‘Did you have a good Christmas, Araminta?’ she enquired.
‘Yes, I did,’ I lied.
‘Just you and your parents, I suppose.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’
‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘We had
so
many people here,’ she confided smugly. ‘I mean, this is a pretty big house, but even so it was a bit of a squash. Still,’ she went on softly, ‘we managed. And how about New Year?’ she said over her shoulder as she reached down for a book. ‘I suppose your New Year Resolution was to find yourself a husband?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually, my New Year Resolution was to kill and then dismember you.’ She turned and gave me a quizzical stare.
‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘I said my New Year Resolution was to
remember
what
you
said.’
‘Ah. You know, you single women are so
brave
,’ she crooned, as she lowered her huge backside on to a nearby chair. ‘I really don’t know
how
you cope.’
I just gave her a blank-eyed smile, then mentally counted to ten in order to prevent myself from clubbing her to death with the microphone or strangling her with the lead. In the papers this week there’d been a debate about working mothers. In her column, Citronella had bravely leapt to their attack. I pressed the ‘Record’ button with a sinking heart.
‘I do think women who have small children and who work are
terribly
selfish,’ she announced in her low, deceptively sweet voice. ‘We all know that the first five years of a child’s life are the most formative years,’ she went on smoothly. ‘And children
need
to be with their mothers during that vital period. Now, I’m a feminist,’ she added. Of
course.
‘But I think that on
this
issue, feminism has got it wrong.’
‘But most women don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not they go back to work,’ I said. ‘They
have
to go back. Their income is essential.’
‘Oh, I
know
that old argument,’ said Citronella with an indulgent smile. ‘But the fact is that sacrifices
have
to be
made.
’
‘But you don’t have to make those sacrifices yourself, do you?’ I said with unfamiliar boldness. She blinked. Looked at me. Then gave me a
faux
-guilty smile.
‘Well, no,’ she conceded, ‘I don’t. I suppose I
am
in a very fortunate position in that my husband is so successful. And then of course I’m doubly lucky in that I have always been able to pursue my career from home.’
‘Career?’ I said, archly. ‘What
was
your career, exactly, before you began writing your column?’
‘Oh, childcare consultancy,’ she said confidently, though her large behind shifted on her chair. ‘But I really don’t want to brag about my past accomplishments, Araminta. And though it’s not always easy working at home, with a very boisterous and
particularly
demanding toddler, I am in the very fortunate position of having help in the home.’
‘Yes,’ I said, crisply, ‘you have a nanny, and a cleaner, I believe.’
‘
And
a gardener,’ she added with a smirk. ‘Oh yes, I know how
lucky
I am,’ she continued, fiddling with her voluminous
frock. ‘Terribly, terribly, lucky. But that’s not the point here. The point is that small children need to be with Mummy.’
‘Well, thanks very much, Citronella,’ I said breezily, as I pressed the ‘Stop’ button. ‘Another very thoughtful contribution to our programme.’ Citronella showed me to the door herself today. And I glanced at the beautiful Françoise, playing with the infant Sienna, and wondered how she could stick working for this dreadful woman and why on
earth
she stayed.
‘Anyway, chin up, Minty!’ said Citronella as I stepped on to their drive.
‘Chin up? It’s not down,’ I replied with a breezy smile. But of course it was. It was in the gutter. Scraping along with all the stones and the dirt. I half expected to wake up one morning and find it had double yellow lines. I was miserable. I was in despair. This was the bleakest of all midwinters. My rock had rolled down the mountain again and lodged in a deep crevasse. At work I coped by being businesslike, crisp and unfriendly. Nor was I any fun at home. I stayed in my room, reading
Great Expectations
and reflecting on my bad luck. I brooded on it; I luxuriated in it. I nursed it as though it were a glass of vintage port. And I must have been really desperately unhappy, because when, at last, Joe phoned, I didn’t want to know.
‘This is the third time he’s rung,’ said Amber from the other side of my door two days later. ‘Why won’t you speak to him?’
‘Because a) I don’t want to,’ I replied. ‘And b) I don’t want to.’
‘He says he wants to talk to you.’
‘Well, he didn’t before. He ignored me for over a month.’
‘May I remind you, Minty,’ said Amber, ‘that the Season of Goodwill is not yet over.’
‘It is for me.’
‘Why won’t you have a word with him, Minty?’
‘Because he hurt me. That’s why.’
‘Well there’s no need to hurt him back.’
‘Why not?’ I said airily. I
wanted
to hurt men. Miss Havisham got back at them by educating her ward Estella to despise them. And now I would despise them too. It wasn’t difficult.
They
were
despicable. All of them. An inferior breed. With no feeling. Jilting one woman and then gaily going on to the next. I had no faith in them. None. I didn’t want to know. In fact, I didn’t want to know about anyone. In just a few days I’d grown a brittle carapace of unconcern. My shell was as hard and unwelcoming as the frosty January ground. I didn’t need the Nice Factor any more. I wasn’t ‘nice’ at all. And when, on the sixth, Amber called out that we’d better take down the Christmas decorations because otherwise we’d incur bad luck, I emitted a bitter, hollow laugh. So she said she’d do it herself. And she told me she was going to plant the Christmas tree in my little garden, as she’d deliberately asked for one with roots. But I didn’t offer to help her. I was hard and heartless. Because Dominic had been so heartless to me. So when, later that day, I heard Amber calling, I simply groaned, and turned back to my book:
Miss Havisham beckoned Estella to come close …‘Let me see you play cards with this boy.’
‘
With this boy
!
Why he is a common labouring-boy
!’
I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer – only it seemed so unlikely – ‘Well? You can break his heart.’
‘Minty!’ I heard Amber call again. ‘Come down here.’
‘Why?’ I shouted back.
‘Just do it.’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘Come on!’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘Go away.’
‘But I want to show you something.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Something exciting.’
Oh. Curiosity drew me downstairs. I found Amber in the garden. She’d planted the Christmas tree, which was remarkable, as the earth was frozen hard. And now, there on the
wall, rubbing itself against her, was a dainty little black cat. I’d never seen it before.
‘Isn’t it
sweet
?’ she said with a rapt smile. Her breath came in little clouds.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ It was tiny, and slightly chinky-looking, as though it had some Siamese in it, and it had a funny little kink in the end of its tail like a question mark.
‘It’s so
thin
,’ Amber observed, as I stamped my feet in the knife-like cold. ‘I don’t know how it’s survived in this freezing weather. It obviously hasn’t eaten for ages.’
Oh.
Poor
little thing. I felt the ice around my heart begin to crack and tears sprang into my eyes. I went up to it, and stroked it. It stood up on its hind legs and rubbed its face against my hand, like a wave.
‘We must give it some milk,’ I said.
‘Come on – puss puss!’ Amber called, though it needed no encouragement. It had shot through the open back door, into the kitchen and was now winding itself in and out of Amber’s ankles in a restless figure of eight. We put some milk down for it, and then some ham, cut up small. And then a little smoked salmon.
‘I’ve got a pot of Russian caviar,’ said Amber excitedly. ‘I’m sure it would like some of that.’
‘I’m sure it would,’ I said. ‘But I think we ought to give it proper cat food.’ So I went to the corner shop and bought a couple of tins of Whiskas, and when I got back it had had Amber’s caviar, and was lying across her lap, dribbling with happiness, and purring like a tiny tractor. And that was that.
‘What shall we call it?’ I said later, stroking its tiny, triangular ears. ‘We’ve got to give it a name. How about Epiphany?’
‘Why?’
‘Because today’s the Feast of Epiphany, when Christ was revealed to the three wise men.’
‘Mmm,’ said Amber thoughtfully.
‘Or we could just call it Cat,’ I suggested. ‘Or Catalogue. Or Catalonia. Or Catatonia or Catalyst or-’
‘Perdita,’ said Amber suddenly. ‘That’s what I’d like to call
her. It’s from the
Winter’s Tale
,’ she explained, ‘in which the infant Perdita was lost, and then found. It’s a wonderful play,’ she went on, dreamily. ‘It’s about redemption, and resurrection. It’s about being given a second chance when you thought you’d really buggered things up.’
‘Perdita,’ I said. ‘Or rather Purr-dita,’ I punned. ‘But how do you know it’s a girl?’
‘Well, she looks like a girl. She’s got a pretty, girlie face.’
‘We ought to check. Let’s ask Laurie.’
‘Oh, he’s such a pain,’ said Amber crossly.
‘No he isn’t,’ I said quietly. ‘He’s fun. In fact, he’s sparky,’ I added, pointedly.
‘He’s an idiot,’ she insisted.
‘OK. If you say so. But he’s a trainee vet,’ I pointed out. ‘So he can tell us what sex Perdita is, and he can also examine her to make sure she’s all right.’ Put like that, Amber thought it was a good idea. So Laurie came round that evening and declared Perdita to be a healthy female ‘queen’ of about four months.
‘She’s just a big kitten,’ he said. ‘She’s terribly thin. But that’s all that’s wrong. Maybe her owners moved house, and forgot her, or she wandered out and got lost.’
‘We’ll put a notice in the “Lost and Found” column of the local paper,’ said Amber. ‘I hope no one claims her,’ she added wistfully. ‘She’s lovely.’
Pedro was cross, of course. We knew this because he stopped saying, ‘
Super
, darling!’ for a while. And he wasn’t cross because he was jealous – though parrots can be jealous – but because he has nothing but contempt for cats. Now, dogs he likes. Dogs he can respect. But with cats he has always affected a superior, icy disdain. Granny had a Burmese called Binky, and Pedro ignored it for fifteen years.
‘Pedro will just have to get used to Perdita, won’t you, Pedro?’ said Amber cheerfully. ‘Because I think’ – she crossed her long slim fingers – ‘she’s here to stay.’
So was Laurie, at least for supper, and he told us about his latest exploits as a male escort.
‘On Monday I did a Bar-Mitzvah with a divorcee of forty,’ he said. ‘On Tuesday I went to a Law Society drinks party with a widow of fifty-three. And last night I had to go to a British Medical Association dinner with a single woman of thirty-five.’
‘Oh,’ said Amber, a little suspiciously, I thought. ‘Was that fun?’
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘I see. A lot of fun?’
‘Yes. But not as much fun as the Anti-Slavery International Ball,’ he added gallantly. ‘Now, some of these women ask me for sex,’ he confided, as we ate our pasta.
‘And what do you say?’ Amber enquired, somewhat nervously, I thought.
‘I say that it’s absolutely out of the question,’ he replied. ‘And then I explain that sex is extra. However,’ he added pointedly to her, as she rolled her eyes, ‘I’d like to point out that it’s free for friends.’
‘Oh, jolly good,’ she said, in a bored kind of way which I knew – I
knew
– masked something else.
‘All these women are so
exhausting
,’ he said with extravagant indolence. ‘I’ll be glad when I can give it up. But I can’t afford to at £200 a throw – well, £150 after Shirley’s taken her cut. And it’s so easy. All I have to do is put on a suit and be charming.’
‘Charming?’ said Amber archly. ‘Is that what you call it then?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t remember you being charming to me.’
‘Oh, you’re so negative.’
‘Well, you weren’t,’ she insisted.
‘Look, I pulled out your chair. I told you my best jokes.
And
I consoled you when you narrowly lost the auction. I know how
devastated
you were by that,’ he added with a facetious smile.
‘Mmm.’
‘And had you not left the ball so precipitately – like Cinderella
herself, I couldn’t help thinking – I would have invited you on to the dance floor.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I would have looked deeply into your eyes and said, “Wanna shake?”’
‘What a pity to have missed
that
,’ she said, sardonically.
‘And I’d just like to say that if you were to hire me for the rest of my life it would work out at a mere five million quid, assuming that I make it to seventy.’
‘I see.’
‘But we could of course negotiate a good discount – it’s always cheaper if you buy in bulk.’
‘Well, that’s very flexible of you,’ she said, with a tiny smile. ‘Now, why did you change career?’ Amber enquired, seriously. ‘I meant to ask you that at the Savoy, but I had other things on my mind.’
‘I’d always wanted to be a vet,’ he explained. ‘But my father persuaded me to go into chartered surveying, like him. And later I regretted not having held out for what I truly wanted. So when I was thirty, I went back to college. But this time, I didn’t get a grant. And I’ve used up all my savings. So that’s why I became a walker. To subsidise my final year.’
He’s a risk-taker, I thought, like Joe. Striking out from the safety of the harbour for strange and possibly hostile shores.
‘And have you got a place in a practice yet?’ Amber asked him. ‘For when you qualify.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘at the Canonbury practice in Islington, where I’m doing my placement now. I’ll join them officially when I qualify in July.
If
I qualify,’ he added, standing up. ‘On which note, I really must get back to my revision. Equine Obstetrics – fascinating. Thanks for supper,’ he added. ‘Bring the cat into the surgery and we’ll sort out all her jabs. We don’t want her getting ‘flu. And in a couple of months you’ll need to think about having her spayed.’ He stroked Perdita, then smiled at Amber, and me, then quietly let himself out. ‘Isn’t he an annoying fellow?’ said Amber, hugging the cat.