Fast Friends (42 page)

He had brought her here, then, and she had excused
herself, telling him that she would make the necessary calls from the bedroom.
Sitting on the edge of her bed she had picked up and
replaced the receiver three times, so that he could hear the
pings
on the extension downstairs. When several minutes had
passed, she had returned to the sitting-room to assure him that
her
mother, her aunt and her very best friend were all on theirway, refusing his
offer of a sedative and explaining that she was
fine, that what she most needed was twenty minutes alone
before
her mother arrived.

It had been a relief when the poor, well-meaning,
exhausted man had gone. How, after all, could she have explained to him
that her parents were both abroad and unable to be
contacted,
and that she only had one
friend, who was herself on the verge
of
giving birth? Such a dearth of friends was positively
embarrassing.

When the doorbell rang, shattering the silence, she
thought it
must be the milkman calling to
present his bill and took her
purse
with her to the door. She was already fumbling for a £5
note and some coins before realizing with vague
astonishment
that it was the GP from the village.

‘
Dr Logan, what are
you
doing here?’ It was like bumping
into
one’s dentist at a night-club. ‘I’m ... I’m afraid I have
some very bad
. . . very sad news for you.’

‘
Let’s go inside, shall
we, Roz?’ said Dr Logan, his deep,
kind voice loud and reassuring as he
placed his arm around her narrow shoulders and led her back towards her chair. ‘My
dear,
the hospital contacted me. They told me
about your daughter.
I’m here to make
sure you’re all right. Do you want to talk
about it, or shall I give you
something to let you sleep?’

Almost with a sense of relief, Roz
felt the grief well up
inside her.
The taut, gritty pain in her chest seemed to move and
her chin shuddered with the effort of control. The rough tweed
of
the doctor’s jacket grazed her arm as he helped her sit down and she gasped for
breath, her eyes blinded by the tears now
streaming
down her cheeks, reaching for him in an over
^w
helming spasm of loss and desperation and sheer,
bleak
desolation.

‘
There now, Roz. My poor
girl, I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible
thing that’s happened to you,’ murmured
Dr Logan, holding her
tightly in his arms and
letting her sob. ‘Good girl, cry as much
as you want, don’t you worry, we’ll get you through this .. .
there
there . . . go on . . . good girl . .

Chapter 33

Matt had always been the kind of person who knew exactly what he wanted.
A firm disbeliever in fate – although since
meeting Camilla he was
willing to reconsider that one – he had
planned
his life down to the last detail at an astonishingly
young age and never even thought for a moment that
what he
had decided would happen might not.

Matt’s mother, coming across the sheet of paper containing
his Life
Plan one day while she was tidying his room, had been amused and touched by her
elder son’s presumption. That her tousle-haired, over-active, sports-mad nine
year old could have
compiled such a
thoroughly organized and forward-thinking
list was simply the cutest
thing .. .

 
Finnish
college.

Work at a top-class golf club.

Become a proffesional golfer and win
the US
Open.

Travel the whole world and win lots of tornaments.

Have fun.

Find a really beautiful and nice girl.

Go and live in England.

Get married to her (the girl) and have five children and
three dogs and maybe some other pets too.

Teach my children to play golf and
other sports like
tennis and baseball.

Enjoy
myself until I am very old.

Die

’But why d’you want to go and live in England?’ his mother
had
asked him when he’d returned home from
school that evening.
He was, after all, the most all-American boy she’d
ever known.

Matt had shrugged, an untidy sandwich in one hand and a
milkshake in the other. ‘I’ve seen it on TV. I’ve
read books
about it and they have
some great golf courses. England’s neat
and I just want to live there. But don’t worry, Mom,’ he’d
immediately
reassured her with characteristic generosity and
panache, ‘you and Pop can come over and visit me as often as
you
want. I’ll pay for the plane tickets, OK?’

By the time he was thirty-five he’d
reached number five on
his list, the only disappointment so far having occurred when
he’d been runner-up in the US Open,
narrowly beaten into
second
place by a blisteringly on-form Tom Watson.

But that was almost more than made up for by the fact that
he had fulfilled the sixth goal. He had met the woman who was
indisputably the beautiful and nice girl of whom he
had dreamt
so very long ago.

All he had to do now was buy a house in England, marry
Camilla and
hope to God that she wasn’t allergic to dogs.

As the friendship between Loulou and
Mac was tentatively
renewed, both working
desperately to hide the strength of their true feelings for each other for fear
that they would destroy its cobweb fragility, the relationship between Matt and
Camilla became more intense, and happily knew no such caution. Matt, larger
than life in every way, knew that he had found the woman with whom he wanted to
spend the rest of his life. And happier
than
she would have ever believed possible, Camilla allowed
him to sweep her
totally off her feet. There were no obstacles in the way of their idyllic, laughter-filled,
sex-satiated love, even
Toby and Charlotte
liked Matt and for the first time she learnt
not to question her right
to such happiness.

It was hers. It wasn’t all a mistake
or a dream that might
disappear
at any minute. She deserved it.

Especially, she often thought with unbounded glee, the sex.

Jack, she now realized – although it
had taken her long
enough to find out –
was not one of the world’s great lovers. He
had
been selfish, at times little more than perfunctory, and
totally lacking in consideration for her needs.
Maybe he had
made more of an effort with Roz, but Camilla, in her
ignorance, had not known enough to expect or demand more from him,
innocently accepting that what she got was all
there was. Nico
had opened doors for her but for some reason she had –
equally
naïvely – assumed that he was an
exception. Incredible as he
had been,
she had somehow come to the conclusion that he was
a one-off, an
experience that could never be repeated.

It was a source of incredulous joy to
her to learn that Matt
was equally talented. Tender, teasing, exciting and exhilarating
. . . he had awoken in her a sensuality she hadn’t known
existed.

The most difficult part, she found,
was keeping the news of
her
wonderful discovery to herself. Loulou, who was still being perfectly saintly,
but who managed to retain her old forthrightness had winked knowingly and said,
‘Good in bed, is he?’ but other than that, no-one else knew. It was, Camilla
decided, the
only aspect of the affair which
was frustrating, unless you counted the slightly irritating fact that she had
wasted two
whole weeks by holding out before being persuaded into Matt’s
bed.

Oh, but it had been worth waiting
for, she remembered now
as she soaked in a hot bath before getting ready to meet Loulou
at Lorenzo’s for lunch.

And it wasn’t as if she had set out on
purpose to delay the
big seduction scene; events had always seemed to conspire
against Matt, and she had been
privately relieved each time
they had.

Once a fat lady always a fat lady, in your mind, at least,
she thought ruefully, sinking down in the Badedas-scented water so that the
foam spilled over her breasts.

It took some adjusting to; she had to make a conscious
effort
each time she thought of her body to
remind herself that she
was no longer
overweight, and that instead of unsightly fat
there were now generous but firm curves, all in perfect
proportion
with each other.

But the image that she had long been
used to was what
tended to remain
uppermost in her thoughts. And that, coupled with the knowledge that she was
woefully inexperienced with men, particularly for a woman of thirty-two, had
been the reason for her reluctance to consummate this thrilling new
relationship.

Smiling to herself, Camilla thought back to the
long-delayed
seduction. The first time they
had shared an hotel room Marty
had been there, bouncing and giggling
between them, blissfully unaware of Matt’s good-humoured frustration. Later
that night, following the charity gala, he had driven her home and still
unsettled by the unexpected meeting with Nico and
Caroline,
she had accepted an enormous brandy. Intuitively, Matt had
understood that that aspect of the evening was something she
preferred not to discuss and she had been
profoundly grateful.
So grateful that she had fallen asleep on the
settee.

And after
that it had become a kind of joke between them, at
times an almost farcical one. When Matt kissed Camilla the
phone invariably rang, or Zoë arrived
unexpectedly with a troupe
of
friends, or Fee and Gussie burst into the room to show them the jam jar of
spiders they had so painstakingly collected from
the overgrown garden.

‘
We’d have had more privacy in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot,’
complained Matt when what was supposed to be an intimate
lunch at
his hotel was gate crashed by three of his fellow golfers, hell-bent on
celebrating their morning’s win. ‘Those guys were supposed to be on my side,
for God’s sake.’

‘I liked them,’ Camilla protested, laughing at his
indignant expression.

‘And they liked you. That’s something else that makes me
nervous. What are you doing at the weekend?’

‘
Working.’

‘
Swap with
Zoë. I’m taking you away. We’re going to have some time alone together if it’s
the last thing I damn well do.’

But even then events did their level best to conspire
against them.

‘
Alone together,’
Camilla mouthed at him as they boarded
the packed shuttle from Heathrow.
A delegation of Japanese businessmen had taken up all the available seats. She
and Matt were three rows apart.

‘
Alone together,’ she
reminded him as they queued amidst
the babbling French and Japanese
crowds to squeeze through customs at Orly.

‘Alone together,’ she whispered as they tried to claim
their
room at the glamorous Paris Hotel on
the Rue St Jacques, only
to be
apologetically informed that due to an over-enthusiastic
new clerk, they had been double booked with an Australian
sheep farmer and his young secretary who had arrived half an
hour earlier and promptly hung their ‘Do not
disturb’ on the
door. The manager
explained that he was dreadfully sorry, but
the rest of the hotel was full. There were no other rooms
available
at all.

‘
Oh merde,’
said Matt, very loudly. ‘And on our
honeymoon, too. This is
três tragique, m ‘sieur Tres tragique
indeed.’

‘
Alone together,’ said
Matt, a hint of smugness and a great
deal
of relief in his voice when an hour and a half later they
found
themselves installed in the honeymoon suite of the even more glamorous Hotel
Bristol. ‘At bloody last. Come here,’ he
entreated,
reaching for Camilla, ‘and give your clever old golfer
a big hug.’