by Bella Mackie
Caro. I won’t waste time here. I hated her from the moment I met her. Intensely. I imagine you’re wondering if this is because her presence threatened to take away my oldest friend, the man I’d relied on since I was a child. To you I say: try harder. We shall have no banal cod psychology here. A month after I’d first heard about the new girlfriend, we were set to meet.
We arranged drinks at a bar in Maida Vale one Wednesday night, something I was silently furious about because I still hadn’t made any headway with my grand finale. But it was clearly a three-line whip and I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to postpone again. Jimmy and I downed a bottle of wine as we waited for her. She was so busy with work, he explained, as he scanned his phone for an update on her whereabouts. Ten minutes later, she walked in. I didn’t need to be told that it was her – I knew. Caro pushed her way past the group of people waiting to be seated without having to say a word. Phone clamped to her ear, she had long red hair (which looked intensely natural but which I later found out was dyed. Never trust an artificial redhead – their need to be different and interesting marks them out as neither) and wore a cream silk shirt and wide-leg trousers. The only makeup I could discern was a swipe of red lipstick. And it goes without saying that she was beautiful, ethereal, captivating, blah blah. She knew it. Women always know it. And Jimmy would think that he’d discovered some untapped beauty because she didn’t wear tight clothes or bother with nail varnish. Men always think that a surface level lack of vanity is a winning trait, as if the amount of effort women like Caro put into their appearance was any different from the dolled-up girls you see on any British street on a Saturday night. It’s just a different way of approaching it. And the beauty is still obvious, but men think it’s more refined, as if beauty in women is only pure when they pretend not to care about possessing it.
Ah look, I have wasted time. But it pays to have a sense of her – even if it’s just so that I can congratulate myself on my restraint as I remind myself what eventually happened. She was young – younger than Jimmy and me, but she was remarkably possessed. A lawyer, as I’ve mentioned, who specialised in complex business takeovers. She explained her job as ‘the organiser if Nike wanted to buy Adidas’. I had not asked for an explanation. I think this particularly patronising description was the specific moment when I realised that I hated her. She neither tried to win me over nor did she smother Jimmy to show her ownership. She was cool with him, which of course made him even more frantic in his affection, and she was matter-of-fact with me. We spent a couple of hours circling around each other, but I didn’t really give it my best shot because all I could really focus on was how rapt Jim was. How much nervous energy he was emitting. How desperate he was for us to connect, be firm friends, link around him. I felt rising anxiety, feeling my fingers crawl up my neck, desperate to scratch. At 11 p.m., in the middle of a story Jimmy was telling about a family holiday where we ended up climbing a mountain by mistake, Caro put her hand over his and rubbed the skin between his thumb and finger and said that she had to go to bed. And just like that, the evening was over. The bill was requested, Ubers were ordered, and I was dispatched with a bear hug from Jimmy and an air kiss from Caro which did not require her to touch me. Their cab came first, and they drove off, Caro looking down at her phone without a backwards glance. Neither of them had suggested another meet up.
I knew that there was no way to play this and win. Jimmy was completely infatuated with this woman, and any sign of reluctance from me would have propelled him towards her even faster. I’ve always wondered why people get so defensive about criticism of their partners. If your mother, a person who has known you since you were a screeching potato in a onesie, thinks that the person you’re with is a bit off, why the fuck would you discount that? Tell me if the person I’ve fallen in love with seems like a monster. List the ways. Do a deep dive into it, make graphs. I want all the information. But nobody else ever seems to. And Jimmy was no different. All I could do was be nice and hope that Caro got bored. Her attitude towards him had hardly screamed ‘devoted’ and I clung to that for a while.
A night at the Latimers’ soon slashed that particular dinghy. I had long moved out by then of course but the penance I paid for escaping (middle-class kids stay at home throughout their twenties in London; they might rent a flat somewhere else for a bit, but even then they partially live at home until their parents stump up some deposit for a mortgage and they can actually have their own place for real) was that I had somehow found myself promising Sophie that I’d come for supper at least twice a month. This was a promise I really had no intention of keeping – modern life is 75 per cent cancelling plans and both parties feeling relieved – but I underestimated Sophie’s need to stay involved, to always feel as though she played a vital role in the lives of those she knew. I tried to cancel at the beginning – I’d cry off with headaches or late nights at work. Every single time I offered up a plausible excuse that would save us both from the hassle, she’d offer her commiserations and promptly suggest another date instead. And if I cancelled that date, she’d just offer up another. She didn’t really want me there, you understand, but it was a good show to keep up with the orphan that she had so selflessly taken in. I fast realised that I’d be better off picking the dates that worked best for me and sucking it up. For years that meant the second and last Sundays in every month. Always at the family home. Always an Ottolenghi recipe that called for spices that even Sophie, who spun out over local grocery shops in the way that others might salivate when they see a shop window full of diamonds, couldn’t find. As a result, every meal tasted predominantly of basil, since she could get that at any Waitrose going.
The Sunday when I saw that Caro had burrowed deeper than I’d previously realised was an unusual one, in that neither John nor Annabelle (nor Jimmy for that matter) were around to join us. Normally we were buffeted along by other people, indulging in pointless talk about how awful it was that the local library was to close, and wasn’t austerity finally revealing its true victims. The kind of politics talk that achieves nothing but that a certain type of person perseveres with because it makes them feel like they’re doing something about it just by mentioning it. God knows none of the Latimers ever went to the local library in the years I spent with them.
Sophie was completely undeterred by the concentrated chat we would now have to have with each other. Sophie never feels awkward in conversation. The way she views it, she always has something interesting to say, and what on earth could make her feel inadequate when armed with that certainty?
As she poured me a glass of wine and shoved the aged cat off the sofa, she began to gush about Caro. ‘Lovely girl – Jimmy said you’ve met her. She’s actually the daughter of Anne Morton – you know, the last foreign sec, and Lionel Ferguson. He writes fabulous books about the British empire. We knew them fairly well from an NCT class we took when I was pregnant with Annabelle – we both had these big bumps and bonded over the ridiculously judgey group leader we had. We saw them at parties over the years but of course Anne had a demanding job and by then they’d moved to Richmond. So remarkable that our boy has ended up dating little Caro.’
Oh God. Of course. That kind of self-assuredness that Caro had didn’t come from nowhere. Her father was called fucking LIONEL. Her mother was a politician. And on top of the privilege she’d been born with, she was striking and smart too. I used to flick through the society pages of Tatler in the office sometimes, usually to see if Bryony was featured, where the women in the photos were always the daughters of earls or dukes as standard. But it bothered me that they were also ethereal, limby, beautiful. How did the luckiest in society also get to be physically superior? I’d assumed the breeding pool for those kinds of people was so small as to ensure genetic weakness, but here they all were – the Caros floating around looking effortless and perfect, gliding through life with the confidence that they won the birth pool jackpot.
Sophie carried on gushing. Caro had sent her a limi
ted edition of Toni Morrison’s essays last week. Caro had cooked for the family round at Jimmy’s. The chicken had been perfection. Caro had suggested a weekend in France in the spring. I traced my fingers along the scratch marks the spiteful old cat had made on the arm of the sofa and nodded. Sophie didn’t much want me to contribute anything here. And I didn’t have anything to contribute that she’d want to hear anyway.
‘Yes, it’s soon but John and I were only together for a few months before we shacked up in that little flat in the Angel,’ I heard her say. I looked up and rewound the conversation. They were moving in together! It had been … I cast my mind back … a little over two months since they met. What kind of needy lunatic shacks up with someone when they haven’t even admitted that their favourite movie is Die Hard and not, as they’d said on date two, Il Postino? I mean, I don’t think Jimmy has even seen Il Postino. Maybe he’d say some obvious Tarantino film.
Caro didn’t strike me as needy. She didn’t give off the desperate vibe that so many high-flying women do who really yearn for a good man and a chance to endlessly look at paint samples for the vintage dresser they bought together. Why was she pushing this? Jimmy might be head over heels but he wouldn’t have suggested moving in – he didn’t have any get-up-and-go, no drive like that. For Jim, everything plodding along nicely was the ideal state of play.
‘Of course, it’s very heartbreaking for yours truly that he’s moving into hers – Clapham is absolutely miles away – but her flat is divine and much nearer her work, so I do understand.’ Sophie looked up from stirring the risotto and smiled at me. ‘You’ll be a bit unsettled not having him around so much, I think? We’ll have to find you your own Caro.’
I was unsettled. I wouldn’t admit that to Sophie, who has always been slightly nervous about just how close I am with her son. Not that she’s ever blatantly discouraged it – nothing so blunt. I think she just found it strange that her son could spend his entire teenage years hanging around with a girl without ever falling for her. Or at least, never saying it outright. Sophie and John don’t really have friends of the opposite sex – it’s always couples at their dinner parties, or the occasional single pal that they tried to set up with someone, normally in vain. I still suspect that she spent our teenage years hovering outside the den, just waiting to swing the door open and find us naked together. She never did. I think that was even more disconcerting for her than if she had. At least then she’d understand the dynamic.
The thing is, Jimmy has probably always been in love with me. Oh, he’s never said it. He’s probably not even aware of it on a conscious level. Jimmy isn’t one for deep introspection. But I’ve known it forever. You just know, don’t you? And normally, that would be a friendship breaker – at some point, someone confesses, or lunges, or starts acting out. But not Jimmy. He loves me fiercely. I’m a part of him. But it never tipped into anything of note. Well, we wobbled just that once, when we were just on the cusp of adulthood and I didn’t want him to pull away completely. But mostly I held the line – never giving him a suggestion of something more, or encouraging him to explore the possibility. No lingering looks, no drunken hugs that feel just a little too intense. I’ve played it well and kept my friend. I knew that any potential exploration of deeper feelings would break us in ways that we couldn’t fix. And why would I fuck it up for some idiotic attempt at a relationship in our teenage years, when nothing meant anything? I always stored it away, thinking that it was something to revisit when we were both older, when the mission that had driven my life was finished. A bond that I’d made over years and years would reward me with a simple and uncomplicated future. But I couldn’t think of any of that yet, not while I had such work to do. I’d not even entertained it properly, never imagined the specifics of that life. It was just a vague sense, but one that was strong, and always there. And now I could see that Caro was going to derail it all. You cannot account for the Caros of the world, no matter how tightly you try to control things. People like her take pleasure in striding into your world and taking what they want from it. Not even deliberately, the bonus of your loss is just a nice extra. I might be able to carry out a ruthless line in fairly epic revenge, but I didn’t know how to stop love. That felt completely beyond me and it made me feel like I was drowning.
* * *
I have derailed myself. My mother used to do this and it always enraged me. A story about a trip to the supermarket would veer off into some sad tale of the local café owner and her back problems and I would sit there scratching at my arm wanting to bark at her to hurry up. Nobody gives a shit about the stupid café woman, I wanted to say. Stop caring so much for strangers who don’t even know your name and figure out a way to get the heating back on. All of this is to say, I could write an entire book about the trials of Caro, but it is not the most interesting story I have to tell, and also, she’s dead. So I was the victor. Except I wasn’t. Because Caro was never going to let me win with any ease, was she?
The facts are these. Jimmy moved into Caro’s immaculate flat in Clapham. His communication with me crumbled almost immediately. Long chats on the phone late at night were out first. Then impromptu coffees or meet-ups in the pub we’d frequented since we were old enough were next to go – after all, Clapham is another country when you live north of the river. The text chain was not erased entirely, but I was the initiator more often than not, which made me feel pathetic and furious. Worse, whenever I did see Jim, she usually inserted herself into the plans. Drinks (with her friends), dinner at the Latimers’ (where she would greet me at the door), occasional parties at their flat, where she would make a great show of introducing me to incredibly dull, ruddy-faced men in chinos and then abandon me and walk off looking amused.
I took it all. I didn’t engage in the game. I had bigger things to do – I was gearing up for my final assault on the Artemis family and I was frustrated enough by my lack of a proper plan, I wouldn’t compromise that to indulge a bored posh girl who wanted me to care enough that it made Jimmy seem more of a prize. Instead, I watched her. And I learned four things:
Caro had a raging eating disorder
Caro had a not insignificant drug habit
Caro flew into rages with Jim which often became mildly physical (from her side)
Caro was desperately unhappy
What a fucking cliché.
He proposed on her birthday. I don’t mean to imply that Jimmy has no spontaneity but people who propose on big meaningful dates lack imagination. I cannot envisage a worse day to get down on one knee than a family Christmas where your dad started on the Buck’s Fizz by 11 a.m. Sophie was beside herself with excitement. Even John was beaming at the celebratory lunch. The Morton family were invited, and the old family connections were fast revived over couscous and a nice assortment of Italian white wines that Lionel brought from his cellar. Caro was her usual collected self, wearing a silk jumpsuit and showing off her ring only when requested, nails short and free of varnish. Jimmy smiled a lot at her, but he was quiet, following her around, only really speaking when she asked him a question.
There was one fun little moment at the lunch, when Caro’s mother started talking about how shocking the death of Bryony Artemis was. The group collectively leant forward around the table, gossiping like old women about a young woman they’d never met, offering up theories about her demise and talking about how ghastly her family was.
‘Gave £50,000 to the government trying to be made a lord, I hear. As if we need more barrow boys in the house. Men like that make a mockery of the entire system.’ I sat there quietly, sipping my wine and enjoying the hypocrisy of these people who pretend to be above such salacious stories suddenly finding themselves more animated than they’d been all day. The following conversation about the latest Ian McEwan novel wasn’t nearly as lively, I can tell you.
Two days after the lunch, I broke. I had taken my eye off the ball, so consumed with panic about my master plan and the rising impotence I felt about access to Simon. I st
upidly assumed I had more time to deal with this lesser problem, but I was gravely mistaken. I asked Jim to meet me at the Southbank, where I greeted him with coffee and we walked along the river. He traced the freckles on my arm absent-mindedly, like he used to when we were teenagers and saw ourselves as a unit of two. Not charged with a frisson of anticipation but warm with the familiar. He called me ‘Gray’ as he always used to, and teased me about the new shoes I was wearing.
‘So flashy, Gray, your footwear doesn’t have to look like modern art.’
I retorted that his new silk scarf made him look like an old Italian count, and he had the good sense to look embarrassed. We both knew Caro had chosen it. After a while, I asked about wedding plans, introducing the subject with a light touch which felt obvious. He was vague, talking about Caro’s wish to have the dinner at a private club her dad belonged to. Jim didn’t sound too keen, and he kept his eyes on the water flowing next to us. A lull in the conversation gave me the push to get to the point.
I told him that her outbursts were concerning me, that I’d seen the scratches on his neck at lunch. I said that Caro had monopolised him, rubbed out all the things that made him him, and that I thought that marrying her would be a bad idea. I’d got it into my head that this was courageous, and that whatever happened, he’d want me to say it. He looked away as I said it, put his cup in a bin, and then walked over to the river barrier and breathed deeply.