Venus Envy (4 page)

Gail said haughtily that she saw his inner beauty,

but I’m afraid what she saw was an inheritance of

several million quid and the Royal Enclosure at Ascot for the rest of her life.

For things like that, Gail would overlook the odd stone or two.

Thinking of Tom, I felt a guilty pang. I hadn’t kept up with him, after college - somehow I was unable to face his pity, when relating the story of my artistic failure. I still sculpted, but so what? That was going nowhere fast, or maybe it had already arrived there. Last time I had seen Tom I was still sending off my sculptures to galleries, I was still bright eyed and bushy tailed, full of hope and defiant youthful enthusiasm. We’d had a brilliant, chatty lunch, at which Tom had three helpings of treacle pudding, and refused to let me pay for anything.

He spent ten minutes in the driving rain hailing me a taxi, and.when it had discharged me at my destination, the cabby waved away my twenty quid.

‘The gentleman paid for wherever you wanted to go, miss,’ he grunted.

I wondered what Tom would say about Seamus. It would be great to have his advice. But Tom would surely tell me to stay well away. Married was as good as dead, in Tom’s book.

Ridiculously old-fashioned creature that he was. ‘I’m going to bed, I want an early night,’ I announced, leaving them to try and dislodge Bronwen from the sofa before the start of Friends. I was totally shattered, and I wanted to look rested and beautiful, or should I say professional, for tomorrow.

After all, I yeas a working woman now.

z7

The next morning things were going to be different. Oh yes they were. I’m not such a hopeless case as all that when I’ve got good enough motivation.

I set my alarm for six thirty. I know, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And my patience was rewarded right away, with a Keisha-free bath, room, and no sound in the whole flat, unless you count the lilting strains of Bronwen grunting that she was a firestarter, a twisted firestarter, hey, hey. We had at least trained Bronwen to use her Walkman when she arrived back from clubbing at five a.m. It beat the early wake-up calls at maximum volume telling us that football was coming home, or that we were her Wonderwall, or whatever catchy tune was top of the hit parade that week.

Triumphantly I dragged my sleeping corpse into the shower and proceeded to give myself shock therapy. I meant to start with a cold shower, but that resolutio lasted all of fifteen seconds. No wonder they get so many public schoolboys in the Forces. Since she’d been so mean, I also stole some of Gail’s expensive Nexxus shampoo; it was cool because the bottle was white plastic, so she couldn’t draw little lines on it in black ink to mark where she’d left it, like she did with all her bottles of spirits and scent, the mean cow. Amazingly enough, I did actually start to wake up and I set to like Posh Spice, plucking my eyebrows and shaving my legs and slapping on the body lotion and towel-drying my hair before starting on with the hairdryer.

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We’d put the hairdryer in the bathroom in the hope that Gail would drop it in the bath by accident and electrocute herself, but so far, no luck, even though she went for those pseudy candlelit affairs with the organic body soak that costs twenty quid a pot, so you can’t see what you’re stepping on. Maybe it was the jet takeoff roar of the dryer that gave its presence away. It certainly gave my presence away.

Keisha was banging on the bathroom door in two seconds flat, as I sat there smugly, drying my hair, plucked and prepared like Mummy’s prize Christmas turkey. Now the tables were turned!

‘Get out, get out, get out, get Outt’ she screamed. It certainly had more of a ring to it than my timid enquiries as to when she might be finished,
etc.

‘I’ll get out when I’m ready,’ I said haughtily. Keisha’soVoice turned menacing. ‘You can get out now, or you can give me back my Donna Karan,’ she said heavily.

I was back in my own bedroom in ten seconds. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all. Can’t win any of them, when you live with this crowd.

Gail came in blearily to find me as sleek and shining as I’ll ever be, carefully applying Nude Lip Gloss with matching Liquid Liner, Fresh Cream Blusher, Time Off Hideaway Concealer and Crack the Whip Long Lash Mascara.

‘It won’t do you any good, you know,’ she said nastily, ‘Dolores goes to the Dorchester Spa three times a week. And she works out at the Harbour Club.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Dolores,’ I re’plied defensively. This was true, as I was thinking of Seamus.

I told myself I only wanted to look respectable. OK, pretty and respectable, but that was positively it. After all, he was married, and looked a real Liam Neeson type, or even Liam Gallagher, the heartbreaking playboy who dates every woman in town, but once

z9

they get married, they turn sick-makingly uxorious and faithful. I mean, what is it about the name Liam? Is it some kind of Irish luck charm? I should be grateful that Seamus was called Seamus. Even if I still wasn’t in with a chance.

Could you believe that Dolores? As fragile as a Georgia peach, as pretty as Claudia Schiffer. Nobody could compete with the perfect body, the TDOs that were even out of Keisha’s reach — Dolores would scorn Keisha’s TDOs, she would say things like ‘Oh, prt—porter, how frugal,’ since she would go for the real haute couture and have seamstresses in Paris and London moulding costly fabrics to her slender body. She would have the front row at all those mobbed-up , designer shows. She would … Never mind. Let’s just say I felt no compunction about looking my best. I was about as much a threat to Dolores as Manchester City were to Manchester United.

Seamus was taken. I told myself this firmly. He was taken by a Patsy Kensit lookalike, so real women, as opposed to goddesses, would have no chance. Men who had the Wall Street Journal flown in every day from New York did not date real women. Who could blame them? They didn’t have to. I mean, if I looked like Dolores Mahon, would I condescend to date some geezer from the local chippie? Nope, it would be Johnny Depp and Mr Darcy off the telly or forget it, boy.

Maybe Seamus would have some good-looking single friends.

I pulled on Keisha’s Donna Karan super-carefully to avoid getting foundation on the collar. Best to start as you mean to go on, namely alive.

I slipped my feet into low heels and then I was ready. Oh, how I wanted to wear high heels, my new ones from Office that were so high it was like wa!king on

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stilts, for comfort is all very well but who cares about comfort when you can have an optical illusion that slices pounds of fat from your legs? But no, this was work, sorry to say, and even I could not justify teetering into the office like Naomi Campbell on that runway. Jenny would be on the phone to Mrs Seamus Mahon before you could say Code Red..

‘Tony is coming round this evening,’ Gail announced, sending dagger glances into my bedroom. ‘So you’d better have that lot cleared right away.’

The cause of her are was my latest sculpture, the one I’d been working on when Alan Pell came round. It was another owl.

‘I haven’t finished .my owl.’

‘It doesn’t look like an owl, it looks like a squashed hedgehog,’ Gail snarled.

‘Yeah, n’tan, or a wonky surfboard that curves a bit in the middle,’ Bronwen chipped in. She bounced into my room with a merry expression and a chemical glitter in her eye that suggested she’d have many more happy hours before she finally went to bed. She was chewing gum like some sort of beautiful ruminant, a determined cow or goat or some such. Any minute now she’d be giving us all big hugs and telling us she really loved us, sister. Also she would start talking crap and continue blithely until the drugs wore off and she slumped into a depressed, irritable ‘e’-hangover that would then last for days. It was a tough call which mood was more annoying.

‘Hey, man, you look stunning,’ Bronwen breathed, but she’d think the same thing about Cilia Black in this humour, so I ignored her.

‘It’s not meant to be an owl, it’s meant to be the idea of an owl,’ I explained.

‘Well, it’s my idea of a mess,’ Gail snapped, ‘and I don’t want Tony seeing it.’

Tony was her latest bit of trouser, a beefy,

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rugby-playing, red-braces-wearing City trader. He laughed loudly at her attempts to get him to switch to tofu salads and soya milk, so he wasn’t all bad. But the plus column was still fairly short, in my opinion. He was ruddy faced at twenty-nine, and thought that Michael Howard had been a dangerously soft touch. Bronwen and Keisha wondered what Gail could possibly see in him. I reckoned it was his cherry-red Ferrari.

‘Tony will have to put up with it.’ I heard myself go dangerously silky. Amazing, the way I could summon up the old backbone where my art was concerned, but under no other circumstances. Maybe it was because statues meant something to me, still, after all the

misery and failure. This one had come to me in a

‘ dream last week, a pale shape ghosting through the blackness, and I’d jumped out of bed, wide awake at four a.m., to start the first sketches.

‘Humph! You know you promised Mummy you’d forget all that nonsense,’ Gail flounced.

Keisha strode in commandingly. ‘I agree with Alex.

It’s a very nice buzzard,’ she said defensively.

Gail sniggered.

I grabbed my genuine leather-imitation briefcase, an important part of every career girl’s armoury, if you asked my mother. I hated the damn thing but if I ignored it Gail would just blab to Mum, and anything was better than that.

It may be pathetic to be scared of your parents at twenty-seven, but you haven’t met my parents. And my parents were paying the bills.

So I grabbed the briefcase. It was neon pink. Then like a woman to look feminine, darling!’ Mummy had insisted loudly, dragging me to the counter. ‘This will grab their eye! You don’t want to

look the same as all the other girls, do you?’

No danger of that.

I hoped I could shove the nasty thing right under my

3z

desk when I got in to work, where it could stay as lost as the Ark of the Covenant until the end of time.

‘And I’ve got some more news,’ Gail added. ‘Someone’s taken the flat across the hall!’

We all paused in our last-minute application of female protective camouflage - scent, hairspray, tights - to listen up. This was news. The flat opposite ours, the only other flat on the top floor, was one of the smartest in Belsize Park. You could see right into Zoe Bali’s apartment from the bedroom. It was three times as big as ours and was rumoured to have a sunken bath and in-house cinema screen.

‘And guess who it is?’ Gail asked proudly, enjoying our suspense. It wasn’t often we were hanging on her every word. ‘Snowy!’ she announced proudly.

Keisha apd Bronwen looked blank, but my face was a picture. I could see myself in the mirror gaping like some landed fish, or Bronwen when she was ‘on one’.

‘Olivia White?’ I asked, horrified. Olivia White, hence ‘Snowy’ (nobody ever accused Catholic schoolgirls of being original), had been one of Gail’s friends at school. She was impossibly beautiful and always rowing with everybody. She refused to do any work, as I recall, and accused the teachers of jealousy over her looks when they tried to suspend her. Nobody wanted to expel her, because she had been orphaned aged three in a car crash Brought up by a long-suffering old aunt, Snowy had milked this early tragedy over and over again during our schootdays and it always worked. She was supposed to be a major bitch. I didn’t mix with the fourth-form girls, so I didn’t care.

.I was horrified, really, at the thought of Gail having reinforcements.

‘She was such a sweetheart at school,’ Gail said airily. ‘You’ll love her, Keisha, she gets thirty per cent off at Gucci, and she’s supposed to know all the big “

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promoters, Bronwen, she says she can get you backstage passes to any gig you want.’

‘She sounds great,’ Keisha said.

‘She sounds brilliant!’ Bronwen enthused, chewing wildly.

I stomped gloomily off to work.

I can’t deny it was a better start than yesterday. This morning the receptionist looked almost niollified, apart from cruelly obvious stifled grins at my neon briefcase. I could see her struggling not to say anything, but she lost the struggle. Obviously I did not rate the cool professionalism .everyone else got walking through these doors. Receptionists were probably not encouraged to be chatty at Hamilton Kane, but she doubtless figured I wouldn’t be around long enough to cause any problems.

‘What is it, top of the range at Strawberry Shortcake?’ she sniggered.

‘You’re showing your age,’ I shot back. ‘It’s My Little Pony these days.’

‘Avoided the tights problem by not wearing any?’ she retorted.

‘Actually, I’ve got two pairs in my bag, I’m going to change in the Too,’ I batted back.

‘Well, you’d better get a move on. Jenny Robins has been in Mr Mahon’s office for half an hour already,’ she said, winning the match on points.

I darted into the loos and put on my tights with a nerve-racking combination of speed and caution. Damn. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep this organised stuff up.

Still, I thought modestly, I didn’t look bad. Tummy pulled in with Tummy-Buster support tights that made it hard to breathe, but which did let the dusty pink Donna Karan jacket drape forgivingly over my torso. Foundation, nude lips and blushers and concealers and

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mascara all gave my face that un-made-up look that takes hours to perfect. Scent was still wafting from my pulse points - ‘A woman should place her scent where she wants to be kissed,’ said Coco Chanel, but somehow despite me dousing myself everywhere except my armpits, nothing usually happened. I also left my toes out. Maybe it is very erotic, but it now calls forth pictures of a) David Mellor or b) Fergie, and thus is sent to Forbidden Sex Prison along with all fetishes and men that need to call you ‘Mummy’ before they can come.