office with its chipped metal filing cabinets and girlie calendar, drinking thick tea and listening to the subterranean pounding of machinery down on the shop floor.
Mr Jepson wanted to be paid in advance. Harriet leaned forward over his desk.
‘Can I have everything by February the twentieth? Without fail? With a written undertaking?’ Mr Jepson appeared to be offended that she would not accept his word as his bond. Harriet opened her chequebook and wrote out a cheque for the full amount that he had quoted. She held it out to him.
‘My written undertaking,’ she said, ‘in return for yours.’ He buzzed his secretary, and dictated the brief letter to Harriet’s satisfaction.
‘And then there’s the production run. Thirty thousand units, price quoted, for delivery at the end of May. Can you guarantee that, too?’
‘Those wishbones are the devil’s job.’
‘Can you guarantee it?’
‘Aye. If it gets to that.’
Mr Jepson was a Northerner. His voice reminded Harriet of the man in the blue shirt.
‘It will,’ she said grimly. ‘It will, I assure you.’
They shook hands. Mr Jepson was a small man. Over his head the January girl winked out of the calendar at Harriet. She was wearing a white fur tippet and mittens, and long white boots. Nothing else. Harriet’s jaw and neck ached with the wire-tightness of her determination to pin Jepson down. She thought, suddenly, how comforting it would be to have a good cry.
‘Goodbye, Mr Jepson,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we can do business together, now we understand each other.’
Harriet had written to Simon, announcing her visit. He had no telephone, of course. But she had to stand for a long time in rain driven horizontally by the wind, before she heard his steps on the other side of the door. Still the door didn’t open. The movements stopped, replaced by interrogative silence.
‘It’s Harriet.’ And more emphatically, into the blanket of it, ‘Kath’s Harriet. Do you remember?’
At last the bolts were being drawn back. A moment later, Simon confronted her. She had forgotten his height, and the milky, frosty eyes. ‘I did write,’ she reminded him lamely. ‘I thought you’d write back and tell me not to come, if you really didn’t want to see me.’
‘You’d better come in,’ was all he said. The door opened another frugal slice. Harriet followed him down the passageway. She hadn’t forgotten the smell, or the gnawing cold, much worse in January than it had been in the mild autumn. The kitchen seemed even more forlornly lumbered.
‘Would you like some tea?’
Harriet would not, but she said cheerfully, ‘Let me make it for you this time.’
She went to the sink and tried to clear some of the slime of crusts and potato peelings and tea leaves before rinsing and filling the kettle. Behind her she could hear Simon moving busily. She had the impression that he was putting things away, out of her sight. The notion that her visit was an unwelcome intrusion stabbed a little dart inside her. She had allowed herself to imagine that he might have been looking forward to it. Harriet brushed aside her own disappointment and began to tell him little, inconsequential snippets of news, mostly about Kath and Ken and the house, or about Lisa and her boyfriend. At length it sounded as though Simon had finished his rites of concealment. She could hear him breathing now, noisily, as if with a degree of difficulty. She plugged in the kettle and washed and dried two cups before turning unhurriedly around.
‘Have you got a bad chest?’
‘It’s winter.’
The economy of the response made her smile, in spite of her discomfort. ‘You think I sound like a busybody from the Council or somewhere.’
‘That’s right.’ A smile, but as wintry as the weather. Gratefully Harriet accepted the moment of rapport. She put his cup of tea down at his elbow and bent down to open her case, placed on the floor for lack of a clear space anywhere else. She took out Conundrum, Mr Jepson’s expensive Conundrum, with the ritual incantations of the three wise monkeys somehow still clouding its polished flanks. She put it into Simon’s hands like an offering and laid its box beside it, its resonant colours almost too bright for the meagre room.
‘You’ve done this?’
‘I brought it to show you. I want to tell you all about it.’
In his eyes Harriet saw a dark spectrum of responses, from disgust to fear, quickly shuttered, and wished that she had not. She stooped on her haunches, to bring herself to his sitting level.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. She did not know exactly what she was trying to reassure him about.
‘What do you mean?’ He wouldn’t admit her through the smallest chink in his armour. Harriet wished for the disarming surprise of her last visit, or for the levelling of whisky. There was no excuse for whisky at three o’clock in the afternoon.
‘Where is my game? My packing case game?’
‘It’s safe. It’s at home, but I can bring it straight back for you, if you want that.’
‘No. It’s funny, I’ve kept it with me all these years. But I feel better with it out of the house.’ He picked the gates out of the slots and shook the white bones in his cupped hands. Then he swept a clearing in the table’s litter and laid out the bones in a line, a series of Ys, two narrow paths diverging from each broad central one, offering choices. ‘You’d better sit down properly,’ he told her. ‘And say what it is you’ve come for.’
Harriet described everything, from the first tentative plans she had made alone in the rented basement to this morning’s confrontation with Mr Jepson. Her words came out in a rush. She didn’t weigh them or try to modulate them. She simply told Simon what had happened, in a rapid, fervent, breathless outpouring. And when she had finished, there was silence. It was a particularly cold and weighty silence after the heat of her delivery.
‘You told me I could do what I like with it,’ she said, very humbly.
‘I know I did. I meant it.’ Simon studied her face. He was realising that, in the time that had passed since her last visit, he had been recalling Harriet as prettier than she really was. Somehow he had superimposed Kath’s soft, bloomy features on the daughter’s thinner, sharper ones. Kath had never looked threateningly famished, as this girl did.
‘Simon?’ she was prompting him, in a voice that carried the echo of her mother’s, just as her face carried the print of the other one.
‘What is it?’
‘I …’ Harriet’s words dried. Glancing at it she saw that Conundrum looked meaningless, and its box garish. She had been wrong to come bearing her bits and pieces to Simon in search of approval and praise for her industry and cleverness. His game, to him, was Shamshuipo camp and so it was nothing to do with this shameless, glossy reflection of it.
There was another thing to remember, also. Simon was not her father. She had no right of filial expectation, no right to resent his lack of paternal pride. He could not be her father, however much she might wish him to be.
‘I’m
