“What?”
“Cut her off.”
“. . . God’s sake . . .”
“Call her back. It’s Janey.”
“Who?”
“Janey.”
Never had a man been more debilitated by wealth than Julian.
Images from Africa were going round and round in my head. I couldn’t stop them. I thought I was going mad. Lights flashed on the phone. I moved from the window and sat down on a beanbag, holding my knees, resting my head on the holes in my jeans. Oliver came back into the room.
“Rosie, I wish you wouldn’t come out in those jeans. You look like a member of a teenage girl band. What’s happened to all your nice clothes?”
“Sold them,” I said, still with my head down.
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve taken them to a shop called Second Thoughts. They’ll get five hundred quid for them and I’m sending it to Oxfam.”
“How naïve can you get? What the fuck difference is that going to make? How are you going to live life here if you can’t dress appropriately?”
“It’s what’s inside you that counts, Oliver.”
“Oh. Is it really? Is it? Thank you. Thank you, Mother Teresa, you have shown me the light.”
I kept my head down, saying nothing.
“Jesus, Rosie, when are you going to snap out of this? Look, I’ll send Oxfam five hundred quid if you feel that strongly about it. Go and get the clothes back. When did you do this?”
“You can send them five hundred as well.”
“I’ll send them a grand, all right? You get the clothes back, then everyone will be better off.”
I straightened up and looked at him. “And what would I have done?”
“Got a grip at least.”
“You can’t buy me out of what I believe.”
“Oh, God, spare me the violins. Someone pass her an onion.” He saw my look. “OK, sorry, I know. I know. But could you just try to keep at least some hold on reality, however tenuous?”
Julian’s heavy, lumbering tread was approaching up the stairs. He came in, flung himself on the sofa and lit a cigarette with an air of aggrievement.
“Margarita is stealing from the fridge.”
“Who?” said Oliver.
“The lady who looks after me. You’ve met Margarita. I had six bottles of Moët in there and now there are only four. It really isn’t on. I’m more than generous to her. I have her son clean the cars five times a week and then he leaves fleck all over them. What shall I do?”
“Cut off their heads,” I said.
“Shut up,” said Oliver.
Oliver had come round to look at the scripts for an advertising campaign for British Telecom that Julian had been offered. Julian was worried that the character he was playing wasn’t funny enough.
“How much?” Oliver said, as Julian handed him the scripts.
“A hundred grand.”
“Not enough. You should ask for two.”
I got up and walked out. I stamped down a flight of stairs to the fourth-floor guest room bathroom. It was the size of my flat and lined with mirrors. The floor looked as though it had been cut from a single piece of jade, and in the center, standing on wrought-iron eagles’ talons, was a mock Victorian Jacuzzi bath. The loo seat matched the floor. I put the lid down and sat on it. I stared into the gilded mirror opposite seeing the starvation lorry and the body falling out. My face didn’t look like my face. There was a marble stool at my feet with another of the switchboard telephones on it. Two fluffy toweling bathrobes hung on a brass eagle’s head behind the door. I got up and went out onto the landing.
Julian’s voice boomed, “You could always do it better, couldn’t you, Oliver?”
“Have you ever had one good word to say about Soft Focus? Ever?”
I walked very slowly up the stairs and into the room. They both looked up nervously as if they had a lunatic in their midst. I sat on the chair behind the desk. Once I was settled they looked at each other, picked up their scripts gingerly, and started talking about the advert again.
Amongst the papers in front of me was an invoice with Leighton Health Club written on top. I picked it up. “Julian Alman, one year membership, full and social, £3,500,” it said.
“Ahem.” They both looked up.
“Why have you done this?” I said.
“Leave Julian’s papers alone.”
I held it out to them. “Three thousand five hundred pounds. Why?”
“I need to lose weight.”
“Three thousand five hundred pounds to lose weight?”
“Rosie,” Oliver said. “Will you stop being so fucking sanctimonious?”
“Do you know what this would buy out in Africa?”
“I know, but I do give money to Africa.” Julian looked apologetic. “I just don’t give all of it. And of what I keep, what does it matter what I spend it on?”
“Well, exactly,” said Oliver. “Exactly what I’m telling her. Either you give it away or you don’t and if you’re not going to give it away it makes no difference what you spend it on. Whether it’s horses, stocks and shares, Picassos, microwaves—it’s all the same.”
“We do not have a right to live in luxury and make token gestures when half the world is poor.”
“A hair shirt does not suit you, darling.”
I got up dramatically, swept over to the window and turned my back on them.
“She’s just gone loopy. Ignore her.”
“Waste and excess. Waste and excess. It eats away at the soul,” I said, turning to look at them like Lady MacBeth. Then I turned again and banged my forehead on the window three times.
I thought I heard one of them giggle. When I turned round they were both looking at me like small boys, as if they didn’t know what to do.
“I’m going outside for a bit.”
“You are not going to sit in the car again. It’s ridiculous.”
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Actually I’d rather like to go for a walk,” said Julian.
“It’s fucking pissing down.”
“Well, you stay here, then.” Julian looked very concerned. “In fact, that’ll be much better, Oliver, because then we won’t have to set the burglar alarm.” So, of course, Oliver immediately decided he wanted to come for a walk in the pouring rain too.
The three of us stood shivering in the porch for some time while Julian tried to set the burglar alarm. “Blast. Hang on. I’ll just have to go inside again.” He opened the door. The loudest bell I’d ever heard pealed out above our heads. Julian sprinted along the hallway, slipping on the Indian rug on the polished floor, his huge form crashing against the radiator. “Blast,” he said, careering off again. The bell was still going strong. Five minutes later it stopped and Julian reappeared, panting.
“Right.” He started fiddling with the little box by the doorbell again.
“Come on, Julian. What are you doing?”
“Hang on, it’s just my mother’s date of birth, then my bank card number.” He straightened up and looked at us. “The thing is, you see, it’s jolly good because if you key the wrong code in, it won’t let you do it again unless you put another code in first, which is jolly good because it stops people taking pot luck. Oh, blast.”
The bell had started ringing again.
In the end, the walk was an unexpected success. We all felt bad about the last few hours and were making an effort, so the chemistry altered and a bad time turned into a good time. Julian and Oliver were hungry and I refused to go to a restaurant and made them go to the pub. It was a lovely pub, with a roaring fire and Christmas decorations. They were serving a full Christmas dinner for £4.95, which I deemed acceptable. I lightened up and even managed to eat a bit of Oliver’s turkey. It was odd with Oliver. Always before I had felt I was on such thin ice that if I didn’t focus all my attention on trying to please him, he would be off like a shot. Now I was routinely behaving with no regard whatsoever for what
he wanted. I kept expecting him to explode and disappear. A lot of the time I wanted him to. And he didn’t.
Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered. It took me a while to realize what that would do to me and Oliver.
CHAPTER
Ten
It was 1:00 A.M., Saturday night, Sunday morning, my flat. Oliver got up from the sofa with a face like thunder and started putting his coat on: the big, soft dark-blue overcoat which I used to love.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going home.”
No, no, I thought, as I always did. Please, please, don’t go. He had done this so many times before. I knew what it meant: flopping into bed in floods of tears, lying awake half the night miserable, waking up on Sunday morning with no one there, no sex, no fun, pointless croissants in the fridge, pointless ironed duvet, pointless best-pant choosing. No Shirley or Rhoda to cheer me up till the morning. Pain, rejection, everything all over with Oliver.
Traditionally at this point I would burst into tears, throw my arms round him, apologize for whatever had slighted him, beg him to stay. All the familiar feelings began, the tears were welling. I got up, heartbroken, moved towards him, looked up at him, saw the anger in his face, and then, all of a sudden, I stopped. The feelings had vanished. It was as though a giant fuse switch had been pushed and pushed and then finally gone, clicked down. OFF.
“Bye, then,” I said. “Make sure you shut the door properly downstairs.”
I put the telly on. It was Carry On Up the Khyber. There was a Christmas stocking full of chocolate items which my mother had sent lying on the table. I suddenly wanted a Rolo, and ate the whole tube.
The doorbell rang. I gave it lengthy consideration and then decided to open the Maltesers. It rang again. Then again. Then continually.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. This can’t go on, I thought. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. It has to stop. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
It didn’t.
I padded over to the entryphone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m coming back up.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No.”
“I can’t hear you through this thing.”
“No. You wanted to go home. Go home.”
Silence. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Then more silence. I went back to the Maltesers and Carry On Up the Khyber. For the first time since I got back from Africa, I was properly, ravenously hungry. I ate the Milky Way, then after a while I remembered the croissants. Chocolate croissants. I went to the kitchen, put three croissants on a plate and took them back to the living room. Then I heard the key in the lock. Shit. I had given him the key when I went to Africa.
Oliver was holding the sort of bunch of pink and yellow flowers you get from petrol stations for £2.95 with imitation white lace on the edge of the cellophane.
“Plumpkin,” he said, holding them out to me.
“I said, no.”
“Hey, hey, come on.” He held his arms open to me, smiling, confident.
“You said you were going home. Go home.”
He stared at me, disbelieving. “Come on, it was just a row.”
“You’ve done this to me just once too often.”
“Rosie, please.” He came towards me and tried to put his arms round me. “Please. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
I disengaged myself from him as coldly as he had disengaged himself from me so many times. “You think you can turn me on and off like a tap. When you want me I’m there. When you don’t want me, that’s fine. I’ll still be there for next time. Now go on. I mean it. Out.”
“Don’t do this,” he said, anguished. “It’s too . . . it’s too . . . wretched.”
“Too wretched?” I said. “Too wretched? Was it too wretched when you did it to me half an hour ago? Was it too wretched after Bill Bonham’s party? And after we’d been to ET ? And after we had dinner with my brother? And when I said I didn’t think your Lorca thing was the best program ever made? Was it too wretched then? Did it matter what I felt like in the middle of the night on my own? Here take a croissant for the morning. Chocolate. Very good.” I took a bite and munched it.
The thunder look crossed his face again. “Don’t push it, OK?” he said dangerously. “I am extremely tired and I’m beginning to run out of patience.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “These are delicious.”
He strode towards the door, furious, then his face crumpled. “It’ll be too grim if we part like this. Please. Just think about it. Think what it means.”
“I’ve had to think about it plenty of times,” I said quietly. “Now just see how you like it.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.” He was practically in tears.
All the things he used to say came back on cue. “Look, I have made it as plain as I possibly can that I want to be on my own tonight, all right? And don’t come on at me like that. I’ll call you in the week, OK? Now, please, let go of me. You’re behaving like a spoilt child who can’t have what he wants. Good night.”
When I finally got him to go he was crying. He was pretty plastered. He slipped as he was going down the stairs. He tried to come up again. And it felt so good. But after the first rush wore off I felt mean and cheap. And somewhere in my head I heard my mum’s voice saying, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
The relationship limped on for a while but it was no good. Once the scales had fallen from my eyes it couldn’t work. The whole thing had been based on my desire to win him, which made all his inconsistencies and cruelties seem like obstacles to be overcome, rather than the unappealing flaws which now stared me in the face. I was horrified at my own coldness of heart. Had I been in a less extreme mood then perhaps I would have thought harder about love, about how it means taking the whole package, good and bad. How it had been my fault, too, for letting our peculiar dance begin and continue as it had, without standing up to him before. But everything looked black and white to me now. The switch had been thrown.
I had been staring at the computer screen for ten minutes. I was trying to write a press release but I couldn’t do it. Hermoine kept glancing over at me, nervously. She was being much nicer to me since I’d got back. Sir William knew who I was now. He was very concerned that I was thin and weird and could only interpret it as a stomach bug. I suspected he had told her to go easy on me. Or maybe it was just the peculiar reverence people have for someone who has been to a horror zone.
I stared furiously at the screen, trying to force myself to concentrate. Thankfully, the phone rang.
“Ah, hello, it’s Gwen here. How are you feeling now?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Now, it’s about tonight.” I suddenly felt really annoyed with him for always making our arrangements through his assistant. It was just too grand for words. Often I suspected it was to stop me asking questions.
“No offense to you, but is there any reason why Oliver can’t ring me himself just now?”
“Ah, Er. Well, you know how busy he is.”
“Yes, but what is he doing at this precise moment?”
“Er—he’s, er—he did say he was busy.”
“I see. What is the message?”
“He says he won’t be able to come round until ten o’clock because he has a meeting. Oh, and he won’t want to eat, so go ahead and eat without him.”
“Fine, thank you.”
This one again. An unexpected meeting till ten, with food, which he daren’t tell me about himself. Great. I had spent my lunch hour buying our supper in Marks and Spencer’s. Who was it? Vicky Spankie? Corinna? Someone else? I’d sit in all evening, wondering, and then he’d turn up pissed and guilty at eleven-thirty. No, he wouldn’t, though. Not
this time.
“Hermoine?”
“What is it?”
“Would you do a favor for me?”
Hermoine looked at me warily.
“What?”
“It’s nothing much. It’s just to ring this number, say you are my assistant, and that I’m sending my apologies to Oliver. I won’t be able to make it tonight because I have a meeting which will go on till one.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Oh, go on. Don’t be a bloody old bore.” I winked at her. I really didn’t care what she thought. I hated the stupid job now anyway.
“Go on. Please,” I said, holding out the piece of paper with Oliver’s number. “He’s always doing it to me.”
“Oh, all right, then,” she said. And afterwards she shrieked with laughter. “Perfect! Oh what a scream! I must tell Cassandra. That was completely brilliant. Jolly well serves him right.”
And when my phone rang again a few minutes later, she snatched it up before I could get to it and told Oliver I was in a meeting. Unfortunately, though, she got rather carried away.
“Yes, of course I’ll give her the message but she’s frightfully busy. I really don’t know if I’ll catch her. Why don’t you ring back in a couple of months?”
She banged down the phone and looked gleefully across for approval. But I was horrified.
“A couple of months? Oh no.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so wet. Do him the world of good. Fancy coming down to Larkfield this weekend?”
When I got out of work he was waiting across the road for me with a bunch of red roses. The seesaw had definitely swung. My flat was starting to look like a flower shop. I couldn’t have turned things round better if I had planned it in months of therapy. The trouble was, though, it wouldn’t have worked if I was pretending. Never does.
It was Valentine’s Day, the day of Julian Alman’s wedding to Janey. Oliver was best man. It had been a whirlwind romance. Julian had collapsed gratefully and needily into Janey’s abundant offerings of beauty, warmth and normality. Sometimes you could see Janey three times a night on the TV, advertising bras or deodorants. Tall, blond, willowy, with almond eyes and cheek bones to die for, she was the epitome of sophistication and chic until she opened her mouth. Then she was, well, loud, coarse, hilarious, fun, kind—but definitely not chic. In the Claridge’s ballroom, Janey’s East End clan were mingling confidently with Julian’s star-studded guest list, knocking the booze back and roaring with laughter. Janey, however, was in tears.
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