Venus Envy (39 page)

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Ron. ‘And you’re going to buy it, Tom? How sweet!

You are a darling …’

‘How much?’ asked Mum eagerly. Too eagerly.

‘Two thousand,’ said Tom, kindly pretending not to notice my flush of shame.

Two thousand? I’d really got it bad, because I didn’t

feel thrilled, I felt gutted. He loved Gail so much he was prepared to pay two grand for a clay figurine of her?

‘Oh my God,’ said Mum loudly, ‘what is that?’

I spun round to see thick smoke blooming up behind

a Grecian urn. There was a distinctly nasty crackling

sound.

‘Fire! Fire!’ screamed Lady de Winter.

There was a general howling and everyone tried to leave at once.

‘Oh my God, the de Kooning,’ I gasped. It was

propped against one wall just inches from the blaze.

‘Fire! Fire!’ Gordon wailed.

I shoved back through the stampeding customers

and tried to reach the painting.

‘Don’t worry, Alex, I’ve got it,’ Tom yelled.

I stood up on a chair so I could see over the heads of

the crowd.

Tom came back into the main body of the gallery

and flung a huge bucket of water at the fire, which fizzled out nicely.

It also did a damn good. job. of soaking me. Everybody halted in the scramble to the door and gazed transfixed at me, wet, no underwear, with a see through, white, soaked, rayon dress plastered to my body like cheesecloth on a porn model.

‘Outstanding,’ said Dwight S. Limo, grinning broadly.

And at that moment, the chair teetered slowly and toppled backwards, flinging me against the wal!, right

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with a pop like the paper on a new jar of Nescaf&

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Well, I was mature about it. I did the only sensible thing. I crawled into bed and refused to answer all phone calls the next day.

Keisha and Bronwen kept me supplied with life’s essentials, such as the Sun and bars of Caramac. They made feeble attempts to tell me everything would be OK.

‘It’ll probably clear up very nicely.’

‘It wasn’t your fault you were naked.’

And ‘Everyone will have forgotten it soon.’

‘Really?’ I asked, perking my tousled head out from under the sheets.

‘.No,’ said Keisha, who couldn’t resist laughing hysterically. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’

‘D’you know what Gail said to me when we were giving you our jackets?’ Bronwen jumped in eagerly. ‘ “If I had a body that fat I’d have worn a corset, let alone no underwear.” ‘

I buried my face in my hands. Oh God, I was never,

ever going.to be able to show my face in London ever again.

‘I’ve got to get away,’ I said, ‘maybe I could go to Australia, except I don’t have the money.’

‘Maybe Gordon will sue you and send you there in a convict ship,’ giggled Keisha.

I’d forgotten all about Gordon. Last thing I saw before I dived into a taxi, sobbing with humiliation, was his darling little face all shocked and staring woefully at the ruins of the Pollock. Not to mention

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the rest of his shock. Gordon had been calling all night but Keisha told him I was out. I didn’t need to speak to him to know that I was fired. Toast. History. Kaput.

I always believed I was not an average girl, and now I was being proved right, because I had the worst employment history in the history of history. What would my next triumph be? I wondered. Janitor at the Natural History Museum, where I would somehow knock over that big dinosaur skeleton, reducing it to dust after a billion years? Au pair, so I could poison the children and turn the house into a fire hazard? Secretary, so I could mix up envelopes and spill corporate secrets wherever I went?

Perhaps I could become a nun. In one of those contemplative orders where they don’t even speak.

Let’s face it, my lovelife could not be any worse in there than. it was out here.

Of course, they did have the annoying requirement that you love your fellow man and do not covet your neighbour’s wife. They said nothing about coveting your sister’s boyfriend, but I had a nasty feeling it might be included.

‘You’ve got money,’ Bronwen said.

‘Yes,’ Keisha reminded me, ‘Tom is giving you two thousand for that statue of Gail. You could go anywhere with that.’

‘Wow, two grand just for a statue of her,’ Bronwen sighed, ‘how romantic, he must truly love her.’

‘You’d better call him and-tell him to send the money right away.’

‘Wire-transfer it.’

‘Then you can get the hell out of Dodge,’ Keisha concluded.

The phone rang. Keisha let the answer machine pick it up, which was just as well since it was my mother.

‘Alexandra, this is your mother - Mrs Wilde calling

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for Alexandra, and I know you’re there, you had better pick the phone up at once.’

I sighed and held out my hand for the portable. ‘Hi, Mum,’ I said.

She was cross. Very cross. I’ve seen charging rhinos in a better mood.

‘I don’t know how you could put me through that humiliation,’ Mum shouted, ‘standing there naked like a tuppeny whore … don’t tell me you didn’t know you were going to get wet! And such a scrimmage, and that revolting food, my goodness, with me your mother and everyone thinking “There’s her mother, ” not much of a cookery teacher!” ‘

I doubted that was what they were thinking but , refrained from saying so.

‘And what do you think you did to poor Gail’s chances with Tom? Do you think he wants to be associated with such an exhibition? You’d make a

terrible person to be related to, so embarrassing.’ This was true but she could talk!

.’Poor Gail is in floods of tears; she wants to change her surname so nobody connects you to her. Although how they could do that I fail to see, with Gail so

feminine and always nicely turned out. Anyway ‘ Here it comes.

‘Your father and I want you to move out of the flat, you’re doing nobody any good with this silly, “staying in London” business, you’re to come home here, where

we can keep an eye on you.’

‘But Mum, I hate Surrey.’

‘That’s something you should have thought about before you disgraced the whole family. No, I won’t hear another syllable, Alex, you can come back home and help your father in his business, it’ll be good for

you to do something useful.’

‘I won’t,’ I said defiantly.

‘Well, you can’t stay in the flat,’ said Mum heavily,

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‘and remember the last time you tried to make it out there on your own.’

‘This’ll be different.’

‘You ended up with lice and living in a house with rats.’

‘They weren’t rats, they were very small dogs,’ I said, but sadly, because she was in fact right. Why is it that most people are perfectly capable of looking after themselves by the time they’re eighteen, and my mother wanted me to be chained up at home at twenty-seven?

Sometimes I think I’m OK, I’m quite pretty and a bit of a laugh, and then I go home and they lop twenty years off my age and. make me feel like that awkward schoolgirl with pigtails I was in Mrs Minchin’s class.

‘Well, if you think you can take care of yourself, be my guest,’ Mum went on in outraged tones, ‘but

you’re not doing it in our flat.’

‘Can I speak to Dad?’

‘Your father agrees with me one hundred per cent,’ said Mum. Poor Dad, that meant Mum had chewed his ear off for four hours until he was too cowed to do anything but agree. I made a mental note to remember to call Dad at the office if I really needed some money. Then I thought, how sad was I to be. thinking this way?

‘We’re not having you hanging around London ruining things for Gail, Mum said annoyingly.

I wondered idly if I had in fact been so embarrassing that Tom would finish with Gail in order not to have me as a sister-in-law. That would have been a silver lining, but unfortunately, Tom was too honourable to do that, and anyway, he wouldn’t give a damn what people thought of anyone he liked.

‘I want you out of that flat by the weekend, Alex, and—’

I hung up on her. Then I quickly took the receiver off the hook. This kind of thing is a scorched-earth

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tactic with my mother, but what the hell. I was going to run away to sea so she’d never find me to exact her fearsome revenge.

‘She wants me to move out,’ I told the others, ‘and

go back home.’

‘To the commuter belt?’ Keisha asked with as much horror as if I’d said ‘the gulag’.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Bronwen said. ‘If you

can type you can get good money temping.’

‘I can’t type.’

‘You did it for Seamus Mahon, of course you can. Look, I’ll ask Personnel if you can come and work for me at Up and Running,’ Keisha said.

‘Or you can be a stylist’s assistant for me,’ Bronwen

, said bravely, looking at my utterly unstylish clothes

that were strewn about my bedroom.

I gave them both a hug. They might be annoying when it comes to chocolate, clothes and having a life, but they’re good girls. Without my friends I would be a pancake by now. Crushed by the oncoming trucks of despair and poverty.

‘Thanks, you guys, but I have to find something myself,’ I said resolutely.

There was a knock on the door.

‘I bet it’s Jeremy,’ said Bronwen jealously to Keisha.

‘I bet it’s Clan come to apologise. Don’t take less

than two dozen red roses,’ Keisha said.

But it wasn’t, it was Tom Drummond..

I barely had time to pull on a dressing gown and

wrap my hair in a towel. It was perfectly dry, but it was also greasy and tangled. This is a top tip for when men you fancy drop in unexpectedly, when you always look shit unless you’re my flatmates, who are the supremely awful pulled-together females. The definition of a pulled-together girl is that she puts on makeup in the morning - whether she’s going out or not.

Tom came in and I refused to look him in the eye.

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‘Alex, I’ve brought you your cheque,’ he said.

The trouble with this situation was that I couldn’t very well say, ‘Piss off and leave me to die of a broken heart, you sister-dating bastard,’ when he was handing over a cheque for two grand.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and then some gremlin taking over my better judgment added, ‘You’re paying far too much for it, you don’t have to give me that much.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, it’s a steal,’ Tom said.

‘Can I sit down? Any chance of a cup of coffee?’ ‘Please, please do,’ said Bronwen,

‘Of course, let me put the machine on, I’ve got some Jamaican Blue Mountain,’ said Keisha, most unnecessarily I thought. They both bad boyfriends and they professed to hate the English upper classes, so why

were they all of a flutter now Tom was around?

‘I s’po.e,’ I said grumpily.

‘I’ve never seen a more lifelike sculpture. You got Gail so wonderfully. She breathes in the clay.’

‘Yes, well,’ I said nastily, ‘you can think of it as Pocket Gail. It twirls, it flicks its hair. You can take it with you whenever she’s not there and kiss it - “Good night, Pocket Gail!” Or if you’ve got any questions about organic goats’ cheese pizza, or whatever bloody veggie crap she’s got you eating, you can get it out and focus on what ail would say - “What do you think, Pocket Gail?” It’s just like the real thing: it never has anything interesting to say and it never puts on an ounce.’

Tom looked at me in total amazement. ‘Are you and Gail, er, fighting, Alex?’ he asked.

I shrugged and died a little bit more. Where did that come from? Well, I know where it came from, but the point was, I might as well wear a big T-shirt with ‘I AM

JEALOUS’ stamped across the front.

‘I expect she’s too ashamed of me even to speak,’ I grunted.

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Tom laughed. What a sexy laugh that boy had. ‘She

did use some rather choice language. She told me I wasn’t to see you any more.’

‘But you’re here,’ I pointed out.

Tom shrugged. ‘I don’t like being told what to do.

Oh, thanks, Keisha, terrific coffee. Anyway, I wanted

to make sure you got your cheque.’

‘You could have put it in the post.’

‘Well … Gail mentioned to me that you wouldn’t

be staying here.’

‘I see,’ I said blankly. ‘Well, she’s right. I’m going to cash your cheque and go to Australia.’

‘You are?’ said Tom, looking alarmed. ‘But I’ve only

just found you again, you can’t run away from me like that.’

‘I can do anything I want to,’ I said miserably, ‘Girl Power.’

‘But you’re one of my best friends,’ Tom objected. I looked at him sharply. ‘I am not one of your best friends. I’m your girlfriend’s sister, that’s all. I’ve got enough friends, actually, thank you very much.’

‘And your boyfriend, Gordon, of course,’ Tom said sarcastically.

I recalled that Gordon had been openly snogging the svelte blond man. ‘My relationship with Gordon is none of your business,’ I said with dignity.

‘Why are you being so awful, Alex?’ Tom demanded sharply. It was the kind of question I usually asked with a sort of whining tone. Tom barked it at me like he was still in the Army and I was a private who’d failed the boot-shining.

Tm not,’ I said, snatching the cheque before he could change his mind. ‘I just don’t need another male friend, Tom. Anyway, Gail wouldn’t like it.’

‘Who gives a damn what Gail would or wouldn’t like?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll be buggered if I’m going to let you slip away again.’

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‘Well, bend over and grab your ankles, then,’ I grunted.

‘You can’t just disappear, what about your job at the gallery?’

‘What gallery?’ I laughed. ‘It was burned, soaked, crushed, knocked over … and it’s got a Page Three girl for a gallery assistant.’

Tom grinned. ‘Actually I thought it was great fun. And I enjoyed the last bit most of all.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve always wanted to see me naked,’ I challenged.