Acquired Tastes

by Simone Mondesir

  Acquired Tastes

  Simone Mondesir

  Acquired Tastes

  Revised 2nd edition 2014

  eISBN 978-1-78301-581-8

  First published in Great Britain 1996 by Mandarin Paperbacks an imprint of Reed International Books Ltd

  All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright Simone Mondesir 2014

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  One Week Later

  One

  'Men,' Vanessa announced loudly, her index finger tracing the contours of a large, plump peach, 'should be like summer peaches: firm and hairy to the touch.'

  She bit sharply into the ripe flesh and pale, sticky juice trickled down her fingers. She licked them clean, the tip of her tongue protruding pinkly cat-like between her lips.

  'When bitten they should be sweet and juicy, but when stripped bare …' She paused theatrically before pulling the hapless fruit in half, exposing the wrinkled brown stone at its centre, 'they should be very, very hard.'

  There was an expectant hush at the surrounding restaurant tables. Vanessa leaned conspiratorially across the table towards her companion as though to whisper, but her final pronouncement could be heard within a radius of ten feet.

  'The trouble is most men are like prunes - one taste and you want to run.'

  Vanessa dropped the broken fruit on to her plate and raised her wine glass in an ironic toast to her mainly male audience. There was an embarrassed chorus of deep-throated harrumphs as heads turned away.

  'Vanessa…' Her companion’s voice was timid, rather like her appearance.

  Even though it was a hot summer's day, Alicia was dressed in a beige wool twin set and a stout tweed skirt. She looked small and round and dun-coloured beside Vanessa whose day-glo pink mini dress clung to her five-foot ten, whippet-thin body by the merest whisper of material.

  'I'm sorry… perhaps I shouldn't ask, but…' Alicia's voice faltered and then trailed off yet again.

  'Why must you always apologise for everything you say or do?' snapped Vanessa. 'For heaven's sake Alicia, spit it out.'

  'I'm sorry…' Alicia began again but checked herself. 'I was wondering… You never seem to talk much about Jeremy anymore.'

  'Didn't I tell you? Jeremy and I are divorced. You know, D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D, like that dreadful whingeing song says.' Vanessa spelt the word out rather too loudly, causing heads to turn in their direction once again.

  Behind the lenses of her glasses, Alicia's eyes blinked rapidly. She always wore glasses, even though her optician told her there was no need to wear them all the time. Lately, she had taken to wearing large, brightly-coloured frames, the one splash of colour in her otherwise beige appearance. Today her frames were pale blue, the same colour as her eyes.

  'I'm so sorry. I hadn't realised it had got so bad. Divorce is such a… Well, such a big step.'

  Vanessa threw her head back and laughed. 'Christ almighty Alicia, you surely don't still believe in all that old crap about divorce and mortal sin, do you? I gave up believing in all that hell-fire and brimstone stuff even before I left the Convent.'

  'Oh no, I didn't mean it like that,' Alicia said quickly. 'I just meant that it might be painful to talk about it, but if you wanted to share…'

  'Painful?' Vanessa sounded incredulous. 'Divorcing that little shit was one of the best things I've ever done. God knows I must have loved him once, but for the life of me I can't remember when or why.'

  She poured some more wine into her glass and drank deeply.

  Alicia sipped her Perrier water thoughtfully. She was convinced that Vanessa was a lot more hurt about the breakup of her marriage than she would admit, but Vanessa had always found it hard to show her feelings, even when they were at school together.

  Vanessa Swift, or Sprunt as she had been then, and Alicia Binns had first met on an unseasonably cold and damp day early in September 1968. Together with thirty other eleven-year-olds, they stood on the steps of St Aloysius' Boarding School for Young Ladies, surrounded by trunks and sobbing mothers.

  Everyone that is, except for Vanessa and Alicia.

  Vanessa had arrived alone in her father's chauffeured Bentley. Now she stood slightly apart from the rest of the new girls, clutching an overnight bag in her kid-gloved hands, the rest of her matching luggage piled neatly beside her. She was glad her mother, Gwenda, had not come with her. Gwenda's glamorous 1950's Rank studio starlet look would have looked distinctly out of place next to the sensible tweed skirts and twin set and pearls of the other mothers, and Vanessa had a feeling her mother would have felt moved to try and outdo the other mothers when it came to weeping. It would have been very embarrassing.

  Alicia had arrived last, spluttering up to the school steps in the sidecar of her father's motorbike, one hand holding her hat to her head, the other trying to hold on to the collection of bags and boxes which had been stowed haphazardly around her. Strapped to the back of the bike was a disintegrating trunk which bore her father's service number and the names of assorted foreign military outposts, testament to the remnants of a post-war Empire much reduced in size, but still in need of a token British presence.

  Having hurriedly unloaded Alicia and her possessions, her father seemed about to hug her, but then he brought his arms smartly back to his sides as though he was coming to attention and bent stiffly down, his lips pursed together. At the last moment he closed his eyes, perhaps mistrustful of his urge to be affectionate. A badly-aimed kiss landed on Alicia's right ear. Moments later he was astride his motorbike and then was gone, leaving the acrid smell of his exhaust floating on the air behind him. Alicia's parting from her mother had been almost as brief. She had left her surrounded by tea chests, murmuring to herself as she ticked items off several different lists. Her mother was packing up their married quarters - a task that demanded all her attention if she was to complete it to the satisfaction of Alicia’s father. He inspected their quarters in much the same way that he inspected the quarters of the men under his command - not stinting on reprimands where they were due.

  A flock of nuns descended on the now weeping girls and herded them into the building, cooing words of comfort as they gently but firmly separated them from their mothers who, with much fluttering of handkerchiefs, bid a last bosom-heaving farewell to their dear little ones.
<
br />   United by their mutual motherlessness, Alicia and Vanessa gave each other cautious, dry-eyed looks and fell into step at the back.

  'How do you do?' Vanessa held out a kid-gloved hand. 'My name's Vanessa Sprunt. My father's a self-made man. He's very rich and intends to get even richer.'

  The small bare hand that briefly touched hers was still blue with cold from the motorbike ride.

  'I'm Alicia, Alicia Binns.'

  'What does your father do?'

  'He's in the army, but he's leaving on Sunday. He's been posted to Singapore. My mother's going too.'

  Behind the pink plastic frames of her round National Health glasses Alicia's eyes grew watery, and a tear slid down her cheek. It was quickly followed by several more.

  'Is your father a General or anyone important?' enquired Vanessa hopefully.

  'No, he's just a Regimental Sergeant Major but I won a scholarship, that's why I'm here.'

  Alicia's father had impressed on her that usually, only officer's daughters went to boarding school, so she had better come up to scratch and not to let him down in anything, two of his oft-quoted expressions. She dug her hand into her blazer pocket and found the neatly ironed handkerchief her mother had placed there. She blew her nose loudly and then angrily wiped her eyes. Her father disliked women who cried and she was determined not to disappoint him.

  As they walked at the end of the crocodile of new girls, Vanessa looked down at her companion. Alicia's uniform was obviously second-hand and at least two sizes too large, however someone clever enough to win a scholarship could prove useful when it came to doing homework and passing exams. Not that her parents cared about exam results quite the opposite. The only reason that her mother, Gwenda, wanted her to go to boarding school was in the hope that she would make the right kind of social contacts.

  Ever since the Sprunt family moved to a vast, detached, mock-Tudor mansion complete with swimming pool and tennis court in one of the leafier areas of Barnet in North London a year ago, her mother had become obsessed with getting into the right social circles. Vanessa's father Ted had made a fortune from supplying gaming machines to bars, pubs and amusement arcades, a business that sometimes called for strong-arm tactics to protect it. But now he wanted to 'go legit' as he called it and had decided to go into property development - a business which called for suits and smart lawyers rather than men with muscles.

  Along with the mansion in Barnet and a new tailor, he had acquired swish, oak-panelled offices in the West End of London and a secretary who not only had the right telephone manner, but could take dictation and type 80 wpm using all her fingers. Gwenda, who had worked as his secretary since he first set up business in one cramped room off Brick Lane, did not approve of her replacement. It was true Annabelle had undoubted secretarial skills, but she was also slim, blond, young and very pretty, all of which were important attributes in creating the right image for his new business according to Ted. Gwenda had eventually agreed to Annabelle's continued employment, but only at the price of a cook and a housekeeper for the mansion in Barnet, as well as her own uniformed chauffeur - an extremely handsome young Italian - to run her about. After all, Ted could not expect her to catch a bus to go to Harrods.

  With so much time on her hands, Gwenda had become a voracious consumer of the type of glossy magazines which contained society pages. They opened up a whole new world to her - a world she was determined her daughter would enter, beginning with the right school.

  'Contacts are what life is all about,' she declared. 'It's not what you know but who you know and only the right school will give you an entrée into the right circles. We may not have been born with class and breeding like some, but money can buy anything that's worth having.'

  However, while Ted was usually happy to indulge Gwenda’s little extravagances, when he saw the fees for the well-known girls' public school she selected for Vanessa he put his foot down. He even proved deaf to her pleas that the school numbered royalty among its pupils. Going to a secondary modern hadn’t held him back and anyway, it was different for girls. If all Gwenda wanted was a rich husband for Vanessa, surely money spent on pretty dresses would be a much better investment?

  St Aloysius had been the eventual compromise, and while it was not quite in the top rung of private girls' schools, that had not deterred Gwenda from indulging in a frenzy of preparation. So exhausted had she become, that when Vanessa casually showed her an article about the opening of a smart new health farm in a former stately home, and suggested to her that perhaps she needed a rest, Gwenda had tearfully picked up the phone and booked herself into a deluxe suite.

  'Are you sure you'll be ok without me?’ Gwenda asked as she replaced the receiver. She waved at the pastel pink and pale green short frothy dress with matching stilettos she had agonised over buying. 'My outfit cost a pretty penny and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste so perhaps I should come along. I’ve also had some rather smart calling cards made. They've got embossed writing and gold edges. I thought I could give them to some of the other mothers…'

  Vanessa eyed the dress then went and sat down beside her mother on the white, king-sized, Louis XV-style bed that occupied most of the floor space in her parent’s bedroom. She gave her mother a little hug. 'Go to the health farm. I can look after myself.'

  Her mother looked at her, her eyes suddenly bright and hard. 'That's the one thing a girl should always be able to do, look after herself. My old ma said much the same thing to me - always know the score and never let anyone get the better of you, do you hear me? '

  Vanessa nodded although she needed no bidding. There had never been a time in her eleven-year-old existence that she not known the score as her mother put it.

  Now, as the nun in charge of the dormitory began to call out names and allocate cubicles to the assembled new girls, she bent down and whispered in Alicia’s ear: 'Don't worry, I'll make sure you’re next to me. Just do as I say.'

  And for nearly twenty-five years, Alicia had been largely content to do just that. After all, Vanessa was her dearest and oldest friend.

  'Sex was always the problem with Jeremy,' Vanessa said, waving the empty wine bottle at a passing waiter who promptly brought a fresh bottle. Alicia put her hand over her glass as the waiter attempted to refill it but Vanessa held hers up impatiently.

  'He felt it was his duty to perform once a week, in bed and with the lights out. If I blinked my eyes it was all over. God, he was so predictable.' Vanessa drained her glass. 'When I dared to suggest that there were other ways to do it other than with him on top, he couldn't get it up for weeks.' She threw back her head and shrieked with laughter.

  Alicia shifted uneasily in her chair, aware that Vanessa had regained her audience at the surrounding tables. She decided to try to steer the conversation away from Jeremy.

  'How's your job going these days? It always sounds so glamorous.'

  'Working in television isn't all a bed of roses you know, although everybody thinks it is,' said Vanessa. 'Sometimes I long for the quiet life like you. No pressures, no rat race, no endlessly trying to prove yourself better than the next man.'

  'Oh, but university life has its own pressures,' Alicia said eagerly. 'There's always a lot of competition for any available post, particularly with all the cutbacks. Only the other day …'

  'But of course my life does have its compensations,' Vanessa continued, as though Alicia hadn't spoken. 'The money, the people, the way the adrenalin races when you are about to go on air.'

  'But what exactly is it that you do?' asked Alicia. 'I always keep a look out for your name at the end of programmes, but I must be watching the wrong ones.'

  'I'm strictly a back-room boy at the moment, but there are big things in the pipeline,' Vanessa said airily. 'PP and I, that's Philip Pryce of Right Pryce Productions, one of the biggest noises in independent production, PP and I have got some really super ideas that will put us right up there among the major players.'

  'So you don't work for the BBC any more
? Oh dear, I've been telling everyone that you run one of the departments there, documentaries or something. I get so muddled. It all seems so awfully technical.'

  Alicia never seemed to be able to keep up with Vanessa's career. She was accustomed to university life where academic posts were so hard to get, people tended to hang on to them for life, but Vanessa seemed to change jobs every couple of months.

  'The BBC was nothing, merely a stepping stone.' Vanessa waved her hand dismissively, with all the authority that her three-month stint as a temporary secretary in the documentary department had given her.

  'The independent sector is where it's all happening these days, not that I'd expect you to know that, tucked away from the real world in your cosy little academic nest up there in the Styx. The BBC is a dinosaur and well on its way to extinction. I wouldn't be caught dead working for it anymore. I'm at the heart of the media revolution these days. We're talking satellite, cable, interactive programming, the demand is insatiable.'

  Vanessa leaned across the table, stabbing a long magenta-tipped index finger at Alicia to emphasise her point as she grew more excited. 'Its dog eat dog out there, no room for the faint-hearted.'

  She reached over and with the same finger, scooped some cream off the top of the cheesecake Alicia was eating. Vanessa had ordered fresh fruit to follow her grilled sole and green salad with no dressing, but she had insisted Alicia order from the dessert trolley. After all, Alicia never seemed bothered about the way she looked and it showed. She was beginning to look positively middle-aged thought Vanessa as she caught sight of her own reflection in a mirror opposite. She smiled. No one could possibly believe that she was thirty-six and nearly a year older than Alicia. She looked at least ten years younger.

  Alicia closed her eyes as she savoured a spoonful of cheesecake. It was really rather good. She swallowed and looked across at her friend. 'Gosh, your world seems such an awfully long way from my little concerns over finishing research papers and preparing tutorials, although Fergus says that I am much too conscientious and work far too hard.' A hint of colour came into her cheeks.