Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-eight
On the evening of Friday, the fifteenth of December, Harriet met Josef crossing the foyer on his way up to the restaurant, where the tables and chairs had recently been reconfigured to form a large square.
“Happy Hanukkah, Josef!” she said, smiling. “I would hug you, but I’m weighed down with fish and chips.” She leaned in and kissed him on either cheek instead.
“Thank you!” he replied, beaming. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”
“Come on, then, everyone’s waiting for you.”
She ushered him through the doors and up the stairs to the restaurant.
A cheer went up when Josef entered with greetings of “Shabbat Shalom” and “Happy Hanukkah.” Everyone stood as he lit all eight candles on the menorah he had brought from home and offered a blessing. Harriet did indeed feel blessed, ever more so.
It was noisy as food parcels were passed around the table, a great crinkling of paper as everyone unwrapped their fish and chips. And when Farahnoush and Carly came in carrying plates of plaited babka they’d ordered from the local bakery, Josef almost jumped out of his seat.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Destiny, “we’ll all be high on carbs tonight!”
“We’ve got doughnuts yet!” Ricco called across the table.
“I’m only glad I had my cholesterol test before this feast!” Kingsley joked.
“I wish we could have parties every night,” said Sid.
Harriet took a moment to soak it all in, this marvelously colorful gathering. Every person here held a story and a strength within them, and when they mixed and mingled all together, their stories became an epic tale and their combined strengths bloomed into a force to be reckoned with. Humans had such a propensity for love and kindness, and here in this room, in this theater, it seemed to explode out in hearts and stars; she could feel the warmth of it fluttering around her like snowflakes.
“That chip has been dangling from your fingers for the last two minutes. What thoughts have you so engrossed in them that they are surpassing the allure of classic British cuisine?” James asked, taking the seat beside her.
She looked at him.
“I love it here,” she said, almost dreamily. “Don’t you?”
“I do.” He mirrored her smile.
“I mean, I didn’t love it at first and I still hide in the toilet when everyone wants a piece of me at once. But I feel like, I don’t know, like I’ve grown into the space or maybe like it’s grown around me. Have you ever seen the way a tree can grow around and through iron railings? I’m not making sense. Ignore me.”
“You are making sense,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I understand you completely. In fact, what you’ve just described is rather how I have come to feel about you.”
She swallowed. Her heartbeat was very loud in her ears. There was so much she wanted to say to him, but all her words had fallen into a massive black hole.
“That’s nice,” she said weakly.
He raised an eyebrow. “Nice? I just told you that I no longer know where I end and you begin, and your response is ‘that’s nice.’?”
She cupped his face in her hands.
“No, no, it’s so much more than nice. It’s all the very best words. If you were inside my body right now, you would know how you make me feel.”
“Well, that’s a very saucy invitation.” He grinned mischievously.
She flushed instantly, realizing what she’d said, and dropped her hands, snorty-laughing as she did so.
“Oh gosh,” she said, flustered. “What I meant was…”
He kissed her, and she could feel the smile on his lips. “I know what you meant; I’m only teasing.”
“Let’s keep it clean at the dinner table, shall we?” Grace called.
The call came through just after six a.m. on Saturday morning. As with any call that came in late at night or early in the morning, Harriet’s mind immediately flew to bad news. Oh god, Maisy! She swallowed down the adrenaline as she snatched up her phone.
“Hello?” Her voice was gravelly with sleep and trepidation.
“It’s Ken. Sorry to wake you so early.”
Not Maisy! The relief was dizzying, and she flopped back onto the bed, taking a couple of deep breaths, one arm draped over her face.
“Are you still there?” Ken’s voice broke through the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
“Yep. Here. What’s up, Ken?”
“We’ve got a problem.”
She sat up again. Alert. “What kind of a problem?”
She knew he would be rubbing the back of his neck with one of his giant hands.
“Some of the pipes froze overnight.”
“Okay.”
“And burst.”
“Where?”
“Over the stage.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad.”
Forty minutes later, having waded through last night’s fresh snowfall in the dark—her car was snowed into its parking space—she arrived at the theater. James was waiting for her on the path just outside the main doors, stamping his feet against the cold.
“How bad?” she asked.
He screwed his face up in answer.
“Fixable?” she asked.
“So Ken says. I guess he would know.” But he didn’t look convinced. “My phone’s been pinging like a pinball machine since you messaged the group chat.”
She sighed. “I figured they had a right to know.”
James held the door for her, and they went inside, the lights bright after the darkness. Shouts and ominous crunching sounds poured down the grand staircase to the auditorium. She looked up and sighed again.
“I guess there’s no point putting it off any longer. Better go see what the damage is.”
Their feet squeaked on the thick plastic protecting the carpet. Together they pushed through the swing doors at the top of the stairs and headed straight to the edge of the balcony.
It was worse than she’d imagined. A huge chunk of ceiling flapped down from the joists above, like the lid of a grand piano hanging in midair. The sounds of wood straining creaked ominously around the theater like a portent of doom, and stagnant water dripped from the massive hole onto the stage below. The stage itself was a swamp. The trickle must have been a torrent before the water was switched off. The curtains hung heavy, saturated both from the waterfall above and then drinking in the flood from the hems up. Jagged fragments of old plasterboard littered the stage, and clumps of plaster hung down in wet clags from the horsehair they were originally mixed with. It smelled earthy, like chalk cliffs after a heavy rainfall. Inside the hole were bundles of wires, layers of old wet newspaper, and the bottoms of the floorboards that lined the attic space.
“Flapping fudge nuggets,” she breathed.
“Yeah,” James agreed.
“Frozen pipes did all this?”
“Ken thinks they probably had hairline cracks from winters before and were leaking so slowly that nobody noticed. Each year they weakened a bit further until this year’s big freeze—”
“Finished them off,” she concluded.
“Yeah.”
“Crikey. Thank god no one was here.”
She looked at the heavy chunks of plaster that had smashed down onto the stage, fragmenting into sprays of white shingle. “If anyone had been under there when it collapsed…” She shuddered.
James put his arm around her. “I know,” he said. “I keep thinking the same thing.”
Ken was directing the positioning of a skip being maneuvered by a heavy-duty forklift to rest beneath the island of swinging ceiling. To the side of it, a scaffold tower was being hastily erected. Ken looked up and saw Harriet and James watching.
“Right, people, keep going, I’ll be back in a mo,” he shouted to his team, and disappeared out of the auditorium, reappearing moments later by their side. “You got here quick,” he said.
“It didn’t seem like a time to dawdle,” she replied. “What’s the plan?”
Ken rubbed his chin, the sound of his stubble like sandpaper.
“Well, first off, we need to cut that lump of ceiling down before it flattens someone. Then we’ll make the area safe. And then we can start on a proper cleanup.”
“What about the show?” she asked.
He sucked in air through his teeth, the universal signifier of bad news.
“You’ve got two options. The first is to postpone the performance until after we’ve replastered and made everything good. Realistically you’re looking at the middle of January.”
“And the second?” asked James.
“We make it safe. Clean everything up and cover the hole with a strong waterproof tarp. It won’t look pretty, it’ll likely be drafty, but you can have your show as planned. We can get it into working order in a couple of days. Quicker if we have help with the surface cleanup.”
Harriet looked at James and could see him weighing the two choices in his mind. For her, though, there was only ever one course of action.
“Let’s do option two; not pretty with a tarp,” she said with conviction.
“Are you sure?” James asked. “I could speak to Evaline—”
“I’m sure. Too many people have worked too hard on this. If we postpone, we lose the momentum. This whole production has been created by determination and goodwill. We’ve built it on make do and mend, and I can’t think of a more fitting way to showcase our hard work in the face of adversity than to do it despite a massive hole in the ceiling.”
James smiled at her. “You’re right,” he said. “This has us written all over it.”
“Brava!” Gideon boomed, surprising them all. “I came as soon as I could. Of course, the show must go on, that is the cornerstone of every creative’s belief. The gods may rain their trials and tribulations down upon us, but we will rise to the occasion!” He swooped his arms into the air as though he intended to take off from the balcony and fly around the auditorium.
“Right you are, then,” said Ken, wholly unimpressed by Gideon’s outbursts. “I’ll crack on. Nobody’s to go down there until I say it’s safe. Understood?” They all nodded. “If you need to practice, do it in the cocktail lounges.”
And with that he was gone. The scaffold tower was almost complete, and at its base three members of the maintenance team were clambering into safety harnesses while others gave their chain saws a quick once-over.
“Rather them than me,” said James just as his phone began to ring. He pulled it from his coat pocket, frowning when he saw the name of the caller. “Lyra. Is everything all right?” His expression was serious and growing more so by the second. “Is she okay?” A beat as he listened. Harriet could hear crying down the phone. “All right, I’ll come up. No, it’s fine, nothing that can’t wait. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” More talking on the other end. “You too. Bye.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket, not making eye contact with Harriet as he took two steadying breaths, seemingly making decisions and locking them into place in his mind. “I have to go,” he said finally, meeting her eyes.
“Go where? Is Lyra okay?” she asked. Her stomach was sinking.
“She’s fine. I mean, she’s physically fine but she’s upset. I have to go to Edinburgh. Morgan was in a car accident this morning on her way to work.”
“Oh my god. Um, okay.” Her mind was scrabbling around trying to put everything together. “Is it serious? Morgan, I mean, is she seriously hurt?”
“Lyra says not. She’s just a bit shaken up. The paramedics assessed her on the scene and said she was fine to go home. They suggested she rest up for the day.”
“Right. So, Morgan’s okay and Lyra’s okay?” Harriet clarified.
“Yes. Both are fine. But Lyra is upset, and I said I’d go up there for moral support.”
“Does she need you to?” Harriet asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, only that she’s an adult and Morgan is clearly unhurt and what with all this going on…” She gestured to the mess down below.
“She was crying down the phone! She needs me!” His usual cool air had evaporated.
“There’s no need to raise your voice. I’m simply pointing out that we need you too. I need you.”
“I’m sorry Morgan didn’t time her road traffic accident better.”
“Don’t be a bum-wipe. You said Morgan is fine. You’re going to drive three hours in the snow because you feel guilty.”
“Why are you being like this?” he demanded.
She looked out toward the scaffold now being scaled by maintenance workers lugging chain saws.
“You asked me to put you first, to put down my phone and choose you instead, and I did. Now I’m asking you to put me first. Please. They are okay. Lyra is fine, you said so yourself, she’s a bit tearful, but surely it isn’t anything that can’t be soothed by a FaceTime?”
“I need to be there.”
“And I need you to be here. I haven’t asked you for anything. You have had to make exactly zero concessions for me. I am asking you for this one thing.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“No, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
The words hit like a slap.
The swing doors swished closed behind him, and Harriet was left feeling more alone than she had in a long time.
“He is a man of passions,” said Gideon gently. She’d forgotten he was there.
“Yes,” Harriet replied absently. How quickly she had allowed herself to fall. A lifetime of caution thrown to the wind for a handsome face and some pretty words.
“Come now, my dear. We have play business to discuss. It’s early still, let us go to the little café on the corner and I’ll buy you breakfast, what do you say?”
Harriet looked down at the stage. Gideon touched her shoulder.
“I believe our Mr. Knight needs to deal with his ghosts, as we must ours, though of a Dickensian kind.”
She looked at him then, in his green corduroy cape.
“That’s very astute of you,” she said.
“People often mistake my flamboyance for narcissism. It’s a useful tool, people drop their guard under the presumption that I am a brick wall, when in fact I am a keen observer of the human condition.” He winked at her and tapped his nose.
“Blimey,” she said.
“We have hours before the hordes arrive for practice, and I don’t believe you want to spend the intervening time with nothing but your own thoughts for company.”
That was probably true.
“And I have heard tell that the café offers a festive pancake stack, which I am most interested to sample.” He tapped his forefinger to his lips thoughtfully. “Surely you won’t make me eat alone?”
She smiled at him, grateful.
“Thanks, Gideon.”
He flapped his cape over one shoulder and put an arm around her. “Now, my dear, riddle me this, have I yet regaled you with tales from my time at a little theater you may have heard of called Shakespeare’s Globe?”
“No,” she said warily, as they left the theater.
“Then you are in for a treat!”
Harriet had spent most of Sunday lying on the sofa in her sitting room alternating between watching holiday movies and reading; some might call it moping. James hadn’t called her, but neither had she called him. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true; he had phoned her twice on Saturday and left messages, both of which she had ignored—he had asked her to spend less time beholden to her phone, after all—but by Sunday he seemed to have got the message and for the first time in years, she wished her phone weren’t so quiet. She was sad that their spark hadn’t had the chance to become a flame, but she reasoned that it was better to know where she stood now rather than later.
James might not have been her favorite person right then, but she was grateful that he had made her decorate her home for Christmas. Her festive space would keep her warm now that it seemed likely that James would not. Really, she should thank him; he and his dreadful boss had helped her to see the value of self-care…and it looked like now she’d have plenty of time to practice it.
“Explain it to me again,” Maisy asked. Her phone was propped up on a dressing table while she packed her suitcase, ready for when she and Savannah’s family drove up to their cabin in the mountains for Christmas. She kept wandering back and forth across the screen while she talked. “He wouldn’t stay because his daughter was upset and you wanted him to stay, and then he called you and you didn’t respond.”
“I mean, yes, that’s the nutshell version, but it isn’t the whole nut tree. What about your fleece hoodie? A mountain cabin sounds cold to me.”
Harriet was eating a bowl of vegetable noodles that she had made from scratch, and it felt like a big win for her personal growth. She watched Maisy pull her fleece out of a hamper and add it to her pile.
“But you like him. I mean, you must really like him to have told me about him, you’re normally well cagey about your boyfriends.”
“I’m not cagey, I’m selective.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Maisy, flinging a pair of bed socks over her shoulder. “My point is, if everybody decided not to get together with the person they fancy on the chance that one day that person might let them down, then nobody would ever get together with anybody.”
“You have managed to both overdramatize and oversimplify the situation in one fell swoop. Don’t forget to pack gloves and a hat.”
On another pass by the dressing table, with several pairs of knickers scrunched up into balls in her hand, Maisy stopped and bent to the phone screen. “Love is all about taking risks, isn’t it?”
“Who mentioned love?”
“All right, then, falling in ‘like’ is all about taking a risk because nobody knows what the future is, do they?”
“That’s a calculated risk, based on there being no obvious glaring red flags. And James is currently waving a big red flag at me. At any given moment Lyra or Morgan could break a nail, and he’ll go scuttling off to Scotland with an emergency emery board.”
“Now who’s overdramatizing? Striped scarf or checked scarf?”
“Striped.”
“The thing is, Mum, she’s his daughter and he put her first. Isn’t that exactly what you would do with me?”
“Yes, of course. But this was different. If the situation had been reversed and I knew that you were perfectly fine aside from being a bit upset then I would have talked you through it until you felt better; I wouldn’t have driven a hundred miles to help you blow your nose.”
“But that’s because you know me. You know how I tick; you know what I need when I need it because you’re my mum and you’ve always been there. James is a proper novice. He barely knows his daughter—for all he knows, she could’ve been having a full-on meltdown.”
Harriet slurped up a noodle as she both marveled at her daughter’s emotional intelligence and wished she weren’t quite so perceptive.
“Okay, you make a good point.”
“I know.”
“But what about Morgan?”
“You think there’s something going on between them?” Maisy asked.
“No,” she conceded. “But I don’t know how far he’ll go to make amends.”
Maisy held up two oversized chunky knit cardigans.
“Both, obviously,” said Harriet.
“It sounds to me like he’s still working out how to navigate having a surprise family.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to invest in somebody who doesn’t have their ducks in a row yet.”
“Sheesh! You and your ducks!” Maisy exclaimed.
“What? You leave my ducks alone. Anyway, even if nothing romantic ever happens between him and Morgan, I could still be setting myself up to get left in the lurch a lot.”
“Or maybe Lyra and Morgan are the perfect excuse for someone as risk-averse as you not to put yourself out there?”
“I am not risk-averse!”
“Mum, you choose exactly the same curry, side dish, and naan bread every single time we go to the Everest Inn.”
“That’s just being sensible, I know that I like their vegetable bhuna, aloo gobi saag, and peshwari naan and if I ordered something different and I didn’t like it I’d be disappointed, which would be a waste of money.”
Maisy laughed and lobbed a bottle of perfume across the room, where it landed on top of the pile of clothes in her case.
“Now play that back in your head and tell me that’s not risk-averse.”
Harriet narrowed her eyes. “Choosing a curry is not the same as committing to a relationship.”
“Well, that’s just a matter of perspective,” Maisy said smugly.
Harriet chuckled at being outpsyched by her seventeen-year-old daughter.
“Well, you’re no help. Don’t roll your dress like that, you’ll never get the creases out.”
“There!” Maisy said, leaning bodily on her suitcase to click it shut. “I’m packed.”
Harriet was suddenly flooded with the knowledge that for the next few years her relationship with her daughter would revolve around suitcases being packed and unpacked as she traveled back and forth between home and university, until one day she would pack up her suitcase and leave to find a place of her own to call home.
“Mum?” Maisy was studying her with a concerned look on her face. “You all right?”
“I’m fine, darling.” She swallowed hard. “You know that I love you more than the sun and the moon and all the stars put together, don’t you?”
Maisy smiled. “I love you too.”
With a knock at the door, Savannah stepped into her room.
“Hi, Harriet!” she said brightly. “We’re going to see the living nativity on the corner of Main Street, do you mind if I steal your daughter away?”
“No, not at all. Go, have fun!”
She managed not to cry until after Maisy had hung up.
Later, as she lay in bed, pondering Maisy’s words, she wondered if her daughter might be onto something. Was James the king prawn rogan josh, Bombay aloo, and keema naan that she’d always wanted to try but had never dared? Sure, the vegetable bhuna had never let her down, there was safety in the bhuna and that was not to be sniffed at, but might the rogan josh be an even better fit for her if she only gave it the chance? “Ugh!” she groaned, flinging the duvet off. “Now I’ve made myself hungry!” And she padded out to the kitchen in search of crackers, cheese, and mango chutney.