Damage
No-one had ever told her she was beautiful. Not said it and meant it. There had been lots of boys who’d said something similar, assuming flattery and a kind word was all it took to be rewarded with her favours. And sometimes it had, but usually only when she was lonely or bored or victim of a little too much wine on a Saturday evening. If she worked late, as she sometimes did, her encounters with friends were shaped by the fact that they had already been drinking for a while, served in bars by someone just like her. When she was in the mood she would strive to join in with the bonhomie and general abandon, that was when their flattery worked best. But sooner or later she would realise they were just boys with no real interest in her; no interest in anything but satisfying themselves. Sometimes this realisation would occasionally dawn on mornings when she would wake up somewhere new; strangely homogenous bedrooms even though each and every one of them was unique. More than once she had woken in the middle of the night in such places and found herself swamped by the drab certainty of having made another mistake and so slipped away before dawn. Once or twice enlightenment took a little longer; it had taken nearly four months before she saw through Sam - though catching him in bed with a mutual acquaintance was what really drew back the veil. Perhaps that had been the lowest point of all. So she had berated herself, told herself to ‘get a grip’ and ‘pull herself together’ - a mantra which worked well enough for a while until she became bored or lonely once again.
Yet if you had asked her what she was looking for, softened your words to make the enquiry seem as caring as possible, she would have struggled to articulate her goal, in all probability telling you precisely what it wasn’t rather than what it was: not drifting from one shit waitressing job to the next; not getting paid peanuts for working her arse off; and not being weak when it came to giving in too easily. Not that she was that kind of girl. Unlike Abi who was in many ways her yardstick, the epitome of what she was determined to never let herself become. Careless Abi whose judgement was worse than anyone’s, whose capacity for reckless abandonment seemed to know no bounds, and who would regularly chide her for failing to ‘let her hair down’. Three years in the UK and, even if she had not entirely lost her East European accent, Kara’s knowledge of English colloquialisms was sufficiently substantive to know what people really meant most of the time. To be any good working in restaurants and bars she’d had to learn quickly, the textbook language she’d been fed at school inadequate in such environments.
Which was one of the reasons she’d been taken aback when he’d said “you know, Kara, you are beautiful”. Not only had no-one ever said that to her before, he had said it properly, meaningfully, without resorting to slang or swearing; the words he used passed the test of being ‘grown-up’, ‘adult’. Perhaps above all else, they had been understood - not by her, but by him. And he had said them without any apparent devious intent or self-serving ambition. She truly believed he had spoken - “you know, Kara, you are beautiful” - because he was being honest. Yet even taking all this into account, what surprised her most of all was the notion itself, his premise. How could he say such a thing, applying a quality to her against which - in her own estimation - she fell so far short? She thought, for example, that her face was slightly too broad, her nose slightly too large; she had always assessed as her hair as being a little too straight; she felt her build a tad stocky and her thighs a little fat - a fact of which she was reminded every time she forced herself into the tight pairs of black jeans restaurants and bars tended to insist she wore. “It helps take the punters’ minds off the crap food” a bar manager had told her once. In her more generous moments - and in spite of the myriad of ‘too this’ or ‘too that’ with which she labelled herself - she was prepared to concede she was passable enough and that her figure was decent. She knew she looked good in a bikini for example, and when she really made an effort - make-up, the works - then maybe the mirror might award her seven-out-of-ten. But ‘beautiful’? That was nine-out-of-ten territory!
There were lots of girls like her of course: Caro, Anna, Trudi. To her they all seemed slimmer, prettier, and made the most out of what they had been gifted. Anna, now pregnant for the second time, hadn’t wasted a day since she’d arrived in England with Kara and the others, a little squadron of university-educated Europeans landing at Gatwick and seeking Nirvana. Anna’s plan was the most clearly defined, and she was prepared to use whatever tactic required to see it through. Toby, who she’d met after three months’ working in Brighton, hadn’t really stood a chance, seduced by her easy manner and the way her accent caressed words and made his native language seem exotic. Kara had met him briefly the last time Anna had come north for a reunion, the four of them dispersed around the country soon enough, eventually needing to resort to coordinated and therefore infrequent catch-ups to compare notes and geography. Inevitably Kara judged Sam against Toby if only to try and assess how close she had been to fulfilling her own version of ‘the dream’ - or to confirm that she’d had a lucky escape. Like Sam, Toby seemed little more than a boy: yes, he was older than Anna by a couple of years, and yes, he had a good job in the city which funded their semi-detached suburban lifestyle; nonetheless to Kara he was little more than a youth. In comparison - and even taking all Sam’s plus points into consideration - her conclusion was that she’d had a lucky escape. When they had all last met, Sam had been old news and, in consequence, her debrief on the state of her love life amounted to no more than a perfunctory update. Sitting outside a canal-side pub in Nottingham (it being Caro’s turn to act as ‘hostess’), Kara’s seismic event - “you know, Kara, you are beautiful” - was still four months hence; she had no more chance of predicting that than the winning lottery numbers, a crossed-fingers two-pounds-a-week addiction she tolerated because it kept alive the dream of having the freedom to experience life through a lens that didn’t involve reliance on a Sam or a Toby.
Having tried working (adopting a portfolio of jobs similar to Kara’s own), Caro had eventually returned to studying. Ever since they’d arrived in England, she had confessed to feeling unfulfilled academically in spite of the degree she’d gained before leaving home; so she found herself a post-graduate course at Nottingham University, indulging her passion for ancient history. If she rarely spoke about men it was either because they didn’t much matter to her or because she was an ultra-private person. Kara was unable to be certain which it was, but knowing Caro found her studies totally absorbing, favoured the former. What she had in common with Anna was that, in their different ways, they were living out their dreams - as Trudi would soon be once she had completed her nurse’s training in Bristol. Leaving Nottingham that Sunday evening (the last time they had been together) how could Kara feel anything other than that she was the odd-one-out, still adrift with no course plotted?
He had become a regular at the café - even though it wasn’t a particularly special café at all, but rather a tea room attached to the municipal art gallery. On perhaps his second or third visit he had told her he didn’t like chain coffee shops because, although they were friendly enough, he felt the staff were just going through the motions, and, as a patron, he was entirely inconsequential. The gallery’s tea room was a more personal experience, a ‘one off’. He said he loved art and, even though the main displays changed infrequently, liked to visit regularly; for him, the real joy came from the two rooms used for temporary exhibitions and which in consequence were in a general state of flux. Finding something new was always wonderful. So she got used to seeing him, initially perhaps twice a month, and then recently as much as twice a week. She became familiar with what he ordered depending on whether he was visiting in the morning or the afternoon; the day she had suggested Earl Grey and a scone (no cream!) before he had requested them prompted his first use of her name, clearly visible on her royal blue and gold badge.
He was not the only regular patron of the tea room, nor the only one who used her name. Kara liked her regulars, their friendliness; she liked knowing something about them, the titbits they shared with her helped form a connection, their reward being a little extra attention when she was able to offer it. There were the Clarke sisters who turned up on the first Wednesday of every month, travelling from the opposite sides of the city to spend the morning triangulating their lives. Often, Jane (the younger of the two) would say “it looks like a three-pot morning today, Kara” - a sign that she and her elder sibling would chat on through until lunchtime. And Mr Bostock who broke into his pension every Thursday morning with tea - “nice and strong, Kara!” - and two well-browned crumpets. If the sisters and Mr Bostock helped provide a drumbeat to her working week, then the sporadic and unpredictable appearance of her new admirer offered a lift to her day. And was that he was, an admirer? It sounded an unwholesome appellation, though one she was fairly sure Caro or Trudi would use if she told them about him. Anna would probably surface a more agricultural term! But would she tell them? After all, what was there to tell, really?
She knew little about him beyond his preferences for comestibles and tea, although he had confessed his name - Charles (he hated ‘Charlie’!) - and that he was a University lecturer ‘on sabbatical’. It was a phrase which had immediately prompted questions; conscious of her position, they remained unasked. If you were to have caught sight of him across a gallery floor what would you have seen? A man probably in his forties, impeccably dressed with a penchant for tweed jackets and matching waistcoats. His shirts were always plain but never dull, with a preference for the blue end of the spectrum, their shades ranging from the most subtle pastels to the garishly bold. He usually wore brown shoes - well polished brogues seemed his favourite - and between the shoes and the jacket, trousers that were nearly always casual but never slovenly. Kara had categorised his face as ‘kind’ from very early on. It was slightly elongated and angular, and she never saw him anything other than clean shaven. Circular-rimmed glasses adorned his nose behind which lively dark brown eyes would scan the scene. His hair, parted to one side and swept back, was longer than fashionable and, though also brown, already betrayed early traces of grey. To Kara it seemed entirely appropriate that Earl Grey should be his favourite type of tea - not that she had any idea what an Earl should look like! And that was how she occasionally thought of him, an Earl. Yes, he looked entirely like a university lecturer, and Caro probably had numerous tutors who fitted the same identikit profile; yet Kara knew there had to be more to him than that, after all he was as far removed from the likes of Toby and Sam as it was possible to be. Overall, he had the air of a man who knew things - perhaps himself most of all. He looked intelligent and gave the impression that when he walked around the gallery he would know what he was looking at. There was nothing frivolous or superficial in his demeanour, which inevitably suggested a sense of purpose. Here was a powerful combination - this capacity for seriousness and knowledge, allied to Kara’s simple assessment that he seemed ‘kind’ - which endowed his words with weight. So how could he not have meant it when he said “you know, Kara, you are beautiful”? After all, did he not understand what beauty was? Had the many hours spent pacing the gallery (and other galleries elsewhere, Kara assumed) not qualified him to be able to say what was - and what was not - beautiful? There could be nothing superficial about him from that perspective. Others might point to his jackets and waistcoats and accuse him of being showy; they might raise an eyebrow at the way he insisted on keeping his hair a little on the long side; they might ask the question Kara felt unable to - exactly what did ‘on sabbatical’ mean? - and do so with a knowing timbre in their voice.
Yet Kara did none of those things, which in itself raised a question which required answering. She liked him as a customer in the same way that she liked Mr Bostock or the Clarke sisters - indeed as she preferred to think she liked all her customers - but from the moment that afternoon when she placed his tea and scone in front of him as he sat at his favourite table in the corner of the tea room and told her she was beautiful, what then? Something happened at that point. He was no longer ‘Charles, her customer’; he became someone else, if for no other reason than at some unknown point Kara had, for him, ceased to be simply the girl who served him tea.
His change of status did not arise simply because he had called her beautiful, but because of the process leading up to that moment: he had noticed her, marked her out, individualised her, examined her as he might have a painting on the gallery walls; at some point she had ceased to be anonymous and became ‘Kara’, with qualities he deemed needed recognition. Inevitably this meant how she saw him had to change too. In her head the voices of Anna, Caro and Trudi fought to have their say, overlaying their own experiences and prejudices, jumping to their own conclusions. Anna, the mercenary one, would tell her to make hay while the sun shone, and use terms like ‘Sugar Daddy’, encouraging Kara to take advantage of the situation for who knew where it might lead? Caro might shrug her shoulders and tell her that the world was full of such men, most of whom were only feigning intellectual superiority; she might say that once you scratched the surface, the veneer inevitably ended up behind your fingernails; so Kara should be wary, run a mile. Always the considerate one - as her chosen profession demanded - Trudi’s view would be more balanced, more romantic. Harbouring an unspoken desire to be swept off her feet one day by dashing young doctor, there were elements in Kara’s story that played to her own dreams. Unable to resolve the contrary views, Kara’s predicament remained solely her own.
How many factors did she need to consider? And if she were weighing them on some kind of scale, how would she define the extremes - and what would tip the balance either way? He had said “you know, Kara, you are beautiful” as if it were an incontrovertible fact that simply needed stating; he had not followed it with anything other than a smile, turning his attention to buttering his scone. He appeared to have expected nothing from her as a consequence of his statement - presumably other than the inevitable blush on her cheeks - and had not pressed her further. As far as she could see there appeared to be no motivation other than to register a truth, and neither was it the first move in an opening gambit. It was as if an invisible full stop after ‘beautiful’ brought the matter to an end. Had it done so, from his perspective? How could it from hers? If the ground had shifted between them - for her at least - how did she now feel about him? Had his words loosed any stirrings of attraction? There could be no doubt that he was a reasonably handsome man, even if his was the persona of a slightly outdated ‘cavalier intellectual’; perhaps ten years earlier he might have been at his peak - and five years before that entirely irresistible. But if he was in his early forties as Kara suspected, then he was almost old enough to be her father, and this endowed Anna’s imagined ‘Sugar Daddy’ comment with a second meaning. But Kara told herself age wasn’t the primary consideration here. What if he had followed up his statement with something else, a proposal, a suggestion? The offer of dinner perhaps, couched in such a way as to seem logical, generous, unthreatening. Under those circumstances she would have been pressed into something entirely binary. Deciding which way to jump would have forced the application of a fresh lens onto his declaration of her beauty - one which confirmed she accepted what he said at face value, or one which dismissed his words as a cheap and grubby salvo.
As it transpired, she had limited time for deliberation. He next crossed the tea room’s threshold just two days later, and with less than half-an-hour before it was due to close. Kara was already well into her routine of cleaning the tables to ensure they would be ready for the following morning when something made her look up from where she was working. Charles paused at the door, then, having caught her eye, made his way to his usual table. Surprised to see him there - around three o-clock was his normal arrival time for afternoon visits - she wiped her hands on her apron and walked over to where he sat. Although from a distance he appeared no different to normal, once she was standing across the table from him it was evident something was amiss; he had clearly not shaved since she had seen him last, and his jacket-shirt combination lacked its usual harmony.
“I’m afraid all the scones are gone,” she offered, trying to focus on her role.
“Of course,” he replied with a tired smile. “Just a coffee will be fine, Kara, thank you.”
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
He never drank coffee in the afternoon. As she walked back to the counter, she wondered if the coffee was to keep him awake, or perhaps there had been some bad news and he had been knocked out of kilter - hence the timing of the visit, his appearance, his choice of beverage.
“He’s late today isn’t he?” said Angie as she passed Kara the coffee, nodding in Charles’ direction. “Ten more minutes and I wouldn’t have served him.”
Placing the cup on a tray with a small pot of milk and bowl of sugar - even though she knew he required neither - Kara wondered if he had indeed arrived ten or more minutes later whether she would have gone behind the counter and prepared his drink herself.
She put the coffee, milk and sugar on the table in front of him along with the bill. Charles glanced at the assemblage, smiled just a little, then looked up at her.
“Thank you, Kara.” Then, as she turned to go and resume her end-of-day chores, he said, “Actually, I wonder if I might have a word.” It was enough for her to stop and look back at him. He registered the look on her face. “Not now, obviously. But once you’ve finished here. Just five minutes. I’ll wait outside. If you don’t mind. Please.”
The gallery was set back from the road. A three-storey u-shaped construction designed to look older than it actually was, it embraced a small stone-flagged courtyard with a fountain at its centre; between the fountain and the building, six wooden benches stood guard. Often, when the weather was good, tea room patrons might ask for their drinks to be served in takeaway-style cups and their food on paper plates so that they could sit outside in the sun. The gallery management had debated the possibility of upgrading the simple benches to proper tables and chairs thereby positively encouraging people to use the courtyard as an official extension of the café. Although no decision had yet been taken, in Angie’s view it was “just a matter of time”, bemoaning the likelihood of having more people to serve, more distance to cover, and not being paid a penny extra for doing so.
Having completed her work slightly more rapidly than usual - and eschewing the customary end-of-day chit-chat with Angie - Kara emerged from the building some forty minutes later to find Charles sitting on a bench in the left-hand corner of the courtyard. He waved, briefly and unnecessarily.
“Are you okay?” She had come to a halt in front of him.
“Please.” He motioned to the vacant space alongside him.
Kara hesitated for a moment, long enough to assess size of the gap and how far she would be from him. Once sitting down, she looked out towards the road, establishing her bearings to it, clarifying her route should she need to make a rapid getaway. On the pavement, people were making their way home from work, and the two nearby bus stops had small queues forming. Feeling secure, she turned to look at him. His head was bowed slightly; he seemed to be focussed on his hands which were resting in his lap.
“I wanted,” he said without moving, “to apologise.” Then he looked up. “For what I said the other day. It was - inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
She was instantly confused, though not to what he was referring.
“That’s okay. I mean, I didn’t take offence or anything.” She expected him to smile, to show some sign of relief.
“Good.” He paused. “But it was still wrong of me to say what I said.”
“Wrong? You mean it wasn’t true?”
She wasn’t sure what hit her the hardest: the idea that he had lied to her, or the possibility that she wasn’t beautiful after all but rather - as she had always believed - plain and ordinary. As she juggled both notions for a split second, it became clear that neither would be without collateral damage.
“No. Of course not.” Seeing the concern on her face, Charles tried a smile. “It was absolutely true. You are… But that doesn’t alter the fact that I shouldn’t have said it, compliment or otherwise. And certainly not in your working environment where you could have no opportunity respond as you might have wished. You would have been perfectly justified in slapping my face… It was actually a selfish thing to say. I said it more for my own benefit than yours, I fear; as if I was proving something to myself, how clever and mature I was, and without any regard as to how you might react.” Prompted by his own words, he paused to allow her to respond. She did not. “It only hit me later that evening. I went from feeling smug, very pleased with myself, to being absolutely horrified at what I’d done. And all in a heartbeat. I wanted to apologise immediately, but couldn’t. I wanted to come yesterday to do so, but couldn’t. This is the first chance I’ve had, though the damage may have already been done.”
“Damage?”
“To me, certainly - but I don’t care about that. But to you. What must you have thought of me, or of yourself even? What might my words have made you think, or do? One can’t say anything like that - or anything at all really - without there being consequences of some kind. I only hope they haven’t been too great. For you, that is. And that you’ll forgive me.”
There was no point in denying the train of thought initiated by what he had said. All that self-analysis, the asking ‘what if?’, the internal dialogues with her friends; undoubtedly he had been responsible for those. But ‘damage’? Kara wasn’t sure about that. Had a revised consideration of herself - all predicated around the word ‘beautiful’ - been harmful in any way? She doubted it. Perhaps the opposite. If it allowed her to take a more positive view of herself, wasn’t that - generally at least - a good thing? And had he not just reaffirmed his statement? If it was as true now as it had been two days ago did that not make it even more powerful? Whether or not he should have made the declaration in the first instance was another matter entirely, Kara understood that. Saying something so unexpected, so personal, so out-of-the-blue, was unconventional to put it mildly. And he had placed her in a difficult position, that she could not deny, his words perhaps backing her into a corner. But ‘damage’? Perhaps to him; she could see that. Unshaven and - by his standards - vaguely dishevelled, he had clearly taken the potential consequences of his action to heart, its negative repercussions self-inflicted.
A large cream-and-blue bus pulled up at the bus stop, dragging her attention away from him. Kara watched two people get off and then the bus swallow the entirety of the queue that had formed.
“You don’t need to apologise,” she said, still looking away, watching as an elderly lady, just disembarked, struggled to get her shopping trolley under control before shuffling slowly away towards the centre of the town. She looked back at him; his face seemed suddenly hopeful. “It was a nice thing to say - even if it did take me by surprise. For all sorts of reasons.”
A frown appeared on his forehead and Kara could see Charles fighting back the desire to delve, to ask her what she meant. It was a question she had no desire to hear, never mind answer.
“So please don’t worry about it. No damage done. Not to me at any rate.”
They both fell silent - Kara because she had nothing else to add, and Charles because he dared not to. It felt a little like a truce, even though such a thing was inappropriate given there had been no hostilities. Quite the opposite, in a way.
But it was time to move on. Kara felt as if she had managed to draw a line under the incident, a boundary which freed them both; her to carry on with her humdrum life, Charles to forgive himself. She stole a glance at him. He was now looking toward the road, and she had a sense of a weight having been lifted from his shoulders. She could imagine him going home, shaving, ensuring he had the right clothes ready for the day that would follow this one; perhaps he might even be reenergised, who could say. Anything was possible.
And whether he realised it or not, he had given her something precious too; Kara now saw herself in a different light, a better, more positive one. Certainly she had told him not to apologise, but what she had not done was to thank him. Didn’t “you know, Kara, you are beautiful” deserve recognition of some kind? Would it not be right to ensure the scales were balanced so that any notion of ‘damage’ was expelled for good?
“There’s a new exhibition opening on Monday,” she found herself saying. “Eastern European painters and sculptors. Are you planning to come and see it?”
He smiled.
“To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure.” He paused. “If you had been upset with me then I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. Under those circumstances I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to come back here again.” He glanced around the courtyard with the air of a man who could have been saying goodbye - and was relieved not to be doing so.
“I don’t work Mondays,” Kara said. “Perhaps I could see the exhibition with you and then you could tell me what I was looking at and explain things about my countrymen I don’t already know.”
He laughed.
“I suspect you know far more than you let on, Kara.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out isn’t there?” And she laughed too. It was laughter that allowed her to stand and smile, and with a slight wave of her hand, to walk away.