Scarlet Feather (17 page)

It does my street cred good to have a handsome young man like yourself come to the apartments,’ Geraldine said. ‘Come round on Sunday morning and we’ll see what we can find.’

The Glenstar apartment block was immaculately kept. There was regular landscape gardening, all the outside woodwork was repainted every year, brass gleamed everywhere and a smart commissionaire stood in the hall. Tom wondered how much they paid a year in services charges. Then he reminded himself not always to think in terms of how much things cost and how much they might bring in. It was the way his parents went on, and he certainly didn’t need that. It was just that these sessions with James Byrne had been exhausting and worrying.

He had organised a filing cabinet and installed proper ledgers for them, warned them thunderously about keeping every receipt, and details of every piece of equipment bought so that its eventual depreciation could be properly noted. He explained how they must bill separately for waiters or waitresses asking clients to pay them directly; this way they avoided tax problems. It had been fascinating to hear James Byrne talk. It made Tom feel that anything was possible, and that they were safe from all the minefields of being prosecuted over
VAT
or any other kind of tax. Three jobs in February wasn’t
too
bad. Was it? But he was out on the hunt for more work. And he had a Sunday-morning appointment with Geraldine O’Connor, so that she could go through her list of clients and decide who could be approached and with what angle. Geraldine looked magnificent: she wore a dark green velvet tracksuit, her hair was still slightly damp from swimming in the Glenstar pool. The smell of coffee filled her big sitting room. The Sunday papers were scattered over the big, long, low table in front of the sofas.

Geraldine got down to business at once, and they spent an hour at her dining table seeing where any opportunity might lie. ‘Peter Murphy’s hotel is useless, of course, since they have all their functions there and are catered by themselves. The garden centre never wants to spend any money, they serve thimbles of warm white wine and that’s that.’ The estate agents might, only might, let them send menus and a letter, saying how much it would»enhance any future function to have unusual and memorable canapes served. ‘Let’s put it this way, it might give people
something
to remember from their dreary dos.’

Tom looked at her with admiration. She was afraid of nobody. Where had she got this confidence?

‘But Tom, these now are a bit more lively…’ She gave him the address of an import agency. ‘They take a lot of clothes, even some from your brother, he was telling me the other night. The sky’s the limit with these lads. And they’re totally legal now, no more black economy. I’ll tell them they should get better known. They need an upmarket party. I’ll promise them buyers from Haywards if they come.’

‘And Haywards themselves?’ Tom said hopefully.

‘No, not a chance. Shona Burke and I have talked about it over and over. She’s done her very best but they have a cafe, you see, so it doesn’t make any sense for them to bring in an outsider.’

I know, that’s true. It’s just that it would have been such a feather in the cap for Scarlet Feather,’ he said wistfully.

What Tom really meant was that it would have been good for Marcella too. If her fellow was doing the high-profile catering it would make her look good by association. But it wasn’t to be. They went through the list of names. The pharmaceutical people possibly, the educational project no way, the people who organised the big literary competition were attached to a brewery and had their own contacts, the cross-border cooperation people had no money. Tom admired the matter-of-fact way Geraldine went about her business. She spoke affectionately, even discreetly about her clients, she emphasised to Tom that this was all in confidence, but she was in no way impressed by any of them. She told him that they had to have this conversation in her home rather than at her office as she would not want the staff to know she was divulging the secrets of the filing cabinet. She looked so at ease with herself, unlike any other woman he knew. Not like her sister, Lizzie, who worried and apologised; unlike Cathy, who was driven to show Hannah Mitchell that she was a career woman in her own right. Not like his mother, who saw only the bad side of everything and relied on the power of prayer. Not like Shona Burke, who always had this faraway, sad look on her face. He remembered Joe asking how Geraldine had got the money together to buy this agency, but it wasn’t a question he would ever put to her, even though the great splendour of her apartment and her readiness to back them in this enterprise sometimes did make him speculate. But he frowned to himself. He would
not
become obsessed with money like so many people were nowadays.

‘What on earth are you making faces about, Tom?’ Geraldine didn’t miss much.

I was thinking about money, actually, and why it mustn’t be a god itself but if you don’t keep an eye on it you go down the tube,’ he said.

‘I know what you mean. Money itself is not important at all, but in order to make it and to get the life you want you have to pretend that it is for a while, just so as to keep it rolling on in.’ Her face looked hard for a moment.

Tom said no more on the subject. He gathered up his notes to leave. When he took his coffee cup into the kitchen he saw ingredients for a lunch set out there. ‘Have you a busy day?’ he asked.

‘A friend to lunch,’ she said briskly. ‘Which reminds me, find a few canapes that freeze well and give them to me, then I can talk you up all round the place.’

‘Of course, but why don’t you let us
do
a lunch for you, any time, it’s the very least we can do.’

‘I know, Tom, so Cathy already said. You’re both sweet, but the kind of guys I entertain like to think that I cooked everything for them with my own fair hands.’

Shona Burke was getting out of her little car, and she called out to him as he left. ‘Do you have your brother’s phone number in London?’ she asked.

‘No, not you too. What do you all see in him?’ he groaned.

‘Purely business,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you’re much better-looking than he is. They’re doing a young people’s promotion in Haywards in late spring, and he told me that he might just have a line of what he called fun clothes. Swimwear, lingerie, you know.’

‘Sorry, Shona.’ He took out a Scarlet Feather card and looked up Joe’s London phone number for her in his diary.

‘You don’t know it?’

‘Hey, no, I’ve no memory for numbers,’ he said.

She nodded.

For some reason Tom said, ‘Anyway, I don’t call him that much or he me, I don’t know why it is. Have you got sisters and brothers?’

Shona hesitated. ‘Well, yes, in a way I do.’

It was an odd response but Tom let it go. Some people hated to be interrogated about their families; Marcella did. Her mother was dead and her father, who had married again, just wasn’t interested, she said, and wanted it left like that. Cathy, on the other hand, had something to say every day about her parents: she loved Lizzie and Muttie, in spite of her mother’s humble, grateful attitude to life. Cathy would also go on about her mother-in-law Hannah’s innate viciousness, and about the sisters and brothers in Chicago, particularly Marian, the eldest, who had done well in banking but poorly in her love life until recently, and was now going to marry a man called Harry who looked like a film star. And look at his own brother Joe, who had not a family bone in his body. Tom got into his van waving her goodbye. She stood there taking no notice of the light rain that had begun to fall, not covering up her hair as most women would, still looking oddly lonely and vulnerable. She was a handsome girl, not strictly beautiful. Marcella always said that Shona Burke could look much better than she did if she wore more make-up and got her hair changed from that old-fashioned style. Her hair did look dull and flat. But she had a lovely smile. He wondered for a moment if
she
had been Joe’s companion back in the hotel after the party. Why not? They were both free. She didn’t have to tell anyone about it. Then he pulled himself together. He must stop speculating like this. She was saying something; he opened the van window to hear properly.

I was only saying that you’re very restful, Tom, a peaceable, handsome person,’ Shona said.

‘Not a word about the killer instinct that’s going to make me a force in the land?’ he called.

‘Oh, that goes without saying.’ She laughed

.

Marcella came home from Haywards beauty salon the following evening and told Tom amazing news. This woman had come in to book a hairdo, manicure, a facial, the works, and said she was going to a drop-dead-cert smart christening party on Saturday, and she had actually said there were going to be fancy caterers at it. Tom could hardly believe it. Already people were talking about them and they hadn’t even got properly started! He couldn’t wait to ring Cathy. But tonight she and Neil were taking those children to see their mother in some drying-out place. He would tell her tomorrow.

‘Will we celebrate?’ he asked Marcella.

‘Ah love, I’m just off to the gym,’ she said.

‘Couldn’t you… Just for one night… To raise a glass to posh people in Haywards referring to us as fancy caterers?’

‘Tom, we
agreed
. The subscription costs so much, the only way to make sense out of it and get any value is for me to go every day.’

‘Sure,’ he said, then knew he must sound a little warmer. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘And as soon as we really are a fancy caterers, then you’ll come to
every
classy, fancy thing we do as a guest and get yourself photographed all
over
the place.’

‘It will happen that you’ll be a great big success… you do know that, don’t you?’ she said, and he thought he saw tears in her eyes. ‘I’m not just saying that… you really know.’

‘I know.’ He
did
know. She had wanted the best for them from the start. ‘Of course I know,’ he said, and he held her close to him before she went to pack her leotards, trainers and body lotion. Tom looked out of the window until she waved up at him from the gates of Stoneyfield, as she always did. He wondered had she any idea how beautiful and endearing she was already, without having to punish herself with all this ruthless regime.

Ricky rang. He had the pictures they needed, six black and white arty studies of food which they were going to put up in the premises. He could bring them around tomorrow if the picture rail was up, and did Tom want the measurements. Tom did, and he got his paper and pencil.

I was going to give them to you tonight at the do, but I figure it makes us look idiotic talking work at a party,’ Ricky explained.

Tarty?’

‘Yeah, you know, the new club?’

‘No, I never heard about it.’

‘Well I told Marcella, she said you’d both be there.’ Ricky was puzzled. Tom could feel his heart beating faster.

‘Misunderstanding of some sort,’ he mumbled.

‘Sure. Now they’re all portrait-format. I’ll give you the top-to-bottom measurements first, then the side-to-side. Your father’s getting a rail made, isn’t he?’

Ricky went on and on with his specifications and Tom wrote down lists of numbers of centimetres on his pad, but his mind was on autopilot. He could not believe that she had just left pretending to go to the gym, and was in fact heading off to something without him. And how would she account for her late arrival home? He felt such a shock at the betrayal that he could hardly hear Ricky’s words.

‘Right, I’d better go and put on my going-out gear. Crazy idea having a party at this time. No one’s properly awake yet. See you over at the HQ tomorrow, okay.’

‘Okay Ricky, thank you a million times,’ Tom Feather said to the cheerful photographer who had just broken his heart.

He needed to give his father the measurements. The pictures were to be suspended from a pole that would have grooves cut in it at a specific number of centimetres apart, and JT had been asking when anyone would inform him of what he had to do, so that it would not be yet another botched job. With fingers that seemed the weight of lead he dialled his parents’ number, realising that first he must cheer him up before his father would agree to write down the measurements. Please may it be his da – he couldn’t go through the whole cheering-up process twice if he got his mother.

But it was neither of them. It was a woman with a bark that nearly lifted him off the phone.

‘Yes,’ the voice said.

‘Sorry,’ Tom began,  I’ve got the wrong number. I was looking for the Feathers.’

‘This is the Feathers. Who’s that?’

‘Tom, their son.’

‘Great bloody son you are, wouldn’t you think you’d have left your number beside the phone for them?’

‘But they
know
my number,’ Tom cried, stung by the injustice of this.

‘They don’t know it now,’ shouted the woman.

‘What’s happened… ?’ This was a new kind of fear. Tom could hear voices in the background. Something must have happened. Eventually, and only when he had assured her that his phone number was at the top of a list in a plastic-covered notebook which for some reason his mother kept in the kitchen drawer, did the woman with the barking voice agree to tell him what was going on, and he learned that his father had chest pains and his mother had run out into the street to get help. Almost all the neighbours in the small street had come into Fatima, and someone had gone to the hospital when the ambulance came, and others had stayed making tea with poor Maura, who wasn’t herself at all and couldn’t cope with what was happening.

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘Why don’t you just
get
yourself there?’ said the woman with the unpleasant voice. Which made sense. He wished he had been nicer to his father, less impatient. Tom grabbed up his car keys and coat. He paused for a moment to consider writing a note. He and Marcella often communicated by letters left to each other on the table. But he didn’t want to tell her about his father. And moreover, he couldn’t forgive her for lying to him. And he knew she had. She had looked too excited going out to the gym, she smelled too well, there had been tears in her eyes over something. But then, she must not think he had run away either. ‘My father’s not well, gone to see him, hope you enjoyed the party,’ he wrote. That would show her. He drove to the hospital.