Foursome (3 page)

4

Isabel calls me. I think about ignoring the call, letting her go straight to voicemail. I can’t even begin to tell her what’s been going on in my life. I never keep things from her but I know that this time I really have to. I hate not answering, though. To be honest, I feel like I’ve let her down a bit recently by consorting so much with the enemy. I haven’t been as supportive as I could have been. It should be her spending every evening round at ours, not him, and I hate to think of her sitting in her big empty house miserable and needing someone to talk to. So I pick up.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she says.

‘Do you want me to come over?’ I say, and, although I’m hoping she’ll say no because I’m halfway through cooking dinner and I promised to test William later on the speech he has to learn for his one scene in the class play, I’d hand everything over to Dan and go if she said yes.

‘No, don’t be silly. I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ll see you at the weekend, though? I’m letting Alex have the girls on Saturday.’

‘Definitely,’ I say, making a decision to tell Dan that whatever Alex might want to do it’s tough because I’ve made a date with Izz. ‘We can spend the whole day together if you like.’

‘Great,’ she says, and she sounds so grateful that I feel even worse and when she asks me how I am I say, ‘No, wait. First I have to say sorry for being such a crap friend and for not supporting you as much as I should have, and for not insisting that Dan kick Alex out.’ It’s a bit of an awkward moment because Isabel and I don’t really do that soul-searching kind of stuff about our friendship. We’ve never needed to.

‘It’s OK,’ she says, and she sounds like she means it. ‘Dan is Alex’s best mate so I kind of figured that things would be awkward for a while.’

‘But you’re
my
best mate. I should have put my foot down and that should have been that.’

‘Bex, it’s fine. But thank you.’

We say nothing for a few moments and then she says, ‘How
is
Alex?’

‘Actually I have no idea,’ I say. ‘He hasn’t been around much lately. You’ve probably seen more of him than I have.’

‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘But the kids are always there.’ She and Alex have worked out an elaborate child-share system, which Isabel thinks is grown-up and responsible of them. Alex, I know, thinks it is mean-spirited and immature. He wants to be able to visit the girls whenever he feels like it.

‘Him leaving doesn’t mean I don’t still care about him,’ she says. ‘I want to know he’s OK. After all, he is the father of my children.’

I’m not about to say, ‘He’s falling apart – and do you know how I know that? Because he’s telling me he’s in love with me.’

‘He’s fine, I think. You know Alex. Like I said, I haven’t seen him for a while.’

And it’s true. Alex hasn’t been round for nearly two weeks. He and Dan have been out a couple of times and I’ve faked sickness or the need for an early night. I just don’t want to see him at the moment. Dan has taken the fact that Alex has stopped using our sofa bed as a hotel as a good sign. He thinks it means that he is getting back on his feet, but I know otherwise. Luckily Dan has been snowed under at work and he hasn’t really felt like going out much anyway, otherwise he might have noticed my reluctance or Alex’s refusal of any offers to come round. I know it’ll all blow over. Not for the first time I curse Alex for getting us all into this situation in the first place. Was life with Isabel really that bad that he couldn’t just put up with it? For my sake, I find myself thinking, and then I remember that it’s not all about me.

It’s funny but when they were together, much as I loved them both, I often used to wonder what it was that Alex and Isabel saw in each other. Beyond the surface things, that is. They were such different people – Alex with his caustic wit and his egocentric universe, Isabel so much more gentle, but equally as entrenched in her opinions. They never agreed on anything, but their opposing viewpoints had got to be a routine so I guess I just never took them seriously. That was just how they were.

Alex is a writer and an impoverished one at that, and I know it used to drive Isabel crazy that he couldn’t just get a job and write in his spare time. Which I guess I understood until they had the twins and he did all the house-husband stuff when Isabel went back to work. In fact, I used to envy her for the way that she could say goodbye to the kids in the morning, knowing that someone who loved them as much as she did was going to be looking after them, and then not have to see them again until nearly bed time. Not that I didn’t love staying at home with my two – I did. It was just… exhausting. Plus, Isabel loves her job (she’s a graphic designer) and so it was no great hardship for her to go back to work. But I think she still made him feel bad about it. Emasculated him, I guess. And I think she had a way of making him feel inadequate because he earned so much less than her (nothing, pretty much, if truth be told). Not deliberately. She would never have done that. But it was there between them, nevertheless. I always thought it wasn’t really fair that she was doing exactly what she wanted but making him feel bad for trying to do the same.

And, to give Alex credit, he did use to have a job. Somewhere back in the dim and distant past he had a ‘promising future in the City’. But he hated it, the stress and the cut and thrust of it all. He hated the hours and the dry soulless office. He earned an awful lot in a very short time and he nearly lost himself in the process. He’d finally told Isabel he needed to take some time out to pursue his passion and she had happily said OK. I assume she just never imagined he’d be no further on twelve years later.

Actually, I worry that Alex is a shit writer. He gave me one of his plays to read once – hoping, I think, that with my connections I could help him get it produced or, worse, give it to Joshua in the hope that he might see Alex’s potential and offer to take him on as a client. God, it was awful. All middle-aged existential angst about being forced to settle down and have children. All, of course, thrown into relief when one of said children gets knocked down by a bus and nearly dies. Nothing that hasn’t been rehashed a million times already by an army of male mid-life-crisis writers. Turgid, worthy, sentimental. He warned me it might make me cry and it nearly did, out of frustration because I had to finish it and because of the fear of what I was going to say to him about it (shit, clichéd and melodramatic not being the words he was looking for I suspected).

In the end I settled for ‘very thought provoking’ and told him that really I only knew people who made musicals and farces, not real theatre. Try the Royal Court, I said. I’m sure it’s right up their alley but unfortunately I don’t have any connections there. He sent it in and I assume they just sent it straight back after a cursory read because, truly, by page ten you knew it was a dog. Anyway, he didn’t mention it to me again and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. So, maybe Isabel was right all along, but it still felt mean to disabuse him of his dream and, besides, she earned enough to indulge him.

So, in all honesty, despite the fact that Isabel’s my closest girlfriend, I always thought in the back of my mind, that maybe Alex would be happier with someone else. And so would she. Not that I ever wanted that to happen. I loved our little clique. It couldn’t have been more perfect that Dan’s best friend ended up married to my best friend. And now they’ve split up I just want them to get back together. I want everything to be back to normal.

The ‘who’s a pretty boy’ act is driving me especially crazy today. She’s eating pomegranate seeds. Red juice is getting all over the papers on her desk and she’s got stuff round her mouth like a two-year-old who’s been chewing raspberry jelly. I hold my breath waiting for the next sucky noise followed by the little crunch. Part of the reason I find Lorna’s dietary habits so mind-numbingly annoying is that she’s tiny. There’s not an ounce of fat on her eight-and-a-half-stone frame.

So partly, I guess, you might be forgiven for reading it as jealousy because I am on the fat side. Not ‘you’ll have to take the side of my house off if you want to get me out’ fat but fat-ish. Plump. I have that trunky thing going on. Big tits, skinny legs but a big thick trunk in between with no waist, a fat stomach and absolutely no arse to speak of. Like a pillar-box with a head and two bits of string dangling down, someone once said to me.

Like all women blessed with a body like mine I have succumbed to dressing in a way that I despise – low-cut top to distract the eye with my cleavage, short skirt as if to say, ‘Look, I can’t be fat – I have skinny legs.’ It kind of works when you’re twenty but at forty-one I know I have the potential to look like Bet Lynch. If I put on anything baggy, I resemble a marquee. So I’ve settled for blousy but with a lot of vintage and retro prints that I vainly hope will make me look interesting.

Lorna, on the other hand, is like an ironing board, which is not a good look either, in my opinion. Actually, she’s like a bony ironing board. I imagine you could play the xylophone on her ribs (don’t ask me why you’d want to). Everything about her is hard and angular and unfeminine. I may admit to an occasional pang of envy when I see those rare women who are both curvaceous and slim, but Lorna? No thank you. Give me lardy over skeletal any day. The point is that she doesn’t need to diet. And she certainly doesn’t need to keep going on about how big she’s getting and ‘look at my stomach’ or ‘have I got a double chin?’.

As well as Phone Wars she has several other weapons in her armoury. She’s a master of work-avoidance techniques for a start. When I first started working part time I would go in on a Tuesday and she would usually give me a few tasks that she hadn’t had time to complete the day before. I would diligently work my way through whatever Melanie and Joshua gave me to do and then, if possible, would help Lorna out too. There were a few occasions where there was simply too much and, at the end of the day, I would apologetically pass a few bits and pieces back to her. I soon started to realize that when I went back for the second time that week, on Thursday, the uncompleted tasks would still be uncompleted and would be piled up on my desk again.

OK, so this didn’t seem like too much of a big deal until one day when Melanie asked Lorna why such and such a job hadn’t been done and Lorna piped up, ‘Oh, I asked Rebecca to do that. Has she not done it? I told her it was important.’

She never acknowledged what had really happened, even in private to me. And I was too new and unconfident to challenge her. Subsequently I would break my back to get through my own work
and
hers until one day, about three months later, after I genuinely hadn’t been able to finish what she’d given me the previous Tuesday, and either Joshua or Melanie had queried it, I had simply said, ‘Oh, Lorna, remember I told you I hadn’t had time to do that on Tuesday. If you weren’t going to be able to do it yourself, you should have told me then,’ and I’d smiled sweetly at her as I’d said it. She’d got a little better after that.

Now I’m full time I’m wise to all her moves, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still try. Whenever I go out at lunchtime there’s always a note on my desk when I get back as if someone has called to ask me to do something. ‘Melissa says can you get her the pages for her audition on Friday,’ was one. Most actors are happy just to be handed their scenes when they arrive at an audition, but Melissa is dyslexic so we always ask for her to get them a day early. It’s common practice. I’m happy to call up and ask for them. The point is that Melissa didn’t phone
me
to ask
me
to get them, she phoned to ask for
someone
to get them and, since Lorna was the one who spoke to her you would think that she would do it. But no.

Once she left me a note that said, ‘Simon Harte called and asked if you could change the time of his costume fitting at the Shaftesbury to three rather than two,’ and I absolutely knew that she was lying, because Simon Harte was a new client and didn’t even know I existed yet. It must have taken her longer to write the note than it would have taken for her to phone and change the appointment herself. But, of course, that wasn’t the issue. It’s a power thing.

Lorna is forty-two and single. Occasionally she gets even more twittery than usual for a few days, and pays a lot of attention to her appearance, and I know it’s because she’s seeing someone. Then a couple of days later, inevitably, she’ll look all teary-eyed and weepy so it’s clear that it’s all gone wrong. She spends an inordinate amount of time on her computer and I’m convinced she’s checking out dating websites. I never ask her about her love life and, surprisingly, it’s the one detail of her life that she doesn’t feel compelled to burden me with, but I get the impression she’s desperate to settle down and have kids. I imagine she scares off all the men she meets by asking them what their intentions are during the starter, and then moving on to their sperm count and whether there are any hereditary diseases in their families by dessert.

When I’m feeling generous, which isn’t often, I feel sorry for her. She’s not really a bad person. And I know that I lucked out when I met Dan otherwise there but for the grace of God and all that. Other times, though, I want to slap her and tell her it’s all her own fault that she’s on her own because she never effing shuts up. (I’m trying to wean myself off swearing, by the way, ever since I heard William, my youngest, telling his grandmother that his birthday present was ‘fucking marvellous’. I tried to blame it on Grand Theft Auto, but William despises computer games.) She would drive any man crazy after five minutes, but, thankfully, I’ve never actually said this to her yet. Although I think evil thoughts about her I would never want to knowingly hurt her, or anyone else for that matter. So I try to hold my tongue. My biting but devastatingly witty comments remain in my head.

The fact that I am so intolerant is one of the things I dislike most about myself. It’s a hard-fought contest because I am a master in the art of self-loathing. From the physical (my weight; my crêpy cleavage; my feet or more specifically my toes, which are short and stumpy; the bump in my nose) to the behavioural (my fear of change, my inability to do anything about my weight despite the fact that it makes me miserable, the way I always judge people before I meet them, my refusal to even pretend I can tolerate fools), I can find a million different ways to beat myself up about my failings. On a good day, when I’m being really honest with myself, I can acknowledge (only privately, of course), that I’m basically a good person. I’m a good wife, a caring mother and, usually, recent times with Isabel aside, a loyal and supportive friend. I give money to homeless people sometimes and I always sign up when I’m stopped by those charity muggers in the street. I just don’t like people I don’t know. Or idiots. Or my feet. Or Lorna, for that matter.