that case,’ he winked at her, ‘come upstairs.’
In the end they perched at the top of the stairs, looking down on the heads below. The man in the smock was still doing door duty. Harriet took the first mouthful of her wine.
‘How are you, Charlie?’
‘I’m fine. What is it you want advice about?’ Deflecting her from his own concerns, of course. What was it Jenny had said? It hasn’t been very easy for us to live together. Harriet thought of Leo, and then of the spectacular strength of women’s friendships.
‘Are you sure you don’t really need a solicitor?’ Charlie prompted her.
Harriet smiled. ‘I’ve got a solicitor.’
Her plan had become important to her. More than important, almost a lifeline. Charlie would be the first person she had shared it with and she didn’t want him to laugh at it or dismiss it, because she valued his judgement. She took a breath, launched herself.
‘Listen.’
‘I’ve been given a game, a game of skill and calculation, by a friend of mine. He invented it, and it’s very clever, very original. I want to develop the game, market it commercially. I think it will sell.’
She glanced sideways and saw that Charlie was staring gloomily down the stairs.
‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it.’
To her relief, Charlie’s face cleared. ‘That encourages me a little. Originality is the first requirement.’
‘What’s the next?’
Behind them, on the landing, someone stumbled against the bathroom door. Downstairs the music suddenly boomed out at double volume. The party was warming up.
‘If you’ve really no idea, then you should abandon this scheme at once. Go and ask that man in the blouse to dance with you, to take your mind off it. I’ll dance with you, if it will help.’ He looked at her face then, and changed his tone. ‘You work in retailing. You own a shop selling fashion goods, don’t you? You tell me what your first step should be.’
‘I do know,’ Harriet said. ‘I just wanted to … rehearse it with you. When you’re married you get used to someone being there, don’t you? To listen to you thinking aloud, 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.
