Georgie preened. I can take it, she told herself. Whatever Donna can dream up, I’m way ahead of her.
4. April 15
Too early the next morning, Felix stood at the end of their bed and announced: ‘The liver is a forgiving organ, but after the age of twenty-five it becomes increasingly less efficient at processing sugars. Alcohol is a sugar. And a toxin, of course. It is a medical fact that women’s livers are less efficient in coping with alcohol than those of men. Early liver damage is indicated by arterial discase, premature dementia, mature-onset diabetes and in extreme cases multi-organ failure leading to death. There really isn’t anything you can do to prevent liver damage except not overload the organ by binge drinking.’
‘We were not binge drinking. We were having a night out.’ Georgie sat up. Bad move. Bad.
‘In a country with a public health service, taking care of your health is just good citizenship. I mean, why should people who’ve always lived right have to pay for the treatment of people who abuse their bodies?’
Georgie put her feet on the floor and looked for something to grab. The table was fashionable and had no real legs. The bed was fashionable and had nothing except a mattress on a platform. Felix was standing too far away. She made a supreme physical effort and stood up without help. The Seven Dwarfs were mining diamonds in the region where her neck joined her head.
‘I need coffee,’ she said, managing to place one foot in the direction of the door.
‘The best thing you can drink in your condition would be water. You need rehydration.’
‘Yes,’ Georgie agreed, getting the second foot in front of the first. ‘I will make the coffee with water.’
‘Look, you know that caffeine is a stimulant …’
He followed her out of the bedroom and downstairss to the kitchen. It was a sunny morning and the room was bright so she had to snap the venetian blind shut.
‘You should at least have some juice,’ Felix pleaded standing in the doorway.
‘I will have juice when I have had coffee,’ said Georgie, concentrating her entire mind on filling the coffee compartment of the espresso machine with medium-roast Colombian.
‘You’re just assaulting your liver with that. You should take some plain water, then juice, then a little protein, tofu or some cashew butter on sourdough or something.’
Georgie found the thought of tofu unwelcome. She asked him, ‘Do you want some of this?’
‘No, thank you. I can’t watch this. I’ve got work to do.’
Felix strode to his study and shut the door. The espresso machine started brewing. It was chromed and weighty, and sat farting sulkily on the worktop looking like an evil alien spacecraft. Music started behind the study door. Georgie rubbed her eyes. Eventually the black liquid ejaculated into the tiny cup. When it was done, Georgie disconnected the hot coffee holder, banged it on the side of the waste bin to eject the old grounds in a neat wad, refilled it and started the machine again.
Her espresso skills were impressive. Pulling an espresso reminded her of waitressing when she was a student. Georgie climbed on to a stool at the breakfast bar and started to ingest her coffee. Ten years of pulling coffees. Ten years of wearing shoes that made her feet ache. Ten years of some man standing in the doorway and watching her work. Now she was going to be married and everything would be different. Felix was only trying to be kind, he was concerned about her, that was all.
The espresso machine dribbled and spat and produced a second cup. Georgie identified a sense of dissatisfaction. She realised that she preferred Java to Colombian. In addition, she liked coffee in a big, abundant cafetière, not a mean tight-arsed espresso leaving black scum in its little cup. She also would have preferred anything to the Miles Davis which was trickling out under the closed door of Felix’s study. Chopin, actually, she’d really like some nice splurgy Chopin. Her cafetière and her Chopin were with friends in Chicago, because, as Felix had pointed out it was crazy to keep two sets of everything now that they were going to become one household for good. He was quite right, of course; they didn’t need two of everything.
Defiance was not Georgie’s way. She moved on from coffee to juice – cranberry, when what she really liked, what she had in fact missed in Chicago, was fresh English single-variety Bramley apple juice. She allowed herself the luxury of some negative thoughts.
To stop going mad, Georgie found she had to organise her mind like a computer screen. She didn’t really think she was going mad, it just felt that way. She always had so much to do. Down the side of the screen in her mind was a menu of things to be done. It was always there, even on a wiped-out Saturday morning. On this menu she noticed a resolution to confess to Felix her lust for Great Lats, the third junior from the end. Well, sod that, Georgie resolved. She would say nothing. That’d fix Felix.
‘If you loved me, you would bring me three paracetamol, two capsules of milk-thistle and a towel wrung out in that nice lavender water you’ve got for ironing your shirts.’ Flora said this to Des when he looked around her bedroom door in the early afternoon.
‘You’re awake,’ he observed.
‘Of course I’m awake. Are you going to fetch my stuff or stand there being stupid all day?’ Under the duvet, she lay as flat as a corpse.
‘She’s awake,’ he confirmed. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have some nice little slices of cucumber to put on your eyes? The lavender water costs nearly as much as my shirts.’
‘You don’t love me,’ she accused him.
‘I thought that was Dillon’s job now.’
‘It’s everybody’s job,’ said Flora. ‘You’re not going out, are you? I thought when I was feeling better you could massage my scalp.’
‘What else do I have to do with my life?’
‘Quite,’ Flora agreed.
‘Dillon’s called three times. And Donna called just now.’
‘Donna?’ Flora’s head left the horizontal plane. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘She said not to bother you. She said she was going out. She’s going to call later.’
‘Damn.’ Flora’s head fell back on the mattress.
‘She said she bet you couldn’t score some guy.’
‘You didn’t get it. Not any guy. Georgie’s fiancé.’
‘I told her she was crazy, she was bound to lose, you were invincible.’
Flora found this opinion a good reason to sit up. ‘She wasn’t serious.’
‘She sounded serious to me.’
‘Are you getting my drugs or just leaving me here to die?’
While she was alone, Flora remembered the evening. She remembered it clearly. She remembered Georgie getting pissed in half an hour. She remembered Georgie going all gooey. She remembered her describing that pervy confessional thing she had going with Felix. She remembered Donna making her entrance. God, that woman was amazing. She remembered the expression on Donna’s face when they told her Georgie was getting married too. She remembered Donna’s idea.
So, Donna was serious. In Flora’s mind, there was nothing more to be agreed. She remembered that both of them accepted her challenge. The next thing to do was check in with Georgie and get a line on this Felix. And maybe fix a bet on the outcome.
Des returned with the medicine and a glass of filtered water from the tap. She sent him back for a bottle of Welsh spring water.
‘Des,’ she said, pulling back her feet so he could sit on the end of the bed. ‘If you’re with a guy, you know, like in a relationship, like it’s love or something. And you fancied somebody else. Would you tell him?’
‘Oh yes. That’s the whole fun of being with someone. You get jealousy to play with.’
‘And if you had sex with somebody else? Would you tell him?’
‘Absolutely. If he was into that. What am I saying, even if he wasn’t into it.’
‘What do you mean, into it?’
‘Well, a bit of pain makes it more exciting, doesn’t it? You can do all the rowing and the screaming and t
he hitting each other and the waving broken bottles about and then the crying and sobbing and the making it up. I mean, it passes the time, all that. It’s great if you can be bothered.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What do you mean, you suppose so? You know so, you minx. You do it all the time, I’ve seen you. Go out to dinner with some poor schmuck and spend the whole evening drooling over another poor schmuck so you can go home with lover-boy and have a row and have loads of crazy sex to make it all up. You do that, Flora, don’t lie to me. I know what goes on, I sleep underneath you.’ Flora giggled and hugged her knees. The paracetamol was taking over, her head was throbbing quietly. She pulled aside one of the bedroom curtains to let in some light. Des sat cross-legged on the bed, lolling back a little to be comfortable with his belly-button rings. He had been cursed with clean-cut boyish looks, clear skin, rosy cheeks, and floppy dark brown hair. Monday to Friday, when he was a junior negotiator at the hottest estate agency in the east, the looks were a plus. But on Saturdays he felt challenged to appear degenerate.
‘What have you done to your hair?’
He caressed his head. ‘D’you like it?’
‘What is it? Spots or something?’
‘Leopard spots,’ he told her, putting on a snarl. The floppy locks were now one inch long and spattered with leopard spots in two shades of silver.
‘Nice,’ Flora agreed. ‘Easier than the spikes.’
‘No, they’re a drag, it took me hours to spray them on. But everyone’s doing spikes now. So, come on …’ He hugged his ankles in anticipation. ‘What am I to tell Donna? Are you pulling this poor pathetic bastard or not?’
‘I’m up for it,’ she told him. ‘But we’ll have to make a plan. When my head’s sorted I’ll call Georgie.’
‘So is it, like, reciprocal? Does she have to start prowling around Dillon?’
‘That’s the whole idea.’
‘Wicked,’ Des approved. ‘That should start a fire in the engine room.’
The Sir Rudolph Trippitt Retirement Home for Actors. This stone was laid by Miss Tallulah Bankhead on July 20, 1923. Georgie smiled while she waited for someone to answer the door. Whenever she came in this way with her father, he made an eloquent gesture at the foundation stone with his good arm and chuckled, ‘And the stone wasn’t all she laid, so the story goes.’ Then Georgie would wonder how often the home’s secretary heard those words as she struggled with the antiquated but highly polished brass latch on the door.
‘He’ll be simply ravished to see you,’ the secretary promised her.
The primary smell of the Sir Rudolph Trippitt home was of beeswax furniture polish mixed with the scented flowers and rotting stems of the purple stocks in the flower arrangement that sprawled over the hall table. Georgie could only just detect a tang of the antiseptic solution that was used to steam the carpets every week.
‘I’m here, Daddy. Wow, it’s bright in here.’ Her father’s room had fresh wallpaper since her last visit. As she kissed him, Georgie registered grandiose flowers which were apparently tumbling from the ceiling.
‘My darling! Do you like them? I made them put it on upside down. I thought it was time I was showered with carnations again. Linnet just despises them.’
‘They’re fantastic, Daddy,’ she assured him. Each bloom was the size of a baby’s head so she was speaking the truth. ‘How is Linnet?’
‘Apart from losing some of her joy in vulgarity, Linnet is the same, my darling. Just the same. She was here yesterday. She comes most Fridays.’ He blinked in delight. Georgie deduced that Linnet was still his lover. In many ways, the woman made Georgie feel that some one had walked on her grave. At the minimum age of fifty, she wore hoop ear-rings and ankle socks with ballet pumps, looking and sounding like a superannuated member of the cast of Grease.
‘That’s good.’ She sank into the visitor’s chair, a comfortable neo-Victorian velvet affair with fringes to its mahogany feet.
‘As good as it gets at my age,’ her father agreed, ‘let alone in my state. Probably better than I deserve. I know you don’t like her.’
‘She makes you happy,’ Georgie proposed.
‘She makes me come.’ He blinked again, several times.
‘I don’t wish to know that.’
‘I thought you were in Chicago, not Kansas, dear.’
‘Wherever I was, I’m happy for your private life to stay that way.’
‘But can’t I be proud of it, dear? Just a little bit?’
‘You can be proud without actually telling me.’
‘The prudery of the young.’
He smiled at her and blinked again. Any degree of pleasure sent his long eyelashes fluttering. His hair and eyebrows were pure white but the lashes were still dark and hinted at the feline handsomeness that had made his name. He claimed that the blinking mannerism was involuntary but since it had disappeared when he was working, Georgie assumed it was sheer affectation. Her father had worked only once since his accident. There were, he said, a surprising number of parts for old men in wheelchairs but the scripts were all crap.
‘God, it’s good to see you. Way-hay-hay!’ He shifted unsteadily on his inflatable cushion and dropped his half-glasses. Georgie picked them up for him. He was seventy-nine. She was his only child, born when his bachelor days were finally ended by her determined mother, who was thirty years his junior. Eight years later, her mother moved to California with an osteopath, whereupon Georgie’s father resumed his amiable orbit between lunch at the pub at the end of their road in Hampstead, afternoon trysts at the flats of lady friends and the Garrick club in the evening. Georgie learned to fry fishfingers for two and make Buck’s Fizz for Sunday breakfast. She became the real love of his life.
The year she left school, her father slipped on the stairs at the Garrick, under the portrait of Edmund Kean as Louis XI. Predictably, he broke his hip, then followed up with a stroke on the operating table while the bone was being pinned. Or so the surgeon had said. Sometimes Georgie wondered if the issue of trust was so big between her and Felix because of that surgeon. Her father now had only one leg, and the use of one arm. His mind was delightfully unimpaired.
While the Sir Rudolph Trippitt Retirement Home for Actors ate up their capital, Georgie had switched from Art History to an MBA, determined to be able to meet the fees when the money ran out. In that she had exceeded her goal.
‘Matron tidied up the chits for you,’ he said, indicating a folder of papers.
Georgie opened the folder and began checking the bills. The shower of carnations, she noticed, came at £85 a roll. ‘Daddy, I’m getting married,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the figures.
‘I knew you hadn’t come home just for me,’ he said sadly.
‘He’s a doctor. He’s called Felix.’
‘What sort of doctor?’
‘Research.’
‘No money then.’
‘No.’
‘But he makes you happy?’
‘Every morning.’
There was a pause and a sigh. ‘You know, I don’t wish to know that,’ said her father.
‘I was in Chicago, not Kansas,’ she quipped. There was a silence.
Georgie looked up and saw that his eyes were shut and a tear had appeared on one of his finely wrinkled cheeks.
‘You old crocodile,’ she said.
He laughed and opened his eyes again. ‘Still works! I can still do it and it still works!’
Donna called Flora at six, just as she had started to think about what to wear to the party she intended to go to later. The new trousers were essential, the top was the big decision. The choice was the net thing embroidered with beads or the crinkle silk shirt.
‘I think Georgie’s going to be a problem,’ Donna warned.
‘Hasn’t she changed? She’s got so dreary. We have to save her.’ The net thing was sexier but the vest that went underneath it needed washing.
‘She’s not a laugh any more, is she? D’you think it�
�s him?’
‘That man? Probably. I hate to say this, but it seemed to me that she changed her mind about him when Dillon proposed to me.’ Flora decided to try the shirt to see if she liked it better when she was wearing it.
‘Funny what’s happening with you two. When I first knew you, she was the alpha beast. Now it’s like you’re the dominant one and she’s going out of focus.’
‘It was the Scumbag. And Chicago.’
‘Now she’s hooked up with another one. What’s happening to my beautiful, brave Georgie?’
‘You’re right. It’s just dysfunctional. We’ve got to stop her. When she understands, she’ll be grateful.’ In the mirror, Flora frowned. The shirt was bloody tasteful, it was the kind of thing married women wore to drinks evenings in the suburbs thinking they were being daringly funky. Never, never, never.
‘I could not believe that open relationship thing she said they had going.’ Donna delivered this statement in the way she had of tying to the end of the sentence a hook which somehow snared the solution she wanted.
‘I know. Sick.’ Holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, Flora rifled through the washing pile behind her bedroom door with both hands. No vest. ‘But she really believes it’s making the relationship stronger.’
‘She does, doesn’t she?’
Flora located the vest under the bed. She shook it violently to get rid of the dust balls. ‘Before you came into the bar I was trying to make her see how weird this Felix guy must be but she wasn’t having any of it.’
‘For a sweet person, Georgie can be really arrogant sometimes.’
Really, the vest didn’t smell too bad. There was some old guacamole on the front but under the net nobody would notice. Flora sat on the end of the bed with a non-specific sense of relief. ‘I’ve got it, she told Donna. ‘I know just how to play it with Georgie. Leave it to me.’
‘Smart as Prada, you are,’ Donna’s voice in her ear approved her. ‘I knew you’d come up with the answer. We’re going to do it, aren’t we? We’re going to save our Georgie. But listen, how about you? And your Dillon. Flora, don’t let me get you into anything you aren’t comfortable with here.’
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