Venus Envy (18 page)

It made me feel good, too, a bit feminist. You always see younger women as the enemy, when they’re often not, not really. Patsy’s fiye years older than Liam, look at Ralph Fiennes and Francesca Annis. Princess Di was a lovely woman, but I’m sorry, I was thrilled to bits to find out Charles’s heart was stuck on Camilla. None of those rock stars with the endless open limbs of schoolgirls available to them actually bother, do they, unless it’s a quick poke on a tour bus?

If it’s women versus girls, women win, and we should all stop wetting our pants about it.

However, that said, it’s usually women like Snowy and Keisha who win.

‘He’s a cover star for lust Seventeen,’ Bronwen scorned.

‘Come on, Keisha, don’t you think you’re repeating a bit of a pattern here? He’s famous, he’s got nothing in common with you, and you’re going to date him for three months and then drop him and then cry.’

Bron looked over at me and laughed, and Keisha stiffened in the front seat. ‘I thought you hated therapy. And anyway, you can -talk, you’re the girl who thought Seamus Mahon was for real.’

I sighed, because I didn’t want to start a row. And because it was hours ‘til we would get to Tom’s place. Oh God, I wondered if this was going to be as deadly as I thought it was. , ‘You’ll love it.’ Bronwen’s psychic. ‘You’re going to

meet the perfect man of your dreams, it’ll be like Four Weddings and a Funeral.’

Yeah, I thought, and whose funeral will it be?

It was dark by the time we pulled up to the house, negotiating the last few winding B-roads in total silence. I had a vicious headache, and I expect the other girls had too. The first half of the journey was OK, slagging each others’ bosses and ex-boyfriends, not Seamus, Dick and Lennox, you understand, but ones before that, ones whom it was safe to slag off. Isn’t it great when you replace boy A with boy B, and you can finally lay into boy A without feeling any of those secret twinges that say, oh God, I still love him?

Every crack about Seamus was agony to me. I was in a lose-lose situation: I wanted to talk about him all the time, but whenever I heard his name I felt an agonising shot of pain.

Girls who are friends with their exes. They’re a complete mystery to me, like crop circles or ley lines. Either they’ve got new men, or they weren’t really in love with their blokes in the first place. And yes, yes, I’ve done it too, that ‘I can’t bear not to have you in my life, let’s always be friends’ spiel, but what it meant - on both sides - was ‘I don’t really want this to end, let’s pretend to be friends so we-have lots of opportunities to sink into each other’s arms, saying we just can’t help ourselves.’

.The only help for me is another guy. I know it’s pathetic, I really do. And I can survive on my own without a boyfriend, I’ve done it lots of times. But for forgetting one man, as such, I need another. I am a one-man woman. I never have that torn feeling Keisha

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gets. If I’m in love with Seamus, Oliver seems utterly unattractive. If I’m in love with Oliver, Gerald has lost his sparkle.

So we were quite happy, lacing into Oliver. How he used to wash compulsively before and after sex. And liked to wear pink ties. And the Very Famous Foot bailer, who had to listen to ‘Sexual Healing’ every single time he had a shag.

‘He used to try to time it,’ Keisha told us, in fits. ‘When it goes, “I want sex-ual healing”, he used to screw up his eyes and come on the upbeat.’

‘He could do that?’ Bronwen was impressed.

‘He had great rhythm,’ Keisha dissolved.

And Bernie, Bronwen’s ex. How Bernie used to keep a wardrobe full of Mothercare at his place and make Bronwen change whenever she went over there. I liked listening to Bronwen’s stories, it was fascinating, like a car crash. I knew that however bad my love life had been to date, there was at least one person who’d had it worse.

Then we put on the radio and found one of those regional stations - ‘Ninety-two point nine, Seashell FM’ - that only plays Top Forty from ‘eighty-three to ‘eighty-seven. We were well away on that one. Bawling out ‘I just died in your arms tonight’ and ‘What a feeling!’ and ‘Rio’, halfway up to Gloucestershire.

We left the motorway and got on to the narrow, twisty roads. It was all ooh-ing and aaah-ing for twenty minutes, then we discovered that Bronwen had the map upside down.

Keisha then had a sense-of-humour failure that lasted an hour and a half.

So after the rows, screaming until we were hoarse, slamming on the brakes and hysterical threats to turn round and go straight home, we were finally there and we were not speaking to each other.

I gasped as I saw Carrefour rising towards me under

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the red harvest moon. Carrefour, it’s been in Tom’s family for a few hundred years and it’s not exactly a stately home, but it’s the next best thing. A huge Elizabethan manor house, ghosting up out of the darkness, its grey stone front dotted with diamond paned windows, exquisitely lovely. I’d been here before but I’d forgotten how pretty it was. And now I could make out the lavender-lined paths on the lawns behind the house, the old sundial to one side and the tall, moss-covered leaping satyr, that made Keisha scream and pull the wheel sharp right.

Gravel sprayed up round the car and I groaned. First

bloody offence: they probably, spent ages raking it

neatly.

There were several other guests arrived there already. Bentleys, Rollers and Mercedes everywhere. I even spotted a Ferrari.

We parked Keisha’s Nova conspicuously in the front. There was nothing else to do.

I jumped out, trying to get the blood back into my legs, smoothing my new hair round my face, and we hefted out our bags and walked up to the front porch. Keisha looked around as though she couldn’t quite believe the indignity of having to carry her own cases. Bronwen rummaged around in her handbag like a mad ferret.

‘Hey, no drugs,’ I hissed.

‘What do you mean? I need to relax after that sodding drive,’ Bronwen spat back, but fear of Mrs

Drummond was stronger thari my .usual cowardice. ‘Not here, or I’m leaving. Truly.’

So by the time I’d pressed the bell, and could hear the ancient clanging through the depths of the house, we were all standing on the steps fuming and glaring at each other, and Gall wasn’t even there yet.

After an age the heavy oak door swung open. A heavy woman in a no-nonsense Jaeger tweed suit stood

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there, her white hair coiffed in a real Tory bouffant do, pearls around her crinkly neck, looking us over very critically.

‘Are you from the hunt saboteurs?’ she demanded angrily.

I leapt forwards. ‘Er, no… I’m Alex Wilde, Tom’s friend, we’re here for the wedding.’

‘Supper finished over two hours ago,’ said the lady, not mollified, ‘do you realise what time it is?’

Keisha opened her mouth and I had to jab her very hard in the ribs. ‘We got lost, I’m so sorry.’

‘Louise, are you scaring these poor people?’ said a familiar voice, and Tilly Drummond, Tom’s mother, appeared behind the Gorgon Medusa, smiling gra,ciously, like the Queen Mum. Tilly was also grey haired, but softly elegant in moss-green cashmere and a skirt that skimmed her narrow frame to just below the knees. I could see Bronwen and Keisha nodding approval. We all want to be old like that. When the time comes.

JrIow on earth did such a birdlike woman produce a great hulk of lard like Tom, I wondered silently.

‘Alex, how lovely to see you again! And your friends - Keisha, Bronwen, how do you do.’ Mrs Drummond sounded just like Penelope Keith in To the Manor Born, but nobody made a sarky remark under their breath. You just wouldn’t dare. I felt instantly overwhelmed by the flagstone floors and grandfather clock that probably cost half of our flat. From the living room - I suppose they’d say drawing room - came the sound of drunken, braying laughter and Mozart, and the warm glow of candles. ‘You’ve met my sister, Louise … was it a nightmare journey?’

I let myself be steered towards the throng, muttering things like, ‘So kind of you,’ and ‘Terribly sorry about the time,’ in my best imitation of upper-class manners. My ego was shrinking like Alice in Wonderland after

eating the mushroom, or drinking the potion, whatever it was. I was so glad my mother wasn’t there, my mother who right now would be putting on an obviously fake voice and saying ‘Pardon’ and crooking her little finger whilst drinking coffee, and all the other things she fondly imagines are posh.

It was one of my secret shames at Oxford. I was meant to be this big revolutionary, but I was fascinated by Tom’s manners. By the way he did everything without thinking about it. His class was just bred in the bone. And although I didn’t mind working-class guys at all, I developed a repugnance for the straining, striving middle class I was born into, with its obsessions as to how to hold the forls and what table you sat at in restaurants.

Tom never gave a bugger about stuff like that. He was secure in his position, I guess.

‘We’ve put you in the green and red bedrooms upstairs. Come and have a drink before you turn in.’

I reached for my case, but Tilly waved it away. ‘One of the boys will do that for you, we have so many on tap -Jack, come here,’ she said, grabbing some hapless reveller as he staggered out of the kitchen. ‘Take these up to the empty bedrooms on the second floor, could you dear? Thanks.’

There was nothing for it but to acquiesce, so I smiled weakly and followed a .furious Keisha and Bronwen, not to mention Aunt Louise, into the drawing room.

The party was in full swing. We’d dressed nicely enough for travelling, but everybody here was in evening dress: slinky silk things and linner jackets and the older women in ghastly Laura Ashley frocks in purple and orange and eggshell blue. Clearly they hadn’t stinted on the port.

Horsy laughter stopped mid-whinny. Insistent voices shut up. Everyone stared at us, it was like a spaceship with three aliens had just landed in the middle of their

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creaking old pile. Instinctively, I moved closer to Keisha. You’d think they’d never seen a black person before. Christ, didn’t these people know it’s rude to stare?

I scanned the room desperately looking for Tom, but I couldn’t see him. Anybody would be good news right now, anyone at all.., even some of his lame friends from Oxford.

‘Everybody, this is Tom’s friend Alex, and Keesha

and Branwen,’ Mrs Drummond said loudly. ‘Bronwen,’ said Bronwen. ‘Keisha,’ said Keisha.

‘That’s right, Brunwane and Kraysha. Come in and meet some of the crowd,’ but she was spared from imaking any formal introductions by a vast apparition in crushed claret velvet and a face to match, a frightful old boot whom my mind scrambled to get a lock on.

I don’t know, is it possible to be born with selective amnesia? My memory for telephone numbers is spot on, despite all the ‘e’s in the disused quarries, but my me/nory for names is worse than a sieve with three foot holes. I get so bloody embarrassed with people, I remember their football team and whether they read their star sign, but ask me their name and I’m a total blank. And they never understand, they always get so annoyed. They all say, ‘Oooh, I’m just the same, I’m terrible,’ but their mouths make those little cat’s arses of annoyance and you have to scramble to get back the lost ground.

Tom, actually, taught me the only technique that works here. He was so famous at Oxford everyone knew him, and forgot that he didn’t know them back. So Tom said, ‘Say, “How nice to see you again. How have you been?” and later, say, “I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” and when they go “Mary,” you say, “I know Mary, of course, I was thinking of your surname,” or the other way round.’

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‘How nice to see you again. How have you been?’ I stammered.

She gave me a crocodile smile with a strange edge to it. ‘I’ve been fine, Alex, why haven’t you kept in touch? Ellen asks about you all the time.’

And then it hit me in the head like the tennis balls I kept missing at school, and I couldn’t stop myself gasping ‘Ellen Jones?’

‘Not for long,’ said the creature, who was of course Mrs Jones. With a sinking feeling I recalled that Mrs Jones never liked me. Ellen was the fat girl at school I used to hang out with, remember I was telling you about her before? We were two weirdos together. Maybe Mrs Jones resented that Ellen couldn’t do any better than me. Or that when Ellen and I sat together in the cafeteria, I only needed one space on the bench.

We didn’t keep in touch after school. We didn’t have much in common, really, except misery. It’s like being stranded with someone in a plane crash - you hold on tight to each other during the ordeal, but afterwards, you probably don’t go to the same dinner parties.

‘Not for long,’ she repeated triumphantly. ‘It’ll be Ellen Drummond on Sunday afternoon.’ There you go, missy, stick that in your pipe and smoke it, said her look.

I grabbed on to a foaming glass of champagne proffered by an elderly butler and glugged it down in one second flat.

Ellen! Ellen was marrying Charles! Oh my God, fat, ugly Ellen Jones, the only girl at school more unpopular than me, was about to get married! And I didn’t even have a boyfriend to my twenty-sevenyear-old name.

‘I know, isn’t it wonderful?’ Keisha butted in, with that sixth sense of hers coming in to the rescue. She could see me floundering. Doing my ‘goldfish on the floor’ impression.

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‘And how do you know Tom?’ Mrs Jones demanded.

‘Keisha’s a friend of mine,’ I explained.

‘Well,’ Mrs Jones said smugly. ‘I’ see you’re not married yourself, Alex. It’s nice for spinsters to have lots of friends. I expect you keep a cat, do you?’

I wanted to say, ‘I expect you keep a vibrator, do

you?’ but I just smiled weakly instead.

Oh God.

‘It has been a long time! Tom;s been telling me all about your goings on. Oxford, how impressive, you little bluestocking.’ I got the impression that wasn’t a compliment. ‘Ellen will be thrilled you’re here and so