All that was vengeful fantasy; more realistic was the justice Kate would mete out.
I’ll out her. Everybody would hear of Becca’s cruelty. The whole family. Charlie. Even Flo would know one day what a witch she had for a mother.
I’ll take back all my love. I’ll rescind the protectiveness. I’ll spit on the shared memories.
And then Kate would drive home and never speak to her cousin again.
A light that bright doesn’t just go out.
The setting was perfect, as if somebody had bottled Christmas and sprinkled it over the room.
Beyond the shuttered window, the empty street was sharply drawn in cold grey light. Even Soho’s naughty teeming thoroughfares are quiet on Christmas Day.
Within, the Grade II listed panelling and the leaping fire made the salon feel like a private sitting room, although the bar at the back of the long double room debunked that illusion. Dressed up, holding a sherry and feeling festive, Kate was glad of the locked front door. Today the club was not a public place. Today its comforts and delights were for invited guests only.
A tousled head bobbed up from behind the bar. ‘Where oh where is the sodding decanter?’ There was no heat in his bad language: Angus adored Christmas. Angus is Christmas! thought Kate, watching him drop things and exclaim and help himself to a sneaky sip. Tall, wide, with an extravagant belly, he could have been a shop-soiled Santa were it not for his hair.
The absurd halo of white blond hair (quite natural, despite its detractors’ claims) was impossible to domesticate. It exploded constantly, a nuclear fission on his head. As befits such a Dickensian character, Angus’s clothes were not recognisably modern. The tweed and velvet, flecked with ash and riddled with rips, could have been filched from a country house wardrobe at any stage during the past century.
‘Why,’ roared Angus, ‘won’t it snow?’ He was speaking to nobody and to everybody. Kate didn’t feel obliged to answer. Astor House was a success only partly because of the noble bones of the building. The real secret of its enduring popularity was Angus.
Like him, the club was louche but inoffensive. Grand but jolly. It welcomed all-comers, but booted out the rude and the snobbish. High jinks of all sorts were indulged; a member could be blacklisted for sexually harassing a woman but applauded if he started a food fight.
‘Door!’ bellowed Angus at the sound of the bell. ‘Get that, somebody!’
Kilian O’Brien was shown in by a mohawk-haired member of staff, one of three on duty and earning triple rate. An ebullient girl, she was unusually quiet.
Kate understood. Although Angus was no star-chaser – he routinely turned down boorish celebrities’ requests for membership – his hospitality attracted many well-known folk and Kilian’s star shone brighter than most. The daintily built actor unwound a long long scarf and surrendered to a bear hug from Angus.
‘You came!’
‘Of course,’ smiled Kilian. He was dark, neat, and pulsing with the charisma that is the natural atmosphere of idols. ‘Who in their right mind turns down an invitation to one of your infamous Christmas lunches?’
‘You’ve met my girlfriend, Kate?’
‘Yes.’ Kilian turned his green eyes to Kate. They were like jewels. He recalled they’d discussed China. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said in a dancing Irish accent, and kissed her, shyly, on the cheek.
It had surprised Kate the last time they met that Kilian was so low-key, so diffident. Her heart had been fluttering so hard she’d wondered if he’d heard it. Daft, but I expect actors to be like the parts they play.
They talked about Kilian’s chickens as Angus poured more sherry. The man had never mentioned a significant other; Kate wondered if he was gay. As an actor specialising in romantic leads, coming out might be tricky.
Maybe that was the reason for his invitation. There was always a reason. Angus flattered people, begging them to come, saying it wouldn’t be the same without them, but the truth was he had divined they would be alone on the most convivial day of the year and he wanted to right that wrong.
As Kilian detailed his fowls’ various ailments, Kate sneaked a look at Angus, who was laying out tiddly widdly canapés on paper plates from her new range. Illogical to be staring at Angus when she had the sole attention of a heart throb. Angus had not been meant to happen. He was just the final internet assignation after the orgy, one she’d tried to cancel, but felt obliged to honour when her date sounded so disappointed.
The mohawk waitress ushered in Charlie. Not at all awed by this guest, she barked, ‘Charlie’s ’ere,’ and abandoned him.
‘Charles!’ Angus was upon him and Charlie quailed as if being greeted by an exuberant dog. Angus’s bulk diminished Charlie’s stature, even though the hours spent at the gym (another by-product of Charlie’s mourning for Lost Youth that amused Kate) had turned the lanky boy of yore into a well-built, broad shouldered man of substance. Angus was blunt about his own body: ‘No other word for this but fat!’ he would say, rubbing his tummy, but his rotundity was so obviously due to a surfeit of good food and great wine that he delighted in it. This delight was infectious; even if Angus had been skinny he would seem large, thanks to his voice and manner, his expansive gestures, the way he remembered and used everybody’s name. Early on Kate had noticed that children and dogs adored him; they are never wrong.
Charlie’s attempt to stay cool when confronted with Kilian was an early Christmas present for Kate, who accepted his tissue-wrapped package and kissed him on his cold cheek.
‘Contessa!’ shouted Angus.
‘Ah, Mum’s here,’ said Kate, breaking away from her clique to welcome her mother, who’d been wafted to the club in a chauffeur driven car, courtesy of Angus.
This gesture, plus her aristocratic nickname, was one of many reasons Mum was pro-Angus, to the point of lobbying Kate to make an honest man of him. Not close to his own family – Kate had never been introduced to a single relative in their three years together – he delighted in Kate’s Irish clan. ‘My friends are my family,’ he was wont to say. He collected people the way Jaffa collected fleas: effortlessly.
With the arrival of Aunty Marjorie and Uncle Hugh, overdressed and chattering like parakeets, Angus said, ‘Nearly all assembled!’
London café society would kill to be here, thought Kate. And there’s my aunty accepting a Baileys with an ‘Ooh I shouldn’t really!’ Kate sat beside her mother on a Chesterfield.
‘I don’t like what you’ve done to your hair, Kate.’
‘I haven’t done anything to my hair, Mum.’
‘Well, you should.’
Kate’s hair, longer these days, was casually drawn up into a ponytail. When she let it down, it was just for her and Angus. She caught one of his staccato bursts of laughter from the bar. Angus could pin down the moment he fell for Kate: eight minutes into their first date.
‘When I knocked over your wine and it went all over your trousers.’ Angus liked to reminisce. ‘You just dabbed at the stain with your napkin and told me to go on with whatever bloody anecdote I was boring you with.’
He was not to know that Kate hadn’t cared about her patterned harem pants, that she’d cared about very little. Kate had been going through the motions, not just of the date but of her life. She washed her hair, prepared her food, did thirty lengths of the local pool every morning like an automaton. Everything had had to form an orderly queue because at the forefront of her mind was Charlie’s letter.
How often she’d wished she could forget the callous wording of the other note, not knowing that the sincere yearning in the original letter would hurt her even more.
Charlie clinked glasses with her. ‘Bottoms up,’ he laughed.
The doorbell rang again, and delivered a bespectacled woman to the gathering.
‘Is that . . .’ Charlie asked.
‘It is.’ Kate nodded. ‘Rosie Smith.’
‘Where have her . . .’
‘Boobs gone?’ Kate wondered how many more of Charli
e’s sentences she would have to finish for him. Rosie had that effect on the opposite sex. ‘She’s taken out her implants and started wearing glasses because she is now a serious actress.’ Kate tapped him on the nose. ‘Put your tongue back in. Unbridled lust is not a good look on you.’
Disapproval emanated from Mum and Aunty Marjorie, who looked on, lips as tight as a hen’s bottom, as Angus fell upon Rosie, showering her with the compliments she needed and introducing her to her fellow revellers. They had all seen the topless photo shoots; the bluestocking makeover didn’t fool anybody, especially as the woman persisted with clingy dresses and tottering heels. Kate noticed how Charlie, the very model of a modern liberal chap who decried women dressing to please men, cleared his throat and passed a hand through his hair. Angus was immune. Women like Rosie – who Kate secretly thought of as poor old Rosie – were the reason he’d turned to internet dating.
His blurred profile pic had given little away. Not that Angus could ever lead with his looks. Emailing Kate out of the blue, he wrote that he’d noticed from her photograph that she had freckles on her nose: ‘And in my long experience you can rely on nose-freckled folk.’
On meeting him, Kate had recognised him. Back in his decadent advertising days, Charlie had been a member of Astor House; Kate had met him there for drinks and seen Angus roaming the rooms. Since then, she’d seen him in the gossip columns, always raffish and rowdy looking, with tossed hair and messy clothes.
Towards the end of their obligation date, strolling along the South Bank primly apart (Kate now appreciated how hard that had been for the tactile Angus), Kate had asked why such a famed bon viveur, surrounded by celebrated sexpots, was on a dating site.
Aware she would never see him again, it was an idle question, a prelude to a farewell as Kate geared up to return to the Kate-shaped niche she’d carved.
Thinking before he spoke, Angus hadn’t responded in kind to the throwaway enquiry. ‘Because,’ he said, pausing by the hulk of the National Theatre, ‘people run through my fingers like sand. I’m in my world, but not of it. Sex is currency. The shallowness dismays me. Women I’ve dated have berated me for not introducing them to movie stars.’ He had, he told her, acquired x-ray vision. ‘I see who’s on the make. I see who’s floundering. It’s easy to lose your footing in Soho. I know who’s desperately hanging around until the cocaine comes out, and who should be tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa instead of dancing on the tables. You,’ he’d said, turning to her, ‘interest me.’ He smiled. ‘You really have the most lovely face, Kate Minelli.’
Unaccustomed to compliments – Charlie’s were too antique to carry any weight, Julian had been miserly with them and Warren’s were ones she’d rather forget – it had taken a while for Kate to realise that Angus meant every word. She came to recognise the difference between the air kissing, the ‘Darling you look gorgeous!’ to the hoi polloi at Astor House, and the whispered ‘You have such soul’ he dropped in her ear at unexpected moments.
When Angus hailed a taxi for her that first night, he hadn’t lunged. He’d taken her hand and said, ‘I’ll hold you in my heart until I see you again.’ The feeling of well being, of being thought about, that flooded through careworn Kate was one she hadn’t experienced since the death of her father. A layer of grief had simply peeled off and flown away, flapping in the air over the South Bank. Without realising it, Kate had settled into a bizarrely premature old age; wincing when she knocked into things and treading carefully as if she might slip. Angus’s attentions had coaxed her back to her thirties.
‘I’ll get it.’ When the doorbell cut once more through the festive babble, Kate escaped Rosie’s me-me-me small talk (Charlie was helpless in the woman’s tractor beam) and went to the front door.
‘Happy Christmas!’ said Becca, on the doorstep.
A different doorstep, three years earlier. Kate banged and knocked and rang in the darkness.
A tremulous ‘Who is it?’
Kate answered with a vigorous ‘Me!’
There was no need to name herself. The power of history, blood and love opened the door in a trice, even though enough dark energy coursed through Kate for her to kick it down. Fists balled, expletives gathering on her lips, she quivered as bolts were drawn.
The door opened, and there was sleep soiled, bedraggled Becca, her greatest friend, her almost-sister, her most barbarous adversary.
All Kate’s ire disappeared. She held out the letter. ‘Why?’ She hadn’t meant to sound so weak; she’d meant to be a fury.
Becca’s face folded in on itself. No fight in her either; she recognised the piece of paper.
‘How could you?’ Kate was high pitched. ‘How could you do this to us?’ She had meant to say ‘to me’.
‘I’ve been waiting for this to happen,’ said Becca.
Inside the house, they sat in the pool of light thrown by the low-hanging shade above the circular kitchen table. Kate eschewed the soft chairs; she wanted hard seats and hard facts. They came out slowly, in a non-linear fashion.
‘It’s almost a relief,’ said Becca.
Jaffa snored at Kate’s feet. The kettle, the fridge, the cherry-patterned blind were all the same. She was changed, however. She no longer felt at home here.
Before they got to the ‘how’ Becca had a lot to say about the ‘why’.
‘I’ve always been jealous of you.’ Planted when they were both children, Becca’s resentments had been watered until they grew vigorous. And dangerous.
It was all news to Kate.
‘You and your dad got on so well. When I went round your house it was alive and warm, with the fire going, and your books all over the rug.’ Her own parents, said Becca, were ‘joiners’, always out and about, playing golf, sailing their boat, dragging her to grown-up parties where she’d get overtired and vomit down her new dress.
Sensing Becca was working herself up, Kate got in early with her rebuttals. ‘Hang on a minute. We had a fire because our house was unmodernised and freezing cold.’ She remembered her mother comparing their house to her sister’s ‘palace’. ‘We’d have killed for a boat!’ From Kate’s point of view, Becca’s childhood had been glamorous.
‘But,’ said Becca, ‘did you ever envy me?’
‘Never. But that’s about my temperament, not whether or not your life was enviable.’
‘I was spoiled,’ said Becca, pulling her dressing gown tighter, ‘but I was ignored.’ She was more familiar with the back pages of her father’s newspapers than with his face. ‘And, Christ, the pressure from Mum. She’s always expected so much from me. You’re lucky. You could withstand your mum.’
‘Lucky?’ Kate drummed her fingers on the pine. ‘Everybody’s lucky in your version of events. Except, crucially, you.’
‘Exactly!’ Becca, never expert at spotting irony, seemed glad of the empathy. ‘You had your dad. He was always there, always ready with a cuddle if your mum was on the warpath.’ Becca had nobody. ‘My mum and dad threw all your exam results in my face. I grew up knowing they thought I was stupid. I couldn’t be successful on my own terms. I had to nab a husband, and a house, and have babies.’ All liberally sprinkled with sanitising money. ‘Otherwise I’d be a failure.’
‘So far, so self-pitying.’
‘Then I bagged Julian. Mum was pleased at last. He wasn’t like the other boys. I was dazzled.’ Her initial I-can’t-believe-my-luck reaction never had the chance to settle down into anything approaching love. ‘I guessed early on that he had a soft spot for you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Kate sat back. ‘I would’ve noticed.’
‘Why would a man that sophisticated and worldly be interested in me?’
Kate had never heard Becca disparage herself. ‘Because . . . because of a million reasons. All the guys were after you.’ She remembered it well; wallflowers have long memories. ‘You were catnip.’
‘I was candy floss. You were clever and funny and had all these opinions on things I hadn’t even hear
d of. Looks fade, Kate. Brains don’t.’
Becca wiped at her wet cheeks with a savage hand. Kate didn’t leap up and hold her, coo it all better as she’d always done in the past. Their friendship had finally come of age, fifteen minutes – or thereabouts, Kate wasn’t certain when she would stand up and leave – before it ended. Becca said, ‘We were given our roles. Pretty One. Clever One. We swallowed it whole without question.’
Their family were neither psychologists nor evil geniuses. None of the parents could have foreseen what would happen. Carefully, the girls had taken pains never to overlap. The Pretty One could never be interested in topics other than herself; the Clever One believed herself unattractive.
It struck Kate forcefully that she loathed confronting her appearance in the slab of mirror at the hairdresser’s, or happening upon her reflection in a shop window. She looked down at her hands, at the unvarnished nails kept short; even though she’d dressed up for the country house party she hadn’t contemplated painting them a showy red. The Clever One, Kate had no confidence in her own femininity.
The roles assigned to Kate and Becca in childhood had fused to their skin.
Becca said, ‘It wasn’t fair that Julian liked you. You already had the perfect boyfriend.’
‘Hardly! You thought Charlie was a chump.’
‘I mean he was perfect for you.’
‘Do you want me to apologise for being in love?’ Kate leaned forward. ‘I’m not the one in the wrong, Becca.’
‘Sorry. I just . . . I need you to understand.’ Becca dried her eyes, shook her head like a pony refusing its bridle, as if to discourage any more tears. ‘It’s important.’
Kate could see that it was too important. The hot-house nature of their kinship had blurred boundaries.
‘When Julian dumped me, I was all over the place.’ Becca blew out her cheeks. ‘But, to be honest, I knew I’d get over it.’ Becca grimaced. ‘Just being me wasn’t enough for a man like Julian, that was clear.’
When Becca heard that Kate and Charlie had suddenly split, although she felt terrible for her, self-interest had bobbed to the surface, like a cork. ‘It was comforting having you to suffer with.’
These Days of Ours Page 18