Chapter 6 The Lift
The Lift
The lights in the lift flickered. There was a crack as if something complicated and electrical had blown, and Jack and Tam were plunged into total darkness, just for a few seconds but enough to spike Tam’s anxiety level.
‘Dear God, I know I haven’t been to church in ages but I am getting married in one soon so you are important to me.
Like my Aunt Rosemary, who I don’t see too much but I think about her all the time because she’s not like the rest and I think she must be a throwback, like I am,’ said Tam, squeezing her hands together and issuing her prayer, which was more audible than she’d intended, because Jack responded.
‘What a coincidence. I have an Aunt Rosemary too. Not a name you hear much of these days, is it?’
‘I’m sorry for this irrational fear I have of lifts,’ said Tam, flashing her eyes towards him. ‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t judge my entire personality and work abilities on the events of this hour.’ It needed saying.
‘I wouldn’t,’ replied Jack, holding up his hands in mock surrender. ‘For the record, I have an irrational fear of balloons. If I’m in the room with them, I find myself tensing up. It’s the unpredictability of them popping at any given moment. They freak me out. If that makes you feel any better.’
It didn’t really. He was probably making it up anyway in his quest to be seen as down with the plebs.
Tam began to pray again, even if she doubted she was being listened to.
Jack continued his questioning of her. ‘So . . . how long have you been together with your partner? Harris, did you say he was called?’
‘Four years.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Through his sister, Natasha, who I met when I was roped into doing a charity Women in Business thing for Children in Need.’
Four years. It felt like a lifetime ago.
She’d just split up from someone and her ego was in her boots, her well of smiles dried up.
Then she happened to be thrown together with an accounts manager in another firm in a three-legged race, and they were both equally matched in their inability to coordinate.
They’d celebrated coming last with a coffee and they got on well, chatted for almost two hours.
It had made her feel valued that someone liked her company so much as to want to meet up again.
She’d sacrificed her social life on the altar of trying to build up her career, trying to make her parents as proud of her as they were of her gifted siblings, and had virtually no life outside work.
So that when she needed a friend, there weren’t any around, no one to talk to but her old Siamese cat, Walter.
He wasn’t that great a conversationalist, but he was somewhere to invest the reserves of love she had, and he helped to make her not feel quite so alone.
She hadn’t had a true friend in her life since Anna at uni and they’d drifted apart long ago.
‘One day, Natasha’s brother turned up to give us a lift home from the theatre when our taxi didn’t materialise.
’ She smiled in the dark, remembering her first sighting of him: so incredibly handsome, tall, golden-haired.
He’d opened the car door for her and she immediately thought, This is someone my parents would like.
So far, no one she’d taken along for Sunday lunch had met with their approval.
‘I didn’t think I’d made that much of an impression on him as he never rang.
At least, not until weeks later. My old cat, Walter, had just died – he went to sleep and never woke up.
He was a huge chocolate-point Siamese and the previous owners of the house I’d bought just left him behind, can you believe?
I loved him so much and I was absolutely heartbroken.
I felt as if someone had taken the top layer of my skin off, if I’m honest. And then out of the blue Harris rang me and asked me out to dinner.
’ She didn’t say that she was ripe for a man to breeze into her life offering some much-needed attention, because it sounded pathetic.
‘What’s he like?’ asked Jack.
‘A gent, cultured, drop-dead gorgeous,’ replied Tam, ignoring the burn of her heels as she leaned back against the metal walls of the lift, aware of just how close Jack Cesaroni was.
‘He likes the finer things in life. We go to some wonderful places to eat and he always pays, even though I do offer because I’m not a freeloader.
And he’s really good at presents. He bought me these shoes, not that you can see how properly fabulous they are in this light.
’ He’d bought her a whole wardrobe of clothes, in fact.
Out went her ‘boho nonsense’ and in came the separates he said would suit her better.
He wanted her to be a classy woman and she wanted to be that classy woman for him.
She wanted him to approve of her. She had spent a lot of time in her life chasing approval, now she thought about it.
‘He always has my best interests at heart,’ Tam went on, though she didn’t go into details.
It might sound a bit odd to confess to an outsider that he preferred her wild cloud of hair straightened – just because it’s natural, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look a little silly – or that he figured she was pretty enough without wearing all that make-up.
There was nothing wrong with telling her to act her age and be more ladylike, even if that off-the-wall giggly girl inside her didn’t feel quite done with her yet.
He didn’t want her to make a fool of herself.
What was wrong with that? She wondered if Anna had grown up in the years since she’d last seen her, acquired a sober wardrobe and consigned her Ruby Woo red lipstick to the bin.
They’d discovered it together on the MAC counter at Boots one day.
It was a fabulous shade and she’d worn it for years, but Harris didn’t like it, he said red lipstick was vulgar – so she stopped.
‘I did notice the shoes. Louboutins,’ Jack said, with a nod to them.
She followed his gaze. ‘I just wish they were as fun to wear as they are to look at, but Harris is tall and I look daft in flats when I’m out with him.
He’s very stylish and I’m not naturally, so it’s nice to be with someone who has an eye for .
. .’ Her voice trailed off. In her effort to show him off, she seemed to be doing exactly the opposite.
‘He’s high up in finance. He’s very clever,’ she continued, because she was on much safer ground talking about his job.
‘He’s also very encouraging about my ambitions. ’
Although. She hadn’t quite been able to shake off the disappointment that he had been less than effusive when she told him that she’d been made MD of YorkMart.
She and Anna would have danced around the room like idiots.
She missed letting her corsets out, being crazy, being the girl she had caught a glimpse of again in the mirror of the wedding-dress shop only two days previously.
She still thought of Anna and it was usually when she needed a friend most of all, but the sort of friend that would listen to her without judgement, and that wasn’t Natasha.
She had met Anna on their third day at uni.
She had been drawn to her light, which was bonkers really because Anna had told her later that she had been attracted by her vibe and Tam had thought she was joking.
Did she even have a vibe? Especially one that this Amazonian-tall, white-blonde, funny, kind, confident queen would have noticed?
Anna looked Swedish and she convinced so many that she was, faking the language and sounding like the chef on The Muppet Show, even though her only connection with Sweden was her fondness for Ikea’s meatballs.
Tam laughed more in those three years at uni than in all the eighteen years before that.
They were both on the same course and worked as hard as they played.
They were going to share a flat and hit the business world with their joint genius when they were armed with their degrees, but instead Anna met Leo, a Spanish maths student, and fell head over heels.
As soon as they’d graduated, Anna moved out to Spain and got married.
What had once seemed like a rock-solid friendship had crumbled like chalk over the next year or so.
The last that Tam knew, Anna was working as the head of PR for a firm in London; she’d looked her up four years ago, when she was at a low ebb.
She’d changed her name back from Silva to Anderson, so presumably her marriage to Leo had ended.
Tam hadn’t dared to contact her, though; she couldn’t bear the thought that Anna might not reply.
Best to leave the happy memories intact and accept that Anna had outgrown her and moved on.
Tam had thrown herself into her career even more after that, but it never quite filled the empty space where her friend used to be.
So was it any wonder that when she met Natasha, she sucked up the connection like a thirsty sponge?
And then Harris arrived on the scene and her poor battered heart felt the restorative heat of his interest in her.
The best moment, though, came when she invited him for Sunday lunch, and the full sun of her parents’ approval lit up the dining room.
They loved him. Sometimes, she wondered if they preferred him to her.
On paper, their relationship was perfect.
Each family an ideal complement to the other, both principal players clever and ambitious, with great jobs.
They were staring at a future that would be solvent and comfortable and content.
Okay, so there were a few niggles, which would be ironed out over time, Tam was sure.
Little things, though. Harris wasn’t a passionate man, but Tam had accepted that.
He wasn’t one for puppyish excitements, declarations of love or throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her up to bed.
That kind of thing happened in films and books, not in real life, Harris had once said when she’d been a bit tiddly and had leapt on him in the car.
Real love was sensible, solid and not silly like that.
And considering the relationships she’d had that had been distinctly wilder but had ended so hurtfully, she could only conclude that he might be right.
Everything else was good. He didn’t cheat on her, he didn’t eye up other women when he was with her, he didn’t lie to her, use her or ever give her reason to doubt what he said was true, all of which she had experienced with other boyfriends.
But sometimes, though she tried to bat the thought away, she did wonder if part of her had fallen for what Harris wasn’t, rather than what he was.