The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle

I’d never slapped anyone before: it always seemed like such a pointlessly feminine gesture, an admission that you haven’t the wit to inflict a more serious injury. Almost as soon as I’d done it, I regretted the act (and I certainly had cause to regret it later). Angel took his hand off my bottom and put it slowly to his cheek. A fat, oily tear built in the corner of his eye and rolled down his face until its way was blocked by the broad fingers, whereupon it found some subterranean passage and disappeared. Still without saying a word, Angel turned and walked away.

Boys don’t understand how hard it is to break a heart. They think we have it easy, dispensing joy or misery with a nod or shake of the head, as they cavort around us, offering themselves for humiliation. But you really have to be a complete bitch to derive any pleasure out of kicking some hapless youth in the teeth. In fact the only thing worse than having to reject a boy is having no boy to reject at all.

Anyway, after a few minutes I went out to apologise to Angel. I liked him, and I didn’t want things to be awkward. I saw that he was in the office. Cavafy had his arm around him. He looked at me blankly, and made a slight shooing gesture when I began to walk towards them.

It was shortly after the Angel incident that it all began with Ludo, and for one reason or another it was a couple of months before I went back to the depot. On that first post-Ludo visit, Angel was nowhere to be seen, and Cavafy stood silent and stony faced in his office, staring icily through the plate glass. Even Doris sat aloof, and barely returned my smile. Penny must have told Cavafy. The two of them had known each other for decades. The old Greek had made her first collection. Although Penny had moved on to bigger and better things she would still send him the dockets for fifty or so skirts, or a couple of dozen jackets, for old time’s sake. I can imagine what kind of spin Penny put on it: Katie the gold digger; Katie the counter-jumper; Katie who thinks she’s too good for your son; Katie servant of Beelzebub; Katie mistress of the secret arts; Katie who suckles her cat familiar with her third teat; that sort of thing.

But I toughed it out (and in truth it wasn’t that tough, bearing in mind that everything else in my life was starting to go so well) and it seemed that things had blown over. After a couple of months you’d hardly have known about the crisis, except for the sullen yearning you sometimes saw in Angel’s eyes, and, if I’d been more perceptive, something colder in Cavafy’s.

I sensed the sullen yearning thing as I slipped by Doris and through the door into the depot. It didn’t take me long to sort out the interlining: it was hiding under a roll of wool crêpe. The depot has an exit out to the loading bay, and I didn’t fancy going back through the factory, with Angel moping at me. The exit leads on to a ramp, and, as you know, heels hate ramps, so I usually sat at the top with my legs dangling over the edge, and let myself down the few extra inches. I was just doing that when something emerged from the shadows.

‘Give you a hand there, Katie,’ came a voice, the type of gorgeous, Irish voice that just cries out to be called ‘lilting’, and bugger the clichés. I managed to feel both startled and soothed at the same time. A face followed the hand out of the shadows. It was vaguely familiar.

‘Do I know you?’ I asked, harshly, trying hard to mask the fact that I had been caught by surprise.

‘Sure you do. I’m Liam … Liam Callaghan. I drove for you last year at the London Designer Show.’

Thaaaat was it. Normally I’d go with the clothes, helping to set up the stand, arranging the stories – a story, by the way, for you fashion know-nothings out there, means that part of a collection made out of the same cloth – and all that, but last season I went in the car with Hugh, and he insisted on stopping off at his club for a G & T, which turned into about seven, and by the time we got to the stand all the work had been done. Penny was furious, but didn’t say much because it was all Hugh’s fault. I just managed to catch Liam as he was leaving, an empty clothes rail balanced on each shoulder. As he’d passed me he’d half turned and thrown me a wink, which was naughty.

‘Oh, hello, yes, Liam. Of course. What are you doing skulking back here?’

‘Skulking’s a little harsh now, isn’t it? What could be a more natural habitat for your common or garden van driver than a factory loading bay?’

He had a point, although the ‘common or garden’ bit was fooling nobody, as he well knew. Although I’d only come across him that one time, I knew that Liam Callaghan drove for almost every designer fashion company in London. He was reliable, hard-working, relatively honest, and heterosexual. In the fash biz any one of those would have set him apart: taken together it meant you had to book him weeks in advance. And yes, Liam was something of a looker, in an almost caricatured Irish-rogue kind of way: dark curly hair, blue eyes, a long face that had a suggestion of melancholy about it, you know, as if he’d just finished playing a piano concerto, until he wheeled out his smile. And that was some smile: a smile that could stop trains. And hearts. It was a smile he must have worked on in front of the mirror. It began, like all the great smiles, with the eyes: a barely perceptible widening, followed by an irresistible crinkling. And then the lips would purse for a moment before collapsing exuberantly into a lovely white roller coaster.

‘Well, are you going to give me a hand down or will I have to leap and sprain my ankle?’

He gave me a smile for that: not an all-guns-blazing, blow-your-knickers-off special – perhaps just a 7.5 on the Richter scale of smiles. But it made me want to bite him, for all that.

He was strong and lithe: not a pumped-up gym-fairy strong, but a lifting, shifting, working, strong. His hand stayed in mine for a second or two after I landed.

‘Are you going back into town?’ I asked.

‘I am that. Do you need a ride?’

‘Mmm. Anything’s better than the tube. Even a smelly old van cab, with fag ends on the floor and porno mags under the seat. I know what you drivers are like.’

‘Well, you know, you could always give it a wee tidy for me, if you’ve a mind.’

The van, of course, was spotless. He opened the door for me, and again offered me his hand, saying, ‘This is habit forming.’

Despite the traffic, the drive back into town was fun. We joked about all the appalling old dragons he had to work for: the cranky, tight-fisted Elland sisters, who’d always make him show his hands were clean before he was allowed to touch any of their precious hats; Emelia Edwards, who’d once actually pinched him for eating an orange, for which fruit she had a notorious aversion; Kathryn Trotter, who wouldn’t let any of her actual employees carry Kathryn Trotter bags, as they simply could not convey the right image.

‘And Penny Moss?’ I asked.

‘Wouldn’t say a word against the lady. Fierce as two ferrets in a bag, but never rude unless provoked. And always pays her bills on time. And I’d hardly say otherwise when you’re set to marry the precious boy now, would I?’

‘I wouldn’t tell.’

‘Well maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. And how do you feel about getting wed? All a-tingle?’

‘I’m slightly past the tingle stage.’

‘Second thoughts?’

‘I can’t quite see how that’s any of your business.’

‘I’m only making polite conversation, am I not?’

‘Of course I haven’t got second thoughts. Everybody loves Ludo. He’s a honey.’

‘And you’re the bee.’

When you thought about it, that was really rather a horrid thing to say. But he said it with such a charming twinkle that I didn’t mind.

‘Won’t you miss all the parties and suchlike, when you’re wed?’ he continued.

‘What do you mean, miss them? Why should I stop going to parties?’

‘Ah, there’s no reason under the sun. But when did you last meet a married couple at a fashion shindig? Isn’t it all single people, or boyfriends and girlfriends. There’s something about the married state that leads you on to quiet nights by the telly, and Ovaltine before bed. And that’s before we even start talking about the kids. No, let’s give you a couple of quiet years first, then the time of chaos with the children – let’s say you have two, a couple of years apart, and they stay like millstones round your neck till they’re eighteen and they go off to college. Well that’s twenty-two years before you’re clear of the last of them. And then you might be in the mood for a party, but who the hell’s going to invite you then?’

I laughed, but it sounded hollow even to me.

‘If you knew me better you’d realise that nothing could stop me going to parties. Anyway, it’s my job. How else could I know who was wearing what, or who was wearing who? How could I keep up with the scandal and gossip? My life isn’t going to end when I get married.’

‘But some things will have to stop now, won’t they, Katie?’ He unfurled a smile. It was simply impossible not to smile back.

There was no way he could have known about my one or two little flirtations. And you’re not going to like this, but I had, it’s true, been thinking about one, last, final, meaningless, harmless little fling before settling down in utter and complete faithfulness with Ludo. The idea had half formed itself in my mind. I knew it was there. It nudged and winked at me. And without explicitly acknowledging its presence, it became part of me, and I knew that I was going to do it.

But who with? No one in my circle. The best looking men were, naturally, gay. The sexiest men were married – and I may be naughty, but I’m not bad. No, it had to be an outsider. There was the aforementioned Divine Dante, who always put chocolate on my morning latte, (which I always spooned off with a shudder back in the office). Handsome, in that baby-Vespa way that Italians have. But really, no. I thought about Max from Turbo Sports next door but one. I once saw him, glistening with sweat, at the gym. Body hard as a pit bull terrier. He had the cold eyes of a serial cat-strangler, which I rather liked. So different from lovely, helpless Ludo. But again, no: his head was too small, and he conversed principally in grunts and lewd gestures. There was always the queer little man who came in to fix our Mac whenever it crashed. He once gave me a big, embarrassing sunflower. But beware geeks bearing gifts, as I always say.

So it went with all of the men I met: too old, too silly, too ugly, too gay, too small, too close, too far.

‘What does your girlfriend think about you working with all these glamorous fashion women?’ I asked, shamelessly.

‘And what makes you think I’ve got a girlfriend? Could I not be a sad, melancholy soul, drifting forlorn and loveless through life?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘As it happens I am between girlfriends at the moment, which is saving me a fortune in roses, but costing me one in Guinness.’

‘I hate Guinness,’ I said. ‘Tastes like old-man’s bile to me.’

‘Well, you see it all depends on where you drink it and …’

‘Who you drink it with?’

‘I was going to say how it’s poured. But now you mention it …’

‘There’s a rather good Irish word I’ve heard occasionally.’ I said, sweetly, ‘Gobshite.’ For the first time he laughed. The laugh was less studied than the fabulous smile, but lovelier for it.

‘Gobshite is it? Will you look at the tongue on her! She’ll be calling me an auld bollix soon.’

‘So where should I be drinking Guinness?’

‘The only place for a pint of slow-poured black stuff, amid convivial company, with your ears caressed by the finest fiddle playing, is the Black Lamb in Kilburn.’

‘Kilburn. Is that where you live then?’

‘Not every Irishman lives in Kilburn, you know.’

I did know. About half the people you meet at parties are Irish: Emerald Tiger types, fresh out of Harvard Business School or journalism college, sleek, clever, ambitious. The girls are all beautiful, if a touch wholesome and buttery, and the boys are all puppy-faced and eager. They’d no more live in Kilburn than I would. Of course I’d been to the Tricycle Theatre a couple of times, dragged by Ludo. Once we saw a version of some Brecht play performed by Eskimos. The second time was less commercial. The whole show consisted of a man buried up to his neck in a heap of broken watches, screaming, ‘It’s later than you think! It’s later than you think!’ Give me Cats any day. Even Ludo agreed we shouldn’t go back after the interval.

I looked out of the window and caught a glimpse of myself in the wing mirror. I’d just had my highlights done at Daniel Galvin’s. I always think I look better in bad mirrors, caught in movement or glanced at an angle. Unless you’re obviously at one end or the other of the spectrum, it’s impossible to really know how attractive you are. Models know they’re gorgeous. They might pretend to be riddled with doubt, but that’s just them trying to seem cleverer than they are. And people with hare-lips and things. I suppose they must know that they’re ugly. Sorry, sorry – beautiful on the inside, I’m sure, but, whatever you might say, ugly on the outside. Actually, in my experience ugliness does something horrid to the soul. Knowing that whoever you’re talking to can only think ‘God, but she’s ugly’, must burn into you like acid. Unless you’re especially stupid. Which makes it all the sadder that pretty people are so often dim, and ugly ones clever. (I know it’s a cliché, but clichés get to be clichés because they’re true. Sometimes, anyway.) Hugh once gave me a very good piece of advice. I don’t know where he got it from. ‘Katie,’ he said, ‘always tell pretty girls that they’re clever, and clever girls that they’re pretty. They’ll love you forever.’

‘And what do you say if they’re pretty and clever?’ I asked.

He smiled and patted me on the bottom. ‘You say yes, Katie. You say yes.’ Naughty man.

But I’m drifting off my point. Which was, unless you’re at the extremes, you really don’t know where you are. And I thought, as I looked at myself in that wing mirror, ‘Are you pretty, Katie? Or are you plain? If you’re pretty, how pretty? If plain, how plain?’ I’d always had boyfriends, and men to tell me that I was pretty, or better than pretty. But men lie. And even the ones that didn’t lie, who believed it, did they know, were they right? If you get the devotion of some poor simpleton who thinks that because you don’t buy your clothes from a shop with two letters with an ‘&’ in the middle you must be pure class, does that count? Any man will say he loves you, any man will say you’re beautiful when he has a fistful of your knickers and his nose in your Wonderbra. Girls know, of course. We can cast our cold eye over each other. But knowing that girls think you’re pretty is like drinking alcohol-free wine, or decaffeinated coffee: it just doesn’t hit the spot. No, what we want or at least what I want, is for men to find us, me, beautiful, and for them to be right.

But after all that I think I know what the truth is. The truth is that I am quite (a lovely word that can mean ‘really quite a lot’ or ‘not really very much at all’) pretty. I’m not very tall, perhaps about five six. I’m slim, but not, by anyone’s reckoning, skinny. My hair is naturally a dark browny-yellow, the colour, as Ludo once said, not meaning to be horrid, of a nicotine-stained finger. Hence the highlights. My eyes are grey, which is good. I have no eyebrows, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. My eyelashes are too pale to be of any use, and so I have them dyed. The second time we slept together, Ludo lay gazing into my face. ‘your eyelashes,’ he said, his breath heavy with wine and cigarettes, ‘they’re amazing. They’re so dark and long! I love them, and your eyelids and your eyes and your face and your head and your everything.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I still haven’t. It’s one of the things Penny thinks she has over me. My breasts are small enough not to embarrass me in the world of fashion, and big enough not to embarrass me in the world of men. And all the bits in between? O God! Who knows?

My point is, and I know I’ve come the long way round, that I’m a good-looking girl, but not good-looking enough to be blasé, not good-looking enough not to need the glances, the praises, the presents, the adulation, the worship, the flattery, the fawning of men. You see, what makes me interesting is that I’m close enough to be able to reach out and grab these things, these meaningless, gaudy, pointless baubles, but too far away for them to drop into my lap.

And now I was reaching, foolish, foolish, girl, for the bauble that was Liam Callaghan, van driver, Irish blarney-merchant, borderline beautiful boy.

‘Your Black Lamb doesn’t sound like the kind of place a girl could just wander into on her own.’

‘Ah Jesus there’s plenty of girls come into the Lamb, but it’s true enough none at all like you. A good-looking lady by herself might attract a bit of attention, but then you wouldn’t have to be by yourself.’ It was coming. ‘You know if ever you wanted a taste of the dark stuff – the real thing mind you – then I could show you the place. It might be the making of you.’

I have no idea how serious he was up to this point. Was he just playing the Irish rogue to pass the time on our way into town, his mind in neutral? Was this just a diversion? The bluff, if bluff it was, about to be called.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay what?’ I noted with pleasure that he was a little taken aback.

‘Okay, why don’t you show me what a good pint of Guinness looks like.’

Now there was no smile at all.

‘When can you come?’

‘Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? I’m in Paris from Thursday through till Sunday. How about a week tomorrow?’

That ‘I’m in Paris’ was precious. Thank heavens for Premiére Vision.

‘Thursday week it is then. What if I meet you in the pub at, say, eight o’clock?’

I suddenly felt giddy. Was I in control? I thought I had been. But here I was, agreeing to meet an almost complete stranger, in a desperate pub in Kilburn, a part of London I knew about as well as I knew the courtship rituals of the white-tailed sea eagle.

‘Jesus, look it’s Regent Street,’ said Liam. ‘Why don’t you leap out here?’

‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.

He said nothing, but looked at me and smiled. It was like being overwhelmed by a warm Caribbean wave: giddy, intoxicating, engulfing, fatal.

chapter four

a technical interlude, concerning leases, and the provenance of penny

I cannot say that my endeavours that afternoon represented the triumph of the production manager’s art. Whatever Penny might think about me, she knows that I work hard and efficiently. Being good at anything is all about focus, filtering out the white noise. Ludo told me once that some scientists had done an experiment where they monitored the eye movements of different types of chess players, you know, Grand Masters or whatever they’re called, and ordinary chess-club hopefuls, with tank tops and dirty cuffs. The really great players, it turned out, spent all of their time scrutinising just a couple of squares – the ones that really mattered. The eager amateurs, on the other hand, roamed busily over the whole board, eyes feverishly darting from square to square, in search of the secret, the code that they would never crack.

Ludo, of course, was useless at chess. He was too soft-hearted; he could never bear to lose a piece, and could no more sacrifice a pawn than he could drown a puppy in a sack. Not that I used to play him. His chum, Tom would come round, and they’d disappear into the Smelly Room with the board and a bottle of whiskey.

No, that afternoon I couldn’t focus at all. My eyes were all over the board. Or off it altogether. I oscillated wildly between the fear of what I was getting myself into, and a bubbling, uncontrollable excitement. Sitting at my desk I found myself, amazingly, turned on. I crossed my legs and thought of Ireland.

I could tell Penny was getting annoyed: she kept making a little noise, that began as a tut and ended in a grunt. Her mind was turning slowly as she tried to find something to throw at me. I pictured an ox tied to one of those big grindy things they have in Biblical epics.

‘Katie,’ she called, slyly from her place under the skylight, ‘have you spoken to Liberty yet about the reorder? We have to let them know today.’

‘You know I haven’t. Couldn’t you have done it while I was at the depot?’ I didn’t normally bite back at Penny but, as I say, I was elsewhere.

‘No, Katie you dear thing.’ Ouch! One of the things I remember from ‘A’ level English was that in Restoration comedies whenever the level of explicit courtesy rises you know a sword is being drawn somewhere beneath a frock coat. Penny was like that. ‘Lady Frottager came in drunk and peed on the ottoman.’

‘What, again?’

‘Yes, again.’

‘Someone,’ I said in a half-conscious echo of Penny’s own grande dame manner, ‘ought to tell that woman our ottoman is not a public convenience.’

‘Well anyway, she was terribly distressed, and I had to comfort her until the taxi came.’

‘Did she buy anything?’

‘I coaxed her into one of the pashminas but that’s hardly the point. And then that ugly brute Kuyper came a-calling.’

‘Still banging on about the rent rise?’

‘Without a … a … bazooka, there is simply no stopping that man.’

Kuyper, a South African who’d learnt his social skills as a torturer under apartheid (well, he might have), really was a brute. His company, Kuyper and Furtz, had bought the freehold on our shop, and three other units in the lane, one of which was empty and officially cursed after a string of businesses had tried, and failed, to sell, in order, posh bras, camping equipment, cameras and, inevitably, candles.

The first thing Kuyper and Furtz did was to invite the utterly pointless Anita Zither, who was currently between retail outlets, into the empty unit. Pointless, because despite being the press’s darling, and the establishment’s pet English designer, she’s never managed to put together a collection anyone would want to wear or buy, and every two years she goes bust, owing her suppliers tens of thousands. The day after she’d signed her lease, Kuyper came to us claiming that she was paying three times the rent we were. And there it was, in black and white. As it was time for our rent review, this spelled serious trouble. Kuyper ranted on about market rates, his bullet head and fat neck glowing red with greed, his fat finger pointing away, like a school bully bursting balloons. We couldn’t afford anything like what he was asking, and nor, surely, could Anita Zither.

The next day we got at the truth. One of Anita’s girls was an old bitching partner of Nester, our rather stately manageress. They went off for a coffee, and word came back of the dastardly scheme. The enormous rent existed only on paper. The Anita Zither shop was to be given a two-year rent holiday. After that she could renegotiate something more realistic, or just do her usual evaporating trick. The bogus agreement was the perfect stick for beating the rest of us into submission.

Penny, tough cookie that she is, stonewalled, and Kuyper became more and more aggressive, issuing all kinds of threats, legal and physical, and cursing in Afrikaans.

(Sorry if that was all a bit drab and technical, what with leases and freeholds and things, but it wasn’t completely irrelevant, as you’ll see later. Look on it as being like the half talky bits in operas that fill in between the nice songs, the recitative I think it’s called. Ludo took me to see The Marriage of Figaro when we were first seeing each other. I read the programme, which went on for pages. Too many notes.)

Back to Penny and her mood.

‘Sorry I wasn’t here to help.’ Conciliation seemed a good idea. ‘I’ll call Liberty’s now.’

‘No need to apologise, I am one-third American, after all,’ she said, as if that explained everything.