at the sober little five-year-old, the only child not smiling. How would it have been if he’d married Mum? Would there have been a Trudy, a Declan, an Alison? If so, they would be different from the ones I knew now, and Tom O’Mara would never have existed. I remembered reading that if a time traveller went back to the beginning of time and destroyed a blade of grass, it could change the entire course of history.
It was all becoming too deep for me. Anyway, if I thought about it long enough it would be easy to cry and never stop. I took a long shower, made myself a decent breakfast for a change, then went to work, feeling only slightly better.
Stock Masterton was in turmoil. The Woolton office had been decorated and furnished; it was ready to move into the following day. To celebrate the opening, clients would be offered refreshments and a glass of wine. There were adverts in the local press, though no mention of the food and drink, otherwise there would be a deluge of people who had no intention of buying or selling a house.
Every file had been copied, duplicates made of the wall charts. The contents of Oliver and Diana’s desks were transferred. People kept rushing in, collecting papers and rushing out again. I sat behind my desk, feeling dazed. I hadn’t the faintest idea what was happening to me.
Should I transfer my things to Woolton or not? George seemed to have forgotten that I was to have been the receptionist, just as he’d forgotten that Diana lived and breathed. I’d typed out my notice weeks ago and put it on his desk, but it had never been acknowledged. Yesterday he’d asked me to make an appointment early in January with a firm who were erecting a small estate in Seaforth and wanted Stock Masterton to handle the sales side.
“An appointment for you?” I enquired.
“No, for yourself, of course,” George replied testily.
There was mention of someone called Sandra in the new office, but no one seemed sure what job she was to do.
Oliver was no help. He complained that he was being kept in the dark and was at loggerheads with George, though George hadn’t noticed, and Jennifer, Oliver’s wife, was touring commercial property agents, presenting him with sheafs of offices to rent when he got home.
“She’s approached her father for a loan,” he said soon after I arrived. “I told her that Diana’s like a pricked balloon, but she said, ‘You never know, the whole thing might start up again.’ Would you come in with me, Millie?” he said plaintively. “I don’t think I could do it on my own.”
“I’d be glad to,” I told him, for the umpteenth time.
Even if my job turned out to be safe, after all, I didn’t think I could bring myself to trust George again.
To add further to my confusion Barry Green came up later in the morning and looked at me searchingly, as if he’d never seen me before, then gave a little “Humph” of what sounded like approval. “Tess has suggested I invite you round to dinner one night next week,” he said jovially. “She said to please give her a ring if you’d like to come.”
I said I would, and meant it. I’d liked Tess enormously, and everything else about the Green household. I was thrilled to be asked to dinner.
Oliver took off again for Woolton. George was in his office, noisily slamming drawers and talking to himself.
Everyone else was either at lunch or in Woolton, except for Darren, who had taken a client to view Nancy O’Mara’s old house in Clement Street. I’d seriously thought of buying the place myself, cutting my mortgage by a third. After about half a minute, I realised it would be wrong, like going back instead of forward.
I leaned on my desk and thought about Flo, who would always remain a mystery, even though I knew so much about her. Had she been happy in the flat in William Square with her memories of Tommy O’Mara?
Flo, with her secret lover, her secret child, the weekends spent with Mr Fritz on the Isle of Man.
George appeared, clutching his forehead dramatically, and announced that he was off to the Wig and Pen to have a pint and a panic attack. June had already left for lunch.
There’d been numerous times in the past when I’d been in the office alone, but when George slammed the door, it was like being shut in a place I’d never been before. I looked around uneasily, as if adjusting to strange new surroundings. There were decorations, very tasteful: a silver tree with “presents”—a dozen empty boxes wrapped in red and green foil—and silver bells pinned to the walls. The fluorescent lights seemed to be humming much too loudly. Outside, people hurried past, loaded with carrier bags, and I remembered that the sales were on. The sound of the endless traffic was oddly muted, and I had a sensation of being in a different dimension, and while I could see the people, they couldn’t see me. The light, bouncing off one of the silver bells on the wall behind, was reflected in turn on to the screen of the computer, and all I could see was the dark shadow of my head surrounded by a bright, blurred halo. I stared at the screen, hypnotised, and the shadows seemed to shift and change until I thought I could see a face, but it wasn’t mine. The eyes were very old, set in deep, black hollows, the mouth was . . .
The phone on my desk rang stridently. I jumped and grabbed the receiver, glad to escape from the face on the screen. It was Declan.
“Could you come to Mam’s early tonight?” he said eagerly. The Camerons and the Daleys had been invited to Charmian and Herbie’s New Year’s Eve party.
“Why?”
“You’ll never guess what our Trudy’s bought!” Declan paused for effect. “Champagne! I’ve never had champagne before. We’re going to drink to the future, before we go upstairs. Oh, and there’ll be a special guest—Scotty!”
I laughed, delighted, and promised to be there by eight. When I rang off, there was no longer a face on the computer, merely the dazzling reflection of a silver bell, and the office appeared quite normal. A man tapped on the window and made the thumbs-up sign. He could see me, I was real. I smiled at him and he opened the door.
“You should bottle that smile and sell it, luv,” he said.
“You’d make a fortune.”
I knew then that I’d come through. My mind cleared, and I was myself again, but better than the self I’d been before. The future no longer seemed bleak and hopeless, but bright and full of promise. Never again would I dream about slithering footsteps on the stairs or wake up with a feeling that something was missing from my life. I stretched my arms as wide as they would go, scarcely able to contain the sensation of total happiness.
There was wine on Elliot’s desk. I went over and poured myself a glass just as the door opened and a boy came in, not very tall, with an engaging face burned dark brown by the sun. He looked so ridiculous I had to smile.
A long mac swirled around his muddy, wrinkled boots, but the comical thing about him was his hat: a brown felt beehive with a wide turned-up brim and a brightly patterned band.
“Hi!” He grinned, and lines of merriment crinkled beneath his eyes and around his mouth. I realised that this wasn’t a boy but a man. I recognised the young rebel in the photographs Tess Green had showed me on Boxing Day, as well as her impish smile.
I returned to my desk. “If you’re looking for your father, I’m afraid he’s out, I’m not sure where.”
“Shit,” he said amiably. “Will he be long?”
“I’m not sure about that, either.”
“How come you know who I am?”
“Your mum showed me your photograph.”
He grinned again. “Did she now?”
The atmosphere in the office had changed yet again.
There was a tingling in the air, a crackle of excitement.
“So, you’re just back from Mexico,” I said.
“That’s right, early this morning. Dad had left for work by then, and Mum suggested I come and make my peace.
I’d promised to be home for Christmas, you see, but got delayed. Dad gets worked up about these things, not like Mum. I had to borrow his matinee-idol mac. I mislaid my coat somewhere on the journey.” He gestured vaguely. “He’ll be annoyed.”
I could feel my lips twitching and longed to laugh. “It’s a pity you didn’t mislay your hat instead.”
He removed the beehive and regarded it dispassionately.
His hair was yellow, like wild straw. “All the men wear them in Mexico.”
“This is Liverpool,” I reminded him.
“So it is.” He threw the hat to me like a frisbee. I caught it and put it on. “It suits you. Keep it, not to ‘wear, to hang on the wall.’
“Thanks. Help yourself to a drink while you’re waiting.”
He poured a glass of wine and perched on the edge of his father’s desk. I noticed his eyes were very blue, his face neither ugly nor handsome. It was an interesting face, open and expressive, and I could tell he had a great sense of humour. “You obviously know loads about me,” he said, “but I bet you’ll be astounded to learn I also know a lot about you. You’re Millie Cameron, you live in Blundellsands, have just dumped a boyfriend called James, and are in a bit of a tizzy over your job.”
“What on earth possessed your mum to tell you that?” I wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or not.
“Because—you’ll be horrified to hear this she really fancies you for a daughter-in-law. She started pinning my ear back about it the minute I arrived home. That’s the real reason she asked me to come, not to see Dad but to see you.”
I released the laughter I’d been trying to contain ever since he came in. “That’s a mad idea.”
“I just thought I’d warn you, because I understand you’ve been invited to dinner next week, when Mum will really get to work on you.”
“Will you be there?”
“She’ll handcuff me to the chair if I refuse. What about you? Will you come?”
“Under the circumstances,” I said gravely, “I’ll have to give the matter some thought.”
I removed the Mexican hat, which suddenly felt too heavy, and laid it carefully on the desk. The door opened and Oliver came in, followed by a sullen Diana.
“Do you fancy lunch?” Sam Green said. “We can laugh ourselves silly over my mother.” Our eyes met fleetingly and I felt something pass between us. I had no idea if it meant something or not.
I reached for my bag. “Why not?”
And why not go to dinner at the Greens next week. If the truth be known, I quite liked Sam Green, and fancied Tess for a motherin-law. Nothing might come of it, but so what? As Peter Maxwell said, we were all dancing in the dark.