her and withdraw from her but she knew she shouldn’t touch it or acknowledge it in any other way. He did the minimal amount of touching needed to get it into her. She tried to manually stimulate him once, but he moved her hand away and she had the impression for some weeks afterwards that he thought she was some sort of . . . Well, some sort of whore.
Black whore. Asian Whore. Teenage whore. Whores gagging for it.
Cartoon whore.
Now they are strange.
Beatrix’s orgasm flutters through her like a tired goldcrest. Afterwards, she gets up and makes herself a pre-lunch gin and tonic. In the kitchen, the laptop showing one of her ADVFN stock-market monitors flickers blue, red and green. Mostly blue today, which is good, although that often means red tomorrow. Once the blood goes back to wherever it came from, Beatrix finds she can’t quite believe that she just looked at all those pictures of miserable looking people being, frankly, violated (she has to be honest with herself and admit that ‘in the moment’ she likes the miserable ones best, but anyway). Beatrix feels very flat at this time of day, around about the time she used to take Archie for his walk. She could still go on her own of course, but she doesn’t. At first she enjoyed seeing other people out with their dogs, but now she doesn’t. She used to feel like a dog-owner who had lost her dog (in relation to Archie she can’t say the word died, and even the word death, used so frequently about friends, relatives and even a husband, a word that she previously felt was clean, to-the-point and brave, is so wrong in this situation; just as it was about her beautiful daughter Plum) in some sort of temporary way, but now she doesn’t; now she’s just an old woman doddering about on her own, and it’s as if she never had a dog. It was two years ago when he . . . Well, anyway, it was not long after that when she began scrapbooking her investments (a strategy taught by that incredibly tall man at that strange seminar she went to in London), which was why she was looking for pictures of clocks, sort of, but never mind that. Beatrix can’t possibly hold the thought of what she just did at the same time as thinking, however fleetingly, about Archie. She sips from her drink and gets one of the scrapbooks down from the shelf. The tall man (what was his name?) had suggested scrapbooks based on sectors: travel and leisure, perhaps, or food and drug retailers. But grandchildren works for Beatrix. Not precisely as they are in real life, but . . .
This is her favourite one, really. In Clem’s scrapbook she is not married to ghastly Ollie. Clem is married to Bill Gates, who is not just rich and powerful but surprisingly easy to cut out. This gives Clem a potential budget of billions. What would she do with all that money? Quite clearly, she’d change her life completely. Of course she wouldn’t want simply to be Bill Gates’s trophy wife. In the scrapbook, Clem has decided to leave her lecturing job in London, get a PhD in Botany and set up her own botanical garden somewhere in the West Country. Her father Augustus, alone again after the sudden death of his young second wife Cecily – from something viral, Beatrix imagines, something old-fashioned and messy like Spanish flu – will pick up his gardening gloves again and become Chief Botanist. Yes, it’s based on the Eden Project, and that’s what Beatrix has used for her scrapbook, but in her mind it is much more beautiful, and is closed to the public on one day a week when Clem gives tea parties and talks about science and the latest plant research projects. Instead of going off to silly places in JEANS to film palm trees wandering about (which Beatrix doesn’t really believe in) Clem spends her days floating around orchid houses in perfect white dresses. She never has periods. Occasionally she gives press conferences in lemon Capri pants. The Capri pants are from Dior, of course. And from about 1982. But that doesn’t really matter. Sometimes Beatrix puts things in her scrapbooks simply because she likes them.
Beatrix has a copy of this month’s Vogue and a pair of scissors and is planning Clem’s outfit for the funeral on Thursday. There’s a Reiss dress worn by Kate Middleton that would work, although is it too cheap for someone married to Bill Gates? Then again, if it is too cheap for a billionaire, then maybe it’s within the range of a relatively well-off grandmother taking her granddaughters to London for shopping and lunch (Saturday) and art galleries (Sunday). Last time they went to an art gallery Clem made her look at a skull covered with diamonds and a sun made of dead flies. This time Beatrix will choose. Perhaps those botanical illustrations at the V&A. They won’t be able to get an outfit in time for the funeral, of course, but that’s fine; since Beatrix’s scrapbooks exist outside normal conceptualisations of time and space, the outfit can be added much later. And the scrapbooks are to help visualise investments anyway. Not that Reiss is listed on the Stock Exchange, but still. Maybe one day it will be. Beatrix wonders where a busy young woman like Clem – either the imagined version or the real one – might buy a funeral outfit in a hurry. Then she buys some shares in ASOS.
After she has checked her email – nothing from Clem, Augustus or Charlie – and moved on to Bryony’s scrapbook – now there’s a problem – the Schubert begins again. It’s not that Beatrix does not like Schubert. She does like Schubert very much. Sometimes when she’s searching for c(l)ocks on the internet she does it with Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major playing on the stereo system that Augustus bought her for her ninetieth birthday. Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major is, to use a word that Beatrix has learned from the internet, ‘dirty’. It is also quite ‘rough’, the last movement in particular. But she likes to choose when she hears it. Not that the person upstairs ever plays the String Quintet in C. It’s always the piano sonatas. Because of the c(l)ocks, Beatrix has missed You & Yours on the radio, which is just a lot of old people moaning, really, but can be helpful when she is in the mood for shorting. But she has no intention of also missing The Archers. Would the kind of person who thinks it appropriate to listen to Schubert at full-blast at midday also be the kind of person who would remember to switch it off in time for The Archers? Perhaps not. Beatrix goes back to her study and Googles ‘spying on neighbours’. Around a million hits come up, but most of them are just more pornography.
‘Right, so here’s the dilemma. A colleague has made it clear that he has feelings for you, and you have made it clear that you don’t have feelings back. Then he gives you a gift. Is that harassment?’
‘What’s the gift?’
‘That’s what I said! They were all like, Yeah, this is total harassment, without even knowing what the gift was.’
‘I mean, if it’s the Kama Sutra, then yeah, I guess that’s probably harassment.’
‘But it could be like a Polo or something.’
‘Do people still eat Polos?’
‘Who knows? Also, what’s the context of the gift? Has he given lots of people gifts? I mean, you could just imagine some twat going to Human Resources to complain that this guy’s given her, I don’t know, a copy of his new film or something, even though he’s given it to everyone else in the department and put it on YouTube.’
‘Or it could be Christmas,’ Clem says.
‘What a long day.’ Zoe sips her soya latte. ‘My God.’
‘But you’ve got your certificate now?’
‘Yeah. But guess what? It needs updating every five years. I’m going to have to go through all this again before I’m thirty.’ She groans. ‘Obviously I’ll have to make it in Hollywood by then.’
‘Is that what you want to do?’
‘No. Well, sort of. I don’t know.’
The staff common room is almost empty. It has a strange old municipal feel to it despite the posh vending machines and bright red sofas.
