Perfect Liars

by Rebecca Reid

  But back then it had been a relief when exactly two weeks later her period had arrived. She had celebrated – pouring herself a glass of wine and giggling with Lila that she had dodged a bullet. There were still holidays, parties, lines of coke that needed to happen before she relegated herself to the role of mum.

  This afternoon she had trailed around the house, emptying every single bin, searching through with her bare hands to find every used ovulation stick and pregnancy test, wrapping it all in plastic bags and putting them in the bin at the end of the road. No risks could be taken. If someone, most likely nosy Lila, ended up in her en-suite and saw one it would be too much to bear. It was lucky that Charlie had been at work. He found the way she behaved around Nancy and Lila odd enough already. He couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just tell them about the IVF. ‘They’re your friends,’ he’d said. ‘They want to support you.’ He had no idea how wrong he was.

  ‘George?’ Lila was back. Georgia looked down at her hands, suddenly conscious that she had been distracted. ‘Why are you being weird?’ asked Lila.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said evenly, carrying a jug of water to the table even though no one would drink any.

  For the starter, Georgia had roasted peaches. The idea had been to toss them with rocket and balsamic vinegar, and mix in sizzling hot halloumi. But the ‘tour’ Nancy had insisted on had taken longer than she’d anticipated and the peaches had overcooked. Some of them were OK. Others were an orange sludge. Carefully she lifted the better slices, earmarking them for Nancy and Brett. It didn’t matter what she served Roo or Charlie, and Lila was too busy getting pissed to care.

  ‘Does everyone want to sit down?’ asked Georgia, trying to make her voice carry across the room.

  ‘Where do you want us?’ asked Roo.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ replied Georgia evenly. Why hadn’t she done a seating plan? It would have taken minutes and she could have kept Lila away from Roo, whom she would start a fight with after another glass, or Brett, whom she clearly wanted to lick.

  ‘You two can’t sit together,’ said Charlie to Lila. ‘Bad form to sit next to your wife. You go there, Brett, next to Nancy. She can look after you.’

  Georgia’s heart sank as Lila slid into the chair at the head of the table, leaving the only empty place at the far end, next to Roo. They would move around for pudding, she told herself. She wouldn’t be stuck with him all night.

  ‘There’s no wine on the table,’ came Lila’s baby voice. Georgia didn’t need to turn around to know that her words were accompanied by an exaggerated pout.

  ‘I put a bottle out a minute ago,’ said Charlie.

  Georgia turned to see Lila, sitting with her legs crossed on the chair, holding the bottle of white wine upside down. A tiny dribble escaped the neck and beaded on the table.

  ‘Bloody hell, chaps,’ said Charlie, laughing. ‘You’ll drink us dry at this rate.’ He laughed at his own joke as he went to the wine fridge to get more bottles. It wouldn’t occur to him to make anyone feel bad, to mention that, at £48 a bottle, it was there to be savoured. Not used as petrol for Lila’s latest meltdown.

  As Georgia sat down, she remembered why she never wore the jumpsuit Lila had forced her into. It constricted her hips and stomach painfully, clinging to every ounce of flesh on her torso.

  ‘This looks quite lovely,’ said Brett loudly. His dedication to having a nice time was valiant, especially in the face of such an odd combination of guests. Perhaps he had some British blood in him.

  ‘Quite means very in America,’ said Nancy. ‘I didn’t realize when I first moved there. It led to some funny misunderstandings.’

  ‘Quite funny ones?’ teased Brett.

  Do you live in America, Nancy? Georgia wanted to say. None of us could possibly have known. It’s not like you talk about it at all.

  ‘Like what?’ asked Charlie.

  Nancy cocked her head to one side. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What kind of funny misunderstandings?’

  Nancy looked affronted. ‘I can’t say, off the top of my head.’

  Charlie said nothing, looking back down at his plate. Georgia felt, not for the first time, disloyally pleased at how much her husband disliked her best friend. He had barely ever made it known. But each time he got in a dig at her it felt like a tiny triumph over Nancy.

  Charlie knew better than to suggest that Nancy be cut, or even to pry into why the two women remained friends. He realized that it was deep magic that he would never comprehend. Georgia liked that about him. He had only once questioned the relationship, when they had got engaged. They had been lying in bed together one evening, Charlie running his fingertip lazily over her stomach, when he said, ‘Don’t ask Nancy to be a bridesmaid.’

  Georgia had been shocked. The idea that Charlie even cared who she was friends with had seemed unlikely.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ she had asked him.

  ‘She won’t want to,’ he replied. ‘And she won’t be happy doing it.’

  Georgia had claimed that it would break Nancy’s heart, and that they were deeply bonded, tied together by mythology older than Charlie knew. He had smiled, apologized for even asking and thanked Nancy in his speech for being such a wonderful support. What he didn’t know was that being a bridesmaid was Nancy’s punishment. She had had to wear a dress, a beautiful, expensive dress which was whisper-light, floaty and pale pink. It was perfect on Lila and entirely wrong on Nancy, clashing with the severity of her haircut and the angles of her limbs. She had to stand next to Georgia all day, saying how beautiful she was and how much she deserved a lifetime of happiness, not allowed to be smart or sarcastic or anything other than a sweet handmaiden. There was no way out. To have said no would have looked as if she wasn’t a real friend. Even worse, someone at the wedding might think that she hadn’t been asked. So there she had stood. God, it had been satisfying.

  ‘I had a terrible misunderstanding,’ chimed in Roo, glass in hand, ‘in America, when I wanted a packet of cigarettes and I asked the concierge where I could buy fags.’

  Everyone laughed at Roo’s joke, which probably wasn’t true, or if it was true had likely happened to someone else rather than to him.

  ‘So you’re going on to Paris after this?’ said Georgia, breaking the silence.

  ‘Don’t let Nancy order the wine,’ laughed Lila.

  ‘What?’ laughed Brett. ‘Why not?’

  Nancy laughed an entirely fake laugh. Georgia knew she shouldn’t enjoy this so much, forcing Nancy to embrace false humility in front of Brett, in front of everyone. But she did.

  Nancy explained: ‘I accidentally ordered the wrong bottle of wine on a school trip to Paris – my French wasn’t so good back then – and it turned out it cost nearly seven hundred euros. We had to call my father and make him pay over the phone.’

  Georgia forced herself to join in the laughter. It hadn’t been funny at the time. They’d all checked their bank accounts, trying to scrape together the money to pay for the wine. Georgia’s heart had nearly broken through her sternum at the thought of spending everything she’d saved in the last five years on a third of a bottle of wine.

  ‘And what about your families?’ Brett asked. ‘Are all of your parents as cool as Nancy’s? Is it just an English thing?’

  ‘Mine are OK,’ said Lila, waving a forkful of salad around. It would go near her mouth, but never in it. Georgia knew the routine. Lila would feed bits of her food to anyone who was sitting around her (even though they were all eating the same thing). Dogs or toddlers were especially useful. By the end of the meal she would have managed to make a decent dent in the plate without ingesting much more than a couple of leaves. ‘My stepmother is about fifteen.’

  It wasn’t true. Clarissa was in her fifties now.

  ‘She was furious when she found out we were making her a grandmother,’ laughed Roo. ‘I reckon we cost Lila’s dad at least a grand in Botox that month.’

  ‘My parents aren’t “cool”,’ laug
hed Nancy, putting down her knife and fork. ’All parents are embarrassing in their own way.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ said Roo. ‘My old man keeps touching up nurses at his home. Bloody nightmare. Can’t stop sticking his hands up their skirts.’

  Like father, like son, thought Georgia. Everyone knew that Roo couldn’t resist anything with a single-digit dress size flashing a bit of leg.

  ‘What about you, Georgia?’ asked Brett. Georgia smiled. His voice was velvety. He was trying to draw her into the conversation. He cared if she was involved. ‘Are your mom and dad embarrassing?’

  What a question. If he hadn’t seemed so easy with it, Georgia might have wondered whether Nancy had told him to ask. Certainly, she would say that the answer to that question was yes. But then Nancy thought it was shameful that her own parents didn’t own a second home.

  Usually, these days, Georgia liked telling people where she’d come from. It lent her a kind of cachet.

  When people at work or at dinner parties, or Charlie’s work friends, tried to brush her off as a posh piece of fluff, she liked being able to explain that she wasn’t like that. That she hadn’t grown up in a castle, no matter what her accent might suggest. Announcing, ‘Not at all; my parents are working class and very strait-laced,’ with a hint of superiority that came so easily to her now. How could it have been so impossible back then?

  A teacher should have taken her aside on the first day, she had thought once, and told her how to tell her friends. Sitting in the front row in assembly and wearing the scholar’s robe simply didn’t cut it. Lots of Octavias and Tabithas got a ten per cent Drama scholarship for the prestige. Georgia was different. It would have been better if the school had just posted a list of the scholarship girls, in order of how much discount they got. At least if everyone had known she was there for free then she wouldn’t have to explain that, no, she couldn’t come skiing this year even though she had missed out the year before, too.

  She had invited Lila and Nancy back to her house once. After months of teasing from her brothers and a tearful exchange during which her mother asked if she was ashamed, she had capitulated and invited them.

  If they were surprised by the cramped terraced house, the cul-de-sac or the fact that it was only half an hour from the school, they didn’t say anything. Georgia thought she could remember a tiny twinge below Nancy’s left eyebrow. Maybe a tightening around the corners of Lila’s mouth. But not of judgement. More of surprise.

  They had sat around the kitchen table and her parents had acted like her friends were visiting dignitaries. Georgia had felt embarrassed by the mismatched Ikea cutlery and the big TV left on in the next room, and then ashamed of herself for feeling embarrassed. Her mother had overcooked the green beans and Georgia remembered something Nancy had said years ago about how working-class people always overcooked their vegetables.

  It hasn’t been a total disaster. They’d eaten three tubs of Ben and Jerry’s and watched a scary movie, screaming the house down. It had been fun, all of them sleeping on sofas in the living room, and if anyone had registered the fact that there wasn’t a guest bedroom, they didn’t say it. Nancy had mentioned her surprise not to have been offered wine with supper, but Georgia’s mother had encouraged them to eat, something Lila and Nancy hadn’t ever experienced. There was squirty cream, a complete novelty. They’d liked playing with Georgia’s doughy littlest sister. But when Mr Green dropped them back at school the next day, all three of them knew that it had been a courtesy. The only visit that they would ever make.

  ‘No.’ Georgia beamed across the table, allowing herself a glance at Brett’s right angle of a jawline. ‘They’re not cool at all. Old-fashioned would be the most accurate description.’

  ‘They sound like my folks,’ said Brett, leaning forward to top up her wine glass as he spoke. For a moment she wondered what it would be like if dinner was just the two of them, in some cosy restaurant with a flickering candle on the table between them.

  ‘You haven’t met Nancy’s parents yet?’ asked Charlie. ‘Hope you manage to do it before the wedding!’

  Georgia’s fingers twisted in her napkin. She was horrified at the jolt of anger she felt towards Charlie for stealing Brett’s attention, for giving it back to Nancy. What on earth was he playing at?

  ‘I can’t wait to meet them,’ said Brett. He sounded genuinely excited. ‘I’ve read a lot of their work. As a writer, I couldn’t think of a better pair of in-laws.’

  ‘Didn’t Nancy’s old man fancy Georgia?’ said Roo, a forkful of salad held aloft. ‘Isn’t that what you always said, Gee?’ The table turned to look at Georgia.

  No one said anything. Nancy chose that moment to take a slow, slow sip from her wine glass, her gaze deliberately avoiding Georgia. She could have saved it, thought Georgia bitterly. She could have laughed, brushed it off. Made it into no big deal. But in typical Nancy fashion she chose to make everyone else sweat.

  ‘No,’ Georgia said eventually. ‘That was someone else’s dad. Another girl in our year.’

  It wasn’t even a very good lie. Charlie said nothing, looking into the bottom of his glass. Chivalry really was dead, apparently.

  ‘So, you three were at boarding school together?’ asked Brett as the quiet resettled across the table. Georgia’s shoulders relaxed. Thank God for Brett.

  ‘Yes,’ said Georgia. ‘In Hampshire.’

  ‘What was that like?’ he asked.

  Lila leaned forward, seizing the conversation. She loved this. Telling men what they had been like at school was her party trick. Usually she supplemented the story by angling herself to offer the listeners a peek down her top, her finger carelessly inserted into her mouth, her hands running through her hair. Clichés, but she performed them so beautifully. Or at least she used to. Tonight the wine had hit her harder than it should have done, probably because she wasn’t eating anything. It was like watching an actress who was just a little too old to play the role she had been cast in and was desperately trying to overcompensate with a falsetto voice and too much make-up.

  ‘Are you asking if we’ve ever kissed each other, Brett?’ she husked.

  Nancy smiled. She pretended she didn’t like this routine, but Georgia knew she did. It gave her put-together-princess image a hint of an edge.

  Brett did a comedy double-take. ‘I wasn’t, but now I am!’

  The boys laughed. ‘You’ll never get it out of them,’ chimed Charlie.

  Lila giggled. ‘Two of us have kissed each other. But we don’t tell which two.’

  ‘So, aside from kissing,’ asked Brett, grinning, ‘what did the three of you get up to at school?’

  Georgia caught Nancy’s expression across the table. The skin beneath her dark eyes had tightened slightly. It was fine. They didn’t need to worry. Lila wasn’t going to say anything. Not now, not here. She would tell the story of the time they broke into the pool and swam naked in the middle of the night, or one of her many stories about sneaking boys into the dorm and smuggling them back out in their uniforms.

  ‘Well,’ slurred Lila, ‘we did all sorts of things. Naughty things.’

  Her eyes were drooping now, just a bit, just at the corners. A sure sign that she was on her way to getting absolutely shit-faced.

  ‘Georgia gave a teacher a blow-job.’

  The table exploded into laughter. Georgia felt her neck getting hot. It was strange how secrets aged. That one had seemed so vital at the time, and now it was a dinner-party anecdote. Why was it that one secret mattered so little and another had the power to come from the past and decimate the present?

  Charlie, sitting across from her, smirked. He liked that story. He liked the idea of his wife on her knees in her tartan kilt, a man so desperate to feel her lips around the base of his cock that he would risk losing his job to have it. Brett and Roo were applauding. Georgia gave a little bow.

  Sensing that she had the room, Lila went on, her voice growing louder: ‘And then there was the time that Nancy had a
coke dealer drive from London to drop off a gram of Colombia’s finest on a Thursday night to win a dare.’

  Brett grinned. ‘Nancy? Surely not?’

  Pretending to be annoyed, Nancy pinched the bridge of her nose, but there was a smile that she couldn’t suppress. ‘I was sixteen!’ she said eventually, as the whole table laughed and cheered. ‘Everyone’s a nightmare at sixteen!’

  ‘And then,’ Lila went on, her voice raised over the hum of laughter and appreciation for Nancy, ‘then there was that whole murder thing …’

  Silence fell across the table, silence so loud that Georgia could hear the clock on the wall and the fan of the oven pressing their noise against her brain. What the fuck was Lila thinking? She searched across the table, trying to find Nancy’s gaze.

  ‘It was two grams, actually,’ said Nancy. And then she laughed, a perfect replica of her real laugh. It took Georgia a second, but she gave a laugh too. Hers was too loud and too high, but it was OK because everyone was laughing and the noise was washing her panic away. Even Lila joined in, as if she’d forgotten that the ‘joke’ was hers in the first place.

  ‘I cannot believe you did coke at school,’ Brett laughed.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said Roo, who seemed to be warming to Brett, ‘nightmares, the lot of them.’

  Georgia stood and began gathering up the starter plates, desperately grateful for a chance to leave the table. Charlie got to his feet. He was being surprisingly helpful this evening. Together they carried the plates to the island. Lila’s plate was almost untouched, and Nancy had pointedly picked out the two slices of burnt peach that had made it into her salad. Carefully she scraped the plates, the good ones from Harrods which would be a pain to replace if anyone broke one, and then stacked them on the side. She had organized for Larissa to come tomorrow morning to wash them by hand.