Perfect Timing

by Jill Mansell

  The dentist—‘Please, call me Lisa’—was spending so much time flashing her flawless smile in his direction, it was a miracle she hadn’t taken out the wrong tooth. Unable to speak, what with the numbness and the mouthful of metal clamps and suction pumps, all Poppy could do was listen to the pair of them chatting each other up. When the thirty minutes of torture were over, the dumpy dental nurse gave Poppy a beaker of pink water and a funnel to spit into. Lisa gave Caspar her business card and scribbled her home number—in case of emergencies—on the back.

  Poppy’s frozen mouth had turned to rubber. She could no longer spit, only dribble pathetically into the gurgling silver funnel. Ribbons of blood-stained saliva dangled from her chin.

  That’s it, no toffees ever again, she thought exhaustedly.

  It was also definitely the last time she let Caspar come along to give her so-called moral support.

  ‘Don’t forget, I’ll be expecting to hear from you,’ Lisa told Caspar with a dazzling white grin. ‘Oh, ’bye,’ she added to Poppy as an afterthought.

  ‘Thankth a lot,’ mumbled Poppy when they were out of the building.

  ‘No problem.’ Caspar was blithely unaware of his crime. ‘How d’you feel, still a bit shaky? You’ve got blood on your shirt,’ he pointed out, to be helpful. ‘Come on, we’ll get a cab home.’

  ‘No, I want to walk,’ Poppy said to punish him. Caspar never walked anywhere if he could help it.

  ‘Are you sure?’ A fresh stream of dribble was sliding out of the corner of Poppy’s mouth. One side of her jaw had already puffed up. She was beginning to look like a gerbil.

  Stubbornly Poppy nodded. They set off up the road.

  ‘Tho? Are you going to thee her?’

  Slow to translate, Caspar frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘My dentitht!’

  ‘Oh… well, could do. Seems a shame not to.’ He shrugged good-naturedly. ‘It’d have its advantages, you’d never run short of dental floss.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘And she’s a dab hand with a drill,’ Caspar mused. ‘I bet she’s brilliant at putting up shelves.’

  If not at putting up much of a fight, Poppy thought sourly. Somehow she had expected better of a dentist. It was almost undignified, like witnessing the Queen bopping along to the Spice Girls.

  ‘Come on, cheer up.’ Caspar took her arm as they crossed the road, heading for the park. ‘It’s over now. Look on the bright side; you’ll never have to have that tooth out again.’

  ‘Don’t you have enough women to worry about already?’ Poppy refused to join in. She wasn’t in the mood. To punish him some more, she quickened her step. ‘I mean, do you need to add another one to your litht?’

  ‘Who says I worry about them?’ Caspar grinned. ‘I’m not worried. The more the merrier.’

  ‘That ith tho immature,’ snapped Poppy. She dragged another handful of tissues out of her jacket pocket and mopped irritably at her chin. The tissues came away crimson; all this stomping like a soldier on a route march had brought the bleeding on again. And she might not be able to feel it, but she knew her left cheek was swollen. She must look completely mad.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re in such a stinking mood,’ said Caspar.

  Poppy didn’t know either. She didn’t reply, striding on across the grass instead. When she tried chewing her lip it felt disgusting, like a car tire. Behind her she heard Caspar’s far more leisurely footsteps and the brief crackle of a sweet wrapper.

  Go on, I hope both your front teeth fall out, thought Poppy vengefully. That would put the frighteners on his precious harem. That should do the trick.

  The sun had disappeared behind a bank of ominous grey cloud. A cold wind whistled across the park. As Poppy tugged the flimsy bloodstained collar of her denim shirt up around her ears, fat raindrops began to fall.

  To her even greater annoyance, she’d been so set on striding grumpily ahead at a rate of knots that she hadn’t thought where she was going. Now, having veered left instead of right, they were closer to the boat houses on the bank of the Serpentine than to the bridge leading across it.

  ‘Where are we going?’ protested Caspar. ‘This is miles out of our way.’

  Poppy hoped he was freezing. She hoped he was hating every minute. It was a comforting thought.

  ‘My feet are starting to ache,’ Caspar complained behind her.

  Without bothering to look round, Poppy murmured, ‘Good.’

  Chapter 34

  They cleared the trees and approached the water’s edge. Poppy, blinking rain out of her eyes, wondered why a disheveled-looking pensioner would want to wade around in the muddy shallows on such a cold day.

  Then she spotted the bottle—whisky-shaped—in the pensioner’s hand. Poppy turned and waited for Caspar to catch up.

  ‘He mutht be plathtered. Should we try and do thomething?’

  ‘What did that dentist take out, your eyes as well?’ said Caspar. ‘It’s not a he, it’s a she.’

  Poppy squinted across at the pensioner. In that battered trilby and long flapping raincoat it was hard to tell.

  The next moment the pensioner was wading round in a semi-circle, shaking her whisky bottle at them.

  ‘Bugger off!’ The throaty, clearly articulated voice that floated across the water towards them was deep-pitched but definitely female. ‘Sod off, the pair of you. Nosy bastards, come to gawk. What am I, some kind of peepshow? The latest tourist attraction?’ She glared at Caspar and Poppy in disdain, then bellowed, ‘By God, it comes to something when a soul in torment can’t even bloody kill herself in peace.’

  The voice wasn’t only female, it was instantly recognizable.

  ‘Crikey.’ Poppy gazed transfixed. ‘It’th Eleanor Brent.’

  ‘Whatever you do,’ said Caspar, ‘don’t ask for her autograph.’

  Eleanor Brent was one of the darlings of British theatre. She was practically a national treasure. Never what you could call a stunner, she had made up in talent and character for what she might have lacked in the looks department.

  Eleanor’s first fifty years had been spent ricocheting from one hopeless marriage to the next. She endeared herself to her public by proving you could be endlessly talented and still spectacularly unlucky in love. She was famous for smiling through her tears and insisting the show must go on.

  Now she was in her mid-seventies, still much-loved, still working in the theatre, but no longer a slave to men.

  ‘I’ve grown up,’ she was fond of informing interviewers when they broached the subject. ‘Put all that lovey-dovey stuff behind me, thank God. My days of romance are over. Such a relief.’

  In which case, thought Poppy, what was Eleanor Brent doing, drunk as a skunk in the Serpentine, hurling insults at strangers, and threatening to do herself in?

  ‘I mean it.’ The actress stumbled and waved her bottle wildly over her head to balance herself. Her trilby slipped over one eye. ‘Get out of here,’ she roared, sounding like Margaret Thatcher in need of a cough drop. ‘Go on, bloody clear orf.’

  To make sure they got the message, she stuck two fingers up at them.

  ‘No,’ said Caspar.

  The deadly glare narrowed.

  ‘Look,’ Poppy began to say nervously, ‘how can we leave you here? You thouldn’t be—’

  ‘Jesus Christ, what are you, a pair of sodding Samaritans? Just turn round and start walking, can’t you? I don’t want to be lectured to about the joys of living by a couple of do-gooders. Apart from anything else, this water is fucking freezing—’

  As she bawled out these lines, Eleanor Brent began wading clumsily backwards. Within seconds she was up to her waist. The rain, pelting down even harder now, pitted the surface of the water like machine-gun fire.

  The next moment she lost her balance and toppled over, losing her trilby in the process.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ sighed Caspar, kicking off his shoes. He peeled off his jacket and handed it to Poppy.

  ‘Quick,’ Po
ppy squealed, shoving him forwards and promptly dropping his jacket in a mud slick. ‘She’th going to drown!’

  The torrential rain had emptied the park as efficiently as bleach kills germs. There wasn’t another soul in sight.

  ‘Damn.’ Caspar spoke through gritted teeth. ‘She was right about something. It is bloody freezing.’

  The trilby was sailing out into the center of the lake. Eleanor Brent appeared to have sunk. Not without trace though; a stream of bubbles broke the water’s surface ahead of Caspar who was now struggling to keep his own balance.

  The bottom of the lake was disgustingly slimy. The thought of what he could be treading in made Caspar wish he hadn’t kicked off his shoes. Taking a deep breath he launched himself into a crawl in the direction of Eleanor’s bubbles.

  This was nothing like Baywatch. It didn’t bear much relation, either, to the lifesaving techniques he had practiced years ago at school, when all you’d had to save was a plastic dummy in a pair of striped pajamas. Plastic dummies cooperated beautifully. They rolled over onto their backs, let you put one hand under their chins, and allowed you to guide them effortlessly back to the side of the pool.

  They definitely didn’t kick, punch, bite, and swear at the top of their voice. Nor did they bash you on the head with a bottle of Scotch.

  ‘Drop it,’ Caspar spluttered as Eleanor Brent simultaneously kicked him in the kidneys and lashed out at his face. God, for an old dear she had a grip like superglue. ‘Drop that bottle and stop fighting—’

  ‘Bog off,’ howled Eleanor, her teeth bared with rage. ‘Think I want to be rescued by some bloody blond nancy boy who dyes his hair?’

  ‘My hair-is-not-dyed.’

  She let out a turkey screech as he managed to pry the bottle from her gnarled fingers. Her nails clawed at his neck, drawing blood. Caspar began to wonder if he was going to have to knock her out cold; at this rate, he didn’t stand a hope in hell of getting her onto dry land.

  The next moment, eel-like, Eleanor slithered from his grasp. She sank again. Caspar dived and dragged her back to the surface. This time she didn’t fight back. All her strength had gone, he realized. She had also swallowed a couple of lungfuls of lake.

  By the time Caspar managed to tow Eleanor Brent to safety, two cars had stopped. Poppy, who had flagged them down and dialed 999 on the second driver’s mobile phone, waded in up to her knees to help Caspar haul the semi-conscious Eleanor out of the water and up onto the grass.

  Eleanor promptly threw up. When she had finished, she rolled over and aimed a wild punch at Caspar’s knees.

  ‘Raving bloody poofter. My second husband was one of ’em. And what the buggering hell have you done with my Scotch?’

  ‘I’m not a poofter.’ Caspar rubbed his eyes wearily, then blinked as a flashbulb went off six feet to his left. The driver of the first car was crouching on a muddy patch of grass to get the best camera angle.

  ‘What the bloody hell was that in aid of?’ Caspar demanded. Listen to me, he thought. Eleanor Brent’s profanity must be catching.

  ‘Come on,’ reasoned the man, ‘I’ve got a mate who works in a picture agency. You’re Caspar French, aren’t you? And that’s Eleanor Brent.’ As he spoke, he took another shot. ‘I can sell these. You’ll be a hero.’

  ‘I can hear the ambulanthe,’ said Poppy, whose mouth was hurting horribly. She took off her shoes and emptied them of water.

  ‘Come here.’ Caspar patted the ground next to him, thinking that this could give Jake the break he’d been looking for. ‘Come and sit down next to me.’

  Chapter 35

  Poppy spent the next day in bed nursing a monumental toothache—or, more accurately, gapache—and gazing morosely at the photographs of Caspar and herself in the papers.

  Claudia, who had dumped the whole pile into her lap before rushing off to work, hadn’t helped.

  ‘I’ve heard of bad hair days,’ she told Poppy with ill-concealed smugness, ‘but this has to be a bad face day. You must be so embarrassed.’

  Tactless but true. With her hair plastered down, her white face grotesquely swollen on one side, and a dribble of blood smearing her chin Poppy was almost—but sadly not quite—unrecognizable. She looked like a cross between Quasimodo and a vampire left out in the rain.

  Caspar, needless to say, looked terrific.

  The day worsened as one by one, the women Caspar had stood up yesterday discovered the pictures in their own newspapers.

  Caspar made his escape shortly after breakfast, murmuring something vague about having to meet a visiting Hong Kong collector. This meant Poppy was left in the house with only a packet of ibuprofen for company.

  And a phone that rang every five minutes.

  Babette Lawrenson was the first, madder than a wasp because not only had Caspar stood up the journalist from GQ, he had made her look a fool in the bargain. It was unforgivable, she raged, not to mention bloody unprofessional. What the hell did Caspar think he was playing at?

  Poppy, who hadn’t so far met Babette, quailed beneath the onslaught. She wasn’t up to this; her jaw felt as if it were being pried apart with the kind of equipment blacksmiths used on horses’ hooves. She certainly didn’t have the energy to defend Caspar, who might have let Babette down but who had saved someone’s life.

  As if sensing as much, Babette swapped targets.

  ‘And I’m surprised you haven’t seen fit to apologize,’ she remarked acidly, ‘seeing as you were the one who persuaded him to slope off yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘But I didn’t—’

  ‘Funny, Caspar’s talked so often about you, I’d imagined someone more attractive. When I saw the photo in the paper I couldn’t have been more surprised. I had no idea you were so… plain.’

  The calculated hesitation indicated that plain was Babette’s way of saying she looked a complete fright. Poppy was rendered speechless by the jibe, all the more cruel because it was true.

  ‘Anyway, make sure Caspar rings me the moment he gets in,’ Babette concluded briskly. ‘Oh, and tell him I spoke to my travel agent last night. If we want to go ahead and book, he needs confirmation by noon tomorrow.’

  Wearily Poppy put the phone down. She wished she was one of those people who could leave it off the hook but she wasn’t.

  Minutes later, as she was mournfully examining her reflection in a hand mirror, the phone rang again.

  ‘I’ve just seen your picture in the paper,’ Dina screeched joyfully. ‘Not that I recognized you! God, Poppy—what have you been doing to yourself? You look like that chap in Alien just before the monster explodes out of his chest. Whatever’s happened to your face?’

  With friends like this, Poppy thought, who needs enemies?

  She certainly didn’t need Julia’s barbed comments. They might not have been as deliberately cruel as Babette Lawrenson’s, but the implication was there; Caspar had failed to turn up for Jules’ best friend’s wedding and it was all Poppy’s fault. Somehow she had forced Caspar to go for a walk with her in Hyde Park. He hadn’t wanted to, of course; she had dragged him along, subjected him to some insidious emotional blackmail.

  Whatever, she was the baddy. She was entirely to blame.

  It was almost a relief to field the terse calls from Bella McCloud’s manager. At least he didn’t sling vile accusations directly at her or tell her she had a face like a monkey’s bum.

  The next call was from Kate, in tears as usual. She didn’t have the nerve to point the finger at Poppy, but she undoubtedly thought it. Listening to her being sweet and understanding and asking how she felt made Poppy feel worst of all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Kate hopelessly, ‘I didn’t ask him to come along with me to the dentist. He just… insisted. You know what Caspar’s like when he makes up his mind.’

  ‘Of course I know,’ Kate sniffed. ‘It’s not your fault, Poppy. He just decided he’d rather be with you than with me. Oh bugger’—she blew her nose noisily—‘how can s-someone you love so much ma
ke you so mis-mis-miserable?’

  The last call came from her dentist, the lovely Lisa, who was too busy inflicting pain of her own to read newspapers. She hadn’t heard about the rescue in the park, she was simply phoning to invite Caspar round to her house for dinner that night.

  ‘He’s busy,’ snapped Poppy.

  ‘Oh, shame. Well, do tell him I called. Maybe another night.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Is this Poppy?’ As if remembering her for the first time, Lisa asked with professional politeness, ‘How are you feeling today?’

  ‘Like shit,’ said Poppy and hung up. She had had enough.

  When Caspar finally rolled in at six o’clock, she had had time to build up to a simmering state of rage. Misery had given way to irritation. All the blame that had been so unfairly heaped on Poppy by the various women in Caspar’s life, she was now ready to off-load onto him.

  Her jaw had never hurt more. And the swelling was expanding to unimaginable proportions. The anger inside her grew.

  First Alien, now The Elephant Man, thought Poppy as she caught sight of her reflection in the sitting-room mirror. At this rate, I’m going to do John Hurt out of a job.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Caspar, who was in great spirits. ‘How about a brandy, would that sort you out?’

  ‘I don’t need sorting out,’ Poppy snapped, itching to get started. ‘You’re the one who needs to get yourself sorted out. I’m sick of it, Caspar. Bloody sick of this.’ She tried to hurl a piece of paper at him, which didn’t really work. She should have written his messages on a brick.

  ‘Ouch.’ Caspar pretended to stagger backwards.

  ‘It’s not funny. This is the list of everyone who phoned you today. Sorry I didn’t have time to type it up’—Poppy attempted withering sarcasm—‘but I was in bed trying to get some sleep.’

  ‘Sweetheart—’

  ‘No! Shut up and let me say this. And don’t call me sweetheart,’ she yelled, ‘because I’ve had it up to here with your sweethearts. That bitch Babette… Kate… Julia… they all blame me for you standing them up yesterday. It was all my fault, wasn’t it, that you let them down! You should have heard the things they said—’