The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy Read online

  ‘I’m here to be your new accountant.’

  ‘You?’ said a scrappy figure in a shiny three-piece suit. It was Napier. He stopped at the door to his office and stared at me across the anteroom. ‘But you’re a woman.’

  I studied myself, the bump of my breasts, the neatness of my hands, as if I hadn’t noticed these things before. ‘My God,’ I said. ‘So I am.’

  My remark was supposed to be funny. I liked to laugh. Apparently Napier didn’t. He looked appalled, followed by furious. It’s a shame short men don’t wear heels; it would save the world a lot of trouble. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. He practically collided with a tinsel Christmas tree in his rush to get away from me.

  ‘You at least have to interview me,’ I called out. ‘Equal rights and so on.’

  This, it seemed, was funny after all. Napier turned and bared his teeth. Then he gave a high-pitched laugh. Yap, yap, yap. I could see the gold points of his molars. It was not very festive.

  ‘But you’re not the person I want for the job,’ he screeched.

  It was in me to get up and leave. The smell of the brewery was so nauseating I had to keep pinching the colour into my cheeks. But something about the way that man stared at me and laughed, as if I weren’t good enough, as if I never would be, brought out the stubbornness in me. ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait until you change your mind.’ Now it was my turn to produce a smile. Only, mine hurt.

  I waited all morning. Every time Napier opened his office door, I was still there. ‘Any applicants?’ he’d call to his secretary.

  ‘Miss Hennessy,’ she’d say. The door would slam again.

  Around lunchtime, Napier went slinking along the corridor, almost appended to the polished wood panelling. His secretary asked if I was all right, if I wanted water, but I said no. ‘Maybe this job is not for you,’ she said softly. We listened to him scream at someone in another part of the building before he reappeared, casting round anxiously to check if my chair was empty yet. I stood and waved. ‘Here I am, Mr Napier.’ I was weak with the lack of food.

  ‘Do you like sex and travel, Miss Hennessy?’

  At last. An interview, albeit unconventional. I blushed, but I wasn’t going to be bullied. ‘I do, actually.’

  ‘Then fuck off.’ The door slammed.

  I asked the secretary if her boss liked women, and she said he did, but mainly in the back of his car. Also Margaret Thatcher, along with the Queen, though not in the back of the car. Those two were in silver frames. I said something like ‘Well, never mind,’ but the irony was possibly lost on her.

  By five o’clock, no one else had turned up. Napier’s secretary put on her coat and turned off the lights. ‘There will be other work,’ she said. ‘When the tourist season starts in Kingsbridge, there will be waitressing and stuff.’ I explained to her that I needed an office job, one that didn’t involve lifting, and that I was almost penniless. I had no time to wait. ‘Well, good luck,’ she said. I sat in silence for another half-hour. The brewery was quiet in the way an old building can be, as if silence is made up of creaks and ticks that are no longer to do with people but only with the things they’ve left behind.

  I knocked on Napier’s door and waited. Had he leapt out of the window to escape me? Had I spent all day waiting only to be tricked at the last minute? It was too much. I swung open the door and walked through the gloom of smoke. I took in a collection of Murano glass clowns glowing dimly on his desk, about twenty in all, blue and orange and yellow, like a band of melting musicians in smog. And there was Napier behind them. Swivelling anxiously from side to side on a leather and mahogany desk chair.

  ‘Don’t touch the glass clowns,’ he snarled. (As if I was going to.) I’m sorry to have to remind you of those things, Harold.

  I said, ‘It appears you’re going to have to employ me, Mr Napier.’

  ‘I told you. This is not a woman’s job.’ He lit one cigarette from the one he’d been smoking and screwed the spent butt into an ashtray.

  ‘I don’t want a woman’s job. I want a man’s one. I can save you five hundred pounds in six months.’ At this point I had no idea how. ‘I’ve sat here all day. If I set my mind on something, I don’t waver. What have you got to lose?’

  And that is how I got my job in accounts. I bought a cheap brown wool suit, slightly roomy at the waist, from a thrift shop in Kingsbridge. I also bought a black handbag and a pair of sensible brown lace-up shoes – small heel, square toe. I spent every day at the library, reading up about bookkeeping and finances, and sometimes I thought of the one I had left behind, the man in Corby, and I might have cried, but I’d done so much of that already there was no room left for it.

  I returned to the brewery in the New Year, half expecting to be turned away, half expecting to be on another bus that same evening, but Napier’s secretary said, ‘Ah, Miss Hennessy. Your office is on the first floor, three doors to the right.’ I could have fallen out of my plain brown shoes.

  Word had clearly gone round the brewery that a female was starting in accounts. Several of the reps lingered outside my office to get a look. Woman. Maths. Brown suit. They assumed one thing. This was twenty-four years ago, remember. Behind those Victorian brewery walls, nothing had changed in decades.

  ‘You’re the first lesbian we’ve had,’ said Napier’s secretary brightly.

  ‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘I like men. I mean, I really like them.’

  ‘It’s a free country!’ she sang, still in the upper register. She smiled, but she didn’t shake hands.

  Tonight Sister Philomena delivers meds, and the duty nurse changes my dressing and gives me a fresh pain patch. They look surprised to find me still sitting up with my pencil and notebook. ‘Are you all right?’ says Sister Philomena. ‘You look very busy there.’

  ‘I am good,’ I grunt. I even smile.

  ‘We’re both good,’ says Sister Mary Inconnue. She slots her typed pages in order. ‘It has been a good day.’

  ‘Good,’ says Sister Philomena.

  ‘Good,’ says the duty nurse.

  We all laugh, as if that is the only word.

  Sunday song

  THE HORSE IS visiting again, but it must be Sister Mary Inconnue’s day off. The horse keeps shifting her hindquarters and bumping into the armchair. Also, she has turned up in a hat and four dancing shoes. The shoes look like mine. The hat is twisted straw, trimmed with a nest of plastic blossom and cherries; it’s not dissimilar to the one my mother bought to wear for my graduation. She was a masculine-looking woman, and the hat proved a challenge. To her profound irritation, it kept shooting from her head. ‘Scheisse, Scheisse,’ she growled. In the end my father carried it on her behalf, slightly aloft and careful not to tip it, as though he were bearing an actual fruit salad.

  There is no sign of the horse’s owner, the woman with the grapefruit. Perhaps she is off buying hay.

  Before I began writing to you today, I practised my finger stretches. Then Sister Lucy washed what is left of my hair and fetched her blow-dryer. ‘You have nice ears,’ she said. She picked up some of my pages lying on the floor. She frowned and then she turned them upside down as if that might help. I pointed to my suitcase, where she could store them.

  ‘I’m writing a letter for Harold Fry,’ I told her. ‘Sister Mary Inconnue has been helping.’ I should have scribbled this sentence in my notebook because the poor girl never understands, but I was tired. Once I’d finished trying to speak, a look of panic swallowed her face. Her small eyes twitched, in an effort to comprehend.

  ‘I’m not sure I got that,’ she said slowly.

  I reached for my pencil and notebook but she said, ‘No, no. Say it again. It’s my fault. I am sure I will get it this time.’

  ‘I’m writing a letter,’ I managed. I made each sound stand apart, like I used to do at the post office store in Embleton before things got too difficult and I gave up going there.

  Her pink mouth broke into a triumphant peal of laughter. ‘Oh,
I understand, Queenie! I know what you said!’

  Sister Lucy got up with gusto. At the door she turned. ‘Would you like one sugar in that or two?’

  Monday blues

  NO POSTCARD.

  I expect you’ve gone home.

  ‘Oh, enough of that,’ says Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘Let’s get back to our letter.’

  Another patient has arrived. A man. Probably in his mid-thirties. He wears satin pyjamas, large blue slippers like monster feet and a dressing around his head. From the way the bandage sags over the crown you’d think his skull was a boiled egg, with the top sliced clean away.

  His family came with him. Two little girls, a young wife dressed for work in a white uniform, his mother and father, and another woman who looks like his sister; she shares his dark eyes. That man looked the centre of so many lives. They all sat alongside him with tall backs, very stiff, on a bank of chairs beneath the cork noticeboard in the dayroom. You could see them glancing at him and glancing at us and holding tight on to their cups of tea and wafer biscuits, as if dying were contagious and only the everyday things might save them.

  ‘My daddy has new slippers,’ said one of the little girls.

  ‘They’re nice,’ said the Pearly King.

  ‘Also, new pyjamas.’

  ‘Nice one.’

  The mother shot her daughter a warning look. Don’t talk to strangers. Especially not ones with a sell-by date. The grandmother slipped a colouring book out of her handbag. ‘Come here, Alice,’ she called.

  ‘What is wrong with that lady?’ said the little girl. The young mother pursed her mouth to suggest she was busy thinking of something important and hadn’t heard. So the girl spoke again. But this time she stood up. She pointed. ‘WHY DOES THE OLD LADY LOOK LIKE THAT?’

  ‘Oh, that’s Barbara,’ said Finty. ‘She’s got no eyes. The NHS gave her two prosthetics, but one of them keeps popping out. Doesn’t it, Babs?’

  Barbara laughed. So did the little girl called Alice.

  The family didn’t.

  ‘You can do my colouring book, if you like,’ said Alice.

  ‘Fab,’ said Finty. ‘I love colouring.’

  A nice pair of sandwiches

  ‘THIS IS Miss Hennessy. She’s our new accountant. Did you hear how we first met?’

  If I am honest, and after all that is the point this time, one of the things that used to annoy me was when you got out of the car and told pub landlords about our first meeting. Every time you said it, every time it made you laugh, I thought, Good grief, here we go again. Listening to you get the detail wrong, over and over, was like being married to you without the happy bits.

  ‘Yes. It’s a funny story, actually. Very funny. We met in the stationery cupboard.’

  We didn’t.

  Prior to my unaccustomed display of feeling in that particular repository, we had been introduced. In the canteen. I know this because I’d spotted you every day from my office window. I wanted to know more about the tall man who hid his empty cans in the bins and danced with his shadow and stood up to a bully.

  It was lunchtime. I’d had my job at the brewery for almost two weeks, and I was sitting with Napier’s secretary. I have it now – Sheila was her name. She was a slight person, quietly spoken, but her breasts were so disproportionately gigantic that no matter how much one tried to appreciate something else about her, her rather ordinary mouth, for instance, or her thin curtain of hair, your eyes kept forgetting about those bits and landing slap bang back on her bosom. It was the same for everyone. The men had full-on conversations with them. I watched her, her look of patient embarrassment, as if she were waiting for people to lift their faces and realize that she had one of those as well.

  I remember asking some sort of polite question about how she was and her giving some sort of polite answer about the weather, when you stopped by our table. I didn’t even look up. I just saw yachting shoes and the way the cuffs of your trousers didn’t hang quite long enough to cover the zigzag pattern in your socks. If anything, I was struck by the overwhelming ordinariness of your lower half.

  That was when I raised my eyes and found it was you. The man I’d been looking for. I blushed.

  To my surprise, you did the same. But you were not embarrassed because you had been secretly spying from a first-floor window. Oh, no. You were openly gawping straight down Sheila’s cleavage. You couldn’t seem to budge your eyes. ‘Gosh,’ you said out loud.

  ‘Oh, hello there, Mr Fry,’ said Sheila.

  You looked devastated, as if your mouth had come out with the one word you had trusted would remain inside it. Then you tried to make up for your appalling indiscretion. What you came up with was ‘Golly.’

  ‘Harold Fry is one of the reps,’ said Sheila to me, as if this explained everything. Sheila said to you, ‘This is Miss Hennessy. She’s new. She’s in accounts.’

  You adjusted the knot of your tie. (It was not out of place. It never was. But I came to know it was a thing you did, just as other people clear their throats, or just as my father used to say, ‘Well, there it was,’ when a conversation reached a natural end.)

  ‘Pleased to meet you both,’ you said, offering your hand. And once again you seemed to realize what you’d done, and this time you groaned. By now, the other reps were beginning to put down their meat pies and cigarettes and laugh.

  ‘Would you care to join us, Mr Fry?’ I asked.

  You were in it now. It was clear you wished to flee both the canteen and your mistake, but you put down your sandwiches next to mine on the table. That seemed to be as far as you were willing to go. I had made my sandwiches that morning: ham on brown bread. Yours were in a Tupperware container with the name David Fry taped to the lid. I guessed you had a wife who’d made your lunch.

  So there were three of us not knowing what to say where before there had been only two. Sheila and I looked up at you and you remained on your feet, hovering in close proximity to your sandwich box.

  In the end Sheila said, ‘I’m getting married next week.’

  ‘Well, how nice,’ you said.

  ‘Actually, I’m really nervous.’

  ‘Nervous? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just am. I can hardly eat. Look.’ She showed us her packed lunch and she was right. She’d barely pecked at it.

  You shared a quick, anxious glance with me. It linked us briefly as if it were our duty to join forces and help this young woman. Not knowing her or you, of course, and knowing nothing about marriage either, I merely shrugged. Over to you, tall man. Besides, I was thrown by your eyes. The blue of them was so generous, I couldn’t quite think of anything else.

  You caught your hands behind your back. You placed your feet firmly astride, rooting them to the floor. You bowed your head a moment, thinking something through, so that those lines appeared again and pleated your forehead. Sheila gave me a look as if to say, What’s he doing? And I gave her a return smile that said, I haven’t a clue but wait.

  ‘Please don’t be nervous,’ you said slowly. ‘I spent most of my wedding night in the bathroom. It was still the best day of my life. You’ll be happy.’ Here you lifted your head and gave a benevolent smile. Your whole face looked full of it, out to your ears. Your eyes shone. I knew then that you would always see the positive side because you liked people, and you wanted the best for them. It was intoxicating.

  Before my work at the brewery, I’d done many things, seen many places, met many people. I’d got a first in classics. I’d taken a job in a bar to fund a secretarial course. I’d had the job as a researcher, and when that got too much I’d taken another as a tour guide and afterwards a tutor. I’d hung around for a few years with a troupe of female artists in Soho, I’d got involved with a retired high court judge (the Shit) in Corby. All in all, I’d heard people do a lot of things with words. I’d heard them not say what they meant and I’d seen them not do what they said, but I’d never met a person who could speak so simply and still convey so much. Sheila lis
tened in awe. There you stood, feet firm, shoulders set, believing she would be happy with such conviction that right away she began to believe it too. Then you said, ‘Well, cheerio, ladies,’ and you walked off with my sandwiches.

  It turned out yours were turkey and salad cream on white. Your wife had cut off the crusts. I know this because I ate them.

  Sheila said to me, ‘He’s a good man, Mr Fry. He’s not like the others. I’ll be OK now.’

  ‘He’s a dancer, isn’t he?’

  Sheila laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think so. He mostly, you know, he mostly sits.’

  Afterwards I asked the other secretaries about you, but no one had much to add. You had already worked at the brewery longer than a lot of people. You’d never missed a day’s work, not even when your son was born. Apparently you took a two-week holiday every summer with your family, but there were no photographs on your desk because I checked when I returned your Tupperware and all I found were paperclips, a plastic pencil sharpener and a complimentary Christmas calendar from the Chinese takeaway. It was out of date.

  Watching you from a distance, I discovered several new things: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays you wore a brown suit and a selection of golf club ties; on Tuesdays and Thursdays you wore beige corduroys and a beige V-necked sweater. When it came to fashion, it seemed you were mainly interested in blending in with the background.

  Your eyes were a deep blue, almost shocking they were so vivid. Years later, I tried to find the same colour in my sea garden, and sometimes I thought the irises had it, sometimes my blue poppies. On an early summer morning, when the sky was reflected in the smooth folds of the sea, it was there I found you. You walked with a straight spine. Your hair was a thick sweep of brown that never quite sat flat. You wore your scarf (fawn stripes) in a tight knot and this made me wonder if your mother had once said you’d get a cold unless you kept your neck warm. It lifted my spirits at the brewery to watch you from a distance and ask myself these things. I assumed you had a drinking habit of which you were ashamed, but there. We all have secrets.