Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  Peering out at them unseen from the shop window I saw to my secret delight that he was wearing a bracelet, which nearly made me shout with laughter, until I noticed that Hugo was wearing one too, peeping out of the French cuff of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. They were matching. How very lovely.

  It had nearly killed me, seeing them together, but in the interests of Tom’s happiness and my own sanity – and taking sage advice from Suzy – I’d decided that I was going to try to get on with Greg. But guess what? He refused to be nice to me.

  When they had been living together quite a while – he’d moved in almost immediately, so much for doing it ‘in stages’ – I’d told Hugo I thought Greg and I should meet officially. Hugo was pathetically grateful and I think in a funny way he wanted to show us off to each other. The only problem was the venue. I still wasn’t ready to have Greg in my home and visiting them in their homo love shack was definitely out of the question, so I suggested Hugo brought him into the shop one evening after closing.

  I was incredibly nervous before they arrived and felt furious with myself as I tidied and restyled everything, so it would look its best. Who was I trying to impress, I wondered, but I had drinks and nibbly bits all ready and I was determined to make the meeting go as well as possible.

  Of course, they arrived just as I was lying on the floor trying to reach a spool of ribbon that had rolled under a cabinet. Not a great start. Greg looked down his nose at me, folded his arms and sat on my counter, pushing my carefully assembled plate of crostini out of the way with his hip.

  Hugo pulled me up from the floor by my hand and gave me a warm hug. I saw Greg sniff and look away. Then he picked up a little ceramic figure of a pug that I kept by the till because it reminded me of my mother’s dog. He looked at it with contempt and practically threw it down again. Hugo didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Antonia,’ he said, Mr Manners to the last, ‘I would like you to meet Greg Papodopoulos. Greg, this is Antonia Heaveringham.’

  I felt my mouth twitch with childish amusement at his name, but managed to control it. I was about to put my hand out to shake his, when an instinct made me wait to see if he did it first. He didn’t. He didn’t say anything either. He didn’t even look at me.

  I looked at Hugo, questioningly. He scratched his head. Then he folded his arms very high up his chest in a posture I knew to be his personal expression of extreme social discomfort. It pleased me to know that it would be a while before Mr Papodopoulos would be able to read him as clearly as I could.

  ‘Now,’ said Hugo, trying again, in a tone he had learned in school army cadets. ‘I think it’s important that we all face up to the situation. It’s not easy, but we are all going to bump into each other all the time in Sydney and I, for one, would like to think we could all …’ – he glanced at Greg as he said it – ‘at least be civil to each other.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said in my most cut-glass voice. Then I waited for Greg’s agreement. Silence from Mr Pap.

  ‘How about you, Greg?’ I said, eventually, trying to make contact. For Tom’s sake, more than anything, I had decided to give him one more chance. He looked up and sighed, like it was the most boring thing he’d ever been asked to do and finally looked me in the eye.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Whatever.’ I could have slapped his spoiled little dermabrased face. Of all the men in the world, I thought, why was my darling husband in love with this one?

  ‘Right then,’ said Hugo, delighted with the progress. ‘I believe Tom is at Vita’s house this evening, isn’t he, Ant?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So how about we all go out to dinner and you two can get to know each other properly?’ he continued in gung-ho mode.

  ‘I’m busy,’ said Greg, way too quickly. ‘Actually, Hugo, we’re busy. We’re going to Nikki’s.’

  He gave me a triumphant look as he said it – all of it guaranteed to cause me maximum pain and insult.

  Hugo looked as though he’d been winded. I knew this was not how he had wanted it to go. It was his dearest wish that I would come to love darling Greg, as he did – and vice versa – and now he knew it was hopeless. I folded my arms too. My flinty core came out.

  ‘You know, Greg,’ I said. ‘It’s one thing to steal someone’s husband and take him away from his home and his child, but it’s quite another to then be plain rude to the person you’ve done it to, who is trying to do the decent thing by you. And as someone who has known Hugo Heaveringham for an awfully long time, I’m going to give you a piece of advice. The Heaveringhams are a family who put a lot of store by good manners, so if you want to stick around one of them you’d better learn some.’

  I paused to savour the look on his face.

  ‘Do give Nikki my love,’ I continued. ‘And have a lovely evening. Goodbye.’

  It was a golden moment. I didn’t care if I was going to regret it later, it felt so good telling him what I thought. He looked so angry and so surprised, it was brilliant. My cheeks were flaming and my heart was thumping, but it felt really good. He started to storm out, before pausing in the doorway.

  ‘I’m leaving, Hugo, and you’d better come with me,’ he hissed and then – get this – he actually spat on my floor.

  I just looked at Hugo. Words weren’t necessary. I knew Greg was history. Hugo was clearly infatuated with him, but there were some lines I knew you could never cross with a Heaveringham and Greg had just pole-vaulted across one of them. Hugo gave him a cold look and turned to me. He took my hands in his and looked at me, sadly.

  ‘Thank you for inviting us here tonight, Ant,’ he said. ‘It was extremely gracious of you and I apologize for my friend’s behaviour. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Hugo lifted my hands to his lips and kissed them, then he left. As he hit the street, I realized that he was actually running after Greg.

  I went home to an empty house.

  I got even less sleep than usual that night, turning the evening’s events over and over in my head. Surely Hugo couldn’t stay with someone as awful as Greg, but if he didn’t, would he come back to us? And would I take him?

  I really didn’t know. It had been over three months since Hugo had come out and moved out, the hardest months of my life, but by concentrating on the shop and on Tom, and with the help of Suzy’s CD, like the song said – I had survived. I didn’t know if I was prepared to risk it all happening again. Because now that Hugo had come to terms with being gay, if it wasn’t Greg, surely it would just be someone else?

  I wondered yet again if I shouldn’t just move back to London. That had been my first instinct when the whole thing had happened, but when I’d thought more about it, I’d realized it would be much harder for Tom to be separated from his father by twelve thousand miles, than having him living around the corner with a man.

  There was also the consideration that I would have to explain why I had left Hugo, to all my friends and relations – not to mention Hugo’s lot. There had never been a divorce in the Heaveringham family, as Lady H was very fond of announcing, and it wasn’t a precedent I wanted to be responsible for setting.

  In fact, I was so frightened of her I was quite happy to go along with Hugo’s pretence that we now had two phone numbers at the same house – the ‘family number’, which was the old number in our house, and his ‘personal line’, which was actually the phone in his new house. He’d told her it was something to do with the internet and she’d never questioned it. None of them had. They weren’t what you’d call a close family.

  I was quite happy to keep up the pretence for myself as well. So far I hadn’t even told my own parents or any of my friends back home what had happened. I was just too humiliated. I’d only told my sisters, who were both wonderful and agreed I should stay in Australia for the time being, for Tom’s sake and my own.

  As my elder sister, the ever sensible solicitor Rebecca, reasoned – her legal analysis coming to the fore – it was one thing being a single mother in Sydney, wh
ere everything was new and strange, but to do it in London, where there were ghosts of Hugo’s and my past on every corner, would be unbearable. Plus, she pointed out, it would mean more upheaval for Tom.

  She was right, and apart from anything else, I didn’t want to leave my little shop. I loved Anteeks and it was doing really well. I knew I would never be able to afford the equivalent location in London and I just wasn’t ready to chuck it all in. Then Hugo really would have spoiled everything for me, I thought. So I stayed.

  Hugo didn’t ring me the day after my encounter with grisly Greg, which surprised me, but Suzy did.

  ‘Hear your husband’s split up from his little bum chum,’ she said, straight to the point as always.

  ‘How on earth did you hear that?’ I asked, still not used to the speed of the Eastern Suburbs tom-toms, but delighted at the news.

  ‘Had my hair done this morning. Greg wasn’t in. Too upset. He was over at Nikki’s, being comforted.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  ‘Will you take Hugo back, Ant?’ said Suzy. ‘If he wants to come?’

  I thought for a moment and suddenly the answer I had tossed and turned about all night was clear to me.

  ‘No,’ I said, firmly. ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Suzy. ‘That’s the way.’

  And it was lucky I had reached that conclusion, because two days later, I heard that Greg had moved back in with Hugo. I didn’t understand what my charming husband could see in such a nasty piece of work, but he was a grown man and had to make his own choices. And it just went to prove, I thought, lust conquers all.

  More dull Hugo-less weeks went by and as the leaves fell off the spreading trees in Queen Street and it turned into Sydney’s strangely bleak version of winter, I tried to stop thinking about myself and concentrated instead on making sure Tom was happy.

  I was also very glad of having the shop to distract me and it was doing better than ever after a wonderful six-page spread in Vogue Living. With lavish pictures of the shop and the house, with lots of gorgeous detail shots, it made me and Tom look happy and sparkling – almost a perfect couple in our own right. It cheered me up a lot. I also took up my old hobby of needlepoint, to fill up the long evenings and the quiet hours in the shop.

  Tom had his own name for my rediscovered hobby. One quiet afternoon he was ‘helping’ in Anteeks as he did most days after school and after rearranging a display of old teapots – rather well, I had to admit – he came and leaned on the arm of my chair and watched me stitching.

  ‘What are you doing, Mummy? Is it sewing?’ he asked after a few moments.

  ‘It’s a sort of sewing,’ I told him. ‘But it’s called needlepoint.’

  He watched for a few more moments before making one of his characteristic pronouncements. Tom was a very definite boy.

  ‘Well, I think you should call it filling holes, because that’s all it is. You’re just filling holes with wool.’

  So that’s what we called it from then on, filling holes. But however pointless it seemed to Tom, I’d always enjoyed it and I had fun coming up with smart lines to embroider on cushions for the shop.

  A pretty pink one with ‘Yes’ on one side and ‘No’ on the other was my biggest seller, closely followed by a matching pair that had ‘Chairman of the Board’ on a navy blue cushion and ‘Chairperson of the Bored’, on a lilac one. It clearly struck a chord with the locals and was bought in equal numbers by thin women with large diamonds and expensive hairdos and well-dressed young men with large muscles and expensive hairdos, which pretty much summed up my clientele.

  So those were my days – sitting in the shop, filling holes – and my nights were spent in front of the television, alternately sobbing at anything remotely sad and eating biscuits. Once I nearly choked on a chocolate chip cookie, I was weeping so hard at a British Airways commercial. It was truly pathetic.

  Then one day, when I was really starting to wonder if I would ever go out again, a particularly lavish object dropped through my letter box. It was a large fuchsia pink envelope, lined with tissue and addressed in gold, and it contained quite the most splendid invitation I had ever seen. It was from Suzy, who was having a huge fortieth-birthday party, at their Palm Beach house.

  ‘I did think about having it in town,’ she told me the next morning, when we met for brekkie in Queen Street, ‘because it is winter, but I want people to make a weekend of it. I didn’t have a big wedding, so I’m having this instead. Five hundred of my closest friends,’ she laughed. ‘Just a cosy little evening …’

  And that was what I really liked about Suzy – she did laugh at herself. She was definitely a central figure in the champagne social set and among the ‘top end of town’ wheeler-dealers in her professional life, but she could see the preposterous side of it all too.

  Underneath the Crème de la Mer skin, the head-to-toe black label Armani, the daily blow-dry and the serious rocks, a conscience lurked in Suzy Thorogood.

  I reckoned it was left over from her radical student days, when she’d intended to be a human rights lawyer, before getting waylaid by the more lucrative speciality of corporate PR. She’d once let it slip to me that she worked in a soup kitchen every Christmas Day, but she’d made me swear not to tell any of the other ‘girls’ about it. She didn’t want them to think she was a ‘goody goody’.

  ‘I’d hate to live up to my married name too literally,’ she’d said, grinning.

  But while it was good to know that she wasn’t as silly as the likes of Nikki Maier and Caroline French, I was delighted that it was the socialite side of Suzy which was planning her birthday party. I was seriously in the mood for some fun.

  ‘The decorative theme is A Thousand and One Nights,’ she told me, excitedly. ‘I’ve hired a guy called Antony Maybury to do it all. He’s really a dressmaker, in fact he’s making my dress for the party, but he’s brilliant at styling parties too – especially when the budget is no object.’

  She laughed at herself again and somehow when Suzy said something like that, it didn’t bother me. I normally hated people talking about money, but she was proud of her wealth – their wealth – in a way that was somehow acceptable. They hadn’t started with much, she’d told me, but between the two of them they had built it up and now they had all kinds of business interests and directorships, as well as their own principal professions.

  I had no idea how much money they actually had – apart from people you know are bona fide billionaires, I’ve never really understood how much money you need to have to be considered ‘rich’ – but it was obvious from the way the other women on the circuit deferred to Suzy, that she and Roger had more than most.

  At first it had amazed me that Hugo and I seemed to know so many rich people in Sydney, but after a while it was quite easy to forget that there was a real world out there as well. In London you were constantly aware of the gulf in fortune that exists in large cities, but in Sydney I rarely ventured out of Woollahra, unless I was going to Palm Beach, or on one of my buying expeditions, and it was easy to start thinking that everyone lived in a five-million-dollar house, had an ocean-going yacht, ate out every night and always flew first class.

  I did try to remind myself that the life I was leading wasn’t normal, but for the time being I was quite happy to share Suzy’s excitement as she planned what she was determined would be remembered as the ‘party of the decade’.

  And that was another thing I liked about Suzy – funny, kind and self-deprecating as she could be, at heart she was still fantastically ambitious in every area of her life. It wasn’t enough for her to be the social doyenne, the most successful woman in her profession, an adoring mother to her two teenage children and very popular, she also had to be a famous hostess and a perfect size 10 – and I was told she was an absolute demon on the tennis court. She hated to lose.

  She was certainly determined that her party would be an unforgettable hit.

  ‘We’re flying in loads of stuff from Morocco a
nd India, as props,’ she told me. ‘We’ve got two hundred carpets coming and hundreds of lanterns and cushions and big painted plates that we’re going to pile up with couscous. We’ve got embroidered tents coming from Rajasthan, musicians from Goa and a chef from Marrakesh. We’re going totally overboard on the décor, but it’s not fancy dress. I want people to really dress up and look gorgeous. Vogue Entertaining are doing a shoot at the party, so you’ll have to get an amazing outfit together, Antonia. No flip-flops – that’s what you Poms call them, isn’t it? – this time, please.’

  She looked me over fondly. I knew my hair could do with a wash, I was wearing my usual droopy layers and a pair of old Tod’s which were seriously due for retirement. My trusty Mexican basket was at my side.

  ‘I’ll lend you some jewellery,’ she said.

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ I said in a mock haughty voice. ‘I’ve actually got quite a healthy collection of jewels stashed away at home, from the Heaveringham vaults. It’s one of the advantages of marrying into the aristocracy, you know. I just don’t wear them during the day, like you colonials all do.’

  We giggled.

  ‘What? Second-hand jewellery?’ she said, pulling a face and pretending to be horrified – I’d told her about Nikki’s trip to Wally’s Where House.

  We laughed some more and my mood got even better when Suzy told me she wanted me to be one of the select few who stayed in the house for the party, coming up on the Friday night on the sea plane, which they had chartered for the whole weekend to ferry guests back and forth from the city to Palm Beach.