Their chauffeur had barely shut the car door before Vince started in.
He was pissed. Pissed and pissed off, and Melanie didn’t blame him. Trouble was, she was still so shell-shocked that she couldn’t bring herself to much care either.
“Don’t,” she said. “Vince, just don’t, not now. OK?”
“Don’t ‘Vince, just don’t’ me,” Vince almost spat. “It’s not OK.”
Melanie had never seen him like this, had never had cause to, and she knew it wasn’t good. How could it be? It wasn’t the side you saw of someone in the early days of a relationship. At least not if that relationship was going anywhere.
“You drag me to…that room full of arseholes and twiglets, then you ignore me for the entire evening because…because your fucking ex and his new girlfriend are there?”
“She’s his wife,” Melanie said. “The mother of his child.”
“Whatever. I don’t give a fuck who she is. I care about the fact my so-called girlfriend has just treated me like shit in front of…in front of everyone. You drag me into your world and then do that to me.”
“It’s not my world.”
“Well, it’s fucking not mine!”
Melanie didn’t understand why Vince didn’t understand.
How would he feel if he was confronted with his ex and her new husband for the first time in front of five hundred strangers and every paparazzo in London? How would he like being splashed on tomorrow’s papers, next week’s gossip mags and all over the internet, indefinitely?
Outside the limousine’s windows, Hyde Park loomed in the darkness as the car passed the Albert Memorial and curved up toward Park Lane. Vince was still muttering, but Melanie wasn’t listening. Staring blindly at the back of their driver’s head, she wondered if he was listening to Vince’s rant. Or whether it was all in a day’s work to him. She knew chauffeurs were paid not to listen, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hear.
As the car approached Marble Arch, Vince leaned forward. “Hey,” he said rudely, tapping the driver on the shoulder. “Let me out here, will you?”
“Right here?” the driver asked. He didn’t need to point out that right here was in the middle of the three lanes of traffic circling the Marble Arch roundabout. It might have been midnight, but central London was still in gridlock.
“That’s what I said. Right here.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Vince, don’t be stupid.” It was the first thing Melanie had said for several minutes. Her voice sounded hollow even to her. “How will you get home?”
“I’ll get a cab or a night bus, like the rest of London.” Vince paused. “Public transport,” he said, “it’s what real people use.”
If she hadn’t been so anaesthetized by shock, confusion and alcohol, his words might have stung. Instead she just stared at him. Seeing how fury hardened his face and narrowed his eyes. For a moment she wasn’t even sure she recognized him.
“I love you,” he said, hand resting on the door handle, “but I’m buggered if I’m going to be with someone who’s in love with someone else.”
The car door swung open, narrowly missing a motorcycle filtering between the two lanes.
“I am not in love with Simeon,” Melanie said irritably. Men. Why did it always have to be about other men?
“So you say.” Vince was looking at her. As if waiting for her to do something, say something. Quite what, she didn’t know.
“You aren’t over him, that’s for sure.”
Thirteen
Matt! How much longer are you planning to be in there?” Mandy shouted through the locked bathroom door, not for the first time in the last hour.
On the other side, water thundered down, and downstairs Mandy’s ancient boiler wheezed on.
“Matt!” Mandy yelled again, this time banging the heel of her hand against the wood.
The water slowed to a drip and plastic rings clattered as the old shower curtain was yanked back.
“What?” came her eldest son’s voice.
“I said,” Mandy replied, trying to suppress her exasperation, “how much longer?”
“Not long. Going out soon.”
And the water started up again.
Glancing at her watch, Mandy sighed. It was 7:30 p.m. Where had the afternoon gone? Wandering into her room—her and John’s room, Mandy corrected herself—she tossed a box of Schwarzkopf root retoucher onto the bed. It bounced and landed on the floor.
Oh, well, her roots would have to do. It was the thought that counted, after all.
Mandy had been debating getting her roots done at the salon on Clapham High Road ever since Lily had invited her to the club, only she hadn’t gotten around to it. Just as she’d debated doing a home dye job. Debated it, bought the kit, just hadn’t moved fast enough to grab the only bathroom when John had left to take Jack and Izzy back to their mother’s.
At the far end of the landing, the shower stopped and, in the kitchen below, the boiler stuttered gratefully to a halt. Mandy could hear her eldest son bang shut the medicine cabinet door. Through force of habit, Mandy snatched up the hair dye from where it still lay and headed for the bedroom door. With three teenage-ish boys in permanent residence and another two teenagers in and out, you had to move fast in this house.
Minutes crawled past as Mandy kept one ear on the bathroom and the other on the street outside for the sound of John’s Peugeot. Finally, the bolt slid back and Matt shuffled past to his room. Waiting just long enough for him to get inside, she slipped around the door, almost sprinted along the landing and pushed open the bathroom door. A cloud of hot steam and Lynx assailed her, sodden towels were strewn over the flooded floor, condensation misted the mirror and every tile. No wonder mold was forming in the ceiling corners.
“Ma—,” Mandy started. And stopped. It would be quicker just to clean his mess up herself.
When the bathroom was tidied, clean towels found, dirty ones bundled into the laundry basket, and she could see her hand in front of her face and her face in the mirror, Mandy pulled the dripping shower curtain from the bath, turned the hot tap on full and returned her attention to the box of dye.
Idly she dangled her hand under the tap to check the temperature and snatched it away. Cold. Not just cold; the water was freezing. Mandy turned the tap off and then on again, just to check that she hadn’t been running cold by mistake. No, still cold. The hot water tank was empty.
“Bloody kids,” Mandy muttered, twisting the tap irritably and pulling the plug. Matt had used all the water. Looked like her roots would have to go au naturel after all.
Defeated, Mandy headed downstairs to iron the boys’ school shirts. Now there was an exercise in futility. But still she did it every Sunday night without fail, because there was no way Mandy McMasters’s boys were going to school looking like tramps. If they came home looking like tramps…well, that was another thing entirely.
Sometimes it amazed Mandy how much time she spent doing things that looked as if they hadn’t been done fifteen minutes later. Ironing, washing, cooking, cleaning. All things that were satisfying for, ooh, five minutes. And then all signs of her hard work were obliterated by the appetites, scuffling and clomping size 10 feet of five teenagers.
The obviously uneasy woman who hesitated in the doorway of Starbucks looked as if she was about to turn around and walk straight out again. West Soho they called this area now, according to a sign outside. But whatever they called it, the street, the café, the area, they weren’t her kind of thing.
She was turning to go when someone called her name.
“Mandy!”
She’d taken too long to make her decision. Story of her life really. So she sat at the chair they’d saved for her, nodded hello as Lily introduced them all, although she didn’t really take in their names, and thanked Lily for the coffee when it arrived. But what she really wanted to say was, Why the hell did you invite me here?
Mandy imagined herself as the others must see her—sm
art but cheap knee-length skirt (navy); knee-length, re-heeled boots (black); round-necked sweater (pink). Her work clothes were the only ones she had that were remotely smart enough.
Of course, there was that purple Monsoon wrap dress from a few years back, bought shortly before Dave had moved out. She could still remember twirling in it for him to admire, while he’d hissed in irritation and tried to see the football scores around her.
How much? he’d demanded when Final Score had finally been over. A bloody fortune. Immediately trampling on all the joy she’d drawn from choosing the dress, trying it on and buying it on sale.
That thought, the memory of Dave, nearly finished her off. What little self-confidence she’d brought to the table shriveled and died.
What on earth had she been thinking?
Risking a glance up from her extortionately priced mug of coffee, her eyes met those of the woman with the mass of dark bouncy curls. Mandy forced a smile and looked away before she could see if it was returned.
I don’t belong here, she thought. I should never have come.
What was it her mother always said? Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t give yourself airs. There were plenty more where those came from.
Mandy sighed.
The coffee wasn’t even that good, she thought, sipping its dregs to avoid making any more accidental eye contact. Not that much nicer than instant; certainly not enough to warrant the price, at any rate. It was watery, and too milky for her taste.
It was only when Lily asked for an extra shot, and the glamorous-looking Chinese woman demanded skimmed milk on the side, that Mandy realized she could have done the same.
It hadn’t occurred to her.
You ordered a coffee, it came, you drank it. She didn’t spend much time in coffee shops. Who had the time? Come to that, who had the money? Not her, that was for sure.
The glamorous-looking one, the one with the long, shiny hair and beautiful almond eyes, whose clothes even Mandy could tell must have cost Mandy’s entire monthly maintenance (when Dave bothered to pay at all), was telling a complicated story involving an award ceremony, an ex-husband, a new boyfriend and a big row. It seemed to Mandy that she was more upset about her ex and his new wife than the row with her new man. But Mandy didn’t say so, obviously. She was the new girl.
“Grim,” Lily said.
“Has it occurred to you,” said Lily’s sister, “that you’re more upset about seeing Simeon with Poppy than you are about the row with Vince?”
Mandy nodded agreement as a chorus of disapproval ricocheted around their table from the others.
“Clare!” the curly-haired one cried. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Jeezus,” Lily added. “Call a spade a bloody shovel, why don’t you?”
“It’s just an observation,” Lily’s sister said. “And since when did we introduce censorship? Melanie asked what we thought. That’s what I think. Vince is right. Melanie’s not over Simeon, if you ask me. And she did, didn’t you, Melanie? Ask, I mean.”
Melanie nodded bleakly, clearly wishing she hadn’t asked.
Mandy was warming to Lily’s sister, a few years older and obviously sensible, not that Mandy could see a family likeness. And not that warming was the right word. Clare was too prickly for that, wearing her opinions like armor. But still, Mandy liked her for having the courage to say what Mandy had been thinking. Mandy was drawn to people who said what they thought. More than that, she admired them precisely because she never did.
“You’re wrong,” Melanie said. “I don’t want Simeon back. I wouldn’t have him back if he came crawling on bended knee.”
“That’s not the same thing at all,” Clare pointed out. “There’s a big difference between wanting him back and being over him.”
“Takes one to know one,” muttered Lily.
Clare scowled at her.
“Enough about me,” Melanie said brightly, fooling no one. “Tell us about you, Mandy. Lily’s told us a bit already, but I’d like to know more.”
The other four women turned, and Mandy felt blinded, like someone had flashed their headlights and shone them in her face. She hated being the center of attention. Even on her wedding day, she would have avoided being in the photographs if she could have.
“Um, not much to tell, really,” she said, tugging at her Next skirt (fifty per cent off, last season’s sale) and wishing she’d worn jeans instead. Not that her jeans looked anything like the ones Lily and Melanie wore. Hers were strictly weekend jeans, more suited to gardening and housework than coffee up West.
“Of course there is,” Lily said reassuringly. “Go on.”
“Honestly,” Mandy said, seeing there was no way out of this. “It’s all pretty ordinary, really. I’m divorced, obviously. We were together twenty years, married seventeen. I’ve got three boys, teenagers, near enough. Matt, the eldest, he’s sixteen. He’s like me—quiet, bit of a plodder, just keeps his head down and gets on with it, with luck that will be enough to get him through his qualifying exams next summer. Jason’s the youngest, he’s twelve. Nothing bothers him apart from his stomach and football. And then there’s Nathan.” She took a breath and looked at the women watching her. Where to start with her middle son? “He…gets more like his father with every passing day. Not just physically, although there’s no denying the likeness, it’s more his personality. Human bulldozer. Just like Dave.”
Mandy gave a shudder and hoped no one else noticed. Please God, she thought, mentally lighting a candle, don’t let Nathan turn out to be too much his father’s son.
Realizing the others were waiting, she picked up where she’d left off. “Dave’s my ex, he walked out three and a half years ago now. I’m not sure which of us was more relieved in the end. Doesn’t see much of his kids, only pays up when the CSA makes him. And doesn’t see why he should pay at all now John’s moved in. John’s my, erm, boyfriend,” she explained unnecessarily.
It was a strange word, boyfriend. Mandy still couldn’t get used to it, and it sounded even more wrong when applied to a forty-three-year-old. But what else was there? Partner was too women’s magazine. Lover was too Jackie Collins. Other half sounded like a sitcom.
“Dave says he won’t pay to have some other bloke live in his house. Which is complete b—rubbish. For a start, it’s not his, it’s mine and his kids’ now. And he’s not paying for some bloke, he’s paying for his children’s food, school uniforms, that kind of thing. Not that what he pays even begins to cover it. Anyway, John has two kids of his own to pay for.”
“How did you and John meet?” Lily asked.
Mandy looked embarrassed. “Through work. I work at that solicitor’s above the butcher’s. You know the one?”
Lily didn’t, but she nodded anyway.
“Worked there since the boys started school. Part-time, just to make a bit of extra cash. They let me go full-time after Dave left. John works in the council offices just down the road. Funny how we never came across each other before. He came in when his wife said she wanted a divorce. When he came to pay his final bill, we got talking. He asked me for a drink and we went from there.”
Thank God, she thought but didn’t say.
At the point he’d asked, it had just begun to dawn on Mandy that she would have to “get back out there.” It was either face the horrors of dating again or spend the rest of her life on the shelf. Dating? On the shelf? Where did those words come from? Sometimes she felt as if she’d gone to bed one night and woken up in the 1950s.
“And what about John’s children?” Eve was asking. “How do you get on with them?”
Eve looked genuinely interested. So interested, in fact, that Mandy half expected her to whip out a notepad.
“They’re good kids,” Mandy said, finding her voice. “They come to us every other weekend. Well, Jack does. He’s thirteen, the same age as Nathan, and he gets on OK with my boys. But Izzy’s fifteen. It’s not that we don’t get on. We do. And I’m fond of her
, actually. She’s a good kid. But, you know, she’s fifteen.”
Mandy gave the others a meaningful look.
“Fifteen’s bad?” Eve asked. She looked worried. “I’m having enough trouble with thirteen.”
“Try fourteen,” said Clare. “That’s worse.”
“I just wasn’t expecting having a stepdaughter to be so complicated,” Mandy said apologetically. “Like I said, mine are boys, so I’m used to the noise and the mess. Their teenage stuff starts a bit later. And even when they’re properly moody, it’s different. Matt either locks himself in the bathroom and fumigates the house with Axe, or shuts himself in his room and plays rap so loud the entire town house shakes.”
She glanced at Lily, who laughed and nodded. “It’s true. You can hear it out on the street. Still”—she grinned to show Mandy she wasn’t complaining—“we’ve all been there.”
“Izzy’s fine,” Mandy said. “She just doesn’t want to spend her weekends hanging out in a house full of teenaged boys, and I don’t blame her. She wants to see her dad, but she’d rather see him on his own. And she’s not interested in me. She’s got a mom, after all, and the only boys she’s interested in are older than Matt and hate rap.”
“The indie crowd,” Lily said, nodding.
“It’s called emo now,” Clare told her.
Lily rolled her eyes.
“I had this idea we’d be one big happy family,” Mandy said. “But it’s not happening. Izzy stayed over once, but there’s not really room for her. My boys have their own rooms and Jack normally sleeps on Jason’s floor, but Izzy had to sleep on the sofa. Between you and me, I think the lack of space is just an excuse. She comes for Sunday lunch sometimes—not that she eats it—and that’s about it. John seems happy enough with it, but it’s not how I imagined it would be.”
Mandy caught Eve and Clare exchanging a glance. She didn’t know what their glance meant, but it made her nervous. She stopped.
“Weekends must be a barrel of laughs,” Lily said.
Mandy shrugged, too intimidated to continue.
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