Through Every Human Heart (4 page)

‘Dina, my angel, I believe I've left the disc for the Hamiltons in the kitchen,' Irene held out her house keys, ‘and stupidly, I don't have a copy. If you go now, you'll be back well before they come in. No need to run, just don't stop to smell all the roses.'

‘How long have I got?'

‘Half an hour tops.'

She could have said forty-five minutes, but that would become an hour. You had to allow Dina a little ‘distraction time'. Apart from this minor flaw, she really was an angel, Irene mused, turning back to the task in hand. No job too trivial, an excellent finder of lost objects, able to anticipate a person's needs and understand their moods. Terribly indecisive if not kept busy and clearly directed though. She'd driven Paul crazy on the odd occasion when Ronni had been unwell, and Dina had been lent to him.

‘You just have to be very clear and very specific,' she'd told him.

‘How do you cope?'

‘I'm very clear and very specific. You've been spoiled.'

‘By Ronni?'

‘By everyone in this building, darling.'

They were like a perfect salad dressing, Paul had once told her. He was the oil, and she was the vinegar. An expensive balsamic. A Paltrinieri, he said, or something like it.

She sighed and pulled out another sample book. Sometimes it was best to go back to the old favourites when an idea refused to develop. She was so tired of black, despite clients still wanting it. The Hamiltons had a wonderful top floor, and still they were reluctant to let go of black leather. Or grey, they said. She was tireder still of grey. Every year she dreaded winter. Grey skies and often pale grey at that, they depressed her so much.

‘You'll be living here in winter too,' she'd told the Hamiltons. But they were accountants, both of them, not a creative bone in their desperately rational bodies. They didn't even seem able to make the, to all intents and purposes rational, leap between paying her lots of money and accepting her advice. They were passionate about trees, they said, that was one fixed point. She'd incorporated stylized branches into the wet room, and developed them in more muted tones on the walls in the master bedroom. They'd liked the leaf designs on the dining table, and the chair frames, but she was going to have to break it to them soon that there could be too much of a good thing.

Dina, in complete contrast, was delightful, a little, biddable sponge, soaking up all the knowledge and advice she could.

‘It's huge, isn't it?' she'd said in her first week.

‘Design? Of course,' Irene had told her, amused and pleased. ‘It's the Universe. It's all there is.'

She was pleased because Dina had taken it all on board so quickly – the mystery of creativity, its irrationality, its connection to the indefinable personality of the artist. She had a good instinctive sense of colour. Whether she would ever go deeper was another question. She was a bit of a butterfly, sipping from this flower and that, not always pausing to think too deeply. Subjectivity and profound thoughts were not Dina's style. Her childhood had apparently been idyllic, and her life, Irene thought, would be a happy one, since it would consist of looking after other people, and there would never be a shortage of people who wanted to be looked after.

She almost envied Dina. Her own childhood had been quite different. Born far too late in her parents' marriage, tolerated by a father who spent his life listening to grand opera and dwelling on what might have been, and a mother who continued to drown her past and present sorrows in the most genteel fashion. Neither had tried to understand her at all. For a time in her teens she had wondered if she might have been adopted, she was so unlike either of them.

She glanced at the wall board. The Zoological Society had sent a handwritten letter of thanks for her help with the auction several weeks earlier, which was rather sweet of them.
These animals have no obvious benefit to humans. No vested interests will attempt to save them.

She despised people who looked on the natural world as something to be used. They were, she felt, merely a small step away from people who felt the same about other people. Nor was it enough to love tigers and pandas: their charisma attracted everyone. They were exciting and fun. Whereas, if you believed that all species had an inherent right to exist, it hurt to read of guinea pigs in Brazil (down to 40 individuals), tortoises in Madagascar, silky lemurs and sandcats, hunted, killed by fire, driven out by human expansion.

She'd been driven out in her late teens by her father's indifference. It had taken her a long time to realise that this was not because there was something wrong in her, and to understand also that her mother's alternating kindness and cruelty depended on whim, rather than anything she herself did or failed to do. There was no logic in it. She could have a bad report from school and be assured that spelling didn't matter, and be comforted with chocolate, then come home with a good report for something else, maths, say, which wouldn't elicit praise, because ‘You won't need it. We use calculators now, darling.'

When they went out, they went out together, leaving her with a neighbour, who wanted to watch tv programmes she was too young to watch and made her go to bed too early. She'd decided at the age of seven never to pluck her eyebrows, since the woman had said, ‘You've got nice hair, Irene, but you'll have to do something with those when you're older.'

Her first affair had been a huge step forward in so many ways, not hampered one bit by her apparently wayward eyebrows. It had ended in tears, but she had emerged stronger (too naïve to know that this was an established cliché) and with a new set of rules. Different didn't mean wrong. Knowing what you wanted was good. The easily available was not all that appealing. Regret could be sweet, but was best kept short. And in some instances, regret was pointless. She hadn't gone to her father's funeral, and she hadn't tortured herself about it. Torturing yourself about what had happened or not happened was only interesting up to a point.

She looked at the sofa designs again. She'd never tortured herself about leather either. Sheep, goats and cows were not endangered. She hadn't used a lot of leather at the Bank, because the brief had suggested some of their clients were sensitive about it. A great pity, but you had to follow the brief. It had been quite an anxious time. Too many people wanting to put in their tuppence worth, was how Paul had put it. She'd felt her confidence beginning to dissipate halfway through, which was just a little scary, so she'd handed it over to him. Paul was better with Corporate clients. She herself was too different from the unthinking masses to handle their world with patience.

Blue was what the Hamiltons needed. She would sell it to them as a grey, but in their well-lit expanse, it would be blue.

Still no comment on her hair. Was it possible Irene hadn't noticed that she'd become a blonde overnight? Well, not completely blond. It was a trial run, and would wash out after a while. It marked the one month anniversary of goodbye to Derek. Derek who'd admired her ‘sweet round face'. Deodorant Derek, the man with the most fragrant armpits in town. Fragrant armpits, she realised now, were not what she craved in a man.

The disc would probably not be in Irene's kitchen. Like many creative people, Irene frequently lost track of where things were, and it was frequently Dina's job to find them. She paused in the office corridor to look again at a photograph, cut from Interior Design Today. Irene from the waist up, sitting in a row of designers at the annual one day conference, elegant as always, her hair pinned up with one of the fabulous clasps she had inherited from her aristocratic ancestors.

She gave a little sigh. She herself was a peasant. Stocky fishermen and crofters and the odd Viking marauder had provided her with no innate elegance whatsoever. At least her legs were good. Lots of small women had fattish legs. And tall women too. Irene's legs were fattish. Well, not fat. But not terribly slim. Dina glanced down. Slim ankles. Very satisfactory.

Outside, the sun was pleasantly warm. She liked Glasgow's West End. There were so many mature trees, it was almost like a stroll in the country, if you ignored the traffic noise. Irene's flat was only a twenty minute walk, and quite a few of the curving streets had big, well-tended ‘residents only' gardens surrounded by railings, with colour and scents and birdsong for peasants walking by to enjoy.

Not that she deserved to be loved for her ankles alone. And not that finding a man was the sole purpose of her life. It was just proving harder than she had anticipated. ‘You have to kiss a lot of frogs,' someone had reminded her once, ‘before you find your prince.' Did other girls have to kiss as many as she did? And why could she never spot the frogs in advance?

Everyone seemed happy to be out today. It was almost autumn but people were still wearing summer clothes. She loved being in the heart of the city. A place of her own would be better than having to share. She was saving the income from the croft, more or less, and maybe some day there would be enough for a deposit for something. Although Rachel who owned the flat was really nice. She was a social worker who also made cakes for parties so there were sometimes tasting sessions.

She loved her job: colours and textures, the history and theory, the buzz of multiple new things from all around the globe happening all around her. Of course she only had a little corner separated by a wall of glass bricks from Irene's big office, but as soon as she sat down in the morning and switched on the laptop, she felt needed. She felt like someone who could become capable, given time. By which she meant not just capable at her job, which she felt she was already, but capable at life generally. She liked Paul, and his two trainees, Oliver and Jonah, and Ronni, his PA, who together turned Irene's inspired ideas into reality. There was a quiet man who did mysterious things upstairs on a computer and never smiled back when they passed on the stairs. Ronni was the one she felt most at ease with. She and Ronni often had fun lunches together. Ronni was in her mid-forties, originally from America with British citizenship through her Scottish mother. She wore her curly hair very short and very white and had for a period in her life been an anarchist. ‘But I was never violent,' she said, ‘because my Daddy was in the CIA and though I wanted to embarrass him, I was kinda cautious.'

Before meeting Ronni, she'd never given anarchy a thought. Nursing College in Inverness hadn't dwelt on it, nor had her other admin jobs. It was about freeing the individual, and finding your true self, Ronni said.

The houses here probably didn't have a lot of anarchists in them, she thought. They had walls or high privet front hedges so you couldn't see in. But there were flowers growing freely along most of the walls, being their true selves. She stopped for a sniff at some yellow roses, wishing she could keep the scent inside her. So faint but so beautiful. Elusive. That was the word.

She had to stand still to let an elderly man cycle across in front of her. Bad man, she chided him silently. No helmet. She had cycled to school, always with a helmet on. Her father had insisted. The island's roads weren't busy outside the tourist season, but they were always dangerous, because the wind could level you like a blow from a hockey stick at any time of the year, and because no local ever slowed down and because sheep were too stupid to move out of your way, especially if the tarmac was dry and warmer than their field.

It was a really lovely day. She slipped off her cardigan, and put it in her capacious handbag. Canvas with leather trim. She was learning to trust her own taste. Ronni had told her, ‘Never do what everybody else does without thinking.'

A middle-aged woman with a border terrier in a red harness smiled at her in a friendly way as they passed. More sensible than a collar, kinder to the dog. ‘Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.' She still remembered the list from Sunday school, more or less. She liked that about Glasgow. Complete strangers were often friendly.

The two middle-aged women in the showroom downstairs weren't kind or friendly, but then as Ronni said, ‘Upstairs and downstairs, honey. Everyone's different. It's their problem.' They were apparently really nice to the customers. Possibly they'd decided that being their true selves involved being free to dislike other people without cause.

Irene maintained her freedom. She had never lived with a male friend. ‘We're such opposites,' she had said of one. ‘He likes the toilet roll to unroll that way,' she'd gestured with both hands, ‘and I like it to unroll this way.'

That couldn't be the real reason, Dina thought. What kind of people cared which way the toilet roll unrolled? It wasn't something she'd ever noticed. That might be part of her problem. Not knowing what she wanted exactly. Perhaps Irene was right. Perhaps what made relationships last was knowing what you wanted in even the small things. Being decisive. She tried to walk more decisively but gave up. It wasn't easy in heels on an uneven pavement. Shoes were so much easier for men, like everything else.

The fine weather had brought out lots of mothers with babies, as if they'd been hatching over the summer. Some day, possibly, she thought. Loads of time. No one she knew had babies. Not that she would mind making babies with the right man. For the right man, she would make babies till the cows came home.

The hallway of Irene's basement flat was just as she remembered it, constricted on both sides by shelves of books, valuable objets d'art, curious bits of faded writing under glass, and paintings, large and small, of Irene's aristocratic ancestors, who had arrived in Britain as fugitives from somewhere in Europe. It wasn't cluttered, Irene wouldn't be able to function amidst clutter, it was just very full of stuff in comparison with the rest of the public rooms, which were sparingly furnished. It was, she thought, kind of the opposite way from most people's homes, which were easy to get into and cluttered as you got further in.

‘Bebe?' she called cautiously, before going any further. ‘Nice cat? Bebe?'

In truth, Bebe was
not
a nice cat. A large, un-neutered lilac point show Siamese, with bright blue eyes and a vicious temper, he adored Irene as much as he loathed the rest of humanity. Irene wouldn't accept any criticism, though. Bebe could turn taps on and off, enjoyed watching the ten o'clock news and only talked when he had something interesting to say. Paul had been heard to comment that the cat was very beautiful but ‘too smart for his own good'.

She walked cautiously down the long corridor, eyeing the tops of the shelves and the ceiling lights. At one of Irene's elegant Sunday brunches, she had seen Bebe with bared claws drop like Attilla's wrath from the sitting room curtains onto the neck of a man who choked on his canapé and vomited.

There was no sign of Bebe in the sitting room. The crimson leather sofa was cat-free, as were the long curtains at the French windows, heavy gold and black brocade, the ones Irene intended to be buried in, since they had cost so much. Irene had broken all the rules in this room, mixing different reds, dark blues and golds, and art from different eras. The effect was spellbinding.

Enough of this, she told herself. Disc for the Hamiltons.

She had to push to get the kitchen door open. There was a large sports bag stuck behind it.

‘I'm so sorry. Was that in your way?'

The man who spoke was standing by the sink, washing his hands. He didn't sound like a workman, though he was wearing overalls.

‘I'm sorry,' he repeated. ‘We're here to check the washing machine. The door wasn't locked, so we came in. Are you the homeowner? Miss Arbanisi?'

‘No. I work for her. But I had to unlock it,' she said. He had gorgeous eyes, almost as blue as Bebe's.

‘Did you? That's odd. I've been trying to phone you. I mean her. But she's not picking up. We were supposed to meet here.'

‘Were you trying the office or her mobile?'

Before he could say anything, another man came in right behind her.

‘Dan, this young lady works for the homeowner. I've just explained that we're here to fix this old bugger.' He gave the washing machine a thump.

The big man said nothing. He wore the same navy overalls as the other, with a picture in gold of a leaky tap and spanner above the breast pocket.

‘Reliable most of the time, this model, but when they break down, they really break down,' the first man said.

The front door bell rang.

‘That might be her,' Dina said, though she realised it made no sense for Irene to be ringing her own bell. Especially since the door wasn't locked. The bell rang again, this time as if someone was leaning on it.

‘Why would she be ringing the bell?' the big man asked.

‘The door's not locked,' she said. It might be someone returning the cat, she supposed, if he'd bolted when the workmen came it. He wasn't supposed to go out at all.

‘Let's both go,' said the other. ‘Dan, could you try that phone number again?'

He put his hand on her back as they went through the sitting room, as if she needed help. It wasn't all that annoying, barely touching.
Be reasonable
she told herself as they made their way to the door.
Everybody's different
.
He doesn't mean anything.