A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

first time. Give me what I have to sign.’ He read her intentions. He was shrewd enough to know that she wouldn’t have made the journey unprepared. Harriet felt grubby as she took out her papers. She had taken legal advice, not Henry’s but specialist advice. She held out her simple, watertight contract. There was an interval in which Simon shuffled in search of his spectacles, another in which he read the words she had presented him with.

      At length he looked up. ‘That seems very thorough,’ he said. He took up a pen, and signed.

      ‘It should be witnessed.’

      ‘Do you think I will renege?’

      She bent her head. ‘No.’

      ‘No other intrusion?’

      ‘None, I promise. Only we must decide between us what your share of the profits will be.’

      There was another dry sound, neither a cough nor quite a laugh. ‘What will I do with profits, Harriet?’

      She held her ground. ‘Heat your house adequately. Repair the roof.’

      ‘And if I told you that I am happy as I am?’

      ‘Are you?’ But as she said it she felt her impudence. He would share no whisky-confidence with her today. ‘Money never hurt anyone,’ she defended.

      Simon swept the Y-shaped gates together into a heap, and funnelled them from his cupped hands into the mocked-up box. He put all the components neatly together, fitting the lid in place, and held it out to Harriet. ‘Here. Take your game.’

      She was being dismissed. Well, she would make the division of the money between the two of them as and when the time came. The time seemed a long way off. Harriet was afraid of everything she must do before it could come.

      ‘Thank you for giving me the game,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m grateful.’

      This time the desiccated laugh did turn into a cough. ‘You should get some medicine for that,’ she told him. Simon’s face altered. He fell against the back of his chair. ‘You sounded like your mother, saying that. Here.’

      She went to him. He lifted her hand and held it, very briefly, against his cheek. A moment later he had disengaged himself, impatient, unfolded his height from the chair. ‘You’ll want to be on your way.’

      The touch had been a father’s gesture, Harriet thought. She felt lighter, happy now. He came with her to the front door, peered briefly into the rain before retreating into the shell of his house. Harriet left him, and drove back down the motorway to London.

      In the next month, Harriet worked harder than she had ever done in her life before. By the last week of February, using the Toy Fair Directory, she had mailed five hundred publicity kits to every buyer, every store representative who might have the remotest interest in Conundrum. She had designed the dressing for the bigger stand, in white parachute silk and black PVC, and supervised its making-up. She wanted black, shiny curves and cloudy white billows to back her sunray trade-mark. She had found a team of props designers who had made the huge, polystyrene sunray itself, and painted it in the rainbow colours of the boxes. She had dozens more boxes made, ready to be heaped in apparent profusion on the ledges of the sunray. Through an agency, she had booked two girls to man the stand with her. Remembering Sandy and her friend, Harriet had chosen young students, part-timers, whose hair could be dressed in the same nodding plumes.

      She had bought three black-and-white outfits, and replaced the buttons with penny-sized ones in rainbow colours. Through Jenny, who knew his agent, she had cajoled a television personality to be on the stand for the busiest day, to challenge buyers to solve Conundrum. His fee was enormous. Jane and Jenny and the others helped her to stuff envelopes for the mail shots, and Jenny machined yards of parachute silk. Her friends worried gently about her, and tried to persuade her to slow down, but she was driven beyond the ability to rest. Only Charlie Thimbell told her that if she was going to do it at all, she might as well give it all she had.

      Harriet did everything she possibly could, and she neglected Stepping. There was very little left of her fifteen thousand pounds.

      Three nights before the fair opened, Harriet had a nightmare. When she woke up, sweaty and disorientated, she couldn’t remember the details of it. But an oppressive fear made her head and limbs heavy. She felt deathly tired but she couldn’t go back to sleep again; in the morning the weight of it was still with her. She felt drained of all her strength, ill without any symptoms.

      The feeling was the exact opposite of the euphoria she had experienced after the strange, waking dream in her old bedroom at home. It was as if all the anxieties and weaknesses she had suppressed had surfaced at once to cripple her. She was afraid of everything she was doing, of the ballooning enterprise she was trying to launch on such shaky foundations. Harriet lay in bed, with her knees drawn up, her arms folded around her head.

      The thought came to her, effortfully, I need help. I can’t do this alone.

      After a time she got up, and groped painfully around the flat. She found the card that Henry Orde had given her.

      As soon as she judged the working day to have started, she telephoned Landwith Associates.

       Seven

      Landwith Associates occupied a stucco-fronted house in a quiet side-street. There was no marble entrance hall, and no opulent fountain. A discreet brass plate gave the company’s name, and an equally discreet bell placed beside it brought an immaculate girl to open the door.

      ‘Harriet Peacock,’ Harriet announced herself.

      She had christened her embryo company Peacocks, and since the meeting at Morton’s she had resolved that there would be no more Mrs Gold. Nor would she go back to calling herself Harriet Trott. The direct identification of herself with her company, and also with Kath in the years when there had been just the two of them, with Simon’s Kath even, gave her pleasure.

      ‘Mr Landwith is expecting me.’

      Armed with an introduction from Henry Orde, and once past the barrier of an ingeniously defensive secretary, Harriet had found it quite easy to achieve an appointment with Martin Landwith. It had been harder to find the time in her own schedule. The Toy Fair opened the next day. Harriet knew that she should have been on her stand, organising the pinning and draping and positioning.

      ‘This way, please, Miss Peacock.’

      The hall was panelled and empty, except for a Persian rug on the floor and an oval table with a big bowl of fresh flowers. Harriet followed the girl up the shallow curve of the stairs, passing three serious, gloomy still lifes in weighty frames. Harriet suspected that they were worth, individually, about as much as the total amount she was trying to borrow.

      The girl opened the double doors facing the top of the stairs. Harriet saw Martin Landwith stand up at once, and come round his desk to greet her. He was a stocky man, not very tall, but dressed in a dark blue suit of such magical cut that he seemed perfectly proportioned. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and a sober tie. Narrow, shiny, hand-made shoes emphasised the smallness of his feet. His dark hair was greying at the temples; it seemed sculpted rather than mundanely cut. The silver threads glittered as he turned his head. He had dark eyes, and his naturally dark skin had the healthy polish of a real sun-tan. Harriet judged that he was in his early or mid-fifties. The fingernails of the hand he held out to her were professionally manicured.

      ‘Please sit down, won’t you?’

      His voice was friendly, his smile followed the invitation only a second or two later. Martin Landwith made no attempt to disguise his scrutiny of her. Harriet accepted it, looking coolly back at him, and then sat down in the chair opposite his desk. She glanced around the room. To her right there were tall windows overlooking the street. They were framed in curtains of some honey-coloured material, with deep, soft scallops above and long rippling tails that were fringed in dull gold. Opposite the windows stood a Chinese Chippendale cabinet, the glass front reflecting