Friends for Life

by Carol Smith

  “She took the morphine sulphate I left to assuage the pain. It was a shame really, though in any case she hadn’t long to go. These things do happen. Whether she knew what she was doing isn’t clear, but in extremis people should be allowed to think for themselves.”

  He emptied his glass.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  Oliver watched him shrewdly. There was no doubt Addison was holding something back but it wasn’t his right to push any harder. He’d scarcely known the woman, after all, and come to that, neither had Viv. If Addison had helped her on her way, then that was his business and doubtless an act of mercy. One thing Oliver was profoundly glad of was that he didn’t have to make decisions like that. Money was one thing, and he had often watched lives collapse through mismanagement, but at least if he ever made a faulty diagnosis, it was not exactly life-threatening. Or, at least, not often.

  The clock over the bar was pointing to eight.

  “Must go,” he said. “Same time next week?”

  • • •

  “I really don’t know how I’m going to handle it,” said Beth, phone tucked under her chin as she tried to do something last-minute to her hair. Oliver was already late so she was grabbing the time for a swift consultation with Jane.

  “I don’t know how I feel about him anymore, for one thing, and I just don’t want to go to bed with him. Not now. Not since Duncan.” There, it was out. It did sound faintly wet, she realized, but that was how she was. And Jane was her best friend and would understand.

  The last thing comfortably married Jane wanted to do was promote the cause of Oliver, but it was still early days, and a bird in the hand . . .

  “What exactly is happening with Duncan?” she asked. She had not yet been allowed to meet Mr. Wonderful but he was all Beth talked about these days.

  “Really not a lot.” One of Beth’s endearing traits was her total honesty. “But I think he likes me.”

  Which had to be the understatement of the year but that was something she needed to keep to herself, at least until she had some evidence to share with her friend.

  “He rings a lot. And he’s nice to Imogen. And we make each other laugh.”

  And he makes my knees shake and my knickers damp just thinking about him and all I can think of, day and night, is the thought of being in his arms, his bed, his life forevermore.

  “How does he kiss? Or don’t you know?”

  Beth laughed.

  “It’s not quite that dire, thank you very much. We’re beyond playing doctors and nurses, I’m happy to tell you.”

  But it was a bit of a puzzle. She fell silent and thought about it, feeling the familiar swoop of excitement in the pit of her stomach. Duncan’s kisses were all she lived for now, too incredibly exciting even to begin to describe.

  “Not at all bad,” she admitted. “Or else I’d begin to think he was gay.”

  “Well, there must be something wrong.” Jane was a pragmatist. “Or what’s he waiting for? Is he married, do you think? Or perhaps it’s Imogen he’s after. You want to watch these men. Nowadays almost anything goes.”

  Beth gurgled with delight. “Maybe he’s a Hare Krishna. Or do I mean a Mormon?”

  “That wouldn’t get in the way of lust,” said Jane. “Grist to his mill, in fact. You could simply join the team. Nights off to wash your hair while he was otherwise occupied, stuff like that. But do they have them down under?”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Cripes, he’s here. Oliver, I mean. What am I going to do? You still haven’t told me. Quick!”

  “Have a headache. Or a period. Or genital herpes, take your pick. But remember—anything that’s coming to him he richly deserves, so whatever you do, take no hostages. And ring me back the second he’s gone. Otherwise I shall know he won.”

  • • •

  Oliver sat with his head in his hands, more moved than Beth had expected. This was quite a revelation but it came too late. It seemed this man really did care for her, in his own somewhat detached manner. That, or else he was a bloody fine actor. She longed to cross the room to him but stuck to her chair and her guns. It was proving quite upsetting, particularly since she had nothing really to tell him to make things easier to swallow. And that mattered: Beth was a creature of conscience.

  I’ve met this bloke I fancy. Put that way, it would sound too wet for words.

  “I never pretended to be anything but married,” said Oliver eventually, in a low voice. He raised his head and stared at her with reproachful eyes. What was going on here? Was she turning broody all of a sudden? Beth, of all people? It didn’t bear contemplating.

  She shuffled awkwardly and picked at the pewter roses, longing to find a fly. Was he going soft?

  “I know,” she said. “It isn’t that. You’ve never promised anything you couldn’t deliver. I respect you for that.”

  “Then what? Bed is good, isn’t it? I always felt we shared at least that.”

  She glanced at his stricken face and felt even more of a heel. Oh, Lord, what was she to do? Leaving Gus had been bad enough but at least he had wanted his freedom. She had always felt, deep down, that Oliver could take it or leave it, which was part of his attraction; kept her keen. Now she wasn’t so sure. She took a deep breath and pretended to level with him. It might sound a touch naive but it was easier than the truth.

  “It’s Vivienne,” she said. “I like your wife.”

  “Well, I’m glad. So do I. But what difference can that possibly make to us? She has nothing to do with you and me. She’s another part of my life entirely and what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

  Beth’s anguish eased a little. Bastard. Now he was talking like a man; her feet touched bottom and she braced herself.

  “It matters to me. While I didn’t know her, I could only imagine, but now all that has changed. The monstrous Her Inside who gave you such a terrible home life has gone and all I see now is that fragile, frightened woman who always seems so sad.”

  She knew she was enraging him but it couldn’t be helped. It was true what they said; men were pigs. She had started, so she would have to finish, and now was the moment for the coup de grâce, even though it could mean she would spend the rest of her life regretting. And alone.

  Oliver got up, his hands wide in helpless exasperation, and paced the room. Beth, curled in her chair, watched him in silence. There was no answer to this one, none that she could see. He turned to her, pleading, and dragged her into his arms. Normally his fierce kisses reduced her to putty but tonight something magical had happened to her hormones. They just weren’t functioning; he left her cold. Even the seductive scent of his aftershave failed to thrill her. All he was, she saw now with ice-cold clarity, was a beautiful, sexy, selfish man without an ounce of humor or understanding.

  “Come to bed,” he whispered, sticking his tongue down her throat. “And I’ll show you what you’d lose if you ever let me go.”

  She gently disengaged his hands and moved away.

  • • •

  “What it boils down to,” she told Gus the following morning as they strolled arm in arm through the new Whiteleys complex, watching Imogen dodge excitedly among the Saturday shoppers like a dog let off its lead, “is that I am a free agent and what I want goes.”

  Gus squeezed her arm and laughed. This was Beth at her heady best and he thoroughly approved, even if these days she did scare him slightly. They wandered into a bookshop and stood together, companionably leafing through the new publications.

  “I’m sorry if it upsets you in any way,” he said. “But I have a strong feeling it doesn’t.”

  She grinned wryly.

  “You know me. Never content with what I’ve got.”

  Imogen joined them and Beth drew them both into a tight three-way hug.

  “Well, that’s not entirely true,” she added. “What I’ve got is here and that’s really all that matters.”

  Gus shook his head in exaggerated wonder and followed her out
of the shop.

  “Women!” he whispered to his daughter, tucking her hand into his sleeve and stepping forward to grab her mother. “I’ll never understand them, but I guess that’s all part of the fun.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Oliver came home in the worst possible temper but for once Vivienne was in no mood to humor him.

  “You’re late!” she snarled from the bathtub as he burst into the bedroom, and she didn’t even bother to hide the glass.

  “And what’s that to you?” he demanded with equal froideur, even though he was fighting mad and fit to punch the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be her. He ripped off his tie and then his jacket and flung both on the floor in a childish attitude of rebellion. What he wanted more than anything was a drink. He kicked off his shoes and pounded downstairs in his socks but Vivienne had removed the Stolichnaya to the privacy of the bathroom, so he poured a large brandy instead.

  Women. He had had it up to here with them. He was too agitated to work so returned to the bedroom, the only lighted beacon in the house, and threw himself onto the bed. There was silence. In the bathroom the water moved slightly as Vivienne sat up and craned round the door in a fit of curiosity to see what was biting him. All she could see were his feet, dangling over the edge of the bed, and bits and pieces of his clothing strewn across the floor. Most interesting. Despite herself, something moved deep within her and she automatically checked out her appearance in the mirrored wall to see that she was not looking too much of a fright.

  “Oliver?” she tried tentatively as she drained her glass, but there was silence.

  She pushed herself upward out of the foam, wrapped a vast white bathsheet round her as she stepped onto the monogrammed mat, checked her eyes for smudged mascara, and advanced into the room.

  “Oliver?”

  He lay supine, staring up at the ceiling, and his eyes were open but not focused. The top two buttons of his lavender shirt were undone and he smelled divine as she leaned across to check his pulse, then caught his fishy eye upon her and giggled suddenly like a schoolgirl.

  “Oliver!” she breathed as he caught her in a sudden snatch and ripped away the towel, rough hands working her breasts, harsh tongue burrowing into her cleavage. Suddenly awake and as hard and ferocious as a tiger, he was on top of her, pinning her wrists to the pillow, tearing, pummeling, thrusting into her flesh until she wanted to scream out with pain. With the terrifying, unexpected, exquisite pain of it all—pain she had long dreamed of; pain that was almost forgotten.

  “Oliver,” she murmured again when he was through, smoothing back the wild damp hair and kissing the eyelids closed in exhaustion, with lashes like a cat’s fanned softly across his cheek.

  For a long time she lay, spent with emotion, his weight pressing down on her, the damp from the bath drying on her skin, a sharp, sweet, long-forgotten ache issuing from between her legs. Tomorrow she would be sore; just as well she was not going horse-riding. Like an old movie projected on the ceiling, it all came back in sharp, clear focus, that night at the Clermont when she was still just a silly girl and had first set eyes on this man at the gaming table. The night arranged by Fate which had altered the course of both their lives.

  And, once again, she found herself remembering Celia Hartley.

  Vivienne had only actually seen her once, the girl it was widely rumored Oliver Nugent was set to marry. She was a slight, fey slip of a thing in old-fashioned ivory lace, with her hair coiled heavily on the back of her head like an Edwardian heroine and a frowning mama in heavy whale-boned silk like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Vivienne had refused to take her seriously. She might be filthy rich—her family originated in Bristol and founded their huge fortune on the slave trade—but she was certainly no match for a man as lusty as Oliver or, come to that, an opponent with real fire in her belly like Vivienne. At first Vivienne had been wary of Celia, for the fortune which was greater than anything her father had yet amassed, and the sickly breeding which spoke out of every fine bone in her face. But once she had caught Oliver’s eye and seen the visible quickening of his pulse whenever she was near, the other girl had failed to exist as anything more than an irritation; certainly not a threat.

  From the moment of that fateful dinner in Sherborne, Vivienne knew she had won—it was just a matter of waiting it out. From that point on, she had acted as if Oliver were already hers, with not a single thought for the gentle, ailing Celia languishing in her rose-scented bedroom, waiting for him to make their union official. Raised by Eugene to go out and grab what she wanted, Vivienne had made it her aim always to be firmly in the center of Oliver’s attention. Whereas a nicer girl might have held back and reminded him of his existing commitments, Vivienne had brushed aside all mention of Celia as being just too boring for words.

  The courtship was short and heady, with a roller-coaster intensity from which neither of them ever drew breath. Yet, at the same time, Oliver did not forget his duty toward his erstwhile sweetheart. He wanted to let her down gently, not to hurt her more than was necessary. She was, after all, entirely blameless, the sometime future wife who would have suited him perfectly, had not passion come thrusting rudely in in the shape of Vivienne Appleby.

  But Vivienne’s birthday was looming and one of her life’s ambitions had always been to be engaged by the time she was twenty-one. Her parents offered her a dance at the Dorchester but, having more or less snared her man, Vivienne preferred a slightly less formal occasion, celebrating with friends in the family home in Gloucestershire. She begged Oliver to break his silence and let her put the announcement in The Times on the day of the party, but he refused. Some things, he told her sternly, had to be done in the proper way. He would sort out the Celia situation at his own speed, when he was good and ready. She knew she had his heart; the formal announcement that he had won her hand would simply have to wait until a respectable period had elapsed.

  Vivienne was not used to hearing the word no. She went into a sulk, then roared into action in her usual self-centered way. She turned for help to her new best pal, Sukey Portillo, to whom she had already offered the honor of being principal bridesmaid.

  “Sukey, sweetie,” she had said, one week before the party, to which she had invited three hundred close friends plus a sprinkling of prestigious oldies her father wanted to impress. “We are a little light on the glamour stakes as far as the men are concerned. How’s about bringing that delicious young man I saw you with at Annabel’s last week? The tall, faun-faced one with the curly hair.”

  “Richard Compton Miller?”

  “That’s him. Didn’t you mention he works for a newspaper or something?”

  Sukey snorted with derision. “You know darned well he’s on the Hickey column. And I’ll bring him if he’s free. He’s so much in demand these days but he does like to party.”

  Thus it was that the morning after the party, which was a glittering success, Vivienne opened her Daily Express to find herself blazoned across the diary column, hand in hand with a grinning Oliver, above the caption: Deb of the Year to Wed? It was only minutes before the rest of the pack were upon her and Vivienne spent one of the most enjoyable mornings of her life, taking calls from reporters and refuting the rumors.

  “No comment,” she said blithely to all and sundry but the lilt in her voice told another story entirely.

  When he got over her impetuousness, Oliver could not stay cross for long and, with Vivienne in his arms as he drowned in the perfume of her hair, he promised to call on Celia first thing next morning to try and limit the damage caused by the newspaper report. It was not something he looked forward to but there were things incumbent on a gentleman, particularly one who had just been publicly made to look an utter heel. Vivienne’s behavior had been right out of line but he had to admit he was also at fault for allowing the Celia situation to drift on unresolved for so long. He hoped she would understand and might even be able to forgive him; among the reasons for his long attachment to the frail
girl was her exceedingly sweet nature.

  Alas, he was too late. Even while Vivienne was lying on her bed, luxuriating in the excitement her rumored engagement was causing, poor Celia—pushed to the brink by despair—looped a length of curtain cord around her fragile, aristocratic neck and leaped from the top of the ornate staircase in her family’s Belgravia mansion. The butler discovered her broken body, swaying gently over the stairwell, when he came to summon the family to dinner.

  She was buried discreetly in the family churchyard near Bristol and the Hartley clan closed ranks and vowed vengeance on the Nugents. A sister, perhaps as precariously balanced as Celia herself, made it her duty to target the one she accurately considered to be the true cause of Celia’s suicide. Each year since Celia’s death, Vivienne had received a brief, handwritten note to remind her of the anniversary. As if she could ever forget.

  • • •

  Oliver was still fast asleep, snoring now in an unattractive way, the brandy on his breath mixing unappealingly with the smell of stale semen. Vivienne shook herself out of his slack embrace and returned to the sanctity of the bathroom for a shower and another slug of Stoli before gliding off upstairs to one of the guest rooms so that she could sleep alone. Suddenly his presence in her bed offended her. She felt violated by what had happened; sickened to contemplate how the passion they once shared had reduced itself to such a travesty.

  The floor above was one they rarely used, containing two separate guest rooms, both with en suite bathrooms, and a large, empty, bay-windowed room which they had once designated as the nursery. Wearing a full-length nightgown in soft white linen, with sleeves and a high neck, she opened the door of this neglected room and stood barefoot on the polished boards, staring at the space that had for so many years remained unused. Apart from elaborately swathed curtains, in pale blue sprigged with cream, it was entirely unfurnished, and the cream and blue Laura Ashley wallpaper was as fresh and immaculate as when she had first put it up, eight years ago.