A Few of the Girls (8 page)

When I heard that he had left my friend Orla, I began to panic. She loved him so much, trusted him, believed everything he said.

You couldn't tell Orla that Eddie was a man who moved on. She would say that, of course, that had been the way in the past, but not now. Now he had found what he had been looking for everywhere—and thank the Lord he had gone on looking until he eventually found her.

He had moved into her flat four years ago. With all his gear. They made the spare guest bedroom into a dressing room—nobody had as many clothes as Eddie. Orla got a carpenter to make a big closet, with a hanging rail the length of the room and a little angled shelf for his shoes. She had an ironing board in this room and a full-length mirror so that he could admire himself.

She put a new shelf in the bathroom for his various colognes and aftershave products. She changed the furniture around in the sitting room to accommodate his exercise bicycle—Eddie liked to cycle as he watched television. She removed some of her marvelous paintings from the walls to put up his posters, and her own CDs and tapes were stacked out of sight, while Eddie's were all displayed.

As Orla's friends, we rarely went to see her at the flat anymore. Even I, who have the reputation of knowing the right thing to do, or being overbossy, as my enemies might put it, didn't feel at ease going to see Orla. She was too anxious. She was always looking at the door in case he came back; when he did, she would start fussing over him. And then we had to be quiet in case Eddie wanted to work.

There was little sign of Eddie's work around the house.

He was always in the middle of a deal with someone; a project was permanently getting off the ground, or an opportunity being explored. It was restless and uncertain, while Orla went out regularly each morning to work on a women's magazine.

So, if we wanted to meet Orla it was at our own places or in a restaurant. Out of loyalty we didn't talk about her too much, only an occasional sigh or a raising of the eyes up to heaven.

I was surprised that he stayed four years. I thought he would have gone long ago.

So on the morning when Julie texted me to say that the dreaded Eddie had gone, bags and baggage, I was genuinely upset about what Orla might do. And if anyone could help her to see things clearly, I could. I mean, so much so that I told them at work that I didn't feel well and went straight around to Orla's place.

She was sitting, white-faced, at the kitchen table and she showed me the note he had left.

It was brief. I'll give him that.

Dear Orla—and you will always be dear to me—it's time to end it. It's run its course, what we had is over. Let's not fight and squabble about who was right and who was wrong. Let's just remember the good and forget the bad and the upsetting.

Good luck always.

Eddie

I made the coffee, wishing I was grinding his evil, horrible head with the coffee beans, and when I was pressing down the plunger on the coffee I wished it were a stake going through his faithless heart. Her face was empty, as if someone had reached in and turned off a light inside.

“I didn't know there
was
any bad or any upsetting bits, Gina,” she said in a bleak voice. “I thought it was all good, all the time.”

I made meaningless sounds. It wasn't like speaking, actually it was like gurgling or something, it was an effort to be soothing and sympathetic like the way you might talk to a baby. It didn't really matter. I could have been saying the alphabet, quoting a psalm, reading a shopping list. Orla wasn't listening. She was puzzling and regretting and wishing she had behaved differently.

I looked around, just in order to stop looking at her shell of a face.

He had taken all his framed posters from the kitchen walls and the wok that he liked was gone. Through the door in the sitting room I could see that his exercise bike had been removed. Presumably every stitch of clothes in what had been his dressing room had been lovingly packed and taken away. It had taken him a day and a half to unload all his gear into Orla's flat with all of us helping.

How had he got everything out himself?

Orla was weeping now. “It happened on Sunday. I was at one of those ‘meet the readers' events all day. When I came back, this is what I found.” Her sad eyes looked around the near-empty flat and the note on the table.

“Did he take any of your things as well?” I asked in a voice that was like a hiss.

“No, of course not.” She was shocked in his defense.

“Where's the microwave then?” I snapped.

“That was
his,
Gina, I gave it to him for his birthday.”

“What do you want, Orla? Do you want us to kill him?” I asked. I felt I would be able to do it easily. Not anything that involved blood, but something slow enough for him to realize just why he was meeting his end.

“I want to find him and beg him to come back,” she said piteously. “If he'd only tell me what I was doing wrong I'd change it.”

Years ago my mother told me that Living Well is the Best Revenge. She said that it was a wonderful philosophy. You didn't waste time sending poison-pen letters, dialing his phone in the middle of the night; you didn't need to humiliate yourself by making a scene in public, you were not an object of pity for your friends to worry about. You simply lived well.

That was the sweetest payback.

She was absolutely right, I had done it myself a few times, but what could we do with Orla? It wasn't a question of talking her out of some petty revenge. She didn't want
any
revenge: she simply wanted the louse back.

The one bit of good news was that she didn't seem to know where he had gone. She knew of no rival for her affections. But he could never have moved himself unaided from her apartment, I told her.

His friends, his male friends, must have helped him, Orla said.

“But had he any? They were never mentioned,” I said sternly.

“His colleagues, then.”

“But he
had
no colleagues,” I pointed out, “he lived and worked off a mobile phone—talking of which…I am dialing the phone now.”
Big surprise. It wasn't working anymore. Out of service.
“Had he family?”

“None he ever spoke of. Things had been difficult for him,” Orla explained.

I had to be very clever. If I were to get my friend Orla to live well and to forget him eventually, it must all be disguised as an attempt to get him back.

“Right then,” I said, amazed at my own dishonesty. “We'll get him back for you.” I hated the deception, but it was the only way to go.

First, I suggested she have a makeover. She could do it for the magazine and report on every step of the way. That way it wouldn't cost anything. Together we booked the various parts of it, the slimming session, the tanning bed, the hair restyle, the manicure, the pedicure.

“Not that you aren't lovely already,” I said. “You just need to be even lovelier for Eddie when he comes back.” She smiled at me trustingly and I knew she'd feared I would be brisk and urge her to forget him.

Then we approached the work side of things. She should go for promotion. Head of Special Features section.

Yes,
of course
she could do it.

I would help her by giving her a free holiday as a competition prize from my travel agency; Julie would give her a prize of a digital camera and photography lessons from her place; Laura, who was a history teacher, would organize a readers' outing to a place of historical interest.

We would all come round and paint the flat for her next weekend. Bright, classy colors.

“You won't move the wardrobe for Eddie's gear?” Orla pleaded.

“Of course not,” I said with gritted teeth.

And then began the summer of Orla's flowering.

She got the job as Head of Special Features, and we all delivered on our promises about the prizes,
and
we painted the flat, which all looked terrific except that we painted the louse's dressing room in entirely unsuitable pastel shades of blue and pink.

Orla got slimmer and prettier and wore really smart clothes for the first time in ages as she didn't have to support Eddie's lifestyle and pay his phone bills anymore. And we went round often to the flat, which was happy again.

Of course we put up with a lot of nonsense about how wonderful it would be when Eddie came back, as he would, and what great friends we were to her. Whenever she puzzled a bit about where Eddie might be now and what he might be doing, we did everything to head her off at the pass.

One day she would realize he was never coming back and by then she would be so confident and busy and happy she might be able to face it. She was very different to that ashen-faced girl who sat at the table the day after he had disappeared without a trace.

We wondered who would hear something about him first. And, as a matter of fact, I was the one to walk slap into him.

It was six months after he had gone, and it was at a travel fair. Eddie was there, doing deals, following leads, and chasing up projects about snowboarding.

“Gina!” he cried, as if I had been the one person he was looking forward to seeing there. We talked, if you could call it a conversation. From my side it was a series of staccato barks, until he asked about Orla. He actually asked about her. How was she getting along these days?

That's where I burst into information. Orla was just
fine,
she looked wonderful, she had a promotion at work, she had been traveling a lot, she had painted her apartment, wonderful warm, glowing colors. He nodded, pleased.

“It was a little bit drab all right,” he agreed.

And I told him how she had lost nine kilos, and had beautiful window boxes stuffed with flowers and held parties on Friday evenings, and had joined a gym, and was going to be on afternoon television the very next day, talking about women and self-esteem. And every word I said gave me such pleasure, I couldn't keep the smile off my face.

Eddie nodded and seemed pleased for Orla.

And eventually I wore myself out singing her praises and listing her successes and asked him how were the deals doing in snowboarding.

“You know me, Gina, play it close to the chest,” he said.

I deliberated whether I would tell Orla or just conveniently forget that I had met him. But I didn't have to make the choice.

She called me excitedly. Eddie was back.

He had moved back in last night, had decided to the moment he saw her on television. Imagine, he had seen her and thought she looked so well that he had come straight back to say he had forgotten the bad times and the upsetting times and could only remember the good.

I was hardly able to get the words out from sheer rage.
This
was not the revenge of living well. This was the most cruel punishment.

“And what does he think of his dressing room?” I almost whispered.

“He just loved it! He says that we should think of it as a nursery in waiting. Oh, and Gina, thank you
so much
for everything. I used to wonder whether you were too bossy to me at the start, you and Julie and Laura. But you were quite right. It worked like a dream and I'll never be able to repay you. Never in my whole life…”

She had just slightly sticky-out teeth, Linda thought. Which was quite unusual for an American.

“I thought you'd have had braces on them as soon as you could speak,” she said to her. Nothing sounded rude when Linda said it. She had such a sunny and interested way of approaching things. There wasn't a hint of criticism. Alice Chalker took no offense.

“Anyone else's parents would have paid money for braces, that's true,” she said ruefully. “Sadly, I got the kind of parents who paid money for another shot of rye—you win some, you lose some. At least they left me alone to live my life.”

Linda's beautiful face looked sad for a moment. Then it cleared. She could always see the silver lining. “And if they had been proper parents then they'd never have let you travel the world. We might not have met, and you could have missed out on England entirely.”

“And that would have been bad news,” Chalkie said.

She had always been Chalkie, ever since Linda had met her out on a Greek island and told her about a little restaurant in London, and suggested she come and work there for a while. That had been just over four years ago.

Chalkie worked in the background. She didn't come out front much. Linda was the one with the charms and the looks and the personality. Chalkie was the one who kept it all going, behind the scenes.

They were great friends. Chalk and Cheese people called them, so unalike were they. Linda, with her dimples and huge blue eyes, her long blond hair shining and tossing like an advertisement for shampoo. Chalkie, with her nervous smile, her long neck, and her long, shapeless cardigans.

They laughed so happily together and would sit for hours drinking coffee that some people assumed they were more than just friends, that maybe Chalkie and Linda were lovers. But that was before they got to know them. Of course, it couldn't possibly have been true—not with Linda's record, not with the long line of broken hearts and confused males that stretched from the restaurant door. Linda's loves were legendary.

“I'd really like to settle down, to be like you,” Linda would say to her duller friends, birds of much less exotic plumage, who often felt drab beside the lovely, laughing Linda with her shiny hair, sparkling eyes, and bouncy ways. They felt good for a while when Linda said that. It made them seem like winners for a moment. Not that Linda would ever settle for their men and their lifestyles. Still, it was nice that she appeared to envy them.

It was very hard to keep track of Linda's loves because none of them ever went properly away.

Dan, the accountant who had rescued the books in the early days, still came back to keep a friendly eye on things, and if he looked at Linda longingly as he spoke of VAT and turnover, then Linda never seemed to notice.

There was Roddy, the artist, who had done the menus and some of the paintings on the walls. He looked in a lot, always on the excuse that he wondered if his pictures were selling—actually he never cared whether they sold or not. He just wanted to see Linda laugh and pour him a coffee, then look at him with her big blue eyes and hope he was happy.

Then there was Derek, the man from the health food shop, who surely didn't have to check on the menu twice a week, months after his fling with Linda was over. Yet he still felt the need to come in and talk lentils and cauliflower bake.

And then there was Brian from the tourist board, who could just have delivered his thirty-two tourists for their morning coffee and carrot cake without coming in beforehand to check if it would be all right. It was always all right, but he loved to hear it from Linda with her huge warm smile, no matter how many times she had already said so.

None of them seemed to resent having been replaced, Chalkie thought wonderingly, as she sat in Linda's kitchen and chopped and grated and shredded, moving from work space to sink, washing and scrubbing all the saucepans, clearing up behind Linda. For Linda was the chef as well as the front of house. Nobody knew how she did it. Not even the men who sat praising her to Chalkie really knew how she did it, not even as they watched Chalkie wash and polish and put away.

They all sat and sipped and spoke of Linda, a girl in a million. And Chalkie agreed. Dan and Roddy and Derek and Brian said she was a great friend, a tower of strength and easy to talk to. Chalkie was pleased. It was good that people liked her and accepted her.

She blessed the day she had met Linda in that taverna. She often said so, and Linda always smiled one of her great, warm smiles. But Linda never said that she, too, blessed the day that she had found someone to take the entire workload off her shoulders, to keep the place running smoothly and to support her throughout all the various crises. She didn't say it because there was no need to say things like that to Chalkie. She was above compliments and being humored.

Chalkie gave great advice to the four men who buzzed around her friend Linda, but only when they asked for it.

She told Dan, the accountant, that Linda loved the ballet, so he went out and bought two tickets for
Swan Lake,
and the evening was a great success.

She told Roddy, the artist, he should do a portrait of Linda as a birthday present, and she had been right. Roddy was back in favor again overnight.

Chalkie suggested to Derek that he should talk less about nut roast and more about how much he liked Linda's new hairstyle. And, to Brian, she said that Linda was probably not quite as interested in the incoming tourist statistics as he obviously was.

Linda told everyone that Chalkie was simply wonderful about giving advice. She listened and she listened and then she gave her carefully considered opinion.

Chalkie had been able to warn her when Dan was so infatuated or when Roddy was cooling off. Chalkie was the best friend imaginable. And no, she never had any romantic problems of her own. But then some people were just like that, weren't they?

Andy arrived at the restaurant one evening in October. He was a tall, easygoing schoolteacher. He took to dropping in on his way home from school. He would bring his exercise books with him and correct them at the table. Sometimes they would see him shaking his head sadly over the things that the children had written.

“Don't you think it's strange that he hasn't asked me out yet?” Linda said with a toss of her hair.

“Don't worry. He soon will,” Chalkie reassured her.

“Do you think so? Really?” Linda's eyes raked Chalkie's face for confirmation. Andy had managed to interest her by his very lack of interest.

Two weeks went by. “Perhaps he's married,” Chalkie offered as an explanation.

“That has never stood in anyone's way before,” said Linda. It was true. Roddy the artist certainly had a wife lurking in the background.

“Be patient,” said Chalkie. Linda was patient. After all, Chalkie had never been wrong before, had she?

They discovered that Andy taught English. “Should I sort of catch up on my poetry—seasons of mist and all that stuff?” Linda wondered.

“A bit too obvious, don't you think? Anyway, he probably wants to get away from all that. He has it morning, noon, and night.”

“You're right.” Linda looked at Chalkie admiringly. The woman was a genius. For a fleeting moment she wondered why Chalkie had never applied all her wise strategies to herself. Why hadn't she got her teeth fixed and been clever with men? Instead she was sitting in the kitchen in a long cardigan peeling onions into men's faces.

But it was only for a very fleeting moment that Linda thought this. There were too many other things to think about, like the new menu. She must try to get Chalkie to dream up something different, something that would make Linda's even more the place that everyone wanted to go.

Andy sat in the kitchen talking to Chalkie as they all did, sooner or later. “How did they teach you poetry in the States?” he asked. “Did they make you learn it by rote? I wish I knew the answer. I want them to love it, but how can they love it if it's a torture for them to learn chunks every night…”

“How would they ever remember it to love it later, if they didn't know it by heart?” Chalkie asked.

He wasn't convinced. “That's for later. I'm thinking of now,” he said.

“But surely that's the point. You should be thinking of later. That's what teaching is all about,” she argued fiercely. She sat curiously still as her hands were busy, chopping tomatoes very finely. She had long, narrow, white hands, he noticed.

They talked on companionably. Her hands never stopped, but yet she seemed so calm. After the bedlam of school she was restful. After spending all day with people who threw themselves around the place with an excess of energy, she seemed mature and peaceful.

Linda came bouncing into the kitchen. It was all movement. It was dashing here and back, it was dipping her finger in this and that. It was rushing in to get a cup of coffee and rushing out again. When she left the kitchen, things returned to the way they were.

“Wonderful girl, Linda,” Chalkie said automatically.

“Yes…I'm sure she is.”

Chalkie looked up. She was about to list some of Linda's qualities to this warm, kind man who sat beside her, but the familiar words just wouldn't come to her. She didn't say anything at all.

Andy seemed apologetic at having slighted her friend. “I'm sure she is a great person when you get to know her,” he said. “It's just that she's got that off-putting cheesy smile. You know, it flashes on and off. It's as if she were always saying cheese for a photographer who's about to take her picture.”

“That's what they call us, Chalk and Cheese,” Chalkie said sadly.

Andy reached across and touched her long, narrow, white hand. “In my business, chalk is much more valuable you know…No teacher would ever be without it.”

Chalkie would have advised Linda to play hard to get, but she didn't give herself any such rules. She smiled a big, wide smile. When it was something this important, there were no games that had to be played.