‘It’s the first thing you said when I asked you a question, so yes, itisthe word.’
She angled her head, turning catlike sea green eyes onto Susanna, who folded.
‘OK. It’s the word but I – you know ...’ she finished pleadingly.
Toni knew. Unbidden, her sister Lou came to mind. Lou was the most golden person Toni had ever met and ‘sorry’ was her default word, too. Goodness shone out of Lou, she spent her life helping other people – and what did that get her? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She ran around after their mother as if Lillian was a feeble little old lady instead of a fearsome woman who had never seen a door or a rival she couldn’t flatten.
It was Lou’s fiftieth birthday party on Friday and Toni had arranged to have her TV show recorded instead of running live so she could be there. She still hadn’t bought Lou a present yet. It wasn’t so much a case of what you got the person who had everything but instead, what did you get for the person who never asked for anything?
‘Is my hair too long?’ asked Susanna suddenly.
Toni’s razor-like brain returned to the issue at hand and she felt the familiar weariness at the issue itself.
Hair, nails, the wrong shoes – why couldn’t women be judged on the right things instead of on the surface ones? She saw nothing wrong with having her hair professionally dried twice a week. But one profile had nastily worked out how much this luxury had cost her.
‘Can you explain why this worries you?’ she asked.
‘It’s very pretty and my friend says it’s—’ Susanna paused. ‘Cute. I don’t want to be cute,’ she added hotly. ‘I do everything I can to dispel any notion that I’m—’
‘Female?’ asked Toni.
‘Yeah,’ said Susanna with a sigh. ‘I like my hair and I’ve always had it long.’
Toni paused.
‘How you look or what way you do your hair shouldn’t matter,’ she began, ‘but it does. Some of us – women, people of colour, people who dress certain ways because of their religious beliefs – get judged on what we wear, how we look, what lipstick we like, what gender we’re attracted to ... The list is endless. It’s wrong. None of it affects how we work, but some people judge us on that and find us wanting. So we need to be strategic. Tell me about your work life.’
Susanna sat poised with pen and notebook.
Toni wished she could say that society needed to change but this would not be a helpful statement. Once she’d helped Susanna, then Susanna could be a Women in Business recruit and help other people. Person by person they’d change the world.
And nobody would have to explain their hair choices, why they wore flat shoes or high ones or a headscarf or not.
One day.
The church bell was ringing to announce ten o’clock morning Mass as Gloria Cooper stood outside Whitehaven Helps charity shop and polished the glass in the front door. Holding onto her walking stick with one hand as she cleaned, the town’s news drifted past her as people hurried along Main Street. News travelled fast in Whitehaven. Always had.
Gloria, who was gently freewheeling towards eighty-five, could remember when the news came via Old Mac with the milk in the morning as well as from Mr Johnson, the postman, who brought Dr Cooper’s letters as if each was a medical emergency in itself.
Both men knew that Gloria’s father, Dr Cooper, never gossiped, no matter how they waited for a titbit.
Still, news moved just as quickly then as nowadays when everyone had a phone surgically attached to their hand.
Whitehaven’s Main Street was busy and as people walked by, snippets of conversation came to Gloria as she wiped slowly. There was to be a party, people were saying.
‘Marco from the Gin Palace is outraged about it ...’ muttered one woman into her phone as she walked past.
A couple were discussing how Jess from the bakery was wondering if she could get an invite. Three forty-something women in leggings and trainers walked past the charity shop with their yoga mats, exhausted after their morning Iyengar class which had stretched their muscles to pure fluidity.
‘It’s Toni Cooper and her husband,’ one of the women was saying in between sips of water. ‘He was in that Netflix programme about Armageddon. Awful muck but he was good in it, wasn’t he? You wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crisps, even though he’s no spring chicken ... !’
‘Toni’s mother, Lillian, is getting an award. I bet that’s it. She must be seventy if she’s a day. Looks amazing,’ a second yoga lady said. ‘I think she’s had Botox and some stuff in her lips. Not a line on her forehead but no face lifts. Definitely has sex appeal. The men are still mad for her, my mother says. You know my mother: loves a gossip. Says there’s a trail of men in and out of that house, although Lillian apparently insists she hasn’t looked at a man since poor Bob died. I mean, Too Much Information. Imagine sex at her age ... Blast! That’s his sister over there ... shush!’
Gloria kept on serenely cleaning the door, adopting the manner of a woman who hadn’t heard a word. When Lillian was your sister-in-law, the ability to appear deaf had always been an asset. It had from the very first moment. Even at Lillian and Bob’s wedding, Gloria could recall the bridesmaids venting in the ladies’ room about how they looked like green armchairs in their high-necked pouffy, damask frocks while Lillian was a vision in slender white chiffon and a deep 1970s V-neck that revealed her untethered full breasts.
‘Channelling a Van Eyck painting my foot! She made us wear these hideous dresses on purpose so we’d look like pregnant overblown Madonnas and she’d look fabulous by comparison!’ one bridesmaid had hissed, unaware that Gloria was in the bathroom, too, and when Gloria had sailed out of the cubicle later, it had been with a sedate smile nailed to her face.
Assumed deafness had been a boon when it came to Lillian and, true to form, fifty years later, nothing had changed.
