Out of the Blue (48 page)

“Seven, six…she doesn’t look well, you know.”

“There’s a massive cold front building up.”

“Five, four… They say it’s the pressure of the divorce.”

“In fact it’s been building up for quite a while.”

“See Sophie on
Question Time?
”

“And there’s a lot of black ice about.”

“She was fantastic. Two, one…”

“Which can be
extremely
treacherous.”

“Zero.”

“So it’s best to watch out.”

Lily had better watch out, I thought crossly as I made my way to Chelsea that night. I hadn’t told her I was coming over, as I favored a surprise attack. In any case, I knew that New Year’s Eve is the one night she always stays in. I marched down the King’s Road, the thin wind stinging my cheeks. The Christmas lights, like gaudy necklaces, swung back and forth in the bitter breeze. The shop windows were spangled with tinsel and plastered with red sale signs like bleeding wounds.
Massive Reductions!
they announced. I thought, there’s going to be a massive reduction all right. I was going to cut Lily down to size.

“Happy New Year!” I heard someone call out. It damn well won’t be, I thought. Oh no, thanks to Lily, I was going to have a miserable new year. As I passed Wellington Square, I tried to piece together the events of this year. On January the sixth, I told myself, I was a perfectly happily married woman. Now, thanks to Lily’s interventions, I was miserable and alone. It’s all her fault, I said to myself, and I’m going to make damn sure she knows.

“Faith, darling!” she exclaimed as she opened the garlanded front door. “What a lovely surprise. Oh, what’s the matter?” she added, peering at me. “You look a little…
distrait
.”

“I
am distrait,
” I said crisply. “I’m very
distrait
—thanks to you.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” she said wonderingly.

“Lily, you know perfectly well.”

“Faith,” said Lily calmly, “Christmas is a notoriously stressful time—you obviously need a drink.”

“I don’t need a drink,” I said as I followed her into the flat. “What I need is the
truth!”
In the huge sitting room, Jennifer Aniston was sprawled on the white leather sofa watching
One Man And His Dog,
her face, like a furry chrysanthemum, fixed rapturously on the screen.

“Why aren’t you looking more tanned, Faith?” asked Lily suddenly. “You’ve just been to the Caribbean, after all.”

“I have not just been to the Caribbean,” I announced briskly. “I decided not to go.”

“Why ever not?” she demanded.

“Because I didn’t feel like it, that’s why. And the reason for that is that Jos—marvelous, gorgeous, fabulous Jos—to quote you—turned out to be a prize shit!” I told her about Becky and the baby. I thought she’d choke on her canapé.

“My God!” she breathed. “How utterly caddish. But…he seemed so perfect,” she said.

“Well,
you
clearly thought so,” I hissed.

“Oh, I see what this is about,” she went on, nodding slowly. “Christmas has obviously been a bit of a turkey, so now you want to blame me.”

“I do blame you,” I said.

“Why? Because of Jos?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right. I mean, you really pushed him at me, Lily. Ever since I met him you’ve been promoting him, going on about how suitable he was, and how attractive.”

“Well, I thought he was!” she exclaimed.

“You couldn’t just let me get on with it, you had to interfere.”

“But Peter had let you down, Faith, and I wanted your new relationship to go well.”

“Oh Lily, it was much more than that. You were almost stage-managing the whole thing. You were manipulating it from the sidelines, as though you had some agenda of your own.” I suddenly thought of the scheming maid, Despina, in
Cosi Fan Tutte
. She’d been up to no good, and so had Lily, I realized. Katie had said Lily was intriguing—she
had
been intriguing, I now knew.

“I mean, there you were,” I went on resentfully, “kitting me out in designer gear and offering to babysit, and having me photographed with Jos in
Moi!
so that everyone would see we were together, and generally promoting him as enthusiastically as if he were the latest new bag from Chanel. But all along I knew there was something about him that felt hollow and wrong.”

“Well, if you knew that you shouldn’t have gone out with him,” she said irritably. “It’s your life, after all. My God, you’re still so naïve,” she said. “Faith Value, Faith—that’s you.”

“Yes, and you knew that. You’ve known me for twenty-five years. You’ve known I’ll always listen to you, and, as usual, I did. But the point is, Lily, that you’ve been giving me persistently bad advice.”

“Then why did you take it?” she snapped.

“Well…because I was feeling so unhappy and so vulnerable, because of what Peter had done.”

“What Peter did was shocking,” she said crossly.

“Was it?” I replied. “I’m not sure. In any case that’s a bit rich coming from a woman who’s dated truck-loads of married men. Yes, Peter had a fling, Lily. Lots of people do. You insisted I’d never get over it, but actually, I
did
. And then, when I told you I’d taken him back, you were horrified, almost angry, and I thought your reaction was
weird
. But now I understand that there was more to all this than met the eye. You’ve wanted me to get divorced,” I said simply. “That’s been your aim all along. You wanted Peter and I to split up. You see, over Christmas, I worked it out. It all started in Snows, didn’t it, with that nasty little remark of yours. ‘I think you’re marvelous to trust him’—that’s what you said, out of the blue: you dropped it into the conversation like a sharp stone. That’s when I first began to suspect Peter, Lily. That’s when everything changed. And you fanned my suspicions like a fire,” I went on. “You stoked my insecurity, because it kept you warm. You sent me that infidelity article of yours, and got me to look at the IsHeCheating.com website. My God, you even paid for the private detective,” I added, “to make damn
sure
I got my proof. But you were so subtle about it. Pretending that you were certain that he wasn’t up to anything, while making sure I found out that he
was
. Pushing me, against all my instincts, to ask him about the cigarettes and the gum. Then, the minute he confessed to his fling—you pounced. And every time I was tempted to go back to Peter, you’d persuade me to stick with Jos.”

“I thought Jos was a desirable property,” she said. “It’s not my fault he’s no good.”

“No, but it
is
your fault that I got so involved. Because if I hadn’t listened to you, I’d have forgiven Peter. But I did listen to you—to my eternal regret. You’ve destroyed my marriage!” I shouted at her. “We were happily married, and now we’re getting divorced. And it’s all your effing fault!” Lily sipped her champagne with a look of benign contempt.

“You self-deceiving idiot,” she announced calmly. “You weren’t happily married at all.”

“Oh yes we
were!”
I shot back. “We were as happy as sandboys, Lily. We were as happy as pigs in shit. We were as happy as Larry, whoever he is. So yes, Lily, to answer your question, I was very happily married, thanks, very.”

“And very,
very
bored. You were, Faith. It was written all over you. You were just desperate for change.”

“What the hell would you know about it? You’ve never been married.”

“I only know what I saw. You were catatonic with marital tedium, Faith—you both were—it stuck out a mile. So I reckoned I was giving you a helping hand. But I guess I’d be bored too after fifteen years with the same man. With your boring little trips to Ikea, and your boring little house, and your pathetic little sexual fantasies which you’d joke about, but as Freud so tellingly said, Faith— ‘There is no such thing as a joke.’”

“I loved Peter,” I insisted. “We were happy.”

“You could have fooled me,” she replied. “You told me you hadn’t slept with him for over a year. You preferred to sleep with the dog!”

“Why not? I like sleeping with my dog. You sleep with yours. And Peter was having difficulties at work,” I added, “and as you well know, I work horrible hours.”

“Faith,” she said, “you were utterly frustrated and so was he. Ennui oozed from every pore. Remember that weird little speech he made in which he accidentally described his anniversary as a ‘millstone’? So don’t give me this, ‘we were so happy together’ rubbish, because I know for a fact it isn’t true.”

“It
is
true!”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

“It
isn’t
.”

“What do you know?”

“Because if you
had
been happy, you moron, you would
never
have listened to me!”

I stared at Lily, rendered speechless by the shocking logic of what she’d just said.

“If you’d been as happy as you say you were,” she added calmly, “you’d have told me to piss off.”

“I wish I had.”

“But what you still don’t realize, Faith, as you stand there and abuse me, is that I had only your best interests at heart.”

“You
keep
saying that, but it’s a lie.”

“No. It’s not. It’s quite true.”

“It’s a bare-faced lie, Lily. Because if you’d had my best interests at heart, you would not have gone round planting vicious pieces about my husband in the press!” Lily’s champagne glass stopped in mid-air. “It was you,” I added simply. She brushed imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “It was you, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Whatever are you talking about?” she said tetchily.

“It was you feeding that trash to the papers.”

“Faith, I—”

“Don’t bother to deny it, because I have it from an impeccable source. And, worse, it wasn’t even true. It was just spiteful speculation designed to discredit Peter as much as possible, and to give our divorce a helpful little push. It was you,” I said wonderingly. “For a long time I thought it might be Andie, and then I figured it was Oliver from work. But for all your funny, obsessive ways, Lily, I never ever thought it could be you. Because we’re best friends, don’t you remember? We go back twenty-five years.”

“I—” Words clearly eluded her. In any case I didn’t give her a chance.

“Why did you do it?” I went on. “I’d really like to know. What did I ever do to you, to incur your famous wrath? How did I hurt you, that you could feel justified in doing this? All I know is that it goes back to that anniversary dinner. Something happened that night…I’ve got it!” I exclaimed suddenly. “
Othello
. Is that it? Because I accidentally mentioned the play. I tactlessly reminded you of the one instance when you didn’t win. That was always a sore point with you, wasn’t it, so perhaps you decided, then, that night that you were going to punish me.”

“Oh, don’t be so
ridiculous,
” she said. “As though, eighteen years on, I could care.”

“Then what motivated you, Lily? I need to know. All this crap about having my best interests at heart when you were trying to wreck my marriage and Peter’s career. And why did you have it in for Peter so much? I mean, he’s never hurt
you
.”

“That’s where you’re wrong!” she shot back. “He
has
hurt me!”

“How?”

“There are things you don’t know about Peter,” she explained, her voice rising to a reedy whine. “You don’t know what he tried to do to me. Oh yes, there are things you don’t know,” she reiterated shrilly. “Things I found out, last year.”

“
What
things?” I said wonderingly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said quietly. Then she sat down again.

“Just over a year ago,” she began nervously, “in November, I had dinner with
Moi!’s
publisher, Ronnie Keats. That man you met at the polo match.”

“I know. But what’s he got to do with all this?”

“Well,” she said, breathing deeply now, as though in physical pain. “I’d only been in the job for a month when Ronnie—he shouldn’t have done it, really—told me this
terrible
thing.” Lily was inhaling through her nose now, and there were tears standing in her eyes. “He told me,” she began, her lower lip trembling, “that when I was being considered for
Moi!
he sought references from four different people. One of them was Peter.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Well, Ronnie tends to blab, and he got a bit drunk and he told me…” She whipped a tissue out of a box. “That one of these referees had given me the thumbs down.”

“Yes?”

“And that as a result there’d been
considerable
discussion as to whether or not I should get the job.”

“Yes?”

“And apparently it was really touch and go. So, knowing that Peter has never liked me, I knew it could
only
be
him
.”

“But you did get the job,” I pointed out.

“But I very nearly
didn’t!”
she exclaimed.

“And you blame Peter for that?”

“Yes! I do!”

“Ah! I see. So you plotted your revenge.”

“Yes,” she snarled, standing up now. “I did. I decided I’d pay him back. Because in this life, Faith, you’re either a wimp or a terminator—and I’m a terminator!” I wanted to laugh.

“You’re mad,” I said quietly as I stood up to face her. “In fact you’re mad, bad, and sad.”

“I am
not
mad!” she spat.

“Yes you are—you’re crazy. You’re certifiably insane.”

“But don’t you
understand,
Faith? This was the pinnacle of my career. To edit
Moi!
meant everything to me—I’d striven for it all my life. I was going to make those snotty little cows at school eat their words. Don’t you remember how they all laughed when I said I was going to edit a glossy magazine? They laughed at me, Faith—those little rich girls with their ponies and their mummies and daddies and their expensive frocks. And I thought to myself then, I’ll show you. And I
had
shown them, Faith—I’d got the last laugh. Then I discovered that Peter had nearly stopped it.”