Girl From the South (v5) Read online

  ‘Yes—’

  Stephen gestured towards her.

  ‘All yours.’

  Gillon came across and held out her hand.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I’m Gillon.’

  Henry looked down at her. He had not been prepared for someone so much smaller than he was, or for someone so unconventional-looking.

  He said, slightly diffidently, ‘Well, obviously, I’m Henry—’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. She smiled. She had very good teeth. ‘I’ll get my jacket.’

  ‘Sorry about this place,’ Henry said, looking round.

  Gillon shrugged.

  ‘A bar’s a bar—’

  ‘I don’t know this bit of London well enough to know what would be better.’

  ‘This is fine.’

  She had chosen a café latte and a glass of water.

  Henry had ordered a beer and then rather regretted it. The pint glass looked somehow larger than normal. Gross. He said, ‘I’m – well, I’m grateful to you for coming.’

  She stirred her latte with a long wooden splint.

  She said, ‘It must have seemed so strange—’

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Well, Tilly coming back and saying she’d offered a room to this refugee—’

  He picked up his glass.

  ‘Well, it did. A bit.’

  ‘A lot, I’d guess,’ Gillon said. She looked at him. ‘I’ll tell you though, Tilly’s offer is the kindest thing that’s happened to me since I came to London.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Henry said stiffly. ‘About London’s welcome to foreigners, I mean.’

  Gillon looked startled.

  ‘Am I a foreigner?’

  He gave her a small smile.

  ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘Even though I speak the same language?’

  ‘But you come from the South.’

  She took a mouthful of her coffee. Then she said evenly, ‘I wonder what you know about the South?’

  Henry looked away. ‘Oh, I expect only the clichés everyone else knows.’

  ‘Lynch mobs and steel magnolias—’

  He shrugged.

  She said pleasantly, ‘Then you have a great deal to learn.’

  ‘I expect,’ Henry said, ‘that that’s true of me in all manner of respects.’

  Gillon let a little silence fall.

  Then she said, letting her accent give what she was saying a particular edge, ‘My father is a Realtor, my mother is a psychiatrist. My brother works in IT, my sister is married and pregnant and works part-time in the antiques reproductions store of the Historic Charleston Foundation. We are, as a family, the sixth generation born and raised in Charleston.’

  Henry bowed his head.

  ‘I have a Master’s in fine art,’ Gillon said. ‘I’ve worked all over. My last job was in the Pinckney Museum of Art in Charleston collating a catalogue on the miniatures collection there.’ She paused and then she said, ‘I flunked my Ph.D. I just dropped out.’

  ‘Oh?’ Henry said.

  She glanced at him.

  ‘I didn’t need to tell you that.’

  He took a swallow of beer.

  He said, ‘I dropped out too.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I was doing history of art. I dropped out two months before my finals because I decided that all I wanted to do was photography.’

  ‘Two months?’ Gillon said. ‘At least I gave it six—’

  He smiled at her.

  She said, ‘What did your family say?’

  He looked surprised.

  ‘My family?’

  ‘Sure. Weren’t they upset?’

  ‘I don’t – have that kind of family.’

  She waited. She moved her water glass an inch to the right.

  ‘I haven’t seen my father since I was six,’ Henry said. ‘He lives in Australia. He’s got a new family My sister lets me just get on with stuff, on the whole. And my mother – well, my mother is someone you keep drama from, rather than sharing it with her. I’m not sure, in fact, that she ever knew I hadn’t finished my degree.’

  Gillon said, looking at her coffee mug, ‘That’s hard for you.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sure it is. Who’s there to support you, without a family?’

  Henry said doubtfully, ‘I’m not sure it quite works like that in England any more—’

  ‘And you have Tilly.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But you still need family,’ Gillon said. ‘One person can’t be everything to you. One person can’t give you everything you need.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Gillon coloured faintly.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I was just expressing an opinion.’

  Henry looked at her with attention. He looked at her odd hair and her small hands and the faint freckles on her forearms.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

  He took another pull at his beer.

  Then he said, ‘D’you miss Charleston?’

  She nodded, looking down into her coffee.

  He said, ‘You said you’d worked all over—’

  ‘Oh, I have. All over the States—’

  ‘It’s been hard here, then.’

  She hesitated.

  Then she said, ‘It’s been a great experience—’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen so much, learned so much, the history, the art—’

  ‘You could probably,’ Henry said, interrupting, ‘do that on the Internet.’

  She pushed her coffee mug away from her and reached for her jacket.

  She said, her face half averted, ‘Look, just forget this whole idea—’

  ‘Forget it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, struggling with a sleeve. ‘Yes. Forget Tilly and I met. Forget she ever asked me to room with you guys.’

  He was truly startled.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You don’t want a room-mate. Of course you don’t. Why should you? Why should you want anyone else in the life you share with Tilly? It was a crazy idea.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Henry said.

  ‘Have I? Well, let me make myself plainer, then. It’s obvious I’m not welcome to room with you and Tilly. It’s pretty obvious I’m not even, in your eyes, welcome in London. I’m acute enough to see that and I’m proud enough not to want to talk about it any more.’

  Henry slipped off his bar stool and stood up.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He reached forward and held the left side of Gillon’s jacket. She stepped back a little in order to pull the jacket out of his grasp.

  ‘Too late,’ she said. She thrust her arm down the left sleeve and pulled it up to her shoulder. Henry noticed that the collar was half turned in and made an involuntary gesture to correct it. She glared at him.

  ‘Too late, I said.’

  ‘Is it too late,’ Henry said, ‘to say that I’m really sorry if I offended you, that I truly didn’t mean to and that you are very welcome to have the room in our flat that Tilly offered you?’

  Gillon put her hand to her forehead.

  ‘Oh jeez—’

  ‘I seem to be offending people right, left and centre just now,’ Henry said. ‘Particularly women. I don’t know what else to say, except that I’m sorry.’

  Gillon looked at him.

  ‘I don’t know what to think—’

  ‘Think what you thought when you first saw me, before you got to think what a crass bastard I am. Think that you are going to move into our flat just as you supposed that you were and that we are all – as we surely are – going to get on fine.’

  Gillon said uncertainly, ‘It won’t be for long.’

  He made a dismissive gesture.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘My sister’s having a baby in early November. I’ll be going home for that.’

  ‘Will you?’

&n
bsp; ‘So it’s only a couple of months or so—’

  ‘OK,’ Henry said. He smiled at her. ‘Come and live in our flat for a couple of months, then.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Come at the weekend—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He said, ‘I’ll come and help you shift your stuff.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’ll be fine. It’s only one big bag—’

  ‘All right,’ he said. He sounded uncertain. ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded. She suddenly looked very tired.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I’m sure.’

  When Gillon had left him, and he had paid for their drinks – he had hardly touched his – Henry set off to walk down Kentish Town Road towards Regent’s Park. It was a warm, soft evening with that clear translucency to the sky that was so wonderful over sheets and spaces of water. Henry thought about being near water, about being among those quiet, wet, reflecting places where time never seemed to have any consequence at all, where he sometimes knew – whether he could take a picture or not – a depth of contentment he seldom felt in any other circumstances. It had something to do with absolute anonymity, something too with the total indifference to humanity of the natural world, that was so liberating and so centring at the same time. He’d known, he reflected, steadily treading the dusty pavement of Kentish Town Road, more satisfaction, more blessed absence of pressure and tension, in wild wet places than in any other situation he could recall. Yet if that was the case, why then did he feel so unexcited about the commission his agency had rung through yesterday, a commission for a series of wildfowl and seabird postcards for a greetings-card company? The work was reasonably paid and satisfactorily autonomous. Why was it then, Henry thought, manoeuvring his way across towards Parkway, that he should feel so indifferent, so like just shrugging his shoulders and letting the job pass to someone else?

  He couldn’t, after all, afford to turn the job down. He couldn’t afford to turn any job down. The need to earn had always, in the past, made amends for any lack of quality in work, had provided its own stern momentum. But at the moment some kind of small but steady inertia seemed to have hold of him, seemed to be making his response to anything one of reluctance, of incuriousness.

  And now of rudeness too, he thought. Gillon Stokes had turned out to be the oddly appealing creature Tilly had said she was and he had been, in a quiet, insidious way, rude in response. When she had flashed back at him, pointed out his boorishness, he had felt a small elation at hitting home rather than embarrassment at having behaved badly. The thing was, he didn’t really care if she came and lived in the flat or not. What he cared – and despaired – about was that neither he nor Tilly seemed in any way able to take the gloves off and confront each other bare-knuckled, open-hearted. All this circling, suggesting, avoiding: all this pain and disappointment waiting to happen, waiting for him to say what he could not bring himself to say because there was no reason for feeling as he felt. Well, no reason that was acceptable anyhow. In all this irresolution and unhappiness, he thought, how can the presence of one unremarkable American girl make any difference whatsoever? She can’t possibly make things worse: she might even, in some unlooked-for way, make them better by relieving the tension, even forcing an issue. In any case, if Tilly wants her, she shall have her. Tilly can have anything that will make her feel better. Except-except, Henry thought miserably, the one thing that would make me feel worse.

  Chapter Seven

  During the day, the small scruffy reception area of William’s offices served as a meeting place of the leather-clad bike boys between runs. They all carried radio control and it was William’s ambition that one day they would all be so busy moving from job to job in central London that there would be no time to return to lounge against the walls drinking Diet Coke and bad coffee and filling the tin ashtrays, nicked from pubs, with Marlboro stubs. The telephonist, a thin-faced girl called Corinne who came in each day from South Woodford on the Central Line, and left each evening exactly five minutes before the close of business, took no notice of the couriers. Her world was through her headphones and she had the weary competence of someone who has accepted that a job is necessary for an employee and has to be done, for an employer, however tedious. She had been engaged since she left school – five years ago now – and showed as much interest in the bike boys as if they had been her younger brothers.

  With William himself, however, it was different. She was not a girl with much energy or appetite, but she was aware she found William attractive. Very attractive, in fact, in his long dark way and often – and she was pretty much resigned to this – much more attract ive than the fiancé in South Woodford who did not seem to have progressed significantly beyond the sixteen-year-old who had suggested to her, in the draughty entrance to a snooker hall late one Saturday night, that they get engaged. William spoke politely to Corinne, after all. William knew, despite her irritating time-keeping habits, that he had a reliable employee in Corinne, an employee without ego, who did not mind concerning herself either with repetition or detail. He smiled at her, he remembered to thank her. His partner, Sam, frequently forgot to smile and was inclined to say ‘Cheers’ instead of ‘Thank you’. He was also on the pudgy side. In Corinne’s book, if men were going to be heavy, then they had to be tall to compensate. Sam wasn’t tall. Sam also liked a laddish josh with the bike boys which Corinne despised him for. On the days when William was out pitching for new accounts – at which he was far more successful than Sam – Corinne shortened her hours by fifteen minutes instead of five, and silently dared Sam to stop her.

  She worked at a desk behind a raised counter on which stood plastic holders containing leaflets about the company’s rates and conditions. She had once added a pot plant which was immediately used as an extra ashtray and died within a fortnight.

  ‘Thanks for trying,’ William had said.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Should’ve known—’

  He gave her a plant the next Christmas, with a box of chocolate-covered Brazil nuts (she was allergic to nuts) and two £50 notes inside a card with a nice message inside. She’d kept the card. She couldn’t quite think why, except that she had a disinclination to throw it away.

  From her desk she could see both the door to the building’s staircase and the door to the cramped office where William and Sam worked. If they were there together, or Sam was on his own, the door would be shut. If William was on his own, however, he propped the door open with a copy of the Yellow Pages directory, which Corinne thought was a nice gesture. Every time he did it, she thought it was nice: un-grand, friendly. She never called out to him but she liked to see him at his computer, or on the telephone, rumpling his dark hair as he talked, stretching his long arms in the air, yawning. On the day that Tilly came in, however, Corinne wished that William’s door had been shut. If it had been shut, Corinne might have been able to tell Tilly that William was out and that she didn’t know when he’d be back. It wasn’t that Tilly was a stranger to Corinne, or that Tilly was anything other than pleasant to her, or even that Tilly’s looks were not conducive to arousing a generous response in less-favoured girls. It was, pure and simple, the fact that, when Tilly came into the office, and William’s door was open, William would stop almost anything he was doing and come out to greet her.

  ‘Hi, Corinne,’ Tilly said.

  Tilly was wearing a narrow black skirt and a small striped cardigan and very high sandals. Her hair was loose and held back from her face by a pair of sunglasses.

  Corinne directed a meagre smile at her switchboard.

  ‘You OK, then?’

  ‘Oh,’ Tilly said. ‘So-so. In need of a break—’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Corinne said.

  Tilly leaned on the raised counter.

  ‘Corinne, is William—’

  ‘Yes,’ William said, behind her.

  Tilly turned. Corinne could sense her smiling. She could see that William was.
r />   ‘Hi!’ Tilly said. She reached up a little so that William could kiss her cheek.

  ‘Surprise,’ William said.

  ‘I wanted to catch you,’ Tilly said. ‘Just for a minute. Before you went.’

  William grinned.

  ‘OK.’ He looked at Corinne. ‘Want to shut up shop?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s five-fifteen.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Corinne said crossly. ‘As usual.’

  William looked at Tilly.

  ‘Give me five minutes.’

  ‘Of course. Look, I don’t want you to stop—’

  ‘I do,’ William said. ‘There’s nothing booked late today anyway.’

  He touched her arm.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Come and play chess with yourself on Sam’s computer while I just tidy some stuff up.’

  Tilly moved into the office ahead of him. She’s tall, Corinne thought, even without those heels, five eight or nine anyway. William turned in the doorway, smiled towards the reception desk and nudged the Yellow Pages directory aside with his foot so that the door swung shut behind him. Corinne glared at it. She was, she knew, five foot four in her bare feet and there was nothing to be done about it. She took off her headphones and threw them on the desk.

  William found seats for them both in a corner of a bar.

  ‘White wine?’

  Tilly shook her head.

  ‘Mineral water.’

  ‘Since when—’

  ‘Since Gillon.’

  ‘Oops,’ William said. He stood up. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Tilly watched him thread his way between the tables to the bar. He’d get served quickly, as Henry always was, as tall men always seemed to be. She leaned back in her chair and inspected her nails. Gillon told her that her sister Ashley, back in Charleston, had a manicure every two weeks and, in summer, a pedicure too. She also, Gillon said, had her eyebrows shaped on a regular basis and this wasn’t considered at all unusual because all her friends did too.

  ‘How much time does this take?’ Tilly said.

  ‘Quite a lot. But you plan for it. You build it into your schedule. Like working out.’

  ‘Wow,’ Tilly said faintly.

  William came back and put two glasses down on the table. She peered at his.