A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
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That’s all very professional-looking. I’ll check through it in a moment, but we should talk a little first. It helps if I can get a kind of a feel for the person you are.’
Ms Abraham smiled encouragingly. They began to talk about the kind of work Dinah might do. Dinah knew that her body language was all wrong, but still she could not make herself unlock her knees and arms. She doubted that there was much in advertising outside New York or Boston, and even if there were there would surely be plenty of home-grown talent. Who would want a precarious Englishwoman? She wondered vaguely if she could teach. Almost everyone in Franklin seemed to be some kind of a teacher.
‘Good. That’s very interesting.’ Jenny Abraham managed to purse her lips and shake her head at the same time. She was writing busily in the spaces on a long form. The little stabs of her pen seemed sharp enough to puncture Dinah’s skin. There was a big coloured Peanuts poster on the wall behind the woman’s desk.
This was a bad mistake, Dinah was already thinking. Why had she let Ed Parkes bully her into it?
‘Let’s talk a little bit about the real you, Dinah.’
Ms Abraham leaned back in her swivel-chair and steepled her fingers.
‘Tell me, what are you proudest of, amongst all your achievements?’
Dinah started to talk too quickly, to fend the woman off. The words came out jumbled up. She said something about a campaign for a children’s charity she had once worked on and then contradicted herself, mentioning her boys, her family.
‘And most ashamed of?’
No.
I should have heard that before she said it. I should have guessed it was coming and forestalled her.
Who is she, to sit in her big chair with a smile and eyes like glass chips and ask me about shame? It was only a job I wanted. Some little occupation to divert my mind. Perhaps make me feel fixed here like Matt, even Jack and Merlin, instead of skidding over some huge inhospitable polished surface with no landmark, no harbour.
Only there is no diversion. How could I have imagined there would be? I have to get away from here first. Then I can think.
Dinah made an answering smile, just by stretching her stiff lips. She leaned forward and took her papers off the woman’s desk, squared them neatly by tapping the edges and slid them back into her briefcase.
She said, ‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve been wasting your time. I don’t really need a job. I’ve just realised.’
Somehow, she was standing up. Ms Abraham’s face showed a real expression, surprise. Dinah gathered her belongings awkwardly in her arms. Anger carried her out of the room and past the secretary in her cubicle, and back down in the elevator to the lobby. The Cherokee was where she had parked it, across the street.
She was driving, unseeingly following the route that led across town, before the fortifying anger drained away. It left her weak and disorientated so that she blinked through the windscreen at the white clapboarding of the Franklin Hotel on the south side of the green, and the line of cars waiting to turn at the lights. The driver of the station-wagon behind her hooted, and Dinah slid the Jeep into a parking space. She was shaking now.
Surging out of the dark place that she kept shuttered all her waking hours came a black wave of pain.
What was she ashamed of? That was what the woman had asked her. Not the woman’s fault, of course. Just a crappy pop personality-test question to make everyone think they were getting a slice of a real person in the answer.
Dinah’s hands gripped the steering wheel until the bones of her knuckles showed their reddened cleft. Shame and guilt were her constant companions. Sometimes they hid their faces, dissembling as craftily as she did herself, but still they were always with her.
She didn’t see the fake-rustic Franklin Inn sign swinging in front of her eyes. Instead Dinah was thinking of home, picturing the rain-smeared streets of a small town in Norfolk. She had never even been there, although to hear its name or see it written made her catch her breath.
I have to go home, she said aloud, knowing that she must look like a madwoman mouthing in the sanctuary of her car. I have to go back home and start searching.
Matthew sat at the end of the big kitchen table with some papers spread out in front of him. The boys were in bed and the house was quiet except for Ape snoring and twitching in his basket under the window.
Matt liked this time of the evening. The day trailed in a wake behind him and there were still hours beckoning, subterranean chambers below the chipped surface of the working day, before he need think of bed. Matthew never slept before the small hours. There was too much else to do, to think about, to waste time on sleep. Dinah was different, always had been. She needed eight hours and firmly believed, like her mother, that one hour before midnight was worth two after.
Matthew was reading columns of figures, following a pattern through them that was as vivid to him as a picture. He didn’t hear Dinah come in, but he looked up when she sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing her bathrobe, splashy red print on a white background.
‘Hi.’ He had been drinking a glass of wine, a Californian Cabernet recommended by Todd Pinkham. ‘Want some of this?’
Dinah shook her head.
Resignedly Matt took off his reading glasses. ‘Tell me about your day. What did happen with the job woman?’
He had asked the question earlier and she had turned it aside, pressing her lips into a thin suffering line as she did so.
‘Nothing happened. I just decided it was a bad idea.’
‘Okay, so don’t talk about it.’
Irritated, although he had resolved that he would not be, Matt replaced his glasses and began reading again. He wanted to slip away from Dinah and the difficulty that she had become, and re-enter the cool lofty place in which she had disturbed him.
Dinah sat in silence. She was aware of the comfortable structure of their home enclosing them, filled with pictures and furniture and all the insulating drift of their joint possessions. How many things, she wondered, remembering the packing cases in which they had been shipped to Franklin. How many cups, and scarves, and books, and teapots.
Matthew turned a page. She watched the way he reached out unseeingly for his glass, his fingers quivering a little until they connected with the stem.
Dinah looked at her husband and wondered, do I love him or hate him? Did I do it alone, this thing, or did I do it because it was what Matt wanted?
‘Matthew?’
He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes, sighing, working his middle fingers under the lenses so that the frame bobbed over his nose.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m all adrift here in this place. I want to go back home, to look for her.’
His face hardened. His flexible mouth became a slit and the planes of his cheeks and forehead turned boxy.
‘You can’t do that, Dinah. Why torment yourself?’
‘Why not be like you, you mean? Indifferent?’ Her voice whipped him.
‘I’m not indifferent.’
The telephone rang. For three, four rings neither of them moved, and then Dinah slowly got up and lifted the receiver. Even from where he was sitting Matt could recognise Sandra Parkes’s high insistent voice. Dinah listened as it nibbled on, saying yes, yes okay, nodding as she spoke.
‘Of course we can,’ she added at length. ‘If Milly’s happy with that we’d be glad to have her.’
There was another high-pitched torrent of talk. And then Dinah said, ‘Friday, then. Yes, yes. That’s fine.’ She replaced the receiver.
‘Ed and Sandra