Authors: Elizabeth Day
The policeman leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
‘There’s nothing for you to worry about, Carol. There will be police officers here twenty-four hours a day. We’ll take the appropriate measures to ensure your safety. These questions are all just routine. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’
Carol lifts her head and slides out a folded handkerchief from her cardigan sleeve. She wipes her nose as best she can.
‘Of course, officer. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’
He waves his hand. ‘No need to apologise. I’ll leave you in peace shortly, Mrs Hetherington. Just one last thing: do you happen to have any contact details for Mr Clithero? A mobile number, anything like that?’
‘Yes, I’ve got his mobile. He wanted me to call if anything went . . . well, if anything went wrong.’
‘I’d be very grateful if you could get it for me.’
‘Yes, Vanessa, it’s on the pad by the calendar in the kitchen, would you—?’
Vanessa pats her hand and gets up in one swift motion from the sofa. Carol can see the policeman look at her appreciatively as she walks to the door, then he spots Carol looking at him and drops his head.
‘Would you like a cup of tea or anything?’ she asks.
‘That’s very kind, thanks, but I’m fine.’
Vanessa comes back into the room and hands the police officer a square of pink paper with a floral print around the border. It had been part of a Christmas present from Connie last year. She thought of Connie every time she wrote something down. And now, she thinks of her friend as the policeman takes the scrap of paper in his big, meaty hand. She’s not sure how she’s going to tell Connie all that’s been going on. She isn’t even sure that she wants to.
The policeman gets up, slips his notepad back in his jacket pocket and prepares to leave with a final flurry of reassurance. He says he’ll check up on them first thing tomorrow morning but that, in the meantime, the best thing is to get some rest. He hopes the work next door won’t disturb them too much.
For the first day in her new job, Beatrice has treated herself to a new outfit from the charity shop. The dress had been staring at her for days and she saw it every time she walked past the window on the way to the bus stop. It was pinned slackly to a faceless polystyrene mannequin, the sleeves tied behind the torso like a straitjacket. Beatrice could never understand why the women in that shop took so little pride in displaying their clothes. If she worked there, she would spend hours poring over each bag of donations, feeling the cuffs, tracing the buttons with her fingers, imagining the stories they could tell.
She would cherish the sparkly sequinned skirts, discarded after some long-ago office Christmas party romance turned sour. She would carefully fold the cardigans with baggy elbows, thinking that once they kept an old lady warm through the winter. She would have hung up the wedding dresses with extra sensitivity, knowing that, beneath the off-white taffeta, the hems stained with dots of spilt champagne, there was a story, a proper human story of love and sadness and all that lay in between. Clothes were so much more than fabric, Beatrice thought. The stitching, the precision of a pleat on a trouser waistband, the sculptural curve of an armhole . . . all of it so consciously designed. All of it spoke of a person who, at some level, had made a choice, had decided that the world should look a certain way. She admired that in people. In a way, she admired Howard Pink for it too.
She is surprised at how little rancour she feels for this man now that they have spoken. Perhaps, she thinks, she has been conned by him. Perhaps what she has taken for genuine feeling on his part is little more than the well-deployed charm of a successful businessman, a man used to getting the deal he wants, no matter who he is negotiating with. And yet, in spite of herself, Beatrice was won over by Howard Pink during that forty-five-minute meeting at the Royal Garden Hotel. He had seemed genuinely moved by her plight. She had looked into his eyes and seen a film of sympathy there, she is sure of it. And he had been as good as his word. Within two weeks, she had a job at Paradiso HQ and was able to hand in her notice at the Mayfair Rotunda. Her new role came with a fancy title: correspondence secretary. She likes the sound of it, can imagine it printed in raised block capitals on an embossed business card.
The dress in the charity shop had not been styled to look its best but Beatrice could see through the superficial disappointment of a first glance. It was dark blue and dropped to just below the knee. The top half was fitted, with a low V-neck and the waist nipped in. The skirt was looser. If she wore it and spun slowly round on a dance floor, the skirt would twirl in a pleasing way. Not that she can ever picture herself doing such a girly thing in real life, but still. The possibility was always there.
The dress had long sleeves and the cuffs had tiny silver buttons. She was worried, at first, that the dress would be too small for her but when she went in to try it on (causing all sorts of consternation behind the till as the women huffed and puffed about their display being ‘ruined’) she found that it was a perfect fit. She had lost weight in recent weeks. Partly, it was the stress of meeting Howard Pink. But it was also because she felt a small but recognisable happiness. She wasn’t used to happiness and distrusted it, instinctively. But she couldn’t help it – she
was
looking forward to her new job. Which was why, when she checked the price-tag on the dress and saw that it was £12 – far more than she intended to spend – she told herself it was worth it. She needed to feel her best on her first day.
And now, here she is, Beatrice Kizza, soon-to-be correspondence secretary, dressed in her smart blue dress with the silver-buttoned cuffs, walking smartly down Praed Street, past the men smoking fragrant rose tobacco from hubble-bubble pipes, past the Lebanese bakeries with their sweet pistachio smells, past the cut-price hotels with unlit neon ‘No Vacancy’ signs and the minicab offices and the kindly faced young woman in a waterproof red jacket, carrying a clipboard and trying to stop passers-by to talk to them about some charity or other, past the exhaust rattle of the traffic, the flapping confusion of the urban pigeons, the ambulance with its flashing silent siren, past the leaves, the bustle, the people, the city, the cutting slice of cool, cool British air and for once, Beatrice Kizza does not feel lonely, an outsider, a mismatched button that doesn’t belong. She feels part of it all, part of the gigantic sprawling nexus of the city. She feels her finger is one of the millions now plugged into a tiny hole in the vast walled dam that is London. It is a connectedness that you only perceive when you’ve lived here for long enough. The pattern of things continuing. Somehow it works in spite of all that is thrown in its way. Somehow, she thinks as she turns off the main thoroughfare, life keeps on going.
Paradiso HQ is reached across a pedestrianised stretch of coffee shops and mini-supermarkets and then along a wide road built under the shadow of a looming dual carriageway. The building itself is a block of grey-tinted glass, the panels of which stretch and warp horizontally in a wave formation. She stops and checks herself before entering. The dress flickers in the breeze like a loosening sail. She has worn it with her old grey jacket, buttoned in at the waist. She is too cold with just the jacket as protection against the English wind, which never seems to drop, even today when spring is meant to be melting into early summer and the supermarkets have long since exchanged chocolate Easter eggs for disposable barbecues and value-packs of sausages. But the only coat she owns is her bright red puffa and she hadn’t though it smart enough for her first day at work. Her lips are chapped and dry. She takes out a stick of lip-balm and swipes it across her mouth. She has not worn make-up. It hadn’t seemed right, somehow. She doesn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. In the absence of Susan, wearing lipstick feels like flirtation.
Clasping the strap of her handbag more tightly, Beatrice marches towards the reception desk with what she hopes is a convincing simulation of assertiveness. There are three ladies behind a bank of computer screens, each one with hair-sprayed black chignons and immaculately painted nails that tip-tap against the keyboards. One of them raises her head and looks at Beatrice without smiling.
‘Yes?’
‘Hello,’ Beatrice says and her voice sounds far too low, too unfeminine in comparison to the woman’s sing-song accent. ‘I’m starting here today. A new job. I was told to ask for . . .’ She scrabbles around in her handbag, dragging out the piece of paper with her fingertips. ‘Tracy Lampton.’
The receptionist tilts her head to one side like a sparrow sizing up a bag of seed. ‘Sir Howard’s PA?’ she says, clearly believing Beatrice must be mistaken.
‘That’s right,’ Beatrice replies. ‘She’s expecting me.’
‘Name?’ the lady asks, wrinkling her nose.
‘Beatrice Kizza.’
‘All right then,’ she says sceptically. The lady picks up a phone and dials a number. Her name-badge, pinned neatly to the lapel of a tailored red jacket, says ‘Lauren’.
The phone seems to ring for a very long time, during which Lauren refuses to look directly at Beatrice, instead choosing to concentrate on an area of space directly above Beatrice’s left shoulder. Then someone picks up at the other end and all of a sudden, her face changes. She smiles, sits up straighter in her chair.
‘Oh hello, Tracy,’ she says, her voice efficient. ‘It’s Lauren here from reception. I’ve got a—’ There is a deliberate pause. Beatrice hears it. It is the pause of a white person, of someone who feels threatened by otherness. It is the pause of a white person who wishes to reassert control. ‘Beatrice . . . Quisser here who says she has an appointment with you?’ Lauren makes the last statement a question, allowing the words to wander upwards in a whiny scale. After a few seconds, Lauren hangs up and turns back to Beatrice, lips pursed.
‘If you fill out a visitor’s pass—’ She pushes a book of perforated paper squares across the desk. ‘Tracy will sort out your staff pass later today. You need one of these to get through the security barriers.’
‘So she was expecting me?’ Beatrice can’t resist it. She shouldn’t push her luck, she knows she shouldn’t, but still . . .
The veins in Lauren’s neck tense. She gives a brittle moue of distaste. ‘She was, yes.’
Beatrice hands across the piece of paper with her name on. The receptionist tears it out of the book, folds it in half and slips it in a plastic tag.
‘Wear this at all times in the building. The lifts are up there on the left. You need the fifth floor.’
Lauren bows her head and clicks on the computer mouse, thereby giving the impression of someone getting back to some extremely important administrative task that has been subjected to a rude interruption.
Beatrice walks towards the security barriers. A guard in uniform winks at her. She grins at him. He has a cheery, round face and looks Igbo and she feels warm towards him as he calls the lift, holding the doors open for her with his forearm.
By the time she gets to the fifth floor, her excitement has been replaced by nerves. What does she think she is doing? She is clearly not going to fit in here. Chambermaid. Cleaner. That’s all she’s good for. That’s all people like her can expect. She wants to go back to her flat and lie underneath the duvet and never come out again. She wants to take this stupid dress off and crush it into a ball and throw it away. She is embarrassed. Why is she pretending to be something she’s not? What if Howard Pink had lied to her and, instead of the promise of a new job, there would be a line of stony-faced immigration officials standing on the other side of the lift door, waiting to deport her? She lunges forward and tries desperately to press the button to take her back to the lobby. But no matter how many times she jabs the metal ‘0’, the request doesn’t register. The lift keeps moving inexorably upwards.
And then the doors open and neon lighting spills inside. A woman with blow-dried grey-blonde hair tucked behind her ears is smiling at her.
‘Beatrice?’ she says, taking a step forward, her arm outstretched. Beatrice shakes her hand without thinking. Her chest is tight, her mouth dry.
‘I’m Tracy, Sir Howard’s secretary,’ the woman says and she presses Beatrice’s hand warmly in hers. ‘Welcome to Paradiso.’ She gives Beatrice a brief, concerned glance. ‘I expect you’re nervous. First day and all that. Well there’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t we go and have a nice cup of tea and I’ll tell you all that you need to know?’
Beatrice nods. ‘Thank you.’
Tracy squeezes her arm. ‘Don’t mention it.’ Tracy leads her through a pair of frosted-glass doors into a long corridor, lined on either side by banks of desks and floor-to-ceiling windows. All the time, she keeps up a steady stream of chatter that makes Beatrice feel calmer.
‘Love your dress, by the way,’ Tracy says.
‘Thank you,’ Beatrice replies and she tries not to show how pleased she is. She has forgotten how nice it is to get a compliment.
She follows Tracy dumbly to a small side kitchen with spotlessly clean white surfaces, a microwave and an open cupboard stacked with mismatched mugs. Tracy makes the tea and hands it to Beatrice in a mug bearing a faded picture of Kermit the Frog. She gestures at Beatrice to sit at the fold-out table and she is reminded of her first day at the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Support centre in London Bridge. Slowly, Beatrice feels her shoulders relax. She allows herself to lean back in her chair as Tracy explains what she will be expected to do.