It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (27 page)

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sure you won’t come and molest me in the night.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. There was a pause, then he said, “You know, you’ve changed since I first met you.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of all those plates of salad and bowls of porridge, all the runs and the spin classes, the new clothes and the manicures.

“Not just the way you look,” he said. “Everything. You were different from the other women I know. Less shallow. Softer.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“I fancied you like crazy the first time I met you,” he said.

“Really?” I remembered my ancient jeggings and shapeless hair.

“Sure. You seemed so passionate about things, so comfortable in your own skin. You were beautiful without trying. You’re still beautiful, but now you’re putting the effort in, and it makes you less… individual, I guess. Since you’re not going to fuck me, I may as well tell you.” He laughed.

I shrugged. “I suppose I needed to grow up a bit.”

Oliver ground out his cigarette and lit another one. “You can still change your mind, you know,” he said. “But you’re not going to get another chance, after this.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’ve asked Rose to marry me,” he said.

Oliver kept his word, and I slept unmolested in one of the spare bedrooms. Except I didn’t sleep – I lay between the slightly damp-feeling sheets, turning over and over from my back to my side to my stomach to my other side to my back again, like a chicken on a spit. I tried to soothe myself to sleep in all the usual ways – counting slowly backwards from a hundred then back up again; imagining which famous people (alive or dead, real or fictional) I’d invite to my fantasy dinner party (my current list was Caitlin Moran, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Marie Colvin, Nelson Mandela and Jacob out of
Twilight
– call me lowbrow, but you so would, wouldn’t you?); the progressive relaxation techniques I’d learned from a long-ago yoga teacher. But nothing worked. My brain just wouldn’t switch off and my body followed suit, and eventually I gave up and got my Kindle out of my handbag and tried to read, but that was no good either. I couldn’t stop thinking about Rose and Oliver,
Ben and Nina, what a horrible mess everything was, and how quite a lot of it was my fault.

At about seven o’clock I gave in and got up, feeling scratchy-eyed, achy and horribly cross. I had an unsatisfactory shower in tepid, rust-coloured water, with the pipes clunking and shrieking alarmingly above me, and got dressed again in my pink dress. There was no sign of Oliver, but when I went downstairs, Elliot, his driver, was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. I blushed horribly when I saw him – how many women had he driven back here, I wondered, knowing they were going to shag Oliver and then be transported back whence they came the next day, like books being returned to the library before you’ve finished them, or clothes purchased online and found to be baggy around the arse, or something.

“Morning, love,” he said. “Beautiful day.”

I agreed, and said something about how it might only be April but it felt as if summer had properly arrived, and he said it would probably make for a soggy July, mind, and I said how lucky we’d been to have had such a mild winter, apart from the few snowy days around Christmas, and he said it made you think there might be some truth in all that talk about global warming, and I said yes, he was right, and realised we’d reached the point at which the subject was well and truly exhausted.

“Oliver mentioned that it might be possible for you to drive me back to the hotel where my colleague is staying,” I said. “My bags are there and I was hoping to get back to London this morning.”

“It’s no trouble, love,” he said. “Fancy a cuppa before we go?”

“No, thank you,” I said, “but please do finish yours, there’s no hurry.” So I had to sit and look relaxed while he finished his tea and then had another cup, reading the sports section of The Times very, very slowly, occasionally making comments like, “QPR look to be
staying up,” and, “Sri Lanka are all out for 324 then,” until I wanted to howl with frustration.

At last he slowly stood up, had a good old stretch, folded the newspaper neatly and put it in the exact centre of the kitchen table, and said, “About time we got going then,” as if it was me who’d been keeping him waiting.

The lobby of the Swains Abbey Novotel smelled of coffee and bacon, and was crowded with bleary-eyed people with suit-carriers and hat boxes – evidently there’d been a wedding there the previous day. I made my way up to my room, changed into jeans and flip-flops, packed my bags, checked out, sent Daisy a text telling her I’d see her in the office on Monday, and got a taxi to the station, all with a sense of frantic urgency. It was only when I was on the train that I realised I was hurrying back to the flat to see Rose, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to her.

“I wouldn’t advise you to marry your boyfriend, because after being pursued by your sister for months he finally made a play for her,” was something of a non-starter. “Oliver is a duplicitous shit who would have fucked your sister if she’d let him,” wasn’t brilliant either, as conversation-openers go.

Nor was I loving, “You would have to be certifiably bonkers to marry someone who cheats on you the second he’s got a ring on your finger, because believe me, if he does it once he’ll do it over and over again, and you’ll end up as bitter and desiccated as one of those orange slices you hang on Christmas trees,” even though it was true.

As is so often the way with train journeys when you are less than eager to reach your destination, there were no delays at all. Soon I was standing at our front door, fitting my key into the lock and praying, “Please let Rose be out, please let Rose be out.” But she wasn’t, of course.

“Hey, Rose,” I called, walking into the hallway. I could hear the telly playing MTV – it sounded like Glee, which Rose absolutely adores. I dropped my bag on the hall floor and walked through to the kitchen. Rose was sitting at the table, surrounded by piles of paper. There was a ring on her left hand, a tasteful platinum band set with a single, huge diamond. She looked as if she’d been crying.

“Rose?” I paused in the doorway.

“Hi Ellie.” Rose smiled a rather wan sort of smile. I went in and switched the kettle on, waiting for her to say something. It wasn’t until it had boiled and I’d made a pot of tea and put it down on the table with two mugs, my Marmite one and Rose’s Pantone Warm Grey one, that she did. “So, I’m getting married. Not in the morning, probably next year sometime. It took a while but we got there in the end.”

Her face had its closed, calm look. She wasn’t smiling at all anymore. I reached out and touched her hand, the one with the ring on it.

“You know this isn’t really how you’re supposed to tell me,” I said. “You’re meant to be shrieking and dancing and I’m meant to join in and then you ask me to be your chief bridesmaid and we scream some more. You’re not doing this right.”

Rose laughed, a soft, breathy laugh. “Sorry, Ellie. Of course I want you to be my chief bridesmaid. I’ll work on going ‘Oooh!’ a bit, I promise. It’s just that it takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all.”

“Rose,” I said, “you do know that when someone asks you to marry them, that’s when you’re off-the-scale happy. Later on you can have rows about him having strippers on his stag night and whether his mother gets to choose the colour of your bridesmaids’ knickers. But for the moment, you’re meant to be really, really loved up and excited, and you aren’t.”

“You don’t seem excited, either,” Rose said.

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, it’s not a surprise to me. I saw Oliver yesterday – he was at the polo with some mates – and he told me. I think he’s a lovely guy, I think you and he could be really happy together. It’s just… you don’t seem sure, and to be totally honest nor does he.”

“I’m as sure as I need to be,” Rose said. “Oliver’s got what I’m looking for.”

“Which is?” I said.

“He’s gorgeous looking. He’s generous. He’s well connected. And, Ellie, he’s fucking rich. There, I said it. I need to marry a rich man and Oliver asked me and I said yes because if I don’t I will be well and truly, totally fucked.” And she swept her scattered piles of papers together in front of her and put her head down on them and started to sob huge, keening sobs.

“Rose, what the hell is this about?” I put my arm around her and reached for the roll of paper towels on the worktop. “Come on, what’s going on?”

“Ellie, are you completely fucking stupid?” Rose said. “Do you know how much I earn?”

“How much you… no, of course I don’t.”

She mopped at her swollen eyes with a paper towel. “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, and did.

I was shocked. Don’t get me wrong, working as a press officer in the charity sector is not exactly the career you choose if you want to live in luxury, and although my salary at Black & White was a bit better, it was still far from huge, but it was still double what Rose said.

“Shit, Rose,” I said, “that’s not much.”

“And do you know how many people apply for jobs like mine?” Rose said.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Hundreds. Every time Quinn’s advertises a vacancy for a specialist. Hundreds. And every single fucking one has got a rich husband or gets an allowance from Daddy, so they can start their own art collection and dress the part and go to the right places.”

“Shit, Rose,” I said again.

“What did you think, Ellie? How did you think I bought all this stuff?” She sort of waved a hand at herself: her Paige jeans, her T-shirt, which looked like any black top with a sort of squiggly gold design on it, but I could see the design spelled out Moschino, her Mulberry bag on the floor next to her. “This top cost four hundred pounds,” she said.

“Four hundred… Shit,” I said again, uselessly.

“And Gervase doing my hair costs two hundred and fifty quid every month,” Rose went on calmly. “Facials, manicures, pedicures, eyebrows, waxing – that’s another two hundred a month or so. Skiing holidays, meals out, bottles of champagne in clubs – all charged as taken. It’s what’s called investing in one’s future, and now the time has come for me to recoup my investment. Look at these.”

She pushed the pile of papers over to me, and I saw that they were credit card statements. I flipped through them. I’m no financial genius but I’m used to working with budgets and I could see that things in Rose’s world were badly, badly wrong. I quickly totted up the figures in my head and said, “You’re ten thousand pounds in overdraft and you owe more than thirty thousand on credit cards.”

“Correct,” Rose said. “I can’t even cover the interest. Let’s say the credit crunch has not been kind to me.”

I privately thought that the opposite was true, and the proliferation of easily available credit was what had been unkind to Rose, but I didn’t think I should say so.

“I’m fucked, Ellie. It’s getting so I won’t be able to pay my share of the bills here.”

“Okay, look, Rose,” I said, “You’ve been so stupid I could slap you. But this is all fixable. It’s only money. You don’t have to get out of this mess by marrying someone you don’t love. Dad would…”

“I am not fucking borrowing money off Dad,” Rose said. “How do you think it would look? I behaved horribly, I know I did, I’ve known all along. I went there yesterday to tell him and Serena about Ollie, and I also told them how sorry I am. Maybe one day Serena will forgive me, I don’t know. I hope so. But I’m not suddenly going to get all like, ‘Oh Daddy, I know I was rude to your wife and wouldn’t come and support you when you almost lost your babies because I was too insecure to spend a weekend away from my boyfriend, now please can I have forty grand?’”

“You were too…” I paused, thinking back, and I could remember all the opportunities Oliver had taken to make Rose feel uncertain, to keep her on her toes. His lateness, his unreliability, and of course most of all his flirtation with me, which Rose could hardly have failed to notice. I felt sick with shame. “You don’t have to do this, Rose, honestly,” I said. “There’s another way, I know there is, we just have to find it.”

“You’re so sweet, Ellie,” Rose said. “But there really isn’t. This is what I wanted, remember? What I’ve always wanted. A lovely big chunk of status, right here.” She held out her hand and the diamond blazed in the morning sun. “I’ve made my bed and I’m going to lie on it, and it’ll be a really comfortable bed, one with five hundred thread count sheets and goose down pillows.”

“Rose, you can’t. I can’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me either.” Her face was a smooth, serene mask.

I thought, yes, I can stop you. I could tell you about me and Oliver and what happened last night, and then surely you would change your mind. But by giving Rose the knowledge that would stop her making this stupid, life-shattering decision, I would risk losing my sister’s love forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Claire, Pers and I were eating ice cream in Brixton Village Market. I had a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of salted caramel, and bugger the calories; Claire had a scoop of mango sorbet and a scoop of vanilla, and Pers was having tiny bits of all of them, but not too much because although she loved the taste, the cold made her scrunch up her little face and look perplexed. As soon as Rose had left the flat – to go and meet Vanessa to share her news and no doubt get swept away on a ridiculous tide of plans involving Vera Wang frocks and receptions at The Sanderson – I’d got on the blower to Claire and said we needed to meet urgently.

“So, what’s up?” she asked, offering Pers a micro amount of orange-coloured ice
cream.

“Everything’s gone completely and utterly fucking pear-shaped,” I said. “Your genius plan certainly worked, but it’s backfired.”

“My genius what?” Claire looked bemused.

“Your plan. For me to get Oliver off Rose, remember?”

“Vaguely,” Claire said. “You don’t mean you… What did I say?”

“You said Rose was obviously Oliver’s type, and as Rose’s sister it would be really easy for me to make myself more like her, and be his type too. You said I could try hanging out at the places Rose goes, because I might see him there. You said I could do with spending a few quid on some designer clothes, and if I made more of an effort with Rose’s friends they’d start inviting me to their parties and stuff, and I’d see him there. You said I could get a new job to impress him, and a boyfriend to make him jealous.”