Free A History of Forgetting by Caroline Adderson Page A

really care what he ate any more, so long as it wasn’t eel. Amanda ordered the wine. She had a system, he observed: the second most expensive. The only system Malcolm’s budget tolerated was that he choose water.
    He watched Amanda pose before the menu, exquisite nostrils flaring, her adolescent breasts resting pertly on the table. She was a phoney, Malcolm thought, and not only because of cosmetic surgery. As any hairdresser-philosopher knows, beauty has little to do with perfection. A truly beautiful woman acknowledges her flaws, even flaunts them, for they are what make her unique. They grace her character, which is the real seat of beauty. What was Amanda doing with a salon if she didn’t understand something so elementary?
    â€˜What is your background?’ he asked, hoping to steer the conversation to personal matters, hoping she might say something that would persuade him to change his mind and like her.
    â€˜I have an MBA. Have you gone to see it yet?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The salon. It’s almost finished.’
    â€˜Yes, I walk the dog past it every day. You’ve given it quite a facelift.’ Wicked, but she didn’t even flinch. She wasn’t listening. She was only talking, and what she went on to say did change his opinion.
    â€˜Your clients won’t like it. You won’t like it. Best if you take them elsewhere, don’t you think?’
    Now he thought she was a fool, as well as a phoney, if she believed for a second that he wanted to stay. He fully intended to look around for another position, once he had got Denis settled somewhere. It was taking longer than expected; every home had a ticker tape waiting list. In the meantime, he just wanted to work in peace.
    The food arrived. He wished she would shut up. On she harped, which only made him dig his heels in. ‘They’re old, my clients. They don’t like change,’ he said. ‘I can’t get them to change their hairstyle, let alone their salon.’
    â€˜I don’t give a damn about your clients.’ She stabbed petulantly with her fork at the grilled vegetables on her plate. ‘I don’t want a bunch of old ladies tottering around spoiling the concept.’
    He stiffened in his chair. ‘You’ll be old yourself one day. Sooner than you’d like. Anyway, I believe there’s a clause in the contract.’ She waved it off, so Malcolm said, ‘I’ll have to contact my lawyer.’ It was a bluff. He’d sooner hire a call girl than a lawyer, but Amanda fell for it. She had no imagination. She thought everyone was like her. Amanda would call a lawyer in a snap.
    The bill came on a little William Morris tray. She snatched it up, read it, then tossed it his way. ‘We’ll split it, okay?’
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    During the renovations he made house calls. Then, when he saw the place and heard the music that they played, he felt sure none of his clients would come anyway. But their diminished hearing proved to his advantage, as well as the daily confusion over which pair of glasses to wear. The one universal complaint was that they had to change. ‘We didn’t change when it was Faye’s,’ they griped. As for the decor, it offended Malcolm more than it offended them, the outcry over EuroDisney echoing daily in his head. ‘I have become a snob,’ he admitted to himself, no different from the snobs he had been decrying all those years.
    As for his rapport with the other stylists, something had gone grotesquely wrong from the start. Perhaps he had said something to offend them, or maybe they had simply sensed how he felt—that they were flowers of degeneration, that freak ishness and mutilation had replaced beauty as a standard. Theirs was a torture-chamber aesthetic. If he hadn’t already ceased to give a damn about the world, he would have shud dered for it. None of this meant he didn’t like them, of course. It was their values