The Weeping Women Hotel (32 page)

Yet as
she spent more time with them it slowly became clear to her that they weren’t
free at all, that their lives actually required much, much more effort than the
average law-abiding civilian’s whom they so despised. The Namibians had no
friends who hadn’t been bribed not to rat on them and they had to act, to keep
up a front of hardness at all times like they were in some sort of a
twenty-four-hour British gangster film. Worse than that they weren’t nice and
nobody they knew was nice, the normal give and take of human contact didn’t
apply, every second everybody they came into contact with was looking to
achieve some advantage over them and they were trying to do the same. The
revelation to Harriet was that knowing all this didn’t affect her attitude
towards them — they were fun, a welcome contrast to Patrick’s gloomy
asceticism, Toby’s mooning devotion or the constant struggle with her sister
for the upper hand. Which didn’t mean she could relax; there was no doubt it
was her physical beauty that bought her a place at the party. Each time they
asked her to go somewhere with them it meant that she was still beautiful.

But
going out all night meant she needed to train extra hard during the day; if she
let her workout regime slip for even an afternoon she instantly thought she
could feel her muscles softening. Sometimes when her bones were burning from
exercise and her knuckles bleeding from punching practice she wondered what it
was about Old Fat Harriet that was so bad that she’d had to be starved to
death. She’d certainly required a lot less upkeep than the new Harriet and
she’d certainly been a lot better off financially. The thing that suffered most
in all her constant exercise and late-night partying was the shop, her credit
card bills lay unpaid and she had to fight really hard not to remember that she
was way behind on the mortgage.

‘Is Mr
Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro around?’ Harriet asked one of the young men
manning the counter in the Namibian Disaster Relief Fund shop. Sulkily he
turned to a doorway which led to a back storeroom and called out; after a few
seconds she heard the older man emerging.

‘Ah,
Harriet,’ he said with a big smile when he saw her, ‘just the person I was
wishing to see. I was wanting to see you to ask whether you thought that the
invention of the camera had destroyed painting and sculpture or had liberated
it?’

‘Liberated
it?’

‘Really?
But don’t you feel that photography reproducing this perfect representation of
the external world meant painting and sculpture went from attempting faithfully
to express the universal world of everybody to instead representing the interior
world of only the artist? Maybe as you say that was liberating but surely it
made things much more difficult for the viewer since we can never know
precisely what’s going on in anybody else’s mind, crikey! It’s hard enough to
know what’s going on in your own.’

‘Yeah,
you might be right.’

‘Also
this abstractionism that you so champion so forcefully, Harriet, means that the
average person can no longer know whether a work of art speaks to them or not.
Nowadays a cabal of high priests, critics and gallery owners tells the public
what is worthy and what is not and they follow like a herd of concrete cows.’

‘Yes,
you’ve convinced me. Now look,’ she said, ‘there’s a friend of mine who wants
to acquire a number of items that aren’t, shall we say … available on the
open market.’

‘I
see,’ replied Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro, his manner changing completely,
stiffening a little like a gun dog at the scent of a business opportunity. ‘Do
you have a list of these things?’

‘I do,’
Harriet replied and handed over the sheet of paper Patrick had printed out on
his computer with Martin Po’s requests on it.

She’d
been fairly certain that he would laugh at it, this long catalogue of ludicrous
items, yet Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro, after studying it for a few
seconds, simply said, calmly folding the list and putting in his top pocket,
‘Hmm … These things are not easy to come by and I do know they will be expensive
but I think at least half of them are possible.’

That morning Toby had sent
a text message to Harriet’s mobile phone; he never used any of the
abbreviations commonly employed so she reckoned it must have taken him over
half an hour with his big hands to type in: ‘Dear Harriet, today I am having
numerous injections in preparation for my Papua New Guinea trip in a privately
owned travel clinic situated just off Regent Street and was wondering whether
you would you like to join me for a relatively late lunch. Kind regards, your
friend Toby.’

‘OK Gr8.2’
she’d sent back. To which an hour later Toby replied with the full name of the
place including what floor of the building it was on, its complete postcode and
complex directions for how to get there.

As
Harriet walked towards the train station she passed the woman from the gift
shop standing in her doorway staring up and down the road. Seeing her she said,
‘Oh, hello, Harriet, how are you? I was beginning to think you’d moved. You
used to be in here all the. time buying presents but you haven’t paid us a
visit in ages.’

‘No,
well,’ she replied facetiously, ‘I don’t have any friends any more.’

‘Oh, I
know, did they get pissed off when you got too pretty?’

Recently
she’d stopped carrying any kind of handbag; when Harriet had been obese her bag
had been almost as overweight as its owner. Looking back she didn’t know why
she thought she needed to carry a spanner around with her — Harriet imagined
the feeling of liberation achieved in getting rid of it was similar to what a
man might experience the first time he got his head shaved. Now all she took
with her was some money, her phone and a comb.

She sat
on the clammy blue-chequered moquette of the train feeling light and free.
Harriet hadn’t been out with Toby since they’d gone to the Italian restaurant
and she told herself she was looking forward to chatting and laughing with him
just like they had in the old days.

Since
the railway companies had in recent years managed to stop vandals daubing their
tags in spray paint on the outside of the rolling stock they’d instead taken to
scratching their names on the carriage windows. Though the train in which the
passengers swayed towards King’s Cross was relatively clean, the window
through which she attempted to see out was as deeply etched as that of a
Victorian gin palace. To Harriet it was as if they were travelling along with a
smoke cloud of names that blew down the track with them.

As Harriet walked down
Regent Street, slipping in and out of the bovine crowds of tourists, she caught
sight of Toby standing outside the building where they were due to meet,
staring across the road, looking for her in the wrong direction. The injections
he’d been given had frozen his mouth so she could see his face was lopsided,
and dribble oozed from his lips to drip over his chin. She stopped and after a
few seconds went to stand in the doorway of a tartan shop. Harriet took her
phone out of her jacket pocket and texted Toby: ‘Soree Tobes, got urgnt repair
at shop, cnt cum. Hat xxx.’ She saw him start jumpily, then after searching
through all his pockets take out his own mobile and stare down at the screen,
read the message and then after half a minute’s thought begin to thumb in a
reply.

She
slid away down a narrow side street and walked east. Harriet had not been into
the centre of
London
for
months; the parties she went to with Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro were
always in places like Tooting and Walthamstow, places that, like them, weren’t
at the centre of things. The thundering, relentless traffic and the foetid
diesel-soaked air made her feel like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel who’d
taken three days to walk into the big intimidating town to buy a wife at the
Michaelmas Fair. Though lunchtime was over all the cafés still seemed to be
crammed full of office workers and tourists. Along the main streets there was a
continuous dreary succession of chain sandwich bars followed by chain coffee
shops, mobile phone shops and ugly building society branches, yet once she got
out of the centre, on the side streets there was a more varied and attractive
life. The cafés and sandwich bars with tasteful tables and chairs outside were
family-run places, the delicatessens and grocery stores managed to be both
modern and old-fashioned at the same time and it was the owners of the
isolated, empty American franchises who stood on the step and stared up and
down in a despairing way.

About
twenty-five minutes later she got the message: ‘Dear Harriet, I am so sorry
that we couldn’t meet for luncheon, nevertheless I will see you on Saturday at
the Admiral Codrington for my leaving party. I sincerely hope your emergency
repair went well. Regretfully yours, Toby.’

It had
been hard to tell from the facial paralysis but to her the expression on his
face when Toby got her message had been one of relief.

Of late when attending all
the film premieres, restaurant openings, charity events, Helen tried hard to
make sure she didn’t get her picture taken. At all these parties there was
always the same photographer from the London newspaper, a swarthy little
Armenian man whose pictures were featured in the Friday magazine that came
free with the paper. A little while ago when she scanned one of his spreads of
a Warbird-sponsored polo match to see if she’d been featured it suddenly seemed
to her that there was a quality in these pictures that made everybody in them
appear to be dead. Actually dead wasn’t the right word, maybe doomed was a
better one. Somehow she felt there was a melancholy property that infused these
images, a feeling that she was looking at people who died fifty years ago,
passengers having a last drink prior to boarding an ill-fated airship, grinning
cadavers partying while all the while under their table an anarchist’s bomb
ticked away the seconds, stiff and starchy regimental dinners captured on the
eve of First World War slaughter.

As Lulu
rampaged around the Admiral Cod, her digital camera flashing like lightning,
Helen recalled seeing in the London paper a grabbed photo of the author Martin
Amis ‘dancing’ at a party. She had always really liked Amis’s books, even the
ones nobody else did, but this photo did for all that. First of all there were
the clothes: some sort of wrinkled linen-jacket worn over a pair of jeans with
a neat crease pressed in them. Then there was the pose: Martin was facing a
corner obviously dancing away by himself and appearing to be totally absorbed
in the track; for some reason she was certain it was ‘You Spin Me Right Round
Baby Right Round’ by Dead or Alive. Then there was the dancing itself: though
it was a still photo you could tell Martin Amis was one of those middle-class
white guys who form shapes with their bodies so disharmonious that dogs start
howling on the Isle of Man every time they take to the dance floor yet who
still believe deep in their hearts that they are really, really great dancers.
After seeing this photo Helen was unable to read any of his books or even look
at their covers without feeling queasy.

She
didn’t know why Toby thought he needed a leaving party: he was only going to be
away for three weeks and if he did need one why not a nice dinner at home with
their good friends, Oscar and Katya and Martin and Swei Chiang, or perhaps a
drunken do at the community centre with those guys from football or a few
drinks at the office. But he had been insistent that he only wanted to go to
the Admiral Codrington on a Friday night with Harriet, Lulu and Rose. Helen had
said to Harriet, ‘Would you like to bring your friend Patrick along?’

She
replied in quite a nasty voice, ‘Why would I want to invite him?’

‘I
don’t know — he seemed good enough to bring to Christmas dinner.’

‘Oh, that
was ages ago.

‘Yes,’
Helen said. ‘It feels like it was ages and ages ago.’

“Ello, Dollface!’ Toby
heard Cosmo the waiter shouting, and turning saw Harriet sashaying between the
chairs as she crossed the heaving floor towards them. Somehow his sister-in-law
seemed able to slide through the tiny slivers of space left by the shouting,
waving drinkers without touching any of them.

Sometimes
like, say, the other day in Regent Street, if he’d seen her then, he thought
catching sight of her wouldn’t have affected him that much because he was
prepared, whereas now the vision of her caught him unawares and he felt like
he’d just donated two litres of blood: light-headed, silly and afraid. She was
wearing combat pants low on her hips, a tight white vest (worn with no bra so
that her nipples were outlined against the material) that didn’t quite reach
the top of her pants and dull black chunky walking boots. Harriet slumped down
at the table where Helen, Lulu, Rose and Toby had been drinking white wine for
about three-quarters of an hour already, the muscles of her tanned arms
shifting under the skin as they rested lightly on the candle-wax-coated pine
surface.

‘Hey,
Cos,’ she shouted back over her shoulder, then looking around said, ‘Christ,
it’s busy in here.’

‘It was
quieter earlier, when we got here,’ Helen replied.

‘Yeah,
well … I’m here now so gimme a drink.’

‘There
you go, Dollface,’ said Rose, passing her the bottle.