The next morning involves awkward phone communications galore. It begins with Samreen Shah—Harriet thought they were supposed to be having lunch together. They hadn’t made a date or anything like that, but Samreen has been at the library from Monday to Friday for the past three months, and almost every lunchtime she and Harriet have chewed salad together in the café as they exchange details of their morning’s reading. Lunchtime was when Harriet would tell Samreen what those members of the Salinas family who kept diaries and household accounts got up to in the years between 1300 and 1400 (mostly traveling Western Europe with troubadours and/or dying of the plague), and Samreen would tell Harriet about the feral camels of Australia, their exploits, plight, and eradication. Then they’d return to their desks with fresh energy for the research ahead. But Samreen doesn’t come to lunch today, and when Harriet phones her, it transpires that Samreen moved to Manchester with her husband over the weekend. This is also the phone call during which Harriet discovers that Samreen hasn’t saved her phone number, forgot Harriet’s name very soon after first being told it, and in fact doesn’t recall exchanging numbers at all, so it’s difficult for Harriet to get Samreen to understand who she’s even talking to. Samreen is a bit alarmed that Harriet knows so much about the book she’s working on, and as Harriet does the necessary reframing of their acquaintanceship, her memory of their lunchtimes is altered too. Samreen never really looked her in the eyes, never called her by name, and never instigated contact. Harriet was the one who’d sit down at Samreen’s table, mistakenly thinking that Samreen had been scanning the room for her. The talking was to pass the time; there was no Harriet-specific content whatsoever.
Harriet takes out her pocket mirror and looks at the face she no longer asks anything of. No use wondering why it doesn’t register as distinct; it just doesn’t. That’s just as it should be: striking types never get left in peace. She widens her mouth around her vowels and reapplies her lipstick at the same time as she wishes Samreen all the best. Samreen wishes Harriet all the best too, and though it should stop there, the conversation somehow continues. Harriet sucks her middle finger so there won’t be any lipstick on her teeth, and when the call finally ends, she feels somewhat mangled but also relieved that she at least made herself useful to Samreen, had provided an outlet for the minutiae Samreen needed to blurt out before discarding. This is, however, the sort of thing that makes Harriet afraid to think about her other relationships and how one-sided they may or may not have been. Aristide Kercheval may be Harriet’s benefactor, but he’s also the only person who has ever been up front with her about using her. Which makes him the only person she feels comfortable using. Her work on the Salinas family annals is a favor to Ari, and a well-paid one. It’s been a few months since they last spoke, and Harriet is about to send Ari an update when her phone lights up with a call from Perdita’s school. It’s Mrs. Scott, the school secretary, inquiring about Perdita’s absence. Harriet knows this drill. She tells Mrs. Scott that Perdita’s unwell. Nothing too serious, I hope . . . Mrs. Scott hasn’t forgotten that the first time Harriet covered for Perdita, she managed to imply that Perdita had contracted meningitis. Harriet calls the GP to book an appointment so that Perdita can be provided with a sick certificate, and then she calls Perdita to ask what happened to giving notice before bunking off school. Perdita doesn’t answer, and some questions begin to occur to Harriet. Mrs. Scott hadn’t mentioned the history class trip to Canterbury. If the entire class had gone on an overnight trip, why expect Perdita alone to turn up at school as normal the next morning? Come to think of it, why does a school trip from London to Canterbury need to be an overnight trip at all? The school letter had been vague about that, but Harriet had signed the permission slip and handed over cash anyway. She’d prefer not to call Mrs. Scott back unless she really has to, so she calls Alesha Matsumoto, whose son, Fitz, is in Perdita’s history class. Alesha’s phone rings unanswered. So does Abigail Klein’s phone, and Emil Szep’s. Then she remembers she has to ask the group to get an answer, and she sends a group text saying she’s lost the school letter and asking what time the A level history class are due back from Canterbury.
Abigail replies first: canterbury when? did they go this morning
Then Emil: Why would they go to Canterbury? A bit off-syllabus, no?
Alesha just sends a question mark.
Harriet texts Perdita: What’s going on? and signs off with three tangerines, their emoji code for love. It would be three oranges, like in Prokofiev’s symphonic suite, but iMessage doesn’t offer an orange emoji. She returns to her window-seat project: preparing a comprehensive family chronicle for a descendant who doesn’t like reading. “Just the turning points, please,” this descendant told Aristide Kercheval, and Harriet has been following that brief for half a year, hacking decades down to paragraphs. The result will be one volume, and ultimately she wants it to read like Spring and Autumn Annals. Simple sentences in which maelstroms crystallize: Peter Salinas was born to every advantage and lost them all one by one, and then ninety-nine years later, John and Christina Salinas paid down generations of debt and became creditors. The Salinases in between lay low—perhaps it takes that long to forget certain blows and to gather strength. And all the while the seasons passed, as they do, without telling us anything at all, not even whether they will come again. They only turn their blank faces to us as they go by.
The library closes, and Perdita still hasn’t texted back. She’s a girl who’ll bunk off school because she feels like going for a spa day with her grandma, but Margot is working and says Perdita isn’t with her today. It’s dawning on Harriet that she should’ve checked Perdita’s whereabouts before lying for her, but it’s OK, a lesson learned. She goes on to night school in a classroom at the local college near her house, paces in front of the whiteboard as the slate-colored seats slowly fill up. Harriet’s class always starts late and often ends a little before the time stated in the course catalog.
Most of her students arrive from jobs as cleaners and builders and nail technicians, and many will go on to other jobs or go back to work after the class. But for three hours a week Harriet’s ten students set aside their fear of falling into verbal traps and give Macbeth a chance, and Jekyll and Hyde, and a selection of Romantic poets. They hadn’t passed GCSE English at sixteen, for various reasons: they hadn’t been in the country, or they had had other things on their minds at the time, or it had been predicted that they’d fail and they’d done as they were told. Every member of this class is under the impression that they are thick, and every single one of them is the opposite. Passing the GCSE now probably won’t improve their job prospects or raise their estimation in the eyes of their family and friends. Betty’s shy cunning as she whispered, “Alf thinks I’m at the bingo . . .” When Betty said this, some gaudy joy flew through Harriet, chirping and fluttering like a canary. The mad canary sings not only for Betty but for the whole obstinate bunch. No need to rationalize this endeavor to anybody outside the class. Their curiosity and readiness to sail through storms of meaning makes Thursday Harriet’s favorite day of the week, though she does occasionally worry about Shura, who has failed this exam three times, even though she’d studied hard and studied from her son’s revision notes.
“Dima gets A’s . . . just don’t understand how this can be,” Shura says with a sigh.
A GCSE exam paper is no place for unorthodox theory. Harriet tells Shura that her gloriously abandoned response to a book she likes, basically that of a living being full of contradictory impulses running off into the night with another living being full of contradictory impulses, is largely incompatible with exam language. Shura zips up her puffa jacket, tucks her chin into the collar, and mutters that glorious abandon is nice, but sometimes in life it’s good to be able to answer questions in the language in which they are asked. Shura needs to know she can do that if she chooses to, so she would like to get an A this time. Harriet promises her at least a C as long as she demonstrates passing familiarity with a handful of established terms and concepts. Shura says a C will do. She says that very quickly, as if the prospect will be taken off the table if she isn’t prompt with an affirmation of interest. At this point Shura just wants a grade.