He wraps the bottle in crisp crepe paper, one finger cocked like he is taking an elegant tea, as if to tell her: this is how it is done. Granted, her wardrobe, her hairstyle, her whole life cannot be salvaged by a moment of his time, but perhaps the act of witnessing his precision and professionalism and his good taste might, in some small way, chip away at her roughness.
She has pulled this bottle from the shelf because a hand-written card describes it as ‘a classic example of the type’. Now she wishes that she had been bolder. That she had chosen something without a ready-made approval, to state firmly that she knows better than this man, than any man, how her desires are best met by grapes, and terroir, and time in the bottle. Imagine asking if they had the same wine but from another year. A better year, or worse. Knowing what the sun or the humidity or the rain had done to that corner of France in that year.
Why should she know? Who is asking her to know these things?
‘Any tips for drinking it?’ she asks, her demeanour easy and friendly, like she’s only really filling a spare minute while he wraps the thing. Like she has no need of his opinion, but chooses to seek it anyway. A generous gesture that allows for him to know more about this bottle than simply how to wrap it.
‘Are you drinking it straight away?’
She shrugs. She won’t be drinking it at all, unless she’s asked to share it. And even then, she’d only take a few sips.
‘Well don’t let it get too warm,’ he says. ‘Won’t hurt to decant it, but it won’t struggle straight out of the bottle either. Cash or card?’
Becky hands over her debit card. It is the same colour as when she was at school. The first-savings-account hue of somebody who agonizes over whether sixty-five pounds, which she really cannot afford, is enough to spend on wine for a man who might consider it midweek drinking, a bottle to open mindlessly before rushing off to a weekend away, leaving it to idle and spoil on the kitchen island. Is it enough, a bottle like this, for a man like Matthew?
Matthew pays her pretty well. She can’t complain. She knows there are others who make less and are worth far more.
Stop it, she tells herself. You are good at your job. You are.
‘Enjoy it!’ says the man behind the counter as he hands her the bag. Did he see the dismay in her eyes as the card receipt chattered through? Surely he knows that this is a gift, one meant to impress; a wine that she does not understand, intended for someone whose world she only fleetingly visits.
And yet, his smile seems sincere. Perhaps he is honestly grateful for her custom, even if the wine is wasted on her. The money is real enough.
Matthew taught her that, like so much else about their business: everything is only talk, only a possibility, until somebody writes you a cheque, or cashes one you’ve written them.
As she exits the shop she holds her head high. Today is a good day. She has come to West London to deliver a gift and the gift has been well-chosen. It will suffice.
Becky passes the wedding-cake white houses of Portobello, takes in the scent of freshly cut stems from an elegant pink-and-orange-painted boutique floristry and the steam-whistle of a barista’s coffee machine through lacquered café doors flung wide-open. The weather has finally turned a corner. Her skin actually feels warm for the first time in months and she cannot help but stop for a moment, right there on the street corner, and turn her face to the sun, smiling even as she hopes that no one catches her in the act.
It’s a small miracle, she thinks, how an idea can turn into a series of meetings, and then a screenwriter’s draft, and now – or at least soon – will become actors and cameras and lights, and conversations in the edit suite. Like watching a foetus growing across a series of ultrasound images.
Tomorrow her yellow brick road takes her to the Cannes Film Festival where she will meet the people who can really make it happen. Those who can write cheques, or accept them. Her small idea, gathering supporters, players, financiers.
‘We could be shooting this time next year,’ Matthew had said at that very first meeting, within a minute of her giving him her seedling of an idea. ‘Produce it. I’ll back you.’
‘But I don’t know how,’ she’d said, hating herself for confessing her weakness so quickly.
‘Nobody does, the first time.’
And with that statement, he’d made it real.
She steps over the cracks in the pavement. She doesn’t want to jinx it, not now. Not when everything is so close.
She can see Matthew’s terraced stucco villa in the distance, its pilasters and columns all whiter than white against the leafy green health of the pavement trees. The early evening sun reminds her so much of that party night, when she walked this road, on that occasion without wine but with a Jiffy bag of contracts from the office for him to sign, not expecting to leave with a plan for her future.
‘Stay,’ he’d said to her as he signed the last of the Post-it-marked pages. ‘Come and meet some people.’
She’d been the one to order the canapés and the watermelon martini ingredients for this party, and now she was invited to share in them. To accept them as easy gifts from the waiting staff who circulated in crisp white shirts and black trousers.
Of course she should network. Wasn’t that how the world worked? A pretty assistant, charming her way around a beautiful garden, making a name for herself, evading both men’s hands and the scrutiny of their wives’ tracking gazes.
And yet, despite the fact of her canary-yellow dress candy-striped with orange, and the fact that she’d washed her hair that morning with a shampoo that promised gloss and hold, her head itched and she felt out of step and out of place. Here, the rich looked rich, and the nonconformists wore their asymmetric fringes with confidence. In one corner, a famous actor in shredded jeans and Debbie Harry T-shirt made conversation with an elderly critic turned out in linen suit and white Panama hat and both seemed entirely at ease. Where were the people stuck in between? Uncomfortably halfway to somewhere? Unfinished, barely done with being utter imposters?
She had been relieved when Matthew had interrupted a conversation between her and a grey-haired, mildly known actor – not so much a conversation, really, as a lecture – by asking her to step away with him, into his study. She had felt eyes on them as they vanished back into the house together. There was always that question, for some people, concerning what a man and a woman stepping away together might mean, especially when she was his, an employee, and just about still young, and unquestionably ambitious. Despite Matthew’s wife and children being there. Despite the way he kissed his wife readily and easily. Of course somebody would make a sly comment, win a cruel quick laugh. Why else go to a party like this?
The walls of Matthew’s study were tessellated with black-and-white photographs of his beautiful family playing cricket on a beach in Cornwall. Smooth custom-made oak shelves held his BAFTAs and BIFAs and Oscars and a galaxy of other awards in glass, bronze, Perspex, silver and wood.
‘I’ve got the Universal contracts here as well,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a minute.’ He glanced up from the paperwork and caught her looking at his statuettes.
‘Pick one up, if you like? The Academy one’s pretty heavy,’ he said. ‘You don’t want that kind of thing to take you by surprise on the night.’ And then he laughed and she really wasn’t
