But not me, not this weekend. Not on your life. Tonight to me is about having the one thing I rarely allow myself … fun. And possibly sex into the bargain, but I won’t count my chickens. Everything is going so incredibly well so far, why shouldn’t my glorious good fortune hold out? I think, more than a bit smugly, floating around with a beam on my face like someone who just won the Lotto, but doesn’t like to gloat. But even besides Jake, aside from what just happened, tonight is a well-earned celebration with people I wish I’d got to know before and who I’d really like to get to know a whole lot better.
For feck’s sake, I think, we do shop talk 24/7 in the office, can’t we all just allow ourselves one night off to let our collective hair down? Christ knows, we’ve earned it.
Next thing I feel a warm hand slip through mine as Jake leans down to whisper reassuringly in my ear.
‘Once more into the breach, dear friend.’
‘Let me guess, your O.U. English course?’
‘Henry the Fifth, the man himself.’
Photos are being taken all round us on camera phones as I beam back up at him, feeling light, lighter than air. He leans down and lightly kisses me just as our picture is taken. I feel the flash in my face, startling me, then I pull back and we both suddenly burst out laughing.
And it’s hard to believe it, but this is actually the last time that anything is ever normal between us again.
True to form, it’s Seth Coleman who gets the ball rolling. Probably the only person here who’s relatively sober, with the lardy-looking head of hair so slicked back tonight, that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Wolverine from X-Men. A galaxy-class schmoozer, the minute his gimlet eye spots us, he oils his way over to Jake then surreptitiously steers him away from me, out of earshot.
It’s beautifully done: they’re just far enough away that even while straining, I’m still only able to pick up annoying snippets of their conversation. All of which are enough to make my blood chill as a long shadow suddenly stretches itself across this near-perfect day. Because he’s grilling Jake, sounding him out, doing a real number on him, almost worthy of a five-and-dime, gumshoe private investigator, circa nineteen-forty-five, by way of Raymond Chandler.
Even worse, I’m stuck with Lady Hume, who’s already far more than three sheets to the wind. I can tell by the way she keeps pressing me to call her Shania, but then she only ever abandons the social pecking order when she’s totally pissed as a fart. For once, she’s abandoned her mobile phone and it’s hard to say which is worse; trying to sustain a half-arsed conversation with her while she’s rudely tweeting away in front of you, or else having to have a full-blown conversation with her, now that she’s phoneless and Twitterless.
She’s wearing a dress a good twenty years too young for her, exposing far more flesh than even a gap year student with a perfect body ever should, with her too-blonde hair and too-fake nails that I’m certain she must have spent an absolute packet on. But then Shania’s one of those women the Celtic Tiger years really suited, but now that we’re all broke, she just comes over as being grossly OTT and faintly embarrassing. There’s always one at these things, that one person that you just dread ending up with and sure enough, it’s my bad luck to have been collared by her.
‘No one here likes me,’ she slurs, standing way too uncomfortably close to me and breathing boozy fumes that nearly make me cough. Christ alive, has this one been on the booze for the whole afternoon?
‘Even,’ she says, starting to sway dangerously now, ‘I might say … especially him.’ She practically spits this out and when I politely follow her eye line, I realise she’s referring to none other than her husband, Sir Gavin.
‘I’m pretty certain he’s having an affair, you know. And she’s only bloody thirty. Some bitch journalist. Thinks I know nothing about it, but …’ then her voice drops down to an exaggerated stage whisper, ‘I make a point of checking his mobile phone bills every month AND his credit card statements … How about that?’
I nod as sympathetically as I can, all the while casting around for someone, anyone, to come and rescue me. But before I can even make eye contact with Jake, she nudges me sharply and sloshes a good half of the margarita she’s been milling into all over the carpet. Jesus.
A second later, she’s leaning in closer, grabbing onto the straps of my dress and locking her lolling head with mine.
‘Wanna know what the useless fecker bought for her on Valentine’s Day?’ she asks me, and somehow it sounds like a threat.
I want to say no, not particularly, but find I can’t. I shoot another worried glance over at Jake, but Seth’s still monopolising him and he’s too far away to dig me out of this.
‘Diamond earrings,’ Shania goes on, her posh affectation of an accent now almost completely evaporated. ‘And you know what the bastard got me? A Magimix blender. A sodding Magimix buggery blender! Bitch he’s shagging gets diamonds, I get kitchen appliances.’ Then even more scarily, she starts laughing like a nutter.
‘You take my advice Eloise, you stay away from all men. Even Mr Rock of a Hunk you’ve got on your arm tonight. Use him, then dump him and move on. Do you hear me?’
I nod placatingly and make the right noises, while Shania slurs a word that might or might not be ‘miserable’. I’m straining to catch snippets of whatever Seth’s probing Jake about. And the little I can hear is enough to bring on an out-and-out panic attack.
‘So what school did you go to?’ Seth is grilling him. ‘And where exactly are you originally from? I’m finding that accent of yours particularly hard to place, and I’m normally good with accents. And who are your parents and family, might I know any of them? Do you have brothers and sisters? And what do they all do? And what did you work at before you got a teaching job? And where exactly did you go to study? Which college? And how did you support yourself before then? And where?’
Seth’s stone cold sober too, I know by the way he’s probably the only person in the whole room not flushed with the heat and with too much champagne. I strain my ears and lean as far back as I can to try and pick up Jake’s replies, or even try to catch his eye, but every time I do, Shania, with that drunken sixth sense people get when someone’s trying to extricate themselves from them, keeps gripping my arm so tightly she’s nearly bruising it, pulling me right back to her.
Christ knows what deep probing Seth is doing on poor Jake. All I know is that there’s a cold clutch on my heart that wasn’t there before and tiny beads of worry sweat are inconveniently starting to pump down my temples.
Turns out I’ve every reason to fret.
Shania has strong-armed me down into the place beside her, with Jake on her other side, while Seth sits opposite leaving his date, who it turns out is called Vogue, on my left. Now having been exposed to Vogue for approximately five minutes, not only am I now convinced she is in fact a hired escort, but also that Seth is paying her an hourly rate. The giveaway being the subtle way she keeps checking her watch again and again. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way on earth Seth could ever land a stunnah like Vogue, short of paying her two hundred euro an hour, minimum. She’s one of those ‘look no carbs!’ thin women, with a glossy mane of Pippa Middletonesque, high-maintenance wavy hair, caramel skin and a mouthful of pretty white teeth so perfect, I’m thinking veneers. Spends twice as long as anyone else perusing the menu, and when it comes to ordering, it’s like an assault course of, ‘Oh no, I’m lactose intolerant, coeliac, allergic to fish and only eat red meat once a week.’
God love the poor harassed waiter, is all I can think, looking at him pityingly.
If I didn’t have other things on my mind and for nothing more than pure bloody-mindedness, it wouldn’t have been easier for me to start grilling her about Seth, just as he grilled Jake out in the bar. Just a handful of questions, I correctly suspect, along the lines of, ‘So tell me, how exactly did you two meet?’ would be enough to flush out an escort from a genuine girlfriend before you could say, ‘Dial 1-800-hotsexydates’.
>
But I don’t get a chance to. Because Shania, having drained the champagne flute in front of her, then picks up mine and says, ‘You’re not finishing that, are you?’ before downing it in one. I flash Jake a look that says, ‘fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to get bumpy’, but Shania’s bypassed drunkenness and has now moved onto obnoxiousness and once she’s on a roll, there’s absolutely no stopping her.
‘Now pleeeeashe don’t get me wrong Eloise,’ she slurs into my face, ‘this guy that you’re with … Jack? Jock?’
‘Jake,’ I answer her absently, my thoughts miles away.
And, just so you know, he’s not deaf and is sitting just one person away from you, I want to hiss at her, but she’s now at that stage of pure stociousness that it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference.
‘Yeah, him. Thatsh’s the one. Jock. He’s a good-looking guy Eloise. Have you noticed? And he’s completely changing your whole pershonality, everyone is saying so. You’re the talk of the whooooole party …’
Oh would you shut up, please for the love of God, just shut up now. Do you know how much you’re embarrassing both of us?
‘He’s sexy too. Jusht the kind of strong, silent type I’d happily go for myself if my bollocking hushhhhband wasn’t staring over at me,’ she says cattily.
‘Here, have some lovely, cool, iced water,’ I say artificially brightly, anything to get off this most mortifying of subjects and get back to all my silent stressing and fretting.
‘Oh sod the sodding water!’ she says, roughly pushing my arm away, so I slosh a bit of it over my own dress.
‘Now you just lishen to me, Eloise. I alwaysh liked you. Alwaysh did. Even though all the other corporate wives said you were just this inhuman, ice-maiden bitch-queen, who terrified grown men and who had nothing else going on in her life apart from her job …’
‘Here, have a bread roll, please, go on, just one little bread roll …’ I say to her in the same coaxing tone I use to get Lily to eat her broccoli. Bit of food to soak up the alcohol, I reason, might just keep her quiet and sober her up a bit at the same time.
‘But all that time, I shtood up for you. Said absolutely not! That you weren’t just the overambitious saddo everyone said you were.’
I say nothing to this, just pick at the corner of a bread roll myself in silent fury, mind racing ahead, wondering what exactly it’ll take to get her to shut the feck up once and for all.
And on she still goes.
‘You wanna know what I shaid about you?’ Shania nudges me so roughly she almost knocks me off my chair. ‘Said to hell with what the lot of you think of Eloise Elliot, I admire a driven woman with a bit of determination …’
‘Oh look, isn’t that Gemma Ingram over there, talking to Marc Robinson? Haven’t seen her in years, let me just slip over to her to say hello …’
‘Shtop changing the shagging subject!’
She senses I want to escape and is gripping onto my arm now. Short of the fire alarm going off, there’s just no way out.
‘But you just lishten to me Eloise, and lishten good. Don’t let any fecking man take over your life. Because that’s what all men will eventually do. I don’t want you to end up like me. I don’t want to see you five years from now, having sacrificed your whole career for some man who’ll then shhtart chasing after thirty-year-olds while you sit at home night after night thinking he’s at a board meeting. At shagging ten o’ clock on a Saturday night, for fuck’s sake. Mark my words Eloise, let a man into your life and you’ll loshe so much more than you have to gain. You have to trusht me … I’ve been round the block and I know exactshly what I’m talking about.’
‘Oh look, here’s the menu,’ I interrupt her, brightly. ‘Mmmmm, I’m starving, what are you going to order? I think I might start with the monkfish …’
‘Sex,’ she nods sadly into her now empty glass, her teeth already well-blackened from all the red wine. ‘That’s all they’re good for. Sex. Even that big hunk of yours on your other side here …’
Jake, who’s in turn being bored to death by Seth beside him, shoots me a quick ‘you okay?’ look and I feel him squeezing my hand under the table, but right now I’m beyond rescuing.
‘Wanna know what I think the best FECKING thing you ever did in your whooole life was, Eloishe?’
‘Why not tell me later? Come on, let’s order …’
But I’m too late.
‘Beshhht thing you ever did was deciding that you wanted to have a baby and not hanging around for any man to make it happen for you.’
Okay, now my stomach actually physically clenches. I shoot her a dangerous, shut-up-now-or-I’ll-physically-throttle-you-with-my-bare-hands look, but it’s no use.
Maybe Jake didn’t hear that. Maybe not – there’s a good chance he didn’t. Every chance in fact …
Next thing, Shania is clapping her hands together, loudly applauding me, just in case we weren’t attracting enough attention.
‘Fair play to you Eloise, tshat’s what I shay! You took control and did what you wanted to do! Who needs a fecking man anyway to have a baby with these days anyway?’
‘Shania, shhh, please!’ I’m almost snarling at her now, heat rushing to my face.
‘Don’t you dare shush me! I’m throwing you my pearls of wishdom here, you know!’
To make matters worse, by now the speeches have started and Jimmy Doorley, our CFO, is droning through a microphone with so much reverb that it nearly whistles, about last year’s fiscal returns and how this year, our projected profits will be down five per cent and blah-di-blah-di-blah.
Meanwhile I’m telegraphing furious ‘we need to listen to this!’ looks at Shania, but she’s on a drunken roll now and no power on earth is about to shut her up.
‘In 2011, our net profit after tax was regrettably down almost five per cent on a lik-for-like basis, compared with the previous financial year,’ Jimmy’s monotonous voice is whistling into the gammy microphone, boring for Ireland, whining on and on and on.
Polar icecaps will melt and seabeds will rise before he ever shuts up, I think, willing him to get on with it as quickly as possible so we can get onto the meal and then get the hell out of here. But even though the room has gone quiet and everyone is at least feigning interest in his speech, no such concerns about politeness are troubling Shania.
‘Courshe I remember all too well the gosship going round about you at the time,’ she nudges me roughly. ‘When you were pregnant I mean.’
‘Shhh … we really need to keep quiet for this speech,’ I hiss at her, nearly ready to stuff a napkin into her mouth if I thought it would do the trick.
‘Oh don’t be so ridiculoush!’ Shania’s voice is vinegary by now. ‘Who in their right minds would wanna listen to boring old Jimmy Doorley anyway?’
A few filthy looks from the tables beside us, but they don’t even register with her.
‘Oh people shaid all kinds of things about you at the time. Who’s Eloise Elliot’s baby daddy was like a partshy game we all played – but you wanna know what I said? I said “to hell with the lot of you anyway!” I shaid that I admired any woman with the balls to do what you did. Because being a shingle parent is bloody hard. And didn’t you have the lasht laugh? You’ve got a lovely little child now … Boy or a girl? I forget – but they’d be about three years old now, ishn’t that right?’
‘Shhh, please!’ I shoot her a scalding stare and furiously grip her arm, but it’s a waste of time.
I offer up a silent, panicky prayer to anyone up above who’ll listen that Jake hasn’t overheard any of this, but it’s impossible to tell. He’s sitting stone still beside me, looking straight ahead of him, fixing the podium with a borehole stare. All the gentle hand squeezing that went on under the table just a minute ago has suddenly stopped.
‘Then when the truth leaked out, no one could believe it! Artifishal insemination – genius! But I said, for Christ’s shake why does any modern women need a partner to get pregnant with thes
e days? Who wants some man in their life telling you how to be a bloody parent anyway? You were dead right Eloise. Are you lishenting to me? Look at me when I’m talking to you! I want to tell you that I think going to a sperm bank was the BESHT idea you ever had! Beshides, I think I might even be able to guess the name of the clinic you musht have gone to; the Reilly something, the Reilly Institute out somewhere in Shandyford, is that where you went? The name shtuck in my mind ’cos a friend of mine goes there for H.R.T. and she shays it’s THE place in town to go to for artificial … artificial … what-doyoucall it, anyway, you know what I mean. So, am I right? Eloise, anshwer me, for God’s shake!’
She’s actually thumping the table, infuriated now at being ignored and airbrushed away.
Please, please, please don’t let Jake have heard, please God, Santa, Buddha, anyone who’s listening, please …
But I’m wasting my breath. And it’s the way Jake is staring straight ahead, glassy-eyed, that’s worrying me.
He knows, I can just feel it. Knows everything now, Shania’s lovely, tactful reference to the Reilly Institute surely put paid to that.
Plus, judging by the looks we’re getting, not only our table, but half the room just heard Shania’s last remark. I’m sweating worse than Robert de Niro ever did in Raging Bull and all I know is that I have to get her out of here. Right now. I don’t care how rude it looks, I’ll worry about damage limitation later.
‘Right, that’s it Shania, I think the best thing is if I take you outside for a bit of air, right now. Come on …’
I cast around our table, desperately needing someone to help me, but no one will. Not Seth, not his Dial-A-Date and not even Jake, who won’t as much as make eye contact with me. So I try to arm-lift her out of her chair, but she’s a lead weight and won’t as much as budge for me.
‘Get your handsh off me, I’m not going ANYWHERE!’ Shania is almost yelling at me now, viciously swatting me aside. ‘I wanna another drink!’
‘Excuse me, is there some kind of problem at that table?’ Jimmy politely asks into the microphone.
A Very Accidental Love Story Page 25