Chapter sixteen #3
Christian didn’t make me wait, as I thought he might have done, but ushered me into his office, and launched straight into a precis of my career at Jacobs’: my client list, my involvement in business development, my five-year-career vision.
Then he fired off a series of questions that I hoped I answered, as the photograph floated across the back of my mind like a distracting, grossly overweight ghost, and my pulse yoyo-ed accordingly.
‘And so, to wrap up – how do you plan to add value to your role?’ he finished. ‘I’m asking the whole team the same question.’
I guessed this would be coming, and had spent some time constructing a strong answer, something that no one else would come up with.
‘What about a community campaign to improve financial education?’ I explained that I’d picked up on a lot of confusion up at Rosemount, not just from the residents.
‘We could offer mentoring for people who want to get to grips with budgeting, especially if their living situations have changed. Widows who historically let their husbands deal with the finances, say. And drop-in sessions to coach young people starting out. It would surprise you,’ I added, thinking of a conversation I’d had in the kitchen about loan sharks, ‘what people are embarrassed to ask for help with. Not just the financially vulnerable, either.’
Christian didn’t seem keen. ‘I was hoping more for ideas on increasing market share and visibility.’
‘But this would be great community visibility,’ I pointed out. ‘And far more organic and useful than just being a shirt sponsor for the football team. Most of all, we’d be giving people genuinely life-changing skills.’
I’ll be honest, I’d asked myself: ‘What would Lewis Levison do?’ and that’s what had come out. People first.
‘Hmm.’ Christian jotted something on his notes. ‘OK. I’ll think about it. Now, do you have any questions for me?’
While I’d been explaining my idea, my heart rate seemed to have calmed down, so I took a deep breath and went for it. ‘Have you considered the points I raised, supporting my request for continued work from home?’
‘I have.’
I waited.
Christian lifted his eyebrows, as if there was nothing more to say.
‘And?’ I asked.
‘Well. I’m somewhat unclear about how you can give social anxiety as a reason not to come to the office when you’re volunteering at a residential home?
Which seems like a terrific initiative, incidentally.
It must take up most of your weekends.’ He paused.
‘I am assuming you’re not there during your contracted working hours? ’
I started to reply, then flushed red, and stopped. I had struggled with whether to use my anxiety as a reason; I wasn’t particularly proud about doing so, but it was what it was. ‘But that’s . . .’
‘Not the same? I don’t see how. OK, so, Beth, that was a useful chat.
I wish we could speak longer but I have to see quite a few people today.
The business is at an exciting crossroads and I appreciate the part you’ve played in bringing it to this point.
’ He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile you could trust. ‘Thanks for coming in today – not so bad, was it? – and we’ll be in touch about next steps. ’
I’d started to get up, but the words ‘next steps’ halted me in my tracks. ‘Next steps’ was what you said at a job interview. Not a casual catch-up with a valued employee.
In what place were you happiest?
23, Grenfell Terrace, Manchester (don’t look for it, it’s been demolished).
Nessy got her grades for university, of course.
One A and two Bs. By then, we were spending every free moment together, although in secret; her parents were strict.
They’d have hit the roof if they’d had the first idea she was wandering the lanes when she was supposed to be in the library.
Luckily my parents weren’t bothered; Mum was too busy dealing with my sister’s baby, and Dad with his darts team, to take much interest in my whereabouts.
As long as I wasn’t in the pub or getting into trouble, they didn’t care.
I’d tried not to think about what would happen when Nessy left, but she had a plan. She had a plan for everything.
Dad was pushing for me to get a job at the glass factory; they were looking for bright teenagers to train up in book-keeping and I’d always been OK at maths.
Not my favourite subject, but in those days you didn’t choose jobs based on what you enjoyed doing.
But wouldn’t it be better, Ness suggested, if I got myself on to a proper course, with a proper qualification?
Marketing, or management, something with prospects?
She’d read something in the newspaper about further-education colleges, and before you could blink, there I was, enrolled on a business marketing course in Manchester with a full grant and money from a trust set up in 1865 by some local businessman made good, to ‘support the higher education of deserving farm workers’.
My mother wasn’t keen on that part. She thought it sounded like charity, as if we were illiterate peasants who needed help.
What was wrong with the glass factory? My dad couldn’t get his head around me wanting to up and go to Manchester.
That said, he told everyone that I was off to university, let his boss buy him a drink to celebrate.
I’ve forgotten what that last day at home was like; maybe I decided not to remember. We left Longhampton station at different ends of the train, but arrived in Manchester together, and that was that. We were starting again from scratch.
I realise now what a luxury that was, for someone like me.
Not just the education and the grant, but the chance to become someone new, not get trapped in the character you’d been assigned at school, then had to wear like an outgrown blazer for ever – the cheeky one, the thick one, the clown.
I could already see my classmates turning into their parents, only growing as much as was allowed.
The idea of that terrified me. But without Nessy to encourage me, to make everything feel possible, I’d have stayed, I know.
I don’t want to think about what I’d be like now.
Manchester scared the bejeezus out of me at first – I’d never been out of the county before.
But I got used to it; when you’re young, you don’t know what you should be worried about, do you?
It was as if we’d been dumped into a sea of young people, where tides swept you off in new directions, and you swam alongside the people who liked the music you listened to, or the film you’d just seen.
Without even trying, we found our shoal of fish to swim with.
It was me who heard about Grenfell Terrace through a friend of a friend who was moving out.
The landlady, Geraldine Maltbeck, was a tremendous old soak who’d lived a long and dramatic life, details of which you could prise out of her with Harvey’s Bristol Cream.
Nothing shocked her, darling: she’d lived in Berlin.
That was her motto. Geraldine was happy to let anyone she took a fancy to move into the falling-down house she owned.
She liked to collect star-crossed lovers.
Below us were a beautiful Jamaican tailor living with a bishop’s daughter, and above us were a couple of actors both called Paul who made us rehearse lines with them – Ness was a tremendous mimic.
Geraldine taught me to play the ukulele, and I planted up a vegetable bed for her in the yard, using my grandad’s soil recipe.
We got the horse manure from the rag and bone man down the road – the Pauls were aghast.
There was only one visit from Nessy’s parents, who were disappointed she’d moved out of halls.
I wasn’t there, fortunately – they came while I was at my bar job – but she told me her mother made a big deal about ‘the area’ and said she wished she’d come home more often.
Geraldine put on all her best Kensington airs and graces, however – that went down well.
A five-pound note was discreetly left with instructions to call at once if any young men were brought home.
Geraldine assured her that no such liberties had been taken under her roof, and spent it on gin and another kitten for the house. Juniper.
This was without doubt the most glorious, adventurous time of my whole life, and yet I wouldn’t – can’t?
– separate any memories out of this time as being happier than others.
We didn’t have a clue these were the golden days: we took it for granted that life would only get better.
The happiest moments were probably the ones I’ve already forgotten: the beans on toast eaten on our laps watching Geraldine’s tiny television, or the Sunday afternoons lying in bed watching Nessy flip through one book after another, speedreading for essays that should have been written while we were at parties or in the pub.
She got her degree, but only because she was too scared of her parents to fail.
If I try to pull out individual moments now, so long after, I fear I’m reaching for those clichés of the 1960s that you see so often on television documentaries that you forget they’re not your own memories.
Not the real, fleeting emotions that even then went in a blink of an eye: that racing sensation when you’re almost too happy for your body to contain it, or the weightless moment when you look into someone’s eyes without speaking, knowing your hearts are exactly, equally balanced like astronauts holding hands, floating in space. Soap bubbles. Dandelions.
All I can say for sure is that I know now my happiness peaked while I was living at 23 Grenfell Terrace.
I’ve been happy since, of course, but not like that.
Everything was possible there, every day I learned something, ate something, or talked to someone I’d never have known if I hadn’t met Nessy in the blackcurrant fields.
I wasn’t becoming a different person, but she was helping me find the person I knew I could be, the same way you’d strip the casing from ears of corn to reveal the perfect beads inside.
It was what I’d dreamed love would be. It’s hard to look back at that now, though, knowing as I do that the sand in our hourglass was already almost gone.
Would I go back? In a heartbeat.