Lucy, relieved, immediately said, “Of course not—”
“But that Cordelia was talking about your mother’s royal wedding commemorative plate last Christmas, and I’m just saying you might regret it if George packs everything up and ships it to Auckland and you don’t even have a photo.”
Lucy took the stickers.
“Thank you, Paula. That is thoughtful of you.”
“We’re nice people, Lucy; we think people don’t do things like that. But you ought to have seen how my brother’s kids behaved when my mum died. It was carnage. They went through the house like a tsunami.”
Paula shook her head at the memory. Then she had an idea.
“While you’re over, why don’t you see a few friends? You can’t sit here on your own for a week. Life goes on. You should call someone.”
That’s right, thought Lucy. Life goes on.
• • •
CAMILLA WAS WAITING, as arranged, behind the taxi stand outside Victoria Station, but Lucy didn’t see her at first because she was hidden behind the enormous steering wheel of what appeared to be a farm vehicle. Camilla caught her expression.
“Don’t say anything,” she said. “In the settlement the Bastard was meant to buy me a four-by-four, but he kept arguing on and on, said a Fiat Punto would do for the school run, but my lawyer wouldn’t let it go and this arrived. I think he shipped it over from Eastern Europe full of refugees. He’s so cheap, that’s what Americans say, isn’t it? He was always cheap.”
“Yes,” agreed Lucy, safe in the knowledge that the chances of Camilla and the cheap Bastard reuniting were nil. “He never ever bought a drink, did he? The first time Rich and I met him and he should have been trying to impress us, he made us gin-and-tonics from those small plastic bottles he got free on the plane.”
“Want to know something worse than that?” said Camilla, “He reused lemon slices.”
Lucy looked at her in disbelief.
“Oh, yes,” she continued. “After anyone left, he would fish the lemon slice out of the bottom of their glass, wipe it with kitchen roll, and leave it sitting in the side of the fridge till the next time.”
“Did you ask him why?”
“He said he didn’t want people to be interested in him for his money. I said there’s no danger of that, love.”
Lucy and Camilla had once been best friends but had not seen each other since Camilla’s wedding four years previously. Since then, Camilla had had a child and got divorced. It seemed to suit her, though. Her long legs, encased in lacy tights under a tight gray pencil skirt—a look Lucy had never liked, but on Camilla it worked—were slender and muscular, and there was no sign of the creeping roll of midriff fat that Lucy felt gathering above her own low-rise jeans.
“You look good,” Lucy said.
“I know,” replied Camilla. “I caught this vile bug that was going round the Montessori. Threw up and out of both ends for a week. Fantastic. I’m back in all my old clothes. It’s totally recession.” She giggled momentarily. Then her face became serious again.
“You should have said something to me, Lucy. If you thought he wasn’t right, you should have said it. It’s not like I was desperate to get married.”
If Camilla had been Pinocchio, her nose would have hit the windscreen at this point. Camilla had been thirty-five, tired of drifting from one low-profile job in the art world to another, fed up of renting a studio flat in Portobello, and had tried and failed to land the kind of chap her father craved, so when the cheap Bastard appeared from nowhere, with his offshore companies and his overuse of aftershave, she asked no questions, brought him home to the family pile in Scotland, and the deal was done at the Soho House six months later.
It was the only wedding Lucy had ever been to where the marriage felt doomed from the very beginning. She tried to explain it to Richard at home the next day—he had remembered an urgent trip to his dentist at the last minute—but it was impossible to describe the sense of foreboding in the room. It hummed over the canapés and the seating plan like petrol fumes rising from the Hammersmith flyover. It was not until a thank-you note for the two brass candlesticks arrived that Richard understood.
“Talk about the unhappy couple,” he chortled, and though Lucy pooh-poohed it she knew he was right. She peered at the black-and-white photo inside and knew that Camilla and her new husband didn’t love each other. Camilla had gone through with it because she had read too many articles in the Mail on Sunday about desperate childless women in their forties, and, although she was genuinely delighted with her son—“At least I got Tristan,” she repeated—the marriage was over before she could provide a spare for the heir.
The Bastard’s motives turned out to be something to do with tax and residency, although he had some sort of penchant for marriage, as he was now on his third girlfriend since Camilla and they had just got engaged.
“She’s a nice girl, actually, but when I congratulated her I said just don’t get older, because then he’ll be off.”
To fill the tense silence that fell, Lucy tried to cheer Camilla up by telling her about the dramatic change in her own circumstances and her new life in New York. She illustrated this by the fact that they had only one bathroom in their apartment. Camilla was appalled.
“You mean there’s only one toilet? How could Richard do that to you?” she exclaimed, in the same tones she had used to describe her ex having sex with an air stewardess at a hotel in Disneyland when they brought Tristan to see It’s a Small World. Lucy started saying that the collapse of the international banking sector wasn’t Richard’s fault, but she knew that Camilla would take Lucy’s defense of any male member of the species personally, so she shut up. Anyway, Camilla and Richard had a difficult relationship. Camilla was suspicious of Richard because, despite his father being a diplomat, he had chained himself to the railings in front of the South African embassy the summer before Mandela was released. (“Couldn’t he just have bought the song?” she said.) Their tongues had also once tangled rapturously on the floor of the drinks tent during a College Ball, but Richard had subsequently pretended it had never happened.
Camilla now pondered the doomsday scenario facing Lucy.
“Are you going to have to get a job?” she intoned, in a voice like Vincent Price at the beginning of “Thriller.”
“I don’t have a proper visa yet,” replied Lucy.
“Thank goodness,” muttered Camilla.
“And I’m not sure what I would do.”
“Oh, Lucy, you could do anything. You had a bit of a career, after all. Not like me. At least when the cheap Bastard tried to make me earn some money the lawyer was able to confirm that I was qualified for nothing. All those years on the front desk at Christie’s doesn’t really get you anywhere, except a chance to marry some duke who’s flogging off a Canaletto.”
Lucy couldn’t help laughing. She was beginning to remember why she and Camilla had been such close friends, despite the enormous differences of background, politics, and aspiration between them. They had met their very first day at university, as their rooms were side by side. It transpired they were also tutorial partners, and Lucy watched in awe as Camilla, with her confidence born of entitlement and her resilience born of boarding school, ran rings round the various professors. Posh, slightly potty, and very clever, Camilla was what Lucy had always imagined a true bluestocking to be, and she felt it was a shame that Camilla had not been nineteen in the 1930s, when she could have danced to Cole Porter, hiked her skirt up to slide down banisters, or been a pioneering Girl Guide. There was something lost about her; she had been born at the wrong time, into a class that was dying, to parents who had no way of providing the life they themselves had enjoyed for their children.
“You know what my mother said to me the other day? ‘Camilla, darling, Cambridge wasn’t meant to be finishing school. Daddy and I thought you’d be a lawyer.’�
� She paused. “Coming from her, can you imagine? A woman who did nothing in her life except read Mills and Boon and occasionally change some curtains in the north wing.”
Remembering her only night in the north wing, shuddering in mildewed sheets as she clutched two foul-breathed terriers to her to try and keep herself warm and Camilla’s lecherous brother Benedict out, Lucy thought of her dinner of half-thawed shepherd’s pie with Lady Fiona, who assured her that all the secrets of a heppy marriage could be learned from the animal kingdom, specifically the big cats.
But Lucy had learned a lot from Camilla. She had arrived at Cambridge silent and cowed; Camilla taught her not to be afraid, not to smoke, and that the quickest way to get a buzz on was a cocktail of champagne and cough mixture. In turn, when Camilla went to parties dressed as a spider and drank distilled alcohol from great punch bowls, Lucy kept a wary distance, ready to rescue her when she couldn’t put her key in her door, and even stayed at the police station with her the night she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly while riding a bicycle.
“Why did you stop work, anyway?” asked Camilla out of nowhere.
Lucy was a little startled. No one had ever asked her this outright before. No one, that is, except herself. Unfortunately, she and her self had failed to come up with a satisfactory answer.
“I was so sick when I got pregnant with Max that I left straightaway, and I thought I would just take a few months off afterward, but . . . then I felt so tired. That was it, really. And I can’t decide if I was tired because of the baby, or tired because I’d worked so hard for so long with so little to show for it. Then Richard started doing really well and he was traveling all the time and suddenly we had this house and this life and another baby, and soon . . . None of the women I met worked—”
“Outside the home,” Camilla chipped in.
“—and . . . I don’t know. Now when I think about starting all over again I feel old . . . and afraid. It’s like I was running the marathon, and I hit the wall.”
“For ten years?” chortled Camilla.
“You’re right. I hate myself. I’ve been asleep for ten years.”
“Darling, no praise, no blame from me. I don’t mean to be tactless after mommy dearest, but . . . we need a big drink. Look at the state of us. Couple of fucking suffragettes, eh? And to think we used to be like George Eliot heroines, you and me. Especially you. I remember you telling old Miss Whatsherface-tweed-skirt-old-English that you felt you would stick your head in an oven if you couldn’t use your mind.”
“Did I?” Lucy was startled. She had a terrible memory and was always interested when people told her things about herself she had forgotten.
“Yes, we’d been reading Middlemarch. Remember the bit, ‘you would die . . . from that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’”
There was a long pause.
“I do need a drink,” said Lucy.
“You need several,” giggled Camilla. “And then if you’re up to it, we’re going to go to Rose and Jasper Hardy’s joint surprise birthday party that’s not a surprise anymore, because I accidentally put it on Facebook. No one told me it was a secret because you know who might be there.”
Lucy knew instantly that you know who referred to nice but unmemorable Peter Aldridge, who used to hang round the edges of discos in his V-neck sweater and, during the years Lucy had had her ten-year nap, had apparently become Home Secretary. From the frisson of excitement in Camilla’s voice, Lucy knew this was meant to be a Big Deal, but in her current state she failed to drum up much excitement.
“I don’t care where we go,” she said. “I’m just glad to be away from the house of death. I’ll go with the flow.”
“You have changed,” said Camilla, pushing the agricultural vehicle into fifth gear.
• • •
CAMILLA LEFT LUCY at the cheap hotel Lucy had booked for the night and gave her strict instructions to get some rest while she went home to check that the new German au pair wasn’t letting Tristan watch Sex and the City on DVD again on the pretext of extending her English vocabulary. (Tristan had asked for a cosmopolitan at a play date the previous week, and it had reinforced people’s perceptions of Camilla.) Camilla would return at seven.
Lucy rifled in her bag to see what Richard had packed, and, in fact, groping for anything black in her wardrobe, she found he had thrown in a pre-austerity ruffled Prada top with a sequin trim that, over her jeans and boots, would do very nicely for a fortieth birthday party for people who did not wish to be forty at all.
It was commonplace for Lucy to declare whenever she met anyone from her college days that they hadn’t changed a bit. In fact, they always had. Normally it was the straightforward deterioration of their looks or the sense that some bright light inside them had been switched off by a force greater than themselves; but sometimes, in her own case, certainly, the years had made them look better, grown into themselves somehow.
Rose Hardy, the hostess, unfortunately fitted into the former group, standing in the kitchen looking oppressed and miserable, despite her picture-perfect breadmaker and children. She was devastated because you know who had not appeared and was not likely to appear, it seemed, due to another problem with the euro, which required the entire cabinet to sit in an office with a big red phone. Well, that was what Lucy imagined, anyway. For Rose, this was a disaster; she knew several people had accepted the invitation only to ask you know who about whether the government could safeguard their pensions and were disappointed to have a couple of mere junior civil servants in the Department of Arts and Tourism to ingratiate themselves with. In fact, Rose was so upset she barely registered Lucy’s presence, and when Lucy pointed out that perhaps the fluctuations of the European currency market might take priority over a party, Rose disappeared off to find a more understanding ear in which to complain about how “certain people forgot their friends, the friends who helped them into their positions of power,” clearly alluding to the days she had spent leafleting in Bayswater before the election.
Jasper was altogether more delighted to see Lucy, clasping her in a slightly too vigorous embrace and marveling at how much time had elapsed since he had seen her. When he asked, sincerely, how she was, she gave him the only line she wanted to talk about tonight: two young boys, living in New York, happy.
“You look happy,” he said. “But then you always were different.” And he picked up a plate of mini-sausages glazed in honey and ginger and headed into the living room.
Camilla was shaking martinis and marveling that Rose and Jasper had two dishwashers.
“Oh, bloody hell!” she said suddenly.
“What?” said Lucy, confused.
“Miranda Bassett just walked in. I’m off to see if anyone’s smoking in the kids’ bathroom upstairs. I cannot face Madam consoling me tonight.” And she seized her shaker and hurried up the back stairs, leaving Lucy alone and defenseless.
Miranda entered radiantly with husband Simon behind her; he was dutifully carrying a small baby instead of her handbag like he used to, but they were both airily dispatched the moment Miranda saw Lucy.
Miranda was the most conspicuously successful of all the women of Lucy’s acquaintance from university. As a shy teenager Lucy had been terrified of her, for Miranda, at age nineteen, swanned around, resplendent in her raven-haired beauty, her permanently airbrushed skin and her maxi-dresses, in which she managed to cycle. In their twenties they had kept a wary eye on each other as their professional paths occasionally crossed, although Miranda was still superior, as, having married Simon at age twenty-three, she had had her first child the year after and was therefore “having it all,” a subject on which she regularly opined in her column in a Saturday newspaper. Her brief was to depict the joys and travails of working motherhood with humor and insight, and so every week she detailed an amusing incident about herself, saintly Simon, and her child, whom for purposes of a
nonymity she called the Savior. She had published the collected columns in a best-selling book and presented a documentary series on Channel 5, so when Miranda sashayed over to Lucy, Lucy knew she was in the presence of someone who had her own website.
“Thank God, Lucy Lovett. Someone here I can talk to. I’ve been looking for signs of intelligent life in the other room and can’t find any.” Her signature peal of laughter burst forth. It never got less strange each time Lucy heard it.
“Was Camilla in here?” continued Miranda. “Thought I saw her running toward her nicotine. Poor thing. We all thought it was bad when she was like Bridget Jones, but now she’s turned into Patsy from Ab Fab.”
From Miranda’s rapid appraisal of the company, Lucy knew Miranda was one of the number who had attended only because Rose had promised to deliver you know who and had worked out that she must stay for at least half an hour before leaving, in order not to be deemed unspeakably rude. Lucy took a deep breath to gather herself before attempting conversation, but fortunately her participation was not necessary. Lucy was left exhausted by the roller coaster that was Miranda’s late thirties. She learned how difficult it was to get anything intelligent made on TV these days, how the Savior had proved an immense disappointment (dropping out of Westminster to go to a Sixth Form College to do woodturning), and as a result Miranda had been gripped by an overwhelming urge to have another, more Miranda-ish, child and, miraculously, after Simon reversed his vasectomy, she did, another boy, dammit, but here’s hoping. . . . She longed to take life a bit easier, but Simon had got so used to being at home he felt he couldn’t possibly go back into the workplace, and they lost so much money after his dodgy investments on the stock exchange, which she had allowed only to make him feel that he was “contributing,” that she’d had to take a job writing for a tabloid newspaper. Honestly she could have divorced him a couple of years ago, but then you realize, don’t you, that there’s only one George Clooney, and while perhaps one could have had anyone one wanted in one’s prime (Lucy realized she must nod in agreement to this), we’re all rather stuck now unless we want to end up like Camilla, bitter and twisted, or like Rose and her ilk in there, the valley of the surrendered wives. What a bloody waste of taxpayers’ money it was educating that lot!
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