Work Text:
“I’d wait for the vegetarian ones to come around again, if I were you.” The woman stopped with the canapé suspended in mid-air, halfway to her mouth, and looked over her shoulder, to where Kate was stood with a grin on her face. She couldn’t help but smile in response.
“Why?” she asked, narrowing her eyes, “what have you done to these ones?”
“Ha!” Kate’s laugh exploded like a party popper in the space between them, several people in the room turning around to see where the sudden noise had come from. Kate cast her eyes down and cleared her throat. “Ahem, nothing. I promise.”
The woman paused for a moment, looking from the vol-au-vent – loaded with perfectly plump, perfectly innocent-looking prawns and a sprinkling of paprika – to Kate and back again, before shrugging her shoulders and putting it into her mouth, whole. She chewed as if she’d been asked to mime it: big, slow jaw movements, followed by a small appreciative moan for good measure, and Kate laughed again – a low, throaty chuckle this time, something for their ears only.
“I do like a woman who knows her own mind,” Kate said quietly, conspiratorially, sliding her hands into her pockets and looking down at her toes. When she looked up again, the woman had one eyebrow raised, a question and a mild rebuke bundled up in one: oh yes? Kate cleared her throat again – she was usually so much better at this! Come on, Stewart, for goodness sake – and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “Kate Stewart,” she added, standing up a bit straighter as she took her hand out of her pocket and offered it.
The woman cocked her head to one side, still smiling, and looked at Kate for what felt, to Kate, like an age.
(“It was barely more than a second, if that!” Len would be forced to protest whenever they told the story in the future.)
Eventually (“honestly, Kate, ‘eventually’? Come on!”) she took Kate’s hand and shook it. “Helene. Helene Francis.”
“Lovely to meet you, Helene,” Kate said, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The assured, amused grin that had returned to Kate’s lips faltered when she saw the quizzical look on Helene’s face. “About the canapés!” she added swiftly, immediately hearing the note of panic in her own voice.
Slick, Stewart; very slick. Really, is it so long since you’ve done this?
*
Actually, it had been a while. There was often an edge of something in the way she spoke with women, a glint in her eye, a warmth to her tone; a certain liveliness, a hint of who she was when she clocked off (it happened, sometimes); but she hadn’t approached a woman like this in months. Life at UNIT had been increasingly hectic, a flurry of alien activity coinciding with her move into the biggest office under the Tower, so that some weeks she didn’t know who kicked and screamed harder: the extra-terrestrial visitors she attempted diplomatically to steer away from the planet and towards the far corners of the universe, or the men in uniform who weren’t getting to blow stuff up anymore. Well, not every day of the week, anyway. As far as dating went, it had become difficult not to let people down, not to have to cancel three times out of four, and it was always so damned difficult to explain. Even if her dates had witnessed the events that kept Kate and her staff busy, they never remembered them; UNIT saw to that. When she took a step back, looked at herself through their eyes, she saw a rotten girlfriend, and she was not entirely convinced that telling the truth would fix that. The way things were, ‘the truth’ felt less like a gift and more like a burden.
Back in the day, she had dated men and women in about equal proportions, but as she rose up through the ranks at UNIT she found herself drawn more and more to the company of women. Or perhaps, as she grew in confidence and stature, as she grew more comfortable at the head of the organisation – “you can do this, Tiger,” the Brig had said, “and even if they don’t want it, they need it. They need you” – men shrunk back, or were resentful of her independence, her resilience. Perhaps. Perhaps as she had become more self-assured, she had simply felt more secure in her preferences. Certainly, men interested her less. She found herself more likely than not to pick out the women in a room, to gravitate towards them, to hear what they had to say. To talk to them, yes, but to admire them, too. And Helene was, as Kate would be forced to protest in the re-telling, really terribly pretty.
*
“About the canapés!”
Kate’s face and neck suddenly burned red, and she knew it, could feel the heat about her ears. She thought about an exit strategy – no, she thought about thinking about an exit strategy; she knew where all the exits were, which doors were alarmed and which weren’t, it wouldn’t be difficult, shouldn’t be difficult, but despite the unfamiliar sense of panic that crackled on the very edges of her vision, she couldn’t quite persuade herself that she had blown things entirely, or that she couldn’t at least retreat a little more casually than all that, some scrap of dignity still intact. They were still stood quite close, after all, and Helene's eyes were still on her, big and brown and deep as oceans, Kate thought, allowing herself the moment of whimsy. Right place for it.
And while Kate thought all of this, Helene stood and watched. She wasn’t sure about being chatted up like this – she had always somehow ended up in relationships with women she’d grown close to one way or another, through work, or community groups, or they were friends of friends, and to have the confidence to just walk over here and say hello? To tell her what sort of women she liked? Could you meet a nice woman that way? Did it seem likely? What were the odds? – yet she too failed to convince herself to make her excuses and move to another room, another part of the exhibition. This woman, Kate, had the posture and poise, had the swagger, had the suit, but she was by no means smooth. She didn’t – how to put this charitably? – she didn’t seem rehearsed. She didn’t seem, truth be told, to be very good at this. And that only made her more appealing, not less. Helene smiled in a way that she hoped would tone down the scorching redness on Kate’s cheeks.
“So what brings you here tonight, Kate?” she asked. A server passed with a tray, looking briefly in their direction before moving on at the shake of Kate’s head; Helene leaned in closer. “Apart from the finger food, of course.”
‘Here’ was a gallery space in one of those parts of east London that made Kate feel ancient if she stayed long enough to look around much. She had used the journey over here through traffic to read the brochure, and to identify one or two pieces that she could express a particular interest in if pressed – she liked photography for the most part, it wasn’t that, it was just that she wasn’t really here to admire the artwork. Parked outside in the street were two UNIT Jeeps; in the alleyway at the back was a group of officers doing their best to blend into the brickwork. Somewhere in the foyer Colonel Whittle had given up trying to look inconspicuous and was now directing people to the toilets and the cloakroom, having been taken for the venue’s own security. And in Kate’s pocket was a button that when pressed would summon a chopper for evac in less than two minutes.
Her thumb had twitched towards it just a moment ago, a reflex, but she wasn’t actually expecting to have to use it. It was just a few energy fluctuations, after all, and not for days; she had been on this site a handful of times already this year, and nothing ever happened, no matter what the readings were saying. But there had been reports of something small and fast and otherwise unidentified making landfall somewhere along the Essex coast around lunchtime today, and though their global monitoring systems threw up blips and glitches and oddities all the time, the coincidence was impossible to ignore, and after the summer they’d had, they couldn’t afford to take any chances. The observation teams had been here all day, the rest of them arriving alongside the first guests; if there was anything dastardly afoot, protecting civilians was the priority. There were still some in UNIT with itchy trigger fingers and unresolved hero complexes, but Kate would be happy if she could stand everyone down and be in bed with a book by 2330 hours.
Or so she had thought when she arrived, anyway. The thought of slipping under the covers with John Grisham was rapidly losing its appeal.
“So what brings you here tonight, Kate?” Helene had asked, before leaning in, close enough that Kate could smell her perfume, close enough that the hairs had stood up on Kate’s arms.
“Oh, I er, I’m working in the area,” Kate answered, not quite a lie and not quite the truth, either. “Thought I’d pop in and take a look. And you?”
“Moral support,” Helene said, tilting her head to the side as she explained: “the artist is a friend of mine. She’s only shown her work once or twice before, and never somewhere like this. I’m here to make sure she doesn’t lock herself in the loo or anything.”
“So you’re an” – just then Kate’s phone buzzed loudly from her pocket. She smiled a terse, thin-lipped smile and turned away as she answered the call in hushed but still biting tones. “Captain Sayles, impeccable timing as always. What is it?”
“Ma’am, sorry ma’am, can you come around to the back of the building?”
Jack Sayles had been in post for a couple of years and knew that “what is it?” also meant “this had better be worth it” when he was speaking to his boss on her personal mobile. But there were no radios tonight so as not to alarm anyone, and the Colonel wasn’t answering. Someone had to sign off on this.
Kate slipped her phone back into her pocket and turned to face Helene, who had gone back to admiring her friend’s work, having been accosted by an older couple who were full of questions. Helene was, Kate noticed with a smile, eating another of the vol-au-vents in between her responses.
“I’m sorry, that was a colleague; needs a hand,” Kate said. “In case I miss you,” she added, pressing her card into Helene’s hand as she gestured over her shoulder, towards the door. “But I hope I won’t.” Confidence sufficiently boosted by the way Helene’s fingers had curled around the card, she winked on her way out of the building.
(“Sharpened up by being called ‘ma’am’, more like,” Helene will tease, whenever the boys recall their surprise that their mum – their mum! – had left Helene with a wink, as if she thought she was James Bond or something. Kate can only ever watch the conversation agape, slowly shaking her head, knowing that there is nothing she can say that won’t simply do further and most egregious harm to her character.)
*
Kate shrugged off her coat and stamped her feet as she came back inside; it was November, and it had barely stopped raining for the past three weeks. A quick glance around the room as she made for the Ladies told her that Helene had left, as had most of the guests. She stood in front of the mirror and wiped the mascara from her cheeks, tried to tousle her hair from under the weight of the rain. A washout. There had been no contact, no signs of potential alien activity save for the mysterious rustling in the bins behind the gallery that had turned out to be a fox, though not before attracting Lieutenant McCarthy’s attention; he’d slipped on the wet cobbles and suffered a concussion.
You couldn’t make this stuff up, she thought to herself with a sigh. Time to go home.
“Drop me at that café on the corner will you, Mark?” she asked her driver. “I’m soaked through anyway.”
She wasn’t far from home, but she didn’t have fresh milk at the flat and she had an urgent need for a cup of tea.
(“You never had milk in, in those days,” Len says. “Correction,” says Kate, raising her index finger in front of her. “I always had milk in. It was just very rarely in date.”)
Kate settled into a seat in the corner with a crumpled copy of yesterday’s paper and flicked towards the – oh, terrific, someone had already attempted the crossword and got 11 across wrong. Kate ran her hand across her forehead and tried not to be bad tempered about it. But honestly, begonia? It was clearly alyssum, otherwise 13 down, ‘a mode of fashion’ was ‘ntyle’.
Before she could turn her attention to the Sudoku, Kate felt her phone buzz and flipped it open to a message from an unknown number. ‘Nice to meet you tonight, Kate. Maybe we can have lunch soon?’ Kate smiled and ran her thumb over the screen. The phone buzzed again. ‘This is Helene, by the way.’
*
“Well, I couldn’t be sure I was the only girl you’d given your number to that night, could I?” Len slides her hand into Kate’s as she says it, squeezing lightly, watching the colour grow in Kate’s cheeks. There will follow as much good-humoured teasing as Kate can stand – about her bumbling lothario ways, about how quickly she had replied with text messages of her own, the first one signed with a kiss and the second apologising for doing so (sometimes Kate could swear this was Len’s favourite part of the story) – before she’ll bump shoulders with Helene and pick up her glass and say, “Anyway, that’s how we met.”