Harriet's Arrangement

Focus, Harriet

Alone at home later that evening, sitting on the sofa not watching the TV that was playing a quiz show that she had very little interest in and slowly sipping a glass of wine, Harriet found herself going over the afternoon's events. No part of her wanted to share this with Eva and Lily; she couldn't imagine what they would say. And she and Danny didn't talk about things like that. She almost laughed at the idea of speaking to her parents, mortified at the very thought. The way Malcolm had handled the situation seemed to her to be utterly baffling. Had he really just wanted to punish her for causing a problem at the event? She couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more than that – the deliberate, methodical way in which he had gone about the whole thing... his rules, the corner time... she couldn't deny a sense of morbid curiosity about it all. And when she thought too hard about the spanking... she shook herself very deliberately, and stood up quite abruptly, not allowing the thought to form.

She walked purposefully back through to the kitchen and put the screw cap back on the bottle of Chardonnay she had opened that evening and put it back in the fridge. That's quite enough of that, she thought firmly to herself, washing the now empty glass in the sink and standing it carefully on the draining board. But the uncomfortable thought hovered at the edge of her mind, and as she returned to the sofa with a glass of water and an open box of chocolates, she couldn't help feeling a strange twisting sensation in her belly. She flicked the TV over to a channel showing something that was more likely to hold her attention – a murder mystery, in this instance – and focussed hard on it, absent-mindedly picking a chocolate out of the box without looking. It turned out to be a generic praline, and she savoured the ordinariness of it, blocking everything else out of her mind.

***

On her way into work the following day, Tom handed her her usual coffee and mentioned that they hadn't caught up in a while. "I could catch you on your lunch break?" he suggested.

"Sure, that would be nice," Harriet said, smiling at him, "One o'clock?"

"Perfect," Tom said, "I'll be here!"

Harriet fidgeted her way through her morning of meetings, sitting on her uncomfortably bruised bottom, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend a good amount of time walking to meet Tom for lunch. She carefully chose the sofa side of the table, and lowered herself gingerly onto the seat, wincing only slightly as she did so. Tom spotted her before she was settled and came over to join her, giving her a curious look.

"You alright?" he asked, sliding a coffee across the table to her.

"Mmm, yeah, fine, sore back," she invented, smiling, "Thanks for the coffee," she said, wrapping her hands around it, "How are you doing?"

He raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly. "I'm good," he said, after a minute during which he was clearly trying to work out whether to push her any further on the matter and deciding against it, "Major breakthrough with chapter eight this week, and the whole thing is just flowing now."

"That's amazing!" she said, "Congratulations!"

"Thanks, Hattie," he smiled, "I can't tell you how good it feels."

They liked to share details of their writing with one another, but his was so historically complex that he often spent as much time explaining the context as he did the plot. She knew so little about the period of history that he specialised in that she felt their conversations these days were more like history lessons than authors exchanging notes. But Tom quite often bounced plot details and character development thoughts off her – should this man be as frustrated as he is with his wife for her fierce independence, or would it be better if his support was alluded to earlier in the novel? How would she feel if she was in the same position? – and she did the same when she was musing about new ideas, although at the moment these were quite fragmented, and she was currently much preferring focussing on him. She enjoyed that their conversations mostly revolved around writing, exchanging thoughts and ideas, being honest with one another. It was something that, of course, she shared with her course-mates – but this seemed somehow more organic and natural.