‘Only by having the opportunity to sell it. I shall be doing that for the next four days, at the trade fair. Why don’t you come and take a look?’
There was no direct response to her invitation. The two men appeared to think symbiotically without even needing to look at each other. Their silence manoeuvred Harriet into the attack.
‘I know you’ve got to calculate your risks. But wouldn’t a real venture be interesting? I’m not asking for a huge investment, I’m sure you can spread it around. And I know this will work. I know it.’ Harriet’s words seemed to echo mockingly in the plush quiet.
This time it was Robin who spoke. ‘Tell us what our exit strategy will be.’
‘USM float in three or four years.’
They approved of that. It was ambitious enough.
Martin was consulting his watch again. The meeting had reached an inconclusive finish. Harriet stood up briskly, so that she could appear to control the endgame.
‘Thank you for your time. I hope you’ll decide in my favour, Mr Landwith. Peacocks could work well for us both.’
He looked up at her; it was an odd, sidelong glance. The atmosphere in the room changed with it. It had been cool and crystalline, now it became warmer, as if thick velvet curtains had been drawn somewhere. Harriet understood that Martin Landwith had finished his appraisal of her investment potential. Now he was examining her as a woman. His eyes travelled from her mouth to her breasts. Such practised attention might have angered her, but she was interested to discover that it did not. She let him look, even squaring her shoulders and holding her head higher.
If he wants to play the game this way, she thought, I can do it too. I can play any way he likes, for the right stakes. The realisation of how much she would do for the sake of Conundrum didn’t shock her. She felt charged by it, rather, as if Martin Landwith’s deft, overdainty fingers had already worked on her. But it was the recognition of her own freedom, to do what she wanted with herself that had excited her, not anything Martin Landwith would or could do.
Robin had seen the shade of Harriet too, through the opaque business dress. They had stepped, an awkward threesome, on to different ground. Harriet looked from the father to the son, meeting their eyes squarely. Funny, she thought. Do they compete, or run together?
‘Thank you for coming, Miss Peacock,’ Martin said quietly. ‘We’ll consider your proposal.’
It was Robin who touched her elbow, guided her back through the double doors and down the staircase to the panelled hall. There was a scent of clove carnations from the flower display that Harriet hadn’t detected on the way up. She breathed it in luxuriously. She felt light-hearted, now that she was released from the strain of the meeting, and Robin became a part of the lightness. When he smiled at her they were almost co-conspirators. They shook hands, still smiling.
‘Try to come to the fair, Harriet repeated.
‘I’ll do my best for you,’ he said. Harriet wasn’t sure whether he meant the Toy Fair or persuading his father to back Conundrum. She went down the steps into the street, knowing that he was watching her go.
The glow of powerful well-being only lasted as far as the corner. By the time she reached it she was out of the patinated smoothness of the Landwith offices and back in the real world. And in the real world there were no Chinese Chippendale cabinets, no silk rugs, and no empty taxis either. It was nearly lunchtime, and every cab that passed was occupied by men, singly or in pairs, on their way to clubs and restaurants. Everyone else in the real world was on the pavement with Harriet, pushing and jostling.
She paused for long enough to look back at the stucco-fronted terrace. She wondered what the father and son were doing behind the tall, shining windows. She doubted that they were studying the copies of the plan that she had left for them. She didn’t even think they were urbanely agreeing that their visitor had been unfortunately flat-chested. She imagined that they were in some mahogany and silver washroom, ivory-brushing their beautiful haircuts ready for separate lunches with identically rich men in twin trendsetting restaurants.
The fantasy didn’t make her smile.
‘Smug shits,’ Harriet murmured. ‘I hate you.’ But she said it mechanically. She didn’t hate them enough not to long to join them.
There were still no taxis, and Harriet was due to meet Jane in five minutes’ time at the Earls Court exhibition hall main entrance. They were going to work on the stand together. Clearly there wasn’t going to be a taxi for the rest of the day. Harriet hoisted her heavy case under her arm and dived for the tube.
‘Harriet? Where have you been? They wouldn’t let me in without an exhibitor’s pass.’
Harriet was hot and flustered and guilty. Jane, loyal Jane, had freed herself from school for an afternoon in order to help her and she had kept her waiting for three-quarters of an hour. She gasped her apologies, waved her pass at the security man, and they were inside. She took Jane’s arm and steered her forward.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Landwith Associates took longer than I thought, then there were no cabs. I thought I’d never get here.’
They were half-running, half-stumbling down a long aisle. On either side there were stands where giant teddy bears reared up, where ranks of dolls smiled sweet persuasive smiles, and the rattle and whirr of mechanical toys mingled and multiplied. The dim roof-space overhead was noisy with the drilling and hammering and sawing of last preparations.
‘Slow down. Calm down,’ Jane ordered her, but Harriet rushed them faster. At last they reached a bare rectangle of space with packing cases tipped haphazardly in the centre. Harriet consulted a docket, looked at the number fixed to the stand frame, and back at the docket again.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘This is ours.’ She couldn’t keep the flatness out of her voice. The space was so bare, and dusty, and uninviting.
‘Not even a giant teddy to lend a hand,’ Jane said. Two young women in red and white Queen of Hearts costumes were eyeing them curiously from an apparently complete display across the aisle. ‘Come on, we’d better get started.’
It seemed impossible that they could ever make the stand look like anything. When she unwrapped the parachute silk and draped the creased swathes over the chipboard walls, Harriet thought she saw the Queens of Hearts covertly smiling. If it had not been for Jane, she would have turned tail, even at that last moment, and run away from the exhibition hall, right away from Conundrum itself.
But Jane raised her eyebrows by a fraction and twitched the corners of her mouth, conveying her opinion of the Queens with such perfect economy that Harriet laughed, and instead of running she climbed a stepladder with a staple gun ready in her hand.
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