It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (2 page)

Anyway, I’d had a really rubbish day and I was knackered by six o’clock, so I declined an invitation to join some of my colleagues in the pub and set off home. I work for a
charity and we rely quite heavily on volunteers to meet our staffing needs, and whilst I really admire their passion and commitment and we couldn’t possibly manage without them, when they are flaky or incompetent or just plain don’t turn up, it makes my job harder than it would have been if they’d never been there in the first place.

My job title is Director of Communications, which sounds dead important, but actually means I spend most of my time scouring the newspapers for stories that are relevant to us and then frantically bashing out press releases to get our response to the story out there before it gets old and everyone loses interest. Occasionally a journalist will ring me up in advance of the story being printed and we get a quote in first time round – that’s a good day. That Friday hadn’t been a good day – there’d been some ridiculous scaremongering thing in the
Daily Mail
and one of my more hapless volunteers and I had spent the day calling and emailing all our media contacts with our response to it, except towards mid-afternoon, just as I was thinking the day was almost over, I realised that she’d emailed out my response to a story from the previous week, ‘Archie, 12, is Britain’s youngest Dad’, rather than that day’s story about the link between binge drinking and genital warts. So I’d had to call all the journalists and apologise and resend the press release, except by then most of them had decamped to the pub, and by the time I’d finished I was too tired and hacked off to do the same.

As I was saying, I knew something was up the second I walked in the door. The flat smelled of polish and lilies and something delicious cooking, and the front room had been all winter wonderlanded up with a Christmas tree loaded with gold and silver baubles and white fairy lights strung everywhere. Personally I like tinsel and multi-coloured lights but Rose says they’re tacky and won’t have them in the flat, and I just have to suck it up because she, as everyone knows, is the one with the taste in our household. No, really, she is, and I
don’t mind leaving the majority of the decorating decisions to her.

I suppose I should say at this point how extraordinarily, amazingly lucky Rose and I are to have the flat in the first place. Our dad could afford to give us a generous wedge of cash for a deposit and so, unlike so many people our age, we are happily installed on the bottom rung of the housing ladder rather than floundering around in rented accommodation, and I am really, truly grateful for our good fortune. The flat’s nothing special, just a small two-bed with a decent kitchen and a lovely smart new bathroom that Dad had done for us when we moved in, and it’s in a part of Battersea that used to be quite grotty but is becoming more and more chichi and gentrified – in fact one of Prince Harry’s pals was mugged at the end of our road the other day, and if that’s not the sign of an up-and-coming area I don’t know what is.

Anyway when we moved in I gave Rose carte blanche to get on with the decorating. Actually the truth is I really can’t be arsed with that sort of thing and I’d quite happily have furnished the entire place in one trip to Ikea, but Rose doesn’t work that way. She went to markets and antique shops and cutesy little boutiques and found loads of lovely ‘pieces’ that together make the flat look lived-in and homely but at the same time really elegant. Even the things that we ended up having to buy from Ikea because Rose had blown our budget on ‘pieces’ look somehow chic and classic, like even if we’d had unlimited funds, we’d have chosen that particular squashy cream sofa anyway, because it’s just so right. Add a few really quite good original drawings and oil paintings – Rose works for Quinn’s, the auction house, so she gets to charm all the Young British Artists and snap up bits of their work that will be worth squillions of pounds one day, for next to nothing – and the flat looks like something out of
Living Etc
, it really does.

But the addition of the Christmas decorations, unnatural cleanliness and delicious
smells emanating from the kitchen reminded me that Rose had told me – I’m pretty certain she had anyway – that she was going to be hosting one of her dinner parties, or possibly a kitchen supper, that night, and I’d intended to make myself scarce as I usually did on these occasions. But it was too late – I had entered the dragon’s den.

“Ellie?” Rose called from the kitchen. I sidled reluctantly through and leaned in the doorway.

“Hi, Rose. The decorations look amazing, and something smells nice,” I said. Rose is, in addition to all her other talents, a fantastic cook. In my gap year I went backpacking around South-East Asia; Rose worked as a chalet girl before embarking on an art-themed grand tour of Europe, and during the course of it she learned how to make mayonnaise and decant claret and all that gubbins. Personally I’m quite happy with a jacket potato in front of the telly, and anyway I’m a vegetarian so most of Rose’s cordon bleu masterpieces are wasted on me, but her friends always bang on about how wonderful her food is, and whenever she has one of her dinner parties she spends a fortune at Waitrose and Borough Market on ingredients and hours in the kitchen.

“I hope you don’t mind me putting the tree up, although it’s only the tenth,” Rose said. She looked flushed and pleased – she really loves doing this kind of thing. “We’re having rib of veal with chanterelles, and smoked, herb-crusted goat’s cheese with chanterelles for you and Simon.”

“What?” I said. My hopes of sending an SOS text message to Ben and if he wasn’t free ringing my best friend Claire, and legging it down to the Latchmere, were fading fast. “Rose, I’m really sorry, but I’d completely forgotten about this and I… er… I have plans.”

“No you don’t,” she said. “I reminded you the other night, don’t you remember,
and you said you were free.”

A hazy memory surfaced of her mentioning something, and me muttering a response before going back to gawping at Oliver. Rose is a chatterer – even if she can see I’m watching something on telly or reading my Kindle, she chats. About her day at work, about the new shoes she’s bought, about her plans for the evening – chat, chat, chat. Bless her, it’s quite sweet really, but the ability to tune her out has been a vital life skill I acquired in childhood and have honed to a fine art since we’ve shared the flat.

Clearly I was trapped – she’d gone and made a special veggie main course for me and this Simon, and I wasn’t going to be able to get out of it without hurting her feelings and making myself feel like a total evil shit.

“Do you need a hand with anything?” I asked.

“No, it’s all under control,” said Rose. Then she gave me one of her Looks. “Why don’t you just have a shower and get ready? Use some of my Molton Brown revitalising stuff if you’ve had a tiring day.”

Which I interpreted as, “Go and wash your hair and change into something decent, or you’ll show me up in front of my friends.”

“So who’s coming?” I asked, opening the fridge and nicking one of Rose’s homemade chocolate and sloe gin truffles.

“Just a few people,” Rose said, checking them off on her fingers. “There’s Simon, who works with me, and his partner Khalid.” So at least she wasn’t trying to set me up with Simon, which was a relief. “And Vanessa and Tom.” Vanessa was one of Rose’s more annoying friends from school, whose wedding the previous year to Tom Willoughby-Archer had graced the pages of
Tatler
and
Hello
, according to Rose. “And Pip, she was going to bring Sebastian but they’ve had an epic row apparently so she’s coming on her own, and I
invited Oliver at the last minute so we’ll be an even number.”

I felt a little fizz of pleasure. “Right, I’ll go and make myself look presentable then,” I said, and went upstairs to shower.

To be fair to Rose, I’m never going to win any best-dressed-woman awards in my work attire. I have to wear suits in the office and I absolutely hate it, and resent paying a single penny more than I have to for them, so I tend to descend on Matalan and Next and M&S at sale time and buy a job lot in various colours and throw them in the washing machine once a week, which is why they don’t last nearly as long as they should. That day I was wearing a particularly uninspiring mushroom-coloured ensemble that had seen better days, and quite frankly even its best days hadn’t been that good.

Steaming gently, a towel wrapped around my hair, I gloomily surveyed the contents of my wardrobe. I don’t much care about fashion – it strikes me as a bit shallow and pointless to spend as much money as Rose does on what you wear – but that night I felt really depressed by my lack of clothes and if I’m being honest by my appearance generally. I was going to be sitting around a table with former model Vanessa, who has the long limbs and perfect bone structure achieved by generations of rich, thick men marrying generations of thick, beautiful women; Pip, who if I remembered correctly was an up-and-coming fashion designer and the daughter of some 1970s rock god and a famous actress; Simon and Khalid who being gay men were bound to be toe-curlingly stylish; and my sister, who always looks gorgeous. And Oliver. Of course. It was Oliver, Rose’s Oliver, who I was really thinking about as I raked through my wardrobe, inspecting and discarding garment after garment. The turquoise silk tunic I bought in China would have been perfect, but had a grease stain in the middle of the front and I kept forgetting to take it to the dry cleaner’s. My black velvet batwing top, which I found in a load of Mum’s old things that Dad was going to take to the
Oxfam shop, and rescued for nothing more than sentimental reasons really, except now it’s suddenly madly fashionable, was in a crumpled ball at the bottom of the laundry basket. My only dress, a red beaded sheath from Monsoon, had suffered cruelly when I ignored the ‘dry clean only’ instruction on its label.

In the end I settled for jeans, of course. That’s what I always do: spend half an hour frantically digging through my wardrobe trying stuff on and dropping it on the floor and end up with my bedroom looking like a branch of JD Sports after the rioters have been round, and wearing jeans. Still, I managed to find a rather nice sparkly scarf in Rose’s accessories drawer (she has an accessories drawer, and a makeup drawer, and a shelf in her wardrobe where all her handbags live in linen drawstring bags. And I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that her shoes are all in plastic boxes with a photo of the shoe stuck to the front), and used her GHDs to straighten my hair and put on some of her Tom Ford scent, and by the time I was ready I looked okay, I thought.

Now you might be wondering whether in addition to nicking Rose’s scent and her hair straighteners and her scarf (oh, and some lovely shimmery Shu Uemara eyeliner – let me not hold back), I had set my sights on her boyfriend. Honestly, I hadn’t. I was… intrigued, I guess, by Oliver. There was something about him that made me want him to think well of me. I didn’t want him to see me as Rose’s fat, slobby older sister, but I didn’t want
him
, if you see what I mean. Not then. Rose and I had never, ever gone for the same sort of men – I fancy blokes who see the world in the same way I do, who care about important things like ideas and politics and the environment, and don’t care about things like looks and money. I didn’t know Oliver, but just the fact that he’d appealed to Rose pretty much automatically made him not my type. Still, when I went downstairs to set the table under Rose’s strict guidance, I found myself developing a severe case of Mentionitis.

“Oooh, you look amazing!” Rose said, when I came into the kitchen. “That scarf is fab on you. You should wear it more often.” That’s another thing about Rose, she’s incredibly generous. She doesn’t mind at all when I borrow her stuff without asking – although the flip side of that is she has no reservations at all about borrowing mine. Not that it matters, because I’ve got nothing she’d want. She does help herself to my fat-free natural yoghurt though, when she’s run out, which is a bit annoying. After all, you can’t just put it back like you can a scarf.

“Thanks,” I said. “I thought I’d make a bit of an effort so as not to look like the fugly sister. So, tell me more about this Oliver then.” When I said his name, I could feel myself blushing – stupid or what?

“Isn’t he lovely?” said Rose, with a little sort of happy sigh, arranging a small battalion of gold candles of different heights on the dining room table. “I met him at work. He came in a couple of weeks ago for the contemporary art sale preview, and then I bid on a couple of Marcus Brands for him, and won them, and he took me out for a drink to say thanks.”

“Wow, Marcus Brand,” I said, putting wine glasses on the table and watching Rose move them to the other side of the plates. Marcus Brand is one of the hottest of Rose’s YBAs. He was long-listed for the Turner Prize a couple of years back and his paintings (to use the term loosely – they’re mostly mixed-media monstrosities made from ‘objets trouvées that epitomise the urban environment’, according to the brochure Rose showed me once, which means empty paper coffee cups, Big Mac boxes, chicken bones and in one instance – and I’m not making this up – a used tampon) are madly sought after and sell for ridiculous amounts. So this told me that Oliver had a) lots of money, and b) not much taste. “He must be loaded.”

“He certainly likes investing in art,” said Rose rather primly. “And I suppose he can afford it; he’s a partner at Longfellow Reeves.”

Business as usual for my sister, I thought. My boyfriends have tended to have interesting but not lucrative careers – Wallace worked in admin for Amnesty International, Sean was a journalist, Chris was training to be a GP, although he changed his mind and decided to go into cosmetic surgery at around the same time as he cheated on me with some blonde nurse. Go figure. And although of course he isn’t my boyfriend, Ben works as a parliamentary adviser for an MP – Lucille Field, who used to be a shadow cabinet minister before she – yeah, that one. But Rose won’t consider going out with anyone who doesn’t have a load of noughts on the end of his net worth. Not that she’s shallow or superficial, she just… Well, I suppose she is, a bit. In some ways.