Chestnut Street

  But Ella didn’t mind. She knew the odds; and then promptly forgot them. She did all the things that the women’s magazines used to advise in her mother’s day: she was a good listener, she drew him out about himself, she discovered his interests and pretended that they were hers too. She didn’t press to meet his family on Chestnut Street; she didn’t impose hers on him.

  In fact, it was all so successful that Ella began to wonder whether those old-fashioned ideas about pleasing a man might not be far more helpful than all this modern advice about being yourself, and being equal from the word go. At any rate, she was very shortly Harry’s constant companion: she was on his arm at every public event, and in his bed when the night drew to a close.

  It was hard work, of course; but then Ella told herself that you don’t keep a peacock by your side without a great deal of effort. Anyone could attract a sparrow, she thought, looking without much pleasure at some of the men her friends were going out with. Some of them were indeed like old crows. Only Ella had the peacock, the glorious Harry, who turned every head; and she didn’t mind when he looked at other women and smiled. They thought he was smiling at them; but he was thinking as much of the actual act of smiling. He knew it made people feel good. He did it a lot. Sometimes he smiled in his sleep, as Ella sat and watched him, his facial muscles stretched into a pleasing, warm half-grin.

  She was often awake at night as she learned the plots of operas. La Traviata: that’s the one about Alfredo and Violetta, and a series of misunderstandings. Rigoletto was the one about the court jester and Norma was the Druid high priestess who did a Romeo and Juliet number with the Romans.

  Ella worked for a publisher. She ran it down to Harry: terribly dull people, frightfully boring authors, very tedious and not worth taking up his time. But Harry’s job—now that was different: he was in wine importing—there was an interesting career for you. Ella made it sound like a magical world. It had involved a lot of studying, more than the opera, even: types of grape, Appellation Contrôllée, this vineyard, that importer, this warehouse, that family firm … Harry accepted her interest. She was right—it was a fascinating business. His previous girlfriends hadn’t understood that nearly so well.

  He introduced her to his colleagues; her admiration of the business was so obvious she could do him nothing but credit.

  The boss and his wife were a cynical, weary couple who had seen it all, done it all.

  “You have a far better chance of nailing him down than the others,” said the boss’s wife as she dabbed her nose viciously in the powder room after dinner.

  “Oh, heavens, there’s no question of that,” Ella protested with a little laugh.

  “Keep that kind of line for Pretty Boy,” said the older woman.

  Ella felt sorry for her. All she had drawn in the lottery of the birds was a bad-tempered, bald and molting eagle, not a glorious, multi-colored peacock.

  She went back to the table, where Harry sat, his chin on his hand, in that way that made total strangers stop their conversations and look at him with admiration. The light fell on his fair hair, making it shine. Ella’s heart soared to think that she had captured this wonderful man.

  It pleased her to think that she had “a better chance of nailing him” than anyone who had gone before—and there were many who had. Sometimes they passed through town.

  “An old friend of mine wants me to have a drink in a wine bar,” he would say from time to time.

  “Oh, but you must!” Ella was insistent. It would give her time to catch up on some new looming opera. Fidelio. This one was by Beethoven, about Leonorea, who pretends to be Fidelio. Another three hours of cross-dressing and misunderstanding.

  Or on the housework. She hadn’t actually moved into his flat, but as near as made no difference. He hated seeing her cleaning, yet he wouldn’t employ anyone else to do it. She did it in secretive, hurried darts when he wasn’t around. She wanted Harry to think that fresh peaches for breakfast, clean towels in the bathroom and big vases of colorful flowers in clean water sort of happened by themselves when Ella was around.

  And, because peacocks don’t think for too long about the world in general, that’s exactly what he thought. He would put his arm around her and say that everything was much nicer when she was there.

  She took seven shirts of his, every Monday morning, to a very good place just beside her work. No, honestly, darling, she reassured him, I’ll be taking my own stuff anyway. He never noticed that everything Ella wore was drip-dry. He thought it was a miracle that his wardrobe was always full of gleaming shirts; he savored choosing them, holding the ties up against them.

  “It used to be very disorganized,” he said with a puzzled frown, shaking his head at the mystery of it all. Ella shook her head too, as if she couldn’t believe that things had not always run this smoothly.

  She never complained about him at work, or sought advice, so her friends just worried about her to one another and not to her face.

  It did not become public until the day she refused to go to the sales conference. For personal reasons. There were no reasons, personal or even global, that allowed you to miss the sales conference. Ella’s friends took her aside.

  “Come on, what’s he doing, what mammoth task has he agreed to do that he needs you to hold his hand?” Clare had been a friend and colleague long enough to speak in that tone. But only just.

  “You couldn’t be more wrong. Harry didn’t ask me not to go; he doesn’t even know it’s on.”

  They looked at one another, shocked. What kind of relationship could he have with someone in publishing and not know about sales conferences?

  “You’ll be passed over, Ella. The boys upstairs will never stand for this. No matter what lies you tell them.”

  “I won’t tell them any lies. I’ll just say that it doesn’t suit me.”

  “Not only are you completely cracked, but you’re letting us all down. They’ll say women can’t cope, that you’re premenstrual or having the vapors or that you’re pregnant. Lord, you’re not, are you?” Clare was aghast.

  “No, certainly not.” Ella spoke in a voice too calm, too normal for the crisis she was bringing down on all of them.

  Clare waved the others away majestically. “Let’s have a glass of the emergency tequila,” she suggested. The emergency tequila was a ludicrous bottle stashed away at the back of an office drawer for an occasion just like this.

  “No, honestly, it’s too early, I couldn’t swallow it,” Ella protested.

  “You are pregnant,” Clare said.

  Ella looked at her friend with a great but almost distant affection. Clare was married to an owl, a wise old owl peering over his spectacles with an indulgent look at Clare. In a million years she wouldn’t know what it took to hold a man like Harry.

  “I can’t tell you—you’d feel honor-bound to try to talk me out of it,” Ella said.

  Clare looked relieved. At least there was a hint of a smile on Ella’s face again; they hadn’t seen that for a long time, only a look of grim concentration.

  “It’s his parents. They’re coming up for this Fidelio; he’s got tickets for all of us.”

  “Ella, Fidelio will come back again—it’s not some new, experimental work that might sink without trace.”

  “No, but it’s …”

  “Even his parents will come back again. They’re not like Halley’s Comet, coming round once every seventy-four years. You can’t miss the conference. What about your authors? You can’t let them down.”

  “Someone else can present their books. Come on, we spend our time telling each other not to believe that we are indispensable.…”

  Clare looked at her in exasperation. It was one thing to realize that you could be replaced; it was another to walk out on your authors. They expected you to be at the sales conference, to talk up their books to the reps, who then had to go out and sell them into bookshops. Apart altogether from what the boys upstairs would say.

  “I’m sick of the boys
upstairs,” Ella said; and all on her own, Clare opened the emergency tequila and drank most of it out of a coffee mug.

  Back in the office, Ella faced the silent reproach of Kathy, her assistant.

  “I wish you’d change your mind,” Kathy said eventually.

  “No, you don’t.” Ella was cheerful and brisk. “This is your big break. It’s like the understudy hoping that the decrepit old bat of a leading lady won’t be able to go on. Suddenly, a star will be born.”

  “It’s not remotely like that.” Kathy was cross. “For one thing, you are not a decrepit old bat, no matter how oddly you are behaving. You are only three years older than me, if I remember correctly. And anyway, this is not becoming a star, it’s taking over all your work as well as my own.”

  “You’re well able for it,” Ella encouraged her.

  “It’s not fair, Ella, even if there was a good reason. And how am I going to deal with that madman from Australia?”

  “Oh, God,” said Ella. “I’d forgotten the Jackaroo.”

  “Well, he hasn’t forgotten you.” Kathy was triumphant. “He has an appointment to see you at five o’clock.”

  “Not this evening. I can’t meet him this evening!”

  Kathy lost her temper. “I think you should play fair with everyone, hand in your resignation, sit at home and plan your hope chest and let the rest of us get on with trying to publish books.”

  When Ella was very young, her father had always told her that it was a great virtue to be able to see the other point of view. She used to be able to do that; in fact, it was one of her great strengths. She could imagine what it was like to be an author, or a bookseller, a rival editor or an office junior. Perhaps of late she had been very preoccupied. She had been seeing another point of view, certainly, but only Harry’s. She had been trying to out-guess him, solve the problem before it occurred, wipe away the frown before it started to pucker on his forehead. She looked Kathy straight in the eye.

  “You are absolutely right,” she said. And for the first time since she had met Harry, she picked up the phone to tell him that she wouldn’t be meeting him.

  Harry was astonished. “Who do you have to meet?” he asked in disbelief.

  “This Australian—he’s an author. I won’t be going to the sales conference, you see, so I have to talk to him about his book and what plans we have for it.”

  “But he’s an author,” Harry said. “I mean, you’re his editor; he should be pretty bloody grateful that you take any interest in it at all!”

  “He is.” Ella’s voice was firm.

  Harry sounded aggrieved. “I’d have made other plans, if I’d known. Now I’ll be hanging about.”

  “Come and join us, then. You and I weren’t going to meet until six anyway. Come to the bar beside my office; that’s where we’ll be, at the back.”

  He grumbled a bit. But he said he’d be there.

  Ella took her notes on the Jackaroo’s book. It was a zany first novel—it was very different from anything else. It was quirky, not in the mainstream. She did regret that she wouldn’t be there to explain at the conference how it should be approached. But she had made up her mind. She had not spent all this time taming her beautiful, strutting peacock—making him adapt to a domestic lifestyle and like the idea of her being permanent in his life—just to throw it away. There would be other Jackaroos, other zany first novels, there were sales conferences every six months; but there might never be another shot like this at Harry.

  She had never met the man she called the Jackaroo. His manuscript had been very neat, and she had imagined him as a small, fussy sort of person—like a penguin, possibly. He had assured her, on the telephone, that he was hopelessly disorganized, but that he happened to be in love with his word processor. He said it had tidied up his mind. Now he wished he could find a machine that would tidy up his house.

  “What about a wife?” she had asked him.

  “Oh, I have one of those,” he had said.

  Or maybe he had said that he had had one of those—she couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, anyway; all that mattered was that she explain to him that even though she wouldn’t be there, Kathy would do everything to ensure that the book was appreciated before it set out on its journey with all the other books.

  She looked around the bar. Nobody looked remotely like a penguin.

  A huge, shaggy man with long hair and a long, droopy coat stood by the bar, sipping white wine.

  “I’m looking for a middle-aged trout called Ella,” he said to the barman.

  “One middle-aged trout reporting,” she said with a laugh.

  “God, you’re different to what I thought!”

  “You too.” She wanted to be brisk, get as much of it over as possible, perhaps even all of it, before Harry came in. He looked a reasonable kind of fellow. About as far from a penguin as she could imagine. They sat down together.

  “Is it worth my getting a bottle of wine?” he asked. “I’m timid with publishers—I don’t want to assume or presume.”

  “You’re not timid with publishers—you call them ‘old trouts.’ ”

  “Ah, but I was wrong. Is the bottle going too far?”

  “No, but I’m the editor, I’ll get it. Anyway, I’ve a friend joining us later.”

  “You get the second one, then.” He had a wonderful laugh, short, sudden and unexpected but very infectious. She found herself laughing too.

  They talked a little about the book. He said it was like a dream, to have made it all the way from the outback to a really smart bar in London and to find that the old trout he had thought was patting him on the head like a good little colonial was a gorgeous bird.

  “You’re like a lorikeet, in those lovely blues and oranges,” he said.

  “A lorikeet?”

  “You’ve never seen a rainbow lorikeet?” He wondered at the strangeness of it. He told her about the rosellas and the fig parrots and the noisy pittas.

  “You’re making them up!” she pleaded.

  Somehow, they hadn’t got round to talking about the book by the time that Harry arrived.

  Harry, in his soft sweater that was exactly the color of his eyes. But exactly. It had taken a lot of choosing and selecting and bringing it out of the shop to the daylight.

  Harry said that the bar was a collector’s item; he couldn’t imagine how they had found somewhere so scruffy.

  “I thought it was a smart bar,” said Greg. She had stopped thinking of him as the Jackaroo.

  “Oh, well,” Harry said. It didn’t mean anything. It could have meant that if you didn’t know better, it was a smart bar; or it might have meant that if you came all the way from Australia, it could possibly look like a smart place. It might have meant, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter—the main thing is that we’re all here having a drink.”

  Ella realized that Harry rarely explained himself. Beautiful people didn’t have to explain themselves or tell stories. A peacock didn’t have to explain itself or tell stories. A peacock didn’t have to do anything except be a peacock: everyone else did things around it.

  She realized what bird Greg reminded her of: an emu, a big, scrappy emu …

  “Tell me what emus are like?” she said, and he told her that they were big, flightless things always looking as if they needed to be put through a car wash—or indeed as if they were a car wash. They were innocent and interested in everything, he said. You only had to sit and wave a handkerchief out of the car and a great big mob of them would come meandering through the scrub to investigate.

  Ella found that both endearing and funny. She threw her head back and laughed. They sat opposite her, Greg and Harry, both looking at her with admiration. But Ella realized that Harry was looking just past her. There was an old mirror behind her. He could see himself nicely.

  “Tell me about this sales conference,” Greg asked.

  Ella looked straight at him.

  “It’s next week,” she said. “I’ll be there to hold your han
d.”

  If you’re telling fortunes for a charity, you have to do your homework just like everywhere else.

  Melly, who lived in Number 26, was very popular in the street, which was unexpected since she was a real old-fashioned hippie with a long floral skirt, long hair and long amber beads.

  She even had a lovely smile, which meant that even the difficult and fussy Mr. O’Brien, next door, liked her. She was kind to her fellow men and women, which meant that the very religious Kennys, who lived in Number 4, approved of her, whereas normally they might have had words to say about hippie culture.

  Her neighbors, the dull Nessa and Barry, had become less dull since they knew her. Melly would always feed a cat or dog if anyone was away and had even been known to take a pair of someone’s canaries for a walk in their cage in case they felt it was too dark for them indoors.

  Melly had held the ladder for Bucket Maguire, window cleaner from Number 11, when he looked as if he would fall down in the next gust of wind. She went regularly to read for Miss Mack, the blind woman in Number 3. It was wonderful that Miss Mack liked all the stuff about the court of King Arthur.

  So when the neighbors decided to have a fete in the central piece of grass that made Chestnut Street into a kind of a horseshoe, they asked Melly to be the fortune-teller. They knew she would say yes because it was in aid of a Kosovan orphanage and she was so good-natured and she would look the part too, with a scarf around her head with little coins attached to it. Melly would see something good ahead for everyone, and money would be raised for children without much hope ahead of them.

  But they had forgotten about the Glastonbury Festival.

  Melly went to that every year of her life. She was desperately sorry. She would try to donate something to the Kosovan children but not her time.

  This festival was the center of her year.

  “Do you think you could possibly find anyone else, Melly?” Nan Ryan in Number 14 begged. “You see, we don’t know any other artistic people like you.”

  Melly was pleased to be called artistic. She did know a girl who read palms but she took it quite seriously. She would be insulted to do something just for fun.