Little White Lies (20 page)

‘Good evening, Miss Betancourt. Welcome to the St James’s.’ The doorman at the front door was quick to welcome them in. ‘Will you be dining with us this evening?’ he asked, relieving them of their coats.

‘Yes, please, William. Is the corner table upstairs free? The one in the alcove?’

‘I’ll just check, miss. Won’t be a moment.’ He picked up the phone nestling discreetly behind the desk. Two minutes later whoever had been seated at the table by the window was gone. ‘If you’ll just follow me, ladies,’ William said, bowing slightly.

Even Rebecca, who was no stranger to members’ clubs, was impressed. ‘The St James’s? How’d you manage
that
?’ she whispered as they walked up the stairs behind him.

Annick shrugged. ‘My dad’s been a member for ages,’ she whispered back. ‘And it’s quiet. It was the only place I could think of round here with a decent enough wine list.’

‘Clever girl,’ Tash murmured, looking round, only just remembering to keep her mouth shut. Was there no end to the wealth surrounding these two? She’d never in her life been in a place like this.

There was a few seconds’ wait as the table was expertly cleared and then the three of them were seated. ‘I wanted us to be somewhere comfortable whilst we hear
this
,’ Annick declared, picking up the wine list. ‘Now, darlings, what’re we having? Something nice and expensive, I think. It’s on the house. Well, on my dad, at least.’ She looked down the list. ‘That one.’ She pointed to a bottle of Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion. ‘Nineteen eighty-five. Ought to be good.’

‘
Very
good, miss.’ Their waiter disappeared happily.

‘So,’ Tash said, taking charge as soon as their glasses were filled. ‘Tell us what the hell’s going on. And don’t spare us the details, either. We’re your
friends
, Rebecca.’

Rebecca fiddled around with the stem of her glass for what seemed like ages. ‘His name’s Jeremy,’ she whispered finally. ‘He’s my seminar tutor. He’s the most intelligent person I’ve ever met and he . . . he likes me.’

‘Why’s that such a surprise? When did it start and, more importantly,
how far have you gone
?’

Rebecca bit her lip. ‘Quite far,’ she said after a moment. The other two stared at her.

‘Is he married?’ Tash asked finally.

‘Tash!’ Annick glared at her.

‘What? Most professors are,’ Tash retorted. ‘It’s a fair question. Well,
is
he?’

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Rebecca said, looking at her hands.

Tash and Annick looked at each other again, both lost for words. ‘What does that mean?’ Annick asked at last.

‘It . . . it means . . . well, I haven’t actually asked him.’ Rebecca’s face was the colour of the wine.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I . . . I don’t know.’ Rebecca turned her face up to look at them both. ‘I . . . I guess I just don’t want to know.’

There was silence for a few moments as the three of them looked at each other, then at the ground as Rebecca began helplessly to cry.

ANNICK

Almost two hours later, Annick clambered gratefully into the taxi that the doorman at the club had flagged down for her. ‘Park Lane, please. Bishop’s Court.’ She sank back against the seat. A light drizzle had begun to fall. It was past midnight and all of London looked as if it were draining, draining slowly away. Her head was swimming, a result of the wine and the conversation. She still couldn’t quite grasp it. Rebecca Harburg was sleeping with one of her professors? A
married
professor at that. She’d sat opposite her, her chin propped in her hand like a child listening to a bedtime story. It seemed so . . . so unlikely! Rebecca was such a
good
girl. The one with the inner moral compass, the one who never,
ever
went astray. She didn’t even
smoke
. Rebecca was so goddamn sensible and however reluctant she might be to face the truth, sleeping with one of her married tutors was the goddamn opposite of sensible. Annick could see it already – disaster was looming.

She was just about to fish in her pocket for a cigarette when she saw the sign. NO SMOKING. She pulled a face; she was dying for one. So, Rebecca was in love, she mused, watching the traffic slip past in a watery blur. Properly, madly in love. Annick felt a surprise pang of envy, listening to her.

After the second glass of wine, she confessed to being unable to eat or sleep. Annick simply couldn’t imagine it. She’d sooner have died than admit it to either Tash or Rebecca, but she couldn’t actually remember the number of men she’d slept with. Not because there’d been hundreds, but because she hadn’t technically been in a relationship with most of them. In her first year at university she’d woken up several times after one party or another, not really able to remember fully what had happened, or how she’d wound up at midnight in some flat in Camden or Kensington with a boy whose name she might – or might not – recall. She hadn’t really thought anything of it. Most of the girls on her course did exactly the same. She rather liked the feeling of grabbing up her clothes, pulling on her coat and walking out of the door without stopping to think what
he
might think. It seemed a neat reversal of the usual order of things. Silly female histrionics over who should call whom, when, how, for how long and so on, simply bored her. One of her boyfriends had once accused her of being more like a man than most men. He was baffled when she laughed. It was a compliment! But listening to Rebecca’s account of the past few months, her first reaction was one of jealousy. A man! A proper, grown-up man with a whole life outside the Student Union and Friday-night parties that were really just excuses to go out, drink as much cheap beer as possible and then tumble into a generally unwashed sack.

The cab stopped suddenly. ‘This it, miss?’ the driver enquired.

‘Yes. Thanks.’ She pulled a ten-pound note from her purse. ‘Keep the change,’ she said, suddenly feeling generous. She got out, ignoring his wide smile, and hurried up the steps. The whole façade was in darkness. The entrance hall and the short corridors were ghostly and empty. There were months when there was no one else in the entire building except for Annick and Mrs Price. A few years earlier, in her last year of school, there’d been a Saudi family on the floor above, who’d stayed for longer than the usual three or four months. Six or seven small children, a gaggle of Filipina maids and several indistinguishable women in floor-length burqas came in and out all day long. One day she’d accidentally come upon two of the women in the lift,
sans
burqas, and they’d struck up a conversation. Dina and Amina were cousins in their mid-twenties, and both spoke excellent English. Dina was a medical student; Amina was studying pharmacy. A rather hurried invitation followed to tea, which Annick accepted with alacrity. From that day, she went upstairs to tea at least once a week. The rules surrounding social engagements in their culture were stricter than anything Annick had ever known, but there was a warmth and intimacy about the way the women lived together that drew her in. She would knock on the door at the appointed hour, remove her shoes and follow one or other of the maids in. There would be scarves beside each chair in the unlikely event that one of the husbands, uncles or brothers walked in, and warm cries of welcome. She would sit down, cross-legged on the floor as they did, opposite the older women who spoke no English but who smiled and nodded at her as they received cups of sweet mint tea from the younger ones. The same maids would bring in trays of delicacies from Fortnum & Mason and the children would be temporarily banished.

Weekends were no longer stretches of empty time to be endured. But their respective courses ended and Dina and Amina returned home.

It had been a couple months since then and now the corridors seemed lonelier than ever. She slid her key in the lock and opened the front door. The flat was silent. Mrs Price was away, visiting her daughter. The central heating gave off its usual soft hum, the only audible sound. She stood uncertainly in the doorway for a moment. She was home. The loneliest place she’d ever been.

REBECCA

Seeds of doubt, once planted, will grow.
Is he married?
Rebecca climbed into bed that night with the question ringing loudly in her ears. She had no idea. He wore no ring and certainly hadn’t mentioned a wife. It had been going on for almost three months and not once in all that time had he ever brought the subject up. As mad as it sounded, even to her, neither did she. They met once or twice a week at her place or in college, never at his. They’d done it once in his office with her bent backwards (most uncomfortably) over his desk, her mouth hanging open as much in surprise as anything else at the force with which he’d grabbed her in the corridor and pulled her in. He was the most interesting person
she
’d ever met. He was some twenty-odd years older than her, but, like an actress, was vague about his age. He could talk about anything and everything: art, history, politics, literature, philosophy, film . . . his was a mind of extraordinary depth and talent. But emotions
were
off-limits, especially his. Whenever she tried, however lightly, to express what she felt about him he swiftly turned away. He had a way of deflecting anything that touched upon the personal (unless it involved his own career), turning things quickly into the abstract. Abstract ideas were safe. Despite the age difference, within a fortnight she saw quite clearly that for someone who made a living out of his head, he had remarkably little understanding of what went on inside it.

She lay in bed, trying not to think. Where was Jeremy at that very moment? She didn’t have his telephone number. He always rang her. She didn’t even know where he lived. Somewhere near Belsize Park, he’d said once. She’d tried to ask something further, a little more detail, but he’d neatly side-stepped the question by opening a book, deftly steering the conversation elsewhere. She pulled her duvet cover up to her chin and stifled an involuntary sob. There were times when the longing just to be near him overwhelmed her. Up until that point, it seemed to her, her life had been ordered, predictable, everything planned. Now, for the first time she was confronted with something she couldn’t control and certainly couldn’t predict and if there was one thing she’d learned about Jeremy Garrick, it was that he was unpredictable. She never knew what to expect. She was a postgraduate student, not an undergraduate, which meant that any relationship they might have was at least permissible. But he’d made it perfectly clear that open acknowledgement of what was happening between them was not an option. It wasn’t anything he’d ever said. No, that would have been to talk about ‘it’, about his feelings for her. It was simply clear in the way he behaved towards her in public as if he didn’t know her, or if he did, only distantly, as one student amongst many. She understood that. From the outset, he set boundaries that she had no option but to keep, which she did, willingly. Until tonight, when Tash, typically, asked her the most obvious question of all, one
she
should have asked him herself in the beginning . . . but didn’t.

And now she couldn’t. She lay in the dark, the horrible realisation slowly breaking over her that even if he
were
married, it would make little difference to the way she felt. It was too late. He’d
got
her, right where he wanted her. At a distance.

TASH

‘Gels, gels,
gels!’
Lady Davenport’s voice rose above the cacophony in the office. ‘
Please!
I’m looking for something
constructive
, gels. A
constructive
suggestion, not just noise.’

‘But everything’s already been done before,’ Tiggy wailed.

Lady Davenport only just managed to hold on to her eyeballs. ‘Oh, for goodness’
sake
, Tiggy! How can you even
think
that? What on earth do I pay you for?’

Tiggy turned bright red and looked imploringly at the other two. Tash looked from one to the other. Her heart was thumping. She rarely got involved in client discussions. For three months she’d kept herself to herself, certainly making no friends but not making enemies either. She tried to stick to Rebecca’s mantra:
if you can’t be nice, be quiet
. Well, she was certainly quiet. She answered the phones, made coffee, did the photocopying when asked and, when there was absolutely nothing to do, flicked through the endless copies of
Hello!
magazine that the ‘gels’ dropped into the pile every Tuesday morning. Lady Davenport was rarely in the office and when she was, she breezed in with a distracted air and breezed out again. She did most of the actual day-to-day work of the agency. The ‘gels’, as she called them, aside from answering the phone, were expected every now and then to come up with new ‘ideas’. Like now.

PINK, the breast cancer charity, was LDPR’s biggest and most lucrative client. In fact, PINK more or less paid everyone’s salaries. Tash knew because the bookkeeper that came in once a month had asked her to photocopy the accounts and she’d subsequently spent an hour in the photocopy room reading them. She’d been pleasantly surprised to see that Priscilla, Tiggy, and Tilly earned little more than she did, despite their superior airs. Now, looking at their blank, terrified faces as Lady Davenport tried to extract an original thought from each, she understood why. Her mouth opened of its own accord. ‘How about doing it a bit differently,’ she asked, as nonchalantly as she could.

All four heads swivelled round to look at her. ‘Differently? What d’you mean?’ Lady Davenport frowned.

‘Well, I don’t know much about it but it seems to me that all the fundraising stuff to do with cancer’s terribly depressing. Worthy, but depressing. It’s all about gloomy statistics and suffering and running marathons – why not do something a bit more glamorous? Get celebrities involved – everyone knows someone who’s been touched by cancer, even famous people. Get someone like Elton John to host a dinner each year . . . one year it’d be fancy dress, the next a masked ball, the next a pink ball . . . that sort of thing. We could get Anouschka Malaquais to be the official “face” of the ball . . . tickets at five hundred pounds a pop . . . why not?’