“No, that’s what I mean, Lola. Will you give me a chance—”
I made it inside and took a glass of champagne off a tray. “I suppose you gave her a key so she could pick her stuff up, but still she should have given you a time. You could have her for breaking and entering,” I half joked, the image of Leggy Blonde cuffed and being led away by a stern police constable was rather soothing. I took a sip of my drink and smiled at the thought.
“No, I gave her the key so she could move in.”
I pressed the end button, took a deep breath and threw myself into the launch, the epitome of CCC.
Nicola, the jeweler of the moment (all A-list celebs were buying her exquisite wraps of platinum mesh with diamonds), wrapped me in a warm hug. I hugged her back, seamlessly whisking a caviar canapé off the tray sashaying past. I really don’t know how I survived the evening. My head was swimming with a mixture of questions I needed answers to and answers I wished I didn’t have. But I wasn’t going to get them here and so I threw myself into what I do best, controlling a situation.
After the launch I went on to the private members’ club Soho House with Nicola, where her achingly gorgeous friends were gathered for a celebration, and acted as if I was the happiest girl in the world. She showed me her engagement ring—which she’d crafted herself for fun. “No man, just a myth, but fun, don’t you think?”
“Adorable,” I gushed, remembering my own engagement ring. Richard had bought the diamond in Antwerp from the bourse—more of an investment, he’d told me at the time. He’d set it simply, to show off the stone, he explained. It was nice for a fuck-off huge diamond, but I always felt self-conscious wearing it because, well, it wasn’t really me. I felt a bit like a dog dragging its lead.
It was the man I loved, not the ring—but maybe the man I loved, like Nicola’s ring, was a myth. Perhaps I loved a man who didn’t exist, not in the way I wanted him to exist, at least.
I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, reapplied my lip gloss and wished I took cocaine like everyone else so that I could do a line and obliterate the pain, or at least the humiliation.
Our table grew increasingly crowded as others joined us. It was the A-list table at Soho House that night and I needed to be on form. I drew on every resource I had acquired as London’s foremost party organizer. These people were my clients as well as my friends, not friends like Clemmie and Elizabeth, maybe, but people I liked, people I wanted to work with, so I laughed, I breezed, and even when Clemmie and Elizabeth joined me, I wore my pain like lip gloss and acted as if I was on top of the world.
At times like this most girls call their mum, but I knew only too well that Kitty would only feed my delusions. The next time I went to the loo, Elizabeth followed me.
“He’s screwed you over again, hasn’t he?” she said as we were washing our hands.
I smiled at her reflection in the mirror. “You read too much into things, I’m fine, just tired.”
“Huh, so you’re gushing like a lunatic because…?”
“I’m so not gushing.”
“You’re gushing like a burst pipe, Lola. Look, darling,” she said ever so gently, “I’m your friend. I know this about Richard. You went after him the other night, didn’t you?”
My silence said it all.
“Darling, if he’s hurt you, I want to kill him.”
These were the words that broke me and made me fall into her arms for a much-needed hug. “And then after I’ve killed him I’m going to come round to your place and wipe every trace of him from your phone, your laptop, your phone book, your mobile. And then I’m going to get you trollied and make you poke every eye out in every photograph you still have intact. Then we’ll burn them and hock your engagement ring and spend the proceeds on a we-so-hate-Richard party.”
So in the loo of Soho House, the floodgates of reality finally opened and I told her everything that had happened between Richard and me since I’d seen him at Posh House, and how I still couldn’t throw off my feelings for him. Elizabeth said I had a family emergency, so I didn’t have to go back to the table in the emotionally incontinent state I was in. Elizabeth didn’t kill Richard that night but she did follow through on her other promises. By the time I took Jean for her romp around the square at dawn, all traces of Richard had been obliterated from my flat.
Maybe that was long overdue, I’d decided stoically as we’d torn the photographs into tiny mosaic tiles. We couldn’t burn them, though, because my flat had no chimney and it was so small we might have burnt the building down. “We can turn them into pulp, though!” Elizabeth had pointed out, so we filled the sink with the tiles of my past with Richard and ran hot water over them.
Perhaps the reason the break with Richard had never seemed real was that we’d never really had the massive Big Breakup arguments and screaming matches. We’d just had “a break” that had drifted into dating other people and finally divorce. We’d gone for a no-claim divorce—by that point there was nothing left to claim, so we hadn’t even had a day in court.
I remembered feeling sad on the day my decree nisi came through. By the time the decree absolute arrived, I was involved with my biggest event to date. It arrived the day I appeared in Vogue for the first time, and the legal document with its fancy legal wording didn’t seem nearly as significant as the glamorous photograph of Charlie, Jean and me. Elizabeth helped me dig up the divorce paper and I fell asleep reading it.
But now the line had finally been drawn and I drifted off to sleep feeling cleansed. It didn’t last.
The next afternoon I woke up with a determination to finish the job off. Really finish the job off. By job I meant Richard, by finish off I mean I wanted closure. I wanted to feel that I was over Richard, like it was a decision I was taking, not being forced to take because of him. Like Elizabeth, I suddenly had an overwhelming need to murder him.
I put an ice pack on my eyes to diminish the traces of all my tears of the night before, then I dressed carefully. Dressed to kill, vintage killer Manolo Blahniks, killer skin tight jeans and a Dolce & Gabbana top that screamed cleavage.
“I’m sorry, Jean,” I told her as I tucked her into my bag. “I’m going to murder Richard, but I don’t want you to get involved, all right, Miss Harlot?” She looked at me in her concerned little way. I hardly ever used her surname, so she must have known something pretty serious was wrong. “It’s always the rabbits that suffer,” I told her as I patted her bag.
I climbed into a taxi, my body drenched in tuberose, and gave the driver the address of Richard’s offices in Hammer-smith.
“Off out somewhere special then, are you?” the cabdriver asked sociably.
“Very,” I told him. “I’m off to kill my ex-husband.”
“Right you are, luv,” he replied nervously, slamming the partitioning screen closed.
Richard’s offices were housed in a crap seventies building near the tube station, but as I climbed out of my taxi I decided that Richard, being the vain bastard he was, probably called the area Chiswick.
I took a deep breath and rehearsed my lines in my head again. I might have had a close shave with madness and delusion, but I was revived by a large dose of reality by the time the lift doors opened. This man had humiliated me, had played with my emotions, had used me as a Sally Substitute and cast me off. And now I was going to tell him precisely what I thought of him.
It was an open-plan office with about forty employees. I took them all in with a sweeping glance. None of the drones in their little cubicles noticed me as they spoke into telephones, peered at computer screens or tapped away at keyboards.
Richard was on the far left-hand side, one leg casually resting on a chair, chatting to one of his partners. He looked carefree, careless—he didn’t look as if he’d witnessed a grenade going off in my life—nor did he look like the guy who’d pulled the pin and thrown it. I strode down the short distance from the lift to the receptionist, who pulled her hand out of a packet of M&M’s and physically
shrank into her chair at my approach. Looking at her anonymous clothes and home-streaked hair, I doubted that she’d ever dealt with someone dressed like me.
“Tell Mr. Arbiter Bisque that his ex-wife is here to see him,” I instructed her in my most authoritative tone.
She scuttled off nervously and I stood there flicking through a back copy of some nerdy computer magazine. I could feel Jean fidgeting in the bag, so I gave her a comforting pat.
“Lola?”
He was only inches away as I spun around on my blade-sharp stilettos to face him.
“Mr. Arbiter Bisque.”
He looked stunned by my tone and words. I’ve never been a vicious person. We’d argued, but I’d always been tearful when I said hurtful things. More than stunned, though, I saw something else in his expression, a mixture of fear and impending embarrassment. He must have been very aware of all his colleagues, who were now all rubbernecking for a better look.
“Are you okay, Lolly, would you like to go out somewhere for a chat?” he suggested in a quiet tone, taking my elbow and leading me toward the lifts as if I was a shoplifter, or a hooker, someone to be ashamed of.
Looking back, I think it was his casual use of my nickname, the name only the people who loved me ever used—that made me lash out. All the things I wanted to say, all the things I needed to say to free myself from the feelings I now knew were as pointless as the care I’d put into my choice of outfit. It was pointless to say those things, too.
So I slapped his face, so hard I thought my hand was broken, turned away and pressed the button for the elevator—which thankfully was still there from my arrival—watched the doors close, nursed my hand and that was that.
It was finally over, I told myself.
I was finally free. There could be no more going back.
I finally had that magical closing-door moment that had eluded me for so long….
nine
“My darling Hen, I hardly know what to say. I cannot begin to fathom the agony of your love for Edward. I thank God that my own marriage is characterized by love and respect for one another, for I have still to find a flaw in dear Bertie. For this reason, I cannot advise you, only assure you that I love you as much as any woman ever loved a sister. Your rapture is your torture and I wonder at your ability to carry yourself in society with the charm and vivacity for which you are so loved and admired. Indeed, you wear your pain like a jewel that becomes you well. Perhaps too well…”
Extract from a letter from Elizabeth to her sister, Lady Henrietta Posche
I rang Elizabeth on my way to work and told her in the briefest terms about my assault on Richard. I made it sound like a boast, the triumph of reason over passion, but the truth was, I was shaken by my bunny-boilerish behavior, which I think Elizabeth picked up on because she didn’t try to drag the details out of me the way she normally would.
“That’s settled, then, we’re all going to the Met afterward to celebrate. See you there around eleven. There’s that new DJ on tonight I want to check out. He might be someone you can use, too, there’s a lot of heat on him at the moment.”
It was important to stay in the loop as far as what was hot and what was up-and-coming, because if you blinked you missed it. I was blinking back tears, though, as I passed Charlie talking to someone in reception. He turned and gave me one of his supergrins, which I returned, determined not to give myself away. I was cuddling Jean, and as he leaned over to stroke her ears, it struck me that Richard hadn’t so much as asked about poor little Jean when we’d gone out on the Friday to Top of the Pops.
I hid myself in my cupboard-cum-office to do my last checks for the evening’s event—a book launch, Secret Passage to the Past: A Biography of Lady Henrietta Posche by Michael Carpendum. Michael, a member of Posh House, was one of London’s notable personalities, a self-declared dandy; the consummate gentleman. He dressed and behaved with the manners of another age, when men were pretty and women were handsome. He kissed hands, he bowed, he was charm personified. He embodied all the magnificent history of the club, but more importantly he was the sort of patron I could safely count on to give no trouble about guests, champagne, or anything else for that matter. He was just the tonic to take my mind off my afternoon’s violence.
I had actually slapped Richard! I still couldn’t believe it myself. I still imagined I could feel his cheek on my hand. And that made it worse. No matter how many times I slapped that cheek, I wanted to stroke it. I felt worse, shaken, ashamed—almost everything apart from “better.”
“So how is my most gorgeous employee doing today?” Charlie inquired, poking his head around the door as I flicked through the incident reports for the week.
I smiled up at him. “She’s perfect.”
“As ever,” he riposted. “So, all ready for tonight? One hundred and fifty, isn’t it?” he asked, referring to the number of guests.
“All is in order, and I even managed to squeeze in a trip to Hammersmith.”
Charlie looked nonplussed.
“That’s where Richard’s office is,” I explained. “I slapped him across the face!” I continued matter-of-factly as I ran my eyes down the guest list.
“Well, there it is, then,” he remarked with equal insouciance, but I could see he was curious because he hung around the door, obviously keen for more info.
“Did he say anything to provoke this slap?” he inquired eventually.
“No, we didn’t have a conversation. I felt we’d had all the verbal exchanges we needed. Time for a short sharp slap of reality,” I explained as I drew a line through a guest we’d banned following a nasty public accusation of theft against another member the month before. Her handbag was later found intact in the cloakroom where she had checked it in. “I simply woke up, realized it was something long overdue on my to do list, so I dropped in at his office and walloped him.”
“I say. Well…congratulations and all that…I guess.”
I looked up at my boss’s befuddled face and smiled. It was hard not to smile when you looked at Charlie. He just had that sort of face, not because he was good-looking, although he was, but it was more to do with the warmth he radiated. He was genuinely kind and thoughtful without being a saint—which would have been intimidating.
“And you, darling one, how’s your love life?” I asked him, suddenly feeling a lot better about everything.
“See, now you’re getting me confused with someone else. My love denies me life!” he announced with a mock-dandy drama that was pure Michael Carpendum.
“And what cruel wench is this? Is her heart made of stone?” I gasped breathlessly, carrying on the parody.
“Yes, well, that’s what I ask myself sometimes,” he sighed, now kneeling at my feet, staring into my eyes and clasping my hand. “Sometimes I think she hardly knows I exist!”
“She can’t possibly be worthy of you, sir,” I told him. “I advise you to sever this inequitable relationship at once!”
“Good God, no! She might wallop me.” And with that the phone rang and Charlie left.
“You just slapped dickhead across the face!” Josie squealed with childish delight.
“I decided it was time,” I replied, as if we’d discussed it all at length beforehand.
“Anyway, long overdue. We’re all meeting up at the Met later.”
“I know. Elizabeth told me.”
“I’m bringing Emmanuel,” she added. “If that’s okay?”
“Fabulous. He needs a night out.”
“That’s what he told me. He’s looking forward to everyone being on good form.”
“Is that a warning?”
“More of a threat,” she teased. “But seriously, Lola…”
“What?”
“Congratulations.”
“Erm, thanks. I think.”
Clemmie called next. “How do you spell intelligent?”
“Intelligent?”
“Yes, it means really bright, full of smart beans, etc.”
�
�I know what it means.”
“Can you spell it?”
“I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-E-N-T.”
“Thanks, I’m just composing a lovely e-mail to you telling you how brilliant you are for slugging old coke chops.”
And so my evening continued. My friends, and friends of friends, and people I barely knew calling—falling over themselves to congratulate me for assaulting my ex-husband in his place of work.
By the time I went upstairs to check how the room was looking for the launch, I’d started to feel a bit bad. All the anger that had drained away when my hand met Richard’s cheek was now replaced by a sense that I was somewhat of a fraud.
Yes, I was angry—okay, furious even—and for a moment expressing that anger had felt empowering and liberating, but while Elizabeth and the others had helped me to destroy all vestiges of Richard left in my flat, they couldn’t delete or burn the memory of last Friday night when we had made love. It hadn’t just been about sex, not totally. I’ve had plenty of disposable sex since our divorce and that night was like a homecoming, sex without the niggling doubt, sex with the certainty of orgasm from the get-go.
We knew our way around one another’s bodies without a compass. We knew the taste, touch and feel of each other, and while there were no big surprises there was plenty of satisfaction.
Much, much, much more satisfaction than could be wiped away with a slap across a cheek.
But I couldn’t think about that now, I had the launch to oversee. The author was darting about in full late-eighteenth-century evening dress, spreading his trademark charm amongst his A-list guests. If only all hosts could manage to greet each guest with his Beau Brummel–like panache. Every one was feeling special and loved up. The books were lined against the wall, the champagne flowed, the canapés were being appreciatively devoured, while a piano, played by one of the members, twinkled Chopin elegantly in keeping with the evening.
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