A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
setting your ideas straight? You notice the loss.’
She had told Simon, she remembered, that to listen was one of the duties of friendship.
Charlie was contrite. He took hold of her hand. ‘I’m sorry. Go on then, rehearse.’
‘Research.’ She began ticking off points on their linked fingers. ‘Look at the market, establish what the competition is, study their figures. Define my own market. Get a prototype made, establish manufacturing costs. Figure out how to sell. Make a business plan, taking a best-possible and a worst-possible set of results. Get into the City and raise the capital. Or something like that.’ She made a sound that was half a nervous laugh, half a groan of dismay.
Charlie nursed his drink in his free hand. ‘Do you want to do all this?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘Oh yes, I want to. I need to do it.’
Charlie looked at her again. It seemed incongruous to hear this talk of business plans and market research in Jane Hunter’s impeccably homespun house. To Charlie, Harriet looked hungry and just a little driven. Need, he thought, was probably just the right word. And if she was to make her scheme work, it would take all the drive she could muster.
‘There will be a heap of work to do,’ he told her, ‘even before you’re ready to go out and get your requests for investment turned down.’
‘I’m not afraid of work.’ A shrug of Harriet’s shoulders told him, eloquently, that she had nothing else to focus on. He felt the vibration of sympathy. Work was a useful palliative.
‘Have you got any capital of your own?’
‘My half of the flat, once the sale goes through. Twenty thousand. I’ve rented somewhere cheap for a year.’
‘Yes. Harriet, do you know about the risk/reward ratio?’
‘Not exactly.’ She was reluctant to admit not knowing anything that might be relevant to her plan.
‘You have to ask yourself whether all the effort and energy and time that you will have to put into developing this business will pay off for you in the end. Will you get enough out of it to make it worthwhile?’
Harriet didn’t hesitate. ‘I want to do it. The game exists, I want to go with it. And I could make a lot of money, couldn’t I?’ Charlie laughed, looking cheerful again. ‘There would be no point otherwise. You’d better let me have a look at this wonderful game of yours. Are you sure there’s no problem over the rights?’
‘I was told that I could do what I like with it. But I’ll make sure, don’t worry.’ For a moment, in place of Jane’s cream-painted stairwell with its framed prints and hanging plants, and the rising scent of carrot soup, she saw Simon’s dim house and smelt the damp and decay. She shivered a little and, mistaking the reason for it, Charlie put his arm around her.
‘Do you remember Crete, Harriet?’
‘Yes, I remember Crete.’
They had been travelling in Greece, half a dozen of them, in their last student vacation. Charlie and Jane and Harriet had all been there; Jenny had been doing something else that summer.
They had reached Vai on the eastern coast, finding a crescent of white sand and a fringe of palm trees, and underneath the palms there were the painted camper vans and orange tents of other travellers. They pitched their tents beside this company, hung up their travel-dirty clothes, and ran down to the sea to swim.
The days were hot, and the hours stretched or telescoped under the eye of the sun. They basked in the sunshine, swam in the iridescent water and read their paperbacks in the shade of the palms. They exchanged travel stories with bearded German boys, although their fund was meagre compared with the Germans who had quartered Europe in their Volkswagen campers. In the red light of beach barbecues they talked to the blonde, beautiful Scandinavians and smoked joints and listened to guitars with the friendly Dutch.
‘It’s perfect,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s Utopia.’
Jane sat cross-legged, with her hair crinkled by sun and salt loose over her shoulders. Even the soles of her feet looked tanned.
‘No violence, no greed, no theft.’ The sun had hypnotised them all, they had few possessions and less money. ‘No vanity, no competition, no racism.’
‘No prudery, nothing to hide.’
A few yards away, on a blanket, Geza and Inge the Swedes were making love. They took a long time over it, and appeared to have endlessly healthy appetites for the banquet of one another. Charlie opened his eyes.
‘Are they still at it? Would you really be happy to go on living like this?’
‘For ever,’ Jane murmured.
‘And the work ethic?’
‘I could subliminate it.’
‘Man lives to work as well as to love,’ Charlie reminded them. ‘One could point out as much to our friend Geza.’
At night, under the formidable stars, they sat around their driftwood fires and set about changing the world. For all the differences in shades of opinion, they were all certain that when they had drunk enough retsina and when the angle of the sun in the sky had declined enough to suggest autumn instead of high summer, they would return home to inherit systems that could be altered to suit their visions. They were full of innocent optimism and zeal.
One evening, as the talk eddied in circles, someone had asked, ‘What do you want, then, Harriet?’
Someone else had responded, ‘Harriet wants to be rich and famous.’
Defending herself with a quick retort she had answered, ‘Just rich will do.’
It was such an unfashionable response, such a bathetic contrast to the house of high-minded talk that had preceded it, that just as she had intended everyone laughed. In the days afterwards she was teased about her bourgeois ideals and exploitative intentions.
And then not long after that, as if governed by the same impulses as swallows gathering on telephone wires in English villages, the campers began to put on their tattered clothes once more and to talk about the long trek homewards to Munich and Amsterdam and Manchester. Harriet’s remark was forgotten as sleeping bags were rolled up and stored in the camper vans, and the tents were collapsed and folded away. A cold wind had started to blow from the east, whipping the sand up the beach. They slung their guitars from their shoulders and tied on their headbands, then set off in twos and threes down the rutted track that led away from the beach.
Utopia seemed a long way behind them even before they reached Heraklion.
‘Yes, I remember Crete.’ Sun and salt water, retsina and talk, endless talk. Harriet no longer felt young or innocent, and she knew that it was illogical to feel a shiver of regret for ten years ago. But she felt the shiver just the same.
‘I remember that I said I wanted to be rich.’
‘Have you been nursing entrepreneurial ambitions all this time?’
But Charlie had misunderstood her. They were not entrepreneurial ambitions, but ambitions for Simon’s game.
‘I said what I said, all that time ago, as a kind of joke. A joke that was forced on me.’
‘There’s no need to excuse it, then or now. I admire you Harriet. If you want to do it, go ahead. The financial climate is good, as you know, this government approves of enterprise, as you also know. I wish you the best of luck, if that’s what you want to hear. If there’s anything I can do to help you, you know I will.’
Harriet stood up, as if he had given her his blessing. She kissed Charlie’s cheek, finding it solid and warm. At the same moment she felt the blood in her own veins, and the bones under her skin. There was no husband downstairs. There was nothing, except her plan. She felt weightless, intoxicated with excitement all over again.
Charlie