by Carrie Adams
I know how worried about me you were, and I don’t want you to worry any more. I’m actually crying now, which I haven’t done for days, but only because I’m so grateful to have had you as a friend, and so happy to put this behind me. Please just imagine the scene: I am surrounded by immaculately dressed, conscientious Japanese businessmen (are there any other kind?) who are all typing away furiously in the business center and I have wandered in from the pool in the floaty kaftan you gave me, to send you this email. The air-con is ferocious so not only am I sobbing, my nipples are picking up satellite signals. Yes, people are now starting to leave…I ought to go before they call security. Oh dear, I’ve made a wet bikini mark on the seat.
Luckily Al is a bit of a golden boy at the moment and the hotel group has asked him whether he’d like to do a tour of all their possible sites in the Far East. One is a proposed tree-top hotel in the jungle in Vietnam. You can only get there by elephant!!! We might stay a while, maybe even find China Beach again. It is v exciting but it does mean we won’t be back as soon as we’d thought. Apart from missing you guys, I think that is no bad thing.
I love you and miss you, and if you fancy meeting me in Vietnam for old times’ sake, get on a plane. I’ll keep you posted of the dates. In the meantime, take care of you, find a job before you start going mad and lose confidence (trust me, I know, it doesn’t take long) and stay away from trouble. And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Love to all. Claud xx
PS We had sex for fun the other night for the first time in years and it was great!!!
OK, so it wasn’t all bad. If Claudia could put those years of peeing on sticks behind her before summoning her husband to the marital bed, then wasn’t anything possible? No more IVF. I knew Al would be pleased about her decision and I’m sure Claudia would continue to be as brave as she had been since this wretched business began. When people asked her, as they often did, when was she going to have kids, could she now look those people in the eye and say, “We can’t have children,” rather than her tried and tested, knee them in the bollocks answer, “We’re trying, but we haven’t been blessed yet.” Less thoughtful people would say, “Sounds fun,” or, “How long have you been trying?” More sensitive people would respond with a “Good luck,” or, “Poor you…” Actually, more sensitive people wouldn’t ask in the first place. Would she miss the whisper of hope that every procedure gave her? What would fill her daydreams if there was no imaginary child? Could she really give it up? I reread her email. Maybe, maybe not, but I had to hand it to her for trying.
James called later in the afternoon to say he’d booked a table at a restaurant, gave me the address and the time and then offered to pick me up. Since the restaurant was next to a bar I knew, I said I’d meet him at the bar. I’d been inspired by Claudia’s email and had developed a bit of a craving for a margarita myself. The exchange of this information took no more than a minute so I was pleasantly surprised when I finally ended the call and saw that I’d been on the phone for forty-five minutes. What on earth had we talked about for forty-five minutes? I already couldn’t recall. I wrote back to Claudia, answered some boring emails and discovered another headhunting company wanted to see me. After setting up the interview, I watered my plants, had a long shower and did my nails. I put my iPod onto its speakers, set it to shuffle and leapt around the room to Eminem and then sang loudly along with the three tenors to Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers while my nails dried. I felt light inside. Buoyant. It took a while for me to put a finger on it. Carefree. I felt carefree. Which was odd, considering the events of the past few days.
I was just about to sit down to the task of blow-drying my hair, when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Tess.”
Ben. I swallowed. Damn, bugger, balls, bollocks, hooray. “Hi,” I said.
“You answered your home phone.”
I’d been doing that recently. I must be better. Even though I changed my number, I had stopped answering the phone. I had changed my mobile too. I only ever gave people my email address now. If my old boss ever did contact me, I had to notify the police immediately, but that would already be too late; I never wanted him to cross my defense line again. Police or no police.
“You disappeared the other night. It wasn’t nearly so much fun after you left.”
I had seen Ben doing dirty dancing with his wife, so I knew that wasn’t true.
“Helen needed to be taken home.”
“Yeah, Fran said she’d drunk a skinful. I didn’t think she drank.”
“She doesn’t. That was the problem.” That and her shit of a coke-snorting husband. Normally I would have told Ben all about it, which was horribly indiscreet of me, but back then I thought we had no secrets. Turns out, all we have are secrets.
“I was just wondering whether you’d heard from Claudia.”
“Got an email today, actually.”
“Everything OK with them?”
“Better than. Claudia sounds great.”
“Thank God.”
“Why?”
“I just got a strange email from Al, that’s all.”
“What did it say?”
“‘All good here, how goes it with you?’”
“That was it?”
“Yes.”
And therein lies the difference between men and women. I get a fifty-line email from Claudia, Ben gets eight words from Al, effectively saying the same thing, but meaning so much less. I was glad I wasn’t a boy. Boys are weird.
“Well, Claudia put it a bit better than that, but yes, I think all is very good with them. She sounds like a different person, and that’s in an email.”
“Are they coming back?”
“Not yet. And they’re not going to do IVF again, either.”
“What a relief.”
Relief? I wondered. Relief in the sense of someone being very ill, for a very long time, and eventually dying. It wasn’t really a relief. It was a gut-wrenching tragedy. But sometimes no life is better than that life. And in Claudia’s case, no life was better than some life at any cost.
If only I was a fairy godmother, I thought in that moment, if only I could wave a magic wand and give Claudia her baby, ease Francesca’s guilt and worry, rescue Helen and give Billy back her strength. I could not magic my friends’ ills away, but what I could do was break my own spell.
“How are you, Tess? It feels like I haven’t seen you for ages.”
I wonder why. “I’ve been busy.”
“What about tonight? You up for a pint or two?”
“Actually I’ve…” Say it. Go on—say it. Why didn’t I want to say it? What was I afraid of? That it would put Ben off me? He was married! Wave that magic wand, Tessa. Now, before it was too late.
“I’m meeting up with that bunch of reprobates, you know, the journalists. They love you, please come.”
I wondered whether Ben sensed I was none too keen to be alone with him. I guessed he was just trying to get things back to normal. Trouble was, normal had been killing me.
“Actually, I’ve got a date.”
Silence.
“Ben?”
“Sorry, lost you for a second. A date? Great. Anyone I know?”
I felt really awkward, but forged ahead nonetheless. I wanted us to be the friends we were supposed to be.
“You met him the other night.”
“Not that old bloke?”
“He’s not old.”
“He’s got grey hair.”
“Salt-and-pepper. And it’s very sexy.” I found it easier to defend James than I’d thought.
“Him, sexy?”
“Well, you’re not the one who’s supposed to find him sexy.”
“He’s not your type, Tess.” This had to stop. Ben had to know I was serious.
“What is my type?” It was a gauntlet. I threw it down.
“Younger,” said Ben, sidestepping.
“Younger blokes think women of my age are scary.”<
br />
“You’re not scary.”
“No, I’m fabulous. But they can’t seem to see it.”
“That’s my girl.”
I’m not your girl, Ben. “It was your wife who gave him my number,” I said, throwing down another one. “Didn’t she mention it to you?”
“That’s not a very Sasha thing to do.”
“Perhaps she thinks he is my type.” Or at least someone other than her husband should be my type. I agreed with her. I needed to take a page out of Claudia’s book. It was time to move on. It was all very well lecturing Helen about coming out from under Neil’s shadow, Billy from Christoph’s, but it was high time I did that myself. “I like him. We’ve had lunch. I find him incredibly easy to talk to. And he likes me, I can tell.”
“Of course he likes you, Tessa. There aren’t many women like you.”
“Well, thank you. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“James Kent.”
“James Kent.” He said it again. “I’m sure I’ve met him before.”
“Yeah, the other night.”
“No, before then, maybe work…I’ll remember eventually.”
I didn’t want Ben to know James Kent. I think I wanted this one all for myself. “Look, I’ve got to go, you’re jeopardizing my date.”
“Me?”
“Yeah—my hair is frizzing up while we speak.”
“When is he allowed to know that he is in fact dating Chewbacca?”
“Ha, ha. Get off my line.”
“If it’s boring, call me, we’ll be in the Eagle.”
“Eight inebriated male journalists and you, no thanks.” Actually, that sounded like fun.
That was good. That was better. Claudia would have been proud of me. Was James Kent the reason I was feeling like this? I thought about it as I watched my reflection doing my hair. Instead of having a clothes crisis, I put on my good jeans, a Matthew Williamson top and my favorite, most beloved cowboy boots. They came in and out of fashion, but I didn’t care, and since men rarely noticed what went on below the empire line, I didn’t think causing myself pain by tottering around on heels was worth it. He’d already seen a large portion of the Tessa King spectrum. Drunk and disheveled at the nightclub. Scrubbed up to the nines at the launch. Untarnished by makeup and in old comfy clothes at lunch, and he’d still asked me out for dinner. So perhaps? Was it possible? Could it be? Was James Kent genuinely interested in me as a person? Wonders would never cease. Unless, unless…I dismissed the thought. He was a good guy, I could tell, but the thought came again: unless he was just going through the motions until he saw the last on the Tessa King spectrum. Naked. No. I would not be plagued by negative thoughts. I would not self-sabotage. I would not drag my previous bad experiences with me. New person. New experience. Just thinking about how he was with Cora encouraged me. I felt very good about this one. I checked over my reflection once more before leaving the flat. I may have been wrong about men before, but I was pretty confident that I wasn’t wrong about this one. Even so, I reiterated my autumnal resolution: James Kent would not see me naked. Not tonight, anyway. I really should have known myself better by then.
He was at the bar. Not at a table. At the bar. Had I told him I liked drinking at bars or was this just another happy coincidence? He stood up and pulled out a stool. We quickly fell into an easy banter which didn’t normally come until I was halfway down a second cocktail. We sat there for twenty minutes before I even ordered mine. A margarita, with salt, on the rocks. I raised a glass and asked James to toast my good friend Claudia. Bless him, he didn’t even raise an eyebrow. We didn’t talk about anything that mind-blowing, and nothing we said was really that funny, but I was fascinated by everything he said, he hung off my every word and we laughed a great deal.
Ben could not have been further from my mind as we walked the short distance to the restaurant, except that I was thinking about how far from my mind he was. I have no memory of what we ate except that it was delicious, there was masses of it and yet we still found space to share two puddings and drink aged Armagnac. That was probably when my resolutions started to slip. I heard myself say something about the waiters clearing up around us, one more drink and Blakes Hotel. Blakes Hotel! The only thing I knew about Blakes Hotel was that you didn’t go there for one drink. It wasn’t even that I was pissed and not thinking straight. I just didn’t want the evening to end because the end meant going home alone and I didn’t want this good feeling to pass. It had been a while.
Blakes is a very sophisticated small London hotel in South Kensington. The outside brickwork is black, the interior always dimly lit, and it has a small, hidden away bar in the basement which is so dark you can barely see the faces of the other clientele. Which is no bad thing, since there were a lot of uncles and nieces huddled over glasses of champagne. It oozed sexual tension and illicit intentions. It spoke to me. We ordered a couple of whisky sours and continued chatting. When we asked for another round the barman told us it was last orders. Mistaking us for guests, he said we could, however, order anything from our room. Our room. Our room. I rolled the words over in my mind. They sounded tempting. I looked at James, James looked at me. We both started to smirk, then giggle.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think that is a terrible idea.”
“Me too,” he agreed, smiling.
“Let’s do it.”
Man, he was good.
It was all very silly and I’m sure the night staff had seen it a million times before. Couple come up from the bar a little more ragged than when they’d gone down, approach the discreet, setback reception area, and enquire after a room. Naturally, there was only one room left, and it was a cripplingly expensive suite. Quite a good scam, really. As one of my aunts once said of such hotels, “For that sort of money I’d have to lie awake all night, staring at the ceiling with matchsticks in my eyes.” Well, I didn’t exactly stare at the ceiling, and I wasn’t always lying, but I was awake. I think I could safely say, in fiscal terms, I got my money’s worth. Or James did, since he was paying. But at that point, as he handed over a credit card, we were ostensibly getting a room in order just to have another drink. Right. We were shown down a narrow corridor, out into an immaculate, yew-strewn courtyard, over flagstones to a wide, white door.
If I hadn’t known before that I was going to end up naked, despite all my promises to myself, I knew then. It was the most beautiful bedroom I had ever seen. Fairy tales aren’t usually very sexy—the ones I read to Cora always lean towards the righteous—but this was a perfect mix of pure fantasy and impure thoughts. The Princess and the Pea meets 9½ Weeks, Alice in Wonderland meets Emmanuelle, all in snowy white. The bed was huge. The ceilings were high. Even the floorboards were white.
“The White Room,” said the porter.
“Champagne, I think,” said James. And that, I suppose, was that. It was a very sedate seduction. The champagne arrived, so we cracked it open, ran a bath, filled it with Anouska Hempel’s signature grapefruit bubble bath, and both got in. We refilled our glasses and the hot water a couple of times. It was really fun. But the real action was getting dry.
Usually having sex with someone for the first time is embarrassing. Unless, of course, the dreaded drink has stripped you of all inhibitions, in which case, the embarrassment is reserved for the morning. I wasn’t embarrassed with James. Since I’d already taken my clothes off and climbed into the bath before we’d even kissed, getting naked was no longer an issue. We first kissed sitting knees to knees in the bath. There wasn’t enough room for the kiss to lead to anything else, not even a big, fat, deep kiss. So until the water got cold for the last time, and my skin wrinkled, we just talked and let our lips touch from time to time. After that there was some lovely rolling about, quite a lot of lying and looking at each other, unending chat, and then more rolling about. Things didn’t get really serious until about five in the morning, by which point we were bo
th completely relaxed. Or exhausted; they feel about the same. It was definitely getting light when we finally fell into a deep and dreamy sleep.
17
played
I was woken up by a kiss. James was smiling over me, which was nice. But he was dressed, which wasn’t so nice. I propped myself up on one elbow.
“Morning, gorgeous,” he said.
I screwed up my face. Morning—yes. Gorgeous—I very much doubted it.
“I have to go, I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss.”
“OK.” I sat up. “I’ll get up.”
“No, don’t. Sleep. I would if I could. Order some breakfast when you wake up.”
That sounded nice. It seemed sacrilege to leave such a place before time was up.