Beneath the Skin(99)
She notices the road sign for the sharp bend ahead and drives on carefully, never quite sure when to indicate right. Waiting for the traffic to pass, she catches her glowing face in the car mirror. It’s definitely fat. A fat face for a boy! Olivia Turner, who’s never had a fat face in her life, has one now.
She smiles wryly at the thought of all the insulation she’ll have to lose once the baby is born but the smile dissolves as she focuses on the drive of White Gables. The hesitant dusk is lit by the open front door where Antonia stands, waving. And there is Mike, Mike her husband who’s so busy at work he barely has time for lunch. He’s striding towards his car, his jacket over his shoulder and he’s wearing no tie.
Her indicator winks, but she doesn’t move. She stares, transfixed, as Mike opens the back door of his car and throws in his jacket. He climbs in and swings it round without difficulty as though he does it every day. Then he indicates left and drives straight past Olivia. Blind to the car, blind to her, at ten to four in the afternoon.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Helen has taken to wafting her colleague, Ted Edwards, away with a ‘Maybe catch up with you later’ type of waft. She’s noticed that he always appears in the staff refectory moments after her with an unconvincing, ‘Oh, fancy you being here, Helen! I’ll keep you company, shall I?’
He’s become rather too tactile as well. ‘These chairs are very heavy, don’t you think, Helen?’ he says regularly. She doesn’t appreciate being manhandled, even if it is with the pretence of pulling out the chair and pushing her back in.
Helen has always been a person to call a spade a spade, a saying she doesn’t particularly get, but she understands the gist. But she’s aware that Ted is, to some extent, her benefactor vis-à-vis NY (as he calls it), so she has to try for diplomacy. Unfortunately diplomacy is not her strong point, as Charlie often points out.
‘Forty-three days until blast off!’ Ted declared only that morning as they passed each other in the foyer.
‘I thought we were travelling by aeroplane, not by rocket,’ Helen replied.
As she sits down at the refectory table, she muses that it was a witty riposte. She would normally telephone Charlie for a chuckle, but Charlie and Rupert have formed a father and son club she clearly isn’t invited to and she finds it rather rankles. But with Ted, the problem isn’t so much his day-counting (which is a little odd), but his hand which he places too regularly around her shoulder. Not just his hand, but his thumb too, which he moves in a circular motion on her upper arm.
He’s here again today, appearing at her table just as she’s about to take a bite of camembert with cranberry on rye, her absolute favourite.
Tact, she reminds herself as her heart sinks. Remember, diplomacy and tact. She might even try some ‘grey’, as Charlie says.
‘Hello, Ted,’ she says. ‘I was just ruminating on how much I’m going to miss Charles, my dearest husband Charles, when we’re away in NY.’
Ted pushes his spectacles up his nose and then settles himself opposite Helen with his All-Bran. ‘A snack for the bowels,’ he explained yesterday.
‘Oh, but of course,’ he replies now, smiling. ‘Which is precisely why I’ll personally see to it that you don’t get too lonely, my dear.’
She’s never noticed the abundance of hair which protrudes from his nostrils before now. Indeed, in all the years they’ve worked together she’s never really examined his face or any other part of his anatomy. He’s a work colleague, a married work colleague, why would she?
She looks at Ted now and sees a grey face and matching hair. But alarmingly, she also sees a self-satisfied look. ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink,’ the look says. She knows what that expression means. She first heard it in a comedy sketch as a young girl and, on one summer’s day at a picnic, when David was acting it out with much laughter, he was kind enough to explain it to her.
Helen puts down her sandwich with a sigh. Calling a spade a spade is clearly the only option after all. ‘Why did you nominate me for the secondment, Ted?’ she asks.
‘Well we’ve always had a rapport, don’t you think? And I’ve always considered you to be an extremely handsome woman.’
Said just like that, in the staff refectory, of all places. It’s so absurd that Helen wants to laugh. But beauty is only skin deep, she thinks. Which, of course, it is. How many times has she said that? It’s something she’s uttered with scorn about Antonia many a time. Yet it’s insulting, she now discovers. It’s insulting to be judged on something physical and God-given, rather than something earned. Very much so.
Oh, Charlie, I’ve missed the grey again, she thinks. I’d like to join your club.
Helen scrapes back the chair (a struggle without Ted’s assistance). ‘How perfectly insulting,’ she declares. ‘NY can do without me, thank you. You can blast off on your own!’
She stomps out as noisily as she can, the camembert and cranberry on rye left sadly behind. It’s all a little thespian, which to her surprise, Helen finds she enjoys.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It’s five o’clock, Mike is back at his office desk and signing the post, no wiser about how he really feels about anything in his life than he was three hours previously.