Venus Envy (3 page)

The whole thing was like a big neon sign from the Gods of Romance. Never fear, Alex! Cease to worry about film directors’ secretaries dumping you by fax! Do not dwell on the rejection slips the London art

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galleries sent you by the busload! Dismiss from your mind how you had to grovel to your mother, and pretend to enjoy trying on the tweedy Jaeger suit with the padded shoulders, also the cerise Laura Ashley ballgown, circa x987, with the enormous bow at the back, or the silver puffball skirt with black velvet dots! Yes, all those worries are over now, for here is Prince Finn MacCool to save you!

But of course not. I should have known better. Seamus was just the final twist of the knife.

Ha, ha, ha, he’s taken, Cupid was sniggering, just like every other decent man on the face of the earth.

‘It does seem like that,’ Gail agreed when I bitched about it later over our communal supper. I was eating a brown bread salad sandwich in a determined attempt to lose weight. Gail had brought home vegetarian sushi, and Bronwen was sound asleep on the sofa in the drawing room; thereby preventing us from watching Brookside. ‘You shouldn’t eat bread. It’s processed.’

It was indeed so disgusting I couldn’t even be bothered to argue the toss. Have you ever tried eating a salad sandwich? Cardboard with grass in it. But it was the supper of choice of a super-skinny, blonde whippet of a girl I used to be at school with, Elspeth, who once ran screaming through the halls when we tried to catch her and forcefeed her a Smartie. Just one Smartie. Her legs were so thin they didn’t even meet at the knees, I mean there was daylight all the way down. Whereas I used to indulge in the great school teatime trick of getting more than one cbokie per girl by breaking two cookies and heaping the pieces on my plate and saying they were one cookie. And I had the body to match. So now, whenever I’m really low, I start eating the salad sandwiches as a sort of foodie hair shirt. The great thing about them is they’re so loathsome, you’re never tempted to pig out on them.

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‘Can I tempt you with another salad sandwich?’ I mean, you don’t hear that at dinner parties across the land, do you?

But Gall was warming to the theme.

‘I suppose it must seem like that when you’re twenty-seven,’ she said, as if trying to get her mind round the concept of being that old. ‘In Japan, they call girls like you Christmas Cake.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked, feeling-I wouldn’t like the answer.

‘Because they’re stale and on the shelf, and after the twenty-fifth no one wants them,’ she told me, laughing gaily.

. Sometimes I could just throttle Gail in her dainty

, homespun dresses. It was even worse because it was true. It certainly felt true. No man wanted me, not once he’d a chance properly to try me out. Rolling back past Oliver, there was Gerald, who’d left me for a scoutmaster, Peter, who’d been apprehended by the police for GBH and aggravated assault and who was now doing five to ten in Pentonville, and Justin, whom I had actually, briefly, been engaged to at Oxford, before he dumped me six weeks into the engagement saying he needed space and would ring me in a couple of days, before, predictably, never ringing again.

Justin did me a favour, in fact, by breaking my naive

little heart so thoroughly that Peter, and Oliver, and even Gerald were just a walk in the park. Being left for a man was certainly humiliating, although it provided me with the answers to Gerald’s insistence that I go on diets and crop my hair very short, and his refusal, despite these aesthetic improvements, to go to bed with me. But it still wasn’t as humiliating as Justin getting married, barely two months after his declaration of need for space, to a particularly clingy, horsy type named Hannah whom I’d known slightly and always loathed. Hannah was fond of tinkling laughs and flicks

of her long hair, and loudly saying things like, ‘You know, we all talk about so-called feminism, but we’re really all longing for some darling man to pay the bills and give us lots of babies.’ Hannah was the heir to a few hundred acres of Shropshire, so paying the bills wasn’t too much of a concern. However, she did get a darling man, mine to be precise. What I got was a sleep disorder and panic attacks for a month, as well as lots of lovely phone calls from old friends ringing me up to congratulate me when they saw ‘Recently married’ appended to Justin’s name in the frequent interviews he gave to the Telegraph and Mail, as a new, ambitious Tory MP. I suppose it wouldn’t have suited him to be married to a would-be revolutionary like me.

Justin cured me of that nonsense, anyway. I decided soon after Hello! did a spread on him and Hannah that all the wo.rld were bastards, and I had better look out for number one. Not that such robustness did me any practical good.

‘You must have heard of Dolores Mahon,’ Gail went on mercilessly.

‘Not ‘til today,’ I groused.

Gail reached for her Tatler and flicked unerringly to the big spread on the Krug champagne party. There, sipping premier grand cru with Tiggy LeggeBourke and Joan Collins was the said Dolores. She had longer legs than a Derby winner, she carried herself like a ballerina and she had frothing platinum-blonde hair spilling winsomely over the shoulders of her pink Chanel suit.

‘I think those diamond earrings really suit her,’ Gail mused, ‘don’t you?’

.I said nothing. It wasn’t fair. Couldn’t his wife at least have been a raging old boot, so Seamus and I could have spiced up the desert of my future days with a little forbidden flirtation? Wasn’t that what offices were for? That, and making free phone calls. Bronwen

had reminded me about the free phone calls before fainting on to the couch. And they were a perk indeed.

The door opened and Keisha strode into the room. Somehow her Nicole Farhi appeared to be even less wrinkly than it had been this morning. I was hit by a waft of delicious scent as she approached - not her personally blended French fragrance: that came a poor second to the glorious aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a huge bag of fries.

I dropped the rest of the salad sandwich and slavered. Pathetically. Keisha was a beautiful girl, but get between Keisha and her chips and she turned into the killer bitch from hell. She had that black girl confidence, she never gave a damn about her weight

,and probably as a result she was always slim and stunning. How did she do it, how, how? She never went running and she unremittingly tucked into Chicken Kiev and burgers and Kentucky and chocolate. She smoked like a factory chimney and she ate entire loaves of warm garlic bread with her salad.

.Tonight, though, she reached into her grease-stained

brown paper bag and tossed me a packet of chips.

‘I thought you might need these,’ she grunted.

I was touched. Stunned. For Keisha, that was quite something.

‘Alex really screwed up, and now she has a crush on

her boss, Dolores Mahon’s husband,’ Gail said gleefully.

Keisha gave her a pitying look. ‘I suppose you can borrow my blue Donna Karan dress tomorrow,’ she said casually to me.

I was filled with relief. ‘Just while I get the suit dry cleaned and stuff,’ I promised.

Keisha’s face had all the world-weary cynicism of a

Tory cabinet minister’s wife. I supposed I should be grateful to Gail: it was only because she annoyed Keisha even more than she annoyed me, that .I was

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being loaned this TDO, as Bronwen had dubbed them, Top Designer Outfit. Keisha’s wardrobe divided neatly into TDOs, MDOs (medium - into this category went her Ghosts, her Emporio Armani and her Equipment) and SDOs (sale). Gail had basically tricked Keisha and Bronwen into moving in by being sweet and uncritical when they were seeing the flat, not mentioning the words ‘organic’ or ‘pulses’ or ‘b-complex’ or any of that nonsense. In fact she had passed herself off as the cheery, ethereal yet hardworking type anybody would be happoy to share their place with.

And then Keisha -and Bronwen had got used to the big space and pretty location combined with the Wilde parent-subsidised rent rates, and then, of course, they were trapped.

After all, Keisha needed her money for the T, M and SDOs. An.d Bronwen needed her money for Class A and B pharmaceuticals. And, to be fair, also for drink, fags, taxis home from gigs and clubs, air fares to Oasis gigs in Scandinavia, that sort of thing. Keisha never had to pay for any of that. She wouldn’t dream of leaving the house with cash. She was a bit like the Queen: an attendant male would always pay for everything, first-class air tickets, dinners, champagne, taxis, the lot. I felt awkward if the guy bought two rounds of drinks together, but Keisha’s men never seemed to mind. Rich .or poor, they did their duty without a .murmur.

When I suggested that it was the ‘nineties, didn’t she think she should pay, Keisha looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

‘Are you insane?’ she demanded. ‘If I’m going out, AI, I don’t open my purse. Simple as that.’ At which point she would strike up an imported American Marlboro Light, you know the ones with the stylish white tips, and that would be the end of the matter. If we’re honest, we all envied Keisha this ability.

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Keisha was a splendid creature, a pure dominant female. She hought of herself as a princess, so therefore so did everyone else.

I tried it, before you say anything. I tried standing in front of the mirror in a borrowed TDO and flouncing and giving my reflection cold, disinterested stares. But it didn’t really work. I’d invariably have smudged eyeshadow or a creeping bit of cellulite at the fold of the knee or something.

Anyway, you try thinking of yourself as ‘all that’ when you’re unemployed, jilted at the altar, or almost, deserted for a bloke and dependent on your daddy when you’re twenty-seven?

It would have been hysterically bloody funny, if it wasn’t happening to me.

Still, ‘Things can only get better’, as New Labour

had yelled all the way through the election.

‘Thanks, Keisha,’ I said humbly.

‘Don’t sound so humble,’ Keisha said briskly. ‘You

didn’t get fired, did you?’

‘.No.’

‘Well, then, you’re gainfully employed. How much is your salary?’

I told her. Keisha did some sums in her head and announced, doubtfully, ‘Seventeen five.’

Seventeen and a half thousand pounds! It sounded like a fortune.

Gail sniggered. ‘We’ve all got to start somewhere.’

‘There’s plenty of morley in the City,’ Keisha said staunchly, ‘I expect Alex will learn loads.’

I tried to feel better about the whole thing. Hell, I was still employed. And maybe such things as promotions and so forth were not out of the question. My mind drifted back to green-eyed Seamus of the soft voice and easy manner. Never mind Jenny, he was my ultimate boss, wasn’t he? And he’d be the boss from heaven, even if he was married to Heather Locklear.

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Maybe he would even take me out for mentor protegee lunches, and pay for everything without being prompted, like all Keisha’s men. A dark rebel part of me sometimes wondered if Keisha’s men were so obliging because they were romantic, or because they were scared? I wanted a man to pay for everything just because he was a gentleman. Not that that happened very often. In fact, the few times I

remembered it happening were with Tom.

Tom Drummond.

Ah yes, I forgot to tell you about Tom. Which is not to say that I’d forgotten Tom. Who could forget the only man on God’s green earth to prefer me to my sister?

Yes, you read that right. Tom Drummond, one of my best friends at Oxford, and a would-be boyfriend, had been.hit on unmercifully by my sister in all her fragile, sixth-form sexy schoolgirl glory. He had been treated to the naturally honey-blonde hair, the eight stone, five six frame, the crop tops and sprayed-on jeans that had preceded the current wispy jumper phase. And he had been wholly indifferent. In fact, he had once said to me, ‘It must be hard, Alex, for Gail, with such a beauty as her big sister.’ This in tones one hundred per cent irony free.

It had driven Gail mad. She reckoned all the eligible beaux were hers by right. Especially a boy like Tom, who was heir to some great creaking pile or other in Gloucestershire, and was going to join the Army for a couple of years. Tom was sensationally upper-class, but he was nice with it. He listened patiently to all my socialist rants about banning foxhunting, then went out with the Christ Church beagles regardless. He thought Classic FM was a hopelessly vulgar modern station. He was the kind of man who would walk on the outside of the pavement when taking you home, who would open every door and pull out every chair,

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not just for his girlfriend but for every woman in the party. I thought Tom was a great laugh, even if he was one of the enemy. He would listen patiently to all my woes with various boyfriends - not saying much, except to suggest he go round and knock the stuffing out of them.

Our friendship had even survived his asking me out,

in a fumbling sort of way, and me giving it a try, and it not working out. I mean, our tastes in life were just different. He liked the opera and Maggie Thatcher. I liked Arthur Scargill and Joy Division. He used to drink vintage port, whereas I was popping ‘e’s in disused quarries at four a.m., unthinkingly setting

myself up for later panic attacks and misery.

Plus, there was the physical thing.

I realise I’ve lost your sympathy now. ‘Looks aren’t everything,’ I can hear you say, and ‘Where did your pretty boys get you, then?’, and you certainly have a point there. But what can I tell you? I’m a hopeless romantic, I need the blood to stir and the heart to beat, not in a panic attack way, but in a squirmy, delicious,

oh my God I can’t think sort of way.

And Tom was fat.

I know, I know, far be it from a woman, one.of the great sisterhood of fat-oppressed, weight-watching females, to castigate a man for a touch of the Robbie Williamses, but I mean, Tom was fat. Seriously overweight. What use they could have for him in the Army, apart from a ballast balloon, was anybody’s guess. Maybe Intelligence: he was reading Applied Mathematics and he certainly had tons of it. However, I just couldn’t get past the lard. We clicked mentally, but that’s only half the story, if we’re all honest. When I tried to see myself in bed with Tom Drummond, all I could do was shudder.