Behind the three men, nestling next to a rucksack, there were several cans – some empty and overturned – of Special Brew. Seeing her glance at them he took hold of one and passed it to her. She shook her head and then thought that it was probably rather impolite to refuse so reached her hand out and brought the half empty can to her mouth, wondering if he would be offended if she first wiped it with a tissue.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked as she handed him back the cold can.
‘Why d’ ye wanna know?’ he said in the lilting tones that she now found oddly attractive.
‘Because if I am going to help you I will have to know everything about you.’
He laughed at that, laughter that was echoed by his incredulous friends.
‘I don’t want your help, hinny.’
‘Of course you do. You can’t want to go on living like this,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s such a waste. Because I – we – my friend and I – we can give you the life you have always wanted.’
‘And how do you know this isn’t what I’ve always wanted, like?’ he said.
There was something very proud about him, Hattie thought as she sat watching him. Despite the grime that covered him, and that awful smell, he had an unmistakable dignity. And she had been right about the eyes – they were astonishing. Brilliant – almost turquoise – blue with long black fringed eyelashes that were almost beautiful. She was curiously excited by the idea of getting to know him, if he would let her. But she was aware of his ambivalence towards her. How could she convince him to allow her into his life?
‘Look, please come with me and meet my friend and listen to what we have to say,’ she said, reaching out to stroke his dog, which snarled and spat at her.
The boy leant over to grasp the dog.
‘Doon, boy … Na, hinny, I don’t want your help,’ he said, turning away as if to indicate that this was the end of the matter.
‘Look, you must have had dreams, you must have had hopes. You surely didn’t imagine that you would spend your life sleeping rough in dirty doorways?’ she said plaintively.
‘There’s worse than this, pet,’ he said, an edge creeping into his voice.
She went quiet then because she felt foolish. How could she have expected to put her own values, her own aspirations, on to this man who had led a life of such obvious deprivation. Why had she imagined that she could impress him with talk of clean sheets, hot meals and a regular job? She had no idea how he had got here and no conception of the suffering he had seen.
‘You can help me, darlin,’ slurred one of the other men, hopefully. ‘You can take me home with you …’
‘Nah,’ said the other man, ‘it’s Jimmy she wants. It’s always Jimmy they want …’
‘Jimmy,’ said Hattie, pleased to learn his name. ‘Look, Jimmy, here’s my address, my phone number, my name. You can reach me any time on my mobile, and there is a day office number and a home number. Think about what I’ve said and call me …’ She handed him a card, which he reluctantly took.
As she left she heard his friends begin to tease him about her interest and she wanted to cry. For the tragedy of his life and her own stupidity in imagining she could save him from it.
In the days that followed, Hattie made it a habit, on her way home from work each evening, to detour via the streets of Covent Garden on the off chance of running into the boy called Jimmy.
But he seemed to have moved on or moved pitch because although she saw many other homeless people camped out in doorways near the big theatres she didn’t see him.
She did, though, encounter one of the two men who had been with him on the day of her ill-fated proposition and she attempted to persuade him to pass on a message asking Jimmy to contact her.
But still there was no sign or word from him. In desperation on the Thursday afternoon she took two hours off work in order to visit the offices of the Big Issue in the hope that they might be able to help her to reach him. But they were very nearly as suspicious of her motives as Jimmy had been himself, although they did eventually agree to leave a message pinned on their notice board.
Her mood of desolation was beginning to irritate Toby who was, in any case, totally against the idea of her rising to the bait of Jon’s bet. Her tender-hearted concern for others had been one of the things that had drawn him to her when they had first met, but nearly six years on, at a time when he was beginning to enjoy unexpected professional acclaim, he regarded her continued devotion to lost causes as naïve and unrealistic. Lord knows he was himself a devoted socialist – well, at any rate an ardent supporter of the ideals of New Labour – but he did not relish the idea of cluttering their lives – let alone their flat – with this latest sociological experiment of hers.
Besides, he was in the middle of a major case involving one of the biggest corporations in the country and he felt that he was in far greater need of support and sympathy than Hattie. Although they enjoyed what he claimed to be an equal relationship he secretly retained many of the attitudes and values of his own middle-class parents and believed that the female role in a partnership should be far more domestically rooted and nurturing than that of the male. He shouldn’t have to come home, as he had tonight, to an empty flat and fridge. Some innate sense in him thought that Hattie’s priorities were wrong, that she should put his comfort before that of the redemption of some hopeless stranger, and that his life should be more like that of his father’s – a man whose role at the head of a respectful household Toby now privately envied.
He recognised, of course, the dramatic difference between his father’s circumstances and his own. Their flat did, in fact, belong to Hattie, having been bought, several years before, with some of the income from her trust fund. His own flat – kept on but rented out after they had moved here – was a substantially less impressive property, so unimpressive that currently he was having trouble finding a tenant for it. So while his own mother had been dependent on his father (which probably did encourage a greater degree of respect) Hattie was a woman of independent means. But just because she wasn’t dependent on him for a roof over head didn’t mean that she could ignore, as she persistently did, the domestic details of their life. That weekend he was hosting, at Hattie’s apartment, a small dinner party for the more important people involved in the important case at work. And although the food was being prepared by discreet caterers – Hattie had no interest in cooking – he was concerned that in her present distracted state the dinner would be a disaster.
This feeling of doom was compounded by her arriving home, that Thursday night, at nine thirty with a bleak expression on her face, after having been on yet another hopeless search for her homeless boy.
‘Oh Toby,’ she said in a dejected voice, ‘it breaks my heart to see all those poor people with nowhere to go. I must have spoken to a hundred of them tonight and some of them looked so lost.’
‘Hattie, at the risk of sounding like Jon I really do think it’s time you gave the homeless issue a rest. I appreciate your concern, I know you’re anxious to prove him wrong, but for Christ’s sakes can’t you just get a life?’
‘I have a life, Toby,’ Hattie said coldy as she made her way through to the stainless steel kitchen in search of food.
‘There’s nothing in the fridge, Hattie. It might have been nice – after the day I’ve had – to have come home to something. A piece of hard cheese, a crust of stale bread, a rotten apple …’ he sulked.
‘Look, Toby, I just haven’t had time for any of that this week. And actually I haven’t had such a brilliant day either. I’ve got a particularly difficult case on my hands