Fast Friends (39 page)

Caroline rewarded him with a smile of bewitching
intensity,
and was interested to observe that
the girlfriend wasn’t reacting
to it with the usual instant suspicion.
Clearly not a run-of-the-
mill jealous blond
bimbo, thought Caroline, and stuck out her
hand in appreciation.

‘
How do you do. My name’s Caroline.’

‘
And I’m
Camilla.’ They smiled at each other, Caroline
instinctively
liking the woman who wasn’t jealous of her,
Camilla admiring the girl’s good bone structure and wondering
if
they had ever met before. Somewhere in the dim distance, a very faint chord of
memory was struck.

‘
I know who you are, of
course,’ said Caroline, turning to
Matt. ‘I was at the US Open last
year. My friend Donna dragged me round the course, convinced that you’d winked
at her while you were teeing up on the first.’

‘That’s entirely possible,’ said Matt, his dark eyes
crinkling
with laughter, the wonderfully
sexy bags beneath them becom
ing more
pronounced as he took Camilla’s hand and kissed it.
But of course that
was in the wicked old days before I met my wife.’

Camilla, with a look of horror, snatched her hand away.
‘Take no
notice of him, Caroline. I only met him yesterday.’ Matt looked unperturbed. ‘I
can live in hope.’

‘
You seem very happy together anyway,’ said Caroline,
finishing her drink and after a moment’s hesitation allowing
Matt to
refill her glass. "Thanks. My husband will be back in a minute with some
champagne. We can share that when he gets here.’

‘What’s your husband’s name?’ asked Camilla, her memory
beginning to clear. The girl’s face . . . she
had
seen photo
graphs . . . she’d also been right earlier when she
thought she’d spotted him amongst the crowds.

‘Nico,’ said Caroline, thinking as she did so that this
was the moment when her own personality began to fade, like an old sepia
photograph left too long in the sun. ‘Nico Coletto. He’s a singer.’

‘
Oh,’ said Camilla, and
in the brief silence that followed
realized
that she had already left it too long to say, ‘I know
him’. Instead she
added lamely, ‘How nice.’

Caroline, staring at her glass and finding it yet again
empty,
twirled the stem between her thumb and
forefinger and said
with forced brightness, "That’s really rather a
matter of opinion.’
Then, seeing the
expression of shocked surprise on Camilla’s
face, and realizing that it
was neither the time nor the place for
True
Confessions, shook her head and laughed. At least neither
of them had
bombarded her with questions about Nico, as every
one else always seemed to do. They had reacted, in fact, as if they’d never
even heard of him. She was still a whole person
and she would damn well
make the most of it while it lasted.

‘
I saw your little boy
on TV this afternoon,’ she said
cheerfully. ‘What a darling! How old is
he?’

‘Hello,’ said Nico, placing two bottles of Lanson with
great care upon the table and wondering how the hell he was supposed
to react, faced with this set-up. Caroline had
been deep in
discussion with Camilla and what they were talking about
was anybody’s guess. Still, the chances were that they hadn’t been comparing
his prowess in bed and marking him out of ten, so to hell with it, he decided.
Inadvertently, Caroline had precipitated
his
meeting with Camilla. It was clearly better to get it over
with.

‘Camilla, how nice to see you again,’ he said, and watched
in
amazement as she turned first pink, then
deeper pink, and
finally an unmistakable shade of red. His spirits
lifted; did this mean she still felt something for him after all?

‘
How extraordinary,’ remarked Caroline,
watching the transformation with fascination and not a little intrigue. ‘Camilla,
I
didn’t realize that you
knew
my
husband. Why on earth didn’t
you say so before?’

Oh, dammit
to hell, thought Nico. Bloody, bloody
hell.

Ironically, Caroline became more animated and more talk
ative than
she had been for weeks, as if the intrigue she sensed
had overcome her habitual reticence. When she pulled Nico
back on
to the dance floor after twenty minutes of incredibly
difficult small talk – thank heavens for Matt Lewis’s easy
going, ebullient manner – her eyes were bright and
her hips
swayed provocatively against
his in time with the music. She
had also, in that short space of time,
finished an entire bottle of champagne by herself.

‘So.’

‘So what?’
he countered shortly, wondering why her pouting mouth no longer entranced him.

‘So, are we
really expected to believe that the lovely Camilla was your . . . housekeeper?’

‘
Of course she was. What’s so bloody extraordinary
about
that?’

Caroline
licked her lips. ‘And were you lovers, too?’

‘No!’
Christ, even now while they were dancing she was man
aging to tug at the sleeve of his dinner-jacket like a bloody leech.

His
discomfort was almost palpable; Caroline was enjoying herself enormously. For
the first time in their short, unhappy marriage she had him at a disadvantage.
Jealousy mingled with
curiosity because it
wasn’t as if Nico shouldn’t have had an
affair with another woman – by
his own admission he had slept with dozens in the past – so why was he so
vehemently denying this one? Why had Camilla pretended that she didn’t even
know him? Interesting.

And upon returning to the table she
observed that Camilla and Nico were still as jumpy as a couple of cats on a
red-hot
roof, the conversation
flowing like concrete, the expressions of their faces equally stone-like. Very
interesting
indeed.

‘
My friend
Donna would just
die
if I could tell her that I’d
danced with you,’ Caroline announced boldly, giving
Matt
another of her dazzling smiles. She switched to Camilla. ‘You
wouldn’t mind, would you, if we had just one quick
dance
together?’

Camilla, stripping a crimson rosebud
from the table decora
tion of its
leaves, said, ‘Of course not.’

‘
And you and Nico must
dance together,’ insisted Caroline,
her
eyes flicking from one to the other, laser-like, missing
nothing. ‘Come
along, let’s really enjoy ourselves . .

Which was how Nico and Camilla found themselves in the
middle of the dance floor, dancing together to the slow, sensual music, but
scarcely touching at all, joined by only the lightest possible contact.

Camilla still wore the same perfume,
Nico realized. She
smelt
wonderful, and was looking spectacular. Christ, he
thought, for a one-night stand he could still recall every
moment of it in amazing detail. But that was probably because for him it
had
been amazing. Camilla was the one who had been disappointed, not him.

We have to talk, she thought wildly. I have to say
something to stop all this desperate awkwardness. Nico’s green eyes were
unreadable, his expression quite blank. Only the terrible silence indicated
that something was not right between them.

‘I’m . . . sorry about what happened,’ she blurted out,
uncon
sciously moving closer to him so that
she couldn’t see his face,
his reaction.

‘
It doesn’t matter,’
said Nico quickly, forestalling her. The
last thing he needed right now
was an explanation . . . details .. .
her
pity . . . "That’s all in the past. I’m married and you’re
here
with Matt.’

‘
But I wanted to . .

‘
No!’ he told her urgently, his fingers tightening against
the warmth of her bare shoulder.
‘I’m
sorry too, so let’s just
forget it.
We’re just friends, OK?’

‘
Are we? Can we still be friends, really?’

Not getting what he wanted didn’t come easily to Nico, he
simply wasn’t used to it. But he couldn’t have
Camilla and it
would surely be easier to get used to it if they were at
least on
speaking terms. His life for the
past three months had been
pretty
bleak, after all. Right now he needed all the friends he
could get.

Taking a step backwards so that he could see her clearly,
and reading the guilt and self-recrimination in the eyes which slowly met his,
he gave her a firm, reassuring smile.

‘
Nothing can stop us
being friends, Camilla. Now, for
heaven’s
sake, cheer up and let’s make the most of the rest of
this bloody awful evening. Tell me what you’ve been
doing
lately. Tell me one of your terrible jokes. Tell me,’ he said, a
strange hollow churning sensation gripping his
stomach, ‘all
about you and Matt Lewis.’

Chapter 32

The telephone call two days later
came like a bolt from the blue. Caroline was out, visiting the hairdressers,
and Nico,
having
just got rid of Monty Barton, was celebrating his
manager’s departure with a large Remy
Martin and a packet
of
digestive biscuits. Feet up, he was watching a rerun of
the Addams Family on Channel 4 while
at the same time
flipping
through a copy of
Cosmopolitan
left by Caroline on
the floor.

‘Five reasons why you shouldn’t fake it!’ screamed a
headline
in the magazine, and Nico winced,
rapidly turning the page.
‘Old lovers
— why can’t they be new friends?’ enquired the
header of the next article he arrived at, and he almost smiled.
On screen, Gomez ran a trail of kisses up Morticia’s
arm and
she answered him with a wickedly enticing smile. Nico downed his
cognac and wondered if Morticia ever faked it with Gomez.

Before he could contemplate the answer, the phone rang.

‘
Nico, it’s me.’

He knew who
it was. ‘Who?’

‘
Roz. Roz Vallender,’ she added with exaggerated impatience.
‘The mother
of your child.’

‘Sure about that?’ he said, more nastily than he had
intended
but unable to stop himself. ‘You
know what they say, Roz.
Don’t believe everything you read in the
papers.’

‘She bloody well
is
your daughter!’ shouted Roz, ‘and
you’d better listen to me. I can’t cope — Nicolette’s seriously ill and I
can’t manage on my own any more. I
need
you,
Nico. You’ve
got to help me.’

He jack-knifed into a sitting
position. ‘What’s happened?
What’s the matter with her?’ It hardly mattered whether
Nicolette was his; if she was that ill
he could still respond to
Roz’s cry
for help. Anyone would, after all.

‘
I’ve got to speak to
you,’ she said urgently. ‘Can I come
round now?’

‘
Well ... I suppose so. Where are you?’

‘Phonebox,’ said Roz, concealing her
triumph at having
cleared
the first hurdle. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes. Thank
you, darling.’

As she made her way up the gravelled drive towards the
front door, Roz recalled the occasion of her last visit, when she had
found Camilla here. That very day, according to
Loulou, Camilla
had packed her bags and left, and had refused to explain
why.

Today, of course, there was the
chance that Nico’s wife would
be here but somehow she doubted it. She bloody well hoped
not, anyway — this reunion definitely didn’t need any
outsiders standing by to witness it, and particularly not a new little wife
who, as she understood it, Nico had only acquired
in order to
spite
her.