The Parrot Tree

By Barbara Kastelin

The Parrot Tree tells the story of Vivien, a talented young Englishwoman in 1980’s suburbia who escapes the loveless marriage which suffocates her creativity, to find professional fulfilment and romance in Madison Avenue. It is also the story of Karl, a tortured genius who as a boy fled the Nazis in the sewers below Bratislava, became gardener to an Austrian baron, fathered a beautiful but illegitimate daughter, emigrated to New York in the 1950s, and eventually founded his own advertising agency.

Karl’s project is the preservation of the rainforest. His deputy, Barney, employs Vivien to assist in the location-shoot in the headwaters of the Amazon: part-paradise, part-nightmare. The model on the shoot is Leandra, Karl’s temperamental daughter. The ancient forest has powers over mankind. The filming in the jungle encounters obstacles, greater even than Leandra and her tantrums. Despite this, a love affair with Barney blossoms amidst parrots, butterflies and passion flowers. However, deep secrets rise to the surface at the death of the Baron von Keyserling when his will cannot be found. Who will inherit the estate? What tortured road had led the Baron from war-torn Czechoslovakia to fame? And how does it shape Vivien’s destiny?

The author’s personal experiences of the rainforest, of Austrian mansions, of Madison Avenue, all find their authentic expression. There is passion, an attempted murder, and political insight. The result is a rich blend of human behaviour and emotions as they come together in a novel which moves, shocks and convinces. This beautifully crafted tale will appeal to all fans of romance and adventure novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785895579

Barbara Kastelin

Barbara Kastelin was brought up in Switzerland. She studied copywriting and design at the New School NY, worked for the UN Secretary General and finally ended up in advertising in Procter & Gamble Geneva. She later married a British diplomat and had two daughters. She is now an artist, specialising in oil paintings.

Book preview

Book cover painted by the author.

Web: www.barbarakastelin.co.uk

Facebook: The-Parrot-Tree

Twitter: @BarbaraKastelin

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Copyright © 2016 Barbara Kastelin

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, eventsand incidents are either the products of the author’s imaginationor used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1785895 579

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter One Again

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

I

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Ii

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Iii

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Iv

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

V

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Vi

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Vii

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Viii

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ix

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

X

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Xi

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Xii

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Xiii

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

The well-dressed businessman faced his greatest challenge yet. The budget for the advertising campaign was over three million dollars. Hooking rimless oval spectacles over his ears, he scanned the paragraphs of the accountant’s report with a frown of concentration, while the limousine glided along the road towards Marlborough in Wiltshire. The large black Mercedes was handled by the chauffeur with care.

Outside the tinted window, a strong wind was chasing clouds across the sky, obscuring and revealing the sun at short intervals. It was ten o’clock on the fourteenth of July 1988.

His Madison Avenue agency’s next campaign had to be launched in six weeks’ time, off the drawing boards and onto the top television networks and the pages of every major magazine in the United States.

He bent his head over the file and clicked the gold pen he had pulled out to approve the budget. He signed Baron von Keyserling with a flourish. What he wanted done, he wanted done exactly and at once. There were not many who contradicted him; over the years fewer and fewer had dared. Perhaps he had become domineering, but he was the founder and president of the company, the man who held the controlling interest in its shares.

This campaign was going to sweep every award, he knew, but he would have to get his backside in gear and he was exhausted. At around sixty years old, even this morning’s meeting in the London office, had left him drained. His breath grated harshly on his lungs. He felt as if he were racing along the hot and storm-threatened road in bare feet. With growing urgency he wanted a whisky on the rocks, but that was out of the question, given the state he was in.

Offices were crippling environments: fake homes for those employed, refuges from personal pressures; but also hurtful places. Why did he remember past offices now? Those cruel hours he had spent sitting in the fancy waiting-rooms of the powerful, unreachable advertising wizards.

For years, he had peddled his passion, had tried to sell his cartoon visions, but after what had seemed an eternity in the waiting rooms, smirking secretaries had always reappeared to say that there was no job for him. Defeated, again and again he had plodded home and vented his frustration with poignantly satirical drawings which laughed at existence, in particular his own.

And then, after years of frustration, he had gone back out there and ruthlessly traded on his title and his wife’s money and background. He had started his own agency; had bought the best copywriters away from the competition. It had been the start of the crown above his head, his image and his hopeless enslavement to success.

The limousine sped past the Norland College for Nannies. While in Europe this time, he had amended his Will: his previous testament had been drawn up before his son was even born. His son! he sighed.

Despite the challenge ahead, he had decided to steal time for himself at the health farm, to ease his stress and stoke up on physical strength to see everything through. It was the wrong moment to leave the scene and go off on a retreat, even a short one. But yes, he had to admit it to himself: if he did not get air to breathe and time to think, to re-group the priorities in his life, he would fail to do a good job.

Bernhard had spelled it out: Lousy timing. Once the Press was aroused, then they were like bees before a storm and they had already heard whispers of the new project. Of course, he was a much photographed man, and the paparazzi fed coldheartedly on weakness. That’s why he disguised his age: wore contact lenses in public; concealed his dieting; pretended to be interested in what he actually was not.

The world needed his name, his strength. The Earth was ailing, and he too was responsible.

He sat in the limo, gently jolted, and felt beaten. A hearse! He was in a black hearse and he panicked, trying to breathe more quietly so as not to alarm the chauffeur.

Overstressed, Doctor Greenfeld, a specialist in diseases of the wealthy, had said. You’re tired: tired of the city, the constant demands; tired of your young and powerful wife, but most of all, you are tired of yourself.

His powerful wife: she was the only one for whom he was still softer, gentler, like his old self. He remembered her as a young girl pirouetting before him, talking back and fighting her attachment to him. Those memories, of course, he was never able to keep at bay, no matter how hard he applied himself to filling every second of every day. Despite the air-conditioning and the subtle perfume dispenser, his skin was clammy with perspiration. Feebly, he pushed the button to open the window.

They were passing a wheat field. Amidst the expanse of golden stalks worried by wind, he saw a scarecrow on a wooden stake. The dummy’s arm pointed stiffly ahead with a bright blue glove and, as in a nightmare of long ago, he felt himself slipping fatally towards a disaster he was powerless to prevent. He could only stare at the stuffed figure, whose eyes painted on sackcloth followed him. When piercing light cut back in, the face grinned as though life were comic. Straw was tweaked from the black coat’s armhole and twirled eddying into the air, as if the gesture of pointing, that he had taken so seriously, was in fact only a factitious spellbinding mime, a hoax, a prank. Bernhard! His closest friend and deputy expressed himself in mimes, aping the profound truths of life and forcing the spectator to question reality.

When the baron checked the field again, it was a different one, one without a scarecrow. The driver turned a corner, and the limo proceeded more slowly: they had entered a built-up area.

How much further?

We’ll be there in five minutes, sir.

*

Look, I’m sorry. This isn’t quite what we had in mind. The editor drums her fingers on the synopsis and the start of my new novel. Her lack of enthusiasm is an attitude only normal in one who shuffles diagonally through dog-eared daydreams by the hundred a month.

In the emulsion-white office with its functional yet expensive furniture, I watch her tensely. She looks up at me and embarks on some smart publishing jargon, possibly designed to put off the uninitiated and establish superiority over the author. Am I oversensitive?

I have disappointed her with my new project; plucked the wrong nerve with Karl in his limousine. At this time of day she has probably just eaten a heavy lunch and yearns for eupepsia rather than fiction.

She breaks off. You’re not listening.

I look up, guilty. I was listening. I give her an eager nod, my head brimming with her words which I am hastily reassembling.

Since the mid-eighties, women’s fiction has become too masculinist, too shrill, she says. This, incidentally, comes from the mouth of the Senior Fiction Editor.

And thus spoke Zarathustra.

Male characters are more often than not feminised or badly mishandled by women – Barbara Cartland transvestites. There is a loophole for adventurous heroines who still retain their traditional tag, she explains. Volumes that are substantial, without being wordy.

She must have caught me frowning, because she gets out of her chair and walks to the Venetian-blinded window. Splicing the metal blades apart gives no view; I have stood at that window. She and I have known each other for years. Experienced with people, she is a self-taught psychologist possessing the knack of handling authors. She can turn work away, yet resettle writers with a euphoric belief that they will do better next time, and with such aplomb that they ruefully regret having exposed her to mediocrity.

She lets the blind snap back into place and slowly turns, her face determined and uncompromising.

Does this mean, I wonder, that the aga saga housewife has defiantly smacked her oven glove to the flagstone floor? Not so long ago, bimbos were in, and then came the superbitches. It changes so fast; it is tough to keep up with the trend, and after all it does take time to put it down on paper.

With courage I say, I chose a male hero because…

Please don’t be offended, but the sort of man you have in mind and the things you plan him to do, I am afraid would be OTT.

You see, I am trying to…

She shoots me a sharp look. I am taking up her time. We know you can do just the thing we’re looking for. Her eyes remain suspended on mine.

Nobody has the cruelty to leave a pair of eyes thus hanging in the air, especially not if they belong to your editor. Nevertheless, I still feel the need to justify my story. I can be stubborn. Shouldn’t true fiction rest in the realm of fiction alone? How can consumer demands tamper with it?

She shrugs her shoulders under the blouse pads. I believe she will make senior editor soon. As the creative pivot, she provides women with books. Far be it from me to stand in the way. I am pushing my luck. I tend to go OTT.

*

Back at home, on the Monday on which I have promised myself I will start writing in earnest, I get up from my swivel chair and lean out of the window. Clouds are braiding themselves into a thick tress. Shirts flutter on a line in the small neighbouring garden. I see their child’s red tricycle stand on the daisied lawn. Beyond these meagre green patches, cars speed past on the road leading to Marlborough. I return to my desk.

Ah well, I will try to resist the temptation to write a novel about him. However, I also know that the subconscious has incubated him to some maturity. It will now need brutal force to sever the umbilical cord that links me to my fictive hero, despite commercial demands. He is an attractive man, a sensitive man, undoubtedly shadowed by his background, embalming his exterior with quality scents, but I have already figured out that inside is a human being afraid of bad smells: someone vulnerable who poses riddles of character more complex than any I have ever encountered.

Never mind. In fact, I am not absolutely sure how he would have fared through this story. Probably I would have had to make compromises, risking him. I could not have done that, not to him. The editor was right: men described by women often come to harm; are scorched or left smouldering too long. Anyway, he was only a few pages old.

As I close the window against the strengthening wind, I notice that the laundry has been taken from the line. And then, I watch the cars pass. It is clear that most are driven by women alone at ten o’clock in the morning, probably on their way shopping. Any of them could become my heroine. Something makes me focus on an old battered blue Mini with a silver roof, driven by a woman with blond hair. This pleases me, on this darkening day. Suddenly she accelerates to overtake a sedately moving black limousine and even hoots her horrid horn, turning her head to glance at the ostentatious car. That shows oomph. She definitely is a desirable candidate, now driving on towards Marlborough. Ah, and there is a dog in her car, a terrier curled on the passenger seat. I trust women who like dogs. For a moment I am afraid that she might resist me, stretch out her tongue at me, turn off the road to soar down a minor lane in an act of defiance, but she takes it well.

My mind made up, I watch Vivien go, now only a small silver dot, and return to my task.

Vivien’s large bay-leaf eyes diminish to slits when she laughs. The prospect of making her happy and laugh tempts me. I am now definitely set on her. Still I flounder for words to describe her satisfactorily, all of her: her creativity; her love for humans and nature; her insecurities; and the way she takes things to heart. But also her dark side; her cowardice. Time will tell. Overall, I believe that Vivien is beautiful, beautiful in her way. I could easily have gone for someone else, however now there is something reassuring in having made this choice. It brings obligations along of course, and I know that Vivien will disappoint me at times, get ahead of herself and outgrow me. I already guess at the extent of her abilities.

It starts to rain, and I begin to type.

CHAPTER ONE AGAIN

The radio babbled on softly in the kitchen about the design of the new 1988 pound coin. A darkly overcast day had invaded the house with shadows, trapping the woman in the muted gloomy atmosphere of her home.

Vivien, in slippers, shuffled around this veiled, colourless world. Her son Dominic was at school: she had taken him there earlier, wearing a raincoat over her pyjamas. She had kissed him lightly on his hair because she had not yet brushed her teeth.

Even though it was expected of the mother of an eight-year-old boy to have pulled herself together again, to be presentable, Vivien was failing. With youthful energy at first, she had joyfully explored her life as mother and housewife, expecting her horizons to expand once her darling baby became a toddler, and then again once the toddler became a little boy. Her husband and she would have more time for each other: city tours à deux could be fun; museum visits; London with all it had to offer; inviting people for meals and becoming more sociable. Vivien hoped to cook more ambitiously for guests.

Malcolm, her husband, had eventually conceded, and they visited Salisbury Cathedral. It rained all day, and the wind tore at their clothes. Her husband made her agree with him that this was not a pleasure. After that fiasco, things went on much as before – for him. She tried a couple of dinner parties, but guests made him uncomfortable; he was an ungracious host. Disappointment and emptiness laid bare her insecurity and self-consciousness. Any enrichment to her life was sacrificed to the ordinary, humdrum. Those around her, for whom she made that surrender, remained unmoved and ignorant of the enormity of it. Her strivings to shake herself free had weakened with time.

Vivien switched the radio off; shuffled from kitchen to living room to corridor, chomping on a banana, still with uncleaned teeth. Her baggy sweatshirt sagged over pyjama’d shoulders; the blond hair restrained by a twisted rubber band formed a thick loop at her neck. She paused for a moment at the orchids in their pot on the windowsill; she still made an effort to have flowers in the house. The white frosted petals surrounding the purple inner lips shone with a dim contre-jour glow, while the tentacle roots sought food and moisture from the air.

In the hall, the tall mirror decided to show Vivien a clear picture of herself, even though she had not bothered to polish it for months.

I’m falling apart and I’m only thirty-five, she said, and wiped banana-mush from her chin with the heel of her hand. I’ve lost touch. I’ve become de-socialised.

On Templeton Street outside, people passed in cars, droning, or swishing when it rained: humans with a purpose, achievements, jobs; and she had no connection to them. There would have been women two centuries ago standing where she now stood, hands on hips, watching men on oxcarts pass on the muddy track. They would have whipped the sluggish animals to progress. Women talking to each other, knowing about each other; there weren’t that many of them. When the sun went down, they would have watched, with wonder, the moon’s light over the wide stretch of unspoilt Wiltshire countryside, and then their tired heads would rest on straw-filled sacks. They still had a right to their natural minds.

How had she let it go this far? Vivien asked herself, taking a seat on the first carpeted tread of the stairs leading to the upper floor. LeRoy, the Lakeland terrier, came to her as she was at his height. She scooped him up and wrapped him in her arms, so that she saw his face. Over the prominent ribcage, both bent front paws dangled. Tenderly, she brushed his bristly fringe back, while he looked straight at her with his nutmeg eyes but in fact, she realised, did not really perceive her. All he did for her was to hold still, until he decided enough was enough and wriggled out of her arms, leaving her sitting there while he trotted back through the utility area into the garden.

She had no right to burden a dog with her problems. Surely she was not so weak as to blame them on someone else, on modern times. No-one prevented her from standing up for herself.

Her tall, older brother had left her life years ago. The inbuilt answering to him, in whatever she did, should have gone from her system. Edward was six years older, already a schoolboy when she had learned to toddle after him, to be ignored, pushed aside. White Pot, a milk pudding, he had called his little sister because she was white blonde. He was like a looming shadow in front of her, obscuring her development, breathing all the oxygen to leave her panting behind him. How he had enjoyed terrifying her with tales: like her teeth would fall out if she didn’t do this or that for him. When she had lost her first milk tooth, she was inconsolable. He is teasing you; he is fond of you, Mum calmed her down. That was easy for her to say; she had no idea what it felt like to have every day start so unfairly.

It was ridiculous to even recall those memories. Edward had married seventeen years ago and lived on his island of Guernsey with Colette, his French wife, in a childless marriage. Vivien only saw them at Christmas, at her parents. Vivien was the one who had offered her parents a grandchild. It was her trump-card, and she had made this the culmination of her achievements, hadn’t she, thereby proving her subservience. She had to step from behind the memory of a brother who appeared to live solely by egotism. Edward never had to boast of anything, as he did not doubt his own importance; she now realised, she had been the largest contributor to that.

Vivien gathered the banana skin and dropped it into the bin, in the kitchen. She closed the cookery book lying open and stuffed it back onto the shelf above the worktop. From the drawer she took a pencil and writing pad. She installed herself at the kitchen table and drew a vertical line down the centre of the page. Noticing that the pencil was dull, something she had disliked since art college, she got up and hunted for her little silver pencil sharpener in the pottery duck, and twisted the pencil in the smaller of the two holes.

Sharply, she wrote the headings Positive on the left and Negative on the right, and then rapidly wrote a list into the left-hand column: a steady husband, a lovely son, a nice house and garden, a loyal dog, supportive parents, good health, degree in art and design, natural blonde hair, green eyes, quite a few good clothes. And then she hesitated at the thought of her brother, Edward.

Vivien quickly licked the pencil tip, a bad habit of hers, and added him on the positive side. With generous calligraphy she wrote across the bottom of the sheet: Vivien, you are an idiot!

Making an abrupt decision, she got up and left the kitchen.

One hour later, she was in the Spar post office, putting up the advertisement she had just typed and printed on her white Amstrad PCW computer. It read: Fed up with the same tired old look of your business? Would you like to stand out more? Would you like to reach further? Professional advice on advertising and PR available at reasonable rates. Please call Vivien on 01672 – 48946 (mornings only).

Coming out of the shop and unhooking LeRoy’s lead from the metal hook provided for this purpose, she crossed to the curb trying not to step on the cracks between the large grey slabs which formed the space in front of the convenience shops. If she made it to the road without stepping on one of them, someone would answer her ad.

In a happy frame of mind Vivien and LeRoy walked on, and the day seemed brighter.

*

Vivien’s ad had now been pinned to the cork for two weeks, between Susan who offered ironing with pick-up and return, and Debbie boarding cats in home surroundings. Vivien hoped fervently that someone would call her; give her a chance to prove that she was grateful for all the good things in her life. At the post office counter, to get her government child allowance, she glanced conspiratorially at her advert under the thumb tack.

It was eight years ago that she had last worked in advertising, in the creative department of Kenneth Davis; eight years since she had acted the part. Cast as housewife since then, she had allowed her artistic talents to lie curled up, dormant. How could she have? Creating, drawing, painting something from her mind, something which did not exist before she made it, gave her the most exalting pleasure. Creative imagination was an animal living inside her that could never be tamed, so private a matter that she had tried to starve it. If someone called the number on the ad, she would probably panic at first. However, she should remember to thank them for calling and say yes to their task, no matter how long it had been. PR, advertising, what was it, actually? There was no right or wrong, only opinions and tastes, art and graphic design; ideally rolled into a product pleasing to mind and eye. Even that had to contend with fashions, fads and trends, market analysis and, last but not least, budgets. It was as complicated as that. Damn it, she had to have enough courage to try it again: it was as simple as that. Perhaps merely the oomph to advertise in Spar was, in itself, creatively daring enough.

Don’t kid yourself, Vivien. Man up, as her father would say. You can do it; you are Vivien Donachi.

*

Three days later someone telephoned, a Nigel Patman. Vivien geared herself up, while Nigel exposed the problems of running his father’s transport business in Marlborough. He rather painfully searched for words to describe how the old man never wanted things changed, resisted even getting new vehicles. Vivien saw the struggle between a domineering father and an insecure, but more ambitious son who was seeking her help. Could she help? Was she qualified to do so?

Of course she wanted to help, shine even. Vivien put her back into reassuring him that the wish to upgrade his haulage company was entirely laudable; that this, their first conversation did not commit him to anything. She appeased him with her assurance that she was a professional, would give preliminary thought to how to modernise Charles Patman & Son, and suggested they met.

Gone was the blinking-in-the-daylight look in front of Dominic’s school. The polished mirror in the hall showed a focused Vivien: one dressed in a denim skirt and a crisp white Italian sailor’s shirt, the buckle on the wide elastic belt forming a perfect silver lozenge over her small waist. The blond curls were blown out and sprayed – a lioness ready to pounce at Nigel Patman’s haulage firm. Women could do things these days. Maggie Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, stood in yesterday’s news in front of Number Ten with Ronald Reagan, as if they were holding hands. Maggie helping Ronald to rule the world. Yes, ma’am.

Vivien had begun her homework by finding out as much as she could about the Patmans and about lorry transportation – fifty tonne drawbar trailers, six wheeled trucks, and flat-beds – with some help from Dominic who found his mother’s intense interest in his toy-truck collection goofy. Vivien was rewarded: Nigel Patman called to say he was ready to see her.

*

The meeting was the fourteenth of July 1988, a Thursday, and her battered blue R-registered Morris Mini-Minor with a silver roof sped along the road to Marlborough in easy traffic. Cumulus clouds multiplied, rising from two sides of the horizon, as cars rolled on the grey asphalt ribbon leading through the countryside. Vivien drove the Mini, her face close to the windscreen, rocking the small leather steering wheel, her fingers sensually curled around it. A sticker in the back window read What’s Up?, and a contorted Garfield looked between his legs at his own backside – a gift from her son.

You are not actually sticking that on your car? Malcolm had sneered incredulously. Her husband, Malcolm, preferred to take the bus to the train station. Whenever she did drive with him, she became tense because he could not help but point out that she didn’t pay enough attention to other motorists, that she was speeding, indicating the wrong way. On outings with her mother, there was always the risk of getting lost because they both chattered about so much, in such a random way, that Where the hell are we now? was a frequent occurrence.

Today, on the way to her first job, she only had LeRoy for company and support. He was curled up next to her on the passenger seat, uncommunicative. After whatever his mistress was doing today, there would be shopping, like every Thursday, the dog knew and was resigned to suffer patiently.

At present, Vivien noticed on the road in front of her a large black Mercedes. It stood out by its sedate speed. She pushed down her foot and roared out of her dreaming, accelerating to overtake, tooting her discordant horn at the same time. A quick glance to the side showed her the head of a man, eyes closed, mouth agape as if gulping for air. Where was the impaired man being driven to in that fancy limousine? She felt some guilt for having hooted: the image of the man in pain lingered.

*

Charles Patman & Son’s business was conducted through an old coach entrance in a row of tall, dark red-bricked Victorian houses. The small office was under the arch, and the lorry fleet parked in the sizeable tarmacked yard beyond.

Looking for something, Miss? One of two idling drivers swaggered over and splayed a large hand onto the Mini’s roof, overwhelming her with his cigarette breath, and the odour of salt and vinegar crisps on his jersey. Looking for someone, Miss?

The manager, Nigel Patman.

We can help. We always help damsels with little doggies.

Excuse me, she pressed out and walked to the door under the arch.

Behind her back, she heard luscious and blondie. Changing her mind, she returned to the car to take LeRoy with her.

Inside the office Nigel Patman stood at the window from where he had seen her arrival. Vivien’s imagined scenario: her dazzling display of ideas; generous arm movements embracing the fleet of vast transport vehicles; admiration from Nigel and the office staff – all this de-fizzed when the short balding man of about forty offered her a limp, damp hand in greeting. In the backroom, at a square bakelite kitchen table next to a sink piled with unwashed mugs and plates, she managed to get this tense man to relax enough to sit down and invite her to do the same so that they could talk.

There the two of them were: an uptight man who knew a change could lead to success but did not dare go there; and an insecure woman who believed she could help make that change but lacked the confidence to impose herself. At the same time a leaking tap popped on unwashed chinaware. Perhaps Susan who offered ironing was doing better; perhaps Debbie’s cat-sitting led to improvement of lifestyle. What was she, Vivien, doing in here, so out of her habitual context?

Nigel waited for her to say something and from the yard came the raw sound of unpleasant laughter.

Those drivers out there are not nice.

I know, he said and bent down to stroke the head of LeRoy, who had chosen to sit at his feet looking up.

Mr Patman, she started and then told him that the initial impression of the Charles Patman & Son business was negative. Its existence was hidden under the arch. She told him that there was lack of respect for the management from the drivers. He listened and stroked the dog. She found the élan to continue. There is no discipline, and the impression is messy. Furthermore, the two vehicles in the yard are unattractive and dirty, even for lorries.

He piped up to tell her that the fleet worked hard, mostly hauling up north, but that they had one contract for Calais which was good business. Good business, he repeated.

Vivien felt some of her old self emerge as she sat at this dirty table in the dim light. A cleaning-up had to be done. A logo invented. Someone & Son businesses were old fashioned. Now, in 1988, colours identified a business throughout, on lorries, letterheads, bills of lading, advertising and, in large format, over the arch. She told him that she had given such a logo some thought: Patman was a good name; the PAT could be graphic and the MAN a stylised man standing feet apart, hands on hips, ready for action.

How much do you charge for this advice? he asked tentatively.

Vivien had prepared a handsome figure, but said £375 instead.

What colour for the lorries? he asked, and she assumed he asked because the money she had mentioned was acceptable. All this guessing was painfully unprofessional.

The colour is up to you. Perhaps one which relates to something for you or your business?

Purple. Purple is my favourite colour, he said. Definitely purple.

That was the last colour she had played with in her mind, but why not? It would make a statement.

Purple Patman lorries. Perfect for recall. Looking for hauling goods? Those purple lorries, purple letters. Purple, leading to P and Patman, the solid man standing there to trust.

You are good, he said, his eyes alive with pleasure. I wish this were possible.

Her shoulders sank down. Your father, she said. Her time was wasted here.

Before jumping into the car, LeRoy made a detour, cocked his hind leg and peed against the front wheel of the largest lorry.

Leaving Marlborough to drive up to Swindon, Vivien said, I’m afraid there will be no celebrating with a glass of wine and a piece of chewy. Picking up work after years of motherhood was obviously like wading in wellies.

No harm was done. Nobody she knew would hear of this. She had left her full name and address behind, in case Nigel decided to grow up, while she returned to her life as it was. At least she had had the thrill of talking PR with someone today, and tomorrow she would persist in her quest for a fuller life.

Vivien rolled the button on the car radio, searching through cacophony. Yes, she mouthed as We’ll be Together from Sting’s Nothing like the Sun album was announced. Now that was a man who looked vulnerably attractive, but had so much personal strength. She hummed along to the tune and stalled the Mini at a roundabout. Revving to drive on, she stalled again. LeRoy lifted his head from his flank.

Okay, I should concentrate on driving.

The presenter played an excerpt from an interview with Sting, enthusing about his new humanitarian goal of saving the Amazon rainforest. They played Fragile, the haunting song about the fragility of the earth. Humans took the earth for granted to ransack for their selfish gain. The guilt was growing but the fault was someone else’s, always.

As she engaged in a wide curve for a roundabout, the dog reacted with alarm; scrambled up to stand with leg muscles stiff and eyes wide, counter-balancing the