Foursome (13 page)

17

I have to decide how much I’m going to tell Isabel about what has been going on. Although obviously we’re never all together any more she’s bound to pick up that Alex and Dan have had a big bust-up somewhere. We have other mutual acquaintances who will realize something is wrong soon enough and report back. Alex and Lorna are both loose cannons careening around out of control. After what has happened with Dan I’m not in the mood for keeping secrets any more, but I’m also not prepared to steam in and tell her that her marriage was a sham for the most part. Dan and I talk it over before I leave to pick up the kids on Saturday morning. I want his approval for whatever I do next. We decide on a slightly rewritten and altogether more palatable version of the truth and I steel myself to try and crowbar it into the conversation in as natural a way as I can.

Isabel has always been the mother of the group, despite the fact that she’s also its only career woman. She’s the kind of woman who has always seemed to have it all – the job, the house, the beautiful twins, the doting husband (OK, so we were all wrong about that one) – but you couldn’t begrudge her that because she was so sweet and kind and thoughtful. Even her good looks are forgivable because she’s blonde and soft and pretty in a way that it’s impossible to find threatening. She always thinks the best of everyone until she’s proved wrong – the polar opposite of me. And she’s propped me up so many times I can’t even remember. I just always know she’s there when I need her. She would do anything for anybody, never forgets a birthday or an anniversary, is both a good mother and daughter and for twenty years was a devoted and supportive wife. To say she doesn’t deserve what has happened to her is like saying that having your puppy put down because he sneezed once was a bit harsh. Which is to say it’s an understatement. I’d do anything to prevent her being hurt even more.

William is sitting on a pile of cushions on one of the kitchen chairs when I let myself in, napkin tied round his neck like a bib. Nicola and Natalie are taking it in turns to ‘feed the baby’ and spooning some kind of porridgy breakfast cereal into his mouth.

‘Hi, girls,’ I say, and I kiss my youngest on the top of his head. ‘Having a good time?’

‘He’s being a very good baby,’ Natalie says, and she pats him on the head and then kisses him too, which explains why he seems to be going along with it so happily.

‘I think the baby’s got wind,’ Nicola is saying as I head out of the kitchen looking for Isabel. ‘Let’s burp him.’

Zoe is lying on the sofa in the living room texting as usual. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she says without looking up.

‘I’m going to chat to Auntie Isabel for a bit before we go,’ I say. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Great,’ she says. ‘Will you drop me off at Kerrie’s on the way home? She wants to go shopping.’

‘Sure.’ I wait for her to say, ‘You and Auntie Isabel can come in here and talk and I’ll go in the other room,’ but she’s thirteen so she doesn’t. I retreat.

‘Where is Auntie Isabel by the way?’ I say as I leave and Zoe shrugs. ‘Dunno.’

Eventually I find her upstairs making one of the beds so I pitch in and help, looking for a way to casually bring up the subject of Alex.

‘Oh, did I tell you Alex left you because he’s in love with me?’

‘Guess what? Dan punched Alex in the face last night and then told him to fuck off out of our lives forever. And all because of me!’

Maybe not.

Izz is telling me about how Zoe spent the evening teaching the girls all the lyrics to the whole of Lily Allen’s back catalogue. On the one hand I’m delighted that my surly teenager bothered to spend time taking notice of her two young non-blood-related cousins. I remind myself that Lily Allen is a good role model: a strong, independent, successful young woman who is actually famous for something other than taking her clothes off. On the other hand, though, the idea of my two adorable little surrogate nieces running around the playground singing ‘I want loads of clothes and fuck loads of diamonds’ but without the irony doesn’t seem like such a great idea. Still, Isabel seems to think it’s funny so I guess that’s all that matters.

‘They idolize Zoe,’ she says, and I find myself apologizing. I’m sure Isabel doesn’t want them acting like sulky adolescents any sooner than is going to happen naturally.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she laughs. ‘They’re a nightmare already. Look at what they’re doing to William.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Izz,’ I say, ‘you know Alex and Lorna broke up?’

She nods.

‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than I told you before.’ She looks at me, curious. ‘Nothing bad,’ I say. ‘At least not really.’

And I tell her the whole story, leaving out the part about Alex telling me he’d been in love with me for years and that that was the reason he couldn’t stay with her any more pretty much. I manage to make it sound like a ridiculous drunken pass, a one-time thing. An embarrassing but not devastating revelation.

She laughs nervously. ‘God, do you think he’s been having some kind of mid-life crisis?’

‘Definitely,’ I say. A mid-life crisis that has apparently been going on since he was in his twenties. I have to make it sound like what I said to Lorna was wildly exaggerated, which luckily Isabel thinks is funny.

It’s a little more difficult to make Dan’s reaction sound reasonable when I am downplaying Alex’s bad behaviour so radically. Isabel knows that Dan is not, by nature, jealous or irrational. He’s never hit anyone before. He’s barely ever raised his voice.

‘I think it’s a bloke thing,’ I say, clutching at straws. ‘They take loyalty between mates so seriously. You’ve seen all those war films where they take bullets for each other. I’m sure he’ll calm down.’

I’m not sure about this last statement at all, but, anyway, it seems like the only way to get off the subject of Dan’s seemingly out of proportion aggression. Thankfully she buys it.

‘Poor you and Dan,’ she says, rubbing my arm. ‘Getting mixed up in our mess.’

‘We’ll live,’ I say. ‘Have you spoken to Luke?’ I ask after a few moments, once I think it’s safe to change course.

‘I have,’ she says, and she looks like an excited adolescent. ‘He called me from Zurich yesterday. Are you still OK to have the girls on Monday night?’

‘Of course. Me and Zoe are going to teach them how to smoke crack.’

‘Don’t even joke about it.’

‘So, what did he say? Switzerland is a barren wasteland without you?’

‘Something like that. No, he just told me what he’s been doing and then we chatted about all sorts of stuff. He’s really easy to talk to. He was at some function or other but he stood outside in the snow and we talked for about an hour.’

I can’t help envying her the excitement of it all. Not that I’d trade Dan in for anyone, but there’s that feeling of being alive when you first meet someone, of being young and a little bit out of control, that’s pretty overwhelming. Isabel even looks different. She’s lost a couple of pounds, not that she needed to. Her skin’s glowing. She’s animated. As much as anything – nice as I’m sure Luke is – I assume it’s from the validation that she’s still an attractive woman, the possibility that there are men out there who will be interested in her. Smart, intelligent, good-looking men at that. At least I assume he’s good looking. Who cares anyway so long as he’s nice to her and she has fun.

‘Well, he’d better appreciate how lucky he is,’ I say, and I give her a hug.

I wake up on Monday morning feeling that at least the world can move on now. It couldn’t really have turned out worse than that Dan ended up the major casualty in all this, but at least now everything is out in the open and we can all start picking up the pieces.

When I arrive at the office ten minutes early Kay is standing on the doorstep looking smart and scrubbed up in that ‘first day on a new job’ way.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘You’re keen.’

‘I always was a swot,’ she says, smiling.

We go upstairs and I show her round the little suite of rooms and where to put her coat. I make her a coffee in the tiny kitchen and talk her through how Joshua and Melanie like theirs.

‘What about Lorna?’ she says. I have already decided that I have to be grown-up about Lorna as far as Kay’s concerned, so I just say, ‘Black, no sugar,’ and leave it at that. I even manage not to roll my eyes as I say it. I show her which is her desk and then talk her through the phone system. I don’t want to overload her so I give her a file with all our clients’ CVs in so that she can familiarize herself with who’s who – given that she won’t have heard of ninety per cent of them before – and I tell her that I’ll answer all the calls this morning, but that she should listen in to get more of an idea of what goes on.

When Lorna arrives she is forced to come in to reception to say hello to Kay, so I make a big point of being really smiley and happy to see her. I know she thinks I will have had a weekend from hell after her visit to see Dan on Friday night, but I am not going to give her the satisfaction of looking miserable. The look of confusion that passes over her face when I cheerily ask how her weekend was is priceless. She wants to make a good impression on Kay, though, so she has to respond in an equally matey manner.

It’s the first time I’ve been in a room with her for more than a couple of minutes since she and Alex split up, and I can’t help but notice that she’s looking even more skeletal than usual and that the dark circles round her eyes seem to have moved in permanently. She looks like she’s aged and it occurs to me that she’s really taking the end of the relationship hard. Loathsome as she is, Alex used her very unfairly. I have no doubt but that he accelerated the relationship cynically, and he made her genuinely believe he had fallen in love with her. Partly, no doubt, it was easy because she’s always been so desperate for someone to love her. Well, she’s better off without him whether she realizes it yet or not (not, I’d say from the red rims round her eyes). Once she gets a bit of distance from the relationship I’m sure she’ll be able to see it for what it is more clearly. And when that happens, I decide, I’ll try to talk to her about everything that’s gone on. I’ll see if we can clear the air and at least pretend to get along.

There’s big excitement in the office today because we have a new client. And not just any old client. Lorna is the golden girl because she has somehow convinced the uncrowned but universally acknowledged queen of prime time Saturday night TV, Heather Barclay, to join Mortimer and Sheedy’s humble little stable.

Supposedly – and I hear this from the skinny horse’s mouth itself because Lorna, while in no mood to share her good news with me, is revelling in showing off to Joshua in front of Kay – Lorna met her at a mutual friend’s short-film screening at BAFTA a few weeks ago. She (Lorna) introduced herself to Heather and flattered her that she was capable of far more worthy and challenging work than merely reading someone else’s words off an autocue. Heather confided that she felt she had been pigeonholed as the nation’s slightly bland sweetheart and that she didn’t believe her current agent knew how to help her broaden her horizons. She was with one of the bigger, flashier agencies and she didn’t feel like anybody there was hungry enough to really be prepared to work hard on her behalf. They were happy for her to just coast along doing the same old stuff so long as they could keep on taking fifteen per cent of her quite considerable earnings.

‘So I told her,’ Lorna says, seemingly loving having an attentive audience hanging on her every word (Kay and Joshua, I mean, obviously. I am pretending to get on with my work), ‘that I was an agent who was so hungry she was almost starving!’ She laughs at her own joke here although, of course, the irony is that she does actually look like she’s starving at the moment. Literally.

‘And I told her all about Mortimer and Sheedy. Then, to be honest, I forgot all about it until she phoned me over the weekend and she said she was going to tell Fisher Parsons Management today that she wants to leave. She’s coming in at three o’clock to talk about exactly what she wants to do next.’

Actually, I feel like there’s something flat in the way Lorna is delivering her story, despite the jokes and the self-congratulation. Like she’s going through the motions, showing off because it’s expected of her rather than because she’s getting any pleasure from it.

‘Good girl,’ Joshua says, as if he was talking to his pet lurcher. ‘And obviously you’ll be looking after her?’ There’s a question mark in his voice that makes me think that he’s hoping Lorna will say, ‘No, she’s coming to be represented by you,’ but, of course, that doesn’t happen. I guess that even while he’s delighted on behalf of the company to have acquired a big fish, he’s a little jealous that he didn’t net her himself. Lorna, of course, has no intention of handing over the big prize.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘She said she felt like we really clicked.’

There’s no denying that poaching Heather is, indeed, great news for Mortimer and Sheedy. The more money the company brings in the better for all of us. Very few of our clients earn the big bucks. We rely more on the slow but steady. Heather’s arrival will not bring about an immediate change in our fortunes, though. In fact, there’s no guarantee that it ever will. The way it works is that Heather will continue to pay commission to her previous agents, Fisher Parsons Management, for all jobs which predated her defection to us. So, if she spends the next five years hosting her hit game show,
High Speed Dating
, we’ll earn nothing. Ditto if she continues to front
Celebrity Karaoke
. Lorna’s job is to find her new projects, to negotiate brand-new deals. And that may not be as easy as it sounds, especially since Heather has delusions of gravitas. Still, even if she never earns a penny for us, she will still be a great poster girl for the company. And, because celebrities attract other celebrities like moths round a candle, the chances are that we will acquire a few more A-list clients in the next few months.

Kay is understandably impressed with her new boss’s brilliance.

‘Wow,’ she says, once Lorna and Joshua have left the room. ‘Heather Barclay.’

‘Yep,’ I say, not quite trusting myself with any more. The truth is that Lorna has pulled off quite a coup and I’m finding that a little irritating.